Discovering Urbanism

In Search of the Megapolitan Scale

2011-11-28T17:44:00.002-05:00

When Jean Gottmann popularized the term Megalopolis in the 1960's, he mostly had the Northeast Corridor in mind. By this time, so many interconnections had developed between the string of cities from Boston through Washington DC that it could be referred to as a single unit. Arthur Nelson and Robert Lang, two noted planning academics, continue this line of reasoning in their new book Megapolitan America, only now highlighting eleven Megapolitan Clusters around the United States. While this nation is a very large one spatially, a significant chunk of economic activity, real estate development, and innovation takes place on only 17% of the privately-held land area. The authors argue that this reality should effect how we conceive of ourselves as a nation.

This is more than just a battle over geographic nomenclature. Once the boundaries of regions are widely accepted, they can define the scale of public and private activities and shape the impact of these activities. The cities of Dallas and Fort Worth formed with completely separate self-images, until a short while after the Census Bureau labeled them a single metropolitan area based on a quantitative definition. The change triggered an adjustment in the federal aid formula used by the FAA, and the two cities were compelled to cooperate on the construction of a single airport. This launched a string of practical joint actions, out of which the single identity of "Metroplex" emerged - the result of a convergence of both top-down and bottom up forces.

So how do you find a Megapolitan Area? If urban systems are dynamic, the boundaries of Megapolitan Areas must be defined by movement. This is a fundamental insight Nelson and Lang adopt from Gottmann and decades of Census Bureau practice. It may be tempting to define regions by drawing a circle around concentrations of stuff, whether population (where people sleep at night) or employment (where those who work in a fixed place spend a large portion of their week), but the movement of people, goods, water, animals, energy, and whatever you can think of through space is what connects places together.

The authors use commuting data to define the shape of Megapolitan Areas, mostly because it's readily available. This works as a proxy but it also misses a majority of human movement, even most work-related travel, since our daily travel patterns are becoming more diffuse and harder to define on a two-point scale. What if you travel to the local office three days a week, work from home sporadically, and visit the regional headquarters a few times a month? Here's where Google or Apple could step in. They've both been amassing huge databases of personal locational information from smartphone users, at least those who have opted in. You can imagine meandering lines on a map, one for each individual path, crisscrossing into a jumbled mess. What most resembles a massive hairball? There's your Megapolitan Area.

If Megapolitan Areas are defined as such by numbers, they remain that way with a story. Nelson and Lang use the apt word "organic" to describe a region that captures the public imagination by tapping into an already understood sense of place. Language is notoriously hard to dictate by fiat, which is why Americans still measure temperature in Fahrenheit. Even if the Census Bureau is convinced to create a new category for megapolitan areas - and the book makes a good case for it - the label will not have much currency until it is accepted by media outlets and the general public in each individual community. They also need a catchy name.

Two very different prognoses for the Sun Corridor

Much of the book focuses on projecting population growth and development out to 2040, in order to predict the continued importance of Megapolitan Areas well into the 21st century. Suffice it to say that the authors are pretty bullish on American growth, expecting it to continue in roughly the same trajectory it has been on for the last several decades, not withstanding our major housing hiccup. Seeing that Las Vegas and the Sun Corridor (Phoenix to Tucson) are slated to be among the fastest growing regions brought to memory an image from a couple of weeks ago. James Howard Kunster was addressing the CityWorks (X)po in Roanoke, Virginia. He showed an aerial photo of houses stretching into the Arizona desert, then quickly remarked, "oh yeah, and Phoenix is toast. There will be no Phoenix" before moving on to the next slide.

So what do you do when two people whom you respect differ in their forecast by ... oh, nine million or so? Well, you cut the difference. Kunstler is clearly being hyperbolic. There's too much vested capital in these Megapolitan Areas for even the worst-case scenario to simply erase them. On the other hand, Nelson and Lang could stand to internalize the possibility of resource scarcity into their projections. They've written a whole chapter on the pressure megapolitan growth will exert on farmland, water, and air quality, but they don't seem to accept that these pressures, in turn, will shape the built environment in a measurable way. For example, the authors point out that water use in the dry Sun Corridor, which is the highest per household in the nation, will have to be reduced somehow. But will those restrictions curtail business? Will future sunbirds be deterred if they can't have the lawn promised in the brochure? That's easy ... yes. Growth will slow down.

But quibbling about the exact distribution of population would be missing the point of the book, and the authors are appropriately cautious in the epilogue with looking so far into the future. The question is whether the definition of Megapolitan Areas will continue to accurately reflect the American pattern of development into the future. Charles Darwin noticed two kinds of taxonomists, the "lumpers" who saw few species and the "splitters" who saw many species. Likewise, reasonable people could look at the same Megapolitan Areas and see many metropolitan areas connected to each other rather than a single whole. Or even a whole galaxy of neighborhoods and employment centers.

This is not a problem. Really, we need as diverse a taxonomy as we have problems to apply it towards. The authors make a strong case for using the megapolitan scale for planning national rail infrastructure, which fits nicely because of the needed density and optimal range inherent to this technology. Some economic development efforts, at least for global markets, would work well at the megapolitan scale, but in other regional markets businesses and communities would be better served by competing with each other.

However, there are points in the book where it feels like the Megapolitan scale is being championed as a superior way of dividing up the nation, rather than just another tool with some good applications. I'm personally very fond of the terms "urban" and "rural" and everything they connote, so it would be sad to see these traditional distinctions melted away into one big megapolitan stew. After all, it's just as legitimate to use labels on the basis of how we want the world to be than on how it currently is. Megapolitan Areas also have the liability of not being exhaustive, which makes the old-fashioned state boundaries more appropriate for applications where complete inclusiveness is necessary.

I'm happy to think in terms of Megapolitan Areas and use the term in the way Nelson and Lang present it, along with several other geographical constructs that have their own appropriate uses.

Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

2011-10-20T17:42:00.000-04:00

Reading a book by an NPR host is a different kind of experience. So was the case with Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi. As Steve Inskeep shares his impressions of Karachi's explosive urban growth, I could almost hear the subtle enthusiasm in his voice over the crunches of granola in my mouth. Fortunately, his skill for parring down complex subjects into bite-sized remarks translates well onto the written page.

Something like a city-wide version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs shows up in various forms throughout the tale of Karachi’s growth. Faced with an ongoing tidal wave of immigrants from rural areas, urban planners and developers alike tried over the years to shape that growth into a desired form. However, in the absence of more basic government services such as security, sanitation, and public infrastructure these higher-level organizational schemes had no chance of actually working. If prospects did seem good for a moment, the regime would change and it would be all over. In many cases, city officials and businessmen would import ideas from the West, often directly through global consultants, without paying enough attention to the very different political reality on the ground in Karachi.

The 50-year-old suburbs of Korangi and North Karachi are apt examples. Inspired by the West’s suburban expansion in the 1950s, Pakistan’s ruling general Mohammad Ayub Khan envisioned many of Karachi’s poor lifted into decent suburban lifestyles to the north of the city. With help from the Ford Foundation, the famous Greek planner Constantino Doxiadis was hired to create, from scratch, a self-contained community for at least a half million people. Doxiadis was careful to take design cues from local architecture and cultural preferences, but the design – and he recorded doubts about this in his journal all along– just could not be fitted to Karachi’s economic situation.

Although tens of thousands of families were relocated to these suburbs, problems arose immediately. First, the proliferation of privately-owned automobiles that made American suburbanization possible just weren’t there. Workers who had always walked now had to improvise bus services and pay to commute to their modest jobs across the city. Along with transportation, the residents just couldn’t pay for the houses they lived in, even with heavy subsidies. Without funds to continue, the city-building was cut short. Although Doxiadis had every intention of integrating rich and poor, the opposite happened. The suburb served as a mechanism for pushing the poor to the periphery of the city, which is how Karachi is arranged to this day. Finally, the carefully laid out designs eventually eroded away as unauthorized settlements filled in the open spaces and yards. The end result was the kind of informal settlement the entire endeavor was intended to alleviate - only now miles away from the center.

Other lofty goals were thwarted. A lavish casino had to be torn down before ever opening when the tide changed and the temptation that Muslims might gamble was no longer acceptable. A grassroots movement to save a national park from encroaching development ended with the assassination of two leading neighborhood activists. The essential functions of placemaking, whether from citizen-activists, developers, or planners, were all drowned out by the deeper needs of security and at least a certain degree of political stability. There is no use putting the cart before the horse.

Visions for an Urban National Park

2011-10-16T14:54:00.000-04:00

I'll admit that I had no idea a reasonably large national park existed within the boundaries of New York City. Even after a short-lived but legitimate childhood obsession with national park trivia, and after having worked in a national park in Wyoming for a little while, this urban recreational area escaped me. That is until opening Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Park, a book recently released from Princeton Architectural Press. It catalogs the collaborative effort between the National Park Service and a host of designers, mostly landscape architects, in telling the story of this park while continuing to write it.

Maybe I missed Gateway, because it has yet to find a clear identity. As Alexander Brash, a director in the National Parks Conservation Association, writes "Gateway really has no clear thematic past, nor has an easily recognizable and unifying vision for its future been embraced."

Gateway is split in to three units: Staten Island, the Jamaica Bay section of Brooklyn, and Sandy Hook in New Jersey. There's no clear way to tie them together.
Gateway's history is split between a location of early native Lenape trails, the site of NYC's first airport, and America's largest World War II naval base. Less glamorously, it contains a quarantine island that housed sickly immigrants, as well as the final and gruesome destination for most of the city's 19th century transportation system.
Gateway is an important estuary for migratory birds, but also a grand experiment in the remediation of over a century worth of unmitigated pollution.
Gateway also functions essentially as a regional park for seven million people a year, allowing many to benefit from a national park who may otherwise never visit one.

The park's complexity is what makes it such a compelling topic for the design competition. Some of the ideas generated can be more feasibly implemented than others, but, in this case, that's fine. The goal was never to select an out-of-the-box design to be built but rather to generate a host of concepts that could help re-envision the park's future. While the NPS will never actually construct thousands of hydroponic pontoons and push them off into Jamaica Bay, the picture of these floating pods underscores Gateway's need to adapt to the shifting interface between water and land after climate change. This was a major theme that many designers picked up on.

Others focused on the park's almost teasing sense of accessibility. While located very near millions of people, it's barely out of reach of the subway and planned ferry services throughout between park sites never materialized. Jamaica Bay became another of Robert Moses' victims when he cut off access from Brooklyn neighborhoods with the Belt Parkway (although, to be fair, Moses also oversaw construction of the popular Jacob Riis park in Gateway). Many proposals tie together ferry lines, subway extensions, multiuse trails, and even overhead cable cars to unify the park and the city.

Of all the parks features, by far the greatest attention was paid to the abandoned Floyd Bennett Field, with its crumbling runways and nameless structures scattered around. This is a canvas to good to pass up. An editor of the volume, Kate Orff describes Gateway as "post-picturesque," in contrast to Olmstead's Central Park.

"Just as Central Park's construction sharpened our concept of 'the public realm' for an industrializing New York City, re-envisioning Jamaica Bay as a thriving cosmopolitan ecology would further evolve the concept of public space based on stewardship and cultivated wilderness for post-industrial contexts."

If the National Park System has traditionally evoked transcendence through spectacular natural beauty or historic narratives, Gateway could be something different. One of the designs had members of the public walking through each stage of a water treatment process. From the point where the effluent flows in, through a series of settling pools, and into a restored marsh. At first, I was skeptical. I doubted that families would really bother to follow the informational signage through this seemingly mundane process. But why not? Where else is this kind of story being told?

Which is denser: New York or Los Angeles?

2011-09-06T11:58:00.001-04:00

Your intuitions are correct. New Yorkers live in neighborhoods with much higher density than do Angelenos. But its not obvious how this conclusion is reached, and there's plenty of confusion going around about measuring density. Where you draw the lines on the map can have a significant impact on the results you get.

