Urban Cartography

A map of the "underground city" of Derinkuyu, Turkey, one of many such complexes in Cappodocia.

Italian urban density chart

Yale University unofficial map of nearly everything, by See-ming Lee

Disney World's Huge Footprint, from the Orlando Sentinel

infographic by Alfredo Cáceres and Juan Pablo Bravo for El Mercurio

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).

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!

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

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.

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.