Eco Cities

This is Masdar City in Abu Dhabi (Map). The idea is to build a 2.3 square mile city starting from desert based on zero carbon emissions standards. It's designed by Foster and Partners and is actually getting built. Some photos can be seen here (the better ones are near the end), and here's its wiki page.

Dongtan (great article) outside of Shanghai (Map). This is designed by Arup and looks like it isn't getting built.

Both of these cities propose to construct a more sustainable built environment by starting from scratch and avoiding the milieu of mistakes that generally plague typical development. It's a novel approach for sure, and the research done for Dongtan is incredible. Here's a bit from the Wired article on how density was determined for Dongtan:

"Their first decision was big. Dongtan needed more people. Way more. Shanghai's planning bureau figured 50,000 people should live on the site — they assumed a green island should not be crowded — and the other international architects had agreed, drafting Dongtan as an American-style suburb with low-rise condos scattered across the plot and lots of lawns and parks in between. "It's all very nice to have little houses in a green field," Gutierrez says. But that would be an environmental disaster. If neighborhoods are spread out, then people need cars to get around. If population is low, then public transportation is a money loser.

But how many more people? Double? Triple? The team found research on energy consumption in cities around the world, plotted on a curve according to population density. Up to about 50 residents per acre, roughly equivalent to Stockholm or Copenhagen, per capita energy use falls fast. People walk and bike more, public transit makes economic sense, and there are ways to make heating and cooling more efficient. But then the curve flattens out. Pack in 120 people per acre, like Singapore, or 300 people, like Hong Kong, and the energy savings are negligible. Dongtan, the team decided, should try to hit that sweet spot around Stockholm.

Next, they had to figure out how high to build. A density rate of 50 people per acre could mean a lot of low buildings, or a handful of skyscrapers, or something in between. Here, the land made the decision for them. Dongtan's soil is squishy. Any building taller than about eight stories would need expensive work at the foundation to keep it upright. To give the place some variety and open up paths for summer wind and natural light, they settled on a range of four to eight stories across the city. Then, using CAD software, they started dropping blocks of buildings on the site and counting heads.

The results were startling. They could bump up Dongtan's population 10 times, to 500,000, and still build on a smaller share of the site than any of the other planners had suggested, leaving 65 percent of the land open for farms, parks, and wildlife habitat. A rough outline of the city, a real eco-city, began to take shape: a reasonably dense urban middle, with smart breaks for green space, all surrounded by farms, parks, and unspoiled wetland. Instead of sprawling out, the city would grow in a line along a public transit corridor."

Why had no one done this before?

These cities are essentially huge experiments which require both a huge purse and some optimism that people will flock there. Which I think they will if they're done right, and of course if they're cost effective it'll be pretty incredible. My only reservation is that the cities are planned all at once which is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing being things like Masdar City's raising the entire city on concrete piers so that all transportation can take place underneath. This sort of design feature is only available if you plan everything beforehand, or at least it's many times cheaper to do so. The curse is a bit harder to explain, but it takes the same vein as a free market versus a socialist economic system type argument. It isn't easy to determine exactly what people are going to want in a city. Whole parts of it may fall into disuse if the preferences of future inhabitants aren't interpreted properly such as was the case with Boston's West End.It was demolished because it was considered a slum although not by residents. Yet it worked and people lived there in a functioning community whereas it was replaced by and urban renewal project that served few and was considered excessive.

I tend to think of cities as a sort of biological organism that is constantly growing, contracting, dying, and regenerating. The buildings are the cells, the streets the capillaries, the highways and subways the veins and arteries, and people the blood cells moving about bringing life to everything. I'm skeptical that any amount of planning can fully account for the complexity that time brings to the development of a city. Then again maybe if built small enough (Masdar City is not huge) it may be possible. Perhaps it can be expandable or maybe just the infrastructure could be built with zoning requirements similar to the New Urbanism ideas of Seaside, FL. Either way it should be interesting to see how these perform as they come online.

