#@citylab

[nisiverum]

Sim city at dusk, Central Park, art. 🥰 • • #newyork #newyorknewyork #brooklyngirls #chelseaneighborhood #brooklyn #cityskyline #citylab #citylabontheground #newyorkskyline #girlsinnewyork #summerinnewyork #manhattan #thebigapple #gettinglostinnewyork #girlswhotravel #travelbabe #citylife #moodygrams #newyorksummer #cityskylineatnight #nyc #nycgram #travelphotography #centralpark #centralparksquirrelcensus #famousartinnyc (at Manhattan, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp8MzRQPsJL/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[mapsites]

Ellie Whelton, B.Arch

MAPsite

[akurjata]

When Crosswalks Go Rogue

"Indeed, that is part of the power of guerrilla crosswalks: Even if they are not long for this world, they demonstrate how needlessly difficult it is to build safer streets in US cities."

[detroitography]

Map: Close City Amenities in Detroit

A new tool to measure accessibility and walkability in cities is out called Close from Nat Henry. The tool relies on supermarket and libraries data points in order to assess closeness. Oddly the data sources are not listed, so it is tough to measure supermarkets against our annual updated list of grocery stores and the data clearly doesn’t account for Detroit’s trouble with library funding and…

[formisthemaskofspace]

Bloomberg CityLab 2024

Mexico City, Mexico October 14 – 16, 2024

Organized by Bloomberg Philanthropies in partnership with the Aspen Institute, Bloomberg CityLab brings together global mayors alongside prominent city innovators, business leaders, urban experts, artists, and activists to discuss and discover replicable solutions to pressing issues.

Bloomberg CityLab was founded on the principle that the most important innovation is happening at the local level and that global impact can be achieved when cities share solutions.

Mayors Coming Together to Change the World

For over a decade, CityLab summits have crisscrossed the globe, gathering the most influential mayors and voices from hundreds of cities worldwide. Summits have made international headlines, and generated tangible takeaways for attendees. Past CityLab conferences have been hosted in New York, Los Angeles, London, Miami, Paris, Detroit, Washington D.C., and Amsterdam.

[biglisbonnews]

AI Invades Urban Planning and Design, With Mixed Results When designers laboring away on a virtual cityscape began observing and tweaking their creation, one of the first things that jumped out at them, … https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-09-16/ai-invades-urban-planning-and-design-with-mixed-results

[wilwheaton]

"Musk/X has slapped a spam/dangerous content warning on this NPR link," wrote Tom Watson, a professor at the Columbia University School of Professional Studies. "This shows just how damaging this explosive story is to Trump. Let's get it wide, folks." "Marking US public broadcaster content as 'unsafe' is the sort of revenge move the KGB has fantasized about for decades — and it tells you everything about what Musk and X actually are," wrote journalist Dave Troy. "Twitter/X is now running a warning that NPR's story about Trump's TikTok video at Arlington National Cemetery is a malicious link," wrote CityLab editor Kriston Capps. "I've never seen this once in the thousands of years I've spent on this site."

X's move on cemetery news shows 'how damaging this explosive story is to Trump': experts

[sarkos]

Musk/X has slapped a spam/dangerous content warning on this NPR link," wrote Tom Watson, a professor at the Columbia University School of Professional Studies. "This shows just how damaging this explosive story is to Trump. Let's get it wide, folks." ADVERTISEMENT "Marking US public broadcaster content as 'unsafe' is the sort of revenge move the KGB has fantasized about for decades — and it tells you everything about what Musk and X actually are," wrote journalist Dave Troy. "Twitter/X is now running a warning that NPR's story about Trump's TikTok video at Arlington National Cemetery is a malicious link," wrote CityLab editor Kriston Capps. "I've never seen this once in the thousands of years I've spent on this site."

X's move on cemetery news shows 'how damaging this explosive story is to Trump': experts - Raw Story

[fellhellion]

Feeling things about how relatively quickly Xina accepts Miguel back into her life as something like a friend. The way she slips into fucking w him or teasingly calling him sweetheart, or even, hell. either Xina was lost in the sauce of reconnecting w a childhood friend and genuinely forgot him being an Alchemax employee meant he couldn’t see anything in Angela’s citylab, or she trusted him enough even w that knowledge to think maybe Angela would reconsider.

