Turmoil = No Links This Week
June 24, 2012 at 8:06 pm | In yulelogStories | 1 CommentWell, the title says it all – I moved into a new place this past week, and it’s all still quite chaotic. Hope to settle into routine of sorts sometime soon… 😉
The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
June 17, 2012 at 6:58 pm | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
The future of oil prices | SmartPlanet
Wake up call.
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The history of oil prices since 2007 suggests that a permanent doubling of oil prices, while possible in theory, are not possible in reality. We have been bumping against the pain barrier since the first oil price spike in 2008. As we substitute more and more unconventional oil for depleting conventional oil, the consequence will not be sustained oil prices at double current levels, but the shrinking of the global economy, or, as I have called it previously, the Great Contraction. Oil prices could actually drift lower, not higher, as we fall into the deflationary vortex.So enjoy the relative stability of the next two years, and take advantage of the narrow ledge concept to trade oil profitably as it bounces between the price floor and ceiling. Just be aware that a large waterfall awaits at the end of that quiet stretch of river, and be ready to head for shore before you get there.
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Fascinating. I had never made this connection before:
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The Schullers, and their contemporary entrepreneurs of religiosity, had happened into an idea that made particular cultural sense at its particular cultural moment: In the mid-1950s, Americans found themselves in the honeymoon stages of their romances with both the automobile and the television. And they found themselves seeking forms of fellowship that mirrored the community and individuality that those technologies encouraged. As one former congregant put it: “Smoke and be in church at the same time, at a drive-in during the daytime. What a trip!”Drive-in theaters, the historian Erica Robles-Anderson says, were a kind of stop-gap technology: a fusion of the privacy and publicness that cars and TVs engendered. (And they’d long had unique by-day identities — as makeshift amusement parks, as venues for traveling flea markets, as theaters for traveling Vaudeville acts and the acts that advertised them.) We tend to think of suburbs, Robles-Anderson told me, as symbols of the collapse of civic life; drive-ins, however, represented a certain reclaiming of it. And a drive-in church service was an extension of that reclamation. It was, with its peculiar yet practical combination of openness and enclosure, an improvised idea that happened to fit its time. The Schullers’ motto? “Come as you are in the family car.”
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Memo to self: (re)watch these.
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Here are 11 new and new-ish documentaries now streaming that offer interesting, frustrating and downright sad stories about cities.
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Can Ditching Your Car Make You Feel More Free? – Cities – GOOD
Love this article, very thought-provoking, especially in presenting the pluses and minuses:
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Although de la Rosa also points to the financial factor as a big reason for her switch—”Spending $70 to fill up my gas tank every other week compared to the $20 TAP card I need to replenish is a no-brainer,” she says—it’s also about slowing down and restructuring her day. “You have to take a different approach to planning your activities,” she says. “When you rely on transit-bike-walk lifestyle your everyday activities like going to work, grocery shopping, and visiting friends takes a little more effort and planning.”But all that extra effort can also be a burden, says Edie Kahlua Pereira, a Santa Monica-based creative and curator who just surrendered her 14-year-old vehicle last week. Although Pereira has walked and biked extensively even with a car, she’s apprehensive. “This coming week, I will be unable to attend two events I want to do because of the time it would take me to get there via public transportation,” she says. “I see this type of situation being an ongoing issue as many events happen east. Missing events that contribute positively to my life does not make me happy.”
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When it all works, the feeling of plotting your bike route on Google Maps, answering emails on your phone while soaring on the 720 bus across town, and walking 20 minutes to the grocery store instead of spending 20 minutes in a Trader Joe’s parking lot can produce a true sense of feeling untethered in Los Angeles—maybe something like what those freeway designers originally had in mind. But there’s something different about this car-free freedom. It’s not convenience, it’s community.
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Incredibly effective vimeo/ demonstration of the effect of rising CO2 levels on songbirds.
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In a new exhibition from architect and educator Liam Young at the Mediamatic Fabriek in Amsterdam, canaries are used to show how rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are likely to affect birdsong. In “Singing Sentinels: Canaries in a Post-Carbon Coal Mine,” a roomful of canaries is subjected (safely, it’s claimed) to gradually increasing concentrations of CO2 in the air – from today’s 390 parts per million to the 1,000 ppm expected by 2100. As this video, “Silent Spring: A Climate Change Acceleration,” shows, the change in their song is incredible.
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The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
June 10, 2012 at 11:26 am | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
An Interactive Journey Through New York’s Roofscape Makeover – Technology – The Atlantic Cities
More like this!
