Detail from Shanghai mapNew Rule #1:
NO MORE HOTELS
If you are planning a military putsch but don't have the balls to try to take the queen in the palace, don't take a hotel. Try to take a significant installation, like say a petroleum depot or a TV station.
Why a hotel? So you have comfy beds and a kitchen staff? How soft are the underbellies of these adventurists? Why does it always have to be a hotel?
New Rule #2:
NO MEDIA INTERVIEWS AFTER AN ARREST
They should be frog marched out of there in hoods and chainlinks. No pussyfooting. No media plays. You wanted to be "heroes?" You wanted to "take a stand," suffer the consequences.
If they want to run for public office, they can use their frog march pictures.
New Rule #3:
YES TO DEADLY FORCE IF IT'S NATIONAL SECURITY
You know they want to topple the government, why negotiate? Send in the damned sharpshooters and take them out. If we're going to have a siege, then let's have a SPLENDID SIEGE! Blood on both sides. Let's see how popular adventurism gets in the barracks after they shoot each other.
What are you worried about? The national image? The morons already took it down.
New Rule #4:
ENFORCE THE DAMN OLD RULES
No more namby-pamby pardons. No more.
This, from yesterday's BusinessWorld Online*
RP positions as region’s innovation hub
THE PHILIPPINES is positioning itself as Asia’s innovation hub that can be competitive with the rest of the world, by institutionalizing a culture of innovation across multiple sectors.
The country’s positioning strategy is embodied in an 18-page document summarizing the country’s National Innovation Strategy which was launched yesterday at the country’s first National Innovation Summit, a product of months of collaboration among government, business, academe and civil society.
The document, entitled "Filipinnovation," was presented by summit organizers yesterday to President Gloria M. Arroyo, who symbolically launched the strategy with a 3D presentation similar to popular game Second Life. "Filipinnovation" is also the brand for the country as it aims to compete with Asian neighbors and other regions.
"‘Filipinnovation’ brings forward a distinct brand for the Philippines as an Asian innovation hub, different [from] — yet as competitive as — its Asian neighbors and striving to be at part with leading innovation regions such as North America and Europe," the document read.
"establishments located in large urban areas innovate as if they face fewer constraints and have lower costs. We also find a symmetric role for internal capabilities: establishments that are in firms with a greater number of IT personnel invested in WEI technology more frequently, as did those with prior experience with related non-Internet applications. Overall, we conclude that the marginal contribution of internal capabilities to investment and co-invention in a process innovation is lower for establishments in cities than for establishments elsewhere."Cities also increase productivity. CEOsforCities cites this article in Psychology Today that says:
For every doubling in city size, there's a 14 to 27 percent increase in productivity per worker, and psychologists and others are trying to explain why. They believe the gains "can be linked to having more and different people to meet, and more meeting places—parks, coffee shops, parties, or simply the sidewalk...Promoting a culture of innovation is the right goal, but to think it's all about "changing culture" is mistaken. Culture arises from place and interaction. The culture of innovation grows best in the city."City dwellers have more places to hang out, and they tend to know more people. Meredith Rolfe, a political sociologist at Oxford, studies social networks through large-sample surveys. While there are only small variations in the numbers of close friends people report having, she's found that 'acquaintance networks'—the so-called 'weak ties' that are most helpful in finding a job or stock tip—range wildly in size, from 500 to 10,000, depending in part on methodology and in part on whether a person lives in a city."
So, we're the 19th most expensive city for expatriates:
Manila has been found to be Asia’s 19th costliest city for expatriates, according to the latest twice-yearly survey by human resources firm ECA International that surveyed 39 select cities in the region.
Jakarta was the 11th most expensive place and Bangkok was in 18th place, while Hanoi landed in 32nd place — more expensive than Kuala Lumpur which was in 33rd place and just a notch above the Laotian capital Vientianne.
Islamabad was the least expensive among the Asian cities surveyed at number 39, while Seoul was judged Asia’s costliest city for expatriates.
ECA International’s cost of living indices are calculated based upon surveys carried out annually in March and September using a basket of day-to-day goods and services. The data used above refers to ECA’s September 2007 survey.
Certain living costs such as accommodation, utilities (electricity, gas, water costs), car purchase and school fees are not included in the survey. Such items can make a significant difference to expenses but are usually compensated for separately in expatriate packages.
This comparison of cost of living was calculated on a base composed of various developed countries and is used to reflect an international lifestyle. Other indices available from ECA reflect specific city-to-city comparisons, and different levels of shopping efficiency.
