Making the Best of the Airport City

Whether Mother Earth can cough up the fossil fuels needed to keep the airline industry flying is a matter of debate (and one that we really should be debating). While airports are primarily significant in their relationships with each other, the ground-level impact that an airport can have on a city is massive. John Kasarda has even coined the term “aerotropolis” to describe the economic activity that develops around airports.

Unfortunately, urban transportation systems fail to accommodate the aerotropolis. The problem makes sense in light of the transportation challenges that an airport creates for a city. Airports must lie far from the urban core by necessity—a dense urban core actually increases the likelihood that an airport will have to be more remote.

Meanwhile, though, successful international airports have spurred the construction of large-scale office parks, hotels, malls and even casinos. In Chicago, the O’Hare area is second only to the Loop in job concentration.

Chicago provides a perfect example of the aerotropolis’ accessibility conundrum. An old city with a historically strong center, Chicago now strikes a delicate balance between the transit-oriented past and the automobile-dependent present. In the midst of its shift toward the latter, Chicago happened to build the largest airport in the world (more recently surpassed by Atlanta’s airport). Another half century since O’Hare’s construction, Chicago still has a largely radial transit and road network that both center on the Loop and link the airport to the rest of the city with just a few spokes.

Not that Chicago’s planners are to blame for the situation. After all, most of the metropolitan area’s transit infrastructure predates O’Hare, as does much of the city’s residential and commercial development. A hundred years of booming development can’t be reproduced overnight. Furthermore, an airport-generated commercial area still needs to have the actual airport at its center, and airports don’t offer accessible or vibrant public spaces like many downtowns can. An airport is likely to generate a sprawling and automobile-dependent aerotropolis, and to some extent that’s unavoidable.

How to integrate the aerotropolis into the metropolis, then? Considering Chicago’s example, a dual-centered metropolis offers an opportunity to create a vibrant and dense corridor between the two hubs. The rail transit network in Chicago, as mentioned above, focuses on the Loop but connects it to O’Hare via the Blue Line. The path between the two offers an easy commute to either employment center and features exciting, walkable neighborhoods and commercial areas that have thrived since before the airport even existed. Thus, the aerotropolis may affect cities negatively in certain ways, but that second central business district might also produce distinct advantages for parts of those cities.

(Photo from Flickr user Wouter Kiel.)

The New New South

When our grandparents re-imagined the urban environment, we wound up with Pruitt-Igoe and the Parisian banlieues. As a result, popular opinion leans somewhat sharply in the negative direction when it comes to large-scale urban renovations. Still, it is largely accepted, among the current generation of urbanists and architects, that the suburbs are in need of a serious, large-scale overhaul. It's always important, when taking on a major project, to learn from the lessons of the past. But what exactly do the tower blocks and windswept concrete plazas of the latter half of the twentieth century teach us? On the surface, it's that tower blocks and windswept concrete plazas make for dire cities. But beyond that, these stark interventions illustrate quite plainly that it is almost never a good idea to rip down everything and start from scratch.

It's too bad, really, because starting a city from scratch is a very romantic and exciting idea. But cities are places that are used by millions of people, in millions of different ways; the longer a place is inhabited, the more people develop routines in and around them. Aesthetics aside, familiarity sets in, and even ugly places can become comfortable and familiar. Modernist urban renewal projects didn't just fail because they were severe and lacked a sense of human scale; they failed, at least in part, because they ignored the patterns and rhythms of the places that they replaced.

It's encouraging, then, to see that some of the cities considered the greatest offenders by anti-sprawl camp are starting not only to attempt to densify, but that they are doing so in ways that adapt rather than replace their built environments. Take, for instance, Miami, where a former car dealership is being redeveloped as a highrise urban district, or Charlotte, North Carolina, which has taken several steps in the past few years to actually start acting like a city of its economic stature. A new light rail has been built, for instance, with plans for considerable expansion; density has been encouraged along the transit lines; in one suburb, all new commercial buildings are required to have at least two stories. For a city with a population density of only 2,515 people per square mile (slightly less than that of Bangladesh), these are very promising steps toward urbanization. Better yet, there's been no wholesale removal of the city's existing fabric; just modifications.

