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Party Animals: Early Human Culture Thrived in Crowds | LiveScience

Article reports on research (noted & bookmarked earlier: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-06/ucl-hpd060109.php) arguing the benefits of density (in early urban settings), which accelerated intellectual and cultural development.

Tags: urbanization, urban_development, urban_energy, cities, population, density on 2009-06-25 and saved by 6 people -All Annotations (7) -About

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High population density triggers cultural explosions

Report on a new study by University College London that high population densities enable cultural & technical innovation. This directly results in modern human behavior, by which the authors mean "a radical jump in technological and cultural complexity," including "symbolic behavior" (abstract & realistic art, body decoration, etc.; music, and other technical innovations). The study aims to explain why advanced behavior and technology only begin to "explode" around 45,000 years ago - even though humans had been around for 160,000 to 200,000 years.

"Ironically, our finding that successful innovation depends less on how smart you are than how connected you are seems as relevant today as it was 90,000 years ago."

Tags: urbanization, urban_development, urban_energy, cities, population, density on 2009-06-08 -All Annotations (4) -About

more fromwww.eurekalert.org

complex skills learnt across generations can only be maintained when there is a critical level of interaction between people
high and low-skilled groups could coexist over long periods of time and that the degree of skill they maintained depended on local population density or the degree of migration between them
"Modern humans have been around for at least 160,000 to 200,000 years but there is no archaeological evidence of any technology beyond basic stone tools until around 90,000 years ago. In Europe and western Asia this advanced technology and behaviour explodes around 45,000 years ago when humans arrive there, but doesn't appear in eastern and southern Asia and Australia until much later, despite a human presence. In sub-Saharan Africa the situation is more complex. Many of the features of modern human behaviour – including the first abstract art – are found some 90,000 years ago but then seem to disappear around 65,000 years ago, before re-emerging some 40,000 years ago.

"Scientists have offered many suggestions as to why these cultural explosions occurred where and when they did, including new mutations leading to better brains, advances in language, and expansions into new environments that required new technologies to survive. The problem is that none of these explanations can fully account for the appearance of modern human behaviour at different times in different places, or its temporary disappearance in sub-Saharan Africa."
"Ironically, our finding that successful innovation depends less on how smart you are than how connected you are seems as relevant today as it was 90,000 years ago."

The Future of Our Cities: Open, Crowdsourced, and Participatory - O'Reilly Radar

Taking the example of closed thinking at New York City MTA, John Geraci makes a compelling case for crowd-sourcing improvements in urban affairs and urban matters (including public transportation). Great article.

Tags: crowdsourcing, cities, collaboration, diycity, john_geraci on 2009-04-10 and saved by 16 people -All Annotations (8) -About

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affordable green housing (podcast.mov (video/quicktime Object))

Excellent short film about biophilia and how to make sure it's satisfied in urban environments, with specific reference to one project by developer Jonathan Rose (of Jonathan Rose Companies).

Tags: biophilia, cities, urbanism, green_strategies on 2009-04-09 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww-tc.pbs.org

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Putting Parking into Reverse - InTransition

"Professor’s Theories Influence Cities to Reconsider Pervasive Free Parking" : on how free parking has distorted urban centers.

Tags: intransition, parking, cars, cities, urban_design, surface_parking_lots on 2009-03-11 -All Annotations (23) -About

