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Thursday, March 29th, 2012

The Great Reordering of the Urban Hierarchy

My latest blog post is online over at New Geography. It is called “The Great Reordering of the Urban Hierarchy.” In it, I look at how the relentless expansion of the US federal government and the “spiky world” forces of globalizations are revamping the urban hierarchy of the top tier cities in the United States. While not a definitive view, it seems that New York is going from strength to strength, while Washington, DC emerges as America’s new “Second City.” This has been to the detriment of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston. It’s controversial to be sure, but I hope you’ll enjoy it. Comments definitely encouraged on this one.

Update: Richard Florida has more to say on this topic over at The Atlantic Cities..

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

The Taxi As Public Transportation by Drew Austin

[ I ran out of Drew Austin pieces to repost from Where, but lucky for us he wrote this original that I'm sure you'll enjoy. Speaking of which, Brendan Crain has restarted the Where Blog, which is really awesome news. This one is an absolute must to subscribe to in my opinion. So check it out if you aren't already familiar with his work. ]

Architecture has borrowed plenty from biology over the centuries, but the reverse is less common. After observing the central dome of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, the paleontologist Steven Jay Gould coined the term spandrel, describing a side effect of adaptation that turns out to be useful in itself. Like the architectural spandrel–a triangular space where two arches meet–the biological spandrel may seem perfectly designed for a certain function though it’s actually more of a lucky accident.

Today, for anyone interested in understanding cities or improving them, data on urban phenomena represent a different kind of spandrel. Much of the data offering useful clues for city planners and researchers is out there accumulating whether anyone wants it or not. The ability to track the origin and destination of every taxi trip in New York or Boston, for example, was a recent byproduct of the self-swipe credit card technology that those cities have required all cabs to install. Last year, an article in Wired described how New York City harnessed the knowledge available from 50,000 daily calls to 311, using that information to map the distribution of problems like noise complaints throughout the five boroughs. Maximizing our understanding of the city means discovering what’s already out there–the spandrels–as much as it means actively collecting data when necessary.

The taxi perfectly illustrates the opportunities these incidental data sources create as well as the limitations of what they can tell us. Transportation is one of the trickiest and most critical problems in any city, and one of the areas where good data can help the most. By recording their own activity, taxis become sensors that roam the city painting a detailed picture of traffic conditions, travel demand, and even the locations where passengers give the best tips. We can learn a lot about the city from taxis, but we can learn even more about taxis themselves and their role in the urban environment.

It’s easy to forget, but the taxi has always been a critical form of public transportation. In cities without good transit, the taxi is often the only public transportation available. More importantly, mass transit cannot efficiently serve every type of travel that passengers demand, and the taxi is better suited to do so in many cases (think of the bus that never has more than a handful of passengers on board). Low-income city dwellers as well as the affluent rely on taxis where buses and trains don’t suffice. In the United States, where everything is seemingly built for the private car, modes of transportation that improve mobility for the carless are allies, not competitors.

Because taxis are privately operated and can’t be planned like mass transit, the opportunity they represent receives less attention than it should. Now, taxis are still private, but the rich data they generate means they are no longer the blind spot for transportation planners that they once were. We may not know exactly how to improve taxis, but we can start by deciding how they might ideally serve a city and then observing how they currently measure up to that ideal. Beginning with the principle that taxis are a form of public transportation, they should complement mass transit by filling in the gaps where transit service is less accessible, and the aforementioned taxi trip data makes it possible to see whether this happens naturally. As the maps below indicate, more taxi pickups happen where transit access is also quite good. Of course, demand is also higher near Boston’s center, and it’s difficult to say where unmet taxi demand exists (although it’s possible to infer this). As a “spandrel,” taxi data alone won’t tell us everything we need to know to answer a question like this–that is, the data collection wasn’t designed with this particular question in mind–but the more we grapple with the data, the more we learn what it can and can’t tell us, and the more useful it becomes as a means of enhancing taxicabs or countless other aspects of city life.