So, this is my first post on The City Fix. Recognize parts of it? -UDC
Is that why I only have a dozen readers?
HAHAHAHA.
(Watch out when you do the readability link. They throw in an ad into the code.)
Eugene sent me a link to this project.
The mission of 19.20.21 is a multi-year, multimedia initiative to collect, organize and package information on population's effect regarding urban and business planning and its impact on consumers around the world. This 5+ year initiative will deliver results via 5 channels: online, television, print, exhibits and seminars. This project will include 10 worldwide partners and appropriate affiliates.
So, I've been accepted as a contributor to Embarq's The City Fix blog. They'll run my first post next week.
The BIG IDEA behind The City Fix is:
"...cities do not have to be chaotic, contaminated, and clogged with cars. With the appropriate planning and design, cities can accommodate the current influx of new people while also improving the quality of life for their residents. By focusing on the intersection of transportation, design, environmental science, and urban planning, this blog examines the myriad ways that cities can adapt and ensure that the current wave of urbanization is good for humanity and the environment." (emphasis mine-udc)
This one from Robert Neurwith's SquatterCities blog:
Of course we've been doing piecemeal sites and services upgrading since the 70s but it's only lately that the World Bank has realized that the urban poor merit as much attention as the rural poor.Mega Cities expert Janice Perlman makes a profound statement:
"The international funding agencies of investment institutions need to give more to urban development and less to rural development," said Perlman. "I’ve argued that the people who come to the city [and live in squatter developments] are the cream of the crop with the highest ambitions and aspirations. If given the chance, they would build middle-class communities. You can’t blame people for polluting the watershed if you don’t provide them with water infrastructure."
Perlman advocates integrating squatter developments into the surrounding neighborhoods. Rather than demolishing these self-made communities, she recommends connecting them to the city’s infrastructure by incorporating paved streets, steps, plazas and new facades as well as offering services such as clean water, sewage connections and electricity. If visually they’re more like the surrounding neighborhoods, these needy areas will be more likely to interact with the middle class nearby, she said.
"the people who come to the city [and live in squatter developments] are the cream of the crop with the highest ambitions and aspirations."
If you've got ten minutes, here's a good intro on what BRT can do for a megacity like Mexico.
It comes across as a little bit of hard sell but it could just be lost in translation.
Can you imagine this in our megacity?
So we've talked about how more people in Metro Manila take public transportation than drive private cars; about how prioritizing public transit, focusing on moving people, is a vastly more efficient use of our roads than just working on moving vehicles; and about how our public transit woes are tied down to the boundary system that governs the business.
The common theme in the discussion about those posts was that we really need the political will to get past the vested interests of the transport unions, to transcend the myopia of the traffic managers and to get national or local governments to pay attention.
So how do we build up the political will?
As the maxim goes, "the squeaky wheel gets the grease."
For too long the discussion of transportation issues have been nothing more than the back and forth between vendors (operators and drivers) and regulators about the right fare level or about who has traffic authority over buses and jeepneys. No one seems to be looking out for the rights of the passengers.
Our investments in mass transit seem to be all about big business interests, or clearing traffic for car riding elite or speculative real estate deals. While the public winds up with high cost projects with badly located and badly designed stations and disconnected rail networks. Who speaks for the customers and the taxpayers?
Who speaks for the people who have no option but to take public transit?
I think it's time we take the advice of WorldChanging. I think it's time that the patient 78% of Metro Manila citizens who take public transit demand what's due them.
I think it's time for a Metro Manila Transit Riders Union.
It's time to ask:
SimCity on an OLPC to help kids understand cities. What's not to love?
This one via Slashdot
SimHacker writes
"Electronic Arts has donated the original 'classic' version of Will Wright's popular SimCity game to the One Laptop Per Child project. SimCity is the epitome of constructionist educational games, and has been widely used by educators to unlock and speed-up the transformational skills associated with creative thinking. It's also been used in the Future City Competition by seventh- and eighth-grade students to foster engineering skills and inspire students to explore futuristic concepts and careers in engineering. OLPC SimCity is based on the X11 TCL/Tk version of SimCity for Unix developed and adapted to the OLPC by Don Hopkins, and the GPL open source code will soon be released under the name
"Micropolis", which was SimCity's original working title. SJ Klein, director of content for the OLPC, called on game developers to create 'frameworks and scripting environments — tools with which children themselves could create their own content.' The long term agenda of the OLPC SimCity project is to convert SimCity into a scriptable Python module, integrate it with the OLPC's Sugar user interface and Cairo rendering library. Eventually they hope to apply
Seymour Papert's and Alan Kay's ideas about constructionist education and teaching kids to program."
