Kiva loans: amazing data visualization

I have been a Kiva borrower for 3+ years now, 8 of the little blips in this video are mine. Look at them traveling, brave little info bits. Haha, seriously though, this visualization is wonderful. To see the amount of care between individuals is lovely.

Intercontinental Ballistic Microfinance from Kiva on Vimeo.

Kiva.org

more on laneways

Laneways a resource for livable cities

re: human scale in planning- in ancient Africa

The Primacy of Pathways

AfricaMap

alternative fuel made from wood and other biomass

A Way to Make Motor Fuel Out of Wood? Add Water

How many trees does it take for how much fuel?
Is there any way to curb our consumption?

how do you feel about American Democracy?

That idea we injected all over the world?
NY Times article:

As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around Globe

Democracy beat out socialism, but neither works, anyone want a monarchy? Something else? Suggestions please.

-Lauren

Health Insurance Costs Rising Sharply This Year, Study Shows

from NY Times: Health Insurance Costs Rising Sharply This Year, Study Shows

The cost of health insurance for many Americans this year climbed more sharply than in previous years, outstripping any growth in workers’ wages and adding more uncertainty about the pace of rising medical costs.

ny times op-ed: The Lost Decade?

The Lost Decade?
by David Brooks

If you want a big swig of despair, listen to the people who know something about the global economy. Roger Altman, a former deputy Treasury secretary, is arguing that America and Europe are on the verge of a disastrous double-dip recession. Various economists say it will be at least another three years before we see serious job growth. Others say European banks are teetering — if not now, then early next year.

The intellectual, cultural and scientific findings that land on the columnist’s desk nearly every day.

Go the Blog »

Walter Russell Mead, who teaches foreign policy at Bard College, recently laid out some worst-case scenarios on his blog: “It is about whether the international financial system will survive the next six months in the form we now know it. It is about whether the foundations of the postwar order are cracking in Europe. It is about whether a global financial crash will further destabilize the Middle East. ... It is about whether the incipient signs of a bubble burst in China signal the start of an extended economic and perhaps even political crisis there. It is about whether the American middle class is about to be knocked off its feet once again.”

The prognosis for the next few years is bad with a chance of worse. And the economic conditions are not even the scary part. The scary part is the political class’s inability to think about the economy in a realistic way.

This crisis has many currents, which merge and feed off each other. There is the lack of consumer demand, the credit crunch, the continuing slide in housing prices, the freeze in business investment, the still hefty consumer debt levels and the skills mismatch — not to mention regulatory burdens, the business class’s utter lack of confidence in the White House, the looming explosion of entitlement costs, the public’s lack of confidence in institutions across the board.

No single one of these currents prolongs the crisis. It is the product of the complex interplay between them. To put it in fancy terms, the crisis is an emergent condition — even more terrible than the sum of its parts.

Yet the ideologues who dominate the political conversation are unable to think in holistic, emergent ways. They pick out the one factor that best conforms to their preformed prejudices and, like blind men grabbing a piece of the elephant, they persuade themselves they understand the whole thing.

Many Democrats are predisposed to want more government spending. So they pick up on the one current they think can be cured with more government spending: low consumer demand. Increase government spending and that will pump up consumer spending.

When President Obama’s stimulus package produced insufficient results, they didn’t concede that maybe there are other factors at play, which mitigated the effects. They just called for more government spending. To a man in love with his hammer, every problem requires a nail.

Many Republicans, meanwhile, are predisposed to want lower taxes and less regulation. So they pick up on the one current they think can be solved with tax and regulatory cuts: low business investment. Cut taxes. Reduce regulation. All will be well.

Both orthodoxies take a constricted, mechanistic view of the situation. If we’re stuck with these two mentalities, we will be forever presented with proposals that are incommensurate with the problem at hand. Look at the recent Obama stimulus proposal. You may like it or not, but it’s trivial. It’s simply not significant enough to make a difference, given the size of the global mess.

We need an approach that is both grander and more modest. When you are confronted by a complex, emergent problem, don’t try to pick out the one lever that is the key to the whole thing. There is no one lever. You wouldn’t be smart enough to find it even if there was.

Instead, try to reform whole institutions and hope that by getting the long-term fundamentals right you’ll set off a positive cascade to reverse the negative ones.

Simplify the tax code. End corporate taxes and create a consumption tax. Reshape the European Union to make it either more unified or less, but not halfway as it is now. Reduce the barriers to business formation. Reform Medicare so it is fiscally sustainable. Break up the banks and increase capital requirements. Lighten debt burdens even if it means hitting the institutional creditors.

There are six or seven big institutions that are fundamentally diseased, from government to banking to housing to entitlements and the tax code.

The Simpson-Bowles report on the deficit was an opportunity to begin a wave of institutional reform. But that proposal died because our political leaders are too ideologically rigid to take on big subjects like tax reform, which involve combining Republican and Democratic ideas. The failure to seize that moment was one of the Obama administration’s gravest errors.

