atlas(t)

merry christmas!

i hope you all have a great holiday season, whether you celebrate christmas or not. And Merry Christmas to those who do!

p.s.: this is atlas(t)'s 300th post!

u.s. bicycle route system

just a quickie:

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, working with The Adventure Cycling Association plus some other groups, have approved a plan for a nationwide network of bicycle routes.

State officials and bicycle enthusiasts are stitching together more than 50,000 miles of pedal-friendly pavement to form a vast network of bicycle routes connecting byways, cities and off-road trails in a system like the one created for cars and trucks more than half a century ago.

Working from a bewildering tangle of existing roads, planners mapped a web of corridors where the national bicycle system should go. They considered traffic volume, terrain, amenities and ways to link together lightly traveled byways, secondary roads, urban trails and already established transcontinental bicycle routes.

How. Cool. Is. That?

I must be getting old. I really wanna BIKE these routes. Who's with me?

today's diagrams

a flow chart guide to understanding flow charts. Via.

Writer Diana Peterfreund's plotboard for her latest novel. Via

curb appeal

okay, I love this show.

I don't really like design shows, so it's probably just the contrast between Curb Appeal and Desperate Landscapes, which was boring and pointless. But I did end up watching most of CA's current season on Hulu, even though I didn't really need to.

Unlike Desperate Landscapes, Curb Appeal has some very clear stakes, and some very clear goals. The owners are all outspokenly unhappy with the appearance of their houses; they all have specific things they don't like, and a specific look they'd like to see. The point of the show is to make the owners happy, to redesign the exterior of the house to suit the owners' personalities and lifestyles, and to have a visually dramatic change in the houses' appearance. 

They do more with the house than they do in DL, but they do just as much landscaping. They talk more here about the house than the landscaping. And this is where the show's value comes out. They detail what needs fixing in the house, show you the plan for the house's new design, and give it an overarching concept and vocabulary. Then they take you step by step through the process of transforming the house, showing you not how to do it, but what you should expect: how much work, how long it takes, and how much it's going to cost. in fact, they detail the costs of every element of the transformation and give information on why they make each choice that they make.

One of the key elements here is that the owner has to pay for everything, and arrange for the work to get done, and it takes place over weeks and months, not a single day like in DL. So you'll see owners contracting out all the work, owners doing simple jobs themselves to save money, owners doing complex jobs themselves to learn how to do it, etc. The owners also negotiate the design with the designers, and can change elements they don't like. They also show the pitfalls and mistakes when they happen.

In CA you get so much more show for your half hour than in DL, that I'm astonished that CA isn't longer. And, by the way, Desperate Landscapes is in its second season, Curb Appeal in its 22nd.

As for the class piece, Curb Appeal owners are definitely in a higher tax bracket. Desperate Landscapes owners are working class to middle middle class. Curb Appeal owners are middle middle class to upper middle class. It's certainly an issue of affordability, because CA does much more extensive, and expensive, renovations. And naturally, those renovations are more dramatic and interesting.

I wish, though, that they could do something similar to Curb Appeal for working class homeowners: a show where the owners pay part of it and negotiate a design concept and design elements. The show spends its money hiring designers and people who can teach the owners to do the work themselves. Everything is done on a tight budget, so the designers have to get very creative. That would be a good show.

And I'd also like to see a show specifically about landscaping. They could talk about the elements of landscape design, they could show the various curent popular schools of thought. They could show private and public landscaping projects, home and institutional landscaping projects, large and very, very small landscaping, green landscaping, etc. I wonder if there's such a show out there.

And final takeaway: "curb appeal" I discovered, refers to the "attractiveness of the exterior of a residential or commercial property. The term was extensively used in the United States during the housing boom and continues to be used as an indicator of the initial appeal of a property to prospective buyers," according to wikipedia.

atlas(t) holiday gift guide

i've written so. Damn. Many. gift guides and year-end lists in the past couple of weeks that I can't think in any other mode. Such is the life of a blogger.

