While I'm glad that this topic is getting addressed, that video was pretty difficult to watch. I know it would be unwise to spend extensive amounts of time on each topic in the video, but the way it was cut made it hard to think about the topic before moving on to the next part.
Otherwise, this topic is likely what I want to focus my career in at some point, understanding how to improve the ways cities run, given how they are more and more the drivers of not only the economy, but a lot of the culture and thinking generated in the world. (As someone who grew up in global cities such as Singapore, Paris, etc., I always felt that these cities had more in common with each other than with other cities in the countries they are in.)
I'm making my way through Jane Jacob's Life and Death of American Cities right now, and it has definitely changed a lot of my thinkings of how cities should be designed (more mixed-used, parks are not necessarily ideal, etc).
I wonder how a company could be created to tackle the issues cities are facing these days, working with local governments (or without if need be).
Philadelphia was the best-designed city, basically ever. Perfect grid, even spacing between residences, businesses, and parks, and you know what ended up happening? Nearly everybody piled up along the waterfronts, because that's where the action was.
London, meanwhile, had never really been planned at all, and even well-intentioned planning often ended up straddling the line between disaster and farce.
If you want to laugh a lot and learn about ways that London has been "developed" over the years, check out this guy's videos:
I guess I wasn't clear. My point is that planning isn't perfect, and will never solve all problems.
An example from my hometown of Ithaca NY: this tiny valley was never built with cars in mind, and because there is a lake to the north and steep hills in every other direction, there are only about 6 ways in and out of Ithaca. Usually this isn't a problem but certain times of day the traffic comes to a complete stop as there is no physical way to relieve the congestion. If major charges to roadways were made, it could fix some of the congestion issues, but since nearly all travel through Ithaca revolves around The Commons (literally: one-way streets move traffic counterclockwise around the popular pedestrian mall), it could have a devastating effect on local businesses.
I am convinced that no single entity is capable of creating and executing a plan that improves an urban area in any more than a limited portion without significant and unforeseen consequences.
Speaking of slums: the original plans for public housing projects in big cities like New York failed to account for the lack of maintenance or the effects of drugs being sold or used on the premises, which matters a lot because one prolific drug dealer can drastically reduce quality of life for everybody in the building, especially if they are smart or small-time enough to avoid police interference, thus allowing dealers to become de facto authorities in the projects. That is an example of a planned (but unexpected) slum.
/s Actually the solution could come from another EM company in the form of self-driving cars, as it would alleviate congestion just enough for it to stop being a problem anymore. The traffic issue really only focuses on certain chokepoints in and out of the city.
You know the deal: everybody stopped at a series of red lights. Light at the front goes green, first car moves, second car behind it has space to move, and so on. If all the cars were able to start and stop in unison based on the state of the traffic lights then the congestion problems in Ithaca would disappear overnight. We aren't big enough to need (or be able to afford) massive infrastructure projects, and as I alluded to earlier, it probably wouldn't be worth the unforeseen consequences. Not to mention the downtown retailers are still reeling from the Commons reconstruction, which put way too many of my favorite stores out of business.
I have much sympathy for the natural development over top-down design, but I have to point out that being symmetrical is not the same as being well designed. In fact, I'd say it's probably a good indication of bad city design.
> My personal approach is to build up better and better datasets (simulated, some taken from open datasets like the Building Performance Database) to slowly but surely force some evidence into these discussions.
You'll fail using that approach. The NIMBYs don't make their decisions based on data. They make their opinions based on emotion. If you want to change their minds you need to appeal to their emotions. Run commercials in the NIMBY neighborhood that show poor, disadvantaged low income families who would get to live there if the tower went up. Make them feel ashamed for opposing towers and they'll stop opposing them.
edit: Yes, this is a bad example, but the point remains. You must hit them in the feels.
And mostly, new construction is not for low-income people, just because it's new. Low-income people tend to live in older buildings that have depreciated.
Sure, the idea at least of Section 37 is effectively "local compensation". Too often it's "councillor's goodies for constituents money", and it's not much help when the Section 37 park gets built a kilometer away from the actual development. And often the locals don't want change anyways, so Section 37 stuff is not enticing. Makes sense in theory though.
