Urbanism Needn't be Techno-Centric

A regular reader and frequent correspondent recently sent me a link to an on-line video about urbanism.  In the video, MIT Professor Kent Larson displays some of the cool gadgetry being developed under his oversight in the campus Media Lab, most of it focused on improving urban life.  In the words of Professor Larson, “We look at how to make creative, vibrant places for people and then the technology follows.” 

Among the innovations being promoted by the Larson and his lab are room configurations that would adjust easily between different uses, small footprint cars that would reduce parking needs, and autonomous electrical bikes that would perform tasks as disparate as queuing up where users are likely to need them and delivering packages automatically, which is a far better solution than the overhyped Amazon drones.

After an introductory sponsorship commercial for JP Morgan Chase, the video runs about ten minutes.  The ten minutes are worth your time.

But while I recommend the video, I’m concerned that some may understand its message to be that cool technology is a necessary pre-condition to urbanism.  That’s not the case.  The technological innovation being done by Professor Larson will hopefully make urbanism more comfortable and attractive, but urbanism has justifications that would be valid regardless of technology.

To take one example, the reconfiguring room, with a bed, work table, and dining room table that all slide out from a wall, is a great solution to urban living, particularly for micro-apartments.  But the reconfiguration is mostly a matter of good design, carpentry, and hardware.  Having the room reconfigure with a remote control and motors is a gee-whiz touch that’s nice, but not essential.  I’d be nearly as content with a bed that slid out from the wall using a hand crank.

To reiterate the primary motivations behind this blog, we need a more urbanist future because (1) addressing climate change demands it, (2) municipal finances need it, and (3) there are people who enjoy the urban lifestyle and who are being denied that opportunity by ill-conceived public policies.  If technology can make urban life more comfortable and productive, that’s great, but not essential.

Ultimately, Professor Larsons’ comment about technology following urbanism is dead right.

But even with my curmudgeonly concerns about misinterpretation, the video is well worth your attention.

In my next post, I’ll explore the relationship between an urbanist and his car.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

New Year’s Resolution (Singular)

Welcome to 2013!  I’d like to think that we made some urbanist headway in 2012, at least in education.  But the road ahead remains daunting.   Luckily, most of us urbanists like challenges.

New Years is traditionally a time of resolutions, goals, and other lists.  And I tend to do some of that.  But sharing a list seems trite, so I’ll offer only a single goal.  For which I must give a short back story.

Last weekend, I met with group of North Bay urbanists.  I had scheduling conflicts, so my attendance time was short.  But it was inspiring to listen, even for a short time, to the stories of others who are arguing for urbanism in the region.

At one point, the organizer of the meeting turned to me and said, “I’ve been reading your blog for awhile.  You’re more of a generalist.”  I’d never thought of myself that way.  But I realized that he was right.  The other people in the room were mostly tackling urbanism from a transportation angle.  Less reliance on freeways.  Streets that serve a broader range of transportation options.  Effective use of transit.

Transforming how we build and utilize transportation is essential to urbanism.  But my personal feeling is that urbanism can’t come to full flower if we predominantly focus on transportation issues.  Or on any single issue.  Instead, we need to spread our attention over housing, public places, retail, jobs, sustainability, energy, and a host of others, including transportation.

Viewing urbanism as a far ranging list of interrelated issues, all of which must be solved, is sort of like going to sea in a colander.  It seems a nearly impossible task, but with enough believers, enough enthusiasm, and enough problem solving, it’s achievable.  And it’s essential if we are to provide the urbanism needed to save ourselves in the coming century.

And that is my one resolution for 2013.  To embrace that I’m an urbanism generalist and to promote the generalist perspective.  (Actually, that sounds more like one-and-a-half, but we’ll round down.)

Other urbanists weren’t as hesitant to share lists, some of which were quite good.  The best are offered below:

Brent Toderian uses Planetizen to issue a 2013 call to action for all urbanists.  He admits to writing the piece with his thumbs.  I wish I could write as well with all ten fingers.  If you only follow one link today, this is the one.

Kaid Benfield of the National Resources Defense Council nominates his best of 2012 across a number of sustainable urbanism subjects.  To me, walkable urbanism is so much more sustainable than drivable suburbanism that I’m less excited about rain gardens and their like.  But I’m pleased that Benfield is paying attention.

Lastly, Lauren Drell writes on Mashable about the 25 technologies that cities should have to provide more effective urbanism.  Most you’ve probably read about before, but there are a couple that were new to me, such as a trashcan adopting app.

Here’s to keeping resolution(s) in 2013!

Schedule Note

The next meeting of Petaluma Urban Chat will be Tuesday, January 8, 5:30pm, at the Aqus Café.  Newcomers are always welcome.  Make a New Year’s resolution to join us this year.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Technology and Public Places Revisited

A few months, I wrote about urbanism versus technology.  It was a cautious entry into a discussion of great complexity.  But understanding how urbanism and technology interact can have significant implications to urbanism.  Technology can help bring new users to a public place, but can also interfere with the success of the public place.  It can also lead us to product ideas that are almost too weird for words.