more fromintransitionmag.org

UCLA Planning Professor Donald Shoup has written 733 pages that say otherwise. Because when cars aren’t going, they are parked somewhere, and when they are parked in one place, an average of six spaces per car nationwide stand vacant. Shoup considers the proliferation of parking spaces to be a plague on American cities, and because the vast majority lie open for the taking, they represent the largest devaluation of real estate short of the subprime mortgage crisis.
If America’s streets were a Monopoly board, it would be a dull contest indeed, with almost every space “Free Parking.” Each of the country’s roughly 200 million vehicles typically demands spaces at home and work, with shares of countless spaces at the market, restaurant, post office, mall and every other imaginable destination. Eighty-seven percent of all trips are made by personal vehicle and 99 percent of those trips arrive at a free parking space.
Many of these spaces stem from carelessly planned street parking schemes and arbitrary minimum parking requirements, by which cities dictate the number of spaces that different types of land uses must provide for tenants and customers.
“That makes parking artificially abundant and therefore cheap and does in some ways tend to subsidize auto use when people would otherwise make other choices,”
Shoup has waged a campaign to convince cities to revolutionize their parking policies, from charging higher meter prices to allowing communal lots to reducing sacrosanct minimum parking requirements. Such efforts, he says, could speed the flow of traffic, encourage denser development, rehabilitate pedestrian environments and even make it easier to find a place to park. Now, four years after his book’s publication, cities across America are devising ways to stop parking in its tracks.
Car Culture “Ruined the City”
As parking requirements facilitate the use of cars, total travel increases, public transit use decreases, buildings scoot farther away from each other, density diminishes, central cities go into tailspins and sprawl increases—all of which, in turn, increases the need for more parking.
“I’m really saying that cities are doing everything wrong, when it comes to parking,” Shoup said. “I firmly believe that. For 75 years we’ve made terrible mistakes with nobody noticing.”
“Parking is the most glaring example of how we have systematically subsidized an auto-driven landscape and systematically devalued the pedestrian landscape.”
A “pseudoscience” was created out of assigning precise requirements to everything from convents to batting cages, and couching them in terms of “requirements” implied that they must be provided free of charge.
the absence of a price does not equate to an absence of cost.
Though Shoup himself gives only the occasional informational lecture and admits that his book is nearly unreadable in its entirety, it has turned into a manifesto for a growing movement of planners, public officials and other loyal revolutionaries who decry the degradation of the urban landscape. These self-styled “Shoupistas” (yes, there is a Facebook group) have created a cult of personality and rationality around Shoup and his straightforward, elegant approach to healing American cities.
Rather than focus on the supply side of the parking equation, Shoup focuses on the demand side and on the heretical notion that, even in a consumerist society, it might be all right to implement policies that would reduce demand.
The fundamental change that cities need to make, according to Shoup, is to charge a price for metered parking that would be expensive enough to create roughly a 15 percent vacancy rate. At that rate, Shoup said, many drivers will either park in private lots or use other means of transportation, and those drivers who want to park on the street will find readily available spaces without “cruising” endlessly.
Indeed, one of Shoup’s studies claimed that in a variety of high-traffic areas in Los Angeles, curb parking was always cheaper than pay parking, by as much as a factor of 10. In Westwood Village alone, this disparity leads to “cruising” that “creates enough vehicle travel to make 38 trips around the earth.”
Add Sticky Note
- yikes...
  posted by lampertina on 2009-03-11
One group likely to raise protests, though, are businesses owners who may fear that higher prices will drive away patrons. In fact, Shoup contends that higher turnover (prompted by higher rates) will benefit some businesses, and he ensures that the benefits will be more than just theoretical.
Shoup proposes “parking benefit districts” by which revenue at the meters would be re-invested in the immediate neighborhood for upgrades such as sidewalk improvements, signage and other amenities that would make the areas more comfortable for pedestrians and less comfortable for cars.
Add Sticky Note
- - that's an excellent idea, and fits in well w/ studies that show how urban forests/ plantings improve commerce, lend an air of ease and pleasure to a district and raise its overall profile/ value.
  posted by lampertina on 2009-03-11
He recommends that cities “let the prices do the planning.”
Leading the pack is San Francisco, where the new SFPark program has received $23 million in federal funding. SFPark takes nearly the entire suite of Shoupisms to heart and is implementing them in an 18-month pilot project that will apply to 7,000 curbside and over 11,000 off-street spaces. It will rely heavily on cutting-edge meter and data-gathering technology to adjust rates and reduce congestion.
Still, Shoup’s optimism extends even to the typology that most revels in parking excess: the big box store. Convinced that urbanism can emerge in the backwash of sprawl, Shoup contends that if big boxes, malls and even strip malls were allowed to reduce their parking and replace excess spaces with something more useful, suburbanites might embark on the greatest land reclamation scheme this side of the Netherlands. He envisions apartment buildings and townhouses sprouting on the edges of malls parking lots and thereby creating nearly fully formed neighborhoods in place of vacant asphalt.
Add Sticky Note
- - this is what's supposed to be going up at Town & Country Mall right here in Victoria/ Saanich (if the current $-downturn hasn't killed the project...)
  posted by lampertina on 2009-03-11

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Green Cities, Brown Suburbs by Edward L. Glaeser, City Journal Winter 2009

Ed Glaeser makes the point that cities are much greener than non-urban areas, all things considered. Your country or suburb carbon footprint is huge compared to your urban carbon footprint.

Tags: edward_glaeser, city_journal, urbanism, green_strategies, suburbs, cities on 2009-03-10 and saved by 3 people -All Annotations (18) -About

