atlas(t)

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 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.

maglev train

Via Scott Westerfeld I came upon this video about a Japanese maglev train in testing phase. This is one of those emerging transportation technologies that gets my undies into a bunch. Nothing more to say here.

garmin vs. maposaurus

"you just can't beat a good old fashioned map sometimes." Indeed.

and

maps are a good way to learn about a civilization. Early maps were full of mythical beasts, representative of our awe of the unknown world. As science developed, these mysteries were solved, and maps, as well as life, became overly complicated and busy. This is the story of a civilization that knows no end to its consumption and is always seeking the final frontier.

Yeah, whatever. Despite the prose, this little video is quite lovely. Yay for DIY!

google maps commercial

real time rome

a very cool project from MIT for the Venice Biennale, involving bus traffic, pedestrian traffic (as measured by the use of handheld devices) 'n' stuff like that mapped out.

Real Time Rome is:

the MIT SENSEable City Lab’s contribution to the 2006 Venice Biennale, directed by professor Richard Burdett. The project aggregated data from cell phones (obtained using Telecom Italia's innovative Lochness platform), buses and taxis in Rome to better understand urban dynamics in real time. By revealing the pulse of the city, the project aims to show how technology can help individuals make more informed decisions about their environment. In the long run, will it be possible to reduce the inefficiencies of present day urban systems and open the way to a more sustainable urban future?

rspb wind farm maps

okay, the brit Royal Society for the Protection of Birds? Needs some help staying on message.

Check out the maps above. These were created, as the RSPB explains here, to demonstrate the "catastrophic impact (on the safety and habitat of endangered bird species) of the world's largest onshore wind farm," which is proposed for the Hebridean island of Lewis.

But how exactly these maps demonstrate that is beyond me. Take a closer look. What each one is, is an overlay of the proposed wind farm over a major UK city.

The unique maps show the current layout plans for the wind farm superimposed over same-scale maps of British cities. Shockingly, they reveal how the development would stretch north from Edinburgh city Zoo to beyond Methil on the other side of the Firth of Forth and west to Dunfermline; from Glasgow Central Station to East Kilbride in the south and Falkirk to the north east; and from Epsom Downs south of London to several miles north of the Thames flood barrier and east to Hampton court.

Okay. So? The wind farm is big. We knew that. That's what "world's largest onshore wind farm" means. It's big.

I get the feeling that some geeky, 21-year-old intern down Royal Society way, with a hard-on for GIS and a newly minted Photoshop expertise, made these one off day when no one knew what to do with her and all the silver-haired birdwatchers got all excited about the "branding" (or was it "marketing"?) possibilities.

What boggles my mind is not only that anyone thought that these maps would help ... anything, but that while they were formatting them for the web and writing press releases so the press could ... do stuff ... with this riveting information, it never occurred to them to superimpose the black turbine installation shape (which looks distressingly like a bird in flight), over a habitat map of the island of Lewis the RSPB must have stashed away somewhere. Or, if they don't (and shame on them if they don't. They have an extensive collection of online maps of bird reserves.) they could have cobbled one together from the excessive online bird migration atlases.

This is such a rich story, and one the RSPB would do much better to pick apart for the press, if they want to save some birdies. Because it's a difficult sell on two fronts:

1. It's ridiculous. Check out their estimation of the dangers the turbines offer to endangered species:

• 50 golden eagles lost due to collision with turbines
• 50 merlin lost due to collision
• 75 to 150 red throated divers lost due to collision
• Minimum of 314 pairs of dunlin lost of the Great British population due to habitat loss and displacement (we believe this figure is more likely to be 640 pairs)
• Minimum of 350 pairs of golden plover lost due to habitat loss and displacement (we believe 700 pairs in a worst case scenario)

I'm sorry, but even as I'm thinking what a shame this would be, I'm giggling at the grotesque image of kitten-sized predatory birds demonstrating what happens when shit hits the fan. Also, the birdy names are cutesy (as birdy names are wont to be) and hard to take seriously. I'd rather protest the shit-fanning of a "panther" or an "elephant" than a "corncrake" or a "whooper swan," especially if the latter come in pairs.

2. They're sending a few hundred ridiculous-sounding birdies up against one of the best technologies currently available to save us from oil addiction. It's spy vs. spy, environmental cause vs. environmental cause, only ... stopping the wind farm will only save a few hundred birdies too stupid not to fly into the blades of the fan, and going ahead with the wind farm will save ... well ... us. Bad message there.

If you think I'm being too harsh, well, I think the RSPB can be forgiven for flubbing the entrée into a brave new world: one in which "alternative energy sources" are becoming a necessity in the public mind. It will be a long time before fossil-fuel-free energy sources get associated with evil big business, and in the meantime, alternative energy installations---which all always take up a lot of space usually inhabited by something else---will come increasingly into conflict with ... well, pretty much every other environmental cause there is.

As such, wildlife organizations need to hit the ground running and start crafting a more complex message that they can get the public used to in stages. Remember, this is a public that still doesn't get why we need to save whales or pandas, other than that the former sings and the latter is cuddly. It's going to have an even harder time understanding why we should continue to emit greenhouse gases just to save a few barnacle geese.

And I'm all for using maps, just not pointless, nonsensical maps that demonstrate nothing. Once again, a map of the installation laid over the Hebridean habitat it is actually going to interfere with would speak a thousand words, and be ... um ... logical. Better yet, a map of existing wind farms that have already interfered with wildlife habitats---before and after maps showing concentrations of birds, perhaps---would speak ten thousand words or more. How about something like that?

mikey arcega has a website ...

... as well as a posse.

Of course, the photos could be a little (well ... a lot) larger, and he could've included some details. Grumble, grumble.

Let's just celebrate the fact that one of my favorite artists has a webs presences. Here 'tis.

And here's my blog post on 'im.

vote! vote! gaaaah!

by all that is holy and sacred in your lives, people, help turn out the vote! Look at this shit! We can take back both houses!

Take the day off work on Tuesday and go canvassing. Sign up to call voters on Monday night. Do something!