The world economy has many rigidities. The worst ones are in people’s heads.

article from Slate: Knocked Up and Knocked Down Why America's widening fertility class divide is a problem.

Knocked Up and Knocked Down

Why America's widening fertility class divide is a problem.

By Sharon Lerner

Since the average American woman has 2.1 children, you might think we aren't experiencing a national fertility crisis. Unlike some European countries whose futures are threatened by low birth rates, Americans, on average, produce just the right number of future workers, soldiers, and taxpayers to keep our society humming. Our families are also, on average, comfortably smaller than those in some developing countries, where high birthrates help keep women and children severely impoverished. But here's the problem: Because the American fertility rate is an average, it obscures the fact that our country is actually more like two countries, which are now experiencing two different, serious crises.

You hear about the "haves" versus the "have-nots," but not so much about the "have-one-or-nones" versus the "have-a-fews." This, though, is how you might characterize the stark and growing fertility class divide in the United States. Two new studies bring the contrasting reproductive profiles of rich and poor women into sharp relief. One, from the Guttmacher Institute, shows that the rates of unplanned pregnancies and births among poor women now dwarf the fertility rates of wealthier women, and finds that the gap between the two groups has widened significantly over the past five years. The other, by the Center for Work-Life Policy, documents rates of childlessness among corporate professional women that are higher than the childlessness rates of some European countries experiencing fertility crises.

Childlessness has increased across most demographic groups but is still highest among professionals. Indeed, according to an analysis of census data conducted by the Pew Research Center, about one quarter of all women with bachelor's degrees and higher in the United States wind up childless. (As Pew notes, for women with higher degrees, that number is actually slightly lower than it was in the early 1990s—but it is still very high.) By comparison, in England, which has one of the highest percentages of women without children in the world, 22 percent of all women are childless. According to the new Center for Work-Life Policy study, 43 percent of the women in their sample of corporate professionals between the ages of 33 and 46 were childless. The rate of childlessness among the Asian American professional women in the study was a staggering 53 percent.

At the same time, the numbers of both unplanned pregnancies and births among poor women have climbed steadily in recent years. About half of all pregnancies in this country are unplanned, with poor women now five times more likely than higher-income women to have an unplanned pregnancy, and six times more likely to have an unplanned birth, according to the Guttmacher Institute's recent analysis of government data.

If our overall fertility rate is at replacement level—if we have enough young people in the pipeline to do all the jobs that will need doing going forward—does it really matter so much if some women are having more kids than they are ready for and some are having fewer? Unfortunately for women on both ends of the economic spectrum, it does. Poorer women suffer when they have unintended births—as do their children. Research shows that women with unplanned pregnancies are more likely to smoke, drink, and go without prenatal care. Their births are more likely to be premature. Their children are less likely to be breastfed, and more likely to be neglected and to have various physical and mental health effects. Then, reinforcing the cycle, the very fact of having a child increases a woman's chances of being poor.

Across the reproductive divide, there are other serious problems. The declining fertility of professional women ought to be sounding an alarm, highlighting the extent to which our policies are deeply unfriendly to parents. Low birthrates in Europe have inspired a slew of policies designed to make it easier to simultaneously work and parent, yet here, because our overall birthrate is robust, we've had no such moment of reckoning. So while Germany recently responded to the fact that its birthrate had slipped below 1.4 children per woman by making its paid leave policy more generous, allowing mothers and fathers to split up to 18 months after the birth of a child, the United States still has no national paid leave law in place. And while Denmark, France, and Sweden provide good subsidized care to the vast majority of their populations, we still have no decent childcare system.

This lack of support makes for not a little unpleasantness in the lives of working parents. Consider the harried existence of professional parents, as described by the Center for Work-Life Policy report:

They are working longer and harder, shouldering new responsibilities for aging parents, and striving overtime to provide their children with all that they, in many cases, had lacked—a smooth path of success and both parents by their side. The costs are steep and include anxiety and exhaustion.

If this is the job description, it's easy to see why women would skip the interview.

At the same time, there's little question why poorer women are having more unintended pregnancies. Only about 40 percent of women who needed publicly funded family planning services between 2000 and 2008 got them, according to the Guttmacher Institute. During that same period, as employment levels and the number of employers offering health insurance went down, the number of women who needed these services increased by more than 1 million.

The fact that our extremes seem to almost magically balance each other out is only part of the reason we've failed to recognize these problems. The other part is that we've applied a distorted notion of choice to both trends. Certainly many professional women opt out of motherhood because they want to—and because that choice is now less stigmatized than it once was. And many women in all income brackets come to embrace an unexpected pregnancy as a happy accident.

But as much as we'd like to see our decisions about pregnancy and childbirth as straightforward exercises of individual will, or choice, there are clearly larger forces at work here, too. "Whether it's the lack of services and education you experience because you're poor or the corporate pressure because you're successful, the broader society's organization of work and support completely affects something as personal and intimate as whether you have children," says Wendy Chavkin, professor of clinical population and family health at Columbia. "These latest numbers show how the macroeconomic trends are lived out in people's personal lives."

