When left to its own devices

Leslie Kaufman, writing at NYT Green:

The test wetlands were created in 1994 and fed with water pumped from the Olentangy River to mimic natural conditions. The difference was that one was consciously planted with 13 varietals of marsh plant and one was left bare and built up its plant life from seeds floating in the air and water or attached to animals migrating through.

Fifteen years later, both marshes had the same plant diversity and abundance. The only difference being the unplanted one captured more carbon along the way.

When is a display "retina" quality?

Here’s one for the tech/design crowd, though with the dispersion of high-resolution displays, it will soon be relevant for everyone. Since Apple introduced the iPhone 4, there has been some debate over what qualifies as a retina display—retina quality being defined as having pixels so small the human eye cannot discern them. Richard Gaywood over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog has crunched the numbers on high-DPI (dots per inch) displays to see which devices qualify as retina displays, which come close, and which fall short.

Many people think 300 dpi is a magic number, and with some justification—the print design world often uses 300 dpi as a minimum standard. But 300 dpi is not a hard limit—when I was art director of the Berkeley Science Review (fall 2008 and spring 2009, if you’re curious), we would often cheat and use art down to 250 dpi if we had no other option. But even that’s not a good rule of thumb. To determine retina quality, DPI has to be considered along with the eye’s distance from the display. Once you take that into account, you’ll be surprised to discover what already qualifies as a retina display.

Small steps

Jon Cotner has a neat piece over at the BMW Guggenheim Lab on a Vienna-based art collective that focuses on hyper-local issues—arsenic in the water supply, affordable student housing, after school programs—in cities around the world. I’m uncertain about the efficacy of “tactical” urbanism, but I have to admit such projects do raise awareness.

How many people can Manhattan hold?

Amy O’Leary, reporting for the New York Times:

Packing Manhattan as tightly as Kowloon Walled City, river to river, would mean jamming in 65 million people. That’s if every surface was built on. If the current streets and parks were left intact? About half that many, or nearly the population of California.

Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong was a free-for-all warren of dystopian flats that packed 33,000 people into 6.5 acres. As O’Leary says, no one wants to live like that. But it’s still a fun thought exercise.

Seeing historical processes in road networks’ patterns

Milan, 1913

Once a road, always a road. That’s the gist of a recent paper that studied 14 different municipalities in the Groane region of Italy near Milan. In cataloging 174 years of road construction, the study’s authors discovered that nearly 90 percent of the regions 100 most vital routes today were already present in 1833.

The researchers also uncovered evidence that the layout and characteristics of road networks are indicative of the age in which they were built. This is nothing new. Take a look at any metro region surrounded by a postwar subdivision—stick straight roads of the late 19th and early 20th centuries give way to ever more writhing tangles of spaghetti. What’s new is that this study claims that top-down planning didn’t drive the changes. Rather, the researchers say Groane’s roads reflect broader societal changes, that the unique circumstances of each era—agricultural through modern—shape road networks more than central planning—or lack thereof.

To arrive at that conclusion, physicist Marc Barthélemy and his colleagues digitized roads using maps and aerial photographs from seven different dates between 1833 to 2007. They threw the resultant vectors into a geographic information system, or GIS, and then distilled primal graphs—simplified maps that show only roads (called “links” in graph theory) and intersections (“nodes”).

Between 1833 and 2007, the number of intersections grew proportionately with population. The number of intersections skyrocketed—there were only 255 in 1833 but over 5,000 in 2007—but the number of connections remained relatively constant at 2.7 on average. The number of roads also increased linearly with the number of intersections. It’s almost as if the expansion of Groane’s social network was mirrored in its transportation corridors.

How those roads interacted with each other changed through time. In the early days, many roads either intersected another mid-link—forming a T-junction—while the others simply petered out in a dead end. Main drags radiated out from town centers like spokes on a wheel. Congruent 4-cornered intersections were rare. Yet as time progressed and cities spread into the countryside, the previous radial expansion gave way to the grid. In other studies, the advent of the grid was attributed to the arrival of master planning, but here in Groane, Barthélemy and his colleagues note that urban planning was never the region’s strong suit. Groane, they write, “never witnessed any large scale planning whatsoever.”

It is because of Groane’s lack of central planning that Barthélemy and his colleagues are able to draw their conclusion, that road networks morphed not because of changes in our approach to planning but because of changes in society as a whole. In essence, they assert that changes to the network were not consciously done.