Friday, January 28th, 2011

Replay: The Importance of Social Structures to Urban Success

[ As a follow-up to my Cost of Clout piece I am re-running this 2008 post demonstrating the important of social structures and culture to urban success. ]

There seems to be a popular belief that what it takes to create an industry cluster in bioscience or whatever is to pair research with commerce. That is, to find an academic institution doing cutting edge research, and connect it with venture capital and entrepreneurs to start companies to commercialize it. Soon enough, you have a “cluster” of businesses that takes off like a rocket. This is the perceived Silicon Valley model, and no company epitomizes it more than Google, which was started by two Stanford students to commercialize their graduate research.

But is this true? There are many top flight research universities in this country, but few major startup clusters. When major research institutions fail to generate commercial spinoffs, this is often blamed on a lack of venture capital. But is that really the case, or is something else at work?

Anyone interested in this matter simply must read AnnaLee Saxenian’s seminal book, “Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128“. A social scientist at UC Berkeley, Saxenian lived and worked in both Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128 technology corridor. She wondered why Route 128, which started out with far more of a technology business and economic base than Silicon Valley, eventually lost ground to become a clear number two. She sees this resulting from the different social structures that exist in the various areas.

According to Saxenian, Route 128 suffered from a culture that was oriented towards a traditional maturing industry, not a rapidly changing one like technology. This included more deliberative decision making; vertical integration and self-sufficiency; hierarchical, centralized command structures; focus on economies of scale; a high friction job market; geographically dispersed locations; and low levels of cooperation and sparse networks between firms in the region. In other words, all the standard traits of a typical large corporation. While she doesn’t dwell on this point, it also comes across that Boston, probably due to its New England locale with all the history there, was a much more closed society. The social network and hierarchy was more fixed (the phrase never appeared in the book, but I couldn’t help but think Boston Brahmin) and the process of establishing trust and credibility much slower than California. While famous as one of the bluest states, Massachusetts is socially conservative in many ways, and highly risk averse. This is the land of the suit and tie, and the difference between that environment and California casual was more than just a surface thing.

Silicon Valley, of course, was just the opposite. It adopted social structures that were very focused around innovation and time to market. It was open, with rapid, decentralized decision making. Firms quickly specialized, focusing on their core competency, and established close links with suppliers to fill in the rest of the value chain. These links were often such that it was not clear where one company ended and the other began. The clearly functioned on high degrees of trust. Even direct competitors often talk to exchange ideas and help each other solve problems. Here’s a quote:

Competitors consulted one another with a frequency unheard of in other areas of the country. According to one executive: ‘I have people call me quite frequently and say, “Hey, have you ever run into this one?” and you say “Yeah, about seven or eight years ago. Why don’t you try this, that or the other thing.” We all get calls like that.’ (33)

Clearly this is quite unique. I’m not even sure if it’s all legal, but hey, it works for them.

The job market in Silicon Valley is extremely fluid, with people constantly changing jobs, starting companies, etc. It is expected that you won’t stay that long with any given employer. Route 128 operated on the “company man” model and to leave was to show disloyalty, often resulting in ostracism. Since Silicon Valley was a new country with almost all immigrants of one type or another, family history and credentials meant little. What mattered was whether you could perform.

Now of course it was almost entirely men, originally white men, who set this up. The tech industry is famous for being one of the most gender imbalanced. What I found particularly interesting was that many of the founders had Midwestern roots. Again quoting:

This collective identity was strengthened by the homogeneity of Silicon Valley’s founders. Virtually all were white men; most were in their early 20’s. Many had studied engineering at Stanford or MIT, and most had no industrial experience. None had roots in the region; a surprising number of the community’s major figures had grown up in small towns in the Midwest and shared a distrust for established East Coast institutions and attitudes. They repeatedly expressed their opposition to ‘established’ or ‘old-line’ industry, and the ‘Eastern establishment.’ (30, emphasis added)
….
The many examples of engineers with humble origins who became millionaires by starting successful companies had no parallel in the more stable social structures of the East. Jerry Sanders, founder of Advanced Micros Devices … grew up in south Chicago, the son of a traffic light repairman. (38, emphasis added)

To digress for a moment, remember how I said the contrarian, ornery Hoosier/Midwestern attitude is, in the right context, a huge strength, not a weakness. This shows that in action. These guys didn’t toe the conventional wisdom line. Instead they created a whole new business model. I’ve got to believe the Midwest mindset played a huge role in making this possible. The unfortunate thing is that they had to leave the Midwest to do it. Imagine if they’d stayed home and made it happen around one of the great engineering schools there? Alas, to this day Midwesterners often have to leave to turn things into reality. Famously, Marc Andreessen had to leave Illinois to start Netscape, and in fact had U of I actively hampering him all the way. If the Midwest cracks the code on this piece alone, it would be a huge step in the right direction.

