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Could Dutch-Style Roads Save 22,000 Lives Each Year In the US? » INFRASTRUCTURIST
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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
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.
Globalization Leads to Civic Leadership Culture Dominated by Real Estate Interests | Newgeography.com
Why is it that "real estate interests" dominate in a local economy like Cleveland? Because, to a great extent, they are among the only ones left. Consider the local industries that were not as subject to roll-ups. Principal among these are real estate development, construction, and law. This means the local leadership of a community is now made up of executives in those industries, and they bring a very different world view versus the previous generation.
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Where then is the source of transactions these firms can turn to in order to sustain their business? The public sector, of course.
I would hypothesize that many local transactionally oriented services companies have seen the public sector take on a greater share of billings than in the past. With the old school bankers and industrialists mostly out of the picture, the leadership in our communities consists increasingly of the political class and a business community dominated by transactional interests.
When you look at the composition of this group, it should come as no surprise that the publicly subsidized real estate development is the preferred civic strategy. Politicians get to cut ribbons. Cranes always look good on the skyline. Local architects, engineers, developers, and construction companies love it. And there is plenty of legal work to go around.
People, Planet, Prefurbia | Newgeography.com
by Rick Harrison, land use planner in Minneapolis
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In Prefurbia, the Neighborhood Planner designs the pedestrian system first. Destinations for the walks are targeted as a basis for the open space “system,” assuring convenient pedestrian connectivity through the developers land. This is called a Pedestrian Oriented Design (POD). In Prefurbia, the suburban desire for space reigns supreme. Each home, attached or detached, is designed to assure that living areas are placed along the best views, giving the illusion of low density.
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The Prefurbia Neighborhood Planner designs something very unnatural… a plan with dimensions greater than the minimums. Using entirely new geometric theory made practical by new technologies, the Neighborhood Planner separates the street pattern from the positioning of the homes, which results in lesser street length, but maintains density.
The Tipping Point: Fascinating but mythological? | vox - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists
Tipping point stories are fascinating, but do we observe them in the real world? I became intrigued with this question a while ago and eventually published a paper testing the predictions of the tipping point story for its original application – racial segregation of US neighbourhoods
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The basic prediction is that mixed neighbourhood are unstable but segregated neighbourhood are stable. Data on American neighbourhoods from 1970 to 2000 rejected these predictions – it was the segregated neighbourhood that were unstable. There was as much “white flight” out of all-white neighbourhoods as there was out of mixed neighbourhoods, and there was a white influx into segregated non-white neighbourhoods. Neighbourhoods are still very segregated in the year 2000, but not because of tipping. Maybe segregation exists because most whites really do want segregation, not because of a chain reaction due to herd behaviour.
More on Frank Gehry, public spaces, etc - James Fallows
I used to think that a topic like -- oh, let's see, US-China friction -- was controversial, or climate change, or Google-v-Microsoft, or McNamara-v-Rumsfeld. That was before I innocently stepped into the crossfire concerning the effect of "star-chitects" like Frank Gehry on the urban landscape.
Urban retrofits: How to make a city green {ndash} without tearing it down - The Boston Globe
Urban Chickens | Dedicated to promoting backyard chickens in urban residential landscapes.
The Rise of Megaregions | The American Prospect
The promoters of megaregions and modern rail systems seem to have a winning formula, one that offers a fresh conceptualization of the spatial workings of economic growth and is glamorous and high-tech (not to mention, green). To say the least, this formula is politically convenient, given how well it responds to concerns -- magnified by the recession -- about America's economic future.
The time has come for a closer look.
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Take the original development of the railroads. Sure, they helped local and regional economies grow, created jobs, and cheapened consumer goods. But the railroad economy also enriched land speculators and robber barons on the one hand and spurred ordinary men and women, in picket lines and in their communities, to fight for their due on the other. It is no coincidence that the railroad, and the mills that forged its steel, were the scenes of momentous labor strife in the last decades of the 19th century. Can the automobile represent progress without the 1937 sit-down strikes in Flint? We should also remember that, for all its clover-leafed elegance, the "expressway world" (as Marshall Berman called it in All That Is Solid Melts into Air) of Robert Moses produced plenty of dislocation and conflict. In other words, if the spatial fix imagined by megaregional planners is to bring not only long-term growth but the equity dividend they often claim is in the offing, it will likely take some of the messy give-and-take of political struggle to make it happen.
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A national growth machine may be coalescing around what Mike Davis, in a recent New Left Review analysis of Obama's election, called "Green Keynesianism," and the biggest short-term winner could be Obama himself.
