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Posts tagged with "city"

Open Urban Planning

Thursday, February 17, 2011 3:08:05 AM

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Urban planning and city architecture has traditionally been a closed process between the client and the planner, possibly with a public hearing (too) late in the process.

We are now at a stage technically, and sometimes socially, that this process could be organised differently. It could be more like the process for producing the HTML5 standard for instance, with early prototyping, public involvement with the stakeholders, scenarios and visualisations, and a transparent process.

Any area potentially under development could be put on Google maps, or local equivalents, as well as on a time line for any interested citizen to see or get involved with.

I am interested to know: What "prior art" do you know of in architecture along these lines, how was it done, what were the consequences and lessons?

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Veien til fremtiden

Wednesday, September 9, 2009 8:11:16 AM

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To transportinnlegg på fremtidsblogg.

Augustine-kommisjonen til Obama: Ingen måneferd før 2020

Kan høyhastighetstog bli ryggraden i vår megaregion?



Cat free 9/9/9? Great, but what about all the other days?

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Ooh, shiny, shiny

Sunday, May 11, 2008 12:45:19 PM

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[/IMG]This Thursday May 8, was a local holiday, the liberation day for the end of World War II. Liberation day used to be the 9th of May, but perspectives change. It also led me out into the Prague suburbs as the latest, and last for a while, extension of the Prague Metro was opening. In the 18 years since I first visited Prague, the metro system has doubled in length, with 19 new stations (Oslo in the same period added 3 new stations). It is a fairly young system, it opened in 1974, and is efficient, convenient and pleasant to use.

[/IMG]While I am an early adopter in the sense that I quickly visited the new stations, I actually never have bothered to be there at the opening (not the official opening, but when it opened its service for the public a couple hours later). With the next station opening in 2013 at earliest I took the trip to the suburbs where the three new stations, Střížkov-Prosek-Letňany, were located, or at least two of them. The terminus, Letňany, is placed in the middle of an empty field. There's an small planes airport nearby and it is just between two large suburbs (Letňany and Kbely). Supposedly the location could come handy if Prague won its 2016 Olympic bid, which is not going to happen. The station is integrated with a nice new bus terminal, as well as a new Park and Ride, so the communications in this part of town still have improved.

[/IMG]What's more the station itself is pretty in blue-tinted glass and highly reflective chrome (at least for now). The most noticeable station of the three is still Střížkov. This dome looks like how the future could be imagined in the 1930s, or progressive architecture concepts from the 1970s. Open, light, and practical. Absent at the opening was commerce, no shops and no pubs or bistros. I can only assume that they will come later, one picture series indicates we can at least expect a hair dresser soon.

More pictures can be found in my album. Skyscrapercity has a relevant thread, and then there is the metro site if you can read Czech or just like to look at the pictures.

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2nd Annual Street Conversion Design Contest

Wednesday, September 26, 2007 9:00:13 AM

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I wonder how cities will change in the 21st century, and believe that it will generally be for the better. That is a good thing given that most people will be city dwellers. One problem which I expect to be solved is traffic as an environmental problem. As travel becomes relatively cheaper and more convenient (which I think it will in the long run) people will travel longer and more often, so the time spent travelling won't decrease even though the injury caused by it hopefully will.

Assuming that the car will retreat from ever-larger parts of our cities, that gives us an interesting problem, what shall we do with the spaces thus liberated? If you go to a city like Copenhagen many central streets seem curiously overdimensioned when the cars are largely gone. Of course there were streets long before there were cars, but in the middle part of last century the city plans were often designed for the car. What can best be done with streets like this when vacated by cars? The traffic and pollution might be gone, but the street is still not an integrated part of the city, and cities abhor empty spaces.

That makes some rationale for a design competion.

The value of human-scaled carfree areas is increasingly appreciated, both among urbanists and the general public. Yet how can we transform existing areas to create lively people-oriented spaces free of traffic?

Through our 2nd Annual Street Conversion Design Contest, we are challenging architects, artists and ordinary citizens from around the world to design carfree spaces from formerly car-oriented spaces. And where possible, we're also encouraging people to realise the designs on the ground. Update: Thanks to a grant from Artists' Project Earth, we are able to do further global outreach to announce this year's contest more widely. Therefore the deadline has been extended to November 15, 2007. The grant has also allowed us to offer cash prizes of €100-200.

