city fix

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)

Which is exactly the gospel I want to preach to Metro Manila.

EMBARQ, a leading international resource on sustainable transport, is a project of the World Resources Institute.

something to think about

This one from Robert Neurwith's SquatterCities blog:

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.

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.

Let me repeat Perlman's thesis:

"the people who come to the city [and live in squatter developments] are the cream of the crop with the highest ambitions and aspirations."

Think about it. Think about the entrepreneurial mindset required to leave a farm and try your luck in the city. You can argue that a hand-to-mouth existence in subsistence farms gives a lot of reasons for decamping to the city. Still, it requires a lot of courage and more importantly, an ability to imagine a different future to take that leap.

I bet that leap takes as much courage as risking a future working in another country to provide a better future for your family.

Maybe we need to rethink our biases about squatters.

Image credit: Jubilee by sendusout

what BRT looks like

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?

step one

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:

• Should public transit riders have to spend more time traveling and in traffic? (Be it because of a traffic bias for cars and bad PUV driving behavior.)


• The government keeps spending on expanding roads, why don't they spend on public transit facilities? Like better bus stops and jeepneys stops. Or better connections between modes. Or better sidewalks.


• Why doesn't the government implement strict quality standards so that public transit riders don't have to suffer in dirty buses with barely functional airconditioning or super squeezed in seats?


• Why shouldn't public transit be more efficient than private transportation?

My contention has always been that we need an Urban Coalition of civic and business leaders that will initiate a metro-wide discussion on urban planning issues. It may take a while to get that coalition off the ground. Starting a Metro Manila Public Transit Riders Union would be a good way to build up momentum among stakeholders, could be a good pre-cursor to the Urban Coalition and should not take as much energy to get off the ground.

We could start with colloquia in our schools, or meetings in our parishes, or informal lunch discussions about our own public transit woes in our workplaces. We could begin with a forum on transportation and invite speakers in our civic clubs. We could start a website with a sign-up sheet. We could begin by talking to our co-passengerss in our daily FX ride.

I know our civic leaders seem to be focused on bigger fish but I wish someone could find the energy to take this initiative as this addresses a very real issue that confronts the poor* in our cities. This could very well be step one in the path towards urban happiness in our metropolis.

Any takers?

Image credit: Indie Fist
by Sparktography

* -You would have to be very myopic not to see that inefficient public transport is an integral dimension of the effects of poverty on our families. The father or the mother who cannot afford a car must pay for that everyday in an extra hour or more spent in traffic, time spent away from their homes and their children.

one sim city per child

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."

green bridges

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.

Dear Roby,

I'm all for your idea. Keeping pedestrians on the ground plane is actually safer as underground tunnels require security. They also cost more as far as maintenance goes (water extraction pumps, lighting, cleaning).

The choice of a tunnel to give pedestrians "safe" access to the circle betrays our elitist bias for the automobile and how behind we are as far as traffic management theory is concerned.

We're learning more and more that the key to efficient roads and road use is to slow down traffic, not speed it up. In fact, lowering the road speed to 30 km/h smooths out traffic and increases road carrying capacity:

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."

Check out this presentation on road diets and urban livability from Parsons-Brinckerhoff (via StreetsBlog).

Your idea of connecting all of QC's parks via a green infrastructure is spot on. And many cities have discovered the power of pedestrian networks in reviving commerce, improving city navigability, enhancing civic pride and creating livable urban environments.

Since, between the two of us, you are the professional journalist/ columnist/ opinion leader, you probably have a better grasp of how we can get these ideas onto the radar of our mayors and our national government.

UDC/BDP

*btw, I only Roby A.'s sweet wife (Joy F.) call me "kuya" -since she was one of my youth campers back in the day.

Image credit: Pedestrian Bridge in
Buenos Aires by Roby Alampay

how to do it, how not to

Here's the good news from Mexico City's MetroBus (sp.) BRT system (via WorldChanging):

Mexico City, Mexico's Metrobus

To 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.

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."

And here's the money shot:

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.

