Photo 28 May 13 notes torontodesign: Regent Park was the first public housing project in Canada, developed in the late 1940’s to replace the Victorian slums that existed in the area with humane and safe housing. The Fugitive Glue Light Fixture OH-85 [SITE-1] nicknamed “Dogbone” has been designed to resemble the shape of those first public housing buildings that are still in use today. Kinda awesome.

torontodesign:

Regent Park was the first public housing project in Canada, developed in the late 1940’s to replace the Victorian slums that existed in the area with humane and safe housing.

The Fugitive Glue Light Fixture OH-85 [SITE-1] nicknamed “Dogbone” has been designed to resemble the shape of those first public housing buildings that are still in use today.

Kinda awesome.

via T O R O N T O D E S I G N.
Quote 13 Apr
At the heart of the company’s algorithms is the idea that a “person, when they walk, is seeking to minimize their dissatisfaction.” On foot, as with life itself! “The same way you can plot density on a map,” Plottner says, “you can plot frustration.” But this simple statement—minimizing dissatisfaction—explains a lot. It is why people take the escalator (and disdain elevated walkways or subterranean tunnels), it is why pedestrians will begin to rampantly jaywalk if you make them wait too long, it is why they trample “desire lines” on aloofly chained-off college quadrangles. As a British engineer once told me, “pedestrians are natural Pythagoreans”—they will always seek the shortest path. The Legion model seeks to understand, with each step the pedestrian takes, what their next step will be, based on a mathematically weighted combination of three factors (the tolerance for, and wish to avoid, inconvenience, frustration, and discomfort). More minor things are often observed—people pausing briefly in London before exiting a transit station to see if it’s raining—but not fully modeled yet. (Plottner notes the company already has some 9 million pedestrian measurements.) Getting large crowds of people to move smoothly often involves negating people’s own natural inclinations. In London, or in Chinese cities, he notes, it is common to see a long railing at the bottom of pairs of escalators. “It forces you to take a few extra steps,” he says. “Every time we turn, we’re always trying to cut the corner, always trying to get a leg up on that other person. This removes the conflict area from the base of the escalator.” Similarly, Legion’s models for sports stadiums and other large facilities often show circular switchbacks in staircases can handle more people than square. “People are better about following the outline of the wall,” says Plottner. “They don’t feel like it’s causing them extra work.
— 

Walking in America: What scientists know about how pedestrians really behave. - Slate Magazine

Thank heavens someone is working on this. It’s nice to finally have something to say to those who think I take my jaywalking casually. It’s an energy maximization thing, people, and I’m evolutionarily adapted to do it, not because I’m an anarchist or some shit.

Quote 23 Mar 1 note
Marohn says he has realized over the past decade that he and the New Urbanists are actually often talking about the same thing. The urban experience and the small-town experience have more in common than people think. And they’ve both been distorted by the suburban experiment. The picture looks different. In cities, it looks like an army of surface parking lots has devoured our downtowns. Small towns have also been hallowed out at the core and nipped at their edges by encroaching subdivisions. But the effect is the same, Marohn says: an erosion of civic space, which has led to an erosion of the financial viability of communities. And this is the language he uses to talk about planning – the language of economics, of debt and prosperity and gas prices. Sure, economic arguments are often environmental ones, too (saving on gas also saves the environment!). But Marohn only ever mentions this under his breath, like, “oh, by the way, reinvesting in our existing infrastructure is good for the environment, too.” He says he sometimes ticks off environmentalists by acknowledging their worldview as an afterthought instead of up front. “The ones that are intellectually honest kind of get it, that we’re talking about the same thing, we’re just starting from a different place,” he says. “If we want to reach the mass of humanity in this country, we need to start somewhere else.
— How To Talk About Cities Without Ticking Off Folks Who Don’t Live There: The Atlantic Cities
Link 18 Mar 268 notes When L.A. painted a 1.5-mile strip of Spring Street neon green last year, it was hailed as a major step in the city's effort to have cars and bicycles coexist. But the lane has been criticized by the film industry, which frequently uses the stretch of Spring as a stand-in for other cities and eras.»

wilwheaton:

When Los Angeles painted a 1.5-mile strip of Spring Street neon green last year, it was hailed as a major step in the city’s effort to have cars and bicycles share the road. But now, the bike lane has become a symbol of how hard it can be to reserve room for cyclists in a city dominated by the car.

