PlanPhilly: Planning Philadelphia's Future

An artist from the U.K. has found a way to make it look as if buildings are being strangled by a malignant Kraken. And for this, we the public should be eternally grateful.

The goosebump-spreading sculptures of Filthy Luker (real name, Luke) look like complete Photoshops, but they're oh-so-real. "I have been putting them up all over the world in many various places and ways since about 2004," the artist e-mails. Luker embarked upon his line of startling objects by first painting huge balloons to look like eyes. After that caught on, he built up a business devoted to custom-making blowup octopi and what appears to be alien bacteria using 3-D software and fire-retardant nylon.

Here are a few of the finer works by Luker, used with his permission. The above image of an "Octopied Building" is from Quito. You can find more on his artist and company websites.

Tentacles sprout from an old diving board in Geneva:

This guy's expression is priceless. Near London:

This "Nightmare on Hill Street" was the first tentacle attack the artist attempted. You can really see how far the work has evolved:

Ah, those beautiful eyes. From "Trees Are People Too":

Truckers in Los Angeles may want to rotate their driving music soon. Switch out the Red Sovine, pop in some Tron soundtrack by Daft Punk.

Why's that? Oh, only because L.A. may be about to usher in the E-HIGHWAY OF THE FUTURE!!!!

That's the name that engineers have chosen for a proposed electric highway for trucks. The concept was touted last week at the 26th Annual Electric Vehicle Symposium, no doubt causing a few conference-goers to cough out breakfast pastries in surprise over how far this futuristic-sounding idea has progressed.

The eHighway, as its known, would operate much like a 'roided-out trolley-car line. The key word here is pantograph. That's the flexible doohickey that you see on the top of a streetcar connecting it to an electric wire. The idea is to work with truck manufacturers to develop a hybrid vehicle with a pantograph that couples with a power line running above the highway.

When a truck pulls onto the enhanced highway, its pantograph grips the line and allows the trucker to switch off the gas and cruise solely on voltage. Braking would activate a mechanism to transfer the dragging momentum into energy, which would be shot back into the grid for all the cargo trucks to use. When the driver is ready to exit, he disengages his or her pantograph from the overhanging line and switches over to diesel fuel.

Renderings of the eHighway concept courtesy Siemens

The company behind the project, Siemens, is currently testing out the eHighway tech on an inactive airstrip outside of Berlin, driving Mercedes hybrid electric trucks down a mile-long runway outfitted with overhead catenary wires. The eventual goal is to deploy an eHighway pilot on Southern California's Interstate 710, which handles tons of truck traffic from the ports of Long Beach and L.A.

The electric highway would, with luck, reduce some of the foul air that currently makes the L.A. region the country's No. 1 city for ozone pollution and No. 3 in particle pollution, by the American Lung Association's ranking. Several key groups have expressed early interest in the project, including the Southern California Association of Governments, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, and Southern California Edison.

Siemens (which, yes, is coincidentally one of our sponsors) has assured doubters that its coupling gadget is savvy enough to automatically disengage in the event of sudden swerves. It also claims that this concept will be "very easy" to integrate with America's existing highway system. And yes, iPad fans, the trucks will have touchscreen counsels for the pantographs.

The eHighway might seem laughable at the moment to all but the most fervent environmentalist, but just wait. Air pollution in Long Beach and Riverside costs these communities an estimated $18 million annually in asthma bills, docking residents on average an incredible 8 percent of their household income. And the toxic stew isn't expected to waft away anytime soon. Here's Siemens infrastructure chief Daryl Dulaney laying out the grim prognosis for the future in a press release:

"When most people think of vehicle emissions, they assume cars do most of the damage, but it’s actually commercial trucks that are largely to blame," says Dulaney. Freight transportation on U.S. roadways is expected to double by 2050, and by 2030, carbon dioxide emissions are forecasted to jump 30 percent due to freight transport alone.

So while electric trucking takes a little away from the exhaust-cloaked, chaw-stained trucker archetype, no doubt Californians will embrace it with both arms if it means hacking a little less brown goo into the Kleenex each morning.

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Construction on OMA’s CCTV Tower Completed!

Where ‘Secondhand’ Clothes Go to Hang

Adaptive reuse is a term that summons both excited interest and annoyance. Drop it in any conversation, and you’ll instantly gain the approval of zealous ecological do-gooders or the dreaded eye-roll from the jaded realists, too “informed” to feign optimism and jealous for not being the first to think of, say, repurposing a water tower to make awesome-looking furniture. That’s exactly what Brooklyn-based woodshop Bellboy did with their aptly-named “Water Tower” chair, a comfy undulating lounger made from reclaimed timber sourced from a certified authentic New York City water tower.

With a strikingly simple, almost Pringle-like profile, the chair oozes summer cool. The seat slopes downward toward the back, creating a pocket of space that eases the user into a lulling nap. The back of the chair narrows at the top, a refined touch that offsets the ovoid concavity of the chair base. The project brings to mind another innovative use of the city’s decommissioned water towers, this Greenwhich Village roof garden by GRAFTWORKS.

This post originally appeared on Architizer, an Atlantic partner site.

Sites along the Schuylkill, like Grays Ferry Crescent, from the Water Works to Bartram's Garden will host painters working outdoors all weekend.

The three-day Art in the Open (AiO) festival will line the banks of the Schuylkill River with art and family activities this weekend, May 18 – 20.

AiO aims to celebrate artists and their relationship with the urban environment. Friday through Sunday juried artists will work outside along the banks of the Schuylkill River from the Fairmount Park Water Works to Bartram’s Garden. The artists will work with a variety of media and create work on-site along the river.

Guests are welcome to observe the artists work for free, and at some locations, visitors will be invited to make their own art. Friday will feature several events specifically designed for families at the “Skate Park” section of the Schuylkill Banks path, the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center and along the Delaware River. Various partner organizations will offer drawing, sculpting, painting and more to artists of all ages and abilities.

If you cannot make the events this weekend, the art created during AiO will be on display at the Independence Seaport Museum from June 15 through September 9.

For a full schedule of events visit http://www.artintheopenphila.org/

How many miles can you bike between now and August 31? How about biking to work this Friday?

May happens to be bike month and the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia has a lot of events planned.

