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"Livehoods offer a new way to conceptualize the dynamics, structure, and character of a city by analyzing the social media its residents generate. By looking at people's checkin patterns at places across the city, we create a mapping of the different dynamic areas that comprise it. Each Livehood tells a different story of the people and places that shape it. "
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One place Zupan spent a lot of time during his research was Penn Station, the very place we had met that morning (where the queue at the Starbucks alone was worthy of study). During the period he was working on the book, Penn was experiencing an upsurge in ridership; the station and the surrounding streets were becoming untenable. “There were situations where it was so crowded where even slow walkers had to go slower than they would like.” When he began the research, pedestrians were still something of an unknown quantity, and indeed, his work was part of a small renaissance in pedestrian studies that flourished in the 1970s, producing works from John Fruin’s landmark—and still consulted—book Pedestrian Engineering, to sociological studies like Erving Goffman’s Relations in Public or Michael Prager’s People in Places. Every street corner was a stage-set of human interaction, no behavior too small to be insignificant. One typical study found that when two pedestrians passed closely to another, the majority of women turned away from the other walker, while the majority of men turned toward the opposing pedestrian. “We were learning by just going out in the field,” Zupan says. “If there was something we didn’t understand, we went out and took a look.”
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Escalators and stairs are, it turns out, problem points in walking, and not just for the commuters at Penn Station. As John Templar notes in his oddly fascinating book The Staircase, an estimate for one U.S. year found that more than 6,000 people died as a result of a fall on stairs or a ramp. Studies have noted that most stair accidents involve either the first three or last three stairs on a flight. “On these high risk-steps,” Templar writes, “many orientation factor changes occur—route direction change, changes of view, and very large changes of illumination.” As we come to the top or bottom of a stair, we are preparing to change our gait, and we may be looking ahead to where we’re going next. We are distracted pedestrians. What’s more, when we fall, Templar notes, “our natural defense reaction systems will not help much until after we have already fallen about one step of 7 inches (18 cm).” The design of the stair and the tread plays a largely hidden, but crucial role; in one problematic staircase, the stairs were marked with lines parallel to the edge of the tread. In six weeks, 1,400 people fell on the stair: They were confusing the marked line with the actual edge of the tread.
"David Harvey’s new book, Rebel Cities, is the latest entry in his life-long interest in uncovering the intersection between capitalism and urbanization. It’s a collection of previously published, but updated and revised, essays and articles. They are all particularly important to our understanding of both the long fall out of 2008’s economic crash and the rise of urban revolts in Egypt, Greece, New York and elsewhere. "
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Who creates what Harvey calls the “collective symbolic capital” that turned Williamsburg into a real estate bonanza? Well a lot of it comes from the collective labor of the thousands of artists, intellectuals, street musicians, freelancers, community-garden tenders, and everyone else who makes the area desirable. The real estate developers, then, act as a parasitic force on our common-labor, growing rich building the condos that will destroy the communities that are the product of our labor and life-activity. It strikes me that universities act in similar, though less self-destructive, ways. It is all of our labor and intellectual production that gives NYU its reputation, which it then trades on to consume ever more of Greenwich Village, raise money, and develop in the future.
"Infrastructure tends to be conceived as stabilized and ‘black-boxed’ with little interaction from users. This fixity is in flux in ways not yet fully considered in either geography or science and technology studies (STS). Driven by environmental and economic concerns, water utilities are increasingly introducing efficiency technologies into infrastructure networks. These, I argue, serve as ‘mediating technologies’ shifting long-accepted socio-technical and environmental relationships in cities. The essay argues for a new approach to infrastructure that, by integrating insights from STS and geography, highlights its malleability and offers conceptual tools to consider how this malleability might be fostered. "
"Environmental psychologists have long known about this widespread and puzzling phenomenon. Laboratory results show conclusively that architects literally see the world differently from non-architects. Not only do architects notice and look for different aspects of the environment than other people; their brains seem to synthesize an understanding of the world that has notable differences from natural reality. Instead of a contextual world of harmonious geometric relationships and connectedness, architects tend to see a world of objects set apart from their contexts, with distinctive, attention-getting qualities."
Indeed, my friend Charles Marohn and his colleagues at the Minnesota-based nonprofit Strong Towns have made a very compelling case that suburban sprawl is basically a Ponzi scheme, in which municipalities expand infrastructure hoping to attract new taxpayers that can pay off the mounting costs associated with the last infrastructure expansion, over and over. Especially as maintenance costs increase, there is never enough to pay the bill, because we are building in such expensive, inefficient ways.
