Big plans

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Mayor Bloomberg recently announced PLANYC2030, a — yes — comprehensive plan and sustainability plan for New York City rolled into one.

The clearly stated goals for 2030 include
* reducing GHG emissions 30%+ (considering the age of the building stock, this is bigger than the 2030 Challenge’s goal of carbon-neutral new buildings by 2030)
* cleaning all contaminated land
* making 90% of waterways safe for recreation
* build one million new homes

Again, a few Chicago departments have shown that they’re capable of setting quantifiable long-term targets with real-world significance (e.g., families helped instead of dollars spent), reporting on their progress, and achieving them — Housing and Bicycle, for example. Yet where’s the climate change planning effort?

a thousand cuts

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From the Economist, 9 Dec:

bq. The term ‘food mile’ is itself misleading, as a report published by DEFRA, Britain’s environment and farming ministry, pointed out last year… It transpires that half the food-vehicle miles associated with British food are travelled by cars driving to and from the shops. Each trip is short, but there are millions of them every day.

(Incidentally, this is the first post I’ve made from a BlackBerry. Scary.)

Quick redistricting

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A volunteer effort to map out geometrically compact Congressional districts with a simple algorithm reports that “Illinois has some of the weirdest districts I’ve seen.” While this particular guy defines compactness slightly differently from me (he minimizes distance to center of district, I’d minimize the perimeter to area ratio), it’s still a neat exercise.

Perhaps that weirdness accounts for the status-quo result reported by “Garance Franke-Ruta”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w061106&s=franke-ruta111006 in TNR:

bq. [besides Duckworth] “six other Democratic challengers also went down to defeat in Illinois, and the only new Democratic congressman elected in the state won his race in an open contest in a traditionally Democratic district.”

Remembering our friends

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From the front page at WSJ.com:

bq. CONGRESS RUSHED to a messy end of 12 years of Republican rule, sending Bush a $45.1 billion tax-cut bill laden with provisions benefiting oil, coal and health-care interests.

As the Billionaire slogan goes, “Hey Congress! Put your mouth where our money is!”

Green Exchange

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“David Roeder”:http://www.suntimes.com/business/roeder/152528,CST-FIN-roeder29.article in the Sun-Times casts a skepitcal glance at the Green Exchange:

ECO- ECHO: In Logan Square, there’s an alderman, Manny Flores (1st), who has insisted that anybody who wants to redevelop the old Cooper Lamp factory, 2545 W. Diversey, at least replace the 125 jobs lost when it closed last year. This stance has been somewhat inconvenient for developers, who see any usable old factory inside the city as a place to live, not as a place to make something.

Despite this obstacle, an affiliate of Baum Realty Group Inc. bought the 250,000-square-foot building for $7.5 million in 2005.

With Flores’ blessing, principal David Baum has announced plans to turn the building, a familiar sight to drivers stuck on the Kennedy Expy., into a kind of Merchandise Mart for businesses that promote environmental sustainability. He calls it the “Green Exchange”:http://www.greenexchange.com/ and his marketing materials say he has tentative lease deals with Greenmaker Supply, which provides ecologically friendly building materials, and a so-called “green” printer, Consolidated Printing Co.

Baum has asked for zoning that would let him build “live-work” units in the building strictly as residents for people who have a business on the property. He has stressed that he wants most of the space to be commercial because it’s cheaper than residential to refurbish.

Teddy in the Times

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Grr. Libby Sander writes in the New York Times about our local preservation battles:

bq. What people do want, [Alderman Ted Matlak] said, is room to grow. To accommodate developers looking to build structures whose dimensions fall outside the parameters of zoning requirements, Mr. Matlak said he frequently changed the zoning of a particular lot. According to city tradition, aldermen have exclusive authority to change zoning requirements — often called spot zoning — to allow construction that would otherwise violate the city’s zoning ordinances.

NIMBYs: the two strategies

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Julia Vitullo-Martin of the Manhattan Institute’s “Center for Rethinking Development”:http://www.manhattan-institute.org/email/crd_newsletter01-04.html writes:

bq. Speaking of the problems of development to Newsday in 1989, Charles Moerdler, former city housing and building commissioner and a partner in the law firm Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, said, “There are two schools of thought. One is for a developer to present a chamber of horrors and then compromise to make people think they won something. And the other is not to get them aroused and united in the first place.” Moerdler thinks the second strategy is preferable.

1 in 13,208

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The IHT reports that the AP/National Election Pool exit poll is based on a mere 13,208 respondents in just 250 precincts nationwide — one of which was me! (CNN has “poll results”:http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2006/pages/results/states/US/H/00/epolls.2.html for the Midwest House poll, which appears to be what I took.) I was pleased as punch to be able to tell the world that I am “angry” with George W. Bush, the war, etc., etc., and apparently the nation agrees!

Yo mama

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This poem caught my eye at a performance of Shostakovich’s fourteenth symphony this summer. The symphony is a set of eleven symphonic poems, all about death, with the poems sung in Russian by an alternating bass and soprano. Needless to say, it’s a little bit somber. I’d never heard of the Cossacks’ insult before, but I’d say it’s history’s sharpest “yo mama” diss. This particular translation was the one in the Ravinia program.

Réponse des Cosaques Zaporogues au Sultan de Constantinople (The Zaporozhian Cossacks’ Answer to the Sultan of Constantinople) by Guillaume Apollinaire, translated by M. Kudinov

You are a hundred times more criminal than Barabbas.
Living as the neighbour of Beelzebub,
you wallow in the most foul vices.
Fed on filth since childhood,
know this you’ll celebrate your Sabbath without us.

Rotten cancer, Salonica’s refuse,
a terrible nightmare which cannot be told,
one-eyed, putrid and noseless,
you were born while your mother
was writhing in fecal spasms.

Evil butcher of Podolye, look:
you are covered in wounds, sores and scabs.
Rump of a horse, snout of a pig,
may all the drugs be found
for you to heal your ills!

Whatever Happened to Modernity?

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Dan Solomon’s “Whatever Happened to Modernity?” plenary (we don’t have keynotes at CNU) is still the most-requested item from CNU XIV. We have a transcript, a PDF slide show, and even a video “available for download”:http://cnunext.org/icharrette/info/sessions.html#926.

bq. Daniel Solomon, co-founder of CNU, will build on the special address by discussing contentious design issues. In the United Kingdom, as in the United States, New Urbanism is pinned in the crossfire of style wars. On one side are jihadists who regard the entire modern world as cultural nihilism; on the other are critics and powerful institutions relentlessly embracing novelty in the name of an historically ordained modernity. Between these extremes, New Urbanism steers an unsteady course, snipped at from all directions.

bq. The situation is made more intractable by the Germanic strain of modernism that infected the teaching of architecture and town planning. However, other, more useful modernist traditions infuse cultural phenomena such as fashion, dance and music with different historiography and different conceptions of the relationship of the tenses: past, present, future, and future perfect.