This article on the recent Suburbia exhibition at the London Transport Museum takes a brief look at the history of suburbia:

Rather than some authentic, uncomplicated, unplanned response to ordinary people’s desires, London’s suburbia was the product of both planning and speculation, heavily mediated, and marketed using an impressive degree of subterfuge. The garden suburb was the official face of suburbia. Developed in 1907 by Toynbee Hall’s chair, Henrietta Barnett, and carefully planned by the socialist and architectural traditionalist Raymond Unwin, it attempted to build William Morris’s socialist “nowhere” in a capitalist context. Unwin and his partner Barry Parker developed a style based on whitewash, pitched roofs and large gardens. This became the basis for its many successors. Yet it was also tightly planned and full of public spaces to encourage social interaction. In the same year, the London Underground opened Golders Green station, and promoted its rural joys in an advertisement campaign, as a means of selling season tickets. Golders Green was enveloped by new, unplanned housing, although the Underground’s posters invariably depicted Hampstead Garden Suburb.

The exhibition alludes to the fact that London’s private transport companies were the sponsors and often the creators of suburbia, extending their lines into open country, promoting the glories of the countryside, and then developing it out of existence.

Guardian: Suburbia explored

(via Tomorrow Museum)

The Surface Transportation Authorization Act, draws both fanfare and trepidation and is widely considered a turning point in American transportation.

The bulk of the bill is dedicated to maintenance rather than highway expansion and construction. Fully $100 billion was set aside for building and expanding mass transit. Another $50 billion is allocated for high-speed rail, dwarfing the $8 billion included in the stimulus package. The bill gives local authorities greater say in how their federal transportation dollars are spent. And our transportation policy would be legally tied to climate protection. The total tab comes to at least $450 billion, twice that of Safetea.

Unfortunately, nobody has quite figured where that money will come from.

Wired: Washington Fiddles as Infrastructure Crumbles

A key road into a squatter settlement in Suva in Fiji has just been paid for and fixed entirely by the people living along it.

Patterson Drive, an old disused roadway, has just been re-opened, with certification from Fiji’s Ministry of Works, Transport and Public Utilities.

Radio New Zealand: Fiji squatters repair their own road after damage made it unpassable

(via Squattercity)

Applies equally well to Portland:

It’s not difficult to infer that this all happened when it did, where it did, because of the post-dotcom-crash emergence of a healthy cohort of talented (and relatively well-capitalized) folks hungry to make something with their lives just a little more tangible than some evanescent Web portal. I’m also willing to bet that the relatively low barriers to entry involved in successful push-button publishing of the early blog era convinced a whole lot of people in the Bay Area that it was safe to try their hand at other, more ambitious endeavors – that is, that blogging constituted a kind of gateway drug.

And yeah, sure, this can occasionally be a little insular and precious, a little twee: the kind of hipster-doofus affectation that makes a nice fat target for equally nitwit parody. But it’s also, hopefully, something that speaks to Russell’s more general point, and is therefore replicable elsewhere, in whatever ways are most true to those places and desires. The San Francisco resurgence would not – could not – have happened if there were not at this point literally several hundred years of insight into craft technique just lying on the ground, for just about any domain of productive activity you can imagine.

Speedbird: Installed infrastructure, latent knowledge and the small-batch aesthetic

Last week, a Siberian hydroelectric dam failed when an explosion rocked the site’s turbine room, killing dozens and taking 6,000 megawatts of electricity offline.

While the tragedy’s ultimate causes are unclear, Russian media has been questioning the state of the aging Soviet-made infrastructure. Dams are getting older in the United States, too. The average age of America’s 80,000 dams is 51 years. More than 2,000 dams near population centers are in need of repair, according to statistics released this month by the Association of State Dam Safety Officials.

Last year, 140 dams were fixed, but inspectors discovered 368 more that need help. That’s why the American Society of Civil Engineers gave our dams a grade of “D” in its 2009 report on the nation’s infrastructure. There are just too many aging dams and too few safety inspectors.

Wired: Old American Dams Quietly Become a Multibillion-Dollar Threat

Police are investigating whether sabotage to an underground fiber optic cable in south San Jose caused a widespread phone service outage in southern Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties this morning that included disruption to 911 emergency phone service, according to law enforcement officials.

John Britton, a spokesman for AT&T, said it appears somebody opened a manhole in South San Jose, climbed down 8 to 10 feet and cut four or five fiber-optic cables.

Britton also said there was a report of underground cables being cut in San Carlos.

The outage is affecting cell phones, land lines and Internet access for Verizon customers in Morgan Hill, Gilroy, San Martin and Santa Cruz County, according to Zachary DeVine, a Santa Clara County spokesman. A county fire dispatcher reported areas of San Benito may also be affected but DeVine had not confirmed that report.

ATM machines may also be affected.

“It’s kind of like an earthquake” said Jack Ahlin, a driver with T. Marx Towing who was standing outside the Gilroy police department.

Service is also affected in South San Jose around Monterey Road and Bailey Avenue.

Santa Cruz Sentinal: Sabotage suspected in widespread phone outage in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties

(via Chris Arkenberg)

Spies from other countries have hacked into the United State’s electricity grid, leaving traces of their activity and raising concerns over the security of the U.S. energy infrastructure to cyberattacks.

The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday published a report saying that spies sought ways to navigate and control the power grid as well the water and sewage infrastructure. It’s part of a rising number of intrusions, the article said, quoting former and current national security officials.

The intruders don’t appear to have done any damage to date but did leave behind software that could disrupt the system.

“The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid,” a senior intelligence official told the Journal. “So have the Russians.”

