Planetizen Posts: New Urbanism and Public Notices on the Web

I’ve posted a couple new posts to Planetizen’s Interchange blog recently:

> Should the Internet Replace Newspapers for Public Notices? Most planning and zoning ordinances require cities publish some notices in the local newspaper. In an age of newspapers decline, and with the Internet readily available, I suggest we should amend our laws.

> The Origin of New Urbanism’s Persistent Image Problem: Despite authoring a trenchant critique of contemporary urbanism and articulating a detailed, comprehensive vision for urban development, the New Urbanism movement retains a vague stigma with many American urbanists. Far more than an unfair stereotype, I argue the reputation problem runs to the core of intellectual life among American urbanists, speaking to the way our cities our developed and studied.

Maine’s Unlikely Train

When I told my boss I was taking the train to Maine for the weekend two ago, he reacted by surprise. “There’s a train to Maine?”

Since the largest city in the state is just over 62,000 people, it’s a fair question. Much of the state is extremely rural and the total population reaches only 1.3 million.

Despite this, the state’s Amtrak service is booming in popularity. The Downeaster service, which provides service between Portland, Maine and Boston via several stops in southern Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts carried record 441,769 riders in FY2008, a 28% increase over the previous year.

The route was launched in 2001, a joint partnership between Amtrak and a special rail authority established by the Maine state government. (13 other states also contract with Amtrak for rail service) Thanks to this arrangement, Amtrak operated the train and the rail authority oversees marketing and management of the line. Initially the route was plagued with delays as the train shares the track with freight trains. Improvements in recent years have cut the average trip time to around 2.5 hours, just over what a similar trip take driving, although recent on-time performance of around 70% clearly needs improvement. The route has its own website, marketing plan, and Downeaster trains now have free Wi-Fi service for passengers.

Why is the service a success? Although a rural state, a significant portion of Maine’s population is clustered in southern Maine near Downeaster stops. The state shares close economic ties with Boston, meaning many commuters — a recent performance report says they make up one-third of the passengers. Furthermore, the two end stations are closely tied to public transit — bus routes in Portland and The T subway and commuter rail system in Boston. Most of all, the service enjoys clear support by riders and political leaders alike who have worked hard to build new stations, keep ticket prices low, promote the service, and trouble-shoot schedule problems. One rider even set up a blog to track news relating to the train.

The success of the rail line has inspired one of the communities along the route, Saco, to build a train station adjacent a collection of vacant factory buildings, where a long-planned redevelopment will put apartments, offices, and stores. The project, featured in a hopeful promotional video, won final approval from municipal officials last year. Although the train station is not yet complete, a large wind turbine installed by the city to power the building is already operating.

The Amtrak system is often discussed as a whole, whose fortunes rise or sink according to macroscopic forces such as the funding whims of Congress and the price of gas. While true to some extent, the Downeaster reminds us the success of Amtrak routes also depends on state-specific service contracts and funds, intermodal transportation planning, stations quality, and the combined efforts of Amtrak staff, riders, and local political leaders. Although the Downeaster faces major obstacles, including long-term funding sources and aging infrastructure, its success thus far has been no accident.

Photos by LenEdgerly and PhotoPunk used courtesy Creative Commons license.

The Online Landscapes of Social Networking

Facebook and MySpace have emerged as America’s dominant social networking websites, boasting over 124 and 245 million members, respectively. While their technical, political, and social implications have been much discussed, these websites also represent virtual landscapes drawing from two distinct strains in American culture.

Invented at Harvard University by a native of New York’s Westchester County, Facebook offers users a regimented experience. Aside from minor customizations in layout, users profiles share a common structure, color, pattern, and design. The individual must be subordinate to the common order unifying the whole. It is, I’ll argue, a European approach to space.

The brainchild of Los Angeles internet entrepreneurs, Myspace users can fully customize their profiles. In a sense they fully “own” what web designers call screen real estate. This is the digital equivalent to the landscape of suburbia, where each owner may landscape and decorate their own as they choose.

A quick tour through American and European cities and cemeteries will clarify the comparison.

In the 19th Century American culture entered a new phase of self conscious cultural independence. Romantic cemeteries were created throughout the country. Designed to replace the church boneyard, where remains were often disinterred to make room for more, the romantic cemetery sought to “rob death of a portion of its terrors,” staking out for each of the deceased a portion of earth. Bellefontaine Cemetery in Saint Louis is a celebrated example. The deceased occupy individual plots, decorate and identified (generally) as the family pleases.

Visitors are reminded through design and allusion this is a natural landscape, far away from the domain of everyday life. Here, in the form of a stained glass window.

At the same time, the country’s first garden suburbs were developed, such as Riverside, Illinois. Invariably these neighborhoods were single family homes placed on uniquely landscaped lots, a pattern that continues to this day.

In contrast, European cemeteries and cities are often quite different. Paris’s famous Père-Lachaise Cemetery, founded in 1804, takes a different pattern. Here family mausoleums line miniature cobblestone streets, creating an urban landscape of death where the individual is subordinated to a familial structure.

Here and elsewhere in Europe from Roman times, human remains are often stored vertically in Columbarium, high-rises of human remains removing the individual from a direct relationship with the earth. Multifamily housing for the deceased, if you will.

Apartment living is commonplace in both city and suburb, seen here in this picture of Finland.

These deep-grained cultural preferences are reflected in the structure of social networking websites, tools used intimately by millions. To be popular, the system must reflect their users preferences. Although celebrated as a seat of American cultural independence, Boston shares close cultural ties with Europe, and its physical structure of many neighborhoods resembles European cities. Like Europe’s vertical family crypts or apartment house living, Facebook’s regimented framework removes from individual control the digital turf on the screen.

Los Angeles, on the other hand, has been celebrated as a quintessentially American city in structure. While it is true the city once enjoyed a large urban railway system and has the highest population density of any major U.S. city, it is a city of single family homes on individual lots. It is fitting, then, that Myspace deeds full ownership of screen real estate to members, allowing them to decorate their profiles with blaring music, intelligible color schemes, and absurd fonts, the digital equivalent of pink flamingos in the yard.

These subtle cultural preferences may explain why Facebook’s membership growth has slowed and remains biased towards certain groups. Perhaps it is some cultural quirk that explains why Orkut has become wildly popular in Brazil. Although Mark Zuckerburg may hope to transform his service into a social networking “utility,” its appeal for some Americans may be limited until he lets the American masses deck out their page in flashing colors and blaring pop tunes. It is, after all, the American way.

Boston Work

I thought I would note here that I recently moved to Boston, and last week started work as a Research Analyst at the Boston Metropolitan Area Planning Council, a planning agency that represents 101 cities and towns in the metropolitan Boston region. I’ll be working in the agency’s Data Center, as well as on the interactive mapping website MetroBoston DataCommon they operate with several partner organizations.