text:
Ivezic, Zeljko. 2013. Personal communication.
Schneider A., Friedl M.A. & Potere D. (2009). A new map of global urban extent from MODIS satellite data, Environmental Research Letters, 4 (4) 044003. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/4/4/044003
Ivezic, Zeljko. 2013. Personal communication.
Schneider A., Friedl M.A. & Potere D. (2009). A new map of global urban extent from MODIS satellite data, Environmental Research Letters, 4 (4) 044003. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/4/4/044003
Just a couple of years ago, if you wanted to make something look trendier, you put a bird on it. Birds were everywhere. I'm not sure if Twitter was what started all the flutter, but it got so bad that Portlandia performed a skit named, you guessed it, "Put a Bird On It".¹
It turns out architects have been doing the same thing, just with trees. Want to make a skyscraper look trendy and sustainable? Put a tree on it. Or better yet, dozens. Many high-concept skyscraper proposals are festooned with trees. On the rooftop, on terraces, in nooks and crannies, on absurdly large balconies. Basically anywhere horizontal and high off the ground. Now, I should be saying architects are drawing dozens, because I have yet to see one of these "green" skyscrapers in real life. (There's one notable exception—BioMilano, which isn't quite done yet.) If—and it's a big if—any of these buildings ever get built, odds are they'll be stripped of their foliage quicker than a developer can say "return on investment". It's just not realistic. I get it why architects draw them on their buildings. Really, I do. But can we please stop?
There are plenty of scientific reasons why skyscrapers don't—and probably won't—have trees, at least not to the heights which many architects propose. Life sucks up there. For you, for me, for trees, and just about everything else except peregrine falcons. It's hot, cold, windy, the rain lashes at you, and the snow and sleet pelt you at high velocity. Life for city trees is hard enough on the ground. I can't imagine what it's like at 500 feet, where nearly every climate variable is more extreme than at street level.
Wind is perhaps the most formidable force trees face at that elevation. Ever seen trees on the top of a mountain? Their trunks bow away from the prevailing winds. That may be the most visible effect, but it's not the most challenging. Wind also interrupts the thin layer of air between a leaf and the atmosphere, known as the boundary layer. The boundary layer is tiny by human standards—it operates on a scale small enough that normally slippery gas particles behave like viscous fluids.
For plants, the boundary layer serves to control evapotranspiration, or the loss of gas and water through the tiny pores on a leaf's underside, known as stomata. In calm conditions, a comfortably thick boundary layer can exist on a perfectly smooth leaf. But plants that live in hot or windy places often have adaptations to deal with the harsh conditions, including tiny hairs on their leaves which expand each leaf's surface area and thus its boundary layer. Still, plants in these environments aren't usually tall and graceful. In other words, not the tall trees we see in architectural drawings.
Next let's add extreme heat and cold to the mix. Extreme cold, well, we all know what that does. It can kill a plant, turning the water inside its cells into lethal, crystalline knives. At the other end, hot conditions post a different set of challenges. To cool off, plants can "sweat" by opening their stomata to release water vapor, at least as long as there's water available. But even then, plants reach a limit. At certain temperatures, which vary from plant to plant, the photosynthetic machinery inside a leaf starts to break down. Keep in mind these are temperatures on the surface of a leaf, not ambient air temperature. The surface of leaf—especially in direct sunlight, as on the unshaded side of a skyscraper—can be many degrees hotter than the air, up to 14˚ C in some species (nearly 26˚ F).
Then there are the logistical concerns. How are these trees going to be watered and fertilized? Pruned? How will they be replaced? How often will they need to be replaced? As someone who grows bonsai, I can tell you that stressed plants require constant attention. Daily monitoring, in fact, and sometimes even more frequently. It's not easy. Growing simple green roofs is a chore, and those plants are chosen for their hardiness and low maintenance. Trees are generally not as well adapted to the wide range of conditions likely to be experienced on the side of a skyscraper.
All of this may sound a bit ridiculous coming from someone like me, an advocate for more trees in urban spaces. It probably comes from having seen one too many sketches of a verdant vertical oasis but too few of them actually built. Plus, having studied plant physiology, I know that it's a pipe dream in many ways. Trees just weren't made for such conditions. Now if someone want to gin up a tree that can survive on top of a skyscraper, go ahead, I guess. But I can think of far better things we should be putting our time and effort into, like preserving places that already have trees growing on them or planting more on streets that need them.
Illustration of Editt Tower, a proposed 26-story building in Singapore.
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More reasons to stop putting trees on skyscrapers
How TED and The City 2.0 took the internet for a ride
Snowfall has many magical qualities, among them the ability to hush a bustling city and, in sufficient quantities, make time stand still. This past weekend's blizzard did just that—it stopped life in its tracks. Everyone's plans went out the window (and landed in a mounting drift, I assume). Meanwhile we all sat—contently I hope—waiting out the nor'easter.
As the night went on, the temperature sank and the wind howled, blowing the ever fluffier stuff into smooth scallops and pointy tufts.
When the sun finally rose, many of us were surprised to find that time hadn't just stopped, it had retreated. You see, the evening before the governor had banned car travel in Massachusetts. That left the streets to snowplows and first responders and, in the morning, the people. By midmorning, the roads around my house in Cambridge resembled what they must have looked like when they were first platted hundreds of years ago. Without the horses of course. People were out in droves, shuffling down the middle of the street on their tour of the neighborhood.
Cambridge has its share of pedestrians, but not like this. This doesn't happen on a normal morning. But Saturday morning, there was plenty of novelty to draw people into the street, including the chance to literally be drawn into the street and not worry about being run over. That and the snow, piled high in magnificent masses.
As people strolled, they stopped to chat. With nowhere to go and no schedule to keep, everyone was a bit more jovial than normal, despite the monumental amount of snow to move.
The streets were cozier, too. The plows had cleared what they could, which is to say not nearly everything. Intersections had quirky, nearly unrecognizable new boundaries. Blizzards, I'm convinced, are thinly disguised urban planning lessons. Watch where cars and plows go during and after a blizzard and you'll see exactly how much roadway you need and not a foot more.
Life is slowly returning to normal. Traffic is up, even if travel speeds aren't quite. The asphalt is showing, but many sidewalks are not. In a week or even a few days, this will be nothing more than a fond memory.
Photos by Tim De Chant.
It's no secret that burning fossil fuels is changing the Earth's climate. Emissions are bolstering the planet's greenhouse effect, which is raising temperatures around the world. But it's not an even warming, and neither may it all be entirely attributable to emissions alone. The heat produced from burning fossil fuels may play a role in climate change, particularly its geographic inconsistencies.
I admit I was a bit surprised to learn that in a recent study in the journal Nature Climate Change. The Earth's atmosphere is massive—the heat we dump by burning coal, oil, and gas seems minuscule in comparison. Picking up on such a signal would be like claiming you noticed that the pool got warmer because some kid peed in the other end. Not very plausible, at least until you realize that the world has thousands of cities, each giving off a small amount of heat. It's like thousands of kids peeing in a really big pool. Eventually, you'll notice something. Each city (or kid) on their own may not have a noticeable effect, but combined, they can alter the distribution of warming, perhaps significantly. It's the butterfly effect applied to the 21st century.
Global energy consumption was 509 exajoules in 2009, down slightly from 2008 (a slumping economy will do that). That sounds like a lot, but it pales in comparison—well less than 1 percent—to the amount of energy the Earth's oceans and atmosphere move around the globe every year.
But our energy consumption—and production—isn't evenly distributed. We make a lot of it near cities and consume nearly all of it in them. The authors of the paper sampled 86 points in the Northern Hemisphere where energy use exceeded 0.4 watts per square meter. That's pretty sensitive, especially if you consider that Tokyo, for example, can consume up to 1,590 watts per square meter on a cold winter morning. The 86 points represent only about 1.3 percent of the Earth's surface, but about 42 percent of our total energy consumption.
The scientists plugged that data into standard climate models and ran them for a simulated century. Without the warming data, the models returned results similar to those found before. But when the point source warming from cities was added, the warming patterns more closely hewed to real world trends. For example, the new model results predicted warmer winters over parts of Canada, China, and Siberia, which the authors note "has a high resemblance to the unexplained surface temperature trend in the second half of the twentieth century by anthropogenic radiative and aerosol forcing." What they really mean is, "Remember some of the shortcomings in previous models? We seem to have solved them."
While at first glance it seems improbable that the heat produced by our energy consumption could affect a system as massive as the climate, it shouldn't come as a surprise. The climate is a complex system, and any perturbation, however small, can have unintended consequences. If you want evidence, just look around. The climate is changing, no doubt about it. The more we look, the more evidence we find of our global footprint. This is just the latest example. I'm certain there'll be more.
Zhang G.J., Cai M. & Hu A. (2013). Energy consumption and the unexplained winter warming over northern Asia and North America, Nature Climate Change, DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1803
Photo by Señor Codo.
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Last year, TED made a lot of noise when it announced that it was awarding its TED Prize to something called "The City 2.0". In case you don't know what "The City 2.0" is, it's an idea. At least that's what TED was telling us. They were awarding the prize to an "idea" instead of a person, sort of like when Time Magazine goes all crazy and awards the Person of the Year to a machine.
Well, TED isn't about machines, but it is all about ideas, so it gave its award to an idea, which was really like giving an award to itself, which as you'll see in a bit is actually a more accurate statement than you'd think. Did I mention that this idea had a website? It does. One that TED designed and built themselves. Well, half-built. See, it wasn't exactly ready when the TED Prize was announced, which is funny because TED both built the site and gave the award.
