Models of Cities

From Norman bel Geddes' GM-sponsored Futurama exhibit to mockups of Leibeskind's post-9/11 Freedom Tower, urban models have a profound influence over how we think about cities. For one of my classes at the U, I've been discussing with a retired computer scientist the relationship between current computer modelling and empirical (and/or reductionist) approaches to understanding social processes.

In particular, the relationship between experiment/empiricism and modeling is what intrigues me. I'm not suggesting that modelling has to supplant physical experimentation, but there are many cases where physical experimentation is impossible or unethical. Consider, for example, studying the way that industrial chemicals affect human populations. Doing tests on actual people is completely immoral, so we often test on animals and extrapolate (messily) to people with far less than certainty.

Similarly, studying cities isn't the kind of thing which easily lends itself to the methodology of experimentation. If you want to determine the relationship between social diversity and crime, for example, it is impossible to conduct a 'scientific' experimentation. One can only study existing structures.

This problem is magnified as one starts to consider problems with broader timescales. Think about the difficulty of looking at generational change, for example, the relationship between transportation infrastructure patterns and political activism.

I'm not suggesting that these sorts of problems allow themselves to be modelled either. These kinds of problems resist a great many approaches. However, modelling can allow us to perhaps see things, and include some level of empiricism, that 'traditional', experimental science cannot.

I have been reading a working paper by one of the leading urban modellers, Michael Batty, that offers up a theory of how models of cities have progressed and changed as computer technology has improved. Batty argues that models have moved from being "iconic" representations of idealized types of cities to "symbolic" representations which reflect empirically actual data. He writes that

Before the digital computer, models insofar as they were articulated at all for cities and city planning, were mainly iconic, built from traditional materials, and used to display 2D and 3D physical designs. Yet even in [early 20th c. planner, pictured above, Patrick] Abercrombie's time, there was a sense in which planning required more powerful tools and statistical techniques, hence symbolic models were implicit in that abstractions were used to symbolize the social and economic data of cities and display them in maps and charts.

Batty's piece, which you can read here, is a fascinating look at how new models are part of a long tradition of conceptualizing cities through representation. He includes some rather exciting looks at the possibilities of geographic data modeling and 3D urban rendering, as well as ways that complexity approaches to models, grounded in cellular automata or the interactions of many, many individual agents, can develop artificial cities according to various criteria.

MPR Decoder: Listen to Garrison

Sorry about the lack of posts, but I highly recommend listening to Garrison Keillor's nostalgic-but-thoughtful speech about historic preservation which aired last Friday.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/10/05/midday2/

Keillor mentions some of Saint Paul's greats (and my personal hangouts): Nina's Cafe, Swede Hallow, Connie's Creamy Cone... then ties this into a broader critique of today's skinflint modernism and mass produced architecture.

City Sounds: Perhaps My All-Time Favorite News Article Ever?

This is, perhaps probably, I kid you not, perhaps my all-time favorite news article ever.

[link to PMA-TFNAE]

It's a London Observer bit on a recent study about city sounds and research on people's enjoyment of different acoustic environs.

Now a £1m, three-year research project is building a database of noises that people say improve their environment. It will translate those findings into design principles to help architects create sweeter-sounding cities.

[...]

Davies is looking for members of the public to take part in mass 'sound walks' through cities or in laboratory listening tests, where the team will use MRI scanners to measure participants' brain activity as they are played a variety of urban noises.

There's even a wonderful, though not comprehensive, list of urban sounds people apparently like.

Among the urban sounds researchers have found to be surprisingly agreeable are car tyres on wet, bumpy asphalt, the distant roar of a motorway flyover, the rumble of an overground train and the thud of heavy bass heard on the street outside a nightclub.

Other sounds that are apparently kind to the ear include a baby laughing, skateboarders practising in underground car parks and orchestras tuning up.

I would add to this list such obviously wonderful sounds as:

• Church or clock bells chiming
• Wind blowing through trees
• Bicycle bells
• Ice cream truck songs (though not at great length*)
• The unintelligible din of cafe conversations
• Crows cawing
• Most any kind of music, played at an echo-y distance (esp. a tenor saxaphone, of course)
  
• Boat horns
• Boats in general
• Water in general, waterfalls in particular
  
• The bell sound train gate arms make when they lower
• Saws that cut wood
• The sound of a pelican street sweeper
• Pigeons taking off / cooing
  

On the other hand, I would add this to the list of sounds I find distasteful, along with airplanes passing by, jackhammers, the beeping noise of backing up trucks, pile drivers (!), leaf blowers, garbage truck hydraulics, and the honking of car horns:

'In the laboratory, many listeners prefer distant motorway noise to rushing water, until they are told what the sounds are.'

I hate, absolutely hate, the sound of a distant motorway noise, almost (but not quite) as much as I hate, absolutely hate, the sound a very close motorway noise. In fact, my hatred is proportional to proximity, I'd imagine. Freeway noise is such a constant, flat, high-pitched whine... it's got zero acoustical value.

I'd also be curious, re: this study, about the mixture of these various sounds, and how their periods of intermittency affected people's ratings of their aesthetic value.

(I'm kind of ambivalent about lawn mowers and lawn sprinklers. They're not found often in cities, anyway. Also neutral-to-slightly-positive on the sounds of subways passing underground.)

