http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a54fc10e-615b-11e1-94fa-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1oMrZ7gqY

Global Gridlock

In researching the concept of hybrid companies it is interesting how just two years ago a hybrid organization referred to one that was murky and part state-owned. This older version of a hybrid organization was one that was part public, to provide security, and part private to take risks – derring-do.  The Economist, in 2009, wrote:  “These are neither old-fashioned nationalised companies designed to manage chunks of the economy, nor classic private-sector firms that sink or swim according to their own strength.  Instead they are confusing entities that seem to flit between one world and another to suit their own purposes.”

Should we look to governments’ experiments with trying private sector tools for some lessons learned as states begin to authorize a new form of corporation?

Is the prognosis better for the hybrid company?  I hope so because I am still a believer.

This film clip is from San Francisco, circa 1905-06.  According to internet sources, this  film was originally thought to be from 1905 until David Kiehn with the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum determined it was from 1906,  four days before the Great California Earthquake of April 18th, 1906.  The film was shipped by train to NY for processing, thus being saved.

“Poor but sexy”, Berlin’s slogan is a strange one, but it underlines the conundrums of price elsewhere. The same house that would cost $1m (£690,000) in Chicago stands boarded up and literally worthless in nearby Detroit. Chicago has managed to maintain momentum, an enticing cocktail of culture, industry, business and banking that has made it eternally desirable, yet it is not New York.

It can be hard to believe that the satanic darkness against which David Lynch’s The Elephant Man was played out, the soot-stained warehouses of London’s Docklands, have been reinvented as Butler’s Wharf, a gastro destination.

Many cities have wasted extraordinary opportunities, particularly along those waterfronts. New York’s Battery Park City became a soulless enclave for the wealthy; London’s Docklands and Vauxhall are fine demonstrations of the limitations of the free market in providing the framework for a city, the oft-talked-about wealth gap in built form, where gated developments crash brutally up against social housing.

Both demonstrate the dangers of the monoculture. The modernist orthodoxy of zoning, born of a necessity to separate noxious industry from dwelling, created a culture of division, in which people lived in suburbs, worked in the city and shopped off the freeway.

Whether it is in the weaving of a new metro system through layers of archaeology as in Istanbul – and the subsequent incorporation of fragments into modernity – or in the revivification of dockside districts through a sustainably complex cocktail of architecture and business and dwelling, regeneration allows the transmission of the culture and memories of cities from the past through the present to the future

It is in capturing and nurturing that mix that the city survives and thrives.

Refections of the past on the new in Boston, Massachusetts