urban cartography

We Heart It: "visual bookmarking for everyone"

We Heart It is "visual bookmarking for everyone" - basically, Del.icio.us for images, as opposed to pages. Unlike their elitist cousin Ffffound, WHI is free, everyone is invited and it's very, very easy to use. Signing up prompts you to add a tiny little "heart" link to your browser's bookmark bar, which you simply hit on any page with an image you want to save for later. You can then tag images, if you like; plenty of people have already tagged maps, and it's a great way to look for inspiration in a particular area.

book review: Sustainable Urbanism

Thank god for the current trend toward the generalization of textbooks.

I don't mean generalization in the sense of broadening or watering-down of subject matter, but rather in writing: many more texts in relatively technical fields are being written so that they can be appreciated interdisciplinarily, but professionals in related and sometimes even slightly-unrelated fields, and other folks who may simply be interested in the topic. It's good marketing, too, of course - it opens up much larger markets both academically and professionally, and as long as the book contains enough authority to convince instructors and professionals to purchase (or trust) it, it's a win-win situation for the publisher and author as well as the audience.

Douglas Farr's Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature (Wiley, 2008; foreword by Andres Duany) falls into the category of win-win for everyone. A very well-illustrated primer on the subject, it appeals to planners, architects, landscape designers, engineers and other folks interested in integrating their work into the larger natural environment.

Duany - the great architect and urban planner whose work with Arquitectonica shaped what we think of as "Florida modern" and whose current firm, DPZ, has become a de facto leader of the New Urbanism movement - suggests that the problem with such books is often that they most often fail to engage the reader in any kind of dialogue by simply being too technical, or by failing to instruct by simply being too exhortative and dogmatic. Luckily, Farr gives more than enough data and instruction in the dozen linked essays and case studies to instruct - but never loses sight of the fact that he's along with us for the ride, not talking at us but at our elbow, learning along with us, sharing both successes and failures and an honest interest in building communities that complement, rather than exclude, the unmanufactured world.

There's so much more here than just part one's "Case for Sustainable Urbanism." Other sections focus on the type of leadership and communication strategies most helpful in implementing both small and large-scale projects; technical tools and special techniques for community involvement are also explored extensively. Other chapters discuss the role of density, how to approach corridor situations, diagramming neighborhoods and the various types of housing that complement specific types of neighborhoods, "biophilia" - including everything from designing walkable streets to integrating wastewater management - and extensive essays on high-performance buildings and infrastructure. The last section of the book is given over to case studies, which both illustrate the preceding chapters with easy-to-understand real-world examples of sustainable success stories & offer solutions for those of us slogging through similar projects or at an impasse with a particular audience.

I recommend the book without hesitation to any planner interested in integrating sustainable projects in urban infill or exurban growth environments, as well as other aficionados of new urbanism topics. It's an entertaining read AND a necessary reference; it will replace several books on the already-overloaded shelves of a number of planners I know.

The Justice Mapping Center: imaging crime

What Charles Booth did for London (see previous post), the Justice Mapping Center does for various American cities, regions and states. Except with a much better methodology. And better technology. And more completely.

Victorian demographics: "poverty maps"

Our friend Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes:

Charles Booth's groundbreaking "Poverty Maps" of London from 1886 to 1903 used survey data to visually represent the quality of life for Londoners across a city that was characterized by enormous economic disparity. The LSE maintains an archive of the maps, zoomable and overlaid with the contemporary London map. The maps are colored from black ("Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal.") to yellow ("Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy.")

Brick Lane is a bit different today - on the map it's black to represent the highest rates of crime, poverty and mortality. A commenter on the BoingBoing thread notes that essays on that area of East London are available online, and also that the maps themselves are on display at Bishopsgate Library.

upcoming map exhibit in Baltimore

Reader Sara Hisamoto writes in with details on an upcoming exhibit at Baltimore's Walters Art Museum (which coincides with Baltimore's own Festival of Maps), opening March 16:

What makes maps so hypnotic? Is it the world of possibilities they offer as they take us on vicarious journeys? Perhaps their connection to a moment in history or their sometimes dazzling beauty?

Whatever your own connection to maps, you will discover unexpected new dimensions of these remarkable objects in Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, on view at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore MD, March 16 - June 8, 2008. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see over 100 of the world’s greatest maps: maps from ancient Rome and Babylonia; ground-breaking maps by Leonardo da Vinci and Mercator; maps loaned from great libraries of the world including that of Queen Elizabeth II housed in Windsor Castle and the Library of Congress. You will see not only the map that drew the first boundaries around a new American nation and the oldest road map of Europe but also maps that scarcely look like maps at all—sculptural forms carved in wood and landscapes fired on ceramic vessels. You will see maps made by dreamers like J.R.R. Tolkien and by visionaries like the Internet pioneers. You will learn how early maps were made and discover how map-making has changed over centuries.

