The Atlantic Cities:

Communities Aren’t Just Places, They’re Social Networks.

Richard Florida. Oct 25, 2012.

Cities are obviously more than just the sum of their physical assets — roads and bridges, offices, factories, shopping centers, and homes — working more like living organisms than jumbles of concrete. Their inner workings even transcend their ability to cluster and concentrate people and economic activity. As sociologist Zachary Neal of Michigan State University argues in his new book, The Connected City, cities are made up of human social networks. Neal took time to discuss his book and research with Atlantic Cities, explaining how cities work as living organisms and why what happens in Las Vegas cannot stay in Las Vegas.

RF: In the book, you write that “communities are networks, not places.” Tell us about why and how networks matter to cities?

ZN: We often think of communities in place–based terms, like Jane Jacobs’ beloved Greenwich Village. But, whether or not a place like Greenwich Village is really a community has more to do with the residents’ relationships with one another — their social networks – than with where they happen to live or work. The danger of thinking about communities as places is that it can lead us to find communities where they don’t exist.  A neighborhood where the residents never interact is merely a place, but hardly a community. This can lead us to overlook communities that are not rooted in particular places, like a book club with a constantly changing venue.

Communities aren’t disappearing, but to find them we need to stop looking in places, and start looking in social networks.”

Image: easyshutter /Shutterstock

via massurban

“The Obama administration, the Republicans conclude damningly, is “replacing civil engineering with social engineering as it pursues an exclusively urban vision of dense housing and government transit.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/opinion/sunday/republicans-to-cities-drop-dead.html

via urbanrelationsinfo:

(via lifeonfoot)

emergentfutures:

LEMONADE PRICES AT THIS VENDING MACHINE CHANGE BASED ON THE TEMPERATURE

Coca-cola’s drink dispensers stocked with Limon&Nada in Spain were equipped with thermometers and the product became cheaper as the weather got hotter.

Paul Higgins: Interesting - you would think that it would be the other way around - cheaper when demand was lower?

Full Story: PSFK

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Cities | Sustainable Cities Collective

1. Be Proactive. There’s much any city can do today. Even without sufficient budget or authorization from ‘senior levels’ of government, every city has a full menu of things that can be carried out immediately, generating positive momentum and goodwill. Business rewards the active entrepreneur, and the public desperately wants active cities. The rewards are great. 
2. Plan – Plan Right. All cities carry out master plans for their key services, long-term infrastructure needs, and land use planning. Before starting these plans, the end needs to be clear. They are guidance documents, aspirational, and ways to rally supporters and give fair hearing to opponents. But a plan, no matter how good, can never be seen as a finished product. Before starting the plan an agreement is needed that the city is moving forward on this issue: the plan is the vehicle to bring along as many supporters as possible and identify potential potholes and trouble en route. Like a city, good plans are living documents. 
3. Put First Things First. How many cities have we visited where they are building a new grand City Hall, yet much of the garbage still isn’t being collected or the water isn’t flowing? A city’s priorities should be basic services, professionalism and quality of staff, clear metrics, a reliable ongoing base budget, and nurturing a respectful two-way conversation with its residents. All great buildings need a solid foundation. 

via smartercities:

“In D.C., low-cost apartments disappearing at rapid rate

By Annys Shin, Published: May 6

For a year, Julio Benitez, 61, has complained to his landlord about the unpatched walls, leaky bathtub and broken electrical outlets in his apartment. Down the hall, where Paul Fisette, 28, moved in a month ago, everything is new, from the paint to the appliances. When the garbage disposal broke recently, the landlord replaced it by 11 a.m. the next day.

Welcome to the New Hampshire, where the underprivileged and upscale exist under the same roof, part of a shift in the District’s housing stock that experts say is likely to change the face of the city for decades to come. Fueled by a strong job market for young professionals and a credit crunch that has made condominium conversion difficult, low-income apartment buildings are undergoing rapid makeovers to meet the demand for upscale housing.

As a result, low-cost rental housing is now disappearing at a faster rate than it was during the height of the housing boom, according to a new analysis of census data by the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. Median rents soared by as much as 50 percent between 2000 and 2010, with much of that increase taking place during the downturn, the analysis found.

