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News, Press

Space Syntax | 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremonies | London

A lot of people did not notice it at the time. Heck, even I did not notice it in the moment. But what was that on the stadium floor during the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremonies in London… after they took up the turf masquerading as a ‘green and pleasant land’? Why is was none other than the space syntax model of London itself! Pretty cool, if you ask me. See a beautiful aerial photograph of the space syntax model on the stadium floor during rehearsals below, courtesy of The Sun above.

More information here from University College London.

Read more about it here at The Daily Mail.

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Financial, Housing, News, Press

Original CNN Money/Fortune Article about Backdoor Bailouts

Excerpt:

“What’s more, dozens of zombie home builders and other serial money-losers will stake similar claims (of profit) in coming months, in a cash scramble that could cost the government more than $50 billion.”

You really can’t make up these examples of crony capitalism.

Link to the full article: http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/07/news/companies/lennar.taxes.fortune/index.htm.

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Education, News, Press, Urban Planning

Long commute time linked with poor health, new study shows | USATODAY.com

A study published this month in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that the longer people drive to work, the more likely they are to have poor cardiovascular health.

“This is the first study to show that people who commute long distances to work were less fit, weighed more, were less physically active and had higher blood pressure,” said Christine M. Hoehner, a public health professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the study’s lead author. “All those are strong predictors of heart disease, diabetes, and some cancers.”

The study monitored the health of 4,297 adults from 12 counties in Texas, a metropolitan region where 90 percent of people commute to work by car, Hoehner said.

The New York area has the longest average commuting time — almost 35 minutes — of any metropolitan area, according to the Census Bureau in its analysis of the 2009 American Community Survey. But the other nine metro areas in the top 10 also averaged a half hour or more. And even the area with the shortest average commute, Great Falls, Mont., still clocked in at 14 minutes.

That’s important because those who commuted by car 10 miles or more each way were more likely to have high blood pressure than people who drove shorter distances. And those who traveled 15 or more miles each way were more likely to have bigger waistlines and less likely to be physically active, according to Hoehner’s study.

Tom Ricci, 53, drives 130 miles round trip each day from his home in Mahopac, N.Y., to his job at a music record company in Lyndhurst, N.J.

He gets up at 4:30 a.m. almost every day to hit the gym before work.

“I’d go crazy and lose my mind” without a workout routine, Ricci said. “You need a release from that grind.”

Diet, exercise and sleep habits were not looked at in the study, Hoehner said. They also can also contribute to obesity and high blood pressure.

Christine Bruno of Garrison, N.Y., feels the difference. Her commute used to be 7 minutes. Now since she moved in with her fiance it take up to 90 minutes each way to make the 40-mile trek to New Rochelle, N.Y.

“By the time you finish your final meal of the day, there is no time to do much else,” said Bruno, 40. “There is no time to exercise. And there is no time to go to the gym, and it’s a huge issue, because I used to be a gym rat.”

Danielle Mahoney, 36, lives in Patterson, N.Y., works in Suffern, N.Y., and commutes 126 miles round trip a day. Her company offers fitness classes to employees several times a week so they can exercise during the day. Without them, Mahoney said, she wouldn’t have time for the gym, especially with twin toddlers at home.

The hours she spends in her car are “definitely draining,” she said. “If it’s a longer day or you didn’t get enough sleep, you can doze when you are driving,” she said. “Numerous times I catch myself.”

Dr. Franklin Zimmerman, a cardiologist and director of critical care at Phelps Memorial Hospital in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., said what makes long commutes by car even worse is that many people are also sitting at work.

He tells patients to get 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise each day. If people can’t get to the gym, he suggests they park their cars farther from their offices and then walk. People can also sneak in exercise by getting off the elevator and taking the stairs.

“It’s OK to split it up into increments,” he said. “It’s hard to find 30 minutes, but it’s not hard to find five minutes, and all of that still counts.”

Contributing: Tim Henderson, The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News

via Long commute time linked with poor health, new study shows – USATODAY.com.

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Editorial, Mark David Major

Viewpoint APA Was Too Afraid to Publish

Good theory leads to good planning and normative theory – without quantitative observation and validation using scientific method – is nothing more than subjective opinion masquerading as theoretical conjecture, says Mark David Major, senior planner in Nassau County, Florida, and former lecturer at The Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, University College London.

VIEWPOINT

Holding up the bogeyman of the modernist architects of CIAM and their industrial age vernacular to deride scientific method and endorse normative theory in planning is a lot like suggesting a rape victim needs to date her attacker to get over the experience. While the metaphor may be shocking, it is not a casual choice.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City (1934-35) (Image: Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation).

