Transit gaining traction?

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 | Cities, Planning, Transit, Trends | No Comments

The NYTimes, this weekend reported on better than expected ridership on the Phoenix light rail.  The Times points out that the 33,000 average daily riders come primarily from weekend riders looking to get out to the bars and restaurants.  This comes as little surprise to me, as many light rail systems, including the one in Denver, far surpassed initial estimates of ridership.  This story has played out over and over again in cities like Minneapolis, Houston, and Charlotte.  The Overhead has more on these underestimates.

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Tags: high speed, light rail, phoenix, Planning, Transit

Sense and the City

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 | Cities, Technology, Trends | No Comments

I’ve lately been excited by the concept of the senseable city (a term I’m borrowing from MIT).  Being able to measure and visualize the intangible rhythms and pulses of a city can be incredibly powerful.  As mobile devices are becoming more pervasive, and embeddable sensors cheaper, we have richer amounts of data at our disposal.  Now, I know this could feed all your worst nightmares about Big Brother, and as with any technology, in the wrong hands, it could be used for nefarious purposes.  However, this isn’t about a centrally controlled system of CCTV’s; this is about large amounts of raw anonymous data aggregated in ways where the whole tells us much more than any one part.  Raw anonymous data doesn’t sound sexy, but Current City makes it look sexy:

SMS during New Years Eve from realtime city on Vimeo.

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Tags: data, senseable city, sensors, technosphere, virtual cities

Cities XL: Next Generation City Simulation

Thursday, June 18th, 2009 | Planning, Technology, Trends | No Comments

Growing up, my first computer game was SimCity (the original).  Ever since then, I’ve become fascinated with cities and, more importantly, the spaces between our real cities and the virtual communities we create online.  I eventually ended up in the field of urban planning (unfortunately, it is not appropriate to release monsters on your city) and devote much of my mental and professional energy to imagining new ways to engage people around sustainability and planning.

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Tags: cities xl, civic engagement, games, simcity, simulation

Am I a Socialist?

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 | Essay, Trends | No Comments

I’ve long held that I believe in the markets of ideas and the power of people to make decisions given the right access to information and tools.  It’s what motivates my work at PlaceMatters.  My reading list includes books like Wikinomics, Here Comes Everybody, and The Wisdom of Crowds.  As a belief system, it is fairly independent of politics, and grounded mostly in both emerging trends and history.  I’ve shied away from ever calling myself a socialist, given the pejorative way in which it is used in politics.  As it has emerged again as a meme on every pundit’s show and in the chambers of Congress, it has been washed over with new realities.  Kevin Kelly aptly describes the new realities of digital socialism in his latest Wired article (The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society is Coming Online) that I’ll explore briefly here.

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Tags: collaboration, crowds, culture, networks, socialism