Yule Heibel's Public Library

26 Oct 09

His brave new world - The Globe and Mail

Who knew that Bob Rennie (Vancouver's "Condo King") was amassing a huge art collection with a focus on "marginalization, oppression and resistance"? Very interesting article about a very interesting collector indeed. I would certainly love to visit his new museum.
QUOTE
"The Downtown Eastside is marginalized, and a lot of what I have is about marginalization, oppression and resistance," Mr. Rennie said as he walked through construction chaos a few days before opening. Some workers were installing the complex pieces created by Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, while others were putting in more pedestrian items like air vents and doorknobs.
UNQUOTE

www.theglobeandmail.com/...article1336925 - Preview

bob_rennie vancouver condo_king art_museum art_collection real_estate

21 Oct 09

Carbon Neutral Now

Nice article about Yale's Kroon Hall and Victoria BC's Dockside Green as true carbon-neutral projects (with Dockside Green a model for building entire neighborhoods as green/ carbon neutral).
"Across the continent, at the southern tip of the mountainous and densely forested Vancouver Island, Dockside Green will soon become carbon neutral. A mix of town houses, mid-rise apartments, and commercial buildings being built on a brownfield at the edge of downtown Victoria, British Columbia, the large, multiphase urban development takes a comprehensive approach to carbon reduction, showing how much is possible at the neighborhood scale. "

www.metropolismag.com/...carbon-neutral-now - Preview

green_strategies green_buildings dockside_green victoria metropolis_magazine yale kroon_hall

20 Oct 09

DailyCandy's Accidental Entrepreneur: An Interview with Dany Levy - Anthony Tjan - HarvardBusiness.org

Excellent interview by Anthony Tjan with Dany Levy, founder of Daily Candy.

blogs.harvardbusiness.org/...candys-accidental-entrepr.html - Preview

harvard_business dailycandy entrepreneurship dany_levy

16 Oct 09

Seth's Blog: Creating sustainable competitive advantage

One of the better definitions of "brand" that I've read in a while:
QUOTE
"You can build a brand (shorthand for relationships, beliefs, trust, permission and word of mouth)."
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Love the last sentence, too:
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The reason the internet is such a home to wow business models is that it's easier to create a network here than any other time in history.
UNQUOTE
So true.

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seth_godin branding competitiveness marketing

The Rise of the Mega-Region - WSJ.com

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"While there are 191 nations in the world, just 40 significant mega-regions power the global economy. Home to more than one-fifth of the world's population, these 40 megas account for two-thirds of global economic output and more than 85% of all global innovation."
UNQUOTE
Interesting idea: that mega-regions are actually more significant as drivers than nation-states when discussing economic competitiveness.

online.wsj.com/...SB120796112300309601.html - Preview

richard_florida mega_regions cities nation_states economies

chashama

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"chashama supports thriving cultural communities by transforming temporarily vacant properties into spaces where art can flourish. By recycling and repurposing buildings in transition, we invest in neighborhoods, foster local artists, and sustain a vast range of creativity and culture. "
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Really love this concept: work with property owners to let artists use currently empty/ unleased space as galleries.

www.chashama.org/...info-about_us.htm - Preview

chashama arts public_art retail real_estate

Why we learn more from our successes than our failures

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"If you've ever felt doomed to repeat your mistakes, researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory may have explained why: Brain cells may only learn from experience when we do something right and not when we fail."
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web.mit.edu/...successes-0729.html - Preview

neuroscience

07 Oct 09

The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future - Future metro - io9

QUOTE
Adam Greenfield, a design director at Nokia, wrote one of the defining texts on the design and use of ubiquitous computing or 'ubicomp' called "Everyware" and is about to release a follow-up on urban environments and technology called "The city is here for you to use". In a recent talk he framed a number of ways in which the access to data about your surroundings that Hill describes will change our attitude towards the city. He posits that we will move from a city we browser and wander to a 'searchable, query-able' city that we can not only read, but write-to as a medium.

He states:

The bottom-line is a city that responds to the behaviour of its users in something close to real-time, and in turn begins to shape that behaviour.

Again, we're not so far away from what Archigram were examining in the 60's. Behaviour and information as the raw material to design cities with as much as steel, glass and concrete.
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io9.com/...esuit-for-surviving-the-future - Preview

cities archigram urbanism science_fiction ubiquity ubicom jjacobs

The city of the future increases its role as an actor in our lives, affecting our lives. This of course, is a recurrent theme in science-fiction and fantasy.
Back in our world, the exaggerated mega-city is going through a bit of bad patch. The bling'd up ultraskyscraping and bespoke island-terraforming of Dubai is on hold until capitalism reboots, and changes in political fortune have nixed the futuristic, ubicomp'd-up Arup-designed ecotopia of Dongtan in China.
2 more annotations...
- We are now a predominantly urban species, with over 50% of humanity living in a city. The overwhelming majority of these are not old post-industrial world cities such as London or New York, but large chaotic sprawls of the industrialising world such as the "maximum cities" of Mumbai or Guangzhou. Here the infrastructures are layered, ad-hoc, adaptive and personal - people there really are walking architecture, as Archigram said.
  
