God View in Port-au-Prince

Fast Company asks, Port-au-Prince 2.0: A City of Urban Villages? discussing Duany Plater-Zyberk’s new plan for Port-au-Prince (download the Downtown Port Au Prince Renewal Plan for full draft proposal):

Can Port-au-Prince be saved? More than a year after a catastrophic earthquake devastated Haiti, much of the capital is still rubble, with basic infrastructure (water, power, sewage) nonexistent. Reclaiming the core of the old city could require block-by-block redevelopment, at least according to the plans presented last night in Haiti by the architect Andrés Duany and his firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company.

The plans envision partial demolition of existing blocks to create parking and open space in the middle of each one. Strict codes and zoning rules would carefully regulate what gets built. Over time, one- and two-story building would be built out to four stories, with buildings on the perimeter opening onto the streets.

Answering his own question of why the plans privileged so much parking, Duany — a founding father of the New Urbanist movement — was characteristically blunt. “If Port-au-Prince is to be rebuilt, it can only be amortized by the middle class and above. The question is: how do we bring them back? Because you cannot reconstruct the city without them.”

I can’t quibble with the design: Port Au Prince historically had a mid-rise density (3-5 floors) so replacing it with a plan for growth approximating the existing height does not bother me. The focus on cars is a Middle Class MacGuffin: setting aside so much land and infrastructure for private automobiles with a hope (a hope) of supporting a perceived want, instead of supplying a concrete need – that of providing room for 2 million people – is a huge oversight. 3-4 floors is fairly dense with the inclusion of front arcades, while historical, makes sense in a tropical climate. Hopefully any zoning would allow flexibility of use so that live/work spaces could occupy the block creating a vibrant streetscape and income for those living in the units.

But the real shortfall is deeper than the design presented and is illustrated by the above image: a god’s eye view. While there were community design charrettes (I would like to know more about the process), urban design as a whole seem to suffer from overuse of the god view, divorced from the street and the person. Perhaps the scale of the system and the totality which the designer is trying to control (not to mention the history of SimCity) pushes the god view as the only way to illustrate the total system.

I wish I had a better alternative. I admit that I am looking for a better theoretical underpinning for my thoughts on urban design, and I hope to talk more about this in the near future.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History

Towers of Dreams: One Ended in Nightmare:

But they’re both classic examples of modern architecture, the kind Mr. Jencks, among countless others, left for dead: superblocks of brick and concrete high rises scattered across grassy plots, so-called towers in the park, descended from Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City.” The words “housing project” instantly conjure them up.

Alienating, penitential breeding grounds for vandalism and violence: that became the tower in the park’s epitaph. But Penn South, with its stolid redbrick, concrete-slab housing stock, is clearly a safe, successful place. In this case the architecture works. In St. Louis, where the architectural scheme was the same, what killed Pruitt-Igoe was not its bricks and mortar. (Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the World Trade Towers, was the architect.)

Zappos New Company Town: Downtown Las Vegas

Zappos wants to join the likes of Port Sunlight (Lever Soap), Pullman, IL (Pullman Coach), and the Reedy Creek Improvement District (Disney) in creating their own company town with Tony Hsieh’s new $350 million startup:

Hsieh and a few partners — the vast majority of the investment is Hsieh’s — plan to spend $350 million to develop and build a small city in the roughly 1.5-square mile downtown area around the Fremont East and Arts District areas (for CES-trekkers and other Vegas aficionados, it’s a few miles north of the Strip). Hsieh’s goal: To turn the overlooked area into a neighborhood not just for his workers’ coffee breaks, but a new live/work/play destination for Las Vegas’ emerging creative class.

This is the plan (modest it’s not): $100 million will go to the purchase of land (not including the new Zappos headquarters) and building acquisition. An additional $100 million will go to residential development including the building of high-rise apartments. Fifty million dollars will go to tech startups Hsieh plans to recruit to the area with seed investments of $100,000 or so apiece. Another $50 million will go toward drawing local small businesses like bakeries, yoga studios, restaurants, coffee shops and other requisite creative-class amenities. And because Hsieh wants people to move here and that requires having decent education for their children, another $50 million will go toward education and the building of — what else? — a school system.

