combining my knowledge of urban planning with the hours of video essays on horror i’ve consumed to come to the conclusion that the real monster is car culture
ok so let me explain. an oft repeated saying in urban planning circles is that cars are the dominant species on the planet. this is based on a 1960s cartoon that satirizes the north american obsession with cars, how much space we devote to them, and how we design our entire cities and lives around them. in jacob geller’s video on the architecture of alienation he talks about the fear created when a space we expect to be built and designed for us subverts those expectations and becomes hostile or incomprehensible. to many people who can’t access vehicles or proper documentation to be able to drive this is exactly what the car-centric city becomes. it is a place that should be designed for people but is not and is hostile towards those who are unable to drive, think about suburbs with no sidewalks or urban food deserts with no grocery stores within walking distance. not to mention the danger imposed by cars themselves, especially when car manufacturers are locked in an arms race to make the biggest, bulkiest vehicle in the name of supposed safety for the driver with very little regard for pedestrians and cyclists. altogether, a car centric city is a horror unto itself.
I’ve written about housing problems, solutions, and the need to address the sprawling issue that is affecting North America under many ways. We know there’s a crisis affecting millions of people which are pushing for a way of life which is not fully compatible with the environment.
Tiny homes have been on the feed of many social platforms for the past ten years displaying how cool they are, how cheap they can be made for people to purchase with their minimal requirements.
After a lengthy look through the years of this trend in small homes, we can say that without any effort it’s financially logical to dive into an investment of such dimension: on the wheel, cozy, made of natural elements, cheap, and so on.
I find myself arguing against this type of living for the simple reason that it represents the most essential condensation of individualism. They are no different than renting a single room in a house, except your isolation increases because you have the ability to pull it wherever you like it if you opted for the wheel option.
Some have different shapes, some look like the Sandcrawler from Star Wars.
Tiny homes are here to represent an extreme side of housing solution, yet they claim to resolve the many issues of urban sprawling. Their volume of less than 500 sg/ft -on wheel sometimes- is now a trend among architecture and design platforms, but they represent a phenomena of hyped iconoclastic reality juxtaposing against any other viable solution.
Why do we drift from gargantuan McMansion volumes to micro living spaces?- One of the reason is the hype of existentialism in reducing everything to the bone which has been affecting modern society today. It comes as an almost natural response to the exaggeration. The other bit is the will of people to remove themselves from the consumerism trap of their previous generation: millennials don’t want to repeat their parents mistakes and don’t want to end up living in the suburbs.
Some of these homes have great interiors and for a moment you forget they are the size of a shoe box. So fare this is not the solution to a housing crisis which tends to sprawl and consume so much capital and resources. Tiny homes are a trend and like all trends they tend to stay for a while and then fly away until the next one comes.
It’s a confining space that dehumanizes the persona and removes any sense of hospitality. Reducing the living space to a fancy VR or trailer might sound cool, but it’s far from being a home, it removes the very definition of human space becoming a display of self indulgence under the pretense of environmental caring.
Perhaps the real issue here is the lack of compromise between the 5000sq/ft mansion and the 500 sq/ft tiny home. There’s a lot that can be done to provide affordable homes and it should begin with the improvement of already-existing spaces, abandoned malls that can be turned into townhouses and have enough green space for people to enjoy. Cities have plenty of old sites that can be renewed, it’s just a matter of gearing up the right mentality.
anyway like. from my perspective cars are… pretty obviously preferable to public transit in just about every aspect of the experience. if you want to attack cars you’ve got to aim at the externalities - the level of danger and the pollution
I think this is actually missing the most important consideration. Anti-car stuff is predominantly for the use of cars to commute, or more broadly to use cars to travel along predictable urban routes at predictable times. This works well as long as only the rich have cars, but when they’re widespread, it makes the entire process deeply unpleasant for everyone. The more other people use cars, the worse using a car is for any given person! The friction associated with relying on hordes of individual vehicles to solve mass transit problems – moving a lot of people the same direction at the same time – is at the root of urban anti-car movements, and it’s significant that these problems severely degrade the experience of driving even for people who love and defend them. It’s a completely normal experience for highway commutes to stretch a 20-minute off-peak drive into hours during the times when the majority of use actually happens, and that property is specific to individual cars.
