Yule Heibel's Post Studio © 2003-2014

David Simon on America as a Horror Show on Vimeo

Must-watch.
QUOTE
David Simon, creator of the TV series ‘The Wire,’ talks with Bill about America’s capitalism crisis. It’s a reality check from a journalist who uses TV drama to report on America from the bottom up. “The horror show is we are going to be slaves to profit. Some of us are going to be higher on the pyramid and we’ll count ourselves lucky and many more will be marginalized and destroyed.”
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tags: bill_moyers david_simon socialcritique socialjustice video vimeo

Startup Datacoup Will Pay You $8 a Month If Your Feed It Data from Facebook, Twitter, and Your Credit Card | MIT Technology Review

Ugh. And also: If my data is so valuable (and it is!), why should I get paid a measly $8 per month for it? Hmm?
QUOTE
But Hogan claims that what Datacoup collects can be especially useful to advertisers because few data providers can combine traces of a person’s online activity with a record of their spending activity. “Both of those are valuable; when you layer one on the other you unlock more value, and there’s no way to do that other than from the user themselves,” he says. Validation for this idea—and competition for Datacoup—comes from Twitter and Facebook, which work with data broker Datalogix to link people’s social media activity and the things they buy (see “Facebook Starts Sharing What It Knows About You”).
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tags: big_data data mit_techreview startups

The Little Girl from the 1981 LEGO Ad is All Grown Up, and She’s Got Something to Say

Good stuff.
QUOTE
“In 1981,” explains Giordano, “LEGOs were ‘Universal Building Sets’ and that’s exactly what they were…for boys and girls. Toys are supposed to foster creativity. But nowadays, it seems that a lot more toys already have messages built into them before a child even opens the pink or blue package. In 1981, LEGOs were simple and gender-neutral, and the creativity of the child produced the message. In 2014, it’s the reverse: the toy delivers a message to the child, and this message is weirdly about gender.” (…)
“Because gender segmenting toys interferes with a child’s own creative expression. I know that how I played as a girl shaped who I am today. It contributed to me becoming a physician and inspired me to want to help others achieve health and wellness. I co-own two medical centers in Seattle. Doctor kits used to be for all children, but now they are on the boys’ aisle. I simply believe that they should be marketed to all children again, and the same with LEGOs and other toys.”
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tags: lego gender toys girls opportunity

2014’s Endless Snow Has at Least Been Good for Transportation Nerds – Sarah Goodyear – The Atlantic Cities

This is great: curb extensions or neckdowns are ways to make streets safer for pedestrians. With the many snowfalls we’ve had this winter, it’s possible to document how plowed snow creates neckdowns, called sneckdowns (and documented via hashtag on Twitter), proving that streets don’t need to be as wide as they all too often are.
QUOTE
Way back in 2006, New York–based Clarence Eckerson of Streetfilms shot a video showing how heavy snowfall creates natural neckdowns, as plows push snow to the curb and cars take only the space that they need — leaving the untouched snow to mark the space that maybe isn’t all necessary for cars. He expanded on the concept in another film in 2011. Then, this winter, thanks to frequent heavy snowfalls across most of the country, Eckerson and a few like-minded people started talking about the concept again. They decided that they needed a catchy name for the snowy neckdowns in order to help spread the concept on social media. Soon enough, a hashtag was born.
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tags: curb_extensions neckdowns sneckdowns snow pedestrians atlantic_cities sarah_goodyear

Netflix and Google Books Are Blurring the Line Between Past and Present | Underwire | Wired.com

Our relationship to the present does seem altered by the omni-availability of the past…
QUOTE
This omnipresence of the past has weird effects on contemporary culture. Take any genre of music, from death metal to R&B to chillwave, and the cloud directs you not just to similar artists in the present but to deep wells of influence from the past. Yes, people still like new things. But the past gets as much preference as the present—Mozart, for example, has more than 100,000 followers on Spotify. In a history glut, the idea of fashionability in music erodes, because new songs sit on the same shelf as songs recorded five, 25, and 55 years ago, all of them waiting to be discovered. In this eternal present, everything can be made contemporary.
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tags: history wired_magazine paul_ford internet_archive

A Very Brief History of Why Americans Hate Their Commutes – Martin Wachs – The Atlantic Cities

