Cities, Science, and City Science

How cities deal with or ignore their topography.

"I Love GLC (Great Lakes City)" - Christopher Marcinkoski and Andrew Moddrell at PORT Architects.

Unrealized maps don't get more fantasy-land than this one of an imagined light-rail network in Columbus, OH. It's laughable (and fun to think about and sad to think about) to imagine this ever existing in Columbus (for so, so many reasons).

As Jettero Heller points out on his blog,

There is an All Streets map floating around tumblr today. I'm digging on that, but also on this All Rivers map from Nelson Minar.

Charles Davis, giving advice for The New Inquiry.

Below is how the downward trend in Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) per capita after 2004 is distributed across the US.

Source: US Public Interest Research Group report "Moving Off the Road."

Author Phineas Baxandall explores whether the driving downturn is due to economic recession, or shifts in culture/working from home/anything else. Emily Badger, writing for Atlantic Cities, summarizes this aspect of the report:

Peter Bellerby - The Globemaker (via meanfreepath)

So happy to come across this link. Which title is more salivating, A History of the World in Twelve Maps or The Power of Maps? Nom.

The above image is from a recent study done by the New England Complex Systems Institute, "Sentiment in New York City: A High Resolution Spatial and Temporal View." To paraphrase the authors, 'we looked at the smileys in a bunch of geotagged tweets and made some pretty maps.'

It's an unfortunate color-scale they chose, but cyan (light turqoise) corresponds to "positive sentiment" and magenta to "negative sentiment." Times Square (A1) pops out on their map as a happy place, while Riker's Island (D1) and Maspeth Creek (E1, an urban waterway known for its pollution) have lots a sad faces. Obviously if mining tweets by robotically-determined mood can identify the Center of the Universe (Times Square) and a prison, this analysis has value.

Unfortunately missing from the paper (which is not peer-reviewed, for the record) is the cut-off, below which a census tract did not have enough tweets to be analyzed. Also, it would be interesting to normalize each tract by its population density, just to see how many people were going out of their way to write a really happy or sad tweet.

City stack-up, via the Urban Observatory.

It ain't perfect (I could use some people per square mile units instead of "very high" for the above plot), but it's fun to play around with.  Especially if not knowing how much open space there is in Hamburg compared to Los Angeles keeps you up at night. There are a list of different variables and cities to choose from.

Stephen Thompson, writing for All Songs Considered:

"The gray areas are places where courtesy dictates that you be available to engage with and/or listen to others."

This is one of my favorite debates, and I don't think this guy gets it right. Or, at least, he doesn't acknowledge the grayness of most places. The line at a convenience store in my opinion, is a place where you should be "on-call" in your ability engage with others. Standing room only on the bus or train is the same thing.

"(The city) is able to endure a lot in the way of economic hardship, even across centuries. There's no reason to think that in the future these cities will go away... unless we invent teleportation."