Re-envisioning Slums and the new Commons

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/stewart_brand_on_squatter_cities.html

Stewart Brand predicts that squatter cities will diffuse the population bomb that has been ticking for the past 150 years world wide.
It sounds ridiculous, but I have been thinking the same thing.  One-sixth of the world lives in squatter settlements according to Mr. Brand.
These folks are leaving the countryside while bringing the ingenuity of country living.  A country shack is charming at the density of 1 per acre.  Once you have 50 to 200 per acre, you have a "slum".
Slums are what Chicago and NYC were before the great depression and the first zoning laws.

However, city dwellers are recognized for democratizing gender roles, and increasing education.
What does this mean for "country values"?
I propose that this will rely upon how individual cities resolve their commons, their public realm.
Rises energy prices will force less reluctant cities to open up the commons to provide for more residents at once.
The crux is to create a commons that pluralistically includes country and traditional values alongside the ambitious cosmopolitan culture and habits.
Nothing is easy.  But this is what we must create as the inheritors of the most explosive human legacy in recorded history.

(Part of this will look like both more centralized transportation, and the disconnection of many suburbs from their parent cities).

Peñalosa's Testing of Hedonics in Bogota

Happiness Economics under Research in the UK.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article766908.ece

Netherlands Researchers Test the "Broken Windows" Theory

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/nov/21/science/sci-graffiti21

Netherlands researchers test the "Broken Windows" theory.  (Thank you guest speaker Charlie Branas of the Epidemiology Department for bringing this up).

The researchers methodologically added graffiti and trash to select locations in select neighborhoods.
It resulted that the inverse of the Broken Windows Theory held true.  Graffit and Trash accumulated exponentially in accordance with the amount of trash and graffiti added by the researchers.  

A wonderful study in behavior science and city planning.  
I love this kind of study because it bolsters the idea of psychogeography introduced to me by the Situationist movement.  It also suggests that human behavior can be significantly sculpted and influenced by sculpting the built environment.
The eternal question:  how do we sculpt the built environment to encourage humane, respectful, and longterm ecological behavior?

Robustness (& Audio Fragility)

Nassim Taleb spoke at my university last week.   Despite skipping the end of class to get a good seat, there was only space in an overflow room where, as it turned out, the audio would be faulty, and only after 3/5's of the audience had left could we hear a little bit of Taleb's lecture.

Taleb has held my fascination for the few months since hearing of him.  He combines my interests in finance and risk with a sense of humour and an appreciation for nuance, all the while looking at events over the long term. 

       Nicholas Taleb is on the ramparts assuming an activist role in urging us "to move voluntarily into     
       Capitalism 2.0 by...shutting down the 'Nobel' in economics, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers
       where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here, and teaching people to navigate a
       world with fewer certainties."

       "Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies, richer 
        ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born
        and die every day without making the news."

        The themes Taleb develops in this manifesto are an outgrowth of his 2008 Edge original essay "The
           Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics". (Aslo, see The Black Swan Technical Appendix.)
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb09/taleb09_index.html

Although I have a sneaking suspicion that this is all quiteover my head, I believe that this is a mythology worth disecting. 
Taleb's words at the talk it is worth figuring out how to fashion a system that grows stronger, more robust, after experiences stress and shocks rather than succumbing to fragility.
My thoughts went immediately to the human skeletal and muscular systems.   A nursing friend suggested that archeologists are able to presuppose the professions of the once living skeletons they unearth by studying the stress and growth of their bones.   As I think many of us know on some level, human bones reshape themselves in accordance to their use and their stress, as do muscles. 
This seems to follow Taleb's suggestion quite well.  However, friends of mine have found a strong fault to this logic:  this adaptive biological structure prepares the body primarily to receive the stresses that it is accustomed to receiving.   A Black Swan type event should prove a little more unlikely. 