This is an interesting counterpoint to the typical start-up’s wish to create an inward-facing campus (Google, Apple, et al) to house, feed and care for their employees. The urbanist in me hopes that Zappos’ succeeds in creating a place in such a damn-awful location which is Las Vegas. It would be well worth the investment to have their campus to be as permeable as the urban core.

It strikes me that so many new trends are just about “rediscovering” historical precedents. Look at Lifestyle center retail, such as Easton Town Centre (below), which explicitly returns to mixed-use town center designs. It isn’t so much as New Urbanism “won” (whatever that means), but that for the last 100 years or so, we were building automobile-dominated space, place and cities. Now developers and city agencies realize there is a pent-up demand for walkable urban living.

It will be interesting to see if the spaces they create are more like Fog Creek’s new office which is more private, supporting alone work; or, will the open-office illustrated by Foursquare’s new office be built. Kottke is dismayed that working in solitude on the decline:

The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I’m talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.” During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.

There was a time where we thought working alone was the only way to accomplish tasks; a certain strand of Taylorism of the office emerged in the early 20st Century, dominating space and hierarchy for half a century. Recently both technology and work theory has moved toward collaborative, and often multidisciplinary, teams. This is how we work at IDEO: small, nimble teams of experts in their own disciplines who come together to solve a problem.

My sense is that a healthy office culture values flexibility of space and workstyles in order to maximize their worker’s skills and output. It seems, to steal from Bob & Denise, office space needs a both-and solution: create varied typologies of space, each with a point of view and type of work clearly defined. Sprinkle liberally, and trust your people to choose where to work and when, so they can get their job done.

This means creating project spaces which facilitate groupwork; phone booths which allow single- or couples to make phone calls; small private offices which allow people to go “heads down;” kitchens and eating areas which allow mixing of colleagues; open-office studio space to house workers when they aren’t in project, phone or private space. The “white room” (above) at Stanford’s d.school is a great example of space which has a point of view, but is flexible. Classical “multipurpose space” (endemic with their horrible accordion dividers), without a point-of-view on how people might use the space, is a waste of resources and will lead to the exact negative feelings of open office Kottke abhors.

Citibank & Lipstick

National September 11 Memorial & Museum

Louis Kahn: Inspired by India?

Red Fort, Delhi

Taj Mahal Fountains, Agra

Bibi Ka Maqbara

Unintended Consequences and Academic Sidestepping: Crowd Behavior Recognition Chain

Via Digital Urban comes the above visualization of realtime crowd densities captured during the 2011 Lord Mayor’s Show in London (a sort of fancy parade). It is unclear if the analysis and mapping is coming from direct capture of mobile phone data, or by providing specialized wearable sensors to a small subset of volunteers who provide data which is pattern matched to different crowd densities based on an in-lab experimental dataset. My guess is that it is the latter, but the former is extremely possible once you have the proper data access. You can read the paper here: Recognition of Crowd Behavior from Mobile Sensors with Pattern Analysis and Graph Clustering Methods.

As seen with the recent iPhone location data file imbroglio (pretty map above of my data), it is both easy to generalize your location based on fixed cellphone towers, situation your precise location with GPS data, and there are huge unintended consequences to us carrying a powerful wearable computer which captures and passively transmits minute detailed data. I’m not putting my iPhone in a tin-foil wrapper, and I’m not following the NSA mobile computing guide (which is basically turn it off all the time), but we are quickly moving into uncharted territory. This has huge implications, especially here in the US where there is a strong history of protecting the populace from continual State tracking and observation.

