126 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
  2. Jan 2024
  3. Dec 2023
    1. Indeed, fortunately, digital technology has also changed material consumption and production. 2008, the global financial crisis which created mass youth unemployment in many different countries and urban areas, saw the emergence and then exponential growth, of what is called the ‘urban commons’.
      • for: urban commons - history
  4. Nov 2023
    1. Globally, 70% of today’s urban growth (PDF) occurs outside the formal planning process.
      • for: interesting fact - urban growth and slums, quote - urban growth and slums

      • interesting fact: urban growth and slums

      • quote: urban growth and slums

        • globally, 70% of today's urban growth occurs outside the formal planning process
      • comment

        • this is definitely a unique urban planning problem of large metros, especially in the Global South
      • for: regenerative cities, living cities, urban permaculture, Pocket hoods, relocalization, Mark Lakeman, Portland villages, people-oriented city-villages, city-village, pocket neighborhood, communititecture, urban planning, urban planning - city villages

      • summary

        • Mark gives a tour of his work at his company, Communittecture in applying permaculture principles to redesign communities in urban environments.
        • The central focus is designing based on commons principles of actually creating lived environments where healthy socialization is a primary design objective.
        • The design involves creating common areas that residents can share, from common food gardens to many mini-parks and recreation areas where families can gather.
        • The modern community has alienated socialization, creating groups of juxtapositioned strangers. There are two different design categories:
          • retrofitting existing neighborhoods
          • designing greenfield new neighborhoods
      • reference

      • for: future cities - Africa, CommuniTgrow, urban planning - Africa, African cities, futures - African cities, 2 Billion Strong, Gita Govin, Richard Rubin, Alistair Rendall

      • title:

        • 2 Billion Strong
          • A Regenerative Solution to Building Sustainable African Cities
      • author
        • Gita Govin
        • Richard Rubin
        • Alistair Rendall
      • date: 2012
      • summary
        • This book outlines the vision from sustainable architectural firm CommuniTGrow for a template for a future sustainable African city. The first project launching in 2024 is the Milkwood Development in Cape Town:
  5. Oct 2023
    1. these villages are so old, they are  working on the old patterns. And the old pattern,   which is the pattern that I am promoting, is  that land management is based on the watershed
      • for: redistrict cities - based on watersheds, watershed - urban permaculture, urban climate action, climate action - urban scale

      • summary

  6. Sep 2023
  7. Aug 2023
    1. the Auto industry built for us and what's most Insidious is the financials behind all of this
      • for: adjacency - urban decay, suburbs, history- suburbs, history - car culture, urban decay - economics
      • paraphrase

        • as the suburbs expanded they need more and more roads highways Bridges infrastructure to stay afloat
        • but because the nature of the suburb is spread out single-family housing as opposed to the densely packed City Apartment dwelling the suburbs have too few people to be able to fund this infrastructure
        • subsequently, they so they have to keep expanding in order to fund themselves and even then they still can't fund themselves
        • so they often rely on tax dollars from City dwellers to subsidize their Suburban excesses
        • who lives in the cities because of white flight ?... people of color
        • when it comes to housing, people of color have been screwed over in literally every way in imaginable

        • so we have this self-perpetuating cycle

          • the growth of suburbs leads to more suburban sprawl
          • this increases the need for cars
          • this leads to the building of more highways and Roads
          • this leads to not enough income to pay for the suburbs
          • this leads to black and brown communities being forced to subsidize Suburban Lifestyles at the expense of the beautification of their own communities leading to the degradation of inner city neighborhoods
    1. we hope that in the future you want 00:16:18 to be a part of the decentralized city that we're building that we're already starting to expand the nodes all over the world and we think there will be thousands more of them that start to form these decentralized uh almost 00:16:30 city-states
      • for: regenerative cities, sustainable cities, doughnut cities, earth system boundaries, urban planetary boundaries, circular cities
      • comment
        • if they are envisioning a lot of cities, they need to carefully think about earth system boundaries for each city, otherwise, they will simply be adding to the problem of cascading tipping points.
        • They also have to be designed to be climate resilient as extreme weather will make any human settlement of the future very challenging
  8. Jul 2023
    1. In der Liberation bezweifelt der Architekt Albert Levi, dass der Plan der Stadt Paris für die Klimaanpassung ausreichend sein wird, um eine unerträgliche Erhitzung und insbesondere die Bildung von Urbanen Hitze-Inseln zu verhindern. Geplant sind 60 Hektar zusätzlicher grünräume, die Entsiegelung von 30 bis 65% aller Parzellen, ein Verbot von Hochhäusern und des Fans von Bäumen. Levi kritisiert, dass die Verdichtungspolitik der vergangenen Jahre nicht gestoppt wird und eine Intensivierung des Tourismus geplant ist. Der Artikel verweist auf wichtige Dokumente zur Vorbereitung der Klimaanpassung in Paris. https://www.liberation.fr/idees-et-debats/tribunes/paris-face-au-rechauffement-climatique-mauvais-plan-20230630_FEFN6PDVJJCXJK2NYAFIE2YZFU/

