Tag Archives: cities

These bizarre, beautiful cities of the future are also super green

by LinnieJ15fyfs Posted on March 3, 2015

These bizarre, beautiful cities of the future are also super green

By on 2 Mar 2015commentsShare

I consider myself somewhat of an expert on future cities. When I relocated to Seattle just over a month ago, I moved into an “apodment,” which is basically Bruce Willis’ apartment from The Fifth Element, one of the greatest futuristic sci-fi flicks of all time (opinions are my own). Sure, my place doesn’t have the automatic bed-maker or window access to floating restaurants that Bruce’s did, but it’s roughly the same size, and I think that’s enough for me to maintain the delusion.

So I was stoked to hear about a new exhibit at London’s Royal Institute of British Architects that shows historical depictions of future cities from as far back as 1900. The images are part of an analysis of how our visions of future cities have changed over time and what that means for our actual future cities over the next 50 years. The U.K.’s Government Office of Science commissioned the report as part of its Future of Cities project.

The researchers looked at more than 80 future cities concepts, classifying them into six categories, including “layered” cities that contain multiple physical levels and “informal” cities that cater to nomadic lifestyles. They then analyzed the popularity of these categories over time and, fortunately for the planet, found a recent surge in “ecological” cities that prioritize sustainability:

The Ecological City paradigm evidences increasing concern about the longevity of the city, adaptability to climate change, resource management and resilience of changing social dynamics and populations.

They also found a shift toward “hybrid” or “smart” cities that integrate physical and digital infrastructure.

I guess that means I’m ahead of the curve here in the Emerald City, where we have one of the greenest office buildings in the world and a fancy climate action plan. All I have to do is connect my micro-studio to the Internet of Things, and I’ll be ready for the future!

Here’s a taste of the exhibit:

Forshaw’s London community map (1943): This map shows a proposed restructuring of London after World War II. It attempts to combat urban sprawl, integrate the city’s various ethnicities, and create a generally more egalitarian society. Patrick Abercrombie

Cosmic City (1963): This city features huge towers built to house 5 million residents. Nature fills the spaces between towers.Iannis Xenakis

Autopia Ampere (1978): Using a technology called Biorock that grows and repairs coral, this city would grow from the sea.Newton Fallis

The Berg, Berlin (2009): Replacing the skyscraper as the city’s identity, this 1,000-meter human-made mountain would tower over Berlin. Mila / Jakob Tigges

Cloud Skippers (2009): Helium balloons lift communities above flooded areas and go wherever the jet stream takes them. Studio Lindfors

Red Hook Brooklyn and Governor’s Island (2010): A nonprofit group of “urbaneers” built this model of a sustainable Brooklyn. Terraform 1

Saturation City, Melbourne (2010): This post-sea level rise Melbourne features a dense city of “superblocks.”Bild Architecture

Singapore (2001-2021): This city masterplan was developed using parametric software that evolves urban architecture from the natural landscape.Zaha Hadid Architects

Source:
18 Visions of the City of the Future, From the Past

, Fast Company.

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These bizarre, beautiful cities of the future are also super green

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Tree simple tricks for making our cities cooler

by KathrinPascal Posted on February 2, 2015

Tree simple tricks for making our cities cooler

By on 2 Feb 2015commentsShare

Melbourne, Australia, is burnin’ up. In recent years, summer temperatures have peaked at about 113 degrees F — and the mercury is projected to keep rising, thanks to climate change. But now the city has a plan to beat back the heat: Plant more trees.

CityLab reports that, in Melbourne, things had to get worse before they got better. Since the mid-’90s, Southeastern Australia has been wracked with an epic drought, a debilitating water shortage, and a heatwave that ignited wildfires and caused a number of heat-related deaths.

The city suffered more than other areas because of the urban heat island effect, when the dense, concrete center gets considerably hotter than surrounding areas. (The fact that Melbourne sits on the world’s largest heat island probably doesn’t help.) And the city’s immune system — its trees, which provide shade, cooler temperatures, and clean air — were the first to suffer. When water supplies ran low, city officials cut them off, and trees suffered the consequences.