There have long been concerns over securing the power grid and other infrastructure. Those security issues are mounting as utilities use more Internet-based communications and software to control the grid through smart-grid technology.

CNET: Report: Spies hacked into U.S. electricity grid

This project explores the idea of using creative infrastructure projects to “route around” geopolitical agreements in Israel/Palestine.

More Images: BLDBLG

Full transcript of Dmitry Orlov’s talk (part of Long Now’s longer term thinking seminar series). This is much better than the Thriving in the Age of Collapse and Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century papers I’d read before.

Moving on to shelter. Again, let’s look at how the Russians managed to muddle through. In the Soviet Union, people did not own their place of residence. Everyone was assigned a place to live, which was recorded in a person’s internal passport. People could not be dislodged from their place of residence for as long as they drew oxygen. Since most people in Russia live in cities, the place of residence was usually an apartment, or a room in a communal apartment, with shared bathroom and kitchen. There was a permanent housing shortage, and so people often doubled up, with three generations living together. The apartments were often crowded, sometimes bordering on squalid. If people wanted to move, they had to find somebody else who wanted to move, who would want to exchange rooms or apartments with them. There were always long waiting lists for apartments, and children often grew up, got married, and had children before receiving a place of their own.

These all seem like negatives, but consider the flip side of all this: the high population density made this living arrangement quite affordable. With several generations living together, families were on hand to help each other. Grandparents provided day care, freeing up their children’s time to do other things. The apartment buildings were always built near public transportation, so they did not have to rely on private cars to get around. Apartment buildings are relatively cheap to heat, and municipal services easy to provide and maintain because of the short runs of pipe and cable. Perhaps most importantly, after the economy collapsed, people lost their savings, many people lost their jobs, even those that still had jobs often did not get paid for months, and when they were the value of their wages was destroyed by hyperinflation, but there were no foreclosures, no evictions, municipal services such as heat, water, and sometimes even hot water continued to be provided, and everyone had their families close by. Also, because it was so difficult to relocate, people generally stayed in one place for generations, and so they tended to know all the people around them. After the economic collapse, there was a large spike in the crime rate, which made it very helpful to be surrounded by people who weren’t strangers, and who could keep an eye on things. Lastly, in an interesting twist, the Soviet housing arrangement delivered an amazing final windfall: in the 1990s all of these apartments were privatized, and the people who lived in them suddenly became owners of some very valuable real estate, free and clear.

Full Story: Club Orlov

Or read Stewart Brand’s summary reprinted at Grinding.

Somewhat related: My round-up of commentary on Obama’s stimulus bill.

Outline for Vinay Gupta’s talk The Temporary School of Thought.

Full Story: How to Live Wiki

This has been on my mind a lot lately since the gas heater in my apartment went out, and the gas company didn’t come look at it for a week. Turns out my building’s manager’s heat went out earlier in the winter and it took a month to fix. My partner and I were blowing fuses nearly daily because of the electric heater we were using.

“It will be the policy of my administration to reverse our dependence on foreign oil while building a new energy economy that will create millions of jobs”

–Barack Obama

“To keep our economy growing, we also need reliable supplies of affordable, environmentally responsible energy. Nearly four years ago, I submitted a comprehensive energy strategy that encourages conservation, alternative sources, a modernized electricity grid, and more production here at home, including safe, clean nuclear energy. My Clear Skies legislation will cut power plant pollution and improve the health of our citizens. And my budget provides strong funding for leading-edge technology — from hydrogen-fueled cars, to clean coal, to renewable sources such as ethanol. Four years of debate is enough — I urge Congress to pass legislation that makes America more secure and less dependent on foreign energy.”

–George W. Bush

“Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977, never.”

–Jimmy Carter

“We will never again permit any foreign nation to have Uncle Sam over a barrel of oil.”

–Gerald Ford.

“Let this be our national goal: At the end of this decade, in the year 1980, the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the energy we need to provide our jobs, to heat our homes, and to keep our transportation moving.”

–Richard Nixon

Full Story: Pizza SEO

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Nearly 60 percent of the air traffic control towers and other key aviation facilities run by the Federal Aviation Administration are more than 30 years old and plagued by leaks, mold and foggy windows that can make it difficult to see the aircraft, an audit has found.

The audit of 16 FAA facilities selected at random by the Department of Transportation’s Office of the Inspector General found “obvious structural deficiencies and maintenance-related issues” that would keep the guys from This Old House busy for years. Beyond leaky ceilings and faulty climate-control systems, the most severe problem was condensation-clouded windows that made it difficult to see the airfield. The air traffic control tower at Edwards Andrews Air Force Base — the airport used by the president — was among those with foggy windows.

“It is important to note that the maintenance issues we observed did not impact the safe operations at the facilities we visited,” the report said. Still, some control towers were too short because the airports they serve have expanded since the towers were built.

Age is to blame for most of the problems, the audit states. The FAA has 420 staffed air traffic control centers, each with a useful life of 25 to 30 years. But 59 percent of the buildings are more than 30 years old, and the average age of the system’s control towers is 29.

Full Story: Autopia

Copper thieves, sometimes acting as “organized groups,” are threatening what the FBI said is “critical” U.S. infrastructure, from electrical sub-stations, cellular towers, telephone land lines to railroads and crops, the agency said in an unclassified report unveiled Wednesday.

The report, Copper Thefts Threaten US Critical Infrastructure, said bandits are taking advantage of unprecedented high prices for copper, an almost 500 percent increase since 2001 as measured earlier this year.

Copper Thieves Threaten U.S. Infrastructure, FBI says | Threat Level from Wired.com.