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Most visitors to New York City crane their necks for a view of the city’s famous skyline, but locals know better: to get the best views, you have to go up. Here’s your chance to take a rare – and vivid – journey atop a few of the city’s billion square feet of rooftops.
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The Right Way to Engage Residents in a Neighborhood Redesign – Housing – The Atlantic Cities
“Cultural Audit”: a useful way to get stakeholder buy-in?
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Perhaps the most innovative undertaking was a “cultural audit,” which Mithun describes as “a methodology of documentation and rigor that uses interview, survey, and in-depth market analysis to provide a contextual community snapshot.” The audit, based on open-ended interviews with residents of and visitors to the neighborhood, produced a summary of community opinion with regard to services and features needed (60 percent mentioned locally owned businesses or youth care and activities), aspirations for the future (31 percent want to “maintain residents, culture and neighborhood feel”), transportation and safety, what makes the community special (42 percent: people), shopping habits and preferences, economic and financial issues, and more. These findings became the basis for all that followed.
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This is such a good article. Morozov’s dissection of the influence of The Bauhaus on Jobs/ Apple makes it worth reading, but then there are also bits like the one below, about *space*:
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The idea of the Internet is still too young to produce strong anti-app sentiment. We do not yet have an adequate understanding of cyberspace as space. While it is safe to speculate that different design arrangements of the online world give rise to different aesthetic experiences, we still do not know the exact nature of this relationship. Nor do we know enough about how the design and the interconnection of online platforms affect the distribution of civic virtues—solidarity, equality, and flânerie, to name just a few—that we may wish to promote online. Just as we recognized many of the important civic functions of the sidewalk only after it had been replaced by the highway, so we may currently be blind to those virtues of the Internet—its inefficiency, its unpredictability, its disorder—that may ultimately produce a civic and aesthetic experience that is superior to the “automatic, effortless, and seamless” (one of Apple’s advertising slogans) world of the app.The point is not that we should forever cling to the shape and the format of the Internet as it exists today. It is that we should (to borrow Apple’s favorite phrase) “think different” and pay attention to the aesthetic and civic externalities of the app economy. Our choice is between erecting a virtual Portland or sleepwalking into a virtual Dallas. But Apple under Steve Jobs consistently refused to recognize that there is something valuable to the Web that it may be destroying. Jobs’s own views on the Internet stand in stark contrast to how he thought about the washing machine. (…)
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Standing back and getting out of the way and letting things take on a life of their own is not a variety of moral reflection, though it makes sense as a way to think about a wildly successful product. The total and exclusive focus on the tool at the expense of its ecosystem, the appeal to the zeitgeist that downplays the producer’s own role in shaping it (“whatever happens is … ”; “feeling the direction”), the invocation of the idea that technology is autonomous (“these things take on a life of their own”)—these are all elements of a worldview that Lewis Mumford, in criticizing the small-mindedness of those who were promoting car-only travel in the 1950s, dubbed “the bankruptcy of social imagination.”
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Great video from Portland’s Mayor’s Office on bicycle infrastructure, with Catherine Ciarlo, Transportation Policy Director explaining things.
The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
June 3, 2012 at 1:30 pm | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
Stop Making Sense: A new strategy for community outreach | PlaceShakers and NewsMakers
A really good, must-read post about rethinking the confrontations between Tea Party folk and smart growth urbanists.
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A lot of the talk is about “reframing the message,” which tends to focus too narrowly, I believe, on coming up with new words to say the same thing. Instead, maybe we should be talking about a reframing of perspectives, particularly from liberal handwringers who tend to be of the “why don’t these guys get it?” mindset.
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This Is How We Ride – NYTimes.com
David Byrne on bicycling. But I especially found this bit spot on:
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When I finished college, I wanted to live in the city, where the excitement was. Like a lot of other young people, I arrived in the city with no money and lived in glorious squalor; we spent most of our full, busy lives in bookshops, bars, tiny apartments and cheap ethnic restaurants. It was exciting and productive, but it wasn’t easy, and eventually we wanted life to be less of a constant struggle. We saw that people in other urban centers, especially in Europe, were finding ways to live with their cities rather than in spite of them. How could we do that?
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Nine Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School – Forbes
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Be aware of the insidious and unspoken lessons you learned as a child. To thrive in the world outside the classroom, you’re going to have to unlearn them.
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I thought #8 was the most dangerous thing you could learn in school:
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8. Days off are always more fun than sitting in the classroom.
You are trained from a young age to base your life around dribbles of allocated vacation. Be grateful for them.