  9. Jun 2023
    1. Längerer Artikel über die Funktion von Bäumen in Städten und über die Schwierigkeiten, dort mehr Bäume zu pflanzen. Detaillierte Informationen zum Programm der rot-grünen Pariser Stadtregierung. Interessant ist auch ein portugiesischer Versuch, die Services von Bäumen finanziell zu bewerten, wobei eine solche Bewertung immer problematisch bleibt, weil sich nicht finanziell messen lässt, was Bäume zu einem Ökosystem beitragen.

    1. Henry Grabar schillert in einem neuen Buch ausführlich die Folgen des parkens für amerikanische Städte. In den USA wird mehr Fläche für das Parken als für das wohnen verwendet. Allein um Houston in Texas herum wurde in den letzten Jahrzehnten eine Fläche, die dem Land Belgien entspricht, versiegelt. Die verkehrsemissionen sind der größte Teil des enormen amerikanischen treibhausgasausstoßes. Das Buch behandelt gründlich alle Aspekte des Themas und stellt Alternativen vor.https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/26/paved-paradise-book-americans-cars-climate-crisis

    1. Vergaberecht, Langsamkeit der Verwaltung und Unterfinanzierung des öffentlichen Verkehrs sind haupthindernisse bei der Umstellung einer Stadt wie Wuppertal auf klimaneutralität. Interview mit dem grünen Wuppertaler Oberbürgermeister Schneidewind, der zuvor das Wuppertal-institut geleitet hat. https://taz.de/Gruene-Politiker-ueber-Wandel-der-Stadt/!5938576/

  10. May 2023
  11. Jan 2023
  12. Sep 2022
    1. It is a region marked by historicallylow wages paid to farm laborers and their families.

      It would seem that most of the large swaths of rural poverty in America are those with historical roots of slavery, colonization, and exploitation. These include: the Deep South and Mississippi Delta region where slavery, share cropping, and cotton plantations abounded; Appalachia (esp. West Virginia and Kentucky) where the coal mining industry disappeared; Texas-Mexico border where the Latinx populations have long been exploited; the Southwest and Northern Plains (including Alaska) with Native Americans who live on reservations after having been exploited, dealt with broken treaties and general decimation of their people and communities; central corridor of California with high numbers of exploited immigrant farm laborers.

  13. Aug 2022
  14. Jun 2022
    1. here are concerns as to the extent to which smart city practices in regeneration programmes, such as Living Labs and hackathons, might

      ... act rather as a magnet for the in-flow and retention of ‘creative classes’ and as gateways for gentrification."

      I agree. There needs to be a focus on pursuing smart city initiatives with the help of local talent and in harmony with the existing community rather than bringing in outside actors, who run the risk of trying to effect change without a thorough understanding of the city as it stands.

    1. This isn't fantasy, anymore; it really happening. The floating city has six integrated systems: #zerowaste and #circularsystems, closed-loop water systems, food, net-zero energy, innovative #mobility, and coastal habitat regeneration. These interconnected systems will generate 100 percent of the required operational energy on-site through floating and rooftop #photovoltaicpanels.

  15. Apr 2022
    1. Humans’ tendency to“overimitate”—to reproduce even the gratuitous elements of another’s behavior—may operate on a copy now, understand later basis. After all, there might begood reasons for such steps that the novice does not yet grasp, especially sinceso many human tools and practices are “cognitively opaque”: not self-explanatory on their face. Even if there doesn’t turn out to be a functionalrationale for the actions taken, imitating the customs of one’s culture is a smartmove for a highly social species like our own.

      Is this responsible for some of the "group think" seen in the Republican party and the political right? Imitation of bad or counter-intuitive actions outweights scientifically proven better actions? Examples: anti-vaxxers and coronavirus no-masker behaviors? (Some of this may also be about or even entangled with George Lakoff's (?) tribal identity theories relating to "people like me".

      Explore this area more deeply.

      Another contributing factor for this effect may be the small-town effect as most Republican party members are in the countryside (as opposed to the larger cities which tend to be more Democratic). City dwellers are more likely to be more insular in their interpersonal relations whereas country dwellers may have more social ties to other people and groups and therefor make them more tribal in their social interrelationships. Can I find data to back up this claim?

      How does link to the thesis put forward by Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous? Does Henrich have data about city dwellers to back up my claim above?

