urban life – Looking Forward

August 17, 2015

Not Your Typical Urban News — Part 2

As part of my summer roundup, this is the second review of unconventional news items about what’s happening in cities, states/provinces and other sub-national governments. Last week, I wrote about urban migrations and urban work/life balance. This week, some stories about urban technology and compassion.

Urban Technology

Many cities claim to be technology leaders, but this story in the Guardian really does stand out: “Welcome to Jun, the town that ditched bureaucracy to run on Twitter – Residents of the Spanish town use Twitter for everything from reporting crimes to booking doctor’s appointments. Is this the future of local government?” The obelisk in the central square is decorated with a Twitter mosaic.

The Mayor is quoted as saying:

“Twitter has created the society of the minute – very quick questions and very quick answers. We now do our paperwork on Twitter,” … “But this is an important point, because who values the work of the people at city hall? The street sweeper? The cleaner? We decided that everyone would have a Twitter account so that they could see that people value their work.”

On the negative side of technology, among all the various scare stories about cyber-attacks, here’s a counter-intuitive argument, “How to hack a city—and why we should”. Its author, Jonathan Keane, notes:

Cities, like any complex system, are potentially susceptible to hacking. The important question is just how susceptible?

“Through smart technologies, wireless connectivity, and the burgeoning Internet of Things, cities and critical infrastructure have been getting a technological makeover in recent years. Amsterdam is exploring several open-source projects and cities like Barcelona, Spain are revamping energy grids and traffic lights. But those new initiatives open up new vulnerabilities.”

Following up on my previous blog post about where people spend their mental time, this research paper in the online scientific journal, the Public Library of Science (PLOS), was of interest — “Do Global Cities Enable Global Views? Using Twitter to Quantify the Level of Geographical Awareness of U.S. Cities”.

The researchers concluded:

“Our findings are that: (1) the level of geographical awareness varies depending on when and where Twitter messages are posted, yet Twitter users from big cities are more aware of the names of international cities or distant US cities than users from mid-size cities; (2) Twitter users have an increased awareness of other city names far away from their home city during holiday seasons; and (3) Twitter users are more aware of nearby city names than distant city names, and more aware of big city names rather than small city names.”

Perhaps their findings weren’t too surprising, although it’s fascinating to see how Twitter data is being used.

Anyway, here’s their ranking of various cities on a global awareness index (GAI):

Compassion?

Finally, perhaps as a counterpoint (or a complement?) to the talk about technology in cities, Louisville, Kentucky is beginning to get noticed for its “Compassionate Cities Mission Statement”. The City boldly states that:

“Compassion is common ground and a unifying force in our polarized world. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there, and to honor the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect. Compassion is the bridge between internal practice and external change.”

They go on to identify these dimensions of compassion – “Beauty, Inclusion, Empowerment, Transparency, Universally Positive, Social Innovation, Paying it forward, Hospitality, Abundance, Awareness/Understanding, and Intention.”

All in all, some very interesting developments on the urban front.

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August 10, 2015

Not Your Typical Urban News — Part 1

As part of my summer roundup of unconventional news items on various subjects, here are some things happening in cities, states/provinces and other sub-national governments. I’ve organized these items into four categories: urban migrations; urban work/life balance; urban technology; and compassion. Let’s review the first two now.

Urban Migrations

Despite the continuing drumbeat about everyone moving to the downtown of cities, the actual patterns of migration are much more complex.
This story perhaps explains some of the movement of people – “These Are the Top 20 Cities Americans Are Ditching: Soaring costs of living meant residents left New York City and its suburbs in droves”. The story is not just about New York, of course:

“New York City, Los Angeles, Honolulu: They’re all places you would think would be popular destinations for Americans. So it might come as a surprise that these are among the cities U.S. residents are fleeing in droves. …

“Interestingly, these are also the cities with some of the highest net inflows of people from outside the country. That gives many of these cities a steadily growing population, despite the net exodus of people moving within the U.S.