Other sprawling cities are starting to take notice. Atlanta, the undisputed Capital of the New South since its rapid revival back in the late 1980s, has recently taken note of Charlotte's urbanization, with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution calling the city "a feisty, undersized boxer [that punches above its weight]." No small words from the Rome of Suburban Postwar America. And as that same article notes (albeit in downplayed terms that any smart urbanist will snicker at), Atlanta is currently struggling under the weight of the obscene freeway system that grew as fast as the metro's population. The city is already saddled with several eight-lane freeways (that's eight in both directions, for a total of 16) and the Georgia State Assembly seems to be making transit decisions using a 1965-vintage playbook. With New Jerseyans now complaining about the gridlock in the Big Peach (which they actually do in the AJ-C article), Atlanta's mobility problems are looking like a very serious liability.

Charlotte, meanwhile, has half the population of Atlanta but less than half the congestion. It remains to be seen if Charlotte will ever catch up to Atlanta in terms of international economic stature, but even if it doesn't, Charlotte can lead the way as a slew of sprawling mid-sized Southern cities (the entire region is notorious for its sprawl, after all) seek to densify and re-work their urban fabric. By taking the lead on lifestyle issues, Charlotte could become the capital of the New New South.


(Photos from Flickr user wbwood1969 and The Daily Green.)

Plan Your Own Route

Mass transit: the democratic transportation mode.

It sounds right, doesn’t it? More than driving (of course), cabbing, biking or even walking, transit just feels like the transportation of the people. Transit does tend to receive the most visible and direct public subsidy, after all, and any way of traveling that forces crowds of people to press up against each other has to be considered democratic.

The countless benefits that cities reap from functional transit systems could be even greater, however, if transit systems could truly match cities’ needs in a timely and precise manner.

Of course, transit service already does approximate the needs of transit riders. This should be obvious—if you’re riding transit, it’s because existing service can get you from point A to point B. If transit can’t meet your needs, though, you’re probably not riding the bus, and non-riders are a blind spot faced by transit service planners.

The actions of communities and neighborhoods within cities hint at a solution to this problem. Since communities know their transit and mobility needs better than any centralized authority, they can approach transit agencies with ideas for improvements to existing bus service. If their suggestions are implemented, both parties benefit—the community for obvious reasons, and the agency by receiving valuable information from a direct source. This process is limited, however, by the incompleteness of information that’s offered. What if only some community groups take it upon themselves to analyze and communicate their transit needs? And what if some groups slip through the cracks or fail to make their case?

A more innovative solution that incorporates more information sources would be helpful, but there are obstacles to such a solution. Urban transit tends to be a natural monopoly—the fixed costs of a transit system are so great that two or more companies could not profitably exist in the same market (actually, cities in most parts of the world can’t even support one transit agency profitably). The result of the single-provider model is that multiple entities don’t get the chance to compete and experiment with different transit strategies. Ultimately, the mass transit “industry” is less innovative than it could be.

However, the internet and GIS technology offer one possible avenue for more direct public participation in the transit planning process. An interactive, online GIS map of a city and its transit network could allow any user to input desired changes to transit service. The GIS database would aggregate all those suggestions and inform the transit agency’s decisions to allocate or modify transit service. The most significant limitation to such an approach would be its reliance upon computer access and technological proficiency, which is not evenly distributed in cities. Despite this and other apparent flaws, a more participatory method of transit planning seems attainable given the technology currently available, and transit agencies can most likely use any additional information they can get.


(Photo from Flickr user pbiongriffin.)

Considering Programmed Housing, Continued

Yesterday, Where featured a post about a proposed development in Albany that would provide affordable urban artist housing while providing valuable cultural services to the existing community by having the residents create and teach free and low-cost art classes, building a community service program into the rental agreement. But artistic development is not the only service that could be programmed into a housing development. In fact, when tax revenue is being used to stimulate the economy and efficiency has become the golden rule, programmed housing stands to give taxpayers a lot of bang for their buck by tackling multiple social problems at the same time.

Foreclosures have become headline news over the past year, and affordable housing has rocketed from being an oft-maligned political quagmire to being an oft-maligned political quagmire in the national spotlight. Public opinion of public and affordable housing is, as Where has argued before, not anywhere near as high as it needs to be at a time when millions of people are in dire need of a place to stay. The central problem here, from a PR perspective, seems to be that Americans assume all residents of public housing are lazy, riding on the government's coattails to avoid working or paying rent. Of course, access to jobs is one of the central reasons for why people actually need affordable housing, particularly in urban areas. Irony is, as the saying goes, a bitch.