(By the way, for a wonderful look at how these Midwesterners invented Silicon Valley and the “elder days” of semiconductor business, see Tom Wolfe’s 1983 Esquire essay, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce“.)

These extremely fluid job markets, open social institutions, high trust customer and supplier interactions, and competitor information exchange create an environment of so-called “dense networks”. In a period of rapid change and innovation, these networks, by efficiently distributing information and dispersing risk, create an environment with very rapid speed to market and high levels of adaptability. A traditional Route 128 do it all yourself model simply can’t keep up with the power of this vast network.

It was this network, more than anything, that created the Silicon Valley we know today. The “cluster” we see in Silicon Valley is not an artifact of spatial co-location. It comes from the network. According to Saxenian:

Spatial clustering alone does not create mutually beneficial interdependencies. An industrial system many be geographically agglomerated and yet have limited capacity for adaptation. This is overwhelmingly a function of organizational structure, not of technology or firm size … The current difficulties of Route 128 are to a great extent a product of its history. The region’s technology firms inherited a business model and social and institutional setting from an earlier industrial area. (161-162).

Sound familiar? It describes the Midwest perfectly. What I find interesting is how Saxenian illustrates her thesis not using a struggling Midwestern burg as a case study, but rather Boston’s Route 128, the second largest technology hub in America, home to possibly the greatest collection of universities in the country, with massive access to capital, etc. If this town had its problems, how much more so places without those advantages? It certainly shows the scale of the challenge in building industry clusters.

Obviously, changing the social structure, culture, and institutions of a region is difficult to do. Even positive articles highlight the scale of the challenge. I’ll refer a recent article on Milwaukee startups that I linked that quotes a local businessman saying, with some pride I gather, “Milwaukee is a one-strike-you’re-out town.” That’s not a good thing. Silicon Valley shows that failure and risk taking are good. The way to innovate is to figure out how to try lots of things and to fail quickly and cheaply. If you are overly concerned that you’ll be permanently ruined if your business goes bankrupt, you’re not that likely to take a chance.

It reminds me of a discussion I once had with a friend from Germany. He told me, “We’re the children of the people who stayed” and bemoaned the highly conservative outlook of his countrymen. He noted the extreme reluctance to take risks because in Germany, if you go bankrupt, you’re stigmatized for life. Obvious some of that carried over to heavily German Milwaukee.

I should note that one should not over-internalize Saxenian’s case studies into some sort of cookbook solution. Every city and region needs to find its own unique path to success based on its own culture, institutions, history, etc.

I would be remiss I did not point out a few areas where I was skeptical of the Silicon Valley model. One intriguing factoid from the book was that in 1962 federal government purchases, principally defense related, accounted for over half of Route 128’s sales. Indeed, the area got its start in technology through defense related research during World War II. Could it be that dependency on government contracts is really what caused the dysfunctional culture there? Government largesse encourages rent seeking behavior at the expense of building a competitive business.

Also, Saxenian highlights how the non-business social networks in Boston substitute for the type of technology networks in Silicon Valley. But is this a bad thing? The books paints a portrait of Silicon Valley as a bunch of geeky guys who toil away long hours on tech projects and even talk about technology at the bar when they do go out. It’s like a community of idiot savants. Some might say “get a life!”

What’s more, there is some research that suggests dense networks themselves aren’t a recipe for success. In an thought provoking paper called “Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown” Sean Safford contrasts the experiences of Youngstown and Allentown, both small steelmaking cities. Despite similar dense networks, Youngstown failed while Allentown fared much better. His conclusion that was the dense networks in Youngstown only reinforced an already closed leadership circle who were economically aligned, while Allentown’s served to bridge otherwise non-overlapping groups.

