Tag Archives: urban planning

Richard Florida on where we live

Richard Florida has an interesting survey on why people in the UK choose to live where they live. Some results are not too surprising. People tend to stick close to where they grew up and close to friends and family when they are younger, then gradually disperse as they get older. Housing cost is a big driver in middle age, then people get a little more choosey about type of housing and proximity to nature in older age. A couple things were surprising though – being close to work, schools and public transportation were all relatively unimportant.

I am very different than these people. Being able to live car-free is an over-arching driver for me. For me this is the only ethical choice, but I also believe it is the obvious choice for mental and physical health. Practical car free living also means being within walking distance of my job, stores and restaurants, and ultimately a decent elementary school although that’s not a factor for my family quite yet. So I picked the closest neighborhood that meets these criteria and has a housing cost I could afford. A little bit of gardening space is important to me, but that is surprisingly easy to find. Great parks, playgrounds, public squares, and easy access to Amtrak and the airport are icing on the cake. I don’t get in a car more than once a month or so, but car share, taxis and Uber are all there when I need them. I think bicycling is a wonderful way to get around on streets that are designed to be safe for it, but our U.S. street designs are not safe so I don’t do it much.

happiness and boredom

In this FInancial Times article, John Kay accuses happy cities of being boring.

Liveability and happiness are complex concepts. The happiest countries identified by the UN are those of “Jante Law”, the stifling conformity described by Danish author Aksel Sandemose: “You are not to think you are anything special, you are not to think you can teach us anything.” Yet there is much that is good about social homogeneity, shared values, peaceful coexistence and honest government. Life in unhappy countries — Myanmar, Syria, Zimbabwe — is not boring, but much of the population desperately wishes it was.

Yet boring is not enough. Security, hygiene, good public transport — the factors that enter the assessment of liveability — are necessary for a fulfilling life, but they are not sufficient for it. That is why so many young people from Melbourne or Toronto go to London or New York in search of the excitement and creativity of the great, rather than the liveable, city. For the technology writer Jonah Lehrer, cities are the knowledge engine of the 21st century. And he wasn’t talking about Düsseldorf.

The most intriguing studies of the determinants of happiness are those of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The moments at which people are happiest are when they are in “flow” — when they are engaged in a challenging task and doing it well: the lecture in which you realise the audience is hanging on your ever word, the tennis game in which every shot takes the ball where you want it to go. For many people, bringing up children is a source of endless demands and frustrations, but taken as a whole it is one of the most satisfying experiences of their lives. There is more to the good life than clean water and trains that arrive on time.

I don’t know. I like a little excitement when I travel, but I like a certain calmness and predictability when it comes to the broad strokes of my day in my home city. Then I can enjoy the fun and interesting little happenstances that happen within that larger sea of calmness. Provide some walkable streets, some small-scale commerce, some open space and some contact with nature and I think you can create this atmosphere. And I don’t know why he picks on Myanmar, they might be able to teach us Westerners a thing or two about happiness.

the lowline

This article has some really fascinating renderings of “The Lowline”, a proposed underground park in an abandoned subway station in New York City. This could work really well in Philadelphia’s Broad State transit concourse, which is still open but looks like something New York would have abandoned decades ago.

The technology behind the project has a kind of irresistible science fiction appeal: A series of parabolic mirrors stationed aboveground collect the sun’s rays and direct them below through a series of “irrigation tubes,” which pipe the sunlight across an undulating canopy that works as a fixture to splash the light across the terminal space. In the days following its online debut, the project’s psychedelic renderings and intriguing pitch for innovative, public green space became a mini-sensation and birthed a wave of stories on sites from CNN toInHabitat to Web Urbanist. The Architect’s Newspaper said it “could become the next park phenomenon”; Business Insider reported that the “ambitious underground oasis” had “New Yorkers buzzing with excitement.”

The project has encountered some predictable challenges, which the article goes into, one of which is how to use corporate funding without it just becoming another underground mall. This is also an important step toward our inevitable “malls in space” future as a species.

 

you’re stupid, Joel Kotkin

Seriously, I take no pleasure in pointing out that Joel Kotkin is stupid. If he ever says something that is not stupid, I will take great pleasure in proclaiming it to the masses. In this article he again claims that only rich, young, childless couples live in cities.

As H.G. Wells predicted well over a century ago, cities now depend in large part on affluent, childless people, living what Wells labeled a life of “luxurious extinction.” Jacobs’s contemporary, the great sociologist Herbert Gans, already identified a vast chasm between suburbanites and those who favor urban core living who he identified as “the rich, the poor, the non-white as well as the unmarried and childless middle class.”

He is sitting in the suburbs making up lies about me. I know this because I am sitting in a single family home in a major U.S. city right now, with my middle class family and a young child. I walk to work and to buy 99% of the things I need. And I have thousands of neighbors doing exactly the same thing and planning to raise our children here. It’s a great lifestyle, but the problem is there are very few neighborhoods in American cities that are as great as mine. And things that are great but in short supply tend to be more expensive than things that are mediocre and in great supply, like the endless suburbs. Joel Kotkin, for whatever weird ideological reason, doesn’t want Americans to have a variety of great neighborhoods to choose from. Don’t listen to him.

