Category Archives: Places

A new way to fight pollution in Chicago: cement that absorbs smog

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Chicago is the first American city to lay concrete that absorbs smog:

There are many sustainable technologies designers can utilize these days to make a project more Earth- and people-friendly, but smog-eating cement isn’t the most talked-about – until now. The City of Chicago is pioneering the use of a revolutionary type of cement that is capable of eradicating the air around it of pollution, potentially reducing the levels of certain common pollutants by 20 – 70% depending on local conditions and the amount of exposed surface area.

Photocatalytic cement isn’t exactly news – it was developed by the leading Italian cement maker Italcementi for the Vatican in honor of the 2,000th anniversary of the Christian faith. The Seat of the Catholic Church commissioned the construction of a new church to commemorate the event and wanted surface material that would retain its new appearance despite Rome‘s high levels of air pollution.

The cement that Italcementi developed uses titanium oxide that, when exposed to natural sunlight, triggers a chemical reaction that catalyses the decomposition of dirt or grime on the cement’s surface; thus, it is self-cleaning. What further research in Europe uncovered, however, was that this cement possessed pollution reduction properties that not even Italcementi could have foreseen, capable of cleaning up smog in adjacent air – up to 2.5 meters away – by breaking down the nitrogen oxides which are the result of burning fossil fuels.

Naturally, this makes the photocatalytic cement a perfect paving material as it successfully reduces the amount of toxins expelled by vehicles and inhaled by pedestrians. Italy and other areas of Europe have already paved many of their roads with the revolutionary material, but Chicago is reportedly the first city in America to adopt it, laying down a thin, permeable pavement for the bicycle and parking lanes on Blue Island Avenue and Cermak Road.

There might be a few issues associated with this:

1. What is the relative cost of laying down this kind of cement compared to other road surfacing material? In Illinois, I’ve read before that laying asphalt is cheaper in the short term compared to concrete but more expensive in the long term because it has to be replaced more frequently.

2. Some may not like this news because if the cement can help fight pollution, people may pay less attention to the effect of cars.

Here is more information on this concrete from an article last October:

According to Nguyen, the titanium dioxide on the cement surface absorbs UV light and uses this energy to react with water vapor in the surrounding air.

The result of this reaction is a highly reactive particle known as a hydroxyl radical.

It is these unstable hydroxyl radicals that in turn decompose a host of other compounds in the surrounding air, including nitrous oxide, a harmful greenhouse gas released in car exhaust…

David Leopold, project manager for the Chicago Department of Transportation, did say the photocatalytic cement is more expensive than regular pavement, but the city expects to see considerable improvement in street-level air quality as a result…

Based on pre-installation estimates, “on a windless day up to about eight feet from the pavement’s surface, you can see demonstrated improvements in air quality,” said Leopold. “Coincidentally, that’s about the height of a person on a bike.”

We’ll see what happens if this concrete is used more widely.

Hoping Chicago can become a big data hub

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A fundraiser held by Tom Pritzker this weekend in Chicago was part of a plan to make Chicago a center for big data:

University of Chicago computer scientist Ian Foster pressed the clicker and up popped a map of the most sophisticated fiber-optic networks in the world.

On that map, at least, Chicago appeared to be the center of everything, a crossroads of information dwarfing Beijing, London and New York in importance.

Fiber-optic lines lace this city — because they are often laid along railroad lines. And the University of Chicago is working to use that geographic advantage to build the largest storage hub in the world for genetic and medical information, called the bionimbus cloud. The goal is to harness massive amounts of data and computing power to solve the riddle of diseases such as cancer.

Last week, Hyatt Hotels Corp. Chairman Tom Pritzker and his wife, Margot, hosted a fundraiser at the Park Hyatt Chicago to introduce the project to about 50 friends, including CDW Corp. founder Michael Krasny; Melvin and Ellen Gordon, the CEO and president of Tootsie Roll Industries, respectively; Crate and Barrel founders Carole and Gordon Segal; Wheels Inc. Chief Executive Jim Frank; and Charles Evans, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago…

Grasping the magnitude of the data the medical community needs to collect and analyze is almost impossible.

But understanding a railroad hub — and the transport of grain, meat or oil — is not.

“Business, innovation, discovery, jobs still depend on taking raw materials and turning them into refined products,” Foster said. “Often, nowadays, the raw material is data and the refined material is knowledge.”

This is an interesting comparison to make in Chicago, a city that heavily depends on its transportation facilities such as busy airports and the large percentage of US rail traffic that goes through the region and has served as a commodity trading center for decades. So why not data analysis and infrastructure? At the same time, I’m guessing Chicago has a ways to go compared to other tech and data centers like Silicon Valley and Seattle, let alone other places like Austin and Boston.