[h/t BLDGBLOG]

*When I lived in an old industrial loft building in a deserted part of Bushwick, Brooklyn, an ice cream truck would basically circle our block for hours and hours on certain summer days, playing over and again the song Turkey in the Straw (I think). This, for obvious reasons, might have driven me insane. Also at that apartment: being only two blocks away from a city-owned facility which cleaned empty Pennsylvania-bound NYC-garbage-hauling semis from the hours of 12am to 4am, I enjoyed the constant idling of large diesel engines directly outside my 4th floor window, to which, after no little period of adjustment, and due to the necessities of sleep, I resigned myself.

WARNING: The Kogler!

A friend took this this cryptic photograph quite recently. It appears to be evidence of the long-rumored, never-before-photographed "Kogler".

A cryptic admonition... What does it mean???



Who? ... or should i say WHAT is the Kogler???

Please, won't somebody think of the children?!?

The Kogler! The Kogler!

Sidewalk Semiotics: "Auto Mobility"

[An utterly useless sign in Saint Paul]

I was doing what I do best the other day -- surfing the internet while the earth spins around -- and I came across an entry that launched me down a long slopingly green hill of thought, rolling and spinning and gathering grassy bits of brain dirt all about my person. It got me spinning and tumbling until I knew not which way was up. My head spun as I wondered about this idea of freedom... What is it to be free? What do we think of when we think of freedom? Close your eyes, and repeat to yourself, "freedom... freedom... freedom..." Go head, and try to conjure up an image of the free-est freedom you can imagine. What do you see?

Chances are you'll be seeing a car commercial. For half a century now, every third ad on the television is a car commercial featuring some one or two beautiful people, winding down an empty black mountain road in their fastback, flooring it in a freeway, or fourwheeling Devil's Tower in a Freelander, looking down at an sublimely untouched natural like some Enlightenment painting. For so many of us freedom means the open road and a full tank of gas, the wind whilstling past your window as the radio belts CCR past the Big Gulp-ful cupholder. This, the cockpit, is the terrian of absolute control, the landscape of freedom and auto mobility.

Well, the thing that got me thinking about freedom was this rather innocuous part of a recent non-political post on M(i)N(nesota)C(ampaign)R(eport) dealing with those panhandlers with cardboard signs by the interstate onramp. Joe Bodell is writing about how easy it has become to ignore these people, but I was thinking about whether or not freedom really lies behind the wheel of a car. Here's teh quote that pushed me down the hill:

Admit it -- there's something uncomfortable about being stuck at an intersection with someone holding a cardboard sign outside. You're a captive audience -- on foot it's easy to ignore such an indigent, but when you're in a car you have a choice either to stare or be painfully obvious about not staring.

Think about it. At least in this instance, these panhandlers have found a captive audience. When we're sitting there at the red light, we're some of the least free people on the planet. We sit there trapped, literally strapped into a one ton piece of steel, and our only graceful exit is to turn our heads and stare at our shoes. This is why the onramp panhandle is simultaneously so awkward and effective.

And this isn't the only time when drivers are highly constrained. In fact, most of the time you're behind a wheel, you're incredibly un-free. You have to stay between the lines, stop and go at various lights and signs. You can only go as fast or as far as the car in front of you. You can't even really go much slower than the car behind you, either. (A friend of mine drove 22 mph down the length of Smith Avenue the other day, just to prove this point. It was incredibly, painfully awkward.) No, the car is the last place you're going to want to be if you want a feeling of limitless freedom. Sure you occasionally find yourself alone on the open road, driving through a car commercial on your way to the lake cabin or Aunt Ida's farm, but probably 75% of the auto time spent by most people is insufferably restricted.

In fact, if you want the freedom of limitless mobility, the best thing you can do is walk on your feet. For an easy example, look at the photo up above, of the 'sidewalk closed' sign. What percentage of people walking down this street obey this sign? My guess is something like 2% of all pedestrians wouldn't actually walk right around this sign, and continue on their merry way down the street.

In a cars, on the other hand, you're constantly at the mercy of the orange traffic cone. How many time have you been driving down a road, found yourself at the clogged end of a meaningless, empty 'road closed' sign?

On foot, one can walk or not walk. Run or not. One can continue forward, and suddenly reverse course and walk backwards. One can skip, jump, turn left, turn right, turn around, go forward and then suddenly turn backward for no reason whatsoever before continuing onward again. Try doing any of that in a car. (Possible exception: those lowriders with hydraulic suspensions.)

Take it from me, brothers and sisters. There's nothing so free as feet. What is liberty, if not the ability to do what you want?

I suppose this all sounds silly and trite. It's painfully obvious, and nobody really likes their bumper-to-bumper, do they? Sure road rage springs eternal, but feet are so slow!

I thought so too, and I wouldn't have mentioned any of this, only I was reading Flesh and Stone, a wonderful look at the interrelated histories of the city and the body by high-minded urban theorist Richard Sennett (who along with his wife, Saskia Sassen, have pretty much cornered the market on high-minded urban theory), and came across this passage in the introduction.

The look of urban space enslaved to these powers of motion is necessarily neutral: the driver can drive safely only with the minimum of idiosyncratic distractions; to drive well requires standard signs, dividers, and drain sewers, and also streets emptied of street life apart from other drivers. As urban space becomes a mere function of motion, it thus becomes less stimulating in itself; the driver wants to go through the space, not to be aroused by it.

Sennett's point, as I see it, is that our ultra-boring, ultra-monotonous freeway landscapes (and their neighborhoods) reflect precisely these constraints of auto-mobility. After all, if nobody can stop and smell the flowers, why have flowers?

[Free running -- like a car commercial for feet]