Posts
10 hours ago
Showing posts with label concept. Show all posts
Showing posts with label concept. Show all posts
Friday, October 9, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
A Few Thoughts on Jane Jacobs
I finally made it through Death and Life of Great American Cities the other day and can move on with my life. I'm embarrassed to say that I started reading Jane Jacobs' classic last spring while there was still snow flying.
While the book is showing its age, especially regarding discussion about banks and housing projects (now that most housing projects have been or will be torn down). Nut overall Death and Life is still a very important piece of literature.
Jane Jacobs obviously takes a lot of pride in the small details that make up a city, the parks, people, sidewalks, building facades, and local entrepreneurs that make up a city. The small details are what matter the most when it comes to building a community with a sense of place and character and it is precisely these most important small details that planners often over look.
That is the inherent contradiction of planning, it is a profession that takes a look at the big picture for the most part, and until recently when collaborative planning has become part of the process, the small details that make a community thrive were missing from planners' radars. That is way the collaborative process is so important, to fill in gaps in knowledge and design that planners might not have access to.
The book is a big proponent of cities as "organic" structures that are not stagnant but alive and constantly in flux. As such, organic growth of neighborhoods, associations, relationships, and the urban structure of cities are what make fro vibrant and strong cities and not massively scaled urban renewal projects that attempt to sanitize an area.
She doesn't spend much time on the car, other than to emphasize the positive feedback the car's influence on city design has on the erosion of vibrant and diverse cities. Cars must be designed for, and in accommodating the use of cars, forces a separation and spreading out of what used to be mixed-use areas because of the pressures of moving and storing vehicles.
Her message from all this critique is simple; that people have to take back the planning process from government bureaucrats that don't have a city's or neighborhood's best interests in mind. Ideas such as Radiant City and Garden City design must be thrown out and replaced with something that actually expresses the reality of people's needs and psychology.
I guess since planning will be my profession I need to heed her words even though the planning process has significantly changed since the book was originally written.
While the book is showing its age, especially regarding discussion about banks and housing projects (now that most housing projects have been or will be torn down). Nut overall Death and Life is still a very important piece of literature.
Jane Jacobs obviously takes a lot of pride in the small details that make up a city, the parks, people, sidewalks, building facades, and local entrepreneurs that make up a city. The small details are what matter the most when it comes to building a community with a sense of place and character and it is precisely these most important small details that planners often over look.
That is the inherent contradiction of planning, it is a profession that takes a look at the big picture for the most part, and until recently when collaborative planning has become part of the process, the small details that make a community thrive were missing from planners' radars. That is way the collaborative process is so important, to fill in gaps in knowledge and design that planners might not have access to.
The book is a big proponent of cities as "organic" structures that are not stagnant but alive and constantly in flux. As such, organic growth of neighborhoods, associations, relationships, and the urban structure of cities are what make fro vibrant and strong cities and not massively scaled urban renewal projects that attempt to sanitize an area.
She doesn't spend much time on the car, other than to emphasize the positive feedback the car's influence on city design has on the erosion of vibrant and diverse cities. Cars must be designed for, and in accommodating the use of cars, forces a separation and spreading out of what used to be mixed-use areas because of the pressures of moving and storing vehicles.
Her message from all this critique is simple; that people have to take back the planning process from government bureaucrats that don't have a city's or neighborhood's best interests in mind. Ideas such as Radiant City and Garden City design must be thrown out and replaced with something that actually expresses the reality of people's needs and psychology.
I guess since planning will be my profession I need to heed her words even though the planning process has significantly changed since the book was originally written.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Why I Went Carfree
I had a conversation with someone - who shall remain nameless - about my little project and the general sentiment that I got from that person was that what I am trying to do here is ridiculous, a waist of my time and my life. Among many pearls of wisdom I was offered were; real people that need to feed their families drive cars, adults don't ride bikes, cyclists don't pay for the infrastructure they use, and the hypocrisy of going carfree when most things I'm buying are trucked in anyway.
Thats a long list of grievances and goes to illustrating the attitudes that advocates of alternative transportation are up against. I don't even really know where to begin with all these, and I've had ample time to think and reflect on what was said before sitting down to write this post.
First off, I'm not stupid enough to believe that all people in every part of the world can live their lives without owning a car. But what I see as the challenge is moving to a reality in which people don't have to own a vehicle to be a productive member of society. Already much of Europe is like this, but here in America - because of our auto-centric urban growth patterns of the last 70 years - there is plenty of opportunity for people to change their behaviors.
Secondly, I consider myself to be a pragmatist, meaning that I believe we need to find a way to reduce our individual environmental impact while continuing to use the technological advances of the industrial and information revolutions. This person said they could only respect someone attempting what I am doing if they went to the extreme and moved to a plot of land and lived a self contained life off the land. While yes this would significantly drop my carbon emissions and ecological footprint, no matter what humans do there will always be an environmental impact. The fact is that this is not an option anymore. The Earth has a population of over 6 billion people, so there is no possibility of everyone having 40 acres all to themselves. We are also now living in a mostly urban world, with over 50% of the worlds population living in urbanized areas. And while this situation creates many challenges ti also creates many unique opportunities in terms of better urban design and transportation.