With growing poverty rates and political attacks on already inadequate family-planning funding threatening to drive the number of unintended pregnancies among poor women even higher, and little effort being made to address the pressures driving other women away from having kids, it's easy to imagine how these forces could push professionals and poor women further apart. Still, in their own ways, both are struggling with the same problem: an untenable "choice" between children and financial solvency. At this point, it may be the only thing they have in common.

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"make it easier to simultaneously work and parent, yet here, because our overall birthrate is robust, we've had no such moment of reckoning"

>>>> For example, we could have more jobs that have 30 hour work weeks, while still offering full benefits. With less work hours per person, I would hope there might be some more 10-30 hr/week jobs freed up, also helping our unemployment rate. It seems like the gov't-mental (emphasis intentional) and insurance powers (any others?) that be would rather have some working themselves too much and others not being able to sustain themselves.

See my previous posting on fewer work week hours.

Other interesting articles on the topic:

On the Changing Correlation Between Fertility and Female Employment over Space and Time

(FLP= female laborforce participation)

ESSAYS ON THE MACROECONOMICS OF LABOR MARKETS

-Lauren

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Related: Idiocracy Trailer

couchsurfing!!!

I was the first host for my friend Arko, only a few months later, he ended up in the couchsurfing video!

couchsurfing.org (my profile = renzimm)

traditional vs. modern architecture and human psychology

I am nearing the end of the Fountainhead and have been paying attention to building design more than ever. I think the author below is a little rigid in his preferences, but I agree with the overall premise. I think it is possible to make a building that is both beautiful and not just a repeat of "vernacular" designs. I think it is difficult to make a building that people trust with amorphous "modern" design. That leads to a whole discussion on purpose, which I also think is lacking in this piece. I think that it is interesting to read because I am always looking back to early buildings and settlements to compare them to our current displacement.

-Lauren

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Architecture and Evolutionary Psychology by Charles Siegel

Vernacular and traditional buildings have common features that create places people are comfortable with. This is what Christopher Alexander calls “the timeless way of building.” Modernists abandoned these timeless patterns because of their fascination with new technology and their search for novelty, which is why modernist architecture feels uncomfortable.

Evolutionary psychology can help us understand why we like this timeless way of building and why modernist architecture goes against human nature.

We must begin by thinking about attitudes toward building that developed during the period of evolutionary adaptation, when our ancestors were nomadic hunters and gatherers. They only built temporary structures, because they stayed in one place for a time, until they depleted their food sources, and then they moved on to a place where food was more plentiful. They built with materials found on the site, because they did not have domesticated animals to help them haul things, so they took only what they could carry when they moved.

Permanent buildings developed later, beginning about 10,000 years ago, after agriculture allowed fixed settlements. Agriculture and domestication of animals are relatively recent and have not had much effect on human evolution. There have been some evolutionary changes since then, but these changes are relatively minor, and they are not universal because they happened after people separated into different groups. For example, some groups evolved lactose tolerance after they domesticated animals and people who could digest milk had a better chance to survive, but Chinese did not evolve lactose tolerance because they did not domesticate animals that produce milk.

If we are looking for universal principles that underlie vernacular and traditional architecture across cultures, we have to go back to Paleolithic times. Despite the immense difference between what people built then and what people built after they had permanent settlements, we can find a basis in evolutionary psychology for key principles of today’s theories of traditional architecture and urbanism.

Scale of Whole to Part

One principle of today’s traditional architecture is the proper scale of whole to part. Christopher Alexander and Nikos Salingaros have found that people are comfortable with buildings that have a hierarchy of scales, with a ratio of about three to one.

A large building might be broken up into two wings and a central portion, each one-third the size of the building. These three portions might each be broken up into three bays by pilasters. The bays might have windows that break them up visually into smaller areas.

There is a great deal of latitude involved. The ratio could be anywhere between two and five rather than three. The submasses of the building could be unequal. Sometimes traditional buildings use more than five repeated elements, to create an effect that is imposing rather than comfortable. Nevertheless, there is a hierarchy of scales within the building, and the ratio of whole to part at each level in the hierarchy is somewhere near three-to-one.

We can speculate that this comes from the ratio between the structure and the entranceway in temporary structures, as we can see in this illustration.

In this nineteenth century photograph of an American Indian teepee, the width of the entrance is somewhat less than one third of the width of the front of the structure. But this structure is made of hides that have been sewn together, and the needle was invented relatively late in our evolutionary history, probably about 50,000 to 75,000 years ago. During most of our evolutionary history, the structure would have been smaller, and the entrance would have remained about the same size, creating a ratio of about three to one.

If the entrance is larger than this, the building does not offers as much protection from the weather. If the entrance is smaller than this, people are likely to knock over the structure when they are getting in and out. Our Paleolithic ancestors probably built structures that were more flimsy than the teepee in the illustration, made of branches and leaves or vines that they found at each place they stopped, so there was a real danger of knocking over the structure.