  Hacking post-industrial cities is becoming a necessity also. The "shrinking cities" project is monitoring the trend in the west toward dwindling futures for cities such as Detroit and Liverpool.
- Jacobs claims that import replacement builds up local infrastructure, skills, and production. Jacobs also claims that the increased produce is exported to other cities, giving those other cities a new opportunity to engage in import replacement, thus producing a positive cycle of growth.

Ego City: Cities Are Organized Like Human Brains

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Cities are organized like brains, and the evolution of cities mirrors the evolution of human and animal brains, according to a new study by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
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Comparing infrastructure to neural networks. Hm - legitimate, scientific, or overwrought metaphor? I can certainly see that "maintaining sufficient interconnectedness" is a problem for both brains and cities.

www.sciencedaily.com/...090903163945.htm - Preview

cities neuroscience evolution urban_development

Just as advanced mammalian brains require a robust neural network to achieve richer and more complex thought, large cities require advanced highways and transportation systems to allow larger and more productive populations. The new study unearthed a striking similarity in how larger brains and cities deal with the difficult problem of maintaining sufficient interconnectedness.
“It seems both of these invisible hands have arrived at a similar conclusion: brains and cities, as they grow larger, have to be similarly densely interconnected to function optimally.”
3 more annotations...
- As brains grow more complex from one species to the next, they change in structure and organization in order to achieve the right level of interconnectedness. One couldn’t simply grow a double-sized dog brain, for example, and expect it to have the same capabilities as a human brain. This is because, among other things, a human brain doesn’t merely have more “dog neurons,” but, instead, has neurons with a greater number of synapses than that of a dog – something crucial in helping to keep the human brain well connected.
- As with brains, interconnectedness is also a critical component of the overall function of cities, Changizi said.
- As cities and the neocortex grow in surface area, the number of connectors – highways in cities and pyramidal neurons in brains – increases more slowly, as surface area to the 3/4 power, Changizi found. This means the number of connectors increases in both brains and cities as S3/4, where S = surface area. Similarly, as cities and brains grow, the total number of highway exits and synapses — which share a similar function as terminal points along highways and neurons — increases with an exponent of about 9/8. The number of exits per highway and synapses per neuron were also closely aligned, with an exponent of approximately 3/8.
  - Whoa, really? Highways are the connectors in cities? I'm calling BS. - on 2009-10-07
  Add Sticky Note

How Long is Your City's Tail? - O'Reilly Radar

Excellent article by John Geraci on how/why "the long tail" analogy has to come alive in cities, and what it would mean.
QUOTE
Most cities right now are models of closed, rigid systems, systems that rely on a few, top-performing agents to get civic tasks done and keep quality of life high for residents. Most of these agents are departments of the city itself, though some are outsourced. Either way, cities rely on one agent per issue, no more. (...)
...imagine instead a city that has totally open, unrestricted access to data (say, San Francisco or DC in 2011). What does it look like? It has all of the familiar city-run departments providing all of the services and assistance they've always provided - that's not going away. Then it also has public services offered by the mega companies, the Google Traffic, IBM's Smarter Cities, and so forth. Those are huge added value to these open cities - they're used by a large percentage of residents and make life in those cities better. But THEN, it also has an insane long tail of services set up and run by anyone with an interest in doing so, just by hooking into city data, distributing it in a new way, improving on it, mashing it up, giving it back to the city, etc. These services each individually get used by a small minority of people, but collectively they get used by more than any other single source in the city.
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It's interesting to think about the differences between Canada and the US here. In the US, all government data is owned by the people - governments can't keep it back. But in Canada, all government data is owned by the Crown. That means, Canadians have to first get someone in authority to grant them access to it and they have to get permission to use it. #fail #deadendfeudalism

radar.oreilly.com/...w-long-is-your-citys-tail.html - Preview

john_geraci cities data open_source democracy long_tail o'reilly

When the cost of each individual transaction falls to nearly zero, marginal and low-performing items, grouped together, can account for a lot more of the overall value of a company than the top-performing ones.
Everybody gets that.

