London's Lost Rivers

Every Londoner immediately recognises the River Thames on a map or aerial photo—not least because it's in the title sequence of one of Britain's most popular TV shows—but not everyone knows about the many tributaries to the Thames which have been buried over the years. London being a mixture of the Thames's historic floodplain (most of the centre) and rolling hills (most of the suburbs), in a famously rainy part of the world, it has a lot of small rivers. Their historical importance shows up in place names all over town, but many of them are entirely or partly hidden from view.

I've written before about how London has many admirable attributes of a sustainable city entirely by accident, and this is one of the things that would look very different if the Victorian builders of most of London's infrastructure had understood what the consequences would be.  Each section of river that was built over or diverted into a culvert must have seemed like progress: one less inconvenient barrier to cross; one more road passable to carriages.  But the whole is much less than the sum of its parts, and modern Londoners suffer from having lost the flood control that a naturally functioning watershed provides, and want the wildlife habitat and public amenities that they could have if the rivers were restored.

Today there is a significant restoration effort in progress, which has been very encouraging to watch.  When I was in London in June I visited a few interesting sites, and over the coming week or two I'll write about a couple:

Daylighting the River Quaggy in Sutcliffe Park

Some of the surprising places where you can see long-concealed rivers

And some thoughts about similar work going on here in Seattle

Mapping ethnic diversity

Eric Fisher is at it again - this time he's made some maps to illustrate ethnic diversity in 40 U.S. cities. Here's Seattle:

image from Eric Fisher; used under Creative commons license

Each dot represents 25 people - Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, and Orange is Hispanic. The categories themselves come from the census, because that's the best available data. If you know Seattle reasonably well, there won't be any big surprises in this, but it's a very effective way to visualise the data and it can be interesting comparing other cities.

Community Indicators work in Truckee Meadows, NV

[cross-posted from the main Sustainable Seattle blog]

The Community Indicators Consortium has been hosting a series of webinars about community indicators and performance measures. The overall arc has been about how some local governments have successfully integrated community indicator work into how they measure their own performance, which is of interest to us because we hope to achieve the same with b-Sustainable. I've listened to the first two and would recommend them to anyone else interested in this kind of work; they've also been kind enough to make recordings available online.

Yesterday's was a case study from Truckee Meadows Tomorrow. I took some notes, which reflect my own biases and interests but may be worth sharing:

• The big impetus for starting their indicator work was a 1990s forecast of enormous population growth for the region - not unlike what PSRC is supposed to be preparing us for here
• The first round of indicator development was done by giving participants monopoly money to "buy" indicators with, as a way of prioritising the most valued n indicators. Apparently they don't use that procedure any more, but it sounds better to me than the more standard focus groups they've switched to, because it gives the meekest person in the room as much of a voice as the loudest. I'd be interested to hear why they switched.
• They're down to 33 indicators now, and even with those they have 10 quality-of-life categories that group things together, and they get feedback that the 10 categories are much easier to get a handle on than the 33 indicators.
• The categories are: Arts & Cultural Vitality - Civic Engagement - Economic Wellbeing - Education & Lifelong Learning - Enrichment - Health & Wellness - Innovation - Land use & Infrastructure - Natural Environment - Public Wellbeing
• In the past 5 years, they've made a special effort to reach "unusual suspects" - identifying communities not represented in the earlier focus group work and specifically recruiting them to add input.
• Washoe County uses the QoL indicators to track its own performance.
• A lot of the work they do on the basis of these indicators is done by partners of the counties - either volunteerism or compacts with companies - http://www.truckeemeadowstomorrow.org/collaborate/100

If this sounds interesting to you, I'd strongly recommend downloading the webinar from their site: http://www.communityindicators.net/post/events,cic-webinars-archive,truckee-meadows-tomorrow-and-washoe-county

Improving traffic by removing lights?

Seattle Transit Blog posted something thought-provoking yesterday. Portishead, a small town in the Southwest of England, has run an apparently quite successful experiment with removing traffic lights from a problem intersection.

