They don't say how they devised the list, but Florence tops it, followed by the likes of Paris, Sydney and Edinburgh, which they say is "steeped in history" but still possesses "a cutting-edge contemporary feel".
Edinburgh is the only UK town to make the cut. But do you think others deserve a place on the list? Let us know which town or city you think is the most (and least) pedestrian-friendly and why by adding your comments below.
A photograph of a car park in Bristol has won a competition organised by the Government's design watchdog to find areas of outstanding urban beauty in England.
"There are 35 Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty in England. But 90 per cent of us live in towns and cities and most people rarely get out and visit them," the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment said in launching the competition.
Commenting on a photo by competition winner Christopher Hoare of the Galleries car park in Bristol (right) yesterday, the judges said: "You have that wonderful blast of colour from the ethereal Ferris wheel, contrasted with the cheap metal of the door panel and the surprise of the church tower. Just like urban beauty itself, this is about strong juxtapositions, and you can read it on many levels." Whatever that means.
There were more than 750 entries - evidence, perhaps, that the topic of beauty, which Cabe chief executive Richard Simmons has said is a taboo subject, is becoming less so. To see a slideshow of the impressive shortlisted photographs, click here.
Mori have also made a ten-minute film, Beautiful Sheffield?, which explores questions of beauty with local residents, commissioned by Cabe in collaboration with the Arts & Humanities Research Council. Watch it here.
We'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the topic - do you think urban beauty matters? Is it still taboo?
Regeneration photographer Len Grant is busy working on his latest project - a collection of photos of people from around Manchester, with poems written alongside them by US poet Linda Chase, a tutor at the Poetry School in Manchester.
Grant's last project was Billy and Rolonde, a book featuring portraits of socially excluded individuals in Manchester, which we reviewed in April. Before this, he compiled images tracking the regeneration of east Manchester, in Reclaiming East Manchester - reviewed in the same month. His latest project, Shooting the Breeze, is scheduled to be completed in time for the Didsbury Arts Festival in October. It entails him - along with Chase - driving round to various Manchester neighbourhoods and setting up a "pop-up studio". There, Grant and Chase stop passers-by, who pose in front of the "studio" - little more than a white backdrop - and tell the two artists a little about their life story. Grant takes a portrait of the passers-by; Chase writes a poem inspired by them.
Grant said: "I've always fancied driving round Manchester and just putting up my equipment wherever I feel like it and capturing people as they go about their daily life. Once people understood exactly why there appeared to be a huge piece of white tarpaulin in the middle of their street, they were really keen to get involved and I sensed a lot of pride in them that we'd taken an interest in them and where they lived."
He added that the locations of the shots were not of huge importance. But can it be a coincidence that for this project - what is essentially a social project - he picked deprived neighbourhoods, including housing estates in Cheetham Hill, Wythenshawe and Gorton - where a New Deal for Communities (NDC) regeneration partnership has been operating for the past ten years.
The text of one of Chase's poems from the project is below.
Man and Son Gabriel with Caiden
Gabriel is a man of names who loves his only son.
He has Dad and Cameron curled around a gun
and Logan lettered right above his heart
as Calvin Klein enpouches every private part.
But his son Caiden is label free, anonymous
though there’s no doubt who’s precious son he is.
Long live tattoos, bare chests and this fine dad--
Speaking at the unveiling last week of Anish Kapoor's and Cecil Balmond's vuvuzela-shaped Temenos sculpture, the Middlesbrough mayor, whose zero tolerance policy has had some success in reducing crime, said such public artworks were about nothing more complicated than "making people feel good".
"Flowers make people smile," he said. "So do pieces of art."
"Quality is everything, but on the whole public art works seem to function amazingly effectively, and there are lots and lots of examples, from the so-called Bilbao Effect, to spaces like the Rockefeller Center in New York or the Millenium Park in Chicago and the Tate Modern in London ..." he said.
"Public art does something to our sense of what we are, who we are, why we are - and those things are not without effect. They bring a sense of belonging and place."
Kapoor also said he'd been told that land values in the Middlehaven regeneration site have gone up by 30 per cent in the last five years, partly as a result of the sculpture. (Listen to the Audioboo with Kapoor here.)