Pre-humans and humans were more likely to survive if it felt right to them when they saw an entrance that was about one-third the size of the structure, so this scaling of whole to part became embedded in human psychology.

The illustration below shows a very ordinary traditional building that uses a hierarchy of scales with this ratio. The building is divided into five sections. The central section, bays, and outer sections are each divided visually into three subsections. Many of the windows within each subsection are divided into three sections. This building would seem cold and impersonal if it were just a box with plate-glass windows, but because it is divided and subdivided, it has a comfortable, intimate scale.

This example uses the ratios of three-to-one repeatedly, but most traditional buildings use a variety of ratios, ranging from two-to-one to five-to-one: the point is that the building is broken into sections, each section is broken into subsections, and so on until we get to the human-scale elements such as doors and windows.

Though most traditional architecture uses ratios ranging from two-to-one to five-to-one, because they make the building feel comfortable, monumental buildings often use higher ratios because they want to feel imposing rather than comfortable.

In the illustration above, for example, the central section of the building is divided into seven subsections, and this higher ratio helps create the building’s monumental effect.

Consistency with Variation

A key principle of today’s traditional urbanism is that the urban fabric should be made up of buildings that are generally consistent in style but are not identical. There should be individual variations within a general consistent framework. Andres Duany and many other New Urbanist planners have created urban codes and design codes that generate this sort of consistency with variation.

Settlements among the earliest humans must have been similar. Our earliest human ancestors were nomadic, and family groups spent much of their time hunting and gathering away from the rest of the tribe, so they had large areas of land to support themselves. But we can speculate that the entire tribe came together periodically so children could marry outside of their families, because choosing mates from a larger group of people creates enough genetic diversity to avoid inbreeding and genetic disease.

The sort of temporary settlements that people built when tribes came together must have combined individual variation with general consistency, because each family built its own shelter but all used the same materials and the same tradition of how to build. The teepee village in this 1892 photograph illustration gives some idea of what it was like, though the structures were undoubtedly more flimsy before the needle was invented.

Evolutionary psychology provides an obvious reason for why people find traditional urban fabric attractive: during the period of evolutionary adaptation, if people were attracted to the temporary settlements with larger groups of people and more genetic diversity, they had a better chance of finding mates and producing healthy children. Thus, evolution hard-wired us genetically to like settlements that have individual variation and general consistency.

This sort of urban fabric remained common during most of human history, from the earliest vernacular and traditional cities and villages until the earliest twentieth century. Here, too, buildings are similar in overall massing but different in detail.

This is necessarily the way that traditional vernacular urbanism was built. There were only a few available materials and there was a local tradition of how to build, but each family built its own house, so there was individual variation within general consistency of design.

Into the nineteenth century, most towns were still built with this sort of consistency with variation, because buildings were constructed individually using the same local building materials and following the same cultural ideal of the proper style.

During the twentieth century, though, we abandoned this timeless way of building for two reasons. First, larger scale development let us create mass-produced settlements in the style of Levittown, where each building is identical with surrounding buildings, with no individuality at all. Second, new technologies let us create modernist buildings that broke completely with the surrounding context, with no consistency at all.

The New Urbanists have shown that it is possible to avoid both these errors by using form-based codes, which create an urban fabric with the same combination of individuality and general consistency that we find in traditional cities and towns.

The most famous examples are walkable suburbs such as Andres Duany's Seaside, because there have been more opportunities to develop new suburbs than to develop other types of neighborhoods. But Duany's Transect makes it clear that the same principles apply to neighborhoods at all densities, from small rural towns to dense cities. We can see from the illustration that Seaside has the same sort of variation with consistency as the vernacular Mediterranean town shown earlier.

Symmetry

A final principle of all vernacular and traditional architecture is so obvious that it is not often mentioned: symmetry.

The evolutionary reason that we feel comfortable with symmetry should be clear. If our early ancestors found symmetrical structures pleasing and built themselves symmetrical temporary structures, then their structures were less likely to fall down, so they were more likely to survive.

But notice that the principle of symmetry and the principle of consistency with variation contradict each other. If there are variations within general overall consistency, then there is not perfect symmetry.

At the level of the individual building, both are common. We are comfortable with symmetry, as in the illustration below, which shows that symmetry is used not only in imposing monumental buildings but also in work-a-day vernacular buildings.

We are also comfortable with consistency with variations, as in the illustration below.

Any individual building that we use today is much larger than the temporary structures that Paleolithic hunters and gatherers built for themselves, and it seems that we can view a building either as a single structure that should be symmetrical or as a sort of village, that should have consistency with variations.

At the level of urban design, larger than the individual building, we are comfortable with consistency with variations. In some cases, traditional urbanism uses symmetry at the level of urban design to create places that are imposing and formal rather than comfortable, such as St. Peter’s Square, but this is done in a relatively limited area within a varied urban fabric.