The principle is that street space was once used for both transport and human interaction. But with the arrival of the automobile, street space has become monopolised by cars and other vehicles, resulting in a loss of community and livability. This competition aims to reintroduce a level of humanity to the streetscape, both on paper and by encouraging lasting on-the-ground initiatives.

We are asking participants to design carfree spaces from formerly car-oriented spaces, in three categories

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Forgotten

Thursday, January 4, 2007 3:55:28 PM

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In Michle, between the proper urban architecture and the high-rise suburbs of South City, there is an area obviously created with a ruler&compass and city planning with an explicit lack of imagination. The streets have names like South-West IV, Lateral II, and North VII. But in between all these evidently planned streets on the map I saw this tiny stub of a street called Zapomenutá (Forgotten).

Of course I had to go there. While in walking distance I aborted my first attempt in the summer. The road had no shade and while I was wearing a hat it was too unpleasant to get here under the sun. Now mid-winter it is much easier (though the picture is correspondingly dark, unfortunately, the day is too short).

An advantage of the unsurprising city plan was that I could guess where the pub would be. Admittedly I was off by 15m, but it was still good enough, and this is written from the Holy Hell pub (so named due to the nearby church?) during a fairly decent meal.

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Prague Guide for Norwegians

Tuesday, April 4, 2006 11:57:33 AM

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Note
To change from Czech Crowns (CZK, koruna, Kč) into Norwegian Crowns (NOK, kroner, kr), use the Currency Converter.
Airlines
Norwegian, ČSA, SAS, and sometimes Sterling have direct flights to Prague from Oslo (Norwegian also has it from Bergen and Trondheim). I like ČSA, but they rarely come with good offers, so Norwegian is the airline I most commonly use and can recommend.
Preparation
Bring a passport, a mobile phone with charger, some plastic for the ATM, non-smelly clothes, and toiletries. If you have time and inclination read about Prague and the Czech Republic beforehand. Go for the stuff you won't discover on your own the first five minutes you get there (e.g. look for history, culture, architecture, current affairs). The Czech Republic uses all the normal standards for electicity, phone networks, etc. You can expect things just to work. Don't bring stuff, you don't need it. Unless you go to Prague in the winter where warm clothing is recommended. That way you don't have to check in any luggage either and don't have to wait for your luggage to come through. Check with Trafikanten for travel options to Gardermoen.
Ruzyně Airport
You will arrive at the Schengen part of the airport, this is the newest part of the airport, but is still pretty dull and by Czech standards exorbitantly expensive. When you get to the public part of the airport, head for the "Metro" booth and buy some tickets. You want a handful of the 26 CZK ones (more than enough opportunities to buy some later). The multi-day passes are unlikely to be cost-effective.
Money matters
If you don't have Czech crowns go to the ATM first and get yourself some. It will ask you for innocuously sounding amounts like 4000 CZK. Don't listen to it! It is optimised for giving the minimal number of bills. You will get two 2000 CZK bills and spend needless time changing into something more comfortable. Ask for 3800 CZK instead. You will still get a 2000 Crown bill to split later, but the remaining 1800 Crowns are money ready to use.
Leaving the airport
It took some time to decide how the transport to the airport should go, not that there were much money for it anyway. There will go trains to the airport towards the neighbouring town and the green metro line A will be extended to the airport. You just have to wait at a decade for the train to arrive and somewhat longer for the metro. We'll see if there will be Schönefeld style walking to the stations when they arrive.
If you can't wait that long
With tickets in hand you go out the main door out front to the bus stops and start looking for 119. It is some 50 meters to the right on the next aisle. In some scenarios you might want to take another bus like the express bus to Holešovice, but then you figure it out on your own. Just sit on the 119 until the last station, and go down the stairways with a green M in front of you, your ticket is still valid (it lasts for 60 or 90 minutes). I assume you are going to a place like Flora further down the green line, but in some cases you would transfer to another line. The colour-coded charts are easy to understand. If you need to switch to the yellow line, do so at Můstek, to the red line at Muzeum.
Hotel
I have generally stayed in the Žižkov district. My hotel of choice has been Prokopka, but can also recommend the bed&no breakfast U Hejtmana, Hotel Kafka (with neighbouring Bílý Lev as overflow), and the hostel Pension 15. For the complete backpacker experience you could try The Clown&Bard. The latter two are closer to Jiřího z Poděbrad, for the others you can pick Flora, taking two stops on the 5 tram if you are feeling lazy (ticket still good).
Annoyances
The city hasn't fully reined in the taxi drivers, though they used to be even worse. Generally fixed rates at the airport at around 800 Crowns. Minibuses are at 400-500 Crowns, but you might get an opportunity deal if you pass by when they are leaving with empty seats. There are pickpockets at some places like in certain trams. If you expose your valuables at these places there is a non-neglible risk of not having them anymore. The ATM programmers.
Getting online
The Czech Trafikanten is vlak-bus.cz, you can find maps over Prague at mapy.cz. There are many free wireless nodes in Prague. The Prague 5 district has city-sponsored ones. If you are staying for longer you might consider getting a Czech SIM.
Prague Underground
In the center you will never be far from a metro line, it is the fastest way to get around, and it is very good method to avoid getting lost. Learn the name of your metro station (and the colour of the line). When in another metro station of the same colour look for the station name on the signs overhanging the platform, go to the (left/right) side where your station is relative to the one you are in. If the metro is of a different colour look for the crossing line of your colour. The train interval range from a couple minutes during day, to about ten minutes in the evening. The clock tells how long ago the last train left. You can get a minute early warning by the draft of the train, so if you are on the stairs down you can catch the train.
