Pop-up Book for Planners

Corporation to Build Full-Size City for Testing Anything

"The idea for The Center was born out of our own company’s challenges in trying to test new and emerging technologies beyond the confines of a sterile lab environment,” said Brumley. “The Center will allow private companies, not for profits, educational institutions and government agencies to test in a unique facility with real world infrastructure, allowing them to better understand the cost and potential limitations of new technologies prior to introduction."

For instance, he said, developers of solar technology would be able to assess exactly how their systems would be delivered and used in one house where the thermostat is set at 78, and another where it’s set at 68. The center could also help show how efficient it might be in an old building versus a new one.

Link
Via Gizmodo

Formalizing the Homeless Camps

Someone wants to turn the derelict KOA campground down by Nevada and I-25 into temporary housing for the homeless.

He still has to line up financing, he said, but that isn’t his biggest hurdle.

“It’s the city,” he said.

The issue is over zoning. He and a proponent of the project, City Councilman Tom Gallagher, say the property at 1209 S. Nevada Ave. is already permitted for use as a campground. But Koscielski said city planners are treating it as a new development that would place cumbersome stipulations on the project.

Sounds like a good idea to me, but what keeps this temporary solution from becoming permanent?

Link

Political Problems for US Base in Japan

The politics of our military bases abroad are complicated:

Apparently, Japan and the US worked out a deal to relocate a Marine Base on the island of Okinawa to the city of Nago. Now, a Nago has elected a new mayor who opposes the deal, and the Prime Minister of Japan may back out of the deal. That would mean the Marine base would have to move to Guam or another island, which President Obama is against.

Link

Via Planetizen

Vandergrift

Looks like a town in Pennsylvania is looking back to its original plan, drawn by the master landscape architect, Olmsted, for tips on sustainability.

Olmsted designed Vandergrift, 35 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, with no right angles, instead following the curves of the river. He also used curving paths to blur movement among pedestrians and hedges to buffer commercialism. Street corners and the buildings on them were rounded. Parks dotted the hilly landscape, and the town was walkable.

Link

Via Planetizen

Empty City, built for stimulus

Ordos, an empty city in China, was built but not unoccupied. Looks kinda cool, but does it make any sense to you to have a city that sits empty because housing is too expensive?

Money quote: "Most of the people here are the construction workers, and some old people."



Via Matt

Unplanned neighborhood wins planning award

Interesting: Houston's Montrose neighborhood won an APA Great Neighborhoods award for 2009. The editorial below claims irony, saying that the neighborhood (like most of Houston) wasn't really planned at all, and if it was planned, it was the private land developers who originally planned it, not public servants and city officials.

Link

Via Planetizen

Personal Rapid Transit

A good in-depth article from the Boston Globe about Personal Rapid Transit's recent resurgence. In some ways, it sounds ideal for military installations.

While some true believers hope PRT will eventually become a dominant mode of transit, others see it more as a gap-filler. It could serve places like airports, university campuses, and medical centers. As a “distributor,” it could branch out into less dense areas to bring riders to other mass transit hubs. And it could provide a valuable service in “edge cities,” to ferry people from residential areas to shopping areas or office parks - routes that are now taken almost exclusively in automobiles.

Link

Via Planetizen

A Perfect City

David Byrne (founding member of the Talking Heads) wrote an excellent essay about what makes a good city.

There's a certain attractiveness to New Orleans, Mexico City or Naples—where you get the sense that though some order exists, it's an order of a fluid and flexible nature. Sometimes too flexible, but a little bit of that sense of excitement and possibility is something I'd wish for in a city. A little touch of chaos and danger makes a city sexy.

Link

Via Amy U.

Imaginary Suburbs

Link

Via Planetizen

How Much do Densification Efforts Help the Environment?

Tyler Cowen, one of my favorite economists online, spots a study that quantifies the environmental gains that result from land use policies that curb urban sprawl. Interesting conclusion:

The environmental benefits of checking pro-suburb subsidies are real, but they are smaller than many people think. That's from the National Academy of Sciences and the authors are no haters of the environment. If you check out p.59, you'll see that a forty percent increase in population density decreases vehicle miles traveled by less than five percent.

Link

Via Marginal Revolution

Plan of Chicago

Almost 100 years ago, Daniel Burnham created the "Plan of Chicago." It was a milestone of urban planning, and the Art Institute of Chicago has a great online exhibition here.

