City in the night. Ciudad en la noche

This digital painting is tricky and it´s influenced by my research on urban morphology. Seen from a satellite, the cities show areas of different colors with more density, usually called ¨urban sprawl¨ or in Spanish, defined as ¨manchas de aceite¨ (oil stains). In this case, the clusters appear to be in a desert land with spots of water, like some areas in Peru, for example. But the light color in the edge of the sea is tempting us to look at the picture as a ¨vertical¨ landscape, being the sea the blue, the stains with lighting an urban horizon, and the rest, a dark-brownish sky. We can read it both ways.

Megaciudades: el desafío de convertir desechos en recursos

Un niño bañándose en aguas altamente contaminadas por desechos, Manila

Un barrio arriba de aguas con desechos, Manila

Reproducido del diario La Nación, sección Ciencia y Salud. Una nota con un video imperdibles:

Una motocicleta tras otra. El ruido se hace insoportable. En "hora pico" el aire es tan denso que a uno llega dolerle la garganta. Es la megaciudad de Hanoi (Vietnam), en un día normal de la semana. Una escena familiar en muchas otras ciudades de los llamados "países emergentes", donde crecen, incontroladas, las megaciudades de este mundo: cada día unas 160.000 personas más.

La infraestructura de estas ciudades, por lo general, no alcanza a crecer en armonía con la población -no tan rápidamente-. Cada vez se hace más difícil proveer a todos de agua potable, recolectar y depurar las aguas residuales, la basura. La cantidad de habitantes de Hanoi, la capital de Vietnam, se ha elevado a casi siete millones en los últimos años. Pero en toda la ciudad no hay ni una planta de tratamiento de aguas residuales. El líquido de sus duchas e inodoros termina -luego de un largo recorrido- en los ríos de la región y, en algún momento, seguramente en el manto freático, sin previo procesamiento.

La Universidad Técnica de Darmstadt (Alemania) ha desarrollado un concepto que debe solucionar este problema: un sistema de aguas residuales, que puede crecer conjuntamente con una megaciudad como Hanoi, que recicla las aguas negras y que, además, produce energía eléctrica a partir de excrementos. "Semicentral" llaman los científicos a su concepto. En un par de años deben surgir en la capital de Vietnam instalaciones del tamaño de un gran parqueo de autos en las que se puede lograr mucho más que el simple almacenamiento de aguas sucias.

Las negras aguas cloacales serán procesadas y transformadas en clara agua potable que retornará a las casas de la ciudad. Los lodos residuales y la basura orgánica se convertirán en corriente eléctrica en una estación de biogás. Lo que no sea aprovechable en ninguno de estos procesos acabará como abono en los campos de la región.

Nigeria

Lagos

Manila

"Las aguas residuales no son simplemente basura para nosotros", explica el profesor Peter Cornel , que dirige el proyecto en Hanoi, "son un recurso". Sobre todo las megaciudades no pueden darse el lujo, bajo ningún concepto, de usar el agua sólo una vez, insiste Cornel. Es difícil que el manto freático a su alrededor resista tal cosa.

Lo más interesante del "Proyecto Semicentral" no es sólo el reciclaje del agua. Sus sistemas, además, son capaces de crecer con la ciudad y sus habitantes: si Hanoi vuelve a ganar 100.000 hanoienses, se agrega sencillamente una nueva estación en el nuevo barrio. "Cuando las ciudades crecen de esta forma descontrolada, hay que repensar constantemente cómo solucionar los problemas de la gente con sistemas bien distintos de los que tenemos en Europa", dice Cornel.

Las fotos y el video fueron bajados del mismo artículo.

http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1407058-megaciudades-el-desafio-de-convertir-desechos-en-recursos

The ¨lilypad¨ artificial floating island for the State of Kiribati

The Lilypad floating city, a concept by the Belgian arch. Vincent Callebaut. Photograph: vincent.callebaut.org

From John Vidal´s article Artificial island could be solution for rising Pacific sea levels:

Sea levels are rising so fast that the tiny Pacific state of Kiribati is seriously considering moving its 100,000 people on to artificial islands. In a speech to the 16-nation Pacific Islands Forum this week, President Anote Tong said radical action may be needed and that he had been looking at a $2bn plan that involved "structures resembling oil rigs":

"The last time I saw the models, I was like 'wow it's like science fiction, almost like something in space. So modern, I don't know if our people could live on it. But what would you do for your grandchildren? If you're faced with the option of being submerged, with your family, would you jump on an oil rig like that? And [I] think the answer is 'yes'. We are running out of options, so we are considering all of them."

Kiribati is not alone. Tuvalu, Tonga, the Maldives, the Cook and the Solomon Islands are all losing the battle against the rising seas and are finding it tough to pay for sea defences. Kiribati faces an immediate bill of over $900m just to protect its infrastructure.

But history shows there is no technological reason why the nation could not stay in the middle of the Pacific even if sea levels rose several feet.

The Uros people of Peru live on around 40 floating villages made of grasses in the middle of Lake Titicaca. Equally, the city of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec predecessor of Mexico City that was home to 250,000 people when the Spaniards arrived, stood on a small natural island in Lake Texcoco that was surrounded by hundreds of artificial islands.(...)

But Tong's imagination has been stirred by a more futuristic vision. It's possible he's seen the "Lilypad" floating city concept by the Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut. This "ecopolis" would not only be able to produce its own energy through solar, wind, tidal and biomass but would also process CO2 in the atmosphere and absorb it into its titanium dioxide skin.

Bangkok architects S+PBA have come up with the idea of a floating "wetropolis" to replace eventually the metropolis of Bangkok. They say that Bangkok is founded on marshes and with sea levels rising several centimetres a year and the population growing fast, it's cheaper and more ecologically sound to embrace the rising seas than fight them.

Wetropolis. From http://spluspba.weebly.com/a-post-diluvian-future.html

Kiribati could emulate Spiral Island in Mexico. This was constructed by British artist Richard "Rishi" Sowa on a base of 250,000 plastic bottles. The island was destroyed by Hurricane Emily in 2005 but is being rebuilt. With millions of tonnes of rubbish already floating in the Pacific, and plans to collect it, Kiribati could solve two problems in one go.

Spiral Island, Mexico. 2000. Wikipedia. org

Read more:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/sep/08/artificial-island-pacific-sea-levels?cat=environment&type=article

Read about my proposal for a fractal analysis for the Uros´ islands:

http://myriammahiques.blogspot.com/2009/10/proposed-fractal-urban-analysis-for.html

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