The humdinger behind the original The City 2.0 ¹ was that people could use the site to start grass roots campaigns to change their neighborhoods and cities. The idea was that "the reach of the cloud" and "the power of the crowd" would join forces and, from that totally awesome buzzword high-five, ten winners would emerge.
Wait, ten winners? Didn't an idea already win the prize? Turns out that even though an idea can have a website, it can't accept $100,000. Well, it could if TED, which came up with the idea for The City 2.0, had awarded the money to itself, but that would just look tacky. So instead they split up the $100,000 with the intent of awarding it to those ten winners who would bubble up from the cloudy crowd.² I'm not sure how the cloudy crowd picks the best ideas, but at the time I guessed it would have something to do with voting, as most cloudy crowds do.
This is the awkwardly placed paragraph where I say that I reached out to The City 2.0 for comment because I felt like I had to and because I actually did. They haven't responded, not even a "no comment" or anything.
With a whole $10,000 on the line, I'm sure TED was expecting the The City 2.0 to be a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity. It wasn't. Two months after the prize was awarded, I checked back. The site was finished, but it didn't seem like anybody else knew that. There were just 124 ideas, most of which only had one or two votes in favor of them. Less than two months remained until TED Global, the event where the ten winners were supposed to be announced.
To be fair, there were a few ideas that were winners, some of which would go on to be actual winners, but they still weren't announced at TED Global. (How these winners were determined I do not know because the only thing on the site about them was a handful of lousy sentences.) Most, though, were definitely not good. Some were rehashes of city council debates:³
Livable Elgin Parkway
Eglin Pkwy in Ft Walton is a 7 lane high speed road. In order to foster development / creativity, this could be reduced to a 2 lane road. Through traffic should be redirected to a high speed location.
Others didn't even bother mentioning cities or local issues:
Creating a Viable 3rd Party
And my favorite?
Make the public aware of City2.0 [sic]
In order for this to become a reality local residents need to be made aware of The Wish.
Umm, guys, you realize anybody can read this, right?
You know how you feel when you see someone do something embarrassing and you feel embarrassed for them? That's how I felt for The City 2.0.
Well, the TED people aren't idiots. They know a failed venture when they see one, so they quietly pulled the plug on "The City 2.0" and rolled out… "The City 2.0".⁴ The, um, 2.0 version of the site scrapped the map and didn't show people's submissions, because, like, some people's ideas are totally lame and we don't want that messing up our snazzy website we dropped a lot of coin on. In it's place were "stories" that were selected by TED along with random urbanist links. That's, like, totally better.
Did you know that October 13 was TEDxCity2.0 Day? Neither did I, and one of the supposed TEDxCity2.0 ⁵ events was in Boston, just two miles from where I live. It had people talking about leadership and Mars and poetry and financial markets and communication and aerodynamics and mind reading but it didn't have anyone talking about cities. Huh.
To date, TED has awarded eight of its ten prizes, five of which were given to projects that had already existed before The City 2.0 got all spendy. That's not to say the winners don't deserve it—they're great projects—but it's not exactly the crowdsourced, spontaneous wonderland what TED led us to believe The City 2.0 would be about. Two more are supposed to be awarded in November and December. It's December already.
One of the things that upsets me about The City 2.0 isn't that it was a half-baked idea with a sucky website that dozens of other organizations were already doing way better. Or that it was a transparent marketing ploy meant to draw more attention to TED than to the issue. Or that there was absolutely zero transparency about how winners were going to be selected despite pandering to the "crowd" and its infinite wisdom. No, what gets me is that so many people bought into it. ArchDaily ran such a breathless piece that I almost mistook it for a press release.⁶ The Atlantic Cities ran a laudatory article. Inhabitat, too.
Well, not everyone was buying it. The Next American City was doubtful—at first. They wrote a bit about how The City 2.0 was a major letdown, man. But later, they heard about the relaunch of The City 2.0 somehow, wrote a nice piece about it, and ended up winning one of the ten The City 2.0 awards. I also wrote a skeptical piece about The City 2.0 way back when, but I didn't hear about the relaunch and didn't write a nice piece about it and didn't win an award.⁷
I shouldn't be surprised by all of this. In fact, I'm not. I know TED is a marketing machine and that its only real interest is making sure that the TED name is everywhere. I mean, what else can you expect from a conference that's feels the need to address its own elitism? But that doesn't make me any less angry. Angry that TED exploited the rampant churnalism⁸ that's so prevalent on the internet. Angry that so many people bought into TED's hokey and transparently vain message. And angry that TED would so arrogantly presume to fix something as complex as the city without giving it any more thought than would a few fresh-faced marketing graduates.
Photo by Stefan Schäfer, Lich.
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There are lots of reasons why the 2012 presidential election broke the way it did, but one that's not often reported—but particularly germane to Per Square Mile—is the divide between cities and the country. I've been thinking for a while now about this split as a driving force behind the polarization of U.S. politics, and I know I'm not alone. (On election night, Adam Rogers tweeted as much.)
But I was curious. Can we actually see the divide between cities and the country in the electoral map? In short, yes, but I'll let the maps to the rest of the talking.
Swipe back and forth to see how population density relates to each candidates' electoral result.
Thanks to Andy Woodruff of the always interesting Bostonography for the shapefile of the election results.
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Income inequality, as seen from space
Here's a fun thought experiment. Plot the population of the world since 500 BCE. Now plot the population of the 50 largest cities over that same time. If you distill equations to describe the two trends, you'll notice the lines cross. At some point in the future, your models predict that the population of the 50 largest cities will overtake the world's population. Clearly that's impossible.
What those trends are telling you is that cities are growing faster than rural areas, something we already know. But if you take that thought experiment to its mathematical extremes, you'll see it's possible that there comes a point when—boom—everyone lives in a city. Rural dwellers—poof—cease to exist. Suddenly, we're all children of the concrete jungle.
That's what Michael Batty, a well-known urban planner and geographer, noticed when he ran through those same hypotheticals. Specifically, he calculated that by 2092 all the world will be urbanized according to those trend lines. Of course that won't happen, and he acknowledges that. The world's population will, at minimum, be equal to the sum of its cities, and I'm 100 percent certain that at least a handful of people will still live in the country, either by choice or chance. But Batty's idea bears consideration. What would the world look like when, as he puts it, "all the world's a city"?
The United Nations currently estimates the world's population will reach 10 billion by 2100, just a few years after mathematics suggests we could all be living in cities. Now, that's not to say the Earth would be covered by one massive city. Cities may be expanding outward faster than their population growth would warrant, but 10 billion people spread across all continents but Antarctica would live at a density of about 190 people per square mile (74 per square kilometer). Hardly a city.
But what if our notion of a city changed? A single definition is already maddeningly difficult to nail down. Take New York City, for example. It has about 8.2 million people within the polity, but the greater region has over 22 million. Where does New York really end? Houston and Tokyo, on the other hand, encompass too much. Each political entity contains vast tracts of undeveloped land. It's clear that political boundaries aren't adequate. So instead, what if we think of a "city" as a collection of conurbations not connected by geography but by social and economic ties, as Batty suggests? In an age of plane travel and high-speed rail, physical continuity isn't necessarily a requirement.
With this new definition, it is possible for all the world to be one city. The Earth doesn't have to be covered in conurbation; rather, everyone simply has to live in urban areas, and those urban areas must be sufficiently connected so as to behave like a single city.
Already metros and their regional governments cross existing political boundaries. New York City is a perfect example. And at the other extreme, there are cases like Tokyo where city governments have essentially absorbed their hinterland equivalents. (We see this all the time in the United States with combined city and county governments—New York City, San Francisco, and Lexington, Kentucky, to name a few.) These mergers grew out of necessity, and it's easy to see the same happening in a hyper-connected world. As more and more cities join the global cluster, as Batty calls it, the pressure to coordinate will rise.
It's possible, then, that the first true world government could emerge from this collection of cities. It would be fitting. Already mayors from around the world meet to discuss common problems, and on issues like climate change where national governments have fallen flat, they have taken the lead. But it would still be a shift of epic proportions. It wouldn't happen overnight, but at a certain point it would be inevitable. Cities could choose to sit on the sidelines, but the benefits of joining the global cluster would be too great to ignore. Eventually, nearly everyone on Earth would count themselves a resident of the One City.
The world as one city would surely be a different place. The relationship between a city and its hinterland would be tested. Indeed, what would become of the hinterland? It would certainly be smaller—although the One City wouldn't smother the planet, it would still have an enormous footprint. The hinterland would remain inhabited by scattered few who choose to live there, perhaps living their quiet lives amongst robotized farms. A great schism between the city and the hinterland could develop. But there could also be a reconciliation. Governments could reconfigure to cope with the changing landscape, both literal and figurative. Instead tension between the city and its hinterland, there could be cooperation fostered by a sense of shared fate. So goes the city goes the hinterland, and vice versa.
Regardless of how it all plays out, a highly urbanized global population will add nearly 6 billion people to cities that only hold about 3.6 billion today. That's growth of almost 280 percent in less than a century. Such a percentage isn't unprecedented—between 1900 and today, the world's urban population grew by more than 1600 percent—but the raw numbers will be. To accommodate those people, cities will have to remake themselves like never before. It's a daunting challenge, and as I stated in my last article, we'll need a science of the city that's equally formidable.
Batty, M. (2011). When all the world's a city, Environment and Planning A, 43 (4) 772. DOI: 10.1068/a43403
United Nations. 2011. "World Urbanization Prospects, the 2011 Revision." Accessed October 8, 2012.