A recent example of a company dealing with the modern problem of accurate Sousveillance is Flickr with their Geofences:

Geofences are special locations that deserve their own geo privacy settings. For example, you might want to create a geofence around the your “home” or “school” that only allows “Friends and Family” to see the location of the photos you geotag in that area. So the next time you upload a photo with a geotag in the radius of a geofence, it will follow the default geo privacy you’ve designated for that hotspot. That way, you can easily make sure that only people you trust can see the location of photos taken inside your house or any other sensitive areas while still showing the world exactly where you had those amazing cheese covered duck fat fries.

Note the total abrogation of any responsibility or even allusion that this crowd recognition algorithm has any negative consequence:

Thus, collecting sensor data from an ensemble of persons is a necessary condition to recognize crowd behaviors, but not a sucient one. The main challenge consists in the interpretation of this collected data and to devise methods to map the sensors signals, collected from an ensemble of persons, to one of several kinds of crowd behaviors.
…
The recognition of crowd behavior facilitates practical applications. In situations of emergencies during large-scale public events, machine recognition of crowd behavior enables a better situational awareness of event managers and informed participants. This may be used to carry out an evacuation more successfully and eciently. Measuring the dynamics of crowd behavior can also be useful for urban planning and pedestrian navigation.

Or in reality, this system will be used by police states, and states which are nominally free, to track and contain any anti-social behavior. Sure there is a legitimate use case for violent uprisings, such as the recent rioting in London, but you can’t for a minute believe that this wouldn’t be used to quash any peaceable assembly. Will planning agencies really have the money, or political constituency, to use this type of service to plan sidewalks?

Really?

This is a tool of state control, with a varnish of gee-whiz info graphics on top. It is saddening that the paper authors totally sidestep their academic requirement to think about their consequences.

Update 22 Nov 2011

On the matter of data collection, Martin Wirz writes:

“The data is being collected in near real-time (delay ~ 1. min) directly from the mobile phones. This allows for an instantaneous heat map visualization. We used the CoenoSense platform to collect the data.

More information: www.coenosense.com”

If you go to the website, under Use Cases comes further information:

This app provided important information to visitors: Maps with points of interests, travel Information, time table and notification services to obtain information about the current state of the event.

Additionally, the app was collecting GPS location updates and streaming them to the CoenoSense backend where this information was processed and used to provide a real-time heat map visualization of the current crowd density. This visualization was instantaneously available to the organizers and rescue forces, helping them to obtain an overall picture of the situation.

So, it appears that what it happening is that the data was collected was through an opt-in situation through the use of an iPhone app which broadcasts to a third part certain information. Furthermore, if you check out the LM Show app page (iTunes) the app description specifically states this:

Neither the Location Based Information nor the Messaging channels are used to send out advertisements. These features are there strictly for your convenience.

This app is part of a research project called Socionical, funded by the European Union. For more information about the project and its top level academic participants, please visit www.socionical.eu.

One of the research objectives of Socionical is to study crowd dynamics, following a major disaster. Since we cannot set up a disaster to test the app, we are testing it with your help during events with a high citizen participation. The app will record data anonymously, to show crowd density; it will, however, be absolutely impossible to deduce your identity from the recorded data. Furthermore, the app will only be active on the day of the Show and only while you are at the event location. You can use the app to check both the data recording zone and the sensor activity.

If there is a problem with congestion, or an emergency situation, then the researchers will inform the organisers of the Show and if necessary the emergency services and you will receive advice on, for example alternative routes. It is important that you do leave the app running so that you can be contacted if necessary. You will not be contacted on a personal basis, but because you happen to be in a particular location.

Socionical respects your privacy and conforms to all ethical rules set by the European Union. Furthermore, the collection of the data has the seal of approval from the Socionical Ethics Committee.

So the authors are very upfront about data collection – cheers to that! Yet the original premise stands: this type of service directly supports State power and control. This of course treads on the line of what is acceptable to research, since the results often can be used for nefarious purposes. The hope is that researchers acknowledge paths to their research have negative, and possibly harmful consequences.