The Alleyway

Hi there! My name is Sophia. This is a collection of ideas related to streetscapes, city blocks, and the urban jungle. I think the best way to explore cities and ideas is by following the alleys.

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Janette Sadik-Khan: New York's streets? Not so mean any more

This wonderful talk by New York City's Transportation Commissioner proves that changing a city's public landscape doesn't require complex computer models, financial burden, years of red tape, and pages of planning regulation.

Instead, New York's example is a call to action for all cities - a proof point that creating engaging public spaces can actually be an overnight experiment fueled by a vision and some scrappy thinking. It's a wonder what a little green paint, a few planters, and some flexible lawn chairs can do for a space.

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Flexible light infrastructure

PSFK labs did a fascinating feature on flexible lighting, exploring the potential for lighting to build flexible environments, construct "infrastructure" from scratch, connect communities, and encourage safer public spaces. 

One of the examples they profiled is the above image of a light-based soccer field sponsored by Nike and a Spanish digital agency called Doubleyou. Soccer players use a dedicated app to request a visit by the company's laser equipped van which raises a crane to project a digital soccer field onto any accommodating flat surface. This allows kids and teens without access to the right facilities to play soccer at any time of day or night. It also allows the space to remain flexible. You can imagine a community projecting any number of light-based infrastructures onto a concrete surface to transform the space as needed. 

Now, is a laser powered van with a crane scalable? Clearly not. But, perhaps there is a future we can imagine where the light emits from a smartphone or even another handheld device. 

Reminds me of something I read recently about architecture and the ability for darkness itself to create walls. Fascinating to think of infrastructure as only spaces of light and dark. Really looking forward to seeing how ideas like the Nike concept could stretch to even create whole 3D structures.

Read more on projects like this over at PSFK

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Living Micro: Single Residents Embrace Tiny Apartments (PBS)

Really enjoyed this short PBS feature on the new developments in what some are calling "apodments". These micro apartments of 400 sq ft or less are being developed in response to the increasing gap between available housing stock and housing need.

Around 30% of New York residents now desire to live in single occupancy housing, up from ~10% in the 1980's. This is the result of a confluence of multiple factors: people getting married later, divorced more often, and living longer. And yet, the city's infrastructure hasn't caught up to meet changing demand.

In a recent exhibit at The Museum of the City of New York (highlighted in this video as well), plans were presented in a competition sponsored by Mayor Bloomberg to re imagine the future of urban housing. A key part of the competition was the suspension of certain zoning codes put in place in the 1980's to prevent overcrowding. The results were truly innovative -- even including a fully built and interactive 300 sq ft apartment with bed coming out of the wall, end tables that convert into four chairs, and micro dish washers.

The Japanese have been on top of this for ages, building iconic pod structures throughout the 1970's to prepare for was expected to be explosive economic growth. While the Japanese vision may never have been realized, there is a lot American cities like Portland, Seattle, Boston, DC, and New York are learning from this experiment.

Notable concern is raised in this quick video on the impact this sort of micro-housing has on low-income housing stock. The effects are real, with many low income residents being priced out of single room housing as the space is refurbished for higher wage earning recent college grads or single adults. The hope is, however, that re-imagining the design of small spaces will pay dividends for the entire spectrum, teaching us to use spaces and technology in new and innovative ways. 

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Five Boroughs: Building Age NYC

This mesmerizing visualization uses open source city data to create an interactive map of New York's buildings by age. Covering all five boroughs, it documents over 1 million buildings with a colorful patchwork of urban history.

Fascinating as well is the response that this has gotten. Viewers are amazed by what may be one of the most detailed maps of its kind. New York residents, though, are skeptical of the accuracy of the data, pointing out numerous errors from their own day to day observations. Amazing what you can understand about data, right or wrong, once its visualized in such a dynamic way.

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Barcelona Kaleidolapse

Love how architectural forms take on new meaning when manipulated like this. Really interesting time lapse and digital techniques used by this BCN based team.

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London to Brighton by Train

Three videos of the same journey, side by side by side. 