Zoning.
QUOTE
As mechanization of transit made it ever cheaper, safer, and cleaner, reformers and idealists seeking to overcome the “congestion evil” pushed for lower residential densities and deliberate suburbanization for more than a century. In 1909, at the First National Conference on City Planning and the Problems of Congestion, speaker after speaker advocated the introduction of zoning ordinances and the extension of transit routes to outlying areas, hoping to lower urban densities by enabling people to travel longer distances to work.
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tags: zoning cities commuting transit cars martin_wachs atlantic_cities

9 Reasons the U.S. Ended Up So Much More Car-Dependent Than Europe – Ralph Buehler – The Atlantic Cities

Zoning (again). This is reason #9, and it seems the most compelling.
QUOTE
Zoning laws. There are many differences between land-use planning systems in the United States and Europe. Europeans tend to allow a greater mix of uses in their residential zones, thus keeping trip distances shorter. For example, in Germany, a residential zone can include doctors’ offices, cafes, corner stores, or apartment buildings. By contrast, single family residential zones in the United States typically forbid those uses. Zoning in Germany also occurs for smaller land areas—almost at the block level—facilitating shorter trips than in U.S. cities, where zones tend to be much larger. And while most U.S. zoning codes still require a minimum number of parking spots, many European countries operate with maximum numbers to limit parking.
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tags: zoning parking cities cars atlantic_cities ralph_buehler

Ink on Paper: Some Notes on Note-taking | Wray Herbert

Fascinating (and not too surprising).
QUOTE
Apparently there is something about typing that leads to mindless processing. And there is something about ink and paper that prompts students to go beyond merely hearing and recording new information — and instead to process and reframe information in their own words, with or without the aid of asterisks and checks and arrows.
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tags: wray_herbert note_taking studying analog

Why It Makes Sense for Long Island to Rethink the Parking Garage – Anthony Flint – The Atlantic Cities

“Structured” parking as an alternative to the awful parking lot? Good idea. Not so sure about the “horizontal skyscraper” idea, aka the “fatscraper”…
QUOTE
Building structured parking is thus seen as an intermediary step in that process. In the ParkingPLUS Design Challenge, architectural firms were asked to be creative in their designs, to conjure places that would not simply store the cars, but open up new possibilities for public use of the space. Roger Sherman Architecture + Urban Design envisioned a “horizontal skyscraper” relating to Main Street in Ronkonkoma; dub Studios submitted a shared parking scheme in Patchogue; LTL Architects rendered a parking garage with a landscaped terraced rooftop cascading towards the rail line in Westbury.
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tags: parking garages retrofit atlantic_cities anthony_flint transit_oriented_development suburbs

Google dreams up free taxi rides to stores – SmartPlanet

Wow… Interesting implications also (aside from data/ algorithms) for online v. “irl” shopping/ consumption/ commerce.
QUOTE
…would it be worth it for businesses to subsidize the trips of individual customers? That’s exactly what Google has invented, an algorithm that determines “the cost of transportation and the potential profit from a completed transaction using a number of real-time calculations.” According to the patent, it would determine that using information like the customer’s location, the customer’s route to the store and most likely form of transportation needed to get there, and the price competitors are willing to pay to get customers in their stores.
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tags: google big_data algorithm retail commerce irl

Gentrification isn’t bad for the poor – Quartz

Well, debates about gentrification aside, it’s clear that SF certainly did NOT build enough housing to accommodate the influx of new residents. (Note: in the article, the paragraph below is studded with links to sources.)
QUOTE
Gentrification, the term of art for an influx of new residents into an urban neighborhood that typically drives up rents, is controversial in many wealthy cities. It’s often blamed for driving out poorer residents. But when researchers try to prove it, facts are hard to find. Any number of outlets have reported on studies by Columbia University’s Lance Freeman and researchers at the University of Colorado and Duke University who find that gentrification doesn’t drive out a rising neighborhood’s former residents. It even stands to benefit them financially.
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tags: gentrification quartz san_francisco rents housing affordability

Evgeny Morozov’s response to Sascha Lobo : More political interference! – Medien – FAZ

