Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Building cities with our minds

Cities are colliding with such potent forces for change that the future of our urban landscape has never been harder to predict. First, there are unprecedented opportunities for infrastructure development in the form of stimulus spending money.  At the same time, a glance at the headlines in almost any major newspaper reflects a populace that is in the mood to hash out what it means to be a city and, more importantly, what we want it to mean in the immediate and long-term future.  A part of what is revving up the drive for a massive re-think of these issues must surely be a background awareness that our future can be nothing like our past.  The economic collapse of the past year and global fallout that will ring out for decades, a growing awareness of the precarious future of an existence based on fossil fuels, and sharp concerns about the sustainability of so many aspects of our current lifestyle have left many of us wondering whether we can even have a future.  Those of us with enough optimism to believe that we can find a way to muddle through are engaged in a furious struggle to figure out how best to pull it off.  Some of us hope, likely in vain, that some key piece of technology will fall into place that can provide cheap, clean and abundant energy sources that will allow us to carry on with the status quo.  Others are beginning to conclude that we need to look inwards to understand the big picture.  The shapes and forms of cities should reflect our psychology as much as our technology.  We may not be able to fundamentally change who we are, but understanding how our wants and needs can drive urban form may be the most important first step in finding a sustainable path to the future. 

It’s surprising how much of the critical debate about the future of the city concerns physical space and how we use and understand it.  What so attracts us to super-sized homes in the open spaces of the suburbs that we are willing to tolerate long commutes to workplaces and isolation from public spaces, entertainment, and even most retail services?  Do we make such choices because we really are happier living outside of the central core of a city, or because we feel as though we ought to be?  Can it really be true that living in the wide, winding streets of suburbia among rows of almost indistinguishable houses can make us feel as though we are in touch with nature or our neighbours?  And what of those who make equally vehement arguments for the imperatives of urban densification, as if the desire to live in a four-bedroom ranch style in the ‘burbs is a crime against humanity?  Are people who live cheek-by-jowl in small condominiums and apartments really happier because they have ready access to a cornucopia of city amenities, all within walking distance, or are they driven to such lifestyles only by feelings of civic responsibility?  What kinds of homes bring comfort, and how is it measured?  How does the rapid transit debate—now being engaged by a large number of mid-sized cities because of the obvious candidacy of such big-money projects for stimulus spending—factor into such thinking?  In cities with weak urban cores, LRT systems can be used like a surgeon’s scalpel to transform an urban landscape rapidly and dramatically.  This is a potent tool to hang from the city planner’s belt, but only if he knows what to do with it.  If we build fantastically expensive transit systems, how do we know they’ll be well-used?  There’s a fascinating psychological paradox here.  Jane Jacobs’ mentor, William Whyte, taught us what makes a great public space: people want to be with people.  Yet the most cited reason for avoidance of public transit in favour of car travel is the desire to be alone!  What is it that we want?

As a psychologist interested in how the shape of the mind helps to form our cities, I’m heartened to see such debates beginning to take shape.  We know a great deal about how to make a city, but much less about how to make a city that is pleasant, livable, and comfortable for the majority of its residents.  If we take the time now to understand who we are and what we really want, perhaps we can defy the doomsayers and actually get it right.

City space in Cork

In many ways, the city of Cork seems not dramatically different to the city of Kitchener-Waterloo.  It's a bit more lightly populated and it happens to have a giant deep-water harbour, second only to Sydney Harbour in Australia.  But just as my mid-sized city residence has a mix of older traditional industries and newer knowledge industries, so does Cork.  There's a major brewery, some pharmaceutical plants, and the European headquarters of Apple, for example.  Given these kinds of very basic similarities, I couldn't help but be jealous of the layout of the city, so typical of an older European urban centre and so different from what I find at home.  It's easy to point to the very different ways in which mid-sized cities have grown on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, and to argue that the huge difference in the ages of cities has had an impact on the plan of the streets and the scales of buildings.  Yet I still find it difficult to imagine that the average North American municipal government would be able to ram through a proposal for a pedestrian centre like this one:

Or put up with this kind of ratio of sidewalk to road space:

Or tolerate the inevitable road congestion that results for those who choose to try to cram their vehicles into the city:

The best option, if you try to drive at all, is to pitch your car into one of the giant (and expensive) city parking lots and then hoof it from there.  Even better, if you're a resident, would be to get into the city via public transit, which seemed ample to me.