“And as Americans leave, people from abroad move in to these bustling cities to fill the vacant low-skilled jobs. [And live in cramped quarters native-born residents don’t want]”

We also see a recent report from the Brookings Institution, titled the “The end of suburban white flight”. William H. Frey points out:

“As the nation’s white population ages and stagnates, the childbearing population is increasingly made up of minorities, who are increasingly drawn to the suburbs. In fact, whites are hardly the lifeblood of suburban growth anymore. … Suburbs will continue to grow in the future, but increasingly as a result of the rapid growth of the nation’s growing young minority families.”

While you might expect there to be a difference in how people of different ages feel about where they live – with young people, in theory, finding cities hip – that story is also more complicated. Dave Nyczepir reported a few weeks ago that “Wyoming Seniors Don’t Feel Much Better Off Than Younger Generations. But That’s Not Necessarily a Bad Thing. Delaware, by comparison, boasts the biggest senior advantage in well-being, according to a new well-being index.”

The news is not just about people moving from one city to another, but even moving less once they’re there.

Urban Work/Life Balance

For much of the 20th century, commuting was one of the most unpleasant aspects of living in a metropolis. Long commutes were a major contributed to a lack of balance between work and the rest of life, in addition to adding all sorts of bad things into the air.

With that in mind, Wendell Cox wrote recently that “Working at Home: In Most Places, the Big Alternative to Cars”.

There were another couple of articles that carried this idea further. Last week, Business Insider reported that “Startups are opening ‘co-living’ spaces, so you never have to leave home to go to work”, which was, in turn, based on a BuzzFeed report titled “Living In The Disneyland Version Of Startup Life”. These describe several ventures in various cities and suburbs around the US that offer or will offer not only the usual co-working spaces, but co-living as well, all in one shared location.

One consequence of these trends in home working is that Iowa’s state transportation chief predicted the road system “is going to shrink”, as reported recently in a CityLab story “Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads”.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/126339216775/not-your-typical-urban-news-part-1]

March 26, 2014

Urban Farming?

Urban farming would seem to be an oxymoron. Yet, the idea of bringing farming into the heart of urban regions is – pun intended – cropping up everywhere.

(In this post, I touch upon on a small subset of recent activities on the urban farming front. If you’re interested, you’ll find lots more urban farming documented on the Internet.)

A couple of weeks ago, a New York Times article “Farm-to-Table Living Takes Root” reported on Agritopia, a neighborhood in Phoenix that focuses on farming. There have been as well reports of other farm-focused urban neighborhoods around the country.

Lack of available land at street level is also no limitation. Rooftop farms are being added to the tops of buildings in many cities. But why just stop with the tops of buildings?

Columbia University Professor Dickson Despommier has been the modern prophet of the vertical farming concept that encourages building agricultural skyscrapers in large cities. One example – the largest in the USA – is FarmedHere, which last month opened an indoor vertical farm in Chicago.

In a much bolder vision last year, the architect Vincent Callebaut proposed a Dragonfly shaped vertical farm for the south end of New York City’s Roosevelt Island. (This is, alas, the same location of the future high tech, entrepreneurial campus of Cornell University and Technion Israeli Institute of Technology that former Mayor Bloomberg commissioned to emulate Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley, in turn, was once filled with orchards, not tech companies.)

If a real island, like Roosevelt, is not available within the city’s borders, then the answer is to build an artificial island. The folks at Blue Revolution Hawaii are hoping to do just that in Honolulu and follow in the early footsteps of other cities around the world with farming on artificial islands – see the article “Floating Farms” in this month’s Modern Farmer magazine.

This may seem like some new trend and, in some ways, it is – as it reflects the ways that the Internet is opening up possibilities for people.

But it is not completely new. My favorite examples come from New York City, yes, New York City. In the Queens section, John Bowne High School with a special focus on agriculture – and the program has been around since the end of World War I, originally in the old Newtown High School. Even in Manhattan, George Washington High School in the north end of the island has a chapter of the Future Farmers of America.

So the graduates of these schools won’t have to leave New York City to become farmers, even in the densest urban area in America.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/80777085555/urban-farming]