Monthly Archives: May 2013

Combining urban planning and urban informatics

Posted on by

The Chief Technology Officer for the city of Chicago argues urban planning and urban informatics need to be combined:

“This is a plea – and I make it frequently – for a discipline that doesn’t really exist yet,” Tolva says, “a merger of urban design and urban planning with urban informatics, with networked public space.”

Tolva is touching here on a number of ideas we’ve broached before. The unevenness of digital information has real-world implications in cities. The tools that we use to access it (smartphones, laptops, WiFi) will demand changes to the physical environment. And social norms about privacy in public space are all evolving as a result. But it’s helpful now to pause and think about who should be addressing all this uncharted territory (and whether those people exist yet).

“The real opportunity is in thinking about how many points of tangency with the online world are actually becoming embedded in physical space,” Tolva says. He is specifically not talking here about government data portals that contain information about the physical city. “This notion of e-government – even coming out of my mouth, it seems quaint – is you interacting with your city in front of your computer. But that’s not how we experience cities. Or, it’s not the best part of cities.”

The best part of cities is on the street. And in the future, your experience of the street life of cities could be enhanced if buildings and stoplights and bus stops and parks all gathered information and spoke to each other (and to anyone who wanted to listen). So what do we call this new job, the architect of everything?

While this may make some quite nervous, there is a lot of potential to put together real-time information and information about urban patterns with real-time devices. Imagine city infrastructure that works by dynamic algorithms rather than strict schedules. Perhaps this could be described as “urban big data” with an “urban big data officer”?

Kotkin: “The Triumph of Suburbia”

Posted on by

Joel Kotkin argues the suburbs have clearly won in the United States:

But the simple fact remains that the single-family home has remained the American dream, with sales outpacing those of condominiums  and co-ops despite the downturn.

Florida has suggested that simply stating the numbers makes me a sprawl lover. While he and other urban nostalgists see the city only in its dense urban core, and the city’s role as intimately tied with the amenities that are supposed to attract the relatively wealthy members of the so-called “creative class,” I see the urban form as ever changing, and consider a city’s primary mission not aesthetic or simply economic but to serve the interests and aspirations of all of its residents.

Clearly the data supports a long-term preference for suburbs. Even as some core cities rebounded from the nadir of the 1970s, the suburban share of overall share of growth in America’s 51 major metropolitan areas (those with populations  of at least one million) has accelerated—rising from 85 percent in the ’90s to 91 percent in the ’00s. There’s more than a tinge of elitism animating the urban theorists who think that urban destiny rides mostly with the remaining nine percent matters. Overall, over 70 percent of residents in the major metropolitan areas now live in suburbs…

While they’ve weaved a compelling narrative, the numbers make it clear that the retro-urbanists only chance of prevailing is a disaster, say if the dynamics associated with the Great Recession—a rise in renting, declining home ownership and plunging birthrates—become our new, ongoing normal. Left to their own devices, Americans will continue to make the “wrong” choices about how to live.

Kotkin has been saying this for a quite a while now. On one hand, he appears to be correct: a good number of Americans like suburbs. On the other hand, others would argue there is much more going on than just individual preferences. Perhaps the whole system, from funding for highways versus mass transit, government programs intended to help people purchase homes, to a culture that idealizes autonomy and driving, is rigged in favor of the suburbs. And if this system is rigged, then people aren’t exactly making completely unconstrained choices.

The key here is that one doesn’t have to argue Kotkin’s individual choice argument is necessarily or completely wrong just because the system may be set up in a certain way. Yet, urban sociologists would tend to put the emphasis on the second explanation, that there are a number of larger social forces that promote the suburbs and have helped convince many Americans that the suburbs are the place they want to be.

Help needed in measuring online newspaper readership

Posted on by

The newspaper industry is in trouble and it doesn’t help that there is not an agreed-upon way to measure online readership:

It’s no longer uncommon for someone to own three or four devices that can access news content at home, work or almost anywhere. This array causes headaches for newspaper publishers and editors and sows confusion for advertisers who want to know how many readers a newspaper has. How should they be counted? Where should advertisers put their dollars? How many readers does an online advertisement reach? What’s an ad worth anymore?

Perhaps as vexing is who is counting readers and who counts them best. Unlike the methods Arbitron and Nielsen use to develop radio and TV ratings, the science of counting online and digital news consumers has existed only for a short time. At least nine companies have crowded into the business of measuring digital audiences over the past 15 years. Each company employs its own methodology to collect data. And because digital technology seems to leap forward almost every day, measurement techniques that were acceptable yesterday may not be adequate tomorrow.