There are multiple possible perspectives on the technology/urbanism interaction.  The Aporetic offers the thought that bland and featureless public places are the result of cell phone proliferation.  Prior to cell phones, when we wanted to meet a friend in a public place, we needed clear and distinctive locations.  The Aporetic’s example is the eagle in the Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia.

But with cell phones available to help us with last-minute course corrections toward meeting points, he argues that we no longer need distinctive meeting places, which leads to bland, innocuous public places such as Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C.

Alan Jacobs of Atlantic Cities, among others, poked the obvious hole in The Aporetic’s hypothesis, which is that Dulles existed long before cell phones were common.  The Aporetic tried to cover the logical gap by arguing that recent Dulles remodels have increased the blandness of the place, which illustrates the impact of cell phones.  But the cause and effect of his hypothesis remain dubious.

Having rebutted The Aporetic, Jacobs then took his own wrong turn, arguing that cell phones have proliferated because public places are bland, resulting in a need for cell phones to help us navigate and to meet friends.

That hypothesis seems equally flawed.  I suggest that there is no cause and effect between cell phones and public places.

Instead, cell phones have become omnipresent because they provide a constant connection to interesting stuff happening in the on-line world, which is both exciting and addictive. 

And public places have become bland and uninteresting because we took a flawed turn into modern architecture (per Tom Wolfe and James Howard Kunstler), because we refocused our world around the needs of the automobile (Jane Jacobs and others), or because of both.

We needn’t blame bad public places on cell phones or vice versa.  They both happened for understandable and unrelated reasons.

Besides, the key question isn’t how did we get here, but where do we go from here?  Is it possible to build public places that create interactions between people when many folks have noses buried in cell phones?

To begin to answer that question, it’s important to note that cell phones offer both benefits and detriments in the creation of effective public places.

Cell phones can encourage people to venture outside the front door, which is the first step toward successful urbanism.  Much like a high school party where you only wanted to attend if you were sure that friends would also be there, cell phones can provide a social safety net, giving courage to a phone user to venture into a new or unfamiliar setting.  Even if there is no one to talk with, a cell phone owner can sit on a bench and play with his phone, pretending not to feel awkward.

So the challenge isn’t to bring people into the public realm.  It’s to get them to set the phones aside and to engage in face-to-face communication once they’ve arrived.  Cari Nierenberg, writing in Health Today, presents current research showing that it only takes the presence of a cell phone on a table to reduce the quality of human interaction.  (Admission: I often have my cell phone on the table when dining with my wife, although I often forget that it’s there.  Nonetheless, it seems to be an oops.)

It’s too easy to say that we should educate people to put their cell phones away when they have a chance to interact with real people.  I doubt the ability of education to match the increasing seductiveness of cell phones.

Instead, it is on the urban planners, landscape architects, and the managers of public places to create places and events that triumph over the cell phone at least some of the time.  Not every battle will be won, but victories are possible.

A few weeks ago, I visited a waterfront park that included swings for two with a view over a lovely estuary.  All the swings were occupied and no cell phones were in sight.  Over the summer, I often went to a public market where conversations were going on all around me and there were no cell phones to be seen.  It’s not easy, but the cell phone can be beaten back into its holder.  It’ll be a continuing challenge to find and to build upon those victories.

To end on a note that reads like it’s from The Onion, John Metcalfe of Atlantic Cities reports on a vest being developed by researchers at MIT.  The vest would constantly monitor your Facebook account, inflating to provide a simulated “hug” whenever someone likes something you’ve posted on Facebook.

Recognizing the need for more human interaction, someone thought that a good idea would be to simulate human interaction based on input from the internet.  At least some of us have truly become lost in our electronics and seem to have forgotten what real human interaction should be.

One wonders how these researchers interact at their holiday party.  Perhaps they show Yuletide affection by liking each other from their cell phones.  The cell phones that are on top of the table.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Urbanism and Technology Firms

In a recent post, I wrote about how technology relates to urbanism.  I appreciate the thoughtful comments that I received in response.  It’s a subject to which I’ll return.

But there is a flip side to the question of how smartphones relate to urban living.  And that how smartphone designers relate to urban living.

From our vantage point in the North Bay, we’re well aware of the rich history of technology in the Silicon Valley.  (I even have a cousin who works for the Computer History Museum.)  But we may not be as aware of the creep of technology firms toward San Francisco.  Pinterest recently announced their move northward, joining Twitter, Salesforce, and others in the city.  Which has led observers to ponder the reasons.

Mark Suster of Both Sides of the Table writes that the bubbling creativity of urban centers is important to continued creativity in technology.  He observes that technology employees have long had a preference for urban living, with firms such as Google providing buses for commutes from San Francisco to Silicon Valley.  He then lists the metropolitan cores, such as New York and London, to which start-up firms are migrating.  And he argues that the trend will continue.

