infrastructure - Yule Heibel on Diigo

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Do tourists miss 'Toronto the Good'? - Posted Toronto

While some people say that "gritty" = "edgy" (and therefore "cool"), there's an undeniable line that gets crossed at some point, and then gritty isn't edgy anymore, it's just shabby & run-down & dirty. It seems that far too many North American cities are on their way to that. I'm reminded of my oldest sister's visit to Victoria a couple of years ago. She lives in the heart of Tokyo, and her observations of Victoria were that it's dirty. Not the air (compared to Tokyo), but in terms of the litter on the streets, the obvious signs of infrastructural decay, and the obvious signs of social decay (panhandlers, drug users). Maybe things have gone downhill in Tokyo since her remarks, but they have also certainly gone further downhill here. This article in the National Post (by Barry Hertz) should be read in conjunction with some of the other commentaries appearing on infrastructure, whether on Richard Florida's blog, or on the CEOs for Cities blog, or even on Doc Searls's blog (see Handbasket weaving, http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2008/05/13/handbasket-weaving/). The basic message is that this is not a question of "style" or edginess or cool or whatever, but a question of underfunded infrastructure, which is crumbling around our ears. And this has long term deleterious economic impacts.

Tags: toronto, infrastructure, infrastructure_funding, economy, competitiveness on 2008-05-13 -All Annotations (2) -About

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the Royal Ontario Museum’s chief executive officer said yesterday that all the litter, dead trees, graffiti, cracked pavement and posters plastered across the cityscape detract from major attractions and leave visitors with an impression that Toronto is a metropolis in decline.
“The devil is in the details,” William Thorsell said. “Public spaces in Toronto are inferior to those in other comparable cities in the world. Just go to New York City or Chicago and walk around downtown. You would see much higher standards for public space than you do in Toronto. I’m just back from Seoul, Korea, which makes Toronto look extremely shabby.”
suggests Toronto needs to polish its tired image if it wants to maintain its status as a top-tier tourist destination, starting with such basic steps as better signs, cleaner streets, fewer panhandlers and an increase in overall friendliness.
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- Yeah, but it's not just a question of "polishing." It's a question of INVESTING: funding, supporting, repairing, improving. If my house's windows are cracked, single-pane, and leaking heat -- as well as dirty -- then polishing them won't do the trick. I need to caulk them, I need to replace cracked panes, and I need to invest in storm windows.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-05-13 22:43:29
“It’s going to take an approach where we look at sprucing up, for example, things like our washrooms in this city,” Mr. Thompson said. “That’s one of the things I got from a lot of people, that ‘Ya, your washrooms really need to be cleaned up.’ ”
One complaint among downtown and entertainment district business owners especially, has been the number of aggressive panhandlers accosting tourists. Tim Finlayson, who operates ShopDineTour Toronto, said he has gotten negative feedback from tourists about the number of homeless and seen his clients avoid streets with a high number of panhandlers.

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City needs to put its foot down, by Christopher Hume (Toronto Star)

This article, linked to the other Apr.26 piece in terms of theme and championing the idea that sidewalks (& therefore pedestrians) are key to a good urban fabric, tackles the question of planning & design. Too much is individual project driven, vs. falling into place as part of an overall sense of what the city should be.

Tags: thestar, pedestrians, infrastructure, toronto, urban_design, christopher_hume on 2008-05-06 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.thestar.com

A
rchitecture is important, but planning is crucial. Though Toronto's known for second-rate design, our real problem is poor planning. Throughout the city there are examples, painful examples, of the lack of intelligent planning. The result is not just visual chaos, but a clear feeling that nothing adds up, that nothing makes sense, that the city consists of a growing number of disjointed projects.
insist on certain basic elements that will eventually allow a number of unrelated developments to be transformed into a genuine neighbourhood? And why doesn't the city do what's necessary to give the pedestrian a fighting chance? As it stands, the residents of these new condos are at the mercy of (usually bad) drivers more focused on their cellphones than pedestrians. They block the crosswalks, drive too fast and generally treat walkers with utter contempt. Given that Lake Shore Blvd. has six lanes and Fleet two, pedestrians must take their lives into their hands just to cross the street. This isn't just suburban; it's dangerous, dumb and no way to build a city. It also reveals the hollowness of a community that loves to congratulate itself on its creativity, and its innovative spirit. When it comes down to making choices between cars and people, we invariably choose cars. This is outdated and marks us for the civic dinosaur that we are.
Lake Shore must be narrowed and new buildings designed to have a relationship with streets with adequate sidewalks and connections beyond. Right now, unless you're a resident, there's no reason to be here. And the south side of Lake Shore, with green space and of course the lake, is almost completely unreachable from the north side of Lake Shore. The result isn't a city but a series of enclaves cut off from one another and everything else by highways. Fleet St. isn't just a missed opportunity; it's a disaster in the making.