May 18 is Bike to Work Day. Of course, you can cycle to work on your own, but you could show your love for bike commuting by riding in a morning road rally alongside alongside Mayor Nutter, and the Bicycle Coalition. The ride will go from Lloyd Hall (1 Boathouse Row) to LOVE Park at 8:30am, rain or shine. Everyone is invited to meet up at Lloyd Hall starting at 7:30am for coffee.

If you can manage bike to work on Friday, you could also take this summer’s I Bike PHL Challenge, by tracking all of the miles you travel by bike until August 31.

As part of the Bicycle Coalition’s first I Bike PHL Challenge last year, city cyclists logged more than 150,000 miles. Can we do better this year? You can register for the challenge at Endomondo to track every mile you pedal as part of the summer-long challenge. [Click through for FAQs about the challenge, and be sure to sign up for Philly-related prizes.]

Earlier this month, I mentioned that I’m learning to be a better city cyclist. I signed up for the I Bike PHL Challenge out of sheer curiosity about how many miles I might travel by bike before September. [team: Spokes on the Street, members: one. Care to join me? ]

The infant nation of South Sudan has a big construction project in mind. Officials are hoping to build a brand new city to act as its capital. The cost of the project was recently estimated at $940 million.

South Sudan already has a capital, of sorts. Juba had long been the regional center of government before Sudan split into two countries last July. But because of Juba's hectic and crowded urban form, the new government decided it needed a new city to play the capital. Last September, a new site was selected in Ramciel, near the geographic center of the country.

The project will be built by the Korea Land and Housing Corporation, the state builder of South Korea, which specializes in the "construction of new cities overseas."

$940 million sounds like a lot, but compared to some other brand new cities, it's pocket change. New Songdo City, the Foster + Partners-designed sustainable city on the South Korean waterfront is expected to cost more than $30 billion to build. Masdar City, another city-from-scratch in Abu Dhabi also designed by Foster + Partners, is expected to cost more than $20 billion by the time it's fully built sometime around 2025. And in Honduras, where economist Paul Romer is hoping to help create a charter city for nearly 10 million people, building such a "special development region" would likely run into the multiple billions as well.

Exactly when South Sudan's new capital will take shape remains uncertain. The costs of building the project are one hurdle, though officials say that some as-yet-unnamed donors will handle the financing. Maybe more of a hindrance is the continued violence and tension between the now-separated Sudans. The oil-rich land of South Sudan has long been a point of contention between the two regions, though violence appeared to calm in the months following the formal split. But since April, tribal clashes in border areas have spread and caused hundreds of South Sudanese to flee.

The project remains a priority for the new nation, and the Korea Land and Housing Corporation estimates that the project will take five years to complete. When the project actually breaks ground, however, is less clear.

Photo credit: Petar Kujundzic / Reuters

Concept plan of Marina View Tower, 230 N. Columbus Blvd | Ensemble Real Estate

The city has thousands of vacant, old industrial properties that are simultaneously keys to neighborhood revitalization and impediments. Today’s Inquirer tours some of these properties in Kensington, Frankford, and Port Richmond, tracing the difficulty even diligent property owners have in keeping buildings sealed and pursuing redevelopment.

The City Parks Alliance has named Hunting Park a “Frontline Park,” in recognition of its community-driven revitalization and its excellence as an urban park, Philebrity reports.

The beautiful Boyd Theater has been closed for ten years now, but its interiors are still fabulous. Hidden City Daily shows a peek inside the Boyd, refreshing our memories about the Art Deco finishes, and how this place is just waiting for a sensitive redevelopment plan.

What happens when L&I issues you violations for a house you don’t own? City Howl has the strange tale of Elizabeth Simmons, a Southwest Philly resident, who had to navigate a maze of city departments trying to clear her name of violations on a property she never owned. Until Simmons involved Councilwoman Blackwell’s office, L&I never bothered to tell her that they fixed the problem. Key complication: A different Elizabeth Simmons owned the house with violations.

The Planning Commission had little love for the conceptual plans of Marina View Towers presented yesterday, reports PlanPhilly’s Kellie Patrick Gates. Commissioners want to see improvements to the building’s materials, large retaining wall, street presence, pedestrian connectivity, height and more.

The Buzz is Eyes on the Street’s morning news digest. Have a tip? Send it along.

To mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II's reign, the National Portrait Gallery opens a new exhibit, "The Queen Art and Image," starting tomorrow.

The exhibit includes paintings, photographs, and press images by renown artists and photographers including Annie Leibovitz and Andy Warhol. 

Top image: A woman stands next to silkscreen prints of Britain's Queen Elizabeth by Andy Warhol during a press view at the National Portrait Gallery in London May 16, 2012. (REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth)

Britain’s Olympic headlines have been fixated with two new towers this month. One is The Orbit, the new sculpture-cum-observation deck designed to pack in tourists and shoot down criticism of the Olympic Park’s otherwise muted appearance. The other is an army missile turret perched on a nearby apartment building, intended to secure the Olympic Park and blow anything that might attack it out of the East London sky. Whether either tower will fulfill its mission remains unclear, but the blend of excitement, satire and suspicion with which London has met news of both is telling. Half willing and half reluctant, this summer’s Olympic city is still waiting to be persuaded that its games will be worth the price.

If success can be measured by public attention alone, then the Orbit at least has earned its keep so far. This asymmetrical tangle of blood-red metal and concrete looks set to be London’s most discussed Olympic landmark, its largely private funding shielding it from some criticism. A sign of its acceptance is that Londoners have been trying out official nicknames for it ever since plans were published by designer Anish Kapoor, a favorite sport in a city that has re-christened recently built landmarks as the Gherkin, the Cheese Grater, Isengard, and the Testicle. London’s newly re-elected mayor, Boris Johnson, favors the "Hubble Bubble," while sci-fi writer China Miéville has dubbed it a "Gaian Hernia."  Early favorites "The Colossus of Stratford" and "The Tangled Earphones" seem to be waning already, while new coinage the "Double Dipper" is on the up, linking the tower’s rollercoaster looks neatly with Britain’s recent return to recession. And while comparisons with Paris’ most famous landmark seem optimistic, they’ve at least inspired a name referring to the Orbit’s intestine-like metal scramble – "The Offal Tower."