[idroolinmysleep]

Why the Debate Over Daylight Saving Time Rages On

The twice-a-year chorus of griping about time changes is upon us. “UGH, I have to wake up before sunrise” in the spring or “UGH, it’s already dark when I leave work” in the fall. Most of this is surely attributable to the shock of getting our schedules suddenly jerked by an hour, as the sunlight hours will eventually lengthen or shorten to one’s liking (or not) anyway, but we don’t notice the incremental changes. So what if we stopped changing our clocks and made either standard time or daylight time permanent? Which choice will give us the fewest days when it’s dark just before or after work? Well, cartographer Andy Woodruff did the math and came up with these results. As he notes on his blog, 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. are pretty much arbitrary, and you can put in your own times if you don’t like them. But they seem reasonable to me, so that’s what I’m going with.

Compared to what we’re doing today, permanent standard time gives us much better sunrise times. The sunset times are a bit worse, but not by much. Year-round DST, on the other hand, gives us many more days with evening sunlight. However, this comes at the expense of mornings, where more of the country stays darker for longer. Personally, I’d rather have a more even distribution of sunlight between mornings and evenings, and permanent standard time achieves that.

Below, I’ve taken the permanent-DST sunrise map (because it’s the biggest one available on the CityLab site) and added the Census Bureau’s population distribution map on top of it. A couple of things stand out for me:

Being near the western edge of its time zone means Atlanta gets to suffer with having fewer early sunrises than other major cities.

It’s pretty clear why El Paso is in a different time zone from the rest of Texas. The poor city would spend so much of the year in the dark otherwise.

The bulge around Boise allows it to stay in the Mountain Time Zone, but it’s unclear to me what advantage this confers since Idaho is otherwise split into two time zones anyway, and this positioning means more dark mornings for the city.

[lamolinastreetart]

Art by Dutch Michel Velt (@michelvelt) for CityLab 971 in Rome, Italy (2020) #michelvelt #streetart #lamolinastreetart | photo via artist bit.ly/3bQiHPC

[nisiverum]

Todays’ final count: 20,005 steps, 65 floors, 8.3 miles, 2 mosquito bites. To say I’m beat would be an understatement, but it was so incredibly amazing exploring Tikal today. Of course I like just got New York on my phone which was august 2021 so at this rate you’ll see Tikal mid 2025 🙃 • • #newyork #newyorknewyork #brooklyngirls #chelseaneighborhood #brooklyn #cityskyline #citylab #citylabontheground #newyorkskyline #girlsinnewyork #summerinnewyork #manhattan #thebigapple #gettinglostinnewyork #girlswhotravel #travelbabe #citylife #moodygrams #newyorksummer #cityskylineatnight #nyc #nycgram #travelphotography #newyorkminute #itstimefornyc #timessquare #timessquarenyc #newyorkwindows #grandcentralterminal (at Manhattan, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/CoEUUh_MUso/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[mapsites]

Elizaveta Basov, BArch

MAPsite

[jessicafurseth]

Get in, the water is good: The surge in urban city swimming across Europe - Bloomberg CityLab

This is one of my favourite stories I've written in a long time - I loved working on this. For Bloomberg’s CityLab I went deep into the urban swimming revival across Europe, with all the red tape and legitimate safety issues that goes along with securing a city swim spot for the public - but city swimming it's a lot safer and easier than most people think. And the water's surface is the best vantage point you'll ever find.

[mm-05]

Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: CityLab Men’s Classic Fitted Soft T-Shirt.

[aman-acan-andacityplan]

Shifting the Goal Posts

How does an elite perpetuate its continued existence? The answer to that question has evolved over the course of humanity's time on this earth. For the latter half of the 20 century and into the 21st, I would say our elite built their prestige on their ability to be astute thinkers and translate innovative ideas into action. Our cities may not be beautiful and humane like those of prior generations, but we have bullet trains and super highways and as engines of social efficiency they can't be beat! At least that's how I think the sales pitch is supposed to go, but as the gears of progress grind to a halt, one can't help but cast a critical eye at the ideas that are so in vogue with our leading power brokers.

It seems to me that so many attempts at reform in urban policy, or any policy for that matter, seem to get overshadowed by sanitized versions that serve the status quo. There may be debate, but the Overton Window is drawn so small that the debates become more about the verbage and aesthetics than about real, substantive differences. The result is that innovative ideas are neutered not only of their popular appeal, but of what makes them innovative in the first place. I noticed this some with tactical urbanism a few years back, but I think this type of elite sanitization can be witnessed in a plethora of ways.

