Hack my city

White Americans’ Hold on Wealth Is Old, Deep, and Nearly Unshakeable

Crucial to understanding how to close that gap—such that it can actually be closed—is grappling with how it was created in the first place. The McKinsey report identifies four components that perpetuate this gap—family wealth, family income, family savings, and community context (a community’s collective public and private assets). Black families have not been able to build wealth due to “unmet needs and obstacles” across these four dimensions.

“First, you legally segregate, and then you let the market do it for you”

So just to run back the score: Southern slaveholding families were able to recuperate post-Civil War wealth losses within one generation, and by 1940 even those families’ grandchildren were doing better than their Southern peers. Also by 1940, low-income and working-class white families are ushered into wealth via federally backed housing and farming loans and derivative lines of credit. In that same time, freed African Americans are mostly robbed of what little bit of land they were able to possess after the Civil War, and passed over for the mortgage loans and credit lines awarded to white families.

In order to create, lose, and then re-create wealth—and then create new forms of wealth for other low-income white families—white families leveraged social networks and credit. This is the community context that the McKinsey report identifies as one of the crucial components needed for families to build wealth. Most African Americans were never able to develop this, and in the few areas where they did accumulate community-level wealth, it was taken from them. And they were unable to recover it due to racist residential and spatial settings.

#ExtinctionRebellion is raising our awareness that climate change is not just real, its danger is imminent. The single most important tool in fighting climate change is carbon tax. It shifts incentives for people and companies to take into account the damage their actions cause to the environment.

Great and short article by FT:

“But there is a better way: a carbon tax. A broad-based tax on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would be far less expensive than a Green New Deal is likely to be, yet it could motivate action on a scale that is both grander and more precise. 

Every part of the economy and each decision we make would be shaped by such a tax. 

A carbon tax would pull billions of different levers in an economy that is both complex and saturated in fossil fuels. Each one of the billions of different products on sale can be designed, produced, transported and consumed in a way that might increase or reduce carbon emissions. A carbon tax nudges the energy mix to shift in favour of renewables, but also pushes fossil fuels from coal towards gas. It encourages efficiency in the design of cars, homes, any light bulb or any motor, but it also rewards frugality. 

A lump-sum subsidy can encourage the uptake of electric cars — but a carbon tax will also reward those who cycle instead of driving. 

Our modern economy reflects countless choices, made by billions of people all over the world. A broad-based carbon price influences them all. Nothing else can.”

Forget those hundreds of kilometres of commutes. People will still prefer to live close to their workplace and amenities. Great work @CoenTeulings!

Finally, a study which is applicable to continental Europe on the likely impact of driverless cars on cities. Fast and comfortable automated public transit leads to people moving to the cities, leaving the countryside empty - more productive time use while commuting cannot balance this impact.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965856417311758?dgcid=raven_sd_recommender_email#f0020

Medieval trade route networks from the 11-12th century. Must-have for transport/history geeks. I spent many many hours already imagining the journey from Venice to Beijing and back.

Great data visualisation of our daily, unconscious segregation

“Guided by the understanding that we, as a society, tend not to interact outside of our respective bubbles, The Atlas of Inequality team’s research seeks to visualize and inform viewers as to the places in their lives where they are actively segregated.

In his recent TEDx talk, Moro notes not only the negative impacts on health and education, and the crime rates faced by segregated lower-income communities, but also the interpersonal costs on individuals and the creative costs for companies. He notes that on average, an individual interacts personally or professionally with only 5000 people in their life. Because of our habits and behaviors we tend to exacerbate segregation, leaving the large majority of those 5000 individuals very similar to ourselves.”

Last mile logistics + Self-repairing cities + Robots that care

THE 'LIVING LABS' THAT SHOW HOW ROBOTS ARE CHANGING CITIES

Delivery bots, maintenance drones and robot carers are all being tested in real world contexts – and that's just the beginning

Autonomous robots are interconnected, interactive, cognitive and physical tools, which can perceive their environments, reason about events, make or revise plans and control their own actions.

Incubators and accelerators work!