So, since my head's in this space already, might as well do a gift guide for the mappy and geographically inclined geek in your life. This is an ENTIRELY SUBJECTIVE list. I will not consider gifts that SOME OTHER map/geo geek than myself might like. This is just what you should send me if you wanna get on my good side.

Here goes:

• Panamap Series by Urban Mapping

A brand new series of what I can only imagine to be lenticular maps, in which three maps of the same city -- streets, subways, neighborhoods and landmarks -- are arranged like those postcards of Jesus so when you tilt the map one way, you'll see one image, and when you tilt it another way, you'll see another image. Three maps in one! Whether it works well or not, it's a collector's item. There are currently maps of Manhattan and Chicago.

• City Walks Decks Series by Chronicle Books

A wonderful series comprising one boxed deck of cards for each city. There are 50 cards per city, and each card contains a simple walking tour of a route of particular interest: either a neighborhood, or a themed tour. On one side of the card is a map of the route, and on the other side is the text explaining what you're seeing. The cards are the size of a mass market paperback, i.e. easy to carry around, and this is the perfect gift for someone going to a city with an extra day or two to spend walking around. The series covers 14 major metropolises at this point.

• Window Seat Books by Gregory Dicum

Two books that offer a detailed and well-designed guide to reading landscapes from the window seat of an airplane. There's one for the US, and one for Europe. I don't know if this series will continue, but I sure hope so. This is the perfect gift for a frequent flyer.

• Elvis Mars Globe by Greaves and Thomas

At £90.00, it's not cheap. But this accurate globe of Mars, with the whimsical inclusion of the site where an Elvis statue was found in 1989, according to a British tabloid, is the perfect gift for a Mars fan. My folks won years' worth of brownie points by getting this for me for Christmas a few years back. Greaves and Thomas also has a number of other historical and beautiful globes, including Cassini's 1790 terrestrial and celestial globes, and the first antipodean globe, which simply reverses the direction of the globe so we can see what the world looks like to an Australian.

• Starry Night star mapping software

When I was trying to figure out, for my feng shui on Mars novel, what constellations one would see from Mars, an astronomy professor turned me on to the Starry Night software which, among other things, enables you to see what the night sky looks like from other points of view than from Earth. Awesome. They've just released a new version, which is a bit pricey ($150) but great for your astronomer or star chart geek.

• Cheap historical facsimile maps

For those mapping geeks who just like to see -- or hang on their walls -- maps from historical periods, you can't go too far wrong by looking online for facsimile reproductions.

• Like these maps of the Great Lakes, which are $10-15 apiece.
• Or this boxed set of maps of London from four different periods for £27.50. 
• Blue Monocle Maps has a whole historical collection, which you can get in a variety of sizes and on your choice of paper, including world cities like this one of Beijing. These start at around £30.
• Historic Urban Plans has smaller maps of cities the world over that start at around $10.
• Historic Maps Restored has a series of higher-quality maps starting at $30 which are mostly of the US -- railroad maps, topographical maps, panorama maps, etc. There is a small collection of international maps.
• The Old Map Company sells maps of mostly England, starting at around £6. There's a small collection of international maps.

• (ETA): Here's one more I just found ... MAP PLATES! From Signals.com, these plates represent some of the countries of Europe, not all. But how cool is a series of plates in geographical shapes that fit together to make a map? I WANT.

There's much more along the lines of interdisciplinary books on geographical ideas, but I don't want to recommend very many books right now. I think the above is enough to go on for now, don't you?

But please feel free to add your ideas to the comments below!

desperate landscapes

who'da thunk a show called "Desperate Landscapes" could be so boring? It's pretty easy to understand why, though: I have no idea what the show is about. I mean, of course, this DIY channel (hunh?) joint is a show about a presenter who brings in a crew to re-landscape the yard and fix the external surface of a house the neighbors are complaining about. You've seen shows in this vein before. Welcome to the reality industrial complex.

But what's at stake here, what values are promulgated, what education is being provided, and who is being served ... none of that is clear. There are tips here and there about how to lay concrete steps, or how to build a shutter, or how to get a plant out of a plastic pot, but you couldn't start imagining how to landscape your yard, much less maintain it, from the material they give you here. It's the DIY channel, but they're not really interested in helping you do it yourself.

