12 Ways to Map the Midwest

What is the Midwest? There’s been a lot of debate about this question among folks passionate about such thing. But it defies easy definition. Here are eleven ways various people have taken a crack at drawing the map.

Traditional Maps

1. The Northwest Territory

Start with the original Northwest Territory, now sometimes referred to as the Great Lakes region. This is the historic core of what we now think of as the Midwest.

Image via WorldAtlas.com

2. Midwest Census Division

The Census Bureau has an official definition of the Midwest, which is one of four so-called “Census Divisions.” This is further divided into two “Census Regions” as in the map below.

Census Divisions and Regions

Ethnic and Cultural Definitions

Others have attempted to draw maps based on shared ethnicity and culture. These tend to deny the existence of an actual Midwest as we think about it today.

3. Nine Nations of North America

One of the most famous of these is from Joel Garreau, who made a claim that there were actually nine nations on the North American continent in his book of that same name.

Joel Garreau’s Nine Nations

4. Eleven Nations of North America

Colin Woodard took this a step further and argued that there were really eleven nations in North America, which he identifies based on settlement patterns. You can see his writeup on this in an article in Tufts Alumni magazine.

Colin Woodard’s 11 Nations

Economic Definitions

Other maps try to define a region based on shared economic characteristics such as industries.

5. The Rust Belt
Here’s a map of the Rust Belt that’s floating around the I found on a website about coal communities of all places. I’m not sure exactly where it originated.

The Rust Belt

Hybrid Definitions

These maps attempt to use both shared cultural/historical and economic characteristics to define a Midwest region.

6. Richard Longworth’s Midwest

In his book Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism, Richard Longworth created his own bespoke definition of the Midwest. He notably excludes the southern regions of Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio as extensions of the south (similar to the 9 & 11 nations map), and also the pure play Great Plains states along the western edge of the Census definition.

Richard Longworth’s Midwest

7. Pete Saunder’s Five Midwests

Pete combines the nations approach with the traditional Census definition of the Midwest in order to divide the Midwest into five sub-regions.

Pete Saunder’s Five Midwests

8. Kotkin’s American Regions and City-States

Joel Kotkin took a similar approach to dividing America up in Forbes magazine. His view also appears to be a hybrid of culture, economics, and history. He turns America into seven regions and three city-states (New York, LA, and Miami). The full map is too huge to blog, but an excerpt is below which you can click on to see the whole thing in a new window.

The Midwest in Kotkin’s map

Crowdsourced Maps

A couple of other people used crowdsourcing, in whole or in part, to define the Midwest

9. Walter Hickey/538 Map

Walter Hickey, writing at 538 when it was part of the New York Times, conducted a survey with Survey Monkey to ask people which states they thought were in the Midwest. Here’s what he came up with.

Walter Hickey/538 Map

10. miguecolombia’s Reddit Map

Here’s one that I found on a Reddit thread started by user miguecolombia. It appears to be his personal take on how to divide America, with a strong dose of crowdsourcing from Reddit.

miguecolombia and Reddit’s map

Self-Defining Maps

And a couple maps that try to use statistical techniques to let the Midwest map itself.

11. Facebook Network Maps

Pete Warden took a look at Facebook profiles and connections to create clusters of regions. Most of what we’d think of as the Midwest he called Stayathomia, which also covers much of New England.

Pete Warden’s Map

12. Chicago Migration Map

Lastly, a special surprise – a map you’ve never seen before. This was created by someone named Daniel Jarratt, who emailed it to me back in 2012. Using Chicago as the capital of the Midwest, he used IRS migration data and a statistic technique called modularity to divide the US into regions based on affinity with Chicago. Darker red means more connection to Chicago and thus in a sense more Midwest.

Daniel Jarratt’s Midwest

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

from The Urbanophile
http://www.urbanophile.com/2015/10/29/12-ways-to-map-the-midwest/

When Detroit Stood Tall and Shaped the World

My recent post about how urban planning decisions helped lead to the Motown sound in Detroit was inspired by David Maraniss’ new book Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story.