“Strikingly, both types of programme have a pretty mixed impact on firm survival: of the four accelerator studies that test this, for example, we find one positive, one mixed and two negative results. What's going on here? The most plausible explanation is that accelerators help participants to quickly gauge the quality of their ideas (e.g. via investor / peer feedback on demo days) and encourage those with weak propositions to quit early. That is, the programmes help kill bad ideas: one provider we spoke to told us they run 'startup funerals' to commemorate their passing, as founders move on to new things. It's rather harder to figure out just how accelerators and incubators achieve these effects - and thus, how to design programmes that reliably get to these outcomes. In part this is because fewer evaluations have explored these issues - so the following results need more caution. For example, we find no clear differences in outcomes when comparing public and privately-run accelerator programmes, although among the latter group, top programmes in the US (like YCombinator or TechStars) do seem to achieve better outcomes. The evidence for incubators is similarly inconclusive. We find that more specialist programmes (single industry) help survival compared to more generalist programmes. For incubators, training seems to be more effective than networking, although neither has much impact. Significantly, what goes on outside the building also seems to matter. For incubators, having university involvement is helpful (although this doesn't apply when individual academics step in). Two accelerator studies find that programmes in regions with denser entrepreneurial networks and high property values achieve better employment and funding effects. Not surprisingly, firms in these programmes are more likely to get funding from local investors. We also look at co-location of researchers, often academics. Results complement the findings for firms. Very close co-location seems to raise the quality/quantity of collaborations. Spillovers are biggest in closely related fields. It’s striking that both permanent and temporary co-location can help drive up these outcomes.”

“Eindhoven continued implementing both horizontal and vertical separation into the next decade, completing a 155-kilometer (100-mile) network of cycle paths and eight tunnels and bridges by 1976. Separating these transportation networks, however, was more about appeasing frustrated motorists than encouraging and enabling cyclists. “We were one of the cities in the Netherlands that were the quickest and most serious in doing that,” claims Braakman. “But it was not meant to facilitate cycling at all. It was meant to facilitate car drivers.” That meant the bicycle routes were often indirect and inconvenient, forcing cyclists to take uncomfortable and unnecessary detours, as was the case of the Berenkuil. These efforts to prioritize driving had the intended effect, and Eindhoven’s cycling modal share bottomed out in the late 1970s, accounting for just one in five trips.”

After an economic downturn, “leaders opted to pivot away from industry and towards technology, attempting to attract new start-ups and revive their region as a “Silicon Valley of Europe.” “With this flow of new energy,” continues Veraart, “Eindhoven started to rebrand itself as a city of technology, design, and knowledge. As part of this rebranding process, it also wanted to rid itself of old views, like being a car town.”

“Rotterdam is seen as the gateway to Europe, with one of the biggest ports on the continent. And Eindhoven now positions itself as being an innovative town, as a bright town. So it’s now indeed attracting all types of industries, and presenting itself as a kind of Silicon Valley.”

Coral cities: the most awesome visualisation of a city’s road network

“The varying patterns of urban forms are inherently dictated by their road network; a complex, seemingly organic connection of links moving people across their city. Like branches of coral they have a pattern and a function, I chose to expose this pattern and manipulate it to become something far more conceptual. However, whilst being incredibly beautiful they are derived from various geo-spatial analysis of drive-times catchments making them somewhat informative as well.”

Walking and cycling for transport is good for your health, and also makes people interact socially more

Combined with other issues like air pollution, it makes sense to think much more holistically about the impacts of our urban policies.

“For example, as London is trying to grapple with major health problems such as air pollution, social isolation, and obesity, why not tackle them together and get a bigger bang for our buck by promoting walking and cycling?”

“I’ll always remember the mother of a friend from Sarajevo visiting her daughter in London and being relieved to find her living in a social-housing tower block, and not one of those poky Victorian houses—the exact inverse of London snobbery.”

“Indeed, it was in Belgrade, nearly ten years ago, that it first dawned on me that socialist Yugoslavia’s architectural project was in a category of its own. Strolling the avenues of New Belgrade, with its ranks of concrete tower blocks, it was not the architecture that drew my attention at first. It was my sense of comfort—the prevailing air of normality. In most of the mass-housing projects I have visited, whether in Europe, South America, New York, or Moscow, one is likely to be aware of one of two things: class or neglect (and often both). There were no class distinctions in New Belgrade because this was not social housing; it was just housing. Many of the heroic housing projects in the West became ghettoized, or were left to deteriorate—some classics have been demolished. 

