The Urban Environment

Invisible

A combination of 99% Invisible, RN, Economist & CBC podcasts

Talks January 2013

A Roaming Plank of Wood

PodCasts

Radio Story Hour

Favorites

A tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.

99% Invisible

99% Invisible-01- 99% Noise

99% Invisible-02- 99% 180

99% Invisible-03- 99% Reality (only)

99% Invisible-04- 99% Details

99% Invisible-05- 99% Forgotten

When most people think of camouflage they think of blending in with the environment, but camouflage can also take the opposite approach.

It has long been hypothesized that stripes on zebras make it difficult for a predator to distinguish one zebra from another when the zebras are in a large herd. The stripes also might make zebras less attractive to blood sucking horseflies. This is called disruptive camouflage.  

When it comes to humans, the greatest, most jaw-droppingly spectacular application of disruptive camouflage was called Dazzle.

Dazzle painting emerged in the 1910s as design solution to a very dire problem: American and British ships were being sunk left and right by German U-Boats. England needed to import supplies to fight the Central Powers, and these ships were sitting ducks in the Atlantic Ocean.  They needed a way to fend of the torpedoes.  

Conventional high-similarity camouflage just doesn't work in the open sea.  Conditions like the color of the sky, cloud cover, and wave height change all the time, not to mention the fact that there's no way to hid all the smoke left by the ships' smoke stacks.  
 
The strategy of this high-difference, dazzle camouflage was not about invisibility.  It was about disruption.  Confusion.

Torpedoes in the Great War could only be fired line-of-sight, so instead of firing at where they saw the ship was at that moment, torpedo gunners would have to chart out where the ship would be by the time the torpedo got there.  They had to determine the target ship's speed and direction with just a brief look through the periscope. 

The torpedo gunner's margin of error for hitting a ship was quite low.  Dazzle painting could throw off an experienced submariner by as much as 55 degrees. 

Our expert this week is Roy Behrens, a professor graphic design at the University of Northern Iowa.  He's published several books about camouflage, and also runs the Camoupedia blog.

99% Invisible-65- Razzle Dazzle

Kowloon Walled City was the densest place in the world, ever.

By its peak in the 1990s, the 6.5 acre Kowloon Walled City was home to at least 33,000 people (with estimates of up to 50,000).  That's a population density of at least 3.2 million per square mile.  For New York City to get that dense, every man, woman, and child living in Texas would have to move to Manhattan.  

To put it another way, think about living in a 1,200 square foot home.  Then imagine yourself living with 9 other people.  Then imagine that your building is only one unit of a twelve-story building, and every other unit is as full as yours.  Then imagine hundreds those buildings crammed together in a space the size of four football fields.

We can't really imagine it, either.

Kowloon Walled City began as a military fort in Kowloon, a region in mainland China.  In 1898, China signed a land lease with Great Britain, giving the British control of Hong Kong, Kowloon, and other nearby territories.  But the lease stipulated that the fort in Kowloon would remain under Chinese jurisdiction.  

Over time, the fort became abandoned, leaving the area subject to neither Chinese nor British authority.  This legal gray zone was attractive to displaced and marginalized people.  Thousands of people moved there after the war with Japan broke out.  Even more people moved there after the Communist Revolution.  It attracted gangsters, drug addicts, sex workers, and refugees.  And it also drew a lot of normal people from all over China who saw opportunity there.  

They built the city building by building, first blanketing the area of the fort, then building vertically. Buildings were packed together so tightly in the Walled City that the alleys were nearly pitch-black in the day time.  Electricity and water were brought in by illegal or informal means.  

The Walled City gained a reputation as a sort of den of iniquity--there were high levels of prostitution, gambling, mafia activity, and, for some reason, rampant unlicensed dentistry.

But an order did emerge.  The Walled City had no schools, but there was an informal kindergarten.  A resident's organization settled disputes.  And there was lots of industry: a fishball factory, a noodle factory, metalworking shops, a textile mill.  There were stores, restaurants.  You could even receive mail in the Walled City.