The book takes a deep dive into Detroit 1963, a city that was, although in some ways already in decline, in others near its zenith.

It’s a great read, in particularly for the depth of characterization. Too often Detroit writing is a story of heroes, villains, and victims. Maraniss rejects that approach and provides mostly nuanced portrayals of Detroiters that allows them to be the actual real, red-blooded human beings that they are.

I just posted a review of the book over at City Journal.  Here’s an excerpt:

In his new book, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story, Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss takes a fascinating and engrossing look at the Motor City during this fateful year. Under Henry Ford II (“the Deuce”) and hard-charging salesman Lee Iacocca, the Ford Motor Company was set to unveil its revolutionary Mustang. The civil rights struggle was creating tensions in Detroit and elsewhere, but Mayor Jerome Cavanagh was committed to addressing discrimination and reforming the police. Detroit was about to transform the American musical landscape with Motown Records, whose roster of superstar artists included Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye. The United States Olympic Committee even nominated Detroit as the American representative to host the 1968 summer Olympics, though it lost out to Mexico City. On the more dubious side, the mafia had a powerful presence in the Motor City, where colorful mob boss Tony Jack Giacalone rode around town in his garish “Party Bus” painted blue and silver, the colors of the NFL’s Detroit Lions.

Click through to read the whole review or buy the book.

from The Urbanophile
http://www.urbanophile.com/2015/10/25/when-detroit-stood-tall-and-shaped-the-world/

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Issues Mea Culpa to App Developers

Jack Dorsey photo by Flicker/cellanr. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

I have argued that Twitter’s fundamental problem is that it sabotaged its engine of innovation when it wiped out its third party ecosystem back in 2010-11. CEO Jack Dorsey apparently agrees. Three days after my blog post on the subject, he took the stage at the company’s developer conference to issue an apology for the way the company had treated developers.

Jack Dorsey wasted no time at Twitter’s annual Flight developer conference this morning, telling the crowd that his company has effectively failed the developers and would like to say sorry. Dorsey says that Twitter has a lot of work to rebuild the relationship with the software community, which it’s soiled by acting in unpredictable fashion, shutting off access to its platform, and ignoring the fact that developers made the service what it is today.” We want to come to you today and first and foremost apologize for our confusion,” Dorsey said onstage.

This is great news and gives hope for the company now that Dorsey is back at the helm. He also implies that Twitter won’t censor content, saying “Twitter stands for freedom of expression, and will not rest until that is recognized as a fundamental human right.”  We’ll see how the company backs these up, but these comments are welcome.

To be fair, I won’t claim to be the only person who ever made the connection between Twitter killing its ecosystem and languishing in growth. But I’m gratified to have contributed to the discussion.

 

 

from The Urbanophile
http://www.urbanophile.com/2015/10/22/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-issues-mea-culpa-to-app-developers/

Why Washington Isn’t Going to Fix Your Streets

America’s transportation eyes are turning back to Washington, as the n-th temporary extension of the highway fund is about to expire. But the cold reality is that no matter what Congress does, it’s not likely to fix the potholes on the streets in your town.  That’s because local streets largely aren’t paid for by federal funds, and only a limited about of the federal road money makes it down to the local level in any case.

That’s the subject of my new Manhattan Institute Issue Brief “Beyond Repair? America’s Infrastructure Crisis Is Local.”  The key point is that there’s a part of our transportation challenge that is simply not addressable by the federal government through the very design of the federal funding system. The federal highway program was created to build the interstate system and care for major infrastructure, not maintain city streets and rural roads. Given that so many cities have a major street repair backlog and aren’t able to even prevent further deterioration, it suggests to me a business model problem at the local level. This needs to be solved locally at the state level.

One challenge localities is face is that while they do receive some federal funds, and a larger chunk of state money, they get raise most of their transport dollars themselves, and this largely comes from general revenue type pots of money.