Modernism was a normative theory. It was a theory that aspired to science in its assertions. However, Modernist theory fails even the most basic tests of being science. It was long on observation and way short on testing the theoretical conjectures arising from those observations. Without scientific method to test its conjectures, Modernism in its infancy never made the leap from normative to analytical theory. Instead, the subjective opinions of the CIAM architects and planners were embraced by several generations of professionals and put into practice in hundreds of cities. Today, for the most part, Modernist theory has finally been tested to destruction by our real world experience of its effects. It has made the transformation from normative to analytical theory and validated as a failure.

Modernism is the failure of normative theory. Ever since Robert Venturi published Learning from Las Vegas, it has been chic to assert that Modernism  – and, by implication, science – was responsible for the rape of our cities in the 20th century. However, like a DNA test that frees a falsely accused rapist, scientific method reveals the true culprit – normative theory. The 20th century is a wasteland littered with the remnants of normative theories: modernism, futurism, Post-modernism, Deconstructivism, traditionalism, neo-sub urbanism and many more ‘-isms’.  After the experience of the 20th century, it seems absurd to suggest that we require more theoretical conjecture without scientific validation, more opinion and subjective observation – that is, less science – if we want to better understand the organized complexity of our cities.

Science aspires to fact, not truth. The confusion about science is endemic to our society. You can witness it every time an atheist claims the non-existence of God based on scientific truth. However, science does not aspire to truth. Not only is ‘does God exist?’ unanswerable; it is a question no good scientist would ever seek to answer in scientific terms. It is a question of faith. The value judgment we place on scientific fact does not derive from science itself. It derives from the social, religious or cultural prism through which we view it. Right or wrong is the purview of politicians, philosophers and theologians. There are plenty – perhaps too many – planners and architects analogous to politicians, philosophers and theologians and not enough of the scientific variety. And, too often, those that aspire to science remain mired in the trap of normative theory.

Le Corbusier’s La Ville Radieuse (1930).

The Modernist hangover lingers in our approach to theory. We require less subjective faith in our conjectures and more objective facts to test them. We persist with models that are colossal failures. When we are stuck in traffic, we feel like rats trapped in a maze. We apply the normative theory to how we model our transportation networks and fail to test the underlining conjecture. We project populations years and decades into the future, yet fail to return to them to test their validity, refine the statistical method and increase the accuracy of future projections. And we hide the scientific failings of our profession behind the mantra, ‘it’s the standard.’ The robust power of GIS to store and organize vast amounts of information into graphical databases is touted as transforming the planning profession. But those that don’t understand science, mistake a tool of scientific method for theory.

Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898).

We require analytical theory and objective knowledge. If the facts do not support our conjectures, then they need to be discarded. In normative theory, ideas are precious. In analytical theory, they are disposable in favor of a better conjecture on the way to a scientific proof. Scientific method is the means to test and validate or dispose of theory. Our profession and communities have paid a terrible price for the deployment of Modernist theory in our cities. However, quantitative observation and analysis of its failings has offered enlightenment about how to proceed in the future. The work of notable researchers in Europe and the United States are leading the profession towards an analytical theory of the city. In the future, we will be able to deploy scientific method to derive better theory about the physical, social, economic and cultural attributes of the organized complexity of the city. The leap forward will propel planning out of the voodoo orbit of the social sciences and into the objective knowledge of true science. Until then, we need to focus a bit more on getting there and less time raising the specter of dead bogeymen in order to endorse the creation of a new one.

This editorial was written November 28, 2003 in response to a Viewpoint published in the December 2003 issue of the American Planning Association monthly, Planning, which derided science as a reasonable basis for sound planning and cited the experience of Modernism as a reason. This response was never published.

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Editorial, Mark David Major, Political Action

The Editorial leftist Folio Weekly Was Too Afraid to Publish

The Editorial leftist Folio Weekly Was Too Afraid to Publish
Corporate Welfare Queens Bankroll Opposition to Amendment 4
by Mark David Major, AICP, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

The opposition to Amendment 4 is using taxpayer money to try and stop you from having a voice in the future of where you live, work and play: our neighborhoods and towns. They are trying to silence your voice about the future of Florida’s growth and development. Home builders and their vassals are principally responsible for bankrolling millions of dollars in opposition to Amendment 4. The only argument they have is fear because no one (not even the home builders) has the political courage to defend the morally corrupt and intellectually bankrupt growth management process in the State of Florida over the last 30+ years. And the home builders are trying to scare you using your own money.

