Ew.
Paris, France
3D GIS iPad App: 3D-GIS in the Cloud
The 3D-GIS in the Cloud App for iPad and Smartphones allows city data to be navigated in 3D. Mixing augmented reality and 3D visualizations the App extends the reach of GIS beyond the office and allows organizations to make collaborative and accurate business decisions in both field and office environments.
Birdseye view of San Francisco 鸟瞰旧金山市区 by Y. Peter Li Photography on Flickr.
(via nickaddamo)
Interesting idea for an urban pool?
THING THAT HAS BOTHERED ME ALL DAMN DAY: "To live in the city is to take a kind of risk, while to live in suburbia is to avoid it."
Emily Badger, over at Atlantic Cities, is one of my favorite contributors. She lives in the Washington DC area and writes about cities. I love the DC area and I love cities, so we’re practically soul-mates, right? Sort of. It turns out we have one fundamental difference: she was raised in a city, and I in a suburb.
So, it seems only natural that I had an allergic reaction to her recent article with the provocative line, ”To live in the city is to take a kind of risk, while to live in suburbia is to avoid it.”
What got me all hot and bothered is this; the tone of the piece seems to follow an equation that basically says: being raised in cities > being raised in suburbs.
This bothers me for two reasons. The first of which is that I currently live in suburbia, would love desperately to live in a city, but for circumstances too long for even a blog post, that’s not an option right now. So that’s probably jealousy rearing its ugly head. The second, and more bothersome reason, is this: people from the suburbs aren’t bad people. Neither are people from cities, but some urbanists have this tendency to paint anyone with a 2-car garage and a driving commute from the ‘burbs as mindless drones who haven’t opened their eyes to the wonders of a higher urbanism.
Maybe I should rephrase: people from the suburbs aren’t soft, or un-cultured, or less sophisticated than someone who happened to grow up in a large urban environment.
I know this because I grew up in several suburbs, in the Midwest and outside the Washington DC area, yet my parents made it a point to take public transportation downtown to experience the urbanism, the culture, and the social benefits of a large metropolis. Yes, we always went back to our ‘burb at the end of the day, but the distant-yet-accessible nature of my suburb still fostered an appreciation and understanding for cities.
At the same time, I took part in epic games of flashlight tag and street hockey in friends’ driveways, attended several spirited block parties, and ran a successful high school lawn care business - none of which would have been possible in a more urban setting than good old suburbia.
All of this isn’t to say, “Onward suburbia!” I think if you follow/read this blog at all, you wouldn’t get that vibe. But in a way, I think suburbia is this country’s (sometimes) misguided attempt to provide citizens with a sense of individualism - their own yard, their own home, their own garage to park their own car. Whether these aspirations are a meaningful and noble pursuit is for the individual to decide. As hard as it is for urbanists to stomach, there’s a reason sprawl consumes this country: it does appeal to a vast number of Americans.
Our task, then, is to change the conversation; change it from a competition between suburban and urban to a collaboration of the best of both types of living - both lifestyles have positives to emulate and shortcomings to improve. And when I say, “our task,” I’m referring to people like myself and Emily Badger - people raised in both suburbs and cities, who have an appreciation and interest in creating the best kinds of communities.
PS: If she ever reads this, I want her to know: Oh my God, Emily Badger I love your work!
Hamburg, Germany
By now you are probably well familiar with the concept of the urban heat island effect, even if you can’t quite pinpoint the physics at play when your sneaker sole melts a little on a hot black street in July. Asphalt is an awesome material for storing the sun’s heat. On a steamy summer day, the surface of a road may be as hot as 140 degrees Fahrenheit. And it’ll stay that miserable long after the sun sets, pushing up the temperature of whole neighborhoods covered in this blacktop.
A lot of work has gone into figuring out how to combat the effect. We could plant more tree cover. We couldpaint black surfaces white. We could construct… artificial glaciers. But this idea might top them all: Why don’t we use that heat instead of fighting it?
“The bottom line is that roads get hot in summertime, even springtime,” says Rajib Mallick, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. “They have a large surface area, which is collecting solar energy. Why not use that solar energy for something? It’s free energy, and if you use it, at the same time you can lower the temperature of the pavement.”
Mallick and other researchers have been developing a model that would harness the heat contained in asphalt and put it to productive uses. Asphalt, for instance, could heat water coursing through a series of pipes embedded in the road. And that process would both cool street surfaces and send their heat somewhere useful.
