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#Urban Planning
reasonsforhope · 15 days
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"With “green corridors” that mimic the natural forest, the Colombian city is driving down temperatures — and could become five degrees cooler over the next few decades.
In the face of a rapidly heating planet, the City of Eternal Spring — nicknamed so thanks to its year-round temperate climate — has found a way to keep its cool.
Previously, Medellín had undergone years of rapid urban expansion, which led to a severe urban heat island effect — raising temperatures in the city to significantly higher than in the surrounding suburban and rural areas. Roads and other concrete infrastructure absorb and maintain the sun’s heat for much longer than green infrastructure.
“Medellín grew at the expense of green spaces and vegetation,” says Pilar Vargas, a forest engineer working for City Hall. “We built and built and built. There wasn’t a lot of thought about the impact on the climate. It became obvious that had to change.”
Efforts began in 2016 under Medellín’s then mayor, Federico Gutiérrez (who, after completing one term in 2019, was re-elected at the end of 2023). The city launched a new approach to its urban development — one that focused on people and plants.
The $16.3 million initiative led to the creation of 30 Green Corridors along the city’s roads and waterways, improving or producing more than 70 hectares of green space, which includes 20 kilometers of shaded routes with cycle lanes and pedestrian paths.
These plant and tree-filled spaces — which connect all sorts of green areas such as the curb strips, squares, parks, vertical gardens, sidewalks, and even some of the seven hills that surround the city — produce fresh, cooling air in the face of urban heat. The corridors are also designed to mimic a natural forest with levels of low, medium and high plants, including native and tropical plants, bamboo grasses and palm trees.
Heat-trapping infrastructure like metro stations and bridges has also been greened as part of the project and government buildings have been adorned with green roofs and vertical gardens to beat the heat. The first of those was installed at Medellín’s City Hall, where nearly 100,000 plants and 12 species span the 1,810 square meter surface.
“It’s like urban acupuncture,” says Paula Zapata, advisor for Medellín at C40 Cities, a global network of about 100 of the world’s leading mayors. “The city is making these small interventions that together act to make a big impact.”
At the launch of the project, 120,000 individual plants and 12,500 trees were added to roads and parks across the city. By 2021, the figure had reached 2.5 million plants and 880,000 trees. Each has been carefully chosen to maximize their impact.
“The technical team thought a lot about the species used. They selected endemic ones that have a functional use,” explains Zapata.
The 72 species of plants and trees selected provide food for wildlife, help biodiversity to spread and fight air pollution. A study, for example, identified Mangifera indica as the best among six plant species found in Medellín at absorbing PM2.5 pollution — particulate matter that can cause asthma, bronchitis and heart disease — and surviving in polluted areas due to its “biochemical and biological mechanisms.”
And the urban planting continues to this day.
The groundwork is carried out by 150 citizen-gardeners like Pineda, who come from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds, with the support of 15 specialized forest engineers. Pineda is now the leader of a team of seven other gardeners who attend to corridors all across the city, shifting depending on the current priorities...
“I’m completely in favor of the corridors,” says [Victoria Perez, another citizen-gardener], who grew up in a poor suburb in the city of 2.5 million people. “It really improves the quality of life here.”
Wilmar Jesus, a 48-year-old Afro-Colombian farmer on his first day of the job, is pleased about the project’s possibilities for his own future. “I want to learn more and become better,” he says. “This gives me the opportunity to advance myself.”
The project’s wider impacts are like a breath of fresh air. Medellín’s temperatures fell by 2°C in the first three years of the program, and officials expect a further decrease of 4 to 5C over the next few decades, even taking into account climate change. In turn, City Hall says this will minimize the need for energy-intensive air conditioning...
In addition, the project has had a significant impact on air pollution. Between 2016 and 2019, the level of PM2.5 fell significantly, and in turn the city’s morbidity rate from acute respiratory infections decreased from 159.8 to 95.3 per 1,000 people [Note: That means the city's rate of people getting sick with lung/throat/respiratory infections.]
There’s also been a 34.6 percent rise in cycling in the city, likely due to the new bike paths built for the project, and biodiversity studies show that wildlife is coming back — one sample of five Green Corridors identified 30 different species of butterfly.
Other cities are already taking note. Bogotá and Barranquilla have adopted similar plans, among other Colombian cities, and last year São Paulo, Brazil, the largest city in South America, began expanding its corridors after launching them in 2022.
“For sure, Green Corridors could work in many other places,” says Zapata."