The green lane has been criticized by the film industry, which frequently uses the stretch of Spring Street, in the heart of old downtown, as a stand-in for other cities and eras. Producers say the eye-catching lane makes it more difficult to use Spring as a substitute for, say, a Manhattan street.

“If you’re depicting ‘anywhere U.S.A.’ or anywhere in the world — that is our claim to fame here in California,” said Ed Duffy, business agent for Teamsters Local 399, which represents location managers, casting agents and studio drivers.

[…]

The Spring Street lane is part of a larger campaign by City Hall to make streets safer and more inviting to cyclists.

The arrogance of the film industry is appalling, and as a member of the film industry, it’s embarrassing to me.

Hey, film industry: BACK LOTS. DO YOU HAVE THEM?

God forbid we invest in making our city safer for cyclists… won’t someone think of the precious  film industry?

What’s kind of funny about this? With New York and LA both installing bike lanes, for those filming somewhere without bike lanes (say, Toronto), it will be harder for them to be factually accurate without putting effort into stalling blue lanes, planters and large crosswalks, even if they capture the “feel” with imported NY taxis and other set dressing, etc. That may pass with the audiences who are used to seeing NY in media and haven’t seen things like the High Line in real life.

Also, from a place-making perspective, I’m also kind of stoked this is happening. No two cities install the same bike lane, because no two cities have the same combination of cycling, driving and local government cultures. They arise from local circumstances, not highway design standard manuals. It makes cities less interchangeable — and, so it appears, this particular aspect of the film industry is discomfited by the development.

Vancouver built part of its reputation as Hollywood North on that ability to pass, and if the reality is that that is getting harder and harder all the time because cities are nurturing their own individual urban identities… Bring it on, I say. There are more than enough places, I’m sure, that would be more than willing to bend to filmmakers’ will to be generic to the detriment of the quality of life of their local tax-paying citizens. (Again, the aforementioned Toronto comes to mind…)

[As a sci-fi nerd who grew up laughing at re-dressed neighbourhood Vancouver locations passing as alternate reality “San Francisco’s” on Sliders and a planning student, simply, I could not resist. Also, I’m going to be in LA in about three weeks and probably want to do a bicycle tour while I’m there, so this will be very relevant to me, very soon!]

via WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR.
Quote 16 Mar

There have been a few voices advocating for light rail on its own merits, even absent funding considerations. [In addition to former TTC Chief General Manager Gary Webster; and former centre-right Scarborough councillor (and budget chief under David Miller) David Soknacki,] current councillor and TTC board member John Parker has been using his Twitter feed to trumpet the economic development that flows from street-level transit.

[…]These voices have been few and far too rare. Too many people who care about transit in Toronto, who want to see it developed based on the best available research and evidence, have just conceded Rob Ford’s basic premise throughout this entire debate [that subways are inherently, intrinsically better].

Perhaps they did so out of a desire to be conciliatory […]. But the effect has been to make a debate that should have been, could have been, largely sane and rational and fact-oriented, utterly, perhaps ruinously ideological and divisive.

— 

How the Left Has Been Letting Rob Ford Win on Transit via Torontoist

While there are times when it may seem to some that the debate in Vancouver on SkyTrains is similar, I would argue that it’s actually very much not, as Jarrett Walker has pointed out, because of the service frequency and cost tradeoffs that differentiate SkyTrain from subways and LRT or streetcar. That said, when it comes to rapid transit to UBC, the same street-level impact arguments that support LRT on Broadway tend to get lost in the multiple account evaluation… (Unless, of course, you are Patrick Condon).

I do also think it’s kind of fascinating that, by sheer force of the history of the debate here, the economic contribution of the transit system as an employer is a total non-consideration in Metro Vancouver; whereas (so I’ve heard) it actually matters a bit to people in other constituencies.