Fighting McMansions in Miami

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The group “Save Miami Beach Neighborhoods” is looking for help in fighting McMansions:

Miami Beach homes comprise a variety of architectural styles that reflect the history of our City, which is not yet 100 years old. Unfortunately, recent zoning changes have allowed for out-of-scale McMansions which threaten the historic character, authenticity and desirability of our single-family neighborhoods.

Our goal with Save Miami Beach Neighborhoods is to ensure that new construction is in line with existing neighborhood context. We want to stop oversized McMansions that are popping up seemingly all around us…

As homeowners and concerned residents, we must act to limit new construction size and scale before our neighborhood character is lost forever.

I would say the one photo of an 18,000 square foot McMansion in the neighborhood is pretty emblematic of what critics do not like about McMansions: large, taking up much of the lot, unusual design compared to the house next to it, and much larger than the next house (which is probably only 5,000 square feet).

At the same time, I wonder if outsiders would look at this and say it is simply an argument between wealthy people about something nebulous like “community character.”

More aldermen voting with Emanuel than did with Daley

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Chicago may have a newer mayor but a new study shows voting with the mayor is now even more pronounced for Chicago aldermen:

After analyzing 30 divided roll calls in the nearly two years since Emanuel took office, University of Illinois at Chicago researchers concluded that Emanuel has enjoyed more iron-fisted control over the council than former mayors Richard M. Daley, Richard J. Daley or Ed Kelly, the Democratic machine co-founder.

Twenty-one aldermen supported the mayor’s programs 100 percent of the time, while 18 others were more than 90 percent in lock-step.

There have been no shortage of controversies — ranging from speed cameras, police station and mental health clinic closings to the mayor’s Infrastructure Trust and his plan to nearly double water and sewer fees.

But only seven of the 30 issues drew six or more dissenting votes. Emanuel’s average level of support on all of the divided roll calls was 93 percent, compared to 83 percent during Richard J. Daley’s first two years in office and Kelly’s 88 percent…

Pressed to explain the City Council’s obedience, Simpson pointed to the take-no-prisoners reputation Emanuel built while working under former President Bill Clinton and current President Barack Obama and as chief architect of the 2006 Democratic takeover of the U.S. House.

Still Chicago, “the city that works“?

One issue with this analysis is that is still leaves Chicago residents with little knowledge of whether these voting patterns are unusual or not. Do other major cities have more contentious voting patterns? Or, is this fairly normal for big cities outside of the occasional wide disagreement? There are always references to more contentious times in the history of the Chicago City Council (see the short-lived Council Wars) but how about even a long view within Chicago for sake of comparison? I imagine this consistent voting together is fairly unusual but once you are around Chicago long enough, this becomes normal.

And regardless of the voting patterns, how about more analysis about whether Mayor Emanuel’s decisions have been good for Chicago in the long-term? Some of this will take time to sort out…

The booming housing market: Washington D.C.

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Washington D.C. may be growing in influence and its housing prices are certainly growing – they just reached a record high.

The median price of a home in the District reached its highest point in history last month, according to the latest data from RealEstate Business Intelligence, a subsidiary of MRIS.

D.C.’s median sale price soared to $460,000 from $405,000 in February, an increase of 13.6 percent month over month. For the entire metro area, the growth was more modest. The median sale price for the region rose 8 percent, to $372,500 in March from $345,000 in February.

Falls Church boasted the largest median price in the area last month and the biggest percentage uptick year over year. The median sale price for homes in Falls Church climbed to $631,000 in March, a 37.7 percent increase. However, there were only 16 sales in Falls Church in March, which likely skewed the numbers…

While this is good news for sellers, it is not as good for buyers who are combatting not only rising home prices but also depleted inventory. The number of homes for sale in the region continues to hover at historic lows. The 6,289 active listings in March were down 4,200 from the same month a year ago and have dropped nearly 20,000 since their peak in the fall of 2007.

A couple of thoughts:

1. This seems to reinforce the figures that suggest the Washington D.C. area is doing quite well. Housing prices are up, the population is growing, the region now has some of the wealthiest counties in the United States…this is a contrast to the fate of many Rustbelt locations as well as some Sunbelt communities that are still recovering from the real estate bust of recent years.

2. This will feed into ongoing conversations about the expansion of the Washington D.C. region and sprawl. In recent decades, there have been a number of discussions and fights about sprawl in Maryland and Virginia and with these housing prices and housing demand, there will be plenty of people who want more new homes.

