Tag: urbanism

Cities and Civilization

  • Agriculture requires sedentism, but sedentism more likely lead to agriculture than the other way around.
  • Monumental stone architecture long predates cities, from Göbekli Tepe, to Nevali Çori, to the orthostats of Nabta Playa and Stonehenge, to the megalithic stone temples of Malta, to the barrows and cairns of prehistoric Europe.
  • Rather than a separate “professional” bureaucracy, or the speculative existence of social “classes,” such relationships may have emerged out of existing social structures.
  • Cities were centers of long-distance trade between cultures, but internally were run by debt/credit relationships and/or centralized redistribution networks, and not by “free and open markets” or money exchanges.
  • Cities were often autonomous and “cut off” from the surrounding countryside, both politically and economically.

Improved Burning Man

Walker’s urban plan for Burning Man simply improves upon the original by applying setbacks along certain streets and intersections for different cultural and urban uses. he built out a “kit of parts” for simple streetscape interventions that he says can have a dramatic impact on urban flow and cultural space. “There are interventions that cities have been using for 100s, 1000s of years”

Suburban Pokemon

you can’t have nice things if your chosen place of residence lacks the density.

Pokémon Go doesn’t appear to have taken off in rural Virginia quite the same way it has in every other corner of the universe. There are no hordes of fledgling Pokémon Masters like Ash Ketchum (protagonist of the immortal Pokémon animated series) crowding around street art or monuments, laughing about things like Pidgeys and PokéGyms. Looking at your smartphone screen, there is no map crowded with landmarks and Lure Modules. There is no one around you, and if there was, the map would appear mostly empty—just wide open spaces occasionally disrupted by a lonely equestrian statue that dispenses Poké Balls. Playing Pokémon Go is nearly impossible out in the sticks.

Against Historic Preservation

Repeal all historic preservation laws. It’s 1 thing to require safety permits but no construction project should require a historic preservation permit. Here are 3 reasons: First, it’s often the case that buildings of little historical worth are preserved by rules and regulations that are used as a pretext to slow competitors, maintain monopoly rents, and keep neighborhoods in a kind of aesthetic stasis that benefits a small number of people at the expense of many others. Second, a confident nation builds so that future people may look back and marvel at their ancestors ingenuity and aesthetic vision. A nation in decline looks to the past in a vain attempt to “preserve” what was once great. Preservation is what you do to dead butterflies. Ironically, if today’s rules for historical preservation had been in place in the past the buildings that some now want to preserve would never have been built at all. The opportunity cost of preservation is future greatness.

Sidewalk Labs Flow

Sidewalk Labs announced that it is building “Flow,” a digital platform that seeks to address the real-time transit problem and more. Flow will aggregate and analyze mobility data from a great number of sources—including Google Maps, Waze, municipal data, and eventually, remote traffic sensors—to identify what’s causing congestion and which areas need what kind of service. This won’t just be software for transit officials to lord over, though. Flow will also have a public, outward-facing element in the form of digital kiosks that provide real-time transit information and wifi, similar to those currently in beta testing by Link NYC. That way, “citizens without a smartphone or data plan use new dynamic mobility services”. The kiosks will also include remote sensors that anonymously gauge parking availability, traffic flow, and rider demand. Eventually, those sensors could be used to test and regulate autonomous cars.