Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2009

Urban density and social media tools

It won’t come as news to those of us who love and defend cities, but it’s nice to have scientific research backing up what we espouse as urban positives: High population density triggers cultural explosions, according to a new study by scientists at University College London. The study was published in the journal Science; see also UCL’s page here (h/t Richard Florida/Creative Class blog).

The study reports that “complex skills learnt across generations can only be maintained when there is a critical level of interaction between people.”

I wonder how current social media tools mimic the benefits of density, or augment it in places that are emerging.

For example, I live in Victoria, BC, a medium-sized city that is approaching good density levels in the core neighborhoods, and I’m continually amazed by how social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, and a local forum on Vibrant Victoria have allowed a speedier dissemination of ideas. The dissemination doesn’t necessarily produce “instant” results, but how much more bereft we would be without the various platforms for those conversations.

While web-based tools can’t replace actual rubbing-up against people, they do facilitate transmission of ideas as well as complex skills, particularly if those skills aren’t manual. Yet even in the realm of manual skill or physical production – say, vegetable gardening or backyard chicken-raising – I’m likely to turn to the internet to find instructional videos or a local group. Digital natives will always go there first (and I’ve been an immigrant several times over, so I consider myself fully “naturalized” here, too, thank-you!).

Online social media tools absolutely augment the benefits of “real” population density. Thinking about online density and actual urban density (and its benefits) together, as being of a piece, seems important.

Better gold through green

It seems everyone is going green, or will be. Today I went to Victoria’s UDI (Urban Development Institute) luncheon to hear Terasen Energy Services‘ Gareth Jones present “All About Geo-Thermal: Learning from Local Projects.”

Some basic take-away points: unless I severely misheard, British Columbia prices for energy (or electricity) will rise 80% in the next 10 years; the best place to make inroads in meeting the very ambitious greenhouse gas reductions (which are nearly as ambitious as Europe’s) set by the BC Liberal Party is in communities/ municipalities; and the best places to get the best bang for the buck in alternative energy is in dense settlements, whether multi-family complexes (including highrises and townhouse developments) or densely settled neighborhoods.

Other points: we in BC often think that we get most of our energy/ electricity “from hydro” (i.e., from hydroelectric power projects, therefore from “clean” water-driven sources), but we actually import 15% of our electricity from out-of-province, and those imports are “dirty” (typically derived from coal-fired plants). In addition to that little wrinkle, only 21% of our total energy needs in BC are met by electricity in the first place (and of that 21%, remember that 15% aren’t “clean”). The remaining 79% are met by natural gas (another 21%), other fossil fuels (can’t remember the exact number – I think it was around 20%?), wood (another 16%), and other sources. Alternate sources are at present but a small, very small piece of the pie.

There was more, and it all deserves a longer blog post or article, for which I’ll have to dig out my notes and do some research. What struck me today was the sense of urgency that came across in Jones’s presentation: that we really don’t have a lot of time to sit on our hands in pursuing alternative energy – not least because an 80% rise in costs will really do a number on the economy. It would probably make the current recession look like a walk in the park.

Jones encouraged all the developers, builders, and planners and politicians at the luncheon to explore the myriad ways that the provincial government and Terasen Energy Services are trying to make alternative energy production (and consumption) more commonplace.

Meanwhile, there’s more to research and think about: Living buildings and how they’re cost-effective, for example.

Next week, there are two events scheduled in Victoria – first, at the University of Victoria on June 3, Jason McLennan, CEO, Cascadia Region Green Building Council will speak on The True Costs of Living Buildings, and the next evening (June 4), a less formal event showcasing some examples will take place at the Burnside-Gorge Community Centre. (I have to admit that after hearing Gareth Jones explain the benefits of density when it comes to installing alternative energy both for new and retrofitted buildings, Jason McLennan’s homepage photo disturbs me. It’s of an isolated single home – a converted church even? – in the middle of nowhere, which is probably the most large-footprint lifestyle, in environmental terms, that privileged westerners can choose. Perhaps his home is environmentally sustainable, but it’s still not a great model in the sense that it’s not anything we should strive for. Ok, end of sour aside.)  (Update, 5/27: If readers click through to the comments on this post, they’ll see Eden’s comment, which corrects my assumption about the photo. It’s actually not a private home, but the barn of a sheep farm. That’s really good to know, because the myth of the self-sufficient yet large single-family family home on a large property – a “green” variant of the suburban lifestyle – exerts a strong and unsustainable pull, which I prefer not to see strengthened. Thanks, Eden, for the additional info!)