Photo by kevin dooley.
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Science fiction is littered with planet-wide cities. Star Wars had Coruscant, Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series had Trantor, and even Star Trek, in an alternate timeline in First Contact, saw Earth paved over by the cybernetic Borg. City-planets are both a wonder and a terror—we stand in awe of our power to change the world, but also regard that ability with fear. What if we actually did it? Hundreds of years ago, it didn't even seem possible. But the quickening pace of population growth in the 1800s changed that, and the vast environmental changes sweeping the planet today are a stern reminder of just how powerful we are.
Of course, Earth is not in any immediate danger of becoming one conurbation, but the trend isn't promising. Urban areas around the world are expanding at double the rate of their populations. That means every person who moves to or is born in a city will, on average, take up more space than the person before them.
And soon there will be a lot more people wanting that extra space. Urban populations are expected to swell to 5 billion in the next two decades, and according to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, cities are expected to gobble up another 460,000-plus square miles (1.2 million square kilometers). Put simply, it means that cities will occupy three times more land in 2030 than they did in 2000.
That's a staggering amount. The results are equally astounding. The east coast of China is likely to merge into one massive city. Cities in the region spanning Lake Victoria's north shore—an arc from Burundi to Kenya—will swell 1,900 percent in area. Urban areas along the coastal strip from Côte d'Ivoire to Nigeria will grow 920 percent. Other countries like India, Mexico, and Turkey will also experience outsize urban growth. Even developed regions like North America and Japan will have to endure massive urban expansion.
There's a lot to be concerned about with these statistics. Urban areas that grow several-fold in a few decades won't be happy places to live—they'll likely be dominated by slums, or at the very least snarled with traffic and choked with pollution. The situation is even more dire for the ecosystems they'll be displacing, which are some of the most diverse in the world. That's because we humans prefer to live in dangerous places, places dominated by disturbances like earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and floods, processes that produce rich and diverse ecosystems. As a result, the next two decades of urban expansion will imperil nearly 140 amphibian species, more than 40 mammal species, and 25 bird species.
That doesn't mean we should halt progress and send everyone back to the farm. Cities are still more environmentally friendly on a global scale than the alternative. No, what it means is that we need to think hard—and fast—about how we're going to cope with the booming urban areas of the next two decades. Much of that growth is going to happen in places like Africa that haven't had large cities historically. Nigeria, for example, is projected to have more than 400 million people in 2050. That's more that double its present population.
Success will depend on thinking big. It'll require "more holistic policies that integrate traditional urban sectors—transport, energy, sanitation, buildings—with land use and conservation," the study's authors write. A "science of the city" that others have been arguing for. Developing that science is, in my mind, the only hope we have of taming these urban beasts. The cities of the future may not be the planet-consuming behemoths of our techno-futuristic tall tales, but they'll be beyond anything we've ever seen before. We'll need a science that's equally formidable.
Seto, K.C., Guneralp, B. & Hutyra, L.R. (2012). Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109 (40) 16088. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1211658109
Photo by Carl Lovén.
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Why we live in dangerous places
In the summer of 2008, I found myself lost in Chicago. I was new to the sprawling city, living there for two months while working as an intern science reporter at the Chicago Tribune. To counter weekend boredom, I would explore the city by bike. I'd often find myself mildly disoriented, but this time I had really done it. I knew I was north of the Loop, but that was about it.
Finally, I happened across Halsted Street, a major north-south thoroughfare that ran a few blocks from where I was living. Relieved, I started south, coasting past nice brick apartment buildings and row houses, big box stores and tony shops. But after a few miles, the timbre of Halsted changed. Quickly. Well-kept storefronts gave way to crumbling industrial buildings and weedy sidewalks. Then came the most depressing hulk of a building you could imagine. It was a drab beige tower surrounded by acres of asphalt and dotted with boarded up windows fringed with smoke stains. I knew exactly where I was.
Cabrini-Green's bad reputation was well-known, especially in the Midwest where I grew up. It was among the first projects built by the Chicago Housing Authority in the mid-20th century. By the 1970s, Cabrini-Green was notorious for destitution and violence. Gangs had taken over various buildings, and internecine warfare kept even the hard-nosed Chicago police at bay. Tales of horrific murders spread around the country. My aunt, who tutored elementary school students there, would recount stories she heard from residents. Cabrini-Green was at best a place to be avoided.
And here I was, blithely riding by. Though I didn't know it at the time, Cabrini-Green's most notorious days were past it. The tower was largely vacant, save for a few holdouts. When I moved back to Chicago a year later, the last of the high-rises were being torn down.
Housing projects are widely viewed as a failure. Their concentrated poverty seemed to descend into a negative feedback loop, where depravity fed on itself. Over the years, Chicago tried to assert control, to no avail. They muscled up the police presence; that was met with sniper fire. In 1981, then-mayor Jane Byrne moved into a ground floor apartment guarded round the clock by uniformed officers. She moved out three weeks later.
Oddly enough, Byrne's publicity stunt was on the right track, if completely backwards. Housing projects' needed a shock to break the cycle. But they didn't need a mayor moving in. They needed to move people out.
That's exactly what the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development did in the mid-1990s, when it took over the dysfunctional Chicago Housing Authority. As a part of the Moving to Opportunity program, households could enroll in a lottery which would give winners assistance in finding and vouchers to pay for housing in low poverty neighborhoods. Chicago wasn't the only city in the trial—New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Baltimore were also involved. The idea was that after moving to low poverty neighborhoods, families would find more and better jobs and be healthier and happier. Nearly 5,000 families were included in the experiment.
It worked, to some extent. A study published today in the journal Science details how people involved in Moving to Opportunity have fared in the 15 years since the program started. Though those who moved to low poverty neighborhoods were still as poor as those who didn't, there were some changes. Notably, they were happier and somewhat healthier.
The study, led by Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago, looked at a variety of factors, ranging from poverty rate to racial segregation to mental and physical health. Though poverty rates didn't change significantly, and racial segregation nudged only slightly lower, people's health improved. Physical health, as measured by obesity and diabetes, were slightly better in this study. (A prior study published by Ludwig and colleagues in the New England Journal of Medicine last year reported more significant improvements.) But mental health, as measured by self-reported subjective well-being, or how people felt about their lives, was significantly improved among people who lived in low poverty neighborhoods. So while people were still poor, they were happier. That says a lot about the importance of your surroundings.
Ludwig and his colleagues point out that if the objective of Moving to Opportunity was to reduce poverty, then at this point it would be considered a failure. But if the goal was to improve people's lives in other ways, well, it's not doing too bad.
The study only focused on adults, in part because measuring subjective well-being of youngsters is an inexact science. Because of that, they're missing an important component. It's difficult to break free of poverty, especially when you've inherited it. But children, through better education and improved health, have more potential than their parents (even if that's only because they have more of life left to live). It's possible that, because of a more positive home life, kids in families living in low poverty will have better opportunities than their parents, helping them break the cycle.
Ludwig, Jens, Greg J. Duncan, Lisa A. Gennetian, Lawrence F. Katz, Ronald C. Kessler, Jeffrey R. Kling Lisa Sanbonmatsu. 2012. "Neighborhood Effects on the Long-Term Well-Being of Low-Income Adults". Science 337(21): 15051510. DOI: 10.1126/science.1224648
Photo by puroticorico.
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"How far should you live from work?"
I pondered that question a few weeks ago after perusing American Community Survey data compiled by Charlie Gardner. It showed that most people in most metro areas in the United States tended to commute about 30 minutes each way to work, give or take a few. That adds up to about an hour of commute time per day. As I looked into it further, I found a lot of research that corroborated the surprising similarity of people's commute times.
But in all ten research papers I used to footnote that article, I was missing one. Eric Fischer pointed me toward a 1994 treatise—for lack of a better term—by Cesare Marchetti. He posited that one hour per day is as long as people have been willing to travel. Ever. Since the dawn of human society.
At least, that's what Marchetti hypothesized. He did have some data to back it up, though it wasn't his own. It was Yacov Zahavi's. Zahavi was a transportation engineer who consulted for the U.S. Department of Transportation and World Bank in the 1970s and early 1980s. As part of his work for the DOT, he came up with what he called the Unified Mechanism of Travel Model, or UMOT. Zahavi produced a string of reports and papers on UMOT, which he hoped would shake up how transportation planning was done in cities.
In the process of developing UMOT, Zahavi collected many juicy tidbits of data. One observation was that as people earn more money, they spend an increasing percentage of their income on everyday travel, up to about 13 percent. That number seemed to be both a hard ceiling and firm floor once households earned above a certain amount (about $50,000 in 1976). The richer you got, the more you spent in real terms. But the percentage remained the same.
Another bit—the one that inspired Marchetti—was that people in the United States and the United Kingdom traveled about 1 hour per day. (Astute readers will notice that a 30 minute commute to work—the number most studies have settled on as the "average" commute—adds up to precisely that amount at the end of the day.) Zahavi also noticed that even though some people could travel faster—by car rather than bus, for example, they still spent the same amount of time traveling. They just traveled farther to work—a trend which more recent studies have also uncovered.
Zahavi's data is compelling, but in Marchetti's hands it quickly became a universal constant. If so many people in Zahavi's study (mostly in the developed world of the 1950s and 1960s) traveled the same amount per day, Marchetti reasoned that humans must have an innate desire to travel at most and at least 1 hour per day. Boom. Marchetti's constant.