With street repairs often in competition with things like pensions and public safety for funding, unsurprisingly it often loses and ends up at the back of the line or crowded out altogether.

I provide some practical policy suggestions cities can look at. The solutions will be as diverse as our communities. But it’s ultimately from state and local government that the solutions to this part of the transportation challenge must be found.

Click through to read the whole thing.

 

from The Urbanophile
http://www.urbanophile.com/2015/10/22/why-washington-isnt-going-to-fix-your-streets/

Home Prices Are Rising Faster Than You Think

Prices of existing single family homes, as measured by the S&P/Case-Shiller National Home Price index, are rising is single digit terms.  However, the price changes that matter – the real or inflation adjusted changes – may be higher than many suspect. Backing out inflation, as shown in the chart, gives real increases averaging 6.3% annually in 2012-20015. The compares to real increases of 6.8% annually during 1998-2005, the peak years of the housing boom. With two percent wage increases and one percent inflation, a real increase of 6% or more can make a difference.  These numbers may offer one explanation for the recent popularity of apartments and renting.

The chart shows the rate of inflation (green bars), the real increase in the S&P/Case-Shiller National Home Price Index (red bars) and the nominal increase in the index (blue line). The data for 1976 through 2014 are the 12 months ended in December; for 2015 data for December 2014 to July 2015 are used and annualized.

from S&P Dow Jones Indices – HousingViews
http://www.housingviews.com/2015/10/19/home-prices-are-rising-faster-than-you-think/

Why Twitter Is Really in Trouble (And What Might Actually Kill It)

Many of you know I do a lot of tweeting out of links to interesting urbanist articles, with some other things that catch my eye. I’ve attracted over 18,000 followers through purely organic growth. You can follow by clicking over to @urbanophile.

There’s been a lot of press about Twitter’s struggles lately. The company always had a revenue model challenge, but the real problem hitting their valuation is stagnation in their user growth.

What caused this? It’s pretty simple: Twitter deliberately shut down product innovation, most of which was developed externally, and killed off much of its ecosystem. Twitter is now less a platform than an app.

URL shortening. Retweets. @-handle notation. #-tags. Tweeting images. Tweetstorms. Basically everything that makes the product what it was came from the user community or third party innovators.

Twitter, unlike Facebook, used to have a policy of allowing the user the choice of how to read tweets. You weren’t locked into their own products in the way that you are with Facebook.

Companies like bit.ly gave you link click analytics. There were apps for tweeting photos. Tweetie created a good Twitter app for phones. And Tweetdeck created what was arguable the killer app for Twitter, which allowed you have multiple columns monitoring various feeds and get on-screen notifications of new tweets in them.

Back around 2010-2011, Twitter decided to take back control of the user experience. It bought Tweetdeck and Tweetie, and more or less shut down people’s ability to create their own Twitter clients. It also created its own link shortening service and photo infrastructure.

This action more or less ended the era of innovation on Twitter, and certainly had to have made anyone nervous about trying to build a business model around adding value to the platform.

What innovations has Twitter created since? Well, there’s their own internal “Retweet” function, which basically everyone hated. The old style retweet only disappeared when Twitter stripped the functionality out of Tweetdeck.

Twitter added inline image preview, which is nice. But it’s hard to believe it wouldn’t have become standardized in other clients eventually. There are now analytics available, but a lot of this just replicates what third parties like bit.ly had already been doing.

In my view by far the best feature they’ve added is Quote Tweet, which allows you to add a commentary while displaying the context of the tweet you are responding to. It’s basically retweet with commentary and I use it all the time.

Quote tweet is feature is really the best cool new piece of functionality I recall them rolling out since they killed off their ecosystem. Twitter may have built the platform originally, but beyond that, they just haven’t proven to be that good at product innovation. Twitter has become a bit stale as a result and it shows in their stagnating usage.

What’s more, Twitter has product design issues and in some respects has gone backwards since the days of the old Tweetdeck.

