Nagasaki along the years: An urban fractal analysis

Surface plot before the bomb

Surface plot after the bomb

This is my last publication in the Vol 1, No 4 (2011): Journal of Mathematical Modelling and Application. Here the abstract of  Nagasaki along the years: An urban fractal analysis:

It is very difficult to define what ruins are, by definition, irreparable remnants of human construction by an act or destructive process. We can not talk about them as objects, even though we know that one day buildings reach their end, the question is on how to reach this final. Fragment causes mental associations with the person who perceives, that happens to be a mystery, since no one knows the facts that have been associated with the final ruins. However, the mental reconstruction is not straightforward, because the ruins interact with nature, are absorbed by it, change over time. This is our aim to show this dynamic situation in which man intervenes in the reconstruction, by a mathematical analysis of the city of Nagasaki based on fractal geometry, and evaluate if there is any related urban morphological pattern before and after the bomb. The method applied is Box Counting.

Keywords: City reconstruction; Fractal geometry; Box counting method

Read the full article on line:

http://proxy.furb.br/ojs/index.php/modelling/issue/view/224

ISSN: 2178-2423

Space organization and organization of meaning

An altarcito enclosed inside a parking structure. Personal archives.

¨Space organization (....) is a more fundamental property of the environment than is shape, the materials that give it physical expression and other characteristics, which can more usefully be seen as an aspect of the organization of meaning. The organization of meaning can then be separated from the organization of space, both conceptually and in fact, as already notes.

While space organization itself expresses meaning and has communicative properties, meaning is often expressed through signs, materials, colors, forms, sizes, furnishings, landscaping, maintenance, and the like (...) and by people themselves. Thus spatial meanings can be indicated by walls or other sharp breaks, or by gradients or transitions. They can be indicate by sanctity (the presence of religious symbols), by planting, by various objects or furnishings -of buildings or urban spaces, by treatment of floor or ground surfaces or level changes, by the presence of particular people, and so on -that is by fixed, semifixed and non fixed feature elements.¨

La Ultima Cena, on the water heater enclosure. See more religious elements on the screen door. Personal archives.

Amos Rapoport. The Meaning of the Built Environment. P. 181, chapter Environment, Meaning and Communication. California, 1982

Parklets in Vancouver

Some months ago, an Argentine creative who draws caricatures, won a prize for designing a mobile park that would be installed in some streets of Buenos Aires. Due to the change of its location, the jury considered the idea to be ¨original and innovative¨, and they gave him money for his project.

I understand the jury was not aware of the current parklets, first in San Francisco, then in New York City, now in Vancouver. It´s not a brand new idea.

From the article Vancouver gets parklets:

San Francisco may have started something with its innovative Pavement to Parks or “parklet¨ program, which turns transportation infrastructure into public spaces. New York City is also a leader, given its recent decision to redesign sections of Broadway as permanent pedestrian malls. Now, Vancouver has gotten on board with its own Viva Vancouver program that features a set of eight streets that have become new mini-parks. Vancouver says these new spaces are “people places” designed to give residents ”extra space to walk, bike, dance, skate, sit, hang out with friends and meet your neighbours.”

One brand new parklet, Parallel Park, which cost just $18,000, features a new deck-like structure in place of two parking spots and includes built-in seats and wood-cubed tables. Designed by Travis Martin.

Read the article in full:

http://dirt.asla.org/2011/09/07/vancouver-gets-parklets/

Pictures from the link above

A free plug-in for ArcGIS mapping program developed at MIT

Urban Network Analysis, is an open-source software released by MIT. Taking a cue from social networks and mathematical network analysis methods, the City Form Research Group's program calculates how a cities' spatial layout affects the way people will live in it.

It measures traits such as "reach, gravity, betweenness, closeness, and straightness," which, in laymen terms, express features such as the number of services, buildings, and resources within a certain walking distance, or the volume of traffic along sidewalks and streets. Designers can also assign characteristics to individual buildings, as well as track urban growth and change with analytic support for policy makers.

