Tag Archives: urban planning

June 2019 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • The world economy appears to be slowing, even though U.S. GDP is growing as the result of the post-2007 recovery finally taking hold, juiced by a heavy dose of pro-cyclical government spending. The worry is that if and when there is eventually a shock to the system, there will be little room for either fiscal or monetary policy to respond. Personally, the partisan in me is thinking any time before November 2020 is as good a time for any for a recession to hit the U.S. I am a couple decades from retirement, and picturing that bumper sticker “Lord, Just Give Me One More Bubble”. Of course, this is selfish thinking when there are many people close to retirement and many families struggling to get by out there. And short-term GDP growth is not the only metric. The U.S. is falling behind its developed peers on a wide range of metrics that matter to people lives, including infrastructure, health care costs and outcomes, life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, addiction, suicide, poverty, and hunger. And it’s not just that we are no longer in the lead on these metrics, we are below average and falling. Which is why I am leading the charge to Make America Average Again!

Most hopeful story:

  • There have been a number of serious proposals and plans for disarmament and world peace in the past, even since World War II. We have just forgotten about them or never heard of them.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • In technology news, Elon Musk is planning to launch thousands of satellites. And I learned a new acronym, DARQ: “distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR) and quantum computing”. And in urban planning news, I am sick and tired of the Dutch just doing everything right.

 

urban planning trends to watch in 2019

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This one is from Planetizen. One interesting point is the role that (lack of) land use regulation has played in bringing the climate crisis about, and how that is not really part of the conversation at the federal level, but maybe could be.

The Green New Deal also provides the latest example of the lack of understanding about the role of land use regulations in housing affordability and climate change. So far, the Green New Deal lacks any specific land use regulation suggestions. Planners realize land use regulations can be a key tool in mitigating climate change, achieving environmental sustainability, and encouraging shared economic prosperity. Getting land use wrong, however, is how we ended up in the current crisis…

After programs like the interstate highway system, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, and the federal Property Tax Exemption created some of the most egregious environmental and social justice mistakes of the 20th century, taking the federal government out of the equation now threatens to cement the legacy of these errors for perpetuity…

In 2019, climate change action, and questions about the effectiveness of future climate change action, must be measured in urban growth boundaries, flood insurance maps, and reduced Vehicles Miles Traveled (VMT). Big talk and subsequent capitulation won’t suffice. (I’m reminded of the implementation of VMT as the legal metric of environmental impact in California, which buckled under pressure from the Southern California Association of Governments.) The built environment will eventually render the failures of compromise.

I do in fact remember Al Gore talking about suburban sprawl. And that is the last I remember a prominent politician talking about it. I don’t think anyone would want to see zoning regulation coming from the federal government. That is not how we do it. But the idea of tying federal funding to a comprehensive infrastructure plan at the metropolitan area sounds to me like it could work. We could think big and make it a lot of funding through an infrastructure bank that served a counter-cyclical function in the macroeconomy, and we could think even bigger by considering all forms of infrastructure from water to the food system to green infrastructure.

August 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • In certain provinces with insurgent activity, the Chinese government is reportedly combining surveillance and social media technologies to score people and send those with low scores to re-education camps, from which it is unclear if anyone returns.
  • Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
  • The U.S. government is apparently very worried about a severe cyber attack. Also, a talented 11-year-old can hack a voting machine.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Eco-cities in Japan and China

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Here’s a paper comparing and contrasting two eco-city developments in Japan and China.

Ecological urbanism in East Asia: A comparative assessment of two eco-cities in Japan and China

The growth of projects translating the concept of eco-city into practices has accelerated during the last fifteen years, making the eco-city a global phenomenon. Asia in particular has witnessed notable developments, characterized by strong governmental intervention and national initiatives to create model eco-cities. In Japan, the central government launched an “Eco-Model Cities” program in 2008 and has designated twenty-three model cities. In China, hundreds of municipalities have pursued plans to become an eco- or low-carbon city following the government’s demonstration projects. Across East Asia, the eco-city is promoted as an innovative urban policy capable of advancing the agendas of sustainable urbanization and the realignment of the post-industrial urban economy.

This paper compares the policies and strategies of developing eco-cities in Japan and China using Kitakyushu and Tianjin Eco-city as case studies. It examines these cities’ common and contrasting approaches to ecological urbanism, their respective technological and urban design strategies, the relationship between eco-city building and local economic development, and the roles played by different stakeholders in this effort. The research focuses on their Key Performance Indicator systems and the spatial qualities they anticipate, which reflect fundamentally different ideas about what societal role an eco-city should best play. The comparative method sheds light on debates around important aspects of planning and managing an eco-city––namely, between new town and retrofit development, between top-down directive and bottom-up force, and between the eco-city as technology and as culture. This paper thus offers critical insight into the changing notions of urbanity within Asian society.