When the Orbit opened to invited guests last week, Britain’s critics remained divided, but have softened since plans were published. Some raved, calling it a "generous drunken party animal" and praising its "anarchic, near random spiralling of red geodesic mesh."  Others, however, claimed that it "represents the archetypal 'turd on the plaza,'" while this video suggests that locals are none too impressed either. The Orbit may yet win the public over, but learning that they’ll have to pay £15 to climb the tower hasn’t softened their skepticism. With the pay-off a sweeping but slightly sullen view of workaday East London, this is a bit like charging high prices for a peep show only to present viewers with little more than a well-turned ankle beyond the curtain.

Meanwhile just down the road, some of the area’s wealthier citizens are revolting over alarming plans for their roof. Residents of the Bow Quarter, a gated development in a former match factory, have learned that the army want to turn their water tower into a high velocity missile base protecting the Olympic Park, a decision presented to them as a done deal. Locals are understandably angry at being billeted with an enforced army base, and became angrier still when soldiers turned up and left what looked like missiles lying around unattended in a courtyard. This mix of official highhandedness and incompetence has given ammunition to those who claim the summer games are providing an excuse to run London by martial law. If the army’s missiles remain unfired and the Orbit’s prices drop after the summer, locals may be won over to the games yet, but for now any sense of pre-Olympic euphoria in London still seems far off.

A police officer stands guard under the shadow of the Orbit Tower inside the Olympic Park in London May 4, 2012. (REUTERS/Dylan Martinez) 

Today’s post is guest-authored by my friend and frequent collaborator, Lee Epstein. Lee is an attorney and land use planner working for sustainability in the mid-Atlantic region.

First, a confession: I went to urban and regional planning graduate school during the “horse and buggy” days, or so it seems today. We read hard-cover books about planning theory and practice. In our urban design studios, we hunched over drafting tables clutching our T-squares late into the night (really). We weren’t unrolling parchment in caves, but it was pretty darned close.    

We used hand-held calculators for simple data crunching, and for running multiple regression analyses, we walked over to the small “computer lab.” This was a dingy, cramped room peopled mostly by pallid, red-eyed math and engineering grad students who were fueled solely by caffeine and an occasional pizza, and who looked like they never saw the light of day. There we created shoe boxes full of punch cards, and waited in line to get them processed by the two large computers which, after processing our hundreds of cards, spit out the results on yards of un-spooling track paper (the kind with holes on both sides to track through the printer).  

We also used large, hard-copy maps, and for a really innovative approach, overlaid them with clear acetate that showed different landscape features or attributes. My 200+ page Master’s Thesis was prepared using a “word processor,” just a step up from an electric typewriter. 

Fond memories? Not so much, but it was an “experience.”  

There were no laptops or desktop personal computers. None of the wonders of GIS or GPS systems. No 3-D, fly-through designs.  No e-mail. No smart phones or text-messaging. No Facebook or Twitter. No Google Earth. No blogs (!).  

The old and new ways of citizen engagement

Sustainable design meeting, Indianapolis. By and courtesy of Joel Mills and Erin Simmons, AIA.

But along with theory, policy and design in grad school, we learned about citizen participation being a very important part of planning. Mostly, what citizen participation meant then was being sure to hold enough public meetings about a new plan to get some public input on it. These would be advertised in the local newspapers, and once you got through the meetings and made changes or adjustments, you moved on to the next phase of the “rational planning process.” These meetings weren’t always quiet, and “rational” sometimes got lost along the way, but still, this was all pretty straightforward.

Well, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

The electronic communications and high-tech, computing revolutions have changed planning for the better since the 1970’s and 1980’s. The tools available today are powerful and much more effective at analyzing, arraying, and mapping important data.  Laptops put into our hands the power of big, furnace-sized computers from a couple of decades ago.  We can run alternative growth scenarios in real time right on those laptops, and model their impacts on local government budgets, water or air quality, or affordable housing. We can play with building designs, or bulk and density, how to manage stormwater runoff, and see what these designs might look like in a particular place. And we can obtain, view and analyze mapped information on hundreds of different parameters, depending upon the technical capacity of a particular state and region or what’s available from the feds.

Along with our data-crunching capabilities, our communication capabilities have also vastly improved. Using those scenario-planning programs in real time, in a public meeting, is a great way to engage local officials and citizens alike, and a good way to present hard choices on this or that policy option or direction with respect to sustainability. Publishing GIS maps on-line, so citizens can see where the forest ends and subdivisions begin, the march of sprawl over time, the health of local streams, or how sea level rise is affecting coastal and estuarine communities, all helps visually communicate concepts that may be difficult to understand in the abstract. 

Not just feedback but collaboration

Illustration courtesy of Julie Stuart, Making Ideas Visible.

This all means that public participation in planning, growth, and sustainable design decisions has already changed in many localities – and that there is no excuse for it not changing everywhere soon.  Bringing the public into public policy decision-making is no longer a matter of the “one-and-done”:  you hold a public hearing on a development proposal, take testimony (that is, if anyone shows up to give it), and make the decision (informed or not informed by the testimony).  It’s not even any longer a matter of a year-long series of in-person meetings by a local volunteer stakeholder committee. Now we can have meetings via the web, so even stay-at-homes can regularly participate. And we can bring into that process the sorts of whiz-bang analytic tools mentioned above, that can make difficult to understand concepts instantly understandable.

Better yet, now there are a slew of ways for not regularly talking to people, but rather connecting, communicating -- interacting – with them: making connections via social networks or a list-serve is one way, for example, to engage citizens in an on-going conversation concerning local policy. Communicating through the local government’s website, or by regular contributions to, or comments on a blog, through RSS feeds, or again, in real time, via Twitter, about the latest change in that big new development proposed for the corner of Main and First Streets, are among the ways citizens today can become a more vital part of the process.

All that new give and take is mostly good news when it comes to citizen participation. There’s some “bad” news that comes with it, however, though mostly that’s really just part of living in a democratic society. What nearly instantaneous communication has given us is not only the ability to dig into an issue pretty quickly, but also to react with our appointed and elected officials – and organize ourselves – without much knowledge, in ways that are not so very useful.   

