So let us begin.

[mangosteen]

Note: I blame Quentin Tarantino for my mild compulsion to do the Michael Madsen Psycho Shuffle(tm) every time I hear the song "Stuck in the Middle With You".

Observation: I was in Miami for a conference last weekend. Miami is a pit. I mean it. Really. It's a place that time forgot, but entropy didn't. With the exception of a few really nice hotels in South Beach, it has the feel of a 1950s beach community that sprawled out of control, and was never maintained. Low-density urban decay everywhere. It was pretty sad, actually. I've been told that it's not as bad as Las Vegas. This irks me.

The reason it irks me is because one of my hobbies is learning about urban planning, and how cities are put together as evolving and growing entities. I have a feeling that this came about due to growing up in very stereotypical suburbs. As in, "would have been a subdivision, but those didn't exist when my parents bought the place." It felt like it was built to the scale of cars, not people. You didn't want to walk around the area because there was nothing to walk to. People resided there, but no one actually lived there. It was like an apartment building, but spread out over several acres. Just Another Housing Pod.

Some book recommendations:
"Home From Nowhere" by John Howard Kuntsler
- A wonderful book about the mathematics of suburban hell.

"How Buildings Learn" by Stewart Brand
- A book about how buildings perform best when they can evolve over time.

"Edge City" by Joel Garreau
- A message from the Loyal Opposition. Pro-subdivision, and an investigation of its ramifications.

(Yes, I thought about doing the amazon.com associate thing. Didn't want to. Too tacky. I reserve the right to change my mind about this.)

So it's President's Day, and theoretically it's a work day, but no one is in. Time to go to the gym, and put in an extended workout. I actually had to put another hole in my belt because it was getting too loose. I guess this means progress. It's a little too soon to be using the worlds "svelte" or "buff", but one can always aspire.

Comments

Edge City

[cos]

I don't think Garreau is pro-anything. His attitude towards urban planning, sprawl, and development, seems a lot like a linguist's attitude towards grammar and the development of language. Garreau thinks the subject is fascinating, and he's come up with a theory about what is going on, so he investigates the places, and talks to the people who are involved and who have points of view, and he tells us all about it, all with a "look what I found out about this, isn't it neat!" kind of attitude. If you really try to pin down where his sympathies lie on the subject, I think he's more on the anti-subdivision side of things, but fundamantelly, he doesn't write as though his ideology matters. He writes to investigate and explain, and the point of view he presents is his view of the reality he observes and his explanation of it, not his view of what he thinks would be good and how to pursue it.

No. Today <i>wasn't</i> a work day

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

It was a holiday. Doofus. :)