“This will be the most ambitious North American tour devoted to maps since an extraordinary show mounted in Baltimore over 50 years ago,” said Walters Director Gary Vikan. “We are so pleased to have maps drawn from cultures and collections from around the globe."

Stephen Walter's London, Feb 11 - March 2

Apparently, most urban planners' ability to write lots of words that mean absolutely nothing is trumped only by that of arts writers. That said, the exhibit does look interesting:

Exhibition dates: 11 February - 2 March 2008

TAG Fine Arts is delighted to present a solo exhibition titled, The Island: London Series, in conjunction with St Pancras Crypt, a perfect location for Walter’s seminal work The Island (2006-7), an intricate drawing mapping the city of London.

Aptly described by the London born and based artist Walter as, ‘a celebration of an unfolding drama based in reality, a place that we are all part of and can relate to‘, The Island (140 x 200 cm) took two years to complete and requires the use of a magnifying glass in central areas to decipher it.  From a distance, the original graphite drawing on paper looks like an old historical map; however, on closer inspection the piece focuses on local place name histories, the artist choosing to highlight etymologies spanning from pre-Christian times to the present day.

The map is geographically accurate and includes many of London’s main roads, railway lines, historical landmarks and green spaces. However, The Island has its own unique identity fashioned by the artist’s idiosyncratic semiotics, which are wittily juxtaposed with the familiar everyday signage used in maps and public spaces. This synthesis adumbrates Walter’s primary concern - the continually shifting cultural identity of the city; he finds ‘its constant energy to reinvent itself, building on top of what was before’, a source of enduring fascination.

The Island demonstrates how mapping the city is intricately tied to its historical legacy.  Whilst working on the project, Walter studied numerous historical documents, London travel literature and antique maps, including Peter Ackroyd’s biography of London, Ian Sinclair’s explorations into the embedded fault lines of the City, and Phyllis Pearsall’s A – Z of London.

Galt "bans" big boxes - or do they?

Galt, a small farming community along the Highway 99 corridor between Sacramento and Stockton, has been at the center of a war between proponents of unbridled growth and those who don't want big boxes cluttering up their quiet little town. Yesterday, the city officially approved a ban on certain big box stores of 140,000 square feet or more, which might mislead you into believing the city council wants to stamp out big boxes in general.

This action allows Wal-Mart to continue plans for a 132,000 square foot store, but puts the kibosh on three other planned stores in the area. Some critics say this was the plan all along, and point out the close relationship between Walmart and several city council members; these critics suggest this was a way for Walmart to stifle competition while looking good.

Of course, I don't think Walmart needs to buy off a city council to quash competition; they can put local businesses down by the dozens pretty easily anyway, hiring those now-unemployed folks at 3/4 of their old wages for 39 hours a week so that they don't need to offer health insurance or other benefits. Of course, every penny of the profit is moved out of Galt (along with the shop, the minute it has an unprofitable quarterly report).

we heart Frank Gehry

Well, actually, not so much. Buy one (or one of our Corbusier shirts) here.

video: Walmart spreading like a virus

Thomas J. Holmes created "The Diffusion of Wal-Mart and Economies of Density" in 2005. The epidemiology and visualization of dumb growth is just as visually interesting as the spread of a disease, and follows similar models.

From an article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

Today, though, Wal-Mart's influence over the retail universe is slipping. In fact, the industry's titan is scrambling to keep up with swifter rivals that are redefining the business all around it. It can still disrupt prices, as it did last year by cutting some generic prescriptions to $4. But success is no longer guaranteed. Rival retailers lured Americans away from Wal-Mart's low-price promise by offering greater convenience, more selection, higher quality, or better service. Amid the country's growing affluence, Wal-Mart has struggled to overhaul its down-market, politically incorrect image while other discounters pitched themselves as more upscale and more palatable alternatives. The Internet has changed shoppers' preferences and eroded the commanding influence Wal-Mart had over its suppliers.

National Park(ing) Day 2007

From Jason Presley at LJurban:

Ever wish for a world with more parks and fewer parking lots? September 21st on the corner of 14th and J in one small 22 x 7 foot parking spot, you'll find just that.

Imagine it. Car. Car. Car. Park. Car. Car. Car. This is just way too much fun.

Better yet. Come out and see for yourself. We'll be there (most of the time). You'll find us sitting on a large boulder dreaming big. Maybe you can sit a spell yourself. Play some chess. Listen to a live musician. And think about what its going to take to make this city better.

It's National Park(ing) Day 2007. Sacramento-style.

Brought to you by a dedicated group of eco-urbanists: artists, planners, bicyclists, landscape designers, photographers, bloggers, and a developer.