At the level of parts of the building, smaller than the individual building, we are comfortable with symmetry. The submasses of traditional buildings are almost always symmetrical, though occasionally a large submass might be asymmetrical to give a quaint and rustic effect. Smaller elements such as doors and windows are always symmetrical. These small elements are similar in size to the temporary structures that our Paleolithic ancestors built, so our feeling for symmetry applies to them without reservation.

Why Modernism Makes People Uncomfortable

These three principles are just a first attempt to explain the timeless way of building using evolutionary psychology. But they do explain enough to let us see why modernism creates places that make people uncomfortable.

Most modernist architecture violates the first principle because it does not have a hierarchy of scales between the entire and elements such as windows. At worst, as we can see in building by Mies van der Rohe that is shown on the next page, there are no intermediate masses between the scale of a very large building and a scale of individual elements such as windows. The architect deliberately makes the spandrels between the windows as thin as possible, so the entire building seems to form a single mass.

The repetition in this modernist building goes far beyond the ratios that are sometimes used in traditional buildings to create an imposing, monumental effect. Rather than feeling monumental, the building feels completely inhuman.

Most modernist urbanism violates the second principle because it has exact repetition on the urban scale, rather than consistency with variation. This feels oppressive in popular modernist urbanism, in the style of Levittown, with identical buildings that look mass-produced even if they have traditional elements. It feels even more oppressive when the individual buildings are themselves in the inhuman modernist style, as in urban housing projects of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Cabrini-Green.

In a rather desperate attempt to get away from the monotonous, repetitive feeling of this mid-century modernism, today’s avant-gardist architects violate the third principle by creating free-form buildings without symmetry even in their smallest elements, such as the building by Frank Gehry that is shown below. These buildings are not as boring as mid-century modernism, but they are even more inhuman.

These buildings ignore the first principle, because they do not have a hierarchy of scales ranging from the building as a whole to human-scale elements such as windows, with the proper ratio of whole to part at each level of the hierarchy. Though they break up the building into random fragments, they have large blank-faced areas of a single material within each fragment, rather than dividing the fragments into subsections.

They ignore the second principle of consistency with variation, because they are so individualistic that there is no consistency at all among them or between them and their context. They violate the principle of consistency with variation in just the opposite way from mid-century modernist urbanism with its identical buildings.

They even ignore the third principle of symmetry. Because they are asymmetrical, they attract attention to themselves and sometimes become media sensations, but the people who have to use them sometimes complain that the buildings are so uncomfortable that they give them feelings of vertigo.

The version of modernism practiced by today's starchitects is as far as anyone has ever gotten from the long tradition of vernacular and traditional building that makes people feel comfortable because it is in keeping with human nature. They want to build sculptural icons that attract attention to themselves, rather than building good places for people to be.

By contrast, today’s traditional architects and New Urbanists are reviving the timeless way of building that suits human nature, designing buildings and neighborhoods that have small elements that are symmetrical, that have the proper scale of whole to part, and that have individual variations within a generally consistent framework.

from galinatachieva's posterous: human scale in architecture and planning

http://galinatachieva.posterous.com/

It Is a Matter of Scale or What is the Connection between Brain Size and Sprawl

Scale is fundamental to urban design. If you get it right, and achieve a well-proportioned space between buildings, you have a sound basis to build upon. Even if the architecture is far from perfect, the public realm you create can be decent and comfortable. If you get the scale wrong and your master plan is built, even the most lustrous architecture won’t remediate the failure of space-making; people might still use it for utilitarian reasons (think the parking lot of a Wal-Mart), but will not enjoy it.

Getting the urban scale right has been the mantra of planners and architects for ages. But have we been practicing what we have been preaching? In reality, we have been putting up for too long with the worst offender to human scale, sprawl. This pathological growth pattern has created environments of magnified dimensions that overwhelm the physical size of the human body. Massive thoroughfares, perfect for fast-moving cars but not for pedestrians, have destroyed our neighborhoods; mind-boggling multi-level interchanges have eroded our urban cores; single-use mega structures of enormous size and their even more enormous parking lots, have obliterated the walkable scale of traditional towns. This type of planning has resulted not only in the largest waste of real estate, infrastructure and natural resources in human history, but has seriously impeded some elemental human necessities – the need to walk based on the physiology of our two-legged bodies, and the need for spatial enclosure based on the physiology of our human eyes as well as our psychology. It is simple: we enjoy walking and we enjoy well-defined spaces, while sprawl has deprived us of both.

