Tag Archives: urban planning

fixing sidewalks at point of sale

You can require homeowners (actually home sellers) to fix sidewalks when they sell their property (“point of sale”). Los Angeles does this, which Donald Shoup says is a great idea. Philadelphia has a similar legal framework where the homeowner technically owns and is responsible for the sidewalk, but does not require point of sale repairs. The city can write you a ticket for a broken sidewalk if they want to, just like any other code violation, but that is not too often done because the public outcry would be pretty severe. Also, it’s the transportation agency that is supposed to do this and not the code enforcement agency, so may not fit clearly within their mission and priorities. One more interesting thing the article mentions is that if sidewalks were made more clearly a code violation, this would show up in real estate records, and there would then be some pressure from mortgage and insurance companies to fix them.

Another option, of course, would be for the city to take over the sidewalk, along with street trees and infrastructure up to the house line. This could be part of a grand vision for how to implement 21st century urban infrastructure – complete streets, better materials than tired old concrete and asphalt, urban forests, public spaces, modernized water, sewer, gas, electric, and communications infrastructure. I for one would be indifferent to paying slightly higher taxes rather than being ticketed for code violations for I have very little control over, and this would also be more equitable. But it’s easier for the politicians to pin in on the private owner and say it has “zero cost”.

2015 Year in Review

I’m going to try picking the most frightening, most hopeful, and most interesting post from each month. If the most interesting is also the most frightening or most hopeful, I’ll pick the next most interesting. Then I’ll have 12 nominees in each category and I’ll try to pick the most frightening, hopeful, and interesting posts of the year.

JANUARY

Most frightening: Johan Rockstrom and company have updated their 2009 planetary boundaries work. The news is not getting any better. 4 of the 9 boundaries are not in the “safe operating space”: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen).

Most hopeful: It is starting to seem politically possible for the U.S. to strengthen regulation of risk-taking by huge financial firms.

Most interesting: Taxi medallions have been called the “best investment in America”, but now ride-sharing services may destroy them.

FEBRUARY

Most frightening: There are some depressing new books out there about all the bad things that could happen to the world, from nuclear terrorism to pandemics. Also a “financial black hole”, a “major breakdown of the Internet”, “the underpopulation bomb”, the “death of death”, and more!

Most hopeful: A new study suggests a sudden, catastrophic climate tipping point may not be too likely.

Most interesting: Government fragmentation explains at least part of suburban sprawl and urban decline in U.S. states, with Pennsylvania among the worst.

MARCH

Most frightening: The drought in California and the U.S. Southwest is the worst ever, including one that wiped out an earlier civilization in the same spot. At least it is being taken seriously and some policies are being put in place. Meanwhile Sao Paulo, Brazil is emerging as a cautionary tale of what happens when the political and professional leadership in a major urban area fail to take drought seriously. Some people are predicting that water shortages could spark serious social unrest in developing countries.

Most hopeful: If we want to design ecosystems or just do some wildlife-friendly gardening, there is plenty of information on plants, butterflies, and pollinators out there. There is also an emerging literature on spatial habitat fragmentation and how it can be purposely designed and controlled for maximum benefit.

Most interesting (I just couldn’t choose between these):

  • Innovation in synthetic drugs is quickly outpacing the ability of regulatory agencies to adapt. (I struggled whether to put this in the negative or positive column. Drugs certainly cause suffering and social problems. But that is true of legal tobacco and alcohol, and prescription drugs, as well as illegal drugs. The policy frameworks countries have used to deal with illegal drugs in the past half century or so, most conspicuously the U.S. “war” on drugs, have led to more harm than good, and it is a good thing that governments are starting to acknowledge this and consider new policies for the changing times.)
  • “Germ-line engineering is much further along than anyone imagined.” This means basically editing the DNA of egg and sperm cells at will. I put this in the positive column because it can mean huge health advances. Obviously there are risks and ethical concerns too.

APRIL

Most frightening: A group of well-known economists is concerned that the entire world has entered a period of persistently low economic growth, or “secular stagnation“.

Most hopeful: Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, is retiring. That might sound bad, but his ground-breaking ideas are continuing on and actually seem to be going mainstream.