Just Some Articles

Just got back from Europe, so there'll be some posts about that after school gets a little less crazy. In the mean time here's some articles:

The FCC is trying to make broadband (internet access) a right just like water or electricity... I have some stuff I could add to that but in general this is something I've thought about and supported for years. The internet gives an individual the ability to learn about absolutely anything they want, access to any news coverage they could possibly dream of, and even the ability to speak openly. If you look back through history these are some of the most common reasons that people go to war, stat new governments and countries, and in general suffer and strive for. The fact that we can now deliver that ability with a netbook and a broadband signal is nothing short of amazing. If any one thing saves democracy/the human race it might be the internet.

Ah camera gear is so fun and addicting. It always pains me to think of myself as against owning many things but then wanting gadgets. Given the opportunity I would totally have an entire room filled with camera equipment. This is a robotic tripod head that helps you create panoramic shots. Here's the newer version that'd work with say... a medium format film camera.

There's a new social media app that forms communities based on real life proximity. I've read about these before a while ago when they were purely conceptual and being made by sociologists, but I think now they have the potential to have some interesting unseen effects. It goes like this. You have an app on your phone that is essentially like Facebook except that instead of having your usual friends it includes anyone else with the app that is within 300 feet of you. I could see this being really useful for people who move to a new city of country and don't know anyone. It oddly reminds me of Chatroulette (here's the Wired article). What fascinates me most though is the fact that if this app were to become popular wouldn't it make physical places popular too? This app wold be interesting to use from where you live of course, but wouldn't certain popular spots start to draw crowds? Won't cafes become even more popular? What if people use it to hook-up, which they will, won't the 300' radius around a 4 AM bar (around that time too) become really popular? There's a lot to think about here but it all boils down to how much this actually catches on, which if it's like anything else promising from the internet, it most likely won't.

Proof That Architects Don't Get Economics

Just super quick before I pull an all nighter and learn some BIM software... just got this is my school email:

So my tuition goes up another 6.4%. Okay... why?

"Well inflation..."

No, the CPI last year was -0.4. So in real terms my tuition is going up 6.8%. If a more common inflation rate is something like 3.5% (as in, not during these economic times) then an increase of this magnitude would yield a real increase of about 3%. Raising tuition at these levels should not be a given every year without some justification.

So what the hell?

Income Ineqaulity, Revisited With an fMRI This Time

I don't get this... Okay, so some scientists at Caltech found that the human brain responds to income inequality in a new and fascinating way; sort of, but first a side note.

A while ago I posted about an experiment where monkeys were given different rewards for the same tasks (pressing a lever a certain number of times). As long as the reward was the same, either a grape (preferred) or cucumber, the monkeys would keep working, but if the researcher gave one monkey a cucumber and the other a grape the monkey given the cucumber would soon refuse to work. If only these experiments were done prior to the Fall of 1917... it reminds me of Pike's work post John Rock (holy tangent). The point of all this being that insights into this sort of thing are both to some degree innate in at least primates and not unknown.

So back to the Caltech work. The researchers basically found that people who were better off/richer responded with greater brain activity (were happier) when less advantaged people were given money as opposed to themselves. That is, rich people felt better/reacted more strongly when poor people were given money instead of themselves. The researchers then extrapolate that this must be due to some sort of altruism. But the evidence against altruism is piling up fast. Even searching for it scientifically at this point is to some extent and act of faith.

Isn't it more likely that the rich people reacted more strongly because the poor people getting something means that the less advantaged people are then less likely to seek out the rich and take their stuff? Or to put it like an evolutionary psychologist, which of course I'm not - Caveman makes a kill and the hungry people start staring uneasily. Wouldn't it be nice if they got some meat of their own so that they'd leave you alone? I don't know, maybe I'm completely wrong. Obviously more testing needs to be done.

Why are different disciplines, even within one field such as psychology, so unwilling to look for explanations beyond their own scope? How does this change? I'm finding that very few people care to take on issues too far beyond art or design within architecture, and that crowd would be in charge of everything if they could.

