National links: How to have outdoor life this winter

Winter during COVID-19 may look bleak, but Norwegians show us you don’t have to stay cooped up. The electric scooters we see in cities are designed like toys, not transportation. A community being developed in Ann Arbor is an experiment in eco-friendly design.

Spending all seasons outside: In the chilly Pacific Northwest, residents are looking for inspiration to get them through a pandemic winter. While many may look at the temperture and stay cooped up in their homes, Norwegians have long found ways to continue life outdoors into the winter. The concept is called friluftsliv, pronounced “free-loofts-leev,” or “free air life.” (Megan Burbank | Seattle Times)

Scooters are poorly designed for city life: The small wheeled electric scooter, with its standing design, precarious balance and lack of cargo space, is poorly designed for commuters looking to travel safely through cities, and their smartphone payment systems are exclusionary and inequitable. One company envisions a better way. (Devin Liddell and Joshua Maruska | Fast Company)

How to design a green community: A developer in Ann Arbor Michigan is building a community that follows the local codes but excels at looking for loopholes to make for a more environmentally friendly place. The community aims to be net positive for electric and water. Streets will be woonerfs with only rear home access for cars and 30% of the land will be set aside for food production. (Lloyd Alter | Treehugger)

Amazon gets tax breaks at the expense of Black communities: Amazon has built 36 warehouses around Chicago by secretly securing sweetheart tax break deals, many in Black communities. Overall $741 million in tax breaks were found by investigative reporters, who learned Amazon would come into towns with deals for new warehouses and wouldn’t disclose who the tax breaks were for until after the deals were signed. (John Lippert and Natalie Moore | WBEZ Chicago)

Seoul creates natural wind paths: Seoul in South Korea is workinig to create “wind paths” with trees in an attempt to bring fresh air into the city from mountains, which generate winds in the evenings. By planting more trees along rivers and roads the city hopes to clean out particulate matter and reduce the urban heat island effect. Different trees will have different functions and the project is expected to cost around $15 million. (Sarah Wray | Cities Today)

Quote of the Week

“We need a better plan for the future. Without one, the algorithmic inequality trap will be a story told not in statistics and wealth ratios, but in distress signals — smartphones hanging from trees, tent cities for the homeless, and human couriers scanning the skies for the delivery drones that spell their impending end.”

Mike Walsh in the Harvard Business Review on how algorithms are making economic inequality worse.

This week on the podcast, Matthew Lipka, head of policy at Nuro, joins the show to talk about autonomous deliveries.