Traditional Architectural & Traditional Urban Form

London RailwayLondon Railway, originally uploaded by plemeljr

I know I slightly admonished David in my last post, but he makes a perfect insight about the difference between traditional architecture from traditional urban form:

Charles has also caused himself undue problems of intellectual substance by not separating traditional architecture from traditional urban form. They are two distinct matters and the issues are conflated to nobody’s benefit, least of all Prince Charles’ effectiveness. Too many react viscerally from the idea that London must be a classical city and yet many of those same people also favor walkable urbanism.
Had anyone of a number of people — Lord Rogers, the Prince, the Candy’s, the Qataris — had presence of mind to split the difference, there might have been no lawsuit. What I mean is that the essential problem to vast majority of people was that Lord Rogers’ plan was not so much as modernist building facade as modernist, suburban, street-separating urban form. Had Rogers been able to imagine a traditional Georgian neighborhood but using a modernist vocabulary of building elements — more glass, harder edges — he would have been able to create a traditional walkable urbanism using modern hard-edge style. Some say that would have been impossible but I suggest that it’s quite wrong. I’ve just been visiting the Olympic Village in Vancouver BC and it offers a fine example of how to real walkable urbanism with nary a Doric column in site. “Splitting the difference” could have allowed (and still could) to offer the architectural form which the Cnady’s and Lord Rogers seem to desire along with Prince Charles’ (and he is correct in substance) that Chelsea Barrack must fit into traditional walkable London.

I don’t think this is splitting the difference at all. You can be contemporary (or modern) in your buildings but follow traditional usage patterns and make a building which is truly relevant to our present and context; yet draw on hundreds of years of established urban understanding. Just look at Corbusier’s church in Firminy, which was built 40 years after his death.
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photo by Ed Alcock for The New York Times

Of Course Governmental Regulations Create & Reinforce Suburban Land Use

Everyone is talking about Ellen Dunham-Jones’ TED talk on Retrofitting Suburbia:
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
By the way David Sucher gets it exactly wrong here taking Big Media Matt to task:

Odd. Nowhere does Dunham-Jones argue against “legal impediments to this kind of adaptation.” She doesn’t address the subject at all and in fact her whole presentation is based on her research into purely free-market adaptations.
Of course as they says, if you are a carpenter, the solution to every problem is a hammer. Perhaps for Yglesias the solution to every problem is government intervention.

Yglesias is fundamentally correct: current governmental restrictions on land use, which started in a just manner to protect citizens, now make it virtually impossible to create walkable urbanism in existing cities. I wrote about this concerning my hometown of Westerville, Ohio:

Not only is Uptown Westerville denser, but also is universally loved and desired throughout Westerville. It is where you went on first dates, where you got ice cream, where you went to buy cute gifts for your mom on Mother’s Day. But for some reason Westerville restricts this type of development, when it should expanded.

Not only do people love walkable urbanism, but developers are building twisted facsimiles of downtowns – which are really just outdoor malls – and making huge amounts of money. Just look at Easton Town Center which is less than 15 minutes away from Westerville:


The solution is to change the zoning rules to allow higher density building. That might be what David is talking about government intervention, but to me, it seems that allowing people the freedom to build a bit denser lessens David’s horrible government intervention.

Boy There Hasn’t Been Links For Awhile, Links

Russ MaschmeyerRuss Maschmeyer, originally uploaded by SVA MFA IxD

Will the real LaGuardia, Please Stand Up?