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A flaneur's lament for the sidewalk, by Christopher Hume (Toronto Star)

Together with 2 other articles (Apr.26 and May 3), a nice trilogy in praise of walking and pedestrian rights.

Tags: thestar, flaneur, pedestrians, infrastructure, christopher_hume, toronto on 2008-05-06 -All Annotations (2) -About

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If only people were cars, maybe then we could get the city to take our sidewalks seriously.
In addition to the decayed state of city sidewalks, many are too narrow to begin with. And given the city's love of widening roads whenever possible, that makes for a dangerous combination.
Have we forgotten the importance of sidewalks? Did we ever know?
They are an essential element of the public realm, not, as we have come to believe, simply a way of getting from A to B. Indeed, they are an irreducible part of the urban fabric.
Sidewalks are stage sets, backdrops and seating areas all in one. They are the very place where urban life occurs. Without them, a city can't be a city.
That's why so much more than broken ankles is at stake when they are allowed to deteriorate. Urbanity depends on sidewalks.
Fleet St., Lake Shore Blvd. and around the Rogers Centre. These islands of condos separated by six-lane highways are hostile, even dangerous, for walkers. Pedestrians are definitely not welcome here; they get in the way of drivers, who are always in a hurry.
This is not how to build a city. This is how to destroy a city.
"Having adequate space and lots of sunshine means a lot psychologically," Brown insists. "But what we're getting is suburban dimensions infiltrating the city. Traffic lanes in an urban condition need be no more than 3.1 metres, that's about 10 feet. On a highway where you have greater speed, lane widths have to increase. But engineers are used to working on an average, a standard. You need to approach things more finely, taking what you can find here and there."
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- - this idea that road engineers use the same rule in urban & suburban settings for arterials, secondaries, etc., reminds me of Andres Duany's critique, and how the transect should be used to contextualize what's needed.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-05-06 21:53:48

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Roads, bridges, sewers: Essential but not sexy, by Christopher Hume (Toronto Star)

Hume's article is about Ontario/ Toronto, but what he says applies to every major city across Canada. Of great interest: that AFPs or P3s translate to 15% involvement of private funding, not more.

Tags: thestar, christopher_hume, municipal_funding, infrastructure, toronto on 2008-05-06 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Escapable Logic » Blog Archive » “Oh, if only government went in for an open source make-over…”

Britt Blaser coins the compelling term "collaboration mall." I left a long comment on April 28, but it appears stuck in moderation or has been deleted. Here's what I wrote: QUOTE Thank-you for using my comment as a jumping off point to a thought-provoking blog entry here, Britt! (And I hope I didn't sound as 'despairing' as all that — my despair, such as it is, stems as often as not from the fossilized pace of local governance here. Other than that, I'm a pretty optimistic, happy-go-lucky person, which is probably why I'm ready to stumble into pre-existing conversations! …Like, duh Yule: one quick google search could have told me that you, Britt, have been talking about open source government for …well, for a while.) But on to your post: I really like your descriptive term, "collaboration mall." As a city person (and yeah, Victoria is a smaller city, but it's pretty dense and urban and walkable), I'm of course loathe to admit that the suburbs might be places that produce appropriate symbols ("mall") for civitas / civic life. But I can remind myself that in the 1920s Walter Benjamin wrote about 19th century Parisian arcades as localities of social meaning (and manufacture of meaning) — and what were the arcades but urban forerunners of suburban malls? I'd say that the urban street is still more democratic/ porous/ open, if only because it really is public space, vs. private or semi-private. But the mall can bring together all sorts of different (including "regular") people, and it's a great term (compared to "street") because it acknowledges the reality of markets, fees for services, settings for enterprise, and consumer platforms. I'm at the very beginning of trying to create a community aggregator type service here, and your suggestion of a "collaboration mall" is intriguing. Just as with Doc's entry on infrastructure, I find it helps my thinking when one (physical) thing typically seen in one context is transposed into another (more abstract) context. Till now, I was thinking for example of "public space" (physical) and how that manifests online (abstract). But narrowing that space to a mall brings things into better focus. UNQUOTE