-via Reasons to Be Cheerful, March 4, 2024
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todays-xkcd · 6 months
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If they're going to make people ride bikes and scooters in traffic, then it should at LEAST be legal to do the Snow Crash thing where you use a hook-shot-style harpoon to catch free rides from cars.
Urban Planning Opinion Progression [Explained]
Transcript Under the Cut
Typical urban planning opinion progression [Each panel is connected to a point on a timeline]
Cueball: I wish there wasn't so much traffic to get into the city. They should put in more lanes. Megan: And more parking. Megan: Parking is so bad here.
Knit Cap: I have to go to Amsterdam for work next week. I hear they all ride bikes there. Ponytail: Bikes are fine but people shouldn't ride them in the street! I worry I'm going to hit someone!
Cueball: It would be nice if we had better transit options! Cueball: I tried a scooter. It was fun but I wish there were more bike paths.
Megan: It's funny how widening roads to speed up traffic makes them more dangerous to walk near, making driving more necessary and creating more traffic. Megan: Really makes you think.
Knit Cap: Visiting the Netherlands was cool! Knit Cap: Amsterdam is really neat.
Cueball: We've ceded so much of our land to storing and moving cars, with the rest of us tiptoeing around the edges and making drivers mad for trespassing on "their" space. Cueball: Even though we're the ones in danger from them!
Megan: Those giant trucks with front blind spots that keep hitting kids should be illegal.
Knit Cap: We should be more like the Netherlands. Knit Cap: They design their street to prioritize...
Cueball: The problem is car culture. It's systemic. Cueball: I don't know if we can fix it.
Megan: People approach road planning decisions from the point of view of drivers because that's how we're used to interacting with the city, so we make choices that make it more car-friendly. Megan: It's a vicious cycle.
Knit Cap: Netherlands! Netherlands! Netherlands! Netherlands!
Cueball: Anything that makes a city a worse place to drive in makes it a better place to live, short of scattering random tire spikes on the road.
Megan: Honestly, I think the city council should consider the tire spikes thing.
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fixing-bad-posts · 7 days
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car culture is so fucking annoying.
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american-boyboss · 2 years
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Lies, damned lies, and Uber
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I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in PHOENIX (Changing Hands, Feb 29) then Tucson (Mar 10-11), San Francisco (Mar 13), and more!
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Uber lies about everything, especially money. Oh, and labour. Especially labour. And geometry. Especially geometry! But especially especially money. They constantly lie about money.
Uber are virtuosos of mendacity, but in Toronto, the company has attained a heretofore unseen hat-trick: they told a single lie that is dramatically, materially untruthful about money, labour and geometry! It's an achievement for the ages.
Here's how they did it.
For several decades, Toronto has been clobbered by the misrule of a series of far-right, clownish mayors. This was the result of former Ontario Premier Mike Harris's great gerrymander of 1998, when the city of Toronto was amalgamated with its car-dependent suburbs. This set the tone for the next quarter-century, as these outlying regions – utterly dependent on Toronto for core economic activity and massive subsidies to pay the unsustainable utility and infrastructure bills for sprawling neighborhoods of single-family homes – proceeded to gut the city they relied on.
These "conservative" mayors – the philanderer, the crackhead, the sexual predator – turned the city into a corporate playground, swapping public housing and rent controls for out-of-control real-estate speculation and trading out some of the world's best transit for total car-dependency. As part of that decay, the city rolled out the red carpet for Uber, allowing the company to put as many unlicensed taxis as they wanted on the city's streets.
Now, it's hard to overstate the dire traffic situation in Toronto. Years of neglect and underinvestment in both the roads and the transit system have left both in a state of near collapse and it's not uncommon for multiple, consecutive main arteries to shut down without notice for weeks, months, or, in a few cases, years. The proliferation of Ubers on the road – driven by desperate people trying to survive the city's cost-of-living catastrophe – has only exacerbated this problem.
Uber, of course, would dispute this. The company insists – despite all common sense and peer-reviewed research – that adding more cars to the streets alleviates traffic. This is easily disproved: there just isn't any way to swap buses, streetcars, and subways for cars. The road space needed for all those single-occupancy cars pushes everything further apart, which means we need more cars, which means more roads, which means more distance between things, and so on.