I'm not sure you can change the NIMBYs minds, but you don't have to. You just have to get the planning commission to stop listening to the NIMBYs. You might be able to do that with enough evidence.
I live in Toronto and this is pretty much how it goes. (The city works in spite of planning, not because of it, generally.) Planners come up with some grand region- or city-wide objectives, with lots of criteria and performance metrics, and then when it gets down to the gritty job of building new stuff, it's all "we don't like it, because it's not what currently exists!" No surprise that the really big development tends to happen on old industrial lands where there's not enough people around to really complain.
But of course, you can see how the incentives run. If somebody likes their neighbourhood the way it is, and doesn't want change, then if they don't complain about new developments to councillors and planners, they gain nothing. But if they do complain, then there's a chance they can get developments stopped. (Thanks, "community-based planning".) So the cost of complaining is quite small, but the rewards can be quite large.
I was born in Detroit and I follow the city pretty closely. The mayor there recruited a city planner, Maurice Cox, who has been getting all sorts of favorable press.
The broken down state of the city's neighborhoods offers a unique opportunity to redesign them. Things like creating a walking path between two small colleges and creating biking paths from old rail lines. Cox wants to enable each neighborhood to have basic services within a twenty minute walk.
I've had this idle thought of what a game-theoretic solution to the NIMBY dynamic would involve: Some kind of investment vehicle offered to a community as part of a development plan, perhaps? Surely someone has thought of this before. The incentives for residents to cooperate need to be really good, else they'll fall back on a conservative outlook. Especially so as you start looking towards residents towards the old/disabled/sick end of the spectrum, who may be physically burdened by the impact of new construction.
I can say that as it is, the process of development is more like consumer marketing: schedule lots of meetings and interviews that sell people on the idea of accepting development rather than giving them a stake in its success. It encourages confrontational deadlock, a buildup of pressure followed by earthquakes of change, as the developers and government gradually start colluding to strongarm residents when they refuse to budge.
Well, generally the game-theoretic proposals are for some kind of direct compensation for impacts - developers pay the residents directly for new impositions like shadows or traffic. But this really throws the whole notion of "master planning" and "expert opinion" out the window (as it's now a transactional system) which is why people who think of themselves as expert city planners do not like it.
> My two cents: this incident illustrates the biggest obstacle to progressive urban policies: upper-middle class NIMBYs politics inform city planners, which ultimately results in policies that favor NIMBYs.
Ultimately its council that approves/disapproves development, so I think while you're right here that NIMBYs are dominant at the community consultation level, and can impact design choices here, ultimately this is a political problem caused by the fact that established land owners show up to vote and other people don't.
It's hard to speak to your 82m tower without more details, but there is a lot that goes into these design decisions. You're right that NIMBYism and politics is involved, but there are plenty of other of reasons why a tower of that scale may not be appropriate for that location. I think it's too simplistic to say that we need more residences, so let's max out the density on every opportunity we see. I'm a bit critical of this in fact, because an outcome from this approach is that rich, low density single family neighbourhoods are completely untouched by any development at all, while poorer, slightly higher density areas are constantly razed and gentrified. Inclusive zoning can mitigate some of the harms here, but ultimately this is clearly an inequitable design approach.
My one other thought is that with platforms like twitter urban planners are no longer faceless bureaucrats, so we can listen to them and try to understand what they're up to and what they're trying to accomplish in our cities. Toronto's chief planner is on twitter at https://twitter.com/jen_keesmaat
I work in Sydney Australia where we are over this hurdle. Key i think is making it a city wide conversation (where is the best place for new housing and how fast is the city growing. Its not just about the existing local residents but the wider community too), showing good examples where towers are part of a nice environment (not just 1960s public housing estates. Vancouver is a good city example who has adopted towers well) and demonstating the effect of not just 1 development but if all of ita neighbours developed similarly the city would still function.