We’ve seen some of this of late with the “Agenda 21” crowd, which this blog and others (notably, this thoughtful article by Ben Brown) have addressed previously. These folks, fearful and suspicious about a massive, world-wide government conspiracy to “take away our freedom,” have in some places and on some occasions made a naturally messy process into an untenable and even dangerous one. What is always fine, and indeed, most welcome in good urban planning, is a rich mix of contrasting ideas competing for relevance. Different views about this or that project, whether a specific direction will best advance the community’s overall welfare and sustainability, are what make planning in a democratic society work. People marshalling the data and facts to support their point of view and serving it up to others to debate and choose a direction in which to head is what planning should be all about.  Unfortunately, Agenda 21 folks, alerted to an open planning meeting via Twitter or e-mail or an anti-planning blog, sometimes show up not to participate but merely to shout down public officials or their fellow citizens, disrupting an open process to destroy, rather than contribute to it. That’s hijacking democracy, not practicing it.

Empowering us to discover what we really want

Proposed park and surroundings, Plan El Paso. Image courtesy Dover, Kohl Architects.

Not everyone will agree that a particular urban design is one that can stand the test of time; that “X” amount of density is the right amount for animating a residential/commercial area; that one good way to achieve “walkability” is by slowing traffic in a particular place; or that the local jurisdiction should act to conserve its working farmland and help its farmers keep farming, so that future generations can live in a place where town and country mixes effectively. Green growth and sustainability are sometimes tough concepts to wrap one’s head around.     

The new communication tools available to us in 2012 should enable us to do just that –communicate better about what we want as a society, learn about an issue or concept, and participate, really and truly participate and debate, in the decision-making of our government. That’s really the only way to obtain some mutual understanding of what sustainability means to a community. And it’s really the only way to get to a state of sustainable growth and design around which a community can rally.

Pry that old T-square out of my cold, dead hands? Please?

Top image: "Plan Bay Area" Public Meeting in Mountain View, California. Courtesy of Noah Berger via the Knight Foundation. 

This post originally appeared on the NRDC's Switchboard blog.   

Recently I spent six weeks in Tokyo for a project entirely unrelated to my transportation writing at Atlantic Cities, except insofar as they both involve the planet Earth and the human race. Still, I intended to keep a scorecard comparing Tokyo's transportation system to that of New York. I kept score for about two days before stopping, mostly out of pointlessness and a little out of patriotism. It was clear even at this early stage which city would win.

No doubt a glass-half-emptyist such as myself could find fault with elements of Tokyo's transportation network given the proper time and linguistic capacity. But within my admittedly limited sample set I found the network — particularly the intra- and intercity rail system — difficult to overrate. The worst you can probably say about it is that it very efficiency creates a problem of crowding. Which, to keep the sports metaphor going, is a little like complaining about the jog after hitting a homerun.

So I'll invoke the mercy rule and, rather than provide a halfway completed scorecard that was tending toward a shutout, offer instead a few broad observations, for New York's own system to take or leave as it will. Hopefully take.

Airport Transportation

Contrary to popular myth, not everyone arrives into Tokyo in a plane that looks like this:

When you do arrive into Narita Airport, Tokyo's main international entry point, you're about an hour and a half from the downtown area — which itself is often half an hour from other parts of the rather expansive city. You can take a taxi into the city from Narita for a fare on the order of several hundred dollars. You can take public rail transit into the city for a fraction of the cost of a cab but a multiple of the hassle, at least if you have big bags. Or you can do the sensible thing and take what's called the Airport Limousine Bus service for about $40.

That modest fee includes a comfortable ride, an orderly boarding process, great attendance to your baggage, and tip, which in Japan is always zero. Though the system is not limited to English-speaking travelers it's clearly intended for them — which, as I'd later find, pretty much goes for all Tokyo transportation. The Limo Bus doesn't travel to every hotel in the city, but dollars to donuts (yen to rice balls?) it goes to one that's either a short walk or quick cab ride from wherever you're staying.

The service is almost suspiciously well-staffed and as a result extremely efficient. Narita ground transportation is ringed with numbered signs and digital placards whose departure times and places appear in English. People stand in neat lines marked by chalk. Boarding assistants position your bags, after they're tagged by destination, at the precise spot where they'll be loaded onto the bus. When it arrives, luggage assistants run over and load all the bags even before the last person is on board. Announcements are in English too, including the one that tells you to silence your cell phones "as they annoy the neighbors." When your bus pulls away, the boarding assistant bows in its direction.

Public Transit

Confusing as the system seems on paper, it's very simple in practice. That's especially true for English speakers. Automatic card vendors have an English button, and if you're still able to make a mistake a little bell goes off and an attendant pops out of a door in the wall you didn't know was there and fixes the problem. Video displays on board oscillate to English, and the final speaker announcement for each station is also given an English — a practice very welcome to this tourist but which must grate on city residents.

In truth you don't even really need to speak any language to ride: just know how to count and recite the alphabet. Each station, in addition to having a name, has a letter-number combination denoting the line and stop number. So if you have trouble at first recognizing the name Azabu-Juban, you can instead just make sure you're heading for N-4 — the fourth stop on the Namboku line. There is also a wonderfully helpful map on every platform that shows you which car to board based on your destination or transfer needs.

The lines themselves are seamlessly integrated despite being owned by different companies: you can take the JR Yamanote line to the Mita line on the Toei system to the Namboku train on the Tokyo Metro system without ever leaving a station or buying a different fare card. The cars have cushioned seats and floors you could eat off and an abundance of hanging straps. I once counted 87 in a single car. The (numerous) ads not only grace the walls of the cars but also hang from the ceiling, and flap a bit in the breeze of the air ducts.

The entire system is almost impossibly neat and orderly. The bathrooms in the stations are perfectly acceptable to use. I didn't see a beggar or performer on a train once in six weeks, and even the guy who sells concessions on the platform wears a suit to work. In the morning people naturally form lines where the doors will open before the train arrives, and the platform speakers pipe in bird calls to increase the serenity. The floors of both the stations and the cars seemed clean enough to eat off.

Speaking of mornings, the early rush is everything it's made it out to be. Take the most crowded car you've ever been on in Washington or New York and add, oh, 30 percent more passengers. You don't have to worry about holding a pole or a strap because there's nowhere to move: you're essentially a subatomic particle. The only thing between you and any number of moral and federal offenses is a thin layer of polyester; once you reach a stop you feel partly obliged to cuddle with those around you. That said, at every stop, those nearest the door funnel out to allow others to disembark, then funnel back in with great aplomb.

Still there are concerns about groping on trains during the morning rush, so there are Women Only cars for those times. Of course the act of groping implies a freedom of movement which, in my rush-hour experience, did not exist. I'm also told that some men, to avoid such accusations, sometimes ride with their hands above their head — like a basketball player does to show he hasn't committed a foul — in what's called a bonsai commute.

