Ankh Morpork recreated to resemble Google Maps. #ankhmorpork #discworld #google #maps
Okay but where’s the drop down feature I want to walk around and find Sam Vimes flipping off the Hex-Imp Car.
@myurbandream / myurbandream.tumblr.com
Ankh Morpork recreated to resemble Google Maps. #ankhmorpork #discworld #google #maps
Okay but where’s the drop down feature I want to walk around and find Sam Vimes flipping off the Hex-Imp Car.
“No urban night is like the night there… squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.”
Thinking a lot about this in my own city and other cities I’d like to live in.
At the first global urban planning conference in 1898, delegates were not talking about infrastructure, resources, or crime. The main urban problem was horses and their copious excrement all over the streets… So much manure! No wonder “horseshit” is such a strong epithet in English…
Read the full story by David Doochin in Atlas Obscura (29 July 2016)
Urbanism patron saint Jane Jacobs, born 100 years ago today, on civic responsibility, how cities foster creativity and what makes for robust public life. (via explore-blog)
Deep in the recesses of Islamic legend, there was once a region so corrupt that God smote it, not with fire and brimstone, but with sand. And as anyone who’s ever lost a set of keys at the beach knows, finding a city smote with sand is as hard as finding a needle smote with haystack. While some thought the place was a fairy tale, no one could ignore the fact that its name, “Ubar,” kept popping up in the Koran, in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, in the writings of Ptolemy and in Lawrence of Arabia’s wet-mares.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that archaeologists, using NASA satellites and super-radars, located a network of camel roads leading to the remains of Ubar situated deep in the Rub’ al Khali desert in the Arabian Peninsula. The records they discovered indicated the area had been a thriving hot spot. For about 5,000 years, people from Persia, Greece and Rome flocked there for one of the major commodities of yesteryear: heroin. Just kidding – it was frankincense.
And then one day, all the hippies flocking their for their sweet frankincense fix returned saying the roads leading up to the city just sort of … ended. The city had disappeared.
Sometime between 300 and 500 AD, the city collapsed into a sinkhole, which then collapsed into a cave.
HISTORY, YO
Bing Thom Architects recently published a blog post looking at the property values of single family homes in Vancouver. The data was taken from the City of Vancouver Open Data Catalogue and is based on British Columbia Assessment data.
The precise timing of the data is likely a bit off, but here’s how the city looked in 2015:
23% of single family homes in the city had an assessed value over $2 million.
A year later, this number increased 32% of all single family homes:
It’s interesting to see how divided the city is along Main Street. But the big takeaway – thanks to BTA – is that $2 million seems to be the new $1 million.
This week I have been thinking and reading about monocentric and polycentric cities. In urban real estate economics, the monocentric city model has historically been an important economic model. Developed in the 1960s, it attempts to explain land use in cities with one core, or central business district (CBD).
In its most simplest terms, the model states that as you move further away from that core, land prices will fall. But since retail and employment need to be at the center of large catchment areas, they will remain in the middle, while the residential will naturally spread out.
When you begin to factor in transportation costs, there is an argument to be made for why inner cities neighborhoods were often poorer in North American cities (no car; higher transportation costs) and why the suburbs were often wealthier. In this latter case, the rich wanted to consume more home/real estate and their transportation costs weren’t as significant. They had cars and subsidized highways in which to drive them on.
Of course, there are many ways in which you could argue against the above. Today, urban neighborhoods are some of the most desirable areas in many cities.
But perhaps the most obvious thing to question is the idea that cities only have one central business district. I mean, just look at all the employment nodes in Toronto. Yes, downtown Toronto is still the dominant zone, but could we really be considered monocentric?
From what I remember, the model had mechanisms for dealing with polycentricity. But at the same time, so much has changed since the 1960s. The central business district with its big department store was only just getting introduced to the likes of fully enclosed, climate-controlled suburban malls. And of course today, we are now living in a world of Amazon Prime and independent workers.
So what does this mean for cities?
Well, as I was reading up on this topic I stumbled upon this diagram by architect Cedric Price (1934-2003):
I wish I knew exactly when this diagram was created, but I wasn’t able to find that online. In any event, the diagram uses different kinds of eggs – boiled, fried, and then scrambled – to explain the urban morphology of cities over time.
In the ancient world, cities had a clearly defined core and a clearly defined perimeter – often a wall for defence (boiled egg). In the 17-19th centuries, cities started to expand outwards through the advent of technologies like rail. This gave them a more irregular shape (fried egg). And then finally, Cedric argues that the modern city had, or would, become all mixed together like scrambled eggs.
I wouldn’t say that our cities have become completely scrambled. But I would agree that we are moving away from the simple fried egg of a city (or monocentric city model). So I guess the big question is really: How scrambled do you think we’ll get?
Fascinating!
I admit to not being familiar with any particular literature on the subject, but in response to your question: I think we’ll get as scrambled as we can given the size of our frying pan, aka urban growth boundaries, be they natural or man-made. I live in Houston, the last bastion of urban sprawl, and it’s a massively polycentric city by any measurement. Houston has few natural growth boundaries and no artificial ones, and what I see happening is a very large scramble.
The interesting thing is that, despite Houston’s polycentric nature, home prices inside inner loop 610 are almost unilaterally higher than outside it. Ex-urbs like Katy, the Woodlands, and Sugar Land have high-end neighborhoods that compete in price, but for a young family buying a starter home, you are buying outside 610 for sure, and probably outside Beltway 8 as well. So our many urban centers still have an overall central conglomeration that acts as one larger center in terms of property values.
(via Hong Kong at Night)
Hong Kong is a remarkable place. It is the 4th-densest sovereign state or self-governing territory in the world (in 1st place is its neighbor across the delta: Macau). Yet this density is fantastically constrained by the mountains and the sea into narrow, snaking corridors of high-rises wherever the terrain permits. At no time is this unique urban development better seen than at night, when Hong Kong lights up like a carnival.
If towns like Shitterton, England, or Fucking, Austria, sold replicas of their signs in a tourist center, they’d not only have to not worry about theft of signage, but they’d also likely end up with a decent amount of profit.
From Amsterdam With Love by MichielBuijse