more fromwww.city-journal.org

if you want to be good to the environment, stay away from it. Move to high-rise apartments surrounded by plenty of concrete. Americans who settle in leafy, low-density suburbs will leave a significantly deeper carbon footprint, it turns out, than Americans who live cheek by jowl in urban towers.
second paradox follows from the first. When environmentalists resist new construction in their dense but environmentally friendly cities, they inadvertently ensure that it will take place somewhere else—somewhere with higher carbon emissions. Much local environmentalism, in short, is bad for the environment.
Matthew Kahn, a professor of economics at UCLA, and I have quantified the first paradox.
we’re trying to determine where future home construction would do the least environmental damage.
Add Sticky Note
- - that's key.
  posted by lampertina on 2009-03-10
In almost every metropolitan area, carbon emissions are significantly lower for people who live in central cities than for people who live in suburbs.
New York City has the largest gap in emissions between central city and suburbs of any metropolitan area in the country—unsurprisingly, since New York’s central city is the epitome of dense urban living. Our estimate is that an average New York City resident emits 4,462 pounds less of transportation-related carbon dioxide than an average New York suburbanite. The reductions in carbon emissions from home heating and electricity are comparably large, thanks to New York’s famously tiny apartments. Manhattan is one of the greenest places in America.
These four cities notwithstanding, the data suggest a strong general pattern: households in dense urban areas have significantly lower carbon emissions than households in the suburbs. The lifestyle that Thoreau preferred, living surrounded by green space, tends to be far less kind to the planet and far likelier to raise global temperatures, just as Thoreau himself did that afternoon in 1844.
There is a large and growing literature, ranging from complete skepticism to ultra-alarmism, devoted to the question of just how much environmental damage is associated with carbon emissions. The widely cited Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change claims that each ton of carbon dioxide emissions causes $85 worth of damage to the planet. More commonly accepted estimates are considerably lower; one meta-study suggests an average cost of about $15 per ton of carbon dioxide. The right number probably lies somewhere between $15 and $85.
Even if, like many economists, you think that the Stern Review overstates the true damage per ton and you chop its proposed cost in half, then the average new home in Memphis still does about $620 worth of environmental harm per year more than an average new home in San Francisco, since San Francisco homes are associated with 14.65 fewer tons of carbon dioxide each year. Once you crunch the numbers, that makes the lifetime environmental cost of building in Memphis, rather than San Francisco, $12,400 per home—a big number relative to Memphis’s average housing price of $90,000.
Before even considering carbon taxes, the country should rethink its land-use policies, which currently push people toward high-emissions areas and away from green ones.
The chart shows a strong negative correlation between restrictiveness and carbon dioxide emissions.
But California’s abundant restrictions on new construction don’t do much to deter building across America as a whole. No matter what the Bay Area does, plenty of new households will come into being, and they will need new homes. By restricting local development, California regulators just make sure that construction occurs someplace else. That someplace else tends to be a lot less environmentally friendly than the California coast, blessed as it is with a superbly temperate climate. The net result of this process: land-use restrictions in California increase carbon emissions and raise the risks of global warming.
The great irony, of course, is that land-use regulations are so often justified by environmental arguments.
So California environmentalists have things exactly backward. If climate change is the major environmental challenge that we face, the state should actively encourage new construction, rather than push it toward other areas. True, increasing development in California might increase per-household carbon emissions within the state if the new development, following the current model, took place on the extreme edges of urban areas. A better path would be to ease restrictions in the urban cores of San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego. More building there would reduce average commute lengths and improve per-capita emissions. Higher densities could also justify more investment in new, low-emissions energy plants.
Similarly, limiting the height or growth of New York City skyscrapers incurs environmental costs. Building more apartments in Gotham will not only make the city more affordable; it will also reduce global warming.
Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.
Add Sticky Note
- Best ending sentence, ever.
  posted by lampertina on 2009-03-10

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Economic Impact: The City as a Social Portfolio « The Captured Perspective

Great 'Captured Perspective' blog post by Peter Boumgarden, who comments on Richard Florida's Atlantic Monthly piece:
QUOTE
"...cities are not just portfolios that emerge segmented for risk, but also social entities that respond positively to this differentiation with increased generativity. Cities are not only portfolios, but also social entities where diverse individuals interacting results in additional benefits for the growth of that city, over and above the lower risk of economic failure. In this way, a city might best be conceived a social portfolio.
UNQUOTE

Tags: captured_perspective, peter_boumgarden, richard_florida, social_capital, cities, diversity, economics on 2009-03-04 -All Annotations (3) -About

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What this means is that cities are not just portfolios that emerge segmented for risk, but also social entities that respond positively to this differentiation with increased generativity. Cities are not only portfolios, but also social entities where diverse individuals interacting results in additional benefits for the growth of that city, over and above the lower risk of economic failure. In this way, a city might best be conceived a social portfolio.
What this means is that cities are not just portfolios that emerge segmented for risk, but also social entities that respond positively to this differentiation with increased generativity. Cities are not only portfolios, but also social entities where diverse individuals interacting results in additional benefits for the growth of that city, over and above the lower risk of economic failure. In this way, a city might best be conceived a social portfolio.

What you have in a city like Detroit (or unfortunately, many mid-major Midwestern cities, St. Louis included) is a poor social portfolio- resulting from a significant lack of industry diversity, and a lack of concentrated interaction among any diversity. Taken together, these cities are both at higher risk of collapse given the right conditions, and a lower ‘risk’ of growth and innovation.
What this means is that cities are not just portfolios that emerge segmented for risk, but also social entities that respond positively to this differentiation with increased generativity. Cities are not only portfolios, but also social entities where diverse individuals interacting results in additional benefits for the growth of that city, over and above the lower risk of economic failure. In this way, a city might best be conceived a social portfolio.

What you have in a city like Detroit (or unfortunately, many mid-major Midwestern cities, St. Louis included) is a poor social portfolio- resulting from a significant lack of industry diversity, and a lack of concentrated interaction among any diversity. Taken together, these cities are both at higher risk of collapse given the right conditions, and a lower ‘risk’ of growth and innovation.

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The Atlantic Online | March 2009 | How the Crash Will Reshape America | Richard Florida

Richard Florida on how the financial crash will affect specific geographical locales and cities in the US / in North America. On NYC, he notes that its diversified economy - even though it's home to Wall Street, which may well be moribund if not dead already - will see the city through the worst of it.