To complicate matters further, the Brookings Institution announced the results of a new study on what they have termed "job sprawl" earlier this week. The study confirmed what many already knew: jobs have followed people out to the suburbs. Nearly every city in America has seen its share of the total metro population shrink drastically over the past half century, and now Brookings has hard numbers to illustrate just how drastically this has affected those cities' share of the job market, as well.

According to the study, the Virginia Beach-Norfolk metro area has the highest percentage of residents working within a mile of the city's central business district, at just 36.4%. New York City, with its infamous hyper-concentration of office space, only managed to come in second with just 34.8% of the metro workforce commuting to its CBD each day. That means that, in the best cases, only a third of people are working in downtown areas, which inevitably have the highest concentration of transportation options.

Transportation is the glue that binds these two problems -- a lack of affordable housing and access to increasingly spread-out job opportunities -- together. Affordable housing is only useful to workers if it is available in a location that allows them reasonable commute times to places where jobs are actually available. Many people in the States are finding themselves rather suddenly without a job or a home, much less the funds to drive around the city looking for either, or to drive an hour each way every day to work a part-time job for $8 an hour (if that).

With the need for affordable housing at an all-time high and urbanists hoping for a stimulus-funded urban renaissance, it only makes sense that we should be presenting decision makers at the Federal level with projects, like Albany's Academy Lofts, that can weave solutions to multiple problems together as efficiently and creatively as possible. Programmed housing has the potential to provide job-seekers with affordable housing while simultaneously providing them with an opportunity to continue building work experience, through participation in community programs, while they continue their search for paid gainful employment. Not only that, but since the work done at programmed housing developments would be on-site, transit costs would be accordingly lowered for residents.


The arts are an obvious starting point, but there's no reason why housing developments couldn't be built around legal clinics to provide students fresh out of law school (and saddled with the accordant debt) with a chance to cut their teeth, or around community centers offering technology classes and computer repair services. Programmed housing could be easily tailored to be double assets; by placing such developments in targeted urban neighborhoods where a lack of certain services was identified, these developments would help both the new residents and the existing communities toward economic recovery.

Programmed housing may not be a sure-fire scheme (a potential downside: turnover could make for some very ineffective services), but tying solutions to jobs, housing, and transit challenges together -- particularly in urban areas -- is certainly the most effective way to use stimulus funds. If we're not talking about multiple solutions at once, we're not really talking about a solution at all.


(Photo from Flickr users The Voice of Eye and your_nostalgia, and from Where@FFFFOUND!. The originals can be viewed by clicking the photos.)

The Value of Scarcity

Urbanization is caused, at least in part, by scarcity. Certain resources are limited, and thus more efficiently used in a communal setting. Through urbanization, more people have access to these resources than would if settlements were less densely populated. This is true of everything from intangibles like creativity to more solid things like water and electricity, which are more cheaply and easily distributed to dense urban areas than rural places. Cities are often trumpeted these days as "the solution" to the challenge posed by global climate change because of this very phenomenon; as energy sources become more scarce, the efficiency of densely populated cities becomes the most viable way for developed nations to maintain a high standard of living while simultaneously reducing energy usage.

A recent article by Thomas Friedman gave me pause because of its implications for the scarcity of energy. Two weeks ago, Friedman wrote about a laboratory in the Bay Area that is optimistic about its ability to make cold fusion power a reality within the next decade. This claim has, of course, been made before, and as Friedman quips, such revolutionary technologies tend to be "20 years away and always will be." The successful commercialization of cold fusion would, at least in theory, solve the problem of the scarcity of energy once and for all; assuming that it were actually only ten years away, what would this mean for cities? How would patterns of urbanization change if energy were not an issue?

On the one hand, an endless supply of cheap, safe, clean energy would make currently-cost-prohibitive technologies like mag-lev trains and supertall skystrapers (we're talking about the kind of buildings that would make the Emirates blush) much more feasible. Mag-lev trains, in particular, would present an interesting challenge to cities by opening up an even more vast range of the exurban hinterlands to development. With the density-related benefits of energy rendered moot, how would urbanists need to re-think their arguments in favor of high-density urban cores?