For example, twitter only allows you to quote your own tweets in Tweetdeck. On the phone and web site, that functionality is disabled. I use this all the time to add pull quotes or commentary to articles I post. Quoting your own tweets is supremely useful, but the user experience for it is at best inconsistent.

Twitter rewrote Tweetdeck (and changed their API to kill off the old one) into what is in some respects an inferior product. The column widths in the new Tweetdeck seem to take up twice as much space as in the old. I used to be able to keep four columns visible easily, now I can only do two at the window size I like to work with.

The old Tweetdeck also embedded additional useful third party products.  For example, by default it included a window from Twitscoop (now apparently defunct) that had a word cloud of what people were saying on Twitter, along with Twitter’s own (inferior) trending topics.

Image via Flicker/Kevin Anderson. Creative Commons Licensed

This is what made Twitter the breaking news headquarters of the web. When you saw somebody’s name light up on Tweetdeck, say Michael Jackson, you knew there was a good chance something big had happened. Click the name, and you instantly discovered he was dead.

This functionality is now gone (at least by default), and I’ve never figured out how to get it back. For me, since Twitter re-wrote Tweetdeck, I’ve found the product far less useful.  I don’t even look at the main timeline much anymore, and haven’t found out any breaking news on Twitter in a while.

In short, Twitter’s functionality and usefulness has actually gone backwards in some ways. Combine that with little in the way of real product innovation, and it’s no surprise the platform is stagnating.

It’s hard for me to see how Twitter turns the ship around if they continue to want to drive everything internally. Maybe they can change their innovation culture, but given that users and third parties developed most of the cool stuff, their best road is to figure out how to credibly – that’s the tough part given that they already killed their client ecosystem once – reopen their platform to outsider innovators when it comes to the user experience.  That is, to become an actual platform again.

Unfortunately, press reports have suggested that Twitter likely to instead do one or both of the two things that really would threaten their platform: censorship and filtered feed.

On the censorship front, there’s a vocal group of people claiming that Twitter’s user growth problem comes from a culture of abuse, and that’s why they are struggling. This isn’t credible. What’s more, those making the most noise about abuse even sometimes have their own history of behaviors that could be classified as abuse. For example, there’s an article people are gushing over this week that claims abuse is the problem killing twitter – written by a guy who was highlighted on marketing web sites for his participation in the Twitter mob attack on Justine Sacco.

Is there some abuse on Twitter? Of course. But a) the rhetoric around it is exaggerated by those with other agendas. For example, situations like Justine Sacco are rare, and seem to result mostly from viral effects, not abusive intent. Is the guy who wrote that article a horrible, vicious abuser of women, or just a guy who clicked retweet on something he thought was funny in the moment? I suspect the latter, so let’s not overstate the case on him. What’s funny when tweeted among a few hundred friends looks different when it’s retweeted a million times.  And more importantly b) it’s not abuse but product stagnation that has led to user growth stagnation. Re-open the innovation gains, and if there’s a demand, some third party will figure out how to filter tweets for abuse or anything else people don’t like.

This is not really about abuse but primarily about people who want to censor Twitter to eliminate views they don’t like, or to establish a mechanism for and precedent justifying censorship. For example, take a look at Twitter’s new abuse reporting page in response to this pressure, which invites you to report people for merely disagreeing with your opinion.

People disagree with my opinions all day long! Even President Obama takes being disrespected in stride.

If Twitter goes down the censorship road, they are definitely going to take a hit. And it would be a shame. Because Twitter’s lack of censorship is what made it so a great tool during things like the Arab Spring uprisings.

But an even bigger threat to Twitter would be implementing filtered feed. This was floated as a trial balloon about a year ago and I haven’t heard much about it since, but you can believe it’s something they haven’t ruled out.  In fact, they are already dipping their toe in the water with this through their “while you were away” feature and Moments.