Prague above board
There is a slower, but much more extensive and tourism-friendly network of trams. The schedule show when the next tram leaves as well as how many minutes it takes to get there. Stops by metro stations are marked with an M and all trams pass at least a few. So if lost jump on a tram for a metro station, and then use the method above to get home fast. The arrows at the top of the signpost tells if the tram is turning off left or right, this is useful for opportunistic tram hopping (you want to go somewhere but don't want to wait for your tram number).There are also buses for the outer parts of the city, but apart from the airport you are not likely to take one of them. By midnight the metro and the regular routes shut down and the system of night trams and buses take over. They are recognizable on the signpost for the dark blue colour and for having numbers starting with "5". It can be handy to note the number(s) of your local night trams. The same tickets are used for night trams, there is no late night gouging.
Language, the missing part
Czech is easy, it is spoken the way it is written. It is the way it is written that will give you headaches. This is a vowels-optional language, the letters R and L can substitute for vowels. The vowels you do find are pronounced like in German or most other European languages. There really are only AEIOU, as long as you always pronounce the last two as ÅO you should be fine. Y is always pronounced I. The Czechs are not aware of the existence of other vowels. Single vowels are rare enough, there are not many diphtongs. Pronounce them as written, not vowel-shifted like a Norwegian. "autobus" is pronounced "aotåboss", not "æutobuss". Long vowels are marked with an accent (áéíóú), for perversity ú is in most cases written ů. If a vowel isn't marked as long, it is always short. "pes" (dog) is pronounced "pess", not "pes".
Language, the consonants
C is always pronounced "ts", the word "konec" (the end) is pronounced "kånnets". CH is a frontal mouth-clearing sound quite like Swedish skär, less close to the more guttural sound in Scottish loch. It is not the same sound as German CH. The haček accent (čďňřšťž) denotes a soft version of the consonant, in Norwegian that would be done by sticking a "j" after it, e.g. český is pronounced tsjesski. Ě denotes that the consonant in front is soft. There is an implicit haček for the letters DNT in front of I, dík (thanks) is pronounced djik, while dýk (several daggers) is pronounced dik. Z (Ž) is voiced S (Š). Unlike in English that distinction matters. At the end of the word or in front of unvoiced consonants voiced vowels become unvoiced, while unvoiced consonants in front of voiced become voiced. That is why "piv" (lots of beer) is pronounced "piff". The voiced/unvoiced pairs are B/P, DŽ/Č, D/T, V/F, G/K, H/CH, Z/S, Ž/Š.
Czech grammar
Grammar doesn't matter in any other language and it doesn't matter in Czech either. It is worth reading about, but not taking too seriously. If you are curious Czech uses a case system (different word endings) while some languages like Norwegian and English use word order. But this isn't that important. Most of the time you can figure out if the boy is playing with the ball or if the ball is playing with the boy. It can be useful to know that adding an -L to the verb puts it in past tense (-LA if you want to be female). Of course there are irregular verbs (though Czechs would claim it isn't so, they just have very many rules), and you can bend the words in numbers and persons and how polite you want to be. Whatever complexity you feel like adding, you can be sure Czech will provide it for you.
Prefixes and suffixes
This however is useful. Czech is a wonderfully constructive language. When you learn the stems like CHOD (walk), you will recognize vchod (entrance), východ (exit), chodba (corridor), průchod (passage), chodník (sidewalk). The prefix DO- is towards or into something, OD- is out of something. The suffixes tell what kind of thing it is, so –ARNA would be an enclosed space (e.g. kavárna, café, "káva" is coffee), while –IŠTĚ would be an open space (letiště, airport, "let" is flight). Grammar mutilates the word endings sometimes to the unrecognizable, so it can be useful to know some grammar to reconstruct the original meaning. Soon you will be constructing words, some which haven't been discovered by the Czechs themselves yet. A Czech-English dictionary is useful too.
Listening
Czech has the same misfeature as German, the most important part of the sentence comes at the end. With a Norwegian or English speaker you can just listen to the first words of a sentence and then go back to what you are doing. In Czech you must pay some attention while the speaker drones on towards the end, and there are many way to elaborate with nothingness so that the end is nowhere in sight.
Climate
May and September are the ideal months, April is much like May in Oslo, October can be chilly, especially towards the end, but unlike Norway it doesn't rain much. November and March are slightly better than Oslo, while December to February are like Oslo or colder. June and July can be sweaty, but after the occasional deluge lasting maybe 15-20 minutes the temperature is comfortable again. August is the month to leave Prague like the citizen do, it is hot and unpleasant and full of tourists.
Away from Prague
If you want to go to the rest of the country, the best option is generally by bus. It is as a rule faster, cheaper, more convenient than by train. Express buses are particularly fast and comfortable. The first problem is to find out which bus station to go to. The vlak-bus site makes this a lot easier (and you can check if train is an alternative at the same time). Not all Czech cities are attractive, but a lot of them are. It makes sense to stay in Prague the first time, and take the excursions the following times. Biking is another option, this also gives better chance to see Czech villages, castles and wilderness. For a relatively densely populated country, the Czech Republic has quite a bit of true wilderness, though cottage holidays by the carp pond is at least as prevalent.