Real-LaGuardia.jpg
Location-aware programs such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Dopplr allow users the ability to chart and share their past, present, and future locations. This is all good fun: letting your friends know you are at a cool bar in the Lower East Side or are about to go on a trip to San Francisco, these new social tools are beginning to redefine our bodies in space (c.f. Sousveillance).
[tl;dr summary: location aware software needs to stop treating locations as points, but rather points, areas, fields, lines and rays.]
I’m going to talk about Foursquare now to illustrate my critique, and in-turn use their nomenclature, but all services currently exhibit these fundamental problems.
First, some background.
In Foursquare, users can create Places which have a name and spatial location – usually an address. A common problem of duplicate Places (both accidental and malicious) is dealt with through the promotion of hard-core users into one of three classes of Super Users (disclosure: I’m a Super User Level 1, please give me a cookie) which can weed out the duplicates. When you check in with your mobile device, you are presented with a list of Places surrounding you. Generally your Place is in the first screen, but often it is not due to weak GPS signals or if the Place isn’t in the database.
The Problem: Accuracy versus Precision
There are two fundamental metrics we can use to evaluate the success of locating ourselves in space. One is accuracy, the other is precision. Accuracy deals with how close your measurement is to the true value; while precision indicates the repeatability of the measurement across a series of trials. The problem arises when the Place you are trying to check into doesn’t fit into the 1:1 modal of address:place. Currently Foursquare only accounts accuracy as a point in space, never a field, area, polyline or ray.
For example, let’s take LaGuardia Airport, a facility I am in and out of constantly. How do we define LaGuardia as a Place which is both accurate and precise?
greater_LGA.jpg
We can certainly agree that LaGuardia Airport is located in the following Places:

  • The Universe
  • Sol System
  • Earth
  • North America
  • The United States of America
  • New York State
  • New York City
  • The Borough of Queens

We can all agree with the above list, which seems rather silly. However, where it gets fuzzy is when we try to increase our accuracy – the distance to the true Place LaGuardia Airport inhabits. LaGuardia isn’t just in one point in Space-Time since LaGuardia Airport comprises over 500 acres of land, parking garages, 5 terminals, concourse shops, and the gates, taxiways and runways. Again, there is no “one Place” La Guardia inhabits; rather than a point, La Guardia (and similar typologies) are areas.
This causes services such as Foursquare a great deal of issues. The result on Foursquare looks a little like this for LaGuardia and Grand Central Terminal respectively:
foursquare_mess.jpg
There are some interesting things to note here:
You can be on the other end of the LaGuardia airfield and not be able to check-in to LGA – which decreases the precision of the Place by users creating new LaGuardias which then have to be merged with the “one true LGA.” As you can see, LGA exists as both points in space, but also more accurately as an area.
The Russian Doll Problem
This brings up a related, but separate issue of User’s understanding of Space-Time. Users conception of Place is as varied as you would imagine, ranging from gamut from the general to the highly specific. To continue our LaGuardia Airport example, users have created Places for the following:


Because the precision of our instruments have improved many magnitudes, Users have created work-arounds creating even smaller levels of detail to accurately describe their location.
Possible Solutions
It would be remiss of me to just point out problems without putting forth any possible solutions. Suspending your judgement, here are some, “What if we…” situations:
What if we provide Places a Typology Option?
LGA_Typology.jpgWhat if we stopped pretending that all places can be resolved with a single cartesian point? Let’s build in tools to our software where we can let Users begin to accurately define the space and place around them. This will undoubtably make the storage and retrieval more difficult, but the payback is greater than the pain: better recording of actual locations and how we humans actually use the city and world.
If Flickr can create whole maps from a field of data which is fairly correct, then we can build tools which will increase the overall accuracy.
What if we provide Users a Russian Doll option?
LGA_russian_doll_solution.jpgWhat if we allow Users to check in to Places which are both implicitly and explicitly higher in the location stack? In other words, going back to our La Guardia Example, if I check in to Gate C9 I should also be checked into the following locations:

  • Central Terminal
  • La Guardia Airport
  • The Borough of Queens
  • New York City
  • New York State
  • The United States of America
  • North America
  • Earth
  • Sol System
  • The Universe

Some tuning between both the implicit location – the Universe all the way to (say) The Borough of Queens – and the explicit – LaGuardia – must be experimented with so that Users won’t be overwhelmed by the data and visual noise. User testing should be also done on creating a clear definition and option so that Places retain their meaning.
What if we provide Users an Accuracy Slider option?
LGA_Accuracy.jpgWhat if we provide Users an option of how accurate they are comfortable living at? Going back to LaGuardia, how about allowing a User to set a high and low threshold of accuracy so they would only see (say) LaGuardia Airport and The Borough of Queens? They might be OK with ambiguity, and the system should respect their careless ways – both in storage and retrieval.
Conclusion
Humans and computers understand location differently. It is the best interest of Users, and by extension location-based services, to understand and map the world correctly; and where possible create visualizations which combine an accurate understanding of the world which is usable by Humans. This is why cartography is so difficult and a balance between “correctness” of a map and how it is used is so difficult.