Archinect - News

New scientific study provides vital data on sinking Chinese cities

2024-04-23T15:08:00-04:00

The toll of urbanization in China has been documented in a new paper published in the journal Science by a team of researchers from different institutions around the country. Using a method called spaceborne synthetic aperture radar interferometry (or InSAR), they were able to establish the rate at which land is subsiding in major cities, affecting over a third (36%) of the country's urban population.

The paper's abstract states that 45% of metro areas surveyed are now subsiding faster than 3 millimeters per year, with another 16% subsiding faster than 10 millimeters per year. By 2120, upwards of 26% of all coastal lands will have elevations below sea level. The source of the sinking is the combined weight of buildings and the depletion of groundwater around urban areas. "Our results underscore the necessity of enhancing protective measures to mitigate potential damages from subsidence," the authors stated.

These latest findings could potentially have bearings on the work of Turensc...

MIT research finds that commuting distances are standard regardless of city size

2023-01-03T11:24:00-05:00

Researchers from the MIT Senseable City Lab have produced a series of maps visualizing commuting habits across Chinese cities. Titled Potato Project, the study used mobile phone location data from 50 million individuals across 234 cities to understand commuting patterns between a person’s home and work locations.

Image credit: MIT Senseable City Lab

The research project was launched in response to the group’s observation that despite the significant increase in the size of cities over decades, commuting distances and times in larger cities have remained stable versus smaller cities. “The conserved commuting properties are quite counter-intuitive,” the team notes, “as the distance from the periphery to the urban center in larger cities is obviously greater than that in medium- or small-sized cities.”

Image credit: MIT Senseable City Lab

With little existing large-scale modeling on the subject, the researchers analyzed the mobile phone location data to better understand the similarities...

Amidst increasing wildfires, should we retreat or regroup? A UC Davis proposal recommends taking the high road despite challenges

2022-07-19T16:13:00-04:00

As Spain, France, Greece, and Germany grapple with a spate of historic wildfires that have gripped the region in recent weeks, a group of researchers in the American West is now advocating for fairly extreme shifts in development trends there which would buck others currently favored by the industry that involve more direct applications of design in the built environment.

Writing in FastCompany this week, UC Davis professors Emily Schlickman, Brett Milligan, and Stephen M. Wheeler proposed a three-point plan that entails zoning changes (including San Diego’s approach of avoiding hillside development) and placing severe limitations on new construction, which are seen as a large part of the problem in Northern California and other places.

The trio pointed to recent examples from Los Angeles County and an existing law in Oregon as frameworks that could easily be adopted in the sunshine state, backed up by aggressive legal measures and incentivizations that would further prevent develo...

Urban street-network sprawl is trending globally, new study finds

2020-02-11T15:10:00-05:00

Satellite images dating back to 1975 allow researchers to map how millions of cul-de-sacs and dead-ends have proliferated in street networks worldwide. [...] A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences charts a worrying global shift towards more-sprawling and less-hooked-up street networks over time.

The study's authors, Christopher Barrington-Leigh at McGill University and Adam Millard-Ball at UC Santa Cruz, were able to identify the global trend toward urban street-network sprawl by analyzing high-resolution data from OpenStreetMap and satellite imagery of urbanization since 1975 and then measuring the "street-network disconnectedness index (SNDi), based on every mapped node and edge in the world."

The documented global drop in street connectivity due to the proliferation of urban and suburban developments that feature cul-de-sacs, dead-ends, and gated communities should require a "rapid policy response, including regulation and pricing tools," the study suggests, "to avoid further costly lock-in during this current, final phase of the urbanization process."

The researchers write that their street-network measure can predict future climate, energy, health, and social outcomes related to urban form.

120,000-resident suburb under construction in California's Central Valley

2019-09-25T18:15:00-04:00

About 450 houses have been sold so far at Riverstone and 73 at Tesoro Viejo, which already has a school (Hillside Elementary) plus a cafe and fire/sheriff’s substation in its fledgling “town center.” Together, these “master-planned communities” along with other proposed developments with names like Gunner Ranch West, North Shore at Millerton and TraVigne form what Madera County officials project will be a city of 120,000 people.

California's urban housing crisis, fueled by lackluster housing production in the state's population centers, is fueling sprawl that is eating up wilderness and agricultural land around cities like Fresno.

