urban cartography

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.

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.

Upcoming & Worth Reading

Lots of new books on the horizon which I look forward to reading in the coming year. Here's a small part of my reading list - you're probably not so interested in the fiction and natural history that I tear through. I tend to group the nonfiction I read by topic - this year I've mostly only been reading books on race, history of segregation and integration, urban African-American ethnography, and other related topics. Sociological analyses like Protecting Home are also particularly interesting to me. Here's what I'll be reading over the summer:

Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh: "In this revelatory book, Sudhir Venkatesh takes us into Maquis Park, a poor black neighborhood on Chicago's Southside, to explore the desperate, dangerous, and remarkable ways in which a community survives. We find there an entire world of unregulated, unreported, and untaxed work, a system of living off the books that is daily life in the ghetto. From women who clean houses and prepare lunches for the local hospital to small-scale entrepreneurs like the mechanic who works in an alley; from the preacher who provides mediation services to the salon owner who rents her store out for gambling parties; and from street vendors hawking socks and incense to the drug dealing and extortion of the local gang, we come to see how these activities form the backbone of the ghetto economy."

The Geography of Opportunity: Race & Housing Choice in Metropolitan America by Xavier N. De Souza Briggs & William Julius Wilson: "Many Americans think of their country as a welcoming "nation of immigrants," yet our communities have a long history of ambivalence toward new arrivals and racial minorities. This is often expressed through segregation by race and income. In this book, some of the nation’s leading analysts and advocates show shy segregation persists and how it undermines education, job prospects, and even health and safety for millions of minorities and low-income families. Calling housing "the most important invisible social policy issue in America," the book outlines and agenda to expand the geography of opportunity and assesses the political promise – and limits – of the movement for regional solutions. This project was sponsored by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University in collaboration with Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program."

Beyond Segregation: Multiracial & Multiethnic Neighborhoods in the US by Michael T. Maly: "At a time when cities appear to be fragmenting mosaics of ethnic enclaves, it is reassuring to know there are still stable multicultural neighborhoods. Beyond Segregation offers a tour of some of America's best known multiethnic neighborhoods: Uptown in Chicago, Jackson Heights (Queens), and San Antonio-Fruitvale in Oakland. Readers will learn the history of the neighborhoods and develop an understanding of the people that reside in them, the reasons they stay, and the work it takes to maintain each neighborhood as an affordable, integrated place to live."

Protecting Home: Class, Race, And Masculinity In Boys' Baseball by Sherri Grasmuck: "Through a close exploration of a boys’ baseball league in a gentrifying neighborhood of Philadelphia, sociologist Sherri Grasmuck reveals the accommodations and tensions that characterize multicultural encounters in contemporary American public life."

The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality by Thomas Shapiro: "Shapiro, coauthor of Black Wealth/White Wealth, has helped establish that the racial gap in wealth-i.e., assets, including property-is more enduring than the gap in income. That gap, a 10-fold ratio, is exemplified by what the author terms "transformative assets"-gifts, from parents and others, that work to lift succeeding generations economically and socially beyond their own achievements. Interviews with black, white and Hispanic families in Boston, Los Angeles and St. Louis show families with similar incomes living in stratified neighborhoods (and better school districts) thanks to parental help. Most of the white interviewees don't recognize the role of Shapiro's form of privilege in their lives, while middle-class blacks report far more issues with needy parents, relatives and friends. Shapiro, who holds a chair in law and social policy at Brandeis, also shows why it costs more for blacks to buy homes: discrimination in credit, higher interest rates (whites have more capacity to pay "points") and depressed home values caused by residential segregation all contribute. At the same time, Shapiro says, policies such as the federal tax break on mortgage interest perpetuates inequality by making the relatively rich richer. He proposes several class-based, tax-eased solutions at the federal level that go beyond social security: children's savings accounts; individual development accounts that match savings; and down payment accounts to help buy homes, drawn from a partial tax credit for renters. Such policies, he reminds us, would hardly be outlandish; they echo previous asset-building policies such as the Homestead Act, the GI Bill and Veterans Administration home loans."

Redefining Urban and Suburban America

The Brookings Institution Press has recently published a third volume in their Redefining Urban & Suburban America series, which mines data from the 2000 Census for a wide variety of interrelated patterns in growth and urban change. This newest addition explores the continually changing American urban environment as well as the effects of revitilization and employment law. This volume specifically examines the impact of growth patterns in several urban and suburban settings, including the effect of suburban development on low-income and minority workers, how residential development influences city population changes, and how such patterns shift economic balances between old and new suburbs.