Just Some Reading

Joshua Prince-Ramus, an architect, gives a talk at TED. He starts by talking about the control that architects have forfeited over the last 50 or so years because they have been unwilling to deal with the liability that goes with being involved in the construction process. To paraphrase his great insight, "where there is liability there is power."



$25 balloon goes 70K feet up. I really like these DIY projects that take cool photos. One of the more interesting ones was that kid and his dad who built radio controlled units that attached to a kite so they could take photos from above.

This is R128, that same home I keep talking about by Werner Sobeck (who teaches at IIT). It seems that if someone builds something which in many ways induces negative externalities on society unwittingly, perhaps it should be required that buildings produce a certain amount of their own energy themselves and can be recycled. It just seems logical that you should be responsible for that which you bring about. I'm aware that legislating such things would be difficult and there would be loop-holes, corruption, and the like and it would also mean that many people could not afford homes. But really, aren't we fooling ourselves when we build these little shanties with poor insulation, ventilation, longevity, and light penetration? It's essentially like a credit card; available to anyone, good times now in exchange for a high maintenance rate for its duration, and in the end you are worse off for it.

Interesting Wikipedia entry: Avicenna, kind of like a Persian version of Da Vinci.

Marika-Alderton by Glenn Murcutt

I just finished a project for studio where we documented the construction methods through 3D computer modeling and a physical model (1:20 metric). My building was the Marika-Alderton house in Northern Australia designed by Glenn Murcutt.

The house was designed to withstand 200 kpm winds and is entirely naturally ventilated. This house was designed as a reaction to the fact that Aboriginal people are often housed in concrete masonry (CMU) buildings with poor ventilation, small windows, and poor drainage. They tend to be hot, dark, and are plagued with standing water. This has led to many conflicts between their inhabitants and the Austrailian government. Murcutt spent three years visiting and staying with his clients, an Aboriginal artist and her husband, to learn about traditional Aboriginal structures - of which there aren't really any other than long structures formed by bending a tree down and making a roof from bark and leaves to form a temporary shelter. The house is prefabricated and then assembled on site. This idea being that this design could be an alternative to the current government provided structures.

The model is made of basswood, MDF, homasote, polystyrene, and various glues and oil based paints. Most of the pieces are laser cut and the roof was vacuum formed from two molds I made. Everything else was either hand cut or fabricated in the woodshop.

GOOD's Slow Issue

GOOD Magazine - The Slow Issue

Q&A with Aubrey de Grey.

GOOD discusses building things that last with Saul Griffith. He's spoken at TED a few times; short and long.

Architecture that forces you to be more active. This is something that I think about fairly often. Our society is so ridiculously good at removing all physical activity from our daily lives; we don't have to scrub our clothes, climbing stairs is done by escalators and elevators, our walk or bike to work is easily done by train and car, etcetera. It's so hard to find physical activity that we design special buildings where we go to run in place and lift heavy objects for no real purpose. It's kind of hilarious and sad at the same time.

Interesting take on investing locally from GOOD. They promote investing locally in socially responsible businesses and being involved with local agriculture which according to them generally comes with a steadier 4-5% interest rate. Hm. Study after study has shown locavorism (eating locally) to be worse off for the environment. Not that I'm entirely against it, just that I think people go a bit too far in requiring all their food be sourced locally. The reality is that our food delivery system is just incredibly efficient and the energy involved in transporting food makes up a really small percentage of the total energy needed to create that food. I do support investing in a socially responsible way, but that's a tricky one. It could probably be reasonably argued that the higher interest rate that most people expect (7-9% as opposed to 4-5%) is just a negative externality being shoved off on someone/thing else that you are then capturing. So really isn't the solution to change laws regarding negative externalities? Basically you're getting left in the dust by those that are willing to play the grey area. And of course it's not that simple, but usually doing the right thing pays off. Who gets the benefits is the question and my argument is that it should go to those doing the right thing.

Cohabitation and Marriage Quality, Rates of Divorce, etc.