Most interesting:

  • Biotechnology may soon bring us the tools to seriously monkey with photosynthesis. (This is one of those stories where I struggle between the positive and negative columns, but clearly there is a potential upside when we will have so many mouths to feed.)
  • Peter Thiel thinks we can live forever. (positive, but do see my earlier comment about mouths to feed…)

MAY

Most frightening: We’ve hit 400 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not just some places sometimes but pretty much everywhere, all the time.

Most hopeful: The rhetoric on renewable energy is really changing as it starts to seriously challenge fossil fuels on economic grounds. Following the Fukushima disaster, when all Japan’s nuclear reactors were shut down, the gap was made up largely with liquid natural gas and with almost no disruption of consumer service. But renewables also grew explosively. Some are suggesting Saudi Arabia is supporting lower oil prices in part to stay competitive with renewables. Wind and solar capacity are growing quickly in many parts of the world.Lester Brown says the tide has turned and renewables are now unstoppable.

Most interesting: Human chemical use to combat diseases, bugs, and weeds is causing the diseases, bugs and weeds to evolve fast.

JUNE

Most frightening: One estimate says that climate change may reduce global economic growth by 3% in 2050 and 7-8% by 2100. Climate change may also double the frequency of El Nino. The DICE model is available to look at climate-economy linkages. Dennis Meadows and Jorgen Randers describe what a coming long, slow decline might look like. Rising temperatures in the Arctic are drying things out, leading to more fires, which burns more carbon, which raises temperatures, in an accelerating feedback loop.

Most hopeful: Stock values of U.S. coal companies have collapsed.

Most interesting: According to Paul Romer, academic economics has lost its way and is bogged down in “mathiness”.

JULY

Most frightening: James Hansen is warning of much faster and greater sea level rise than current mainstream expectations.

Most hopeful: Edible Forest Gardens is a great two book set that lays out an agenda for productive and low-input ecological garden design in eastern North America. You can turn your lawn into a food forest today.

Most interesting:

AUGUST

Most frightening: Steven Hawking is worried about an artificial intelligence arms race starting “within years, not decades”.

Most hopeful: 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.

Most interesting:

  • “gene drive” technology helps make sure that genetically engineered traits are passed along to offspring.
  • 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.
  • 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.

SEPTEMBER

Most frightening: Climate may be playing a role in the current refugee crisis, and the future may hold much more of this.

Most hopeful: The right mix of variety and repetition might be the key to learning.

Most interesting: Edward Tufte does not like Infographics.

OCTOBER

Most frightening: Corrupt Russian officials appear to be selling nuclear materials in Moldova.

Most hopeful: Elephants seem to have very low rates of cancer. Maybe we could learn their secrets.

Most interesting: Stephen Hawking is worried about inequality and technological unemployment.

NOVEMBER

Most frightening: I noticed that Robert Costanza in 2014 issued an update to his seminal 1997 paper on ecosystem services. He now estimates their value at $125 trillion per year, compared to a world economy of $77 trillion per year. Each year we are using up about $4-20 trillion in value more than the Earth is able to replenish. The correct conclusion here is that we can’t live without ecosystem services any time soon with our current level of knowledge and wealth, and yet we are depleting the natural capital that produces them. We were all lucky enough to inherit an enormous trust fund of natural capital at birth, and we are spending it down like the spoiled trust fund babies we are. We are living it up, and we measure our wealth based on that lifestyle, but we don’t have a bank statement so we don’t actually know when that nest egg is going to run out.

Most hopeful: There are plenty of ways to store intermittent solar and wind power so they can provide a constant, reliable electricity source.

Most interesting: Asimov’s yeast vats are finally here. This is good because it allows us to produce food without photosynthesis, but bad because it allows us to produce food without photosynthesis.

DECEMBER

Most frightening: Cyberattacks or superflares could destroy the U.S. electric grid.

Most hopeful: We had the Paris agreement. It is possible to be cynical about this agreement but it is the best agreement we have had so far.