What is filtered feed? It’s basically your Facebook news feed. Rather than showing all tweets in chronological order, Twitter would show the ones that they think are “most relevant” and filter out the rest.

This has nothing to do with relevance and user experience and everything to do with converting Twitter into a toll highway – just like Facebook.

It used to be that if you Liked a page on Facebook, posts from that page would appear in your news feed. Or at least a good chunk of them would. But over time Facebook reduced the number of likers it would show page posts to down to next to nothing.

On my Urbanophile Facebook page, I had over 4,000 Likes, but only 50-100 people would see a post. If I wanted more people to see it, I would have had to pay. So even though you said you wanted to see my content when you clicked Like, Facebook wouldn’t show it to you unless I paid up. I decided instead to get out of the Facebook business.

The same effect would surely happen on Twitter. Celebrity tweets and such would continue to go through (and Twitter might even pay them to tweet). But everybody else would have to pay up, probably calibrated to people with lots of followers. Who is going to pay? Corporations and institutions of course. People like me who distribute information that my followers (mostly) want to see would simply abandon the platform.

Filtered feed would turn Twitter into a glorified ad festival like Facebook. People are willing to put up with that on Facebook because their family and old classmates are there. But will they do the same to Twitter? Color me skeptical.

Filtered feed will always be a danger because Twitter is under huge pressure to show a business model, and building a toll highway has worked for Facebook.

Making Twitter even less useful through through censorship or the filtered feed toll highway isn’t the answer. If Twitter wants to actually get out of its funk, it actually needs to start innovating again, or better yet let others innovate, in order to generate the compelling value that will start drawing people to the platform again.

from The Urbanophile
http://www.urbanophile.com/2015/10/18/why-twitter-is-really-in-trouble-and-what-might-actually-kill-it/

Where Are the Children?

I have a post up over at New Geography looking at changes in child population since 2010 based on the latest Census estimates.

It’s no secret that we have an aging population in America, but a lot of metro areas are actually seeing not just more older people, but actual declines in their number of children. This isn’t just a few places either. About half of America’s major majors have seen a decline in children since 2010, and if you look just at pre-school age children under five, it’s even worse.

There are some interesting results here. One is that some of these Sunbelt boomtowns have actually seen declines in their under age five population, including Atlanta and Charlotte.  Conversely, there has been some overall child population growth in some places you might not expect given this overall pattern, such as San Francisco and Seattle.

Click through to read the whole thing.

You can also download a spreadsheet with all the data.

 

from The Urbanophile
http://www.urbanophile.com/2015/10/15/where-are-the-children/

How Urban Planning Made Motown Records Possible

I’m reading Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story by David Maraniss, a book I plan to review for City Journal. But I want to highlight something briefly that really caught my eye about Motown Records. It’s no secret Detroit punches above its weight in musical influence, and the Motown sound was clearly a big part of that. Maraniss asks “Why Detroit? What gave this city its unmatched creative melody?” He lays out his theory of the case with regards to Motown Records.

The family piano’s role in the music that flowed out of the residential streets of Detroit cannot be overstated. The piano, and its availability to children of the black working class and middle class, is essential to understanding what happened in that time and place, and why it happened, not just with Berry Gordy, Jr. but with so many other young black musicians who came of age there from the late forties to the early sixties. What was special then about pianos and Detroit? First, because of the auto plants and related industries, most Detroiters had steady salaries and families enjoyed a measure of disposable income they could use to listen to music in clubs and at home. Second, the economic geography of the city meant that the vast majority of residents lived in single family homes, not high-rise apartments, making it easier to deliver pianos and find room for them. And third, Detroit had the egalitarian advantage of a remarkable piano enterprise, the Grinnell Brothers Music House. [emphasis added]

Like most things, the rise of Motown Records was multifactoral. Maraniss keys in on the prevalence of pianos in black homes. Note his factors creating this, to which one could also add the first rate musical education available to public school students at places like Cass Tech that he refers to multiple times throughout the text.

