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Modeling Urban Panic
Paul Torrens is someone after our hearts, for he has developed a realistic computer 3D model that can predict crowd behavior in various spatial configurations.
It can simulate, for instance, how people navigate through busy city streets, shoppers through urban shopping centers, and tourists through unfamiliar landscapes.
For the greenish, this has obvious practical applications. According to a press release from Arizona State University, “the project will develop simulations to explore avenues of sustainability in downtown settings, such as how cities can promote walking as an alternative to driving, and how pedestrian flow can be better integrated with transit-oriented development.”
Of course, you can also use the 3D model to simulate far less quotidian, obscenely more interesting scenarios.
“The goal of this project is to develop a reusable and behaviorally founded computer model of pedestrian movement and crowd behavior amid dense urban environments, to serve as a test-bed for experimentation,” says Torrens. “The idea is to use the model to test hypotheses, real-world plans and strategies that are not very easy, or are impossible to test in practice.”
Such as the following: 1) simulate how a crowd flees from a burning car toward a single evacuation point; 2) test out how a pathogen might be transmitted through a mobile pedestrian over a short period of time; 3) see how the existing urban grid facilitate or does not facilitate mass evacuation prior to a hurricane landfall or in the event of dirty bomb detonation; 4) design a mall which can compel customers to shop to the point of bankruptcy, to walk obliviously for miles and miles and miles, endlessly to the point of physical exhaustion and even death; 5) identify, if possible, the tell-tale signs of a peaceful crowd about to metamorphosize into a hellish mob; 6) determine how various urban typologies, such as plazas, parks, major arterial streets and banlieues, can be reconfigured in situ into a neutralizing force when crowds do become riotous; and 7) conversely, figure out how one could, through spatial manipulation, inflame a crowd, even a very small one, to set in motion a series of events that culminates into a full scale Revolution or just your average everyday Southeast Asian coup d'état — regime change through landscape architecture.
Or you quadruple the population of Chicago. How about 200 million? And into its historic Emerald Necklace system of parks, you drop an al-Qaeda sleeper cell, a pedophile, an Ebola patient, a migrant worker, a swarm of zombies, and Paris Hilton. Then grab a cold one, sit back and watch the landscape descend into chaos. It'll be better than any megablockbuster movie you'll see this summer.
Equally plausible, Chicago does not suffer total critical system failure. In fact, the built environment is surprisingly malleable, so very accommodating to a wide range of extreme radical transformations, that the city actually thrives during this catastrophe and in the end successfully expels the intruders. Far from being a vector of apocalypses, cities will save the world.
In any case, the resulting video from the simulation will be entered into a film festival near you.
The Kumbh Mela Array
Reconfiguring the Jamarat Bridge
The vortex
Advertisement: Crowd Dynamics Ltd.
The Parkless Park Resurfaces
The Parkless Park
Counting Crowds
Subtopia: Urbanization of Panic
City of Sound: Robert Krulwich
Paul Torrens is someone after our hearts, for he has developed a realistic computer 3D model that can predict crowd behavior in various spatial configurations.
It can simulate, for instance, how people navigate through busy city streets, shoppers through urban shopping centers, and tourists through unfamiliar landscapes.
For the greenish, this has obvious practical applications. According to a press release from Arizona State University, “the project will develop simulations to explore avenues of sustainability in downtown settings, such as how cities can promote walking as an alternative to driving, and how pedestrian flow can be better integrated with transit-oriented development.”
Of course, you can also use the 3D model to simulate far less quotidian, obscenely more interesting scenarios.
“The goal of this project is to develop a reusable and behaviorally founded computer model of pedestrian movement and crowd behavior amid dense urban environments, to serve as a test-bed for experimentation,” says Torrens. “The idea is to use the model to test hypotheses, real-world plans and strategies that are not very easy, or are impossible to test in practice.”