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Change of Address

Monday, April 3, 2006 11:34:58 AM

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I left the hotel in for the last time today. Except for my flat in Oslo this was the place I had spent most nights the last few years. I have never lived long-term in a hotel before, but I could get used to it. The reason I left was that I had finally gotten the keys to my own apartment, signed the lease, paid the rent. I miss having a reception so that I didn't have to carry my keys around, the two keys to my door are fine but the key to the entrance door is a huge brass thing that seems more appropriate for ceremonially giving someone the key to the city rather than actually unlocking a door.

Having an apartment on your own adds a sense of freedom, having two is better, but I am really not a home-bound person. Whereever I sleep is where my home is. I use to call a small bag with my laptop, chargers and other work equipment my office, and a slightly larger bag with clothes and toiletries my home. Having your office in one hand, your home in the other, and not really having decided where to go next, that truly adds to your sense of freedom. In that respect I don't have homes, I have forward bases.

Another definition is whereever my subscription to New Scientist goes is my home. In that respect the Opera headquarters has been my home for the longest time, but not anymore. I have now officially moved to The Wineyards (Vinohrady) district in Prague, in the vicinity of Žižkov, Vršovice, and Strašnice. With the huge Prague cemetaries to the north the neighbourhood itself isn't among the liveliest, though I can claim living next to the permanent recidency of Franz Kafka for instance, but the communications are great and it is a short walk to the widest variety of what Prague can offer.