Excellent piece from Morozov.
QUOTE
…as everything becomes interconnected – with tiny sensors and modems – “the Internet” will literally be everywhere. But if one accepts the thesis that the “Internet” is just a never-ending exercise in purification, whereby domains that were previously contentious and political are converted into uncontroversial technological domains that are supposed to behave in accordance with the out-of-control logic of the “Internet”– it’s not so hard to see what awaits us: the end of politics altogether, as the only remaining reason for regulating this newly “interconnected world” would be to promote “innovation” (a nice euphemism for the business interests of Silicon Valley) rather than an ambitious social and political agenda. When “the Internet” is everywhere, politics is nowhere.
(…)
…the only way to promote alternative uses of ebooks or search engines or social networks in ways that would not depend too heavily on the seemingly free services offered by Silicon Valley is by developing a new industrial policy that would inject billions of dollars into public information infrastructure. And we don’t want that infrastructure to be managed by the same oligopolies only with European names; it has to be run in a decentralized and civic manner, with citizens owning their own data from the start. It’s not digital optimism that we must cultivate – rather, it’s optimism in public institutions and a renewed faith in politics. Not exactly a very popular messages during the times of austerity.
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tags: politics democracy internet evgeny_morozov faz

Gardiner Expressway at the crossroads: Hume | Toronto Star

This article is about an expressway in Toronto, but Christopher Hume’s closing sentences apply to so many other places and situations: low expectations, self-perpetuating, lack of will to re-invest…
QUOTE
A reason was the low expectations Torontonians had for that part of town. It is viewed as a wasteland, largely because that’s what it has been for so long. Ironically, the Gardiner is at least responsible for that.

But as the waterfront comes back to life, it’s time to demand more. People now live in neighbourhoods that until recently were industrial.
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tags: toronto christopher_hume highways urban_design urban_renewal thestar

Frans van Houten calls for a shift toward a new economic model, based on the use of goods that consumers do not own. – Project Syndicate

A Circular economy: selling a product’s benefits instead of the product itself…
QUOTE
With this in mind, my company is redesigning its products and considering how to capture their residual value. At the same time, it is shifting from a transaction- to a relationship-based business model – one that entails closer cooperation with customers and suppliers. And it is changing its corporate culture to emphasize long-term solutions. None of these changes is easy to implement, but all of them are necessary.
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tags: economies economy economic_development circular_economy davos leasing renting

Most Germans don’t buy their homes, they rent. Here’s why – Quartz

Interesting historical background here:
QUOTE
Economists think German housing policy struck a much better balance between government involvement and private investment than in many other countries. For instance, in the UK, when the government gave housing subsidies to encourage the building of homes after the war, only public-sector entities, local governments, and non-profit developers were eligible for them. That effectively squeezed the private sector out of the rental market. In Germany, “the role of public policy was to follow a third way that involved striking a sensitive balance between ‘letting the market rip’ in an uncontrolled manner and strangling it off by heavy-handed intervention,” wrote economist Jim Kemeny, of the German approach to housing policy.
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tags: germany housing affordable_housing renting

Why Her Will Dominate UI Design Even More Than Minority Report | Wired Design | Wired.com

Ok, but we’re still being mediated *by* technology, subtly primed to respond to its dictates. Would be interesting to think about how that manifests in a supposedly more people-oriented computer technology as depicted in Her… (I’m just thinking about this in the terms laid out by Ursula M. Franklin, viz. growth-oriented and production-oriented technologies, whereby the former is holistic, people-centered, and the latter is geared toward efficiency and fulfilling the needs of production.)
QUOTE
It’s not just that Her, the movie, is focused on people. It also shows us a future where technology is more people-centric. The world Her shows us is one where the technology has receded, or one where we’ve let it recede. It’s a world where the pendulum has swung back the other direction, where a new generation of designers and consumers have accepted that technology isn’t an end in itself–that it’s the real world we’re supposed to be connecting to.
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tags: technology film movies spike_jonze her userinterface design

Why Do the Smartest Cities Have the Smallest Share of Cars? – Derek Thompson – The Atlantic Cities

Is it true?
QUOTE
The Atlantic has called “peak car”—not once but twice. We have repeatedly explained why young Americans “don’t care about owning” a vehicle. We predicted a long-term decline of auto sales, and, in a dramatic moment, essentially announced “the end of car ownership,” generally.

We had strong data. Perhaps we had strong biases, too.
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tags: cars cities

Net Neutrality Quashing Will Mean New Pricing Schemes, Throttling, and Business Models | MIT Technology Review

Susan Crawford gets it.
QUOTE
The theoretical downside is that the Internet devolves into a kind of “pay to play” system, with smaller companies tending to be squeezed out, and prices tending to rise overall.