Madera County supervisor Brett Frazier told The Fresno Bee, “The assumption was this was just going to be another bedroom community. But when you drive through it you see it’s something different. In the next 20 years, it’ll truly be a new city.”

How autonomous vehicles will accelerate suburban sprawl

2016-06-21T13:21:00-04:00

If Mr. Ratti’s projections are correct, and self-driving cars can radically reduce traffic without cannibalizing existing mass transit—the hypotheticals pile up—it is possible that self-driving cars will make many cities livable in a way they aren’t now. Imagine if every U.S. city had a hybrid public-private mass-transit system on par with those in New York City or Washington, D.C., comprised entirely of self-driving vehicles.

China hopes to improve its cities with newly released urban planning vision

2015-12-28T14:54:00-05:00

China has detailed its urban planning vision, which has been designed to make its sprawling cities more inclusive, safer and better places to live. [...] policymakers pledged to transform urban development patterns and improve city management. The last time China held such a high-level meeting was in 1978, when only 18 percent of the population lived in cities. By the end of 2011, in excess of 50 percent of the population called the city their home.

Egypt's urban growth threatens Nile farmland

2015-07-09T21:30:00-04:00

Most Egyptians have always lived in the fertile stretch along the Nile, the nation’s breadbasket which accounts for less than 10 per cent of Egypt’s territory. But urban growth has become the chief threat to agricultural land as farmers haphazardly – and illegally – build new houses to make room for the next generation. Construction surged even more amid a security vacuum that followed the 2011 popular uprising that ousted the country’s long-time autocrat, Hosni Mubarak.

Urban sprawl costs the American economy more than US$1 trillion per year

2015-03-24T14:05:00-04:00

A new analysis authored by Todd Litman at the Victoria Transport Policy Institute concludes that sprawl costs the U.S. economy more than $1 trillion every year. [...] The optimal density Litman uses in the report is only about 23 people per hectare. Add those 2.2 billion people to global cities at a density of about Atlanta, and we'd need the equivalent of all the land in India to accommodate them.

Previously: The true costs of sprawl

Here's a direct link to Todd Litman's study Analysis of Public Policies that Unintentionally Encourage and Subsidize Sprawl.

The true costs of sprawl

2015-03-05T14:04:00-05:00

How much more does it cost the public to build infrastructure and provide services for sprawling development compared to more compact neighborhoods? A lot more, according to this handy summary from the Canadian environmental think tank Sustainable Prosperity. To create this graphic, the organization synthesized a study by the Halifax Regional Municipality [PDF] in Nova Scotia, and the research is worth a closer look.

New study finds that Los Angeles is actually the nation's least sprawling metro

2015-02-17T15:37:00-05:00

A new study by Thomas Laidley, a sociology doctoral student at NYU [...], uses satellite images to develop a new and improved “Sprawl Index,” which he links to a wide range of outcome measures. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that L.A. ranks as the least sprawling metro in the country, ahead of New York and San Francisco.

Previously:

Archinect's Lexicon: "One-story peanut butter"

2014-12-19T19:07:00-05:00

one-story peanut butter, noun: in reference to urban sprawl, how it spreads and oozes.

The term comes courtesy of Archinector and Archinect Sessions co-host, Donna Sink, who recalls W. Kirby Lockard (1930-2007), Professor of Architecture at University of Arizona, using it to describe sprawl during an urban design studio in 1988:

"The only other recollection I have is that he said it as if "...this is the way we build now". That was in the mid-80s, when sprawl really ballooned, I think. The movie Poltergeist was an indictment of it, certainly. The studio class was looking at different ways to build in the desert, in an environmentally friendly and climate-appropriate way - this was before terms like green and eco and sustainable were popular - so we studied historic Native American settlements and Italian hill towns and talked about transit vs. car."

"He spoke about how, in Tucson, which is a valley, "suburban sprawl was one story going mountain to mountain, spread out like peanut butte...

Wowza: Scale Maps of Barcelona and Atlanta Show the Waste of Sprawl

2014-09-03T14:49:00-04:00

Urban densities are not trivial, they severely limit the transport mode choice and change only very slowly. Because of the large differences in densities between Atlanta and Barcelona about the same length of metro line is accessible to 60% of the population in Barcelona but only 4% in Atlanta. The low density of Atlanta render this city improper for rail transit.