Thoughts?
(his other chief theme was the comparison of convexity and concavity, Alan, could you explain this?)

to be continued


thomas

Prince's Foundation for the Built Enviornment

Hey yall,

This wasn't my expected first post, but it kicked something loose. In sifting through the digital flotsam on my bookmark lists, I rediscovered the work of the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment in England. Particularly, the response to the publication of the standing government's Localism Bill was interesting.

I am amazed at the lack of institutional attention that the challenge of building/retrofitting an appropriate built environment for ecological cities has gotten thus far. Its there, but its in the experimenting at the margins stage in the US, it seems.

As I say this, I am reminded that I should preface my comments with this. I'm an industrial ecologist by training. This means I know the science of many dire things. The science about impending materials and energy constraints is not a part of the built environment debate at all. As a consequence, the needs of the built environment to adapt and become a bulwark of resilience against ecological and social shocks is not yet happening. The known and circulating science of ecological change is a part of the debate. The social value of better/more cost effective housing has been a part of the debate for a long time. But without the other constraints as a part of the conversation, the true social import of transforming our built environment isn't quite materialized as yet. So, when I say we aren't really dealing with this yet, I mean we don't yet really grasp what our building are going to have to deal with in the next 30 years.

Also, I don't usually find diagrams of the balance required of sustainability either particularly balanced, or rich enough in breadth of understanding to be useful. I kinda like this one.

Their joural of urbanism might be somewhere that might writings find publishability. I doubt it'll be in APA Journal, that's for sure.

from "place and placelessness" by E. Relph (1976)

"The old road", writes Todd Snow, "was a definite place, a strip of land that went between other places." It was a road which had to be traveled slowly and which this encourages social contact as well as involving the traveler directly in the landscape. "Since the old road was basically an extension of a place it partook of the nature of all other places and was related to the geography beside the road as well as that of and at the end of the road." In contrast to this is the New Road, an essentially twentieth century creation and an extension of man's vehicle; it does not connect places nor does it link with the surrounding landscape. "The New Road generally seems to go between cities, but the primary requirement is that it start from where the people are and go on indefinitely, not that it go between places or lead to places. The Old Road started from and led to the city. The New Road starts everywhere and leads nowhere.

Snow and Relph are here talking about the fact that mass transit, mass communication have shifted away from a model based on facilitating the transfer of people, things and ideas between specific centers or places, and towards the facilitation of movement and transfer in general, as an abstract concept. The interstate highway, the internet, jet travel do not exist expressly to make possible the journey from Rome to Paris or New York to Atlanta, though they do make that journey more faster. Rather they exist to make possible rapid movement between any and all locations, reducing the friction of distance to such a degree that differentiation no longer occurs. Rather than roads coming to places, places become because of the roads. I live in Austin, which is located where the fertile plains meet the stony plateau and a great river flows through the landscape. There is a highway which tracks the path between San Antonio, Austin, Minneapolis. There are cities along its path which were settled long before the roads were built, in response to the natural landscape and the availability of natural resources and transportation (rivers). There are also places like Pflugerville and Round Rock that exist in response to the New Roads.

Kind of interesting!

Is anything new in the field of Planning? Thoughts on Two Movies

Movie Clip of The social life of small urban spaces
http://vimeo.com/6821934

I'm thinking about this amazing movie, and how I can't wait to watch it over and over once I acquire it.

       And also about the movie "The City" narrated by Lewis Mumford.   It was basically a straight propaganda piece for most of the ideas we in Planning take for granted now, but without the suave jargon we've developed.  It's a great challenge to take this and make it relevant and not classist and racist, which are still challenges today, classified under gentrification. 
Here is an excerpt.  
http://vimeo.com/3580199
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_%28film%29

The music was done by Aaron Copeland, highly dramatic following the propaganda idea.
Although we must remember the pollution, coal dirt, and contamination in food, all things very new for many people in this time.  I think this explains much of the reactionary vibe of the flic.