New book and book series "Cities and Nature"

Well, it has been a long time since I added to this blog.

Here is my belated, and now public, resolution for the New Year... since I signed to write a book and to edit a new book series with Springer, both entitled "Cities and Nature", I and my two co-authors [I. Benenson and D. Malkinson] will write our thoughts at least weekly. I hope that we will be able to do it over the weekends.

We will look forward to creative criticisms and to other reactions. We will start soon.

urban and peri-urban sustainability policies

I find Kevin Kelly's writing a pleasure to read. Contrary to many who popularize science he has a deep understanding of current science thinking and an uncanny ability to extrapolate it and indentify questions that are yet to be addressed.

Recently, Andreas Lloyd has "remixed" Kelly's 1994 book entitled Learning from self-organizing systems in nature and technology. Lloyd has made Kelly's book much more accessible by removing, moving and editing the original. This has become a popular method in music. See for example my son's mixes on http://www.jujujordash.com/ . [My son is Jordash]. Lloyd has adopted the method to writing.

In the final chapter Kelly raises and answers a question that sums up much of current deep science thinking.

"So how do you make something from nothing? From the frontiers of computer science, and the edges of biological research, and the odd corners of interdisciplinary experimentation, I have compiled Nine Laws of God governing the incubation of something from nothing. These nine laws are the organizing principles that can be found operating in systems as diverse as biological evolution and SimCity. Of course I am not suggesting that they are the only laws needed to make something from nothing; but out of the many observations accumulating in the science of complexity, these principles are the broadest, crispest, and most representative generalities. I believe that one can go pretty far as a god while sticking to these nine rules:

§ Distribute being

§ Control from the bottom up

§ Cultivate increasing returns

§ Grow by chunking

§ Maximize the fringes

§ Honor your errors

§ Pursue no optima; have multiple goals

§ Seek persistent disequilibrium

§ Change changes itself.

You can download and read the entire book for free at http://eskar.dk/andreas/outofcontrol/. Once you read the book, ask yourself what policy and planning measures should be promoted to advance urban and peri-urban sustainability.

The Stan Czamanski prize for best paper by a young regional scientist

I have been around Regional Science since my early high-school days in Philadelphia. Some kids of the Philadephia I-O table research team were employed during the summer vacation as "research assistants". We wore NASA name tags and felt proud that our salary was paid by NASA.

Many of the small group of people who called themselves regional scientists at the time are no longer with us. I find it rather sad. Walter Isard, the father of the field and Stan Czamanski are still around. Walter is a few month younger than Stan.

I was very sorry to hear that Walter did not attend the November meeting of the RSA. It was a first. The founding generation is no longer present at the conferences and soon their impact on the organization will be forgotten.

Stan just turned 91. I decided to mark the occasion by organizing a young scholar prize in honor of my father. The prize will be awarded during the annual meeting of the Israel RSA organization in January. So, if you are presenting a paper at that meeting and you are a young scholar who recently completed her PhD, please submit you paper for consideration to the organizing committee.

Entrepreneurship, innovation and more

I just came across the following short video clip about the resilience and dynamism of the Israeli economy and the societal driving forces behind it:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1311023934&play=1. The video is a promo for a book entitled Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle.

It raises a vast number of hypotheses concerning entrepreneurship and innovation in Israel. While some of the assertions explaining the record breaking performance of Israel's economy seem correct, there is a need to perform an empirical analysis. In particular, cross-sectional data within Israel could provide counter-intuitive evidence.

I recommend the book.

Sprawl should be studied at various spatial resolutions

Yesterday was the first meeting of our workshop on peri-urban dynamics at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. It was intellectually stimulating to spend several hours with colleagues from Haifa, Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion universities and our past and present grad students. There were geographers, experts in geo-spatial modeling, ecologists, urban planners and of course an urban economist.

We discussed the edge dynamics of cities and considered what is known about sprawl. The consensus around the room was that most of the literature relied on low resolution spatial data to identify and characterize sprawl. At best, the results are uninformative. The required characterization of sprawl should be in terms of the dynamics of natural systems within and at the edge of cities. In other words, when we think of sprawl we should model the urban system from the perspective of the dynamics of natural systems. Various resolutions should be considered. For avian population dynamics 3D porosity of cities is of interest.

At the workshop I presented some of our recent survey: Czamanski, D., Benenson, I., Malkinson, d., Marinov, M., Roth, R., Wittenberg, L., "Urban Dynamics and Ecosystems" in International Review of Environmental and Resource Economics, 2, 2008, pp. 1-45.

I cannot wait unitl our next meeting in Tel Aviv in two weeks.

The Great Cities in History

The Wall Street Journal published a brief review of John Julius Norwich's edited book that tries to identify cities that " played illustrious roles in the world's story". The title of the book is The Great Cities in History.

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704500604574483701746375742.html].

"There are 68 cities here included (if we count ancient Constantinople and modern Istanbul as separate cities). Each is accorded a short chapter, written by contributors whose number includes Simon Schama (on Amsterdam and Washington), A.N. Wilson (on London) and Jan Morris (on New York). The cities under discussion range from the primordial Uruk to modern monsters like Sao Paulo, taking in, along the way, a host of conurbations from the ancient, the medieval and the early modern periods".

I always wondered what makes a city great. I will look forward to reading this book on my next trip.

urban porosity

Urban sprawl has been around for ever. Reading recent contributions on measuring this phenomenon [e.g. Elena G. Irwin, Nancy E. Bockstael and Hyun Jin Cho, "Measuring and modeling urban sprawl: Data, scale and spatial dependencies" or Charles Jaret, Ravi Ghadge, Lesley Williams Reid and Robert M. Adelman, "The Measurement of Suburban Sprawl: An Evaluation".] I became interested in urban porosity. While sprawl is primarily a phenomenon of the urban edge, to describe it and to explain it, there is a need to understand the dynamics of cities as 3D physical objects.

As a preliminary step, there is a need for rules that will enable us to observe cities and to describe the extent and nature of porosity. I have been reading S.T. Hyde, S. Andersson, K. Larsson, Z. Blum, T. Landh, S. Lidin and B.W. Ninham, The Language of Shape, Elsevier, (1997) and Michael Burt's PERIODIC SPONGE SURFACES AND UNIFORM SPONGE POLYHEDRA IN NATURE AND IN THE REALM OF THE THEORETICALLY IMAGINABLE. I must admit that it is unclear to me where to go next. Any ideas?

At the same time, we are making a bit of progress in formulating the structural relationships that should be at the heart of the relevant modeling effort. See Czamanski, D., Roth, R., “Characteristic time, developers’ behavior and leapfrogging dynamics of high-rise buildings" forthcoming in Annals of Regional Science, 2009.