Zahavi's data wasn't the only leg he had to stand on, though it certainly was his sturdiest. Cave men and Greek villages were another. Marchetti pointed out, "Walking about 5 km/hr, and coming back to the cave for the night, gives a territory radius of about 2.5 km and an area of about 20 km2. This is the definition of the territory of a village, and … this is precisely the mean area associated with Greek villages today, sedimented through centuries of history."
Marchetti—not one to think small, apparently—then used his new universal constant as a jumping off point to explore the future of tomorrow. How fast would a transportation system need to be to serve a city of 100 billion people? An average speed of 150 km/h sounds about right. Can you turn Switzerland into one giant city? Sure, so long as you run maglev trains in sealed tunnels sucked free of atmosphere. What about if you linked Paris and Casablanca with a maglev, too? "[A] woman in Casablanca could go to work in Paris, and cook dinner for her children in the evening."
Not a man to leave a logical extreme unreached, Marchetti realized that at some point in the future everywhere on Earth will be 30 minutes from your front door. "With mach-7 airplanes and matching Maglevs, a world city is also possible. The assimilation of the technologies in political terms, however, will take some time."
Details. In the meantime, enjoy your 30 minute commute.
Marchetti, C. (1994). Anthropological invariants in travel behavior, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 47 (1) 88. DOI: 10.1016/0040-1625(94)90041-8
Zahavi, Yacov. 1976. "The Unified Mechanism of Travel (UMOT) Model."
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How far should you live from work?
Tell me how much you drive, and I'll tell you where you live
We've been planning cities for almost as long as they have existed. Archaeological evidence suggests the ancient Egyptians did so 5,000 years ago. Hippodamos, considered by many to be the father of urban planning, imposed street grids on every ancient Greek city that would let him. Since then, we've been busily drawing, revising, and otherwise fussing about how best to design our cities.
It turns out we may have it all wrong. Or at least wrong for today's cities. Urban areas have always been in constant flux, but we're now demanding far more of them than before. They've never housed, transported, or employed so many people. To cope, cities have been changing at an astonishingly rapid pace. The results can be inspiring—as they are in Seoul, Singapore, and Tokyo—or depressing—just look at anywhere with extensive slums. In some cases, it seems urban planning is up to the task. In others, it's not.
Where it falls flat, urban planning's failings aren't necessarily the fault of the designers. Too often planning is focused on minutiae—ordinances, regulations, zoning, setbacks, and so on. Even when it tackles bigger problems like economic growth, it doesn't necessarily consider the city as a whole.¹
The solution, according to Michael Batty, an urban planner and professor at University College London, is infusing planning with science. Systems science, specifically, where bright minds and complex mathematical models try to digest the entirety of a system, like a city. It's no simple task. IBM is just one company throwing billions of dollars and tons of silicon at the problem. What they'll get out of it is anybody's guess, but they seem certain they'll get something. Cities are overflowing with collectable data. It's making sense of it that's difficult. The possibilities it presents is what I think is going drive us to rethink city planning.
Urban planning has its origins in the design world, which is both a bonus and a handicap. Architects make natural planners—they design the buildings, why not have them design the streets, too? When those planners are enlightened designers, the results are attractive and livable cities. If they're not? Well, we've all seen what happens when they're not. But as much as good design has created great cities, I and others suspect it can't deal with the coming challenges. Not on its own, at least. Good design can solve many problems, but it can't solve them all. At some point, you need science.
The rate at which cities are growing and changing presents a problem for the traditional design-centric approach. Good design requires a thorough understanding of your problem. But these days, problems are appearing and evolving so quickly that we don't have enough time to properly observe them.
Urban planning is at a crossroads, much like ecology was 50 years ago.² Planning is still largely descriptive and not very scientific, again, much like ecology was 50 years ago. Sure, cities gather hard data like traffic and sewage flows. Yes, they model projected growth and consider the social factors behind neighborhood demands. But urban planning lacks a unified, data-driven theoretical foundation.
That's beginning to change. Michael Batty, Geoffrey West, Luis Bettencourt, and others are proposing data-driven theories and testing them, just like Robert MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson did in ecology back in the 1960s and 70s. Though these new urban theorists are trying to shake things up, they're not trying to eliminate planning as we know it. Their science of cities won't be a replacement for current planning, but a superset. Think of it as a grand theory to tie it all together, to make sense of why cities have evolved the way they did and how we can coax them to cope with 5 billion people.
The science of cities may be in its infancy, but we can see where it will lead. The first stage, the one we're in right now, is descriptive. It involves gathering data, assembling huge models, and tuning them until we're satisfied. Then we'll apply those models, and see how the real world reacts. There will be some stumbles, but that'll only give us more data to work with. Eventually, we'll arrive at a theory of cities that's universal and flexible enough that it can be applied anywhere. It will be a foundation that will underpin models that grind through piles of data and make sound, timely recommendations which designers can implement.
Getting to that last stage is important, I think. In many cities, it's clear that we don't know what to do with all these new urbanites. Even in cities where things appear hunky dory, cracks are beginning to show. Subways are crowded, freeways are jammed, and sewers are overflowing. Throwing money at temporary fixes will only get us so far. We need to dig deeper and develop a responsive urbanism,³ one that's grand in scale and scientifically focused. We need to listen to what cities are telling us, decide what we want them to do, and plan accordingly.
Batty, M. (2008). The Size, Scale, and Shape of Cities, Science, 319 (5864) 771. DOI: 10.1126/science.1151419
Batty, M. (2012). Building a science of cities, Cities, 29 S16. DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2011.11.008
Bettencourt, L.M.A., Lobo, J., Helbing, D., Kuhnert, C. & West, G.B. (2007). Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104 (17) 7306. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0610172104
Photo by MagnusL3D
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Thirty minutes at most, according to the wisdom of the crowds.
That comes from reams of data and piles of research that suggests commute times tend to cluster around this point. People tend to be good at weighing their options, economists think. If you live farther from work, you can usually afford a bigger house or apartment. But there's a point where that journey becomes too onerous, and you are willing to sacrifice some of those desires to live closer to your job. That point on average seems to be between 20 and 30 minutes.
I was inspired to look into this further after seeing an article by Charlie Gardner over at his blog, The Old Urbanist. Gardner had mined the American Community Survey for average commute times in major metropolitan areas. Though there was a tight correlation between population and commute time (metros with larger populations have longer average commutes), the differences weren't pronounced. They ranged from a low of 22.5 minutes in Kansas City to a high of 34.6 in New York City. That's not a lot.
But before we ask why commute times hover in a tight band, perhaps we need to ask why people commute so far in the first place. Why not work next door? The answers may seem obvious, but what's readily apparent to one person may not be to another. That's why we examine these things scientifically. Well, in this case your hunch is probably correct. An older study by Martin Wachs and his colleagues at UCLA found, unsurprisingly, that people choose where to live not just based on commute times but also neighborhood characteristics, schools, and safety.
Now we can move on to the more curious question, why commutes tend to average 20-30 minutes. It's not just limited to the United States, either. In the Netherlands, the average commute time in the early 2000s was about 28 minutes. Many European nations average about 35 minutes. What makes a half-hour so universal in terms of commuting?
It didn't used to be that way. Average commute times in 1980 were around 22 minutes. Today, they're around 25 minutes. Three minutes may not seem like much, but remember it's an average. To increase an average by that amount, some commutes had to grow significantly to counter those that shrunk or remained the same. Now, keep in mind there is a lot of variation about those averages. Some people travel 2 minutes to work, others well over an hour. But on average, they have increased.
What's causing that lengthening is higher job densities in major metros. Job growth is requisite to economic growth, and vice versa. As metro areas add more jobs, those jobs tend to be concentrated in business districts (after all, not everyone can work out of their homes). And as business districts fill up, commute times lengthen because the roads leading there become more congested. So when the economy booms, traffic slows to a crawl. I heard anecdotal evidence of this when I lived in San Francisco. People told me, if you think traffic is bad now, it was much worse during the tech boom of the late 1990s. When all those tech workers lost their jobs, gridlock practically evaporated, they said.
Subtle changes in urban form may also cause longer commutes. One study in the Netherlands and another in Quebec, found that polycentric metro areas—those with two or more cities, like Minneapolis-St. Paul—tend to have longer auto commute times. As cities grow and begin bumping into one another, such agglomerations are likely to become more common. It's possible commute times may increase as well. While there may not be consensus on this point, I haven't found any studies that claim changes in urban form will shorten commute times. That makes sense if you look at somewhere like New York City, which is both monocentric and dense. People may work a short distance from their homes, but traffic is so congested and public transit makes so many stops that commute times are still relatively long. Simply increasing density in some cities may shorten commutes for a brief period, but the honeymoon won't last forever.
Which is a bummer, because for the most part people think their commutes are too long. A survey of 2,000 commuters in the San Francisco Bay Area reported that 52 percent of respondents said they commuted at least 5 minutes longer than they would like. Among that group, median commute times were 40 minutes, which is certainly longer than the region's average. On the other hand, 42 percent said their commutes were just right (their median time was 15 minutes). Surprisingly, 7 percent felt their commute was too short (median of 10 minutes). But despite the fact that a majority think their commute is too long, most people said they didn't mind it, so long as their trips were less than 100 miles.
That people don't mind their commute may be why commute times refuse to shrink. People in the Bay Area survey who didn't mind their commute said they agreed with statements like, "I use my commute time productively" and "My commute trip is a useful transition between home and work", which supports anecdotal evidence I've heard that people enjoy the separation between work and home. Twenty to thirty minutes may be just enough time to unwind.
