Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 19:36 Dear readers,
Apologies. I've been taking a break from the blog for the last few months to work on other projects. I'm back now, and I'll be posting from time to time - keep the RSS feed in your reader! - but am concentrating on longer, more substantive writing, which I hope to be able to post here soon.
Eli
Tuesday, April 20, 2010 at 12:03 If only I'd gone to Windsor Great Park this last weekend rather than a few weekends ago - a lovely afternoon marred only by the roar of Boeings and Airbuses flying overhead every few minutes on their way to land at Heathrow. Now the skies are empty and clear, thanks to Mt Unpronounceable's eruption in Iceland.
It's not that the skies are empty; it's that they're quiet. I've got a hunch, based upon nothing more scientific than my own ears, that the quiescent noise level has dropped by a good few decibels the last few days, even in central London, even on busy roads. Marylebone Road sounded quiet - well, quieter than usual, at least - yesterday evening (of course, this could be because there are fewer cars driving to the airport!).
Is it possible that constant air traffic over major urban areas, such as London, has raised the entire noise floor of entire cities? Walking down the street outside of major flight paths, one doesn't generally listen to individual aircraft. But does their presence in an area, coupled with the omnidirectional propagation of sound waves from a height of a few thousand metres, create a constant background noise that we've all learned to ignore?
If you're reading this and are in the no-fly zone, go to a park and enjoy the silence while you can.
soundscapes Tuesday, April 20, 2010 at 10:49 I've been meaning for a while to write about the lack of slack in modern, highly-efficient distribution systems. It's a foregone conclusion, really: almost any business looking to optimise its distribution network will pare it to the bone in order to minimise capital and staff costs. What's the point of having machinery and people sitting around, doing nothing, when you can operate at 99% capacity all the time?
The mantras of just-in-time, production-on-demand, and zero inventory make firms completely reliant on highly complex integrated distribution systems. Usually, when the distribution systems hit a snag, it's easy to change suppliers. But when the entire system fails, well, what then? David Wighton, Business Editor at the Times, writes today:
One lesson we learn from Eyjafjallajökull is about the rigidity of modern integrated transport networks. Freight companies focus their operations by creating huge logistical hubs — DHL uses East Midlands and FedEx operates out of Paris Charles de Gaulle. Hugely efficient until ... a volcano erupts.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at 14:02 The winners of the 2010 eVolo Skyscraper Competition are, as my mother would say, 'remarkable'. I'm going to overlook the winner, an absolutely ridiculous prison in the sky (no, really, where "the inmates would live in a “free” and productive community with agricultural fields and factories that would support the host city below", which is a good thing because I, for one, have always wanted to live literally in the shadow of another city) - yes, I'm going to go right pass that bit of inane, thoughtless stupidity and move on to an honourable-mention winner, the 'Art of Building High Skyscraper in Paris', by the French Atelier Zundel & Cristea.
Their website says that they always begin a project with a deep analysis of geographical, economic, and regulatory issues, without ever trying to rely on theoretical justifications. Mm-hmm. So, in the most densely-populated Western city, a city far more dense than any other in Europe, they propose a 'skyscraper-city' in Beaugrenelle, the skyscrapers-on-a-concrete-podium experiment on the south bank of the Seine, in the 15th arrondissement. Unfortunately, the designers of this scheme (it's a 'spatial texture', you dig?) forgot to put in a site visit; had they done so, they would have found that the idea didn't work and that the podium is an urban wasteland. Maybe this is where I come out as a reactionary traditionalist, but a far better way to redevelop bits of Beaugrenelle would be to introduce the tight arrangements of pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use streets with perimeter blocks, courtyards and small parks that have made the rest of the city so famous.
This is just one of countless daft architectural proposals. Naturally, they're all carbon-neutral, environmentally-friendly, zero-waste, uplifting, beautifying, etc. etc. etc. Except they're not. Generally they're no more than highly-egotistical artefacts of highly egotistical, reflection-free, contextually-unfettered minds, and I have no idea how they then go on to win prizes.
