Student of the City

climateadaptation:

“Obama is right on both fronts. Clean policies not only offer necessary protections, they stimulate jobs.

From Scotland to Shanghai to Sao Paolo, the world is moving decisively toward a clean technology conversion and the jobs that come with it for urgent environmental, security and…

This is a great article, now taught in many urban planning classes about the way people act when they live in an area where “no one cares”. Do you feel safer in an area with a constant police presence or do you wonder why they’re there? Small things like a broken window that goes unfixed change the way people feel about their surroundings, perpetuating a cycle of hopelessness, anger and crime.

The building featured in this article is on the right side of this picture.

Hello NYC readers, if I was in the area I would go to this event - historic preservation is so interesting!

October 22, 9:30 AM–1:00 PM

Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue , New York, New York 10029 

 In the past decade the city has been the setting for some extraordinary projects aimed at bringing historic buildings back to life. This half-day symposium will showcase some of those projects, highlighting the various and sometimes controversial approaches to preserving the past while accommodating the needs of modern life. Panelists include interior designer Eric Cohler; interior designer Jamie Drake; architect Cleary Larkin of Beyer Blinder Belle; senior designer of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill Frank Mahan; architectural historian Matthew Postal, and executive director of the Historic House Trust Franklin D. Vagnone. Join the panelist for a discussion on bringing New York historic building back.

Read more: http://www.dwell.com/events/panel-discussion-living-with-history-restoring-redesigning-and-reviving-nys-landmark-interiors.html#ixzz1YPjMsBOj

Building bike paths alone will not get people out of their cars in the U.S. and onto bicycles. To create a thriving bike culture in America’s cities, people must begin to view bicycling as Europeans do — not just as a way of exercising, but as a serious form of urban mass transportation.

NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenyan police officials said at least 73 people were killed on Monday after a leaking pipeline exploded in a crowded slum. Witnesses said a large crowd had gathered to recover the leaking fuel and burned to death in the explosion and ensuing fire.

The cause of the explosion, which erupted in an industrial area of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, called Sinai, has not yet been determined. A police spokesman, Charles Owino, told Reuters that the fuel appeared to have ignited after a cigarette was tossed into the open sewer that flows through the slum.

Television images and photographs showed a horrific scene of charred shacks and smoldering human remains. Residents told The Associated Press that the slum structures had been built right up against the pipeline. The fire burned with such heat that some of the remains were reduced to little more than bones.

Kenyan police officers shut several roads leading into the slum and firefighters were struggling to control the blaze on Monday afternoon.

The scene was similar to an explosion in early 2009 in the city of Molo, when more than 100 people were killed as they tried to recover spilled fuel from an oil truck that had crashed.

Every time I see a story like this my heart goes out to the nearly 1 billion people who live in slums worldwide. Fires in these areas are especially rampant due to the use of flammable materials (wood, plastic, tarps, etc.) and the close proximity of other shacks - often only inches away. This may give you an idea of the basic infrastructure problems places like Sinai, Kenya have.

From the Walker’s website:  Urbanized, the latest film by director Gary Hustwit, joins Helvetica and Objectified as the third installment of his acclaimed design film trilogy. Traveling around the globe, Hustwit interviews some of the world’s leading urban architects, planners, policymakers, and thinkers, about the future of cities. A majority of the people on the planet currently live in cities, and by 2050, that number is expected to rise to 75%. Despite this upward trajectory, urban growth patterns are uneven, with some cities booming and others shrinking. Challenges such as housing, mobility, public space, civic engagement, economic development, and environmental policy are universal concerns, yet too often dialogue about these issues is disconnected from the public domain. Hustwit asks the fundamental questions: Who is allowed to shape our cities, and how do they do it? 

Introduced by the director. A discussion with the director follows the first screening. 

The City Form Research Group is releasing a state-of-the-art toolbox for urban network analysis. As the first of its kind, this ArcGIS toolbox can be used to compute five types of graph analysis measures on spatial networks: Reach; Gravity; Betweenness; Closeness; and Straightness. 

The tools incorporate three important features that make them particularly suited for spatial analysis on urban street networks. First, they account for geometry and distances in the input networks, distinguishing shorter links from longer links as part of the analysis computations. Second, unlike previous software tools that operate with two network elements (nodes and edges), the UNA tools include a third network element - buildings - which are used as the spatial units of analysis for all measures. Two neighboring buildings on the same street segments can therefore obtain different accessibility results. And third, the UNA tools optionally allow buildings to be weighted according to their particular characteristics - more voluminous, more populated, or otherwise more important buildings can be specified to have a proportionately stronger effect on the analysis outcomes, yielding more accurate and reliable results to any of the specified measures.

The tools are aimed at urban designers, architects, planners, geographers, and spatial analysts who are interested in studying the spatial configurations of cities, and their related social, economic, and environmental processes. The toolbox is built for easy scaling - it is equally suited for small-scale, detailed network analysis of dense urban areas as it is for sparser large-scale regional networks.  The toolbox requires ArcGIS 10 software with an ArcGIS Network Analyst Extension.

This is an interesting story about Williston, ND. Currently booming due to a recently discovered oil field, there is no housing or infrastructure available for the new workers. This will be an interesting place to follow in terms of infrastructure management, economic pressures and rural development.