The Urbanist

Sunday November 08, 2009 at 19:29

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My new tattoo of Buffalo’s street plan.

Craig Brown of Historic Tattoo in Portland, OR did a fantastic job. Thanks Craig.

http://historictattoo.com/

Saturday June 13, 2009 at 12:26

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Cleveland, the hipster dog.

Saturday October 25, 2008 at 14:27

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Re-Birth of the Urbanist

Re-Birth of the Urbanist

Unfortunately this site has lain dormant for the past three months once I moved down to Durham, NC, started gutting my house, started graduate school for Urban Planning, and got a dog. During that time I’ve thought about deleting my Tumblr, and I’ve thought about how I would restart it. Although I’ve spent most of my time doing homework. The problem has become that I’ve stopped thinking about urban issues and planning and have just allowed my homework to become work that I am detached from emotionally, even though the reason I started grad school was because of my strong feelings related to cities. Because of this I am re-centering this site to discuss issues and experiences related to my neighborhood and neighborhoods like it.

Hopefully I’ll be able to post rough ideas up here and use this to remind myself of the benefits of school and how what I am learning is applicable to what I want to do. Hopefully it will make work seem less like work, and more like my hobby.

I’m also hoping these entries will elicit more feedback and criticism. I want to make sure my feet are planted firmly on the ground.

Thanks.

Monday June 23, 2008 at 14:06

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Gentrification is fun again!

Monday June 02, 2008 at 14:03

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“For my money, the “we were lied to” chorus only represents the obdurately self-righteous cluelessness in every band of the American political spectrum.”

—

We lied to ourselves. We continue to lie to ourselves every day. The US public barely understands the first thing about the energy predicament we’re in, and what it means for how we live in this country — or how we get along with the rest of the world — and the news media tragically reflects that ignorance. We fantasize about being “energy independent” and still being able to drive to the mall three times a day to eat caesar salads grown on the other side of North America. Get this: we deserve exactly what is happening to us. We might as well keep on lying to ourselves to pretend that we are not descending into a dark phase of our own history. After all, the true basis of American life these days is to feel good about yourself no matter what you do.

- Jim Kunstler (via azspot)

Great quote. I’m finishing up his classic book The Geography of Nowhere as I write this.

This post was reblogged from AZspot.

Thursday May 22, 2008 at 13:46

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The New York Times has a number of interesting pieces on the price of gas. To quote the times, an “Oracle” at Goldman Sachs predicts oil will reach $150 to $200 over the next 6 to 24 months. Ford is cutting production. Coal production is increasing. Oh, and Krugman is calling for the end of the American Dream, or of Suburbia at least.

I would imagine the newspapers looked similar during the oil embargo, but I’m hopeful that this time the price pressure from oil will lead to more meaningful long term changes.

Wednesday May 21, 2008 at 16:44

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"High gas prices are making more people than ever choose public transit"

has been a common headline these past few weeks and months, although it isn’t really true. It’s only more people than have ridden in recent memory, and even then it’s only around a 5-10% increase in ridership, and even then only about 5% of Americans use public transit. I would assume that more people would choose to take transit if there were better transit options.

This leads to the problem of needing massive investment in infrastructure, which would require a few things:

1. a permanent shift in how Americans view transit.

2. a new dedicated funding stream for transit (say a substantially increased gas tax dedicated to transit similar to how Europe operates, or some other system more palatable to Americans, and this of course assumes point 1.)

3. More cities and urban cores would need to become much denser to make light and medium rail economically feasible.

During the turn of the 20th century when Boston, New York, and Chicago built their subway systems many other smaller, but still relatively dense, cities wanted to build their own as well but costs at the time were prohibitive, and now that cities are built up I would imagine getting the right of ways for streetcars alone would make most of these projects a non-starter.

So what will be the answer? What will the price of gas have to be before Americans choose to fund transit?

If you don’t tumbl and would like to respond/comment email me and I’ll post it. matt . dudek (a) gmail . com

Sunday May 18, 2008 at 11:08

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This reminds me of Robin Rhode’s work as well, although he tends to incorporate people interacting with his drawings.

Street art is one of those things I love about cities. For those in the Boston area, the ICA has a great exhibit called “Street Level” on loan from the Duke’s Nasher Museum that features the work of Robin Rhode, William Cordova, and Mark Bradford.

Blublu.org

theron:

very rad.

This post was reblogged from Theron humphrey.

Sunday May 18, 2008 at 10:43

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Well here’s a ridiculously bad idea. Chrysler is offering a deal that if you buy one of their vehicles, they will give you a gas card that locks in the price of gas at $2.99/gallon. (Chrysler will reimburse you the difference). This gives the buyer the perverse incentive of buying the least fuel efficient automobile so they can save the most money.

This will artificially inflate the price of gas by raising demand and, does nothing to address the problem of our dependence on oil and the preposterously bad average fuel efficiency. It would seem that the gas price situation must be pretty bleak if Chrysler is willing to offer an incentive like this.

Chrysler: via: the Boston Globe

UPDATE: Food in Mouth correctly reblogs me and says that the #4 American auto maker probably won’t have that large of an effect on changing demand for oil and therefore the price of oil. This is more than likely correct, Chrysler alone probably won’t be able to do this, but if other car companies begin to offer similar incentives, etc. etc. And either way, Chrysler is creating an artificially low price which as we all know from Econ 101 will have higher demand at that lower price.

And Food in Mouth also believes that potential car buyers will do the math and see that they don’t stand to save much money based on this deal. I hope he’s correct, but I am less optimistic. Kenneth Galbraith coined the term “conventional wisdom” and by it he meant that anyone could choose to believe what they want to believe within a reasonable range and have evidence or theorists that would back them up. (From his book The Affluent Society). I’ve found in my conversations with family living in the suburbs and those that are automobile dependent, they choose to believe that the high prices are due to a constrained supply. So if you choose to believe that, then buying a Chrysler now that get’s 12mpg makes sense with a locked in gas price and the likeliehood of gas prices falling sub $3/gallon in the near future.

Which brings me to my original point, this does nothing to address the oil dependency problem. (Food in Mouth, thanks for continuing the discussion)