On the other hand, it could be argued that the end of energy scarcity would make developed world-conditions in currently-developing countries much, much easier to achieve. This would be a massive economic boon to lower-income and impoverished people around the world, freeing up people previously locked into cycles with few or no opportunities for advancement, greatly accelerating the growth of the Creative Class across the globe. Innovation-intensive fields tend to encourage clustering, as Richard Florida has argued so thoroughly in his books, meaning that a massive shift like the advent of cold fusion power might actually be a boon to urbanism.

Whether or not cold fusion is possible within the foreseeable future, the idea that it is challenges some of the most basic tenets of urbanist thought. What might we learn about how contemporary cities work if we were to give such a seismic technological shift some serious thought? What value does the scarcity of energy -- or any resource -- have for cities?


(Photos from Where@FFFFOUND!. The originals can be viewed by clicking the photos.)

Against Transportation

“More energy fed into the transportation system means that more people move faster over a greater range in the course of every day. Everybody's daily radius expands at the expense of being able to drop in on an acquaintance or walk through the park on the way to work. Extremes of privilege are created at the cost of universal enslavement. An elite packs unlimited distance into a lifetime of pampered travel, while the majority spend a bigger slice of their existence on unwanted trips. The few mount their magic carpets to travel between distant points that their ephemeral presence renders both scarce and seductive, while the many are compelled to trip farther and faster and to spend more time preparing for and recovering from their trips.”

Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity (1974)

* * *

Urban transportation: What are we going to do about it? Fewer cars? More mass transit? More bikes? Fuel taxes?

It's tempting to try solving transportation problems with more transportation. The sight of rush hour traffic jams in cities, or the experience of riding an overcrowded bus or train, suggest the need for increased transit capacity. As a short term solution, that may indeed be the best remedy. In the long run, however, it’s more like supplementing a junk food diet with a few healthy snacks.

Modern industrial societies are addicted to mobility—something Ivan Illich points out in the passage above. Most of us have always lived within this milieu and it’s hard for us to equate less movement with better movement. Our cities embody the assumption that individuals will gladly bow to the demands of transportation systems. New York, Chicago and London all enjoy “strong centers” complete with roads and trains that can pump hundreds of thousands of people into their central business districts every morning and back out again every evening. An hour a day is generally a normal amount of time to spend commuting in these cities—I can live six miles from my job because the infrastructure exists to move me there quickly.

Interestingly, the strong-centered cities with great transit are paragons of urban form in western society. They certainly look great in comparison to the sprawling, decentralized megalopolises that have followed them. I can’t imagine wanting to live in any other kind of city, but the utopian in me wants cities where people spend less time moving from place to place. Christopher Alexander describes such a city in A Pattern Language, writing that the separation of residences and work create “intolerable rifts in people’s inner lives.” He suggests that cities use zoning laws and tax incentives to spread workplaces throughout cities.

Unfortunately, urban transportation is not planned in a way that favors less transportation. Individual agencies generally have one main task, and no agency can be expected to argue against its own existence. A transit planner would never decide that less transit ridership would benefit the city as a whole, unless transit planning was only one component of a broader job description.

Nevertheless, it might be a helpful first step to scatter workplaces throughout dense cities using the types of policies that Alexander describes, along peripheral transit lines or within walking and biking distance of neighborhood residences. A lot of work disappeared in 2008 and plenty more is sure to vanish in 2009. If and when that work comes back, it doesn’t all need to end up downtown.

(Photo from Flickr user truffes.)

LaHood: Not a Disastrous Pick, After All?

I don't know about you, but after Ray LaHood was tapped to serve as Obama's Secretary of Transportation, most of what I read around the urblogosphere was bad-news-bears. Urban policy wonk Ryan Avent questioned the decision over at Grist, as well as his own blog; over at WorldChanging, Alex Steffen wondered aloud wether Obama had used the position as a throwaway to appease Republicans; and transit blog The Overheard Wire took a padded swipe at the new Sec. Interested in getting the opinion of someone in the transit policy arena from LaHood's home state (which, luckily enough, happens to be my own), I checked in with a friend who's on the board of the Chicago-based Active Transportation Alliance, formerly the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation. He pointed me to an editorial piece in the org's latest newsletter, ModeShift, which paints a much sunnier picture of LaHood than I've become accustomed to reading. According to the ModeShift article, LaHood is a strong and vocal proponent of rails-to-trails programs, and has been twice-honored by the League of Illinois Bicyclists for his efforts on biking issues. So his mass transit record is still murky, but it sounds like LaHood's not all bad news. Just a bit of food for thought.