I know there are some big oversimplifications in all of this.  I could even guess that there are lots of Corkonians who utterly HATE their pedestrian dominated city and would like nothing more than a system in which they could drive a car into the city, find a parking spot right outside the shops and save a lot of time.  I had the perspective of a tourist who had nothing more urgent on his mind than soaking up the feel of the city, grabbing a pint at an interesting pub, making sure he didn't miss any of the must-see tourist attractions (of which, truthfully, there aren't many in Cork.  It's just a lovely, bustling, pretty city filled with pedestrians).  Nevertheless, I can't imagine what would make me object to any kind of redesign of our core, no matter how dramatic, that would give us a little more of what you see in the pictures and a little less of what we have now.  This spoken not as a privileged latte sipping condo-dweller with only a toy dog and a seasonal sports car to take care of, but as a member of a family of eight with 4.5 jobs between us, a big dog and a lot of complicated interests and ailments.

There's something else about city plans like the one in Cork, perhaps hinted at by this picture:

I yak all the time about grid cities, deformed wheels, organicity in street layouts, blah blah blah, and though I have a sense of what I mean (and an even stronger sense of how little we know about the long-term psychological impacts of living among such different kinds of urban designs), there's nothing like being inside the issue to really understand it.  Thing is, there's something utterly magnetic about these wee little alleys and walkways that lead from one place to another -- in this case down to the edge of the River Lee which runs through (defines) the city.  When you live off the grid, so to speak, then wayfinding for an utter beginner to the city can be treacherous initially, but it's astonishing how quickly one learns one's way around by imbibing the character of these little nooks and crannies.  In a grid, every intersection is more or less the same other than the signage and whatever local landmarks might appear at the corners.  Off the grid, the size and shape of every intersection is unique, flavourful and unforgettable.  One's initial confusion seems to give way remarkably quickly to an easy comfort and familiarity.  

Sometime soon, perhaps on my next travel junket, I'm going to adopt a more scientific approach to measuring some of this both by monitoring some of my own reactions to what I see and by more careful measurements of the appearances of some of the gorgeous textures and surfaces that lead eye and foot to one interesting new vista after another.

Plato, architectural renderings, public spaces and biology

I spent some time in Waterloo's new public square yesterday.  It's about a 1 mile walk from my office, so an easy jaunt for me to get into the city for lunch, and much of that walk takes me along a nice trail through some woods and past a nice urban park filled with kids and moms on picnics and university students sitting by the riverbank thinking deep thoughts.  We've all been talking about this new space for years now.  It was initially mired in controversy because it replaces a few parking spots, and there were lots of people who thought that parking right in the middle of the busiest part of the the busiest pedestrian street in Waterloo was a good use of space.  I'd driven past the space a few times and listened to its design being brutally panned by my 13 year old daughter.  I'd tried to explain to her the reasoning behind some of the features of the design, as I understood them, but my words were a little hollow as, truth be told, it's not a tremendously attractive space for the drive-by observer.  Her complaint that this was a big hunk of flat concrete when it could have been so much more had some truth to it, frankly.  And her criticism of the sculpture -- a slightly off-kilter bell, had the ring of truth to it (ha, yeah, funny).

But you've got to be in a place at street level to understand it (which is one of my main points today), so I wanted to go there.  I bought some lunch at a small takeout place that's located somewhere behind the square -- top left in the plan view you're looking at -- and I decided to just eat it there at some little tables they had set up rather than cart it over to the square.  The view I had from my little seat was of a fairly busy street -- Willis Way (though in fairness extra busy these days because it serves as a detour around some downtown road construction) -- and also of a gigantic parking lot which is one of the main lots in the downtown area.  Fair enough -- if you want people who don't live in your core to use your core, you've got to give them somewhere to park.  I just wish some of it could be underground or at least compacted a little more by being multi-level.

After lunch I ventured out to the square which looks much like the plan view rendering, except in one important respect.  I've talked about this here before, and I had further long email discussions of this very thing with my friend Richard, and also with an architect friend of mine recently.  I think those tiny dots in the rendering are meant to be the positions of people.  Thing is, unless there's a ballroom dancing lesson, or a concert, or some kind of organized event, people don't often mill about in the middle of large, flat, concrete spaces.  They're much more likely to use the edges.  This is not only good sense (the interesting features and services are more likely to be located around the edges), but downright biological (we have an affinity to locations affording prospect and refuge -- the sheltering corners and cubbies from which we can observe the grand vistas of the square).  So what matters here is that the rendering betrays a failure to take into account how the space might actually be used and understood by people.

