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Amanda Burden, Planning Commissioner, Is Remaking New York City - NYTimes.com
“But that attention to detail has also received criticism. Ms. Burden’s belief in contextual zoning, for example, under which new developments in a neighborhood are required to be in the height and style of surrounding structures, leads to “profoundly conservative building,” said Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association and director of its Center for Urban Innovation. “New York’s greatness as the dominant skyscraper city of the 20th century was the result of bold building, but the local zeitgeist has switched from big and bold to keeping everything small, nondescript and similar to everything else in the neighborhood.”
Daily links 05/20/2012
20-May-12
Daily links 05/14/2012
14-May-12
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“if the government were, as I suggest, to fund a £30 billion (2% of GDP) investment programme, and fund it by borrowing through issuing long-term index-linked gilts, the cost to taxpayers - the interest on those gilts - would be something like £150 million a year. To put this in perspective, it’s roughly the revenue the OBR estimates will be raised by the “loophole-closing VAT measures” in the last Budget. In other words, we could fund a massive job-creating infrastructure programme with the pasty tax.
Twenty, or fifty, years from now, economic historians will look back at the decisions we are taking now. I cannot imagine that they will be anything but incredulous and horrified that - presented with these charts and figures - policymakers did nothing, international organisations staffed with professional economists encouraged them in their inaction, and commentators and academic economists (thankfully, few in the UK) came up with ever more tortuous justifications. In Simon Wren-Lewis’ words, they will ask why “a large section of the profession, and the majority of policymakers, appeared to ignore what mainstream macro [and, I would add ,basic common sense] tells us”. Their judgement will be harsh.”
Daily links 05/08/2012
08-May-12
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Wide Urban World: Are shantytowns a normal form of urban residence?
Looks like most ancient cities featured a lot of informal, unplanned and self-built housing, rather than the formally planned cities found in parts of Italy and Greece.
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The London Mayor thing. The Ken thing. | Chiller
Sadly, I see a similar future for London.
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Tous les résultats à Paris et dans les département d’Ile-de-France – Metro
East-West split in Paris voting patterns, with the east going socialist.
Daily links 05/06/2012
06-May-12
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Estimating London’s Population | LOCATING LONDON’S PAST
Population estimates from late 17th to early 19th century.
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New Statesman - A tax on aspiration?
“The perhaps unintended and unforeseen effect of a shift to greater private contribution in welfare (this time in the form of higher tuition fees), combined with efforts to protect the position of the very poorest (increased bursaries and grants aimed particularly at families with earnings under £17k), and a nod towards localism (universities run their own support system) is to create a new aspiration trap – truly eye-watering effective tax rates hitting families in low-to-middle income Britain sending a child to university this autumn.
This stems from the way in which the complex patchwork of student support gets withdrawn as household earnings rise. Some of the resulting ‘cliff edges’ soar high above those that triggered the Child Benefit row.”
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The court of King Mervyn - FT.com
Superb and rather worrying article. Alastair Darling’s quotes are particularly revealing.
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Drivers who kill ‘should face prospect of life in prison’ says police expert | The Times
“These deaths are coming from all over the place, not just dangerous junctions,” he said. “With the increase in traffic there will be more deaths. We have a road layout not designed for the two forms of transport.”
Motor vehicles and bicycles, that is. It’s quite something when a senior police officer comes out and says this. And he’s right - having a target to increase cycling without any strategy to drive down the casualty rate is the same as having a target to increase cycling casualties.
Daily links 05/01/2012
01-May-12
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Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage: Old Idea, New Evidence
“When asked to name one proposition in the social sciences that is both true and non-trivial, Paul Samuelson famously replied: ‘Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage’. Truth, however, in Samuelson’s reply refers to the fact that Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage is mathematically correct, not that it is empirically valid. The goal of this paper is to assess the empirical performance of Ricardo’s ideas. We use novel agricultural data that describe the productivity in 17 crops of 1.6 million parcels of land in 55 countries around the world. Crucially, this dataset contains information about the productivity of each parcel of land in all crops, not just those that are currently being grown. This direct information about relative productivity differences across economic activities allows us to compute, for the first time, the output predicted by Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage. Despite all of the real-world considerations from which this theory abstracts, we find that Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage has significant explanatory power in the data, at least within the scope of our analysis.”
Daily links 04/30/2012
30-Apr-12
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High-quality, utterly daft illustrations of “Internet!” from the 1990s.