Of course towers also open up a range of other issues like open space provision, sunlight, separation, street wall heights and setbacks, contributions to improving streets, parks, schools etc. To really be successful it needs an organised planninng approach for each centre
> We once proposed a 82m tower within a 100m of a subway station in midtown Toronto. The most senior planner at the meeting exploded at us - "Why is there a tower there!?"
I thought the trick to getting an 82m tower built in Toronto was to propose a 182m tower...
I'm not a transit user, but I thought the YUS (North/South) subway lines were (soon to be?) past their saturation point during rush hours.
I agree, could not watch it past 3 mins - too many editing gimmicks, looks like edutainment nonsense with many fluffy short statements and low actual information density. This video editing talent is wasted for such a topic, would be better used in a music video. Also the author really must hate music.
I have to admit this line of thinking never really resonated with me, and it resonates even less as I get older. My goal in life is not to have minimum impact on my environment, and yes, that includes nature.
I think the nuance of the middle gets lost in these conversations. The right tends to think humans should have dominion over all (while ignoring the fact that we haven't "conquered" nature, and we have ample evidence of the carnage we cause when we think we have), and the left seems to take an Agent Smith view that we're a plague upon the planet and need to be contained, quarantined, and engineered until we no longer impact anything (while ignoring the fact that this flatly isn't possible, or even desirable).
So no, I do not believe that "we do damage to nature", because besides it being a nonsense statement, even the kernel of truth in it is wrong-headed in my opinion.
- Ecological fortitude as you say. Good for food but cleaning up our other messes which can harm us.
- Biodiversity helps us understand life better by providing exceptions to dogmas
- Biodiversity is the crowning achievement of this earth and would take along time to recover. We can colonize other planets more easily than we can replicate our biodiversity on them.
There are more humans right now than there ever was ever before. The biosphere that supports us is already being strained by all our activities. The simple fact is that humans by default do impact our environment very strongly and negatively, especially for all the other species that we share it with. And that is why we need to be careful about minimizing our impact, not eliminating it altogether.
>So no, I do not believe that "we do damage to nature", because besides it being a nonsense statement, even the kernel of truth in it is wrong-headed in my opinion.
It is the general consensus of the scientific community that we do. How is it a nonsense statement?
And since there doesn't seem to be any other form of consciousness other than humans around, I'm going to say that the nature is here for us. Extereme right view is obviously stupid because we need a stable environment to survive. Extreme left view is equally stupid, because it's self-destructive. We're the only part of nature that can care; the rest of it doesn't care, it simply is.
So my goal, and my POV on the goals for society, is to be a responsible gardener. To exploit nature in order to safeguard our survival and comfort of this planet, realizations of our dreams and desires. And that involves a lot of pro-environmental efforts, because our natural environment is pretty helpful and damn useful if we don't go around and indiscriminately destroy it.
> For a rich white dude up in a 50th floor penthouse, “the future of cities” might mean zipping around in a flying car while a robot jerks you off and a drone delivers your pizza.
The guy must think people of color are incapable of attaining that level of wealth.
Well, if you want to go there, it's also sexism. He said "dude". Does that mean he thinks women are also incapable of attaining that level of wealth?
I think he simply wanted to rely on a common stereotype to refer to ultra-wealthy people who live completely different lives and are generally out of touch with reality.
Well, had the author said "black gal", half of the Internet would be on Twitter with pitchforks right now. I do believe that people breaking symmetry inherent in racism and sexism are creating a problem in the society. For any statement containing $race and $gender, it's either racist/sexist or it's not, regardless of the actual values of $race and $gender.
> I think he simply wanted to rely on a common stereotype to refer to ultra-wealthy people who live completely different lives and are generally out of touch with reality.
Well, yeah. Can you name any other race-gender combination aside from "white male" where negative stereotypes are tossed around as casually as this, by people who purport to be enlightened and fair-minded?
By that token is it also sexist because he said "dude"? Where do you draw the line?
Seriously, not every mention of race is racist. Saying this is racism cheapens the whole idea of racism and hurts whatever it is you believe you're fighting for by "calling it out". You're effectively putting a guy who mentioned someone's (hypothetical, as it's not even in reference to a real person) skin color in the same category as people who burn crosses, or deny people of color job opportunities based solely on race, or lynch children.
