Urban Planning Blog

Urban Studies Conference Alerts provides a useful list of opportunities to present your research. But the list is dominated by international events. Can we create (crowdsourcing?) a similar list focused only on the conferences in the United States? Does such a list already exist? By being focused on the U.S., the list can feature even student symposiums and smaller events.

This first-of-its-kind learning conference will help you identify policies that have been successful in other communities and could work in yours.

National Housing Conference (NHC) and its research affiliate, the Center for Housing Policy is hosting the “Solutions for Working Families” Learning Conference from June 28th to 30th.

The City of Geneva’s (New York) pre-war manufacturing and agricultural history was sufficient to build a sophisticated infrastructure going into World War II. The arrival of the Depot and Naval Base in nearby Seneca brought overcrowding and congestion and triggered something of a building boom to Geneva. When the base closed, the city’s middle class left for newer housing and retail outside the city.

Charles Buki describes inherent difficulties in integrating the full range of economic classes into neighborhoods and how the planning process itself is likely to be less effective for poorer neighborhoods.

openhousenewyork (OHNY) will present the 4th Annual OHNY Weekend, America’s largest architecture and design event, October 7 & 8, 2006. Presented by Target, OHNY Weekend provides the public with free access to more than 180 sites of architecture and design significance throughout all five boroughs, including many that are normally closed to the public, as well as 120 tours, talks, performances and family activities and workshops that explore New York City by foot, bus, bicycle and even canoe.

[Source]

Graphical tools have always benefited urban planning and helped it bring closer to the masses. A picture is worth a thousand words – cannot be more relevant when used for planning purposes. Explain the various zoning codes and restrictions in verbose language and legalese, you will only get blank stares from a bored audience; pop in a colorful map, people suddenly wake up and begin to show interest; project a animator on a large screen, they might even begin to cheer you.

Google Earth is somewhat like the last scenario except it can reside on desktops in every home and gratefully, it is free. Devised and released initially as game for virtual reality hobbyists who enjoyed the fly-overs and zooming into the globe to take a look at their homes from above. Google Earth even worried people when the Indian government cited security concerns over the vast availability of satellite data to the general public. But eventually benefits of Google Earth have begun to surface (no pun intended). Google Earth was especially useful in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that allowed relief workers to get a better understanding of the flooded areas and accordingly organize help. More recently, two Google Earth hobbyists helped Surat’s municipal corporation to identify flooded areas and rescue hundreds of people.

In the research field, Geographic Information Sytems (GIS) has always held sway in bridging the gap between planning and graphical interface. But often, GIS has seemed too complex for researchers and have kept the potential of GIS largely untapped. Google Earth just might be the testing ground before people move over to GIS for more detailed analysis. In fact ESRI, the leading GIS software provider is now developing a revised version of its ArcGIS program including a virtual globe that would be accessible through the Internet. Other scientific pursuits taking advantage of Google Earth involve study of spread of diseases like bird flu, demographic information including crime statistics, geological studies, environmental studies that involve tracking animals over a large area.

Google Earth may not seem much at the first glance but the open ended nature of the software lets those who dabble in it to discover hidden gems and devise their own adaptations for scientific pursuit.

[source: The Mapping Revolution]

Technorati Tags: Google Earth, regional science, science, GIS, graphics, planning, ESRI, ArcGIS, GIS

In the brick-and-mortar realm, the plan is for the first Aloft inn to open sometime in 2008, catering to active, urban 30- to 50-year-olds. But the real-world lodge will be preceded by a 3D cyberversion designed to prompt feedback from virtual guests and help guide the earthbound endeavor.The development is a collaboration involving brainstorming sessions, weekly conference calls and the e-mailing of images back and forth between Starwood, ElectricArtists and The Electric Sheep Company, the 3D-design company ElectricArtists chose to build the cyberversion of the Aloft.

Interested parties, real and avatar, can get an early glimpse of the cyberinn at the virtualaloft blog. Electric Sheep is maintaining the blog to track progress and provide a glimpse into the digital construction process of scripting and graphics [source].

Is this SimCity for real or simply taking the feedback loop a bit too far?

