atlas(t)

ice detention deaths

via Zuky, an interactive map showing 83 immigrant detainees whose deaths in detention might be due to neglect or abuse. Click here to engage with the interactive map and read the names.

jane jacobs on discrimination

the effective breaking down of residential discrimination outside a slum, and the less dramatic self-diversification within an unslumming slum, proceed concurrently. If America has now, in the case of Negroes, reached an effective halt in this process and in general entered a stage of arrested development -- a thought I find both highly improbable and quite intolerable -- then it may be that Negro slums cannot effectively unslum in the fashion demonstrated by slums formed by other ethnic populations and population mixtures. In this case, the damage to our cities might be the least of our worries; unslumming is a by-product of other kinds of vigor and other forms of economic and social change.

When an area has unslummed, it is easy to forget how bad it once was and how helpless both the area and its population were thought to be. ... As in the case of other slums, overcoming of discrimination outside the slum, and unslumming within the slum, must proceed concurrently. Neither can wait for the accomplishment of the other. Every relaxation of discrimination outside can help unslumming within. Progress in unslumming within helps outside. The two go together.

The inherent resources necessary for unslumming -- advancement and self-diversification in a population -- demonstrably exist among colored people, including the colored people who are in slums or who have passed through slums, as strikingly as these resources exist among white people. In a way the proved and obvious possession of these resources is more striking among the colored, because they emerge in spite of disproportionate obstacles against their emergence. Indeed, because of the very facts that colored populations advance, self-diversify, and have too much spirit to like ghettos, our inner cities have already lost far more of the Negro middle class than they can afford to lose.

I think inner cities will go on losing too much of the Negro middle class almost as fast as it forms until, in actual fact, the choice of remaining there no longer means, for a colored person, an implied acceptance of ghetto citizenship and status. In short, unslumming is at the very least directly -- as well as indirectly -- inhibited by discrimination.

        --- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

thoughts on jane jacobs four: east german cities

one of my favorite blogs, Pruned, also pointed me to this Economist article about former East German cities now being radically depopulated.

SOMETHING odd is happening to the cities of eastern Germany. Plattenbauten, the soulless prefabricated apartment blocks thrown up by the region's former communist rulers, are being knocked down. Occasionally one will be truncated, shorn of its upper storeys. Older streets are gap-toothed where wreckers have removed abandoned houses. Cityscapes are being pruned, removing dead and dying edifices in the hope of saving the rest.

City planners, normally keen to promote the building of homes, factories and roads, are responding to a double demographic crisis: the collapse of communist-era industry, which sent workers, especially young women, fleeing westwards; and a sharp decline in the birth rate.

Those who remain are fearing blight in the empty areas--some emptied by up to 20%. So they're removing housing units by the thousands ... and expensive infrastructure such as roads. Some cities are taking the problem as an opportunity (ogd, I sound like I should have my own DVD).

That may account for the spirit of zany experimentalism that prevails in cities such as Dessau and Köthen. Under the motto “city islands”, Dessau is nudging life and commerce towards “core areas”, which means making a verdant city (which is already three-quarters parkland) even greener.

Traces of Dessau's busier past—a disused tower for smoking sausages or a dairy's chimney now occupied by storks—are being preserved. Parts of the void are being parcelled into “claims” of 400 square metres, which citizens can use free of charge for projects such as growing biomass for fuel. “Where buildings fall, gardens rise,” a hopeful billboard claims.

Köthen, home of the father of homeopathy, is creating a homeopathy library and school, and even employing homeopaths to help cure the city. "On their advice, the municipality [conducted] painstaking interviews to find out how [residents] thought the newly-created space should be used. To provoke a sharper reaction, the city dimmed the street lights, highlighting only the buildings designated for sacrifice." And Stassfurt removed its entire city center, affected by subsidence because of mining, and replaced it with ... that's right: a lake.

Dessau is also preparing an international Bauaustellung or Building Exposition for 2010, a German tradition intended to bring the best architectural and planning minds to bear on new circumstances and changing trends. (You'd better bet I'm going to be there. That's only two years away!)