It's not entirely universal, though. Tolerable commute times seem to lengthen when people switch from cars to mass transit. People may find that time more productive, or maybe the time seems shorter because driving can be stressful, while just sitting usually isn't. Personally, I know I'm willing to commute longer by train than car. Another reason is because mass transit commutes tend to be more reliable in terms of duration (at least for trains). Not having to worry about traffic jams doubling your commute is a big advantage.
Regardless of mode, people seem to settle on an ideal commute time. And once they have settled, they don't seem to stray from it. A study of two metro areas in Washington State discovered that commute times don't change much when people move or switch jobs. The thinking is that if a person gets a new job that's farther away, they are more likely to move. Plus, as people have moved to suburbia, some jobs have followed. It's a two-way street. But that doesn't mean employers can move to the burbs without consequences. If an employer moves and an employee doesn't move as well, the employee is more likely to find another job. Companies looking to relocate simply to cut costs may find the high turnover that results more costly in the long run.
Commuting is a big part of our lives, so it makes perfect sense that it would affect so much of the world around us, especially the cities we live in. Take a dense city like New York that has oodles of jobs, and lots of dense housing close in. That density helps keep commute times reasonable. But somewhere like Tulsa that doesn't have as many jobs doesn't have as much need for density. Form follows function, and currently the freeways in Tulsa are functioning pretty well compared with New York.
That presents a real dilemma for urban planners, who have been striving to increase densities in cities across the board. One approach has been mixed-use development that blends retail, housing, and office space. That may help reduce trip times for errands and such, but it doesn't preclude people from living in one mixed-use neighborhood and working in another. The reality is, we're probably not going to change commute times. If we offer faster and better transportation, people will use it until it becomes overburdened. At which point they'll just move closer to work. Attempts to influence urban form through design may not have much of an impact if jobs don't follow.
Cervero, R. (1996). Jobs-Housing Balance Revisited: Trends and Impacts in the San Francisco Bay Area, Journal of the American Planning Association, 62 (4) 511. DOI: 10.1080/01944369608975714
Cervero, R. & Duncan, M. (2006). 'Which Reduces Vehicle Travel More: Jobs-Housing Balance or Retail-Housing Mixing?, Journal of the American Planning Association, 72 (4) 490. DOI: 10.1080/01944360608976767
Clark, W.A.V. & Davies Withers, S. (1999). Changing Jobs and Changing Houses: Mobility Outcomes of Employment Transitions, Journal of Regional Science, 39 (4) 673. DOI: 10.1111/0022-4146.00154
Clark, W.A.V., Huang, Y. & Withers, S. (2003). Does commuting distance matter?, Regional Science and Urban Economics, 33 (2) 221. DOI: 10.1016/S0166-0462(02)00012-1
Giuliano, G. & Small, K. (1993). Is the Journey to Work Explained by Urban Structure?, Urban Studies, 30 (9) 1500. DOI: 10.1080/00420989320081461
Levinson, D.M. (1997). Job and housing tenure and the journey to work, The Annals of Regional Science, 31 (4) 471. DOI: 10.1007/s001680050058
Schwanen, T., Dieleman, F.M. & Dijst, M. (2004). The Impact of Metropolitan Structure on Commute Behavior in the Netherlands: A Multilevel Approach, Growth and Change, 35 (3) 333. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2257.2004.00251.x
Schwanen, T. & Dijst, M. (2002). Travel-time ratios for visits to the workplace: the relationship between commuting time and work duration, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 36 (7) 592. DOI: 10.1016/S0965-8564(01)00023-4
Vandersmissen, M.H., Villeneuve, P. & Thériault, M. (2003). Analyzing Changes in Urban Form and Commuting Time∗, The Professional Geographer, 55 (4) 463. DOI: 10.1111/0033-0124.5504004
Wachs, M., Taylor, B., Levine, N. & Ong, P. (1993). The Changing Commute: A Case-study of the Jobs–Housing Relationship over Time, Urban Studies, 30 (10) 1729. DOI: 10.1080/00420989320081681
Photo by Jekkone.
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Tell me how much you drive, and I'll tell you where you live
Urbanites leave the car behind, but not as often as you might think
Shortly after I started Per Square Mile, I produced an infographic that showed how big a city would have to be to house the world's 7 billion people. There was a wrinkle, though—the city's limits changed drastically depending on which real city it was modeled after. If we all lived like New Yorkers, for example, 7 billion people could fit into Texas. If we lived like Houstonians, though, we'd occupy much of the conterminous United States.
Here's that infographic one more time, in case you haven't seen it:
What's missing from it is the land that it takes to support such a city. In articles and comments about my infographic, some people overlooked that aspect—either mistakenly or intentionally. They shouldn't have. Cities' land requirements far outstrip their immediate physical footprints. They include everything from farmland to transportation networks to forests and open space that recharge fresh water sources like rivers and aquifers. And more. Just looking at a city's geographic extents ignores its more important ecological footprint. How much land would we really need if everyone lived like New Yorkers versus Houstonians?
It turns out that question is maddeningly difficult to answer. While some cities track resource use, most don't. Of those that do, methodologies vary city to city, making comparisons nearly impossible. Plus, cities in most developed nations still use a shocking amount of resources, regardless of whether they are as dense as New York or as sprawling as Houston. Any comparison of the cities in my original infographic would be an exercise in futility at this point.
But what we can do is compare different countries and how many resources their people—and their lifestyles—use. For countries, the differences are far, far greater than for cities. Plus, there's a data set that allows for reliable comparisons—the National Footprint Account from the Global Footprint Network. Their methodology is based on peer-reviewed research by Mathias Wackernagel, the organization's founder. It's consistent and comprehensive. Each country's footprint is assembled from sub-footprints, ranging from cropland to carbon to urbanization to fishing grounds. For my purposes, I used only terrestrial sub-footprints. I'll let the results speak for themselves.
Global Footprint Network. 2011. National Footprint Accounts, 2011 Edition.
Wackernagel, M., Kitzes, J., Moran, D., Goldfinger, S. & Thomas, M. (2006). The Ecological Footprint of cities and regions: comparing resource availability with resource demand, Environment and Urbanization, 18 (1) 112. DOI: 10.1177/0956247806063978
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If the world's population lived in one city…
Spare or share? Farm practices and the future of biodiversity
David Nowak is at it again. The tireless ecologist and his frequent collaborator Eric Greenfield have given us another comprehensive snapshot of urban forests in the United States. Nowak has published numerous studies on urban trees, one of which I've covered previously. But that study—which discovered that some cities are leafier than their pre-urban states—takes a longer view and paints a different picture. In this new study, Nowak and Greenfield focus on the more recent past, the 2000s, and find that 17 of the 20 cities they surveyed had significantly fewer trees than just five years earlier. Sixteen became more developed, too, with an increase in impervious surfaces like roadways, parking lots, rooftops, and sidewalks. Taken together, these findings suggest that cities across the U.S. are steadily defoliating.
In this most recent study, Nowak and Greenfield turned to a favorite tool of mine for evaluating forest cover—aerial photographs. For each city, Nowak and Greenfield found a pair of images taken three to six years apart. They scattered a minimum of 1,000 points across each city's photo pair and manually classified them into eight categories: trees and shrubs, grass and herbaceous cover, bare soil, water, and three classes of impervious surfaces (buildings, roads, and other). They were accurate to within a few percent in every class.¹ Nowak and Greenfield also compared their subset of 20 cities to other large cities in the U.S. by sampling an additional 1,000 points in metro areas across the country. The results were largely similar, meaning what they found in the 20 cities would be indicative of nationwide trends.
With the exception of Syracuse, all cities in the study had fewer trees in the later image. Overall, existing tree cover decreased 0.9 percent per year in 18 of the 20 cities (New Orleans and Detroit were excluded from most statistics—more on why later). That may not sound like much, but like any annualized percentage, it compounds. When a small amount of trees are lost from one year to the next, the change may not be that noticeable. But over 10 years, the results can be drastic. And when you remember that trees account for just 28 percent of land area in these cities, at these rates it won't be long before trees cover the barest sliver of our urban areas.
Nowak and Greenfield excluded two of their surveyed cities, New Orleans and Detroit, from most statistics based on their extraordinary circumstances. In New Orleans, they were interested in seeing how Hurricane Katrina changed the urban forest, and in Detroit, they were looking for signs of the emerald ash borer infestation, an invasive insect that has decimated ash trees throughout New England and the Midwest. Detroit was lucky—it emerged relatively unscathed, losing only 0.7 percent of its total tree cover, in part because vacant lots make a great home for young trees. New Orleans, on the other hand, fared poorly, losing more trees than any other city in the study, nearly 10 percent.
Those cities aside, the trends don't bode well for urban forests. Most concerning is the conversion from trees to impervious surfaces. Losing trees to grass and bare soil may be concerning, but it's not catastrophic. Those cover types are easy to reforest. But when land becomes covered by roads, parking lots, or buildings, it very rarely reverts to vegetation of any type. At least 71 percent of the time, the move to impervious surface was because of development, not, say, a tree dying and revealing a parking lot beneath. The majority of the time, it was the more permanent type of conversion.
Which leaves us with a question—how are we going to maintain, let alone increase, tree cover in cities where buildings, streets, and parking lots are taking over the landscape, often in irreversible ways? One is for cities to take direct action, by planting trees in existing public spaces. Lots of cities have planting programs, but in many cases they're barely able to keep pace with deaths from disease, urban stress, and old age.