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Doug Saunders - The Globe and Mail
“Governments seem supremely uninterested in making the creation of housing a desirable pursuit. We’re clogged with zoning policies, rent-control laws, minimum-frontage restrictions, planning requirements – none of which do any good – and, most of all, a shocking fiscal bias toward existing owners.
If we really wanted housing to be profitable and plentiful, we’d tax owners on the annual rise in value of their property – a Land Value Tax. This has two benefits: First, you’re taxing a non-productive source of wealth, whereas income and corporate taxes can stifle innovation and risk-taking.
Second, because buyers and sellers know the tax exists, property values stop rising quickly. This makes it easier for newcomers to enter the property market, and for homeowners to buy and sell based on the desirability of housing.
It also means that investors make their profits from land not by pocketing its increase, but by improving its income value – collecting rent, increasing the quantity or quality of housing on it, pressuring government to allow better or more intensive use of the land.
When people can live fairly well, in large numbers, close to their places of work, the economy functions far better. When a few of us are making useless paper profits from our homes and the rest are stuck outside the market, it hurts everyone.” -
Historic Photos From the NYC Municipal Archives - In Focus - The Atlantic
Magnificent collection of photos from New York’s early 20th century, capital-of-the-world pomp.
Daily links 04/28/2012
28-Apr-12
Daily links 04/26/2012
26-Apr-12
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The Invention of Jaywalking - Commute - The Atlantic Cities
“The industry lobbied to change the law, promoting the adoption of traffic statutes to supplant common law. The statutes were designed to restrict pedestrian use of the street and give primacy to cars. The idea of ‘jaywalking” – a concept that had not really existed prior to 1920 – was enshrined in law.
The current configuration of the American street, and the rules that govern it, is not the result of some inevitable organic process. “It’s more like a brawl,” says Norton. “Where the strongest brawler wins.”"
Daily links 04/19/2012
19-Apr-12
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http://www.iammotoringfacts.co.uk/index.html
Compendious though not completely up to date collection of facts on transport, mainly road, in Britain, including lots of useful long-term trends.
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“The Netherlands currently has 135,470km of roads and 29,000km of segregated cycle tracks. 12,000 of these segregated tracks have been built since 1996.”
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Revisiting the past | As Easy As Riding A Bike
In 1935 the rising popularity of cycling and the rising threat from car traffic moved the Minister for Transport to launch new, high-quality cycling tracks alongside the Western Avenue in London. The National Union of Cyclists protested, saying that they had a right to be on the road and that the key to making cycling safer was to reduce traffic speeds.
75 years later and they’re still saying that, and it still hasn’t happened, and cycling is a marginal, risky activity.
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CycleStreets » Collisions » Collision data reports (STATS19)
Best presentation of this data I’ve seen yet.
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In Economics, You Are What You Model - NYTimes.com
“Central banks’ principal models before the financial crisis, the so-called DSGE models, made a crucial assumption, hard as it is to believe, that economies are always in instantaneous equilibrium. The assumption is nuts to my mind, but it didn’t matter too much as long as the model was used to understand and control inflation in an economy moving along on a fairly even keel. The moment you could no longer rely on the economy to keep moving along on a fairly even keel, that crucial assumption made the model’s picture of an economy catastrophically bad.”
Of course, even economists who accept this will then just say we need a model for knowing when to switch models.
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“During the late 1930s numerous incidents took place on the streets of London which pitted fascists and anti-fascist activists, or innocent bystanders, against eachother. This was the period when the so-called Blackshirts of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) were most active. It was also a period when the BUF had become thoroughly antisemitic and “Jew-baiting” a frequent phenomenon. Such incidents provoked counter-propaganda, demonstrations and sometimes violence from anti-fascist and Jewish activists. Many of these incidents were recorded by the Metropolitan Police and these records can be found today in the National Archives. They enable us to create a spatial and temporal overview of anti-semitic incidents, and occurences of “Jew-baiting “, as well as counter activities in the late 1930s. What type of incidents took place on the streets of London and in what neighbourhoods? What type of spatial and temporal relationship, if any, existed between fascist and anti-fascist activity? This paper will present the results of a first analysis of available data and the maps that have been produced as a result. The aim of this paper is not only to present a particular case study but, more broadly, to show how mapping social history and using GIS in historical research can help historians to challenge existing assumptions with the aid of a new type of analysis. They allow us to question several assumptions, in this case for example the idea that most Jew-baiting took place in the Whitechapel area of London, home to the capital’s poorest Jewish migrants. They also allow us to map counter-violence and thus question the notion that only the Blackshirts engaged in violent attacks of their opponents (and thus notions of passivity on the part of their victims).”
