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As California lays the high-speed rail groundwork, SPUR continues its series on international precedents. While France built high-speed rail two decades after Japan and within a different state apparatus, the system had remarkably similar results: growth and concentration. France teaches us that a state investment in high-speed rail (HSR) can have major impacts on places that are isolated and suffering from lagging economic performance. The examples of Lille, an old industrial and mining center in northern France, and Nantes, south of Paris, are often cited as success stories.

Euralille [Photo Credit: flickr user savourama]

Lille is an important crossroads in the European HSR network with service to London, Paris and Brussels. Once a quickly depopulating and gritty industrial city, Lille has diversified into knowledge-intensive, service-producing activities. Euralille, the new retail, business and conference center designed by Dutch powerhouse architect, Rem Koolhaas and OMA, is illustrative of the makeover. Euralille straddles Lille's two main railway stations. A standalone city, it houses productive facilities as well as affordable housing. In 1994, Architectural Review dubbed Euralille the "Instant City."

Equally unrecognizable change has befallen Nantes. An industrial port city in the 19th century, in the past 30 years Nantes has developed into a major service sector hug. In 2004, Time magazine named Nantes "the most livable city in all of Europe." The TGV, France's high speed rail network, came to Nantes concurrently in 1981.

The success of the TGV cannot be separated from France's institutional and planning framework. The determination and capacity of a strong French state was instrumental. The nation owns and provides operational subsidies to SNCF, the HSR operator.

[Photo Credit: flickr user Julka2009]

However, this is not to say that localities have no role in high speed rail. In recent years, local government has played a more important role in France. Vis-Ã -vis joint development agreements and direct development subsidies, French localities have exerted pressure to densify around TGV stations. Cities also set the purchase price of land and assemble properties to facilitate development. Lille approached station area development with public private partnerships in mind. Part of the key to Nantes' and Lille's success is the not insignificant recent investment in transit feeder networks that connect high speed rail with outlying areas. Not including Paris, there are 20 light rail systems in France, most built after HSR. Of these 20 systems, 18 are in cities with HSR service. At least in France, the concentration of travel demand thanks to high speed rail and the urban location of most stations have generated a consequent demand for feeder transit, with the usual array of environmental and land use benefits.

All told, the public sector bet that HSR investment would be sufficient to catalyze urban growth and induce private investments. They were right.

Takeaways:

• HSR in France is largely a product of the government's building, operating, maintaining the network.

• Local planning and development incentives can play a huge role in sparking station area development.

• HSR can transform decaying cities into the most livable in Europe.

• HSR ridership increases with robust feeder transit.

In the coming weeks, we'll look at "HSR" in the United States and United Kingdom drawing conclusions about what it all means in the California context.

SPUR's policy paper on high-speed rail is due out this fall.

The power of data to destroy preconceived notions seems to drive Hans Rosling, co-founder of Gapminder. My first experience with the website was in the spring of 2009 when H1N1 hysteria reached its apex. When a friend sent over the link, I thought I was looking at a simple scatter plot. I had neglected to notice the play button at the bottom of the screen -- an animated feature which shows change over time. In this case, the graph compared the number of news articles about tuberculosis and H1N1 to the number of reported cases of each disease. Obviously, in the spring of 2009, H1N1 had become a disproportionately large news story.

Purchased by Google in 2007, Gapminder pushes data forward in three ways: it liberates long-buried information by publishing the available data; the animation feature makes the data digestible for a significantly larger audience; and most importantly, it encourages participation through its search function, a seemingly common theme in the Datablog.

The recently introduced Gapminder Desktop allows users to both access the information without an internet connection and save their favorite graphs (the current version comes with more than 600 preloaded graphs). A personal favorite is one that monitors per capita CO2 emissions. Before we assail China for their recent upsurge, it should be noted that until recently the US had held that dubious distinction since since 1903.

Outlier

Trinidad and Tobago was the 1944 world leader in per capita CO2 emissions. Free SPUR membership to the first person who tells me how this could possibly be true.

5.5 Designers' wallpaper maze [Photo Credit: Switched on Set]

You don't have to know what a fabber (digital fabricator) or modder (person who modifies) is to enjoy TechnoCRAFT, the latest show at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Like the word itself, the exhibit offers projects that blur any distinction there may still be between technology and art, designer and user or subject and object. Drawing from household goods, video games and prison-inmate implements, TechnoCRAFT displays frameworks, which the user then mods, tweaks and hacks to fit his or her needs. It is the perfect symbiosis.

