Defying Developers: Buildings of the Resistance
Buildings are creatively converted or utterly demolished all the time to make room for highways and other large-scale civic problems, but the laws vary on what can be done when a single hold-out structure stands alone against a sea of fat-cat developers, builders and architects who all want nothing more but for them to move.
Sometimes they successfully force out residents or bribe them with offers that range up to 20 times the value of the home and real estate – but in many cases they simply have to give up and build around them, creating so-called ‘nail houses’ that stand apart from their surroundings.
In some cases, these incredible stand-alone structures have huge fan bases of individuals who applaud their willingness to stand up for their property.
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Urban Life is Bad for Brains
Many people find that city life is exhausting and now scientists know the reason. Here’s how urban living is actually detrimental to the human brain:
Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.
"The mind is a limited machine,"says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. "And we’re beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations."
One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil.
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