On Urban Attractiveness

In an era of global competition, every aspect of a city that contributes to its desirability or undesirability is been increasingly regarded as a key factors to maintain and strengthen its attractiveness and by consequence its competitiveness. A city’s attractiveness is determined by a wide range of elements based on their own wealth, security (i.e. The Safe City By Leo van den Berg), history, cultural assets, and excellent landscape, measured with quantitative data such as in Richard Florida’s work and the indexes of Mercer, and the UN’s State of the World’s Cities, Quality of “Business” Life. Character, identity and uniqueness are also crucial ingredients in a city’s attractiveness, which can only be exploited by careful planning at a local level and highlighted in more qualitative surveys such as FT’s Cities of Dreams and Monocle’s top liveable cities.
These indicators inform the urban policies and politics of major urban areas and polycentric metropolis with implications on the management of these places and the practice of urban planning and urban design (see Manuel Castells Talk on the Implications of Networks on Urban Planning). The strategies for enhancing attractiveness include city-centre redevelopment, cultural policy, the role of events, city promotion and infrastructure. They were characterized by the so-called “culture-led” regeneration of the New York City Waterfronts and its 4-months Waterfalls public art exhibit that has been playing a role in enhancing city image and achieving economic deindustrialisation of the piers in Lower Manhattan and West Brooklyn. Similar strategy use the concept of “event city” that has come to signify to policy makers that special events can be used to give a specific character to the city that hosts them. Other examples take the forms of new cultural infrastructure, including galleries, theatres and concert halls, as a tourist attraction and a community platform for culture-related economic activities to expand.

The impact of these strategies is only partially measurable (when not too costly), although it is generally accepted that there is a conspicuous impact of these projects on city image, which is reflected in increases in the number of tourists and the demand for tourism-related services. However, these strategies could play negative roles as cites with large suburbs where centers become centres of consumption, apart from production; they might become less about living rather than becoming a place to visit for shopping and eating out, to take part in social events, to have cultural experiences at movie theatres, concert halls and museums, to meet and communicate with others.

In other words, city centers have been the focal point of citizen’s urban life. Therefore, the lack of monitoring of their attractiveness could be regarded as an immediate threat to the liveliness of their economy. Measures from urban data (e.g. land use, census, traffic data) and statistics (e.g. NYC’s Sustainable Streets Index) traditionally feed the suspicions and are less traditionally augmented with the systematic collection of people’s experience, as suggested by Marek Kozlowski’s PhD thesis Urban Design: Shaping Attractiveness of the Urban Environment with the End-Users that aims at obtaining subjective views of end-users and integrating this information into the urban design process.
My work on urban attractiveness proposes a third, complementary avenue that exploits the logs of people’s explicit and implicit interactions with urban infrastructures as evidences of the evolution of attractiveness of a space. The analysis of the temporal density and spatial distribution of digital footprints could help ensuring the sustainability of a city attractiveness by keeping indicators on the evolution of the experience of the space. They are an opportunity to inform urban designer and policy makers to enhance urban quality through post-occupency evolutions. Finally the development and assessment of strategies to enhance urban attractiveness involves of a wide range of local stakeholders and strong partnership among. The visualization of the evidences extracted form digital footprints can help the discussion that contribute to extend the contextual knowledge and deepens understanding.

An evidence of temporary low attractiveness of a space in relation to other areas?

Relation to my thesis: Further motive and ground my latest research work. Keep on highlighting that “it seems that the interface with technologies and networks is still not taught in land use planning and urban design“.

Metròpolis Barcelona – El Projecte Comú

Today closed the Metròpolis Barcelona – El Projecte Comú exhibition on Barcelona’s strategic metropolitan plan featuring 63 projects to extend and develop the city for the horizon 2010. Bruno Giussani has a nice post on it: Walking on Barcelona, and thinking about city design

Relation to my thesis: Location is key when applying for grad school (i.e. Apply to programs in places you would be happy)

Visualizing Prices and Earnings around the Globe

Macrofocus has released the InfoScope v. 3.0.7 that comes with 2006 “Prices and Earnings around the Globe” dataset. The InfoScope is an interactive visualization system that supports analysis and exploration of a large number of indicators in complex datasets. The Prices and Earnings around the Globe dataset contains information about the purchasing power in almost 60 cities around the world. Each city is characterized by more than 100 different attributes such as the price for food, salary of engineers or the working time required to buy a hamburger.

Relation to my thesis: The InfoScope uses multiple coordinated views to analyze geo-referenced datasets. An article explains this approach:

Brodbeck, D. and Girardin, L. 2003. Design Study: Using Multiple Coordinated Views to Analyze Geo-referenced High-dimensional Datasets. In Proceedings of the Conference on Coordinated and Multiple Views in Exploratory Visualization (July 15 – 15, 2003). CMV. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 104.