Tags: richard_florida, economy, economics, cities on 2009-02-24 and saved by 20 people -All Annotations (55) -About

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The great urbanist Jane Jacobs was among the first to identify cities’ diverse economic and social structures as the true engines of growth. Although the specialization identified by Adam Smith creates powerful efficiency gains, Jacobs argued that the jostling of many different professions and different types of people, all in a dense environment, is an essential spur to innovation—to the creation of things that are truly new. And innovation, in the long run, is what keeps cities vital and relevant.
In 2005, I asked a top-ranking official at a major investment bank whether the city’s rising real-estate prices were affecting his company’s ability to attract global talent. He responded simply: “We are the cause, not the effect, of the real-estate bubble.” (As it turns out, he was only half right.) Stratospheric real-estate prices have made New York less diverse over time, and arguably less stimulating.
In his 2005 book, The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman argues, essentially, that the global economic playing field has been leveled, and that anyone, anywhere, can now innovate, produce, and compete on a par with, say, workers in Seattle or entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. But this argument isn’t quite right, and doesn’t accurately describe the evolution of the global economy in recent years.

In fact, as I described in an earlier article for this magazine (“The World Is Spiky,” October 2005 [link opens PDF]), place still matters in the modern economy—and the competitive advantage of the world’s most successful city-regions seems to be growing, not shrinking. To understand how the current crisis is likely to affect different places in the United States, it’s important to understand the forces that have been slowly remaking our economic landscape for a generation or more.
Pacific Northwest’s Cascadia, stretching from Portland through Seattle to Vancouver
The ability of different cities and regions to attract highly educated people—or human capital—has diverged, according to research by the Harvard economists Edward Glaeser and Christopher Berry, among others. Thirty years ago, educational attainment was spread relatively uniformly throughout the country, but that’s no longer the case. Cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Raleigh, and Boston now have two or three times the concentration of college graduates of Akron or Buffalo. Among people with postgraduate degrees, the disparities are wider still. The geographic sorting of people by ability and educational attainment, on this scale, is unprecedented.
University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Robert Lucas declared that the spillovers in knowledge that result from talent-clustering are the main cause of economic growth
Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can. There is no evidence that globalization or the Internet has changed that. Indeed, as globalization has increased the financial return on innovation by widening the consumer market, the pull of innovative places, already dense with highly talented workers, has only grown stronger, creating a snowball effect. Talent-rich ecosystems are not easy to replicate, and to realize their full economic value, talented and ambitious people increasingly need to live within them.
Big, talent-attracting places benefit from accelerated rates of “urban metabolism,” according to a pioneering theory of urban evolution developed by a multidisciplinary team of researchers affiliated with the SantaFe Institute. The rate at which living things convert food into energy—their metabolic rate—tends to slow as organisms increase in size. But when the Santa Fe team examined trends in innovation, patent activity, wages, and GDP, they found that successful cities, unlike biological organisms, actually get faster as they grow. In order to grow bigger and overcome diseconomies of scale like congestion and rising housing and business costs, cities must become more efficient, innovative, and productive. The researchers dubbed the extraordinarily rapid metabolic rate that successful cities are able to achieve “super-linear” scaling. “By almost any measure,” they wrote, “the larger a city’s population, the greater the innovation and wealth creation per person.” Places like New York with finance and media, Los Angeles with film and music, and Silicon Valley with hightech are all examples of high-metabolism places.
While the crisis may have begun in New York, it will likely find its fullest bloom in the interior of the country—in older, manufacturing regions whose heydays are long past and in newer, shallow-rooted Sun Belt communities whose recent booms have been fueled in part by real-estate speculation, overdevelopment, and fictitious housing wealth.
In November, nationwide unemployment in manufacturing and production occupations was already 9.4 percent. Compare that with the professional occupations, where it was just a little over 3 percent. According to an analysis done by Michael Mandel, the chief economist at BusinessWeek, jobs in the “tangible” sector—that is, production, construction, extraction, and transport—declined by nearly 1.8 million between December 2007 and November 2008, while those in the intangible sector—what I call the “creative class” of scientists, engineers, managers, and professionals—increased by more than 500,000. Both sorts of jobs are regionally concentrated. Paul Krugman has noted that the worst of the crisis, so far at least, can be seen in a “Slump Belt,” heavy with manufacturing centers, running from the industrial Midwest down into the Carolinas. Large swaths of the Northeast, with its professional and creative centers, have been better insulated.
Still, as its population density dips further, the city’s struggle to provide services and prevent blight across an ever-emptier landscape will only intensify.

That’s the challenge that many Rust Belt cities share: managing population decline without becoming blighted. The task is doubly difficult because as the manufacturing industry has shrunk, the local high-end services—finance, law, consulting—that it once supported have diminished as well, absorbed by bigger regional hubs and globally connected cities. In Chicago, for instance, the country’s 50 biggest law firms grew by 2,130 lawyers from 1984 to 2006, according to William Henderson and Arthur Alderson of Indiana University. Throughout the rest of the Midwest, these firms added a total of just 169 attorneys. Jones Day, founded in 1893 and today one of the country’s largest law firms, no longer considers its Cleveland office “headquarters”—that’s in Washington, D.C.—but rather its “founding office.”