My architect friend told me that one of the great difficulties he finds in training young architects is to encourage them to understand how the world works at the ground level rather than at plan view.  We never actually see the square as it is drawn here.  And what we see from the ground looks very different to us, and works in an entirely different way.  He likened it to a contrast between a Platonic view of the world in which objects and structures are boiled down to their ideal, abstracted forms, and an Aristotelean view in which we're grounded in the vital particularity of the experience.  And I think that observation is right on the money.  I think it also speaks to a greater problem that permeates every realm of our thinking about our built environment:  it's the distinction between how spaces will actually work given our biology and our psychology, and how we would like to think that they might work based on an idealized view of who we are and what we ought to want.

At a much more prosaic level, I have to say that the square suffers from bad edges.  When I think of the happiest day I ever spent in a public square, I remember a particular late afternoon on a visit to Bonn.  I stumbled accidentally into a large, pedestrian space that was ringed by many cafes and restaurants, all of which had a few tables that spilled out into a part of the square.  I sat at one of them and quenched my hot afternoon thirst with a delicious, fresh wheat beer.  The combination of a little shaded spot at the edge of a grand vista, the drink and food, and the sight of a busy and interesting square made me never want to leave.  And in fact I think I ended up sitting there for about six hours by myself, enjoying the sights, an evening concert, dinner, and yes, a little more beer.

Could our little mid-sized city square be like this?  I don't know.  Maybe it's a pipe-dream to think so.  But as things are right now, it definitely could not be, because it can't be properly surrounded by the right kinds of offerings.  Three sides of the square are surrounded by roads, so it's impossible for the businesses that surround the square to have tables spilling into the space -- which I think is very important.  The businesses that do surround the square are not of the right type.  The marquee building is a drug store with a large sign that dominates the space.  At the moment, there's not even any interesting street food on offer.  You've got to have public food to have public space.

But I still think it's better than a parking lot.

All fecund in my eco-nuttiness

My first op-edwas published yesterday.  I'm not doing such a great job of avoiding glancing at the comments, though I ought to have predicted that if I become aroused about the comments people make on others' work, then my reactions to comments on my own work would be, um, a bit more stress-inducing.  I have to say that it felt good to put the view out there that a very small change to an urban plan that would make life a bit more pleasant for bikers and walkers, ought to be a pretty simple decision.  There were one or two things I might have said a little differently if I had the exercise to do over again, and I would have maybe left out my discussion of inter-city travel (though still quite surprised to read that there are people who, even after looking at the VIA schedule, think that a train system that is less efficient than it was in the 1930s is acceptable).  But rather than defend myself here (I'm completely ok with being 'out there' and taking some abuse if there's a chance I can help make people keep thinking about these issues), I'll just note a couple of things.  First, as with all such discussions whether initiated by me or not, I notice that they reach the boil quickly.  Those who live outside the core in the suburbs are very reactive to defend their lifestyle on a wide variety of bases -- some imaginary and some with quite a lot of validity.  Those who live in the city and who want to adopt a healthier set of transportation alternatives including walking, biking, and public transport argue that such things are easily possible with a bit of planning and also perhaps they do sometimes claim some moral high ground.  Much of the discussion revolves around questions of social responsibility balancing personal freedom.  We don't want to be told how to live by anyone but (hopefully) we all want to find a way of life that is sustainable for all in the face of the epic changes that we see taking place now or in the near term.  How do we do it?  And what's the role of the state?  These are questions that take me far outside my realm of professional experience, yet they are connected to it.  The question of how we live is inseparable from the issue of where we live, and that's something that we all have to think about quite a lot.

And now for my deep confession.  I'll whisper this.  Lean in.  Sometimes I drive.  You see, I have a very complicated lifestyle, a bit like the ones described by some of the readers of that op-ed.  I have a large, interesting, blended family.  There are 3 full-time workers in my house, a couple of children in the public schools, and a couple more in daycare.  I also have a dog.  I have what I used to think of as a moonlight job (the book-writing gig) which I now see as the monster that ate my life (no regrets though).  So there are days when I help get the kids ready for the day, help get the dog ready to face a few hours of solitude (ok, I envy him a bit sometimes), pull together whatever I need to drag myself through another day at the office, and there's nothing I want more than to slide behind the wheel of the old spawnhauler with a big travel mug of Java in my hand, burn a few grams of carbon, and take the fossil-fuel magic carpet to the parking lot conveniently located just across the way from my building at the university.  Ok, and then sometimes I even take the elevator up to my office.  Otherwise I spill coffee.  

