Urban Visionaries

My name is Brian Lemmerman. I'm an urbanist and architectural illustrator living in Miami, Florida. I believe that all people should live in healthy sustainable communities they have a stake in. I use this space to discuss cities, how they're made, and the people who make them.

[imaginingcities]

Two workshops by FREAKS freearchitects. Located in the northern outskirts of Paris, the site of the project is a laneway where a row of residential houses face a row of studios. In this case, the clients’ house is located in front of their two studios. Love the scale of the spaces.

Photos by David Foessel. More here.

[blemmerman]

Miami Critical Mass - July 2013

Great photos by Slipstream Photography. What's been happening lately in the Miami Bike Scene.

[blemmerman]

Is America seeing 'The End of The Suburbs'? - TODAY.com

What we knew more than 10 years ago is now becoming mainstream. That'll make our jobs much easier =)

[oahficw]

[blemmerman]

These great tumblogs all think so (and more about our campaign right here):

GOOD | The Atlantic Cities | This City Life | Sound Bite City | City Breaths | Failed Architecture | 3Space | Secret Republic | Fuck Yeah Brutalism | In Public Space We Trust | Studio630 | Aeon Magazine | Future Cape Town | The New Urbanist | Urban Funscape | Human Scale Cities | Urban Bricolage | Small Spaces | Urban Launchpad | Reinforced Natures | Urbn Futr | Cairobserver | Fuck Yeah Urban Design | ATL Urbanist | Urbnist | Megalopolis | Urbalize | Citymaus | Office for Urban Scenarios | Yurbanism | Transatlantic Urbanism |Berlin Farm Lab | Urban Excursion CPH | Urban Resolve | Transicoesurbanas | The Urban Blueprint | Imagining Cities | Imagining Cities | DeeAnn Marie | The Green Urbanist | Mass Urban | Arch Atlas | Modernizing

via thisbigcity:

[blemmerman]

You Can't Own An Elephant In Coral Gables (And Other Weird Laws)

Coral Gables has a reputation for its very strict—and frequently unusual—city codes. As recently as 2007, the entire zoning code was revamped, but to this day, there are still a few ordinances that are... well, peculiar.

[grazgul]

I should get a t-shirt made up… 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515

[oahficw]

This is beyond brilliant.

[blemmerman]

And now, I know my place.

[soundbitecity]

Inside Out XL

I’m a little late to this project, but better late than never!  Over the past few months, a large number of residents of the Ixelles commune of Brussels took part in being photographed for the Inside Out XL project (XL being slang for Ixelles).  The photographs were then hung on buildings, in windows, along fences, and on many other surfaces throughout the neighborhood, creating sort of a visual gallery of local residents and contributing to local community building and placemaking.

Some of the photos have started to become damaged through ripping, tearing, tagging, and presumably some weather damage, but they are still literally everywhere around the neighborhood.  I find it interesting to document them, even as they start to deteriorate.

The photos above are just several I snapped on two recent walks through the area.  There are many many more to be seen.

Check out more about the project on the official website here, including maps, event listings, and videos. 

The video below shows how many of the residents who were photographed also helped paste the pictures up, and also shows some people’s initial reactions.

Photos taken July, 2013

[blemmerman]

Very thoughtful. One way to engage town residents and instill ownership of their community, whether that ownership has been present is to slap their personal identities on the physical place.

[blemmerman]

Seven50 Moves Ahead. Encounters First Adversary Head-On at Summit #3. Sort of.

Part 1 of 3.

Watching the scintilla of social media buzz around the Seven50 Plan, I noticed some new voices chime in on the Facebook Page and on the Twittersphere. They said things like:

Is it true that you approve of fascism to push your changes through?

I dug further into these homespun posts to discover more folks firing off unwieldy rumors and accusations after misconstruing a quote by DPZ's very own Andres Duany (no surprise to see Duany shake things up).

At first glance, this whole thing seems like an idealist movement spackled with a couple of naysayers. Dig a little bit further, and you learn that the naysayers are more than that. Most of the resistance online can be traced in one way or another to the "Stop Seven50" movement - complete with its own conspiracy theorist-looking website run by a faction called the Liberty Caucus.

This gets more interesting. When I asked how Day 1 of the summit went, Seven50 organizers hadn't considered that the little voices appearing in their Twitter feeds would have organized an entire summit to parallel their own right down the hall of the Palm Beach Convention Center. On top of that, the attendees from the parallel conference sat in the primary conference, and tied up nearly all of the question/answer time with queries like:

Since sea levels are actually declining, why would you plan for a rise of 6 feet?