That is the dystopia envisioned by people like Susan Crawford, a visiting professor of law at Harvard University and a co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “We’ve got very powerful market actors in America who want to make more money from the same infrastructure, without expanding it,” Crawford says. “The way they do that is to divide markets and then steadily charge more. And on the other side, they want to charge people who want to reach subscribers different rates.”
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tags: net_neutrality mit_techreview susan_crawford politics internet

This Sex Offender-Spotting App Sounds Like a Really Bad Idea | Motherboard

What with Google buying Nest (learning about people’s private preferences for how they heat or cool their homes – potential privacy invasion, much?), and apps like this (NameTag), you have to wonder where we’re headed. Creepy creepy.
QUOTE
Perhaps the most cynical part of the whole idea, though, is that the creators do plan to offer people a way to avoid being face-scanned like this—but it looks like you have to sign up to their site to do it. “People will soon be able to login to www.NameTag.ws and choose whether or not they want their name and information displayed to others,” Tussy explained in the release. Is the true idea behind NameTag, then, a social network that you have to opt out of?
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tags: privacy apps google glass facial_recognition socialnetworks victoria_turk

Chris Christie’s New Jersey Is Everything That’s Wrong With America – James Howard Kunstler – POLITICO Magazine

Something worth reading from Kunstler (for a change).
QUOTE
To me, the danger of a President Christie is that he is about the last politician one might expect to recognize the nation’s tragic predicament and he is exactly the figure who will mount America’s deadly final campaign to sustain the unsustainable. He represents what amounts to a sort of national debt slavery: We will pay any price to stay where history has marooned us. One vivid example of this was Governor Christie’s decision in 2010 to cancel New Jersey’s participation in building a new commuter train tunnel under the Hudson River to relieve the unsustainable pressure on the existing 100-year-old train tunnels. He derided the project as “a tunnel to the basement of Macy’s.” Christie then diverted $4 billion from the tunnel project to New Jersey’s transportation trust fund in a bid to keep the state’s gas tax the second-lowest in the country. (New Jersey’s transit system, meanwhile, ranks among the country’s worst, and Christie has cut its funding.)

This little maneuver highlights one of the nation’s most lamentable political failures of recent decades: the lack of will to invest in public transportation, in particular, upgrading and rehabilitating our conventional passenger railroad system. Governor Christie represents the majority of Americans who have no idea how close we are to the twilight of mass automobile motoring.
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tags: chris_christie james_kunstler motordom peak_oil

The Coming ‘Instant Planetary Emergency’ | The Nation

File under “Uh-oh”?
QUOTE
NASA scientists, along with others, are learning that the Arctic permafrost—and its stored carbon—may not be as permanently frosted as its name implies. Research scientist Charles Miller of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the principal investigator of the Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE), a five-year NASA-led field campaign to study how climate change is affecting the Arctic’s carbon cycle. He told NASA, “Permafrost soils are warming even faster than Arctic air temperatures—as much as 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius) in just the past 30 years. As heat from Earth’s surface penetrates into permafrost, it threatens to mobilize these organic carbon reservoirs and release them into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane, upsetting the Arctic’s carbon balance and greatly exacerbating global warming.”
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tags: climate_change methane global_warming

Project for Public Spaces | Toward Place Governance: What If We Reinvented Civic Infrastructure Around Placemaking?

QUOTE
Rather than just sustaining and delivering public goods, government can evolve from regulating “the tragedy of the commons” to fostering its triumph. In other words, government can be most efficient at delivering value when structured primarily to facilitate the capacity of a community to drive and sustain its own shared value.
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tags: ethan_kent place_making project_for_public_spaces

Defining the Worst Type of Street Design – Sarah Goodyear – The Atlantic Cities

There’s a video embedded in this article that nicely sums up the negatives associated with “stroads” by explaining the positives associated with “streets” and “roads.”
QUOTE
If you want to … truly understand why our development approach is bankrupting us, just watch your speedometer. Anytime you are traveling between 30 and 50 miles per hour, you are basically in an area that is too slow to be efficient yet too fast to provide a framework for capturing a productive rate of return.
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tags: charles_marohn stroads atlantic_cities urban_design

Evgeny Morozov: Hackers, Makers, and the Next Industrial Revolution : The New Yorker