March 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

  • One large sprawling city could be roughly the economic equivalent of several small high-density cities. This could potentially be good news for the planet if you choose in favor of the latter, and preserve the spaces in between as some combination of natural land and farm land.
  • The problems with free parking, and solutions to the problems, are well known. This could potentially be good news if anything were to be actually done about it. Self-parking cars could be really fantastic for cities.
  • The coal industry continues to collapse, and even the other fossil fuels are saying they are a bunch of whining losers. And yes, I consider this positive. I hope there aren’t too many old ladies whose pensions depend on coal at this point.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

what’s going on with parking in Australia

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This article summarizes the problems with free parking pretty well. Then it goes on to lament that Australian cities aren’t moving faster to implement the policies that planners and engineers know (or should know) would work.

The third major approach is characterised as responsive. This approach is based around pricing parking to account more accurately for actual demand, to incentivise use of active and sustainable modes of transport, and advocating generally for more efficient publicly-shared spaces (not exclusively used by cars) and area-based planning. It can be said to include Donald Shoup’s well-known reforms, as well as Paul Barter’s adaptive and walkable parking reforms…

Parking can directly compromise the adoption of active and sustainable modes of transport. Firstly, free and easily accessible parking contributes to induced driving and car ownership. For example, researchers from Oslo’s Institute of Transport Economics found that access to private household parking facilities triples the likelihood of car ownership, whereas increasing the distance between parking and destinations reduces car mode share. This means planners must disincentivize convenience (including factors of distance, time and pricing), and reduce its domination of urban space. Secondly, on-street parking can directly compete for limited road space, inhibiting the ability to reallocate street space to improved pedestrian or cycling infrastructure (such as bicycle lanes), or to create priority lanes for road-based public transport (such as buses or trams). Additionally, on-street parking spurs congestion from “cruising” for parking spaces, and movements in and out of spaces, and well as increasing the risk of “dooring” cyclists.

 

one large or many smaller cities for maximum productivity

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This paper looks at data from 306 cities in China to identify trends in how different sizes and densities of cities relative to each other affect economic productivity. The interesting finding is that it is best to have either one big low-density city or many smaller high-density ones.

How did urban polycentricity and dispersion affect economic productivity? A case study of 306 Chinese cities

This article aims to assess the impacts of urban spatial structure on economic productivity. Drawing upon detailed gridded population data of 306 Chinese cities at the prefecture level and above, we identify their urban (sub)centers through exploratory spatial data analysis, construct indicators to measure their degrees of polycentricity and dispersion, and model the impacts of spatial structure on urban productivity. A regression analysis reveals that economic productivity is significantly associated with urban spatial structure. Conditioning on other factors, higher degrees of dispersion are associated with lower level of urban productivity whereas the effects of polycentricity depend on urban population density. Less densely populated cities are likely to have higher productivity levels when they are more monocentric, while urban productivity of cities with high population density tend to benefit from a more polycentric structure. The paper concludes with spatial planning implications.

January 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • Larry Summers says we have a better than even chance of recession in the next three years. Sounds bad, but I wonder what that stat would look like for any randomly chosen three year period in modern history.
  • The United States is involved in at least seven wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Pakistan. Nuclear deterrence may not actually the work.
  • Cape Town, South Africa is in imminent danger of running out of water. Longer term, there are serious concerns about snowpack-dependent water supplies serving large urban populations in Asia and western North America.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

more on movement ecology

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I’m still digging into movement ecology, which has always fascinated me. Here is a comprehensive recent literature review on the subject.

Trends and missing parts in the study of movement ecology

Movement is important to all organisms, and accordingly it is addressed in a huge number of papers in the literature. Of nearly 26,000 papers referring to movement, an estimated 34% focused on movement by measuring it or testing hypotheses about it. This enormous amount of information is difficult to review and highlights the need to assess the collective completeness of movement studies and identify gaps. We surveyed 1,000 randomly selected papers from 496 journals and compared the facets of movement studied with a suggested framework for movement ecology, consisting of internal state (motivation, physiology), motion and navigation capacities, and external factors (both the physical environment and living organisms), and links among these components. Most studies simply measured and described the movement of organisms without reference to ecological or internal factors, and the most frequently studied part of the framework was the link between external factors and motion capacity. Few studies looked at the effects on movement of navigation capacity, or internal state, and those were mainly from vertebrates. For invertebrates and plants most studies were at the population level, whereas more vertebrate studies were conducted at the individual level. Consideration of only population-level averages promulgates neglect of between-individual variation in movement, potentially hindering the study of factors controlling movement. Terminology was found to be inconsistent among taxa and subdisciplines. The gaps identified in coverage of movement studies highlight research areas that should be addressed to fully understand the ecology of movement.

An idea that has always fascinated me is the idea that when designing a development or an even an entire urban area, you could actually lead with ecology, then layer hydrology, infrastructure, housing, and the other human elements on top of that. Sadly, I don’t think I know a single engineer or urban planner who would be particularly open minded to this idea.

cities and gamification

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This article is about applying gamification to the planning and running of cities.

Cities and the politics of gamification

Gamification is widely intended as the mobilisation and implementation of game elements in extra-ludic situations, including the management of social problems and issues. By mobilising virtual rewards and playful elements, mobile apps, websites, social initiatives and even urban policies are getting more and more gamified. The aim of this viewpoint paper is to stimulate a critical discussion on the potential relationships between gamification processes and cities, particularly by reflecting on the cultures of gamification and by discussing potential lines of research for urban studies.