Why do new urbanists hate cars? You're not gonna make us get rid of our cars and single family homes, are you?.

I won't address the first question, but the second is totally absurd. The leading new urbanists I know love their cars.

Having missed the first day, I arrived on Day 2, and approached two gentlemen holding the large "Stop Seven50" sign along the road in front of the convention center to ask for their perspective. I listened as one of the men, Barry Mucklow, explained his beef with Seven50. In a nutshell, he explained that not everyone affected by the plan get represented at these sessions.

Thinking back to the Seven50 workgroups I had attended these past 3 months, and even the previous summits, which I had heard about, most of the participants could be described as suits either in the profession of urban planning/engineering, or they worked for the government in some capacity. I and others brought this to the attention of organizers who never seemed to have a clear solution, but they agreed it was a problem.

Left with his perfectly reasonable observation, Barry and I exchanged handshakes, and I headed inside.

Photo from Seven50 Summit 3, Day 2 Opening: Seven Counties, 50 People.

This speaks to the effectiveness of the marketing behind Seven50. What's really being done to invite people to participate? From my interviews so far with the organizers at Dover Kohl and The South Florida Regional Planning Council, each party said something to the effect of "yeah... we're working on it," and then directed me to the other to ask for more information. My understanding is that Seven50 consultants have promoted it within their inner circles, and that explains the surplus of planning professionals.

Roar Media, the advertising agency contracted to promote the events, seems pre-occupied with the ultra-flashy Seven50 website. Use the interactive scenario modeler while you're there. but they did have some representatives at the Summit to take photos and tweet a couple of times over the course of the three days. Aside from that, there's little sign of their addressing the naysayers or reporting the opposing blurbs to the organizers.

Good thing town planner and tech wiz Victor Dover himself saved Seven50 face by tweeting live from his phone from the front stage, sometimes even while his own company delivered presentations.

Seven50 now has 2 limiting factors impeding its success, and the Liberty Caucus isn't one of them (any press is good press).

Organization: When your opposition out-maneuvers you, and no one on your team takes responsibility or provides solutions, newcomers will take the other side.

Marketing: Every planner knows this. When you don't have all the right people there, your plan will have holes. Big holes. Seven50 didn't spend thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars of our tax dollars to produce a broken future for our region.

Panelists from the Day 3 Agriculture panel made this point:

Invite the farmers to the first meeting. They own the deeds to the land you want to develop.

The marketing challenge of the half-century

Our region covers just about any demographic you can think of. Time to beef up that marketing budget.

It's not too late to get back in the game.

[megalopoliscity]

Bike Share Map

Visualisation for bike shares across the world.

Check out this map of Bike Sharing across the globe!

[blemmerman]

Gov. Scott Accepts UEL Award for "Unraveling Florida's Environmental Regulations"

View the full list of award recipients.

Why I'm writing about an award ceremony.

Nearly every organization holds an annual awards reception. Outstanding members of the community come to the mic, one by one and accept their accolades with humility. With all of the negativity portrayed in mainstream media, we need more of that, right?

UEL believes in acknowledging integrity when they see it. They also take a kick-in-the-butt approach to acknowledging integrity when it bottoms out.

Part two of the evening focused on the Onion awards (those are the bad awards). Unlike the Orchids presented in part one, UEL reserves the Onions for the figureheads who stand in their way.

Won't they look like jerks for calling out the "bad" people?

Not really. At least not in the eyes of fellow event attendees who tend to share in their sentiments. Not surprising, Onion recipients don't make appearances to receive their well-deserved recognition. Heck, they don't even send interns.

A man disguised as Florida Governor Rick Scott accepted an award for "unraveling Florida's environmental regulations in favor of conventional industry practices." To make sure Mr. Scott doesn't forget his onion, tweet this article to @FlGovScott.

The Onions aren't only meant to highlight political tom-foolery. This seemingly negative approach to public recognition has a silver lining. The hope is that award recipients, if they haven't already changed their tunes after listening to the general public, will shift gears after being roasted by Miami-Dade's who's who.

The Epic Hotel, formerly an Orchid recipient, earned an Onion this year for parking a construction trailer in the middle of the Miami Riverwalk, blocking the pedestrian path. After refusing to move it, they had it zoned as a yacht sales trailer to prolong its unwelcome stay on the waterfront. If you know how to share this with them, let me know.

