D is for Density

Today, I gave a presentation/participated in brief table as part of D Magazine's on-going D Academy, where local professionals from a variety of fields learn about various subjects affecting the city.  I was thinking this presentation was taking place later this evening and I'd have time to put together the presentation at the end of a typical workday.

That is, until my sub-conscious jolted me awake from a rare, pleasantly deep sleep at 4 am this morning and said, "dude! Dude!  Wake up!  I wanna play!  Did you check what time the round table is?  Maybe you should?  It's not during the day?  Maybe you should double check."  And so I did once this internal monologue rattled me fully awake.

So I checked. YIKES!  It's at lunch in a place entirely unwalkable or transit-able (sic). So I wrote out an outline stream of conscious-style of what I wanted to say. Put on a pot of coffee and got to work on a new powerpoint from scratch, caffeine-addled to the gills.  Jonathan Swift would've been proud.  Of the caffeine intake and productivity if not the quality.

I wanted to talk about the deeper, driving impulses towards density, towards cities and urbanization rather than grunt grunt tall building is density grunt.  I think to fully explain the complex nature and inter-dependencies inherent in urbanism, this could and should probably double in size to include more statistics and anecdotes, but I was given 15 minutes.  So here is the 19-slide show (I'm going to try and post Noah Jeppson's as well because there were some kick-ass photos in his):

D - Density

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