I did ride several buses in the outskirts of the city but found little of note about them besides, once again, cushioned seats, and also the fact that they turn off their engines at every red light, presumably to conserve fuel and/or mitigate exhaust.

Intercity Rail System

I'm hardly the first to say it, but Japanese bullet trains — called the shinkansen — are also as good as advertised. Not to sound like a broken record, but these too are quite easy to use for an English speaker: the same digital arrival and departure signs that oscillate to English; the same on-board intercom announcement in English, though in a British accent; even the car diagrams on the tray table in front of you offer English.

Now the ticketing process can be a bit confusing. Unlike Amtrak, which has a single fare ticket from station to station, the shinkansen requires you to purchase both a basic rail fare and then also a seat fare. The rail fare, for example, covers passage in the Tokyo-Hakata corridor, but an additional seat fare must be paid to reserve an assigned seat. You can also buy a non-reserved seat fare, for slightly less money, and duke it out in the non-reserved cars with other passengers.

Shinkansen platforms, like those of the Limo Bus, are well-organized. Taped lines and hanging signs (again, which oscillate to English) show you where to stand based on which car you've been assigned and which train you're taking. (While Amtrak offers only regional or Acela trains, there are several types of shinkansen, ranging up to the Nozomi, or superexpress.) Platforms have vending machines, proper convenience stores, and smoking sections, where passengers huddle around air vents.

Watching the JR staff turn a shinkensen at the end of the line is really something. Once a train arrives workers blitz through the cars, wiping down seats and tray tables and window sills and generally straightening the place up. Then they flip the seats with the push of a lever so they face the other direction. The task is taken seriously: when passengers are finally allowed to enter, the platform agent bows to let you know it's time.

The bowing continues on-board — it's done every single time a conductor or cart vendor enters or exits the car. There's no quiet car, but there doesn't have to be. Anyone who receives a call steps out to the space between the cars to talk. There's a small vending machine between many of the cars, and smoking rooms between others. In addition to bathroom stalls there is just a general sink area in case you simply want to freshen. Some trains offer both Western and Japanese toilets: to sit or to squat, that is the question.

The seats are often filled despite holding more passengers than Amtrak. Instead of a two-two seating arrangement, the shinkansen have three-two seating. (The automatic ticket vendors intelligently assign the middle seats last, so that you can often ride, at least part of the way, with a free seat beside you.) The only complaint I had was a lack of electrical outlets, though that's only true on the slower trains. On Nozomi every window seat has an outlet of its own.

Pedestrians-Bikers

A lot of people ride bicycles in Tokyo. The popularity of cycling holds true despite the fact that there don't seem to be any bike lanes in Tokyo. That's impressive but also annoying, since it means a great many people ride on the already crowded sidewalks. No one wears a helmet. This is only halfway related to biking, but it seemed worth mentioning that food-delivery people ride scooters with heated compartments that hold the food.

What's striking to an American in Tokyo is just how many women ride bikes. What's striking to a New Yorker is how many people leave their bikes places without locking them. I won't say I thought seriously about starting a bike-lock business and hiring a number of bike thieves for pretty cheap to get it going. But it's possible the idea crossed my mind.

Tokyo is a very populous city so it's not surprising that the sidewalks and crosswalks are often very crowded. I once wondered whether the famous Shibuya crossing was the Worst. Crosswalk. Ever. but having visited in person it's hard not to appreciate how many people are accommodating at a single intersection, all while cars wait patiently. (There's very little honking in Tokyo compared to New York.)

An American pedestrian in Tokyo also can't help but notice the corrugated yellow stripes that line pretty much every walkway. At first I thought this was to separate lanes of walkers, something I've always wanted in the United States, but I'm told these are actually guides for the blind. It seems like a lot of effort for a small part of the population — that's not to say it isn't admirable, of course — but it speaks, like the English announcements and cell-phone courtesies, to a general transportation culture of accommodating others.

Cars-Taxis

The only element of Tokyo transportation I feel unable to evaluate with any authority is car travel. I know they drive on the left and don't honk much, but that's about it. I can remark only in brief on the taxi situation: it's expensive, with a starting fare up around $8-10, but you can pay with your subway pass — a remarkable feat of urban transport integration. (Side note: you can also use the pass to pay at most food vendors inside a station.) Also the taxi drivers wear suits and hats and some of them even white gloves. And they don't talk on their cell phone or headset. That might be annoying to the neighbors.

All images by Eric Jaffe

As far as big cities go, Portland is pretty safe. According to the 2010-2011 City Crime Rankings from CQPress, the city of Portland ranks 174th in the listing of cities with the most crime – about the middle of the pack of 400 U.S. cities. Among metropolitan areas, Portland ranks 140th out of 347.

These numbers are part of what made it seem a little rash when Portland Police Bureau Chief Mike Reese asked the city council to approve a policy that would allow him to make deals with private property owners to place surveillance cameras on their property to aid in law enforcement and crime prevention. These cameras – used widely in big cities like London and New York, as well as smaller places like Chattanooga – are seen as a deterrent to crime in areas that have been inundated by criminal activities. In Portland, where the crime rate has been steady since the 1960s, inundation isn't quite the most accurate term.

Police Bureau spokesperson Sergeant Peter Simpson says that 1960s-level crime rate is a positive stability in the city, but that there are still pockets where crime is a big problem. One of those pockets, a roughly 50-block neighborhood called Old Town/Chinatown, has been a hotbed of drug crime for decades, says Simpson, and is the main reason the chief proposed the surveillance cameras.

According to crime statistics reported on the Portland Police Bureau's CrimeStats website, the Old Town/Chinatown neighborhood saw 33 drug-related arrests in April, compared with two in Arbor Lodge, one in Brooklyn, and 0 in Homestead. Only a handful of other neighborhoods in the city had one-month figures above a single digit. Downtown, though, had a significantly higher tally, with 65 drug arrests in April.

The drug problem in Portland is highly concentrated, which is why Simpson argues the cameras are needed. The policy would make it so that private business owners would have no liability as a result of the cameras' installation and operation, and that police could remotely tap into those video feeds whenever necessary.

"We hope that, one, they are a deterrent, but two, we can deploy our resources more efficiently," Simpson says. "I think most of the point is to make it obvious that you're being filmed. And if that's a deterrent for people, great. It certainly won't be a deterrent for everybody."

