[p2p-research] Walkability: check it before choosing your next home!

[Paul D. Fernhout]

M. Fioretti wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 09:26:48 AM -0400, Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
>>> "Walkability is a characteristic of homes and apartments that all
>>> their owners, or everybody considering (even in these times) buying
>>> a new house should know and think about."
>>> Full text (please don't overlook the terms of use) at
>>> http://stop.zona-m.net/livingworld/walkability-check-it-choosing-your-next-home
>> With rising populations, there is a need to build new cities. How
>> about a new city in the USA designed for walkability? Or other
>> aspects of "sustainability"? Might even be "profitable" for someone
>> with billions of dollars to build one.
> 
> Paul,
> 
> many thanks for all the comments and reference material. I want to
> cover these themes again on Stop!, so I'll certainly use them in the
> future. Here and now, I would only highlight one background aspect of
> your reply (NOT as a critic, just as food for everybody's thought)
> 
> most of what you said is only valid, applicable or otherwise an issue
> in the USA and only there, because North America has screwed itself up
> so badly with zoning and urban sprawl. Or maybe in China/Asia, but
> there I really don't know. In Italy and most of Europe there is no
> rising populations (even considering immigration, if you look more
> than a decade ahead). And many, many cities here would be perfectly
> walkable as they are, if we just managed to:
 > [snip]

Great points, especially as more and more cars make alternatives less and 
less viable by crowding them out. In the USA, many places just seem too 
unsafe to walk with too many cars, even when there are walkways. I was 
disappointed ten years ago in the Netherlands seeing the individual push to 
get cars for various reasons, even with terrific mass transit. So, there 
definitely is a sense to which automobiles and car culture could almost be 
compared to an infectious disease. :-)

Also, the USA is one tenth the population density of most of Europe:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
and does not have it's history of walkable cities (except in older city 
cores), so yes, it is very different.

I read somewhere that much of the US suburban land use was shaped by crazy 
post-WWII mortgage issues; it was thought an assessor could not properly 
value a house unless it was next to identical houses, thus supporting the 
creation of monocultures of similar houses in zones -- of course, that 
approach devalues most homes through boredom. :-( Also, it means that if you 
economic situation changes or life situation (you get a raise, you lose your 
job, you get married, or have kids, or lose your spouse, your mother-in-law 
wants to live with you, and so on, then you can't just get a different place 
to live in the same diverse community across the street or on the next block 
over, you have to move miles away to a different zone of houses entirely 
(bigger ones, smaller ones, apartments, whatever).

Still, even for people in Europe, access to nice places to live may be 
unaffordable for many these days, especially the young? I wonder what this 
graph looks like for various European countries?
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/02/us-existing-house-price-median-family-income/

Still, with a broader diversity of houses, the issue may not be so bad.

I can still wonder if maybe still "seasteading" etc. may have some appeal, 
even in countries with falling populations? There were reasons many people 
left to come to the USA, Australia, and elsewhere in past centuries, even if 
the situation may have changed since for most. Access to income streams and 
housing and political freedom of some sort were always important issues.

Even if the flow may soon be the other way:
   "The Super Rich are Laughing: The US as Failed State"
   http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts10222009.html
which references this situation:
   "Mayor wants federal probe after SWAT raids house, kills dogs"
   http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/08/07/mayor.warrant/

For many young people, perhaps Europe is not an affordable place to stay or 
raise a family in some ways? Sometimes the only way to get out from a 
financial pyramid scheme like endlessly rising real estate prices is to just 
build something new elsewhere? It's a socio-political issue more than a 
physical issue in that sense.

Certainly the tensions are there under the surface:
   "Are the Greek riots a taste of things to come?"
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/are-the-greek-riots-a-taste-of-things-to-come-1064479.html
"Bringing together youths in their early twenties struggling to survive amid 
mass youth unemployment and schoolchildren swotting for highly competitive 
university exams that may not ultimately help them in a treacherous jobs 
market, the events of the past week could be called the first credit-crunch 
riots. There have been smaller-scale sympathy attacks from Moscow to 
Copenhagen, and economists say countries with similarly high youth 
unemployment problems such as Spain and Italy should prepare for unrest. "

In photos:
"2008 Greek riots"
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/12/2008_greek_riots.html?link=rss

Granted, that is more a macroeconomic issue than a housing one, but, good 
housing and walkable communities are worthless to most people if it is not 
affordable to live there.

This is not to pick on Greece. In the USA, it seems the kids in the streets 
get beaten by the police even when they are not rioting. :-(

See:

http://digg.com/world_news/G20_2009_Police_Attack_Students_at_University_of_Pittsburgh
"Police used teargas pepper spray and rubber bullets against University of 
Pittsburgh students during the Pittsburgh G20 Summit. "

and:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etv8YEqaWgA&feature=player_embedded#t=17
"Police used teargas pepper spray and rubber bullets against University of 
Pittsburgh students during the Pittsburgh G20 Summit. Many of the students 
were not part of any demonstration but bystanders, curious to find a mass of 
armed riot police on their campus. For more information and videos visit 
http://indypgh.org/g20"

Police to students: "No matter what your purpose is, you must leave. ..."

I used to hang out around there in the 1980s while at neighboring CMU as a 
visitor to the robotics labs. I know those streets. If I was that age, I 
might have been there just looking around.

Of course, in ten or twenty years, riot control may just be done with 
robots, who will have even less humanity than the human officers. :-(  Once 
police robots are in place, they will be unlikely to listen to Chaplin's 
plea from "The Great Dictator" movie (1940):
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechthegreatdictator.html
"Soldiers: Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave 
you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to 
feel; who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon 
fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with 
machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! 
You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate; 
only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural."

Soon, the dominant political ideology will be built in to the police robots 
and military robots. What ideology should that be? Not a new idea, of course:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gort_%28The_Day_the_Earth_Stood_Still%29
"""
The eight-foot metal robot accompanies Klaatu, a visitor to Earth from a 
distant planet, aboard a flying saucer. He does not speak, but uses a beam 
weapon projected from beneath a visor to vaporize weapons and obstacles. 
Klaatu described him as being part of an interstellar police force. He 
claims that the people of the universe constructed numerous robots like Gort 
and gave them irrevocable powers to respond to violent actions in order to 
"preserve the peace." He further claims that "There's no limit to what 
[Gort] could do. He could destroy the Earth."
"""

Also:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

Google search:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=police+robots

The lack of more walkable cities can't stand apart from these other trends. 
We have the cities we do, with the cars and so on, as a function of ideology 
and economics. And we are building out from there.

With that said, I believe in a balance of meshworks and hierarchies. Our 
cities being less and less livable for many is a symptom of this lack of 
balance. Of course, at some point, symptoms can become causes (disconnected 
alienated people causing problems beyond the ones that made them that way).

Anyway, this has rambled away from your main point, but the deeper issue is 
how we build our ideology into our physical infrastructure.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/