My rant was inspired by an interesting pairing of articles from Bloomberg's CityLab (see screenshot above). I don't necessarily object to all that is published in these articles, indeed I found much in the article on Latin American urbanism to be rather interesting. What struck me though about this pairing of stories was that these two visions of the future seemed so irreconcilable. A gleaming, 15-minute cityscape on the sunny shores of Greece juxtaposed against development ideas appropriate for a Brazilian style Favela. The article on Latin American urbanism even takes a potshot at the value of European cities as models worthy of emulation:

'According to Juan Miró, a professor of architecture at the University of Texas, Austin, European best practices have proven ill-equipped to address many urban challenges. “People go to Paris, and say: ‘It’s so beautiful, a model high-density city,’” he said. “But go to the outskirts where immigrants are and they are terrible places to live.”'

This would appear to be in stark contrast to the headlining article on Greece's new 15-minute city. Now Bloomberg is not some monolithic NGO or government entity, it is a journalism outfit that publishes opinions from various contributors. What is conspicuously absent from Bloomberg's publication, or from any modern policy journal for that matter, is some underlying philosophy guiding innovation and material progress. Are new technological advances and comprehensive planning going to result in 15-minute urban enclaves or is our future a radically decentralized one comparable to a Favela?

The choice between technocracy vs. more traditional, organic systems of change is a critical one, maybe the most important from an urban policy perspective, but that issue seems to be conspicuously absent from the material presented. Both articles heavily invoke the 15-minute city concept throughout their narratives, so despite their superficial differences they appear to be in sync on that basic idea. After re-rereading the articles again, my final impression is that what starts out as two opposing urban philosophies ends up being more like the "high road" versus the "low road". The routes may be different, but the destination is the same and any genuine differences set out at the beginning of the articles are quietly put to rest by the end.

This trend is nothing new unfortunately as the west seems to be mired in urban stagnation as competing new ideas are quickly robbed of their potency in the public square. I'll mention a few older examples of this trend in action. When New Urbanism emerged in the 90's it was a radical idea in many respects. From an ideological perspective, I think there was much that new urbanists and the avante garde could agree on, but the real rub between the two was that New Urbanism offered a competing notion of what the good life was supposed to be. It railed against the excesses of single-use planning and provided a convincing argument that sprawl was a by-product of the bureaucratic excesses imposed on cities following World War II.

In the midst of this debate emerged Smart Growth. Smart Growth echoed many of the principles of New Urbanism, but in a way that didn't radically overhaul the principal actors in real estate and urban development. So while planning did change: more mixed use, more participatory systems for evaluating plans and city decision making, the paradigm shift New Urbanists advocated for didn't really occur and the status quo was left relatively untouched.

The 90's also offered us another notable example of this in the discussion surrounding the creative class. The creative class when it was first coined by Richard Florida, did seize on one truly novel idea: that in order for cities to thrive they needed a viable counter-culture to challenge the ideas and assumptions of elites at the local level. The problem comes in that once you package it and sanitize it for digestion by local government leaders you've robbed that idea of much of its power. The results are city promotions and branding that are deeply at odds with the true character of a place. Furthermore, when every city chases the same flawed concept of what a counter-culture is for their region they end up flattening genuine community differences, ending up with a pale imitation of counter-culture and one that is joined at the hip to elite society.

Whether you are dealing with Smart Growth, the creative class or a host of other professional terminologies and contrivances the intent is the same. The goal is to simplify complex systems. We define the complex nature of the problem(s), but in defining it we declare that it is solved and that we now have the tools to combat the problem. However, defining a complex system is not the same as truly understanding and grasping it.

All this leads me to the inexorable conclusion that the dream of Managerialism is all but dead, but no one has bothered to inform the public. The idea of a cognitive elite, judiciously using the tools of scientific inquiry and analysis to solve the most vexing social issues of our time, is still at the heart of our society. However, our nation's thinktanks, consultants and government research services are grasping at straws as well, while offering the pretense of understanding all that ails us, or even worse passing off social preferences and desires as objective fact and reality. There is incrementalism, which is fine and good, and then there's the depressing pattern of "shifting the goal posts" as I say at the beginning. A political wish list of vague notions, ideas and plans, which fail to cohere into any meaningful action at all.