And since it pours when it rains, there’s an out-of-town event I’d love to be able to go to: The Seattle Architecture Foundation will lead a tour through South Lake Union, called LEED: It’s Not Just for Buildings Anymore:

SLU’s close proximity to donwtown’s and existing transportation lines are the foundation for a successful sustainable neighborhood. Community design focusing on adaptive building re-use, alternative transportation, storm water management and other sustainability techniques is revitalizing the neighborhood adjacent to Seattle’s urban core.

SLU was accepted into the USGBC’s LEED-ND Pilot (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design – Neighborhood Development) program, and is one of the first existing neighborhoods anticipated to receive LEED certification.

Catherine Benotto and Ginger Garff from Weber Thompson and Katherine Cornwell and Jim Holmes from the City of Seattle will explain how great neighborhoods are created. Highlights of the tour include the Terry Thomas Building, the redesign of Cascade Park, the street car maintenance facility and an exploration of the master plan for Terry Avenue.

Seems to me that the South Lake Union walking tour would be a perfect complement to Gareth Jones’s presentation, but then again, Jason McLennan’s presentation is a lot closer to home…

March article: Victoria’s Urban Forest

It has been up on Scribd for a while, but I haven’t yet given this article a more detailed blog post: Victoria’s Urban Forest, published in FOCUS Magazine last month (March 2009).

My description:

Urban forests are more than just trees in cities: they are the complete ecosystem, including the trees and understory shrubbery and plants, soil conditions, water drainage, and wildlife. Victoria has urban forests in its core neighborhoods, but needs to do more to enrich ecosystems within downtown.

This one was a pleasure to write, and was inspired by two workshops at the City of Victoria last January (see PDF press release). At the workshops, Jeremy Gye (of Gye and Associates Urban Forestry Consultants), Dan Marzocco (Supervisor of Arboriculture at the City of Victoria), and others presented detailed information on what the current state of the city’s “urban forest” system is, and how we can think about improving and enhancing it. (See also this PDF, Factsheet: Trees for the Future: Victoria’s Urban Forest Master Plan, as well as the City of Victoria’s webpage, Urban Forest Master Plan.)

The workshop exercise again illuminated the problems around municipal / local government amalgamation. Why? Because the data presented was of course only for the City of Victoria (that’s one municipality embedded in the Greater Victoria region, which in turn is embedded in the Capital Regional District [CRD], which in turn is not what you think because you forgot about the Census Metropolitan Area [CMA]… Note: interesting PDF on revised population statistics for the CRD and the CMA, and here’s a PDF map of what’s the CMA and what’s the CRD outside the CMA [remember that everything within the CMA is also part of the CRD anyway – but now we’re getting away from forests, urban or otherwise!).

Anyway, in this article I had the opportunity to reference Jonah Lehrer’s recent Boston Globe article, How the city hurts your brain …And what you can do about it, which received a lot of play on the blogs and was even Slashdotted.

What the comments routinely missed was the last part of Lehrer’s extended title, “…And what you can do about it.” As usual, too many folks were jumping up and down that cities are hateful and country living is good, disregarding all the environmental benefits of city living (and the harmful ecological impacts of sprawling far and wide across countrysides). Most of all, they missed that cities are engines of innovation, and that – as per the “…And what you can do about it” teaser – it’s quite possible to design cities so that your brain is rewarded.

That’s definitely the direction I’m interested in moving in.

Notes: spatial arrangements for cars and kids

Bear with me, gentle reader, as I try to describe in words a spatial relationship. Something about how the combination of roads and a school near my house affects pedestrian movement has been bugging me.

Around the corner from where I live are two east-west running arterials, Yates (one-way west-bound) and Fort (one-way east-bound), that merge just east of Fernwood Ave. (which runs north-south). After the merge Fort St. continues as a single two-way arterial.

The merge creates a triangular space, the very tip of which is occupied by a Shell gas station (map). From the tip of the triangle (where Yates and Fort merge) to the end of the gas station property is ~300ft. At the western edge of the gas station, the triangle is bisected by Fernwood Ave. Look to the west of Fernwood Ave., and you see Central Middle School (official address: 1280 Fort St.).