If you measure density purely regionally, Los Angeles comes out ahead. I've used the Census Bureau's MSA to show the two metro area's population densities in 2010. Sometimes the geography of Urbanized Area is used to capture the region, but that hasn't been determined for 2010 yet. So the MSA will do ...

However, this measurement misses the important story. As Ryan Avent explains,

"Simple population density measures the average density across a particular area. If you have a metro that covers a large area but which features a very dense core, however, you can easily have a situation in which the vast majority of the metro’s population lives at densities above the average population density. I think it’s more informative to focus on weighted-average population density."

So here's the weighted-average density (by census tract) for the two metro areas:

New York metro goes from being about 30% behind LA in regional density to more than doubling LA in average neighborhood density.

If you were to drop from a parachute flying over the center of a city on a very windy day, the first regional density figure would tell you how many people to expect to see in the square mile around the random place in the region you land. However, if you currently live in the New York or Los Angeles metro areas (or are considering moving there), the latter figure would tell you how many people you would expect to see in the square mile around you. It's tethered to actual human experience, which is usually what we are asking about when we talk about density.

London Bus Tour

2011-09-01T20:51:00.001-04:00

This is a wonderful video shot during a course of 30 hours riding a London bus. Every person the bus passes seems to have their own story, even if only captured in two-second film clips. I don't think I've seen a more humane portrait of a great city.

London Bus Tour from moritz oberholzer on Vimeo.

Harlan Douglass: The Little Town

2011-08-27T09:43:00.000-04:00

I've decided to resume reviews of books from the the first wave of City Planning in the early 20th century. I'm reading them because a) they're free (copyright expired) and b) there might be something to learn from this period that still applies. Here's the list so far:

Garden City - Ebenezer Howard
Town Planning in Practice - Raymond Unwin
City Planning with Special Reference to Planning of Streets and Lots - Charles Robinson
New Ideals in Planning - John Nolen
The Little Town - Harlan Douglass
Cities in Evolution - Patrick Geddes (upcoming)

All of these reviews are truthful, but they are also selective and editorial. I'm not a trained historian; I only play one on TV. In other words, don't steal this for your class paper. I don't care, but you're professor probably will.

The Small Town Ideal

Americans, today, have a schizophrenic relationship with small towns. We consistently tell pollsters that we want to live in one above any other kind of place, yet we just as consistently choose not to. The Atlantic just ran a story about an idyllic small town in Missouri that, like many around the county, can not attract enough doctors. They've determined that it's not the economic incentives, but the lifestyle that's deterring them. Even small towns that have been engulfed by expanding metro areas tend to receive a scant share of the new arrivals compared to the exurbs around them. Yet the ideal lives on and we like imagine ourselves on the inside of a tight community as we enjoy, at the same time, our freedom from its responsibilities and constraints.

The small town ideal did not exist in 1921. Harlan Paul Douglass wrote The Little Town especially in its rural relationships as a heartfelt defense of what was, in the eyes of many, a pitiable character. He quotes the president of the American Civic Association: "God made the country, man the city, but the devil the little town." From the urban perspective, the townsfolk were unsophisticated, incurious, and many steps behind the moving edge of history. At the same time, rural areas were being lauded by the "county life movement," which had made substantial inroads into the federal government. The farmer was the hero, and the townsfolk were, at best, parasitic middlemen and, at worst, emissaries of corruption from the big city. Farmers were beginning to pull their kids out of town schools and look for a nice field to start their own.

Those who lived in little towns were no easier on themselves. They wanted nothing more than to be the next Chicago, and this overwrought ambition led many to foolishly invest in lavish infrastructure only to be bypassed by the railroad company and left with a dusty, wide main street. Douglass wanted to study and plan for the little town, along with its connected rural areas, as a kind of place that deserved its own category. His aim was to "make it the centre alike of inspiration and administration in the reconstruction of rural civilization."

The Walkable Town

Douglass noted that the maximum size of a town was a function of the walking radius from a single core, enough room for about 5000 people at most. This was the threshold before investment in streetcar lines would have to be justified, creating a natural plateau. With public buildings and business operations at the core and residences surrounding it, every person remained connected to the same sphere. Even the women busy tending their homes could still make it downtown several times a day. The outer ring of the town he calls the "black belt." These were the slum-farms that invariably popped up just outside of a comfortable walking distance but not far enough away to require a motorcar or a team of horses. The farms were small and their buildings created a depressing entrance corridor into the town.

The scale and common center of a town created a unique physical space for diverse interactions. According to Douglass, "no other community enjoys such close daily fellowship with men of so wide a range of vocation or calling." Professional classes in the larger cities would cluster in distinct social groups and neighborhoods, but the size of the small town forced interactions across these lines. Yet there were also physical features of many towns that did create an impediment to interaction. Groups lived on the "other side of the tracks" or "across the river." In these cases mere physical access was directly translated into economic and social access. Douglass believed that,

"a well-planned town with its civic centre is both a means and impulse to social integration, and to the realization of the common life of its people. The physical plan to a town is this as fundamental as the skeleton to the human organism."

This is a notable stance to take, considering that some other planning advocates were, at the time, considering how zoning could be used to properly separate social classes from one another.

The Natural Political Unit

The primary aim of Little Towns is to depict individual towns and their surrounding countryside as interdependent units making up a single "natural community." Despite the significant differences in lifestyle - rural areas were still without electricity - and cultural outlook, the two kinds of places relied on each other economically and socially. Proving that tacky neologisms have always been with us, Douglass liked to use the work Rurban to describe this synthesis.

A central problem consisted in the mismatch between these natural communities and existing political boundaries. So, for example, a farmer would need to travel into town to sell crops, buy goods, and attend church, yet the incorporation of town limits precluded him from the political sphere. The farmer was not expected to pay taxes for the town's function, and he did not have a voice in town matters. Towns compensated for this imbalance by taxing trade, which Douglass believed was underscoring an antagonistic relationship. The farmer then viewed the town as a miniature fiefdom funneling away a portion of his labor, rather than as his own community. For their part, townsfolk considered their rural counterparts to be outsiders.

Douglass believed this could be remedied by a simple exercise. Conduct a scientific town survey to determine the trade area, the availability and use of roadways, and the social identification people declare. Once a map has been made empirically showing the use of services and town identity, the arbitrary political boundaries should be replaced with new ones that match reality. If necessary, multiple zones drawn concentrically from the core outward could be created to define classes with different service needs and different funding responsibilities. Interestingly, Douglass' approach is very similar to later regionalists like Louis Mumford or, much later, Myron Orfield, only at the much smaller rural scale.

As enticing as this solution appears, there remains the challenge of geographical change to deal with. The boundaries of the natural community are always shifting, yet institutions are much stickier. Not only must local governments deal with the transaction costs of redrawing jurisdictions on a regular basis, vested interests start to accrue over time that eventually solidify the boundaries as they are. Annexation was the tool used to deal with spatial change for many years, but this has become politically impossible in most regions. There has yet to emerge another tool that effectively accomplishes what Douglass set out to achieve.

New study sheds light on roadway safety for all

2011-04-16T14:12:00.000-04:00

Traffic safety has been one of those long-standing fault lines in the purported war between cars and pedestrians. In the one corner, we have traffic engineers who are given the task of designing roadways to maximize speed and capacity, while maintaining what is considered an acceptable level of safety for motorists. You do this by making the roadway as forgiving as possible with wider lanes, longer sight distances, and nothing to crash into along the side of the road. In the other corner, pedestrian advocates have insisted on slowing cars down with traffic calming, on-street parking, pedestrian signal prioritization and lots of other strategies to look after their own safety. As the story goes, each side is locked in a shouting match over whose safety is the most important.

Design Solutions for Balancing Traffic Conflicts and Speed. Source: Dumbaugh et. al.

But a new study that appears in the Journal of the American Planning Association sheds more light than heat on the subject. Eric Dumbaugh and Wenhau Li found that designs that make the travel safer for any road user make travel safer for every road user. Really, there is no zero sum game. We don’t have to pick one team. Thankfully.

The researchers looked at almost 300,000 crashes in the San Antonio area and considered all of the details of where the crash happened, not just how many cars use the road or how wide the lanes are. They asked: Is this a pedestrian-scaled “Main Street” or is it an arterial lined with strip malls? Are there big box stores around? How many intersections are in the area, and how many people live nearby? Then they considered who was involved in the crash. Two vehicles? A vehicle and cyclist? A vehicle and a tree? With all of these variables in mind, they determined which factors were better correlated with a safer environment … and for whom.

The results may not entirely satisfy either side, but they make sense. Freeways turn out to be pretty safe, showing a relatively small proportion of crashes. This probably has more to do with the lack intersections on highways, than it does the opulent shoulders and smooth grades. With access limited to a few exits and entrances, there are just fewer chances to collide with an oncoming vehicle. But just as the highway engineers may consider theories are vindicated, the research shows that places on the opposite end of the spectrum are just as safe.

“The presence of pedestrian-scaled retail uses, on the other hand, was associated with significant reductions in multiple-vehicle, parked-car, fixed-object, and pedestrian crashes. We attribute this to reduced vehicle speeds. Street oriented buildings create a sense of visual enclosure of the street, communicating to the driver that greater caution is warranted, and resulting in reductions in both vehicle speed and crash incidence.”

Consider all of the chaos of a Main Street scene. A driver is trying to parallel park while a cyclist dodges the opening door. Pedestrians are crossing at will, and delivery trucks are backing into their spaces. Visual stimulation is everywhere. The old engineering models would take all of these inputs and calculate a daily bloodbath, but nothing of the sort is happening. It’s a highly functional environment. The key here is that both the Main Street and the Freeway are relatively safe for all road users, motorists and pedestrians alike (although let’s admit that pedestrian safety on the freeway is purely a function of their non-existence).

The absolute worst places for everyone were the ones that fell between the cracks of the two paradigms. There’s one of these in your town. The wide highway with a traffic light every few hundred feet leading into strip shopping centers. They are designed to be Freeway-esque with plenty of room for you to veer out of your lane, yet with all of the conflicts of cars pulling in and out still there. These precautions are just a cruel trick, inducing drivers to take on more speed than they really should to their own detriment. Pedestrians are caught in the cross-fire with no armor, and before you judge them for having the audacity just to be there, remember that many service-sector workers have no choice. In the twentieth century we dreamed of the best of both words for our roadways – access and speed! - but ended up with the worst of both worlds.

Freeways will still be utilized for those long-distance trips between cities, at least while gas is still relatively inexpensive. They should continue to be designed to handle the high speeds they command, to allow drivers to travel safely. But within highly-concentrated urban areas, mindlessly applying these same standards wrecks havoc. In these cases, a design approach that takes into account the whole context of the street yields a much safer result for pedestrians and motorists alike.

Where does a revolution happen?

2011-02-11T23:02:00.003-05:00

In an historic sequence of events for the nation of Egypt, massive demonstrations were held at the Nile View mall in suburban Cairo. Protesters began gathering outside of J.C. Penney in late January. Within a week the parking lot was full, and traffic was backed up for miles with eager activists waiting to enter. The food court was taken over as a makeshift shelter, and new vendors popped up to compete with Sbarros and Panda Express to feed the demonstrators. When Hosni Mubarak agreed to step down, the elated crowds moved into the multiplex movie theater for celebration. Historians believe this may be the first revolution in world history entirely set to the soundtrack of smooth jazz.

No, wait. None of this is happening.

Photo taken by Flickr user Ramy Raoof

Democracy for the nation of Egypt was won in Tahrir Square, right in the heart of Cairo. Tahrir Square is surrounded by museums, governmental offices, universities, stores and hotels, and many, many compact neighborhoods, making it a natural epicenter of human activity and the obvious site for political action. Being one of the mostly densely populated cities in the world, thousands of protestors can converge in the center and meet with others from across the socio-economic range. Protestors flooded into the square through the Egypt Metro system, one of the busiest in the world. Although authorities tried to quell the demonstration by blocking the square’s Metro stop, many of the participants have been getting off at nearby stops and walking the rest of the way in.