It is ironic that the demise of human scale in urban planning started with Le Corbusier, who taught us in his Modulor that human dimensions should become the universal criteria for any type of design – from the height of the kitchen counter to the size and shape of an airplane. However, he accomplished something very different in his city-building practice – he introduced gigantism in urban planning based on the necessity to accommodate the movement and speed of cars. Chandigarh, his only built plan, is the implementation of the modernist urban utopia, “a painting on a clean canvas,” per Edmund A. Bacon, where both separation of functions and division of vehicular and pedestrian traffic were instituted. The mega-grid created a strong, memorable diagram; the sculptural quality of Le Corbusier’s civic architecture delivered the grandeur of the image. However, Chandigarh’s scale is car-oriented; its street network is a highway system, with buildings pulled away from the streets, not shaping the streets into spatial enclosures.

The Athens Charter of CIAM (mostly written by Le Corbusier) explicitly calls for the use of human scale in all urban planning matters (Conclusion 76 “ The dimensions of all elements within the urban system can only be governed by human proportions”), but in Chandigarh Le Corbusier did not apply this requirement literally. He carried through the monumental scale of the overall urban diagram, but failed to achieve the smaller, human scale.

Today most of our cities and suburbs repeat the mistake of Chandigarh, ignoring the ways people have been living and socializing for thousands of years in pedestrian-scaled, compact, and diverse environments. These places are sick with a virus that could be called “mega-scale” or as Jan Gehl defines it, “The Brasilia syndrome”.

In Brazil’s capital there is a centerpiece called “The Square of the Three Powers,” designed by a follower of Le Corbusier, Lucio Costa, with buildings by Oscar Niemeyer. The ensemble is an astounding accomplishment of civic pride and symbolism, similar to the grand metrics of Chandigarh. As a main square of the capital of Brazil, its oversized dimensions are suitable. But seeing the pair of gigantic “Candangos,” or “The Warriors,” a metal sculpture at the square, symbolizing the people who built the place, I couldn’t help thinking about scale. I could barely touch the knee of one of the giants. It seemed that the square, as many other places in recent urban history, were created for these metal “avatars.” Towering four-fold over a normal person, they were the only ones who looked comfortable in this vast space. The square and the sculptures are appropriate for their location and function, but they remind us that in urban design large scale should be reserved for the civic and the monumental, while human scale should prevail over most of the urban fabric. We need to reclaim smallness, by “shrinking” the scale to fit our species’ size.

Download this gallery (ZIP, null KB)

Over the ages our minds have evolved more than our bodies. Actually, according to Wikipedia, “the appearance of modern man about 100,000 years ago was marked by a decrease in body size at the same time as an increase in brain size.” Yes, since then we have grown in height compared to the medieval knights; however, the difference is measured in only a few inches that are far less significant than the oversized, car-oriented dimensions we have chosen for ourselves while building sprawl. Today we acknowledge the mistake and the challenge to correct it. Let’s hope our larger brains will help us return to the smaller scale.

NY Times Article: The Fraying of a Nation's Decency

The final paragraphs of this article are particularly interesting to me. There are also links to the author, Anand Giridharadas' other articles.

-Lauren
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The Fraying of a Nation's Decency

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Published: September 23, 2011

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — Amazon.com, the books-to-diapers-to-machetes Internet superstore, is a perfect snapshot of the American Dream, circa 2011.

It grows by the hour, fueled by a relentless optimism that has made America America. First it sold books. Then it realized that buying printed words in bulk, sorting and shipping them was a transferable skill. It has since applied it to anything you could want.

In 2011, for example, I have bought the following from Amazon: a hard drive, an electric shaver, a Bluetooth headset, a coffee machine and some filters, a multivoltage adapter, four light bulbs, a rubber raft (don’t ask), a chalkboard eraser, an ice cream maker, a flash drive, roller-ball pen replacements, a wireless router, a music speaker, a pair of jeans and a shoe rack — and, oh yeah, some books. (Disclosure: A book and a long-form article I have written are sold on Amazon.)

Buying these things the traditional way would have meant driving around to many different stores and paying as much as twice the price for certain items. What’s more, Amazon knows me. It’s like family. It knows where I live, what I like, my credit card number. (Which, come to think of it, makes it closer than family.)

In a moment rife with talk of American decline, my Amazon experiences provide fleeting mood boosts. They remind me that, for now at least, this remains the most innovative society on earth.

And then my bubble burst.

Thanks to a methodical and haunting piece of journalism in The Morning Call, a newspaper published in Allentown, Pennsylvania, I now know why the boxes reach me so fast and the prices are so low. And what the story revealed about Amazon could be said of the country, too: that on the road to high and glorious things, it somehow let go of decency.

The newspaper interviewed 20 people who worked in an Amazon warehouse in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. They described, and the newspaper verified, temperatures of more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 37 degrees Celsius, in the warehouse, causing several employees to faint and fall ill and the company to maintain ambulances outside. Employees were hounded to “make rate,” meaning to pick or pack 120, 125, 150 pieces an hour, the rates rising with tenure. Tenure, though, wasn’t long, because the work force was largely temps from an agency. Permanent jobs were a mirage that seldom came. And so workers toiled even when injured to avoid being fired. A woman who left to have breast cancer surgery returned a week later to find that her job had been “terminated.”