This is really the fundamental issue, I think, the other stuff is mostly noise. If you remove the use of cars for commuting, and for other commuting-like tasks where everyone is doing the same thing at the same time by the same route, you can really just stop worrying about things like intercity travel or bringing home stuff from IKEA or whatever; those contribute a tiny fraction of both usage hours and fuel costs (notwithstanding commercial trucking, which is kind of its own thing).
Should add an addendum here, which is: every transit method gets worse for everyone the more people use it, obviously, like people complaining about buses would not mind having a private bus that nobody else used as long as they didn’t have to foot the gas bill, but it’s worse with cars because of the way the curve falls off: with most mass transit, the negative effects fall off very rapidly with distance, like you might get very negative experiences from the people in your subway car but it basically doesn’t matter what’s happening three subway cars away.
With cars, the most immediate negative externalities are less “I don’t like or trust these people” (though it can be an issue) and more queue-theory shit, about how frictional delays and desynchronizations add up across the entire network. So the “adding another person makes things worse” factor is much less linked to physical proximity, it aggregates over the whole arterial body with relatively low fall-off. That’s the basic dynamic that makes car commutes suck more than other types.
I like this take.
Maximalist “ban all cars” positions obviously just don’t work. They don’t work politically, and they don’t work practically.
(I can get behind banning all cars in certain restricted urban areas, but even then that’s like “a four-block area” and not “all of Manhattan”. If nothing else you need trucks to make deliveries!)
But it’s a good point that the regular commute is an overwhelmingly large part of (1) what causes traffic and (2) what makes the experience of commuting in traffic suck. You have to go there, and also everyone else is going with you. So it makes sense to put you all on one vehicle instead.
That doesn’t solve a bunch of idiosyncratic point-to-point travel but it also doesn’t have to, because that’s relatively low volume and also doesn’t aggregate into traffic the same way. And it doesn’t solve trucking, but it doesn’t need to.
Dimitris Ballas,Danny Dorling and Benjamin Hennig present figures from their new ‘Social Atlas of Europe’, which provides a new way of illustrating the key social and geographic features across European countries. They argue that by viewing Europe in this way it becomes apparent that most of the real social divides across the continent are within states rather than between them.
On 19 September 1946, Winston Churchill stated that: “we must re-create the European family in a regional structure, called, it may be, the United States of Europe”. This idea of a Europe of Regions and of a European People instead of a Europe of nation-states has long been at the heart of the thinking and efforts that have gradually led to the creation of the European Union. Nevertheless, the recent ascendancy of populist groups and the so-called ‘Eurosceptic earthquake’ in the recent European parliament elections have contributed to the painting of a picture of Europe where Euroscepticism is the dominant trend and where the revival of old nationalisms and divisions is inevitable.
Yet, a closer look at the evidence reveals a much more complex picture, which is convincingly argued by Ruth Wodak in her recent blog. In fact, and despite the significant rise of the votes for Eurosceptic parties, the overwhelming majority of votes and parliament seats were won by parties that are strongly committed to the European project. Perhaps the best example is the triumph of Italy’s centre-left Democratic Party whose leader, the Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, in a speech delivered at the State of the Union before the European elections vowed to push for a United States of Europe during the Italian presidency.
It is also worth noting that according to the most recent Eurobarometer survey in Spring 2014 “close to two-thirds of Europeans feel that they are citizens of the EU (65 per cent of all those polled replying ‘yes’), after a 6 point rise since autumn 2013”. In addition, there is a small but rapidly growing number of formal and informal groups of Europeans (such as New Europeans,Bringing Europeans Together,One EuropeandEustory) who promote and celebrate the idea of a collective European identity and of a “European people” instead of a “nation-state” mentality.
Moscow is the capital and largest city in Russia with 12.2 million residents. The city is organized into five concentric transportation rings that surround the Kremlin. The two innermost rings are seen here.