Miami-Dade Expressway Authority has put forth some effort in recent months to curtail its public opinion from highway construction and toll increases, but UEL spotlighted them for promoting "needless suburban sprawl" and raising tolls to fund their vicious circle. On behalf of UEL, Street Plans Collaborative's Tony Garcia, presented the agency with Scallions (not quite a full Onion) in an act of good faith that MDX will go the way of good transit in the future. Let them know about it at @MDXway.

[blemmerman]

Making Transit Sexy and other Takeaways from the 2013 Miami-Dade Transportation Summit

The full day summit was split into two tracks: an infrastructure/technology track and a financial track, where expert panelists spoke about their niches and responded to public comments. As an urban planner, I opted to attend the infrastructure track. Presentations consisted of 95% background and 5% future visioning. I'm going to focus on the 5%. You can also catch the Twitter conversation at #MDCTransit13 for the next 20 or so days before the hashtag gets gobbled up by the internets.

Miami-Dade County Mayor, Carlos Gimenez set the tone with a case for smart transit, a type of transportation that is not only efficient, but integrates with technology that makes transit readily accessible to everyone. We're talking about kinetic rail systems and battery-powered bus rapid transit that charges through induction on the highway and can support itself off the highway for miles before returning for a recharge.

MDX's (Miami-Dade Expressway Authority) chair, Maurice Ferre discussed his vision for retrofitting our existing highway infrastructure with these technologies to make the most of what we already have. Many audience members, including Transit Miami's Matthew Toro pushed back on this ideal, expressing that we're perpetuating our reliance on 20th century modes of transportation and outdated ways of thinking.

Citizen feedback was split 50/50 between topics regarding bus/rail, and topics surrounding sustainability/climate change/bicycling. The conversation around climate and cycling, topics scarcely touched on by the experts, generated significantly more audience buzz both in the crowd and on Twitter - often rousing applause. Three times consecutively, however, audience comments (including my own) addressing solar technology incorporation, sea level rise consideration and bicycle intergration were politely dismissed and tabled by the panel moderator in favor of other questions.

In the latter half of the summit, Coconut Grove Collaborative CEO, J.S. Rashid, called for the "reprioritizing of transit solutions in our communities", expressing that supporting low-income communities with reliable public transportation is essential not only for making economic opportunity equally accessible, but also for saving employers on salary premiums paid out to the car-owning upper-middle class who generally have higher living expenses.

Toward the closing, panelists discussed how leadership drives ridership. A question from Marketing Professional, Francine Madera regarding how often each of the elected officials at the front of the room actively use public transportation revealed that, although some take the bus or MetroRail to work or for weekend excursions a couple days a week, most of the time, they drive.

Takeaways

The general theme of the conference was Smart Transit with a preface of rehabilitating our existing infrastructure. Miami-Dade Transit Agencies are focused first on giving our highways a consistent experience i.e. all of the exits on the 836 Dolphin Expressway should be on the right. Then, they're focusing on retrofitting those highways with new technologies for electric or hybrid bus rapid transit systems.

Miami-Dade County doesn't yet have canned responses for questions and comments regarding climate change, solar energy or bicycling when it comes to transit, although it was apparent that many of the panelists weren't closed entirely off from the issues.

We have to be willing to pay for everything we want. Transit authorities made it clear several times throughout the day that magical transit solutions don't just appear out of thin air. One of the most hyperbolized quotes of the day: 

Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

Cool Statistics Mentioned by Panelists

Fact Checking is Encouraged

A single Miami MetroRail car costs $3 million. A metro mover car costs $2 million.

Every dollar invested in transit yields $3.5 dollars in wealth for our communities.

70% of Miami Transit is subsidized. The U.S. average is 50%.

3% of Miami-Dade's population uses mass transit compared to 13% in New York. When asked who in the room uses Miami's public transportation, roughly 90% of the hands went up. >> I was just informed that these numbers put out by Maurice Ferre are entirely inaccurate. I will provide an update once I review the data.

What was Accomplished

I'm not exactly sure. Experts gave citizens the vision for the future. Citizens expressed concerns and gave constructive feedback. My hope is that civilian input will be taken into consideration when planning our next 20-30 years of transportation systems.

On another note, a small group of young people were united both in person and via Twitter. Here's a list of people I interacted with who care deeply about the future of Miami:

@DaniAmores

@TitanAdvocacy

@MIAtransitangel

@transitmiami

@MelanieInMiami

@skrambleon

@Sustain305

@MTDot9

@AleydaKMejia

@MissSustainable

@TMStrategies

@cinera17

Miami-Dade Expressway Authority's Social Media manager made himself known. This a major development, given that MDX expressed a dire need to jump on social media at their council meeting back in April. His name is Mario Diaz, and can be contacted via Twitter @MDXway. Please be nice and send him informed questions and comments. He has better things to do than answer baseborn 140-character complaints from the uneducated public. He gets those all day and ignores them.