To put it in terms appropriate for HN you're adding an extremely small outlier to the data set of "racists" and thus bringing down the entire average.
That's a stereotype, not racism. It could be a cliche stereotype (rich white dude), which is itself a bit racist and sexist. But at the base level it's a stereotype, not racism.
>That's a stereotype, not racism. It could be a cliche stereotype (rich white dude), which is itself a bit racist and sexist. But at the base level it's a stereotype, not racism.
Would you consider the cliche stereotype "black woman on welfare" to be racist?
See, I'm a "white dude" yet I don't find this statement racist in the slightest. It's an objective truth that white males are disproportionately wealthier than any other demographic. It's just like saying Baby Boomers are the wealthiest generation at the expense of GenX and Millenials: fact.
The author never said nor implied that white males are the only rich people in society. Whether or not money inherently makes you out of touch with the rest of society, though, I'll leave for another day...
> See, I'm a "white dude" yet I don't find this statement racist in the slightest.
As a white dude, would you have thought it racist if that line had been modified to read:
"For a Hip-Hop mogul wearing a half-pound of gold chains around his neck, and $400 basketball shoes on his feet, 'the future of cities' might mean zipping around in a flying car while a robot jerks you off and a drone delivers your bottles of Cristal."
I would call your description a stereotype, excluding the flying car and robot, but I'm sure there are also white, hip hop dudes that fit there as well.
The only thing making me hesitant to give a simple yes/no answer is the implication of tieing my example to a "hip-hop mogul wearing a half-pount of gold chains around his neck and $400 basketball shoes on his feet" - are you trying to imply these people are systematically black? And if so, are you trying to imply that most rich black men dress like this?
If you are (which I don't think you are), I think you can answer your own question.
If not, then I don't think the comparison stands: you're implying a wealthy individual ("a Hip-Hop mogul") is representative of a whole race when his circumstances are (for lack of better wording) merely an exception to the rule, whereas "rich white men" is, objectively, a non-misleading statement, as white men are statistically the wealthiest demographic.
Of course, I could have read to deep into your question entirely - I'm not an expert in this field. Thank you for the thought provoking discussion regardless, though.
thebradbain, I asked you a fairly simple question about a fairly simple hypothetical. Would those words, in your opinion, be evidence of racist sentiment?
Great concept, but no mention of winter, or poor weather. Would be difficult to grocery shop or go far distances in snow or rain. Cities would have to be as compact as possible for public transport to reach everywhere, and that would be difficult to achieve in already existing cities with a lot of legacy infrastructure.
I guess you missed the part where he talks about Copenhagen and how people bike extensively there despite the fact it certainly doesn't have what anyone would call nice weather.
62 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadOtherwise, this topic is likely what I want to focus my career in at some point, understanding how to improve the ways cities run, given how they are more and more the drivers of not only the economy, but a lot of the culture and thinking generated in the world. (As someone who grew up in global cities such as Singapore, Paris, etc., I always felt that these cities had more in common with each other than with other cities in the countries they are in.)
I'm making my way through Jane Jacob's Life and Death of American Cities right now, and it has definitely changed a lot of my thinkings of how cities should be designed (more mixed-used, parks are not necessarily ideal, etc).
I wonder how a company could be created to tackle the issues cities are facing these days, working with local governments (or without if need be).
London, meanwhile, had never really been planned at all, and even well-intentioned planning often ended up straddling the line between disaster and farce.
If you want to laugh a lot and learn about ways that London has been "developed" over the years, check out this guy's videos:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yUEHWhO_HdY
An example from my hometown of Ithaca NY: this tiny valley was never built with cars in mind, and because there is a lake to the north and steep hills in every other direction, there are only about 6 ways in and out of Ithaca. Usually this isn't a problem but certain times of day the traffic comes to a complete stop as there is no physical way to relieve the congestion. If major charges to roadways were made, it could fix some of the congestion issues, but since nearly all travel through Ithaca revolves around The Commons (literally: one-way streets move traffic counterclockwise around the popular pedestrian mall), it could have a devastating effect on local businesses.