I decided to research and write this after having a discussion and realizing that all my arguments were anecdotal, so I did what any good dork would do. I searched JSTOR and wrote about it. With the exception of research concerning vitamins and phytochemicals this is easily some of the most frustrating and in many instances poorly done research I've ever read. I rarely feel that I have the right to criticize so many psychological studies and pHDs (especially considering that all I possess is a B.S. in psych and to be honest I wasn't exactly a stellar psych student), but in this case I make an exception.

Many of the studies made use of data from the 1960's through the mid-1990's which is problematic because cohabitation is a fairly recent phenomenon; which also presents some research opportunities as natural experiments. A few studies that I read tried to exploit this but were unable to find a result as the sample sizes they used were too small to procure a significant result. One study (#2) didn't account for the religiosity of the participants in its study. Why bother even publishing your study - to prove that there is a difference between religious couples who get married without living together first and those who cohabit and don't subscribe to any particular religion? You don't need to do a study to know that... never the less it has now been proven. Anyways, less bitching more science.

It is fairly well agreed that those who cohabit, as a general population, are more likely to get divorced and do tend to be less happy with their marriages* (way at the bottom). This is more or less agreed upon although many seem to make this the sole point of their investigation, but to me that seems to miss the point. What's dangerous about just hearing this is that one is inclined to believe that one leads to another (correlation does not equal causation - the mantra of every stats class). But look at popular media. It's not a lie, couples who cohabit are more likely to struggle and fail, but most people who read that are going to imply that living together before marriage is going to negatively effect their relationship, but read carefully. They're just saying that the two are correlated - not that one causes the other. Cohabitation is merely selective of those who are less committed and more approving of divorce.

There are currently three ways to approach why this difference exists. The first is the duration of the relationship, then the selection perspective, and finally the experience of cohabitation perspective.

1- The duration of the relationship effects a marriage (and studies surrounding it) in that those who cohabit before marriage are essentially beginning their marriages earlier. Since half of all divorces occur in the first seven years of marriage and marriage satisfaction tends to decrease with time (Kurdek, 1999) these marriages do tend to be less happy and end earlier. Thus, by the time people end up marrying they are less happy with their relationship and closer to divorce from a statistical perspective.

2 - The selection perspective posits that those who enter into cohabitation are less likely to be religious, more accepting of divorce, to not believe in marriage, are often younger when they get married (which is a really good predictor of divorce), are more likely to have divorced parents, etc. This position is well supported (#1) with the only real objections coming from studies that I find a bit lacking. Sample sizes of 90 and not accounting for religiousness just don't seem scientifically rigorous. Again, people who choose to cohabit as opposed to get married right away are very distinct groups. For a really good reading of this check out the discussion section of #5 below. I won't get into all of it here but it explores the relationship between education, gender, religiousness (not a reliable predictor of promiscuity), cohabitation, and a few other variables in relationship outcomes. Their main conclusion is that cohabiting women tend to act more like dating women than married women, and that the characteristics by which cohabiting people choose partners is different than those used by those who do not live together before marriage.

3 - The experience perspective says that the actual act of cohabiting somehow effects its participants - generally to the detriment of their future relationships. I found less evidence for this effect. Those that did support this conclusion had what I thought was unconvincing if not well done research. The third study below says that although significant results were found they were admittedly small and due to unidentified third-party variables (hmmm), so it essentially became another study linking cohabitation to divorce and less stable marriages.

Some conclusions from what I read:

Couples who cohabit prior to marriage, as a group, tend to have less satisfying marriages (and really relationships) in general for many reasons. While some researchers think the variables determining this effect are known others are unsure.

In the early 1990's about 60% of people lived together before marriage. Contrast that with only 10% in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Divorce rates for first marriages (not second and so on) during that period have stayed relatively stable.

Some studies (#4) have found that when premarital cohabitation and premarital sex are limited to only the person married (in this case the woman marrying her husband, I have no idea why this study was only done for women) the levels of satisfaction and divorce are no different than those who did not engage in premarital sex or premarital cohabitation. By extension, this supports the selection perspective in that those who get married without living together beforehand are in fact a different group of people than those who cohabit long before marriage.

