Tag Archives: internet

Links: end of the pipe

Time to dump some tabs that I’ve accumulated in the browser over the past few weeks:

You can never go down the drain:

This week’s City Paper cover story is a short piece on DC Water’s Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Facility (arrange your own tour here!).  The accompanying photographs show the infrastructural landscape in all of its glory.

For an incredibly in-depth tour of the facility (without the smell), check out this mammoth post from September, showing the entire process in excruciating detail.  Mammoth notes the fundamental process of cleaning the water mimics the existing natural processes that rivers use, albeit concentrated and accelerated.

The two basic tracks are to separate liquids and solids, while making the liquids more liquid and the solids more solid at each step in the process.  The end result of one process is water back into the Potomac (cleaner than the river it enters); and the other result is ‘concentrated biosolid’, also known as the concentrated crap of Washington, DC.

The biosolid is sold as fertilizer for agricultural applications for non-human consumption. Waste nothing.  For an in-depth tour of how such a facility works, I can’t recommend the mammoth piece enough.

On the water delivery side (as opposed to the sewage disposal side), Atlantic Cities has a piece on why your water bill must go up to help finance the replacement of the infrastructure we’ve taken for granted. Both the delivery and disposal networks are in need of investment.

JD Land has a set of photos from the new Yards Park-Diamond Teague bridge, including one of the historic pump house that sends sewage from the District south to Blue Plains. Another shot shows the bridge’s informational signage from DC Water, documenting the agency’s own long-term control plan for management of DC’s combined sewer system.

It’s all about jobs:

The remarkable takeaway from the Blue Plains phototours is the role of natural processes in the system (minimizing pumping in favor of gravity, for example) to maximize efficiency via infrastructure.  Thus, it was curious to see the Washington Post writing about the expansion data centers in old manufacturing towns to serve as the physical location of cloud computing servers, but noting that such infrastructure doesn’t provide many long term jobs.

Granted, jobs are the narrative of the Great Recession, but using the data center seems like an odd place to focus.  Using a similar infrastructure investment like Blue Plains as an example, a better comparison would be to the economic activity enabled by clean water and sewage disposal – just as the data centers should look at the indirect effects of internet connectivity and activity, not direct employment via the infrastructure that sustains the internet.

Mammoth has a few thoughts on IT infrastructure, aesthetics, and the return of light industry to mixed use urban environments.

Here comes the sun:

Some solar powered notes – the cost of PV cells is coming down.  Some thoughts on the implications for the climate (Joe Romm), for the economy (Paul Krugman) and for DC (Lydia DePillis).

Is transportation too expensive?

David Levinson proffers a few hypotheses as to why transportation investments are so expensive.  Many are interesting, (thin markets and insufficient economies of scale trigger thoughts of rolling stock protectionism; project scoping and organizational structure are similarly compelling) though I’d take issue with a few of them.

One is #5, discussing incorrect scope.  David mentions big buses serving few passengers, but as Jarret Walker notes, the real cost is in operations; the real cost is the driver.

The idea of standards run amok is intriguing, but I think a more relevant point is asking if standards make sense.

Nitpicks aside, the idea is a great one – this is a conversation that needs to happen.

Innovative re-use along the low road

Screencap from Bundled, Buried, and Behind Closed Doors

Assorted (and tangentially related) links:

1. Stephen Smith also digs into Eric Colbert (see my previous post here):

I’m not sure I agree with her parenthetical about DC’s “historic fabric” being “so strong already” – in fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of a newer city on the Northeast Corridor than Washington – but she’s definitely right that that’s what Washingtonians, even the not-so-native ones, think of their city. Of-right development – that is, building within the zoning code in a way that does not trigger a subjective review – is on the wane everywhere in America, but in DC it’s even rarer, and therefore personal relationships like the ones Eric Colbert has (“an ANC 2B commissioner, who had worked with Colbert on previous projects, introduced him with affection”) are even more important than usual when compared to good design.

A few points. A) I’m not sure why Stephen associates the strength of a city’s fabric with age – DC’s fabric has the advantage of being largely intact.  B) Stephen more explicitly states the same thesis – that Colbert’s architecture is ‘boring,’ and boring is, by association, bad design.  I would disagree that fabric is boring – on the contrary, fabric is essential. C) It’s a mistake to conflate the countable and objective measures of development (square footage, height, density, etc) with more subjective measures like ‘good design.’  Stephen conflates two key elements here – development by right, and design by right. The regulatory structures and processes that govern both are quite different.