Melbourne still clings to approximately 70,000 trees, but according to the city’s website, it is expected to lose 27 percent of its remaining tree population within 10 years, and 44 percent within 20. Crikey.

Not to worry: City leaders have read The Lorax enough times to know there’s always an “unless.” Melbourne will plant 30,000 trees in the city’s central business district, increasing canopy cover from 22 percent to 40 percent by 2040. It also has a genius plan to keep them watered, even during dry times. Here’s CityLab:

Complementing the massive tree-planting scheme are more resilient methods of watering them. One such project, in Darling Street on the central city’s eastern fringe, was launched two years ago. The street was identified as an ideal experimental site: downhill, with parkland adjacent and located within the area that had borne the brunt of the drought.

The wider stormwater harvesting network now helps capture 25 percent of the water required to feed the landscape annually. That’s just the beginning. “We aim to source 50 percent of our water requirements from non-potable sources by 2030,” [said Councillor Arron Wood, chair of the city’s environment portfolio.] “Even during future drought. This network will provide us with water security in a cost-effective manner.”

This is all part of a climate change-fighting strategy is known as “urban canopy.” If this plan works, city officials think they could cool the city by 7 degrees. That’s big. The idea is delightfully, yet deceptively, simple — which makes us wonder, “Why didn’t we think of that?” Well, here’s a pleasant surprise: We did!

Many U.S. cities already have plans, or are in the midst, or adopting urban canopy plans, including Baltimore, Tampa, Palo Alto, Portland, Seattle, and plenty others. Plus, get this: In Baltimore, the increase of trees not only provided much-needed shade, but also improved air quality and cut crime levels. What’s more, Yale researchers have concluded that urban forests foster community engagement and neighborly love.

So when it comes to saving our cities from urban heat, it’s either love ‘em or leaf ‘em. (Sorry.)

Source:
Can Melbourne Lower Its Temperature by 7 degrees?

, CityLab.

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Tree simple tricks for making our cities cooler

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This water lawsuit could be huge and it’s happening in … Iowa?

by MirtaHaight Posted on January 13, 2015

This water lawsuit could be huge and it’s happening in … Iowa?

By on 12 Jan 2015commentsShare

Ah, Iowa. Frequently confused with heaven, the Hawkeye State is a place of simple yet profound beauty: filled with pink-hued sunsets, rolling hills, golden corn fields, and strapping basketball players. Now, in an effort to preserve the purity of the state’s stunning resources (DON’T give me that look — beauty is in the eye of the freaking beholder, OK?), the state capital’s water utility company is facing off with farmers over fertilizer in an effort to curb water pollution.

Des Moines Water Works sent an intent to sue to three neighboring counties with high nitrate levels in the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers. The utility is fed up with filtering nitrate out of drinking water — it spent $900,000 on the issue in 2013. And the lawsuit just might finally make a difference in a nationwide issue that has been unregulated and out-of-control for years.

Farmers spread nitrogen fertilizer on their corn fields, which becomes nitrate — a colorless, odorless, tasteless compound. Nitrate becomes a problem when it leaks into streams and rivers. In Iowa, underground tile pipes drain the soil beneath farmers’ fields. Those pipes, which are often managed by county governments, bring polluted water to nearby rivers and waterways, and eventually into the unknowing Iowan’s cup of drinking water. Here’s more from NPR’s Dan Charles:

Too much nitrate can be a health risk, especially for infants under the age of 6 months, and it’s difficult to remove from water. …

Bill Stowe, general manager of the Des Moines Water Works, told Iowa Public Radio in an interview last week that “we are seeing the public water supply directly risked by high nitrate concentrations.” …

Des Moines Water Works is now proceeding on the theory that those governments can be held legally responsible for the pollution that their pipes carry.

“When they build these artificial drainage districts that take water, polluted water, quickly into the Raccoon River, they have a responsibility to us and others as downstream users,” he told Iowa Public Radio.

