The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
December 15, 2013 at 10:04 am | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
Makes sense.
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“What was surprising to us was that the building façades could have such a strong effect on happiness,” he says. “We were surprised to see that people were much happier on a jumbled-up old tenement block with many openings and lots going on…than they were on a block outside a brand-new, pristine, sleekly designed Whole Foods with only two openings to the street. It’s interesting that one would make them happier than the other.”
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Tech and Homelessness: The Essential Conservatism of Silicon Valley | New Republic
Brilliant.
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…a vision of San Francisco I think many in the tech world share—echoes the famous “city on a hill” formulation that the Puritan Reverand John Winthrop plucked from the Sermon on the Mount way back in the 1600s. It’s a beautiful sentiment, but it’s also a strikingly unforgiving, rigid one (that is, a remarkably Puritan one). In the Puritan model of charity, the rich have an obligation to do good for the poor—but the poor also have an obligation to the rich, to try to be a useful part of the same society. It sounds not unlike the way Silicon Valley understands homelessesness: Why are the poor dropping their end of the bargain?This is, of course, a conservative worldview, where harder work will solve most problems. In his farewell speech, Ronald Reagan called America, “a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity.” Commerce and creativity are two things that the tech world, like Reagan, sees as inextricably linked.
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On Admitting That Homeless People Make You Uncomfortable – Amanda Erickson – The Atlantic Cities
Interesting angle re. the “need” for having the disadvantaged/ homeless visible and mixed in to cities. True, false, relevant, key?
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…over just the last couple of years, social scientists have shown us exactly how bad economic segregation is for our communities. America’s increasingly economically segregated cities not only offer far less economic mobility, they actually make the wealthy worse off, too. Other recent studies have linked the size of a city’s middle class to its rate of economic mobility, even as our country’s economic classes have fractured. The idea that prosperous but deeply unequal big cities, like San Francisco, should somehow be cleansed of their poorest residents would actually be catastrophic to their economies.
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Why “Tallness” Isn’t Good for Cities – Point of View – November 2013
The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) recently celebrated 1 World Trade Center as the tallest building in the US, but… (Actually, think of this article in conjunction with the first one, by Charles Montgomery: it’s the way the buildings meet the street, and how they create a streetscape, that makes for “happiness”…)
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But, who cares? New York has many other things going on urbanistically and architecturally that render tallness less significant than it used to be, if not outright pointless. Infrastructural interventions of the more horizontal sort, a la the High Line for example, seem far more significant. In the face of real urban complexity and uneven development, grasping for tallness is a simplistic go-to, while the real problems remain down on the street, unrelated to air rights, view corridors, sunlight access angles, and blocked horizons.
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Business Performance in Walkable Shopping Areas | Active Living Research
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Walkable commercial districts are a key component of communities that promote active living. Walking has great health benefits, including helping people maintain a healthy weight. This report examines whether there are also economic benefits to businesses in walkable communities. The study consisted of a meta-analysis of 70 studies and articles. However, there have been few studies that address economic performance directly and the author conducted an exploratory study of 15 walkable shopping areas judged as successful to examine the sources of success.
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The excellent Todd Litman does an analysis of the costs. Great read.
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A commonly assumed half-truth is that, because various vehicle fees (fuel and tire taxes, and registration fees) are dedicated to roadways, motorists pay for roads. This is generally true for major highways, but most local roads — the roads that pedestrians and cyclists use most — and an increasing portion of regional highways, are funded by local property and sales taxes which residents pay regardless of how much they drive. Currently, only about half of total U.S. roadway expenditures are financed by motor vehicle user fees, a portion that is declining, a indicated below.
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Cost of Gridlock: Canadians say they’d trade more work for shorter commute | Toronto Star
Surprise. (Not.)
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Gridlock has become so brutal, especially in the big cities, that Canadians are putting reasonable commute time as a priority when job hunting.
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Video Library | 5th Global Drucker Forum 2013
We teach deep silos instead of teaching how to deal with inter-domain complexity. <– super interesting 12 minute talk by Roger L. Martin. Must-see.
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Revitalizing the Suburb Without Giving Up the Car – Kaid Benfield – The Atlantic Cities
Some interesting before-and-after photos of Dorn Avenue in Miami here, proving that good (re)design is magic.
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How to Design a Happier City – Eric Jaffe – The Atlantic Cities
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Q: You praise mixed-use, little streetcar towns as a very satisfying social arrangement. What works so well about that design?A: I would say this is where Vancouver has something to teach the world, particularly American cities. Our streetcar neighborhoods — even without streetcars — are becoming increasingly vibrant and dense and fun without resorting to towers. So when people think of Vancouver, they think of our vertical downtown. But our streetcar neighborhoods have accommodated just as many new residents in these past couple decades.
They’ve done it through gentle densification. More mixed-use low-rises along the arterials. I guess what’s more notable is almost every house in neighborhood legally has the right to have a basement suite and a backyard rental cottage. That’s three residences on every lot. You’re probably getting 10 times the density per acre as you would in a typical American suburb. But it doesn’t feel crowded.
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American Cheese | Psychology Today
Seems to me the key word here might well be “insanely”…
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Why talk about a person miserable without the product when you could show a person insanely happy thanks to the product?
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PS: I’m not opposed to smiling. It’s good for you. But we have an awful lot of it in advertising. An awful lot. -
David Simon: ‘There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show’ | World news | The Observer
Good read.
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Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism by the end of the 20th century and was predominant in all respects, but the great irony of it is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or philosophical perfection.It’s pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works because we don’t let it work entirely. And that’s a hard idea to think – that there isn’t one single silver bullet that gets us out of the mess we’ve dug for ourselves. But man, we’ve dug a mess.
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