Tag Archives: urban

Blog

Shanty towns as architectural inspirations

Rio de Janeiro shantytownGOOD Magazine has a piece on architect Teddy Cruz, who plans to use the ad-hoc shanty towns of Tijuana, Mexico as the inspiration behind some new urban developments. The thinking is that what emerges out of necessity may actually have lessons to teach us about the efficient use of space and resources:

Behind the precariousness of low-income communities, says Cruz, there is a sophisticated social collaboration: People share resources, make use of every last scrap, and look out for each other.

[…]

Cruz’s plan aims to vault the income gap with developments on several lots that are integrated into the city. The developments will include 60 housing units, playgrounds, a market, urban agriculture, and job-training facilities, all managed by a coalition of nonprofit groups.

It’s certainly a nice idea, and I’d be the first to applaud any attempt to learn from emergent phenomena where human endeavour is concerned. But I can’t help but feel this might not work out quite as planned… possibly because the UK is littered with housing estates which were designed as self-contained communities, but which aren’t exactly examples of efficiency and harmony any more.

While there are surely lessons to be learned from shantytowns and other interstitial poor communities, I suspect the best lesson we can learn at present is that emergent systems are too complex to be copied easily. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all. [story via BoingBoing; image by Crucsou Barus]

Blog

The paradoxical nature of traffic jams

Following on from the ULTra transit post, here’s a question about urban transport: what’s the best way to solve sluggish traffic flow around a busy street? Well, you could try shutting the street down entirely…

To mathematicians, this may be a real-world example of Braess’s paradox, a statistical theorem that holds that when a network of streets is already jammed with vehicles, adding a new street can make traffic flow even more slowly.

The reason is that in crowded conditions, drivers will pile into a new street, clogging both it and the streets that provide access to it. By the same token, removing a major thoroughfare may actually ease congestion on the streets that normally provide access to it. And because other major streets are already overcrowded, diverting still more traffic to them may not make much difference.

There are links to some research papers and reports on traffic flow studies over at MetaFilter, but you might want to start with the more accessible Wikipedia article on Braess’s paradox. I don’t know about anyone else, but I find it strangely comforting to realise that the world doesn’t always work the way we expect it to… though that could be because I don’t drive.

Blog

ULTra – Urban Light Transit concept

3 Comments

Having spent a little time this holiday scurrying around on the UK’s woeful excuse for a public transport system, I’m very receptive to a technological revamp of the ways we get around. The ULTra – Urban Light Transit – system looks like just the ticket if the video below is anything to go by, though it has the launch date for the Heathrow Airport installation wrong – ULTra themselves have it pegged for operation in spring 2009.

More than a hint of the Jetsons about it, isn’t there? I wonder if it could genuinely scale up to coping with the sort of traffic the London or New York subway systems handle? [via Tomorrow’s Trends]

Blog

Survive the downturn – rent out your swimming pool

empty swimming poolIf you’re looking for a way to make some extra income in the coming years, you could always consider turning that swimming pool in your back yard into a miniature subterranean apartment and renting it out to the recently-foreclosed-upon. Mooted as a potential solution to the housing shortage in Sydney, Australia, it strikes me that it might also make great economic sense in other warm countries and regions. [via BLDGBLOG; image by Addictive_Picasso]

Of course, I don’t have a swimming pool. But if anyone reading this post in California has an empty backyard bowl that they struggle to keep the skaters out of, I have some great references from my previous landlords…

Blog

Urban cyclists and the participatory panopticon

1 Comment

bicycles and graffitiMy journey to my day job is just ten minutes of hard thrash across town on my BMX*, but hardly a week goes by without someone coming within inches of ending my life (or at least my ability to walk unaided) with their car**. [image by freebeets]

And Velcro City doesn’t have a patch on the traffic nightmares that bigger metropolises like London or Glasgow have to offer – cities where commuting by bike is increasingly common and increasingly dangerous. So smart cyclists have worked out a way to put the burden of attention back on the car drivers: helmet-mounted video cameras.

“Although the camera has not changed my commute to any great extent, it does make me feel safer and calmer. Now, instead of screaming in annoyance at motorists, I simply point at my camera. It’s amazing how quickly they back off when they clock it.”

I really love the passive elegance of this solution, and it’s a reminder that ubiquitous surveillance can actually work for the benefit of the little guy… even though he’ll have to be proactive instead of waiting on Big Brother for help.

I wonder what the other upsides to the participatory panopticon might be? Will muggings and similar violent crimes start to drop off the scale when we’re all lifelogging our daily lives?

[ * Yeah, I should probably grow up, but I rode BMX for so long as a kid that the geometry of regular bikes feels completely alien to me. ]

[ ** Usually a taxi driver, too. That’s not stereotyping, either; I keep a diary, and the percentage stats are very telling. ]