But others argue that the cameras aren't needed and they won't do any good.

"Our general position is it's a waste of resources," ACLU of Oregon Executive Director David Fidanque told The Oregonian. "Video surveillance does not prevent crime, and it's not necessarily helpful in solving unsolved crimes."

Dan Handelman agrees. He's a representative of Portland Copwatch, a citizen-run organization promoting police accountability, and he worries that the footage collected by the cameras and their ability to be tilted and zoomed gives too much data to the police.

"For the police to operate any kind of video cameras on an ongoing basis without any direct suspicion that any criminal activity is going on is, in our opinion, against state law, and a bad idea," says Handelman.

He points to a state law passed in 1981 that prohibits law enforcement from collecting or maintaining information about the social, political, or religious affiliations of people unless it directly relates to an investigation of criminal activity. "These cameras are unnecessary and they're just giving the police way too much information that they don’t need."

The city council seems likely to approve the policy. After the idea was first proposed, the council asked the Police Bureau to refine its protocol to ensure the cameras wouldn't be used improperly – to spy through random windows, for example. A second hearing on the idea has been pushed to a meeting on May 30. According to Simpson, the Police Bureau already has the camera equipment on hand and is just waiting for the word to start the installation. He says they'll probably just start with one camera, in Old Town/Chinatown.

"Certainly if it was very successful we might look to expand the project to various parts of the city," Simpson says.

That's precisely what worries opponents like Handelman. He says that if the council approves the new policy, it'll open the door for these cameras to pop up on properties all over the city, and essentially give police permission to keep an almost ubiquitous eye on the city at all times.

"George Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning," Handelman says, "not a blueprint."

Photo credit: David Moir / Reuters

Smart phones have miraculously enabled people to stay connected, informed, and entertained, even in transit. We can now text, tweet, Skype, check Facebook updates, email in-boxes, Pandora channels and news feeds from a subway stop or street corner. The distracted walker has become both an urban menace and an April Fool’s laugh line.

Tali Hatuka, who heads the Laboratory for Contemporary Urban Design at Tel Aviv University, laments, however, what she sees as the technology’s darker side. So many smart phones may now be spoiling the “public” in our public places. Hatuka and colleague Eran Toch have been studying smart-phone users relative to their old-school, flip-phone counterparts. And the difference between the two groups is surprisingly stark, with serious implications for the future of public space in cities and the often-uncelebrated role that sociologists say they play.

“It’s very interesting to see that some of the basic ideas of public spaces are conceived totally differently by smart-phone users,” Hatuka says.

The ubiquitous smart phone may even degrade the way we recognize, memorize and move through cities

She and Toch have given lengthy surveys to both smart-phone and traditional cell-phone users, quizzing them about their own behavior – where, when and how they use phones – and how they feel about the behavior of others. Smart-phone users, for starters, are much more commonly under the illusion that they have privacy even when walking down a public sidewalk. They’re less skittish about having personal conversations in public. They’re more detached from their physical surroundings. They’re more likely to violate social norms about having disruptive, private phone conversations (and less likely to feel guilty about this).

Smart phones, in short, have given users the impression that they move through communal spaces as if in private bubbles. “They feel that everywhere they are, they have their privacy,” Hatuka says. Smart phones have created, the researchers say, “portable private personal territories.”

“The whole idea of public/private as binary is becoming much more complex,” Hatuka says. “Instead of thinking about public and private, we have to think about the private sphere becoming more dominant in public. For the smart-phone users, they’re totally, constantly engaged with the private sphere, and it’s reducing the basic roles of public space.”

This is not a good thing. The public sphere plays an important role in our communities: it’s where we observe and learn to interact with people who are different from us, or, as academics put it, it’s where we come to know “the other.”

In their surveys, Hatuka and Toch also asked what sounded like some pretty silly questions about what people remembered of the public spaces they’d visited just 10 minutes earlier: what did those places and the people there look like? Smart-phone users couldn’t remember much at all, which is another of way saying that they weren’t paying attention in the first place. This suggests, Hatuka says, that the ubiquitous smart phone may even degrade the way we recognize, memorize and move through cities. We will lose many of these benefits when we’re one day all walking around thumbing our Twitter feeds.

“I think we’ve already lost many things,” Hatuka says. Five years ago, if you didn’t know how to get somewhere in the city, you’d probably stop to ask a stranger. Now, Google Maps can get you there. “So no one is asking anything,” Hatuka says. “This kind of stranger communication is a vital thing for a society. The communication of strangers was always one of the key roles of public spaces, observing and exchanging with the other. Because smart phones are supplying so many of these services, this kind of exchange with the stranger is just diminished to almost zero.”

So why do smart phones change our behavior so much more radically than their simpler cell-phone predecessors did? Smart phones, Hatuka says, combine numerous spheres: your social network, your email, your news source, your live personal conversations. When you’re interacting with each of those spheres while walking through a public park, which social code do you follow? Do you follow the code of the public park (wherein we politely make eye contact with one another), or do you follow the social code of Facebook (wherein you better hurry up and acknowledge all the friends who just “liked” your latest status update)?

As Hatuka and Toch have found, for smart-phone users, the social norms of the physical world are often trumped. They’re becoming  less important. All of this means we may need a concerted campaign to keep the “public” in the public sphere, to actively encourage people to observe and interact with each other. We may even need to redesign our public places to do this.

"I don’t have a solution for that yet," Hatuka says. But she suspects we’ll need to tap the very tool that is now harming our public places. "I think we'll need to use technology."

Top image: SVLuma/Shutterstock.com

Density is all the rage these days. Urban economists, some of whom could be heard extolling the praises of "sun, skills, and sprawl" just a few years ago, now see increasing density as the key to improving productivity and driving economic growth. In his story for The Atlantic, "How Skyscrapers Can Save the City," Harvard University’s Edward Glaeser put it this way: "As America struggles to regain its economic footing, we would do well to remember that dense cities are also far more productive than suburbs, and offer better-paying jobs ... tall buildings enable the human interactions that are at the heart of economic innovation, and of progress itself." Well-intentioned planners and preservationists drive up prices when they stand in the way of taller and taller buildings, he argues. Overly restrictive height limitations not only impede economic progress, but make cities less, not more, liveable.

There can be no doubt that density has its advantages. In general, denser cities are more productive, more innovative, and more energy efficient. But only up to a point. 