Dear Kuya B,*
When I first heard that QC was building a tunnel so that pedestrians could simply walk from QC Hall to the Quezon Memorial Park, what entered my mind was an underground passage for CARS as they turn from East Ave towards Kalayaan/Philcoa, that would effectively allow the park to extend its green area all the way to front steps of city hall.
Alas(kado), I was obviously dreaming.
But then I thought, if the idea is to accommodate the wishes of park users, couldn't we at least still allow them to cross above ground rather than below? The objective, I would have thought, is not just to allow for some convenience, but rather to actually create space -- open and CONTIGUOUS -- with the ultimate effect of even making pedestrians oblivious to traffic flowing below them. Couldn't we have had something like this instead? (See two attached photos.)
I'm sure the tunnel is already serving its purpose and that many residents are already benefiting from not having to play Frogger on the eight-lane elliptical road. But for future reference -- say, when we start considering linking the Quezon Memorial grounds to Parks and Wildlife (yes, I'm too old to call it Ninoy Aquino) and/or the Heart Center compound on the other sides of the circle -- wouldn't this be a better alternative? Here, for example, you can actually picture yourself biking across.
Wouldn't this have the better desired effect of expanding the one green oasis remaining in the city, rather than simply allowing us all the privilege of tunneling our way to what would still feel like a separate island?
Finally, wouldn't a pedestrian bridge be cheaper than a tunnel? I also imagine there's only so much landscaping you can do undergound, even assuming the tunnel ends up being well-lit, well-maintained, and clear of vendors/snatchers.
Roby
P.S. I took these pictures in Buenos Aires, and that's really what I wanted to tell you.
Evidence from countries and cities that have introduced a design speed of 30 kilometers per hour (about 18.5 mph) -- as many of the European Union nations are doing -- shows that slower speeds improve traffic flow and reduce congestion.
"This surprises many people, although mathematically it's not surprising," Hamilton-Baillie says. "The reason for this is that your speed of journey, the ability of traffic to move smoothly through the built environment, depends on performance of your intersections, not on your speed of flow between intersections." And intersections, he says, work much more efficiently at lower speeds. "At 30 miles per hour, you frequently need control systems like traffic signals, which themselves mean that the intersection is not in use for significant periods of time. Whereas at slower speeds vehicles can move much more closely together and drivers can use eye contact to engage and make decisions. So you get much higher capacity."
Here's the good news from Mexico City's MetroBus (sp.) BRT system (via WorldChanging):
Mexico City, Mexico's MetrobusTo date, ridership is up, with 164 million users since Metrobus began operating. Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard wants to see nine more such corridors installed before the end of his term. Much cheaper than subway construction, these new lines will move as many as 1.7 million passengers daily, providing a break for public transit users, motorists and the city's air quality.And here's the money shot:
In fact, Ebrard plans to spend about $2.5 billion on improving public transit, adding a new subway line and lengthening the Insurgentes dedicated bus lane. He is going to take on the rest of the city's microbus owners as well.
Along with buying new large buses and junking the aging fleet of microbuses and vans, "We want to convince them to participate in companies like the Metrobus," said Armando Quintero, the city's Secretary of Transport and Roads. "Instead of investing in infrastructure for private vehicles, we are going to invest in collective transport, so that it is no longer a poor method of transport for the poor."
While traffic flow has actually improved, Metrobus moves much faster than the rest of the traffic (emphasis mine, UDC) -- some 250,000 people use the Metrobus every day, and a journey that used to take over two hours is now down to 58 minutes. As a result of both faster traffic and speedier bus transit, the city's famously contaminated air is spared 35,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases annually.Meanwhile, Chile's TranSantiago (sp.) stumbled at the gates (via Embarq's The City Fix):However, the system has another innovative aspect to it: a combination of public and private ownership.
Metrobus director Guillermo Calderon knew he'd have a major fight on his hands if he just kicked the microbus owners off the street. "It would have gone against the politics of the city government and brought about major social problems," he said. "Insurgentes Avenue would have been totally blocked in protest."
Since a previous study of transit use on the avenue showed that about 7 out of every 10 persons used private collective transport, "we came up with an innovative scheme, integrating them into the business," he said.
While Calderon deals with management and planning, a consortium of two entities actually owns the system: the city-run Passenger Transport Network, or RTP, and a new privately-owned company called Corridor Insurgentes, S.A., or CISA.
CISA is made up of the 262 former microbus owners who had previously been offering service on Insurgentes.