      What does this tension have to do with the increasing (and potentially evolutionary) propensity of humans to live in ever-increasingly larger and more dense cities versus maintaining their smaller historic numbers prior to the pre-agricultural timeperiod?

      What are the biological effects on human evolution as a result of these cultural pressures? Certainly our cultural evolution is effecting our biological evolution?

      What about the effects of communication media on our cultural and biological evolution? Memes, orality versus literacy, film, radio, television, etc.? Can we tease out these effects within the socio-politico-cultural sphere on the greater span of humanity? Can we find breaks, signs, or symptoms at the border of mass agriculture?


      total aside, though related to evolution: link hypercycles to evolution spirals?

  16. Mar 2022
  17. Feb 2022
  18. Jan 2022
  19. Nov 2021
    1. Sustainability window analysis is based on the advanced sustainability analysis (ASA) approach. The ASA approach was developed in Finland Futures Research Centre [31,32,33] providing a general framework for analyzing sustainability.

      Include this in a comparative analysis of other methodologies such as Hoornweg, Hachaichi, R3.0 Thresholds and Allocations, etc.

    1. Schools in disadvantaged, rural ordeprived areas are especially likely to lack the appropriate digital capacity andinfrastructure required to deliver teaching remotely. Significant differences in the provisionof online teaching and learning resources may also exist between private and publicschools.

      Schools in disadvantaged, rural or deprived areas are especially likely to lack the appropriate digital capacity and infrastructure required to deliver teaching remotely. Significant differences in the provision of online teaching and learning resources may also exist between private and public schools.

  20. Sep 2021
  21. Jun 2021
  22. quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com
    1. I worry about this often myself. We have bobcats, coyotes, and bears frequently in our neighborhood. Good to hear everyone came out alright.

  23. May 2021
  24. Mar 2021
  25. Feb 2021
  26. Jan 2021
    1. Over the last decade, degrowth has offered a concrete alternative to eco-modernization, projecting a society emancipated from the environmentally destructive imperative of competition and consumption. Urban development is the motor of economic growth; cities are therefore prime sites of intervention for degrowth activists. Nevertheless, the planning processes that drive urban development have yet to be questioned from a degrowth perspective.
    1. The Vertical Field setup retains many of the advantages of hydroponic vertical farms, but instead of the plants growing in a nutrient-packed liquid medium, the container-based pods treat their crops to real soil, supplemented by a proprietary mix of minerals and nutrients. The company says that it opted for geoponic production "because we found that it has far richer flavor, color, and quality."

      A richer and tastier alternative to hydroponics

  27. Oct 2020
    1. el Distrito tiene identificadas 432 huertas urbanas en la ciudad, que en patios, terrazas, jardines, balcones y el espacio público han tenido cabida, tras procesos comunitarios, y se han fortalecido a tal punto que su producción es comercializable.
    1. But it also encouraged masters to allow their slaves to live out, hire their own time, and thereby gain a measure of independence and freedom.

      Northern slaves had better chances of having a better life than what southern slaves did.

    2. Where the provisioning trade predominated, black men worked as stock minders and herdsmen while black women labored as dairy maids as well as do- mestics of various kinds.

      Slaves in the North were living in better life than the Southern slaves.

  28. Sep 2020
    1. alternative activities creatively solicit, collect, and even rank ideas without any assumption that community members should agree. By displaying the full range of ideas, they also put more pressure on public officials to transparently explain why they pursued a certain path without resorting to the kind of “community” talk I observed in Upham’s Corner and Mattapan.

      We did this when discussing the AM bus lane for Mass Ave in Arlington - there was an in-person presentation and people put sticky notes on a giant copy of the plan to note particular concerns. There was an online version after that meeting as well, where those who couldn't go to the meeting could submit further feedback.

    2. What if instead of public meetings—constrained by both time and space, where the optimal outcome is consensus and therefore “no” has more power than “yes”—we invested more in low cost, ongoing exercises that produce a high volume of information, persist even after particular projects are completed, make priorities transparent, and neither seek nor assume a singular position from “the community”?

      I remember Chris Schmidt making a comment about how the online meetings for the Cambridge City Council suddenly had much higher attendance when the pandemic kicked in. But of course that means the meetings themselves got even longer.

    3. In Upham’s Corner, the community wanted a park, didn’t want a park, wanted affordable housing, didn’t want affordable housing, and on and on—there was no single community position to juxtapose against the City or a potential developer. Similar scenarios are easy to imagine; in any neighborhood, opinions will vary. The Mattapan case is complicated for additional reasons. The community simultaneously “won” and “lost”: Middle-class residents were unable to block the new station, while low-income residents gained greater access to public transit. Supporting the community did not necessarily mean supporting poor urban residents.