Edit: all that being said, I'm starting to wish that this Nadler fellow would have been given the nod.

Posh to be Poor? Transportation

Over the last few years there has been a surge away from motorcar transportation towards public transportation and the bicycle. This can in part be attributed to the sustainable movement as well as the growth of our urban cores. In 2008, the number of people living in cities eclipsed rural dwellers for the first time. As cities become more dense, the efficiency of traffic becomes increasingly important and for residents, it becomes faster to take public transportation. Now, aside from public transportation, the bicycle is also seeing a boom in popularity as a primary mode of transportation for many city dwellers.

The bicycle is rapidly becoming the popular mode of transportation in large urban cores. It is cheap, you can find a decent used bike for 25 bucks that will get you around the city fairly well. Bikes are easy to maintain and aren't subject to expensive repairs as they age. No need to buy insurance either, or fill up on gas. These qualities make it a very attractive option for those who are strapped for cash. Also, it is environmentally friendly due to the lack of emissions and lower embodied energy than the automobile. So, this is an important turning point as people begin to look away from a more expensive, more convenient mode of transportation, to one that is significantly more affordable. In fact, New York city saw a 35% increase in people biking to work in 2008. Unlike public transportation though, biking has become a trend with thriving organizations such as Critical Mass advocating for increased ridership. It has become cool to ride a bike as demonstrated by the many celebs recently caught on 2 wheels. Lance Armstrong may have sparked a national movement toward road bikes, but the many bike messengers roaming our urban cores have sparked a fixed gear revolution. Once seen as tacky or radical, the bike messenger style has invaded western culture influencing clothing, style (messenger bag anyone??), and heck, transportation!



So why does this mean it's becoming posh to be poor? Well, because it's a move away from expensive transportation options, toward more affordable and accessible option. It's a move away from $30,000 SUV's toward $125 bikes (these are both averages of course.) Low income residence take public transit, they ride bikes, and they hop trains; 3 methods of transportation that will see a steep increase in 2009. As we enter into an age of frugality, where we find pleasure in the simple aspects of life, people will worry less about luxury and more about experience, an idea which has grown in prominence over the past few years.


Posh to be Poor? Introduction

(Photo from Treehugger The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)
(Photo from SFGate The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)
(Photo from Wikipedia The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Interstate Bike Trails

The above is a collaboration between the American Association of State Highway & Transportation Officials and the Adventure Cycling Association, who have created a transcontinental network of interstate bike routes out of more than 50,000 miles of existing trails. From the Baltimore Sun:

The effort relies on cartography instead of construction, signposts instead of earth-movers.

Working from a bewildering tangle of existing roads, planners mapped a web of corridors where the national bicycle system should go. They considered traffic volume, terrain, amenities and ways to link together lightly traveled byways, secondary roads, urban trails and already established transcontinental bicycle routes.

Each corridor on the map they approved is a broad swath 50 miles wide; the precise routes within each corridor are still to be designated, numbered and given signs.

The plan has been under development for four years now; I'm guessing that the AASHTO and ACA are glad to see the political tide turning the way that it is, since construction responsibilities fall to the states (though I'm guessing that the creators will be working hands on, lobbying hard to see things built, connected, labelled, and otherwise completed). Seeing the above makes the relative unanimity of the newly selected Transpo Secretary Ray LaHood, aka Ray LaWho? as most of the planning media has been calling him lately, seem more worrisome. Does anyone know LaHood's record on bike issues?

(Found via).

Cities Rising

Yesterday's Washington Post talks about the anti-urban bias of American politics:

Is Obama's ascent a further sign...that our cities are back and that the country is making peace with its non-agrarian side? And would a big-city president address as never before the problems of our urban cores -- blighted housing, shoddy public transit, dismal schools?

Well, one can hope, but few of these problems have traditionally been considered national in scope -- the president doesn't build subways or set school curriculum for example.  Of course, the federal government does play an important role in funding local projects, and with economic crisis potentially leading to mass transit cuts, among other things, this role is even more important.

