Car-free zones saw boost in share of consumer activity compared to the rest of the city during Covid-19:

Analysts at the listing platform looked at restaurants in Boston’s Little Italy, San Francisco’s Mission District, Chicago Central Loop’s West Fulton Market, downtown Boise’s 8th Street and Burbank’s San Fernando Boulevard, all of which had slow streets programs that blocked vehicle access in 2020. They measured the difference in the share of consumer interest between the sample of restaurants in each slow street zone and all restaurants across each respective city, comparing the start of the pandemic (using March 15, 2020 as a proxy), when these programs weren’t yet in place, to the various time periods when the programs were in swing. (The chart below shows that difference.) Eateries in car-free areas saw more consumer interest (based on the amount of views, posted photos and user reviews on Yelp listings) when their streets were strictly limited to pedestrians and cyclists, they found. 

• The Soviet Bloc Way of Building Rapid Transit
• Million Programme, an ambitious public housing programme implemented in Sweden between 1965 and 1974
• Possible trend: Cute robots. Postmates’ delivery robot Serve is designed to be “lovable at first sight”
• The World of Sneaker-Buying Bots
• What data cities gave to amazon says a lot about their values
• Seattle’s Viadoom: The ‘Carmageddon’ That Wasn’t
• Visualizing the Speed of Light

Here are the things I’ve been looking at this week. Past weekly Links 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

• Modernist building in Brussels transformed into Fosbury & Sons co-working space
• Why do all new apartment buildings look the same?
• Visualizing Dubious Spelling with Flow Diagrams (People’s attempts to spell “Gyllenhaal“)
• Commuter Knits a ‘Rail Delay Scarf.’ It Fetches $8,650 on eBay

Here are the things I’ve been looking at this week. Past weekly Links 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

On an otherwise typical article about the interaction of city residents, outside groups, and government – Why Detroit Residents Pushed Back Against Tree-Planting – is a mention of a concept I’ve never seen: heritage narratives. The author defines heritage narratives as:

…the stories that people from all walks of Detroit life tell themselves and each other about why city conditions are the way they are. The heritage narratives that residents shared about trees in Detroit were different from the ones shared among the people in city government and The Greening of Detroit.

I love this – this encapsulates what I’ve been searching for when observing that different residents of a place have different views on what the city is, or should be. It brings together the fact that different people, with different contexts, can have a wildly divergent view of where they live, and how they got there.