Edward Glaeser pointed out in the New York Times last week that “it’s always the urban pot that boils over.” Cairo, Egypt and Tunis, Tunisia are only the latest installments in the tumultuous story of cities.

“Cities are places of revolution, because urban proximity connects organizers of opposition. Large urban populations create the scale needed to initially overwhelm local law enforcement … The constant interaction of human energy in dense clusters creates innovations in every area of human life, including politics.”

All the tweets and texts flying through the airwaves have not changed the fact that a physical place, a public square in the most literal sense, will always be a necessary stage for any kind of action. You know, in reality.

Here’s Sarah Goodyear writing in Grist,

“The government of Hosni Mubarak could shut down the internet. It could shut down cell phone service. It could force Al Jazeera, which has been providing superb coverage of the events in Egypt, to close its Cairo bureau. It could arrest journalists and seize their equipment.

But the streets of Cairo themselves have been the medium that has carried the message of the Egyptian people. So have the streets of Alexandria, Suez, and other Egyptian cities. And the government's efforts to keep people off those streets have failed completely."

And Tahrir Square was not just a convenient place to hold a rally. Hey, we're about equidistant between most of our homes, plenty of space to work with, let's start gathering here. No, the fact that the message was brought to the center of the capital city itself conveyed meaning. The central public square is likewise the impromptu location for celebration.

Michael Sandel on public places

2011-01-28T09:03:00.000-05:00

Source: Harvard Gazette

I was pleased to see Michael Sandel’s name show up as a keynote speaker at this year’s American Planning Association conference. He’s a well-known Harvard political philosopher who has made a career out of pushing the boundaries of how we talk about right and wrong toward the notion of the common good. But what does high-minded ethical reasoning have to do with planning the places we live in? As I would find out, quite a bit.

I turned to Sandel’s most recent book, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do, based on a course he’s taught for the last two decades (which happens to also be a hit on Japanese TV, oddly enough). It’s jam packed with those thorny moral dilemmas that are great fun to subject your friends to. After running through the answers given by the usual suspects throughout history, he finishes out the book with his own position. Here’s one salient point:

“An earlier generation made a massive investment in the federal highway program, which gave Americans unprecedented mobility and freedom, but also contributed to a reliance on the private automobile, suburban sprawl, environmental degradation, and living patterns corrosive to community. This generation could commit itself to an equally consequential investment in an infrastructure for civic renewal: public schools for which rich and poor alike would want to send their children, public transportation systems reliable enough to attract upscale commuters; public health clinics, playgrounds, parks, recreation centers, libraries, and museums that would, ideally at least, draw people out of their gated communities and into the common spaces of a shared democratic citizenship.”

To see how he lands here, we’ll have to back up a little to grasp the underlying principles. Sandel calls into the question the modern notion of grounding all of ethics in the consent of individuals, instead reaching back to Aristotle and the notion of a civic order that encourages a strong character that looks outward from itself. Asking anyone today to honor the public good seems even a little quaint, and cynics are ever looking for the angle, but Sandel is serious about reviving the calling of citizenship.

He notes that our public discourse has come to revolve almost entirely around personal rights and personal demands. On the right, this means defending the economic decisions to buy and sell as you wish. On the left, it means breaking away from the shackles of traditional social mores and leveling inequalities. Your choices are: either let everyone keep the resources they earn in the marketplace or redistribute resources to the individuals who have more of a need. But both sides seem to agree that we are essentially individuals. We may engage in relationships or associate ourselves with certain groups, but only as long as our personal goals are achieved in the process.

How does this philosophy translate into our physical places? It means big private homes and small public spaces, many yards and few parks, lots of driving alone and little public transportation, gated communities with or without the literal gates – basically a whole place arranged so that we will never have to see a neighbor or a stranger unless we specifically choose to. We could say all sorts of things about the fairness or sustainability of this arrangement, but Sandel raises another point. This kind of place makes it harder for us to build the character traits we look up to: courage, solidarity to a community, mutual respect, sacrifice for the good of others. You can’t just read about being a good person. It takes some training and a practice field.

To pluck a story from the Christian tradition, when an injured Jewish traveler was lying along the side of a road, it was the Samaritan, his sworn ethnic enemy, who decided to lend a hand. This scene was Jesus’ response to the question “who is your neighbor?” We may like to think of ourselves as similarly generous, but we forget that the Samaritan had to actually walk past the injured man in the first place just to be presented with the dilemma.

This might be what Sandel means by an “infrastructure of civic renewal,” a full-bodied public realm that may be more challenging – alas, we don’t all agree about what the good life should be – but one that will strengthen us through the give and take of a wider community. And this can’t happen if we don’t build places to facilitate these interactions.

Framing the Ethics of Metropolitan Growth

2011-01-03T09:15:00.000-05:00

Source: Continuum

I'll come right out and say that Ethics of Metropolitan Growth is a wonderful resource. Robert Kirkman is a philosopher employed in the realm of public policy by Georgia Tech, and he has obviously poured significant amounts of experience and reflection into this relatively short book. Without an ounce of jargon and very little academic name-dropping, it really is refreshing to read. He drills down to the basic questions of what we want out of the place we live in.

[By the way, please don't confuse my effusive praise for any compensated endorsement. That wouldn't be very ethical, would it?]

The book tours through many of the planning and design decisions we make in our communities, revealing the tangled knot of values and intentions that will be immediately recognizable to anyone who's been to more than a few public hearings or read through comment threads from the whole spectrum of websites. Complicated? Sure, yet he neither leaves us awash in moral ambiguity nor sets up any side in particular on the moral high ground, from which grenades of judgment can be lobbed on the opponents below. He simply builds a framework to help anyone sort through their own goals and compare them with the goals of others.

Kirkman's outlook on ethics, in general, is very modest. He accepts that every decision is uniquely determined by the situation it's embedded in, so no single rule can be applied across the boards to supply the right answer to a question. By extension, this means that blame (or praise) is often very difficult to discern. He also refuses to take sides on any of the perennial debates philosophers engage in over ethics. Is it the consequences of the action that counts? Is it the motivation behind the action that counts? Is it the character of the person acting that counts? All of the above, Kirkman says. He can do this, because he isn't really looking for a way to splice right from wrong but simply a way to think about right and wrong.

"The point is to ask critical questions about each view, to examine its scope and its limits. to test whether it holds together and whether it can be put into practice."

To be honest, this does come across as too modest for many topics. Most of us want to be able to conclude that raids on innocent villagers in the Darfur region of Sudan are flat-out evil, rather than suggest that the raider engage in some serious reflection over whether his intentions are internally consistent or not. But the book isn't about genocide. It's about zoning. And how to get to the store. The hushed, cerebral tone is completely appropriate. To the neighbor shouting down a greedy developer or the dude waiving a shotgun at anyone who will meddle with his property, Kirkman says: relax, let's think it through.

Source: Encyclopedia of Earth

So how do we do that? The framework he presents is better than anything out there. I've been taught a technique called the triangle of sustainability, otherwise known in business terms as the triple bottom line, for making planning decisions. I've always found it to be awkward. You're suppose to balance between economic development, environmental protection, and social equity, all under the banner of "sustainability" which then immediately buckles under the weight and collapses into utter meaninglessness. The terms are not well matched up to each other, and there's no real advice for actually making the trade-off (which is really the whole source of conflict). The triangle also doesn't touch on the important question of who should be making the decision anyway.

Kirkman's framework starts with a place-based spin on Aristotle's classic quest for the good life. Since our lives are necessarily shaped by the environment that surrounds us, the issue becomes whether a place either constrains us or enables us to seek the good. We won't all agree on what the good life is, but at least we can have some clarity on how the built environment overlaps with these personal goals. The second consideration is how the identified good is distributed among people. Is it fair? The third consideration is how the identified good is distributed through time. Will it last? Finally, there's the question of process.

Source: Ethics of the Built Environment

Consider the suburban ideal of living in a private, detached house halfway between nature and culture, possessing the best of both worlds. Those who embrace this as their preferred lifestyle could check off each item on the well-being list, but moving to justice and sustainability reveals some difficulties. If others were to follow suit and move into the neighborhood, the balance is upset toward density and it no longer feels so natural. Therefore, you impose regulations to exclude others, which should be problematic if you consider yourself a person who values fairness. And given that land and energy is finite and human population keeps growing, it's not at all clear that this arrangement will last. Do you want your grand-children to also enjoy this life? Here is the underlying contradiction behind the old joke: sprawl and density are the two things people hate most. The point of the framework is to force a resolution between these competing personal goals.

He doesn't let New Urbanists off the hook either, pointing out how often they present a false choice between an idealized traditional town and the most chaotic of modern suburbs. This is unnecessarily limiting. One of the points of engaging in the ethical exercise is to hunt for new possibilities that had previously been ruled out or missed entirely. It should spur creativity and reveal win-win solutions that meet the unstated preferences lurking beneath some of the stubborn public positions we take.

This is a good list, but I can't pass up griping about including mobility as basic to well-being. Most of us value getting to the place we want to go (accessibility), not just moving from one place to another (mobility). Achieving access usually includes mobility, but it also includes proximity, or not having to move very far to get to where you want to go. Although this seems like splitting hairs, setting access as the ultimate goal of a transportation system completely changes how performance is measured and projects are selected. Just had to throw that in.

One of the more intriguing discussions is over the legitimacy category, especially the scale of the decision. We don't act only as individuals, but also as groups. Even the most ardent libertarian will accept that sometimes decisions should be collectively made, even if he'll insist that this be voluntarily entered into (i.e. marriage, joining a Homeowners Association) and an eject button is readily available (i.e. divorce, leaving the HOA). The rest of us are even more comfortable with power vested in a range of organizations, as long as we are represented fairly in decisions the group makes.

As in the example to the left (my own), a similar inquiry can be broken down across different scales, typically matched with different ranges of time as well. Each expression exerts cause and effect on the rest, making it hard to pin-point any one as the ultimate reason for the way things are. Kirkman writes,

"To the extent all of the different ranges of government pull against one another, each asserting its own rights and prerogatives, there is less likely to be an effective response to problems in the built environment. Perhaps most important, there is often a mismatch between the scale of problems and the scale of government authority with the power to address them."

This leads him to point out the lack of effective regional bodies in American politics, not because a region is the optimal vantage point for all planning decisions but simply because it happens to be underrepresented. The issue of affordable housing is a classic regional problem. Almost everyone values a sufficient amount of housing affordable to residents with the range of incomes somewhere in their region, but the same people start having reservations about putting it in their own neighborhood, and few homeowners want to see their own home become more affordable. Approaching this problem with too small a scale, and you get inefficient fragmentation; too large a scale, and you're apt to be insulated from what citizens actually want for their own community. For this particular question, the region seems just about right.

Kirkman is not so much of a philosopher to insist on subjecting every single decision to this level of scrutiny. He acknowledges that even stepping off the front porch, "I could find myself paralyzed, my foot poised eternally above the pavement, unable to take a single step while the deliberation goes on." Practically, we need to use reflexive behaviors and snap-judgments about the built environment. But the reader of this volume is treated to at least of a few hours of time to stand back and reflect on these habits of thought about the places we live in. It's a worthwhile exercise for any of us.

New Census numbers confirm the resurgence of cities

2010-12-15T22:54:00.000-05:00

With the release of the new American Community Survey data on Tuesday, we are now able to see how the fine-grained nature of metropolitan areas has changed over the last few years. This is the first release since the 2000 Census that really provides enough detail to map these changes, and the New York Times has stepped up to the plate with a handy mapping tool. The Census American Factfinder website will get an upgrade in about a month, and mapping will be much easier once that happens.

