See also, The 51st State – State of New York City:
What’s a Metropolitan Statistical Area?
Tag: urban
The Islands of San Francisco
The Death and Life of Detroit
This is a more intimate Detroit than I—than most of us—have consumed in the media. Detroit takes up an outsize space in the American psyche, with Eminem and Clint Eastwood proclaiming the auto industry’s resurgence in dewy Super Bowl ads; with glowing recovery stories pairing the words “Midtown” and “hipster”; with apocalyptic (and accurate) images of Dresden-like streets; and with a millionaire mayor touting the most ambitious plan in modern history to reshape a U.S. city. Viewing it through those media lenses is like peering through a kaleidoscope or maybe at a Rorschach test: A city in recovery. A city in free fall. It depends on who’s telling the story.
Being present on the network: buildings=yes presentation by Aaron Straup Cope
The second paper I presented was about the building=yes project. It is very much a technical paper going over the nuts and bolts of extracting the data (from OpenStreetMap), indexing it and designing custom map tiles to help make sense of the sheer volume of data. Rather than try to cram all that information in to a 15 minute talk I instead talked about the overall value – the purpose – of creating these kinds of registries and tried to highlight the importance of being patient. It’s not always clear what will come out of these kinds of projects but what is clear is that stable, linkable things that can hold hands with one another are the foundation on which all the interesting stuff will be built.
The Power of Fear in Networked Publics
Increasingly, the battles over identity are moving beyond geek culture into political battles. The same technologies that force people into the open are being used to expose people who are engaged in political speech. Consider, for example, how crowdsourcing is being used to identify people in a photograph. It just so happens that these people were engaged in a political protest.
Radical transparency is particularly tricky in light of the attention economy. Not all information is created equal. People are far more likely to pay attention to some kinds of information than others. And, by and large, they’re more likely to pay attention to information that causes emotional reactions. Additionally, people are more likely to pay attention to some people. The person with the boring life is going to get far less attention than the person that seems like a trainwreck. Who gets attention – and who suffers the consequences of attention – is not evenly distributed.
And, unfortunately, oppressed and marginalized populations who are already under the microscope tend to suffer far more from the rise of radical transparency than those who already have privilege. The cost of radical transparency for someone who is gay or black or female is different in Western societies than it is for a straight white male. This is undoubtedly a question of privacy, but we should also look at it through the prism of the culture of fear.
It’s all about the headways. Period
Part of the conventional wisdom about transit which prevents spending real money on quick headways is that “There’s no market. People aren’t using that route. Why should we be running empty buses?”
My quick answer to that old saw is that just as with roads, with transit, supply induces demand. If you offer a rich ‘connection pipe” (to garble Walker’s terminolgy) then people will use it and people will get used to the service and presto you have political support. People support things (politically) that they use.
It's all about the headways. Period. – City Comforts, the blog.
Happy Birthday, Rome!
During the Roman Republic, several dates were given for the founding of the city between 758 BC and 728 BC. Finally, under the Roman Empire, the date suggested by Marcus Terentius Varro, 753 BC, was agreed upon, but in the Fasti Capitolini the year given was 752. Although the proposed years varied, all versions agreed that the city was founded on April 21, the day of the festival sacred to Pales, goddess of shepherds; in her honour, Rome celebrated the Par ilia (or Palilia). (The Roman a.u.c. calendar, however, begins with Varro’s dating of 753 BC.)
– via Founding of Rome on Wikipedia.
Big Box Stores Linked To the Presence of Hate Groups – Neighborhoods – The Atlantic Cities
The recent surge in hate group activity is a concern to many citizens and policymakers. We examine the roles of socioeconomic factors measured at the county level that are hypothesized to account for the presence of such groups, including social capital and religious affiliations.
Both social capital stocks and religious affiliation exert an independent and statistically significant influence on the number of hate groups, as does the presence of Wal-Mart stores, holding other factors constant.
Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect
Robert J. Sampson’s important new book, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, challenges prevailing notions of community decline. Sampson, an urban sociologist who is the Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University, argues that our communities continue to matter a great deal and that our lives are powerfully shaped by where we live. William Julius Wilson lauds the book as “one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated empirical studies ever conducted by a social scientist.”
via The Enduring Effect of Neighborhoods – The Atlantic Cities.
Ring Roads of the World
The Rice School of Architecture took ring roads from two dozen international cities, layering the ring roads at the same scale, and color coded them. The result is Ring Roads of the World, for their 2012 lecture series.