America’s high-tech, venture-funded start-up model of innovation came of age not in skyscraper canyons but in places like Silicon Valley

The key function of a city is to enable exchange, interaction, and the combination and recombination of people and ideas. When buildings become so massive that street life disappears, they can damp down and limit just this sort of interaction, creating the same isolation that is more commonly associated with sprawl. As Jane Jacobs aptly put it: "in the absence of a pedestrian scale, density can be big trouble." Skyscraper canyons of the sort that are found in many Asian mega-cities, and that are increasingly proposed in great American cities, risk becoming vertical suburbs, whose residents and occupants are less likely to engage frequently and widely with the hurly-burly of city life. 

Edward McMahon of the Urban Land Institute cuts to the chase, differentiating between density and high-rise buildings in his recent post for Citiwire, “Density Without Highrises?”. If the pendulum originally swung too far in the direction of sprawl over the past 50 years, the risk today is that it is swinging way too far back toward high-rise skyscrapers. "To oppose a high-rise building," he writes, "is to run the risk of being labeled a NIMBY, a dumb growth advocate, a Luddite — or worse. Buildings 20, 40, 60 even 100 stories tall are being proposed and built in low and mid-rise neighborhoods all over the world. All of these projects are justified with the explanation that if density is good, even more density is better."

Stop and think for a moment: What kind of environments spur new innovation, start-ups and high-tech industries? Can you name one instance, one, of this sort of creative destruction occurring in high-rise office or residential towers, in skyscraper districts? The answer is no. High-rise districts typically house either corporate office functions or residences. During the post-war era, while they were building these towers for their corporate functions, large U.S. companies housed their research scientists in green, low-rise R&D campuses, where the scientists could interact more freely. 

America’s high-tech, venture-funded start-up model of innovation came of age not in skyscraper canyons but in places like Silicon Valley, which provided such an ideal eco-system for creativity because of its city-like aspects. As Jonah Lehrer told Cities recently, "Silicon Valley manages to replicate the essential function of a dense city, which is to foster a diversity of interactions and knowledge spillovers," albeit largely across industrial parks and based on the car.

Similarly, you don’t find great arts districts and music scenes in high-rise districts but in older, historic residential, industrial or warehousing districts such as New York’s Greenwich Village or Soho, or San Francisco’s Mission District, which were built before elevators enabled multi-story construction. 

The urban tech districts that are emerging today, from SoMa in San Francisco to New York’s Silicon Alley and London’s Silicon Roundabout, are housed in similarly walkable, low to mid-story neighborhoods.

What we need are new measures of density that do not simply count how many people we can physically cram into a space but that accounts for how well the space is utilized, the kinds of interactions it facilitates. "By this measure," McMahon writes, "one block of an older neighborhood might include a community theatre, a coffee shop, an art gallery, two restaurants, a bicycle shop, 10 music rehearsal studios, a church, 20 apartments and a couple of bars, and all with much more 24/7 activity and intensity of use than one block of (much taller) office buildings on K Street [in Washington, D.C.]."

Too many people today conflate density with height. Real interactive density can be better achieved by other means. "Yes, we do need more compact, walkable higher density communities," writes McMahon. "But no we do not need to build thousands of look-a-like glass and steel skyscrapers to accomplish the goals of smart growth or sustainable development." Neighborhoods like Georgetown in Washington, D.C., Brooklyn’s Park Slope, and the Fan in Richmond were largely built before the age of elevators and they are all dense. New Orleans’ "French Quarter has a net density of 38 units per acre, Georgetown 22 units per acre." The real issue isn’t just height and the massing of people and work, but of enabling interaction and recombination.

"Density does not always demand high-rises," notes McMahon. "Skyscrapers are a dime a dozen in today’s world. Once a low rise city or town succumbs to high-rise mania, many more towers will follow, until the city becomes a carbon-copy of every other city in a 'geography of nowhere.'"

Top image: Flickr/terratrekking

Empty for nearly 20 years, a skyscraper in the center of Milan, Italy, was given new life earlier this month when thousands of artists temporarily invaded and occupied the space. Through the act of squatting, the group sought to create a vibrant center where art and cultural activities could be produced autonomously. The city forced the occupiers' eviction 10 days later, on May 15.

Led in part by the group Lavatori dell'arte, the crowds broke into and occupied the Galfa Tower, an empty 31-story building that they immediately re-branded as MACAO, on May 5.

While they had the building, the occupiers created a nearly nonstop flow of performances, talks, meetings, and parties, filling various floors and plaza spaces in the 60-year-old skyscraper. Working elevators are a distant memory in the building, as are working electrical wires and water pipes above a certain height. Once inside, the instigators of this occupation climbed the 31 flights to the top of the building and unfurled a multiple-story tall vertical banner that, when translated, reads, "You could even imagine flying."

"We were born precarious, we are the pulse of the future economy, and we will not continue to accommodate exploitation mechanisms and loss redistribution," reads an official announcement of the occupation from May 5. "We open MACAO in order to let the culture strongly regain a piece of Milan, in response to a story that too often has seen the city ravaged by public procurement professionals, unscrupulous building permits, in a neo-liberal logic that has always humiliated the inhabitants and pursued a single goal: the profit of few excluding the many."

According to Vogue Italy, Milan Mayor Giuliano Pisapia had previously suggested some unofficial support of the occupation's goals. But, in the face of what he later referred to as a public safety issue, called for the occupiers' eviction.

Photo credit: Facebook/Mac AO

You can call them the most "well-read" cities, or at least the cities that purchase the most books online.

Either way, Amazon has released its 2012 list of the most "well-read" cities in the United States. Using their data on online book orders -- they are the largest online retailer, after all -- the company ranked the top U.S. cities for all book, magazine, and newspaper sales in both Kindle and print format, since June 1, 2011.

Alexandria, Virginia tops the list, followed by Cambridge, Massachusetts; Berkeley, California; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Boulder, Colorado. Rounding out the top 10 are Miami, Arlington, Virginia; Gainesville, Florida; Washington, D.C.; and Salt Lake City.

Not much has changed since last year's list, except that the D.C. metro area has solidified itself as a pretty smart place, with three of its cities moving up and into the top 10. College towns have also held their ground and Seattle has moved outside the top 10. 