Polluted water is not only a risk to public health — high nitrate levels also wipe out aquatic life from Midwestern lakes all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.

This isn’t the first attempt to limit run-off. State and federal governments already offer financial assistance to farmers who try to reduce nitrogen leaks. The government-issued dollars can go towards building pollution traps like sediment-trapping ponds and wetlands. (Not only do the wetlands decrease nitrate leaks, they also bolster dwindling waterfowl and bird populations.)

But not every farmer can qualify for the government programs, so Des Moines Water Works is starting to play hard ball. We’ll raise a glass of safe drinking water to that.

Source:
Iowa’s Largest City Sues Over Farm Fertilizer Runoff in Rivers

, NPR.

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This water lawsuit could be huge and it’s happening in … Iowa?

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Your commute says a lot about your salary

by Gertie9954 Posted on January 7, 2015

Mo’ money, mo’ transit

Your commute says a lot about your salary

By on 7 Jan 2015commentsShare

From the “well, duh” files of urban policy: A new report from the Rudin Center for Transportation at NYU shows a positive relationship between access to jobs and higher incomes in New York City neighborhoods. If you’re still with us, don’t go — the study has interesting implications for public transit. In short: If you live in a neighborhood in which many jobs are just a short (an hour or less) bus or subway ride away, your median income is likely to be higher than your counterparts who have long commutes to their jobs.

Every economics professor I’ve ever had is screaming “CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION” in my brain at the moment. I hear you loud and clear, chorus of aging white men! But regardless of which is the causative factor in this scenario, the important factor to note is that those with lower incomes tend to be trapped. They never get the choice to live in an area with great public transit access and lots of job opportunities — they can’t afford it. The Rudin study shows that — intuitively enough — rents increase with the number of job opportunities in a neighborhood.

Keep in mind that this study comes from the city with, objectively, the best public transit system in the United States. In the Providences, the Detroits, and the Houstons of the country, all-night metro access and a wide network of buses is inconceivable — imagine how these findings might play out there. The entire plot of 8 Mile, for example, would be vastly different if Eminem could skip out of his trailer park and hop on a light rail into downtown.

There is, however, an interesting result here: Households with mediocre access to jobs and public transit — not great, but some options — had lower median incomes and higher unemployment rates than their counterparts in both high-access and low-access neighborhoods. In these areas, public transit is just decent enough to rely on as a way to get around without a car but inconvenient enough (think multiple transfers, long walks to bus stops) to prohibit them from easily accessing more and/or better job opportunities. In quasi-suburban neighborhoods with very few jobs, residents tend to own cars and drive — and have higher incomes, although notably not as high as those in high-access neighborhoods. And in job- and transit-dense areas, incomes are high and every moment of life is as perfect and lovely as a Carrie Bradshaw pun. (I made up that last part, and also 99.98 percent of those puns are inane.)

“Well,” those enjoying a high from the fumes of insanely low gas prices might say, “Driving is more affordable now! Aren’t cars a great solution for access to jobs?” First and foremost, my hallucinating friends, have you ever tried to drive in Manhattan? And second, existing roads do not have an infinite capacity for vehicles. As the authors of the Rudin study note:

“Increasing the number of cars used within a region will slow down all road users due to congestion, potentially wiping out the gains that are accruing to the households who gain cars. Contrastingly, increasing the capacity of the public transportation system as a way to increase job access for low‐income families does not suffer from this pitfall.”

The best way to make a city sustainable — read: livable — for all the people who live in it is to make it easy for them to get around in it. This is just one more study of many that implies that life is better for those who can easily walk or take the bus or metro to their jobs — and that shouldn’t have to be a privilege for a select few.

Source:
Bad public transit isn’t just inconvenient; it keeps people from jobs

, Vox.

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NYPD Slowdown Not Likely to Tell Us Much About Broken Windows

by LorrineBucher Posted on December 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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As long as we’re talking about crime today, the New York Times reports that the NYPD’s slowdown in citing people for minor violations doesn’t appear to be doing any harm:

In the week since two Brooklyn officers were killed by a man who singled them out for their police uniforms, the number of summonses for minor criminal offenses, as well as those for parking and traffic violations, has decreased by more than 90 percent versus the same week a year earlier, and felony arrests were nearly 40 percent lower, according to Police Department statistics.