Another option is to open gaps in the concrete along streets to provide new opportunities for planting. Not only does this give the city more places to plant, it sends a good message to the neighborhood, showing that the city cares. Planting trees may also be a way of leading by example, an exercise that could be followed by the offer of free trees for neighborhood residents. It's subtle, but potentially more effective because there's often more land behind people's homes than in front. Cities could also add more parkland. Trees in parks aren't exposed to the same stresses as street trees, but parkland can be expensive to procure.
That Nowak and Greenfield's results span the last decade makes them that much more alarming. We've lost 1 percent of our existing tree cover per year in that time. Where will that leave us ten years from now? We don't know, exactly. Until we have more data from earlier years, we just won't know for certain—these sorts of changes could be cyclical. But given trends in development and population density and the rate at which trees have been converted to impervious surfaces, I'm guessing we're headed toward fewer trees.²
Nowak, D.J. & Greenfield, E.J. (2012). Tree and impervious cover change in U.S. cities, Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 11 (1) 30. DOI: 10.1016/j.ufug.2011.11.005
Photo by Franco Folini.
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A month ago, I covered a study showing how tree cover was related to income level. A couple of weeks later, I posted images gleaned from Google Earth showing how easy it is to spot income inequality from space. I also asked you, my readers, to send me more examples of the same.
The response has been overwhelming. In fact, I'm still receiving emails and comments. I haven't been able to go through them all, so if yours isn't below, hang tight. I'll get to it eventually. Consider this a post that'll be updated continuously. As they say, check back early and often.
So without further ado, here they are. This is where you see income inequality. You may see it every day, right in your own backyard. You may have stumbled across it years ago. You may have noticed on a vacation. But collectively, you see it everywhere. Keep 'em coming.
From Todd Gastelum, who writes:
Although it appears that these satellite images are presented at different scales, I assure you that they were not. The houses in Lomas truly are enormous whereas San Miguel Teotongo is typical of the dense, irregular urbanization characteristic of the city's more peripheral zones.
Lomas de Chapultepec, Miguel Hidalgo
San Miguel Teotongo, Iztapalapa
From Aaron Krolikowski, who writes:
I'm a PhD student (in Geography) from the University of Oxford. My work takes place in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and I spend quite a bit of time looking at maps of the city. One of the first things I noticed was exactly what you mention in terms of the ability to see income inequality from a birds-eye view. I've shared some photos with you to give you an idea of what I look at (and live!) every day here.
The first – To the left you have unplanned settlements of "Mikoroshini" and "Makangira"…to the right, the highly affluent and very European "Oyster Bay"
The second – To the left is the informal settlement of Hanna Nassif and across the river is middle-class Upanga
Mikoroshini, Makangira, and Oyster Bay
Hanna Nassif and Upanga
From Sylvian Paradis.
Downtown East Side
British Properties
From João Jordão.
Cova da Moura, Amadora
Last week, I wrote about how urban trees—or the lack thereof—can reveal income inequality. After writing that article, I was curious, could I actually see income inequality from space? It turned out to be easier than I expected.
Below are satellite images from Google Earth that show two neighborhoods from a selection of cities around the world. In case it isn't obvious, the first image is the less well-off neighborhood, the second the wealthier one.
Zona Sul
West Oakland
Fourth Ward
River Oaks
Hyde Park
Ball Square, Somerville
West Cambridge
Do you have other cities or neighborhoods in mind? I'd love to hear from you. Send me an email with photos or link to your blog post. In the next couple of weeks, I'll put together a follow up article that features your examples.
Be sure to include the names of the cities and neighborhoods you're highlighting and if you'd like me to mention your name.
Your examples are now posted! The response to my call for examples has been unbelievable. I've received hundreds of messages. I have the first batch up, and as I have time, I'll be adding many more. Keep 'em coming.
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Urban trees reveal income inequality
Wealthy cities seem to have it all. Expansive, well-manicured parks. Fine dining. Renowned orchestras and theaters. More trees. Wait, trees? I'm afraid so.
Research published a few years ago shows a tight relationship between per capita income and forest cover. The study's authors tallied total forest cover for 210 cities over 100,000 people in the contiguous United States using the U.S. Department of Agriculture's natural resource inventory and satellite imagery. They also gathered economic data, including income, land prices, and disposable income.
They found that for every 1 percent increase in per capita income, demand for forest cover increased by 1.76 percent. But when income dropped by the same amount, demand decreased by 1.26 percent. That's a pretty tight correlation. The researchers reason that wealthier cities can afford more trees, both on private and public property. The well-to-do can afford larger lots, which in turn can support more trees. On the public side, cities with larger tax bases can afford to plant and maintain more trees. Given the recent problems New York City has had with its aging trees dropping limbs on unsuspecting passers-by—and the lawsuits that result—it's no surprise that poorer cities would keep lean tree inventories.
But what disturbs me is that the study's authors say the demand curve they see for tree cover is more typical of demand for luxury goods than necessities. That's too bad. It's easy to see trees as a luxury when a city can barely keep its roads and sewers in working order, but that glosses over the many benefits urban trees provide. They shade houses in the summer, reducing cooling bills. They scrub the air of pollution, especially of the particulate variety, which in many poor neighborhoods is responsible for increased asthma rates and other health problems. They also reduce stress, which has its own health benefits. Large, established trees can even fight crime.
Fortunately, many cities understand the value trees bring to their cities. New York City is aiming to double the number of trees it has to 1 million. Chicago has planted over 600,000 in the last twenty years.¹ And London has been working to get 20,000 new trees in the ground before it hosts the Olympics.
But those cities are relatively wealthy. It's the poorer ones that probably need trees the most but are the least able to plant and maintain them. The Arbor Day Foundation is a great resource in those cases, but like many non-profits, it is stretched too thin. Compounding the inequality is the fact that most tree planting programs are local. Urban forestry has sailed largely under the federal government's radar. The U.S. Forest Service does have a urban and community forestry program, but is woefully underfunded, having only $900,000 to disperse in grants. Bolstering that program could help struggling cities plant the trees they need. After all, trees and the benefits they provide are more than just a luxury.
Zhu, P., & Zhang, Y. (2008). Demand for urban forests in United States cities Landscape and Urban Planning, 84 (3-4), 293-300 DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2007.09.005
Photo by Alex E. Proimos.
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Peter Sigrist, writing at Polis about what he sees as ecology's shortcomings:
Ecology "proper" is currently limited in addressing human habitation. It doesn't usually incorporate the theory or methods of fields like economics, anthropology, political science, sociology and history. Many subfields have emerged in answer to the need for more detailed study of human-environment interaction, including human ecology, cultural ecology, political ecology, environmental sociology, historical ecology, ecological anthropology, ecological economics and ecological urbanism. But most are not closely integrated with mainstream ecology and its methods, which are primarily focused on nonhuman nature. Many ecologists portray human environmental impact as a kind of alien intervention into the natural world, and don't attempt to understand the political, social, economic and cultural processes through which it takes place.
Sigrist isn't entirely wrong—our understanding of the natural world must consider human impacts. The thing is, many ecologist already do that. If Sigrist had written this decades ago, I would concede his point. But times have changed. No serious ecologist draws a firm boundary between natural and anthropogenic spheres. For years, ecologists have widely acknowledged that no part of the Earth is untouched by human influences. Some may still cling to the old distinction between human and wild, but they are increasingly few and far between. Climate change has thoroughly disabused most of that notion.
Sigrist further laid out his argument in a second post, stating:
Incorporating useful elements of cultural landscape, urban political ecology and ecological urbanism can make ecology more attuned to the ways humans experience and influence cities. This is more than a shared analytical framework or conceptual lexicon (Gandy 2008: 567); it means actual integration so that ecologists are equipped to address the full complexity of human environmental relations and help make cities more just, healthy and beneficial to the planet as a whole.
To say too few ecologists study human-environment interactions isn't just unfair, it's incorrect. Sigrist seems to misunderstand ecology and its relation to the myriad subfields he listed above. The ecologists he describes—the ones that focus on strictly "natural" ecosystems—aren't members of an umbrella field but a subfield. They're just one type of ecologist. The people who study other subfields of ecology? They're ecologists, too.
What Sigrist is proposing for ecology already exists. Perhaps he wants ecologists to avoid over-specialization.¹ Perhaps what he means to say is that there needs to be more collaboration and cross-pollination between ecologists of different subfields. He's not wrong—there could always be more. But he's ignoring what's already out there. I know ecologists of all stripes—field, physiological, sociological, and so on—who collaborate with environmental historians, economists, even electrical engineers. I know ecologists who write papers about the value of ecosystem services, how to use Wall Street's data processing techniques to understand the water cycle, or how spirituality can affect the conservation of biodiversity. Hell, I've been to conferences where ecologists have wrung their hands about how ecology needs more collaboration. If anyone is conscious of the need for interdisciplinary collaboration, it's ecologists. After all, ecology is the original interdisciplinary science.
Again, that's not to say we shouldn't work harder to identify how humans are affecting the natural world. I'm the last to argue against that. But we need to identify our shortcomings where they actually exist, not where we imagine them to be.
Landscape near Paris, Paul Cézanne, National Gallery of Art.
I've heard the statistics so often they're almost cliché: Fifty percent of the world's population now lives in cities, and by 2050 it will be 70 percent. Yet those numbers fail to capture the enormity of the change, especially so for those of us in the developed world where for decades the majority of the population has lived in cities.
Urban growth is going to be especially taxing in Africa, where the population is expected to more than double by 2050 and urban populations are expected to triple. Furthermore, 70 percent of the urban population growth is predicted to occur in cities with less than 500,000 people today.