The article ends with: "From the death of cities, the hope is that new life will emerge," which brings us to the important question:

WWJJD? Dunno, what do you think? Is this situation unprecedented? (Can't be.)  What happens when cities regress back to large towns? Is that even possible?

nasa cyclone nargis flooding photos

nASA Earth Observatory images of Cyclone Nargis flooding Myanmar. Via Sepia Mutiny.

thoughts on jane jacobs three: outdoor living rooms

since I read this NYT article (via Pruned) it has gone behind a firewall, but the upshot is that a new movement is seeing architects assisting communities in building low-cost "living room" furniture in public spaces, if for no other reason, to offer people a place to sit.

These tend to congregate around bus stops.

The idea began several years ago in Oakland, where community organizers and residents got together to improve places where neighbors tended to congregate — the corner store, outside the barbershop — amid a decidedly downtrodden environment.

“The idea was to enable low-income communities to create their own social spaces and improve their neighborhoods without bringing on gentrification,” said Steve Rasmussen Cancian, the landscape architect who helped introduce the living rooms.

With the help of residents, simple pieces of furniture were erected here and there around Oakland, giving bits of cheerful life to corners where there was little to look at. Mr. Rasmussen Cancian then imported the idea to Los Angeles, on a corner where drug dealers and prostitutes did business near a Y.M.C.A. used by families.

At the same time, Central City Neighborhood Partners, a nonprofit group that focuses on low-income families here, surveyed residents in the city’s center about their transportation needs. At the top of the list was a well-maintained place to wait for buses, which, according to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, are boarded citywide an average of 1.2 million times a week. Thus the marriage of community living rooms and bus stops.

One advantage of doing it this way is cutting through red tape, and another is the cost: “A simple pocket park takes a half-million dollars and takes two to three years to build, while a living room takes as little as a month and between $5,000 and $15,000.”

And WWJJD? She might say that this is an interesting experiment in creating community street surveillance. You give people a place to congregate and suddenly, there are people outside to people-watch. You give people a place to sit down, and suddenly, there's a place from which to people watch, in neighborhoods where there aren't many good vantage points to view the street.

I don't imagine that this one effort will solve all of L.A.'s--or Oakland's--problems, but in conversation with efforts to build more street-friendly residences and mixed-use zoning, this could be good.

It's not the same as park-building, but it's closer to effective park-building than street-building. Or maybe you could say it's half-way between the two: creating small spaces on streets that function somewhat like small parks and integrate into street diversity.

It's not surprising that this movement arose in Oakland. Oakland has a number of parks like the one above near my house, shoved into strange unbuilt little triangles of intersections. The one above is what Jacobs would call a successful transient park, a good gathering place for the homeless or jobless, but not pleasant for nearby residents, who never use it. This is because, as you can sort of tell from the photo, there are no buildings at all near it, much less mixed-use residences and shops.

Behind the viewer in this view is a Greyhound station, that bringer of blight; and the center of the park is not merely shaded, but obscured by trees, making any rational person want to avoid it. And further, the park is relatively large, making you feel like you have a distance to traverse to get through it. I always have to think whether I'd prefer to walk through or around it.

On the other hand, there's this one, a mere ten blocks away, near my friend's house:

I visited my friend last weekend during the hot weather, and this park seemed to be bristling with naked arms and legs. Mostly teens and young people, but also some older people were hanging out in tank tops and shorts, drawn together although there wasn't enough shade to cover all of them. The younger people, particularly the men, spilled out into the street to the left, hanging out there, and crossing back and forth frequently between the park and the convenience store that is just outside of our view on the left.

As you can see this park is tiny, just the triangle created by the intersection of two grid streets and a larger avenue that cuts diagonally across the grid. Mixed-use residences overlook the park on two sides: on the left, where your view is cut off, and before you to the left. On the right, across the big blvd (San Pablo) is a higher project which, though farther away, also can see farther and also overlooks the park.

I was late to a party but I really wanted to stop (at a "safe" distance, of course) and watch the goings on in the park because it was so interesting. It's the first such park I've seen in Oakland, although there are fairly frequent triangles in the streets, and many filled with parks.