It’s not surprising, really. Roads are built to handle the traffic of their time. When navigating Cambridge’s labyrinthine streets, I’m constantly reminded that they were built for horse and carriage, not a horseless carriage. The demands of the automobile are sufficiently different from horse or foot traffic. Their greater speeds require straighter rights-of-way. Intersections need to be clear and predictable. Navigation also needs to be simplified—drivers moving at 10 miles per hour have more time to look for their next turn than those moving three times faster. The grid tackles these problems with aplomb.

Road networks are a product of the processes that created them, whether that be wagon traffic from farm fields plodding to town or taxi cabs streaming out from downtown. Discerning process from pattern is also the domain of another field—landscape ecology. Landscape ecologists sweat the details of spatial configuration to learn what ecological processes are at work. The laws of landscape ecology apply just as well in the city as they do in the natural world. The city is nothing but an anthropogenic ecosystem.

Ever since Geoffrey West and his colleagues uncovered the mathematics behind why big cities are economically successfully—but also crime ridden—it has been popular to search for formulae that describe urban processes and city development. This paper by Barthélemy and his colleagues is but the latest addition to a growing literature. By themselves, these discoveries are clever and insightful. But the interesting stuff will happen when urban planning completes the transition from an observation-based science to a mathematical one, much as ecology did in the recent past. Then we’ll have a real sense of how these models will change our understanding of cities.

Map scanned by University of Texas PCL Map Collection.

Source:

Strano, E., Nicosia, V., Latora, V., Porta, S., & Barthélemy, M. (2012). Elementary processes governing the evolution of road networks Scientific Reports, 2 DOI: 10.1038/srep00296

Related posts:

Ghosts of geography

Munich: The million person town

Ghosts of ecology

Urbanists weigh in on The City 2.0

Nate Berg, interviewing Jake Barton, founder of Local Projects, for the Atlantic Cities:

“Creating a website is not terribly difficult. But creating a project that actually has an impact on communities? That’s really hard,” Barton says. “From my experience, the website is a great way to gain attention and motivation and traction, but to actually make real change happen, it’s people.”

Looks like I’m not the only one questioning the ability of The City 2.0 to solve urban problems.

Folly of permanent structures on impermanent surfaces

Cornelia Dean, reporting for the New York Times:

Barrier islands like the Outer Banks are inherently unstable. Waves typically strike these islands at a slight angle, creating currents that pick up sand and carry it along the coast. The wave energy along the Outer Banks is unusually strong; by some estimates 700,000 cubic yards of sand, enough to fill 70,000 average-size dump trucks, moves along that stretch of coast every year.

At the new bridge, evidence of this process appeared even on opening day, in the form of long-necked black water birds called cormorants perching on a spit of sand that had formed near the north side of the bridge. That spit had not been there a few days before, said Pablo Hernandez, the transportation department engineer who managed the bridge work.

Star Wars visionary Ralph McQuarrie reimagined cities, too

Crevasse City, Alderaan

From the moment Princess Leia’s Corellian corvette blasted on-screen, I was hooked on Star Wars. Well, I imagine I was—I don’t even remember the first time I saw A New Hope. It’s as though I was born liking the movies. The worlds in those movies were so alien yet so real that I couldn’t help but be captivated.

It wasn’t until years later when flipping through one of my uncle’s books on the series that I discovered the man behind the original trilogy’s distinctive look—Ralph McQuarrie. McQuarrie was the conceptual artist that shaped the ships, weapons, and worlds of Star Wars. Unfortunately, he passed away this weekend.

McQuarrie used the fantastical universe to dream up cities that dazzled my imagination. They were—to my young eyes—visions of urban agglomerations that pushed my understanding of what cities could be. Obvious examples include Mos Eisley on Tatooine, its buildings sunken and topped with duracrete domes to fight the intense heat of the planet’s twin suns, and Cloud City on Bespin, the improbable floating saucer-atop-a-spire that was filled with airy hallways and gusty landing pads.

The more I dug, the more brilliance I found. Left on the cutting room floor was art for Aldera, and even a skyline for Coruscant before George Lucas even gave planet a name. Another that sadly didn’t make it was Crevasse City on Alderaan, pictured above. After seeing it’s buildings neatly tucked into cliff-faces, it dawned on me that cities don’t have to be discordant with their landscape.

Wookiepedia has an expansive gallery of McQuarrie images.

Can crowdsourcing save the city?