Photographing some of the densest housing on earth in Hong Kong

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Check out a few photos of the dense high rises in Hong Kong:

As one of the most densely populated regions in the world, Hong Kong boasts not only the number one spot on Forbes’ list of escalating real estate markets, but also some of the most packed housing towers on Earth (at least one of which includes an honest-to-goodness 16.4-square-foot apartment). Captivated by these tightly crammed stacked cities, of sorts, German-born photographer Michael Wolf created tapestry-like shots of the residential buildings, cropping context to make the scope of each photo seem all the more mind-bending. In Hong Kong, architecture is “driven by function, not form and one tower block can only be distinguished from the next by the bold colour schemes of its façade,” he says, which means each piece in his Architecture of Density series, published earlier this year in a book by the same name, is pattern-driven and geometric; it’s so reminiscent of computer code that the human element nearly disappears altogether.

It would be interesting to see how people react to these pictures and these building designs. The headline to the story suggests these buildings are “sterile” but I could imagine other reactions: there is an order (and perhaps even some symmetry) to these structures; these buildings are stark and devoid of character; perhaps the buildings have to be this way to squeeze in so many people. Of course, these buildings don’t have to look this way; ornamentation doesn’t necessarily limit density. But, these buildings are the product of a particular era, context, and purpose.

Here is some more from the London School of Economics on Hong Kong’s density and the architecture and planning that has gone into it:

The urban area of Hong Kong has the highest population and employment density in the world. Measured at block level, some areas may have population densities of more than 400,000 people per square kilometre. As of 2011, there are seven million people for its 1,068 square kilometres (412 square miles) of land. However, more than 75 per cent of this land comprises no-built-up areas. The high concentration of people in just a few square kilometres is due partly to the fact that new town development did not take place until well into the 1970s and therefore most of the population (which had experienced a post-war boom in the 1950s) had to be accommodated in the main urban area along the waterfront of the Victoria Harbour on Hong Kong Island. The high price of land in Hong Kong also contributes to its high-density development…

Over the past few years, Hong Kong has developed the following planning, design and management measures to continue improving its high-rise living environments:

External environment of buildings
1) Better planning and design so that buildings are positioned further apart and have more open space;
2) Improved transport management by prioritising the development of mass transit and focusing on pedestrian movement in order to keep traffic congestion in check;
3) Creation of space by fully utilising the already-existing areas within buildings, such as roof tops and podiums, and transforming them into community and recreational spaces;
4) A trend towards large-scale property developments, which allows a greater consolidation of space in order to provide community facilities and ease of movement between locales;
5) The use of new building technology and materials to break the monotony of a district, while outdoor escalators facilitate the movement of pedestrians; and
6) Public education campaigns to encourage people to contribute to maintaining a clean environment.

All of this makes for quite a sight, even compared to the density of Manhattan.

Should thriving Sunbelt cities like Houston seek a denser core?

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Joel Kotkin points out the growth in a number of Sunbelt cities and then raises a debate within urban circles today: should these thriving Sunbelt cities try to replicate the cores of older American cities?

Finally, they will not become highly dense, apartment cities — as developers and planners insist they “should.” Instead the aspirational regions are likely to remain dominated by a suburbanized form characterized by car dependency, dispersion of job centers, and single-family homes. In 2011, for example, twice as many single-family homes sold in Raleigh as condos and townhouses combined. The ratio of new suburban to new urban housing, according to the American Community Survey, is 10 to 1 in Las Vegas and Orlando, 5 to 1 in Dallas, 4 to 1 in Houston and 3 to 1 in Phoenix.

Pressed by local developers and planners, some aspirational cities spend heavily on urban transit, including light rail. To my mind, these efforts are largely quixotic, with transit accounting for five percent or less of all commuters in most systems. The Charlotte Area Transit System represents less a viable means of commuting for most residents than what could be called Manhattan infrastructure envy. Even urban-planning model Portland, now with five radial light rail lines and a population now growing largely at its fringes, carries a smaller portion of commuters on transit than before opening its first line in 1986.

But such pretentions, however ill-suited, have always been commonplace for ambitious and ascending cities, and are hardly a reason to discount their prospects. Urbanistas need to wake up, start recognizing what the future is really looking like and search for ways to make it work better. Under almost any imaginable scenario, we are unlikely to see the creation of regions with anything like the dynamic inner cores of successful legacy cities such as New York, Boston, Chicago or San Francisco. For better or worse, demographic and economic trends suggest our urban destiny lies increasingly with the likes of Houston, Charlotte, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Raleigh and even Phoenix.

The critical reason for this is likely to be missed by those who worship at the altar of density and contemporary planning dogma. These cities grow primarily because they do what cities were designed to do in the first place: help their residents achieve their aspirations—and that’s why they keep getting bigger and more consequential, in spite of the planners who keep ignoring or deploring their ascendance.