They need both the mixed-use surroundings, the small, overseeable size, and, as pointed out above, furniture for people to sit on.

I love how my eyes are seeing things Jacobsly.

blog nirvana map

this is an old one from a year ago when I stopped blogging here completely. Jumping off an earlier post mapping the route to blog nirvana, this Valleywag blogger mapped out which blogs have gotten close, or reached it (boingboing). I'd comment, but it's pretty self-explanatory.

thoughts on jane jacobs two: atlantic yards

i posted nearly two years ago about an article by Brooklynite Jonathan Lethem protesting the planned development Atlantic Yards, which requires the clearing of existing residences using eminent domain. A court fifth amendment challenge to the developer was not upheld and building is underway.

At the time I couldn't figure out the rights and wrongs of the situation--although later that summer I visited my cousin who lives in Park Slope, and she told me that the same developer had created a less ambitious project in a nearby part of Brooklyn which had degraded the neighborhood and gotten no business, and ended up costing the city a great deal.

But after reading Death and Life I now have the framework to definitively hate Atlantic Yards.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who thought this way.

Karrie Jacobs (no relation) posted nearly two years ago in metropolismag.com about how her reading of Jacobs affected her view of the Atlantic Yards project. Her criticisms of the project based on Jacobs are as follows:

I don’t know whether Jacobs, circa 1959, would approve or disapprove of Ratner, circa 2006, but her take on the project would likely be a bit more nuanced than the simple declaration “too big.” In certain ways the Ratner plan, with its arena, density, and mixture of residential and office uses is influenced—albeit indirectly—by her thinking. The project’s substantial number of “affordable” housing units adds to its overall heterogeneity. On the other hand, a huge project by one developer and one architect cannot be diverse, and it’s possible that Jacobs would have reacted to Gehry’s irregular forms much as she reacted to Googie-style coffee shops: “virtual sameness trying, by dint of exhibitionism, to appear unique and different.”

The biggest drawback to Atlantic Yards, according to my reading of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is that it will be constructed atop a rail yard that currently separates the neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. The new development is unlikely to knit together those two neighborhoods; instead, lacking the cross-streets that Jacobs thought were key to urban vitality, it will exacerbate the division, generating more of what she termed “border vacuums.”

But she goes on to point out, quite rationally, that

Admittedly I could be the one misreading Jacobs—cherry-picking her book for the ideas that support my own penchant for density, diversity, and complexity—but it’s clear from the book’s final chapter, “The Kind of Problem a City Is,” that she was arguing above all against reductive thinking.

... The mistake made by Jacobs’s detractors and acolytes alike is to regard her as a champion of stasis—to believe she was advocating the world’s cities be built as simulacra of the West Village circa 1960. Admirers and opponents have routinely taken her arguments for complexity and turned them into formulas. But the book I just read was an inspiration to move forward without losing sight that cities are powerful, dynamic, ever-changing entities made up of myriad gestures big and small.

I'll be visiting the area next week and intend to go check out the site. Stay tuned.

*****Update 5/3/08

Turns out, Karrie Jacobs has a blog and she just posted about Atlantic Yards recently. Plus, Saint JJ is all over her blog.

distribution of space debris

via the fabulous/ist io9, this animation from the European Space Agency of the distribution of space debris in orbit around the Earfs between 1957 and 2000.

At closing speeds reaching 50 thousand km per hour, even the smallest bits of space debris can cause serious harm to spacecraft; larger ones cause catastrophe. Near-Earth missions, like the International Space Station, now carry ever-more sophisticated shielding. Not only is space debris a hot topic, it is also a fascinating — and growing — field of space science.

The animation shows the little dots of light representing satellite grabbage increasing and swarming around the Earth like flies. It's creepy.