….Yet reports of major crimes citywide continued their downward trajectory, falling to 1,813 from 2,127 for the week, a nearly 15 percent drop, according to Police Department statistics.

Mike the Mad Biologist thinks this might be a useful natural experiment:

Here’s the thing: this might not be like the sanitation workers strike. Then, it was obvious what the consequences were—mounds of rotting garbage. But what happens if, after a couple weeks of slowdown, there’s no uptick in violent or property (i.e., breaking and entry) crime? That would undermine the current policing philosophy of the NYPD (and many other cities)….If violent crime doesn’t increase, then arresting people for minor violations doesn’t seem like a good strategy.

Helluva experiment. Let’s see what the outcome will be.

Unfortunately, I doubt that this will tell us anything at all. The timeframe is too short and there are too many other things going on at the same time. Crime statistics have a ton of noise in them, and it’s hard to draw any conclusions even from a full year of change. You need years of data, preferably in lots of different places. A few weeks of data in one place is basically just a null.

So….yes, it’s potentially an interesting experiment. In real life, though, it’s not. It’s just a howl of protest from the police that will tell us little about anything other than the state of relations between City Hall and the NYPD.

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NYPD Slowdown Not Likely to Tell Us Much About Broken Windows

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This Little History Lesson Should Terrify Vladimir Putin

by Donekola Posted on December 16, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Why did the Soviet Union lose control of its satellite states behind the Iron Curtain in 1989? Lots of reasons, but the proximate cause was a disastrous war in Afghanistan; plummeting oil prices; and a resulting economic crisis. Here is Yegor Gaidar:

The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms. As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive.

The Soviet leadership was confronted with a difficult decision on how to adjust….Instead of implementing actual reforms, the Soviet Union started to borrow money from abroad while its international credit rating was still strong. It borrowed heavily from 1985 to 1988, but in 1989 the Soviet economy stalled completely. The money was suddenly gone. The Soviet Union tried to create a consortium of 300 banks to provide a large loan for the Soviet Union in 1989, but was informed that only five of them would participate and, as a result, the loan would be twenty times smaller than needed.

The Soviet Union then received a final warning from the Deutsche Bank and from its international partners that the funds would never come from commercial sources. Instead, if the Soviet Union urgently needed the money, it would have to start negotiations directly with Western governments about so-called politically motivated credits. In 1985 the idea that the Soviet Union would begin bargaining for money in exchange for political concessions would have sounded absolutely preposterous to the Soviet leadership. In 1989 it became a reality, and Gorbachev understood the need for at least $100 billion from the West to prop up the oil-dependent Soviet economy.

….Government-to-government loans were bound to come with a number of rigid conditions. For instance, if the Soviet military crushed Solidarity Party demonstrations in Warsaw, the Soviet Union would not have received the desperately needed $100 billion from the West….The only option left for the Soviet elites was to begin immediate negotiations about the conditions of surrender. Gorbachev did not have to inform President George H. W. Bush at the Malta Summit in 1989 that the threat of force to support the communist regimes in Eastern Europe would not be employed. This was already evident at the time. Six weeks after the talks, no communist regime in Eastern Europe remained.

This sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it? War, sanctions, an oil crash, and finally bankruptcy. And while history may not repeat itself, it sure does rhyme sometimes: 25 years later Vladimir Putin has managed to back himself into a situation surprisingly similar to the one that led to the end of the Soviet Union and the final victory of the West—the very event that’s motivated almost everything he’s done over the past few years. This is either ironic or chilling, depending on your perspective.