Poking through some of the data, I haven't been able to discern any interesting new trends that have not previously been identified. But we do see some pretty clear confirmation of earlier predictions, such as those made by Bill Lucy and David Phillips in Tommorrow's Cities, Tomorrow's Suburbs. Taking a look at a number of indicators, they outlined the beginnings of a reversal of the 20th century story of urban decline. Instead they found evidence of city centers prospering and the aging suburbs around them falling into economic decline.

Take a look at these maps of changes in median income by census tracts between 2000 and 2005-2009, courtesy of the NY Times site. Orange is positive, blue is negative.

Charlotte, North Carolina

Chicago, Illinois

Cleveland, Ohio

Columbus, Ohio

Houston, Texas

Indianapolis, Indiana

Louisville, Kentucky

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Washington DC

Atlanta, Georgia

Atlanta offers a particularly striking pattern. During this interval, the median household income in the whole Atlanta metro area grew a reasonably healthy 12.4%. But looking just at urban Atlanta, we see a growth in median income of 44.5%. It turns out that Atlanta's wage growth is being driven almost entirely by wage growth in its core. The suburbs are still a tad bit wealthier in general, but that will probably not last more than a year or two longer.

Then see how this stacks up against the age of the housing stock in the core and the surrounding "suburbs."

Homes in urban Atlanta are, on average, much older than they are in the rest of the metro area. Despite the remarkable wage growth in the center of the metro, there still has been relatively little actual home construction for some reason. Less than 10% of all homes built since 2000 have been built in urban Atlanta (although it's worth noting that this share is up from the low of 5% in the sprawling 90s). Conventional wisdom says that wealthy people gravitate to newer homes, and the houses then trickle down to lower-income households as they are bought and sold over time. But wealthier people are moving to the core of Atlanta despite, or maybe because of, its older homes and neighborhoods.

One last important note: this census dataset doesn't do a very good job showing changes due to the housing market collapse, because the data is sampled from both before and after it happened. We'll have to wait a couple more years for Census data showing the new spatial patterns that emerge from the rubble.

Transit Oriented (affordable) Development

2010-12-09T21:57:00.000-05:00

In case you missed it, the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University dropped a bombshell of a report about Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) back in October. Key finding:

"Rising incomes in some gentrifying [Transit-Rich Neighborhoods] may be accompanied by an increase in wealthier households who are more likely to own and use private vehicles, and less likely to use transit for commuting, than lower-income households."

Ironically, they found that enhancing transit infrastructure can actually make ridership go down (and car ownership up) in the neighborhood it serves. That's a puzzling dilemma that deserves some attention.

TOD advocates have understood for a while that infrastructure and design need to be carefully coordinated to produce successful results. Just plop down a new station without changing any of the zoning codes in advance, and you're guaranteed to end up with a park and ride lot surrounded by much of the same 20th century stuff. There's transit, and there's development, but the orientation part is missing entirely.

Back in 2003, Patrick Seigman published a handy and oft-cited TOD checklist,"Is it Really TOD?"

"A true TOD will include most of the following:
The transit-oriented development lies within a five-minute walk of the transit stop, or about a quarter-mile from stop to edge. For major stations offering access to frequent high-speed service this catchment area may be extended to the measure of a 10-minute walk.
A balanced mix of uses generates 24-hour ridership. There are places to work, to live, to learn, to relax and to shop for daily needs.
A place-based zoning code generates buildings that shape and define memorable streets, squares, and plazas, while allowing uses to change easily over time.
The average block perimeter is limited to no more than 1,350 feet. This generates a fine-grained network of streets, dispersing traffic and allowing for the creation of quiet and intimate thoroughfares.
Minimum parking requirements are abolished.
Maximum parking requirements are instituted: For every 1,000 workers, no more than 500 spaces and as few as 10 spaces are provided.
Parking costs are "unbundled," and full market rates are charged for all parking spaces. The exception may be validated parking for shoppers.
Major stops provide BikeStations, offering free attended bicycle parking, repairs, and rentals. At minor stops, secure and fully enclosed bicycle parking is provided.
Transit service is fast, frequent, reliable, and comfortable, with a headway of 15 minutes or less.
Roadway space is allocated and traffic signals timed primarily for the convenience of walkers and cyclists.
Automobile level-of-service standards are met through congestion pricing measures, or disregarded entirely.
Traffic is calmed, with roads designed to limit speed to 30 mph on major streets and 20 mph on lesser streets."

But is there anything missing?

We're seeing that having a mix of incomes is not just a bonus policy goal, but something woven into the success of a TOD on it's own terms. On the one hand, attracting the professional class is realistically the only way to generate the capital needed to spur substantial redevelopment. But the service-sector workers are the ones who are more likely to forgo car ownership, use transit more frequently, and actually walk to work in that cool, mixed-use cafe. Both the urban design features the architects want and the return on investment the transit planners want depend on a healthy mix of incomes.

Many cities now seek to capture some of the value generated by their public infrastructure investment into land-banked supported affordable housing. Groups like Denver's Urban Land Conservancy carefully anticipate any market changes along transit corridors and grab some of the land before it becomes prohibitively expensive. Then innovative housing models, such as community land trusts, can be used to hold down the value of the land to a level affordable to low- to moderate-income households indefinitely. When these units are built they'll be doubly affordable, in both housing and transportation costs for the residents.

"Density, Diversity, and Design" is still the operative catchphrase, as long as by diversity we mean the people as well as the structures and uses.

Smart growth and fiscal responsibility

2010-12-03T16:18:00.001-05:00

I noticed that Geoff Anderson, President and CEO of Smart Growth America, has come out in favor of the recommendations submitted this week by the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, at least the ones pertaining to tax reform.

"Unbeknownst to most, the federal government plays a massive role in the real estate market by subsidizing and enabling all kinds of development in our communities. With ballooning deficits, now seems like a good time to revisit these subsidies and make sure they are achieving a legitimate public purpose -and not, in the commission’s words, 'creating perverse incentives.'"

The smart growth movement has a long history of focusing on fiscal responsibility, dating back the the Costs of Sprawl published in 1974. This makes sense. Those of us who are too frugal to throw away the ketchup bottle before it's completely drained, cringe at the sight of underused parking lots being given over to weeds while far-off greener pastures are built on. It was all the more frustrating to watch this being done around the country with money that didn't actually exist. "Can we really afford this?" has been asked all along by John Norquist and James Howard Kunstler (albeit in very different ways!), and now finally this question is gaining some traction at the federal level.

The Home Mortgage Interest Deduction stands front and center in all of this. The deficit commission wants to limit the deduction to mortgages of $500,000 or less on primary residences. A healthy debate has been occurring among urbanist blogs about whether the HMID, in general, leads to a dispersal of housing. I'll dive in: I think no and maybe, depending on the region, but that there may be an important inter-regional impact to consider. My take on this is heavily influenced by Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko's book Rethinking Federal Housing Policy (free pdf here).

In supply-constrained regions (like San Francisco), the extra money infused into the housing market by the HMID is swallowed up almost entirely into the prices of existing homes. There are few options for more development, so existing homeowners can simply raise their sale price to account for the buyer's willingness to spend more. This doesn't effect the built environment but it does mean housing affordability is compromised. In fact, the lower middle class takes a double-whammy with this. They pay taxes but don't make enough to use the deduction at all. Then they have to compete in a housing market inflated by the wealthier people who do benefit from the deduction. In these situations, the HMID may actually push people away from homeownership - the exact opposite of its stated purpose.

In elastic housing markets (like Houston or Detroit), the HMID probably does effect the built environment and drive down home prices to some degree. However, Glaeser and Gyourko's research indicates that the deduction is still not inducing much homeownership, because the subsidy is only available to wealthier households who are not usually the ones on the margin between renting and owning. They would buy anyway. Instead,

"A more important effect probably is on the quality of the home consumed, with people living in bigger and better homes than they would otherwise."

They question the wisdom of this tax incentive,

"In the old world of dumbbell apartments in dilapidated tenements, there may have been a case for government policies to improve quality and size. That case seems to much harder to make in today's world of suburban McMansions."

This is why I guess "maybe" for these regions. The quality improvement could mean either nicely-built craftsman bungalows or subdivisions of cavernous and disposable homes, but the HMID itself would not have much impact on the land costs - and that's what determines the spatial distribution of housing throughout the region.

What about the national scale? If the HMID pushes home prices higher in San Francisco and, at the same time, makes houses bigger for the same price in Phoenix, it's not hard to imagine some people who are considering a relocation to choose Phoenix partially on account of this effect. So the HMID may not make a region more sprawling than it would be without it, but it may help redistribute the national population away from places that are condensed to places that historically have been sprawling.

Bottom line: the HMID is essentially a one hundred billion dollar program for giving bigger homes to wealthier households in places that don't have much of an affordability problem anyway, all the while exacerbating the affordability in places where it already is a problem. It's not surprising that a group like Smart Growth America may question whether this is the best use of taxpayers' money in an era of overwhelming deficits.

UPDATE: Here's a recently published study on the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction that puts some empirical meat on the bones I've described here. The Modeled Behavior blog summarizes the results:

"Using national data from 1984 to 2007 they found that the MID did not increase overall homeownership. In areas with light land use regulation they found that homeownership among higher income families was increased, and in tightly regulated housing markets homeownership was decreased for all income groups except the lowest. The effects, both positive and negative, generally range from 3% to 5%. Regardless of the regulatory environment, homeownership among the lowest income group was not affected at all by the MID.

The authors estimate that it each additional homeowner created by the mortgage interest deduction costs the government $53,590, a number they rightly call “staggering”.

An important implication of the findings is that in urban areas, where land use regulations are typically more restrictive, homeownership is likely to be negatively impacted."

Is the Broadacre City Worth Reviving?

2010-11-05T23:24:00.001-04:00

Charles Waldheim of Harvard Graduate School of Design showcases a few historic architectural visions for those who wish to explore integrating agriculture into cities. However interesting this question is, a bright red flag shows up right away in his approach to the issue.

"The categories of agrarian and urban are usually understood as distinct. Across many disciplines, and for centuries, the country and the city have been defined in opposition to one another. But today, in striking contrast, design culture and discourse abound with claims for the potential for urban agriculture. As environmental literacy among designers and scholars has grown, so too has enthusiasm for agricultural production in and around cities. Fueling this trend is rising public interest in food and its production and distribution in a globalized world."

Maybe if it's reiterated "across many disciplines, and for centuries" there's something to it. As I’ve argued on Grist, the urban and the rural should become oppositional again (not to be confused with being opponents - they need each other). Synthesizing both together may have the sort of Hegelian appeal that’s drawn in some academics over the last century, for whom transcending accepted dichotomies is a way of life, but it’s less clear whether having one’s cake and eating it too works as well in the real world. Sprawl, which is the result of the union, happens to be much less romantic when you're parking your car at Target. So, first of all, I don’t know why a simple proposal like growing and distributing food within metropolitan areas has to carry with it such an iconoclastic dismantling of traditionally recognizable forms, but he seems to assume this from the outset.

Frank Lloyd Wright Displaying Broadacre City

Waldheim goes on to review some of the prominent modernist attempts at decentralizing the city from the American Frank Lloyd Wright, the German Ludwig Hilberseimer, and the Italian Andrea Branzi. Wrights’ utopian scheme of the Broadacre City is probably the most familiar. American settlements would be organized around a network of highways and (underground) power lines, with each citizen-farmer tending to his own acre. A benevolent architect would oversee the arrangement of the whole county. Wright considered cities, as they currently existed, debased beyond all possible reform. They could only dissipate into the countryside. Since Waldheim never comes out and declares a value judgment for any of these 20th century proposals, I couldn’t quite tell if he was raising them as fruitful considerations to be built upon or as warning signs, a set of reductio ad absurdum arguments against pureeing our low-density rural and our high-density cities into a mush of placeless mediocrity across the landscape.

