The RGS-IBG annual conference has been on this week, and I presented as part of a series of geocomputation sessions arranged in advance of the 21st anniversary Geocomputation conference in Leeds next year. The topic was current CASA research from the RESOLUTION project, looking at developing fast and consistent methods of measuring public transport accessibility between different cities.
The data used for the London analysis comes from the Traveline public transport timetable data. The image below shows an example accessibility measure of jobs accessible within 1 hour’s travel time leaving at 8am.
Last week I attended the American Association of Geographers annual conference in San Francisco. This was my first AAG and first time visiting the Bay Area, so made for a fascinating trip.
The tech boom and economic resurgence of the Bay Area is a topic of much interest to geographers, and I really enjoyed the Author Meets the Critics session on Michael Storper et al.’s new book The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies. The book compares San Francisco to Los Angeles over the last 40 years, and how SF has more successfully developed new knowledge economy industries, including through government interventions like the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). It was great to see influential economic geographers like Michael Storper and Allen Scott debating city evolution and path dependence, as I’ve been following their work for a long time.
CASA and UCL were well represented at the conference. Martin Zaltz Austwick presented on how the Olympic regeneration in London is affecting artistic creativity in Hackney Wick. Continuing the artistic theme, Miki Beavis presented her PhD research into the dynamics of live music performances and venues in Camden. Agent-based modelling was a big conference theme, and Kostas Cheliotis presented his work modelling pedestrian behaviour in Hyde Park using the Unity game engine. I also enjoyed Kurtis Garbutt’s work using ABM for flood relief modelling in the UK.
Continuing the pedestrian theme, Panos Mavros presented his PhD work on measuring psychological responses to the built-environment using mobile EEG readers, based on pedestrian navigation experiments in Fitzrovia London. I had participated in the experiment that was presented six months previously, and it was interesting to see the academic analysis on the psychological experience of navigating through urban space. Quick takeaway was the high diversity of route choice and psychological response amongst participants, even within a controlled experimental context of a small area of London.
My own presentation reviewed methods for creating online thematic mapping platforms for researchers, based on a recent open access review paper. The session included Jesse Piburn from Oak Ridge lab, presenting innovative recent work integrating global spatio-temporal data (World STAMP project).
As well as the academic work, their was some leisure time for enjoying the city. Spring is well underway in California, with lots of wildlife and colour. I visited Muir Woods, one of the few last reserves of the giant coastal redwoods, named after the Scottish naturalist John Muir who had a key role in founding Yosemite National Park.
The city has many affluent picture postcard neighbourhoods famous from movies that are great to explore. But there are urban challenges too. One can’t help be struck by the extent of homelessness in downtown, where large city districts have hundreds of people sleeping rough. The story of low income households being left out of a huge real-estate boom is all too familiar. With homelessness on the rise in London, and government policy making things worse, we are heading for a similar situation.
The 2013 Urban Age conference took place in Rio de Janeiro on the 24th-25th October. The LSE Cities research team have spent recent months learning about Rio and the fascinating changes this city is undergoing. It’s a city right in the eye of the storm of current debates in urban studies, relating to poverty, urban regeneration, mega-events and informal housing. I summarise some of the conference research highlights in this post. For a more comprehensive picture you can download the conference newspaper here.
Rio is defined by it’s mountainous topography. Here we look east with Zona Central on the left overlooking Guanabara Bay, and wealthy Zona Sul on the Atlantic Ocean to the right. Photograph by Tuca Viera for LSE Cities.
Economic Boom and Poverty Reduction
Rio conjures up very contrasting images to the outsider. On the one hand there is the wonderful exuberant city of Copacabana beach, samba music and carnival. These inspiring images are juxtaposed with the ongoing challenges Rio faces in terms of poverty, gang violence and drugs, captured in popular culture through films like City of God. Much more recently, Brazil has been hitting the headlines because of widespread protests across the country, with citizens demanding better quality public services and the tackling of government corruption.
Brazil has in fact made admirable progress in social development in recent decades. Social welfare reforms, such as the Bolsa Familia pragramme introduced by former president Lula in 2003, have seen one of the world’s most dramatic reductions in poverty, with significant improvement in cities like Rio. Education rates have greatly increased, and the high number homicides that plagued Rio in the 1990’s has fallen significantly.