Just 'cause you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there.

thoughts on jane jacobs one: the fountainhead

Photo via

jane Jacobs may be a genius, but I mistrust genius, especially where it relates to architecture and city planning ... probably because my sister sent me, without irony, a copy of The Fountainhead when I was a freshman in college (she a sophomore) and, although I threw it across the room every fifty pages or so, I felt that I had to finish it, and therefore read all the way through the part where Roark 'sploded up a housing project because they changed the pipes or something and then justified it on account of his genius, even though he was a rapist. Jane Jacobs gives me a whole new set of ammo against Howard Roark that I never thought I'd get--or need--namely the simple fact that housing projects are bad, and for that, I forgive her her genius.

Jane Jacobs is, in fact, the anti-Howard Roark: because she was real whereas Roark was fictional; because she stood for the collective using principles to guide minimal interference in community long-term, "natural" building and development processes that brought aesthetic diversity and diversity of use, while Roark was all about the monolithic, single-use project designed by an individual and forced upon a disempowered mass; because she was a woman and Roark, a man--a very important difference; because she was married, a parent, and lived in urban neighborhoods and Roark was perennially single, fatally paternalistic, and residentially nomadic, through urban, exurban, and privileged rural spaces.

I'm shocked that I remember this much about a book I threw across the room twenty years ago. Let this be the last time I ever write about Rand.

atributos urbanos

this very cool dictionary/glossary  was created by the Andalusia Center of Contemporary Art for their Atributos Urbanos, or Urban Attributes, program, which will "generate a framework for reflection and debate on contemporary cities."

Urban Attributes undertakes a synchronic study of urban areas within Andalusia, and also of local and globally relevant phenomena which during recent decades have determined and defined ways of generating a city.

Two complementary work areas have been created together with a program of parallel activities that will take place in autumn 2006... The first of these work areas includes the study of adjectives and nouns assigned to the contemporary city by various authors. A glossary of attributes has ... served to describe urban phenomena from our recent history. ...

To complement this we propose the analysis of five urban areas affected by intense socioeconomic, infrastructural, and cultural transformations, i.e.: the Campo de Dalias-Campo de Níjar, the Costa del Sol, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Bay of Cadiz, and the SE30-SE40 district within the metropolitan area of Seville.

Some favorite terms:

• Buffer City: Global buffer cities become spaces of transition between countries and continents, where differences in economic development cause the uncontrollable decanting of people and businesses. The interest of the buffer city lies exclusively in the fact that it is crossed to reach the other side, and this condition of area of passage, where legal exchange and illegal traffic are more intense, gives it a high degree of crossovers and social conflict that become spatially various manifestations of a provisional nature.


• Cannibal City: We understand such a city to be one that in the process of its territorial expansion and growth engulfs any other urban area that it encounters. This is an organicist characterization of the city, which resorts to the analogy with natural phenomena to reveal the most irrational facet of its behaviour. Cannibalism becomes a valid reference for situations in which the expansion of the city is subject to the vicissitudes of the free market and the changing interests that encourage property speculation, which raise doubts about the efficiency of any regulation, norm, or form of planning.


• Surfurbia: Coined by Reyner Banham in his Los Angeles. The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), the term surfurbia is used to describe the influence that the overwhelming trinomial of the three Ss (Sun, Sand and Surf) has on the construction of the contemporary metropolis. In the first place, surfurbia arises as a habitual process of suburbanization: Since it was founded, the city of Los Angeles was kept separate from the sea until in the early 20th century the coast became the declared objective of its expansion. This process, as in the remainder of North American cities, was based on an alliance with rail companies which permitted easy access from the downtown area to the first exclusive resorts of the periphery such as Santa Mónica, created as a result of the growing fondness for bathing of the Los Angeles bourgeoisie of the late 19th century.


• Villa Miseria: Villa Miseria is the Argentinian version of a term that has numerous local equivalents: Favela in Brazil, callampa in Chile, pueblo joven in Peru, katchi abadi in Pakistan, shanty town in Kenya, bidonville in Algeria, township in South Africa, barong-barong in the Philippines, jhuggi in India, etc. All of them refer to the same phenomenon, the slum housing that surrounds the large metropolises of developing countries. The Villas Miseria are unplanned settlements. They appear as a result of the initiative of a group of citizens (normally from rural areas) who appropriate furtively and illegally an empty territory located on the periphery of a large city.