Sunday reading 12 July 2015

Matt Yglesias, “Here’s what the world would look like if every country had the same population“, Vox:

Maps are a great way to illustrate the world, but I’ve always been fascinated by maps that illustrate worlds that might have been. To me, redditor frayuk’s new map of the world divided into 200 countries with equal populations hits both of those bugs. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Neil Freeman’s plan to redraw the US states to be equal in population, but since frayuk’s map is global in scale, it’s less familiar.

Here’s the whole thing:

As you can see, New Zealand would become part of an Oceanian super-state also containing the Pacific Islands, Australia, and Papua New Guinea.

Bob Dey, “That colour house is not available, sir“, PropBD:

What kind of home would you like? “I’d like a house at least 40km from my job, inadequate public transport so I have to sit in traffic an hour each way. It can be near the sea but I don’t want to be able to see the water. It will be far more expensive than the many old places on big sections with sea views. Ours will be a big house on a small section, so it will have stairs.”

That’s not quite how the latest study on what kind of housing we’d like was summed up, but it is the way we’re headed if big changes aren’t made to housing stock, and the use of existing stock.

The study, The housing we’d choose, was headed by senior researcher Alison Reid, of the council’s research & evaluation unit (RIMU). Report authors were Market Economics Ltd analysts Rodney Yeoman & Greg Akehurst.

[…]

What’s needed now is bolder work on how to make a more tightly populated city a more enjoyable place. Amenity & privacy are the keys: amenity for leisure activities close to home, privacy so you can escape to your cubby hole. For apartments, that means more than one room (and the toilet/bathroom doesn’t count), and it also means a balcony to give the outdoors feeling to make up for reduced indoor space.

Derek Thompson, “A world without work“, Atlantic Monthly. Not quite about urban issues, although it’s mainly set in cities. The anecdotes from Youngstown, Ohio, a former factory town, are particularly good:

Work is really three things, says Peter Frase, the author of Four Futures, a forthcoming book about how automation will change America: the means by which the economy produces goods, the means by which people earn income, and an activity that lends meaning or purpose to many people’s lives. “We tend to conflate these things,” he told me, “because today we need to pay people to keep the lights on, so to speak. But in a future of abundance, you wouldn’t, and we ought to think about ways to make it easier and better to not be employed.”

[…]

The factories that arose more than a century ago “could make Model Ts and forks and knives and mugs and glasses in a standardized, cheap way, and that drove the artisans out of business,” Katz told me. “But what if the new tech, like 3-D-printing machines, can do customized things that are almost as cheap? It’s possible that information technology and robots eliminate traditional jobs and make possible a new artisanal economy … an economy geared around self-expression, where people would do artistic things with their time.”

In other words, it would be a future not of consumption but of creativity, as technology returns the tools of the assembly line to individuals, democratizing the means of mass production.

Something like this future is already present in the small but growing number of industrial shops called “makerspaces” that have popped up in the United States and around the world. The Columbus Idea Foundry is the country’s largest such space, a cavernous converted shoe factory stocked with industrial-age machinery. Several hundred members pay a monthly fee to use its arsenal of machines to make gifts and jewelry; weld, finish, and paint; play with plasma cutters and work an angle grinder; or operate a lathe with a machinist.

Steve Maas, “Are cities losing their edge?“, NBER digest:

Nearly a century ago, the eminent economist Alfred Marshall hypothesized that ideas were more likely to germinate into useful inventions in large cities than in smaller ones. Innovators working in close proximity to other creative minds, he argued, had a greater opportunity to learn of the latest advances and to engage in brainstorming.

In Cities and Ideas (NBER Working Paper No. 20921), Mikko Packalen and Jay Bhattacharya test this conjecture. They study U.S. patents granted between 1836 and 2010, and calculate the population density per square mile where the inventor resided. This enables them to distinguish patents that were developed in urban areas from those that were developed elsewhere…

The authors find that, on average, patents that were filed by inventors in densely populated areas relied on newer science than patents filed by their more-isolated peers until the middle of the 20th century. In 1900, for example, a two standard deviation increase in the population density of an inventor’s home town was associated with a 20 percent increase in the probability that the patent would be one that relied on the latest scientific advances. The study defines a patent as using “latest advances” if the age of the patent’s key concept falls in the youngest 5 percent of the concept age distribution.

The tendency for patents filed by inventors in densely populated areas to rely on newer scientific breakthroughs has waned in recent decades. There was a decline between the 1950s and the 1970s, and, after an uptick in the 1980s, a decline again in the 1990s and 2000s. “Taken together,” the authors write, “our results suggest that in the late 20th century agglomeration has become less important to innovation both in absolute terms and relative to other factors—like collaboration—that predict the use of newer ideas.”

I can’t help but wondering whether these results are inflected by the author’s choice of a citywide average population density measure, which tends to hide the existence of dense city centres by lumping them in with the sprawled-out hinterlands that most American cities have developed since the 1950s. Most of the other research I’ve read suggests that dense city centres have retained or increased their importance as places where knowledge can be transferred efficiently.