My Thoughts

To guide the conversation away from using automobiles and toward using other forms of transit, I feel that public transportation in Miami needs a full brand overhaul. If we really want people to make that shift, it won't matter how reliable the bus schedules are or how advanced our new high-speed rail systems get. Taking the bus or the MetroRail today, you feel like a second-rate citizen - most of the time, waiting unshaded along a 6-lane freeway, sitting next to coughing strangers, breathing black diesel exhaust, avoiding the sticky seat, and wondering how those kids etched graffiti into the glass. It's as though our current transit system was designed without human enjoyment in mind, and it has deteriorated over time as a result. Remember, it costs $3 million for a single MetroRail car.

I think it's time we make public transportation sexy in Miami. 

The way advertisers have managed to make driving sexy. Except we won't do it with fancy cupholders and all-wheel drive. We'll do it with unique experiences that driving doesn't offer.

I had a conversation with Mary Adelyn Kauffman, a musician and doctoral fellow from the University of Miami, who shared with me some of the great transit experiences her travels in Germany had to offer that could work just as well here:

The Party Bus - a downtown circulator complete with disco ball and music to transport pub crawlers (and other people too).

Weekend concerts and performances on the train in partnership with local performing arts schools.

A monthly "Leave Your Car at Home Day" with incentives provided at local events and other venues.

Please share your thoughts and ideas below in the comments.

I also recommend reading this book: "Making Transit Fun! How to Entice Motorists from Their Cars (and onto their feet, a bike, or bus)" by Darrin Nordahl. It's only $3 if you have a Kindle.

Contact Your Local Transportation People

Boy, would they love to hear something positive for a change! The best way to get in touch with the people in charge of the summit to express transportation concerns is through this Miami-Dade Transportation Trust website page. If anyone can find their Facebook Page, please send me a link, and I'll post it here.

[blemmerman]

In 2001 artist Peter Gibson began a guerrilla street art campaign to encourage the city of Montreal to build more bike lanes. What began as a project borne of activism eventually became an art project that continues to this day.

[thegreenurbanist]

Read on

[blemmerman]

Proposal for Bicycle-Friendly Streets Starting in Miami-Dade County

As of June 2, 2013 at Miami's National Day of Civic Hacking - this idea is only a couple days old, and can use your help. Please contact me if you would like to contribute.

Miami-Dade citizens have the perception that their streets are unsafe for bicyclists due to the many bike and pedestrian related auto accidents we hear about in the media and experience ourselves (I’ve been in two bike accidents, myself). This is a phenomenon that puts the brakes on many of the county’s health and sustainability related initiatives in an era when the rest of the world is making a return toward building livable and walkable places.

We seek to alter the current conversation about bike safety in Miami-Dade in order to increase the number of cyclists on the road, thereby reducing the number of automobiles and improving safety. As an added bonus, the increase in cycling will lead to the greater fitness and sociability of our citizens, while reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we pump into our atmosphere.

To do this, we must first discover whether there is bicycle-related data to support or overthrow the current perception that Dade County’s streets are dangerous for cyclists. Studies have been conducted by independent organizations, but our team hasn’t yet found any bike-related data from Miami-Dade County. Data could also be scraped from news stories featuring these types of incidents.

The data we seek concerns the number of bike to automobile related accidents that have taken place within the county limits, where they took place, and when. We can use this data to determine what the frequency of bike to automobile related incidents are, and pinpoint the hotspots where accidents occur most in the county. If records of incidents involving bicycles cannot be found, purely automobile-related incidents will suffice as a measure of danger in our streets.

Because safety and danger are comparative terms (i.e. when people say that flying is safe, one could argue that planes have fallen out of the sky and killed people. Therefore, it’s more appropriate to compare the safety of flying to an activity like driving, which is responsible for a higher frequency of death and injury), we need to compare the relative safety of Miami-Dade’s streets to the safety of a place like Portland (everybody wants to beat Portland), renowned for its bike-oriented culture.

Not only must we compare the rates of death and injury to change the current perception, but there are other factors such as the quality of a person’s bicycle commute that contributes to their propensity or reluctance to ride. Current mobile technologies now allow us to track things like:

Vector data of individual commutes.

Distance of a commute v. time travelled, compared to other places, which would tell us about the overall ease of bike travel.