The residents of the New Hampshire, a 1920s vintage building by the Georgia Avenue-
Petworth Metro station, are intimately familiar with the forces reshaping the city. Their building and the adjacent Quincy were purchased in 2010 by Urban Investment Partners, which launched extensive renovations under an agreement worked out with the tenants.

To comply with the District’s housing laws, UIP promised to bring the buildings up to code and even upgrade them and let the residents who chose to stay keep their apartments rent controlled. Those who wished to leave could walk away with a buyout of $10,000. In exchange, the owner would be allowed to charge new tenants market-rate rents.

Such voluntary agreements are increasingly common, housing advocates say, because they allow building owners to raise rents without a prolonged fight while giving tenants a way to get their buildings fixed up, or, if they prefer, money to move out. Over the past several years, UIP has pioneered the use of voluntary agreements and is now one of the city’s most prolific users of them. The alternatives, such as petitioning the residents to raise the rent, very often trigger court battles, which cost money and goodwill.”

Via: The Washington Post & massurban:

Photo: Michael S. Williamson / THE WASHINGTON POST

“The Rise of the Temporary City

by David Lepeska. 5.1.12

While artists, activists and event organizers have embraced the pop-up phenomenon, urban visionaries have remained overwhelmingly concerned with permanence.

That may be changing, according to The Temporary City, a new book by urban planner Peter Bishop and environmental scientist Lesley Williams that outlines a greater appreciation for immediate outcomes and temporary activities among planners, architects, developers and city officials.

“An alternative approach to master planning is beginning to emerge,” the authors write.

Temporary uses are nothing new. Nearly all of the 200 buildings of Chicago’s magnificent 1893White City came and went within a few years.* And the reclaiming of public space has been going on for more than half a century, in free zones like Copenhagen’s Christiania, a squatters’ settlement founded in 1971.

The continuing economic crisis has curtailed development funding and increased unemployment, particularly among the young and educated. Many cities have lost sizable chunks of population, leading to vast swathes of vacant property. And today’s constant communications capabilities have made organizing events much simpler and quicker.

Combine these with the appeal of time-limited exclusivity and you have a boom in pop-ups, like the recent weekend-long mall on Cambridge’s Newbury Street, or the 10-day food truck park, with furniture, plants and a performance space, in Surrey, England.

These enrich urban life, acknowledges Bishop, but it’s the grander, longer-lasting temporary projects that have begun to alter thinking in the field. Eric Reynolds of Urban Space Management created London’s Camden Lock Market a few decades ago. Initially a group of temporary cart stores and retail outlets in and around vacant warehouses, it has since become one of the city’s most popular markets and helped rejuvenate an overlooked neighborhood.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities & massurban:

Photo: Peter Bishop 

via thisbigcity

(via thisbigcity)

Why Place Matters

By Saffron Woodcraft. 20 April 2012

“The idea of ‘community’ has gone in and out of fashion in the past few decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, commentators on globalization suggested that places, and, in particular, cities would no longer matter if people and organizations could be connected anywhere and everywhere.

Two decades of change has shown this picture to be only partially accurate. Global connectedness has transformed the way businesses operate, and how people relate to each other and to places. Yet, cities have become more, not less, significant.

Sociologist Saskia Sassen, argues that globalization has intensified the importance of place as specialised industries – banking, technology, biotech and others – have become concentrated in particular areas; generally a handful of major cities. Clusters of specialised industries create demand for highly skilled professionals, but they also create demand for a whole range of administrative jobs and service industries.  Globalization theorists focus on the mobility of specialised industries and their elite workers.  Sassen argues this is one-sided and more emphasis should be given to the local impacts of global networks.

Sassen’s perspective is important because it is a reminder that cities have a complex social life, which, for the most part, is rooted in particular places and defined by the people who live and work in them. Most city dwellers spend a considerable part of their lives in roughly the same place. Therefore, the quality of that place matters – the range and affordability of housing, the job opportunities, the schools, healthcare and public transport – because it shapes day-to-day life and long-term opportunities.