Perhaps to a great extent, the key attribute is less the networks themselves, than the ability of outsiders and new thinking to penetrate them. Silicon Valley’s social structure was open, Route 128’s wasn’t exactly closed, but there were barriers to entry. In a globalized world of ever faster change, the ability to respond and adapt, to process new ideas and react to rapidly shifting global forces, is critical. This puts a bit premium on dense social networks that are also open and flexible.

This is somewhat the thesis also of Richard Florida. He has a somewhat different spin, saying that the economy is now powered by the creative class, and they want to live in places that are open, tolerant, etc. This is his “three T’s” model: talent, technology, and tolerance. The last appears not to be so much valuable in its own right, but for what it says about the openness of social networks. Thus a large number of gays in a community isn’t what drives economic growth per se. Rather, a thriving gay community is a signaling mechanism that lets people know that diverse ideas and people are welcome.

I think we all know places where the social network is impenetrable. This isn’t necessarily a function of size, prosperity level, etc. I mentioned the Boston old money, social register concept. In any number of southern cities, who your daddy is, or what sorority you went to in college is a huge determinant of your place in a social hierarchy. If you don’t come from the right family, the right schools, etc., you can forget it.

Perhaps this explains my Cincinnati conundrum. Here’s a city with better assets than almost any in America, but it is one of the all time relative decline stories in US history and to this day is on a moderately stagnant, slow growth path. Why is that? There was an intriguing study I saw recently called Who Rules Cincinnati? [dead link] This is by an independent researcher named Dan La Botz, who I get the impression is some sort of hard core left activist, so keep that in mind. Nevertheless, he uses a similar approach to the Garden Club study to track social networks in the city, coming to the conclusion that officers of seven major corporations basically run Cincinnati, mostly to that city’s detriment. Another person I know offered the interesting insight that when he meets someone in a bar in Cincinnati, the first question they ask him is where he went to high school. This both indicates a highly inbred culture as evidenced by the assumption one must have gone to high school in Cincinnati, and shows that the school you attended is an important social marker. (It perhaps also shows a lack of regard for higher education).

It could be that the Midwestern cities that have the best potential for future growth are those with the most open social networks, as well as exhibiting other of the characteristics Saxenian cites. I think this would be fertile ground for social science research. It also makes me wonder if perhaps that goes part of the way to explaining the relative success of the Midwest’s larger state capitals. State capitals constantly have people traveling and doing business there from all corners of the state. This flow in and out might potentially prevent a social structure from completely congealing into a small, impenetrable elite. I sense another potential dissertation topic here.

The key takeaway is not to focus on purely the institutional infrastructure (universities, venture capital funds, labor force, etc.) when trying to set out an economic strategy. The local culture, norms, and social practices, and in particular the density and openness of the social networks is critical. Clearly, as anyone who has found themselves mired in a corporate or governmental bureaucratic organization, changing a culture is an extremely difficult thing to do. But it is something that clearly warrants an examination.

This post originally ran on July 13, 2008.

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

Midwest Miscellany

I have received some reports of badly distorted fonts with Firefox on Windows XP. If the font on this site is rendering horribly for you, I’d appreciate you sending me a screen shot, along with your browser and OS version. I’m investigating. In the meantime, you can see a cleaner version by either using Internet Explorer or using the alternate URL www [dot] arenn [dot] com. Please do not share any links using that URL, however, as I don’t want to confuse Google.

Neighbors for Neighbors

Joseph Porcelli, a friend of mine, has a very interesting project going on in Boston that I wanted to highlight. It is called Neighbors for Neighbors, a social networking platform that includes social networks for every neighborhood in Boston. This came out of his experience with his Jamaica Plain neighborhood, which was experiencing a crime wave and needed a way to organize. Fast forward, and N4N has launched, in official partnership with the city of Boston, with hyper-local based social networks that bring people together and span both the online and offline world. This is a model I think is worth checking out.