What this means is that city planners can look at their cities and see, for instance, that some neighborhoods are closer to jobs than others (the map at the top is the "reach" map for jobs in Cambridge, MA. Red means closer to jobs). Knowing this, planners might want to build transportation from green areas to red areas. It can also predict things like street traffic: Good to know if you want to create a commercial zone where you will need walk-in customers.

Until now, claims MIT, no free tools were available for city planners to tackle the tough computational challenges of characterizing the dense tangle of streets, buildings, and transport in modern cities. MIT hopes the UNA toolbox, an open-source plug-in for the ArcGIS mapping program, will enable urban designers, architects, planners, and geographers around the world to better understand how the spatial patterns of cities will affect the way people live and move around their urban environments.

The UNA toolbox can be downloaded here

http://cityform.mit.edu/projects/urban-network-analysis.html

REFERENCE:

MIT's Free Urban Planning Software Will Help Build The Cities Of The Future. By MICHAEL J. COREN

http://www.fastcompany.com/1778514/open-source-program-released-to-redesigning-tomorrows-cities

The color and the city

Ancient Beijing. Ref. below

Ancient Beijing. Ref. below

Pueblo Blanco in Spain. From http://www.highonadventure.com/Hoa98jun/Arcos/arcos.htm

Black and white thus evoke positive and negative affective associations and meanings. These are more polarized in the West, where black has extremely negative meaning than, for example, in Japan, where black and white tend to harmonize more and are seen more in terms of a complementary balance of opposites, although even in Japan white is still preferred. White is rated positively by Hong Kong Chinese, Asian Indians, Danes, English, Germans and white Americans, whereas black is uniformly negative. These two colors seem to involve universal meanings (...) modified by culture (...)

It is quite clear, though, that colors generally do have a meaning both in themselves, by contrast with noncolors, and in terms of increasing the redundancy of other cues. For example in ancient Peking most of the city was low and grey, the sacred and hierarchically important section was centrally located, larger in scale, more elaborate and higher, and the use of colors were restricted to that section.

San Salvador de Bahía de Todos los Santos, Brasil. From http://www.enviajes.com/videos/senti-salvador-de-bahia.html

Corner in La Boca, Buenos Aires. Personal archive. Picture by Myriam B. Mahiques

Amos Rapoport. The Meanings of the Built Environment. A Nonverbal Communication Approach. P.113. California, 1982

Pictures of ancient Beijing from

 http://www.ebeijing.gov.cn/Elementals/eBeijing_Neighbourhood/t1051247.htm

Las Aerotrópolis

Atlanta. Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. De http://www.destination-one.com/

Concepto esquemático de Aerotrópolis. De la página Cleveland.com

En el principio fueron las ciudades. Y luego, los aeropuertos. De modo que el siglo XX configuró el desarrollo urbano con ciudades en el centro y aeropuertos en la periferia.

Pero según John D. Kasarda, académico de la Universidad de Carolina del Norte, el modelo urbano del siglo XXI será la aerotrópolis: un aeropuerto en el centro, y una ciudad construida en torno a él.

Zuidas en Amsterdam, Las Colinas en Texas o Songdo en Corea del Sur son distritos que hoy crecen al compás de esta música: un aeropuerto en el corazón, y arterias que comunican con distintas áreas urbanas a menos de 30 km a la redonda: de negocios, convenciones y entretenimiento, de industrias sensibles a la logística, de oficinas globales. Y más allá, las áreas residenciales. El modelo, además, barrena la ola de la sustentabilidad.

El autor presenta a las aerotrópolis como la próxima frontera de la globalización, e identifica el centro vital de nuestro futuro desarrollo urbano en el aeropuerto, ese no-lugar en donde, según Marc Augé, olvidamos y perdemos nuestra identidad.

