Problems With Scale | Nov 7th at 3:31pm
For cities to operate well, city functions need to operate at the same scale. Mismatching scales create broad problems for the “system” of a city, and especially for those trying to manage the city form.
James Higgins, a regional manager at the mapping software firm ESRI cites the example of Doha, Qatar. This is a middle-eastern city that is undergoing a huge wave of growth. He showed a picture of downtown Doha, with dozens of high-rises under construction. The problem is that the infrastructure for each of these buildings was constructed at different scales. It all uses the same physical space, but the way it was constructed and the ministries involved in approving it and collecting information about it is disjointed. Without a united way of controlling this data and construction, the city has been left with a jumble of fully constructed infrastructure within its skeleton that can’t interact at a managerial-level.
Uniform scales would clearly play an important role in some of the physical aspects of cities. But how do you get there? That’s a question Richard Saul Wurman hopes to answer. The geographer, author and founder of the TED conference is working on 192021 aimed at creating unified scales to map and record data about cities. None of the major cities of the world records the same data about itself in the same way, making comparisons difficult. This is an especially big problem, considering the common theme running through this conference that the cities of the world have to work with each other to address the urban implications of climate change (and the climate change implications of urban development).
But, as Wurman stresses, the problem of incomparable data is just a symptom of a sickness that is in essence caused by the problem of scale mismatch. These cities aren’t mapped to the same scale. Without this relation, information about cities can’t accurately compare.
Nate Berg is the assistant editor of the urban planning news website Planetizen, where he reports, blogs and podcasts about urban planning issues. The topic areas he's most interested in right now are the environment, public space and event-based urbanism.