Many second-tier midwestern cities have tried to reinvent themselves in different ways, with varying degrees of success. Pittsburgh, for instance, has sought to reimagine itself as a high-tech center, and has met with more success than just about anywhere else. Still, its population has declined from a high of almost 700,000 in the mid-20th century to roughly 300,000 today. There will be fewer manufacturing jobs on the other side of the crisis, and the U.S. economic landscape will be more uneven—“spikier”—as a result. Many of the old industrial centers will be further diminished, perhaps permanently so.
But in the heady days of the housing bubble, some Sun Belt cities—Phoenix and Las Vegas are the best examples—developed economies centered largely on real estate and construction. With sunny weather and plenty of flat, empty land, they got caught in a classic boom cycle. Although these places drew tourists, retirees, and some industry—firms seeking bigger footprints at lower costs—much of the cities’ development came from, well, development itself. At a minimum, these places will take a long, long time to regain the ground they’ve recently lost in local wealth and housing values. It’s not unthinkable that some of them could be in for an extended period of further decline.
To an uncommon degree, the economic boom in these cities was propelled by housing appreciation: as prices rose, more people moved in, seeking inexpensive lifestyles and the opportunity to get in on the real-estate market where it was rising, but still affordable. Local homeowners pumped more and more capital out of their houses as well, taking out home-equity loans and injecting money into the local economy in the form of home improvements and demand for retail goods and low-level services. Cities grew, tax coffers filled, spending continued, more people arrived. Yet the boom itself neither followed nor resulted in the development of sustainable, scalable, highly productive industries or services. It was fueled and funded by housing, and housing was its primary product. Whole cities and metro regions became giant Ponzi schemes.
From October 2007 through October 2008, the Phoenix area registered the largest decline in housing values in the country: 32.7 percent. (Las Vegas was just a whisker behind, at 31.7 percent. Housing in the New York region, by contrast, fell by just 7.5 percent over the same period.) Overstretched and overbuilt, the region is now experiencing a fiscal double whammy, as its many retirees—some 21 percent of its residents are older than 55—have seen their retirement savings decimated. Mortgages Limited, the state’s largest private commercial lender, filed for bankruptcy last summer. The city is running a $200 million budget deficit, which is only expected to grow. Last fall, the city government petitioned for federal funds to help it deal with the financial crisis. “We had a big bubble here, and it burst,” Anthony Sanders, a professor of economics and finance at ASU, told USA Today in December. “We’ve taken Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams and now it’s Field of Screams. If you build it, nobody comes.”
Will people wash out of these places as fast as they washed in, leaving empty sprawl and all the ills that accompany it? Will these cities gradually attract more businesses and industries, allowing them to build more-diverse and more-resilient economies? Or will they subsist on tourism—which may be meager for quite some time—and on the Social Security checks of their retirees? No matter what, their character and atmosphere are likely to change radically.
Every phase or epoch of capitalism has its own distinct geography, or what economic geographers call the “spatial fix” for the era. The physical character of the economy—the way land is used, the location of homes and businesses, the physical infrastructure that ties everything together—shapes consumption, production, and innovation. As the economy grows and evolves, so too must the landscape.
Positioning the economy to grow strongly in the coming decades will require not just fiscal stimulus or industrial reform; it will require a new kind of geography as well, a new spatial fix for the next chapter of American economic history.
Suburbanization was the spatial fix for the industrial age—the geographic expression of mass production and the early credit economy.
Demand for houses was symbiotic with demand for cars, and both were helped along by federal highway construction, among other infrastructure projects that subsidized a new suburban lifestyle and in turn fueled demand for all manner of household goods. More recently, innovations in finance like adjustable-rate mortgages and securitized subprime loans expanded homeownership further and kept demand high. By 2004, a record 69.2 percent of American families owned their home.
The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism. Velocity and density are not words that many people use when describing the suburbs. The economy is driven by key urban areas; a different geography is required.
The bubble encouraged massive, unsustainable growth in places where land was cheap and the real-estate economy dominant. It encouraged low-density sprawl, which is ill-fitted to a creative, postindustrial economy.
The solution begins with the removal of homeownership from its long-privileged place at the center of the U.S. economy. Substantial incentives for homeownership (from tax breaks to artificially low mortgage-interest rates) distort demand, encouraging people to buy bigger houses than they otherwise would. That means less spending on medical technology, or software, or alternative energy—the sectors and products that could drive U.S. growth and exports in the coming years. Artificial demand for bigger houses also skews residential patterns, leading to excessive low-density suburban growth. The measures that prop up this demand should be eliminated.
in both the United States and Europe, those places with higher homeownership rates also suffer from higher unemployment. Homeownership, Oswald found, is a more important predictor of unemployment than rates of unionization or the generosity of welfare benefits. Too often, it ties people to declining or blighted locations, and forces them into work—if they can find it—that is a poor match for their interests and abilities.
we need to encourage growth in the regions and cities that are best positioned to compete in the coming decades: the great mega-regions that already power the economy, and the smaller, talent-attracting innovation centers inside them—places like Silicon Valley, Boulder, Austin, and the North Carolina Research Triangle.
we need to make elite cities and key mega-regions more attractive and affordable for all of America’s classes, not just the upper crust. High housing costs in these cities and in the more convenient suburbs around them, along with congested sprawl farther afield, have conspired to drive lower-income Americans away from these places over the past 30 years. This is profoundly unhealthy for our society.
If there is one constant in the history of capitalist development, it is the ever-more-intensive use of space. Today, we need to begin making smarter use of both our urban spaces and the suburban rings that surround them—packing in more people, more affordably, while at the same time improving their quality of life. That means liberal zoning and building codes within cities to allow more residential development, more mixed-use development in suburbs and cities alike, the in-filling of suburban cores near rail links, new investment in rail, and congestion pricing for travel on our roads. Not everyone wants to live in city centers, and the suburbs are not about to disappear. But we can do a much better job of connecting suburbs to cities and to each other, and allowing regions to grow bigger and denser without losing their velocity.
Places like Pittsburgh have shown that a city can stay vibrant as it shrinks, by redeveloping its core to attract young professionals and creative types, and by cultivating high-growth services and industries. And in limited ways, we can help faltering cities to manage their decline better, and to sustain better lives for the people who stay in them.