Not this morning, though.  Having actually been referred to as an eco-nut yesterday (yeah, I know..cool),this morning I hauled out the bike trailer and I lugged two pretty solidly built five-year olds up the road to the daycare centre.  This was interesting because we had to get through a major construction site on my street to do this, so there was a bit of a wait while the workers, who were incredibly obliging and supportive, cleared a path for us.  I had a full load of gear on my back as well.  And some lunches.  And then I had a flat tire, which I managed to buff up to the point of rideworthiness so that I could deliver my children, who were utterly thrilled to be transported through the streets in their open air chariot.  Did I mention it was pouring?

But here's the best part.  I arrived at my office soaking wet, slightly flushed, breathing deeply, fully awake and alert and, in spite of the 10 pounds I've gained in the last 2 months eating potato chips so as to avoid compulsive Amazon rank checking, feeling rather healthy.  And pleased with myself.  

If I'm going to be called an eco-nut, I'm going to live the part.  I'll let you know how that goes.

Tomorrow night, June 2, I'm going to be appearing at the Waterloo Entertainment Complex with Thomas Homer-Dixon.  I'll try not to show up all soaking and sweaty.  

London tube maps

I often use images of the London tube map to explain what I mean by topological maps.  I have to confess I hadn't known much about the history of these maps, so was really glad to find this little treasure today, which shows the revolutionary influence of Harry Beck, who in 1933 proposed that much of the geographic information in the map -- information that he reasoned was not really necessary for people making transit decisions -- should be removed from the map, leaving something that looks more like a circuit diagram and is a familiar form for transit users the world over.  This type of map, as I discuss here, is a mirror of our mental spaces.

The marketplace of place

There's a sad little platial drama playing out in my town -- Kitchener, Ontario.  We've had a farmer's market in the centre of town for well over a hundred years.  In fact, Kitchener boasts one of the oldest continuing farmer's markets in the country. The market has resided in various locations through the city, but in my years of living here, it has been in only two places.  First, in Kitchener Market Square -- a moribund downtown shopping centre that was built in 1973, mostly vacated by merchants over the years as commercial development migrated to the exurbs where operating costs were much lower because taxpayers were footing the bill for much of their infrastructure.  More recently, beginning in 2004, the market moved to a new space right on Kitchener's main street (King Street) in a gigantic multi-level building that ended up costing a small fortune.  The concept was that the traditional Saturday market would be supplemented by a retail and restaurant space that would operate every day, draw a good lunch crowd and possibly some daily food shoppers for gourmet items.  When I read of this plan, it seemed to me like a no-brainer.  The organic and locavore movement was just beginning to pick up some steam, the market was easily accessible and central, and to me the idea of being able to go grab a quick lunch and then maybe pick up some good coffee beans or some cheese to take home seemed like exactly the thing a growing city should offer.  Yet in the five years of its existence, I've visited the Kitchener Market exactly twice at times other than Saturday morning.  And my experience is not an isolated one.  The market is just not doing well.  Why?

Compared to our much larger market situated squarely in Mennonite country in St. Jacobs, the little urban market attracts a decent but much less impressive Saturday crowd.  When I go, I actually like this because it's not as hard to move from aisle to aisle, find the things I need, and even to stake out a little spot to stand and eat something delicious on offer from one of the few restaurant stalls that operates on the main market floor.  I have no idea whether the main market space is doing better or worse than in its old location, but I do know that the upper floor, housing the permanent restaurants and stores, is foundering.  It seems like such a good idea until you arrive at the site.  First, the opening to the market building is a large, empty piazza.  It's just not an inviting space that reels me in and makes me want to linger.  But more importantly, for all of the efforts that were made to make the upper space cheery, inviting, and in keeping with a market atmosphere, it just seems to make the space act like one that I want to rush out of rather than cling to.  The large, vaulted skylit ceiling and the wrap-around windows seem to take away any semblance of coziness or refuge.  The exposed surfaces, almost all consisting of concrete and metal, don't help.  The food is actually quite good and there is good variety, but having purchased a delicious order of jerk chicken or some rib-sticking Croatian fare, when I get to my table, I just want to gulp it down and flee.  It's very much the same feeling as having lunch at a food court in a shopping mall.  These are not spaces that are designed to encourage us to linger and relax so much as to bolt down some sustenance and to go back into the shopping fray.