The school occupies the bulk of what follows in the triangle, with building and playing field stretching to Ormond St. in the west. (See this map for details.) Apartment buildings line Fort St. along the edge of the school’s playing field. The field is shielded from traffic, and the street in turn is shielded from the blank space of a school playing field that’s intermittently used.

So far so good, …except for pedestrian crossings. Fort St. is a busy one-way heading east (Yates heads west). Like Yates, Fort is a relatively densely built-up street with low-rise apartment blocks lining both sides. Fort St. now has a fairly decent (and new) bicycle lane as well, but, like Yates St., it’s clearly a hold-over from low-density automobile-oriented living, which explains why both arterials were streamlined into one-ways and why traffic generally speeds along both streets. Since both roads connect Oak Bay to downtown, the traffic isn’t insignificant, and both roads are used by the buses heading to and from the University of Victoria.

Let’s go back to the triangle’s apex where Fort and Yates merge. There you’ll find a crosswalk, but you won’t find one the additional 300 feet further west at Fernwood Ave., even though that’s a popular crossing point for people heading to catch buses to downtown on Yates, or for people crossing the street to walk up Joan Crescent to Craigdarroch Castle.

There is a crossing (with traffic lights!) another ~650 feet further west of the apex at Moss St., which is designed specifically to feed into the school’s property.

After that (heading west), there’s nothing for at least another ~900 feet at Linden St. In fact, it’s almost as if pedestrians are discouraged from attempting any crossing between Moss and Linden, even though there are two other cross streets abutting Fort (Pentrelew and Ormond), and there are a number of apartment buildings and services (veterinarian, church/ community center, dentist, several law offices) on either side of the road that make people want to cross.

So what gives?

It’s easy to blame car culture, but I don’t think it’s just that. I think the missing crossing opportunities are also a by-product of controlling children (middle schoolers), who are obliged to use the crossing-guard-manned “school crosswalk” at Moss Street during morning arrival and afternoon release. It’s to discourage their freedom – to cross the street at another unmanned crosswalk – that the rest of us are forced either to take our lives in hand by scurrying across the street (legally, by the way!) at intersections that have no crosswalk, or to go out of our way to cross the street where there are crosswalks.

Perhaps it’s a combination of controlling the kids and making room for cars. At any rate, we have two very wide arterials tearing through a relatively densely built up part of town, with too few options for pedestrians to cross, and it looks like it’ll stay that way unless we admit that even kids can cross an urban road without assistance.

We protect the children by giving fewer signals to drivers to stop for the rest of us at other points. Somehow that seems nuts.

More Focus Magazine articles up on Scribd

I managed to scan & upload a few more articles, this time starting with October 2006, and managing to get through half of 2007.  See my Scribd page here for details – there are now 3 folders (2006, 2007, 2008), to make it easier to find articles chronologically.

Next up, finish 2007, and then do the beginning months of 2008 (currently uploaded to the Berkman server in over-large PDFs). The Scribd format is much user-friendlier – very easy to zoom instantly to read clearly, etc. At least I think it’s user-friendly. Let me know / give feedback if there are problems – or kudos.

Scribd updated with recent Focus Magazine articles

I finally updated my Scribd.com page with the past five months worth of my articles for Victoria’s Focus Magazine! That’s August, September, October, November, and December 2008.

I’ll post an update with details (titles, etc.) later, and I also need to update my “Articles published in FOCUS Magazine” page here.

In addition, I need to uplodad to Scribd.com (which means re-scanning and creating PDFs first) all my articles prior to the first upload to Scribd (which is the March 2008 article).  That’s October 2006 through to February 2008.  Why? Because I currently saved them as PDFs that are basically not down-loadable (files too big, etc.).

Before I do all that, other work beckons, however.  So enjoy (I hope!) the current up-to-date 2008 crop.  More later.

Fantasy, failure, and faux: that’s Victoria!

There are plenty of important things to write about (like Canada’s miserable inability to defend net neutrality), but I just realized something important about fantasy, failure, and the city of Victoria’s self-deceiving love affair with faux heritage. It’s a mind-set espoused by way too many people, and likely to contribute to our upcoming stagnation.

