Urban Cartography

If you are interested in the life and death of urban space, please do yourself a favor and buy a copy of Ian Lambot's City of Darkness - Life In Kowloon City.

Now demolished to make way for - of course - new development, Kowloon Walled City was one of the densest and most interesting urban spaces to ever grace the globe. Lambot's book is both a photo essay and a sociological / anthropological meditation on how this sort of dense city living changes people and the way they live. It's tremendously interesting and a very important part of the Urbanism canon, albeit an underrated and overlooked book. Please find a copy - I guarantee you many, many hours of poring over the photographs.

At $70, it's not a cheap book, but it is definitely worth owning by anyone with an interest in cities and how they can take on a life of their own.

Urban Green Belts in the Twenty-first Century (Urban Planning and Environment)

As the jacket says, "maintaining and enhancing living conditions in cities ... is a newly emerging focus of governments around the world." But how dedicated are planning agencies to long-term solutions, and are they strong enough to fight the many developers and other interests who see integrated green space and other non-commercialization of otherwise salable property as a waste?

Marco Amati, professor of urban planning at Australia's Macquarie University, presents 11 case studies on the successes of using so-called "green belts" - in residential and mixed-zone neighborhoods and as barriers between types of zoning - and, between these cases, discusses the conflicts that have attended the planning and building processes in these communities.

The first chapter lays the conflict out explicitly: "the coalition of the unwilling: landowners and the green belt" looks at the abandonment, in the 1950s, of Tokyo's vaunted, long-planned and partially constructed green belt in one case study, and the "reform" - what some would call the capitulation to commercial interests and incredible growth - of a similar project in Seoul. Chapter 2, which addresses how the use of green belts has "fallen out of fashion" in some municipalities, addresses attempts to protect the "green wedges" of Melbourne, as well as the lip service that was paid to green belt planning in New Zealand throughout the 20th century. Other case studies in later chapters deal with attempts - some successful and others not nearly - in other cities around the world, including Ottawa, Seattle, Vienna, Berlin, Paris and various locations within Italy.

The book itself is well-illustrated, with maps and tables of contemporary and historic data throughout, and while most readers won't need to be persuaded of the importance of green zones in urban planning, the editor does work hard to make this consistent argument tie together the disparate cases. Urban Green Belts is both a valuable resource, giving plenty of ammunition to planners and activists trying to integrate a consistent plan for green space in their own communities, and an excellent primer on the contemporary and historic uses and misuses of such spaces, and how solutions aren't always best described by their inclusion in or exclusion from a strictly-defined "success / failure" model.

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.

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.

from Seth, via Boingboing:

Donald Shoup, professor at UCLA, will be speaking about his book The High Price of Free Parking at UC Berkeley (this coming) Friday. Shoup estimates "the cost of all parking spaces in the U.S. exceeds the value of all cars and may even exceed the value of all roads." He also contends that the cost of free parking gets passed on to all consumers, including the poorest of society. His talk is bound get people thinking about our addiction to free parking and car-oriented politics.

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."

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.

Forbes (Edward) Smiley has been a bad, bad little man. He cut up atlases and other books in the Yale University library, absconded with the purloined plates, and sold the items to the highest bidder. He's due in court tomorrow, where he is expected to admit guilt. The quote below is from a recent Hartford Courant editorial; thanks to the endlessly updated and always interesting Map Room for bringing it to our attention:

To cultural guardians, this is no less serious an affront than desecration of a church … When it comes to crimes against property, this is about as low as one can go. Monetary value is beside the point. It’s one thing to steal mere objects out of greed, but quite another to pilfer irreplaceable treasures, hugely important to the study of history, that belong not to one victim, but to civilization.

I'm certain that this is not an isolated situation, and I imagine a pretty large proportion of the antique maps sold on Ebay, for example, have been removed from books not in the seller's possession and in less than kosher circumstances. At least one good thing is coming out of this: the Smiley case is generating a lot of much-needed dialogue.

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.

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.