A quick background check on Landscape Urbanism suggests that he may seriously be hoping to revive the Broadacre City. When we thought Jane Jacobs had thoroughly shellacked the whole decentralist train of thought back in the 1960s, a few academics have apparently determined that the dictates of avant garde subversiveness actually swing them back into the direction of auto-dependency and vigorous fragmentation of land.

Michael Mehaffy describes, on Planetizen, this curious position,

“The Landscape Urbanists, like many free-market defenders of sprawl, seem to think that sprawl is the result of inexorable forces, and did not arise as a result of comprehensible historical choices – choices that can be understood and thereby, to some extent, changed. Indeed, both groups share a remarkable consistency in their laissez-faire attitudes to what is, and what cannot be changed through concerted public action.

Yet the historical record is clear, in the writings of Le Corbusier and others: sprawl was the result of designers' visions of their future, working with industrialists (or, less charitably, as apologists and marketers for industrialists).

Indeed, the Landscape Urbanists' shallow "understanding" of the forces that generated sprawl seem more aimed at constructing a "grand narrative" that declares that nothing is to be done, except to create art. History, precedent, typology – all of these are irrelevant now, and the only relevant force is their own imagination: "avant-gardist architectural practice, an interest in autonomy authorship."

Add to this the fact that the kind of art under consideration here is one that cannot, as a rule, use the term beauty. The ultimate purpose is to challenge preconceived notions, which works for you if you are trying to establish a niche in the global architectural pecking order. But if you happen to be someone living within the scheme, you may just prefer something beautiful and functional as a backdrop to your life - whether or not it has been done before.

Let's go with pictures. Here’s two places in my region from the last month:

There's an aesthetic presence to each of places that would be lost if they were mashed-up together. Downtown Charlottesville benefits from the vibrancy of human interventions, and the vineyard in Albemarle county from the relative lack thereof.

Frank Lloyd Wright conjured up Broadacre City during the Great Depression, when widespread automobile ownership was just starting to take hold. Perhaps he can be excused for forgetting to draw the acres of parking lots his ubiquitous highways would necessitate, or for undercounting the hard limits, in terms of land and energy resources, his spread-out settlements would run up against. But those of us with the benefit of hindsight should think twice before dusting off the old Broadacre City.

Developing a YIMBY mindset

2010-10-27T22:02:00.000-04:00

Suppose you’re a homeowner in a nice, classic inner suburban neighborhood. There’s a little bit of vacant land down the street from you, and rumors are going around that some developers have their eyes on it for new homes. Your neighbors are looking into their legal options for stopping any construction from happening before it’s too late. They ask you to sign a petition they are bringing to city hall. You hadn’t thought much about this issue before, but now the question is sitting right in front of you with a pen and ink. Do you sign it?

You already like where you live – that’s why you chose it – but you wonder why it couldn’t become an even better neighborhood. You want to show solidarity with your neighbors, but there’s a selfish voice in the back of your head saying: maybe I want a few more homes or even a store on my street. It’s true that the residents of these new homes may be criminals, but that’s not very likely. Most people are decent. Maybe you’ll borrow a hedge-trimmer from them, or they might even host a block party in a few years. You could gain some new friends. You realize that it’s far more likely these new neighbors will call the police on someone breaking into your house than actually try to break into your house themselves.

You know the neighborhood coffee shop where you stop in the morning runs on a thin profit margin, and you would hate to see it close down during an economic down cycle. It occurs to you that a few more homes nearby means a few more daily customers. Maybe with more revenue coming in, your shop could justify serving bagels and cream cheese, giving you more breakfast options. Same goes for your friend’s dental practice on the other side of the street. Economically vibrant surroundings benefit you in a number of ways.

Then there's traffic. That’s the big one. The thought of more cars speeding by your home does give you pause, but this is where you have to consider the long-term effects. The residents of these new infill homes will probably drive less than they would if they were forced out the exurbs, meaning less overall congestion. And the more people who move in the more likely this is to be true. Maybe some will even eschew their car altogether. More people also means more political clout to get neighborhood amenities like better transit, traffic calming, a nice playground, whatever it is your neighborhood wants. And there may be a way to influence the design of this new development to reduce the chance that the new people will bring motor vehicles with them.

But what if you are just odd? Everyone else seems to resist more density, not embrace it. Remember, your property values are determined by what some anonymous future buyer wants in a neighborhood, not what you want in a neighborhood. Maybe you should just join the angry crowd at the public hearing, if only to protect your largest financial investment and keep your options open when it's time to move. But here’s the bewildering paradox: for all the resistance, there’s actually a huge latent demand for walkable urban neighborhoods not unlike what yours could become. New neighbors and services are more likely to help then hurt your nest egg.

Everything points to a yes-in-my-backyard response, and you haven't even gotten into the moral heroics of saving the region from sprawl or allowing more people an affordable and accessible place to live (or recognizing property rights, for that matter). These are just your own wishes for seeing your own neighborhood change for the better.

The Reluctant Suburbanites

2010-10-11T23:16:00.000-04:00

Rod Dreher, a social commentator who writes under the self-titled banner “crunchy conservativism,” shared on his blog an interesting confession about the suburbs. Not interesting because it’s strange, but interesting because it’s so altogether normal. Despite his long-standing preference for, or at times even a philosophical commitment to walkable urban neighborhoods, he thinks he just might choose the opposite kind of house next time he moves. A conventional suburban home. Why?

“Whenever we get ready to buy our next house, it's not going to be in the city -- here in Philly, there's a four percent tax added to your wages -- but in one of the suburbs. I'd be lying if I said schools weren't a big part of it. We can't afford private schools where we live now, and the urban public school in our neighborhood leaves much to be desired, for the usual reasons. … Besides, life with kids is just easier in the suburbs. I hate to admit it, but it's true. The older I get, and the older my kids get, the less tolerance I have for the kinds of things that I didn't much mind when I was younger and in love with city life.”

Looking through the lens of personal morality or rationality or whatever, who can begrudge Dreher this decision? Let me immediately distance myself from those who reflexively cast judgment on suburbia and all who inhabit it like hurling a ball of fire down onto Sodom and Gomorrah. Let the record show, suburbanites are not evil. Yet whatever honesty Dreher reveals in this personal question, there’s still a structural tension in his mind. He can go on to say in an update,

“I think any place that makes you car-dependent is bad for your soul and the community's soul. The way we built suburbia in the 20th century was foolish and destructive in a number of ways. But we are where we are, and the flaws of suburbia don't obviate the flaws of urban life for middle-class families in the year 2010.”

Very obviously, his ideals are clashing with the reality of how things happen to have been built in America.

This is exactly why you should immediately distrust anyone (ahem … Joel Kotkin) who insists that because people are “choosing” to live in the suburbs, in fact, the suburbs are their market choice - that the silent majority has spoken with their actions. As the logic goes: if everyone seems to be buying cookie dough ice cream then it means they must really like it, so somebody should go ahead and make more cookie dough ice cream. It's only the pistachio-craving elites who urge otherwise. Ok, but buying a home is different:

First, every home is a bundled good. You’re not just buying the roof that keeps rain from hitting your head and a patch of grass. You’re buying the educational options for your children, the transportation access to your job, the character of the neighborhood and the status it confers, membership into a jurisdiction (or HOA, for that matter) and the services it provides, a perception of safety, and on and on. You can’t always just disaggregate these parts, like ordering a Soy Mocha Half-Caf latte at Starbucks, at least not if you need to fit it into a middle-class budget. This is why people like Dreher may have to compromise on neighborhood form for, say, good schools.

Which gets to the second point. Real estate supply is always constrained in some way, whether by geography or land use controls (yes, Houston too). Even in metro areas with plenty of vacant land, there’s only one piece of land with that house on it. That’s just the nature of space. No two places are alike. Because the market price responds to these inevitable supply constraints, consumer demand does not always win the day. Middle-class families like the Drehers can be priced out of even preference bundles that seem logically reasonable - like a modest home on a small lot with ok schools near some neighborhood amenities.

Thirdly, transitions in the housing stock move painfully slowly - as they should, because these are really durable goods. But there are other reasons the supply does not hasten to meet new demand. Infrastructure built to support an old model is hard to readapt, vested financial interests try to maintain property values through land use controls, and well-worn development business models seem less risky. As a result of these forces of inertia, a lot of us are living in houses built for the preferences exerted a generation or two ago, maybe even if it was just built five years ago.

Fourthly, homes have traditionally been investments as well as consumer goods. You’re not supposed to just buy what you want, but you also have to buy what you perceive others to want. This can lead to a self-perpetuating bias for the status quo and an over-emphasis on quantitative measures like square footage. But maybe as the investment side fades these days, we can feel more free to exercise our own desires.

Finally, there’s a long-standing mismatch in most metro areas between the resources for social services and those who need them most. Over many years, the demographic categories have sorted themselves out geographically and circumscribed themselves with political boundaries. This is part of the reason for the extra tax burden Dreher is referring to. Many suburban areas have absolved themselves of having to pay this by ensuring that the region’s share of the poor are not within their borders. Making a personal decision to buck the trend usually does carry a cost.

The point, maybe hidden in here somewhere, is that there has to be many Rod Drehers out there, albeit most of them without the time or ability to wrack their brains over the urban planning implications of their choices. For every household choosing the suburbs as suburbs, in all their backyard-grilling, kid-shuttling, lawn-mowing glory, there’s another household who grit their teeth and accept this spatial arrangement because it happens to be the only option available at their price point. This is hardly an argument for building more of them.

Thanks to Architecture and Morality for launching a discussion on Dreher’s housing thought process.

A housing director who understands the full cost of housing

2010-10-06T11:46:00.000-04:00

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan was interviewed on the financial costs imposed on individual families by lower density housing patterns. Ever since the Costs of Sprawl report was published in 1974, the talking points have mostly hovered around the increased fiscal costs to taxpayers of sprawl - you know, the pipes and roads, public services, environmental clean up, and so forth. Lately this story has been filled out with a more precise understanding of what individual Americans pay for this arrangement not just in taxes but in the everyday effort to balance the household budget.

Consumers need full disclosure of transportation costs

2010-09-17T23:09:00.000-04:00

If Walkscore put walkability on the real estate map (it's getting better all the time, by the way), the new online tool Abogo might do the same for transportation affordability. Just type in an address and the home gets placed on a map showing average transportation costs for the surrounding neighborhood and the region. This is what you can expect to pay on a monthly basis if you choose to live here. Seeing this number in black and white may help diffuse the old drive-til-you-qualify myth - that you can find more house for the money the further from the city you move. Living in lower densities may pose less up-front costs per square foot, but the ongoing cost of getting to where you need to go on a regular basis is real and likely much higher. Abogo puts a number on that reality.

The site is developed by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, who have been amassing an armful of data on transportation and housing for years now. Their Housing and Transportation Affordability Index presented this data last spring to tell the story of affordable living choices from a metropolitan area perspective, and the H+T Index site has already been incorporated into plenty of policy discussions, including the federal Sustainable Communities Initiative. Abogo is the next logical step, because it narrows the story to the consumer level where any real change in the marketplace will have to occur. Markets work best when information is available. As a homebuyer, the basic housing cost information is in your face. You literally have to write the check for your mortgage. Transportation costs are more nebulous, hidden in gas prices, insurance costs, saving for the next vehicle, parking, etc. Because of this, they have not typically figured into the home purchasing decision to the same degree.

I wanted to see how I stacked up out of curiosity. As a new homeowner, this tool is less useful to me now than it would have been a few months ago when we were looking, but it does put my home location in context. Abogo lists my block group as $830 a month in transportation costs for the average resident. We happen to keep meticulous budget records, and, from what I can tell, we’re spending around $200 per month for transportation. This includes amortization on the vehicle, which is oldish and no-frills. We’re a family of three – pretty average on that account. The difference probably arises out of the fact that I bike to work, and neither of us use the car every day. When we do drive – to the grocery for instance – it’s usually just a mile or so. Then there’s the occasional out of town trip.