Well, I think it's time to establish a new prize: Idiotic Architectural Fantasy of the Month. Check back soon for more entries. Why, maybe I'll set up a competition. E-mail your entries in...
architecture Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at 13:32 I have often railed at what seems to me to be the wholly-inappropriate siting of the Mayor of London's office in the More London development, which includes a raft of shiny offices and restaurants. Not that there's anything wrong with the location; no, the problem I have with it is that More London is private land. That nicely-maintained 'public space' along the south bank of the Thames that people stroll along? You think you have free rights to access it? Think again. It's private space, and don't think of locking up your bike there, or skateboarding, or panhandling. The private security guards won't stop tourists taking snapshots as they walk along the river, but try setting up with your tripod to take pictures of the buildings and you'll soon find out that there's a very real difference between public space and this.
Of course, the fact that it's private land means that folks could be excluded from it without any rhyme or reason, at the whim of the freeholder. Which means that there is no right of assembly or protest outside City Hall. Sure, the powers that be could let people demonstrate outside City Hall. But they could just as easily have protestors charged with trespass.
I'm not the first person to mention this; a quick Google search will throw up plenty of photographers' rants about More London, and it's been getting my goat for years. But I thought it would be a good preface to something I read this morning in the Guardian: "British Airways strikers face terminal five ban". It turns out that Heathrow's Terminal Five is on private land, so strikers against British Airways can't picket there. There are only about seven sites in Heathrow where picketers *can* stand, including the police station and Hatton Cross tube station, according to the story. Needless to say, since voyagers don't tend to either go to the police station or to Hatton Cross on their way to or from a flight, I doubt the pickets will be much use to anyone.
So, we in America and Britain continue to privatize land willy-nilly, creating only pseudo-public spaces, worshipping land value and retail spend, at the expense of real public spaces where all have the right to congregate and express themselves. Is it any surprise citizens feel disconnected from their democracies?
cities, public space Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 16:22 Anthony Townsend talks a lot of sense with his blog posts, The Future of Social Networks is Storytelling, Part I and Part II.
I think this makes a lot of sense, and jives perfectly with my complaints about social networking, which are generally that a) the signal-to-noise ratio stinks out loud, and b) that it's all disjointed: in other words, that it doesn't organise itself...and the way to finish that sentence may be, 'that it doesn't organise itself into stories'. When I log in to facebook, I get a massive page of random information - and even if it were all of interest to me (ha!), it would still be a bunch of random, disconnected tidbits.
And what he points to with the evolution of Foursquare etc., I have done with my diary for years - recording the 'header information' of where I was and with whom, so I can reconstruct the story later on, combining it with my memories of the 'content', i.e. what actually happened/was important about that day/night.
Now, bear with me.
We've recently been going through a host of documents which belonged to my grandparents. It's amazing what we're finding, photos of relatives from the early 1900s in farflung places, sometimes with notes on the back explaining who's who, sometimes without; letters, postcards, relics, you name it. There are a few boxes of this stuff. And it's all turning into some very interesting, meaningful stories, filling out the history of my family.
Let's fast forward a few generations to some people who are curious about us. Of course, they won't have any photos or letters, not the kind they can put in a box; it's all digital (and it's owned, effectively, by facebook/flickr/name-your-provider-here; because what happens to your social-networking data when you die? Better make sure you put your passwords with your will so someone can download it all before it disappears!) Will future generations be curious about the minutiae of your daily life? I'm guessing, not so much - who will ever have time to go through it?! - and again, the signal-to-noise ratio is terrible. I don't go through my e-mails every week, getting rid of the 'what do you want for dinner?', 'see you at the pub at 8' etc. and leaving only what I consider the meaningful stuff. No-one does, because storage is cheap and everyone else is making lots of money by mining the minutiae. So in 100 years, even if my children can get a hold of the archive of all my online dealings and missives, they're gonna have a heckuva time putting it together into something that tells them what was important to me, at least without resorting to data-mining techniques to make sense of it all.
Eli
So what does [the commons concept] + [overwhelming control of personal data by Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc.] * [legal issues and obscurity around control and disclosure of that data] + [the shortcomings of social networking media] + [Google and Mozilla's separate projects, however unbelievable on Google's part!, to make our data portable] = ?
