Excepting only a family visit to Siem Reap, our trip has been a catalogue of cities, mostly very big cities. According to the list I consulted (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population), three are among the top ten and eight among the top 31. All are bigger than Los Angeles.
That leads me to think about how big cities work and how they succeed. I’m no Lewis Mumford, but I’m struck by the fact that they’re all dynamic, with the new structures constantly replacing old ones. Bangkok has a lot of big new buildings that compete with numerous Buddhist temples. Kuala Lumpur has a Muslim flavor and the new buildings seem to have greater architectural distinction. . Bangkok is still an old city being replaced while Kuala Lumpur has fewer hints of its past. All the cities are served by readily-accessible subway systems, but only the older cities have complete coverage.
In some of the cities, the buildings are very big. Here in Kuala Lumpur we have the Petronas Towers, which were once the tallest in the world. That title resides in Dubai, having briefly been in Taipei. What’s interesting to me is that we’ve largely lost sight of that competition since the disappearance of the World Trade Center and the U.S. became distracted by other issues. Currently one of the ten largest buildings in the world is located in the United States and two are in the top 20. The list of the 20 largest cities includes only one in the U.S.
In the decades ahead, those numbers won’t shift in our favor.
I dunno, I think maybe it's in our favor that we're not competing to have the tallest buildings anymore. But I suppose that may just be a sign that we've turned into an old country and that's why we've withdrawn from the competition. Personally, as an old entity myself, I like it.
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