kateoplis: “Copenhagen, a city of 1.2 million people [the bicycle-friendliest place on the planet], saves $357 million a year on health costs because something like 80 percent of its population commutes by bicycle, even in winter. That’s $300 per person per year. Clearly, the reason the new Danish minister of the interior said she’d ‘rather invest in cycle tracks than freeways,’ is that only one of those has a positive return.” [photo: Ben] From Copenhagen’s biannual Bicycle Account | Grist 
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kateoplis:

“Copenhagen, a city of 1.2 million people [the bicycle-friendliest place on the planet], saves $357 million a year on health costs because something like 80 percent of its population commutes by bicycle, even in winter. That’s $300 per person per year.

Clearly, the reason the new Danish minister of the interior said she’d ‘rather invest in cycle tracks than freeways,’ is that only one of those has a positive return.” [photo: Ben]

From Copenhagen’s biannual Bicycle Account | Grist 

Source: kateoplis

architizer:

At Fab Cafe, you can order coffee, snacks, and time on a laser cutter.

I think this would be a brilliant move in a city that has a growing population of small design firms. Imagine how easy it would be for you to make impressive models for those special projects? I would spend time every week in a place like this.

Source: architizer

Networked Society ‘Thinking Cities’ - Ericsson

This is a fantastic video about utilizing technologies for the future networked landscape. It’s great to know that companies like Ericsson are putting an effort into innovating specifically for this. Most people are wrapped up into the iPhone app as their main way of bringing about networked societies, but I think expanding into infrastructure and physical objects can have more profound influences.

That being said, I do love the little things like Boston’s app for reporting public issues like potholes or disturbances in the landscape. Allowing for that connection, trust, and feeling of ownership are important elements of this urban ideal we’re all reaching for: the social, sustainable, and walkable city.

thewonk: This is an amazing advance. A smart phone app that will use people’s everyday movements and activities to track how people use cities (via Hacking the city for a greener future - CNN.com). I’m excited to see the accelerometer review stats for those of us who walk long distances or use public trasnit often. It’ll give a good look into habits, which allows for reflection and motivation to be more green.
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thewonk:

This is an amazing advance. A smart phone app that will use people’s everyday movements and activities to track how people use cities (via Hacking the city for a greener future - CNN.com).

I’m excited to see the accelerometer review stats for those of us who walk long distances or use public trasnit often. It’ll give a good look into habits, which allows for reflection and motivation to be more green.

Source: CNN

Innovation Starvation

Found this fascinating article on how our current methods of imagining and innovating the future have practically diminished into “googling”. It’s a wise point, and very worth a read:

Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one—or at least vaguely similar—and has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must number in the millions.

What if that person in the corner hadn’t been able to do a Google search? It might have required weeks of library research to uncover evidence that the idea wasn’t entirely new—and after a long and toilsome slog through many books, tracking down many references, some relevant, some not. When the precedent was finally unearthed, it might not have seemed like such a direct precedent after all. There might be reasons why it would be worth taking a second crack at the idea, perhaps hybridizing it with innovations from other fields. Hence the virtues of Galapagan isolation.

Back in December, while applying to graduate school, I also applied to present at the Social Cities of Tomorrow Conference in Amsterdam. I’m happy to announce that I’ll be one of the ten presenters at the Conference on February 17th. You can click through the poster to learn more about the events, keynote speakers, and other showcases. So in February I’ll be missing classes for a week in order to participate in the workshops and present my work on using Social Capital in order to bring about Urban Revitalization. The projects I will be showing are from studios at Cornell, in which I used public data [from web applications and the city] to generate mappings of social interaction in both negative and positive conditions. You can see the two projects in my portfolio under Utica and Rochester for now. If you’ll be there, I can’t wait to meet you! If not, I’ll be sure to find a way to share my presentation and lessons of the conference with you later.
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Back in December, while applying to graduate school, I also applied to present at the Social Cities of Tomorrow Conference in Amsterdam. I’m happy to announce that I’ll be one of the ten presenters at the Conference on February 17th. You can click through the poster to learn more about the events, keynote speakers, and other showcases.

So in February I’ll be missing classes for a week in order to participate in the workshops and present my work on using Social Capital in order to bring about Urban Revitalization. The projects I will be showing are from studios at Cornell, in which I used public data [from web applications and the city] to generate mappings of social interaction in both negative and positive conditions. You can see the two projects in my portfolio under Utica and Rochester for now.

If you’ll be there, I can’t wait to meet you! If not, I’ll be sure to find a way to share my presentation and lessons of the conference with you later.

Source: socialcitiesoftomorrow.nl

“Mirage focuses on the concept of peripersonal space, the space that your body encompasses at its most extended point in every direction, which describes the body’s potential boundary.”