The longer a couple cohabits, the more likely they are to get married. By year ten over 80% of (white) cohabiting couples get married. If a couple that cohabited is still married past seven years the negative effect associated with cohabiting prior to marriage disappears.

As living together prior to marriage first became mildly tolerated, at least legally, the most common reason was to do so was to "see if a marriage was possible." Essentially a trial run. This is no longer the case. People are more likely to respond that they cohabit to see their partner more often and for reasons of convenience and economy.

Cohabitation is illegal in five states: Florida, Mississippi, West Virginia, Virginia, and Michigan. Although, to be fair, it's rarely enforced.

Regardless of living status before being married, marriage increases the level of commitment in a relationship. However, those that marry without living together first tend to be more similar in terms of ascribed characteristics such as age and religion. Those who cohabit tend to select partners based on achieved status (#5).

*This study (#6) bucks the trend in saying that cohabitation may not in fact be deleterious to a marriage. At least not intrinsically. Its discussion section is well worth a read. Here's an excerpt:

"Far from being a mere rite of passage, the act of becoming formally married may have deep and quite different meaning for those who marry after cohabiting or after traditional courtship. To the latter, marriage is a liberating ritual through which new possibilities, notably, the public establishment of a common household, are opened to a couple and are celebrated. Cohabiters have already established common residence and have had to define their roles to each other and before friends and, often, to defend their action before parents. To them, the aspect of marriage which is emphasized is not the freedom it brings but the assumption of new responsibilities. It is this which, reflected in responses to the items of the scale, leads to their lower scores. If this latter explanation of the score differentials is valid, one would predict that as couples move further into their first decade, their premarital practice, whether courtship or cohabitation, would have progressively less influence on marital adjustment."

The studies I consulted were the following (these aren't full citations, I'm assuming no one is going to look them up but if you do this info should be sufficient):

1 - The Relationship between Cohabitation and Divorce: Selectivity or Causal Influence?, by William G. Axinn and Arland Thornton Demography, 1992 Population Association of America.

2 - The Relationship between Cohabitation and Marital Quality and Stability: Change across Cohorts?, by Claire M. Kamp Dush, Catherine L. Cohan and Paul R. Amato Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003 National Council on Family Relations.

3 - Toward a Greater Understanding of the Cohabitation Effect: Premarital Cohabitation and Marital Communication, by Catherine L. Cohan and Stacey Kleinbaum Journal of Marriage and Family, 2002 National Council on Family Relations.

4 - Premarital Sex, Premarital Cohabitation, and the Risk of Subsequent Marital Dissolution among Women, by Jay Teachman Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003 National Council on Family Relations.

5- Sexual Exclusivity among Dating, Cohabiting, and Married Women, by Renata Forste and Koray Tanfer Journal of Marriage and Family, 1996 National Council on Family Relations.

6 - Premarital Cohabitation vs. Traditional Courtship: Their Effects on Subsequent Marital Adjustment, by Roy E. L. Watson Family Relations, 1983 National Council on Family Relations.

Weekend Reading

The Obama Administration unveils its education reform plan. Front and center are two issues dear to my heart: increasing the number of charter schools and linking student test scores to teacher performance (the later requires some explanation that I don't feel like giving, but if done properly would be amazingly helpful). From Freakonomics, which has a nice overview of the whole thing too.

Researchers at Harvard have found an antibody that seems to work against a lot of flu virus strains. It's a bit early, but wow.

A Japanese photographer takes photos using film and electricity in a process that I don't fully understand and I'm not sure he does either.

What do black holes look like when they collide? Like this.

Google came out with a new phone called the Nexus One. It has a processor in it that's about twice as fast as anything else on the market. The Android OS seems to be developing rather quickly considering the G1 came out just barely over a year ago.

Pretty soon you'll be able to buy and build your own jet.

Am I missing something here? Why is this single blue fin tuna worth $177,000? That comes out to $345 a pound.