Most interesting: I mused about whether it is really possible the U.S. could go down a fascist path. I reviewed Robert Paxton’s five stages of fascism. I am a little worried, but some knowledgeable people say not to worry. After reading Alice Goffman’s book On the Runthough, one could conclude that a certain segment of our population is living in a fascist police state right now. There is some fairly strong evidence that financial crises have tended to favor the rise of the right wing in Europe.

DISCUSSION

Well, one thing that certainly jumps out on the technology front is biotechnology. We have a couple articles about the possibility of drastic increases in the human lifespan, and what that would mean. “Germ-line engineering”, “gene drive”, and “CRISPR” are all ways of monkeying with DNA directly, even in ways that get passed along to offspring. To produce more food, we may be able to monkey with the fundamentals of photosynthesis, and if that doesn’t work we can use genetically engineered yeast to bypass photosythesis entirely.

At the risk of copyright infringement, I am reproducing the “Gartner hype cycle” below, which was mentioned in one of the posts from August.

Gartner Hype Cycle

Gartner Hype Cycle

Government and corporate labs have been making huge advances in biotechnology in the last decade or so, so it is well beyond the “innovation trigger”. It has not yet reached the “peak of inflated expectations” where it would explode onto the commercial and media scene with a lot of fanfare. I expect that will happen. We will probably see a biotech boom, a biotech bubble, and a biotech bust similar to what we saw with the computers and the internet. And then it will quietly pervade every aspect of our daily lives similar to computers and the internet, and our children will shrug and assume it has always been that way.

Obviously there are dangers. A generation of people that refuse to die on time would be one. Bioterrorism is obviously one. Then there is the more subtle matter that as we raise the limit on the size our population and consumption level can attain, the footprint of our civilization will just grow to meet the new limit. When and how we come up against these limits, and what to do about it, is the subject of the updates to two seminal papers on these issues, by Rockstrom and Costanza. We have entered an “unsafe operating space” (Rockstrom), where we are depleting much more natural capital each year than the planet can replenish (Costanza), and there will be consequences. The Paris agreement is one hopeful sign that our civilization might be able to deal with these problems, but even if we deal with the carbon emission problem, it might be too late to prevent the worst consequences, and there are going to be “layers of limits” as the authors of Limits to Growth put it all those decades ago. If we take care of the global warming problem and figure out a way to grow food for 50 billion people, eventually we will grow to 50 billion people and have to think of something else.

So without further ado:

Most frightening: I can’t pick just one. In the relatively near term, it’s the stalling out of the world economy; the convergence of climate change, drought, and the challenge of feeding so many people; and the ongoing risks from nuclear and biological weapons.

Most hopeful: I see some hope on energy and land use issues. The Paris agreement, combined with renewable energy and energy storage breakthroughs, the potential for much more efficient use of space in cities rather than letting cars take up most of the space, are all hopeful. The possibility of making carbon fiber out of carbon emissions is a particularly intriguing one. At my personal scale, I am excited to do some sustainable gardening of native species that can feed both people and wildlife. I don’t expect my tiny garden to make a major difference in the world, but if we all had sustainable gardens, they were all connected, and we weren’t wasting so much space on roads and parking, it could start adding up to a much more sustainable land use pattern.

Most interesting: I’ve already mentioned a lot of stuff, so I will just pick something I haven’t already mentioned in the discussion above: the rise of synthetic drugs. It’s just an interesting article and makes you think about what it will mean to have advanced chemical, information, and biological technologies in the hands of the little guy, actually many, many little guys. It is a brave, new, dangerous, exciting world indeed. Happy new year!

December 2015 in Review

Now it’s time to review December 2015, before we get on to reviewing 2015 as a whole.