"A recent post on the suburbs closed with the observation that there is an important "other" social space in the United States beyond the categories of urban, rural, and suburban. These are the small cities throughout the United States where a significant number of people come to maturity and develop their families and careers. I speculated that perhaps there is a distinctive sociology associated with these lesser urban places. Here I will look into this question a bit more fully."
"Pocket neighborhoods are clustered groups of neighboring houses or apartments gathered around some sort of shared open space — a garden courtyard, a pedestrian street, a series of joined backyards, or a reclaimed alley — all of which have a clear sense of territory and shared stewardship. They can be in urban, suburban or rural areas."
"If Aspen is the most expensive town in America, it isn't alone; a friend who is an architect in the Hamptons reports that construction for the ultra-rich has barely slowed due to the crash. Budgets? For these the ultra-rich cost doesn't matter. Instead, they set out to build structures that are modelled less on vacation homes and more on resorts. Forget Dubai, everyone knew that was a bubble: the real money goes to places that don't need to advertise.
For some time now, I've been warning that uncritically worshipping city life (or rather, the increasingly bland Starbucks blend that passes for life in global cities like New York, Los Angeles, or London) blinds us to the real changes and problems such communities face. Although some of these—like the lack of economic diversity and growing homogeneity—appear to hardly be of interest to urban boosters, the development of exurban enclaves should be."
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Note the inversion from the usual logic of the global city in both of these cases: rather than being located near airports, they are located far from them. As Keates points out, it keeps the tourists away. Similarly, one of the main selling points of the Hamptons is the private airport at East Hampton. While tourists are stuck in traffic for hours, the ultra-rich fly overhead, their identities unknown.
"Tomography is a method of exploring a phenomenon through a large number of examples or perspectives. In medical tomography, such as a CAT scan, two-dimensional slices or images of a three-dimensional organ are used to envision the organ itself. Urban tomography applies the same approach to the study of city life. To appreciate different aspects of a community, from infrastructure to work to worship, urban planning expert Martin H. Krieger scans the myriad sights and sounds of contemporary Los Angeles. He examines these slices of life in Urban Tomographies.
The book begins by introducing tomographic methods and the principles behind them, which are taken from phenomenological philosophy. It draws from the examples of Lee Friedlander and Walker Evans, as well as Denis Diderot, Charles Marville, and Eugène Atget, who documented the many facets of Paris life in three crucial periods. Rather than focus on singular, extraordinary figures and events as do most documentarians, Krieger looks instead at the typical, presenting multiple specific images that call attention to people and activities usually rendered invisible by commonality."
" Typically, linear per capita indicators are used to characterize and rank cities. However, these implicitly ignore the fundamental role of nonlinear agglomeration integral to the life history of cities. As such, per capita indicators conflate general nonlinear effects, common to all cities, with local dynamics, specific to each city, failing to provide direct measures of the impact of local events and policy. Agglomeration nonlinearities are explicitly manifested by the superlinear power law scaling of most urban socioeconomic indicators with population size, all with similar exponents (1.15). As a result larger cities are disproportionally the centers of innovation, wealth and crime, all to approximately the same degree. We use these general urban laws to develop new urban metrics that disentangle dynamics at different scales and provide true measures of local urban performance. "
"In an article this month in PLoS ONE, Bettencourt and his team created a way to measure how exceptional cities are by comparing their characteristics with what mathematics would predict for their size. The team then ranked the exceptionality of 300 U.S. cities based on personal incomes, gross metropolitan product (GMP), number of patents and number of violent crimes. "
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Eric Dunbaugh of the Texas Transportation Institute has looked at the fatality rates on “livable streets”–broadly speaking, those that aren’t mini freeways–in the US and found that they are considerably lower (pdf). Apparently, using street design to wean drivers from highway-style driving habits really does save lives.
The rub, however, is that involves slower diving speeds. As Dunbaugh puts it: “The more basic problem appears to be that safety and livability objectives are often in direct conflict with the overarching objective of mobility, and its proxy—speed.”
The Urbanophile is about the intersection of urban policy, architecture and design, strategy, transportation, economic development, talent acquisition, branding, arts and culture, and demographics as applied to the future of the Midwestern and American city.
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