"America's G.P.A.: D+. Estimated investment needed by 2020: $3.6 trillion."

No one’s surprised by that quote, right? We hear this at least once every four years, when the American Society of Civil Engineers releases its report card. The news is always bad, because guess what? We still didn’t do anything to rebuild, replace, or make redundant all those rickety bridges and crumbling dams. 
I regularly drive under an interstate overpass near my house (that’s Route 80 in Tully, for you local folk). It’s best not to look to closely at it, the rusted steel and crumbling concrete. When the traffic light stops me under those tons of decay, I look up and think, “how did we get here?”

Well, you know how we got here. To oversimplify (because this is a blog post, not the book), we, as a country, used to invest massive amounts in public infrastructure, and now we, as a country, do this no longer. This means not only do we not build new or replace or even maintain old, but it means that we have a large number of structures that are all reaching the end of their lifespan at once. It’s a bit like if you buy all your socks at once, they all wear out at once. If you bought one pair of socks every few months, you’d always have socks in various states of repair: some new, some wearing out, some in between. Because we’ve coasted for a long time on the infrastructure investments of the past, we now have a lot of it wearing out at once, and as all those bridges and dams and roads have aged, we’ve changed into a country that doesn’t really do huge public projects any more. This lack of investment dovetails with other urban problems, creating terrible multiplier effects like Flint's water supply crisis.


The city where I work, Syracuse, New York, had on average more than one water main break EVERY DAY in 2015.  But Syracuse is nowhere near unique in its infrastructural woes. Our failing infrastructure is one fruit borne of our politics over the last few decades, the inescapable sum of gridlock and budget cuts and starving the beast. I have my politics and you have yours, but we share the broken water main (although those of us with the wherewithal to live in the suburbs or exurbs don’t have nearly the share of broken water mains as those in the city, but that’s another post). 

I propose we acknowledge our nation’s epidemic of failing infrastructure as a typical, if not universal, condition of urban design projects. Expect the pipes to break or be clogged, the combined sewers to overflow, the pavement to crack, the streets to flood. This makes the actual condition of failing urban systems part of the landscape, not as we think they should be or wish they were. They aren’t swept under the rug of inhibitions, but instead can be viewed objectively and incorporated into the catalog of opportunities and constraints that designers make at the beginning of a project. Like every other site condition, those failing systems can provide constraints…

…and opportunities.

Wait - really? Could failing systems in urban infrastructure create design opportunities? Could those opportunities include ways not only to fix or mitigate the failure, but also advance toward cities as more sustainable, healthy, and just places?

Consider this: failing infrastructure, public systems, and neglect of all forms is already a major shaper of our cities. The whole idea of urban wilds is based on neglect, the shaping force of lack of intention, what happens while we’re looking the other way. Disinvestment is neglect. Fraying social fabric is neglect. Less directly, all the myriad compromises required by years of tighter and tighter budgets, of doing more with less, are neglect of a sort, because something (or someone) always loses that compromise.  Choices must be made, and the expendable things become neglected. We choose sidewalks over mowing, roads over sidewalks, highways over side streets, and everything over public transportation. 

Neglect shapes the city through lack of intention.  We don’t mean for it to happen, but it does, and when we’re consistent in what aspects or places we overlook, neglect becomes their primary shaper. 

How does neglect present itself in our cities, how is it shaping our cities, and most especially, how does it or could it make those cities better places for people?

Let’s find out.



WHAT DO I DO FOR CLASS? 

• Read this post and click on all the links within it. 
• Read the articles; review (that means look through, but don’t read every word) the websites.
• Think about what you agree with, what you disagree with, and what doesn’t make sense to you. 
• Come to class prepared to talk to your classmates about it.

This post begins with the foundational assumption - foundational fact, really - that the world is warming. Our climate is changing, and that’s not an assumption, that’s a fact. Last year was the second warmest year on record in the US; 2012 was the warmest year recorded. We experienced a series of climate-related storm/fire/flood events, and around the world we've seen several extreme droughts in the last few years. 

It’s easy to find people, and when I say “people,” I mean pundits and politicians, who are eager to convince you that climate change is a theory, that it’s not proven, and/or that there’s nothing we can do about it. These claims are politically charged, and in the dark magic of our times, that makes the facts that we just saw politically charged, EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE FACTS.

Our task here is not to debate the cause of climate change or what actions should be taken to limit greenhouse gas emissions and eventually to reduce them. Our task, regardless of each of your beliefs and place along the political spectrum, is to discuss the city in a warmer world, and the facts demonstrate that it is a warmer world. 

So: what next? What does the heat of a warmer world mean for urban environments and their residents? What does it mean for urban design? 

We know quite a bit about climate change at this point. Once the Pope and 190+ countries get on board with something, it’s officially big news. We, in this class, know more about climate change now thanks to the readings recommended by Rachel May at SU Sustainability and tweeted @susandieterlen with #citybynext. Rachel also recommends Climate Wire, a subscription-only resource you can access here . She also recommended Vox and Grist more generally. New information is constantly coming out about climate change, so you need to stay up to date with resources like theses.  

Some of the highlights (?) of climate change impacts at the scale of the postindustrial city include more unpredictable or extreme weather (called “global weirding”) and its impacts in turn, including flooding and landslides, extreme heat events, and power outages due to storm events. While some places (California?) are becoming drier, here in the Northeast we expect to become rainer, which brings a different set of challenges. There’s a substantial public health angle here, not just from heat and natural disasters, but from infectious disease shifts due to changing weather and climate refugees. Declining air quality due to more pollen and mold, as well as ground-level ozone, is an issue, particularly in urban areas where air quality is already poor. 