Kowloon Walled City was torn down in 1993.  Today, it's a park, and most traces of the city are gone. But the memory of the city lives on.  It was featured in the non-verbal film Baraka, plays a cameo role in Bloodsport. It's also served as the setting in a number of video games, including most recently Call of Duty: Black Ops

This week's episode was produced by Nick van der Kolk.  He spoke with photographer Greg Girard and architect Aaron Tan, who both spent time in the Walled City.  Nick also talked to as Brian Douglas, who helped design Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Nick is the director of the award-winning podcast, Love + Radio.  You can also hear him over at Snap Judgment.



99% Invisible-66- Kowloon Walled City

http://99percentinvisible.org/post/36839932084/episode-67-broken-window

When Melissa Lee was growing up in Hastings-on-Hudson, a small town in upstate New York, there were only so many fun things to do.  One was buying geodes and smashing them apart with a hammer.  (You know geodes, right?  Those dull-looking brown rocks that you break open to reveal crystalline structures inside?)

One day, when Melissa was thirteen, she and her friend Liz bought some geodes. They didn't want to wait to get home to crack them open, so they decided to throw them against the wall of an apartment building.  Liz's aim went wild, and the geode went through a window.

Melissa and Liz tried to find person whose window they had broken, but they couldn't figure out which door in the apartment building lead to the unit with the window in question.  Eventually they gave up.

Melissa would have probably forgotten about the incident had it not been for one inexplicable thing: the window didn't get fixed.  Ever.

It was clear that someone lived there.  Melissa would walk by the window and see the apartment lit up by a TV.  Someone was opening the window in the summer, and closing it in the winter.  But the hole remained. 

Melissa finished middle school, then high school, then went away to college.  And when she came home and saw the window still broken, it had this effect of making her feel like the nervous, insecure thirteen year old she was when she broke the window.  

This became a pattern for Melissa: she'd leave home, do some growing up, come home, see the window, and feel like a teenager.  

Melissa traveled the world.  She went to graduate school,  She moved to Washington, DC, She got married.  And every time she'd come home, she'd see the window.  "As much as I was changing, this part of my past was completely frozen," Melissa says.  "As soon as I saw the window I was brought right back to those middle school days when we had broken it."

So in 2011, 22 years after the incident, Melissa went to go find the person who left the window broken for so long.  She brought along a tape recorder.

99% Invisible-67- Broken Window

I want you to conjure an image in your mind of the white stripes that divide the lanes of traffic going the same direction on a major highway. How long are the stripes and the spaces between them? 

You can spread your arms out to estimate if you want to.

Over the course of many years, a psychology researcher named Dennis Schafer at Ohio State asked students from many different parts of the country this question and the most common response was that the white stripes are two feet long.

Tom Vanderbilt, author of the brilliant book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), reveals the real answer and some of the other perceptual countermeasures that are designed to make you feel comfortable going way faster than your brain can adequately process. 

We also talk about how this design language of exaggerated scale and wide vistas is great for limited access highways, but it’s problematic when these features are grafted onto suburban landscapes where they don’t belong. 

All the music in this episode is courtesy of my favorite new label, the Utah based, Hel Audio. Specifically, we played the bands OK Ikumi and Mooninite. Hel Audio focuses on physical releases of electronic and experimental music. I just bought myself the full Hel Audio catalog on four glorious cassette tapes, along with less glorious but more versatile (and free) digital downloads of the same songs. The tape deck in my twelve-year-old Golf has never been happier. http://www.helaudio.org/


99% Invisible-68- Built for Speed

An oral history of interstates in Louisville. Featuring: Metro Councilman and historian Tom Owen, Professor and historian Carl Kramer and urbanist and writer Branden Klayko.

Produced by Gabe Bullard (@gbullard)
Music by Company Flow and Grapes

The Past and Future of Highways in Louisville

When Eric Molinsky lived in Los Angeles, he kept hearing this story about a bygone transportation system called the Red Car. The Red Car, he was told, had been this amazing network of streetcars that connected the city--until a car company bought it, dismantled it, and forced a dependency on freeways.

But like most legends, the one that Eric heard about the Red Car is not entirely accurate. It's true that Los Angeles did have an extensive mass transit system called the Red Car, which at one time ran on 1,100 miles of track--about 25 percent more more track mileage than New York City has today, a century later.  