The transition into a remote worker isn't too hard as I haved worked from the beyond before, but there will still be some days before everything is in order. Making it work should be fun.

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Last week in Berlin

Sunday, February 26, 2006 11:56:49 AM

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Berlin may be my most bypassed city. In the old days I would either take bus or train the Oslo-Göteborg-Malmö-Sassnitz-Berlin-Dresden-Prague route. Apart from train change I rarely spent much time in Berlin, and the bus wisely took a huge circle around it. So it is now when I'm mostly flying over the city that I seek it out, and this time I did it the old-fashioned way, taking the Budapest-Hamburg train from Prague. The web site had warned me the train was running 18 minutes late so I could leave later than I otherwise would have to. The 350km train ride might have costed more than the 900km airfare from Oslo but that is fair since the ride lasted more than twice as long, passing through the pretty but depressed landscape of the Czech-German hinterlands.

Maybe more than any other European city Berlin symbolises transition, in particular the reunion of the four occupation zones, and the restoration of Berlin as Hauptstadt Deutschlands, in many respects a geographical Hauptstadt Europa. I was getting off the train at Zoo, a station in the former British zone, an area I hadn't visited in fifteen years. The Zoo was the terminal station at the time of the West-Berlin enclave, a train station I remember with fondness as having the rudest train information staff in the known universe (usually the customers yell at the staff, not the other way around). I hadn't time to check if it still had the old spunk, as I hadn't reserved accomodations for the night and there was a film festival going on.

The centerpiece of my visit was The Pergamon Museum. The result of true cultural imperialism a century or two ago when architecture was taken wholesale back to Berlin, Paris, or London from the countries of origin. But apart from making the artifacts available to the public this has let them more protected than they would be where they came from. For the Pergamon Museum this hasn't been entirely true, it was ravaged by the end of WWII, but most of the pieces were saved. In particular for the Ishtar Gate and the collection of Babylonian, Sumerian, and Assyrian artifacts Berlin is the place to go as visiting Babylon is not currently an option.

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City Weekends

Sunday, January 22, 2006 7:51:08 AM

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I came across the yearly survey over Norwegian vacation habits. The City Weekend is becoming a fixture, every other Norwegian do two and a half such trips on average. This is a direct consequence of low-fare airlines making direct travel cheap and convenient, and that the European cities are close by when travelling by plane. Australia and Africa are where people would like to go but don't, while USA has become dramatically less popular as a tourist destination.

Weekends are popular as you use up at most a couple vacation days, while I like the short trips for not having to bring a full set of clothes, thus lugging closer to the ideal nothing. The most desirable city in Europe according to this survey is Prague, edging out Rome, the previous favourite. Outed. I was in Rome last week and I am in Prague right now. Rome and Prague have much in common. Both are friendly cities to ease in to, you adapt to them as you arrive. Rome with its layering of time, place, and food, Prague with its architecture of hospitality, both merging an intricate past with a live presence, unafflicted by the monoculture of lesser cities.

Rome is a city built on top of itself, jumbling the brutal with the renewal. With a hub in the Colosseum concrete island the grid traces a history of subjugate or be subjugated. Today Rome largely follows the one Spanish rule: Thou shalt not miss lunch hour. If you do your whole day will be wasted, and the most you can hope for is a better tomorrow. But if you can stick to this rule Mediterranean life can be very seductive.

I'd never been in Rome in January before. In very late February it felt chilly for almost spring, but 10C (50F) was balmy for midwinter. It is a stroll in the park, a recommended activity when in Rome. Prague in January means winter, making even Oslo feel warm. Having hibernated for centuries in the frozen Czech highlands I came prepared for the cold onslaught, and the light in the historical center as it is staggering past you is special.

Prague, at the too-convenient crossroads in Europe, has mostly tasted subjugation in its cycles of rebellion, glory, and repression. As a city it has evolved this trade or flight reaction. When free everyone flocks there, when not everyone flees. Prague provides the convenience that everything works, no strange plugs, free wireless connectivity (if at the oddest locations), a well-functioning extensive transport system, no phone troubles, no Spanish rule, no pain except for the tingling at your extremities.