Time of day travelled.

Velocity during any given moment in a commute as determined by GPS, which would tell us about the friction (not the roughness of the asphalt, but the general surroundings such as the effectiveness of bike lanes, sharrows, road width, traffic conditions, etc.) of the road.

Acceleration and deceleration during a commute, which would tell us about the obstacles (including accidents) encountered during a trip. Accelerometers in smartphones are now sensitive enough to record the vibrations resulting from bike tires rolling over asphalt – one way of determining the overall quality of our pavement very inexpensively on a continual basis. Imagine thousands of cyclists commuting every day for years through nearly every street in the county measuring the road quality.

Type of commute being made – manually inputted by the cyclist.

Work commute. More rides in this category indicate a concentration of cyclists dealing with rush hour traffic.

Running errands.

Leisure ride. More rides in this category indicate either that people have a lot of time on their hands, or that Miami-Dade truly is a great place for cyclists to ride.

The aforementioned data, except the type of commute being made, have already been collected all over the world by independent applications such as MapMyRide and Garmin Connect, but it is not publicly available. We propose connecting with these companies to gain access to their data for the purposes of our public safety study.

If, after these comparisons, we determine that our streets are inherently unsafe for cyclists, we now have the proper information to open a dialogue for change between our municipalities and our citizens.

If, on the other hand, we determine that our streets are safe, we propose expanding upon our county’s safe streets by empowering citizens with knowledge of where problem areas are, and giving them an ongoing means to communicate to the county what works and what doesn’t work for cyclists in our streets.

We propose creating a mobile application for cyclists that does this by accomplishing three objectives, while utilizing a combination of government and user generated data.

The app will collect data related to ride quality previously mentioned by using technology that powers apps like MapMyRide. I smell a partnership.

Vector data for individual commutes.

Distance and time traveled.

Time of day.

Velocity.

Acceleration/deceleration.

Type of ride.

It allows users to submit positive and negative events to a database during or after a commute using a combination of text and photos. They can pinpoint their recorded incidents on a map within the application.

It warns cyclists of accident-prone areas nearby by displaying automobile accident datapoints on the map near the cyclists’ current location and, and it generates an audio signal. It will also display points representing other people’s positive and negative submissions.

To constrain the scope of the project in the interest of time, money and usability, this app will not include a way to make friends, track past routes, beat your best times, or comment on other people’s submissions. It will, however, require a valid login to authenticate collected data, and borrow certain functions directly from another application that does these social things. It also will not allow cyclists to interpolate the best routes to take between points A and B. We have Google Maps and MapQuest for that.

The data input from this application is meant to be monitored and added to by government agencies. In an ideal world, all of these agencies would be using a standardized API. With the knowledge that Miami-Dade County has begun the process of standardizing an API across its 34 municipalities, we feel there is a possibility that outside agencies will adopt their API, making the utilization of this application integral to their own bicycle safety initiatives.

Miami-Dade County already has a bicycle route-related website in partnership with FIU called the Bicycle Knowledge Explorer, which is designed to collect some of the commute quality data I’ve talked about. It could serve as a parent website to the mobile app with some refinement to its features.

[blemmerman]

I've been in two bike accidents. As a part of Miami's National Day for Civic Hacking on June 1 and 2, 2013, a group of bicycle advocates and I put together a proposal for a research project and mobile application that will alter the conversation about bike-safety in Miami-Dade County's streets. The proposed design is scalable to the national level, and will provide municipalities and civilians an easy way to share data with one another related to bike to automobile accidents and the quality of our streets. The effort will save lives and money on behalf of government and citizens, while increasing bicycle ridership nation-wide.

[oahficw]

Only 1.5% of Istanbul is devoted to public green space, so an official decision to demolish a park and replace it with a shopping mall is receiving strong protests. Demonstrations continue amid tear gas and pepper spray.

[blemmerman]

Kudos to sticking up for green spaces. Too many times, big box stores and shopping malls take over our public space in the U.S. and even though we have the appropriate avenues to speak out against it, few of us actually say anything. Then, when a project breaks ground, we let it happen without a peep.

[blemmerman]

Merging YouTube Accounts

This morning I tried to transfer my YouTube account from my Google Apps account to my Gmail account, and learned it was impossible. According to Google, you have to download your videos, delete your account, and start a new one. I began this process, but then hesitated. I checked my YouTube account settings again around noon, and noticed a new feature in the Advanced section that was not there before. It allows you make the transfer between Google accounts with only a couple of clicks. The people have been asking for this for years! Thank you, Google.