Such as the following: 1) simulate how a crowd flees from a burning car toward a single evacuation point; 2) test out how a pathogen might be transmitted through a mobile pedestrian over a short period of time; 3) see how the existing urban grid facilitate or does not facilitate mass evacuation prior to a hurricane landfall or in the event of dirty bomb detonation; 4) design a mall which can compel customers to shop to the point of bankruptcy, to walk obliviously for miles and miles and miles, endlessly to the point of physical exhaustion and even death; 5) identify, if possible, the tell-tale signs of a peaceful crowd about to metamorphosize into a hellish mob; 6) determine how various urban typologies, such as plazas, parks, major arterial streets and banlieues, can be reconfigured in situ into a neutralizing force when crowds do become riotous; and 7) conversely, figure out how one could, through spatial manipulation, inflame a crowd, even a very small one, to set in motion a series of events that culminates into a full scale Revolution or just your average everyday Southeast Asian coup d'état — regime change through landscape architecture.
Or you quadruple the population of Chicago. How about 200 million? And into its historic Emerald Necklace system of parks, you drop an al-Qaeda sleeper cell, a pedophile, an Ebola patient, a migrant worker, a swarm of zombies, and Paris Hilton. Then grab a cold one, sit back and watch the landscape descend into chaos. It'll be better than any megablockbuster movie you'll see this summer.
Equally plausible, Chicago does not suffer total critical system failure. In fact, the built environment is surprisingly malleable, so very accommodating to a wide range of extreme radical transformations, that the city actually thrives during this catastrophe and in the end successfully expels the intruders. Far from being a vector of apocalypses, cities will save the world.
In any case, the resulting video from the simulation will be entered into a film festival near you.
The Kumbh Mela Array
Reconfiguring the Jamarat Bridge
The vortex
Advertisement: Crowd Dynamics Ltd.
The Parkless Park Resurfaces
The Parkless Park
Counting Crowds
Subtopia: Urbanization of Panic
City of Sound: Robert Krulwich
Warped Space
Simply because we cannot get enough of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, here's another photo of ATLAS, one of the five particle detectors and the future birth chamber of microscopic black holes and primordial particles not seen since Creation.
For the curious, the subterranean nave housing the detector actually looks like this to an observer, since its monstrous toroidal magnets have warped the fabric of space and time. There is no fancy Photoshop trickery at work here.
And here's another photo, looking down towards ATLAS.
Perhaps we're looking up? From 10 seconds back in time? Forward in time? From an angled view?
The Descent
The Machine
For the curious, the subterranean nave housing the detector actually looks like this to an observer, since its monstrous toroidal magnets have warped the fabric of space and time. There is no fancy Photoshop trickery at work here.
And here's another photo, looking down towards ATLAS.
Perhaps we're looking up? From 10 seconds back in time? Forward in time? From an angled view?
The Descent
The Machine
The Alzheimer House
“Tiny motion sensors are attached to the walls, doorways and even the refrigerator of Elaine Bloomquist's home,” writes the Associated Press. They were installed there to track any deviations in “the seemingly healthy 86-year-old's daily activity,” any small changes in her routine which could be attributed to the onset of Alzheimer's. “It's like spying in the name of science - with her permission,” we read.
And if the sensors detect any wayward behavior, Elaine Bloomquist gets zapped.
Which, of course, isn't exactly true.
This sensor network is a sort of early detection system for the disease. “The theory is that as Alzheimer's begins destroying brain cells, signals to nerves may become inconsistent - like static on a radio - well before memories become irretrievable. One day, signals to walk fire fine. The next, those signals are fuzzy and people hesitate, creating wildly varying activity patterns.”
Currently 112 homes in the Portland, Oregon area have been retrofitted with the devices. A $7 million grant from the National Institute of Health will expand the project to 300.
Firstly, if the experiment proves successful, should we expect to hear about similar tele-monitoring networks operated at the urban scale? CCTV-Alzheimer's®. An entire retirement community comes under the constant, penetrating gaze of their hometown doctors and medical technicians thousands of miles away, diagnosing every move our grandmothers make or incorrectly make, and administering behavior modification electroshock treatment when so diagnosed.
Secondly, might we also expect to hear of a house or a town patterned after the erratic movements of Alzheimer's patients? Rooms, hallways, corners, ceilings, streets, gardens, parks arranged according to fuzzy and hesitating markings of dementia? What would these spaces look like? Perhaps we've heard about this already?
