Originally built as a Chinese military fort, the Kowloon Walled City became a residential enclave after the New Territories were released to Britain in 1898. The population boom occurred after World War II, when the Japanese occupation drove prostitution, gambling, and drug use out of downtown Hong Kong and into Kowloon. In 1987, its population numbered 33,000 within its 6.5-acre borders.

More here.

Now it’s a park (map here):

 Video here, before it was torn down.

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Here’s another way to think of it: Take almost all the population of the West End (38,000) in the red box – and squeeze everyone into the two blocks inside the yellow box.

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So, um, where is the densest place now?

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UPDATE: TWO WHEELS AND HIGH HEELS 

Recently, I won a fellowship and got to spend six months living life on two wheels in the world’s most bike-friendly cities. I brought home ten lessons, and thousands of photographs, for Cascadia.

Outside addresses bike theft:

When thieves stole his beloved ­commuter bike on a busy street in broad daylight, PATRICK SYMMES snapped—and set out on  a cross-­country plunge into the heart of ­America’s bike-crime underbelly. What he saw will ­rattle your frame.

And this: Get a bike. Lock it to a post. Take a pic every day for a year.

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SO WHO’S CHEATING? 

Tim from B.C. Hydro:

I made this bike about my electric bike and the typical response I have with people when I tell them about it:

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MAKING CYCLING COUNTS 

Invented in Denmark, the cyclist counter represents the melding of infrastructure and public data in a way that is transparent, interactive and even fun for citizens.

An interview with Marianne Weinreich of Veksø A/S, a Danish company which has produced cycling equipment for the urban environment for the past 60 years – here.

How do you respond to someone who says: “This is just a waste of money, why do cyclists need special counters?  Pedestrians and cars do just fine without them.

It’s an important signal.  It’s a signal from the city saying that they want things to be different.  We’ve had 50 years of cities being planned for cars.  Now we are at a point in time because of congestion, climate change, immobility and obesity that we have to do things differently.

Of course you cannot suddenly increase the number of cyclists just because you put up a cyclist counter, but it can be a first step – a kind of a lighthouse – and a signal to citizens saying that cyclists are a priority.  In the United States in particular where the bike is viewed not so much a means of transportation, but rather as a thing of leisure, it may be that a counter could get cyclists to view themselves as part of a movement.

Also, a short catalogue of cycle counters, along with some useful info here.

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BICYCLE SUPERHIGHWAY

From Treehugger:

Malmö is upping the stakes by putting up 30 million Swedish crowns (about US$4.1 million) toward the building of a four-lane super cycling highway between it and its bike-happy northern neighbor city Lund….

The proposed bicycle superhighway would, in addition to four lanes (2 in each direction) have exits but no intersections, two types of wind protection (low bushes as well as solid fencing) periodic bicycle service stations, and would take eight years to complete.

Total cost of the superhighway is estimated to be about 50 million Swedish crowns (US$ 7.1 million).

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Dubai Marina – the development based on a rough equivalent of False Creek (seriously) – can be seen centre left, next to the base of the Palm Islands.

Thanks to Tom Durning for this and other links.

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Winter in Vancouver is not quite like winter in other Canadian cities. There is a unique beat that arrives in the city as the days get longer and the nights get shorter. …

The last week of December ended with bitter blasts of chilly air, followed by intense rain showers. Vancouverites bear this kind of weather triumphantly, year after year, saving the evenings to be outdoors discovering their very own winter solstice beat. We find the time to be colourfully lit skaters in Robson Square, blinking cyclists with white front and red rear lights, and most popular of all, joyful walkers exploring our downtown community.

[Plug: For those out there looking for a landscape architect intern - one whose visual skills are on display in the video and this exquisite website - then you might well contact Kathleen Corey here.]

]]> http://pricetags.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/winter-solstice-beat/feed/ 0 pricetags http://pricetags.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/the-100-hot-dog-enough-already/ http://pricetags.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/the-100-hot-dog-enough-already/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 01:08:34 +0000 pricetags http://pricetags.wordpress.com/?p=13673 ]]> Please, please stop the media excess.  No more stories about the cognac-infused hot dog on Granville Street.

I think maybe VREAA has it right:

 …the Wall Street Burger Shoppe has just raised the price of their burger to $175, to ensure their place as New York’s most expensive burger.

- ‘America’s most expensive burgers’, Huffington Post, 28 May 2008, shortly before Wall Street imploded.

But in this 3-D age (Doubt, Deny, Delay), it helps to be reminded – especially since it starts roughly at the point when Vancouver was incorporated and takes us to the present.

Unfortunately, that’s not a good timeframe in which to motivate action.  It’s too long and too slow to match up with the human timeframe for action (something sudden, visual, unavoidable), which is why we respond so much better to temporal disasters.  And it looks like that’s what we will need: a succession of overwhelming events sufficient to overcome the climate-change denialist’s strategy of doubt and delay.  But by which time it may too late.

*  From our friends at NASA comes this amazing 26-second video, depicting how temperatures around the globe have warmed since 1880. That year is what scientists call the beginning of the “modern record.” You’ll note an acceleration of those temperatures in the late 1970s as greenhouse gas emissions from energy production increased worldwide and clean air laws reduced emissions of pollutants that had a cooling effect on the climate, and thus were masking some of the global warming signal. The data comes from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, which monitors global surface temperatures.

As NASA notes, “in this animation, reds indicate temperatures higher than the average during a baseline period of 1951-1980, while blues indicate lower temperatures than the baseline average.” 