This isn't something for everywhere to copy. For a start, Portishead's a town of only 22,000 residents, so what works there won't necessarily scale up to a big city. Then there's the relative narrowness of urban British streets, compared with much of the world. It also wasn't an unqualified success for all users - the blind man's comments towards the end of the video are worth listening to. But it's an interesting exercise to think about how differently traffic could be handled, and whether a piece of infrastructure as ubiquitous as the traffic light may be helping us less than we think, because it encourages thoughtless behaviour.

What tourists see vs what locals see

Following up on the Geotaggers' World Atlas, Eric Fisher has dug deeper into the data to try to distinguish photos taken by tourists from those taken by locals. It illustrates the point about the difference between a relatively superficial tourists'-eye-view of a city and the real workings of it from the point of view of locals even better than the previous maps did, as you can see in the Seattle one:

image from Eric Fisher; used under Creative commons license

Tourists (those whose photos are all from within a month of each other) show up in red, locals in blue, and those who the algorithm couldn't place in yellow. The locals' photos still show a distinct concentration on the prettier parts of town, but they're dramatically wider ranging than the tourists'.

I am particularly conscious of this right now, because I am in London, a city where I'm halfway between a tourist and a local because I grew up here and come back to visit family and friends, but haven't lived here since I moved away for university. I've been collecting observations of the city from that perspective, and I'll write a few up over the next couple of weeks.

The intentionally sustainable city?

I just saw an announcement for a symposium, in Portland in July, about the global trend of "eco-cities":

The debate about global climate change, increasing urbanisation and advances in technological innovation have given rise to a new, rapidly growing international phenomenon: eco-cities. This symposium aims to explore this new global phenomenon by discussing what we mean by ‘eco-cities’; why they have suddenly become so fashionable; whether they deliver on their promise to be more sustainable; and who decides where, when and how they are implemented. [more info]

I'm rather sad that I won't be able to go, because it clashes with our Triple Bottom Line Reporting workshop. More importantly, it got me thinking about just how new an idea it discusses; not just the label "eco-city", but the whole idea of deliberately planning urbanisation to be in some sense sustainable. I'm about to visit London, where I grew up, and it strikes me as a great example of a city where everything environmentally friendly (density, public transport, mixed-use streets, parks and tree cover, lack of a major highway through the middle) is the way it is for reasons other than planning for environmental benefit. There are green initiatives now, such as the congestion charge and the London Rivers Action Plan [PDF], but these are things that have been introduced within my lifetime.

It's not that the idea of sustainability is new. The old testament warns against wantonly cutting down trees, with a straightforward argument from self-interest, and we have a talk coming up about the Buddhist scriptures' angle on climate change. All that's new is seeing these ideas taken seriously in mainstream discourse—dare I say it, even becoming trendy—which is one of the reasons we're developing this blog. As cities around the world make unprecedented efforts to become sustainable, we all have a huge amount to learn from each others' experiences.

This trend is one of the things that gives me hope for the world.

The Geotaggers' World Atlas

Here's an interesting way of visualising part of the activity of a city: The Geotaggers' World Atlas by Eric Fisher. Eric has taken publicly available street maps of major cities, and overlaid them with traces of the locations from which people have taken geotagged photos. The result is a rather beautiful trace of the picture-taking activity through a city, which seems like a reasonable proxy for "where is open to the public and visually interesting".

image from Eric Fisher; used under Creative commons license

Looking at where is missing from these maps is also rather striking. For instance, Seattle has a river running through it, and that river is both an important industrial site and a tragic pollution dump. It's only a weak trace on the map because it isn't a scenic destination, but it's an important part of the story of Seattle. In the same way, in most of the mapped cities the majority of residences are off the photographed track. Looking at these maps, I'm painfully aware that in each of these cities that I have visited, excepting the two I've lived in (Seattle and London), I myself have barely left the heavily-tracked areas.

I don't have a huge point to make here, just that really knowing a city requires more than a tourist's-eye-view, because every city has important places that are not necessarily notable or tourist-inviting.