2. Cities are all about context. Atlantic Cities discusses a review of San Francisco by John King, from iconic buildings to more mundane (boring?) elements of the urban fabric.

3. Mammoth links to another Atlantic piece, discussing “Low Road” buildings and their importance in urban economics, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

The startup lore says that many companies were founded in garages, attics, and warehouses. Once word got around, companies started copying the formula. They stuck stylized cube farms into faux warehouses and figured that would work. The coolness of these operations would help them look cool and retain employees. Keep scaling that idea up and you get Apple’s ultrahip mega headquarters, which is part spaceship and part Apple Store.

But as Stewart Brand argued in his pathbreaking essay, “‘Nobody Cares What You Do in There’: The Low Road,” it’s not hip buildings that foster creativity but crappy ones.

“Low Road buildings are low-visibility, low-rent, no-style, high-turnover,” Brand wrote. “Most of the world’s work is done in Low Road buildings, and even in rich societies the most inventive creativity, especially youthful creativity, will be found in Low Road buildings taking full advantage of the license to try things.”

Being on the low road isn’t exactly the same as being a part of the fabric – the price point and the prominence don’t always correlate – but the concept is somewhat similar.  These spaces are easy to adapt and reuse. Not just easy, but cheap.

4. Where Stewart Brand discusses the space of innovation, Ryan Avent has another (follow-up) piece on the geography of innovation:

I think that the authors have basically gotten the state of innovation right: we are approaching a critical point at which impressive progress in information technology becomes explosive progress. And I think that the authors are right that the extent to which we are able to take advantage of these technological developments will hinge on how successful America’s tinkerers are at experimenting with new business models and turning them into new businesses. But I also think that there is a critical geographic component to that process of experimentation and entrepreneurship and, as I wrote in my book, I think we are systematically constraining the operation of that component.

High housing costs constitute a substantial regulatory tax burden on residence in many high productivity areas. These are the places where the tinkerers are having their ongoing innovative conversation. But if the tinkerers are driven away, the conversation loses depth and breadth, and we lose many of the combinations that might go on to be the next big company — the next big employer. That, to me, is a very worrying idea.

5. When considering both the versatility of space as well as the institutional and infrastructural momentum (as well as touching on the importance of information technology), Mammoth also links to a short documentary of the infrastructure of the internet: Bundled, Buried, and Behind Closed Doors:

 

Ad-hoc internet infrastructures

CC image from sarnil on flickr

CC image from sarnil on flickr

In this week’s City Paper, Lydia DePillis has a story about an ad-hoc wireless broadband internet network that emerged out of community discussions in DC’s Bloomingdale neighborhood.

Finally, the group gave up on city assistance, turning to a local IT company that could get them a commercial broadband subscription. They set up “gateway” routers at Big Bear and in Rustik Tavern and then started knocking on doors to ask whether homeowners wouldn’t mind hosting a free “repeater.” For a few hundred dollars in hardware and about $800 a year for broadband, a six-block long stretch of houses now has WiFi access—for much less than the cost of individually subscribing each area household to Verizon or Comcast.

For Youngblood, wiring the neighborhood is worth it because of what he can then build on top: Through his company, Youngblood Capital Group, he hopes to develop a “smart grid” in the area that could support things like solar energy systems. “You build the network, and then you’ve got this fertile field you can grow everything in,” he says.

The application on a neighborhood basis is interesting.  I can speak to plenty of anecdotal accounts of similar networks on a smaller, apartment building basis where neighbors will chip in for one internet connection and share it via a wireless router – or even less formal ones where dwellers simply ‘steal’ wireless from unencrypted networks within range.

Lydia’s follow-up blog post addresses some of the competitive concerns that the to-the-curb providers might have:

But community wireless projects in America haven’t taken off to the same extent as they have in Europe, in part because of pushback from the big carriers. (Although, as Youngblood pointed out, resistance is sort of silly: Expanding wireless to underserved areas is a good thing for cable companies, since some new users will inevitably want the stronger connection they can only get from “fiber to the curb.” In that way, free or low-cost wireless is like a gateway drug. “We get people addicted,” as he puts it. “If you want the strong stuff, go get it from the man.”)

The decentralization (and democratization) of these kinds of infrastructures is an intriguing prospect.