Remember that the approach of living a self contained life has already been tried, and for various reasons, failed to hold the attentions of Americans other than a small die-hard minority. I have written in previous posts about the failings of the political movements of the 60's. The attitude of turning away from civic culture as so eloquently captured by Timothy Leary, "Turn on, tune in, drop out," failed. When an attempt to turn this mantra into reality - in the form of communes, Haight-Ashbury, etc. - the people who flocked to there new social experiments (new to America) didn't last very long. The model of society being proposed was to radical a departure for most Americans to find appealing, leading to a large backlash the produced Reagan, Gordon Gekko, and yuppies.
This is illustrated yell - in the rather terrible movie - Rude Awakening in which Cheech (without Chong) is a radical revolutionary hippie from the 60's that is forced into exile in South America when the government raids the commune he was a part of. The friends he leaves behind are transformed during his absence into everything they were fighting against and when he returns in the 80's he finds they are aspirational elitist New York yuppies.
We must build a mainstream movement of people that are interested in environmental and social justice issues. Thats a big goal, but if you give people easy choices that allow them to feel good knowing they are doing something positive, and spread that across millions of people, there is a chance for a real impact.
Of course this means educating people, and since we live in a Capitalist system, that mainly means education about the choices people make every time they consume something. Being a pragmatist, I see no contradiction or hypocrisy in choosing not to drive while many of the things I consume continue to be shipped into Missoula from many thousands of miles away. I have very little control over where things are manufactured, but I do have control when it comes to local transportation. And this being, mostly, a free market economy, I gladly choose to commute by bicycle.
A good example of this pragmatism is the argument over food miles and the true cost of our food and agricultural system. Localivores often argue for the 100 mile diet, but here in Missoula that would mean NO BREAD. A recent article I read (I wish I had a link) stated that a study found that only 20% of a food products environmental impact comes from transportation while the majority comes from the excessive use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and diesel consumed by a tractor. So given a choice, its between organic that was trucked in and something local from a traditional agribusiness farm, the organic wins out in terms of lessening the products impact.
While its nice to stick to principles, taking the pragmatic approach allows many more people to participate in a given social movement. Rigid adherence to principals and a radical approach are what brought the political and environmental movements of the 60's to a halt and actually set them back about a decade.
So given the choice of being an appathetic consumer, turning my back on civic life, or taking the middle road and being pragmatic about the choices I make in my daily life, I'll choose to be pragmatic. Already, the little changes I have made have resulted in a significant reduction of my ecological footprint (which I'll go into more detail in a later post). My carbon emission are reduced by about 50% from going carfree while my overall ecoligical footprint has been lowered by approximately 1/3. Other than not driving, I haven't radically changed my behavior its just that the little things I have changed add up.
Thats a long list of grievances and goes to illustrating the attitudes that advocates of alternative transportation are up against. I don't even really know where to begin with all these, and I've had ample time to think and reflect on what was said before sitting down to write this post.
First off, I'm not stupid enough to believe that all people in every part of the world can live their lives without owning a car. But what I see as the challenge is moving to a reality in which people don't have to own a vehicle to be a productive member of society. Already much of Europe is like this, but here in America - because of our auto-centric urban growth patterns of the last 70 years - there is plenty of opportunity for people to change their behaviors.
Secondly, I consider myself to be a pragmatist, meaning that I believe we need to find a way to reduce our individual environmental impact while continuing to use the technological advances of the industrial and information revolutions. This person said they could only respect someone attempting what I am doing if they went to the extreme and moved to a plot of land and lived a self contained life off the land. While yes this would significantly drop my carbon emissions and ecological footprint, no matter what humans do there will always be an environmental impact. The fact is that this is not an option anymore. The Earth has a population of over 6 billion people, so there is no possibility of everyone having 40 acres all to themselves. We are also now living in a mostly urban world, with over 50% of the worlds population living in urbanized areas. And while this situation creates many challenges ti also creates many unique opportunities in terms of better urban design and transportation.
Remember that the approach of living a self contained life has already been tried, and for various reasons, failed to hold the attentions of Americans other than a small die-hard minority. I have written in previous posts about the failings of the political movements of the 60's. The attitude of turning away from civic culture as so eloquently captured by Timothy Leary, "Turn on, tune in, drop out," failed. When an attempt to turn this mantra into reality - in the form of communes, Haight-Ashbury, etc. - the people who flocked to there new social experiments (new to America) didn't last very long. The model of society being proposed was to radical a departure for most Americans to find appealing, leading to a large backlash the produced Reagan, Gordon Gekko, and yuppies.
