Density and Compacity
Politics and Plans
Density and compacity are terms useful for places like the New York Metropolitan Area. Several technical measures produce components by volume and within these volumes, fine granular distinctions of enormous importance.
Volumes are also the subject of power in politics and plans. They distinguish one leader’s area from another, they reveal distinct responsibilities for services such as police, fire, and sanitation or how water, gas, electricity, and bytes serve your community.
- ODBC
- Good Doomed or Bad Doomed?
- Place Design
- Rocky Mountain Institute
- Mandatory Inclusion
- The White Chair
- Favela Policy
- No Limits Preservation
- Every Problem is a Housing Problem
- Housing Economics
- The Climate Requirement (II)
- Housing Map
- The Climate Requirement I
- Fire
- Extinction
- Megawatts for Megabytes
- The Vehicular Pedestrian
- Climate Central
- Index Density
- Density Favorites
- Road Density
- Black Rock
- Diversity/Density
- Van der Ryn and Cowan
- News Source
- Book Act
- The Point of Data
- Tale of Two CTs
- 100 Change Agents
- Placeless Participation
- The Citizens United Thing
- Liz Cheney
- Methods
- Unspecified to Self, Unexplored by Others
- Concrete Thinking
- Planning Together: Part IX
- Creating a Living Place
- Si se puede
- Federal Agents
- Brooklyn is Charitable
- Elizabeth Warren
- George Monbiot
- Becky Bond and Zack Exley
- Whitney M. Young
- Planning Index
- Planning Together: Part VIII
- Number Truth
- Castling
- Planning Together: Part VII
- Planning Together – Part VI
- Planning Together: Part V
- Planning Together: Part IV
- Planning Together: Part III
- Planning Together – Part II
- Planning Together: Part I
- Critical Politics
- The Fairness Doctrine
- Storm Politics
- Planners Network
- Vote Splitting
Energy and Synergy
The lines are multi-linear. They can define you by a zip code, or the train or road used to a set of career routes to and from places that shape human life. People know exactly where they are in the NYMA and when not. Boundary lines separate one thing from another, and the stuff that makes the NYMA separate from everything else is tied to the density of things per unit of land or water. At some point, the area is not dense enough to be called metropolitan. Although these many densities combine to form measures of compacity, of everything we know, and to the detriment of humanity, it remains a vague notion.
The premise of combining stories and writing about the densities and compacity of urban life and the many opportunities it offers includes elements of personal political leadership essential to educate and inspire the will to create change on a scale so massive it appears impossible. It is not.
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