I am convinced that no single entity is capable of creating and executing a plan that improves an urban area in any more than a limited portion without significant and unforeseen consequences.
Speaking of slums: the original plans for public housing projects in big cities like New York failed to account for the lack of maintenance or the effects of drugs being sold or used on the premises, which matters a lot because one prolific drug dealer can drastically reduce quality of life for everybody in the building, especially if they are smart or small-time enough to avoid police interference, thus allowing dealers to become de facto authorities in the projects. That is an example of a planned (but unexpected) slum.
/s Actually the solution could come from another EM company in the form of self-driving cars, as it would alleviate congestion just enough for it to stop being a problem anymore. The traffic issue really only focuses on certain chokepoints in and out of the city.
You know the deal: everybody stopped at a series of red lights. Light at the front goes green, first car moves, second car behind it has space to move, and so on. If all the cars were able to start and stop in unison based on the state of the traffic lights then the congestion problems in Ithaca would disappear overnight. We aren't big enough to need (or be able to afford) massive infrastructure projects, and as I alluded to earlier, it probably wouldn't be worth the unforeseen consequences. Not to mention the downtown retailers are still reeling from the Commons reconstruction, which put way too many of my favorite stores out of business.
You'll fail using that approach. The NIMBYs don't make their decisions based on data. They make their opinions based on emotion. If you want to change their minds you need to appeal to their emotions. Run commercials in the NIMBY neighborhood that show poor, disadvantaged low income families who would get to live there if the tower went up. Make them feel ashamed for opposing towers and they'll stop opposing them.
edit: Yes, this is a bad example, but the point remains. You must hit them in the feels.
Note that this is equally true of both sides. "YIMBYs" are just as guilty of this.
But of course, you can see how the incentives run. If somebody likes their neighbourhood the way it is, and doesn't want change, then if they don't complain about new developments to councillors and planners, they gain nothing. But if they do complain, then there's a chance they can get developments stopped. (Thanks, "community-based planning".) So the cost of complaining is quite small, but the rewards can be quite large.
The broken down state of the city's neighborhoods offers a unique opportunity to redesign them. Things like creating a walking path between two small colleges and creating biking paths from old rail lines. Cox wants to enable each neighborhood to have basic services within a twenty minute walk.
http://www.freep.com/story/money/business/columnists/2016/12...
I can say that as it is, the process of development is more like consumer marketing: schedule lots of meetings and interviews that sell people on the idea of accepting development rather than giving them a stake in its success. It encourages confrontational deadlock, a buildup of pressure followed by earthquakes of change, as the developers and government gradually start colluding to strongarm residents when they refuse to budge.
Ultimately its council that approves/disapproves development, so I think while you're right here that NIMBYs are dominant at the community consultation level, and can impact design choices here, ultimately this is a political problem caused by the fact that established land owners show up to vote and other people don't.
It's hard to speak to your 82m tower without more details, but there is a lot that goes into these design decisions. You're right that NIMBYism and politics is involved, but there are plenty of other of reasons why a tower of that scale may not be appropriate for that location. I think it's too simplistic to say that we need more residences, so let's max out the density on every opportunity we see. I'm a bit critical of this in fact, because an outcome from this approach is that rich, low density single family neighbourhoods are completely untouched by any development at all, while poorer, slightly higher density areas are constantly razed and gentrified. Inclusive zoning can mitigate some of the harms here, but ultimately this is clearly an inequitable design approach.
My one other thought is that with platforms like twitter urban planners are no longer faceless bureaucrats, so we can listen to them and try to understand what they're up to and what they're trying to accomplish in our cities. Toronto's chief planner is on twitter at https://twitter.com/jen_keesmaat
Of course towers also open up a range of other issues like open space provision, sunlight, separation, street wall heights and setbacks, contributions to improving streets, parks, schools etc. To really be successful it needs an organised planninng approach for each centre
Throwing hotel, casino and residential towers on public land isn't about serving the wider community.