This is illustrated yell - in the rather terrible movie - Rude Awakening in which Cheech (without Chong) is a radical revolutionary hippie from the 60's that is forced into exile in South America when the government raids the commune he was a part of. The friends he leaves behind are transformed during his absence into everything they were fighting against and when he returns in the 80's he finds they are aspirational elitist New York yuppies.
We must build a mainstream movement of people that are interested in environmental and social justice issues. Thats a big goal, but if you give people easy choices that allow them to feel good knowing they are doing something positive, and spread that across millions of people, there is a chance for a real impact.
Of course this means educating people, and since we live in a Capitalist system, that mainly means education about the choices people make every time they consume something. Being a pragmatist, I see no contradiction or hypocrisy in choosing not to drive while many of the things I consume continue to be shipped into Missoula from many thousands of miles away. I have very little control over where things are manufactured, but I do have control when it comes to local transportation. And this being, mostly, a free market economy, I gladly choose to commute by bicycle.
A good example of this pragmatism is the argument over food miles and the true cost of our food and agricultural system. Localivores often argue for the 100 mile diet, but here in Missoula that would mean NO BREAD. A recent article I read (I wish I had a link) stated that a study found that only 20% of a food products environmental impact comes from transportation while the majority comes from the excessive use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and diesel consumed by a tractor. So given a choice, its between organic that was trucked in and something local from a traditional agribusiness farm, the organic wins out in terms of lessening the products impact.
While its nice to stick to principles, taking the pragmatic approach allows many more people to participate in a given social movement. Rigid adherence to principals and a radical approach are what brought the political and environmental movements of the 60's to a halt and actually set them back about a decade.
So given the choice of being an appathetic consumer, turning my back on civic life, or taking the middle road and being pragmatic about the choices I make in my daily life, I'll choose to be pragmatic. Already, the little changes I have made have resulted in a significant reduction of my ecological footprint (which I'll go into more detail in a later post). My carbon emission are reduced by about 50% from going carfree while my overall ecoligical footprint has been lowered by approximately 1/3. Other than not driving, I haven't radically changed my behavior its just that the little things I have changed add up.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Fun with Goggle Trends and Week 13 Carfree Stats
As part of my job at the non profit I work for, I spend a lot of time reading blogs that are all about the effective use of social media. There is plenty of BS to sift through out there, but I have also found some great tools that I never knew existed. One of which is Google Trends. What I'm about to write is mostly for the benefit of other alternative transportation and carfree bloggers.
If you've never heard of Google Trends don't worry, its not all that important. Basically its a tool that measures the search volume of a given word or phrase over time. So you can see when news events affect a phrases search volume as you can see in the following graph - which just for the fun of it and as a good example of news pushing search - shows search volume for Michael Jackson. The recent news of his passing caused Google search volumes to increase by over 40 times the normal search volume average.
Michael Jackson Search
We can then use this tool to analyze trends in search, which is really a measure of how a concept spreads through our society; the more people are thinking about a particular issue, the more Google searches are performed around a given concept. Below you can see the results for "carfree" in Google search and notice that carfree is a concept that for sometime wasn't showing up in Google's radar. One also notices that events such as carfree days and conferences are major drivers of search traffic.
Another useful feature is a display of the regions, cities, and languages that are searching the most for the term. In the case of "carfree" Hungary is the region generating the most searches while Phoenix, AZ (WTF) Portland, OR and Budapest Hungary are the three most prolific searchers.
Carfree Search
Again, we can see that the concept of alternative transportation, while not new, has in the last several years gained social awareness. And after reading through the information about Google Trends I've concluded that the dead space in the graphs for both "carfree" and "alternative transportation" isn't form Google not tracking the terms or people not searching for these concepts. Rather, its the result of such low search volumes to begin with that the current search volumes make the old data from years 04 and 05 not show up on the graph because of the graphs scale, which just goes to illustrating how much these two ideas have seeped into our social consciousness.
Alternative Transportation Search
The next graph for "cycling" was interesting. First, the fact that it is trending down doesn't mean less people are searching for the term, just that the average search volume is slowly increasing, making the peaks less out of range with the average. Secondly, the peaks are associated with the Tour de France.
Cycling Search
Of course using a seemingly related search term such as "bicycle" can change the trend significantly even though it would seem that they are closely related. Gone are the big peaks produced by the Tour de France and instead we see more gentle increases during the summer months as people no doubt search for bike shops, parts, new bikes, and places to ride while the weather is nice.
Bicycle Search
Finally, we can see a true trend with "fixie" the term given to fixed-gear bicycles by urban hipsters. The Europeans have us beat when it comes to Fixies, with Denmark topping the search list for regions while the US is only sixth.
Fixie Search
Week 13 Carfree Stats
Miles Biked: 54.99
Gallons Saved: 3.44
CO2 Not Emitted: 21.58 Ibs
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