The 1000 greatest buildings.

Hahaha, a right wing publication calls out Obama for publicly predicting the bottoming of the stock market in early 2009. The crazy thing? He was right.

Paul Volcker Interview & CEO's Salaries

"The American political process is about as broken as the financial system." - Paul Volcker

Here's a short article from Business Week that I think it's very much worth reading. It's very straight froward. Paul Volcker, chairman of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board and previous Federal Reserve Chairman, is one of those rare people who's ideas can be understood by someone with a 4th grade reading level (which I think is a good thing). I like this insight from near the end of the article:

"[Y]ou take the trading guy who says: 'I brought in $100 million worth of profits, therefore I want $25 million.'Have they really taken into account that this trading guy is going on [the firm's] reputation, capital, and risk when he went out there and made the $100 million? If he's so good, let him go out and do it himself."

When people get mad that CEO's get paid a ton of money I usually explain that prominent CEO's are exceedingly rare. Think about it for a moment. Then try to follow my weird logic.

How many NFL teams are there? Thirty two - at a minimum they have 30 guys per team that dress every game. That's 1000 people, and that's just football. There are only 500 CEO's on the Fortune 500 and by the time you get to the end of that list you're talking about people making less than a million dollars a year. The point isn't "poor CEO's." I think those at the top are probably far overpaid; this is the point that Volcker makes up above. My point is that becoming a CEO is crazy hard and the reason they get paid so much is that if they can do their job 0.5% better than the #2 guy and they run say Target with 52 billion in revenue (for 2006, same year as my Fortune 500 data) then that half a percent difference is equal to $260 million dollars. So the fact that Target's CEO got paid 40 million dollars that year is not crazy at all; at least to me it isn't.

If you add up the first 7 CEO's on the Fortune 500 list you get just over a billion dollars. To get the next billion in salary you have to add up numbers 8 through 30, and somewhere around #16 the salaries start to become somewhat homogeneous. It seems that a good CEO in America makes about $20-40 million a year. That's a lot of money. However, in the grand scheme of things how much is a billion dollars? Oh right; it's 1/14,000, .007%, or seven thousandths of a percent of GDP. The problems in our country are not soley due to CEO pay. It just makes us mad.

What Volcker is saying is that perhaps my way of looking at this is not the correct one, and to some extent I agree with him. It is very hard to accept that perhaps a very few people are so exceedingly talented that they do in fact deserve salaries of a quarter billion dollars a year.

And yes, I do feel dirty explaining the plight of the xenophobic rich white man.

Reading

The irony of "green" technology (I just dislike the term, not the idea) is that you still have to plunder the earth to make the stuff. Here's how we'll be getting all that lithium from the Bolivian Andes.

This is an article about some newly researched bio-materials. The last three slides are of a sponge animal...? Their internal skeletal structure is glass. Really obscenely strong, better-than-anything-we-can-build glass. So many implications for anything from nanotechnology to aeronautics and architecture.

The courts say that cops using tasers to force victims/citizens/suspects to comply with the officer's will will from now on be frowned upon... in certain places.

Humorous article about how cheap economists can be. Good ending too. I loved that Milton Friedman would call reporters back collect, so classic.

GDP is still one of the best predictors of overall happiness for a nation.

I love when researchers have to prove something that all of us deviants already know. Apparently the clearer a liquor is the less of a hangover you get - shocking.

Picturequote

"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come
at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or
hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and
machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them
unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with
your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals,
man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them
wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong
before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get
them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell
somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again.
Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is
really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing
farce of perception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly
significant business of other people, which gets bled of the
significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that
is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's
interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock
the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof
cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word
people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we
mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting
people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them
wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then,
on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we
know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget
being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But
if you can do that -- well, lucky you." - Philip Roth, American Pastoral

Here's some instrumental music from "Dark Was the Night."

Prepping a boiler in Mokena, IL to be re-tubed. It's one of the more physically demanding things we do. One person rests while the other fights with the roller (a drill the size of your torso).