This part is encouraging:

One of the first interest groups [Obama] met with after securing the Democratic nomination in June was an alliance of bicycling advocates. 

Maybe they talked to him about how to make America more French.

(Photo from Flickr user glennharper. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

The Ads Are In the Air

In case you were wondering, the answer is no; nothing is sacred anymore. At least not to advertisers. A Dutch company called Geotronics recently launched a re-branding campaign by staging a full-blown musical number in the busy concourse of a train station in Utrecht. While there are plenty of ways to read this (the least entertaining of which is not that we'll finally have an answer for people who say musicals are unrealistic because "no one bursts into song and dance routines in real life"), it seems to set a troubling precedent. Long since unsatisfied by innumerable billboards and neon signs, advertisers have been aggressively acquiring pieces of the cityscape (ceilings, stairs, escalators, trees, sidewalks, benches, busses, etc.) over the past few decades. With this latest move, it seems, even the physical space -- the very air around us -- is fair game for splashy advertisements.



Observe above: an image of Charing Cross Station in London. Below, the same image with green filters highlighting existing advertisements:



Here, as in most contemporary public and quasi-public spaces, people are bombarded with ads for food, real estate, toiletries, and events. The advertising has become so ubiquitous, that it seems abnormal to pass through an urban space without ads on every flat surface (think back to the media bonanza in late 2006 when São Paulo banned all outdoor ads). And now, we can't even count on the people we're sitting next to, or the janitor sweeping up litter a few yards away, not to be a part of some grandiose sales pitch just waiting to erupt. The advertisement space in public spaces starts to look a bit more like this:



There's a fundamental problem with being told by your environment that you are merely a consumer. Yes, we are consumers living in a capitalist society, and I don't intend to argue the merit or value of that. But there is something to be said for maintaining the dignity of public space, and keeping some places free of advertisements. If we merely see each other as fellow consumers we are, in an odd way, pitted against each other. I have to buy what you can't buy if I want to feel successful. Ads do nothing to reinforce the fundamental building blocks of any harmonious human settlement: community, interdependence, and civic engagement. Those are the values that public spaces should strive to promote.

But what's the big deal with the Geotronics musical performance ad, you may be asking? If we are already bombarded by ads everywhere we go, what's the difference adding the occasional flash-mob-esque song and dance routine hawking toothpaste or the newest Barbie doll? It might even be fun -- certainly moreso than any billboard. But advertising has a way of growing, cancer-like, taking over new nooks and crannies without us noticing. In some cities, storefronts are now more profitable with windows boarded up to shoulder more posters and billboards.

Jump ahead a decade or two, to when these performance ads have become more commonplace. What happens when civic officials see more value in a park as a place for elaborate performance ads? Just imagine your city's parks, transit stations, and civic plazas as dozens or even hundreds of little Disneylands. And what would a child who grows up riding the Citibank Train to Coca Cola Park instead of just 'the local playground' think of the city once they were grown? The only value a place has once it's been bought is what the company that bought it was willing to pay for it.

(Original photo from Flickr user annabelb. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

The Valley Does Watts

Pickle and Cake has this great video of a field trip of suburban LA residents to another suburb that happens to have this famous piece of outsider architecture. Of course, the trip is only noteworthy because of the "whites visiting the ghetto" angle, and the visitors to their credit are very honest about race and their perception of danger.

However, I was struck by something more trivial -- that as recently as 1994, when the video was made, people were still fascinated by light rail lines. So fascinated, that LA's (admittedly new) Blue Line shared top billing with the Watts Towers as the trip's main attractions. Even the ticket machines are an exciting and confusing part of the experience! And ticket machines, I think we can all agree, are really boring.

It's as if the scores of midwestern immigrants who settled in LA actually managed to produce children less urbane than they were. Reluctant metropolis indeed.

(Photo from Flickr user amycqx. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Design a new bus for London

The Outquisition and Urbanism Camp

Prolific greenblogger Alex Steffan wrote a post last weekend about an idea spawned during a late-night coffeetalk with the equally prolific and fantastic Cory Doctorow (which sounds like maybe the most thoroughly awesome way to spend a weeknight, ever) that Doctorow dubbed "The Outquisition." The idea is grand and audacious in just the right way, and the comments that follow the initial post are well worth a read. But this post is about an offshoot inspired by a footnote in Steffan's post.