They don't show the actual design of the yard: they don't get a camera up on a crane, they don't show you a map or floorplan (or whatever landscape designers call the plan) of the landscaping they've planned, even though you know they have one. The presenter dude even goes a little out of his way to make it seem like he's not familiar with a color wheel. (He's "not a color wheel kind of guy.") There are few design concepts presented here, much less discussed. So you don't learn anything about how to design the landscape, either.

And what's it all for, anyway? All they talk about is how the owners can't manage their yards, but not about why they would want to. There's no case made for how a pretty yard can improve the owners' quality of life. There's no case made for green landscaping. The neighbors have sharp things to say about the owners' yards, but that's because they're being pointedly asked. No case is made for the neighbors' quality of life, or for property values in the neighborhood. So what's at stake? Why should we care?

Shows like this always have to have something at stake, or some why-should-I-care proposition. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, in which a needy family gets all the toys they could ever want, is purely about rewarding virtue or reversing neediness. It's about putting excess in where want used to be. While You Were Out has a family member sending someone away for a few days and redecorating one room in the house while they're gone. The crew must complete the redecoration with a budget of only $1000. This show doesn't mess around with virtue rewarded or any grand themes. It's about home decorating tips on a budget, with two rewards: 1) a dramatic before and after picture and 2) a dramatic reveal for the person being surprised.

There's no big theme in Desperate Landscapes, no thrifty or useful tips being conveyed, no design concepts taught, and ... this is the key ... there's no big reward. The big reveal is to the neighbors, but who really cares what the neighbors think? It's not their house, and they only have to see it when driving in or driving out. They're not close enough to the main players for their displeasure to be a serious problem, and their pleasure to be a reward. And since no case has been made for the owners' quality of life, why should we care that they get a nice new yard? Plus, the makeovers are never dramatic enough to make the reveal dramatic.

There's another problem: all of these folks let their yards go to hell because they don't have the time to do anything about them. Getting a huge group of dudes in there to fix it all up in one day will make it look nice for a while, but eventually, it'll all go to hell again because they STILL don't have the time to keep up their yards. And this is never addressed in the show. The design of the landscaping doesn't seem to have anything to do with ease of maintenance ... or if it does, they're keeping it a secret. In fact, they're not talking about maintenance at all, just how to put stuff in.

It's giving a man a fish, not teaching him how to fish. The owners are put to work, but they don't pay for any of it, and they don't get any say in the design. They're also not learning to do the difficult things.

One clue I have to all this is that the houses being addressed are all clearly in neighborhoods that range from working class, to lower-middle and middle-middle class neighborhoods: what presenter Jason Cameron calls, in one episode, "solidly middle class." These are not yuppies. They are not upwardly mobile. In fact, in most if not all cases (I haven't watched all the episodes), while the owners are thriving, their neglected yards are a definite sign of how much they have to struggle to thrive economically.

This is a class piece that makes the show interesting for a minute. But that minute is killed by the fact that the show brings no particular value. Its presumed target audience isn't getting very practical advice, ideas, or background from this show, nor any moral high drama. And they're also not getting house porn: aspirational designgasms that make them dream of ... someday. They're getting a nice cleanup for their houses, but that's about it. So who is going to watch this show ... and why, again?

alien land and freedom

just for the fun, let's juxtapose two stories this week about Asians coming to California and dealing with land ownership.

The backdrop is the California Alien Land Law of 1913, a law repealed in 1952, which prohibited people ineligible for American citizenship, primarily Asians, from owning land. This was part of a raft of racist laws aimed at controlling Asian immigration, including barring Asian laborers from entry, and restriction of commercial fishing licenses to citizens.

One of the long-term consequences of this series of laws, which began with the Naturalization Act of 1790, was that Asians, although a substantial presence in the US since the mid-19th century, remained permanent foreigners -- literally alienated from the land -- in the American imagination. So, jumping ahead a century or two, how's this gonna play with 1) a conflict between government and squatter farmers, and 2) Chinese real estate carpetbaggers?