These social improvements have been aided both by progressive leadership, and by a booming economy. The State of Rio has received a huge financial injection from the extensive oil and gas fields discovered off the coast. It makes for an incongruous sight walking along Copacabana beach to see the far horizon dotted with oil platforms. Revenues from this windfall have boosted investment into the city, although supporters of the current protests would argue that it should be more fairly distributed.
Rio and the Favelas
Rio has grown rapidly into a city of 6.4 million people and 12 million in the wider metropolitan region. It is both defined and constrained by its spectacular coastal topography of steep slopes, forests and lagoons. Much of the expansion in population in the 20th century was housed informally, and 20% of Rio’s population still live in the favelas. These were built on the less accessible steep forest slopes, leading to the common distinction between the ‘morro’ and ‘asphalto’, the informal and the formal city. This is often a fine-grained division, as favelas are spread across the entire city, visible from the richest to the poorest areas.
Rather than demolish the favalas, Rio has worked to upgrade them with sanitation and electricity. Yet many remain isolated from public services and employment. The favelas have also been at the centre of drugs trade, controlled by gangs and armed militias. A high profile ‘pacification’ programme has been implemented over the last five years by the Rio government to reclaim these territories for the city. While this programme generally has public support, it involves serious use of force, with the army moving into favelas and disarming local gangs. After this initial disarming process, a network of police stations is set up and further efforts are made to made to reintegrate communities into the wider city, socially and economically.
As seen in the above map, there is a distinct geography to the pacification programme, with favelas in the city centre and around the Olympic venues given priority. Rio will host both the World Cup in 2014 and Olympic Games in 2016, and these megaevents have greatly accelerated the pacification process. It remains to be seen whether pacification will eventually reach the entire city, or if peripheral favelas will remain beyond the control of city authorities.
Complexo do Alemao is one of Rio’s largest favelas. After the initial pacification phase, there have been investments in new housing, and a cable car transport system to aid accessibility. UPP police stations are located adjacent to cable car stops. Photograph by Tuca Viera for LSE Cities
Urban Integration and Mobility
Rio’s topography and sharp social contrasts make for a largely fragmented city. Wealthy residents are concentrated in Zona Sul, the coastal area to the south that includes Copacabana and Ipanema. The magnificent beaches in Zona Sul are a central attraction for wealthier residents and tourists, and this area is expanding westwards along the coast to Barra da Tijuca, defined by high rises and gated communities that resemble Miami. The rest of the city is much poorer. Residents in the periphery and isolated favelas can take hours to access services and work locations. This is exacerbated by Rio’s very limited public transport system, and the underdevelopment of the old city centre and port area.
Concious of this fragmentation and the need for better connectivity, Rio’s authorities have begun a massive investment in public transport infrastructure. The centre-piece is a city-wide bus rapid transit system, with 160km of lines covering the entire width of the city area. The challenging topography of Rio requires serious infrastructure investment in tunnels and bridges to construct this new network.
As can be seen in the above maps, the BRT routes have several aims. One is to make Barra da Tijuca a new transport hub, with the three lines converging near the location of the new Olympic Park. Another is to provide much better connections for the previously isolated western suburbs of Rio. And finally the TransCarioca line will improve links to the city centre. Arguably this latter point of better connectivity to the city centre should be a higher priority if Rio is to successfully revive its inner city. Olympic developments and real-estate interests are playing a significant role in this major public transport investment.
Michael Kimmelman, Bjarke Ingels, Ricky Burdett and Alejandro Zaera-Polo debate urban design
You know you’ve attended a good conference when the discussion leaves your head buzzing with new ideas and possibilities, and the debate continues long after the event closes. This was certainly the case at the Urban Age Electric City conference last week, where politicians, academics, designers and technologists met to share, discuss and argue urban policy and the future of cities.
Ostensibly the conference theme was smart cities and urban technology, and there were several tech business speakers extolling the virtues of electric cars, smart grids and so on. There was however widespread cynicism of techno-fixes on many fronts. Adam Greenfield used the very definitions of the smart city provided by corporate promoters to show the vacuous techno-utopian branding of what is often simply an extension of the real-estate industry. Richard Sennett articulated the ambiguous and complex nature of traditional street-based urban form, and by extension how archetypal smart-city examples from Masdar and Songdu failed to create similar spaces of social interaction that support innovation.