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Milky way

Saturday, October 1, 2005 12:59:25 PM

It was an accident that may cause some damage to the wildlife, but a white river looks nice. While I would prefer the river au naturel most of the time, a white river/black lights event once in a great while wouldn't be too bad.

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Towards Carfree Cities V

Monday, June 13, 2005 7:55:08 AM

As is stated in Tor Åge Bringsværd's Den som har begge beina på jorda står stille (He who has both feet firmly planted on the ground stands still) — tilfeldighetene er våre venner (coincidences are our friends). Shortly after writing about car-free cities, car-free Budapest in particular, I came across a conference in Budapest that will be in a couple weeks time, and it was organised by the World Carfree Network that happened to be within walking distance from me.

I am usually a little stand-offish for classic green groups. They may be more often right than wrong and the issues are important, but they tend to be wrapped in a moralistic and often apocalyptic language. The message that comes across is "We know what is best for you and if you don't do what we say the world is going to end." As a rule I would say that green groups are better at identifying problems than at prescribing solutions.

This network is more interesting than that. Cars are not bad because they are inherently evil. Cars are bad when they do harm, and the harm they do depend on how they are used and where they are. The probably most ecologically sustainable and diverse human habitat ever created is the city. Even if it was not, the city is where most people choose to live, and the number of citizen in the workd is increasing. Making better working cities will make improve the life of the greatest number of people.

Cities are not created equal and there is a rich choice of cities to compare with. Apart from the basics – a place to work and a place to live – cities offer benefits like a rich social life, cultural, architectural, and historical depth, a wide variety of entertainment, good communications. A badly run city can be experienced as a dangerous, polluted, lonely, noisy, crowded, and hostile place.

Traffic is not the only factor to determine the "niceness" of a city, but it is likely the most important one today. In the early years of the industrial revolution the cities were blighted by heavily polluting industries and endemic poverty. Urban renewal in city by city has now cleaned up recreational areas and repurposed heavy industrial parks, typically into shopping centres, new industries, or high-rent apartments. Moving cars out of city centres will be next in line.

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Stop the traffic

Sunday, May 8, 2005 10:48:11 AM

Revisiting Budapest was a reminder of what damage the automobile, the scourge of the 20th century, has caused human society. The same century started a departure from cities built to a human scale to cities built to suit the the car.

This is likely to change in the 21th century. While an immediate car ban in urban areas is unlikely, economic savvy will move us there anyway. It is no accident that Venezia is the most attractive city in Europe. It may be an open sewer, the buildings are dilapidated, it suffers from chronic floods, the commotion and the prices are high, but this is a city where you find no cars and the tourists love it.

The same can be seen in other cites as well. Where there are zones with high traffic and zones with no traffic, tourists, and the locals as well, gravitate towards the no traffic zones. While tourism is important in itself as the largest economic activity in Europe, they are also an eye-opener. Tourists have the privilege to choose where they want to go and you don't see them flock to traffic junctions.

The car belongs to the country-side and not in the city. In less densely populated areas it is a symbol of freedom, each individual can go where he wants to go when he wants to go there. In the city the car is the symbol of gridlock. More people live in cities than anywhere else, for them the city is their home not just a place of work or entertainment. If the citizen had a direct say in whether their own street was pedestrian or allowed cars to drive through it the changeover would happen sooner, but they do have a say indirectly.

The cost of allowing cars in to a neighbourhood can be measured by that the noise, the danger, and the pollution lowers the value of the buildings. Cleaning up facades is meaningless as the car exhaust mucks them down again within a couple years and the buildings themselves dissolve within decades. The quality of life is lessened as you can't even cross the street without the risk of being run over by a car. Commerce suffers as drivers don't window shop and their only contribution to the environment is negative, they do their damage and drive on. Having good communications with no cars offers a high value to the residents which in turn offers a high price to the property owners. This gives them a financial incentive to move against the traffic.

A city is dependent on good logistics, goods and people need efficient transport. Most cities have by now routed not city bound traffic to car moats circling around it. Much of the remaining car traffic is the daily commute which currently favours cars partly because drivers don't pay the true cost of driving in cities and partly because alternatives like mass transit can be ineffective or even inappropriate to the traffic patterns in an area.