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.

Meanwhile, Chile's TranSantiago (sp.) stumbled at the gates (via Embarq's The City Fix):

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.”

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).

Why? (IndioSign would appreciate these notes):

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.

Meanwhile, we're making baby steps with Hapi Buses.

Image credit: Metrobus and TranSantiago Images
from Wikimedia Commons

agro-housing and cars that fold

(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:

• 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 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?

Meanwhile, those crazy kids from MIT have proposed a carbon-free, stackable rental car.

"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.

This will be fantastic paired with Zipcar's model of shared-car ownership (read: car membership plans). I've been a Zipcar member for the last 4 years and I find it indispensable. I get to use cars without having to worry about parking or maintenance. All for a reasonable hourly rental rate that covers gas and insurance.

I've wondered if a model like this could work in Makati and Ortigas. The big worry of course is carnapping, but the technology actually tracks the vehicles which could be a bit of a deterrent. You can also price in the cost of theft insurance into the business model. It could work. Plus, if MIT's cars finally get to market, then you have the added insurance of easy to spot cars not available in the retail market. (e.g.- no place to sell the car -unless, of course, you break it up).

eco-cities and mega-regions

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Note: It's been a little tough around here, so again my apologies for not giving timely responses to your comments. We were terribly affected by the loss of Jack. Top that off with losing my eldest brother the month before, and Ana X a few months earlier. So it's been quite a year.

I had started several posts -all of them are stuck in some half complete form that I will hopefully get around to posting. (Q: How many half-completed posts are in your "draft posts" queue? I've got 38.)

There were several interesting articles last week that I wanted share and comment on but with the work grind still at maximum, I'll have to stick to short comments.

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Eco-Cities


Pictured above is Arup's EcoBlock, a carbon-neutral take on China's SuperBlock model of urban development. SuperBlocks are key units in the 400x400 sq.m. development scales used in PROC's urban planning models - usually gated, always hi-rise.

"We knew that Chinese gated superblocks comprise the largest part of China’s overall development efforts, which are among the most ambitious construction in the history of the world. The Chinese are building 10 to 15 gated superblocks every day, equal to 10 million to 12 million housing units per year (10 times the US average). " (Unforbidden Cities)

So says Harrison Frakker Jr. (Dean of UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design). Berkeley CED's Urban Sustainability Initiative worked with Arup (the top engineering firm the world) to develop the alternative model for China's cities. Enter the EcoBlock:

Designed to be replicable to the masses, a concept that in reality puts minimal pressure on off-site infrastructure and the natural environment...Largely self sufficient in terms of energy and water use, EcoBlocks are carbon-neutral developments. Their layouts encourage walking, cycling and use of public transport.

All wastewater is recycled on-site; energy generation is on-site and any energy generated on-site from waste, sun, and wind is used to treat rainwater and gray water and provide residents with high quality potable drinking water. Even food waste and landscaping waste will be converted into energy to power residents' homes.

Constructed wetlands and swales collect and treat water for reuse, serving the dual purpose of enhancing the aesthetic value of each neighborhood and creating green waste that can be transformed into energy within an on-site anaerobic digester. And EcoBlocks are designed to use 40 percent less energy than a standard development of its size.

And the potential impact of the EcoBlock model?

...if 18,333 600-unit EcoBlocks were built, it would keep 34 landfills, 42 power plants, 54 water treatment plants, and 51 wastewater treatment plants from being built, at a total cost savings of $38,737,185,000 ... (Arup) estimates that the Chinese government alone would save 1.3 percent of its GDP from not having to build additional infrastructure to meet demands for energy, clean water, sanitation and waste disposal - and that's not counting the savings from costs currently associated with treating environmental pollution associated health problems, which currently claims about 10 percent of the country's GDP.