Quote 5 Mar 5 notes
we do need researchers excited about driverless cars not to forget the human element. The goal of our built environment is not to move cars as fast as possible everywhere, but to create a better quality of life. The computer science researchers need to also talk to their colleagues in other disciplines, set appropriate goals that consider all users of the roads, and think about what algorithms can actually make life better.
— 

A great summary of my own anxieties about the “OMG DRIVERLESS CARS!!11!!!” via Jarrett Walker in this article: Why Driverless Cars Will Increase Tensions in Cities and Suburbs Alike - The Atlantic Cities.

I’ve been carefully stepping around online. I don’t think it’s all that unrelated to questions like, “Why isn’t Google Plus more successful?” The common elements are the gap between our idealized models of human behaviour and, well, what human behaviour is actually like.

Quote 2 Mar
The manufacturing jobs that pay best today look a lot more like knowledge work than traditional factory work. In fact, high-paid manufacturing work – guiding and maintaining advanced machinery, engaging in problem solving, and continuous improvement with other workers and engineers – increasingly is knowledge work. “If you look at what people are doing in manufacturing today, they are running robots, designing tools, programming computers,” Judith Crocker, director of education at the Manufacturing Advocacy & Growth Network, or MAGNET, a manufacturing promoter in Cleveland, recently told a reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer[9]. This is true across the board, in every kind of job. When my colleagues and I parsed the data[10] on the hundreds and hundreds of jobs that make up the U.S. economy, we identified key skills that matter to wages. The first is well-known – “analytical or cognitive skill,” of the sort most people associate with knowledge work. While it is certainly the case that doctors, computer scientists, and software engineers earn more money based on their cognitive skills, analytical skill has an even bigger effect on wages for both blue-collar and service workers. But the skill with the biggest effect on wages is the “social intelligence skill.” Much more than being friendly or outgoing, it includes the ability to help develop people, to organize them around goals, to recruit and lead teams and mobilize the right people for a project – the cornerstones of leadership and effective management that add to organizational productivity.
— A Blueprint for a 21st Century Workforce - Jobs & Economy - The Atlantic Cities
Quote 16 Feb
Advocates of the Digital Sabbath have the opportunity to put forth an important message about practices that can transform the pace of everyday life, practices that can offer new perspectives on things taken for granted as well as offering people insights on the social norms that are often disrupted by the intrusion of mobile devices. We absolutely need breaks and distance from our routines to gain a new points of view and hopefully understand why it might come as a shock to your partner when you answer a work call at the dinner table. Yet, by conflating mobile media with a lack of meaningful connection and a distracted mind, they do a disservice to the wide range of ways we use our devices, many of which develop deep and meaningful relationships to the spaces we move through and the people we connect with.
— 

The Myth of the Disconnected Life - Jason Farman

Farman’s nailed it here. It’s possible to get too much of a good thing, for all the good things we’ve ever made. But they still do some pretty gosh darn good stuff, and we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater by seeing doom in the new. (We always had that potential, sillies.)

Quote 27 Oct 10 notes
In culture governance, just as civil society loses it innocence as the bearer of all that is good, collectivistic and harmonious, so political power is no longer victimised as a uniform and coercive power claiming command and control over all subjects within its territory. Politicising individuals in civil society by inolving them in the rule of expert systems, whether as employees, customers, user or citizens, is articulated positively as a necessary means to survive and develop as an organisation.
— Henrik Bang, “Governance as political communication,” 2003, page 20. (In this quote, he seems to pretty much lay the groundwork for tying together service design/co-creation/co-production and governance.)
Text 11 Oct 1 note Architecture for Embodied Persons

Mark Kingwell, Concrete Reveries (emphasis mine):

Indeed, a given piece of architecture was often here before us and will likely be here when we are gone, so short is our individual stay. Unlike political participation, even on a positive (some would say romantic) view of able and dedicated democratic citizens, architecture is not optional. It influences us in countless ways both obvious and subtle. We cannot understand ourselves without it, for this is is where we eat and sleep and work and raise our children. And we cannot understand the built environment without confronting ourselves: not rational abstractions thinking rationally, but embodied persons. Persons, that is to say, with an upright posture that gives us left and right, in front and behind, down and up; persons who find some rooms oppressive and others uplifting, some spaces intimidating and others cozy; persons who perspire and breathe, laugh or grow angry while waiting in traffic. Persons who cross boundaries and enact them too, in the embodied, temporal being that they are.


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