Such a demographic shift is occurring today in China, but the situation there is different than in Africa. China's semi-command economy and authoritarian government make managing mass migrations easier. Furthermore, the Asian nation is two times bigger than Africa's two largest nations—Algeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—combined. Planning on that scale has its advantages.
China's and Africa's circumstances aren't entirely dissimilar, though. China's expanding cities have displaced farmers on the periphery, leading to protests. Social strife in African nations is similarly problematic. Take the example of Bahir Dar, Ethiopia. Researchers from Tattori University in Japan and Mekelle University in Ethiopia mapped the city's expansion from 1957 to 2009 and found that Bahir Dar's area expanded 31 percent annually, or 88 hectares (217 acres) per year. That's a shockingly rapid pace, even outpacing some of China's cities.
It also portends social strife. The researchers interviewed 271 of the nearly 2,900 households whose farms had been seized between 2004 and 2009 to make way urban development. What they heard paints a gloomy picture. First the good news: Nearly all were offered and received monetary compensation. Now the bad: Nearly all of those who had received compensation said it wasn't nearly enough to replace what they had lost. One farmer's response explained the shortfall in a nutshell: "I had 300 eucalyptus trees, 45 coffee trees, ten mangos and avocados, and ten papayas on my land, but finally I received compensation only for the farmland."
Even if monetary compensation were sufficient, it wouldn't be what expropriated farmers need to transition to urban life. Nearly 60 percent of the surveyed households let their money sit in the bank—they hadn't a clue what to do with it. "It would have been better to change the money into other assets. But to do this, I do not have experience and knowledge since I am illiterate," one respondent said. A few were given other opportunities—40 percent were offered a line of credit and 24 percent were offered some sort of training. But those promises were often reneged.
The loss of farms isn't just a tragedy for the affected families—residents of Bahir Dar will feel the effects, too. Though African cities are entering global food markets, many people still rely on outlying farms. And as cities expand, many of those farms disappear. That means crops have to be trucked greater distances, increasing food prices and further sensitizing them to rising oil prices. People in developing nations already pay a greater proportion of their income on food than those of us in developed nations. Any increases in food prices can be calamitous, as we saw in 2007 and 2008.
It doesn't look like there is relief in sight, either. In Bahir Dar's case, the researchers predict the city will double in extent by 2024. Similar patterns are likely to be seen across Africa as many cities will double in population by that date. As in developed countries, part of the solution will be better education and training for the displaced and newly immigrated. But given the projected magnitude of urban growth in Africa, even that may not be enough.
Haregeweyn, N., Fikadu, G., Tsunekawa, A., Tsubo, M., & Meshesha, D. (2012). The dynamics of urban expansion and its impacts on land use/land cover change and small-scale farmers living near the urban fringe: A case study of Bahir Dar, Ethiopia Landscape and Urban Planning DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2012.02.016
Photo by Marc Veraart.
Related posts:
Can we feed the world and save its forests?
Spare or share? Farm practices and the future of biodiversity
In my mind, my hometown will always be a city of 24,000 people. It'll also be supported by three major manufacturing companies. And it'll always have a certain, intangible something. Of course, today West Bend has 5,000 more residents despite the demise of all three manufacturers. And every time I return, that certain something isn't quite the same either. It's like waking from a dream I can't entirely reconstruct.
Geographer Gilbert F. White would say I've got "last settler's syndrome". To me, the ideal West Bend is the city I remember from my childhood—really, from my middle school days when my friends and I explored every street in the city by bike. White would also say I'm not alone: "Each wants his particular town and country landscape to remain just as it was when he or she arrived. The most recent settler wants to be the last settler."
One could argue that the settlement of the United States was driven in part by last settler's syndrome, that the pioneer spirit is just a euphemism for the malady. Pioneers who saw their wilderness fill up with other settlers may have become disillusioned. The Ohio River Valley, for example, wasn't the same after the first trees were felled. So people picked up and moved on. It instilled a distinctly American habit—moving west for new opportunities.¹ My own ancestors followed that well-worn path, moving from Ohio to Wisconsin in the late 1800s.
Seemingly everything in our lives is touched by the last settler's syndrome, from our childhood homes to our neighborhoods to our favorite haunts. It can be a powerful, positive force—if John Muir hadn't been afflicted by last settler's syndrome, there probably wouldn't be a Yosemite National Park. But last settler's syndrome also can be problematic. Neighborhood quarrels can result when new transplants push for change. And while obstinacy can be good in some cases—Muir and Yosemite—it also can be a barrier.
Understanding the last settler's syndrome—how it affects people, and more importantly, how it affects ourselves—can help us better understand where we live, whether that be cities, farms, or forests. It also can help explain why change is so accelerated these days: We're a population that moves a lot. As of 2010, less than 60 percent of Americans lived in the state in which they were born, almost 30 percent were born in another state, and almost 13 percent were born in another country. How people defined "the way things were" used to evolve over generations. Today it's on the order of years.
In an era of constant upheaval—where cities look nothing like they did a few years ago, let alone a few decades ago—we need to consciously disassemble our relationship with places and analyze them in parts. What should we keep? What should we change? What needs to change? It's difficult to abandon the past, but the future will be nothing like we imagine. Things are going to change whether we like it or not.
Nielsen, J. M., Shelby, B., & Haas, J. E. (1977). Sociological carrying capacity and the last settler syndrome Pacific Sociological Review, 20 (4), 568-581
U.S. Census. 2011. Lifetime Mobility in the United States: 2010.
White, Gilbert F. 1986. The Last Settler's Syndrome. in Geography, Resources, and Environment: Volume 1. Robert W. Kates and Ian Burton, eds. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Photo by anoldent.
Related posts:
Interview: Jon Christensen on California's cities


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Teresa asked for the recipe for this tasty bread. After remembering how good it is when used for grilled cheese sandwiches, I instantly knew what dinner would be tonite! lol!!!
Jalapeno Cheese Bread 1 Cup warm water (110 degrees)
Add ingredients according to the bread machine's directions. Set your machine on regular basic bread. Makes 1 - 1 1/2 pound loaf. It makes a nice, spicy loaf of bread - just asking to be used for grilled cheese sandwiches! Hope you like it as much as we do. |
Follow-Up Postings:
You need a good Jersey Beefsteak tomato to make a great sandwich on this bread - sounds just heavenly! |
Ptsbgh fan....you say 1/2 cups of cheese....is that a typo or did you mean 1 1/2 cups? Linda C....cheese fan |
- Posted by pghsteelerfan (My Page) on Mon, Jul 31, 06 at 0:37
No, Linda....my recipe only calls for 1/2 cup of cheese. There are so many recipes floating around out there, though, if you'd like more cheese in your bread, I'm sure you could come up with one fairly easily. Ooooo - I shouldn't have started eating good, homemade bread again......once I start, I can't stop! Today I made a tasty caraway-rye bread - I guess reubens will be on the dinner menu tomorrow. I have to agree with what Shaun said on another thread...I can see the pounds climbing aboard with every bite of bread I eat! My goodness.....I hate this menopause thing! Barb |
- Posted by teresa_nc7 (My Page) on Mon, Jul 31, 06 at 7:03
Thanks for the recipe, Barb! I can't wait to make this. Why did I never think of putting jalapenos in bread? I put crushed red chili peppers in my cornbread - so why not jalapenos? Do you use fresh jalapenos or pickled? Teresa |
- Posted by pghsteelerfan (My Page) on Mon, Jul 31, 06 at 13:05
Well, the reason I originally started baking this bread was because I had a bumper crop of jalapenos and I wanted to use some up. So, actually, I use fresh when I have them - pickled when I don't. Sometimes you have to watch out for how much liquid they contain, though - like any other bread recipe - too much liquid may cause your bread to fall. Red chilis in cormbread?? Why didn't I ever think of THAT? Sounds delicious! Any special recipe or do you just mix some in......and how much do you use? |
- Posted by teresa_nc7 (My Page) on Mon, Jul 31, 06 at 21:30
Barb, I put the crushed red peppers in my Mexican Cornbread which is one of my favorites: Mexican Cornbread 1 cup self-rising cornmeal Grease a 9-inch square pan. Preheat oven to 400. Mix dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Stir in onion, peppers, and grated cheese. Mix in another bowl, corn, eggs, oil, and buttermilk. Mix wet into dry with a spoon until just blended. Put into prepared pan and bake at 400 for 30 minutes. This is a very moist bread. I think of it as a vegetable side rather than a bread :o) |
Did you add the cheese right away so it would blend completely, or did you wait towards the end of the mixing cycle of your bread machine? My husband is asking for jalapeno cheese bread, and your recipe sounds good. Thanks. |
Here is a link that might be useful: That's My Home
- Posted by pghsteelerfan (My Page) on Sun, Feb 4, 07 at 0:35
Joan, I always add the cheese at the very beginning. Hope you enjoy this bread as much as we do! Barb |
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subset: commoncrawl


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See pdf map of fields on download section of homepage.
Field is directly along Hainesport - Mt. Laurel Road to the right of the school
field is behind the school next to playground
field is behind both Hillside and Harrington schools
Creek Road past 295. Take right at Centerton Road. Then right into development to parking lot.Field is to right of the parking lot.
Creek Road intersection prior to 295
Enter Laurel Acres Park from Union Mill Road and take the first left at the soccer fields back to the Baseball Triplex.
Lenape HS Hartford Road and Chuch Road Medford NJ


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2015 MA Application Now Available!