Technorati Tags: hotel, user behavior, Second Life, Starwood Hotels, virtual reality

I am neither an anarchist nor a libertarian as I do believe that the government has an important role in our society. But it is often seen that governments do not always function efficiently and sadly, only such cases of ineptness come to light. That said, I would still recommend minimum government control especially to tackle market failures. The decision of a few imposed on many has never worked but unfortunately, it continues to happen everyday. There are plenty of underlying cultural factors that lead to unintended consequences of otherwise well-intentioned or rather politically feasible policies.

In a thought-provoking article, Robert A.Wicks, an Unix administrator in Atlanta succinctly lays down arguments to the weakening consequences for African Americans due to government welfare in the United States [via]:

Black men used to be sold up the river. This was a process in which the patriarch of a family would be sold from one plantation to another, breaking up families. Many slave owners had as much respect for the integrity of a black family as a cattle rancher would for the integrity of a bovine family. Single motherhood had always, therefore, been more socially acceptable among blacks. This was an absolute necessity, obviously, and not some indication of some mass failure of black people’s character. After the end of that wretched practice, many women didn’t remarry, as they had no way to tell if their husband was dead or not. This is one reason black women have always had such an obvious role in black economic development. Many black women have always had to work.

Somethings that we routinely consider as morally unacceptable or causing poverty have subtle historical undertones that still have lingering effects. Unfortunately we have either never thought about this or have paid scant regard to this undeniable effect. Similarly, democracy may not yet be the perfect solution for the Middle East and the Bush Administration trying to impose ‘our’ idea of a perfect governing system may be basically faulty. Food for thought, eh?

Wicks goes on then to tackle the ongoing war on drugs and offers radical solutions to tackle the problem at its root:

Ownership of streets and roads would do more to solve the problem of street crime than just about anything else. Drug dealing usually heavily involves the streets. Dealers perform transactions on the streets, crack fiends hang out on the streets. What if the streets were privatized? How many of you would allow a drug dealer to make sales in your living room? How about allow crack heads to hang out in the kitchen? Then why would you allow them to do the same on your street? Well, the problem is that the streets are not owned by those who live along them. They are owned by government, and government is usually an absentee landlord.

Seems okay in principle but I find it difficult to implement. But to Hicks’ credit, he tries offering some implementable solutions like creating a neighborhood ‘company’ or involving NGOs to micro-manage streets. Basically his arguments are rooted in the principle of property rights and the legal right of an individual to keep away unwelcome elements from it. This also has serious implications for neighborhood revitalization by trying to entrust the residents with the responsibility of changing it themselves, which is not an uncommon strategy at all.

Hicks concludes with a strong statement against the government which I think in principle he is against the government imposing its will on the people:

For me, one of the most troubling aspects of government is how government is always the exception. How many moral codes permit stealing? Yet government taxes are somehow different. How many moral codes permit the killing of children? Yet, government wars are somehow different. How many moral codes permit someone to storm a person’s house in the middle of the night for something they are doing in the privacy of their own homes? Yet government is somehow different. It is always the exception. I often wonder how many ostensibly religious people aren’t simply idol worshipers in the most literal sense, considering how many exceptions they allow government. If there are exceptions that you are willing to allow for in the case for freedom here and there, what exceptions will be allowed in the future?

Read the whole thing even if you disagree with most of it. Definitely an thought-provoking read and it is time well-spent.

Technorati Tags: culture, war on drugs, government, libertarian, African American, Black, slavery, control, choice

A street plan of Opolis, an imaginary city, has been laid out on the floor of the Flux main space. Individual city blocks have been claimed by individual artists. They have designed the buildings and environments that fill the city blocks (apartment buildings, libraries, factories, parks, junkyards, skyscrapers, bars, office buildings, theaters, etc), and have invented characters to populate these environments. The artists have created the work in such a way that as the viewer walks around the block, the buildings (or images in or on the buildings) function as comic strip panels that resolve into a story.

Opolis: A Comix Flucture is trying out the age-old idea of placing the viewer in a Lilliputian city, letting him walk the streets, touch the buildings and basically get a sense of the place that you wouldn’t by staring continuously at a plan drawing for a few hours. The man on the street has always related better to real stories and images than abstract conceptions that architects often resort to. Winning awards is one thing but building an experience-rich place requires taking all those inane and otherwise-mundane stories and weaving them into a conceptual storyline. An interesting experiment, I might say.