"Premier rightly targets blowhard NIMBYists," by Christopher Hume (Toronto Star)

Backed by a recent announcement by Dalton McGuinty (that "the province will limit the endless NIMBY wrangling that accompanies its every attempt to introduce environmental measures"), Hume takes aim at Toronto NIMBYs and blasts away. No holds barred, great stuff:
QUOTE
The NIMBY response has become a given, a default position, an automatic reaction, a cliché. It's the same whether we're talking about highrise condos in north Toronto, narrowing Jarvis St. from five lanes to four, constructing a streetcar right-of-way on St. Clair Ave., rehabilitating the Wychwood Barns or trying to slow global warming to save the planet and this sorry ass of a city.

Many residents assume that to live in a neighbourhood confers the exclusive right to decide what should or shouldn't happen in it. In some cases, NIMBY opponents of homes for unwed mothers and the like have claimed the right to say who can live next door. The sense of entitlement behind such an attitude could sink a battleship.
UNQUOTE

So true.

Tags: nimbyism, toronto, christopher_hume, cities, environment on 2009-02-17 -All Annotations (0) -About

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LimeWire Creator Brings Open-Source Approach to Urban Planning | Epicenter from Wired.com

Mark Gorton, software entrepreneur, turns to urban planning (transportation, specifically), using opensource to revolutionize planning.
QUOTE
You might call it a "P2P-to-people" initiative -- these efforts to make cities more people-friendly are partly funded by people sharing files.

That's not the only connection between open-source software and Gorton's vision for livable cities. The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he's lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people's needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the past, but it was closed to citizens.

Gorton's open-source model would have a positive impact on urban planning by opening up the process to a wider audience, says Thomas K. Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association, an organization that deals with urban planning issues in the New York metropolitan area.

"99 percent of planning in the United States is volunteer citizens on Tuesday nights in a high school gym," Wright says. "Creating a software that can reach into that dynamic would be very profound, and open it up, and shine light on the decision-making. Right now, it becomes competing experts trying to out-credential each other in front of these citizen and volunteer boards... [Gorton] could actually change the whole playing field."
UNQUOTE
Yes!

Tags: wired_magazine, mark_gorton, open_source, local_government, urbanplanning, cities, limewire, transportation on 2009-02-01 and saved by 13 people -All Annotations (12) -About

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"P2P-to-people" initiative
The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he's lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people's needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the past, but it was closed to citizens.
"99 percent of planning in the United States is volunteer citizens on Tuesday nights in a high school gym," Wright says. "Creating a software that can reach into that dynamic would be very profound, and open it up, and shine light on the decision-making. Right now, it becomes competing experts trying to out-credential each other in front of these citizen and volunteer boards... [Gorton] could actually change the whole playing field."
San Francisco, whose MUNI bus system is a frequent target of criticism, could be next to get the treatment. Gorton says he's in talks with the city
to supply transit routing software for MUNI that will do
a much better job of keeping track of where people are going and
figuring out how best to get them there. San Francisco "overpaid
greatly" for a badly-supported proprietary closed-source system that
barely works, according to Gorton, putting the city under the thumb of
a private company that provides sub-par support.
Add Sticky Note
- Yes!
  posted by lampertina on 2009-02-01
The quest to bring open-source software to real-world urban planning continued, following the clearance of a key hurdle: Before you can build a transportation model, you need to know where the roads are.

While public, that data was locked by private software used by public organizations and suffered from an overall lack of standards. Thus was born GeoServer, an open-source, Java-based software server that lets anyone view and edit geo-spatial data. Road information can now be painstakingly imported once from proprietary systems or entered from scratch, double-checked by other users, and rolled out to anyone who needs the data.

"It didn't really exist before," said Gorton. "Most of the data was run on software from a company called Esri. Government agencies have this data, but it's all running on proprietary systems and you couldn't get access to it, or it was very hard to get access to it." GeoServer now runs in thousands of places around the world for all sorts of reasons, according to Gorton, whenever an online app needs to know where roads are.