What almost nobody realizes yet is that the same is true for cities - or can be.
5 more annotations...
- Most cities right now are models of closed, rigid systems, systems that rely on a few, top-performing agents to get civic tasks done and keep quality of life high for residents. Most of these agents are departments of the city itself, though some are outsourced. Either way, cities rely on one agent per issue, no more.
- A good number of cites are beginning to do deals with mega companies like Google and IBM, giving them access to city data so that they can build excellent tools for residents to use.
- If we do that, of course, we're missing out on what is potentially the biggest piece of the pie - the tail. That's where a huge chunk of the value comes from.
- But THEN, it also has an insane long tail of services set up and run by anyone with an interest in doing so, just by hooking into city data, distributing it in a new way, improving on it, mashing it up, giving it back to the city, etc. These services each individually get used by a small minority of people, but collectively they get used by more than any other single source in the city.
- So it might be time to ask yourself: how long is your city's tail shaping up to be? The answer may determine, to a large degree, how much your city is a thriving place to live in decades to come.

Storefront for Art and Architecture | Pike Loop, a Robot-Built Installation in NYC

QUOTE
Gramazio & Kohler's work represents the cutting edge of innovation in the field of digital fabrication in architecture. For many years architects have relied on digital manufacturing processes such as CNC milling or 3D printing as a tool for formal research at model-scale. For the first time, Gramazio & Kohler’s work explores the potential of mobile digital fabrication techniques that can fabricate at 1:1 scale on site.
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www.storefrontnews.org/exhib_dete.php - Preview

robotbuilt architecture design

Urban Planning Tools for Climate Change Mitigation

"Land use and urban form are key contributors to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) through the physical arrangement of streets, building types, and land uses that influence vehicle use and energy consumption in buildings. City and regional officials now facing new emissions reduction requirements are increasingly turning to urban design as a key component of climate mitigation. But, this approach requires decision support tools that illustrate the GHG implications of land use and transportation options. While a wide spectrum of tools currently exists, few have the capacity to work simultaneously at both the regional and local scale, or to capture both building performance and transportation demand analysis.

This report reviews existing tools by scope, scale, methodology, and policy support, and presents four case studies illustrating how existing tools at various stages of development have been used. "

www.lincolninst.edu/...1573_Urban-Planning-Tools - Preview

mitigation urbanplanning urban_development lincoln_institute

30 Sep 09

TED and Reddit’s 10 questions to Hans Rosling - Gapminder.org

Hans Rosling answers 10 questions posed to him after his TED Talk. Almost as good as the TED Talk that inspired the questions, this too is a must-see presentation.

www.gapminder.org/...s-10-questions-to-hans-rosling - Preview

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Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset | Video on TED.com

An amazing presentation by Hans Rosling about world health & economic data, his site (gapminder.org), the "bottom billion," and ...well, blowing cliches about health and wealth out of the water. Also see Rosling's 10 answers to 10 questions video: http://www.gapminder.org/videos/ted-and-reddits-10-questions-to-hans-rosling/

www.ted.com/...hans_rosling_at_state.html - Preview

ted_conference data video statistics hans_rosling demographics gapminder

Video - The Coming Currency Revolution - WSJ.com

Fascinating video about some of the alternative currencies already out there, building peer-to-peer finance and personal (and virtual) currencies. Scarcity, attention, money... Good stuff. Note: Saltspring Island has had its own currency for years - take it to the next level with virtual component?

online.wsj.com/...79-4609-A55D-1BAE9A1BA158.html - Preview

wsj.com currency economics virtual_currency ven peer-to-peer-finance p2p video

29 Sep 09

"Fact and Friction" Interview with Jay Rosen in Volume » Page not found

Great interview with Jay Rosen (conducted by Jeffey Inaba and Talene Montgomery) that delves into (and knits together) the "pro" (professional) and "am" (amateur, blogger) divide. Rosen advocates for Pro-Am journalism. And what is "the public"?

"How do journalists decide how to tell stories? What are their responsibilities when reporting a story? And to what extent do they write in the public’s interest?"

The questions revolve around whether journalists represent or create the public.

volumeproject.org/...7715 - Preview

jay_rosen jeffrey_inaba journalism volume_magazine citizen_journalism politics talene_montgomery