With the money at stake in advertising and prestige, you would think there would be more agreement here. Without agreed-upon standards, newspapers can claim very different numbers and there is no way to really sort it out.

Why can’t newspapers themselves pick a provider or two they like, perhaps one that is more generous in its counting, and run with it as an industry?

Dana Chinn, a lecturer at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, said newspapers haven’t kept up with other industries that do business online.

“There is a stark contrast between the news industry and e-commerce, in that e-commerce is saying analytics is do or die for us because we are a digital business,” Chinn said. “News organizations don’t say that, because if they did they would use the right metrics. All the news organizations I know are usually using the wrong metrics to make the decisions that are needed to survive.”

This is a reminder that money-making today is very closely tied to measurement, particularly when you are selling online information.

Claim: a McMansion might kill you

Posted on by

I’ve seen lots of critiques of McMansions but I can’t recall seeing one that suggests they are bad for your health:

https://i0.wp.com/homeinsurance.com/images/McMansion.v2.png

Quite the infographic but I think it (perhaps intentionally) invokes McMansions to introduce some negative connotations and avoids the bigger context: these are problems across American society, whether you live in a big house or not. Some of these are tied to sprawl more broadly with its dependence on cars, on a shift toward eating out and more sedentary jobs, building homes in general, and a growing emphasis on media. This could fit with a common critique of McMansions: they are part of larger patterns of excessive consumption.

In the end, your McMansion is not killing you much more than “average” American contexts are.

New Urbanist Andrés Duany discusses “lean urbanism”

Posted on by

Architect Andrés Duany talks about his latest idea: lean urbanism.

Galina Tachieva: Can you summarize the big topics that are on your mind today? What about some short-term actions we can take as urban thinkers and doers?

Andrés Duany: We at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company have been engaging many of those topics, and are in the midst of writing a book to be called Lean Urbanism. Big things changed on a permanent basis around the 2007 meltdown; many of the false premises that guided American urban planning seem almost comical today, while, in fact, in the past they had the dignity of seeming tragic. One of the most interesting topics is identifying another set of appropriate models. Our current thesis is studying the great American continental expansion of the latter half of the 19th century, when thousands of towns and cities were founded in the absence of financing. We must understand what allowed that and what makes it seem impossible today. Among the constituent elements are a very light hand of government and, often, management genius—as well as normative patterns like the continental survey, the town grid, etc. But the key element is successional urbanism. Start small at the inauguration, and later build well, culminating in the climax condition of the magnificent cities of the 1920s. By contrast, for the past 15 years or so, planners have been going straight to the climax condition, bypassing the inaugural condition and successional stages of urban molting. We need to develop protocols for every level—financial, administrative, and cultural—that will allow successional planning to occur again. Those are the big things…

Galina Tachieva: Why is it important to talk about and further develop Lean Urbanism?

Andrés Duany: Some of the conditions we find ourselves in are permanent. Even when the effects of the real estate bubble are overcome, what is revealed is an underlying impoverishment. We are no longer the fantastically wealthy nation that we had been since the Second World War, in which we could implement simpleminded ideas and then proceed to mitigate them by throwing money at them. The primary wasteful idea is the building of very high-grade highway infrastructure, not just for inter-city commerce, but also for securing quite ordinary things. Taking an arterial to get a cup of coffee at Starbucks is now conventional. This posits an urbanism in which it is assumed every adult will purchase a car because it is a prerequisite for a viable social and economic life. This is an astoundingly profligate conceit, and one quite unfair to the 50 percent or so Americans who don’t drive because they are too young, too old, or too poor to have access to a car. We can no longer even pretend to afford that kind of thing.

There is more interesting material in the full interview including Duany’s take on the historical stages of New Urbanism.

The portion in the quote above sounds like New Urbanism tweaked for a recession era: you can’t put it all together at once so you need to build in modules and continue to question some of the basic assumptions about planning so that we don’t incur unnecessary long-term costs (like keeping up with cars). Of course, the economy doesn’t necessarily have to stay in the doldrums, oil may be plentiful, and Americans may have more wealth down the road to continue to have cars (which are quite costly). But, it sounds like Duany assumes these problems will persist – and this may just be good for New Urbanism in hte long run.

If the economic situation continues to be difficult, it would then be interesting to ask how this is supposed to work out in practice. Building whole towns in a New Urbanist style is out? It is worth noting that Duany mentioned the need not just to have good planning of physical space but also the right administrative and cultural elements. Indeed, the physical planning may be the easiest part as it takes a lot to put together good yet limited management/government within communities that are meaningful from the start.