August 2015 in Review

Negative stories (-12):

  • About 7-19% of cancers are caused by chemicals in the environment. (-1)
  • Steven Hawking is worried about an artificial intelligence arms race starting “within years, not decades”. (-2)
  • The anti-urban attack continues, based on the false idea that crowded, stressful living conditions are the only type of urban living conditions available, and people are being forced into them against their will. This is naked, obvious propaganda that must be rejected. (-1)
  • The more ignorant our species is, the more confident we tend to feel. (-3)
  • According to Naomi Klein, “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war.”  In related news, July was the warmest month ever recorded by humans, and carbon dioxide concentrations are the highest seen for millions of years. (-3)
  • The media buzz about a worldwide recession seems to be increasing. (-2)

Positive stories (+12):

  • The suburban vs. urban culture wars continue. Suburban office parks are tanking as young people prefer more urban job settings. Entrepreneurs are working on the problems of being car-less with children. (+1)
  • Steven Hawking has a plan to figure out if there is any intelligent life out there. (+1)
  • There are straightforward, practical ideas for dealing with the issues of loading, deliveries, and temporary contractor parking in dense urban areas. (+1)
  • Economists have concluded that preventing human extinction may be economical after all, because “reducing an infinite loss is infinitely profitable”. Is this kind of thinking really useful? (+0)
  • “gene drive” technology helps make sure that genetically engineered traits are passed along to offspring. (+0)
  • Technology marches on – quantum computing is in early emergence, the “internet of things” is arriving at the “peak of inflated expectations”, big data is crashing into the “trough of disillusionment”, virtual reality is beginning its assent to the “plateau of productivity”, and speech recognition is arriving on the plateau. And super-intelligent rodents may be on the way. (+1)
  • Honeybees may be in trouble, but they are not the only bees. (+0)
  • Robotics may be on the verge of a Cambrian explosion, which will almost certainly be bad for some types of jobs, but will also bring us things like cars that avoid pedestrians and computer chips powered by sweat. I for one am excited to be alive at this moment in history. (+2)
  • Dogs can be trained to smell cancer. (+1)
  •  There’s promise of a vaccine for MERS. (+1)
  • It may be possible to capture atmospheric carbon and turn it into high-strength, valuable carbon fiber. This sounds like a potential game-changer to me, because if carbon fiber were cheap it could be substituted for a lot of heavy, toxic and energy-intensive materials we use now, and open up possibilities for entirely new types of structures and vehicles. (+3)
  • Robot deliveries and reusable containers could be a match. (+1)

You might think I rigged that to come out even, but I didn’t.

Edible Infrastructures

Just an interesting site I came across in random web surfing. If you really had a clean slate and could turn a computer loose to design an efficient city for you, it might look something like this.

Edible Infrastructures is an investigation into a mode of urbanism which considers food as an integral part of a city’s metabolic infrastructure. Working with algorithms as design tools, we explore the generative potential of such a system to create an urban ecology that: provides for its residents via local, multi-scalar, distributed food production, reconnects the traditional waste-nutrient cycle, and de-couple food costs from fossil fuels by limiting transport from source to table.

Our research is conducted through the building up of a sequence of algorithms, beginning with a Settlement Simulation, which couples consumers to productive surface area within a cellular automata type computational model. Through topological analysis and interpretation of the simulation output, we explore the hierarchical components for a new Productive City, including: the structure and programming of the urban circulatory network, an emergent urban morphology based around productive urban blocks, and opportunities for new architectural typologies.

The resulting prototypical Productive City questions the underlying mechanisms that shape modern urban space and demonstrates the architectural potential of mathematical modelling and simulation in addressing complex urban spatial and programmatic challenges.

 

everything I know about cities is wrong?

Planetizen called this anti-urban article “frank, tough talk at it’s [sic] most provocative”. It sounds somewhat scholarly on the surface, but dig in and it stinks. They use the same scare tactics Joel Kotkin used recently, descriptions that suggest people are being forcibly marched out of the countryside and into urban high-rise towers. Sure, that has happened in a few places and times in history, but it is not the norm. In fact, you could argue that history’s greatest tragedies (if you measure simply by body count) were caused by the exact opposite, people being marched out of cities and onto rural farms at gunpoint, only to starve in the tens of millions (Ukraine, China, Cambodia). For the most part, cities form organically when people concentrate in pursuit of economic opportunity. Agriculture and mining are just as necessary as they ever were, but we don’t need large numbers of people engaged in these any more because they are largely automated. For large numbers of people to achieve a high living standard, the bulk of us have to be working together in higher-tech pursuits like manufacturing, design and invention of new products, processes, and ideas. This is the direction our species has evolved, and there is no stopping it now.