Morozov quotes Mary Dennett here. “He must make what his machine is geared to make” is a very potent phrase, but it also reminds me of “program or be programmed” somehow.
QUOTE
“The modern man, who should be a craftsman, but who, in most cases, is compelled by force of circumstances to be a mill operative, has no freedom,” she wrote earlier. “He must make what his machine is geared to make.”
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tags: evgeny_morozov newyorkmag makerspaces socialcritique socialtheory

Fifty Is the New 65: Older Americans Are Getting Booted From Their Jobs – and Denied New Opportunities

It’s all part of the plan to make throw-away people. Of course it will cost us dearly in the end.
QUOTE
We live in an era of planned obsolescence, in which designers deliberately make a thing limited in its useful life. Now this planned obsolescene includes human beings. Is it really an efficient use of our human capital to turn experienced workers into Walmart greeters?
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tags: socialjustice socialtheory ageing aging ageism workforce lynn_parramore jobs

Thatcher’s slow-motion housing timebomb – Boing Boing

Full-on indictment of the public housing sell-off in the UK (initiated by Margaret Thatcher).
QUOTE
Housing in the UK is a microcosm for everything wrong with neoliberalism: corruption, cronyism, grinding human misery, and funny accounting to prove that it’s all working, honestly.
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tags: affordable_housing housing england

Roman Fever – Rob Goodman – POLITICO Magazine

Exigency / decline / disaster IS addictive. And self-fulfilling. Good article.
QUOTE
In all, it has become the background drone of our politics, the dull hum of impending doom. Let’s understand why this thinking appeals. Envisioning decline is addictive. It offers us the chance to imagine our times as extraordinary and to cast ourselves in heroic roles to meet them. And the thrill demands a higher dose of doom each year.
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tags: rome republic politico_magazine rob_goodman usa politics

One code to rule them all: How big data could help the 1 percent and hurt the little guy – Salon.com

omg, and YIKES.
QUOTE
A white paper on “Embedded Governance from the Institute for the Future is even more direct:

Laws, now written on paper and enforced by people, will be carried on software and enforced through electronically updated and immediately downloadable rules woven into the fabric of our environment. Governance will become automatic, and lawbreaking much more difficult…. Embedded governance will prevent many of the crimes and violations we see today from happening. Firearms will work only when operated by their rightful, registered owners. Office computers will shut down after 40 hours of work unless overtime has been authorized. Disasters and quarantines could also be managed more effectively if information about citizens were known and if laws were downloaded to change behaviors immediately.
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tags: evgeny_morozov algorithm socialcritique salon.com andrew_leonard big_data big_brother

Evgeny vs. the internet : Columbia Journalism Review

Good summary.
QUOTE
At bottom, Morozov says his work is an attempt to integrate the debates about technology into the broader debates about politics, economics, history, and culture—areas of study with much richer traditions and far greater intellectual resources for tackling the many challenges that technology presents. Such a shift in discourse, he feels, would limit the influence of those advocating narrow technological solutions to what are essentially non-technological problems—like spreading democracy—and would rob a word like “disruption” of the positive connotation it has acquired as a force for progress, allowing it to be seen instead as a painful example of neoliberal economics. When discussed in purely digital terms, for instance, letting a company like Uber transform a city’s taxi service is a no-brainer. When the digital is integrated into the political, however, this becomes a more complicated debate about regulation and infrastructure and the rights of cab drivers.
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tags: evgeny_morozov socialcritique

Why the Tea Party Isn’t Going Anywhere – Theda Skocpol – The Atlantic

Theda Skocpol on the Tea Party’s awful hold on US politics.
QUOTE
Here is the key point: Even though there is no one center of Tea Party authority—indeed, in some ways because there is no one organized center—the entire gaggle of grassroots and elite organizations amounts to a pincer operation that wields money and primary votes to exert powerful pressure on Republican officeholders and candidates. Tea Party influence does not depend on general popularity at all. Even as most Americans have figured out that they do not like the Tea Party or its methods, Tea Party clout has grown in Washington and state capitals. Most legislators and candidates are Nervous Nellies, so all Tea Party activists, sympathizers, and funders have had to do is recurrently demonstrate their ability to knock off seemingly unchallengeable Republicans (ranging from Charlie Crist in Florida to Bob Bennett of Utah to Indiana’s Richard Lugar). That grabs legislators’ attention and results in either enthusiastic support for, or acquiescence to, obstructive tactics. The entire pincer operation is further enabled by various right-wing tracking organizations that keep close count of where each legislator stands on “key votes”—including even votes on amendments and the tiniest details of parliamentary procedure, the kind of votes that legislative leaders used to orchestrate in the dark.
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tags: theda_skocpol usa politics tea_party

Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission’s accomplished – The Washington Post

Agree.
QUOTE
“You recognize that you’re going in blind, that there’s no model,” Snowden said, acknowledging that he had no way to know whether the public would share his views.