Daily links 04/16/2012
16-Apr-12
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Density and the Journey to Work by David Levinson, Ajay Kumar :: SSRN
“This paper evaluates the influence of residential density on commuting behavior across U.S. cities while controlling for available opportunities, the technology of transportation infrastructure, and individual socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. The measures of metropolitan and local density are addressed separately. We suggest that metropolitan residential density serves principally as a surrogate for city size. We argue that markets react to high interaction costs found in large cities by raising density rather than density being a cause of those high costs. Local residential density measures relative location (accessibility) within the metropolitan region as well as indexing the level of congestion. We conduct regressions to predict commuting time, speed, and distance by mode of travel on a cross-section of individuals nationally and city by city. The results indicate that residential density in the area around the tripmaker’s home is an important factor: the higher the density the lower the speed and the shorter the distance. However, density’s effect on travel time is ambiguous, speed and distance are off-setting effects on time. The paper suggests a threshold density at which the decrease in distance is overtaken by the congestion effects, resulting in a residential density between 7,500 and 10,000 persons per square mile (neither the highest nor lowest) with the shortest duration auto commutes.”
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Jean Renoir - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“In his memoirs My Life and My Films (1974) Renoir wrote of the influence exercised upon him by his cousin, Gabrielle Renard, the woman seen in the portrait by his father above. Shortly before his birth, she came to live with the Renoir family, and helped raise the young boy.[73] She introduced him to the Guignol puppet shows in the Montmartre of his childhood: “She taught me to see the face behind the mask and the fraud behind the flourishes”, he wrote. “She taught me to detest the cliché.”[74] He concluded his memoirs with the words he had often spoken as a child, “Wait for me, Gabrielle.”"
Well, that’s the first time I’ve been moved to tears by a Wikipedia article. So beautiful.
Daily links 04/15/2012
15-Apr-12
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CiteULike: Aid Unpredictability and Economic Growth
“In this paper, we examine the influence of unpredictable aid on a recipient’s economic growth. If aid amounts vary by year and the changes are unpredictable, we expect that this “unpredictability” decreases aid’s growth-enhancing effect. This naturally raises the questions: How large is the influence of aid “unpredictability” on a recipient’s economic growth? Does “unpredictability” significantly damage aid’s growth-enhancing effect? Our research shows that the impact is significant; in a typical case, one fifth of aid is wasted due to “unpredictability.” Further, it is possible that in some cases, the aid may be wasted by as much as one third.”
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Geography Department, Cambridge » The occupational structure of Britain 1379-1911
Impressive collection of data on population and economic geography of England and Wales going as far back as the 14th century, much of it digitised and available in GIS form.
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UNU-WIDER : WP/2012/09 Inequality Trends and their Determinants: Latin America over 1990-2010
Left-wing governments are achieving the holy grail of strong growth combined with reductions in inequality.
“The paper reviews the steady and widespread decline in income inequality which has taken place in most of Latin America over 2002-10 and which––if continued for another 2-3 years––would reduce the average regional income inequality to pre-liberalization levels. The paper then focuses on the factors, which may explain such inequality decline. A review of the literature and an econometric test indicate that a few complementary factors played an important role in this regard, including a drop in the skill premium following a rapid expansion of secondary education, and the adoption of a new development model by a growing number of left-of-centre governments which emphasizes fiscally-prudent but more equitable macroeconomic, tax, social expenditure and labour policies. For the region as a whole, improvements in terms of trade, migrant remittances, FDI and world growth playeda less important role than expected although their impact was perceptible in countries where such transactions were sizeable.”
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Research by Joan Walker of UCLA, much of it applying insights from behavioural economics and psychology to transport policy.
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Kidderminster appears to be pretty much a textbook example of how to ruin a town with cars. And from the last picture it doesn’t look as if they’ve really learnt the lesson yet.
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Hollande - Clip de campagne Officiel - Présidentielle 2012 - YouTube
Note to British Labour politicians - this is how you give a speech (though not necessarily in French).