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/barangaroo-is-more-insult-than...
Im also not saying density is always done well here, just that it is done and fundamentally thats the right thing to do
I thought the trick to getting an 82m tower built in Toronto was to propose a 182m tower...
I'm not a transit user, but I thought the YUS (North/South) subway lines were (soon to be?) past their saturation point during rush hours.
I think the nuance of the middle gets lost in these conversations. The right tends to think humans should have dominion over all (while ignoring the fact that we haven't "conquered" nature, and we have ample evidence of the carnage we cause when we think we have), and the left seems to take an Agent Smith view that we're a plague upon the planet and need to be contained, quarantined, and engineered until we no longer impact anything (while ignoring the fact that this flatly isn't possible, or even desirable).
So no, I do not believe that "we do damage to nature", because besides it being a nonsense statement, even the kernel of truth in it is wrong-headed in my opinion.
- because it's cool and fun to have all those cute plants and animals around
- because biodiversity reduces the chance of sudden ecological collapse that would leave us without food
- Biodiversity helps us understand life better by providing exceptions to dogmas
- Biodiversity is the crowning achievement of this earth and would take along time to recover. We can colonize other planets more easily than we can replicate our biodiversity on them.
>So no, I do not believe that "we do damage to nature", because besides it being a nonsense statement, even the kernel of truth in it is wrong-headed in my opinion.
It is the general consensus of the scientific community that we do. How is it a nonsense statement?
And since there doesn't seem to be any other form of consciousness other than humans around, I'm going to say that the nature is here for us. Extereme right view is obviously stupid because we need a stable environment to survive. Extreme left view is equally stupid, because it's self-destructive. We're the only part of nature that can care; the rest of it doesn't care, it simply is.
So my goal, and my POV on the goals for society, is to be a responsible gardener. To exploit nature in order to safeguard our survival and comfort of this planet, realizations of our dreams and desires. And that involves a lot of pro-environmental efforts, because our natural environment is pretty helpful and damn useful if we don't go around and indiscriminately destroy it.
The guy must think people of color are incapable of attaining that level of wealth.
Unintentional racism, but racism all the same.
I think he simply wanted to rely on a common stereotype to refer to ultra-wealthy people who live completely different lives and are generally out of touch with reality.
Well, yeah. Can you name any other race-gender combination aside from "white male" where negative stereotypes are tossed around as casually as this, by people who purport to be enlightened and fair-minded?
Seriously, not every mention of race is racist. Saying this is racism cheapens the whole idea of racism and hurts whatever it is you believe you're fighting for by "calling it out". You're effectively putting a guy who mentioned someone's (hypothetical, as it's not even in reference to a real person) skin color in the same category as people who burn crosses, or deny people of color job opportunities based solely on race, or lynch children.
To put it in terms appropriate for HN you're adding an extremely small outlier to the data set of "racists" and thus bringing down the entire average.
Would you consider the cliche stereotype "black woman on welfare" to be racist?
The author never said nor implied that white males are the only rich people in society. Whether or not money inherently makes you out of touch with the rest of society, though, I'll leave for another day...
As a white dude, would you have thought it racist if that line had been modified to read:
"For a Hip-Hop mogul wearing a half-pound of gold chains around his neck, and $400 basketball shoes on his feet, 'the future of cities' might mean zipping around in a flying car while a robot jerks you off and a drone delivers your bottles of Cristal."
Seriously, would you deem that racist or not?
If you are (which I don't think you are), I think you can answer your own question.
If not, then I don't think the comparison stands: you're implying a wealthy individual ("a Hip-Hop mogul") is representative of a whole race when his circumstances are (for lack of better wording) merely an exception to the rule, whereas "rich white men" is, objectively, a non-misleading statement, as white men are statistically the wealthiest demographic.
Of course, I could have read to deep into your question entirely - I'm not an expert in this field. Thank you for the thought provoking discussion regardless, though.
There is insufficient evidence to support that claim.
Wait, did I miss when Detroit had toxic water now too?