Could we use a similar model in redeveloping Metro Manila? (To give you an idea of the scale of a 400x400 meter project (16 hectares), here's how it measures against Glorietta:

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Mega-Regions

Meanwhile, Richard Florida, proponent of the Creative Class and their role in making cities competitive, published a list of the top 40 mega-regions in the world. (All of them, urban corridors). Florida and his team compiled the top mega-regions (via CEOsforCities):

They use a new measure they call Light-based Regional Product to rank the world's top 40 mega-regions. They also include rankings by population, patents and frequently-cited scientists.

Greater Tokyo is the world's top mega-region. Boston-Washington and Chicago-Pittsburgh rank second and third.

Greater Toyko has 55.1 million people, LRP of $2.5 trillion, 91,280 patents, 11 highly-cited scientific authors. (All numbers are 2000-2001.)

Boston-Washington has 54.3 million people, LRP of $2.2 trillion, 21307 patents, and 293 authors.

Chicago-Pittsburgh has 46 million people, LRP of $1.6 trillion, 17,686 patents and 67 authors.
Rounding out the top 10 are:

Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Ruhr-Cologne-Brussels-Antwerp-Lille
Osaka-Nagoya
London-Leeds-Manchester-Liverpool-BIrmingham
Rome-Milan-Turin
Charlotte-Atlanta
Southern California (LA-San Diego-Tijuana)
Frankfort-Stuttgart-Mannheim

In an article addressed to Torontonians (via Google's cache), he writes:

According to our definition, mega-regions are made up of two or more contiguous cities and their surrounding suburbs, and generate more than $100-billion in annual economic output.

...mega-regions are the real economic engines of the global economy. The 10 largest account for 43 per cent of the planet's economic activity and more than half of its patented innovations and star scientists who generate pioneering breakthroughs, while housing only 6.5 per cent of its population. The top 40 produce 66 per cent of the world's economic activity and more than eight in 10 of its patented innovations and most-cited scientists, while being home to just 18 per cent of the world's population.

All of this convinces me that place, not statehood, is the central axis of our time and of our global economy.

Read the pre-publication release of the paper here. (pdf)

Is Metro Manila on the list? Nope. Despite the supersized populations, megacities don't automatically fall into the mega-regions, although Mexico City, the Rio de Janeiro-Sao Paolo corridor, and Delhi-Lahore make it to the list. (So do Singapore and Bangkok.)

Here's their map of the mega-regions in Asia:



Which then makes me think that key to our competitiveness would be to strengthen Metro Manila's connections (transportation and trade) with Hong Kong-Shenzen, Singapore and Taipei.

jack

Fully Charged Jack from junisimbulan on Vimeo.

The saddest news: we lost brave Jack last night. He was six.

The video above was Jack after his last tranfusion in L.A.

He came home to battle an infection. He was in the hospital for over a month, the last week or so in the ICU.

My thoughts and prayers go out to his parents and family.

It is very very hard to say goodbye. But it is selfish to keep you with us when you do not seem to get any better. We have given you the best that we could possibly give. We have begged God for mercy countless times. We’re really sorry that our best could not save you. You know we really really tried. And we know you did too. You were such a brave kid, with such tenacity and will to live.

We’re very very proud to be your parents. We feel blessed to have been part of your life. 6 years is better than 0 years. We regret that we were not able to spend a lot of time with you because we were both working. But we are thankful for the nice vacations together: Baguio, Palawan, Tagaytay, Subic, ChiangMai, Singapore, LA. It was money well spent with you.

We were really hoping and praying that we could beat FA. We were ready to beg from people and have in fact started doing that. But this disease is plain cruel. It has robbed you of energy, playfulness and laughter.

We have said to you all the things that you needed to know, especially in our last month in the hospital. You only need to remember that we love you. And even if you go away, that love will not change. Ever. You will always be our baby – the one who went through such odds, the one who has given our family so much joy and laughter in the last six years.

We’d like to say sorry for whatever shortcomings, for sins we may have committed knowingly or unknowingly. Sometimes, we take our role as parents too seriously.

Anyhow, rest our child. Go to God, Jesus and the saints. To heaven where there is no more suffering. We will always love you. Until we see each other again.


Love always,
Papa and Mama