Much of their argument rests on the idea that cities can be stressful, and that they are linked to diseases of the affluent and physically inactive such as diabetes and heart disease. Concentrating people certainly gives rise to obvious stressors like noise, air pollution, heat, and traffic deaths, and less obvious ones like reduced leisure time and contact with nature. Richer and more egalitarian-minded cities are doing more to mitigate these stressors, while developing cities and cities where the pursuit of profit dominates everything else are doing little. There are ways to mitigate the stressors – noise abatement, non-motorized transportation, parks and green infrastructure to name a few. We need to focus on maximizing the positive aspects of cities while removing the stressors.

We should all welcome serious, scholarly thinking about the form future human settlements could take to maximize the potential and minimize the impact of all of us, but this is not serious scholarly thinking so let’s not take it seriously.

“Uber for kids”

What’s the busy, car-free urban soccer mom (or dad) to do when they occasionally need to pack the kid off to a remote inaccessible (except by car) suburban area? Here’s an idea for an Uber-like service where the drivers are certified in childcare.

Parents schedule a ride with a ‘CareDriver’ and are sent a short bio for that driver, a picture, and are required to enter in a code word for the ride. The parent then relays that information to the child, and then to the school or daycare organization from which the kid is getting picked up. That way, little Tommy or Patty knows how to identify their ‘CareDriver’ through both the photo and the code word.

Parents can track the ride in real time through the app and have multiple methods of contacting the driver at any time…

All of the drivers on the platform go through a rigorous, 15-point certification process. They must have at least five years of child care service experience, alongside passing a number of background checks, criminal background checks, as well as getting fingerprinted. HopSkipDrive also ensures that their drivers are TrustLine certified, which cofounder Joanna McFarland describes as the gold standard of childcare certification in the state of California.

Joel Kotkin

Joel Kotkin has penned a transparently political anti-urban piece, so transparently political that it’s in Real Clear Politics rather than a major newspaper. He creates a picture of “forced densification” – I imagine people being marched into cities at gunpoint and into Soviet-style high-rise apartment blocks.

Roughly four in five home buyers prefer a single-family home, but much of the political class increasingly wants them to live differently… it has been decided, mostly by self-described progressives, that suburban living is too unecological, not mention too uncool, and even too white for their future America. Density is their new holy grail, for both the world and the U.S. Across the country efforts are now being mounted—through HUD, the EPA, and scores of local agencies—to impede suburban home-building, or to raise its cost.

Of course, people who actually choose to live in cities know this is absurd. Sure, there are high rise apartment blocks and some people choose to live in them. But many people choose to live in row homes, town homes, brownstones, etc. These are single family homes, Joel. Let’s think about land use for a minute. Density is defined by residents per square mile. Density allows infrastructure, open space, and economically productive space to be shared more efficiently by more people. It also allows more people to get around under their own muscle power, i.e. by walking and bicycling. This promotes physical health and mental health, social activity, creativity and innovation. Time spent “commuting” to work on foot or by bicycle is not empty, useless, or wasted time.

Once density drops to a suburban level, most people have to make most trips by car. Cars require enormous amounts of space, for driving but especially for parking. This space is wasted – it is not available for housing or for recreation. It is not economically productive. The infrastructure cost in the suburbs has to be much higher per person, and the economic production and tax revenue has to be much lower per square mile. The enormous amounts of time spent commuting by car are just wasted time – they are not economically productive, supportive of physical health, mental health, or families. Add air pollution and civilization-crushing greenhouse gas emissions on top of all this.

So what does all this add up to? Resources are being sucked out of the efficient denser areas, where they are generated, and used to subsidize the time-, land-, money-, and health-wasting lifestyle in the suburbs. And yet, contrary to what Joel would have you believe, not only are people not being forced into walkable, bikable, communities, but these choices are not available to most Americans.

Forcibly marching people into high-rise apartment blocks wouldn’t be American. Some people really want privacy and large private open spaces to themselves, and certainly those choices should not be taken away. But many people would love to live in truly walkable, bikable communities, and those choices have been denied most citizens of the United States. Giving people true equal opportunity and a free choice of lifestyles, and letting them choose to pay the true cost of their choices, would be very American. Don’t fall for the deceptive double-talk people are throwing out there to try to convince you to support having your choices taken away.

cars are over in the UK

Most Americans haven’t caught on yet, but the tide has turned against widespread car ownership. Here’s an article in the Guardian about the tide turning in the UK:

London, which has pioneered congestion charging and has a well-integrated system of public transport, has led the move away from cars over the past decade, during which time 9% of car commuters have switched to other forms of transport. “People in London have a lot of options and there’s been huge growth across all modes,” says Isabel Dedring, the American-born deputy mayor for transport in the capital. “There’s been a massive increase in investment in public transport…”

Dedring says London has always been progressive in terms of public transport – its narrow, twisting roads were never conducive to the automotive domination that occurred in many US and European cities in the 1960s and 70s, when the car was king. But from the turn of the millennium, there has been a concerted attempt to encourage switching to other modes of transport, and the past decade has seen a 30% reduction in traffic in central London.

“Traffic levels have gone down massively,” says Dedring, “partly because of the congestion charge, but also because we are taking away space from private vehicles and giving it to buses through bus lanes and to people through public realm [developments].” And now to cyclists, too, with the planned “cycle superhighways” and cycle-friendly neighbourhoods being trialled in three London boroughs.