Hybrid solution like park and ride can suit the opposing urban and suburban needs. Uninhabited traffic corridors can localise the problem. In cites like Oslo the cars are being driven underground. Tunnels is an expensive solution and the cars still pollute, but the other nasty habits are resolved and valuable real estate is liberated. Pedestrian zones will grow out from the city core and recreational areas like parks and waterfronts, as well as former industrial parks and the swankier residential areas. This won't happen first in Budapest, but when it happens it will be one of the cities that benefits the most.

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Civilisation: What made us do it?

Thursday, September 23, 2004 9:23:08 AM

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My travelling companion and favourite publication, New Scientist has a special issue on civilisation (vanity is posed as a prime suspect for the title question). Insightful as always, it still left open the question if there really is any new science to pre-history.

I got a more present puzzle: Why do US IT companies leave civilisation behind? I have arrived at a W3C multimodal working group meeting IBM is hosting in New York, but of course not in the city. Like any other event hosted in the US this is located deep into the suburban wasteland.

European events are in the city centre. Opera for instance is well placed in the middle of Oslo. Admittedly the company started in Kjeller ("Cellar", if you ever get there you would agree the name fits), an out of place that can boast of being the birthplace of object-oriented programming, the first Internet node in the world outside of the USA, inventor of key mobile phone technology, and incubator of Opera. Opera still had the sense to move into my neighbourhood as soon as they got any ambition.

In USA the move would be in the opposite direction. It is not as if New York is a city to avoid, it is rightly recognized as one of the great cities in the world. The communications could be better, but the system is still fairly convenient and efficient.

Instead I am at a highway in the middle of the woods. Mercifully W3C meetings consume most of your waking moments, because the nightlife here is a vending machine.

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Circus Českomoravska

Thursday, May 6, 2004 6:57:21 PM

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The venue for all this hokej was the recently built Sazka Arena in Vysočany, naturally the target for the daily pilgrimage. I had an additional reason for a visit. After the revolution but before the normalization I used to live there. In fact it was the first flat I had of my own, a penthouse pad with a great view over the humongous ČKD industrial complexes just across the street. I even tried to buy it with my pocket money; Vysočany was unpopular and no-cost real estate, primarily for being the most polluted area in Prague, which truly was saying something at that time.

But all things heavy industrial must pass, and so would the low grade coal that gave winter its distinct colour and aroma. The Metro was coming through and would shorten a half hour tram ride to the center down to ten minutes. My lack of Czechness and drive to circumnavigate the city bureaucracy left me homeless, but the location made great sense for a sports arena. The half-fallow land is still cheap and the Metro can push people through like no other transport system could, and does on a daily basis.

Like all other tickets, the tickets for the least popular quarter final was long sold out. The start price for a ticket was now 2000 CZK (about 60 €), but by waiting until the match was about to start and the unsold tickets were about to turn worthless with no buyers, I got one for 300 CZK just when I was about to accept another one for 400 CZK, half the original price.

Getting inside was a security version of snakes and ladders. Stand in line for two turns. You carry no gun, move two squares ahead. You have a valid ticket, move four squares ahead. Your bag is screened, stay over a turn. Your body metal is phone and wallet, one square. You carry a laptop, stay over two turn for it to boot up and down without blowing up. You have no laptop license, return to start and deposit the thing. Stay in line for a turn. You carry no gun, move two squares ahead… Thereafter you have to traverse a labyrinth of automatic doors that only opens for the proper tickets without telling which tickets a given door will accept.

Being there was an entirely different experience. Viewed on TV hokej looks like a live enactment of a Stiga game, but when you arrive at the arena you're instantly transported back to a Roman coliseum. Sazka has same body plan and atmosphere as Colosseum, only that the audience isn't long dead. The Romans may not have invented sport, nor even sports arenas and events (the Greeks have a claim there), but they did establish the modern body plan and choreography and there has been no reason to change it since. There have been improvements over the years. Most visibly Sazka has a cube of oversized TV screens hanging from the roof that successfully wrestle the attention away from the Stiga game below. The TV cube I guess is an American addition, one that I am sure the Romans would have loved to have.

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