China’s Empty City

Here’s a fascinating video I found via the NYT Economix blog about an empty city in China from the Al Jazeera English language service. We keep hearing about China’s inexorable rise. Yet clearly there are massive speculative excesses built up in the Chinese economy. We just watched Dubai, another seemingly unstoppable juggernaut, suffer a debt crisis. China is obviously a much strong country, but stories like this make you wonder. (If the video does not display, click here).

Dangerous by Design

Transportation for America released a major study on preventable pedestrian deaths called Dangerous by Design. In the last 15 years, over 76,000 pedestrians have been killed in America. Here is where our 12 Midwest metros stacked up among regions of over one million people. The ranking is by most dangerous, so the top of the list is more dangerous than the bottom:

• #7 – Louisville
• #14 – Detroit
• #20 – Kansas City
• #21 – St. Louis
• #31 – Indianapolis
• #35 – Columbus
• #37 – Milwaukee
• #41 – Chicago
• #43 – Cleveland
• #46 – Cincinnati
• #49 – Pittsburgh
• #52 – Minneapolis-St. Paul (America’s safest major city)

Full data tables are available here.

Oxford Circus Pedestrian Improvements

For those of you who’ve been to London, you know pedestrians overwhelm the too-narrow sidewalks. The city has been looking at various ways to improve this, and one of the more interesting projects is one at Oxford Circus. Broken Sidewalk points us at this video (click here if video does not display).

Here’s the “Before” view:

Here’s the “After” view:

Best Performing Cities

The Milken Institute released their rankings of the best performing cities of 2009. Their index “ranks U.S. metropolitan areas by how well they are creating and sustaining jobs and economic growth. The components include job, wage and salary and technology growth.”

Austin, Texas was #1 in America. Here is how the large Midwest metros stacked up. On this one, a higher rank is better, like a normal league table. The ranking is out of the 200 largest metro areas. You know your region is struggling when it can’t crack the top 50. (In fairness, Peoria, a city I generally don’t cover, was #33)

• #52 – Kansas City
• #108 – Columbus
• #109 – Pittsburgh
• #123 – Minneapolis-St. Paul
• #125 – Indianapolis
• #128 – St. Louis
• #138 – Cincinnati
• #148 – Chicago
• #151 – Milwaukee
• #153 – Louisville
• #186 – Cleveland
• #199 – Detroit

No two ways about it, that’s a pathetic showing.

Detroit Roundup

The Wall Street Journal wrote up an interesting incident here a group of people found an old dump truck on the fourth floor of an abandoned factory and pushed it out of a window. Below is the video. If it does not display, click here. h/t Rust Wire.

Also:

An American Catastrophe (Bob Herbert @ NYT)
David Bing’s last second shot (WSJ)
Michigan’s roads are in a fix. The Detroit News reports that 1/3 of the states total road miles are in poor condition.

8664: River Fields Exposed

LEO Newsweekly, Louisville’s alt-weekly paper, had a great piece recently called Burned Bridge that talks about how River Fields, once a bona-fide conservation group, has become nothing but a front for East End NIMBY’ism. They are a group opposed to the East End bridge at all costs. They so hated this article, that apparently they might have pulled issues from racks to keep people from reading.

Everyone knows the River Fields agenda in Louisville. However, the National Trust for Historic Preservation allowed their name to be attached to the River Fields agenda in filing a lawsuit against the bridges project. Personally, I wouldn’t be sad to see the Record of Decision re-opened, since that is necessary for the 8664 option. But the National Trust may yet find that their own reputation ends up tarnished by linking themselves with an organization that is actually in favor of demolishing historic properties in downtown Louisville to build a bridge there. The River Fields agenda is antithetical to bona fide historic preservation. I actually asked the National Trust what their rationale was for joining the lawsuit, but wasn’t able to get much from them beyond the press release which said it was not about just the East End bridge, and the list of potentially impacted properties taken directly from the EIS. I think they ought to re-evaluate who they are getting into bed with, however.

National and International Roundup

Carol Coletta: Regionalism as identity theft for cities.

