notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Two photographs of escalators from the Magnum collection, as posted to Slate as part of their series on walking.

Lineposters, prints of city transit systems around the world, for sale at Etsy.

(Source: lineposters)

slavin:

“If the world’s 6.9 billion people lived in one city, how large would that city be if it were as dense as…”

When I first saw this map, I was slightly peeved that London appeared to have lower density than San Francisco, or Paris. I lived in London for ten years, and have been in SF for a few months. I hope residents of the latter won’t be too offended if I say that, all too often, even relatively central neighbourhoods feel more than a little suburban.

I decided to go and have a deeper look at the figures. Firstly, at the original post, Tim De Chant (who designed the maps), writes that they’re based on

Strictly city limits. So the San Francisco map, for example, only uses density data for the city of San Francisco and does not factor in Oakland, San Jose, etc.

Now, San Francisco is a city of 600 km², with a population of roughly 800,000. It’s embedded in a larger “combined statistical area” - including the aforementioned cities - of nearly 8 million. The densities for the two? 6,688.4/km² and 320/km² respectively. There’s almost a factor of twenty difference there.

By contrast, London’s nearly 8 million fit into an area barely one-fifteenth that of the Bay Area - making the entire city nearly match San Francisco’s density. The central London boroughs - like Islington, where I lived for six years - come top of the list of districts by population density in the UK, with double the population per square kilometre of SF. (I haven’t bothered to calculate the density of the old LCC boroughs, but my bet would be they handily outrank SF, although I doubt they approach NYC.)

Similarly, the incredible showing by Paris is helped by the fact that the city is still defined by its medieval extent, excluding a large chunk of its metropolitan area: to paraphrase Wikipedia, the city has a population of two million, but the metropolitan area has a population of nearly twelve. The density of the latter is roughly one seventh that of the former - and lower than that of London of SF.

This is, perhaps, too much effort to put into a single graphic, especially one that does such a good job of showing how sprawling a car-centric US city can become (hello, Houston). However, it’s an interesting exercise in noting that defining a city is harder than it may appear.

Paris metro interactive map by Nicholas Nova. “The inner mechanism is [similar] to “Operation” with lights. Very low-bandwidth and based on electricity.” An interesting historical artefact.

Doors of Perception: Dreaming of a Paris as a sponge

Further to last week’s post on Richard Rogers and Greater Paris, here’s John Thackara on the other architects proposals for the city, including extending it right out to the coast and “hard nosed number crunching”:

I can’t help thinking that the Dutch team’s visual metaphor of a massive mainframe computer landing on Paris is unlikley to win them the popular vote.

After the Pompidou, can Rogers transform the secret, shabby, divided side of Paris?

An article in the Guardian about Greater Paris.

the Greater Paris project to reunite Paris’s centre with its neglected outskirts is steeped in controversy as local and national politicians fight over its boundaries, budget, population and new identity before the architectural debate has begun.

Funnily enough, I’m reading The Future Of London, a 1960 Pelican covering the progress (and failure) of the three great post World War II plans for the London area, and it’s had to spend a chapter or three defining what London even is.

It turns out that the current Greater London is a compromise between sticking with the pre-1960s London County Council (which seems absurdly small to the sensibilities of someone who’s always known a city that, basically, fills the M25) and expanding it further, to take in the parts of the south-east of England that London dominates culturally and economically, which expands for a good 60 miles or more from the city centre (and takes in towns such as Haverhill, which took “London overspill” in the 1960s).

That final compromise now seems natural, but I’m sure it didn’t seem that way in the 1960s (just as it’s evident that drawing the lines for Paris is proving difficult, especially given how long-standing the boundaries of the current city are).

In an exclusive preview of their strategy, Richard Rogers’s group told the Guardian yesterday that the biggest challenge was Paris’s “enormous disparity” and the “staggering psychological barrier” between the core of the city and the world beyond the ring-road.