The City 2.0

TED is currently in full swing, and the program this year has an entire section devoted to the city. Fitting, given that this year’s TED Prize went to a city-centric project, one that hopes to crowdsource ideas to solve urban problems and reinvent cities. It’s predictably named The City 2.0. The site has a flashy splash page, but the innards still need some work—tapping in my current city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, sent me to a generic index page that encouraged me to “get connected” with other aspiring urban planners in my area, but responded to my clicks with little more than a broken Google Maps interface and some “COMING SOON” dialog boxes. For now, it’s long on pizzazz and short on details.

The TED Prize website fortunately has more on what The City 2.0 hopes to accomplish:

For phase I, the website (www.thecity2.org) will focus on helping individuals in forming cross-disciplinary groups to:

  1. determine the issue they want to tackle (i.e. traffic, lack of trees);
  2. determine a solution;
  3. develop an action plan;
  4. work to implement the solution;
  5. share the story of their success or failure with others.

Companies and organizations will be able to offer their tools to site users for use in executing their action plans. Ten micro grants of $10,000, coming out of the $100,000 TED Prize money, will be awarded in July 2012 to ten local projects that have the best hope of spurring the creation of their City 2.0.

To be clear, that’s $100,000 to be equally split among ten groups. Not a lot of money to tackle problems that probably need millions, even billions, of dollars thrown at them. Thankfully, there’s more:

As the site continues to grow and the overall platform grows we expect to:

  1. expand the functionality for individuals to connect and act;
  2. develop and design templates for knowledge sharing between new ideas formulated on the site and preexisting projects;
  3. build out our resource section with new local and global partners;
  4. introduce technology solutions for non-web based communities;
  5. expand our financial incentive program with larger grant offerings for active projects
  6. establish local and/or global gatherings on the City 2.0.

That’s a little better. This part of the project should have a longer-lasting impact than the small pot of grant money. Local civic groups often don’t have the skills or wherewithal to build a connected platform to publish their ideas and solicit feedback. The City 2.0 could provide that. But soliciting ideas is just the beginning. Many other hurdles stand in the way, and from what I can see The City 2.0 doesn’t propose how to address them.

The most obvious barrier is money. The City 2.0 acknowledges that to be successful it needs “companies and organizations willing to offer empowering resources” and “financial support”. It seems to me they are simply hoping companies and philanthropists will step forward and reward the best projects. That’s papering over a big problem.

The next issue is how to choose the best project. The City 2.0 says in its intro video that it will “combine the reach of the crowd with the power of the cloud”. Both crowdsourcing and the cloud are hot topics these days. Crowdsourcing in particular can give people a voice who otherwise may not have spoken up, and it leverages the law of big numbers to extract a handful of singular, stand-out ideas. But the real problem with crowdsourcing solutions for cities is more fundamental than that: Who decides which ideas to implement?

Lior Zoref, a crowdsourcing advocate, gave a TED talk this year about the wisdom of crowds in which he was joined on stage by an ox. After the gasps died down, he asked everyone to guess the weight of the animal and submit it to a website. At the end of his talk, he announced the average of the audience’s guesses: 1,792 pounds. The real weight of the cow? 1,795 pounds.

It is an impressive demonstration, but one that doesn’t sell me on the crowd’s ability to reinvent the city. That’s because crowd wisdom cannot apply to projects like The City 2.0. With the ox’s weight, there is one right answer. The crowd’s wisdom can be unambiguously verified. But with ideas and concepts like those solicited by The City 2.0, there is no right answer. And you certainly can’t distill an “average” idea from them all. Ultimately, a panel will have to pick the winners and losers. Those panelists will have enormous sway over the outcome of The City 2.0. If they are experts in their field, what’s to say the winners will be revolutionary, or even substantially different from their own work?

If winners are picked by popular vote—which I highly doubt—that, too, is no guarantee that the most promising proposals will be selected. People don’t always know what they want. “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups,” Steve Jobs once said. “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” There may be wisdom in crowds, but genius is usually confined to individuals.

I suspect it’ll take true genius to remake the city. We’ve been spinning our wheels in recent years, rehashing concepts of the city that have been around for decades, even centuries. Those ideas may have worked well in the past, but they didn’t have to contend with airports, globalization, or climate change. Today’s best solution may be unlike anything we have come to expect from cities.

I’m sure The City 2.0 will fund some great projects, but we won’t really know how they work until we really try them. Not small bits here and there, but big implementations. Trying on that scale takes money, and the only organizations with the money to do it are governments.