"Where Do Cities Come From?" (Richard Florida - Creative Class)

Florida points to an article that smacks down cities (it claims that historically they've been "death traps") and asks for reader feedback. I left a long comment.

Tags: cities, richard_florida, industrial_revolution, urbanism, comments on 2009-01-23 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.creativeclass.com

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"'Actions' anthology a handbook for urban revolutionaries" by Christopher Hume (TheStar.com)

Discussion of Montreal's Canadian Centre for Architecture's publication "Actions: What You Can Do With The City" (Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi): 98 examples of "techniques, events, ideas and strategies aimed at making cities more sustainable, humane, efficient, livable and, not least, fun." I was especially intrigued by what Hume describes as "Actions"' subtext, *waste* - see article.
QUOTE
"Our whole economy has become a waste economy," writes Zardini quoting Hannah Arendt, "in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end."
UNQUOTE

Tags: thestar, christopher_hume, waste, cities, urbanism on 2009-01-19 -All Annotations (5) -About

more fromwww.thestar.com

"Between the utopian fantasy of starting over and the impossible dream of continuing in the direction that we are headed," writes architect/activist Fritz Haeg, "there lies a middle ground in which we come to terms with the urban decisions that have already been made and repurpose aspects of our existing built environment in strategic ways. ... No matter what has been handed to us, each of us should be given licence to be an active part in the creation of the cities that we share."
Add Sticky Note
- Well said, and interesting to think about in relation to someone like J.H. Kunstler, who thinks there's a tabula rasa coming up.
  posted by lampertina on 2009-01-19
If Actions has a subtext, however, it's that of waste. Many projects included are based on reclaiming the vast quantities of food we throw away – a quarter of all food produced in North America ends in a trash bin, much perfectly edible.
"Our whole economy has become a waste economy," writes Zardini quoting Hannah Arendt, "in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end."
Arendt's words, written half a century ago, have never been so pertinent.
At the same time, Action recognizes that livability can be a strictly local issue.
Add Sticky Note
- V. true.
  posted by lampertina on 2009-01-19

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The economic impact of high density development and tall buildings in central business districts: British Property Federation

A 9/10/08 pointer to a 44-pg PDF, "The economic impact of high density development and tall buildings in central business districts: British Property Federation." From the description:
QUOTE
There is increasing recognition of the need to increase the density of commercial development, especially in the centres of our towns and cities. The sustainability benefits of high density are relatively well known. For example, less urban sprawl means less need to use greenfield sites, more use of public transport and, with mixed use developments, a reduced need to travel.

However, there is also an economic case for increased commercial density, as specified in Policy Planning Statement (PPS) 6 and the State of the English Cities. In current debates about increasing commercial density in London – including through tall buildings – this economic element has been little mentioned, and is perhaps little understood.

This research has sought to explain and estimate the economic costs and benefits of high density commercial development in central business districts. The aim is to provide a more rounded picture of the economic impact of high density development and to strengthen the assessment of such development.
UNQUOTE

Tags: central_business_districts, cities, urbanism, economic_development, tall_buildings, high_rise, density on 2009-01-01 -All Annotations (1) -About

more fromwww.bpf.org.uk

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"Like it or not, condos will keep going up," by Christopher Hume (TheStar.com)

On the rise of condo living in Canadian cities.

Tags: thestar, christopher_hume, condos, cities, families on 2008-12-23 -All Annotations (2) -About

more fromwww.thestar.com

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"Need for infrastructure investment nears crisis point," by Mike De Souza (National Post)

Yet another article on the massive infrastructure crisis in Canada, and the federal attempts to boost the economy by putting money into infrastructure upgrades.

Tags: national_post, canada, cities, infrastructure_funding, infrastructure, federal, bailout on 2008-12-16 -All Annotations (5) -About

more fromwww.nationalpost.com

Canada's crumbling cities are on the verge of getting a multibillion-dollar makeover through a federal strategy that is being billed by the government not only as a shot in the arm for a fragile economy, but also as a long-awaited plan to rebuild the backbone -- from roads to sewage treatment -- of our communities.
For years, the country's ever-growing "infrastructure deficit" took a back seat to other priorities. Now it is on the lips of virtually every politician as a key solution for tackling an economic slowdown by providing funds to companies bidding for contracts and putting people to work.
The Conservative government introduced its Building Canada plan, an infrastructure strategy worth $33 billion over seven years, in its 2007 budget. But key stakeholders have raised doubts about whether it would be enough to fix the problems that are becoming more costly to resolve with each day.
Despite repeated warnings since the 1990s that much of the infrastructure has reached the end of its service life, the federal government is at least five years away from completing a study to get a handle on the extent of the problem.
Perrault's federation estimates that cities would need at least $123 billion to bring essential public infrastructure up to acceptable levels and an additional $115 billion to build infrastructure to meet the needs of a growing population.
Within that $123 billion, the Federation estimates that $31 billion would be needed for water and waste water systems, $21.7 billion for roads, sidewalks and bridges, $22.8 billion for public transit, $7.7 billion for waste management and $40.2 billion for community, recreational, cultural and social infrastructure.
A study by economic forecasting firm Informetrica estimated that every billion dollars invested in infrastructure would create the equivalent of 11,000 jobs, including 5,500 in the construction sector. At the same time, the study estimated that better infrastructure could translate into savings for the private sector of up to 17 cents for every public dollar invested. The manufacturing sector, for example, could see reduced maintenance costs if delivery trucks are travelling on better roads.
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- Jeez, why does it all have to focus on ROADS for CARS and TRUCKS???
  posted by lampertina on 2008-12-16