      Conflicting needs, and the best we can do is "nobody is satiisfied, even if they got what they wanted, because it took so long to do anything about."

    4. It’s Time to Move On From Community Consensus Public meetings often disprove the notion that communities have a unified stance on any issue. With this in mind, we must move past trying to find consensus and focus on uplifting the most marginalized voices.

      Provocative summary. How does anyone determine the most marginalized voices in a given situation without turning it into competitive Oppression Olympics?

      Two informative case studies from Boston.

    1. make on-street parking expensive (to reflect its real costs) and to make transit cheap or free. The way we price transit, and don’t price private car storage in the public realm, is evidence of “Asphalt Socialism“–subsidies for cars and driving, and high prices and penalties for those who take transit.

      Socialism for the oligarchs, the pointy end of capitalism for everyone else.

    2. the only places where transit really works well in the United States are in the areas where cities charge for parking.  When street parking is free, people own cars and drive, depriving transit systems of customers and revenue, and skewing the transit ridership to the dispossessed and powerless.

      Though NYC has probably the most comprehensive transit capabilities in the US, and it somehow fails to charge for parking permits. Surprisingly, SF appears to be the "big winner" here, $12/month for a parking permit and $81/month for a Muni pass. (However, in these pandemic times, I wonder how much buying monthly passes has decreased. And for a compact city, so much SF stuff still assumes you have a car.)

      Also of note: huge swaths of SF are SFH yet still have (one-car) garages so you don't have to park your (first) car on the street. Compare how many cars per household in SF, in the Bay Area, and contrast with NYC.

    3. on most streets, in most cities — including, bizarrely New York City — street parking is completely unpriced almost everywhere.  In effect, the prices shown for parking in Goodman’s sample overstate what city’s actually charge for parking: it’s mostly zero.

      $70 for a monthly transit pass vs. $2.25 for a monthly parking permit. I wonder what the price for a monthly parking permit averages out to among the cities that DO charge.

  29. Aug 2020
    1. Dave, D. M., Friedson, A. I., Matsuzawa, K., Sabia, J. J., & Safford, S. (2020). Were Urban Cowboys Enough to Control COVID-19? Local Shelter-in-Place Orders and Coronavirus Case Growth (Working Paper No. 27229; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27229

  30. Jul 2020
  31. Jun 2020
  32. May 2020
  33. Apr 2020
    1. We are a strategic discovery, design and development lab working to transition society in response to technological revolution and climate breakdown.

      Seem interesting and progressive. Very elegant website etc 😉

  34. Jan 2020
  35. Mar 2019
    1. According to the analysis, urban areas were found to be relatively cooler than the surrounding non-urban areas during heat waves. At 44.5°C, the non-urban areas were warmer than urban areas (43.7°C). However, during the night, all urban areas were hotter than the surrounding non-urban areas.

      Urban heat island effect

  36. Dec 2018
  37. Sep 2018
    1. Abstractijur_891 957..973Informal housing and industrial developments in the so-called urban villages have beenkey features of the recent Chinese urbanization. In this article we will examine thedevelopment of urban villages in one of the most dynamic Chinese cities — Shenzhen.The article first reviews the urbanization and migration process in the region and theemergence of urban villages. It then examines informal housing, commercial andindustrial developments in these villages. We analyse the politics of village urbanizationand highlight the important relationship between migration and informal villagedevelopment. We emphasize the contribution made by urban villages in providingaffordable housing and jobs for the low-income population during the rapidurbanization and urge cautious consideration with regard to hasty and large-scaleredevelopment of these villages. We conclude that the development of urban villages isa very important part of the urbanization process.
  38. Aug 2018
  39. Oct 2016
    1. London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

      I find this reference to the London bridge interesting here. The last time it was mentioned in the poem was the end of the first book. This seems to bring the poem full circle by having the first and last book end with a similar mention while also referencing death

  40. Nov 2015
    1. ascending an escalator in a department store was moving in a space entirely captured and formedby industrialism

      If it weren't for industrialism they would just be there in that space without the ability that these developments have given them. Holiday gift shopping would be such a different experience in downtown Chicago if elevators didn't exist.. I honestly think people would spend less because they wouldn't want to climb the stairs to additional stores to "just see what's in there".

  41. Oct 2015
    1. The democratization of that right, and the construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will is imperative if the dispossessed are to take back the control which they have for so long been denied, and if they are to institute new modes of urbanization.

      Is this just becoming more of a competition between who ends up with control? I thought we were working towards beneficial social and urban reform here..

    2. The urban crisis that is affecting millions would then be prioritized over the needs of big investors and financiers.

      Would the affected "millions" have the power/force to go up against these "big investors and financiers" though?

    3. including a dif-ferent kind of urban experience.

      what kind of different "urban experience" could we expect?