Do you want to talk about the audacity of audacity? Let’s follow the money.
At the beginning of this year, the Democratic Congress passed and President Obama signed into law an extension of unemployment benefits compensation. So far, so good: right? But the special interests in Washington DC successfully lobbied to insert something more into the bill: a tax loophole for the home building industry. The national home builders were able to claim losses over the last 2 years against federal taxes on their corporate profits during the previous 5 years. Basically, this means the federal government is using deficit spending (by borrowing mainly from China, Japan and the United Kingdom) to refund corporate taxes on national home builders’ profits during the boom years to compensate for their losses during the Great Recession. Of course, it will be left to this generation and future generations of unborn Americans to pay this debt.

Let’s be clear. This is a “backdoor” government bailout: nothing more, nothing less.
But wait, there’s more. After receiving their bailout, the national home builders report the tax refund as profit to Wall Street, thereby maintaining the value of their shares. Most home builder shares lost more than 80% of their value during the financial crisis, broadly dropping from $35-45 a share to around $10 or less a share. Even with this backdoor government bailout, home builder share prices had only remained stable more or less near their historic lows. So, not only is the federal government propping up the obsolete business models of the home building industry that planted the seeds of this Great Recession in the first place (especially in Florida, California and Nevada) and not only is it also the means to artificially inflate home builder share value on stock market to create another “bubble” but it isn’t even working all that well. To any common sense American, this is a waste of money on an almost unimaginable scale.

Oh, and the unemployed? At the same time the home builders are receiving billions of dollars in backdoor government bailouts, the federal government taxes as income the unemployment compensation payments for the unemployed. This is the anti-Robin Hood economics of the perverse. Steal from the future earnings of the poor to bailout the rich today. It is a house of cards waiting to fall all over again. And, once again, it will be left to the taxpayers to cover the bills.

In the early 90s, Welfare Reform was a major legislative achievement of President Clinton and Newt Gingrich’s Republican Congress. It rolled back one of the worst abuses of Johnson’s Great Society programs by getting people off the welfare rolls and back into the workplace. At its core was the idea there is dignity in being able to work and stand on your own without government assistance. Now, we have the new phenomenon of the Corporate Welfare Queens. The banks, auto industry and, now, the home builders are just some who have been caught red-handed sucking at the teat of the federal government. How are these Corporate Welfare Queens any different from the welfare queens President Reagan used to describe as both an abuser and victim of the system? Well, for one thing, we are talking about corporations that are too stubborn, too beholden to their quarterly profit reports to Wall Street, who possess obsolete business models they are too cowardly or dense to change in order to address the new economic realities. They would rather stick their fingers in their ears and hum really loud (and insert their heads with the fingers plugging their ears into the sand, for good measure) rather than adapt their business models and methods. Corporations like this should be allowed to perish in a capitalist society. The innovators will survive and thrive. The dinosaurs will finally become extinct, as they should. Instead, the federal government is using corporate welfare to pervert the marketplace and these obsolete industries are as happy as pigs at the trough. Today, what we clearly need is Corporate Welfare Reform.

So what does this have to do with Amendment 4? The home building industry has bankrolled 40% of the funds raised to oppose Amendment 4. The rest of the funds raised to oppose Amendment 4 largely come from businesses/organizations providing support services – and receiving income – from the home builders. Amendment 4 is a ballot initiative designed to give voters a say on major changes to their community’s future land use map; specifically, how our neighborhoods and towns in Florida will grow in the future. They want to deny you a voice in your future.

Many voters are old enough to remember the Watergate adage, “follow the money.” If you do, it’s easy to see they are using your money to tell you to shut up. But this is our Florida. They may have more money (even if a part of it was stolen from you) but there are more of us. Nothing can stop the power of The People when they decide to act (see the Revolutionary War against King George and the British Empire for a relevant example). Let your voices be heard loud and clear this November 2nd. Vote YES on Amendment 4.

Tea, anyone?

Mark David Major, AICP is a certified planner of the American Institute of Certified Planners, a former planner for a national home builder and former Chair of the First Coast Section, Florida Chapter of the American Planning Association from 2005-2008.

This editorial was originally written October 26, 2010 and submitted to Folio Weekly for their back page editorial. It was never published and Amendment 4 was defeated by 67% of the vote in the November 2010 election. The scare tactics employed by the home builders, government officials, and real estate and planning professionals to defeat Amendment 4 was instrumental in driving up vote turnout and electing the current unpopular Republican Governor of Florida, Rick Scott. Today, the Florida real estate market remains vastly overbuilt with inventory on life-support. You reap what you sow. Don’t believe the bizarre rants and maniacal claims of real estate agents about a “hot” real estate market. They are lying to you.

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