But of course I highlight: “the vast majority of residents lived in single family homes, not high-rise apartments, making it easier to deliver pianos and find room for them.”

It’s no secret that Detroit, like most Midwest cities, is a city of single family homes. Detached houses have a bad rep in planning circles today, but in this case the space they afforded allowed black families to have a piano – and in Motown Records founder Berry Gordy, Jr.’s case, a baby grand at that. This would be much more difficult in a microapartment to say the least.

Let’s not get too carried away. As Gordy was founding Motown, Jane Jacobs was pointing out the trouble with Detroit’s “gray belts” of single families that were already being abandoned. Pete Saunders has highlighted Detroit’s housing stock as one of the nine key urban planning reasons Detroit failed (ironically, in part because today these houses are too small).

Nevertheless, no preponderance of single family homes, no widespread pianos in black Detroit homes, and likely no Motown Records either. The history of American music was literally shaped by the single family housing character of Detroit. If we can acknowledge its flaws, it’s only fair to acknowledge it’s unique strengths too.

What this suggests is that cities shouldn’t despair too much about their existing built form, even if in many cases they are struggling with it. The question might be, what does that form enable that you can’t get elsewhere? Grinnell Brothers Music figured out that auto money + under-served black households + single family homes meant a potential market for pianos. And the rest is history. What other market opportunities exit right before our urban planning eyes that we have not yet noticed?

from The Urbanophile
http://www.urbanophile.com/2015/10/13/how-urban-planning-made-motown-records-possible/

How Chicago’s 606 Trail Fell Short of Expectations

When I was back in Chicago over Labor Day, I had to check out the “big three” new public space projects there: the Riverwalk, Maggie Daley Park, and the 606 Trail. The Riverwalk is a spectacular project I already wrote about. Maggie Daley Park, a new playground just across Columbus Dr. from Millennium Park’s Frank Gehry designed band shell, has been controversial and got mixed reviews. But I really liked it. More importantly, kids seem to love it. The place was jammed, and it appeared to be mostly locals. My cousin tells me her young daughter can’t get enough of the place. I’m not doing a post on this, but it looks like another big win.

The 606 Trail, a 2.7 mile biking and walking trail built on the embankment of an abandoned rail line, is a different story, however.

The problem with the 606 is not that it’s bad. In fact, it’s a nice, eminently serviceable rail trail. I won’t do a full writeup since Edward Keegan had a good review in Crain’s in which he asks, “Is that all there is?” that I think gets it basically right.  Numerous other reviews are also available.

What I will do is highlight three areas that I think contribute to Keegan being underwhelmed: inflated expectations, financing problems, and an odd lack of attention to design detail.

Inflated Expectations

The fact that the 606 is an elevated trail on an abandoned rail line creates an almost inevitable comparison to New York’s High Line. The city did nothing to downplay those comparisons, and in fact suggested Chicago’s trail would actually be considered superior. For example, in national urbanist web site Next City, Deputy Mayor Steve Koch said, “A lot of people are familiar with the High Line — this is a concept far beyond that truly transformative project.”  Frances Whitehead, lead artist for the project, told WBEZ regarding the High Line, “I think we’re gonna smoke them.”

It’s very clear the city wanted this to be considered a project worthy of national, not just local attention. Back to Koch, he said, “Someone will call you up and say, ‘I want to see the city’ This is where you’ll go; this is the way you’ll do it. And I think people are going to come from all over the globe.”

The very name speaks to the ambition level. Originally it was known as the Bloomingdale Trail, a name that technically still exists but which has been replaced for most purposes by “the 606.” The new name was taken from the first three digits of zip codes in the city of Chicago. Thus by using 606, the name itself suggests a project of citywide, not neighborhood, significance. The city also pushed for national media – and got it.