Tags: infrastructure, britt_blaser, collaboration_mall on 2008-05-03 -All Annotations (5) -About

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…But the developers of OSS2, whose work we desperately need, to escape from the political specialists who’ve hijacked governance, don’t behave like that. The OSS2 developers we seek to serve are ready and able to form groups and describe their pain and hopes. But, just like OSS1 developers, they need an organizing environment suitable to their skills: a collaboration mall with all the tools they might need as they become more engaged.
I called it a collaboration mall because the Open Source Society engineers are regular people, who won’t even blog, unless tricked into it, and need a UI as user-friendly as the malls that have worked so well, regardless of sophisticates’ sniffing at them as proletarian.
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- - very true. Right now (social) media participation/ blogging/ etc. becomes a self-selecting population, which skews the picture, too.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-05-03 19:20:47
But if some of us are persistent enough to build hundreds of expandable little collaboration malls, located where they (we) will try them and engage our neighbors and find it easy to shop for hope there, then we’ll become the unwitting designers and producers of little patches on our governmental structures.
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- - community aggregators, but also sites that make it easy to "shop" (participate). Forums are really easy -- lurk, participate, whatever. But they don't have RSS and remain isolated and potentially silo-esque.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-05-03 19:23:29
- - "shopping for hope" is a very interesting way of putting things.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-05-03 19:24:55

The House That Twitters Its Energy Use, by Katie Fehrenbach « Earth2Tech

Among other things: "The Twitter stream is an exercise in using the data from home automation feeds, and the hope is that, by making energy usage data transparent and easy to digest, it will change consumer behavior and reduce energy consumption." As I noted in bookmarking the related Wired Magazine piece, this relates to Wired Mag's earlier article on "Peak Water," too, where we learn that many London homes don't even have water meters. Actually, it's the same here in Victoria & Oak Bay. Not good.

Tags: twitter, earth2tech, andy_house, energy, consumption, infrastructure on 2008-05-02 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Comparing hard and soft infrastructure | Linux Journal

This is the 2nd in what looks to be a series. As the title indicates, Doc Searls compares infrastructures -- what we'd traditionally consider infrastructure (the "hard" infrastructure of roads, sewers, etc.) and Linux/ the Net -- programming -- the "soft" infrastructure that pervades our existence today.

Tags: infrastructure, linux, doc_searls on 2008-05-02 -All Annotations (4) -About

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- Infrastructure is natural. That is, we try to make it as additional to nature as possible. It sometimes improves on nature, but more often serves as an adjuct to it, altering it in some way, always for practical purposes.
- Infrastructure is patchy. In computing terms, we patch and debug it all the time. Even terminology changes. CATV becomes COMS becomes BROADBAND, all on a series of manhole covers. Sidewalks of brick are torn up and laid down again, over and over. Asphalt streets are patchworks of exposed and buried culverts, piping and conduit.
- Credit is interesting, but secondary.Companies providing infrastructure sign their work, often in forms that last decades or centuries. At a certain point this credit-taking ceases to be promotional and begins becoming archival, historical. Steel service covers bear the signatures of Edison Electric Illuminating, the Bell System, Cambridge Electric Lighting, McClure (a dead fiber company), MetroMedia (another dead fiber company), and Simpson Brothers, and countless other names once considered, mostly by themselves, as permanent.
- Re-usability matters. Pipes and poles made for one thing get used and re-used for other things. Poles that first carried electricity later came to carry phone, cable TV, and fiber optic cabling to carry phone, TV and internet service.
- Ease of servicability matters. Streets are marked everywhere with red (electric), yellow (gas), green (non-potable water), orange (communications), blue (potable water) and white (planned construction) graffiti. That these are all ugly is of little concern.
- Infrastructure is vernacular. It's local, and the expertise behind it is local.
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- Something else to consider here: density affects infrastructure, and therefore how socio-political trends manifest. For eg., NYC Mayor Bloomberg, in support of Obama's opposition to a gas tax holiday, said, "The last thing we need to do is to encourage people to drive more and to take away the monies we need for infrastructure in this country."
  