Yet what makes a bricks-and-mortar neighbourhood into a flourishing community is more than these big-ticket items.  There are other, more subtle, factors that shape how safe, inclusive, cohesive and supportive a place feels, and how attached to that place people become. The Young Foundation has been researching how people understand community for over 50-years, and for the past three, the Foundation’s Future Communities programme has been thinking specifically about what makes some communities thrive and others fail.”

Via: Urban Times & massurban

Photo: Crispin Hughes

Your next mayor: a computer | KurzweilAI

In May 2009, some residents of Paris were given La Montre Verte (“The Green Watch”). The watch is actually a watch, and it also has two sensors to detect noise levels and ozone levels, a GPS chip, and a Bluetooth chip. As people went about their day, the watch recorded the noise and ozone in their environment. The data was transferred to a companion mobile phone application, regularly uploaded to a central server, and crunched into maps like this. (Credit: Fing)

“Almost anything — any person, any object, any process or any service, for any organization, large or small — can become digitally aware and networked,” said IBM Chairman Samuel J. Palmisano at the 2010 SmarterCities forum in Shanghai. “Think about the prospect of a trillion connected and instrumented things — cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipelines …”

via smarterplanet:

(via emergentfutures)

Missing middle housing: Responding to demand for urban living

Dan Parolek, Better! Cities & Towns.  03 April 2012

The mismatch between current US housing stock and shifting demographics, combined with the growing demand for walkable urban living, has been poignantly defined by recent research and publications by the likes of Christopher Nelson and Chris Leinberger and most recently by the Urban Land Institute’s publication, What’s Next: Real Estate in the New Economy. Now it is time to stop talking about the problem and start generating immediate solutions! Are you ready to be part of the solution?

Unfortunately, the solution is not as simple as adding more multi-family housing stock using the dated models/types of housing that we have been building.  Rather, we need a complete paradigm shift in the way that we design, locate, regulate, and develop homes. As What’s Next states, “it’s a time to rethink and evolve, reinvent and renew.” Missing Middle housing types, such as duplexes, fourplexes, bungalow courts, mansion apartments, and live-work units, are a critical part of the solution and should be a part of every architect’s, planner’s, real estate agent’s, and developer’s arsenal.

Well-designed, simple Missing Middle housing types achieve medium-density yields and provide high-quality, marketable options between the scales of single-family homes and mid-rise flats for walkable urban living. They are designed to meet the specific needs of shifting demographics and the new market demand and are a key component to a diverse neighborhood. They are classified as “missing” because very few of these housing types have been built since the early 1940’s due to regulatory constraints, the shift to auto-dependent patterns of development, and the incentivization of single-family home ownership.

The following are defining characteristics of Missing Middle housing:

A walkable context. Probably the most important characteristic of these types of housing is that they need to be built within an existing or newly created walkable urban context.  Buyers or renters of these housing types are choosing to trade larger suburban housing for less space, no yard to maintain, and proximity to services and amenities such as restaurants, bars, markets, and often work. Linda Pruitt of the Cottage Company, who is building creative bungalow courts in the Seattle area, says the first thing her potential customers ask is, “What can I walk to?” So this criteria becomes very important in her selection of lots and project areas, as is it for all Missing Middle housing.

Medium density but lower perceived densities. As a starting point, these building types typically range in density from 16 dwelling units/acre (du/acre) to up to 35 du/acre, depending on the building type and lot size. It is important not to get too caught up in the density numbers when thinking about these types. Due to the small footprint of the building types and the fact that they are usually mixed with a variety of building types, even on an individual block, the perceived density is usually quite lower–they do not look like dense buildings.

A combination of these types gets a neighborhood to a minimum average of 16 du/acre. This is important because this is generally used as a threshold at which an environment becomes transit-supportive and main streets with neighborhood-serving, walkable retail and services become viable. “

Via: Better! Cities and Towns & massurban

Image: Diagram of missing middle housing types illustrating the range of types and their location between single-family homes and mid-rise buildings (via Better! Cities and Towns)