Negative stories (-10):

  • Some car dealers are deliberately talking customers out of buying electric cars that they want, because the car dealer will make less money on oil changes. (-1)
  • Breaking news: we can’t believe everything we hear on the internet. Some of it is deliberate government and corporate propaganda, and some is “online filter bubbles” or marketing algorithms telling each of us only what we want to hear. Data used by all these algorithms is becoming more and more valuable. (-1)
  • Cyberattacks or superflares could destroy the U.S. electric grid. (-1)
  • Guns cause gut-wrenching, accidental deaths of children quite frequently in the U.S. The U.S. has a rate of violent assault 5-10 times higher than our close Anglo-American cousins, which in turn have higher rates than most of Europe and developed Asia. (-1)
  • I mused about whether it is really possible the U.S. could go down a fascist path. I reviewed Robert Paxton’s five stages of fascism. I am a little worried, but some knowledgeable people say not to worry. After reading Alice Goffman’s book On the Run though, one could conclude that a certain segment of our population is living in a fascist police state right now. There is some fairly strong evidence that financial crises have tended to favor the rise of the right wing in Europe. (-2)
  • After more than a decade of drought, there may not be enough water to sustain both Lake Powell and Lake Mead in the U.S. desert southwest. Some are suggesting draining Lake Powell. (-1)
  • This year’s “super El Nino” might have happened with or without climate change, but climate change made it more likely. I have to admit though I enjoyed sitting on my front porch in shorts on Christmas here in Philadelphia. (-1)
  • Jeffrey Sachs makes a pretty good case that the rise of violent religious fanaticism in the Middle East is largely the CIA’s fault. (-2)

Positive stories (+13):

    • Las Vegas is planning to go all renewable by 2017, mostly centralized solar. (+1)
    • Children have a natural aptitude for learning to recognize patterns. Now all we have to do is figure out which patterns we should be teaching them to recognize. (+1)
    • Some U.S. Presidential candidates want to invest in infrastructure, which is good. A national infrastructure plan might also be good. (+1)
    • Ericcson released some technology predictions for 2016 and beyond: Artificial intelligence will start to assist us without the need for smartphone screens. Virtual reality will start to come into its own for tech support, sports, dating, and shopping. And we will start to see more sensors embedded in our homes and eventually our bodies. (+1)
    • Trends in Ecology and Evolution made some technology predictions too: “managed bees as transporters of biological control agents, artificial superintelligence, electric pulse trawling, testosterone in the aquatic environment, building artificial oceanic islands, and the incorporation of ecological civilization principles into government policies in China”. (+1)
    • A serious but treatable infection can destroy a tumor. (+1)
    • Self-driving cars could drastically reduce the amount of land required for parking in cities. There are some moves toward car-free central cities around the world. (+3)
    • We had the Paris agreement. It is possible to be cynical about this agreement but it is the best agreement we have had so far. (+2)
    • New York City recently finished planting a million trees. (+2)

So we end the year on a positive note!

zoning

City Observatory has a long article arguing against the idea that a right-left consensus is emerging against zoning, making the obvious point that existing homeowners fight zoning changes when they perceive they might affect their investment, which often makes up a large part of their savings.

homeowners dominate local development politics in large part because their homes make up such a large proportion of their total wealth that any decline in property values could devastate them. (Or, conversely, cut into huge capital gains, if they are lucky enough to own property in, say, San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood.) As a result, they’re extremely wary of any change to their surroundings that might reduce their property values—and zoning gives them the legal ability to stop those changes.

So even to the extent that there’s a consensus about the damage of zoning among policy wonks, part of that consensus is also that zoning is incredibly difficult to change, because the interest local homeowners have in preserving it is so powerful…

When housing decisions are made hyper-locally, the only interests taken into account are those of nearby residents, who may have worries about their property values, the visual “character” of the neighborhood, or even more directly exclusionary concerns about the type of people who will leave near them. It also creates a sort of “prisoner’s dilemma” in which no neighborhood wants to be stuck with “undesirable,” or costly, land uses. But when decisions are made at a broader geographic level, the people who stand to gain from new housing—renters and potential buyers who want more housing options, businesses that might gain more customers, and people thinking about how more density might support the regional transit system—also get to have a voice. Scholars of zoning and segregation have argued that more local fragmentation in decisionmaking is a crucial part of using land use laws to impede integration.

The basic idea the “policy wonks” are proposing is kindergarten simple – when zoning restricts the supply of something, the price of that thing goes up, and some people who would like to have that thing have to do without. So what we need to do is find ways to promote zoning rules that allow residential density to increase, and commercial intensity to increase along with it, without allowing drastic, sudden changes in the character of the neighborhood.

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.