My urbanist friends mostly hate skyways [and that’s just Bill Lindeke] [Streets.mn has 13 pages of posts about skyways. This blog has a few as well]. A dictionary says: sky·walk (skī′wôk′) n. An elevated, usually enclosed walkway between two buildings. Also called skyway. I will not comment on the use of skyway vs. skywalk, that’s just like Ramp and Garage. While I point out that streets steal urban activity from […]
2013-07-09 Saint Paul, a set on Flickr. I took a set of photos of the skyways and sidewalks of downtown St. Paul prior to a meeting a week ago. While I generally don’t take close-up pictures of individuals whom I don’t know, I didn’t really have much opportunity in St. Paul. Mears Park had some […]
Recently Published: Huang, Arthur and David Levinson (2013) The structure and evolution of a skyway network The European Physical Journal: Special Topics January 2013, Volume 215, Issue 1, pp 123-134 [download] We study the structure and evolution of the downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota skyway network. Developed by private building-owners, the network evolved from tree-like to grid-like […]
At streets.mn: In defense of skyways In defense of skyways by David Levinson on January 9, 2012 in Skyways, Transportation Crossposted at streets.mnand transportationist.orgPhotos of skyways by author from Sydney (2), Portland (2), Minneapolis (3), Tokyo (1), and Harrogate (1) respectively. Everyone seems to be hating on Minneapolis’s world-beating skyway network. Sam Newberg is the latest in a recent post at streets.mn: Is […]
VitaMn article: Take the skyway: A downtown dweller spends 14 days in the skyway system – and survives. This is how I optimistically imagined the future when I was young. The city is a superstructure, and just as rail connects larger areas, skyways do so for local areas. The more internally connected everything is, (i.e. […]
Recent working paper Huang, Arthur and Levinson, David, (2010), Modeling the Minneapolis Skyway Network, No 000075, Working Papers, University of Minnesota: Nexus Research Group. Adopting an agent-based approach, this paper explores the topological evolution of the Minneapolis Skyway System from a microscopic perspective. Under a decentralized decision-making mechanism, skyway segments are built by self-interested building […]
The following was recently published: Corbett, Michael, Feng Xie, and David Levinson (2009) Evolution of the Second-Story City: The Minneapolis Skyway System. Environment and Planning b 36(4) 711-724 [doi] This paper describes and explains the growth of the Minneapolis Skyway network. Accessibility is used as a major factor in understanding that growth (i.e. does the […]
Two new movies/simulations of the co-evolution of downtown Minneapolis and its skyways system have been postedhere These are large movies (132 and 137 MB), so be forewarned. These are based on research done by Michael Corbett as part of his MS classwork and Feng Xie as part of his PhD. The research paper underlying this […]
Sadly, it’s not my research on network growth that won a major award, the penalty of being a civil engineer and thus invisible to economics. But nevertheless congratulations to Stanford economist Dave Donaldson for winning the John Bates Clark medal for work in economic history, and better still, transport history, and even better still for […]
Like buildings under construction, cities are built with scaffolding. Remove the scaffolding and cities remain. Yet what is “scaffolding” and what is “permanent” is not at all clear. Yesterday’s permanent structure is today’s scaffolding. Take for instance the deployment of streetcars in the late 1800s and early 1900s. These streetcars enabled (not coincidentally) suburbs from […]