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The world's tallest slum: Caracas' Tower of David

This is a fascinating introduction to one of the world's largest "vertical slums", an organized squatter society in an unfinished high rise in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas. This 45 story megalith towers over its surrounds, a symbol of a glittering financial future long since abandoned. Its hard to say what life is really like from a documentary as short as this, but it's shocking and in many ways reassuring to hear residents speak about the added safety of organizing in numbers. The surrounding community cites frequent reports of violence, rape, and abuse, but the tower's residents argue a different reality. This building's dripping, elevator-less, partially finished infrastructure, they say, has made room for a strong governing fabric of its own, one where the illegal residents actively renovate, collaborate, and organize to bring electricity, safety, and other services to their vertical community. 

If anything, this short 6 minute video is worth a watch to imagine an alternate vertical history for a slum and its grassroots governance. 

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3D visualization of inequality in Manhattan, by Nickolay Lamm

This image, and the others in Lamm's collection, highlights the startling reality that Manhattan has one of the most unequal distributions of wealth not only in the country, but in the world. This is a city where "middle class" means making $235K per year and where basic commodities like milk and haircuts cost more than twice the national average.

More on how Manhattan stacks up from this January New York Times piece: 

The average Manhattan apartment, at $3,973 a month, costs almost $2,800 more than the average rental nationwide. The average sale price of a home in Manhattan last year was $1.46 million, according to a recent Douglas Elliman report, while the average sale price for a new home in the United States was just under $230,000. The middle class makes up a smaller proportion of the population in New York than elsewhere in the nation. New Yorkers also live in a notably unequal place. Household incomes in Manhattan are about as evenly distributed as they are in Bolivia or Sierra Leone — the wealthiest fifth of Manhattanites make 40 times more than the lowest fifth, according to 2010 census data.

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Elevated BRT stations in Curitiba, Brazil

Really enjoyed this piece from Michelle Young over at Untapped Cities on "Why NYC’s Select Bus Service is Not a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) System". A few highlights below.

Last week, the MTA announced an expansion of Select Bus Service (SBS), New York City’s version of a “Bus Rapid Transit” (BRT) system. Streetsblog has noted that this strategic move is essentially the MTA’s acknowledgment it’s not financially feasible to build subway lines fast enough to meet demand. In pioneering cities like Curitiba (the first to implement BRT), Taipei, and Jakarta, BRT has been a viable means to improve and/or increase public transportation service at a lower capital expenditure than traditional transit options that require fixed rails, tunneling for new routes, custom train cars, etc. The system can also be built quickly and incrementally, offering improvements to the populace sooner than other more labor-intensive options.

The main criteria for a strong BRT are:

Service Planning: includes off-vehicle fare collection, routes in top 10 demand corridors, peak and off-peak frequency, enforcement of right of way, operational control system to prevent bunching

Infrastructure: includes bus lanes in center of the road, physically separated right-of-way, stations shared by both directions

Station Design and Station Bus Interface: platform level boarding, number of doors

Quality of Service and Passenger Information Systems: branding of vehicles and system, safe weather protected stations

Integration and Access: bicycle lands in corridor, bike sharing systems and bike parking at BRT stations

Out of a 100 point ranking scale for evaluating BRT systems, New York only gets 35 points. A significant road is ahead to even catch up to the best BRT systems in the country (which are not great), let alone the Brazilian standard.

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Great projects start out feeling like buildings. There are architects, materials, staff, rigid timelines, permits, engineers, a structure. It works or it doesn't. Build something that doesn't fall down. On time. But in fact, great projects, like great careers and relationships that last, are gardens. They are tended, they shift, they grow. They endure over time, gaining a personality and reflecting their environment. When something dies or fades away, we prune, replant and grow again. Perfection and polish aren't nearly as important as good light, good drainage and a passionate gardener. By all means, build. But don't finish. Don't walk away. Here we grow.

Seth Godin

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Map of Midtown Manhattan, from 34th Street to 59th Street and from 1st Avenue to 6th Avenue

Published by Sun Manhattan, 1890

Or, when all of Manhattan looked like the West Village. The 1857 installation of the first working elevator in a New York Department store was surely one of the major catalysts that transformed the New York cityscape from this image to what we know today. The widespread adoption of the elevator made new urban landscapes possible and would have entirely wiped out the village-like city if it weren't for Jane Jacobs and her tireless advocacy for the preservation of West Village street life and density. Fascinating to imagine that New York may have looked like a brick Paris or Barcelona.

Click here for the full map. Love all of the charming detail, especially Grand Central!

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Can you name these cities by their Starbucks locations? 