I guess this means we have an extra $630 in our pockets each month just for some of these simple lifestyle tweaks. (Or it could mean the models are out of whack, but I've read through the methodology and it seems sound to me.)

Rational choices adding up to insane results

2010-08-07T14:03:00.000-04:00

I really like Andy Clarkes' pithy description of one of our contemporary rituals:

"Just look at the madness we create for ourselves with the school trip: 20%-30% of morning rush-hour traffic in many metro areas consists of perfectly able-bodied kids being ferried to school by parents with better things to do with their time who won’t let their kids walk or ride their bikes to school because there are so many harried parents rushing their kids to school and the roads and sidewalks around the school aren’t safe. And frankly, many of the kids could use the exercise."

This evokes the old prisoners dilemma situation. Everyone would presumably be better off if children had a safe environment to get themselves to school, but each person is individually worse off if everyone else chooses to drive and their child is the only one stuck breathing the exhaust. Clarke is right in calling this "madness," but it's a particularly insidious form that feeds off of mostly rational individual choices. As frustrated as parents may be with this vicious cycle, especially those who hold to personal principles of environmental stewardship and healthy lifestyles, few will want their own children to be the ones breaking it. So they drive.

I try to remind myself how structural, not necessarily personal, the ethics of transportation and land use are.

The kinds of places we used to build

2010-07-22T23:15:00.000-04:00

I snapped this photo of the Church Hill neighborhood in Richmond the other day and immediately wanted to live there.

From whether you live to how you live

2010-07-20T00:52:00.000-04:00

Science writer Fred Pearce has been taking up a worthy cause over the last year: persuading the environmental community away from a focus on population growth and toward a focus on managing consumption. There is his book on a stabilizing global population (which I haven't read) and then a column in Grist, for yesterday's World Population Day, another in the Guardian, Prospect Magazine, and so forth. Then there's the Daily Show appearance. In other words, the message is being heard.

The basic point he's making is a rebuttal to the Malthusian line of reasoning that has popped up here and there throughout modernity. These are the guys with charts purporting to show all hell breaking exponentially loose as a result of people giving too much birth and not dying enough. Pearce thinks this threat is not only overstated - in fact, global population is likely to stabilize at around 9.2 billion due mostly to economic conditions - but, more importantly, it can divert needed attention from how we in the West are living to the mere fact that people in growing developing nations are living at all. And there are the unethical situations, the draconian sterilization regimes and such, that 'population control' advocates consistently find themselves tangled up in, whether justified or by perception alone, that do the environmental movement no good.

Pearce's detractors think he is creating an either/or dichotomy out of strategies that should be held together. It's the old I=PAT equation from the 70's. To get environmental impact (I), you multiply population (P) by affluence (A) by technology (T). Averting the environmental crisis involves a combination of all three strategies to mitigate the effects (presumably all negative) of humans living on earth. This equation may work in the abstract, but messing with the P variable becomes less than useful in practice for a variety of reasons.

Most importantly, it doesn't scale well. Population control really only makes sense at a global scale, but most sustainability solutions must be forged at much smaller scales. As a case in point, the Smart Growth Manual by Andres Duany et. al. states the very first principle as: "Inevitable Growth." This is because,

"No-growth campaigns, even when successful, tend to last one or two political terms at most, and often serve as an excuse to avoid planning altogether. When such policies are eventually reversed due to housing shortages, growth quickly resumes in its worst form."

Localized or nationalized no-growth groups may frame their message in terms of population stabilization when functionally their platform is anti-immigration. As it plays out, it becomes more about the distribution of the population - just not here - more so than the overall number of people on the planet. Far too often, the no-growth "environmentalists" lock horns with the pro-growth "capitalists" and what you get is a compromised mash-up that pays little attention to the most efficient distribution of land use and resources. Per capita consumption gets lost in the brawl.

Secondly, managing consumption is more within our realm of control as individuals and as communities than population growth is. To be effective, environmental rhetoric has to find that balance between actionable concern and despair. Like a blackjack player who's played the hand too far, once you've reached assured doom the rational response is to "eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die." Why should I remember to turn the lights out when I leave the room if the world will be crushed under the weight of billions of people I will never meet? At least in the West, this approach merely externalizes the problem removing it from the realm of potential actions I may take.

And although population is expected to stabilize, there's no end in sight for consumption. As another Brit George Monbliot writes,

"People breed less as they become richer, but they don’t consume less; they consume more. As the habits of the super-rich show, there are no limits to human extravagance. Consumption can be expected to rise with economic growth until the biosphere hits the buffers."

This trend helps explain why studies have shown a correlation between the countries with the fastest growing populations and the slowest rates of carbon emission growth. Shifting blame to population growth in the global south is not only counterproductive, it's not true at all.

As I see it, urbanists are environmentalists who are unashamedly pro-human. Cities are machines for energy, land, and water efficiency and people are their lifeblood. The fact that the global population is rapidly urbanizing, having just passed the 50% threshold, is cause for optimism about our potential to live within the earth's means at some point. An urbanist's ideal vision is not wilderness everywhere, but cities throbbing with human vitality here, productive rural areas over there, and pristine wilderness yet again over there. Humans are neither the parasites of the earth nor the paragons of the ecosystem. Every human life is good (population) but humans do not always perform good actions (behavior) - that is where the focus needs to be.

Great streetviews

2010-07-16T16:08:00.000-04:00

Allan Jacobs Great Streets is the definitive guide to good street design. As I'm working my way through it, I'm compelled to find the examples in the book on google streetview to get a closer look and explore the surroundings. The hand drawings and plan-view diagrams in the book are classic, but you can't beat the online tour for detail. Of course, I'm still logging these places away until I actually get a chance to visit some of them in reality.

Residential Street: Roslyn Place, Pittsburgh

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Still Great Medieval Street: Via dei Giubbonari, Rome, Italy

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Grand Manner Boulevard: Paseo de Gracia, Barcelona, Spain

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Las Ramblas, Barcelona, Spain

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Great Residential Boulevard: Monument Avenue, Richmond, VA

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Central Commercial Street: Motomachi, Yokohama

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I'd love to add more, but this may already be too intense with the bandwidth.

Following the gas tax storyline

2010-07-13T21:11:00.000-04:00

New buzz about the federal gas tax is in the air.

A USA Today report found that American motorists are now spending the lowest amount of money per mile to maintain infrastructure since the advent of the automobile.

"Americans spent just 46 cents on gas taxes for every $100 of income in the first quarter of 2010. That's the lowest rate since the government began keeping track in 1929. By comparison, Americans spent $1.18 in 1970 on gas taxes out of every $100 earned."

This interesting finding leads the Washington Post editorial board to connect the dots and call for an increase in the federal gas tax rate, which has not been touched since 1993. While almost every group interested in transportation policy supports some sort of levy on driving like this, it still is a tough sell with the general public. A choice comment on the editorial illustrates this well:

"Since when must citizens pay for the "privilege" of driving on OUR roads? Should I thank Obama for allowing me to drive to work today?"

Reading between the lines, I can only assume the gods of asphalt and rebar have gifted this regular American citizen with motoring freedom, and the government should just get out of the way. What he might not realize is that the Highway Trust Fund is almost bankrupt, and the tab is being picked up by general revenues (read deficit) this year - $19.5 billion, as it was last year - $7 billion, and the year before that - $8 billion. So, this gentleman need not thank Obama, but he might want to thank his grandchildren for the privilege of his drive to work.

Where the Highway Trust Fund is headed (in billions) from Congressional Budget Office.

One interesting twist on the public perception front is that new polls have shown that Americans are more receptive to a gas tax if they can be assured the revenues would go toward reducing climate change. It seems that there is a sizable segment of the population that agrees, in theory, that externalities from driving should be paid for, but worries that more funds would just set us back on the course of business-as-usual highway building. Check out the full 19% spread in approval of a simple .10 gas tax and the same gas tax with dedicated environmental goals.

Survey Results from a gas tax poll, June 2010 from Mineta Transportation Institute

To wrap this up, Brookings' Robert Puentes offers an astute reaction to the Washington Post call for higher gas taxes. He's principally concerned with this trend:

Graph compiled from FHWA Traffic Volume Trends 2000 - 2010

Vehicle miles traveled plateaued between 2006 and 2008 and we seem to be dropping off the other end of the curve. With Americans driving less and less every year (and driving more fuel-efficient vehicles when they do), pinning the bulk of infrastructure revenues onto gas taxes alone is boarding a sinking ship - while jabbing more holes in the hull all the way down.

Puentes,

"So while near-term gas tax increases are necessary on the federal and state levels just to stay afloat, we need to be thinking about a range of other options to raise transportation revenue such as pay-as-you-drive charges, tolls, congestion fees and -- most significant -- a carbon tax."

Two helpful lectures

2010-07-06T23:11:00.000-04:00

Neither of these are brand new, but they're new to me.

Ezra Klein calls attention to a TED talk given by Ellen Dunham-Jones on retrofitting the suburbs with urbanism:

And Doug Farr speaks to Case Western University more generally about sustainable urbanism. This is a full-length lecture, not as polished in production as the TED ones, but still a very good introduction to Farr's work as a green architect and writer.

Learning from Fulton Mall

2010-07-05T16:29:00.002-04:00

The Fulton Street Mall is a pedestrian street that runs through the heart of downtown Brooklyn. A new book Street Value by Rosten Woo, Meredith Tenhoor, and Damon Rich follows the retail strip from its budding growth along transportation corridors, to the mid-century urban renewal schemes, and finally to the current era of gentrification/revitalization. The authors recount the many efforts to "fix" the mall launched over the last fifty years, but this book asks two simple questions:

1. Is it broken?
2. Fix it for whom?

The department store was king in the early years, anchoring the retail street with the kind of opulence that sold social identity along with cuff links and trousers. Fulton Street, conveniently situated at a major transit hub, became the destination for white middle-class Brooklynites. However, this all changed with the demographic shifts and rise of the suburban retail malls. Black and Puerto Rican shoppers began to outnumber white shoppers, and before long the whites who did show up would come in through the back and avoid Fulton altogether.

The department store owners were nervous and began to search for ways to reinvent the shopping street to meet their picture of success. This included closing it down to private vehicles and implementing some basic streetscaping. The interesting twist, however, is that Fulton was throughout this period, and remains to today, an incredibly popular and highly profitable retail corridor. In fact, it's still by some measures the third most financially successful commercial street in the country, with ground floor rents commanding over $200 a square foot. The national chains have stayed away because the rents are too expensive. The authors suggest that the perpetual calls to "revitalize" Fulton may be more situated in particular cultural values than anchored to actual numbers,

"Fulton Mall continued to be judged not by the literal value of the goods sold but by the cultural value that the mainstream applied to them, thus trapping its public image as a failure. Given these terms, what could success look like?"

Rosten Woo surmises that the real motivation behind the various revitalization schemes has not been to create a more successful retail environment, but rather to create a public amenity attractive to the new affluent white residents moving in to the brownstones and condos around it. This situates the Fulton Mall right in the middle of the heated Brooklyn gentrification debates, only it's shoppers not tenants who are being threatened with displacement.

To be perfectly honest, the street, as it stands, really does break a lot of the design principles planners usually work with. There are buildings with historic character that are covered with false facades. Many of the signs seem to be trying to scream louder than the one next door. The stadium-style lighting does little to define the character of the place. There's few places to sit and congregate. Upper floors are boarded up, and many of the property owners are reportedly absentee. Not much for mixture of uses. The Business Improvement District is in the process of overhauling the streetscape and addressing many of these concerns.