The Hmong community of Fresno is the second largest Hmong settlement in the States. Earlier this fall a Hmong community garden created without permission 13 years ago on public land was threatened when the city decided to take back the land to build a police station.

There are 20 gardeners feeding around 300 people from this 4 acre plot. Over time the gardeners got grants and acknowledgment from organizations, with the approval of parks and recreation, but no formal permission. But then parks and recreation transferred the $750,000 parcel of land to the police, and the gardeners were supposed to be out by Nov 1.

The community looked to a new parks director to help them and at first he was enthusiastic.

He envisioned a cultural center, a park, carving the garden into smaller plots involving more people from all over the city, walkways, statues. It would be called the National Hmong Friendship Garden. The plans cost $2,500.

"He had plans drawn up. They were beautiful, expansive," says Edie Jessup, director of a hunger nutrition project with Metro Ministry. "We were all impressed. But then he said, 'By the way, it's up to you to raise the millions of dollars.' "

Of course, the garden was partly about growing food for a community that was "still struggl(ing) with poverty and food bills." City officials said the police department served the community as a whole, and that was that.

After protest and advocacy -- and the great article in the Fresno Bee I linked to above -- the city tried to arrange to move the police station to another site, but the plan was kiboshed when the city council tied on the vote. Now the garden has to move, although it hasn't yet.

Given the same state, and the same time frame, we have a much different second story: Curbed SF tipped me off to a new trend in China: organizing real estate trips to downturn-hobbled San Francisco, LA, and Vegas to buy up foreclosed homes.

As we have learned, the combination of rising housing prices in China and the appreciation of the Renminbi coupled with declining real estate prices in the US and the depreciation of the US dollar, has already become an impetus for Chinese investors to buy properties in the US. Besides, due to the continuous appreciation of the Renminbi, it is more cost effective to shop in the US. At the same time, the US sub-prime crisis has forced the prices of some of the mortgaged houses to drop, increasing the interest of some investors to go house hunting.

Apparently, half these folks

plan to buy houses when the US housing market is at its low level so that they can keep their children company when they study in the US. "My daughter started school in the US in August this year. I might as well buy a house if it is really cheap and I can visit her by the way," said ... one of the registered members.

Because of the decline of foreign students from the Islamic world due to post-9/11 immigration difficulties, 57% of foreign students currently in the United States are from Asia.

Okay. On the one hand, we've got a classic immigrant grit story superimposed on a group of refugees from a botched American war. They are traditionally agrarian, they're poor and dispossessed, they've squatted government land, and their welfare is not considered to coincide with broader community welfare. On the other hand, we have our greatest fear: an Asian superpower rising to meet us at a moment when our economy is faltering and our military superiority isn't doing us any good; citizens of that superpower are replacing us in our very own, white-picket-fenced dream homes, and not even living there but using them as edu-dachas!

The first is an age-old enclosure of the commons issue updated to post-Cold-War racialization, where the enclosing force is actually public ownership of a more institutional sort. The second is a new (or is it age-old?) situation: the US as exploited, exploitable land. This will be the first time since ... I don't know ... ever? ... that the US. has had foreign carpetbaggers coming in to take advantage of the mess we got ourselves into. And our family homes are now being colonized by the very people the US colonized in the mid-19th century. Does this make them Asian Americans, or are they going to be something else, something new?

Are these just the same old themes playing out yet again? Are we seeing new trends in immigration, land, ownership, conflict? Are there similarities in these two cases?

Discuss.

Crosspost.

new tag line and next series

just a quick note:

I've changed the blog's tagline from "mapping, taxonomy, and you" to "mapping, landscapes, and you." I haven't done anything with taxonomy in a while, and without intending it, I've really been turning my attention to landscape and urbanism. So this is a stop-gap. I might need to rethink the tagline and even the banner in the near future. Design might be forthcoming, is what I mean to say. We'll see.

Also, I'm working on a series of posts about landscaping TV shows. Coming right up.

That is all.