“But when you weigh that against the alternative, which is not to act,” he said, “you realize that some analysis is better than no analysis. Because even if your analysis proves to be wrong, the marketplace of ideas will bear that out. If you look at it from an engineering perspective, an iterative perspective, it’s clear that you have to try something rather than do nothing.”
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tags: edward_snowden nsa democracy

In a Noisy Brooklyn Park, the Best New Feature May Be a Wall – Sarah Goodyear – The Atlantic Cities

Urban noise/ traffic noise *is* horrible.
QUOTE
The long-term health effects of noise in modern cities are only beginning to be understood, although anyone who has ever lived in a city knows intuitively how stressful the constant din of motorized traffic can be. The new wall at Brooklyn Bridge Park provides a bit of respite from the assault. But it’s only a few hundred feet long. Its greater value may be in the way it makes us aware of the destructive and unpleasant sonic reality we take for granted every day.
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tags: atlantic_cities bqe highways parks noise_barriers liveability

How A Giant Mall Parking Lot Turned Into A Park And A Walkable Community | Co.Exist | ideas + impact

Slideshow documenting the transformation of a surface parking lot into an urban infill development complete with bioswale for cleaning run-off to a creek that has seasonal salmon runs. The architects, Mithun, are among the good guys.

tags: slideshow seattle malls parking surface_parking_lots urban_development

Why have the tech buses invaded San Francisco? // Markasaurus

Eye-opening…
QUOTE
Google, for one, would love to build housing near its campus in Mountain View. They have tried to get it permitted and it has been rejected, while at the same time the city has approved additional office space. In fact, the city of Mountain View expressly forbade housing in its citywide general plan for the area around the Bayshore Campus. This would have put large numbers of Google employees walking distance from work, while also providing a walkable neighborhood near a light rail station. Google has also started investing in affordable housing, including one project in Mountain View, but unfortunately it’s only 51 units. The truth is that suburban communities don’t want to build more housing, and Prop 13 gives existing owners little reason to care about increasing housing prices.
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tags: san_francisco google buses public_infrastructure suburbs planning zoning

Listing: Airbnb’s San Francisco Offices. Cost: $0 – Next City

Cool, but double-edged forces here, too…
QUOTE
There’s a strain of thinking afoot, embodied in the Tea Party, that pushes for restricting government to the barest of services. This has played out most recently in the idea that the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is doomed because government cannot pull off something that complex. At the same time, there’s a clamor for the private sector to get involved in the sort of activities we once limited to government.
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tags: airbnb third_places spaces san_francisco libraries

Project for Public Spaces | A New Movement Champions Walking for Health and Happiness

On the benefits of walking.
QUOTE
Garrison emphasized that walking should be a natural part of our daily lives, rather than something we add on specifically for exercise, health or recreation. “I have the pleasure of walking every day to the store, the dry cleaners, the post office, to the park with my husband. That’s no accident,” she said. It’s the result of deliberate urban planning that locates important destinations within walking distance —a traditional common-sense idea called walkability, which is at the heart of making our communities more safe, comfortable and convenient for walking.

“Walkable communities are the key to a strong American Third Century,” observed Tyler Norris. “They help protect us from spiraling health care costs in great part driven by preventable chronic disease, while creating vibrant communities that are fonts of equitable prosperity.”
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tags: project_for_public_spaces jay_walljasper walkability walking health happiness

The Health Risks of Small Apartments – Jacoba Urist – The Atlantic Cities

Good point(s)…
QUOTE
By the same token, if micro-apartments are indeed the wave of the future, Saegert argues, they increase the “ground rent,” or dollar per square foot that a developer earns and comes to expect from his investment. So over time, New Yorkers may actually face more expensive housing, paying the same amount to rent a studio in the neighborhood where they used to be able to afford a one-bedroom. With the gradual erosion of zoning rules, the micro-apartment could very well become the unit of the future, the only viable choice for a large number of renters.
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tags: microhomes crowding apartments nyc atlantic_cities