Temenos already seems to belong at Middlehaven Dock. Though longer than a Boeing 747 and taller than Nelson's Column - it makes the Angel of the North look piddly - it complements, rather than dominates, the busy industrial landscape it inhabits. (Don't take my word for it - listen to the views of an expert.) Its scale is not overbearing, the sculpture's net of stainless steel cables seemingly shifting in the winds like the smoke stacks rising from the cooling towers behind it.
It is a fitting advertisement for Mallon and Kapoor's view of the regenerating role of public art.
London mayor Boris Johnson stopped the traffic for five minutes on Oxford Circus yesterday, to officially open a Tokyo-inspired diagonal crossing that will allow pedestrians to traverse in all directions one of Europe’s busiest intersections. The redesigned crossing, part of a scheme in the West End approved by Westminster City Council, is modelled on Hachiko crossing in Tokyo’s Shibuya district, where an awful lot of pedestrians weave their way to the other side of the road every day. A handful of Londoners acknowledged the inspiration, dressing up as their favourite Japanese manga character.
The makeover, which included removing guardrails and other clutter, has increased the amount of pavement space by nearly 70 per cent, Transport for London says. We went to Oxford Circus to see how commuters felt about the new crossing.
“To be able to move away from the panic of cyclists and traffic around you feels quite liberating,” said Leeroy Milton, who works in retail and negotiated the 25 metre crossing quite smoothly. “I was able to swing my arms quite a bit. I’ve always found the amount of time it takes to navigate this area very frustrating. I think it will give priority back to pedestrians.”
Whether or not Oxford Circus’ 32,000 pedestrians per hour can pass through it as unflappably as their counterparts in Shibuya remain to be seen. Tokyoites don’t tend to swing their elbows with quite the same force that Londoners do. (However, preliminary eye-witness accounts reported no incidents.)
But it did make us think, what will be the next Tokyo trend to be adopted by London’s mayor? White-gloved wardens to push commuters onto rush-hour trains? Boris cycling to City Hall in a cosplay-style maid outfit?
It seems appropriate to give the last word to a Japanese. “It felt pretty familiar,” said Teppei Inamoto, a London-based freelance graphic designer, when asked about his Oxford Circus saunter. “I think Londoners will be fine walking diagonally - once they get used to it.”
Oxford Street is set for a taste of Tokyo. Oxford Circus, the intersection between London's most famous shopping street and the elegant Regent Street, is to be reworked. Under the plans, traffic approaching the crossroads from all four directions will be halted simultaneously at red lights, allowing pedestrians to cross diagonally as well as straight ahead en masse. The scheme, modelled on the Shibuya crossing in the Japanese capital, will also see much of the ugly street clutter and barriers that blight Oxford Circus removed.
That may help, but it won't help enough. Inexplicably – certainly to Londoners, many of whom try their best to avoid it – Oxford Circus is among the world's top destinations, getting 200 million visitors a year. For visitors from smaller countries, the concentration of so many big retail brands in a long, wide thoroughfare may command awe, briefly, but it doesn't take much more than a second glance to see that London's shopping heartland is something approaching a national disgrace. Londoners may know there are plenty of better areas to spend a Saturday shopping in the capital, many visitors don't.
Blessed with a grand boulevard and fine buildings, Oxford Street has managed to fashion a sow's ear from a silk purse. The pavements are way too narrow to accommodate the throng of confused tourists and exasperated locals that blend awkwardly in the area. Shabby transitory retailers pollute the Tottenham Court Road end of the street. There is clutter everywhere – poor signage, ugly street furniture and unlicensed advertisements for such delights as the never-ending golf sale. But the area's fundamental problem is its traffic.
In spite of being closed to general traffic, Oxford Street is plagued by motor vehicles. These are chiefly buses moving at a snail's pace in a noisy, smelly, grumbling thin red lines; plus a few cabs with frustrated drivers and the odd lost boy-racer in a sports car. The air quality and environment is unpleasant – even crossing the road can be an ordeal.
A few pilot traffic-free days run by the New West End Company have been hits with shoppers, so the question is, instead of messing about with Tokyo-style pedestrian crossings, why not abolish traffic in Oxford Street completely and open up the street to pedestrians? Some people will moan that they can no longer catch their bus from outside, say, John Lewis, but this is a price worth paying. A clever programme of re-routing would do the trick, and people would get used to it.
Many of the world's best shopping areas are pedestrianised – including many in London itself, such as Covent Garden. It seems ludicrous that its biggest draw is relegated to monumental embarrassment by the smoke and choke of jammed-up traffic.