And thirdly, how about houses for, say, the most obsessive of obsessive compulsives, hacked not to monitor their disorder but rather to cure them? Wherein the faucets, for instance, run skin-peeling, scalding water whenever they sense three or more consecutive washes in the span of 15 minutes, wherein the furniture unaligns itself at arbitrary times of the day, and wherein light switches and door knobs and that tempting patch on the wall electroconduct when they come into contact repeatedly with human skin.
“Tiny motion sensors are attached to the walls, doorways and even the refrigerator of Elaine Bloomquist's home,” writes the Associated Press. They were installed there to track any deviations in “the seemingly healthy 86-year-old's daily activity,” any small changes in her routine which could be attributed to the onset of Alzheimer's. “It's like spying in the name of science - with her permission,” we read.
And if the sensors detect any wayward behavior, Elaine Bloomquist gets zapped.
Which, of course, isn't exactly true.
This sensor network is a sort of early detection system for the disease. “The theory is that as Alzheimer's begins destroying brain cells, signals to nerves may become inconsistent - like static on a radio - well before memories become irretrievable. One day, signals to walk fire fine. The next, those signals are fuzzy and people hesitate, creating wildly varying activity patterns.”
Currently 112 homes in the Portland, Oregon area have been retrofitted with the devices. A $7 million grant from the National Institute of Health will expand the project to 300.
Firstly, if the experiment proves successful, should we expect to hear about similar tele-monitoring networks operated at the urban scale? CCTV-Alzheimer's®. An entire retirement community comes under the constant, penetrating gaze of their hometown doctors and medical technicians thousands of miles away, diagnosing every move our grandmothers make or incorrectly make, and administering behavior modification electroshock treatment when so diagnosed.
Secondly, might we also expect to hear of a house or a town patterned after the erratic movements of Alzheimer's patients? Rooms, hallways, corners, ceilings, streets, gardens, parks arranged according to fuzzy and hesitating markings of dementia? What would these spaces look like? Perhaps we've heard about this already?
And thirdly, how about houses for, say, the most obsessive of obsessive compulsives, hacked not to monitor their disorder but rather to cure them? Wherein the faucets, for instance, run skin-peeling, scalding water whenever they sense three or more consecutive washes in the span of 15 minutes, wherein the furniture unaligns itself at arbitrary times of the day, and wherein light switches and door knobs and that tempting patch on the wall electroconduct when they come into contact repeatedly with human skin.
Un-vanishing a lake
From January 10, 2005 to October 22, 2006, or thereabouts, Ledia Carroll retraced the ghostly outline of a vanished freshwater lake in San Francisco as part of her Mission Lake Project.
From a press release, to be read in the past tense, unfortunately: “On October 22, 2006, Ledia Carroll will use a field line chalker to recreate the full perimeter of Lago Dolores, a former freshwater lake that stretched from what is now South Van Ness to Guerrero and 15th to 20th Streets. Drawing the line in reference to maps from the 1800s, Carroll’s chalkline allows the still visible ancient depression of the lake to become apparent to the eye. In conjunction with the re-created lake shoreline, Ledia Carroll presents a 'lakeside' barbeque and perimeter 'alleycat' bike race.”
There were also guided tours later in the year to some of San Francisco’s hidden underground waterways. And if someone could let us know where we might find more info on these hidden waterways online, that'd be fantastic.
Prunings XXXI.1
Call 811
From January 10, 2005 to October 22, 2006, or thereabouts, Ledia Carroll retraced the ghostly outline of a vanished freshwater lake in San Francisco as part of her Mission Lake Project.
From a press release, to be read in the past tense, unfortunately: “On October 22, 2006, Ledia Carroll will use a field line chalker to recreate the full perimeter of Lago Dolores, a former freshwater lake that stretched from what is now South Van Ness to Guerrero and 15th to 20th Streets. Drawing the line in reference to maps from the 1800s, Carroll’s chalkline allows the still visible ancient depression of the lake to become apparent to the eye. In conjunction with the re-created lake shoreline, Ledia Carroll presents a 'lakeside' barbeque and perimeter 'alleycat' bike race.”
There were also guided tours later in the year to some of San Francisco’s hidden underground waterways. And if someone could let us know where we might find more info on these hidden waterways online, that'd be fantastic.
Prunings XXXI.1
Call 811