Why haven't China's cities learned from America's mistakes?

2014-08-26T13:43:00-04:00

In the wake of economic reforms in the 1990s that helped set off the largest urban migration in history, China had the rare opportunity to embrace cutting-edge city-building approaches as it expanded its skyline. It could have avoided the mistakes that made Los Angeles into the land of gridlock, or bypassed the errors that turned the banlieues of Paris into what one American planner calls “festering urban sores”. But China looked back instead of forward.

Meanwhile in Africa: Urban China: Chinese Urbanism in Africa

Why sprawl may be bad for your health

2014-08-17T16:06:00-04:00

Marshall, Garrick and Piatkowski are talking about a different set of health concerns: not communicable diseases like cholera, but lifestyle diseases like diabetes. "The literature suggests," they write, "that the shift in industrialized nations toward a more sedentary lifestyle is linked to increasingly auto-dependent lifestyles, which in turn is linked to lower density developments and auto-friendly land uses." Maybe we're designing places, in other words, that make it harder to be active.

The U.S. Cities That Sprawled the Most (and Least) Between 2000 and 2010

2014-06-04T14:15:00-04:00

A new report from Reid Ewing and Shima Hamidi of the University of Utah, lead researchers on the aforementioned rankings, gets at that question. Ewing and Hamidi scored the largest 162 U.S. urbanized areas on the Sprawl Index — or, if you're feeling optimistic, the Compactness Index — for 2010. (Urbanized areas reflect development better than fixed metro area boundaries do.) Then they applied the index to the same cities in 2000 to show the change over time.

America's Oddly Beautiful Suburban Sprawl, Photographed From The Sky

2014-04-29T13:51:00-04:00

In a series of photos taken over seven years, now published in a new book called Ciphers, photographer Christoph Gielen shows a different perspective on sprawl, intended to get more people to question typical patterns of development. "I meant for Ciphers to be provocative at a time when we are witnessing a phenomenal escalation in urban construction ... when entire cities are emerging fully formed in India and China, rather than slowly evolving," says Gielen.

Southern California not so sprawling after all

2014-04-02T18:46:00-04:00

It may not seem like it when you’re stuck in traffic on the 110 Freeway, but Southern California is home to some of the least-sprawling metro areas in the country. That’s according to a study out today from Smart Growth America, which attempted to measure the concept of urban sprawl in 221 metro areas nationwide. The study ranked the Los Angeles, Orange County and Santa Barbara regions in the 25 least-sprawling.

Driven Away: The Role of Urban Planning in a Car-Dependent Society

2013-07-26T17:46:00-04:00

“Ultimately people can’t get around conveniently because they are far away from everything.” And it is this observation that for me epitomizes the problem of the driverless car — it’s the worst kind of solutionism. By becoming so enamored with how technology might transform the car, we’ve neglected to adequately explore how getting rid of cars might transform how and where we live. We’d do well to heed Gorz’s exhortation to “never make transportation an issue by itself.”

It's a given that America continues to be a car-obsessed society despite the more painstaking reality of driving a car in many major cities of today. In The New York Times, editor Allison Arieff of SPUR points out that the U.S. is still fixated on selling, using and enhancing the car when commuters are carpooling more and buying fewer cars.

Furthermore, Arieff gets to the root of the problem by pointing out the negative impacts that a car-dependent culture has on public transportation and the even more complex issue of urban sprawl--both which are in need of more attention and innovation. As Arieff mentions in her article, cars aren't what make up the city--it's the city itself. Taking that into account, urban planners have a crucial role in making the Land of the Free less dependent on the car.

Do you agree with Arieff? What's your take on the issue? Feel free to share your opinion in the comments below.

Community Growth, Crisis and Challenge

2011-12-14T15:12:36-05:00

This 1959 film, "Community Growth, Crisis and Challenge," warns citizens, developers, and city officials of the dangers of urban sprawl. This historical artifact, co-sponsored by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and the Urban Land Institute ULI) provides alternative approaches to land development. The film was produced by the NAHB.

The Urban Land Institute is clebrating their 75th birthday this year. To join in the celebration, enjoy this classic film warning of the perils of urban sprawl sponsered by them and the National Association of Home Builders. You can see their other videos on YouTube by going to their page.