Fred Wilson of AVC (A Venture Capitalist) concurs, noting the creativity in technology has a symbiotic relationship with other forms of creativity, including the bubbling creativity of an urban setting and the creativity of good science fiction.

But against that background, Apple is proceeding with a grand new Frisbee-shaped corporate building in Cupertino.  The state considers the project so important that the governor approved it for fast-tracking through the environment impact review process.

Kaid Benfield suggests that Apple’s vision is flawed.  That, even if Apple chooses to remain in Cupertino, an alternative land-use configuration might have been better configured to position both Apple and Cupertino for the future.  He presents an alternative vision by a pair of Israeli architectural students that appears to be a reasonable urban-style approach to the site.

The proposed Apple headquarters was first announced by Steve Jobs in the last public appearance before his death.  Jobs was a very smart man and a visionary.  I fully respect the technological legacy he left behind.  But I wonder if the vision behind the proposed building was that of a deathly ill man whose ability to the see the path of the future was fading.  And if a healthy Jobs might have embraced urbanism instead of what appears to be a monument to his own ego.

I appreciate the reverence for their late founder, but I hope that Apple management doesn’t blindly follow a dated vision off a cliff.

(Acknowledgement: I have a small investment in Apple.  However, I’m pondering the sale of my shares based on the regressive thinking behind the new headquarters.  If this is how the post-Jobs management views the future of land-use, one shudders to think about their vision for the future of technology.)

What does all of this imply for the North Bay?  Probably not much.  Although the North Bay once had a foothold in the telephone industry, today it really can’t compete with either the deeply-rooted technology base of the Silicon Valley or the urban energy of San Francisco.  If the North Bay is ever to have another role in the world of technology, it’ll probably come from raising our own Steve Jobs whose local roots overcomes the other factors.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Urbanism and Technology

A frequent punchline to stories about romantic relationships is “It’s complicated.”  In the past few weeks, a friend used exactly that line in describing a relationship of hers.

And yet, “It’s complicated” applies even better to the relationship between urbanism and technology.   Technology helps us overcome the separation caused by drivable suburbia.  Then it leaves us sitting in a public plaza, engrossed in our own smartphone or earbud worlds.

Technology Review tries to make the case that technology is counteracting the influences of automobiles and suburbia.  But the writer’s arguments add up to an argument that technology is less bad than suburbia.  It’s better than nothing, but not good enough.

Derek Thompson of Atlantic offers a quick history of headphones along with a review of the average teenager’s contention that studying is more productive with headphones.  (It’s not as untrue as most parents believe, but ultimately studying is probably better without headphones.  Headphones may provide a calming, distraction-free environment, but they also interfere with bursts of creativity.)

Thompson then looks at the social aspects of headphones, noting that headphones did for music what writing and literacy did for language. They took what had been a public experience and made it private.  Thompson goes on to speculate that headphones fit well with American tradition of independence, allowing people to maintain solitude even when surrounded by others. 

Thompson quotes Dr. Michael Bull of the University of Sussex, "With the urban space, the more it's inhabited, the safer you feel.  You feel safe if you can feel people there, but you don't want to interact with them.”

As Thompson phrases it, headphones allow us to say “I am here, but I am separate.”

Thompson’s article was a coda to the cover article in Atlantic magazine the previous month titled “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”  Writer Stephen Marche found the perfect image for his story, an aging movie star whose only remaining connection to life was with fans who found her online.  When she collapsed and died in front of her computer, no one knew to look for her.  Her mummified remains weren’t found for a year, but the computer screen was still casting a blue glow over her body.

When the story of her death went viral, it completed a bizarre and disturbing circle.

As Marche describes it, “Facebook doesn’t destroy friendships—but it doesn’t create them, either.”  As he continues, “Our omnipresent new technologies lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy.”

Plus many of us are constantly aware of the image we’re portraying on Facebook.  “Curating the exhibition of the self has become a 24/7 occupation.”

And the internet also affects the type of friends we have.  The Wall Street Journal reports on studies showing increased internet use leads people to have more homogeneous groups of friends.  We prefer to associate with people who think as we do, so the broader pool of people available on the internet allows us to find more people with whom we agree.

Unfortunately, the time we spend online with those people, who may live in North Dakota, is time we’re not spending talking to our neighbors with whom we should be building a community.

I don’t see an easy solution to the conundrum of urbanism and technology.  Technology seems to offer interesting opportunities for improved urbanism experiences, but capitalizing on those opportunities is a challenge.  And asking people to leave their headphones at home would be a fool’s errand.

Perhaps the best hope is that someone will have a brilliant idea for the Internet 2.0 by which technology can encourage us to leave our computer screens behind to engage in public conversation.  Although the days of flash mobs are fading, perhaps the impromptu congregation idea can be reborn as a path to meaningful urbanist experiences.

Or maybe the best we can do is to blog about urbanism.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)