Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1228

Hövding – a Swedish company best known for its radical airbag cycling helmets (definitely check these out ) – is currently crowdsourcing unsafe conditions and cyclist frustration in London.

Working with the London Cyclist Campaign, they distributed 500 yellow handlebar buttons. Cyclists were then instructed to tap these buttons whenever they felt unsafe or frustrated with current cycling conditions. 

Here’s what the button looks like:

Every time the button is hit, the data point gets logged to a public map and an email gets sent to the Mayor of London reminding him of his promises around cycling. Both of these things happen via the rider’s smartphone.

Here’s what the public map looks like at the time of writing this post:

Not only does it tell you pain point locations, but it also seems to suggest the primary cycling routes. I think this is a brilliant initiative because, it’s entirely user-centric. It’s telling you how people feel on the ground.

Supposedly,  Hövding is actively looking for other cyclist groups around the world to help them distribute their buttons. So if you’re a group in Toronto or in another city, I would encourage you to reach out to them. The more data the better.

I just stumbled upon an interesting Architectural Review article from last year called:  Architecture is now a tool of capital, complicit in a purpose antithetical to its social mission . The author is Reinier de Graaf, who is an architect and partner at the firm  OMA .

The focus of the article is on inequality; capitalism vs. socialism; Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century  (which is now on my reading list); and on how Modernism lost its social mission and got repurposed as a tool that just serves capitalist interests. It went from an ideology to simply an architectural style.

Here is an excerpt:

“Once discovered as a form of capital, there is no choice for buildings but to operate according to the logic of capital. In that sense there may ultimately be no such thing as Modern or Postmodern architecture, but simply architecture before and after its annexation by capital.”

Given that I am initially trained as an architect, but that I work as a real estate developer, this article hits home for me. But unlike the author, I am not as fussed by this intertwining of capital and architecture. In fact, I have always believed that the more architecture can understand its economic milieu, the more likely it can affect positive change.

Of course, there’s the question of whether that economic milieu is even the right one in the first place. I’ll echo this blog post (on the limits of capitalism), by saying that I consider myself a capitalist, but not an absolute capitalist. Capitalism isn’t perfect.

I like Reinier’s description of income vs. wealth (borrowed from Piketty):

He identifies two basic economic categories: income and wealth. He then proceeds to define social (in)equality as a function of the relation between the two over time, concluding that as soon as the return on wealth exceeds the return on labour, social inequality inevitably increases. Those who acquire wealth through work fall ever further behind those who accumulate wealth simply by owning it.

What are your thoughts?

Access Magazine has a good piece on parking minimums and the cost they create for our cities. The article is by Donald Shoup, who is Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA. He is also the author of The High Cost of Free Parking .

Here is his argument:

“Minimum parking requirements create especially severe problems. In The High Cost of Free Parking, I argued that parking requirements subsidize cars, increase traffic congestion and carbon emissions, pollute the air and water, encourage sprawl, raise housing costs, degrade urban design, reduce walkability, damage the economy, and exclude poor people. To my knowledge, no city planner has argued that parking requirements do not have these harmful effects. Instead, a flood of recent research has shown they do have these effects. We are poisoning our cities with too much parking.”

And here’s his summary of what it costs to build a parking stall in various US cities (both underground and aboveground):

To put these numbers into perspective, he also looks at the median net worth of US households (2011) to show just how expensive this parking is for some groups. 

Because remember, these parking costs get embedded into the cost of housing, retail stores, and so on.