How Cities Work

Reader Nikos Salingaros sent us a little blurb on his new book, Principles of Urban Structure, and we're definitely going to check it out. Here's the blurb from the back cover:

This book explains how cities actually work. It will serve as a guide and inspiration for planners to re-humanize our cities using the latest technologies and recent understanding from science and mathematics. The dogma of mainstream urbanism cannot cope with the changes in technology, culture and science of the last decades. The heritage we are left with is an overly asphalted and sterile concrete environment. Therefore this book addresses the needs of professional urbanists, students and teachers, who wish to understand how and why cities are successful or not, depending on their form, components, and substructure. Most of the needs are related to the urgent search for new instruments of urban planning and design, to which this book contributes conceptually by showing how to connect the fractal city on multiple levels.

There is an increasing awareness that a city needs to be understood as a complex interacting system. Different types of urban systems overlap to build up urban complexity in a living city. This raises the need for using concepts such as coherence, emergence, information, self-organization and adaptivity. This book relates these concepts to the city, shows how to operationalize them, and hopefully marks the beginnings of an urban science.

Natural History of Vacant Lots

This is a book you should own. Anyone who walks anywhere in a human-built landscape should have this. Read it, carry it with you. Keep it in the car. It's a sort of field guide to the war between pollution, sprawl and the natural environment and will be useful anywhere human beings intrude on nature or vice-versa, even cracks in asphalt.

book review: Place, Art, and Self

Place, Art and Self by Yi-Fu Tuan
review by David Shabazian

When does a location gain the meaning of a “place?” This question is explored in this philosophical venture through the many considerations that one may use to identify somewhere as a “place.” Tuan first defines “place” and, of course, it’s relative. You can be somewhere two weeks and it becomes a “place” or “home” to you. You also may have different boundaries that define a “place”, a house, a block, a city, a state …. As we migrate through the stages of life, our definition of  “place” or “home” changes, just as it does as we travel and begin to draw a connection between various locations. This aspect of the book is intriguing and it is a shame that Tuan’s discussion on art did not follow on this theme.

Tuan’s ideas of  “place” venture into the art that we see and experience around us. Here’s where the book begins to get a bit too philosophical. Tuan is not as interested in how art influences the sense of, or definition of  “place,” but rather how art is a “virtual place.” While interesting, the book stretches the definition of place into a realm that is somewhat incongruous with the idea of geographic and temporal boundaries shaping the meaning of place for each of us. The ability of art to “take you somewhere” or provoke feels about a time or place that you have experienced is nothing new. It seems that for this book, a more appropriate discussion of art would have been geared toward how it enhances the geographic or temporal parameters that define place throughout one’s life. A discussion more along this idea would have nicely tied together art and place in the philosophical context with which Tuan starts the book.

book review: Mapping Hacks

A lot of what we get here for review are dry, academic texts, technical manuals, and stuff like that. But Mapping Hacks is none of those things: it's a guide to extreme map geekery for the cartonerds of the world, a über-text for GIS analysts, programmers and anyone else interested in mapping or geographic imaging. In short, it's pure awesome.

I wrote a bit about this book earlier, before I had a chance to properly sit down and read it, but it requires - nay, it demands - further praise. Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson and Jo Walsh, the authors, have made a technical book that is not technical; they've made a manual that is automatic; they've made a really fun and interesting book on a subject whose instruction manuals are far too often boring and dry.

The pursuit of precision in mapmaking has and (as the scope of our territory, in macro and micro scale, gets larger and larger) always will continue to grow. With interactive and accessible technologies finally coming into their own, cartography is entering the mainstream. As everyone noticed when Google Earth hit the virtual newsstands recently, the implementation of these technologies gets oohs and aahs from the most jaded GIS analyst and the least experienced novice. This book will help your own work get those same stares - and not just because you chose a color scheme that actually causes physical pain and eye-bleeding yet again.

This book can easily replace a good portion of the cartography textbooks out there, because it's not just a compendium of tips and tricks; it's a manual for an entire discipline, illustrating everything from basic concepts to history and the many possible futures of this science and craft. You'll learn where to find the best sources for geodata, how to integrate accurate and scalable data into your own work, and how to make the finished product useful, accessible and attractive. Learn all kinds of neat and useful tricks for interpreting and working with data, and for using that data in tandem with a wide range of technologies - from web APIs, GPS, photography, navigation and wayfinding systems, mobile phones and more.

Whether you make maps for a living or a hobby, or just want to learn how to integrate maps into your own work (or just want to learn to make simple maps for your own personal entertainment), this is the book for you. I recommend it highly and without reservation.

book review: Lots of Parking

Lots of Parking: Land Use in a Car Culture
John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle
288 pages, 80 b&w illustrations

If you're interested in the history of automobile parking, if you've never consciously acknowledged that part of automobile travel is parking, that the storage place for cars - parking lots and spaces - tremendously shapes the urban fabric of America, then awaken your parking consciousness with Jakel and Sculle's Lots of Parking.