But the Red Car wasn't the victim of a conspiracy. The Red Car WAS the conspiracy. 


99% Invisible-70- The Great Red Car Conspiracy

Though its official name is JFK Plaza, the open space near Philadelphia’s City Hall is more commonly known as LOVE Park.  With its sleek granite benches, geometric raised planter beds, and long expanses of pavement, its success as a pedestrian plaza is debatable.  But it turned out to be perfect for skateboarding.  As skateboarding culture grew in the 1990s, LOVE Park became a Mecca of the skating world--even though skateboarding was officially banned there.  

Skateboarder and radio producer Andrew Norton takes us for a ride through the surprising history of LOVE Park, and pulls back the curtain on a decades-old battle over public space in Philadelphia and beyond.


99% Invisible-71- In and Out of LOVE

1- I'm not paying attention I'm on a cruise
2- Inauguration on Martin Luther King day? What's next walking on water?
3- Aretha Franklin to Kelly Clarkson
4- Congress won't get paid and we're still looking for who cares
5- New York. Gun owners ignited to Texas?  His should be good for a laugh
6- Texas tea party
7- Let's confess to Oprah
8- I dedicate this podcast to my late imaginary girlfriend Jan 23, 2013

#35: Let's Confess to Oprah

Like many cities in Central Europe, Warsaw is made up largely of grey, ugly, communist block-style architecture. Except for one part:  The Old Town.
Walking through this historic district, it’s just like any other quaint European city.  There are tourist shops, horse-drawn carriage rides, church spires. The buildings are beautiful--but they are not original.  
During World War II, Nazi forces razed more than 80% of Warsaw.  After Soviet troops took over, much of the city was rebuilt in the with communist style: fast, cheap, and big.  They built apartment blocks, wide avenues, and heavy grey buildings.  It was communist ideology in architectural form.
But when it came to the historic district of Warsaw-- the Old Town and a long connecting section called the Royal Route--they decided not just to rebuild, but to restore.  Builders would use the same stones, and use special kilns to make special bricks to preserve its authenticity.  After six years of reconstruction, the new Old Town was opened.  Poles were ecstatic to have it back.  Even in the West, it was seen as a triumph of the human spirit. 
But here's the thing: Warsaw’s historic Old Town is not a replica of the original. It’s a re-imagining. An historic city that never really was. 
Reporters and producers Amy Drozdowska and Dave McGuire talk with social anthropologist Michael Murawski about the fake recreation of Old Town and what it means to modern Warsaw.


99% Invisible-72- New Old Town

Kastle returns with the fourth installment of his speciality mixtape series dedicated to coffee, the universe and love. An intro clip from a Radiolab podcast sets the tone as it goes into a story from Plato's Symposium.

Kastle - Coffee Shop At The End Of The Universe Vol. 4
Released: 2011

00. Intro via Radiolab / Plato's Symposium
01. Noyce - Lucy
02. Lunova Labs - Burden (Kyson's Market Stall Remix)
03. Laurel Halo - Sunlight On The Faded
04. Mux Mool - Ruin Everything
05. Monokle - Coast
06. Anthony Ellect - WhiLe
07. Atjazz - One ft. Amalia
08. Evil Needle - Time Travel
09. Catching Flies - Life Size Ghosts
10. Sekuoia - Rituals
11. Rakotep - Get Up
12. LoopMaffia - God Only
13. Singularis - You're Always There (Vitamin D Re-Edit)
14. Portformat - Science Fiction ft. Distantstarr
15. Meesha - Feel U
16. Jensen Sportag - Jareaux
17. Mr Blazey - Too Good
18. Cassie - Me & U (Village Remix)
19. Ragnar Dagur - Alright
20. Zodiac - Come ft. Jesse Boykins III

Free Download

Coffee Shop At The End Of The Universe Vol. 4

I liked the audio prompts... "Wait"... "Wait"... "Wait"

The walk sign at MLK and Liberty, Savannah GA

A tiny radio show about design, architecture &amp; the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.

http://99percentinvisible.org/

New episodes every Wednesday.

On the radio on 91.7 KALW in San Francisco. Fridays at 7:35am and 4:30pm, Saturdays at 8:35am.  And public radio stations across the country.

Created by Roman Mars.
