The first commercial passenger elevator was installed by Otis Elevator Company in 1857 and climbed at a glacial pace of 40 feet a minute, though it felt staggering at the time. Since then, we have come a long way both in terms of elevator speeds and in terms of the heights these elevators are... View full entry
Megacities—those urban centers crammed with more than 10 million people—would be well served to double down on their arboreal assets, according to a new paper in the upcoming issue of the journal Ecological Modeling.
A team of researchers led by Theodore Endreny of SUNY’s College of Environmental Studies and Forestry sought to quantify how leafy infrastructure pays dividends in 10 chock-full cities—and the extent to which those benefits could compound if those urban areas planted more trees.
— Citylab
You can check out the research paper here, as well as this 2015 report about the health benefits of more greenspace in urban centers. View full entry
The standard yardstick for judging housing affordability is to look at the median level of rents or home prices. As we all remember from statistics, the median is the observation in the middle of the distribution. And while for many purposes, it’s a reliable indicator of typical prices, in some neighborhoods, particularly those with a mix of expensive and cheap housing, the median is actually a weak indicator of affordability. — City Observatory
"For an illustration of this problem, imagine two neighborhoods. In both places, the median home costs $300,000. But in the first neighborhood, every home costs exactly $300,000, while in the second, there are a range of homes from $100,000 to $500,000. Although both neighborhoods have the same... View full entry
OK, so this would mean the way to make San Francisco as affordable as (say) Portland would be to either cut everybody’s salary in half, or fire half of them, or allow the city’s population to rapidly grow about 50 percent, to about 1.2 million, while the number of housing units increased even faster. — Michael Andersen, on Medium
In discussing San Francisco's rising housing costs over the years, journalist Michael Andersen re-emphasizes some points in this recent blogpost by a man named Eric Fischer, who took his own approach in analyzing the city's housing prices before 1979, when SF's rent-control rates began being... View full entry
Today the U.S. Census Bureau released its 2015 population estimates for counties and metropolitan areas. After volatile swings in growth patterns during last decade’s housing bubble and bust, long-term trends are reasserting themselves. Population is growing faster in the South and West than in the Northeast and Midwest, and faster in suburban areas than in urban counties; both of these trends accelerated in 2015. — citylab.com
Related stories in the Archinect news:See 2,000 Years of Urban Growth Around the World With This Interactive MapThe World’s Population Can Fit Inside New York CityCensus: LA is the nation's densest urban area, while New York ranks 5th View full entry
In 1980, for instance, fewer than 12 percent of American workers commuted for 45 minutes or more one way, according to the Census.
The Census didn't even bother separating out 60- and 90-minute commuters in 1980, since it was relatively rare. But they began tracking these mega-commuters in 1990. That year, 1.6 percent of workers commuted 90 minutes or more one way. In 2014, 2.62 percent of workers were commuting this long, an increase of 64 percent over the prevalence in 1990.
— Washington Post
More about urban mobility:So Cal has dumped a lot of money into transit projects, but there's been little pay-off so farThe Ehang passenger drone might be another way people will get around town somedayIs America actually shifting away from its car obsession? Not entirely.Think driverless cars... View full entry
2014 was the year of the tall building. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) published its 2014 Tall Building Data Research Report, a statistic-laden round-up that could make your head spin and wonder how much taller a skyscraper can possibly get. Last year, a total of... View full entry
Find out how, since the date of your birth, your life has progressed; including how many times your heart has beaten, and how far you have travelled through space.
Investigate how the world around you has changed since you've been alive; from the amount the sea has risen, and the tectonic plates have moved, to the number of earthquakes and volcanoes that have erupted. Grasp the impact we've had on the planet in your lifetime...
— BBC
Quantitative Analysis of NYC Open Data: Every data set that the city releases tells a story. This blog is all about telling those stories, one data set at a time. — iquantny.tumblr.com
Ben Wellington's "I Quant NY" blog is a gem in data-driven journalism's crown. Featuring visualizations of data sets from New York City's remarkable Open Data Portal, the blog covers a wide-variety of civic topics, everything from mapping fire hydrant usage to rate of taxi complaints by... View full entry
"For years, urban designers and architects have claimed happiness as their goal," Montgomery says. "And yet none of the claims have been supported by empirical evidence. Which isn't to say they're not right. It's just to say that we don't know. That we haven't known."
In this spirit of empirical discovery, Montgomery takes readers around the world in search of the places where urban design has (and has not) improved quality-of-life.
— The Atlantic Cities
Human behavior can be extremely difficult to quantify, and determining its exact context even harder. But some cities just seem happier than others, no matter how difficult that status is to qualify. In his book, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design, Charles Montgomery tries to... View full entry