The dynamic e-duo's Outquisition involves sustainability-minded urbanites trekking out to failing suburbs and shrinking cities around the world, bringing with them innovative, site-specific solutions to the slew of new problems being brought on by the collapse of the oil-based economy. In his litany of suggestions, Mr. Worldchanging mentions "running holistic programs for kids" as a possible method of green evangelism. This re-ignited an idea I'd been going over a few months back: urbanism camp.

There are all kinds of camps for kids. There are outdoor adventure camps, sports camps, art camps, and plain old-fashioned away-from-home summer camps, with their crafts and campfires and capture the flag tournaments. Kids learn a lot at camp; not only do they build social skills, they are able to hone their interests and be exposed to new activities and ideas. With families increasingly looking at cities as a solid alternative to suburban picket fences, it seems like camp would be the perfect way to teach kids how to appreciate the urban environment.

Indeed, life in the city is very different from life in the suburbs for a youngster. A city-focused camp could feature games that took advantage of urban neighborhoods, sneaking in lessons about street safety amidst the fun. Trips to different neighborhoods, museums, community centers, parks, and public spaces could not only expose kids to a variety of subjects, but also introduce them to the many different creative outlets provided by a dense urban core.

This poses all sorts of interesting questions; architecture, public space, sustainability, diversity, mass transit -- can these things be entertaining to an eleven-year-old? It's kind of fun to ponder. Maybe someday, somebody will actually come up with an affirmative answer.

The Urban President

What I find most impressive about Barack Obama is his ability to speak about the Bush administration's bungling over the past eight years that so clearly outlines the need for a different approach. As I listened to his speech to the US Conference of Mayors, I found myself shocked -- dumbfounded, even -- to hear a presidential candidate speaking about urban issues in such plain and ambitious terms. That a presidential candidate would talk the talk about metropolitan- and regional-scale economics, mass transit and high-speed rail, and the specific ways that the war in Iraq hurts individual cities and neighborhoods, is almost hard to believe after eight years of secrecy, corporate carte blanche, and a complete lack of focus on anything that actually matters to peoples' day-to-day lives.

"Neglect," Obama quips, "is not a policy for America's metropolitan areas." Word.

If you like the clip above, check out the full video on the US Conference of Mayors website.

Three Short Urban Navigation Blogedankens

No prizes this time, but I do encourage you to leave comments if these exercises lead to any interesting answers...or more interesting questions. Click the links to see the inspiration for each thought experiment.


Blogedanken #1: Imagine that your city were like Venice; where would the Grand Canal be located? What streets would remain streets, and what ones would be sunken to form the city's canal network? Create a corresponding map. Does this map tell you anything about transportation and infrastructure networks in your city? How could such a map be used to plan transit lines, or a park system?


Blogedanken #2: If someone asked you to write a guide to your city for visitors that didn't want the tourist experience, where would you send them? Determine 5-10 places and/or experiences that you consider essential for the un-tourist in your city. Now create a walking-tour route that connects these spots in a way that creates a meaningful way -- a way that can direct the visitor's interpretation of your city. Compare your route to a map in a typical tourist guide. How do the two differ? What does this tell you about the way that you have experienced the city, yourself? What has your city taught you?


Blogedanken #3: Cities are very much about paths. Numerous networks of people, information, and physical infrastructure create a massive web often referred to as the urban fabric. Almost every city has one or two once-crucial cords in this web that have faded from prominence, or even disappeared completely. Imagine that you are creating a virtual guide, using GPS and voice recordings, to one of these defunct lines in your city. How have the areas around this forgotten path adapted since its decline? If they have not adapted particularly well, speculate as to why that might be. Based on what need the path and its surrounding infrastructure originally served, what currently vibrant paths through your city could become deserted or forgotten in the future? How might this be averted?

(Photo from Flickr user Damiel. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Urbanffffinds 027

Apologies for the lack of Urbanffffinds last week. This week, please accept this double-shot of urban imagery goodness as a peace offering. And some more happy news: part-time employment has been secured, and regular posting will resume at Where, starting with almost three weeks of great arch&urb stuff in a hearty linkdump, tomorrow morning.