Now there's a new manager for the market, who says that she's going to try to figure out how to make the upper retail and restaurant space more compelling.  She says she is going to "warm it up and make it very comfortable to be there."  Encouraging that she seems to have put her finger on the problem exactly.  But how to fix?  Can shuffling the purpose of the space, filling it with cooking demonstrations, community group meetings, and a mini-market accomplish this, or does the configuration of the space itself need some more radical surgery?  It's a fascinating problem and one I hope finds a solution.  I'm a firm believer in urban markets and local foods, and I know I'm far from alone.  I want to want to go there, but right now I don't.  

Le Corbusier Redux

I got some great feedback on yesterday's post on Le Corb.  Perhaps the most interesting comment arrived by email late last night.  A friend said something that given my bleary-eyed post-putting-children-to-bed state, I hadn't been able to process properly until this morning.  I quote:

"The problem is when you put actual humans into a giant open space, they all
huddle at the edges.  I don't think they knew this is how people would
actually behave."

Spoken like a psychologist, and I think getting at a key part of what I was trying to say at the end of my post.  I'm still stumbling around in dangerous ignorance of Le Corbusier's project, but I think I'm in fairly firm grasp of two things:  1. the kind of planning in which we all live off the ground in massive high-rises full of a beehive of machine-like dwellings, while the ground plane is left completely open for us to wander, drive and all somehow share, doesn't work.  2. Le Corbusier's motivations for thinking that it would were not grounded in an understanding of human psychology, but in something else.

So what the kinds of approaches I've been trying to develop and those advocated by Le Corb share in common is that they both strive to find a way to design spaces in accord with the dimensions and functions of the human body.  But I argue (like many before me -- William Whyte, for example) that the way to do this is to measure behaviour -- to see what we do in real spaces (or virtual ones).  Le Corbusier's approach, as I understand it, was to try to approach the problem in a different way -- by theorizing about what people were and, in the tradition of French philosophers like Blaise Pascal, to build an image of humanity and then to design to it.  I think this is also the approach of at least a good handful of other very prominent architects -- you could probably name some of them yourselves.  The problem is, if you're wrong about the image, you can be dead wrong about the design.  You can be wrong about the measurements as well of course, but you're more likely to be wrong about the explanations for the measurements than the measurements themselves.  And even if you are wrong, the design principles that emerge still might not be completely doomed -- you just may be confused about why something actually works.  What's truly exciting about this to me is that we now have a great set of tools for making the right kinds of measurements.  I think at least we can now get that part right.

So now I'm thinking about that -- how we design for images of who and what we are, rather than the stubbly little biological critters that we may sometimes want to deny lie at our cores, but can never divorce ourselves from completely.  I've just written a little thing for another site in which I'm talking about how I think people should go about hunting for a home.  One of the pointers is to work hard to make the distinction between the image of yourself (sometimes a fantasy) that you'd like to project via your home, and the way that you actually live.  I think that the failure to make this distinction can cause great unhappiness.  I even think our inability to separate realistic insight into self from fantastic dreams of what we might turn into given a suitably palatial residence is one of the root causes of the US housing crisis.  Sure the bankers (with a huge assist from the federal government) let people buy beyond their means.  But it's the fact that they wanted to so badly that fascinates me more.

Re-thinking Le Corbusier

The great thing about multidisciplinary research is that it lets you dig into things that interest you without having to worry too much about what you don't know.  The worst of it is that you can dig into things that interest you without worrying enough about what you don't know -- sometimes to great detriment.  And so to Le Corbusier.

There's a chapter in my book -- and I think it's a pretty good one -- where I talk about how cities work, how their spatial organization and appearance can influence our behaviour and what all of that means.  There's no way to write about those ideas in a North American context without discussing the wisdom of people like Jane Jacobs and James Howard Kunstler.  And I do.  But what also happens in that chapter is that I talk a bit about the revolutionary ideas of early modernist architect Le Corbusier.  Le Corb had some deeply concerning ideas about how cities should be put together, and to my eye there is a fair consensus that he got some important things wrong -- that if the city of Paris had really allowed him to tear down a big swath of architecture and to replace it with Radiant City, the results would have been disastrous.  Some modern buildings that resonate with some of the Le Corbusian ideals (the infamous Pruitt-Igoe building, for example) have also suggested that Le Corbusier's notions about how cities should be put together were mistaken -- perhaps because of a wrong-headed view of what people actually were and how interactions between individuals could be promoted (or not) by the organization of spaces.  Mostly, modern planners suggest that Le Corb didn't fully understand the impact of the automobile in the evolution of cities -- but given the times -- early 20th century -- one can hardly blame him for this.