In other ways, Fulton performs very well by most planners' criteria, with an incredible diversity of small-scale shops that have grown up organically around each other, some of the best transit access there is, and plenty of interesting transparent ground floors to keep the attention of pedestrians. There are a fair number of street trees. These are all assets the BID does not have any intention of doing away with.

But the question this book raises is a very searching one: are these values that we typically espouse as good placemaking culturally contingent or are they widely shared across cultures? Just as Robert Venturi attacked the standard negative aesthetic reaction to suburban strip development in the 1970's, Street Value asks how we can be learning from Fulton rather than trying to change it. From this perspective, attempts to improve a place may really have a subtext of shifting power and ownership from one group to another - in this case from blacks traveling in from Bedford-Stuyvesant to the whites moving into adjacent Brooklyn Heights.

I'm personally less willing to travel all the way down Venturi's path toward cultural relativism. One hint of a more unified aesthetic is a survey of shoppers administered by the Pratt Center for Community Development researchers a few years ago. One of their findings:

71% of our respondents considered Fulton
Street Mall, “an important place that could be improved”; a further 17% considered it, “an important place that should continue just as it is.”

Many of the problems mentioned above were also cited by the mostly black shoppers given the survey. The authors of Street Value may go too far in their assumptions that the black community wants Fulton to stay as it is. Even the construction cones are praised as interventions positively contributing to Fulton's grittiness by keeping it in constant flux. Language like this is out of sync with the instinctive tastes of any culture. It's probably better to fix things quickly and move the cones away as soon as possible, I would think. It might not be too naive to envision a place like Fulton Mall serving both of the communities around it in with a consensus of some values and a kind of ad hoc compromise for those values that do diverge. It need not be a zero sum game.

Quibbles aside, the book does drive home a few good, general lessons.

Historic preservation is more than just restoring pretty buildings; places get embedded with social meaning and the collective memories of those who use them. Nostalgia is a strong emotion that should be accounted for in any planning decision.
The scope of gentrification reaches beyond housing and into the changes that take place in public and commercial spaces.
Design is probably less important than designers make it out to be. Any physical space can be successful with enough access and prior social momentum from a community.

A garden block proposal

2010-06-28T07:34:00.000-04:00

It looks like one of the main take-aways from the CNU 18 conference is something being labeled agrarian urbanism. Fast Company is calling it the "new new urbanism" and Treehugger has described the notion as the next phase in the evolution of this 30-year old movement. Andres Duany, in particular, has been pushing pretty hard in this direction for the last couple of years. Briefly, the idea is that walkable neighborhoods could be intentionally structured so that food production is integrated into the physical form and the lifestyle of the inhabitants. In other words, it is a synthesis between urban and rural.

Of course, this new new urbanism is really no newer than the old new urbanism was (but that's fine). One of the primary motivations behind Ebenezer Howard's Garden City was to connect working class households with a viable food supply to relieve some of their financial stress. He landed on the number twelve dwelling units per acre as the magic density for self-sufficiency with affordability, and he worked out a form of common land ownership to help it along. Christopher Alexander thought that something more like a tenth of an acre was necessary to supply vegetables to a family of four. He had plenty of practical, timeless advice for arranging an urban living space accordingly. More recently, some architects have been using the word rurbalization to describe this sort of synthesis. Having recently passed through the grad school circuit myself, I can attest to a strong interest in food systems among new graduates.

I think these are good trends. Local food systems should inform urban design and vice versa, but I'm not sure the new developments being modeled have been able to find this synthesis without swallowing one side with the other - specifically, subsuming the urbanism into the bucolic landscape. This seems to be the case with Southlands in British Columbia and Serenbe in the exurbs of Atlanta. Kaid Benfield has this to say about these "farming is the new golf" developments,

"In theory, these "new towns" are great - self-contained entities providing walkability, efficiency, and all the services of a community within the development. So, their proponents (nearly all of whom profit from them, one way or another) claim, it is a good thing to build them almost anywhere. In practice, though, the nearby once-remote locations soon become filled with sprawl, in no small part because of the initial development, and the theoretical self-contained transportation efficiency never comes. They become commuter suburbs, just with a more appealing internal design than that of their neighbors."

So can this vision work? Or is building agrarian urbanism like serving a glass of hot cold water? I'd like to play with this a little and consider what it would look like if we followed Duany's vision but flipped it on its head. Instead of embedding hamlets within a rural landscape, the garden block embeds pockets of agriculture within the urban landscape. It is not a stand-alone community but just another gene sequence to be spliced into the DNA of existing inner suburbs and cities.

Start with the standard grid. It can be found all over North America, but the following sketch is based on the 340' by 340' block in the Fan neighborhood of Richmond. Cobble together property ownership for the whole block into something like a community land trust. Households would own their home individually but share ownership of the land with the other 38, in this case, units on the block. Certain commitments to planting and maintaining the garden, either personally or through payment, would be built into an HOA contract.

The exterior of the block functions as in any other urban area. The public streets are activated by the fronts of the buildings and streetscape features, and the full range of transportation access to the rest of the city is available. The interior, on the other hand, is devoted to the more constrained social scale of the block community, and the structures serve as a wall protecting this garden area. Enclosure is necessary to provide a degree of privacy, to protect produce from theft and vandalism, and to keep animals from wandering.

By the numbers, this block allows a density of 15 DUA while keeping 28% of all land for growing produce. This is not food self-sufficiency, but I'm personally not too worried about these kinds of absolutes.

Here are some of the pieces:

Mix of Housing Types. One might expect retirees and young families alike to be attracted to growing their own food, but there is a broad range in housing needs between these two groups. Allowing a range of housing types could facilitate lifecycle diversity, as well as allowing those from different income levels to share the same space. The larger homes include their own growing plot delineated by a short fence.

Shared Resources. The shady northern side of the condo buildings is a place for the utilitarian functions. Gardening requires many resources that can be shared by the whole block. A tool shed is accessed from the side by the glass elevator. A water cistern collects and stores runoff from the buildings above. Chicken coops are lined up against the building. Although chickens need sunlight, some shade could benefit them as well. Maybe they could be on wheels. The composting bins are directly in front of the block's dumpster, so households can deposit their organic waste while taking out the trash.

Childrens' Area - The playground and "kindergarten" is in full view of the whole grounds. Children have their own 24' by 31' plot to grow whatever they choose. A row of fruit trees creates a sound barrier for the adjacent rowhouses. Being within the enclosed communal area allows parents a certain assurance of safety.

Green Roof. I know these things are expensive for now, but in this case it's integral to the whole concept. Connected directly to the rest of the grounds by an outdoor elevator, it expands the growing area measurably. Less tangibly, the views to north into the block help create a sense of internal cohesion, and the southern views to the rest of the city a sense of external connection.

Greenhouse and Car Sharing. A greenhouse is one of the most efficient uses of solar energy, and it's necessary in most climates for extending the growing season. A single 4100 sq. ft. greenhouse should be sufficient to meet the needs for the whole block. There is off-street parking available at a rate of roughly one space per three units. The relative paucity of spaces may be compensated for by car-sharing. For areas with greater transit accessibility, this lot could be substituted with two homes.

Corner Store. The corner store is the public interface of the block and a neighborhood shopping hub. Possibly, excess produce and supplies from the garden could be sold here. The upper floors could be leased out to offices or any other reasonably compatible use.

John Nolen: New Ideals in Planning

2010-06-22T16:58:00.000-04:00

I've resumed my practice of reading old (read free) city planning books from the early 20th century to try to mine some insights that may still be useful. Hopefully, this slightly editorialized summary of John Nolen's New Ideals in the Planning of Cities, Towns, and Villages from 1919 may be helpful for anyone who is curious but doesn't have the time to read the whole thing.

Probably more than anyone else, John Nolen was the voice of the early American city planning establishment. He studied under Frederick Law Olmstead Jr. in one of the first graduating classes at Harvard, sat on the board of more professional organizations than you knew existed, and compiled an impressive resume of plans from around the country. New Ideals is both an amalgamation of the basic planning platform of the time and a passionate plea to carry it into action. What stands out to this reader, at least in contrast to the current climate, is the almost uncontrollable optimism written into every page of the book. Just a taste,

"Almost anything is possible through the cooperative effort of such men as are now permanently pulling together toward definite ends in the civic and commercial organizations of scores of cities that might readily be named."

I haven't heard exuberance like this since the brief period between Obama's election and his inauguration, and especially not from hardened planning and development types. Nolen really did believe he was part of something moving history unequivocally forward.

The case for thinking before acting

The gist of Nolen's defense of planning can be boiled down to simple financial terms. The requirements imposed upon cities by modernity would need to be met somehow. Either local governments proceed through trial and error, leaving a trail of expensive mistakes in their wake, or they think carefully from the outset and get it right the first time. Nolen was fully aware that it was the local Chambers of Commerce, in the end, that would be making decisions for their communities, and he knew exactly how to speak to them.

But his argument is also founded on two more core values: local collectivism, or the ability for a community to make decisions cooperatively for the common good, and local individuality. Nolen bemoans the growing homogeneity of urban landscapes throughout the country and urged community leaders to search for a distinctive identity, whether in nature or culture, and assert it through design. Today, we may view these values as clashing with his more fiscally conservative sensibilities, but many in the business class of his day were equally motivated by a deep sense of civic responsibility. Even when reaching the loftiest heights of idealism, Nolen seems fully aware of the influential audience he was addressing.

Everything is connected to everything

Nolen was what we might call a systems thinker. Here he is on transportation,

"The component parts of a problem cannot properly be separated ... Whenever possible, the entire problem should be considered and attacked as a unit, and the development of the system as a whole should entail the consideration of all transportation routes."

and on parks,

"Just as a city needs a street system, a school system, a water system, a drainage system, and systems to provide for its other municipal activities, so it needs a comprehensive, well-distributed, well-developed system of parks and pleasure grounds."

His goal is to position the newly-formed Planning Commissions as the experts who could see through these moving parts to the "organic whole" and pull it all together. Although staff would aid in data collection and writing, the commissioners themselves are not professionals (compensation is optional, he says) but citizen-activists. They ought to represent the full spectrum of community members - even laborers and women. Although Nolen's writing is a far cry from the full participation that has been strived for since the 1960's, there is a certain sense of real democracy interspersed with some of the admittedly heavy-handed prescriptions.

The primacy of streets

Nolen understood that the street design is the main physical framework of a city. Once they have been laid out, development arrives, and they are very difficult to change. Future widenings for the sake of circulation should be avoided as much as possible, and the widths should vary according to their hierarchical function. He still holds on to the old notion that wider is always better. He simply thinks over-building local roads is too expensive. He then indulges in the perennial planners' debate between the boring, systematic grid-iron and the interesting, albeit somewhat confusing, radial pattern of streets.

"From the point of view of traffic facilities, as well as city attractiveness, the radial system has proved the better one in use"

But in the end, he settles for a hybrid of the rectilinear pattern with radial avenues emanating outward - presumably, once again, to save costs.

Nolen has the habit of treating every individual topic as if it's the single most important topic of all, neatly combining his overall giddiness with his comprehensive attitude toward planning. So street railways are "the chief agencies in promoting progress in cities." Parks are "the most necessary and valuable antidote to artificiality, confusion, and feverishness of life in cities." Zoning is "as far-reaching and important as each of the others, but it is singular in this point, that it costs the city nothing to put it into execution." If you're a mover and shaker in post-Great War society, no matter what interests you have Nolen is squarely (and sincerely, I believe) on your side. This new city planning may be a science, but it's also a coalition.

Learning from Europe while being America

For most of the book, he cites example after example of the British and the Germans getting things right. Forced to rebuild after their various wars, the Germans "achieved success in the replanning of towns for modern life." The English Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909 gets a special mention as a model policy to be imported across the Atlantic.