The Topography of Wealth in L.A. Visualizing Income Inequality as Terrain ByNick Underwood
Los Angeles has 58 billionaires and 58,000 homeless people. In a city where destitution coexists with opulence, vast gaps in opportunity exist between neighborhoods. Let’s use physical terrain as a metaphor to visualize income inequality across LA.
“Developers still can and will build parking in South Bend, but a city planner says the new regulations won’t force businesses or apartments complexes to build more than what they need….
“Divita says while the parking rules don’t change much for existing businesses, they help promote bringing new ones to the area. It can also lower the rent for apartments like college campus housing, where many of the people who live there don’t have cars.
“At a city budget level, empty parking spots don’t do much in terms of bringing in tax money. But eliminating them can also boost revenue for the city with the businesses that grow in their place.
“South Bend is the largest city in the Midwest to make this change. Some urban development scholars say it has the potential to make cities much more vibrant.”
Imagine a world without waste. A place where the train always comes on time, where streets are plowed before snow even stops falling, and watchful surveillance cameras have sent rates of petty crime plunging. Never again will you worry about remembering your keys because your front door has an iris recognition system that won’t allow strangers to enter. To some people, this kind of uber-efficient urban living sounds like a utopian dream. But to a growing number of critics, the promise of the “smart city” is starting to seem like the stuff of nightmare.
Smart cities are loosely defined as urban centers that rely on digital technology to enhance efficiency and reduce resource consumption. This happens by means of ubiquitous wireless broadband, citywide networks of computerized sensors that measure human activities (from traffic to electricity use), and mass data collection that analyzes these patterns. Many American cities, including New York, Boston and Chicago, already make use of smart technologies. But far more radical advances are happening overseas. Masdar, in Abu Dhabi, and Songdo, in South Korea, will be the first fully functioning smart cities, in which everything from security to electricity to parking is monitored by sensors and controlled by a central city “brain.”
The surveillance implications of these sorts of mass data-generating civic projects are unnerving, to say the least. Urban designer and author Adam Greenfield wrote on his blog Speedbird that this centralized governing model is “disturbingly consonant with the exercise of authoritarianism.” To further complicate matters, the vast majority of smart-city technology is designed by IT-systems giants like IBM and Siemens. In places like Songdo, which was the brainchild of Cisco Systems, corporate entities become responsible for designing and maintaining the basic functions of urban life.
Smart cities are predicated on the neoliberal idea that the market can fix anything—that companies can manage cities better than governments can. Their advocates claim that they will enhance democratic participation by relying on crowdsourcing and “civic hacking projects” that allow locals to use newly available data to solve municipal problems. But they ignore the fact that private corporations are the ones measuring and controlling these mountains of data, and that they don’t have the same accountability to the public that government does.
InTheNation last year, urban theorist and author Catherine Tumber expressed some of the principle concerns about smart tech, reviewing Anthony Townsend’s Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. (Full disclosure: I fact-checked the review). Tumber asserts that “the economics of ‘smart’” are in keeping with “the ramped-up market rationalization carried out by finance monopoly since the Civil War, culminating in a minimally civic world fit only for…the unencumbered self.”
I caught up with Tumber via telephone at her office at Northeastern University’s School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, where she is a visiting scholar, to talk about what the rise of smart cities means for our understanding of urban life.
Editor’s note: This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Allegra Kirkland: How did you first become acquainted with the concept of smart cities?
Catherine Tumber: I had been aware of them kind of through the ether because I pay attention to cities, and I’m very much aware of what’s going on in the digital world in a broad sense. I think it’s quite dangerous actually, in all kinds of ways….
I thought Townsend did a good job laying out what the fault lines are: the big digital systems corporations like Siemens and Cisco and IBM versus what these hacker “democratic heroes” are trying to do. I found that to be useful but I wasn’t persuaded that they aren’t all part of the same sort of dangerous direction of things.
AK: These digital innovations are supposed to be all about access to information and transparency, but it seems like many people don’t even know these initiatives are going on. Chicago, Barcelona, and all of these other urban centers are now considered “smart cities” but I feel like most people don’t think of them that way.
CT:I think people are only vaguely aware.