In fact, one of the more insidious and sinister aspects of climate change and the city is that many climate change impacts turn up the heat, in a somewhat dreadful play on words, under existing urban problems. Climate change impacts makes these problems wicked-er. Combined sewers overflow more as rainfall and storm events increase. Inner-city asthma rates increase due to that declining air quality. Already-vulnerable populations take the brunt of extreme heat events, a killer that flies under the radar but that the CDC takes very seriously. Inequality matters more in a warmer world. Resilience becomes more necessary all the time.

Whenever you read this, chances are excellent that there will be a new story about some aspect of climate change and its impacts out today. We in environmental design fields are grappling with how to design, build, and retrofit places in this new context. It’s tempting to view this as a game of catch-up or a huge limitation - “climate change ate my design.” I propose that climate change impacts are a constraint, like any other constraint in that established design language of “opportunities and constraints.” And like any other constraint, it’s inspiration waiting to happen. The biggest obstacle to a great design is a blank slate. You need some boundaries, some context, to make it real enough to mean anything. This isn’t Sketch-Up. 

Should you need it, there is ample motivation or inspiration in the need to reduce greenhouse gas levels - to reduce, not just mitigate. The challenge lies in breaking this global effort down to the scale of a single design decision. What does a warmer world mean for this flooring tile, this section of curb, or this window?

How can urban design simultaneously address climate change at multiple scales? 

Let’s find out.



​

WHAT DO I DO FOR CLASS? 

• Read this post and click on all the links within it. 
• Read the articles; review (that means look through, but don’t read every word) the websites.
• Think about what you agree with, what you disagree with, and what doesn’t make sense to you. 
• Come to class prepared to talk to your classmates about it.

Data* is one of the big ideas of our time, or better said, it’s a big idea following on the heels of a mammoth established trend. This makes it much more powerful than if it were merely an idea, because it’s an idea resting on a foundation of facts. Those facts are that our lives and opinions and environments are documented to a completely unprecedented extent, and that documentation - that data - is available to third parties. Frequently it’s publicly available, or available to anyone with the skills and savvy to figure out how to get it, or it’s the property of some Big Authority somewhere. Regardless, it’s not really under your control, particularly because there’s so much data that tracking what you produce is a full time job. Social media, photo sharing, fitness trackers, web use, remote sensing, financial transactions…the list goes on and on. 

Besides being the plot of nearly every dystopian movie ever, the rise of Big Data is a mega-trend. That makes it a good candidate for the biggest influencer of the next 25 years, which concerns us in this course and anyone planning to work anytime before 2041. I imagine (hope) that includes most of us.

So what does data mean for urban environments and their residents? What does it mean for urban design?
That’s a question without a ready answer, which is a good reason to study it: any question worth asking doesn’t have a ready answer. So, how to go about answering an answer-less question? 

Look at what’s already been done around the edges of the question. In this case, that includes data-based plans for very large cities, performance landscapes, and citizen science. Green building, to a large extent, relies on data, particularly in the myriad rating systems required to achieve various certifications or credentials. These are based on checklists, and checklists, like surveys or quizzes on Facebook, are data. These certifications also strive to be objective and quantitative in their measurements, so they rely on thresholds and ranges - data again.   

At the outskirts of data + design, things get really weird, meaning futuristic and mind-blowing, with just a hint of sinister. Environments that respond to individuals via real-time data. Buildings joining the “internet of things.” This is all pretty hard to imagine, but there’s this thermostat already on the market. Research on office systems that adapt to individual users is going on right here right now, at the Syracuse Center of Excellence indoor environmental quality lab.  

Most of these projects differ in scale from our interests, with the metropolitan region plans at one end and that thermostat at the other end. What does data mean for the neighborhood or site scale?

If you’ll indulge me in a Gen X moment, I’ll observe that back in the day when I was doing my first degree in landscape architecture (ca. 1995), we made a lot of assumptions and generalizations about site functions and use because we had no data. You could talk to the client, visit the site in person, and collect your aerial photos - taken from a real plane about every five years and available only in hardcopy -  from the county offices. If the project went forward and the client hired you, you’d have a survey done - with actual instruments on the actual land - and then you’d know the topography and the dimensions of structures. You could sometimes get as-built drawings of buildings. It was nothing like the data glut we live in today. So design decisions often got made according to what we “knew,” not what we really knew, following, for example, the boss’s pronouncement that “no one plays tennis anymore.” Therefore: the park plan without a tennis court. 

My point, digital natives, is that the atmosphere or paradigm then was data scarcity, so we created ways of doing things that compensated for or disguised that lack. Tradition, culture, and convention have great influence in design; perhaps they do in every profession. Realize that much of “the way we do it” may/is/could be based on this data scarcity. A big part of earning a professional degree in any design field is learning “the way we do it,” so be wary.

How will urban design practice embrace the era of data?

Let’s find out.




WHAT DO I DO FOR CLASS? 

• Read this post and click on all the links within it. 
• Read the articles; review (that means look through, but don’t read every word) the websites.
• Think about what you agree with, what you disagree with, and what doesn’t make sense to you. 
• Come to class prepared to talk to your classmates about it.

*Yeah, I know it’s plural. In keeping with the informal tone and breezy feel of this blog and my classroom approach, I’m sticking with the common usage of “data” as singular.