So this morning, and over much of the weekend, I've been very much back in the presence of a dear friend and collaborator who passed away last summer.  Thomas Seebohm read my chapter on cities.  The review was mostly good -- he told me that he thought every architecture student should read my book, which I took as lofty praise indeed coming from someone who took such pleasure in educating architects.  But he also warned me to re-think what I said about Le Corb.  Thomas was far too gentle and kind a man to have laid it out for me, but I now understand that he wanted me to avoid making a knee jerk condemnation of Corbusian ideals without fully understanding what the man was trying to do.  He suggested I think about colour.  He urged me to go take another look.

My memory is a bit fuzzy now about what happened next.  I know I toned things down a little bit, but I didn't really take the time to re-write my review of Le Corbusier.  It was time I didn't have, and I instead fell into the little trap of assuming that since others, whose opinions I valued very highly, had condemned Le Corb in much more damning language than I would ever use, I must not be completely on the wrong track.  Anyone who knows anything about Jane Jacobs will see much irony in this kind of blind trust in authority.

More irony:  I spent this weekend with a little book called "Experiencing Architecture" by Steen Rasmussen.  Thomas put this book in my hands.  When he and I were designing experiments together, we needed to come up with some recommended reading for our participants -- so that if the people who explored our virtual reality models were really fired up by what they were asked to think about we could send them off to learn more.  Thomas recommended the Rasmussen.  I bought it, but confess I didn't open it until very recently.  In the pages of this little gem of a book I found the clearest explication of Le Corbusier's ideas that I've ever encountered.  I still know very little, but now I understand a bit more of the program.  It may still be true that Le Corb's proposals for city plans would have been disastrous if enacted (and I suppose some might argue that in some ways they have been in certain quarters), but the core of his life's work was not so much to fill cities with anonymous and insular beehives of dwellings devoid of public space and choked with cars.  His motivation was to find a way to parlay what he saw as certain basic truths about how human beings engage with built structures -- having to do with the mathematics and scaling of the human body -- into a philosophy of architecture with human embodiment at its centre.  When I try to build a virtual model of a room or a building and then measure how people behave in that space, I'm really doing exactly the same kind of thing.  Le Corbusier's theoretical underpinnings might not have been the same as mine -- where he had golden ratios, mathematical measuring sticks of the proper heights and widths of things based on the form of the human body, I might substitute certain facts of the anatomy and physiology of the body and the operation of the human senses.  But there's definitely a connection.

So on this chilly Monday morning I'm feeling a bit chastised by my own ignorance but also heartened because it isn't too late for me to learn more about this fascinating figure, correct my errors in thinking, refine my arguments and now, with the help of one or two new friends in architecture, perhaps to embark on some new studies.

Cities, networks and information: The New York Talk Exchange

Sometimes I find these Seed Salons a tad contrived and unsatisfying, but this one, a conversation between urban visionary Carlo Ratti and mathematician Steve Strogatz works really well and captivated me completely.  The discussion of Ratti's New York Talk Exchange project connects with some other discussions I've been listening to.  What the project does is to track social networks by poring through A T & T records to see who is talking to whom.  It turns out that there's an interesting kind of power law so that as the size of your city increases, there's an exponential increase in the size of your network.  This may help to account for the fact that we're rushing to join together in gigantic urban environments like never before, even though one might argue that with the advent of modern technology for communication, we don't necessarily need to pile our bodies together in huge cities.

It's a fascinating conundrum.  As viral carriers of information, we seem to be following certain kinds of rules that maximize the power of our social networks -- which is a perfectly adaptive thing for us to be doing -- big groups offer certain survival advantages.  Ratti thinks it may be possible to characterize these rules using  a kind of network theory -- a reasonably well-developed field of mathematics -- applied to real geographic spaces.  But on the other hand, as flesh and blood biological critters, the urban environment is not necessarily very good for us.  So our post-human existence as nodes in a network pulls us together, to the detriment of our physiology.

Light, rapid, and grassy

When I read Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language", one idea that seemed to me impractical in my part of the world but lovely nevertheless was to replace residential streets with what amounted to grassy cart tracks that could reduce and slow traffic and greenify a neighbourhood.  Kind of a bio-Woonerf.  Something like this might not work in a typical wet and muddy Ontario November, but it's an incredible idea for a green context for an LRT.  What's wrong with us in North America?  Why aren't we doing this kind of thing here?