Category Archives: Systems

We Need Woody To Remind Us How To Share

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I was at a block party on Saturday, which, being in Brooklyn, had a band playing on a stoop that were pretty damn good. One of the band members, before playing Woodie Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” introduced the famous song by telling a story about Guthrie, who was the folk singer from the 1930s onward that inspired Bob Dylan and hundreds of other folkies. Anyway, the band member said that Guthrie had a sign posted when he played, or outside his door, that said something like, Anyone Who Reproduces In Of These Songs In Full Or On Part Is A Mighty Good Friend Of Mine! Boy, that attitude is in short supply. It’s clear that the copyright, patent and trademark systems of intellectual property have become perverse distortions of their original intent. Rather than inspire and reward innovation and creativity, these systems now almost certainly impede innovation and creativity. This is because the courts with some help from Congress have defined intellectual property so rigidly and expansively, that the typical process of creativity is short changed. One can’t invent a new song, a new device or a new piece of writing because every where one turns you are stepping on someone’s legally defined property rights. What’s helpful to learn is that this is not an entirely new situation. With patents, I was just reading in Richard White’s great new book, Railroaded, 19th century railroads benefited for the first few decades of a culture and practice of open sharing. Engineers and firemen would modify engines and fireboxes on the spot, and these inventions were swapped around and evolved. White compared it to the open source system among software developers now. Later though, this practiced faded out as companies began to patent their inventions more systematically, and this impeded progress in railroad development. Something similar, although in reverse order, occurred in the early 20th century when the Wright Brothers and the Glenn Curtiss were both struggling to develop commercially viable aircraft. The Wrights, who had been the first to fly a manned plane, sued Curtiss for patent infringement, and much of the normal process of innovation was stymied. Under the pressure of World War I, the federal government got the Wrights, Curtiss and other airplane manufacturers to form a “patent pool,” so inventions could be freely traded and innovation proceed more quickly. Would such an arrangement happen today. At the moment, despite some bright spots, the environment is way too restrictive. Documentary filmmakers now often edit reality to take out any logos or trademarks on someone’s T-shirt, for fear of being sued for illegal use of intellectual property. Mickey Mouse will be providing royalties to Disney when the last sun burns out, I wager. Much of the tech world competes to patent anything and everything. What we should remember about intellectual property is that it is a social good. It exists only because we as a society say it should. That being the case, we should remember, as a society, to continually ask whether these systems are living up to the reasons for their existence: improving society as a whole.

Conclusion

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Getting There: Building Healthy Cities

[Excerpt From Chapter Nine]

Of all the public decisions that go into place-making, the most important is what type of transportation systems to use. They will determine the character of the city and much of its economy. Do we pave roads or lay down tracks? Do we fund buses or subsidize cars? Do we lay down bike paths or more highway lanes? Do we build airports or high-speed train lines?

What is transportation for? That’s the essential question Lewis Mumford asked forty years ago.

In the first place, it’s for building the economy of a city. A city’s external links to the outside world, its freeways, train lines, airports, ports, and others, will determine the potential of its industry and people. The big links a city has to the outside world determine its economic potential, something most people do not grasp. Thus, people should think hard about, and usually be ready to fund, the new airport, the new train lines, the new port, and even the new Interstate if it actually travels somewhere new, though this is not likely these days.

As these external links are established, attention can be paid to the internal transportation network. We should recognize that the internal transportation serves a different purpose than the external transportation systems of a city. The layout of a region’s internal transportation will determine how people get to work, how they shop, how they recreate, how they live. The standard choice today of lacing a metropolitan area with big freeways for purely internal travel means we will have a sprawling, formless environment. Simply getting rid of the freeways–forget mass transit–would establish a more neighborhood-centered economy and dynamic. But we don’t have to forget mass transit. Laying out train lines, streetcar tracks, bus lanes, bike paths, and sidewalks–and forgoing freeways and big roads–will mean a more place-oriented form of living. Both the drawbacks and the benefits of such a style dwell in its more communal, group-oriented form of living. You will have the option of not using a car. But to get this option, you have to accept that using a car will be more difficult.

Transportation is not the only public decision. Policies on growth and development can help implement a transportation policy. Such policies are far less important than usually thought, however. The major transportation systems dictate the pattern and style of developments. Once those are established, ways will be found over and around zoning and land-use laws to build the type of development that fits with a big highway or train line.

But zoning and other land-use laws can be used to facilitate or support the type of development that goes along with a particular style of transportation. The best way to do this would be to move away from zoning and go back to actually designing cities. Governments would actually lay out street systems on paper, and then private or public developers could build them as needed. This would give a coherent structure to a metropolitan area. It would also mean better coordinating the relationship among states, metropolitan areas, and smaller localities.

Growth control laws and boundaries are a wonderful tool for shaping development. Conceptually they are great because they help the public and the planners focus on where they want growth to occur. But growth boundaries are misleading because they give rise to the perception that without them, houses and shopping centers would magically pop up like mushrooms after a good rain. They would not. In reality, development only occurs after the public has made a decision about where to lay out roads, train lines, sewers, and other public infrastructure. Growth boundaries are as much about inhibiting public development as private. They are lines that tell government, beyond this point, go no farther with your services. A better way to think about growth boundaries is that they are lines that demarcate to what point the public is going to extend its blessings, both in the form of transportation and in things like educating children, police services, and libraries.

But growth boundaries are not possible usually without addressing the tangled political structures of our cities. Which leads us to our third rule of thumb.