Does that mean it’s back to the old way, sitting through planning meetings and zoning boards? Maybe. Crowdsourcing is a great way to gather ideas, but implementing them takes community and persistence and enthusiasm. It’s possible that a website could create that community, but I’m skeptical—most social media tools piggyback on existing, real-world social bonds. I know I sound pessimistic about The City 2.0. I’m not entirely. I hope that the project will uncover a work of genius that would have otherwise been ignored, but I’m not holding my breath.

Photo from The City 2.0.

Central Standard Time, circa 1883

Central time zone, circa 1883

In honor of leap day, take a look at this map of the North American time zones when standard time was first adopted in 1883. Check out the central time zone—it’s massive!

Railroad magnates were behind standardized time because it made easier the creation of timetables and transmission of telegraph messages. Though widely-used shortly after their introduction, time zones wouldn’t become federal law until 1918.

Thanks to Eric Fischer for the scan.

MoMA tackles forclosures

This being MoMA, the project plans are the other side of fanciful. Still, someone has to push the boundaries or else we’d still be living in two-story Federals. I’m partial to the plan for Keizer, Oregon, by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood of WORKac—I love the way they incorporated animal habitats and corridors—but Jeanne Gang’s proposal for Cicero, Illinois, is a close second.

New battery triples energy density

Christopher Mims pointed me to this article by Jim Motavalli at the New York Times:

The advances were credited to the company’s proprietary cathode, anode and electrolyte materials, including manganese for the cathode. G.M. Ventures, in announcing its $7 million investment in Envia last year, noted that the company’s materials would “store more energy per unit of mass than current cathode materials.” Because the cathode was a “key driver” in the cost of a pack, the venture firm said, “the more energy the cathode delivers, the lower the battery cost because fewer cells are needed.”

As Mims puts it, “That’s right: Sometimes, when the government invests in innovation, it pays off moon launch-big.” If Envia is actually able to commercialize it along the lines they’re predicting, we’ll be seeing plenty of electric cars on the road sooner rather than later.

Climate change triggers earthquakes and eruptions

Bill McGuire, writing at The Guardian:

It somehow seems appropriate to imagine the Earth beneath our feet as a slumbering giant that tosses and turns periodically in response to various pokes and prods. Mostly, these are supplied by the stresses and strains associated with the eternal dance of a dozen or so rocky tectonic plates across the face of our world; a sedate waltz that proceeds at about the speed that fingernails grow. Changes in the environment too, however, have a key role to play in waking the giant, as growing numbers of geological studies targeting our post-ice age world have disclosed.

It’s easy to see how a melting glacier can affect river flows, but less obvious how the shifting weight of water affects geologic processes. As it is, we strain to understand the timing of earthquakes and volcanoes. Add another unpredictable system like the climate into the mix and it’s almost too much to fathom.

Bleak future for many birds

Jim Robbins, reporting for the New York Times:

There are about 10,000 bird species globally and most of them live on land. Based on the middle range of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s projection of warming—3.5 degrees Celsius or 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100—534 to 800 tropical land bird species could become extinct, out of a total of 7,565 species. Worldwide, of all of the 8,500 or so land bird species, as many as 600 to 900 could disappear. And for each degree of climate warming above that, the experts say, another 100 to 500 birds might go extinct…

The loss of birds could be mitigated somewhat, the scientists write, by conducting more research into the subject, by restoring degraded habitat and by protecting more land.

Why you should pay for public schools even if you don't have kids

Emily Badger, writing for Miller-McCune:

The researchers discovered a strong correlation between community satisfaction and quality schools. The better the schools (as people perceive them), the more satisfied people are with their communities — and this is true whether they have children attending them or not. This positive relationship holds even after the researchers controlled for other community and individual characteristics, suggesting, they write, that “public school quality uniquely contributes to community satisfaction” above and beyond other common explanations, such as high rates of homeownership or job availability.

The researchers believe it’s not simply the case that good schools happen to be located in good communities. Rather, public schools actually contribute to that satisfaction — and for everyone.

Public schools are a common whipping boy for budget woes in my home town, and many people without school-age children say they shouldn’t have to pay for them. If I could send each and every one of them Badger’s article, I would.

Flyways and greenways

Red-eyed Vireo

Earlier this week I pointed out that urban areas can actually increase tree cover over time, albeit with a caveat. The two studies I cited measured tree cover and only tree cover—they made no claims about ecological function. Luckily, other studies have done just that, including one that looked at migratory bird use of greenways in urban areas.