AK: It seems like these major urban initiatives are being conducted largely out of the public eye, without public oversight or involvement. Maybe there are some smaller initiatives being carried out by civic hackers, but the major ones have to be implemented by corporations or the government because regular people don’t have the ability to build that kind of infrastructure.
CT: Right, these are major infrastructure projects.
AK: And there’s no means of opting out. Once a city integrates smart technology, your information gets caught up with all the rest, whether you want it to be or not.
CT:Exactly. And also what’s often not taken into account, and I guess you have to live long enough to really see it—though it’s happening very quickly in our time—is that when you introduce a whole new paradigm of infrastructure, the old infrastructure dies. So it ends up being coercive. At some point, you really have to participate in it or you are not able to execute that function, whether that function be communications or entertainment or transportation or energy.
For example, if you did not really want to be available on a cell phone at any given moment or own one, and wanted to simply rely on a landline, that was fine as long as you were home. But they stripped out all of the phone booths. That was really completed by around five years ago. So it really forces your hand quite a bit.
AK: You seem skeptical of the idea that smart cities are inherently democratizing—that they are sites of greater sociability and inclusion. Does that seem plausible to you?
CT: I think that digital technology, aside from providing all kinds of information that is trackable, holds up the false promise of greater democratic participation. It holds out a sort of false sense of moral agency, for one thing. The argument as I understand it is that crowdsourcing provides people with a different, less curated sense of democratic participation. It involves reaching out to individuals, so it’s a version of democratic practice. I think the jury is still very much out on whether that is persuasive.
Part of what I think is important and rich about democratic culture as a living tradition is that it brings people of very different backgrounds and types together in surge spaces. And crowdsourcing tends to be consistent marketing in that it excludes whole groups of people, just because of the way it works. It’s not even intentional.
AK: Because of the kind of people who get surveyed, who are aware that these kinds of civic campaigns are going on and would get involved?
CT: Yeah. I find that to be somewhat dubious…for the long-term health of the civic project.
AK: It seems like there’s a fundamental split between people who think there is something organic and inexplicable about the ways human beings come together in cities, and those who believe that all human behavior is quantifiable—that we can rely on data to understand how humans interact. Which side of the line do you fall on?
CT:Digital technology and its use compresses experience. It tends to lead to niche cultures; it tends to lead to a sense of being untethered, as if that’s the golden pathway to real freedom. There are several traditions of political philosophy that hold that its important to be tethered so that you have a sense of the limits of yourself and of what it is that humans can do in the time that they have on this earth. This sense of endless freedom can lead to a very false sense of utopian promise that is simply unrealistic and unwanted. It’s yet another way that we’ve decided to take a pause from history and what history has long told us.
There are some things that you really don’t play with. People have acquired great wisdom over the ages—across the globe, this isn’t just a Eurocentric thing—about what it means to travel and to leave home and to come back. These are all the great stories and myths and fables. Technology kind of flattens all of that.
AK: This is sort of a related question, but what do you think are the primary things smart cities take away from the people who live there? What do we lose in these sorts of manufactured urban environments?
It makes me think of the complaints about the gentrification of places like New York City. Michael Bloomberg created new green spaces in Times Square and along the waterfront, made city services more efficient, rezoned districts, and now we have this sanitized, business-friendly, soulless city. The neighborhoods look the same; there’s no mixing of social classes, no weird dive bars. So you’d think smart cities, with their emphasis on homogeneity and efficiency, would be equally off-putting to people.
CT:I think it’s a matter of the convenience of it and the novelty of it. But smart technology is relatively new and there are so many unexamined consequences, as I think there are with any major technological change like this.
I think that we’re only beginning as a culture to wince a little and take a second look at this. … There really hasn’t been any sort of consensus about what the right manners are in using these technologies. Across the world for time immemorial, every culture had some understanding of manners, and I don’t mean that in the prim Victorian sense. But just some ways in which you convey unspoken, coded assumptions about respect and caring and common courtesy and stuff like that. We haven’t had that conversation here. …The main point is that there are real unintended consequences of this.