But as Davis suggests, infrastructural investment, however cutting-edge and green, might not be all that effective as stimulus, because "protracted stagnation, not timely tech-led recovery, seems the most realistic scenario." It also remains to be seen how progressive this growth machine will actually be, if it does jump-start the economy. After all, bullet trains aren't magic bullets.
) of Robert Moses produced plenty of dislocation and conflict. In other words, if the spatial fix imagined by megaregional planners is to bring not only long-term growth but the equity dividend they often claim is in the offing, it will likely take some of the messy give-and-take of political struggle to make it happen.Street Farmer - NYTimes.com
profile of Will Allen from Growing Power farm in Milwaukee, WI
How We Drive, the Blog of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic » Blog Archive » ‘Portion Distortion’ and the American Road
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But I had a different comparison in mind: The way the size of our roads affects our behavior in “consuming” them as drivers.
Where
To live in a city in a globalizing world is, inevitably, to live in a globalizing city.
Where brings together urbanists from all walks of life living in cities around the world to poke, prod, and otherwise examine everything urban in an effort to maintain a global conversation about this increasingly vital subject matter.
New Left Review - David Harvey: The Right to the City
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Formulating demands
Urbanization, we may conclude, has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses, at ever increasing geographical scales, but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction that have dispossessed the masses of any right to the city whatsoever. The planet as building site collides with the ‘planet of slums’. [16] Periodically this ends in revolt, as in Paris in 1871 or the us after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. If, as seems likely, fiscal difficulties mount and the hitherto successful neoliberal, postmodernist and consumerist phase of capitalist surplus-absorption through urbanization is at an end and a broader crisis ensues, then the question arises: where is our 68 or, even more dramatically, our version of the Commune? As with the financial system, the answer is bound to be much more complex precisely because the urban process is now global in scope. Signs of rebellion are everywhere: the unrest in China and India is chronic, civil wars rage in Africa, Latin America is in ferment. Any of these revolts could become contagious. Unlike the fiscal system, however, the urban and peri-urban social movements of opposition, of which there are many around the world, are not tightly coupled; indeed most have no connection to each other. If they somehow did come together, what should they demand?
Streetsblog » Back to the Grid: John Norquist on How to Fix National Transpo Policy
If you look at communities that are really successful and have rich, complex street grids with transit -- or even without transit, but they have street grids -- there’s much more efficiency in the use of pavement. You can go the direction you want to go, you don't have to go out of the way and come back.
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The feds don’t even do the requirements directly -- in the federal highway program they reference the AASHTO Green Book. These are rules, they're just not stated as rules… On the interstate system you can’t have a lane that’s less than 12 feet wide, so that actually is a rule there. You have all these metrics that make everything bigger -- turning radii and ramps, the length of ramps -- all these things designed to have the vehicles move faster without having to slow down when they get off the freeway, that sort of thing.
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So what are the metrics? The metrics would be intersection density, block size -- you would reward intersection density. And the feds can do that, they can say that states could draw federal money and add to the density of a street network, creating more mobility that way.
And the metric we use is 150 intersections per square mile, which wouldn’t just be like Manhattan or Philadelphia. In Wausau, Wisconsin, which is the home of the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Dave Obey, we counted 158 intersections per square mile. That’s counting alleys. You look at all these places that have high intersection density and they're very likely to be valuable settings for jobs and real estate, and they're also very good for distributing local traffic
Tracking The Future
The emerging infrastructure is different. Varnelis describes it as something multiple and shifting: “networked ecologies,” plural “infrastructures” that are “hypercomplex” and as likely to consist of legal mechanisms and barely visible cell-phone networks as the heavy stuff of tunnels and bridges.
Growing Power
Growing Power is a national nonprofit organization and land trust supporting people from diverse backgrounds, and the environments in which they live, by helping to provide equal access to healthy, high-quality, safe and affordable food for people in all communities. Growing Power implements this mission by providing hands-on training, on-the-ground demonstration, outreach and technical assistance through the development of Community Food Systems that help people grow, process, market and distribute food in a sustainable manner.
Streetsblog.net
The national blog network for sustainable transport, smart growth and livable streets.
Detroit: City of Hope -- In These Times
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We can begin by organizing ourselves in every city and community to secure a moratorium on foreclosures.
As food prices soar, we can achieve food security and better health by joining the local foods movement.
We can bring the neighbor back to the ‘hood by organizing “skills banks” to exchange goods and services among ourselves.
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