It uses several interesting visualization techniques I could think of applying:

Fisheye view

A fisheye view of the world focused on Europe. Highlighted objects in the periphery remain visible.
Similarity map

Similarity maps help to gain an overview of the global relationships between objects: cities are placed on a map so that similar cities are located close to each other and dissimilar ones far apart.

Parallel coordinates view

The parallel coordinates view shows one axis for each attribute or criterion that characterizes the cities. Connecting the actual values for one specific city on all the axes leads to a polygonal line that forms a visual representation of the characteristics of this city.

Retaining the Creative Class

The San Francisco Bay Area thrives on tides. It profits from low tides to reinvent itself as innovation hub. However, with the emergence of competing creative region, business and government officials face challenges that could be overlooked in the past. Baby boomers are retiring, workers are getting squeezed out by the high cost of living and foreign professionals are moving back home. High cost of living and the obstacles raised by U.S. immigration policies and factors are the obvious factors to reduce the regional quality of life. Interestingly now, measures to attract new creative brainiacs is to capitalize more on the home-grown workforce. That is investing in lower education and training programs to reduce education and social gaps. Boldly put: “if teachers and firefighters can’t live in the region, then you’re not offering a very attractive region to the engineers who are thinking of moving here”. The SJ Mercury News has an article on it: Bay Area brain drain, lack of affordable housing, education gaps, stunting economic grows.

World's Most Photographed Cities

Based on Flickr’s All time most popular tags

• New York
• London
• Paris
• San Francisco
• Chicago
• Seattle
• Tokyo
• Amsterdam
• Barcelona
• Vancouver
• Sydney
• Toronto
• Washington
• Hong Kong

Ich Soy a Transnational

Dans «Moi, Chinois de Boston vivant à Paris», Le Temps mentionne l’apparition d’une nouvelle catégorie de migrants: les transnationaux, qui passent régulièrement d’un horizon à l’autre sans choisir et sans en quitter vraiment aucun . De plus en plus d’hommes et de femmes réalisent des parcours constituant d’allers et retour et de multiples étapes. Portés par la démocratisation du transport aérien et le développement des télécommunications, et de la libre circulation ils passent d’un horizon à un autre sans plus en choisir et sans plus en quitter vraiment aucun.

Les transnationaux sont un signe de l’émmergence de la creative class [fr] (qui par choix ou contraite vivent dans 2 villes bien connectées en même temps (Barcelone-Genève, Zürich-Paris, Genève-Lyon, …).

L'émergence des Créatifs Redessine la Suisse

Dans L’émergence des créatifs redessine la Suisse, Xavier Comtess reprend les idées de Rise of the Creative Class de Richard Florida pour les contextualiser à la Suisse. C’est peut-être un peu trop porter sur la creative economy en laissant un peu de côté les composants non-économomiques de la creative class comme le style de vie et les motivations de cette nouvelle classe. Actuellement la fracture en Suisse qui n’est pas au niveau des langues ou des cultures, mais dans les différences grandissantes du High-Tech Land et du Heidi Land.

Il mentionne les villes européens capables d’attiré les créatifs sans oublier Barcelone:

En devenant des acteurs mondiaux des technologies des télécommunications (Helsinki), de l’innovation (Dublin), de la nanotechnologie (Grenoble), de l’aéronautique (Toulouse), de la culture et des échanges (Barcelone), de la nautique et du tourisme (Valence), ces métropoles ont su attirer la matière la plus rare aujourd’hui: les créatifs.

Telecommuting Era Still Facing Social Barries

“Work is where you hang your coat Sun leads way in telework — working not just from home but anywhere” talks about “telecommuting”, the next generation of “telework” because nowadays we are not not just working from home but working from anywhere. In a few words, the technological barries for telecommuting now in the verge of being broken, telecommuting is still facing social barries. Managers worry that unsupervised employees might goof off. Workers worry that losing face time might hurt their chances for advancement. However, telecommuting cuts the costs for the employer and improves the productivity of some types of employees. “All of us who participated can attest to the fact that you end up working more because of sitting there without day-to-day interruptions”. Telecommuting is still based on very informal rules, as a lot of telecommuting arrangements are initially done under the table and many companies have no program to manage their guerrilla distributed workers.

Barcelona's New Behomians

According to easyJet’s In-Flight, Barcelona is the answer to a new generation of young and creative people and bohemians ex-pats: Barcelona New Bohemians.

Renaissance in Spain

According to Nature Jobs, Spain aims at premier league. After decades of brain drain like in many other european countries, science and research have finally climbed up ithe political agenda the last couple of years. In Renaissance in Spain it is mentioned that the trend is most notable in Catalonia, where a science-friendly regional government wants to turn Barcelona into a Mediterranean science showcase. However with a system still very hard to penetrate the two biggest obstacles in building up its scientific workforce: accommodating scientists from abroad, and offering fellows the hope of future employment. It seems to be very much a latin problem.