Of course, Amazon has no way of knowing whether its customers actually read the books and magazines they purchase. While the most recent ranking of the "most literate" cities by John Miller at Central Connecticut State University concluded that D.C. was the most literate city under its metrics (newspaper circulation, magazine and journal circulation, online reading and book purchases, number of bookstores and public libraries) no other city in its top 10 made Amazon's top 10, and only Pittsburgh (11th), Cincinnati (17th), St. Louis (18th), and Atlanta (19th) made Amazon's top 20. (We should note that our own Richard Florida took issue with one of the conclusions of that particular ranking, on the connection between literacy and wealth).

And when we compare Amazon's top 10 book-buying cities to the 2011 Indie City Index, a list that ranks the vitality of independent, locally owned retail businesses (keeping in mind this means more than just bookstores), we find that only one of the cities on Amazon's top 20, Gainesville, made the top 10 on the Indie City Index.

Of course, a list of cities that spend a lot of money at local bookstores probably shouldn't match up with a list of cities that buy the most books from Amazon; the two concepts practically cancel each other out. Which buying habit is "smartest" is no doubt the subject for yet another list.

Top image: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque

The yearlong, collaborative “Make Your Mark” neighborhood planning process is nearing completion, and People’s Emergency Center, the organization driving the planning process, has released a draft of the proposed Lower Lancaster Revitalization Plan [pdf]. Now through May 23 anyone may submit comments regarding the draft to zsivertsen@pec-cares.org.

The Lower Lancaster Revitalization Plan is an effort to improve the communities surrounding Lancaster Avenue between 37th and 48th streets. The draft of the plan, produced by Interface Studio, includes initiatives to cultivate civic leadership, support local youth, improve access to fresh food, clean and green the neighborhood, bridge the digital divide and more.

As previously reported on PlanPhilly, the planning process has included various community engagement components including ongoing work with a steering committee, a several month long resident survey, open house events, public meetings and more.

Residents hoping to voice their opinions or concerns may view the drafted plan at http://makeyourmarkplan.wordpress.com/ and email comments by 5 p.m. on May 23.

"So much has been said of the crisis of Detroit or the ruin of Detroit. I think what's really interesting is, enough's been said about that. It's really an interesting place to look at as a laboratory of rebuilding. ... Great economic crises are generational events. We're only four or five years into this one, and already you can see the seeds of renewal and revitalization." -- Richard Florida

Last month, Cities readers sent in their questions and ideas on the current state of Detroit and where it's heading. Over the next several weeks, Atlantic Senior Editor Richard Florida responds by leading a conversation on the future of the Motor City. This is the first installment.

brightcove.createExperiences();

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Commenting on the brevity and precariousness of life, Erasmus likened man to a soap bubble (homo bulla), a vain, delusional creature who exerts much effort and time to erect “walls of bubbles” to insulate its base vulnerabilities with intricate systems of culture and knowledge. The barefaced fact of one’s finitude is, as Sartre facetiously and accurately noted, “a fart in a soap bubble”–to shamelessly exploit the metaphor–the noxious truth of extinction thinly veiled by the seeming vibrancy of the life about to pop.

That’s part of what the “Bubble Building” tries to express. Designed by DUS Architects for the ZigZagCity festival in Rotterdam, the pavilion is the world’s most temporary and fragile structure, comprised of 16 shallow hexagonal pools, each of which is filled with a reflective solution, that collectively form 35 square meteres of “soap surface”. Visitors grip handlebar frames at the base of the ponds and pull up to create iridescent globular volumes that appear different from one to the next but which last for all but a moment. The speed with which the form materializes and fades occludes any close reading of the emergent forms, and so the communal, participatory act itself assumes priority of place. At least two people are needed to construct each of the bubble cells, whose size and coverage corresponds to the number of participants cooperating uniformly across space.

The architects make explicit reference to the bursting of the worldwide economic ‘bubble’ that has galvanized significant reforms across all strands of government which paradoxically rebuild and dismantle the loci of public benefit and collective experience. This, coupled with the work’s concern with the fleeting temporality of existence, paints a pretty bleak picture. Yet, the architects are optimistic, choosing instead to see the beauty of temporary experiences, where “a multitude of soap walls and rainbow of colors” are perpetually replenished by the “old and young [who] join in to make the pavilion appear, over and over again.”

Via Dezeen

All photos courtesy DUS Architects Facebook

This post originally appeared on Architizer, an Atlantic partner site.

School District of Philadelphia | Vincent J. Brown via Flickr, Creative Commons License

This week’s news is again dominated by school coverage, so here’s a special roundup:

• Governor Corbett will be in Philly today, and activists plan to welcome the Governor with a human red carpet outside the Prince Theater in protest education cuts. Corbett is in town to address the Chamber of Commerce.
• Grant Calder, a Friends Central teacher, contextualizes today’s school debate with a look to the city’s public school past in an Inquirer opinion piece. Philly never had a public school golden age, Calder contends. In 1912, as in 2012, the city “lacked the will to invest in high-quality education for all its children.” And, he continues, “The populations served by the district over the decades have always lacked the economic and political clout to force the city to provide better schools.” As long as education funding is tied to municipal boundaries, the problem isn’t going anywhere.
• An Inquirer editorial today calls for caution as the radical school-restructuring plan is implemented. The scale of the School District’s problems requires major intervention, but there are very reasonable doubts about the process ahead. As dozens of schools close, will quality charters be ready to absorb the high volume of students? Will there be adequate oversight of the charters and “achievement networks” by the shrunken district?
• Retired teacher Lisa Haver calls the plan the end of public education in Philadelphia, in a Daily News opinion piece peppered with tough questions. How have we arrived at a point where the public-school system can be auctioned off to the lowest bidder? Will our schools be able to remain a unifying force in our society or will they widen the gulf between haves and have-nots? Haver has doubts about the ability people from outside of the education world to privatize the public school system with quality education in mind.
• The It’s Our Money podcast this week features three big-time questions for the School District:  ”Why do the schools need the extra money to come from property taxes? How will the district’s restructuring plan save money? And what is Harrisburg’s role in this?” Listen here.
• Metropolis has a two-part series on making public schools work by Connie Langland. In part one, she makes the case that public schools can be turned around, with a close look at Stetson Middle School. In part two, she zeroes in on strategies being used to boost student learning and ultimately test scores. She concludes, “what matters is the student — not the bureaucracy, not tradition, and not doing things the easy way.”