AK: The corporations behind smart cities throw around all these statistics about how smart technology reduces crime, reduces waste. So it makes you feel like a Luddite to say that you’re uncomfortable with these technologies because there is all of this evidence that they’re successful. But I feel like there’s a difference between using technology to fix a specific urban problem, like Rio de Janeiro using weather tracking to forecast flash floods, which are a major problem there, and places like Songdo, where you’re really rebuilding the concept of the city from scratch and dictating how people should live.
CT:Yes, they’re riddled with totalitarian overtones, and that’s built into it, it’s part of the built structure.
AK: So do you think smart city initiatives are not necessarily problematic, and it’s just when they’re applied on the scale of an entire city that it gets out of control?
CT: I’m mainly concerned with this assumption that this is new, this is shiny, this is innovative, to use everyone’s favorite buzzword, and that we should just do it. A lot of people don’t really understand what’s involved. There’s a tendency to have it sort of inflicted on people, and part of that is the way the business model for digital technology, at least at this point in time, works, which is to make everything cheap. It doesn’t cost the public very much to say, oh, okay, because there’s not much of a pricetag on it yet. Part of the reason why it’s so cheap is that so much of the work is based on volunteer labor.
So many of these civic hackers, all these projects and apps they develop, so much of that is based on free labor. People try to frame that as a sort of revival of Tocqueville—voluntary associations and all that stuff. But instead it’s just downright free labor, like unpaid internships or something. That’s why I’m very skeptical of all of this; this is really just another variation on the sort of neoliberal business model that we’ve been using now for the past 35 years and has grown out of control. This is just another iteration of that with nice shiny technology attached to it. Americans are always suckers for technological determinism.
AK: Sure. I feel like privatization initiatives in cities have multiplied in recent years, with cities selling stakes in public housing to private developers—
CT:And all the stuff Rahm Emanuel is doing in Chicago.
AK: Exactly. It seems like smart cities are sort of the ultimate example of the corporate-designed urban environment. Should that inherently be a cause for concern? It goes without saying that corporations don’t always have the best interests of people in mind. And places like Songdo were designed to have minimal regulatory barriers. They prioritize technological innovation and wealth generation, so it seems like they could really deepen existing economic inequality. If you’re not part of those spheres, you don’t really have a place in these cities.
CT:To really take on wealth inequality and the kind of ravaging done by the spoiling land use policies that we’ve had in place since after World War II, we need to have a body of ideas and practices that have a clearly defined sense of what their political vision is: what the good life is and how to get there. What are our fundamental values, our limitations? All of this smart city design is apolitical. That’s the problem. The longer it seeps into our political culture, the more it will drain the public imagination of the next generation, of what a real political movement looks like and why politics are important.
AK: It also seems like the obligation of government to provide essential public services like housing is reduced. It becomes the responsibility of corporations and developers, so there’s less accountability, less control over pricing and over the data the companies acquire.
CT:Then there’s all this debate about regulations—which industries require more or less. These are all very difficult questions of practicality and philosophy. And I fear that our political discourse and understanding of the world is being degraded and coarsened by the uncritical dissemination of a digital substitute for a real politics.
AK: Another thing I wanted to bring up is the surveillance concern. I read a quote from the mayor of Rio, which is a smart city, saying “The operations center allows us to have people looking into every corner of the city, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” He meant it as a positive, but that’s a sort of terrifying statement. What are your thoughts about the surveillance implications of smart technology?
CT:All these sensors will and are being used to invade our privacy. There are good and bad things about that. You know, here in Boston we had the marathon bombers and they were very quickly apprehended, partly because that area is so rigged up with security cameras. We have to decide whether it’s worth it.
Another thing I’ve been concerned about is thinking about the difference between Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. You know, George Orwell talked about Big Brother and the authoritarian state, the invasion of privacy. Huxley talked more about the internalization of oppression, and I’m in some ways even more concerned about that. It’s a cultural critique of the way we internalize and accept the terms of our lack of freedom. We accept the deprivation that totalitarian movements end up exacting on us. So we end up being our own worst enemies. It’s almost like we don’t even need Big Brother.
AK: Sure. We voluntarily give up so much information about ourselves.