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25 years of the Transport Economists’ Group journal, mostly reports of seminars. If you’ve got enough time, you can trace much of the history of the London Congestion Charge here, from modelling to feasibility studies to inception to ex-post evaluation.
Daily links 04/10/2012
10-Apr-12
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Improving road safety - Gareth Rees
Heroic attempt to come up with internationally comparable estimates of cycling fatalities per 100km cycled.
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“Thus, unless we believe that the long-term real borrowing costs for western Europe as a whole will be more than 5% per year – that nominal borrowing costs will be more than 7% year – spending cuts now to reduce the deficit are likely to erode rather than bolster the overall fiscal situation. They damage rather than restore confidence. They raise rather than lower the riskiness of the outstanding bond stock. And so they reduce rather than raise employment and production in the economy.
Credible plans and programs for long-run fiscal balance, yes.
Structural reforms to free-up enterprise and increase opportunity, yes.
Reworking the social-insurance state to make it cheaper and less wasteful, yes.
But spending cuts now to lay sacrifices on the altar of credibility in the hope of improving confidence and reducing the riskiness of the outstanding bond stock? No. The arithmetic simply goes the wrong way – unless you believe that Eurozone nominal bond yields will soon normalize to levels above 7% per year.”
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Extremely well-hidden mid-year UK and GB population estimates back to 1971. Congrats to ONS for making such a stupendously challenging website - had to really think my way through this one.
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Wonderfully cutting description by Joe:
“Dramatically, it is like a play full of wonderful, strong second acts all coming down on the same curtain line, all proving the same tragic point. Then suddenly someone appears on the apron and says the play is over without there having been enacted a concluding third act.”
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Not the Treasury view…: It’s not too late to change course: Macbeth and fiscal policy
I’m getting to it a bit late, but this from Jonathan Portes is superb and depressing. This government and governments around Europe are deliberately implementing policies which are guaranteed to create huge and long-lasting levels of unemployment. The really scary thing is wondering what they are going to do to distract us all from the damage they’ve caused.
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Not the Treasury view…: Conservative government still has a chance to get it right on fiscal policy
I hadn’t appreciated the extent to which Spain’s current problems were due not to pre-crash fiscal irresponsibility but more to allowing a huge private-sector credit bubble to inflate. This misconception is probably in large part due to the currently pervasive guilt-based discourse around macroeconomic policy.
“What role did fiscal irresponsibility play in this? Almost none, because, despite the serious policy errors just mentioned, Spanish fiscal policy was generally prudent; in 2007, on the eve of the crisis, the IMF estimated that Spain had a substantial structural surplus. As Martin Wolf put it in the Financial Times, Spain’s fiscal difficulties are a consequence of the crisis, not a cause; the deficit is simply the mirror image of the private sector’s swing from borrowing to saving.
In such conditions cutting the deficit too fast simply makes matters worse, as we have known since the 1930s. It reduces demand further; the private sector, quite rationally, responds by investing less and reducing output and employment, since demand is falling. This is the vicious spiral already afflicting Greece. “
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CiteULike: Integrating congestion pricing, transit subsidies and mode choice
‘We model and analyze optimal (welfare maximizing) prices and design of transport services in a bimodal context. Car congestion and transit design are simultaneously introduced and consumers choose based on the full price they perceive. The optimization variables are the congestion toll, the transit fare (and hence the level of subsidies) and transit frequency. We obtain six main results: (i) the optimal car-transit split is generally different from the total cost minimizing one; (ii) optimal congestion and transit price are interdependent and have an optimal frequency attached; (iii) the optimal money price difference together with the optimal frequency yield the optimal modal split; (iv) if this modal split is used in traditional stand-alone formulations – where each mode is priced independently–resulting congestion tolls and transit subsidies and fares are consistent with the optimal money price difference; (v) self-financing of the transport sector is feasible; and (vi) investment in car infrastructure induces an increase in generalized cost for all public transport users.”
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1.4.42 | Orwell Diaries 1938-1942
“One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting…It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours.”
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“This paper examines discrimination in the rental housing market. We analyze a rich data set on rental contracts from Norway. We find that tenants born abroad pay a statistically significant and economically important premium for their dwelling units after controlling for a comprehensive set of apartment, individual and contract specific covariates. Moreover, we find that the premium is largest for tenants of African origin. Finally, Norwegians whose parents were born abroad also face a statistically significant and economically important rental premium that is directly comparable to the premium paid by tenants born abroad.”