Brain Drain Report: Berlin Wall Edition (Burgh Diaspora)

Three simple rules for getting out of poverty – but how easy are they to follow? (One Story Up). Also from One Story Up, Don’t fall in the poverty trap – you night never get out. This is a great public housing oriented blog by Megan Cottrell. Worth checking out.

Housing bust halts growing suburbs (USA Today)

Paris debates plan for new subway (Yahoo News). Proposed 80 new miles of subways for inner ring suburbs at a cost of $31.4 billion.

High hopes and higher standards for Bloomberg 3.0 (Streetsblog)

LA Mayor seeks creative funding to prevent 7 MPH gridlock (Bloomberg)

Smart City Memphis offers Lessons from Great Mayors.

Grand Plans for Rail in Denver Hit a Wall of Fiscal Realities (NYT)

Salt Lake City passes gay rights ordinance with Mormon backing (USA Today)

California exploring detailed strategy for growth (SF Chronicle via @gosner)

Miami ponders whether the good outweighs the bad (NYT)

More Midwest

Chicago
Leaseback deals could come back to bite CTA unless Congress acts (CTA Tattler)
Company piles up profits from parking meter deal (NYT) – Related: Chicago’s parking meter deal a massive rip-off (Streetsblog)
What Oprah’s departure means for the Windy City (Julia Vitullo-Martin @ WSJ)
Review of Aqua (Blair Kamin @ Tribune)
5 year tollway project under budget and ahead of schedule (Tribune)

Columbus
Residents look for trees in I-70/I-71 plan (Dispatch)

Cleveland
An open letter to Cleveland (Cleveland Love via Brewed Fresh Daily)

Detroit
Detroit voters approve $500 million school bond (Detroit News)

Indianapolis
Indianapolis lands 100 more life sciences jobs (Indy Star)
Suburban counties slowly building loop roads to avoid Indianapolis (IBJ) – By the way, Urbanophile readers got the story here first – back in 2007.
Allen Plaza developer bullish on downtown (IBJ)

Kansas City
Mayor-manager system makes problems for Kansas City (KC Star)

Louisville
Would UAW wage concessions have been good for Louisville? (TNR)
Baxter Avenue elevated train station (Louisville Art Deco)

Milwaukee
A void paved over with concrete (Richard L. Birch @ J-S)
City may use water to lure business (J-S)
Republic Airways to add up to 800 jobs.

Pittsburgh
Ravenstahl at crossroads in defining his legacy (Tribune-Review)
How Pittsburgh is managing population loss (Newsweek)

St. Louis
St. Louis second worst city for crime, report says

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Report from the Rail~Volution

I was in Boston last week for part of Rail~Volution 2009, America’s premier transit conference. I was part of a panel on the use of social media for transit advocacy. It’s clear this is a topic a lot of people are trying to figure out. I don’t want to go too far topic, but maybe I’ll do a post on that in the future, since obviously I’ve got a lot of experience in the space. In the meantime, just ponder this: why are almost all influential blogs and web sites in this space run by more or less independent people instead of agencies or organizations?

Election Results 2009

First, a quick Midwest election rundown in some key races:

• The great news is that Issue 9, the anti-rail charter amendment in Cincinnati, failed. I mentioned briefly before Issue 8, which would require a public vote before transferring the Cincinnati Water Works to a water district. That issue passed.
• Issue 3, permitting casino gambling in Ohio, passed
• Mark Mallory was re-elected Mayor of Cincinnati
• Frank Jackson was re-elected Mayor of Cleveland
• Cuyahoga County, OH approved a charter form of government
• In Indianapolis a referendum on building a new Wishard Hospital passed
• Dave Bing was elected to a full term as Mayor of Detroit
• Macomb County, MI approved a government reorganization
• R. T. Rybak was re-elected Mayor of Minneapolis
• Chris Coleman was re-elected Mayor of St. Paul
• Luke Ravenstahl was re-elected Mayor of Pittsburgh

John Robert Smith

I was able to catch up with John Robert Smith, CEO of Reconnecting America, and he recorded a short two minute video for me. If you only watch one of the videos I post, make it this one. He makes two incredibly important points that are too often overlooked when it comes to the livable cities agenda. The first is that we need to build an urban-small town-rural coalition around a new transportation policy. The other is that these issues are, or should be, non-partisan. (If video does not display, click here.)