Of course, most people don't seem to care, mostly because the big providers provide those services for (ostensibly) $Free. But if they did, could we move towards independent cloud data hosting for the masses, and open-source protocols for social networking: what if, instead of using proprietary social networking sites, people instead effectively all ran their own social networking servers? My cloud data would interact, somewhat like RSS feeds, with the cloud data of all the other people I care about/am 'connected to, and so on.
It's still a half-a-thought. And, for all I know, there's a project working right now on such a thing. But when I googled 'open source social networking' just now, I found nothing of the sort - just ways for you to make your own conventionally-hosted social network. Anyone want to give it a shot?
Eli
Tech website Gizmodo has posted a report about Diaspora, a new, distributed Facebook alternative. Looks like some other people have been talking about what I'm talking about. Or did they read it here first?
Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 13:33 So, the new economics foundation (why the no capital letters?) has published "21 hours: Why a shorter working week can help us all to flourish in the 21st century". The idea is that moving to a three-day working week would reduce income inequality and increase quality of life.
Would it?
Anna Coote, one of the authors, said at the launch today that they are 'still working' on how people would pay their mortgages. It would also be dependent on a more progressive tax system, a higher minimum wage, a de-facto monetization of non-'work' time, a change to employers' National Insurance contributions in order to facilitate having greater numbers of employees rather than fewer, and reductions in the desire for consumer goods - "a change to what we think is enough", partly through self-production of goods in 'leisure time'. The authors want to change the way we value all our time, paid and unpaid.
A certain amount of the following discussion was really a reaction to the prescriptive nature of the ideas and the implicit call for regulation contained in the report.
Mark Littlewood (Director General of the IEA), replying, pointed out that there are people who work 50-hour weeks and there are people who barely work at all, and that over a person's life, the number of hours varies dramatically. He also contended that workshare doesn't, ah, work, and that Mitterand's government in France, and an experiment in Germany by IG Metall in the 1980s, prove it. And he suggested that 'self-production' is highly inefficient - far better to do that which one is good at, no? - and, finally, he pointed to OECD figures showing that working hours in the UK have dropped by about one-sixth since 1970.
John Philpott, chief economist at the CIPD, welcomed the vision but not much of the detail regarding the solutions, saying they're "not the right ones", and pointing to the old Keynesian idea that increased riches will lead to greater leisure. He thinks that 'low-growth-low-consumption' doesn't work, favouring flexibility in working practices and greater choice in how we produce and consume. (That's all very well, except for what Hank Sohota calls 'fat, sugar, and salt' - when the choices people make aren't the ones they perhaps ought to.)
Perhaps the issue is that the nef folks are trying to push too hard, that these kinds of changes could happen over a century or more - but that structural shifts take time, a lot of it. The authors contend that they understand it; but if they do, why the call for prescriptive regualtion? With something this complex - we're talking about a fundamental re-working of our economy here - any policy intervention is going to have unintended consequences. Nonetheless, the aims are laudable, and as a bid to start discussion, this is a good beginning.
(As an aside - if the problem is that we don't sufficiently value what is currently unpaid time, why don't we find ways to remunerate it? Not to sound Panglossian, but the logic of capital would, I think, always drive us to the current economic system. The big question is: Can we combine markets with an economic model which is not predicated upon eternal growth, natural resource use, and measures of GDP?)
resources, sustainability Friday, February 19, 2010 at 16:38 Architectural photographer and writer Dan Hewitt has just blogged about architectural icons. It's an interesting and provocative piece and well worth reading.
The word 'iconic' gets bandied about to mean 'oh that big building that everyone notices', and particularly 'that big building that defines city X'. But of course this simply makes an iconic building 'one which stands out'; in other words, perhaps, one that ignores its context. It ignores the fact that an icon should perhaps have some sort of meaning: either as an archetype for a class of building, or possibly imbued with some other social, economic or political meaning.