P.S. Even better yet - volunteer to help, and spread the word!

We got shirts!

We got shirts! The Le Corbusier shirts are done, and Jane Jacobs and Frank Gehry versions are on the way. Who else would you like to adorn yourself with?

The CDM and building sustainable cities

Now even George W. acknowledges that the world needs to “confront the serious challenge of global climate change”. The scientific consensus is that if present trends continue, the world is due for a 1.4 to 5.8ºC warming by 2100. The current international policy response is embodied in the Kyoto Protocol, which sets binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions. One part of the Protocol, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), allows for emissions trading between developed and developing countries. I’ve been thinking recently about how the CDM may serve as an unexpected new source of funds to finance more sustainable urban development, of which all urbanists should be aware.

In the context of global warming, it is important to realize how massive the coming global urbanization will be. By 2030 there will be 1.7 billion new urban residents in cities, the equivalent of building a city the size of Vancouver every week. The two largest sectors of global energy use, transport and power generation, serve primarily urban residents and industries, and account for almost 60% of total energy use. Therefore the form that this urban growth takes, and particularly its density, will clearly affect energy use and carbon emissions, as has been argued so frequently by compact city theorists.

Consider a city in the developing world with a high population density but little public transit. What public transit exists is mostly motorbike and minivan taxis, with inefficient old engines burning gasoline. Suppose this city, with the help of some significant investment from an Annex 1 (rich) country or investment firm, build a new electric mass transit system, out of light-rail or bus rapid transit. Suppose they finance the switch to a cleaner burning fleet of taxis. Suppose they make sure new settlements in the growing city are designed to be easily accessible to mass transit, reducing private automobile use. A clear reduction in CO2 emissions would have occurred, generating a Certified Emission Reduction. Sale of the CER would cover most or all of the initial foreign investment. Moreover, the city would be left with a more livable, sustainable place. There are two significant hurdles to be overcome if these kinds of scenarios are to occur. The first is the calculation of the baseline (the “additionality”): what would have happened to emissions without the project? A strict interpretation of the Kyoto Protocol says the project should not have happened without the external funding to qualify for the CDM. The second hurdle is financial viability. Several studies have suggested the minimum viable size for a CDM project is one that stores about 100,000 tons of CO2  per year (or other greenhouse gases with an equivalent global warming potential). Only very big projects within cities are likely to reach this threshold.

As a small-scale example of this, Dhakal (2003) shows that a modest promotion of electric vehicle use in Kathmandu, converting all three-wheeled passenger travel to electric motors and 20% of the bus-travel to trolley buses run on overhead electricity, would save 20,400 tons of CO2 annually. As a CDM project to perform this upgrade could claim credit for several years worth of decreases in emissions, the value of the project on the global carbon market might be in excess of US$500,000, which would cover a significant portion of the project.

I believe the CDM may prove to be a grand opportunity for sustainable urban development. Estimates of the potential global market of the CDM have varied widely depending on assumptions, from $3-21 billion per year. Urbanists need to press for a broadening of the interpretation of CDM under the Kyoto Protocol. If even a small part of the global market for CDM could be used to leverage projects in cities in the developing world, it would make a huge difference. In the process, we would also build more sustainable, livable cities. In essence, I believe the world has the technical know-how to build more sustainable cities, but poorer cities simply lack the capital to enact this change. The CDM could be one of the important tools to close this funding gap.

--Hamlet's Dreams

On the Best Arrangement of City Streets

Lewis M. Haupt's On The Best Arrangement of City Streets, 1884. A mixture of common sense, good advice, and a bit of phenomenally bad suggestions.

A Loathsome Promiscuity of Animals

"The cities of the future will contain no useless garbage of trees and flowers or loathsome promiscuity of animals, but geometrical buildings in glass and armed cement."

So says Signor Azari, a particularly pessimistic futurist, in this wonderful 1927 editorial from the New York Times. To see how another age debated modernism and feared the mechanization and dehumanization of the city-to-come, take a look at the article (PDF).

Pictures of Sprawl

Zoetrope takes pictures of sprawl.

Platial for architectural maps

Even though Platial is still buggier than, well, something with lots of bugs, it's still lots of fun to play with. I just made my first map, which shows the locations, dates & in some cases plans/photos of every still-standing home or civil structure built by California's two greatest architects, Greene & Greene. Check it out!

What's Missing from the New Google Maps?