Streetsblog and Streetfilms

I got to see an inspiring presentation by Aaron Naparstek, Editor in Chief of Streetsblog, and Clarence Eckerson, Director of Streetfilms. I’ve talked about Streetsblog here many times, but you might not be familiar with Streetfilms. Streetfilms produces short, high quality films on innovative transportation and livable communities projects from around the world. These films can be an extremely effective sales tool because they can show people in a very real and tangible way what a city looks like when it adopts these types of progressive ideas. The videos are under a Creative Commons license, so can be re-used as necessary. It’s a great resource.

I’ll share a couple of them with you today to give a flavor. This one is a ten minute piece on Bogotá’s “Ciclovia” program. This was one of the many innovations by Mayor Enrique Peñalosa and it has been widely imitated, including in the US. Every Sunday, 70 miles of streets are closed to cars and given to people for walking, biking, relaxing, or socializing. Also, exercise classes and other public events are held in the streets. It’s pretty amazing if you are not familiar with it. (If the video does not display, click here.)

This video has been viewed over 200,000 times.

Here’s another three and a half minute piece on students in New York “painting the pavement”. I hear people all the time say that livable cities initiatives are too expensive and that we can’t afford them. Well, something like Ciclovia does cost money for policing. However, there are all sorts of things we can do that cost virtually nothing. Here is the type of project that can be done for next to nothing. There is simply no excuse. (If the video doesn’t appear, click here.)

Here’s a similar example, where people paint wonderful murals in residential intersections. It’s in Portland, so it’s a little crunchy, but even if that’s not your bag, it’s a great idea. (If the video does not appear, click here).

Again, how much does it cost for a few buckets of paint? The video also talks about the practicalities, such as getting neighbor sign-off and working with city engineers. They even leveraged people sentenced to community service to help with the project!

Dallas TOD

Loyal blog readers know that I’ve written extensively about the challenges of inner ring suburbs in America. One of those inner ring suburbs is Carrollton, TX in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. They are trying to build a future for themselves based around transit oriented development. I also ran into Peter Braster, who is the TOD Manager from Carrollton, and recorded this 40 second teaser video. Anyone looking for lessons learned or someone to network with about TOD in an inner ring suburb, reach out to Peter. (If the video doesn’t show up, click here.

Boston Cityscape

Since the good people in Boston were nice enough to host us, I thought I’d share a few pictures from the city.

Remember the “Big Dig”? This is where it happened. Where once a huge elevated freeway cut through downtown Boston, now there is a park. At $20 billion, it is certainly questionable whether the expense was worth it, but they at least got the results they were looking for.

Boston was home to America’s first subway. Today, the regional transit system is known as the “T”. Here’s a picture of the Red Line as it crosses the Charles River. Note the iconic “T” logo.

Don’t be fooled by the MBTA maps. The Green Line is principally a streetcar. And the Silver Line is a bus.

Here’s South Station. It’s a rail terminal used by Amtrak and commuter lines. There is a North Station as well – located on the lower level of Boston Garden.

A pedestrianized street in downtown Boston.

Beacon St. in Back Bay

Boston Common

The Brutalist Boston City Hall

Sunday, July 1st, 2007

Good Articles in the FT Weekend

IMO, the Financial Times is a must-read newspaper. I’ve long been a regular reader and subscriber. In particular, the FT Weekend edition on Saturday is highly recommended.

This week the FT Weekend has a number of articles of interest. Some of these are:

• Urban Outfitters. An article on ideal cities, various urban planning failures, and what makes cities function.
• A City Rediscovers Its Heart. On development on downtown Los Angeles.
• Seattle Rising. About Seattle, obviously.
• An Accidental Beauty. A travel article on Boston

You can read these online, but would be well served to start reading the FT regularly, at least on the weekend. You can’t miss the FT at the newsstand. It’s unique salmon color is visible a mile away.

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Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker, and writer on a mission to help America’s cities thrive and find sustainable success in the 21st century.

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