Creating a "third place" in commercial space

Today, I had the great pleasure of meeting the Interfaith Amigos, who will hopefully give a talk in our brownbag series later this year. The meeting was also a pleasure for a secondary reason, which is that they had me come to their 'office'. They don't have a private office - they meet at the Third Place Commons in Lake Forest Park. Third Place Commons is a big common space in a mall, distinguished from the typical mall food court by being expressly intended to be a comfortable gathering space that the community can use as their "third place" - one that is neither home nor the office.

I had seen a similarly convivial space in the Crossroads Mall in Bellevue before (turns out they are backed by the same developer), and I loved the idea but found myself a bit skeptical. Shopping malls are private spaces conditionally open to the public, and typically so tightly controlled and intensely devoted to the act of selling stuff that it was hard to imagine them really working as worthwhile gathering places for anything else. My abiding suspicion that the loveliness of the Bellevue and Lake Forest Park third places was an illusion was finally put to rest when the Amigos told me that they had coauthored a book, using Third Place Commons as their main office through the whole process. That's a serious commitment of time, effort and concentration, and if the venue worked for that then it really does succeed as a third place.

This left me wondering why so few mall food courts serve this purpose. In terms of its basic functional components, there's not much difference between these deliberate third places and the typical food court: a central open area with chairs and tables, with food and drink vending at its edges, and shops to either side of it. So why is it that so few are inviting, comfortable places to meet someone, or to spend countless hours working together on a project?

Clearly intent matters in itself—because these are designated as common areas, we know we aren't going to get shooed away or snarked at for not spending enough money—but there are also some design decisions that anyone trying to emulate these places could learn from:

• The food & drink vending isn't as heavily intertwined with the seating as in most malls, so you can sit in the middle without bathing in the neon lights of a fast food outlet.
• There's some open space that can be used as a stage with minimal planning.
• Both places have a giant chess set, which serves as a highly visible sign that noncommercial uses are welcome.
• The presence of the mall as an organisation—manifested in signs and uniformed personnel—is lighter in these places than the rest of the mall.
• I don't recall this being true at Crossroads, but at the Third Place Commons the furniture feels quite different. It's made of wood, and it doesn't have the uniformity of typical chain-commercial furniture.
• Both places are connected directly to the outside. At Crossroads it's possible to walk into the mall and go straight to the gathering area, without walking past more than one shop. At Third Place Commons that isn't possible, because it's upstairs, but there are big windows facing outside.

Alone, none of these are magic bullets—in fact, I think I can find a sterile, hostile food court with each of these features—but collectively they do help reinforce the impression that these are authentic, welcoming gathering spaces, carved out of the usually much less welcoming commercial space of the mall.

Townsville Scorecard

The Townsville Region of North Queensland, Australia has a set of sustainability indicators, the Townsville Scorecard, along similar lines to Sustainable Seattle's own b-Sustainable project. Like b-Sustainable, it uses indicators to try to objectively assess whether sustainability trends in their region are improving, it takes a comprehensive view of sustainability, and it makes explicit the interlinked nature of the indicators.

It is a good deal simpler than our project, with 33 indicators as compared to our list of almost 200 (create a free account and log in to see the full list). This is both an advantage and drawback, in that a shorter list must necessarily leave things out, but is also much easier to maintain and describe. And on the description front, Townsville has done a good job of presenting quickly comprehensible summaries of the indicators (here's an example) along with concise commentary that adds a lot of value. b-Sustainable is a work in progress, and you can expect to see us take inspiration from some of these ideas as we improve its interface over the coming months.

We believe that every region should have a set of indicators broadly along these lines, because measuring what really matters is a crucial first step towards improving it and properly assessing the effectiveness of sustainability efforts. One of our long term goals for b-Sustainable is to package both the indicators themselves and the software to display and analyse them as an open source project that sustainability advocates and organisations elsewhere can use as a starting point for their own. Until we have that ready, projects like the Townsville Scorecard show how it can be done independently.