Daily links 04/09/2012
09-Apr-12
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How to Write for and Get Published in Scientific Journals - Daniel McGowan
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Portfolios of the Poor (Collins, Morduch, Rutherford, Ruthven) - Danny Yee’s book reviews
Good review of a book I’ve heard a lot about before, none of which explained it properly as Danny does here. The main point seems to be that transferring your assumptions about lending and saving instruments from your own rich world context to that of the extremely poor just won’t work. That and the value of the extremely detailed and painstaking research methodology employed …
Daily links 04/08/2012
08-Apr-12
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does posting pictures work on this thing? - joedunckley’s notebook
“A 1991 study by Socialdata found that across the European Union, both decision-makers and citizens overwhelmingly want to see “environmentally friendly modes” favoured, but each believes the other to be pro-car. As a result, pro-car measures have predominated.”
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Link to the brilliant ‘Old Moscow Inventory 2011′ by students from the Moscow Architectural Institute, which deconstructs and reassembles the basic elements of Moscow’s urban form like a box of Lego bricks.
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Livia Corona / Of People and Houses
More brilliant photography from Livia Corona, this time from the Steiermark in Austria.
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Online Portfolio of Artworks by Livia Corona
Livia Corona’s photos of Mexico’s vast new estates of low-rise, identikit public housing and the people who live there. Note there is lots of conversion and re-purposing.
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Race in LA: See How We’ve Grown - Features - Los Angeles magazine
Another brilliant map by Eric Fischer, this time showing shifts in the ethnic make-up of LA’s neighbourhoods.
Daily links 04/07/2012
07-Apr-12
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Small Worlds: Observatory: Design Observer
Wonderful:
“There is the question of whether something is too simply too large, too complex to be modeled. Several years ago, I spent an afternoon exploring the incredible ruins of the Mississippi River Basin Model, near Jackson, Mississippi. Built by German POW labor during the war, it is a scale-model replica, spanning some 200 acres, of the river’s entire reach, from northern Mississippi to New Orleans, untold thousands of acres faithfully carved in modeling clay. The Corps used it for several decades to predict the effects of its various engineering projects and, on several occasions, to estimate in real-time the downriver effects during various floods. When the Corps began shifting to computer modeling in the 1980s, the model was vacated, left to slowly decay in the Mississippi humidity and sun. At the Corps’ Waterways Experimentation Station in Vicksburg, however, there are still physical models being built, sprawling lakes and miniature rivers contained in metal hangers.
Some of the engineers still swore by physical models for being able to predict dynamics that even the most powerful computer might miss. But any model is ultimately haunted by a simple, powerful fact: It is not reality. The truth may be that reality is impossible to capture. Something like the Mississippi River is changing every minute, and it was this difficulty in rendering some version of truth that one engineer told me kept him “awake at night.” A few years later, Hurricane Katrina proved his fears correct, even if not as predicted. Nature cannot be adequately replicated in a bathtub, or even a swimming pool.”
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6.4.42 | Orwell Diaries 1938-1942
“Building this viaduct alone must be a job comparable, in the amount of labour it uses up, to building a good-sized warship. And the by-pass is very unlikely to be of any use till after the war, even if finished by that time. Meanwhile there is a labour shortage everywhere. Apparently the people who sell bricks are all-powerful. (Cf. the useless surface-shelters, which even when they were being put up were being put up were pronounced to be useless by everyone who knew anything about building, and the unnecessary repairs to uninhabited private houses which are going on all over London). Evidently when a scandal passes a certain magnitude it becomes invisible.”
Daily links 04/02/2012
02-Apr-12
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Environmental and Urban Economics: A Few Thoughts About “Why Nations Fail”
“If I’m reading this book correctly, the authors view growth as a multiple equilibria game where the U.S and England lucked out due to a variety of early conditions (that extraction of resources in the Jamestown colonies was not profitable) and thus inclusive institutions and high powered incentives were needed to lure men to devote effort to developing these areas.”
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UnderstandingSociety: Making Peter Berger
Interesting short intellectual biography of Peter Berger. Two quotes of his jumped out at me:
“Sociology derives its moral justification from its debunking of the fictions that serve as alibis for oppression.”
and
“For just a few years after 1966 there was a narrow window of opportunity for our approach to sociology, since especially younger colleagues were disillusioned by the double dominance of so-called structural-functional theory and quantitative methodology; hence the initially favorable reception of the book. But then, almost immediately afterward, there occurred “an orgy of ideology and utopianism” with which neither Luckmann nor I could identify.”