CT:When I see people walking around in public as though they’re wearing a blindfold because they’re so absorbed in another world on their devices, that has the look to me of self-degradation and degradation of the public realm that is more effective than security cameras. Because people won’t resist. They’re not even aware of their surroundings, just as animals moving through the world. So why would they be able to muster whatever it takes to resist the invasion of privacy by the state or by corporations, for that matter? It just all represents such a contraction of democratic culture to me. It worries the heck out of me.
Another exquisite example of American NIMBYism - local regulations in a rural town that make illegal any house that is too small from being built on a given property. A lady wants to build a smaller house on her lot so she can build a horse stable on the rest and she just….can’t.
What i like about this story is that a lot of the narrativr around “how did America get so NIMBY” is that it was almost accidental. People wanted to preserve their neighborhood, preserve historic buildings, etc, and were fine with affordable housing conceptually but, ya know, not in their back yard. And its partially true, for sure, for every bad actor manipulating the historical preservation board is a group of willing allies proud to Save Our Heritage.
But that narrative also concedes too much, and this article shows that: this ordinance exists as part of an explicit agreement with the state agencies to “keep property values high”. Because property taxes are what funds local gov, and housing prices fund the resident’s finances. They just say it, openly, no shame, “your house proposal is just too cheap, spend more”! The idea that high property prices is a bad thing is not on the radar.
If you have a policy apparatus built explicitly to increase property values, well, not surprising that it achieves that goal.
Vista de la calle, Casas en Las Américas, 3ᵃ calle Maracaibo 65, 67, 69, 71 y 73, Las Américas, Naucalpan de Juárez, Estado de México, México 1964 (remodelado)
Arq. Enrique Morales
Street view, Houses in Las Americas, 3ᵃ calle Maracaibo 65, 67, 69, 71, & 73, Las Americas, Naucalpan, Edo.Mexico, Mexico 1964 (remodeled)
Detalle de un muro entre filas de casas, Unidad habitacion ‘Libertad’, calle Palmita, entre Paseo del Rubí, Santiago Álvarez y av. Miraflores, Vivienda Popular, El Rubí, Tijuana, Baja California, México 1963
Arq. Félix Sánchez Baylón
Foto. Nacho López
Detail of a wall between rows of houses, Housing complex ‘Libertad’, calle Palmita, between Paseo del Rubi, Santiago Alvarez and av. Miraflores, Vivienda Popular, El Rubi, Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico 1963
“Boxes clad in steel and glass are so last century. Computers and robotics are giving architects access to levels of complexity and more sculptural forms and details we haven’t had in centuries.”
Koreatown is the most densely populated section of Los Angeles. Guess how many parks it has…
Exactly zero. No parks in all of K-Town.
In this booming urban corridor increasingly smothered in concrete and glass, A public outdoor space for respite would be welcome.
People need parks. That’s what psychologists and urban planners say, anyway.
And the residents of Koreatown were about to get one at Wilshire and Hobart back in 2011. The requisite millions had been allocated and earmarked. But, as reporter Victoria Kim writes, five years later, a 346-unit luxury apartment building dubbed the Pearl on Wilshire is taking root where Koreatown Central Park was slated to go.
Will it have even a park bench for the public to sit on? Nope. But, it will have a dog wash, yoga room, putting green and spa – for residents.
“Where people do not have much political power, they don’t have a strong voice to demand parks.”
— Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, professor of urban planning at UCLA
What went wrong? Council President Herb Wesson’s spokeswoman blames bad timing and the recession. Wesson’s district includes most of Koreatown.
So what now? The councilman has proposed turning part of the local library branch’s parking lot into a pocket park, with parking underground.
This is our version of Ecological Accounting. These are 50 days in and we have only had to cover them with Agribond twice.
Atlanta Urban Agriculture.
Seriously….. Atlanta Urban Ag.
Want to learn more about the benefits of different types of vegetable gardens? Book a tour or working experience and see how to make raised beds, grow tasty lettuce, eat your lawn, compost and more. Book a date or two and find out how we feed the soil and grow millions of worms.
