Niches Between Nodes

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took the one less traveled by,

and that has made all the difference."

The Road Not Taken--Robert Frost

According to Merriam-Webster, a Niche has the following meanings:

a :a recess in a wall especially for a statue

b :something (such as a sheltered or private space) that resembles a recess in a wall

a :a place, employment, status, or activity for which a person or thing is best fitted

b :a habitat supplying the factors necessary for the existence of an organism or species

c :the ecological role of an organism in a community especially in regard to food consumption

At the turn of the century, nations became more transparent, news spread all over the world, and travelling became a common practice for common people as well as the elites. For many common people, at the local neighborhood scale, public transportation is a nasty little pet. Most of the time, it behaves; but once in a while, it bites you hard. at the city scale, when we consider several transportation systems, buses, subways, trains, ships, and planes, have their own specific set of systems and policies, but there are few connections between each systems. At the global scale, we can map out a massive network of transportations for different purposes. It may be a tour, a business trip, a conference trip, an economic trade, or even a military set up. Transportation is very common, and is usually boring. As Denise Hoffman, program director at Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, once said, "city is plastic"; and I would add: it is a series of infrastructural networks that transports people and things. Think about New York City: the grid, subway, Penn Station, highways, bridges, ships, airports... they all serve as transitional agencies for the network.

I as an individual participated in this transitional network at many scales and level. Thus, I am interested in studying the connections between different transportations infrastructures. By comparing different existing cities as models, one shall find niches--opportunities that allows innovative designs that changes perception on transportation and modes of living.

The following are based on the research structure proposed in Landscape Architecture Research, p.59-60, Table 4.1.

Situation:

Globalization—city nodes, hubs, diversity, gentrification

Increase in population density, immense growth of cities

Mission:

Promote and embrace diversity and sharing of knowledge?

Speed up or slow down the transitional time frame

Changing the perception of travelling, changing the modes of travelling

Relevance: (benefits, and learned)

Enhancing accessibility, time is money,

City is plastic and transitional, full of networks of infrastructures that transports

Address environmental opportunities, urban planning,

Economic—promote transactions

Academia—promote the exchange of knowledge, conversations (in both direction, east west, north south)

Resources—strike balance in distributing food resources—(social implication)

Shelter—political instability

Planning— benefit ecology? greening? pleasing the mundane live?

Discipline: (what field? What body of knowledge?)

Not sure. Water? Land? Sky? Military? Trading? Social-economic? infrastructural

Epistemology: (how to claim the new knowledge)

perception shift, redistribution of resources, improve networks, pointing out gaps and opportunities in different modes of networks, ie infrastructural system.

Context and scope: (when is the issue apparent?)

Daily failures and malfunctions in NYC subway

Delays or cancelation in flights or train due to weather conditions

Large scale retreat from catastrophic events

Poverty, imbalance distribution of food and resources

State of current knowledge:

(THERE ARE SOOOO MUCH)

-Shipping industry is declining, or the habor is more crowded if the location is cheaper, or more convenient, or less bounded by policies

-Plane network is vast. It involves different social classes and is for different purposes. Private jets for the rich, economy class for public municipals(tourists), and business class for the higher class, (for conferences).

-Trains—more for public municipals, failing system,

Strategic framework:

Dissecting a city or several cities,

City scale,

finding niches/success within one infrastructure as well as between different infrastructural systems.

Researchable question:

How to integrate 3 networks in a city?

How to integrate shipping infrastructure into air modes, or underground modes of transportation?

What are the transportation niches in different cities?

Researchable design:

Propose linkages between different modes of transportations

Improve linkage between different modes of transportations

Expected findings:

{expected critiques:

highly controlled niches, need to provide options at these niches, does environmental issues plays a big role? It is mostly human-centric}

Demonstration: (rubric and agenda of project)

80% of “niches” of one specific city model shall be resolved

Feasibility: (time, scale)

?addresses local municipals, and worldwide scales, trading, social-economics, and environmental question