Un 3D render de una Aerotrópolis. De la página utopianist.com

REFERENCIA:
Nota de Carlos Guyot para La Nación, sección Opinión.
http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1405263-ciudades-que-seran-aerotropolis?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=titulares&utm_campaign=NLOpi
Definición de Aerotrópolis en Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerotropolis

Richard Florida and his theory of the ¨creative class¨

Houses in Hamburg´s Hafenstrasse. The brightly painted buildings now belong to a Cooperative. Picture DPA. http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-50489-6.html

Hamburg is investing billions in ambitious urban planning. This is the project for the Elbe Philharmonic concert hall, by archs. Herzog and the Meuron, which is over the budget. Picture DPA. From http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-50489.html

From the article by Philipp Oehmke ¨Who has the right to shape the city?¨:

The three pages, printed from the Internet, are lying on Richard Florida's desk in his Toronto office. He begins skimming the document, but by the first sentence he has already had enough. It is, once again, an attack on his theories.

The sentence in question reads: "A specter is haunting Europe, ever since US economist Richard Florida came to the conclusion that only those cities prosper in which the 'creative class' feels comfortable." The "creative class" is a term coined by Florida. He puts away the pages and smiles weakly.

The sentence he just read comes from halfway around the world, from the northern German city of Hamburg, and it marks the beginning of a manifesto that Hamburg artists, musicians and social activists published in October 2009. In recent weeks, this manifesto has attracted a great deal of attention in Hamburg and throughout Germany. It is directed against an urban development policy that is based on a theory that Florida has developed over the past few years.

In his theory, Florida argues that cities must reinvent themselves. In contrast to the 1990s, they should no longer attempt to attract companies, but people. More specifically, the right people -- people who invent things, who promote change and who shape a city's image. He has classified these people as the "creative class." It's a theory that has had unintentional consequences -- including bitter conflicts in places like Hamburg. (...)

In Europe, hardly any other city has relied on Florida as heavily as the traditional trading city of Hamburg. A few years ago, Jörg Dräger, at the time Hamburg's science minister, showed up one day at the city-state's administration, the Hamburg Senate, with Florida's books under his arm. It was shortly before the summer recess, and Dräger distributed the books to his fellow Senate members. He asked them to read the books over the summer, saying that they offered a possible approach for the city's future.

Soon afterwards, the city of Hamburg hired the management consulting firm Roland Berger to examine how Florida's theory could be applied to Hamburg. "We didn't simply want to follow him blindly, but his ideas were the basis for the subsequent development of our strategy for the city," says Dräger today.

The result was called "Hamburg, City of Talent," and Florida, in his role as guru, even came to the city in person and gave presentations there.

Hafen City development (Harbor City). Picture DPA, 2008

The new Water District investment designed for 12,000 people

Clashes between the police and leftist protesters in 2009. Picture DPA

Keep on reading about the fight against gentrification:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,670600,00.html

The first "National Day of the Pedestrian" in Bolivia

Pedestrians in Bolivia´s streets. Picture from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/

Empty of cars, the streets were turned into playgrounds for street artists, performers and exercise instructors.

Cars and buses were taken off the streets of Bolivia as the country held its first "National Day of the Pedestrian".

All motorised vehicles, including public transport, were banned in cities across the country on Sunday.

Bolivia's government says it wants to raise awareness about the environment.

It comes at a time when President Evo Morales' government is facing criticism over plans to build a highway through the Amazon rainforest.

The recent protests against the highway have been an embarrassment for Mr Morales, who is a prominent advocate of indigenous rights and the protection of "Mother Earth".

Two million cars were taken off the streets on Sunday in nine cities, according to officials cited by Reuters news agency.

In Bolivia's main city, La Paz, the BBC's Mattia Cabitza was engulfed by a sea of young people taking part in a marathon, and the usually congested streets were instead occupied by street artists and other performers.

REFERENCE:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-14783305