A man I know quite well wrote a letter to our weekly “alt” <kof> paper, Monday Magazine, and it was published in the current edition, here. He tries to construct some sort of metaphor based on Tolkien’s Middle Earth, with urban development functioning as the evil towers of bad ol’ Saruman/ Sauron. In a misplaced effort to invest himself with authority, he references the fact that his great-grandfather was the Bishop of BC, as if that contributed anything to the issue at hand.  (And incidentally: In his letter, he writes that his grandfather was Bishop, yet that’s completely untrue. Fantasy worlds do tend to warp the time-space continuum a bit, I suppose…)

He then mentions me by name, and references an article I wrote last April for Focus magazine (and which is available online via Scribd, here).  He writes: “Yule Heibel in Focus magazine talks about having View Towers declared a heritage site. Has Ms. Heibel actually been in View Towers?”

Well, let me answer that last question first: yes, I have. Admittedly, it was a long time ago (the early 70s), but one of my good friends from high school lived in View Towers with her family. There were nice people living in the building, believe it or not, despite the fact that today many (myself included) think it looks like typical “commie block” architecture.

As to the letter writer’s first assertion, I didn’t talk about “having View Towers declared a heritage site.” I was writing about our attitude toward blight, and how we too easily get caught up in aesthetics, instead of focusing on real human needs and usages.  View Towers, importantly, continues to fulfill a crucial role in Victoria by providing much-needed affordable housing to many people.

Here’s what I actually wrote:

Centennial Square replaced an area labeled “blight” by 60s-era planners.  Its decrepit buildings looked awful.  The area was economically depressed, aspersion cast on its social networks and human uses associated with them.  Because they looked “slummy” and undesirable, the assumption was that anyone associated with those spaces was probably undesirable, too.  Whatever embodied energy those spaces contained was deemed less meaningful than a clean slate.

I’m reminded again of the BC Historical Federation symposium last May, “Heritage & Tourism – Compatibility or Conflict?”  A woman in the audience spoke up to say that defining heritage only as “valuable” architecture is far too limiting, since this elides what buildings actually embody.  Stripped of embodied heritage energy, buildings are just containers; but if we consider how they’re used, another real dimension snaps into focus.

The woman’s husband had grown up in Eastern Europe, in a building we’d probably dismiss as a “Commie block” tower.  Yet for him, that “ugly” building was his history and personal heritage.   He’s hardly alone.  In Berlin, there’s a nostalgic and carefully cultivated revival of  “Commie block” style, indulged by middle-aged people for whom those buildings represent their pre-1989 youth: the bars and eateries, the apartments, the cheap concrete — all of it literally embodies their coming of age, before the Wall came down.

And so, consider View Towers.  I’d argue it has a richer history of use than Centennial Square: its embodied energy is tremendous, particularly compared to the square’s suburban one-dimensionality.

Would we endorse knocking View Towers down just because we don’t like its looks?  Or because we (mistakenly) believe it might house dodgy people?  I wouldn’t.  If anything, I’d encourage increasing the density around View Towers with equally imposing (if differently styled) multi-use buildings, to balance its sometimes oppressive and lonely formal energy.

What might this perspective mean for “real” (read: historically and aesthetically more significant) urban heritage?  It again comes back to uses, and the energies embodied in them.  Heritage buildings need to live, which means they need to be used.

In cities, buildings can’t afford to be museum pieces unless they actually are museums – in which case they need to be paid for and maintained by some foundation with really deep pockets.  Otherwise, they have to earn their keep.  This means that buildings have to be adaptable to other uses over time.

In other words, I don’t say anywhere that this building should be declared a “heritage site.”

The author of the letter gives kudos to one of Monday’s writers whose hobby-horse is development-bashing. This staff writer likes to cloak himself in a green and socially-conscious mantle, all the while espousing the “values” of suburban sprawl: the single-family home with a lawn out front and a nice picket fence, set in low-density zoning.

Folks, that’s not a city.

And it’s not environmentally responsible, either.