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Housing Problems (1935) on Vimeo
A remarkable short film from 1935 about the slum problem in British cities, and the clearance and building programs then being begun to deal with it. It’s a production of the British Commercial Gas Association so it is part propaganda, but what sets it apart is that it (for the first time?) just let slum residents talk direct to camera about their living conditions. If it is propaganda, it is very effective. Slum clearance tends to get a bad name now because of the many notable failures of the homes that replaced the slums, but if you’re going to criticise those new homes you have to also recognise what the policy was responding to.
Daily links 03/31/2012
31-Mar-12
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Vestiges of Transit: Path Dependence and the Modern City - Lincoln Institute Working Papers
“By the 1910s, Los Angeles had one of the largest urban rail networks in the world. Streetcars dominated urban transit and motivated building and investment. New streetcar construction ceased by 1922 and the system entered a long, slow decline, culminating with elimination in 1963. Does the modern metropolitan area still reflect vestiges of this fifty-year- extinct transport system? In other words, are metropolitan areas sufficiently malleable to allocate capital to current demands? We use data on the location of extinct streetcar routes in Los Angeles and data on modern-day land use at the level of the individual property to show that properties near streetcars are statistically signifcantly different from other similar properties as of 1999. Relative to properties in a small neighborhood farther from the extinct streetcar, properties closer to the extinct streetcar are more likely to be zoned less restrictively, to have more capital per unit of land, and to have higher land values.”
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[PUBLIC TRANSPORT]. ROYAL COMMISSION ON LONDON TRAFFIC.
All eight volumes of the report of the Royal Commission on London Traffic, 1906. I like this bit:
“Amongst those who gave evidence before the commission was Charles Booth, the author of Life and Labour of the People in London, who explained that ‘housing, and the moving of work people to and from their work’ were ‘the same problem.’”
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Information resources - London Transport Museum
Useful collection of pictures and text on changing modes of transport in Victorian London.
Daily links 03/30/2012
30-Mar-12
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Have we reached peak travel? Physorg
Suggestive rather than conclusive
“Since the 1970s, passenger travel by vehicles and airplanes has grown rapidly in industrialized countries, and the International Energy Agency has predicted steady, though slower, travel growth until 2030 and beyond. However, a new study of eight industrialized countries has shown that passenger travel seems to have peaked in the early 2000s, just before the recent rise in fuel prices. The results suggest that demand for travel has reached a saturation point, which could mean that future projections of carbon dioxide emissions and fuel demand could be lower than previously thought.”
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A very thoughtful response to the ever-controversial MVs.
“The ability to fail and adapt is a rare asset in aid-funded programs. It is why local private and charter schools provide some hope in inner U.S. cities. It is why the private sector has been the engine of growth in China and India. In this singular and unusual respect, the MV experiment seems like a rare exotic bird in a vast flock of highly planned, input-dominated aid programs. It is this aspect of the MV approach—that relies on implementation savvy and flexibility at the local level that cannot easily be replicated let alone scaled up — even were more money and more fine staff across all of rural Africa fully available to manage MV-style interventions.
The best hope for learning about development from the MVs lies in its potential combination of demonstration effects and positive spillovers that don’t rely on MV flexibility but on local people’s initiatives and demands. The best hope is that the project highlights, through trial and error, a few ideas and interventions that inspire people to be agents of change themselves and thus might just work at scale and over time in a few specific settings.”
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557 - The First Satellite Map of California (1851) | Strange Maps | Big Think
“Surprisingly, a satellite picture in 1851 would have shown a large lake in the southern part of the [Central California] Valley. Tulare Lake once was the largest freshwater body west of the Great Lakes, and its fish-rich waters supported local Indian tribes for centuries. Tulare Lake’s size varied widely, dependent on both rain and mountain snows for nourishment. At around the time this picture would have been taken, it would have measured about 580 sq. mi (1,500 km2). Thirty years later, it would have swelled to almost 700 sq. mi (1,800 km2).”
Daily links 03/25/2012
25-Mar-12
Daily links 03/24/2012
24-Mar-12
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Democracy in Islington - Adoption of Islington’s Transport Strategy and Local Implementation Plan
Islington’s adopted transport strategy.