  He added that we need to get people out of their cars. I completely agree, so I was really struck by some "tweets" that high gas prices would keep people from driving to the polling stations! Ok, those tweets were a bit tongue-in-cheek, but there was a kernel of truth in them. If you live in a city (like NYC), which has great density, you'll have access to public transportation (infrastructure) and you won't need a private car to "get to the polling station." However, as soon as you get to the suburbs, that piece of infrastructure could easily not be there, and you then might well be dependent on having a car to vote.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-05-02 06:09:16
- For reference, the Bloomberg article:
  http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/05/01/967843.aspx
  posted by lampertina on 2008-05-02 06:10:18
- So in other words, infrastructure works or manifests differently depending on the density context -- and it might be much more efficient the more dense and networked its connections and build-out are.
  
  Efficient doing what? Efficient at giving people time to focus on things other than providing their own private infrastructure (personal car, eg.).
  posted by lampertina on 2008-05-02 06:12:43

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Home Tweet Home: Energy-Savvy House Broadcasts on Twitter | Wired Science from Wired.com

Wired Magazine article by Alexis Madrigal on "wired" homes, including http://twitter.com/andy_house, by IBM "master inventor" Andry Stanford-Clark who "rigged up his home to twitter its energy use." See The House That Twitters Its Energy Use by Katie Fehrenbacher (http://earth2tech.com/2008/04/30/the-house-that-twitters-its-energy-use/). Compare to Wired Mag's recent "Peak Water" article, which pointed out that many London households aren't even on water meters, making consumption monitoring impossible. In addition, consider too the New Scientist article, "City road networks grow like biological systems" (4/23/08). All this relates to infrastructure -- and to how we're just beginning to understand it from new angles. (See also Doc Searls' continuing investigation of infrastructure in Linux Journal.)

Tags: twitter, infrastructure, data, architecture, housing, consumption, energy, wired_magazine on 2008-05-02 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (2) -About

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City road networks grow like biological systems - tech - 23 April 2008 - New Scientist Tech

- this is fascinating: road systems evolve more along "biological" lines, vs. according to master-planned dictates...

Tags: infrastructure, highway_system, roads on 2008-04-28 -All Annotations (2) -About

more fromtechnology.newscientist.com

French and US physicists have shown that the road networks in cities evolve driven by a simple universal mechanism despite significant cultural and historical differences. The resulting patterns are much like the veins of a leaf.
They found that cities' road patterns have a lot in common mathematically, as well as looking similar to the eye.
The main influence on the simulated network as it grows is the need to efficiently connect new areas to the existing road network – a process they call "local optimisation". They say the road patterns in cities evolve thanks to similar local efforts, as people try to connect houses, businesses and other infrastructures to existing roads.

Evolution has ensured that local efficiency also drives the growth of transport networks in biology – for example, in plant leaf veins and circulatory systems.

"Cities are not just the result of rational planning – in the same way that living organisms are not simply what is in their genetic code," Barthélemy told New Scientist.
The study's results might be important for understanding urban growth and "sprawl" says Barthélemy. More than half the world's population lives in cities, a proportion that continues to increase.

"The approach could even help city planners to better predict how some street networks will evolve and to plan accordingly," he adds.
Previous models of urban development assumed that efficient transport across the entire network motivated the system's growth – as if planned from the top down. Focussing instead on the structure of local connections seems truer to real life, says Flammini.
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- Yes.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-04-28 06:45:05
Using the local efficiency of connections to drive road network growth looks to be a truer fit with reality than using the total cost of travelling across the network, says Onnela. "Especially given that the time scale of city growth (possibly thousands of years) and the time scale of urban planning (perhaps tens of years) are so clearly different."