The image of one man stuck with me. He was a temp in his 50s, one of the older “pickers” in his group, charged with fishing items out of storage bins and delivering them to the packers who box shipments. He walked at least 13 miles, or 20 kilometers, a day across the warehouse floor, by his estimate.

His assigned rate was 120 items an hour, or one item every 30 seconds. But it was hard to move fast enough between one row and the next, and hard for him to read the titles on certain items in the lowest bins. The man would get on his hands and knees to rummage through the lowest bins, and sometimes found it easier to crawl across the warehouse to the next bin rather than stand and dip again. He estimated plunging onto his hands and knees 250 to 300 times a day. After seven months, he, too, was terminated.

In a statement this week, Amazon acknowledged the complaints and said that it was working to address them, including by installing air-conditioners.

The prevailing American story line right now is seething anger at politicians: that they’re corrupt, or heartless, or socialist, or dumb. But the Amazon story, and many other recent developments, suggest that the problem is significantly deeper.

Far beyond official Washington, we would seem to be witnessing a fraying of the bonds of empathy, decency, common purpose. It is becoming a country in which people more than disagree. They fail to see each other. They think in types about others, and assume the worst of types not their own.

It takes some effort these days to remember that the United States is still one nation.

It doesn’t feel like one nation when a company like Amazon, with such resources to its name, treats vulnerable people so badly just because it can. Or when members of a presidential debate audience cheer for a hypothetical 30-year-old man to die because he lacks health insurance. Or when schoolteachers in Chicago cling to their union perks and resist an effort to lengthen the hours of instruction for children that the system is failing. Or when an activist publicly labels the U.S. military, recently made safe for open homosexuals, a “San Francisco military.” Or when most of the television pundits go on with prefabricated scripts to eviscerate their rivals, instead of doing us the honor of actually thinking.

The more I travel, the more I observe that Americans are becoming foreigners to each other. People in Texas speak of people in New York the way certain Sunnis speak of Shiites, and vice versa in New York. Many liberals I know take for granted that anyone conservative is either racist or under-informed. People who run companies like Amazon operate as though it never it occurred to them that it could have been them crawling through the aisles. And the people who run labor unions possess little empathy for how difficult and risky and remarkable it is to build something like Amazon.

What is creeping into the culture is simple dehumanization, a failure to imagine the lives others lead. Fellow citizens become caricatures. People retreat into their own safe realms. And decency, that great American virtue, falls away.

Next Frontier for Restless Americans?

The Kitchen-Table Industrialists

Men Seek Their Place in a New World

renting and job availability correlated

I am not sure when Milwaukee got expensive...?

Detroit No. 4 on the list of best cities to find a job and buy a home

urban infill: alley houses

Seattle passed a similar infill building code a few years ago. I hope the likes of these Vancouver house designs show up here instead of more condos.

Right up your alley: the hidden housing trend (from Grist)


1. They add "hidden density" to single-family neighborhoods.

2. They're ultra-green.

3. They provide a totally new housing option for those who can't afford Vancouver's sky-high home prices.

Artificial island could be solution for rising Pacific sea levels

Kiribati's President Anote Tong is considering radical action of moving 100,000 people to 'structures resembling oil rigs'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/sep/08/artificial-island-pacific-sea-levels?cat=environment&type=article

The 'Lilypad' floating city, a concept by the Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut Photograph: vincent.callebaut.org

Sea levels are rising so fast that the tiny Pacific state of Kiribati is seriously considering moving its 100,000 people on to artificial islands. In a speech to the 16-nation Pacific Islands Forum this week, President Anote Tong said radical action may be needed and that he had been looking at a $2bn plan that involved "structures resembling oil rigs":

"The last time I saw the models, I was like 'wow it's like science fiction, almost like something in space. So modern, I don't know if our people could live on it. But what would you do for your grandchildren? If you're faced with the option of being submerged, with your family, would you jump on an oil rig like that? And [I] think the answer is 'yes'. We are running out of options, so we are considering all of them."

Kiribati is not alone. Tuvalu, Tonga, the Maldives, the Cook and the Solomon Islands are all losing the battle against the rising seas and are finding it tough to pay for sea defences. Kiribati faces an immediate bill of over $900m just to protect its infrastructure.

But history shows there is no technological reason why the nation could not stay in the middle of the Pacific even if sea levels rose several feet.

The Uros people of Peru live on around 40 floating villages made of grasses in the middle of Lake Titicaca. Equally, the city of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec predecessor of Mexico City that was home to 250,000 people when the Spaniards arrived, stood on a small natural island in Lake Texcoco that was surrounded by hundreds of artificial islands.

More recently, Holland, Japan, Dubai, and Hong Kong have all built artificial islands for airports, or new housing. The mayor of London Boris Johnson has a vision of a giant international airport in the middle of the Thames estuary with five runways to replace Heathrow.