It is clear what side Kotkin is on – we might call this “free market urbanism.” Kotkin suggests cities are all about freeing up individuals. This is not the common urbanist view that typically suggests cities are about community life (what can be accomplished through cities is greater than what individuals can do as individual parts) or about vibrant and diversestreet life (think Jane Jacobs).

But, Kotkin is not the only one who suggests there are some major differences between older American cities and newer Sunbelt cities. For example, the Los Angeles school of urban thought held up decentralized LA as the way cities were going. But, their analysis was more Marxist than free market and involved a thorough critique of capitalism and its effects on major cities.

In the end, it remains to be seen what happens to these newer Sunbelt cities as they could go all sorts of directions. If they continue on their current path, they will continue to be decentralized and sprawling. But, social or economic changes might encourage more density, new land use policies, and new visions about what the city should be.

Census Bureau official: Chicago now 5th biggest city in North America

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Following on new from a little while back, the US Census Bureau has officially confirmed that Toronto is now larger than Chicago:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, our city is home to 2.71 million people to Toronto’s 2.79 million in 2012.

Mexico City, New York and Los Angeles top the list.

Chicago is still one of the top 10 largest cities in North America, and the population did increase by more than 11,000 residents between 2010 and 2011. And we lead the nation in the category of cities that have experienced population growth downtown over the last decade, with an increase of more than 37,000 residents within 2 miles of City Hall, according to Chicago magazine.

Not a big difference at this point but Chicago is unlikely to get much closer in population compared to Los Angeles anytime soon, Toronto may continue to grow, Washington D.C. is growing in influence, and Houston is a ways behind Chicago but has been growing at a rapid pace in recent decades. Maybe this means Chicagoans should be a little worried about their status as a global city?

One area where Chicago does not have to worry: it is still securely ahead of Toronto in terms of its metropolitan area population. The Chicago metro area has over 9 million people while the Toronto metro area has over 5.5 million (2011 figures). Additionally, Chicago has over 2.5 million more than the next biggest US MSA, Dallas.

The country home of urbanist Lewis Mumford

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Lewis Mumford was a well-known mid-twentieth century urbanist. Mumford had a country home in New York:

For six decades, the Federal-style country home that sits at 187 Leedsville Road was the residence of renowned American historian, sociologist and influential literary critic Lewis Mumford…

Mumford first became acquainted with Amenia in 1926, when Joel Spingarn, an educator, literary critic and civil rights activist invited Mumford and his wife, Sophia, to spend the summer at Troutbeck, his estate farther north on Leedsville Road. A decade earlier, Troutbeck hosted a meeting that laid the groundwork for what would become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Having become enamored with the community, the Mumfords returned in 1929 and for $2,500 purchased property and an early 19th-century home just down the road from Troutbeck. While initially using it as a summer residence, Mumford made Amenia his year-round home in 1936.

He began to expand the property by purchasing surrounding parcels and upgraded the 1830s-era home with electricity and heating. Discovering an affinity for gardening, Mumford landscaped the grounds and added walking trails and formal gardens…

Mumford found the peace and quiet at his Amenia home conducive to writing and many of his major works about the role of cities in civilization and the roots of industrialization were accomplished in the first-floor study of the residence. He installed numerous bookcases in the house for his large collection of books.

Am I alone in thinking it ironic that Mumford, a scholar of cities, did much of his writing away from the city? It would be interesting to explore this interplay further. I could see the possible argument: being away from the city for stretches brings it peculiarities into sharper relief.

Livening up Modernist architecture with public art

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While recently taking an architecture tour in Chicago, I was intrigued by two scenes in the Loop: the Alexander Calder piece “Flamingo” in front of Mies van der Rohe’s Kluczynski Federal Building and the and Picasso’s sculpture in front of the Richard J. Daley Center. Here are the two sites:

ChicagoPicasso

CalderFlamingo

Both sites feature a similar set-up: modernist buildings on superblocks surrounded by large concrete plazas. On one hand, these could be dead zones as Americans tend not to like such spaces, particularly in cold weather or in the shade. But, introducing a little bit of color and disorder through the art compared to the repetition of the modernist buildings leads to a pleasing contrast. Both sculptures are tactile, particularly the Picasso one where kids were climbing on its lower levels. Americans tend not to not think modernist structures are worth of preservation or landmark status but it is hard to imagine these pieces of famous art working so well in front of different buildings.

Chicago does some interesting stuff with public art but I still wish more cities would engage in more projects like this in public spaces. What is there to lose?