Migratory routes are important, though most research into migratory bird decline has focused on habitat loss in their breeding and wintering grounds. That has left a large piece of the puzzle unsolved—the habitat between point A and point B. Think of it this way: If snowbirds—you know, northern (human) retirees who flock to warmer climes in the winter—started disappearing and our best solution was to look for them at their apartment in New York or their rental in Boca Raton—ignoring rest stops and motels along I-95—we’d be doing a great disservice to our older generations. Ignoring flyways is similarly foolish.

There have been studies in more recent years that aim to fill this gap, and one published in 2009 by Salina Kohut, George Hess, and Christopher Moorman picks up the trail along, well, trails. They surveyed bird species abundance and richness—how many and how varied the itinerants were—in 47 greenways in and around Raleigh, North Carolina.

Greenways are a common and convenient way for cities to conserve natural habitat. Their linear form is well suited to urban areas, and they easily double as parks or recreational trails. They also can serve as stop-over habitat for migratory birds. Kohut, Hess, and Moorman were hoping to find the right type of corridor for migrating birds, where our feathered friends can take a load off and fatten up.

It turns out that most birds were not picky and would stop at just about any greenway, regardless of vegetation, adjacent land use, or corridor width. That’s not to say all greenways were entirely equal. Overall, birds favored corridors with taller trees and lots of native shrubs teeming with fruit. And among birds that live in forest interiors far away from human development and even open fields, greenways wider than 150 meters (about 500 feet) surrounded by low-intensity development were the most popular.

None of the greenways Kohut and her colleagues studied were as good as a regular forest, though. Still, with some tweaks—including widening corridors, siting them near low-intensity development, and planting with natives—greenways can make decent stand-ins for the real thing, at least as far as migratory birds are concerned. Residential neighborhoods can even make themselves into agreeable stopover habitat by mimicking vegetation found at popular stops along the flyway.

So greenways make for good bird habitat, but let’s not forget that they’re good neighbors, too. In addition to helping migrating fauna, they boost property values, add recreational opportunities, and work well as commuting corridors for cyclists. Five benefits from one land use. Not too shabby.

Photo by qmnonic.

Source:

Kohut, S., Hess, G., & Moorman, C. (2009). Avian use of suburban greenways as stopover habitat Urban Ecosystems, 12 (4), 487-502 DOI: 10.1007/s11252-009-0099-6

Related posts:

Tree City

An ecology of gardens and yards

Plants rockin’ the suburbs, animals not so much

Thank Google for your transit app

Wade Roush, reporting for Xconomy:

Google’s leadership has opened up space for a whole ecosystem of transit-app startups. It’s not as if Google invented the idea of putting transit data online—that’s been going on since at least 1998, when a pair of University of California students created a website called Transitinfo.org to tie together data from 26 transit agencies around the Bay Area. (It’s now called 511 Transit.) But the emergence of a common standard for publishing transit schedules has enabled independent developers who started out building apps tailored to their local systems to think much bigger.

Do wildlife corridors really work?

Fifteen years ago, when I visited Costa Rica for the first time, I was riveted by a conservation effort our guide was involved in—the stringing of habitat corridors across the country to facilitate animal movements. The idea maps were being redrawn—with nature in mind instead of economic or social demands—captured my imagination.

Scientists are split on whether or not they work, and I’ve been following their volleys for about a decade. Virginia Hughes details the latest round of inquiry where longtime corridor booster Paul Beier feels the science behind corridors is still too shaky:

In a commentary published last month in PLoS Biology, conservationists Paul Beier and Andrew Gregory from Northern Arizona University pointed out that there’s actually scant evidence that wildlife corridors work in large, human-dominated landscapes. Almost all research has been done on corridors less than 150 meters long, whereas most implemented corridors are many times larger. What’s more, these studies generally measure only whether animals move from patch A to patch B, rather than explicitly testing genetic diversity or long-term occupancy.

Beier and Gregory’s solution is pretty nifty: Have people—scientists and citizen scientists alike—identify what they think are suitably substantial habitat corridors. The pair will then investigate whether and which animals use them. It seems to be a crowd-sourced evolution of their earlier project, Corridor Designer, which took a computational approach to identifying candidates. It’s like pitting local knowledge against digital brawn. I’m curious to see which one wins.