At the same time, these were not the repetitive, mass-produced housing blocks of Russia’s microrayon suburbs. They were more socially idealistic than the West, more architecturally inventive than the East. In Yugoslavia, the right to housing was enshrined in law. 

And yet two factors distinguished its effort in building mass housing from those in other socialist countries. The first was that this was not just centralized, state-built housing. In fact, following new legislation, in 1960, the housing boom was driven by competitive house-building firms (self-managed, naturally) aiming at a market of institutions seeking homes for their employees. These were subsidized by the state but there was no state-owned property; it was “social property.” Second, Yugoslavian housing was not standardized. There were certainly prefabricated systems in use, but these were highly flexible and encouraged the diversity of housing types. (This was a far cry from the Khrushchyovkas, in Russia—the standardized blocks of Khrushchev’s great house-building drive—which left the architects nothing to do except arrange them in the landscape.)”

I know an Eastern European country where not just city councils, but the government follows the same strategy...

Man dressed as snail races Hungarian train – and wins!

“A member of the local group named MátészalkaLeaks decided to demonstrate just how awfully slow the Hungarian State Railway (MÁV) is. 

Naturally, the man put on a snail costume and began running next to the train, winning the competition easily. 

The group aimed to draw attention to the excruciatingly slow speed of the trains, as it takes them 1 hour and 49 minutes to cover a 78km distance.

They pointed out that it’s cheaper to travel from Debrecen to Budapest by plane, with an added stop in Brussels, than taking the state railways.”

Free-floating bikes and scooters are the future. The new transportation is floating, it has no set stops or infrastructure, and it’s filling a mobility gap in our cities.

- ‘Floating transport is going to invade our streets and ruin the feng shui!’ 

- Wish we would apply the same critical mindset to carbon polluting parked and single occupancy cars.

Floating transport can solve the last mile problem of public transport, and thus enhance the use of existing infrastructure. If the trip to the local train station goes from a 15 min walk to a 5 min scooter ride, then it improves access. And could help public transport further compete with car ownership.

The traditional transport system has been designed by people sitting in an office. Stations are fixed. Bus stops are fixed. Once set, they don’t change very often. Stability and predictability is important of course, so they need to exist. But the city is an organism that changes day by day. Floating transport can respond more quickly and evolve with it.

Brace yourselves, post-modernism is coming back!

“The wonderful thing about postmodernism is what Charles Jencks, the writer and designer who pretty much popularised it, calls “double-coding”. A good postmodernist building works on (at least) two levels. It bristles with architectural gags and knowing tricks, designed to appeal to the connoisseur and, particularly, other architects. But a good Postmodernist building is also populist. It might be brightly-coloured, decorated, fun, even. It aims to engage the public.”

Denmark: in a series of announced policies that seek to impose special requirements and even graver punishments for crimes committed in Denmark’s poorest urban areas.

“The measures come as part of a national plan to get rid of concentrated areas of poverty, and the attendant problems such as low educational performance and lower levels of public health. Also included in the plan, for example, is a ruling that in areas of high deprivation, no more than 40 percent of future housing can be public—an attempt to increase the country’s social mix. Denmark is not alone in Europe in trying this approach. As Citylab has noted in the past, cities like Berlin and Rotterdam have experimented with public housing quotas aimed at diluting concentrations of ethnic minorities, while the Paris region offers frequent tax breaks to encourage businesses to relocate to the deprived banlieues.

Without evidence to suggest that either measure would do much to reduce crime or foster integration, what then is the point of the new ghetto plan? Danes have long had a pattern of coupling great generosity in overseas aid with a hostility towards actually accepting outsiders, a paradox described in the past as the Copenhagen Syndrome. Possessing some of the most restrictive immigration policies in the E.U., Denmark accepted nine times fewer refugees in 2015 than its neighbor Sweden.

The government’s new plans may do little meaningful to improve these people’s (or anyone’s) life chances. But that may not be the point: They seem instead to be a theater of cruelty, a display of intolerance designed to publicly shame people seen to be on the outside of society. Rather than fostering future integration, they’d create a two-tier legal system that could enshrine social divisions. And they’d help confirm a pernicious idea that Europeans have struggled to overcome for centuries: The understanding that there are those who are supposed to be here, and those who live in the ghetto.”