people involved in arts, culture, education and politics, have to figure out continually how to bring the public alive.’ It’s not just a question of information either, its also one of art. Because engaging people successfully is a social problem we have to figure out. So to me, yes, the public is there to be informed and it is something we have to bring to life. There’s no objective way of doing it; it’s an art and a commitment. I think really good journalists who care about telling the truth, who care about their stories and about having an effect are really saying, ‘I’m going to awaken the public’.
JR: Journalists have a responsibility to tell us what’s going on and tell us the truth and that does require impartiality. We know this from our normal lives. It doesn’t require you to be a journalist. If you went to a contentious meeting – and other people who also have a stake in what you have witnessed couldn’t go and they ask you what went on – you have a responsibility to report to the other people accurately and impartially. Yet you have other responsibilities too. People want to know not just what occurred, but also how they can affect things. Their participation and their power to affect the situation has something to do with their interest in information and there’s a vital connection between those two things.
6 more annotations...
- JR: The great press critic AJ Liebling once famously said about freedom of the press, ‘Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one’. And blogging means anyone can own one. That is a switch and 'citizen journalism' is simply a name for this fact. People have the tools and therefore they also have the powers of the press. Citizen journalism is when ‘The People Formerly Known as the Audience’ pick up these tools and use them to inform one another.
- First: we need verified information. The most important reason for having professional journalism is it represents a verification system we otherwise would not have. The essence of what they do is not just that they report stuff, but that they report stuff that's verifiable.
- Second: there are some kinds of stories – investigative journalism, for example – that you can only get if somebody is working on them full-time. Finding out facts requires somebody working on it. That argues for professional journalism. There's a whole class of things for which that is true.
- Third: we need people with power, including and especially people in government, to provide access to the public itself. But it's not practical for them to provide access to the public at large, so we need representative figures to pose questions. And obviously that, in a practical way, argues for people who have that access, because certain stories can only be gotten that way!
- So what is citizen journalism good at? We don't necessarily know entirely yet, because we haven't built good structures for it. But one of the things that it's good at – which really comes from blogging – is that having people who really care about issues guide you to news about those issues is actually a better way of learning about them than depending on, say, the LA Times. What's great about citizen journalism is that it is born from participation and it is created for your participation. The bloggers have been the ones – like amateurs in other new arts – who have actually pushed the craft forward. They’re the ones who learned to write with links; they’re the ones who learned to take the freedoms of the web – which are vast – and bring enough discipline to them through forms that make blogging intelligible.
- JR: I'm interested in this thing people are calling Pro-Am journalism. [1] Ultimately the strongest forms and the best discoveries will be made with ‘pro’ journalists working with networks of amateurs, connected through smart web tools and applications and motivated to produce new information.

15 Sep 09

David Byrne’s Perfect City - WSJ.com

I love David Byrne's music, but in this essay for the Wall Street Journal I think he somewhat over-reaches himself. Why? The essay is muddled. He includes too many contradictory pronouncements. For example, that big and dense is good, but that you need the "village" thing for safety & security; or that LA isn't dense (I believe it is, actually); or that lack of density creates narcissistic attention-getting ploys; or that "human scale" needs to be achieved through some process of "compromise" (left undefined), and so on. Furthermore, his closing sentence really confuses me: "My perfect city isn't fixed, it doesn't actually exist, and I like it that way." He likes that it doesn't exist? What does that mean?

online.wsj.com/...3440104574403293064136098.html - Preview

wsj.com david_byrne cities urbanism jjacobs

14 Sep 09

See Span | Monday Mag

Added a comment to Monday Magazine's article on Victoria's Johnson Street Bridge debacle.

mondaymag.com/...see-span - Preview

johnson_street_bridge victoria blue_bridge infrastructure municipal_funding municipal_politics comments

11 Sep 09

Forget Curbing Suburban Sprawl (MIT Technology Review)

I have some questions about the source of this report/ research, which claims that density (including examples such as Vancouver's eco-density) "would yield insignificant CO2 reductions."
QUOTE
Even if 75 percent of all new and replacement housing in America were built at twice the density of current new developments, and those living in the newly constructed housing drove 25 percent less as a result, CO2 emissions from personal travel would decline nationwide by only 8 to 11 percent by 2050, according to the study. If just 25 percent of housing units were developed at such densities and residents drove only 12 percent less as a result, CO2 emissions would be reduced by less than 2 percent by 2050.
UNQUOTE

I guess the problem is with defining real density as a mere "twice the density of current new developments": if you consider that new developments include suburban greenfield spreads on 1/4 to 1/2 acre for each SFH, then doubling that density really doesn't amount to much.

Further down, the report just makes the case for building more fuel-efficient cars - so maybe that's where the report's agenda originates.

www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx - Preview

mit_techreview sprawl urbanplanning phil_mckenna density national_academy_of_sciences

AIArchitect This Week | Pushing the Limits: Contemporary Parisian Architecture in Historic Contexts

Hillis's article looks at how historical and contemporary architecture is "blended" in a "historically centric city such as Paris." Focus on Les Halles; new Ministry of Culture building; Le Fouquet Hotel on Avenue George V; etc.

info.aia.org/...0731d_paris.cfm - Preview

architecture heritage paris wendy_hillis