Kiribati could also take a lesson from the Maldives, where the rubbish of the capital city Male and the hundreds of tourist islands, is sent to the artificial island of Thilafushi. It's growing about one square metre per day.

Neft Daslari, Stalin's city in the middle of the Caspian sea, is still operational after more than 60 years. At its peak it housed over 5,000 oil workers 34 miles off the Azerbaijan coastline. It began with a single path out over the water and grew to have over 300km of streets, mainly built on the back of sunken ships.

Kiribati could emulate Spiral Island in Mexico. This was constructed by British artist Richard "Rishi" Sowa on a base of 250,000 plastic bottles. The island was destroyed by Hurricane Emily in 2005 but is being rebuilt. With millions of tonnes of rubbish already floating in the Pacific, and plans to collect it, Kiribati could solve two problems in one go.

But Tong's imagination has been stirred by a more futuristic vision. It's possible he's seen the "Lilypad" floating city concept by the Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut. This "ecopolis" would not only be able to produce its own energy through solar, wind, tidal and biomass but would also process CO2 in the atmosphere and absorb it into its titanium dioxide skin.

Bangkok architects S+PBA have come up with the idea of a floating "wetropolis" to replace eventually the metropolis of Bangkok. They say that Bangkok is founded on marshes and with sea levels rising several centimetres a year and the population growing fast, it's cheaper and more ecologically sound to embrace the rising seas than fight them.

Stranger still could be the German architect Wolf Hilbertz's idea for a self-assembling sea cityelectrodeposition to create an island that would build itself in the water. It would begin as a series of wire mesh armatures connected to a supply of low-voltage direct current produced by solar panels. The electrochemical reactions would draw up sea minerals over time, creating walls of calcium carbonate on the armatures. called Autopia Ampere. Hilbertz plans to use the process of

Islands have always fascinated political utopians, and now the billionaire hedge-fund manager and technology utopian Peter Thiel, has linked with Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer and grandson of Nobel prize-winning free market economist Milton Friedman to envisage a libertarian floating country.

Their idea is to build a series of physically linked oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters. The new state would be built by entrepreneurs and have no regulation, laws, no welfare, restrictions on weapons or moral code of ethics. Eventually, millions of "seasteading" people would live there.

Plans for a prototype are said to have been drawn up for the first diesel-powered, 12,000-tonne structure with room for 270 residents. Eventually, dozens – perhaps even hundreds – of these could be linked together, says Friedman who hopes to launch a flotilla of floating offices off the San Francisco coast next year.

In the end, it depends on money, which is in short supply for poor countries. If the world puts up several billion dollars – as Tong and his people would probably prefer – it would be technically possible for Kiribati to stay where it is.

Realistically, though, Australia, New Zealand and larger Pacific states are likely to be leaned on heavily to provide land for the Kiribatians and the world can expect a series of evacuations over the next 30 years.

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When Sea Levels Attack Visualization (Informationisbeautiful.net)

perspective: Billion Dollar Gram

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/the-billion-dollar-gram/

unmarried and single Americans week: really?

I have much to say about how silly the Census Bureau is. One thing they are adorable for: giving each demographic a little pat on the head, from time to time. This week: unmarried and single Americans.

Unmarried and Single Americans Week

Sept. 18-24, 2011

“National Singles Week” was started by the Buckeye Singles Council in Ohio in the 1980s to celebrate single life and recognize singles and their contributions to society. The week is now widely observed during the third full week of September (Sept. 18-24 in 2011) as “Unmarried and Single Americans Week,” an acknowledgment that many unmarried Americans do not identify with the word “single” because they are parents, have partners or are widowed. In this edition of Facts for Features, unmarried people include those who were never married, widowed, or divorced, unless otherwise noted.

99.6 million
Number of unmarried people in America 18 and older in 2010. This group comprised 43.6 percent of all U.S. residents 18 and older.

44.9%
Percentage of unmarried U.S. residents America 18 and older who were women.

61%
Percentage of unmarried U.S. residents 18 and older who had never been married. Another

23.8 percent were divorced, and 14.4 percent were widowed.

16.4 million
Number of unmarried U.S. residents 65 and older. The elderly comprised 16.5 percent of all unmarried and single people 18 and older.

88
Number of unmarried men 18 and older for every 100 unmarried women in the
United States. (Side article from New York Times: "Single, Female and Desperate No More")

59.1 million
Number of households maintained by unmarried men or women. These households comprised
45 percent of households nationwide.

31.4 million
Number of people who lived alone. They comprised 27 percent of all households, up from 17 percent in 1970.

6.5 million
Number of unmarried-partner households in 2009. Of this number, 581,300 were same-sex households.

393
The number of dating service establishments nationwide as of 2007. These establishments, which include Internet dating services, employed nearly 3,125 people and generated $928 million in revenues.

85%
Percentage of unmarried people 25 and older in 2010 who had a high school diploma or more.

25%
Percentage of unmarried people 25 and older in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree or more education.

http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/pdf/cb11ff-19_unmarried.pdf