But here’s the crux. This letter-writer, who has already given himself a false lineage to claim an authority that escapes him, exposes himself further as a lover of fakery:

My grandfather [sic, see above] was Bishop of B.C. and oversaw the construction of Christ Church Cathedral and I never fail to marvel at those sere towers and magnificent flying buttresses. I suggest City Council are flying, that this mania is akin to the worst of manic highs and that we are going to regret this period of growth when the distinct seven villages in town are no more. One only has to view the gaping hole where the Oak Bay Beach Hotel was to experience an ineffable sense of loss and now I hear that Anne Hathaway’s cottage is slated for demolition. (more)

Note the bolded part: after castigating View Towers, which at least and to its credit is an honest building, built in an age when concrete slab apartment towers were all the rage in Soviet lands as well as their meteorological kin (i.e., the colder parts of Canada), expressing nothing but their own truth (utility and the belief that you could safely warehouse people – which of course you can’t), he exalts two structures that embody all the fakery of “olde Englande” heritage, often known as mock Tudorbethan.

Admittedly, after enough time has passed even Tudorbethan might become “authentic,” providing it can be maintained (which requires deep pockets and a sense of economics).

But authenticity will forever elude people who live only in the past, rely on false authority, create fantasy worlds that don’t even function as thoughtful prototypes for imaginative action – in short,  people who really should move out of the city.

Diigo Bookmarks 08/05/2008 (a.m.)

• Protein® Feed | Could Globalization Be Going In Reverse? – Annotated

  “The world is flat” or “the world is spiky” or …”the world is complex,” maybe? At any rate, this article questions the idea that outsourcing will continue to continue, spreading outward in some sort of new and flattened topography (akin to a downward spiral insofar as the search for ever cheaper labor and laxer labor laws continues, but not wholly downward because economically, there’s an upward trend associated with it, too – hence perhaps the “flat” topography). And it presents some interesting data as well as suppposition for why this might be so. It’s not just the huge up-tick in transportation costs (although that’s a key factor), it’s also the logistics — including “reverse logistics.” For example, consumers *want* to do better, and are becoming more aware of the “carbon footprint” of the products they buy.

  tags: globalization, trends, economic_development, manufacturing, transportation, factories, shipping

• “Trading Places” by Alan Ehrenhalt (The New Republic)

  Interesting article (which incidentally puts Vancouver front & centre), blogged by Richard Florida at Creative Class: the subtitle is “the demographic inversion of the American city.” It’s about how the “inner city” and its “inner city suburbs” are now desirable (and expensive) places to live, creating a 24/7 downtown (desired & theorized early on by Jane Jacobs, eg.), while the less affluent (ok, the poor!) are forced to live on the outskirts (suburbs). This used to be called “gentrification,” but Ehrenhalt points out that it’s a much more complex process than just that.

  Haven’t read all the comments to this article, but it starts with some excellent ones — intelligent observations by readers.

  tags: cities, downtown, creative_cities, suburbs, gentrification, trends, urbanization, urban_renewal, demographics

• Night Life Reprogrammed – NYTimes.com – Annotated

  Everything is more intense in NYC, including the geek or nerd “party” scene (meet ups, tweet ups, “ignite” events, etc.). More people = more capital, in terms of creative energy and innovation. (And perhaps headaches… but that’s another story…!)

  Of course I’d love to figure out how to sustain a mini-version of this right here (Victoria). Vancouver works very hard at it — but even in Vancouver (I’m told), it’s the same people reappearing at the different events (i.e., nowhere near the critical mass of larger US metros). Part of the problem is enticing people to come out — it’s so easy to stay home, after all…

  tags: nyt, creative_class, geek, socialtheory, ignite, meet_ups

Diigo Bookmarks 07/28/2008 (p.m.)

• Old vs. New: Extreme Edition | weeasssuburb

  Dan Bertolet of Seattle-based blog “Huge ass city” spent some time visiting Medfield, Massachusetts (where I gather he was raised). He temporarily renamed his blog “Wee ass suburb.”

  This particular entry looks at two houses — one, the Dwight-Derby house from 1621, the other a 2005 “Extreme Makeover” McMansion. Throughout, I’ve found Dan’s entries really intriguing, but didn’t comment. Today, however, someone commented with “Who gives a flying f*ck about Medfield,” which prompted me to post a comment. Click through to read. I do give a flying f*ck, I guess.

  tags: dan_bertolet, hugeasscity, weeasssuburb, medfield, beverly, massachusetts, comments, history, urban_development