Through a comprehensive review of the evolution of parking in the United States, the authors argue that the parking facility deserves as much study and attention as other uses of land.  One can't help but agree with this argument after examining the excellent maps and aerial photos in the book and noticing just how much land a parking lot actually consumes (a 1972 map of Detroit shows more land devoted to moving or parking automobiles than to any other single use). However, while reading through the authors' meticulous history of different parking issues - for example parking lot aesthetics, orientation and size of parking spaces - your attention might waver and you might find yourself asking "who cares?" As well as the book is written, it's hard to make such details interesting to anyone other than an engineer. That said, Lots of Parking is a still a user-friendly introduction to the shaping of American urban form ... by cars at rest.

John A. Jakle, Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is the author of City Lights: Illuminating the American Night, which won the 2002 J. B. Jackson Award of the Association of American Geographers. Keith A. Sculle is Head of Research and Education for the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Springfield. Together, Jakle and Sculle are the authors of Fast Food: Restaurants in the Automobile Age, The Motel in America (with Jefferson S. Rogers), and The Gas Station in America.

book review: The Last Undiscovered Place

Collinsville, Connecticut is no more an undiscovered place as Orlando, Florida or Panguitch, Utah.  David Leff, the author of The Last Undiscovered Place, is not attempting to to call his home town the only island in a sea of suburbia, although it may feel that way at times. Instead he's opening his door, walking down his steps, and discovering a unique history by exploring his own town. He is becoming friends with his neighbors, neighborhood, and town. Discovering greatness in your own backyard is admittedly difficult, but as the author states, "If we grow to know our own communities, they will enrich our lives, and we will learn to care for them and work to make them better." 

Not only, however, is discovering your own town a difficult task, so is finding the message throughout most of this book. I suggest to anyone wanting to learn about discovering place should study the first and last chapters, and then explore. You will be surprised at what your neighborhood has to offer.  Then, if you want a history of Collinsville and fun stories of fighting fires and small town corruption, read the middle chapters.

James S. Russell

Architect James Russell has written a number of excellent articles on "some of the key buildings and architects of our time," primarily in and around New York City. He is the editor of The Mayors' Institute: Excellence in City Design with Mark Robbins as well as publications for the New York City Art Commission. A number of excellent articles are available from his web site, including a critique of the new MoMA; crits of the new Clinton Library and the Museum of the American Indian, and more.

Jacobs gets Shaughnessy Cohen

Jane Jacobs, matriarch of modern urban planning and social critic, has been awarded the 2005 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Dark Age Ahead. I have heard from a reliable source that she will not be putting a down-payment on a tract home with the $15,000 award.

Jacobs argues that what she calls the 'five pillars of our culture' are in jeopardy. These comprise families and communities, higher education, science and technology, taxes and governmental power, and, finally, the self-policing of learned professions ... Jacobs can write, and so by the end her arguments and admonitions all appear persuasive and disquieting. Crisp, entertaining, scholarly, scary. —Kirkus Review

New York Underground

Julia Solis' excellent new New York Underground: The Anatomy of A City (Routledge, 2004) delves into every aspect of subterranean NYC - from analyzing urban legends (alligators, mole people and much more) to a detailed history of the trains, steam tunnels, and much weirder spaces under the buildings and streets of this city. The book is very well illustrated, and is more a tour of the various underground systems of the city than any kind of dry academic analysis. Solis is an accomplished photographer, and her creepy and haunting images - abandoned train stations, cathedral crypts, subterranean hospital passageways - will stay with you long after you put the book down.

Some things I should probably read

Collapse by Diamond sounds interesting. Here's part of Wired's review:

The ways past societies crippled their environments and thus themselves compose a litany Diamond should put to music: "deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per capita impact of people."

Also, considering that I'll be working  for an organization involved with affordable housing  I should check out the APA's affordable housing reader.

The Nine Nations of North America

JLT's post on 'Gated New Urbanist' communities got me to thinking about post modern city building. I looked up the diagram from Dear and Flusty's Postmodern Urbanism. Dr. Thomas Ott uploaded the image for a lecture he put online.

Sucher's City Comforts

David Sucher's excellent City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village was revised and dramatically improved last year. Often described as the bible - or one of the bibles - of urban redevelopment, Sucher's book is my favorite all-around primer on urban design. It is especially useful for those of us who have tremendous interest in urban planning but little in the way of technical training; the revised edition introduces quite a bit more easy-to-digest information for those of us without backgrounds in the field. As the reviews on Amazon suggest, it is absolutely a must-have for policy makers who don't have a formal education in planning.