Yet it must be said that the urban technology debate is itself far more diverse than the strawman examples of Masdar and Songdu. Certainly the Shoreditch digital economy cluster that surrounds the conference venue illustrates thriving tech businesses in a traditional urban setting. Many of the counterexamples to smart-city utopia presented during the conference themselves involved aspects of technology, particularly in relation to communication and participation.
Urban equity, or lack of, was a key theme for many speakers. Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá, passionately argued for tackling social inequality as a central element of improving urban sustainability- an argument he has helped translate into reality through reforming Bogotá’s public transport networks. The politics of inequality also underlie the social movements and protests that have rocked the world, from Occupy to the Arab Spring and the London riots. In these cases social networking technology presents a highly dynamic and unpredictable force that city governments, both rich and poor, are struggling to engage with.
On the design front, the talk that best integrated the conference themes was from Alejandro Zaera-Polo, who sought to articulate the evolution of architectural style and practice in response to digital communication. Citing modular and self-build architecture examples, he described a new aesthetic of incompleteness, and used slum developments as the model of how complex functional urban form emerges from simple building blocks. He also pointed to crowdsourcing as an increasingly key funding mechanism for development in the austerity age, requiring a new entrepreneurialism from architects to generate public support and money for ambitious projects. This spirit of architectural daring and entrepreneurialism was certainly on show from Bjarke Ingels, whose mad and wonderful “hedonistic sustainability” examples were a joy to see.
Alejandro Zaera-Polo- “architects must create belief”
Yet as much the designers inspired, presentations tackling the global environment highlighted the gaping chasm between urban sustainability aspirations and reality. “Cities dream of Barcelona and build Los Angeles” was Greg Clark’s quick-fire summary of Joan Clos’s conclusions from the UN Human Settlements Programme. “The compact city plus global lives do not equal sustainability” correctly argued Maartin Hajer.
Intellectual heavyweight Anthony Giddens grappled with the grave implications of the 4+ degrees warming path we are set on for this century, and the high-risk high-opportunity civilisation we have created. When asked somewhat glibly by the chair whether he was an “optimist or a pessimist” he replied quite rightly that the question was irrelevant and that climate change requires scientific realism, a perspective that is currently beyond much of the public. It’s certainly appeared beyond the UK politicians on show, who enthusiastically banged the drum for sustainable London while conveniently forgetting that much of the globe’s fossil fuel industry in headquartered in London and funded by City banks.
Anthony Giddens tackles the implications of global climate change
There were also some rays of hope for a deeper understanding of urban sustainability. The former mayor of Stockholm, Carl Cederschiöld, described how sustainability progress had been achieved in his city, pointing to the vital role of both strong national support and public understanding as well as city government. Dimitri Zenghelis put forward the economic growth case for an urban green transformation. Mark Swilling presented a methodology of understanding urban sustainability through social and resource flows- exactly the kind of approach needed for considering sustainability in an age of global connectivity. Maartin Hajer described the need for forging “coalitions of the willing” in tackling global sustainability where international governance has been so ineffective.
And that’s what the Urban Age conference surely is in the end, one big coalition of the willing… or willing to discuss and debate at any rate. Thanks to all those who took part and contributed to a very engaging event. If you missed it, conference video highlights will be appearing on the website over the coming days, and you can read essays by many of these speakers in the conference newspaper.
I recently began a new job at LSE Cities and have been working for the last month on materials for the Electric City conference in London, taking place on the 6th and 7th December this week. The conference will be exploring smart cities and disruptive urban tech from a sociological slant, and includes talks from famous urbanists such as Ed Glaeser, Saskia Sassen and Deyan Sudjic. You can get a flavour of the debate from Richard Sennett’s provocative article on “Stupefying Smart Cities”.
My role, alongside the LSE Cities Research Team, has been in producing comparative urban visualisations and analysis around the theme of sustainable urbanism. These visuals and articles are now online in the conference newspaper.
CityGeographics 