It's great to see the role of the designer chopped and screwed back together. Among the many striking objects in this exhibit are the bike seat fastened to the legs of a toddler's high chair; build-your-own shoes, soda label and videogame hero; the malleable titanium cube waiting to be crushed into a form-fitting chair; and modular product development open platforms, called bugs.

As delightful as the exhibit is, it's difficult to step midstride into a participatory art project without being able to participate. The 40' by 15' wallpaper maze upon which the artist traced a dozen dead-end paths in magic marker practically begged me to pick up a marker and give it a go. But do-not-touch decorum and omnipresent gallery attendant foiled all hope of that.

Even if a museum isn't the best place to experience art as an interactive process, TechnoCRAFT is inspiring and loads of fun.

In the same do-it-yourself spirit, SPUR's DIY Urbanism exhibition opening Tuesday, September 7, will showcase innovative urban projects defined by their bottom-up approach to urban intervention.

Colleen McHugh, native San Franciscan and resident SPUR photographer, will blog about a different walk through San Francisco each week of the summer, reflecting on what it means to live as a pedestrian in this city and some of the ways we can improve upon that experience. There are so many things a walk in San Francisco can be — from a protest to an errand to an active use of public space. This walk will serve as a kind of memory in motion. Find a map of Colleen's walk here.

Above: Stairs descending to the Sutro Baths

I've arrived at my old favorite spot in San Francisco — a graffiti-covered concrete relic of the coast's military past, at the very edge of the city and the continent, with a view of the Pacific to the left and the Golden Gate to the right. Land's End. When I was in high school, this particular spot was hidden behind a foreboding "Warning: Dangerous Cliffs!" sign and a maze of bushes. Now the bushes have been cleared, replaced by a newly-paved lookout, and my old favorite view in this city is fully exposed — to the coin operated binoculars in the parking lot above and to the eroding cliffs below.

Above: Views to the left and to the right of my former favorite spot in San Francisco

Top: Paved lookout. Bottom: Coin-operated Binoculars from the parking lot.

At this point on a Monday evening after work, I've walking about ten blocks down the forgotten sidewalks at the end of Geary Blvd. And as I arrive to the pristinely-paved trail around Land's End, I am reminded of one of the many great things a walk in this city can be — a measure of change and a memory of the past. The last time I walked along this path — a favorite of runners and dog walkers — it was a mix of dirt and rocks. And the surrounding foliage was not carefully protected native species as it is now, but invasive ice plant. The linking maze of paths have since been closed off for eroding cliff stabilization. So much has changed. Originally, this trail was carved for train tracks — a reminder of the leisure destination this area was a century ago.

Top: Pristine Land's End trail. Bottom: Untamed wide sidewalk at the end of Geary.

I continue down the hill to Sutro Baths, a marshland/concrete ruin below the Cliff House. As I walk through the grass, watching ducks congregate at sunset in the old baths, my shoes are muddied and my socks become wet. It's difficult to imagine the glory days of the former world's largest indoor swimming facility, and the tales of which my grandfather and father have told me over the years sound like fiction. Now part of the GGNRA, the Sutro Baths and Lands End trail are a destination for much more serene leisure activities, like this solitary walk I find myself on this particular evening.

Up over the hill to the south, Ocean Beach and the Great Highway come into view, as do the unsightly condos on the site of the former Playland at the Beach (one of the few remaining memories of which is the carousel that now operates at Yerba Buena). I turn up Balboa as dusk sets in. A passing 31 bus marks the city's decision in the 1950s to forego the old B-line streetcar (Yes, there used to be streetcar lines A-I.) in favor of buses. In the distance, the familiar Balboa Theatre sign shines, even as many of the city's other old movie houses are shutting down. I pass a lively fencing class in a studio down the street, and finally return to Simple Pleasures — my favorite coffee shop, virtually unchanged over the six years I've been going there.

Top: An unexpected fencing class. Bottom: An unchanged Simple Pleasures Café.

[Photo Credit: All photos by Colleen McHugh]