Santiago, Chile's TranSantiago“It is not common for a president to stand before the nation and say ‘Things haven’t gone well,” Michele Bachelet, Chile’s President, said in March of this year. “But that is exactly what I want to say in the case of Transantiago. The inhabitants of Santiago, especially the poorest deserve an apology.”Why? (IndioSign would appreciate these notes):Conceived more than six years ago, TranSantiago was nothing less than a complete overhaul of Santiago’s public transit system with a particular focus on the buses that clogged the city’s streets. In broad strokes, Santiago took old, polluting buses off the streets, partially replaced them with new, clean buses, and reorganized bus routes to maximize the efficiency of the system as a whole. The whole purpose was to reduce system costs and, very specially, to reduce air pollution, a major problem due to thermal inversion in the winter months.
After six years of planning, the new system was launched in early February of this year. The results have been far from impressive: service coverage declined, waiting times increased, reliability dropped, and to top things off, buses and trains were overcrowded, bursting beyond capacity, and causing all sorts of delays. The horrendous service resulted in strong public protests, and even rioting in some areas of the city. The system accomplished exactly the opposite that it was intended for, as car ownership and car use rapidly increased as a solution to meet their commuting needs (see ad by a car dealer).
Some have come away from the TranSantiago experience thinking that large and chaotic bus systems like Santiago’s cannot be fixed without creating an even bigger mess. I want to state unequivocally that this is simply not true. TranSantiago was the most ambitious transport modernization project in a developing city that was carried out in the last decade. The concept was good, but as the adage goes, the devil is in the details. During the development stages, important design components were overlooked. For example, there were not enough bus-exclusive lanes. Low-capacity bus stops were created instead of high-capacity bus stations. And the payment system required commuters to pay once they board, not when they entered the stations. All of these combined to produce overwhelming inefficiencies, with the commuter bearing the brunt of the burden. What we should take away from TranSantiago is that a project of such a massive scale demands a comprehensive design and implementation process, with all stake holders directly involved and in constant communication (emphasis mine -UDC). Quality of service should not be secondary to economic and environmental considerations. At least the average existing service conditions (coverage, total travel time) should be maintained.
(via ASLA's The Dirt blog)
The building above is the proposed concept design for Agro-Housing, Knafo Klimor's winning entry in the the 2nd International Architecture Competition for Sustainable Housing. (Here's the write-up, more illustrations, a pdf presentation and a video tour.)
Basically it's a 12-story residential building with apartment units wrapping around a vertical greenhouse core. Vertical farming is not a new concept but previous proposals were basically industrial farms in skyscraper forms. There are though, very good reasons for moving agricultural production into vertical formats.
This is the first proposal that mixes housing with agriculture. (How's that for mixed-use?)
From the website:
Advantages of this innovative building typology:The proposal intrigues me and I wonder if this can help finance vertical low-cost or affordable housing in Metro Manila? Can the greenhouse produce commercial quantities of organic produce, enough at least to provide shared income for the apartment residents (perhaps as a cooperative)? If this was replicated on a large scale (like EcoBlocks), would it be viable enough to interest an investment from agro-industry?
- Produces food for tenants and the surrounding community.
- Produces organic and healthy food that is disease and fertilizer free
- Creates an abundance of crops for self-consumption and sale for the neighbors.
- Requires no special skill set for greenhouse operation
- Allows for flexibility and independence for the greenhouse working hours.
- Creates extra income and new jobs for the inhabitants in the building.
- Creates a sense of community and softens the crisis of migration to cities.
- Preserves rural traditions and social order.
- Creates sustainable housing conditions and reduces air and soil pollution.
- Improves the building’s microclimate and reduction of its energy usage (cooling and heating)
- Uses water from the existing high water table and recycles grey water for gardening.
"The Smart Cities group at the MIT Media Lab is working on two low-cost electric vehicles that it hopes will revolutionize mass transit and help alleviate pollution. Next week, the group will unveil a prototype of its foldable electric scooter at the EICMA Motorcycle Show, in Milan. A prototype for the team's foldable electric car, called the City Car, is slated to follow next year.
The MIT group sees the vehicles as the linchpin in a strategy that aims to mitigate pollution with electric power, expand limited public space by folding and stacking vehicles like shopping carts, and alleviate congestion by letting people rent and return the vehicles to racks located near transportation hubs, such as train stations, airports, and bus depots.
"We're looking at urban personal mobility in a much more sustainable way than the private automobile provides," says William Mitchell, director of the Smart Cities research group.
