Today’s post is going to be about a handful of things that have caught my attention.
- Gary Hack, who is the former dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, recently published a book called Site Planning: International Practice. It is a textbookish guide to planning processes, new technologies, and sustainability, with an emphasis on rapidly urbanizing countries. Thank you to my friend Michael Geller for bringing this to my attention.
- Sidewalk Labs Toronto is opening a new experimental workspace here in Toronto at 307 Lake Shore Boulevard East (Queens Quay & Parliament) on Saturday, June 16th from 12 - 6pm. It’s an old fish processing plant that they have turned into their office. The team will work there during the week and on the weekends they will open to the public to showcase what they’re up to. Register for the June 16th event, here. I just did.
- Alexandra Lange has a recent piece in the New Yorker called,
Today’s post is going to be about a handful of things that have caught my attention.
- Gary Hack, who is the former dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, recently published a book called Site Planning: International Practice. It is a textbookish guide to planning processes, new technologies, and sustainability, with an emphasis on rapidly urbanizing countries. Thank you to my friend Michael Geller for bringing this to my attention.
- Sidewalk Labs Toronto is opening a new experimental workspace here in Toronto at 307 Lake Shore Boulevard East (Queens Quay & Parliament) on Saturday, June 16th from 12 - 6pm. It’s an old fish processing plant that they have turned into their office. The team will work there during the week and on the weekends they will open to the public to showcase what they’re up to. Register for the June 16th event, here. I just did.
- Alexandra Lange has a recent piece in the New Yorker called,
The Hidden Women of Architecture and Design
. It’s about the important role that women have played in the “design of childhood”, which is the title of a book by Lange. There’s also a short but interesting story about Detroit’s Lafayette Park (Mies van der Rohe) at the beginning of the article.
- Finally, here is a blog post by Witold Rybczynski where he talks about the shortcomings of architectural education. Obscure theories. Technical or made-up jargon. And no concern for budgets and schedules. I have always shared a similar view and have long felt that there needs to be more business school in architecture school.
Hopefully there’s something in here that is of interest to you.
Sidewalk Labs is currently building out a platform called Replica that will support them in their development plans here in Toronto. Replica is:
“a user-friendly modeling tool that uses anonymized mobile location data to give planning agencies a comprehensive portrait of how, when, and why people travel in urban areas.”
Here is a preview of the Replica dashboard showing a section of Main Street in Kansas City. I hope the animated GIF shows up for you.
. It’s about the important role that women have played in the “design of childhood”, which is the title of a book by Lange. There’s also a short but interesting story about Detroit’s Lafayette Park (Mies van der Rohe) at the beginning of the article.
- Finally, here is a blog post by Witold Rybczynski where he talks about the shortcomings of architectural education. Obscure theories. Technical or made-up jargon. And no concern for budgets and schedules. I have always shared a similar view and have long felt that there needs to be more business school in architecture school.
Hopefully there’s something in here that is of interest to you.
Sidewalk Labs is currently building out a platform called Replica that will support them in their development plans here in Toronto. Replica is:
“a user-friendly modeling tool that uses anonymized mobile location data to give planning agencies a comprehensive portrait of how, when, and why people travel in urban areas.”
Here is a preview of the Replica dashboard showing a section of Main Street in Kansas City. I hope the animated GIF shows up for you.
The platform uses a combination of mobile location data (~5% of the population) and on-the-ground checks, typical stuff like manual traffic counts and transit boardings.
The goal is to understand in real-time who is using a street, as well as how (driving? cycling?) and why (going to work?).
Their introductory blog post obviously stresses the importance of personal privacy, but I am curious how they determine where people are going.
I suppose if they pair journeys with destinations (and the durations at those destinations) they can make reasonable assumptions around the why.
I think the benefits to all of this are clear. But does any or all of this worry you from a privacy standpoint?
Emily Badger of the New York Times published an interesting piece yesterday talking about the tech industry’s current obsession with trying to fix cities. And there are certainly many problems to fix.
Staying true to tech and engineering parlance, there’s lots of talk of optimization. How do you technologically optimize a city, for things such as affordable housing?
There’s no doubt that many of you will sympathize with this statement:
“To planners and architects, all of this sounds like the naïveté of newcomers who are mistaking political problems for engineering puzzles.”
But naïveté is not always a bad thing andwith all of the money sloshing around in this industry, there’s also no doubt that this is likely a new era of city building.
The article ends by quoting JD Ross, the 27-year old co-founder of Opendoor – a startup that we have discussed many times before on this blog and is now valued at over $1 billion.
It is him saying that he wants to figure out how to put $100 million into this space as soon as he can figure out the right target to optimize for. “It’s better than buying a Bugatti.”
Of course Sidewalk Toronto – which is mentioned a few times throughout the article – is already a perfect example of tech infiltration.
But I think Dan Doctoroff gets it right when he posits that the real naïveté will come from disrespecting urbanist traditions.
The platform uses a combination of mobile location data (~5% of the population) and on-the-ground checks, typical stuff like manual traffic counts and transit boardings.
The goal is to understand in real-time who is using a street, as well as how (driving? cycling?) and why (going to work?).
Their introductory blog post obviously stresses the importance of personal privacy, but I am curious how they determine where people are going.
I suppose if they pair journeys with destinations (and the durations at those destinations) they can make reasonable assumptions around the why.
I think the benefits to all of this are clear. But does any or all of this worry you from a privacy standpoint?
Emily Badger of the New York Times published an interesting piece yesterday talking about the tech industry’s current obsession with trying to fix cities. And there are certainly many problems to fix.
Staying true to tech and engineering parlance, there’s lots of talk of optimization. How do you technologically optimize a city, for things such as affordable housing?
There’s no doubt that many of you will sympathize with this statement:
“To planners and architects, all of this sounds like the naïveté of newcomers who are mistaking political problems for engineering puzzles.”
But naïveté is not always a bad thing andwith all of the money sloshing around in this industry, there’s also no doubt that this is likely a new era of city building.
The article ends by quoting JD Ross, the 27-year old co-founder of Opendoor – a startup that we have discussed many times before on this blog and is now valued at over $1 billion.
It is him saying that he wants to figure out how to put $100 million into this space as soon as he can figure out the right target to optimize for. “It’s better than buying a Bugatti.”
Of course Sidewalk Toronto – which is mentioned a few times throughout the article – is already a perfect example of tech infiltration.
But I think Dan Doctoroff gets it right when he posits that the real naïveté will come from disrespecting urbanist traditions.