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In Praise of (Loud, Stinky) Bars — Rooflines
Delightful: a place to linger.
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Then one day the son came home and said, “Hey Pops, my girlfriend wants to open a bar.” The father considered this gravely, but finally agreed. Bars were stinky and noisy and they sold liquor. But they also attracted people and besides the place was just sitting empty now anyway. The bar was opened, and lo and behold it became a Third Space: a place where poor young hipsters could go and hang their weary heads over cheap beer after a long day of yarn bombing, and also where the local shipping company guys enjoyed the jukebox. Before you knew it, alcohol was flowing freely, and the new locals and old locals were conspiring to illegally convert lofts into residential units and open food co-ops. It wasn’t long before the bar started serving food, and then one day the unthinkable happened – it opened a café next door with really good coffee and quirky flavors of scones….Look, I’m not telling this story to glorify bars as the ultimate third space intervention – I’m just trying to point out that bars occupy are particular niche in the place-making ecosystem. They are like the prairie grass after the fire: preparing the way for the scrub, and ending with the deciduous trees and their variegated canopy. They are hardy pioneers, taking root where not much else can sustain life.
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Why We Pay More for Walkable Neighborhoods – Jobs & Economy – The Atlantic Cities
Indeed: those attractive downtown neighborhoods aren’t very affordable anymore.
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These neighborhoods are the economic drivers of their cities, often accounting for a disproportionate share of public revenue relative to their land mass. But today, only the wealthiest among us can afford to live in them. That will remain the case until we create many more Dupont Circles – enough to finally bring the supply of walkable urban neighborhoods in line with the demand of all the people who want to live in them.These numbers all speak to a fundamental change in demand in our cities.
“It wasn’t that many years ago that walkable urban places had a price penalty associated with them, not a price premium,” Leinberger says. “That’s the structural shift. And when you have a structural shift, it’s important to change your public policy to take it into consideration.”
Those “walkable urban places” he’s talking about did not necessarily have people walking around in them 20 years ago (“Maybe they were running around because they were fearful of being mugged,” Leinberger says). These were the inner-city neighborhoods that middle-class city-dwellers abandoned decades ago. Over time, they deteriorated. They became the cheap places to live. And now that trend is reversing.
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The Stunning Geography of Incarceration – Design – The Atlantic Cities
Staggering.
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“The first time I was really able to look at all of these images,” he says, “the thing that jumped out at me the most was that the one commonality among almost all of these prisons was that there was a baseball field there. And the baseball field mimicked the form about these buildings as well. There was something very American about it when I first saw it.”
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A Scientist Pushes Urban Planners to Put People First – Research – The Chronicle of Higher Education
Yep.
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In recent months, Dr. Jackson has released another scholarly book, an edited collection on the topic, called Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Wealth, Well-Being, and Sustainability (Island Press), and he is also the host of a four-part miniseries called Designing Healthy Communities, which will air on public television starting this week. The series, which features a companion book, is clearly meant to sway public opinion.“If we are going to change the way we build our communities, it has got to be done because of the demand of the citizenry—a demand that the average, very busy local political leader can understand,” Dr. Jackson says. “We humans are so adaptable that we look at the world that we are in and we think, It has to be this way. But everything around us was an idea in someone’s head before it was built. In large part, the idea behind the series is to alter what’s in our head.”
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In the mainstream media, the work of Dr. Jackson and researchers with similar interests has been pithily condensed to a variation of this eye-grabbing headline: “Suburbia Makes You Fat.” But his focus in Designing Healthy Communities is actually broader than that, with as much emphasis on our need for social connection and beauty as on our need for physical activity. (…)The series also laments the loss of a social contract in America, looking at places like Detroit, Syracuse, and Oakland, Calif., where crushing poverty or pollution have hampered or even dissolved once-thriving communities. (…)
He also challenges the free-market, individualist ideology that has become popular in recent years. Communities and public health are things we build together, with the help of good planning and effective government, Dr. Jackson contends—even as companies that sell junk food, oil, cars, and sprawl pump money into politics and advertising to try to push society in the other direction.
“The fundamental paradigm that nobody else matters but me is making us fundamentally unhealthy and unhappy,” he says. “This is a myth that has been foisted upon us by those that profit from this belief system.”
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8 Dimensions of a Healing City
Some great ideas here:
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What does a Healing City (or town, or community) look like…and feel like? We propose eight dimensions of a Healing City. Use these as a guide to understanding and exploring the concept, and to assist in the development of your own interpretation of a Healing City.
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Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
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