This is a quirky idea, but one that has also occurred to me, and connects with the work of one of my graduate students:
The image comes from a report by David Eilam of Tel Aviv University in which he unleashed rats in different kinds of "urban plans". The one on the left is a Manhattan grid and the one on the right, as he describes it, resembles the layout of an irregular city like New Orleans. Eilam shows that rats in both cities do the same amount of walking, but the Manhattan rats cover more territory. I'm not sure how seriously to take his argument that this kind of setup could be used by urban planners as a design tool, though some similar work in our lab is motivated by our desire to show that certain types of principles used in architecture and planning are so deeply rooted in our biology that one can show them in different kinds of animals (with key differences related to the lifestyle of the animal involved).
Now what Eilam needs to do is to build some nice little subways and LRTs to see how movement at a wide range of speeds influences the mix. You think I'm kidding. You should see my lab.
Comments