Slate did a great interactive feature this week mapping Starbucks locations on blank grids and asking the reader to guess the city. Its fascinating to see just how successful this Starbucks dot skeleton of a city is in describing its shape and density, even hinting at the location of airports with clustered dots outside the city center. Even more interesting is how accurate this is across the globe, even making it easy to guess Seoul, Cairo, and Barcelona just using the dots.

Wonder what this map would look like for McDonald's... similar?

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WalkNYC Maps

One of my favorite things about the new CitiBike program in New York is the brilliant design of the maps and branding that goes along with it. I especially like the placement of the user within the context of the map and city space. For example, the above image shows "you" at the center of a circle who's radius is 5 minutes walking distance and another circle who's radius is larger and indicates 5 minutes biking distance. Not only does this orient you in the map, but it highlights the new possibilities to explore, travel, and experience that the bike brings. Totally brilliant - not to mention the new version of the iconic New York Helvetica that was created specifically for the project. Love it all.

Really enjoyed this designboom piece on all the details:

the new york city department of transportation (DOT) has introduced walkNYC, a new program of pedestrian maps designed by the pentacitygroup, a special consortium of designers that includes pentagram's new york office, wayfinding specialists cityID, industrial designers billings jackson design, engineers and urban planners RBA group, and cartographers and geographic information specialists t-kartor. the team worked closely with DOT and the city’s local Business Improvement Districts (BID) and other institutions and agencies to develop the program.

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San Francisco's Private Bus Lines

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Yelp's Hipster Heat Map

This is fascinating. Yelp essentially did a keyword search on words like "hipster", "yuppie", and "bacon" and plotted heat maps for the occurrence of the word in local reviews. Given that the above image captures an awful lot of subtlety around which types of people and which types of local businesses can be found in these places, I wonder what other trends and urban insights you could uncover with this kind of analysis? Would love to give it a try!

From Gothamist:

If you've been wondering where the bearded, slim-hipped throngs of Daft Punk-worshipping, artisanal razor-shaving blog cliches prefer to get their kale and PBR, well, Yelp has got you covered; the all-encompassing Reviews of the People site has been kind enough to create heat maps documenting where reviewers mention words like "yuppie," "tourist" and "bacon" most, and naturally they've documented where the "hipsters" come to gather. And, surprise! The darkest redhot smudge lies right over Williamsburg. Sadly, the words "fibster," "yupster" and "scarf-wearing $800K condo-dweller" were not awarded the Yelp heat treatment, but just assume the locations are one and the same.

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Quora: Interesting personal stories about NYC

Its amazing what you can find on Quora, especially via the weekly digest that I receive in my inbox every Tuesday. This post about strange personal encounters in New York was particularly interesting because I think it perfectly captures what James Gulliver Hancock talks about in this interview about his drawings.

Part of what makes New York so unique is the sense that so many disparate lives are forced to encounter each other every day in very fleeting, intimate moments. This manifests itself in the architectural diversity of a neighborhood block, smiles of understanding on evening subway rides, and encounters waiting in line for the Sriracha bottle at everyone's favorite $2 dumpling shop. Starving actors, Wall Street billionaires, college kids, drop outs, and euro chic tourists are all sharing intense moments together in this city -- democratic moments of sameness that are allowed to occur on the street (or underground) stage. And, as this Quora feed shows, some spectacularly inspiring, unexpected, and downright odd things happen when you have this kind of forced encounter of every rung of society in one jam-packed urban environment.

These moments of sidewalk chance are one of New York's greatest assets as a city. The likes of Jane Jacobs would probably also remind us that we can't take the sidewalk encounter for granted. Years of advocacy went into making it possible and a continued focus on its value is essential for its preservation. Who knows when that next big idea will be inspired by a serendipitous conversation among two strangers in line for Joe's pizza.

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Hand-drawn map of Greenwich Village from 1925 

Love this hand-drawn map from a 1925 issue of Quill magazine of one of my favorite places in the city: its call-outs for cultural institutions, the elevated rail (?), the cartoon drawing of the Washington Square Park arch, and most of all, the sign below the title that says "Almost Accurate".

I'd like to think that we're experiencing a recent return of yester year's hand-drawn maps in the personalization capabilities that we're seeing today in so many of the new map apps. For example, Map Box (the mapping API FourSquare uses), is wonderful because of the many ways you can tweak it to tell personalized stories. See above for my map of the same terrain, using Map Box.

Image via kottke.org