The problem is that the 606 is not even remotely another High Line, nor a project of citywide significance, nor a bond fide tourist attraction for the masses. It’s a neighborhood serving rail-trail that is elevated above the streets with some nicer features like lighting that you don’t see often. Like many other rail trails around the country, I expect it to have a significant positive development affect in the neighborhood, as well as being a great recreational amenity. All great things – if the trail had been sold that way originally.

To be fair, some like the Trust for Public Land, which was involved in the project design, were more realistic. Their CEO Will Rogers told Next City, “The High Line really reshaped the whole Meatpacking District. The Bloomingdale is going to provide parks and green space for neighborhoods that desperately need it, and bicycle access for people going downtown. It’s a different kind of investment.” But this isn’t the message that won out in shaping perceptions. The city would have been better off setting expectations much differently.

Insufficient Funds

The 606 Trail was primarily paid for using federal CMAQ transportation funds. According to DNA Chicago, the total price of the 606 is $95 million, with $50 million in CMAQ funds, $20 million privately raised, $5 million from the city, and $20 million to fill (for what purposes I am not sure, though see below).

The use of a CMAQ funding had key implications. One is that it more or less required the project to be primarily a bicycle trail. The entire edifice of obnoxious federal transport regs are in play here. Two is that it made this a CDOT project, not a Parks District one (though I believe the Parks District is now in charge of it). I believe many of the things that contribute to Keegan’s feelings come from the funding strings and a budget that was too low. In fact, this project to me brought back echoes of the CTA’s Brown Line expansion project in the way that various parts of it give off the vibe of being value engineered.

One of the things that got whacked in the Brown Line project, for example, was paint. Except for a handful of places such as over Armitage Ave, metal on the project was simply left in a raw galvanized state. I previously noted the austere results of that project give off an homage to prison yard feel. The same look is present on the 606. Consider these photos:

Mesh galvanized metal railing at the CTA Fullerton station.

 

Mesh galvanized railings along the 606.

 

There’s nothing wrong with using an industrial motif, which is very appropriate in Chicago. And obviously security for adjacent property owners is important. It’s also possible that these had to be over-engineered to meet DOT/federal standards, much like the Brown Line station railings for passengers that could stop a Mack truck. The designers may well have felt these were the best choices. But my gut tells me that, like with the Brown Line, this may have been a money issue.

A lot of people have noted the fact that the landscaping has not yet been fully planted or grown to maturity as a reason for the trail’s feel. That surely plays a role. But the preponderance of galvanized metal through much of it plays a big role in giving the 606 an austere feel.

This also demonstrates how the city’s financial problems have practical consequences. Because the city’s budget is in such bad shape, it had to turn to CMAQ, which imposed strings you’d rather not have in an ideal world. And you may not have the cash to do it right. (The Riverwalk doesn’t suffer from this, possibly because its commercial spaces generate revenues to bond against).

Design Oddities

The 606 also has some odd design misses. For example, here is what the Trail physically looks like. It’s a concrete biking path with a soft blue rubberized running path on either side.

Let’s see, where have I seen this design pattern before?

Fullerton L platform.

The CTA uses a similar blue shoulder area on its platforms. But in its case, the design pattern is used to indicate the edge of the platform and thus an unsafe area to stand. You are supposed to stand behind the blue line. Using a similar width blue area, even if a different shade, for a jogging path on the 606 violates a local design affordance, like putting a handle on a door and labeling it “Push.”

Then there’s this arch bridge:

The 606 Trail over Milwaukee Ave.

This design is dimensionally awkward, something Keegan points out too. Given that this is a rail trail, it’s also notable that the designers chose a steel arch pattern that is not idiomatic of rail bridge design, certainly not in Chicago anyway. This also makes me again wonder about the role of CDOT in the project. This arch structure is the same pattern they used for the Halsted St. bridge over the north branch of the Chicago River that Blair Kamin similarly labeled, “less than graceful.” (The Damen Ave arch bridge works much better, probably because the span is longer and higher, lending itself to more elegant design proportions).