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This Little History Lesson Should Terrify Vladimir Putin

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American Lives Will Be Saved, Not Lost, If We Release the Senate Torture Report

by VedaWhited Posted on December 8, 2014

Mother Jones

The Senate torture report seems likely to be published this week in some form or another, but there’s already a campaign in full swing to keep it under wraps. Why? Because its release might put Americans in danger. Paul Waldman acknowledges that this might be true, but provides the right response:

The cynicism necessary to attempt to blame the blowback from their torture program on those who want it exposed is truly a wonder. On one hand, they insist that they did nothing wrong and the program was humane, professional, and legal. On the other they implicitly accept that the truth is so ghastly that if it is released there will be an explosive backlash against America. Then the same officials who said “Freedom isn’t free!” as they sent other people’s children to fight in needless wars claim that the risk of violence against American embassies is too high a price to pay, so the details of what they did must be kept hidden.

There’s another thing to be said about this: our conduct during the early years of the war on terror almost certainly inflamed our enemies, bolstered their recruitment, and prolonged the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. This cost thousands of American lives.

President Obama may have banned torture during his administration, but is there any reason to think we’ve now given up torture for good? Not that I can tell, and it will cost many more thousands of American lives if it happens again. So for our own safety, even if for no other reason, we need to do everything we can to reduce the odds of America going on another torture spree.

How do we do that? Well, all it will take for torture to become official policy yet again is (a) secrecy and (b) another horrific attack that can be exploited by whoever happens to be in power at the moment. And while there may not be a lot we can about (b), we can at least try to force the public to recognize the full nature of the brutality that we descended to after 9/11. That might lower the odds a little bit, and that’s why this report needs to be released. It’s not just because it would be the right thing to do. It’s because, in the long run, if it really does reduce the chances of America adopting a policy of mass torture again in the future, it will save American lives.

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American Lives Will Be Saved, Not Lost, If We Release the Senate Torture Report

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Facebook Is a Widely Beloved Company

by DonetteCoughlan Posted on December 8, 2014

Mother Jones

Alex Tabarrok mulls the question of whether advertising-supported products are fundamentally less attuned to customer needs than, say, Apple products:

Apple’s market power isn’t a given, it’s a function of the quality of Apple’s products relative to its competitors. Thus, Apple has a significant incentive to increase quality and because it can’t charge each of its customers a different price a large fraction of the quality surplus ends up going to customers and Apple customers love Apple products.

Facebook doesn’t charge its customers so relative to Apple it has a greater interest in increasing the number of customers even if that means degrading the quality. As a result, Facebook has more users than Apple but no one loves Facebook. Facebook is broadcast television and Apple is HBO.

No one loves Facebook? This is a seriously elitist misconception. It’s like saying that Tiffany’s customers all love Tiffany’s but no one loves Walmart.

But that’s flatly not true. Among people with relatively high incomes, no one loves Walmart. Among the working and middle classes, there are tens of millions of people who not only love Walmart, but literally credit them with being able to live what they consider a middle-class lifestyle. They adore Walmart.

Ditto for Facebook. I don’t love Facebook. Maybe Alex doesn’t love Facebook. And certainly Facebook’s fortunes rise and fall over time as other social networking products gain or lose mindshare. But there are loads of people who not only love Facebook, but are practically addicted to it. And why not? Facebook’s advertiser-centric model forces them to give their customers what they want, since happy customers are the only way to increase the number of eyeballs that their advertisers want. Apple, by contrast, was run for years on the whim of Steve Jobs, who famously refused to give his customers what they wanted if it happened to conflict with his own idiosyncratic notion of how a phone/tablet/computer ought to work. In the end, this worked out well because Jobs was an oddball genius—though it was a close-run thing. But how many companies can find success that way? A few, to be sure. But not a lot.

“Quality” is not a one-dimensional attribute—and this is an insight that’s seriously underappreciated. It means different things to different people. As a result, good mass-market companies are every bit as loved as companies that cater to elites. They’re just loved by different people. But the love of the working class is every bit as real as the love of the upper middle class. You forget that at your peril.

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Facebook Is a Widely Beloved Company

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Why ants are NYC’s unsung heroes

by HattieCoode Posted on December 6, 2014

More like M-ANT-hattan

Why ants are NYC’s unsung heroes

By on 6 Dec 2014 8:54 amcommentsShare

When you’re crammed into a city with a couple million other people, it’s easy to lose sight of the small things. And when I say “small things,” I mean, specifically, ants.