It is an undeniable fact that geometry hates cars. But geometry loathes Uber. Because Ubers have all the problems of single-occupancy vehicles, and then they have the separate problem that they just end up circling idly around the city's streets, waiting for a rider. The more Ubers there are on the road, the longer each car ends up waiting for a passenger:
https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Uber-Lyft-San-Francisco-pros-cons-ride-hailing-13841277.php
Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After years of bumbling-to-sinister municipal rule, Toronto finally reclaimed its political power and voted in a new mayor, Olivia Chow, a progressive of long tenure and great standing (I used to ring doorbells for her when she was campaigning for her city council seat). Mayor Chow announced that she was going to reclaim the city's prerogative to limit the number of Ubers on the road, ending the period of Uber's "self-regulation."
Uber, naturally, lost its shit. The company claims to be more than a (geometrically impossible) provider of convenient transportation for Torontonians, but also a provider of good jobs for working people. And to prove it, the company has promised to pay its drivers "120% of minimum wage." As I write for Ricochet, that's a whopper, even by Uber's standards:
https://ricochet.media/en/4039/uber-is-lying-again-the-company-has-no-intention-of-paying-drivers-a-living-wage
Here's the thing: Uber is only proposing to pay 120% of the minimum wage while drivers have a passenger in the vehicle. And with the number of vehicles Uber wants on the road, most drivers will be earning nothing most of the time. Factor in that unpaid time, as well as expenses for vehicles, and the average Toronto Uber driver stands to make $2.50 per hour (Canadian):
https://ridefair.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Legislated-Poverty.pdf
Now, Uber's told a lot of lies over the years. Right from the start, the company implicitly lied about what it cost to provide an Uber. For its first 12 years, Uber lost $0.41 on every dollar it brought in, lighting tens of billions in investment capital provided by the Saudi royals on fire in an effort to bankrupt rival transportation firms and disinvestment in municipal transit.
Uber then lied to retail investors about the business-case for buying its stock so that the House of Saud and other early investors could unload their stock. Uber claimed that they were on the verge of producing a self-driving car that would allow them to get rid of drivers, zero out their wage bill, and finally turn a profit. The company spent $2.5b on this, making it the most expensive Big Store in the history of cons:
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/infighting-busywork-missed-warnings-how-uber-wasted-2-5-billion-on-self-driving-cars
After years, Uber produced a "self-driving car" that could travel one half of one American mile before experiencing a potentially lethal collision. Uber quietly paid another company $400m to take this disaster off its hands:
https://www.economist.com/business/2020/12/10/why-is-uber-selling-its-autonomous-vehicle-division
The self-driving car lie was tied up in another lie – that somehow, automation could triumph over geometry. Robocabs, we were told, would travel in formations so tight that they would finally end the Red Queen's Race of more cars – more roads – more distance – more cars. That lie wormed its way into the company's IPO prospectus, which promised retail investors that profitability lay in replacing every journey – by car, cab, bike, bus, tram or train – with an Uber ride:
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1RN2SK/
The company has been bleeding out money ever since – though you wouldn't know it by looking at its investor disclosures. Every quarter, Uber trumpets that it has finally become profitable, and every quarter, Hubert Horan dissects its balance sheets to find the accounting trick the company thought of this time. There was one quarter where Uber declared profitability by marking up the value of stock it held in Uber-like companies in other countries.
How did it get this stock? Well, Uber tried to run a business in those countries and it was such a total disaster that they had to flee the country, selling their business to a failing domestic competitor in exchange for stock in its collapsing business. Naturally, there's no market for this stock, which, in Uber-land, means you can assign any value you want to it. So that one quarter, Uber just asserted that the stock had shot up in value and voila, profit!
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/02/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-twenty-nine-despite-massive-price-increases-uber-losses-top-31-billion.html
But all of those lies are as nothing to the whopper that Uber is trying to sell to Torontonians by blanketing the city in ads: the lie that by paying drivers $2.50/hour to fill the streets with more single-occupancy cars, they will turn a profit, reduce the city's traffic, and provide good jobs. Uber says it can vanquish geometry, economics and working poverty with the awesome power of narrative.
In other words, it's taking Toronto for a bunch of suckers.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible
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Image: Rob Sinclair (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Night_skyline_of_Toronto_May_2009.jpg
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en
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ceevee5 · 7 months
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Best idea I've ever fucking heared.
[video ID: A tiktok with video footage of various trains and mellow music in the background a (male-sounding) voiceover and white text on the video say: "if the train doesn't make a profit, why should we keep it??" The voiceover continiues: "The train isn't making money, I don't see why we need to keep it" Oh I think you're right! let's get rid of the other thing that doesn't make any profit at all
During the last words the background fades from footage of trains to photos of cars on a highway with a spreadsheet of highway spending sorted by US state rolling over the screen - it's too fast to read anything but you can see that the numbers are high. It blends in white text that reads: Highways Don't make Profit Either
The voiceover continiues: guess we have to get rid of them! *the music changes to dramatic orchestra while the voiceover guy laughs like a cartoon villan*
New photos of large highways show up in increasing frequency in tune with the speed of the music. White text pops up that reads: Fund the Goddam trains instead of this bullshit
With the text still on screen the background fades to a video of a tire landfill with a huge dark cloud of smoke coming it.