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What happened to the NPA? And what now?

This once-dominant civic party barely survived the results of the November election. But some of the central organizers of the campaign have few regrets: they still believe the negative campaign they conducted could have worked. Regardless, they argue, there was little choice, given the moribund state of the party after its defeat three years ago, a passive board, a lazy media and a popular mayor.

All that may be true. But they chose the wrong kind of negativity.

Ridicule didn’t work. The repetitive mocking of “chickens and wheat fields and bike lanes” messaged contempt very effectively, in the style of the City Caucus blog cofounded by candidate Mike Klassen, but it was also making fun of people – young people, in particular – who were comfortable with the “greenest city” mantra that Vision had promoted and who found the NPA mockery simply annoying. A lot of them turned out to live in places like West Point Grey.

It also meant the NPA had to give up the centre ground that, until then, it had a right to claim.

The NPA (disclosure: when I was on council) had led the country in green initiatives and had fashioned a city that became an international model of successful and marketable sustainability.

Now it looked as though the association was shifting to the “Rob Ford”-style right. No more war on the car. A return to common sense. A promotion of traditional industries. When it came to being green, the message was clear: no more of that silliness.

The NPA’s backers, principally downtown businessmen with little experience in municipal campaigns, wanted to take advantage of the anger and frustration that the separated bike lanes had generated in their crowd – people who felt they were being inconvenienced for the sake of self-righteous greenies. Clearly the wrong kind of people were running things, and they felt the public would wake up if only the messenger was loud enough.

They also wanted to portray Gregor Robertson as an out-of-touch, muddy-headed leader who wasn’t man enough to be mayor – as his handling of the riot and Occupy Vancouver revealed.

“Vision had the pretty one,” said one insider. “We have the smart one.”

But ridicule and mockery in this case turned out to be bad politics. The NPA mayoral candidate, Suzanne Anton, immediately struck a tone of shrillness and seemed to lack authenticity. But the polls were being positively interpreted at campaign headquarters, particularly when the opportunity to criticize the city’s handling of Occupy Vancouver seemed to put the NPA in striking distance.

Vision, on the other hand, didn’t respond to the ridicule. It didn’t have to. It saw from its polls that the NPA strategy wasn’t working. So it kept to the positives and, given a lack of enthusiasm for its councillor incumbents, promoted newcomer Tony Tang.

Few expected a defeat of Vision. Even the business community was not anticipating a change of mayor. Come election night, though, the NPA was surprised at how well Vision did: all its candidates elected, Gregor Robertson up 10,000 votes. But, in consolation, it felt the party had performed well enough to still be taken seriously.

So what now?

Almost everyone is agreed: a permanent organization must be put in place, an actual party, not a Brigadoon that emerges from the mists every three years. More practically, the NPA needs campaign organizers with municipal experience, armed with the latest technology.

And that means money. Businessman Peter Armstrong – steady, committed, generous throughout – had joined with developer Rob Macdonald to fund and manage the campaign, and much now depends on whether they or others will continue to do so. And whether they want the association to lean further to the right. Of course, the two elected councillors – George Affleck and Elizabeth Ball – will be left, by default, as both the spokespeople and the strategists, but it is not yet clear where they want to take the NPA.

There is, of course, the traditional ground for the west-side rooted association: defenders of the status quo, champions of the established neighbourhoods, representatives of fiscal responsibility. The NPA during the campaign had seceded the anti-growth ground to Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver, and it did not use the credibility of its own candidates – Bill McCreery and Dave Pasin in particular – who wanted to push that button.

Ironically, it was left to Green Party leader Adriane Carr to run on a platform of cautionary skepticism, even about density and bike lanes. Joined with NPA in the face of Vision’s upcoming pro-development housing policies, this could lead to one of the more curious alliances in civic history. •

The politician is in a difficult place. Constituents expect problems of congestion to be solved, but not at their individual expense. People want carrots, not sticks – but don’t want to pay for expensive carrots and don’t want the sticks to hurt.

Politicians appreciate that individuals can hold completely contradictory views about the automobile, depending on whether the point of view is personal or collective. As individuals, people may view attempts to reduce car use as misguided. They cannot imagine their lives without unlimited access to the car.

However, these same people can be heartily in favour of drastic actions to reduce car use and, at least in principle, favour alternatives like cycling.  But once actual tradeoffs have to be made, particularly if they involve reallocation of street space, inconvenience for the car or the introduction of tolling on existing infrastructure, the backlash can be severe if not career-threatening for any local politician in the car owners’ headlights.

… pricing the road is a touchy political proposal. The road is our commons. No matter who you are, you want the same right to the road. Rich or poor, powerful or weak, you are equal, even if you’re equally caught in congestion.

To maintain the automobile as a low-cost form of transportation means the poor meet the rich on common ground, even if the implicit subsidy for the road means more to the rich than the poor. The Left defends the free road so the poor can drive farther for cheaper housing and needed work. The Right opposes the tax grab that road pricing would entail. The politician has little middle ground on which to stand.

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Alex synthesizes a lot of current thinking and ideas into one presentation, familiar to much of this readership.  I particularly like his observations on threshold effects where, for instance (like central Vancouver), “people simply stop driving as much,” and tentpole densities, where “you raise the density a whole lot in very specific spots” (hello, Mt. Pleasant).

Watch til the end, and you’ll get some images (propaganda!) of Vancouver.