Worldchanging: DIYcity Challenge: Build a Rideshare Program that Works

QUOTE
[DIY city]'s second challenge, issued earlier this week, asks participants to "conceive of a grassroots ridesharing system that can overcome the problems inherent in ridesharing and achieve critical mass."
UNQUOTE

Tags: diycity, worldchanging, twitter, carshare, transportation, infrastructure, cities, collaboration on 2008-12-12 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.worldchanging.com

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"Broken Windows Matter," CEOs for Cities :: Blog, View Entry

Carol Coletta points to The Economist article that featured new research in Holland which showed that low-level social disorder provides a breeding ground for creating more of the same. Based on the "broken windows" theory, it gives back some statistical relevance to a theory that has been falling out of favour. (Why it fell out of favour is a mystery to me, but there you have it...)
QUOTE
The "broken windows" theory had its day in the sun during the "zero tolerance" policies of the Giuliani adminsitration in New York. Petty crime, such as graffiti and subway turnstile jumping, were not to be tolerated because, according to the theory, observing disorder has a psychological effect on people.

The theory later fell out of favor. But new research out of the Netherlands bolsters the belief that tolerance of low level crime matters. According to the new research, it actually doubles the number of people willing to litter and steal.
UNQUOTE

Coletta brings the issue back to city budget slashing, and how this will affect the climate for social disorder.

Tags: ceos_for_cities, carol_coletta, cities, social_disorder, broken_window_theory on 2008-12-02 -All Annotations (1) -About

more fromwww.ceosforcities.org

A city that thinks like the web, slides + audio « commonspace

Must-see/ must-listen presentation at the City of Toronto 2.0 Web Summit, by Mark Surman on getting cities to think like the web: open, transparent, shared data, mashable, hackable, improve-able.
QUOTE:
three simple challenges to City Hall. They went something like this:

1. Open our data. transit. library catalogues. community centre schedules. maps. 311. expose it all so the people of Toronto can use it to make a better city. do it now.
2. Crowdsource info gathering that helps the city. somebody would have FixMyStreet.to up and running in a week if the Mayor promised to listen. encourage it.
3. Ask for help creating a city that thinks like the web. copy Washington, DC’s contest strategy. launch it at BarCamp.
UNQUOTE

Tags: mark_surman, web_2.0, commonspace, cities, open_source, mozilla, urbanism, toronto on 2008-12-01 and saved by 3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromcommonspace.wordpress.com

Now is the time to reshape our cities, by Jack Diamond (globeandmail.com)

Excellent article by Jack Diamond arguing the case for LRT and density nodes in development.

Tags: globeandmail, jack_diamond, transit, lrt, cities on 2008-11-28 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.theglobeandmail.com

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Building an Obama urban agenda - PD Opinion - cleveland.com

Cleveland Plain Dealer blog entry about Carol Coletta's visit to Cleveland to speak at the annual meeting of University Circle, Inc.

Tags: cleveland.com, carol_coletta, ceos_for_cities, cities, urbanism on 2008-11-22 -All Annotations (6) -About

more fromblog.cleveland.com

she thinks Barack Obama will be good for urban America.

"I think he has an urban sensitivity -- an urban sensitivity based on working to make things happen in some of the most devastated neighborhoods in Chicago," said Coletta. "He knows what works. He understands the scams. He's no bleeding heart."
Coletta said she's hoping for three pillars to an Obama urban agenda:
Infrastructure. A hot item because it can be the centerpiece of a stimulus package, Coletta hopes the emphasis of any spending on roads, bridges and sewers would be "fix it first." That is, repair what already exists in cities rather than build new or wider expressways out of town. "We need to extract value out of what we've already invested in," said Coletta.
Transportation policy. Coletta hopes Washington will emphasize mass transit, encourage wiser land use and stop urban sprawl. And with her, it's not simply about the environment. Density, Coletta says, drives productivity. That's because modern knowledge economies thrive when creative people, the types who tend to congregate in cities, effortlessly interact and share ideas. "You need to think about how to enable those happy accidents," she said.
Education. There's no better predictor of a city's or a region's economic performance than its level of educational attainment, in particular its percentage of college graduates. That's a lesson Cleveland has learned the hard way. Obama, during his campaign, called for a $4,000 college tuition tax credit. That would help open college doors to thousands of extra students, and cities would disproportionately benefit. "If you're trying to encourage economic development," said Coletta, "that's the lowest hanging fruit."
Coletta says it's important that when urban leaders nudge the White House, they go with solutions in hand -- not with hands out.

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