The name “606” itself is also a bit off. Inside Chicago the reference may be obvious, but outside of its this name is likely to be parsed as an area code, particularly with the “0” middle digit from the original North American Numbering Plan. Today you frequently see people sporting their city’s main area code on shirts and such as a bit of local pride, particularly as area codes have shrunk down to city scale size in many places. The 606 area code is Appalachian Kentucky, however, not Chicago. Few people without a connection to Chicago will know that its zip codes start with 606.

These aren’t huge items, but cumulatively they add up. The little things separate great design from good, and the 606 missed some opportunities.

On the whole, this trail will be a great amenity for the neighborhoods it passes through, and also be legitimately functional for transportation given its elevated nature and the transportation lines it connects to such as Metra’s Clybourn station. It was fairly well patronized when I was on it, but with no sense of crowding. And this was on a nice Labor Day afternoon, suggesting that that chaos and safety issues of the lakefront path won’t be repeated here.

If only it had originally been sold for what it was instead of a High Line beater, had raised that last $20 million (plus a bit more, perhaps), and had a little more attention to detail in some design elements, the 606 would be probably be seen as something that significantly exceeded expectations instead of something that did not live up to the hype.

from The Urbanophile
http://www.urbanophile.com/2015/10/08/how-chicagos-606-trail-fell-short-of-expectations/

Looking Forward to 2050

Tardis Image via BBC America

The folks behind Meeting of the Minds asked me to participate in a group blogging event today about the world of 2050 in the form of a letter back to the present day written from someone at that time. I’m like sure, I can do that. But then I realized I’m rather dreadful at that kind of writing.

So while wondering what to do about this assignment I agreed to, I remembered that I had some Connections. Who they are let’s just leave a bit vague. But let’s just say I was able to arrange to a short visit to 2050 in order to help me with this blog post.

The challenge, obviously, is that as with all things time travel, I can’t actually say anything about what I saw because that would get me into Really Big Trouble. So I wondered what I could do with my newfound insights since I can’t actually say anything about the actual future.

Then I realized there’s one thing that I can tell you, and that’s that the future is different. I mean it’s really different. Different in the sense that you can’t even imagine what it actually looks like.

Think about it. 2050 is 35 years from now. 35 years ago it was 1980. Jimmy Carter was still president. There were still hostages in Iran. The #1 song for that year was Blondie’s “Call Me.”  The Commodore 64 hadn’t even come out yet.

You get it. Nobody in 1980 could have predicted what we’d be doing or what our world would be like today. Certainly thinking about attempting to solve the challenges of the today with technologies they had in mind likely would have missed the mark.

It’s the same for us. We don’t have a clue what 2050 is going to look like. We don’t. But we have to make decisions today, some with implications that stretch well into the future. Infrastructure, for example, lasts a long time. So we need to think about the intersection of planning and investment with an understanding that the world will likely change.

One real life example. I renovated a house in 1998 in Evanston, Illinois. I was very proud of myself for running ethernet cables all over the place when I did it. I thought I was going to be so far ahead of the rest of the world on network readiness it wasn’t funny.

Of course it was funny and the laugh as on me, as I got maybe a decade’s worth of use out of a grand total of one of the wires I ran before Wi-Fi rendered my investment moot. Similarly, the cyberpunk role playing game Shadowrun had to re-invent their game universe in order to make computer hacking a wireless vs. wired activity.

That’s not to say investments like my wires that only last a short period of time aren’t worth making, but if we think we are future-proofing our city or some such, we are probably spending way too much money on things that will last less time than we thought.

Instead of trying to plan for 2050, perhaps we should think about how to create systems that can be upgraded modularly and incrementally over time as change occurs. Or even to evolve in their physical structures over time. The ability to adapt to changing and unforeseen circumstances is what the world demands today. Because I can tell you if you’re making decisions today based on what you think the world will need in 2050, you will be dead wrong. Trust me on this one.

 

from The Urbanophile
http://www.urbanophile.com/2015/10/06/looking-forward-to-2050/