The Sound Stewardship program

Sustainable Seattle is in the process of adopting a habitat restoration site on Seattle's Duwamish estuary. As we get to know the site, we're hoping to post photos and reports from there, but this first post will just be about the restoration program itself. It's a very successful way of mobilising volunteers for long-term commitments, so it's worth sharing.

People for Puget Sound is the organisation responsible. They have access to a large number of habitat restoration sites around Puget Sound, as part of the broader effort to restore the severely impaired marine ecosystem here. As is so often the case with restoration projects, the initial work is much better funded than maintenance, so they need a great deal of volunteer help to maintain the sites and ensure that the initial investment is not lost. Because these sites are mostly small pockets of shoreline in heavily disturbed environments, such as Seattle's industrial waterfront, they need at least 10 years of active maintenance and monitoring to become settled, and if they're ever completely abandoned they will become overrun by invasive plants.

People for Puget Sound's solution to this is the Sound Stewardship program. This invites people to get training in a range of topics including a history of the Duwamish River, introduction to ecology, native vs. invasive plant identification, weed control, and planting techniques. The training is free, but in exchange trainees must pledge to volunteer 40 hours over the coming year at one of the restoration sites. Most people keep their pledge, and most of them are able to keep coming back to the same site so they get to know it well and become deeply committed to taking care of it.

The really impressive part is what happens next: once people have had the training and the chance to become invested in a site's well-being, many of them stay on board for years. These people not only continue to volunteer at their sites, but become the strongest advocates for habitat restoration, and the best recruiters of future volunteers - an outcome any volunteer project must envy.

Write for SCAN!

We are inviting guest contributors to share good practice, success stories, cautionary tales and thoughtful discussions from urban sustainability efforts around the world. If you think you might be interested, read on for answers to contributors' questions:

What should I write about?
Anything about urban sustainability. We mostly focus on the positive, so where possible posts should be framed in terms of either good practices that other cities should copy, or mistakes from which we can collectively learn. Theoretical discussions are welcome, but we want the bulk of posts here to be about projects that are currently happening. We are especially interested in projects that touch on multiple aspects of sustainability: environmental impact, social justice, lasting and shared prosperity, and engagement of the public.

Who is the intended audience?
Broadly, people who are interested in sustainability and urban design & policy. We don't assume that our audience has deep technical knowledge or will be familiar with jargon and acronyms, but we do assume they have some ideas about urban sustainability. We also want this blog to be as usable as possible for people speaking English as a second language, so please try to write at an 8th grade reading level.

How much do you want me to post?
Overall, we're trying to get this blog stable at anything from one post per day to one per week. It's up to you how big a contribution you make to that - if you only ever submit one thing that's still useful. Each post should be short enough that most people would read it in one sitting - if that's not long enough for you to explore an idea properly, consider breaking it into a series of posts.

Should I include images? Do you have requirements for these images?
Images are not required, but they often explain things better than a long string of words. Images do not need to be print-quality, and they don't need to be your own, but you must have permission to use them, and if they are not yours you must credit the owner clearly. We want readers to be able to assume that everything not explicitly credited is the author's original work.

What are the guidelines for talking about politics?
Sustainable Seattle advocates for sustainability, but we are not a political campaign group, and as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit we are not allowed to endorse political candidates or parties. Don't shy away from discussing political issues, but we don't want this blog to be a place for advocating for particular politicians or parties, or for posts that are primarily about politics.

Who owns my posts?
The author of a post retains ownership, but anything you publish here will be covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 licence, which allows others to republish your work for non-commercial uses as long as they credit you as the author.

How will I be credited?
Every post by a guest blogger will have a line like "Guest post by Marco Polo" added, and be tagged with the posters name, so that you will have a URL that lists all of your posts in one place, like this one.

How do I start?
Email us with a bit of information about yourself, and an idea of what you would want to post about. If we think it fits, we'll ask you to send a first post in. At first, we will ask you to email posts to us for approval - after the first few we'll give you an account to post directly.

What if I have more questions?
Please ask more questions in the comments to this post, or by email. Your questions help us refine our ideas.