The application for starting the MA degree or certificate in fall 2015 is now available! Applications will be accepted starting Monday, January 26, 2015. Click here to be taken to the application. Feel free to contact Entry & Advising with questions about prerequisites or completing the application.
What can I do with an MA degree or certificate?
The MA degree/certificate program is designed to train students to work as a member of a health care team, performing a broad range of clinical and administrative tasks under the supervision of a physician, physician's assistant or nurse practitioner. Several areas of specialization are available as described below.
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Quote Richard Graham:
I've just read this entire thread, it's taken me all day, and I don't understand it AT ALL. I thought digital audio was perfect quality, like CDs?
Listening to 'Dueling Banjos' on my portable CD player whilst buggering a goat after drinking a 6 pack; THAT'S PERFECT.


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| Email | Full Article (TrendHunter.com/id/79236) |
The world is abuzz with World Cup madness, but some of the broadcasters aren't as optimistic as others. The Greenpeace Australia ad shows the dark side of soccer (or 'football') by comparing the amount of trees cut down to the field on which our national teams are currently playing.
At the end, the Greenpeace Australia ad reads, "Every two seconds an area of forest the size of a football pitch is being cut down."
Definitely something to think about.


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Saturday, March 11, 2011: The morning after the major earthquake in the Pacific not far from Sendai, the largest city in the Tohoku area, I accessed the Internet news and saw more horrific photos of destruction by the tsunami. A friend with whom I stayed with said, "Over 10,000 people were killed!" I began to … Continue reading
Category Archives: Japanese laws
I had a fantastic 10 day trip traveling 1460 kilometers in 28 vehicles during the Japanese holiday season from April 29 to May 5th known as "Golden Week". April 30th: It took me over two hours and 6 vehicles just to get out of Niigata City! A lady took me as far as Toyosaka on … Continue reading
Sunday, April 5, 2009: A lady picked me up and told me at first she would take me to the center of Niigata City which was my destination. However when I learned that she was on her way home of about 2/3rds of that distance, I offered to disembark at an intersection which I thought … Continue reading


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Dear Devotees
This year 2012 is very special for the Gita Mandir Association as we are celebrating the Golden Jubilee – 50 years Anniversary.
We are inviting all devotees to participate fully in our RAM NAWMI CELEBRATIONS starting on the 23rd March 2012 at 1830 for stapna and 1900 – 1930 Kirtans, 2000-2100hrs Katha.
We shall continue RAM KATHA, DURGA PUJA, and Bandhi Path on other days until the Grand Celebrations of Ram Nawmi on the 1st April 2012.
We shall look forward in seeing you soon.
Keep Posted
Devotedly Yours
GMA Managing Committee


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- Oct 24:
- San Rafael will pay $185,000 settlement for Taser incident
- Jun 28:
- Vallejo police use Taser on Novato man after chase
- Jul 11:
- Novato woman charged in Taser strike on landlord
- Jun 23:
- Novato woman accused of Tasering landlord in face
- Jan 26:
- Marin Deputies drew Tasers 11 times, firing twice
- Jan 5:
- Taser stops man who fled cops
- Dec 16:
- Man shot dead by police after Taser fails to subdue
- Nov 17:
- Ross police will be equipped with Tasers
- Oct 21:
- Supervisors OK Marin sheriff's Taser purchase
- Oct 19:
- County sheriff set to equip officers with Tasers
- Nov 28:
- San Anselmo cops Taser man after dispute
- Oct 9:
- Sausalito police use Taser to stop suicidal man
ABC TV reporter Vic Lee, whose broadcasts have questioned the propriety of the use of a Taser in the 2009 incident, created a stir when he appeared at a county board meeting Tuesday to quiz supervisors about the matter, but didn't get them to say much.
Supervisors interviewed individually said on camera they could not comment on specifics because the Taser victim, Peter McFarland of Woodacre, is suing the county.
"Before this situation is fully investigated it would be inappropriate for me to weigh in with some half-baked opinion," Supervisor Charles McGlashan told the television crew. McGlashan, who added he had seen a video clip of the incident on YouTube, added that Sheriff Bob Doyle "made a great argument" that the devices were a nonlethal alternative to guns when the program was launched two years ago. As for the dramatic video clip, "one never knows what goes on out of view of the camera," McGlashan noted.
Lee, who said the Marin video clip has created a sensation on the Internet where it "has gone viral," reported that Taser experts are among those who question whether the use of a Taser was appropriate in the case.
McFarland, who was 64 when the Taser incident occurred, fell outside his Carson Road home after attending a fundraiser with his wife, Pearl, on June 29, 2009, according to a lawsuit filed in U.S.
McFarland, who had been drinking, apparently made a reference to shooting himself in the head, and paramedics contacted the sheriff's office. Deputies then entered the home. McFarland was arrested for resisting arrest around 12:30 a.m., but the charge was dismissed last June.
The lawsuit names two responding deputies, Erin Mittenthal and Justin Zebb, as defendants and alleges that Zebb fired his Taser four times, including once after McFarland was handcuffed. It claims the deputies had no basis to enter McFarland's house without a warrant, use "excessive force" or arrest him.
McFarland's legal team obtained a video of the incident - filmed by a camera attached to the Taser - from Marin County prosecutors.
A Taser is a stun gun that delivers electric shocks when fired. The sheriff's office began issuing the weapons in November 2008 and has about 100 that deputies carry while on patrol.
Read more West Marin stories at the IJ's West Marin section.
Contact Nels Johnson via e-mail at firstname.lastname@example.com


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If you're looking to loosen up a troublesome residential lawn, a soil aerator is your tool of choice to repair soil compaction.
The manufacturers listed here have what it takes to save your soil. To receive information from any of these companies, circle the appropriate number on the reader service card, toss the card in your mailbox and, in a few weeks, you'll have everything you need to make an informed decision.
For INSTANT FREE information on the companies featured in this guide, visit www.turfmagazine.com/freeinfo.
The Super Finetine maintains infiltration rates through the thatch layer between verticutting and coring treatments. Use with smoothing roller to keep area in play.
The Core Breaker separates grass roots from soil and deposits soil back on the turf. Available in 69 and 93-inch working widths.
Barber & Sons
The tractor-towed Turf Rake uses a grid of geometrically configured spring tines to aerate soil and remove stones.
Billy Goat
The 19-inch-wide AE401 features a water weight directly over the tines, removable tine stars, Fold-n-Go handles and easy-to-adjust drive chains.
Blec USA
The GKB Sandfiller verticuts and backfills with sand to achieve good aeration and drainage, while following the contour of the ground and collecting debris.
The Cherrington 4500 has a 5-foot screening width, 1-cubic-yard hopper, working depth up to 4 inches and solid steel loading paddles.
The SA-25 Stand-Aer ride-on aerator has hydrostatic tine and tire drive, 24-inch operational turning radius, 13 hp Honda engine and split drive technology.
CS Trading
The 63-inch-wide Sisis Maxislit offers two depth settings and a blade angle and spiral shaft design that aid penetration with minimal surface disturbance.
Earth & Turf
The TURFSAW uses a shattering action that produces little compaction and has solid blades that adjust to increase penetration from 2.5 to 3.75 inches.
The Yardmaker overseeder seeds and aerates in one operation. Available in pull-type or three-point models with widths from 3 to 8 feet.
Offers four models of core aerators with knife options, three spike aerators, 4-foot shrouded aerator, three core/slice aerators and two star wheel aerators.
The PTO-driven AERA-vator leaves no cores to clean up, is available in 40 and 60-inch models and has oscillating, forged steel tines to fracture hard soils.
The Hooker uses the forward force of the mower to make holes up to 3 inches deep and pulls loose plugs of soil to eliminate hard cores and compaction.
L.T. Rich
The Z-Plug is powered by a 19 hp Kawasaki engine, aerates 2 to 3.5 inches deep and has a floating tine head, 2,000-pound hydraulic lift and speeds up to 8 mph.
Land Pride
The CA25 Core Aerator is available in 4, 5 and 6-foot units with case-hardened .75-inch spoons and storage stands on all four corners.
Palmor Products
The Trac Vac front-mount aerator is available in 32 and 48-inch widths with heat-treated steel tines and independent core tine wheel rotation.
The Turf Surgeon aerates, dethatches and spikes; is available in 52 and 71-inch working widths; and has a depth of cut adjustable up to 1.75 inches.
The three-point hitch, 72-inch Tracaire offers coring, slicing or deep-spoon tines, independently mounted tine wheels and aerating depth up to 4 inches.
The VersaTow has 12-inch, self-storing wings to allow operation at 36, 48 and 60-inch widths and 80 heat-treated, 5/8-inch tubular tines.
The core aerator for the Steiner 430 Max tractor has a working width of 40.25 inches, independent .75-inch core tine assemblies and depth up to 3.5 inches.
Trackless Vehicles
The Trackless front-mounted aerator has pivoting tine wheels that turn with the tractor and can travel from site to site without disengaging.
Turf Pride
Offers the VSA aerator and the Core Collector, which collects and moves cores to the collar's edge. When the unit is lifted, cores are deposited on the collar.
Turfco Direct
TurnAer 4 and 6 aerators turn while aerating and offer front-traction drive, DiffDrive system and TurnAer Chariot attachment.
The PERFAERATOR attachment has a working width of 41.5 inches, depth of 2.5 inches, and PTO-driven tines that engage and disengage easily.
Don't miss the March issue of Turf, which will feature guides to Riding Mowers & Attachments; Sweepers ;and Trailers & Accessories.