Cycle Action Auckland, “Notes towards a pre-history of Skypath: voices from the 1970s“:

Something that became clearer than ever, over the course of the Skypath resource consent hearing, was how long Aucklanders have yearned to solve this missing link for our city. To be able to walk and bike over our most iconic harbour crossing would be an immense gift to our city, its people, and its visitors.

In our files, we found some eloquent evidence of this longterm longing for a shortcut from Shore to City. We’re not just talking about a decade ago, when Bevan Woodward signed the petition asking for a feasibility study. We mean even further back than that.

Back in 1979, PATH (Pathways Across The Harbour) was set up to advocate for a cycleway across the AHB, and made a bit of a splash in the local papers with an article by Michael Bland of Friends of the Earth (following the lead of FoE in England, they were proto-cycle advocates in Auckland).

Here are five fabulous examples of the many letters PATH received in support…

Daniel Hertz, “Urban residents aren’t abandoning buses: buses are abandoning them“, City Observatory:

“Pity the poor city bus,” writes Jacob Anbinder in an interesting essay at The Century Foundation’s website. Anbinder brings some of his own data to a finding that’s been bouncing around the web for a while: that even as American subways and light rail systems experience a renaissance across the country, bus ridership has been falling nationally since the start of the Great Recession.

But it’s not buses that are being abandoned. It’s bus riders.

…it turns out that when you disaggregate the national data by urban area, there’s a very tight relationship between places that cut bus service between 2000 and 2013 and those that saw the largest drops in ridership. If you live in a city where bus service has been increased, it’s likely that your city has actually grown its bus ridership, despite the national trends. In other words, the problem doesn’t seem to be that bus riders are deciding they’d rather just walk, bike, or take their city’s new light rail line. It’s that too many cities are cutting bus service to the point that people are giving up on it.

Eric Roston and Blacki Migliozzi, “What’s really warming the world?“, Bloomberg View. I highly recommend clicking through – the interactive version of the graphics is even better:

Dita Di Boni, “It’s war… but don’t tell Tim Groser“, NZ Herald:

The US military and the CIA are actively preparing for a world in which civil and political unrest is caused by catastrophic weather events which are caused by climate change.

Those in charge are conducting a review of all US military bases around the world – assessing how they’d cope with weather-related disasters, and converting them into water and green-energy dependent installations…

But hang on a minute, mate: in New Zealand, we know better than all that. They may have the CIA and the Pentagon, and scientists and researchers on the case, but do they have the indefinably excellent Climate Change Minister Tim Groser?

Because surely if they did they could dispense with all that expensive research. They could do what we’ve done here in New Zealand: not even bother pretending they’re interested in climate change science. For example, they could publish a consultation document talking up the costs of getting greenhouse gas emissions under control (while downplaying the cost of inaction). Hold public meetings where no lawmakers appear. Force people to make public submissions in a very short space of time.

After getting up to 17,000 submissions, they could “go Kiwi” and ignore the vast bulk of them. In particular, ignore one from the Royal Society of New Zealand, made up of the country’s top scientists.

The society says the world has to stay below the global average warming of 2C, after which droughts, temperature extremes and wildfires will wreak havoc.

“Significant action must be taken as a matter of urgency,” it warns. “It is not appropriate to do nothing now, for example by claiming that we must wait for the quality of predictions to improve or other, larger, emitters to take action.”

And, “as one of the globe’s highest per-capita emitters of greenhouse gases, New Zealand has an opportunity to demonstrate leadership in reducing its emissions”. The society recommends a target for New Zealand of 40 per cent reduction in net emissions (below 1990 gross emission levels) by 2030.

In fact, 99 per cent of people submitting their thoughts to this so-called “consultation” believed New Zealand should aim for a target of 40 per cent reduction or more.

Josh Fagan, “Auckland’s ambitious $111 million cycleway plan“, Stuff:

Auckland is starting at the back of the cycling pack, statistically speaking, with just 1 in 100 (0.97 per cent of employed adults) using a bicycle as their main means of commuting to work, according to 2013 census data.

While the sprawling suburbs could be a factor, the figures were notably behind every other New Zealand city – Christchurch (5.6 per cent commuting to work by bike), Wellington (3.5 per cent), Hamilton (3.1 per cent) and Nelson (6.7 per cent) – and well short of Amsterdam and Copenhagen (both above 33 per cent).

[AT cycling manager Kathryn] King wants to change that.

Her main goal since relocating from London in January to take over as Auckland Transport’s walking and cycling manager has been to get more Aucklanders on their bikes…

Karangahape Rd, for instance, will see an instant increase and become a “spaghetti junction for cyclists” when the separated cycleway is built sometime between 2016 and 2018.

“We’re looking at developing a connected network from the inner city around Ponsonby, Parnell, Grey Lynn down to the city centre, all of it along separated cycleways.”

While there is criticism that the focus is only on inner suburbs, King said there are cycleway plans for Mt Roskill, Mangere and a major link from Glen Innes to Tamaki Drive.

And finally, this is awesome:

Share this