Perhaps the most striking—and uniquely American—aspect of the Plan was its idealistic belief in Chicago as a city without limits. The planners believed their city could become the most beautiful and prosperous in the world, and they inspired its citizens to undertake the challenge.

You can also view the original plan document here.

The images in the plan are just amazing.

Elephants and Cities

There are a couple of great mathematical gems about cities in this article.

First, Zipf's Law:

The mathematics of cities was launched in 1949 when George Zipf, a linguist working at Harvard, reported a striking regularity in the size distribution of cities. He noticed that if you tabulate the biggest cities in a given country and rank them according to their populations, the largest city is always about twice as big as the second largest, and three times as big as the third largest, and so on. In other words, the population of a city is, to a good approximation, inversely proportional to its rank. Why this should be true, no one knows.

Even more amazingly, Zipf’s law has apparently held for at least 100 years. Given the different social conditions from country to country, the different patterns of migration a century ago and many other variables that you’d think would make a difference, the generality of Zipf’s law is astonishing.

Keep in mind that this pattern emerged on its own. No city planner imposed it, and no citizens conspired to make it happen. Something is enforcing this invisible law, but we’re still in the dark about what that something might be.

Second, cities evolve efficiency through branching networks of circulation, just like animals:

This implies that the bigger a city is, the fewer gas stations it has per person. Put simply, bigger cities enjoy economies of scale. In this sense, bigger is greener.

The same pattern holds for other measures of infrastructure. Whether you measure miles of roadway or length of electrical cables, you find that all of these also decrease, per person, as city size increases. And all show an exponent between 0.7 and 0.9.

Now comes the spooky part. The same law is true for living things. That is, if you mentally replace cities by organisms and city size by body weight, the mathematical pattern remains the same.

Link

Via Kottke

Ugly and Non-Functional Public Housing

Really interesting pictures of the worst public housing projects in history.

Link

Via Kottke

Stimulation

There's an interesting thread running through the three articles linked below.

Enormous government injections of money into the economy have the effect of distorting market forces and shifting the foundations of the economy for a long time. The best historical example: the federal government's huge investment in the interstate system in the 50s made suburban development relatively cheap because transportation infrastructure costs were borne by the government.

In different ways, the authors below are all making the point that we should be deliberate about how this stimulus happens, because it will inevitably affect the economy's ground rules for years to come.

The first article (Link) argues that if we really want to use less energy, we'll never get there by designing more efficient cars.

In 1865, English economist William Stanley Jevons discovered an efficiency paradox: the more efficient you make machines, the more energy they use. Why? Because the more efficient they are, the better they are, the cheaper they are and more people buy them, and the more they’ll use them.

The next editorial (Link), written by Peter Calthorpe, takes the same sentiment to the next level and argues that the stimulus package should be focused on three areas:

• Transportation funding that moves away from a bias for highway projects and toward transit investment.
• Environmental policy that protects air quality and opens space.
• Federal housing assistance that moves beyond its historic orientations toward single-family hosing to encourage urban redevelopment.

The final article (Link) makes the point that we shouldn't neglect design in our haste to jump into the massive backlog of "shovel-ready" projects:

We need to ensure that the money spent goes to creative, sustainable buildings that will stand the test of time and will still be used by our children and our grandchildren. After all, they are the ones who are going to be paying for these debt-financed projects.

Via Planetizen

Matt sent me this link about high speed rail.

Link

Via Getting Rich

Military Installations are Pretty Walkable

Streetsblog has an interesting post analyzing census data to list the places that house the highest percentage of people who walk to work. On the list:

Naval Academy, Maryland
West Point, NY
Air Force Academy, Colorado
Lackland AFB, TX

These are all relatively low-population places, but even if you increase the total population threshold to 20,000, Fort Bragg and Fort Hood are both on the top ten list.

So, the moral of the story is that military installations have good conditions for a pedestrian environment to thrive, they just need the planning to encourage it.

Link

Via Planetizen

"Planners waste architects' time"

An article from Ireland.

Eighty percent of architects believe that planning decisions made by local authorities do not support good quality design.

Pedestrian Environment in Melbourne

Thanks, Doug.

Norman Mailer's Lego Utopia

It was too big to remove from his house when he died.

Link

Via
City of Sound