Whole Foods, and Gentrification, Grows in Brooklyn : The New Yorker

QUOTE
But even John Mackey, the Whole Foods C.E.O., has acknowledged his company’s knack for identifying neighborhoods on the cusp of gentrification. In an interview with CNNMoney in 2007, Mackey said, “The joke is that we could have made a lot more money just buying up real estate around our stores and developing it than we could make selling groceries.” What’s more, Mackey is a staunch libertarian and free-market devotee, as Nick Paumgarten wrote in a 2010 New Yorker Profile, and his attacks on unions and government-supported health care have alienated some of his liberal customers.
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tags: gentrification newyorker elizabeth_greenspan brooklyn whole_foods

Coal use hits record high in Japan – SmartPlanet

Agree.
QUOTE
Coal plants have put far more radioactive emissions into the air than the world’s 430-plus nuclear plants ever have.

If a nuke so much as burps, the authorities in many countries close it. But coal plants as well as coal and gas producers have for years been free to radiate in plumes (modern scrubbers may be minimizing the amount). Their emissions include things like uranium, thorium, potassium 40, radon, radium and others. Mutter those words in a nuclear context, and you’ve got a posse of angry mothers on your doorstep. From the fossil fuel industry, those same radioactive elements fall on deaf ears as they land silently in public lungs.
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tags: coal japan nuclear_power pollution smartplanet

A Before-and-After Guide to Safer Streets – Eric Jaffe – The Atlantic Cities

QUOTE
A safer city street will trade long, indirect crosswalks for shorter crossings and pedestrian islands.
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tags: street_usage safety pedestrians atlantic_cities eric_jaffe

U.S. architecture’s public enemy No. 1: the Tea Party – SmartPlanet

QUOTE
New-old architecture is like a magnet for the Tea Party. Its leaders invariably live in suburban McMansions of various sizes, built recently but gussied up to look old and distinguished. A recent news reports showed a pro-immigration reform group staging a rally at one politician’s house. It looked like a flock of zombies descending on a generic American homestead in a Walking Dead episode.

New-new architecture is a no-no, however. Anything innovative or vaguely European-looking is abhorrent.
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tags: nimbyism tea_party architecture smartplanet modernism

Tall is Good: How a Lack of Building Up is Keeping Our Cities Down

Some excellent points in this article (see quote extract), but also so many contradictions/ so much wrong. E.g., there’s a trickle-down supposition (if you build more housing stock, prices will fall): in desirable urban centers, however, that doesn’t seem to happen (enough). Then, a praise for the super-talls (b/c they’re also super-thins), but at the same time a recognition of the street wall (which you can’t have with a super-tall, at least not in that recognizable way). And so on…
QUOTE
Tall buildings need to create not only an aesthetic contribution to the skyline but also street-level value so they’re more likely to be embraced. But we also need to prioritize what we’re building tall: Right now, housing, in any form, should be encouraged, and cities need to work harder to allow this kind of development to occur.
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tags: allissa_walker gizmodo skyscrapers cities urbanism los_angeles

Author Charles Montgomery’s Happy City shows how urban planning can enhance health and spread joy | Georgia Straight

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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tags: cities happiness charles_montgomery vancouver urbanplanning georgia_straight

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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tags: san_francisco homelessness puritanism city_on_a_hill new_republic noreen_malone conservatism silicon_valley

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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tags: homelessness social_disorder socialcritique socialjustice socialtheory san_francisco cities

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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tags: nyc skyscrapers architecture urban_development street_appeal street_scape metropolis_magazine guy_horton

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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tags: walkability economic_development cities retail research reference business

Mythbusting: Exposing Half-Truths That Support Automobile Dependency | Planetizen: The Urban Planning, Design, and Development Network

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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tags: todd_litman bicycles cars walking costs planetizen infrastructure funding

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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tags: gridlock traffic cars commuting

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.

tags: roger_martin complexity drucker_global_forum silos

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.

tags: suburbs cars atlantic_cities Makeover design urban_amenities revitalization

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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tags: charles_montgomery atlantic_cities neighbourhoods cities happiness

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.

tags: teeth smiling smiles psychology_today lenore_skenazy

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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tags: david_simon the_guardian capitalism socialcritique