A recent census of New York’s smaller residents turned up 42 different species of ants all over the island of Manhattan — and that’s likely only the beginning. From the New York Times:

[Lead researcher Amy Savage] and her colleagues sampled 32 sites north of 59th Street in Manhattan, including urban parks, forests found within parks and vegetated road medians along Broadway. Not surprisingly, the medians harbored the fewest ant species, while the forests had the most.

But contrary to expectations, the ants’ tiny size did not limit their ability to get around town. Instead of colonizing places that were nearby, the same types of species tended to pop up in the same types of habitats, regardless of the distance between them. For example, even though the urban Morningside Park is relatively close to Central Park’s forests, the ants living in Central Park were more similar to those living many blocks north, in the forests of Inwood Hill Park.

Maybe we have ants on the brain since our visit with entomologist and big thinker E.O. Wilson — but it’s a reminder of the way some kinds of wildlife have so thoroughly colonized our cities. And it’s no wonder ants — one of only a handful of other animals ever to organize themselves in complicated social structures — would take to cities.

They also serve a real urban function, which even the most bug-averse amongst us can probably appreciate. In a place like Manhattan, literally thousands of pounds of discarded food are tidily devoured by ants and their brethren every year. That’s food that stays away from disease-carrying rats and larger pests, and streets that are cleaner as a result.

So next time you’re walking down your city block, scan the pavement, see what lil’ urbanists you’re missing and, you know, maybe don’t try to squash them.

Source:
The Ants of Manhattan

, New York Times.

New York Ants Eat The Equivalent Of 60,000 Hot Dogs A Year In Food We Drop

, FastCo Exist.

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Alabama wants to use Gulf restoration funds to build a $60 million beachfront hotel

by ChristiBrothers Posted on November 25, 2014

sweet hotel, alabama

Alabama wants to use Gulf restoration funds to build a $60 million beachfront hotel

By on 25 Nov 2014commentsShare

Alabama is taking the old adage “make the best of a bad situation” to a new low. The state wants to use restoration funds awarded after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill to rebuild a hotel wrecked by Hurricane Ivan. Yep, that’s right. Nearly $60 million for a beachfront lodge that was destroyed six years before the disastrous BP spill.

Environmentalists, understandably, are peeved and trying to block the project. New Orleans-based group, the Gulf Restoration Network, is suing the Obama administration to cut the funding for the hotel.

The money comes from BP’s $1 billion down payment toward restoring the Gulf. Other projects include marshland restoration, sea turtle habitat improvements, and rebuilding boat ramps. Allocation of these funds is being overseen by the five Gulf Coast states’ trustees and four federal agencies.

Here’s NPR on how Alabama is justifying the project:

Alabama’s strategy is to use the bulk of this immediate money for recreational restoration, says Gunter Guy, commissioner of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. He says that was easier to quantify than ecosystem damage.

“We believe there’s still injury out in the Gulf,” Guy says. “It could be to the fish, to the fauna, to the corals, to those kind of things. But those injuries are going to take longer to identify, and they’re going to take longer to figure out what type of remedies need to be put in place to address those injuries.”

Gunter followed that up with something that sounds straight out of The Onion:

“Sure, we could try to spend that on some more quote-unquote environmental projects, but we chose to do it on what we did because we think it’s the right thing to do,” Guy says. “Sure, is it an opportunity? Absolutely.”

Scare quotes for “environmental” projects? And the right thing to do for whom, Guy? Certainly not for the delicate ecosystems that exist along the coast that could use protection and restoration over a shiny new hotel and conference center.

Guy, buddy: We know the prospect of millions of dollars is a lot to get giddy about. But as the commissioner of your state’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, you should know better. High time to put that “money” toward “the environment.”

Source:
Plan To Use Gulf Oil Spill Funds For Beach Hotel Sparks Lawsuit

, NPR.

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