Katie Grinnan recorded a time-lapse of yoga positions and transformed them into a collective image out of sand, enamel, and plastic. It’s a very creative endeavor, but also challenges a different image of temporal existence. How would this change the way we design outdoor furnishings in public spaces if we studied the potential movements of individuals? What sort of boundary can we create with our historic movements?

To read more about this sculpture, click through for the story and more images.

Source: thisiscolossal.com

New York City is getting free WiFi via Skype over the New Year

“From midday on December 31st until midday on January 1st, revelers in the Big Apple will be able to use free Skype WiFi within the areas covered by its partner Towerstream’s network. This means you’ll be able to surf the Web and have a quick Skype video or voice call in neighbourhoods that include: Times Square, West Village, East Village, South Village, Greenwich Village, NoHo, SoHo, Lowe East Side, Clinton, Chelsea, Union Square, Midtown, Midtown South, Murray Hill, Stuyvesant Park and Turtle Bay.”

This is a fantastic move by Skype [more importantly Microsoft who owns the company], as thousands of people flock to New York City, from all around the world, just to celebrate their entrance to the New Year. This will give users the opportunity to generate more content over the night [via the web], connect to family and friends back home with Skype calls [consider how popular the service is abroad for communication], and maybe even increase interactivity in the night’s events. I hope they’ll report back to us all with the data.

User Generated Cities Forum, February 2011

In researching more about Renew Newcastle, I found this clip from a conference in Australia. It’s incredible to hear how the planning framework in “empty” cities, those like Newcastle in Australia or Detroit in the US, is the most important key to changing vacant conditions. The guests recommend having different viewpoints and kinds of people in those times of decision making. [Maybe tech startups need to make their way into these meetings?]

Take the the discussion of capital, though necessary for change is non-existent in vacant cities. Marcus Westbury brings up the argument that change in a city shouldn’t depend on capital, even if it is what makes up the meaning of a city. His argument sounds more like social capital- using the community to make a different at low cost.

This is the same argument I made for both projects in Utica and Rochester. Even in cities that don’t have the money or political initiative to make a difference, the community is able to take action. Today there are foundations, like the Dodge Foundation, that are giving out millions of dollars towards education, environmental, and community initiatives. If there is a group, like Renew Newcastle, which plans and mediates events or programs for the community, they have a great opportunity for philanthropic funding.

Call me idealistic, but I see that we’re living in an age of great opportunity for rebuilding the image of the city using the power of the communities. Why should you count on major corporations to finance the security and livelihood of your city?

Marcus Westbury is a broadcaster, writer, media maker and festival director from Newcastle, Australia. As well as the creator of Renew Newcastle, Marcus wrote a very interesting article on City As Software for Volume Magazine. It’s a fantastic argument for how cities regulate actions . Click through to the article to read more: The built environment and geography of a city is its hardware. It defines much of what a city can and cannot be. The hardware of the city – its topography, the scale of its spaces, its architecture, its patterned dense grid or its narrow laneways or its chaotic sprawl – places a hard limit on what is and isn’t possible. While the hardware of cities can and does change and evolve slowly over time, in the short term it remains relatively fixed – major changes are invariably expensive, can be paralysingly slow and often contentious… We made the city work for people for whom it had not worked in a long time. People without capital for whom low barriers to entry and not certainty of outcome were the defining issues. Those who were operating digital cottage industries and Etsy stores, artists and fashion designers, bedroom record labels and Flickr photographers. In effect we made the physical space behave as their virtual spaces did – easy to get into and out of, allowing of experimentation and failure and most importantly full of tools and structures and plugins designed to make it simple and cheap for them to do what they are passionate about.
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Marcus Westbury is a broadcaster, writer, media maker and festival director from Newcastle, Australia. As well as the creator of Renew Newcastle, Marcus wrote a very interesting article on City As Software for Volume Magazine. It’s a fantastic argument for how cities regulate actions . Click through to the article to read more:

The built environment and geography of a city is its hardware. It defines much of what a city can and cannot be. The hardware of the city – its topography, the scale of its spaces, its architecture, its patterned dense grid or its narrow laneways or its chaotic sprawl – places a hard limit on what is and isn’t possible. While the hardware of cities can and does change and evolve slowly over time, in the short term it remains relatively fixed – major changes are invariably expensive, can be paralysingly slow and often contentious…

We made the city work for people for whom it had not worked in a long time. People without capital for whom low barriers to entry and not certainty of outcome were the defining issues. Those who were operating digital cottage industries and Etsy stores, artists and fashion designers, bedroom record labels and Flickr photographers. In effect we made the physical space behave as their virtual spaces did – easy to get into and out of, allowing of experimentation and failure and most importantly full of tools and structures and plugins designed to make it simple and cheap for them to do what they are passionate about.

Source: marcuswestbury.net