I was all excited to learn that Google is now allowing user-created data in custom maps. This is great! However, when I went to go play with it, I learned the current implementation - which in most ways is an alpha release - is missing 90% of what could make it useful. Such as:

• the ability to import, not just export, addresses. I want to make a canonical map of all currently existing properties by the late great architects Greene & Greene; this is not very easy by hand-entering every single one. However, if I could import tab-delimited text, I could have the full list of 200 up in a few minutes!
• the ability to display multiple maps at once - on top of each other (i.e., LAYERS). this would make google maps a useful tool for data analysis: you could display maps of different data layers at once, but what would make this feature REALLY shine would be...
• the ability to pipe in data from online databases. if you combined #1 with the ability to bring data in from online databases, not just uploaded text files, you could use this with the ability to see different layers at once to see real causality - that is, you could see how income, for example, and property values, tax base, parks, etc. all interact. It would be a really democratic tool - the ability, for example, to see if public works projects actually happen in poor neighborhoods as they do in rich, or to see what zipcodes public university admissions come from (if that data were available), or to see what area codes had the most telemarketer calls originating, etc. In fact, this would turn Google Maps into the ultimate social researcher's dream tool - the killer app that sociologists, activists, criminologists and others have been waiting for.

Just a few (big) suggestions for the Google Maps folks to think about...

East Dallas Gentrification

The Dallas Morning-News' Rod Dreher makes no apologies for homogeneity or gentrification; he has no problem with hundreds of people - often poor families - being priced out of their old neighborhoods and being victims of the ghettoizing of smaller and smaller areas (and this constant concentration of poverty is nothing new; it's been going on ever since the founding of this city and many others). Notice that he frames the entire conflict as one of progress vs. nostalgia, one of the most intellectually and journalistically dishonest arguments I've read lately, but should we expect less from a writer who gets belligerently defensive when his subtle racism is questioned?

There goes the neighborhood, thinks Jim Schutze. Actually, the Dallas Observer's city politics columnist didn't just think it, he wrote it as the cover story in a recent issue of the alt-weekly. He was talking about the decline and fall of Old East Dallas, a former hippie haven that is being slowly taken over by people like, well ... me. "I am frightened," he writes:

East Dallas, once a funky, diverse refugee camp for people on the lam from the real Dallas and maybe real life, is now well on its way to becoming the one thing none of us ever wanted. A nice neighborhood. ... Like that's a good thing? In the old days we took pride in how crappy our part of town was. It took guts to live here. But that's all gone now.

Nostalgie de la boue, a French phrase that literally means "yearning for the mud," describes a sensibility given to romanticizing what is crude, lower, even degrading as somehow more authentic. Fine, dude, let your freak flag fly. But I've got little patience for this sort of thing.

Schutzism was alive and well in New York City in the Giuliani years. It came from the sort of liberals who loathed the mayor for cleaning up the porn theaters, forcing out the sex shops, and generally making Manhattan a place you might actually want to live. For that, he was routinely denounced as a fascist by the kind of leftie sentimentalists who thought there was something noble about decay and disintegration. Saner heads realized that you don't have to love Starbucks to prefer it to a porn parlor.

Los Angeles Mapped

Sometimes maligned, often misunderstood, the City of Angels occupies a healthy chunk of Southern California real estate which has been the subject of thousands of thematic maps, dating back to the time of the first European explorers who began to wander around the area some five centuries ago. Recently, the Library of Congress and the Ira Gershwin Gallery collaborated to present a collection of historical maps of the region culled from the collections of the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. For those who were unable to visit the in situ exhibit, those maps are presented here for the pleasure of the web-browsing public. There are a number of gems among their number, including a composite map plate of the Baja Peninsula from the 17th and 18th centuries, along with a 1906 map of oil fields located right in the city. Visitors can zoom in and out on each map, a feature that will come in handy when examining the 1937 Starland map which features the locations of various Hollywood stars.

Does Sprawl Make Us Fat Lards?

The cover story in the current issue of Science News delves into the many relationships between urban design and individual health. Specifically, the article reports on new research exploring how common patterns of sprawl may make us softer, slower and ultimately less healthy people; is it preselection (i.e., people who enjoy exercise are less likely to move to suburbs), or a result of living in this type of environent? via boingboing.net

(University of British Columbia urban planning professor Lawrence) Frank's team, like the other groups, found that areas with interspersed homes, shops, and offices had fewer obese residents than did homogeneous residential areas whose residents were of a similar age, income, and education. Furthermore, neighborhoods with greater residential density and street plans that facilitate walking from place to place showed below-average rates of obesity.

The magnitude of the effect wasn't trivial: A typical white male living in a compact, mixed-use community weighs about 4.5 kilograms (10 pounds) less than a similar man in a diffuse subdivision containing nothing but homes, Frank and his colleagues reported.

So far, the dozen strong studies that have probed the relationships among the urban environment, people's activity, and obesity have all agreed, says (Reid Ewing of the University of Maryland at College Park's National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education). "Sprawling places have heavier people," he says. "There is evidence of an association between the built environment and obesity."