A tiktok outro crediting @alanthefisher
End ID]
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berniesrevolution · 1 year
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The Urbanist Nightmare That Is Our Current Reality
Watch and scroll as Youtube urbanist Not Just Bikes explains the concept of a STROAD; a literal blight on the US  urban/suburban landscape that is also probably where you live…
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Watch the full glorious video HERE
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anarchistfrogposting · 7 months
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illegal-prime · 4 months
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Normalize updating laws and regulations that are no longer fit for purpose.
Normalize working with powerful enemies to find a solution where everybody wins.
Normalize mutual compromise.
Normalize collaboration over opposition.
Normalize civil discourse on divisive issues.
Normalize good faith and the principle of charity.
Normalize discussion of specific social, political, and economic issues.
Normalize advocacy for specific and implementable policy reforms to to tackle said issues.
Normalize imperfect solutions.
Normalize civic engagement.
Normalize public sector action.
Normalize incremental success.
Normalize improving society instead of destroying and rebuilding it from the ground up.
NORMALIZE PROGRESS!!!
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kalypss · 3 months
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Πως θα βγει και αυτή η εξεταστική;
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rmmgy-blog · 11 months
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I find it fascinating that Judaism is the only religion with explicit commandments pertaining to urban planning, setting out how cities are to be built for the Leviites. The Torah specifies that their core cities must be dense, surrounded by an undisturbed green belt, only allowing for agricultural work outside of that belt.
It seems as if Judaism is an inherently urban religion due to the requirement to live in walking distance of a Synagogue for Shabbat, making Jews the earliest advocates of something like a 15-minute city.
I wonder what the impacts of religion on urban planning are more broadly and which religions promote ideals conducive to good planning. Judaism most directly encourages density and green space as a mitzvah, but what other religions have unique and religiously inspired ideas on how cities should be planned?
I think this is an important and often overlooked question for urbanists as lobbying for change with a diverse coalition of religious communities aligned with urbanist goals of various shades would be hugely helpful towards the causes of both good urban planning and positive incorporation of religions, especially minority religions, in society and decision making.
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atlurbanist · 6 months
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Same view of Downtown Atlanta, before & after freeways destroyed city fabric, displaced residents, and established a car-centric framework.
I highlighted City Hall & the Capitol.
I post this not to make everyone depressed, but to emphasize how much work we need to do.
Overcoming this major wound to our urban fabric is a huge task and it will require a laser focus on great urbanism for every property, so we can establish a pedestrian-centered density that reduces reliance on cars.
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southernsolarpunk · 4 months
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I’ve been lightly researching the environmental impact of skyscrapers/high rises compared to low-rise buildings, and it seems low-rise is better. While high-rise buildings do have more population density, the environmental cost of both building and maintaining them heavily outweighs the benefits. And then they typically contribute to the urban heat island effect more than low-rise buildings. I want to go into this more but more research is needed. But if you’re a solarpunk artist maybe keep this in mind when drawing cities.
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luulapants · 8 months
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People talk big about structural leftist changes, but when it comes down to it, a lot of people haven't sat down to think about what aspects of their current life they're willing to change or compromise on in order to let that happen.
People say they're for walkable cities but still want to live in neighborhoods zoned for single family housing. They say they want more and better public parks but insist their kids need a house with a private backyard. They say they want cities focused on public transit but want to be able to drive to and park at all the places they want to go. They say they want integrated, diverse neighborhoods but they get nervous when there isn't a huge white majority in a neighborhood. They say they want affordable housing but still talk about safety and crime rates if there are low income people in their neighborhood. They say they don't want suburban sprawl but can't concede to the realities of urban living.
I had a family say to my face that they wouldn't look at a house in my neighborhood because it wasn't safe enough. I live there. I walk around there at night. "It's different, you don't have a kid," they said. My neighbors have kids. There are so, so many people raising children in this neighborhood. Just say your kids are too good to be raised in a neighborhood with Black and brown kids and go. This wasn't a wealthy family. They were in financial crisis and housing insecure and they were still too good to live in a neighborhood where families of color are raising their kids. They chose a rental house over their budget in a white single family zoned development on the edge of town.
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