It is in this respect that I find the current crop of starchitects' buildings lacking. Not that I don't like 'em - well some of them, anyway - but let's take Rem's CCTV, or Zaha's...er...anything, or Gehry's Bilbao, or even the Pompidou Centre, and ask how they are iconic: How does the form express the meaning? Well, we can imagine that the Pompidou's form could have particular meaning, given that the idea of putting the services on the outside should, in theory, make for a more flexible set of spaces for viewing art on the inside. And perhaps the idea of the continuous loop in CCTV could have some sort of redefining functional aspect. But aside from their 'wow, look at me' factors, how is MAXXI an icon - or of what could it be an icon?
We should perhaps be introducing another term. For if buildings can be iconic, and if they can be anti-iconic - let's assume so, at any rate - then there must be a middle ground: the non-icon. Caruso St John's efforts in Nottingham strike me as neither iconic nor anti-iconic, but as simply one that fits into the city around it, fits its purpose unobtrusively, and confers a sense of beauty and delight to those who choose to notice it. Surely this should be the point in a post-crash era, however fleeting it may be?
architecture, cities Wednesday, February 10, 2010 at 9:07 
I went to the launch of the second report of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil & Energy Security. Philip Dilley, Arup Chairman, started things off mentioning our increasing reliance on just-in-time logistics. This is something I'll be coming back to later in relation to Haiti and resiliency - a fundamental problem our economic system faces. Jeremy Leggett of Solarcentury mentioned the possibility of shocks to oil supply, too: a real risk to the ability of our economy to function given low inventories and the exaggerated interdependency created by modern logistics.
Meanwhile, back at the launch: My friend John Miles (also at Arup) contended that OECD oil demand could peak now - but that the BRICs countries will keep powering along, literally, and drive up demand, and prices with it. At the same time, the UK is becoming a net importer of energy. This doesn't bode well for Britain. And Ian Marchant, of Scottish & Southern Energy, projected that as coal goes out of fashion, we could end up in a gas shortage too. SSE's emphasis is on reducing demand - households have on average reduced their demand by 15% in the last few years, through condensing boilers, insulation and the like - not to mention rising prices, as my neighbour from the Energy Saving Trust whispered to me! Ian thinks we can get that down by 50%, but he's focusing on the design of new housing. I'm more interested in the existing building stock: we've already got it, after all...
Nice to see Brian Souter of Stagecoach, and Richard Branson of Virgin, talking about the need to deliver demand reductions. Brian - in his wonderful brogue - suggested a carbon tax instead of the lowest rate, redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor.
Of course, the risk we're dealing with needs to be dealt wth by 2014-15 - even shorter-term than with carbon, you could argue. Will Whitehorn (Virgin) and Ian Marchant argued that the North Sea can still provide up to 60% of UK demand by 2020, but only if tax on North Sea extraction is reformed.
Of course, I've got an axe to grind when I put on my localCarbon hat. I was struck by the emphasis on the supply side of energy as compared to the demand side. Have we given up on efficiency? What about fuel poverty, as highlighted by the gentleman from the Association for Conservation of Energy? Or is it just never going to be enough? Will demand peak before supply? No-one knows, but while the chap from DECC who responded defended government's strategy, he admitted that we probably need to be doing more.
resources Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 18:11 Last night, while chatting with Greg Fisher of Pinnacle Global Strategy, our conversation turned (as usual) to complexity theory. During the Modern era, much planning theory and practice was a result of the idea that everything about cities and the built environment could be known and understood, giving rise to the notion of planner as all-seeing, omnipotent technocrat. The backlash to this came with the rise of postmodernism, as the pendulum swung the other way, and theorists told us we could know nothing and that power must be vested in the many, not the few: This ties in with a notion of chaos in the built system.
So what do we have today, with the rapidly expanding amount and quality of urban informatics and virtual modeled environments? Have the academics who wrote over the last few decades about the networked society, about infrastructure, about actor-network theory all heralded a slow move towards applying complexity theory to the built environment?
[As an aside: Much is being written about resilience in cities, and following natural and man-made disasters of recent years, the concept is getting a lot of attention. I'm not sure that we are ready to understand what it is that makes urban systems resilient, as we don't yet really understand the complex interactions which characterise those systems. But, as I keep saying, I'm not interested in examples of failure; they will teach us less than examples of near-failure, when systems that should have failed didn't - the problem is finding them!]