Meanwhile, American cities were stirring up trouble. New York City decimated their natural features and topography with a rote grid, and everyone else followed suit. Land subdivision was carried out on a strictly proprietary basis, and individual landowners would suddenly find themselves abutting a mismatched street configuration on the neighboring site. Lack of foresight for future public facilities required the destruction of existing structures and payment of higher land values when the need was eventually determined. Cities in America have "but limited powers as compared with cities of Europe." He even insinuates that the poor condition of many neighborhoods may start draining its residents of their patriotism.

Just as all of this starts to feel a little nagging, he turns things around at the end and appeals to a uniquely American art of planning,

"The promise for the future is bright in this field of city improvement in the United States, because we realize that change in our cities, if they are to be permanent and far-reaching, must spring from the people and be at bottom and expression of the life of the people. We do not want mere experts' cities unless those various experts - engineers, city planners, landscape architects and architects - show themselves capable of expressing and interpreting the best impulses and highest ambitions of business men, of citizens, of wage earners, and of fathers and mothers and children."

And

"When we are stirred in this matter, we shall not be content with a bright promise of cities, nor with visions, dreams, nor even paper plans. We shall insist upon the adoption of methods that will bring definite and satisfying results."

Mixing the art and science of city improvement with American democracy, empiricism, and tough pragmatism is a winning combination, as far as Nolen is concerned.

Learning from the early family-friendly suburbs

2010-06-14T22:53:00.000-04:00

I ended the last post alluding to ways to make the built environment appeal to young families. Now I'll pull from some of my father's experiences growing up in Ridgewood, New Jersey to illustrate features of what I would consider a family-friendly suburb. Today, these kinds of places are so rare most younger families are completely priced out of them (and many were priced out then too), but the fact that they have existed in the past means they are technically possible to build.

The downtown of Ridgewood, near the New Jersey Transit station. Flickr Credit: Here in Van Nuys

Of the 600 students that my father attended elementary school with in Ridgewood, he recalls roughly 90% of them walking or biking to school every day. If you lived within a mile of the school, this is what you did. You also went home for lunch. The remaining students were mostly residents of a new subdivision built in the mid-1950's. These homes were so isolated from the rest of town, the school district had no choice but to use buses to bring them in. Of course, the rest is history. By the time my generation rolled around, walking to school in the suburbs was a rarity and we all bused. These days, mom drives the kids in and accompanying a child to school on foot is a good way to get yourself fined in some school districts.

The walk to school stats are a good litmus test for a family-friendly community. It has to be fairly compact to yield over 500 kids within a mile radius. The streets have to be well connected to allow a safe route away from the main auto thoroughfares. There's probably sidewalks everywhere, which is the case in Ridgewood. Growing up, my father remembers stopping by a neighborhood convenience store on the way home from school. Another neighborhood store next door gave out licorice in exchange for empty soda bottles. Uses were mixed somewhat.

My father doesn't remember any neighborhood parks, but the limits of the town were within easy reach for him. A wide swathe of undeveloped land and a creek separated his town from Paramus to the east, creating a distinct boundary and sense of territory, at least for a 10-year old. An abandoned trolley track had been used as a de facto walking and biking trail through the town, which made it easier to get around. As long as he was in by dusk, there were a wide range of places to explore.

The center of Ridgewood organically formed around the transit station to New York City, and not much of the development my father knew of as Ridgewood lied more than a mile from it. This is where he went for church, grocery shopping, clothing shopping, the library, the pool, and the weekly YMCA classes. Even the transit station had only a small parking lot attached to it, preserving the valuable central space for use by humans to do all of the things humans like to do.

Is the Ridgewood my father remembers a suburb? Yes, it's a suburb of New York City. But in contemporary planner-speak, it's also a transit-oriented development surrounded by walkable neighborhoods. It really is a town in it's own right. In many of the respects mentioned here, this living environment is as far removed from the late-20th century suburbia as it is from the dense Manhattan its connected to. Most families will probably not choose to live in high-rise condos anytime soon, but if there were places like Ridgewood more widely available, I can imagine many making this choice.

Do young families prefer suburbs?

2010-06-10T22:48:00.001-04:00

A couple has a kid, moves out of their condo in the city, buys a house with a big yard, sets up a swing set in said yard, loads up the ~~minivan~~ SUV with backpacks and shin guards, and never looks back. This is probably our dominant life-cycle narrative in America, but does the actual data of housing preferences bear this out. Is this what we want?

There's generally two ways to figure out what people want: see what they do and see what they say they want. Both are tricky.

A new report from Statistics Canada saw what young families did. Between 2001 and 2006, many of them moved out of the Canadian cities of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver into the surrounding suburbs. A full 27% of first-time parents made the move out the city and very few moved in. While this is definitely statistically significant, we can't jump to the conclusion right away that these families have a preference for suburbs. As family researcher Clarence Lockhead explains,

“I think a lot of what we’re seeing in these patterns are really associated with housing costs and availability of affordable homes. I think that’s a really big factor.”

This is supported by the fact that young families with incomes over $100,000 do tend to live closer in, perhaps because they can afford to be homeowners in high-amenity, walkable neighborhoods. Any market choice reflects both supply and demand. It may look like families are demanding homes in the far-flung suburbs, but it could also be that there is a supply shortage of affordable, urban or inner suburban homes suitable for families. Or a little of both.

Another study just published in JAPA saw what families say they want. Researchers evaluated housing preference surveys conducted throughout the Southwest. They asked questions about trade-offs. Short commute or spacious yard? A Mixed-use neighborhood with things to walk to or a purely residential street? One finding:

"The presence of children in the respondent’s household is linked to less interest in small houses with short commutes, less interest in walkable mixed-use neighborhoods, and less interest in transit-oriented neighborhoods."

The correlation between families and conventional suburban homes was not huge, and it didn't apply at all in some states, but it still does raise our question again. It looks like families are more likely to say they want to live further apart from others, whether they are currently able to do so or not.

Yet here there are complications too. Although the survey tried to force trade-offs, it's impossible to fully construct the multiplicity of real life with questions simple enough be answered in a few seconds. For instance,

"Among the Southwest respondents who embraced a small house and short commute, 39% nevertheless said they preferred to live in a strictly residential (rather than mixed-use) neighborhood, and fully 61% of them said they preferred a low-density, auto-dependent neighborhood."

The researchers note that this is probably not a realistic bundle of preferences, but they were unable to truly force the decision between these ideals.

There's also the difficulty of parsing necessity from contingency. What factors are inherent to a type of physical form and what factors happen to be associated with it in Post-WWII America? For instance, good schools may come to mind when the respondents imagine a low-density scenario, but there's nothing about the density itself that has anything to do with educational quality. It's just how things happen to have shaken out in recent U.S. history. On the other hand, a large yard really is logically connected to lower densities, and lots of walkable destinations are only possible in higher densities. If what we're interested in is just the physical form, it's not easy to pull apart the conscious or subconscious prejudices that have become attached to that form in our culture.

I've hopefully been successful in shrouding this whole issue in a cloud of confusion. Or I could just admit that young families might be more likely to want lower densities, single uses, less connected streets, etc. and point to David Alpert's nice post about incorporating shared play space for children into neighborhoods. There's certainly more that can be done design-wise to make urban neighborhoods attractive to families.

We now know more about the built environment and transportation

2010-06-07T08:39:00.004-04:00

According to Reid Ewing and Robert Cervero, the most intensely researched topic in urban planning is "the potential to moderate travel demand by changing the built environment." Just within the last decade there have been dozens of published studies asking this question from many different angles, using different methodologies. So this dynamic academic duo has decided to do the rest of us a favor and consolidate these studies, pull out a common thread of measurement between them, and weigh the variables against each other. They did something like this in 2001 when there were 14 studies to look at. Now they've compiled results from more than 200 and included about 50 of these in their meta-analysis. I think it's fair to say this is the closest we've yet been to answering this complex question.

The study is published in the Summer 2010 Journal of the American Planning Association, and there are already a couple of nice discussions on the internet from Laurence Aurbach and Kaid Benfield. I have to say that one of the things I appreciate about the planning field is the real interaction between the academic world and practitioners. Working professionals and activists really do read this stuff, and most of the journals make every effort to eschew jargon and ask questions that have relevance.

Here are the land use variables that are traditionally considered in relation to travel behavior:

The D Variables	Summary Description
Density	Concentration of a variable of interest (population, dwelling units, activity centers etc.) per unit of area
Diversity	Number of different land uses in a given area.
Design	Quantifiable characteristics of the street network, such as density of intersections, connectivity, or streetscape features.
Destination Accessibility	Measures the ease of access to common trip destinations, usually in terms of distance
Distance to Transit	Shortest route along the street network to nearest train station or bus stop

The impact that each of these variables has on travel behavior, whether it's vehicle miles traveled or mode choice, is referred to as elasticity. It's "the percent change in the outcome variable [like vehicle miles traveled] when a specified independent variable [like density of dwelling units] increases by 1%."

There are two more D's mentioned that have little to do with the built environment. They are Demand Management and Demographics. Demand Management is mostly parking supply and pricing, but I imagine any economic factor could be considered under this category. Economic triggers factors can be considerable, especially if fuel prices are taken into account, but I understand how this is beyond the scope of what they are doing. Demographics are contolled for in all of the studies in the meta-analysis.

The following chart presents the findings in ranked order from the most significant factor to the least in achieving three outcomes. The variables are color-coded according to the categories defined above.

	Reduction in VMT	Increase in Walking	Increase in Transit Use
1	Distance to downtown	Intersection/street density	Distance to nearest transit
2	Job accessibility by auto	Distance to nearest store	% 4-way intersections
3	Intersection/street density	Jobs-housing balance	Intersection/street density
4	% 4-way Intersections	Land use mix	Land use mix
5	Land use mix	Job within one mile	Household/population density
6	Job accessibility by transit	Distance to nearest transit	Job density
7	Distance to nearest transit	Commercial floor to area ratio
8	Household/population density	Household/population density
9	Jobs-housing balance	Job density
10	Job density (no effect)	% 4-way Intersections (negative)

Some additional points ...

None of these variables are gamechangers, so don't be a physical determinist. Even the most significant factor, the effect of street density on walking, has .39 elasticity. This means a 10% increase in connectivity would lead to a 3.9% greater probability that someone will choose to walk. That being said, these figures are cumulative, so adding the effects together can make a notable difference. There are no solutions to anything, only means for incremental improvement.

The findings seem to show that density itself is not as important as some make it out to be. As they put it, "almost any development in a central location is likely to generate less automobile travel than the best-designed, compact, mixed-use development in a remote location." Absolutely. Although I understand how, in the absence of coherent regional planning, an architect would want to do the best she can with the site she's given. Who knows, maybe in the future it will be the next "central location"? Still, even if it takes cleaning up a brownfield site or working delicately with the neighbors, infill seems to always be more effective.

One of the limitations of elasticity is that it measures relative change only. You could be on the verge of a tipping point, and a tiny little nudge would lead to big outcomes, but these numbers would not tell you that. Can those tipping points be identified empirically and built into the same model?

A big win for connectivity, which is great because this is something that can actually be done. Some cities and states are starting to write codes to ensure a robust street network in new developments. Even more important is retrofitting connections into existing networks. Hopefully these results will spur localities to look for those odd scraps of land and consider punching a street or multi-use trail through them. Although cycling was not considered in this analysis, I can attest from personal experience that street connectivity is the single most important factor for enhancing safety and convenience. Cyclists would much rather take an alternative back route than ride along a busy road with bike lanes.

More fun with grids

2010-06-03T22:15:00.002-04:00

Just ... can't ... stop ... measuring ... grids. Here's some stats on the wide distribution of grid shapes and sizes pulled from around the U.S. (although weighed more heavily toward the Mid-West and West where uniformly gridded cities are more common).

Variety of American Grids

2010-05-25T11:10:00.001-04:00

I wanted a nerdy planning-related poster for my wall (other than the periodic table of city planning), so I made one this week. I scoured Google Earth and measured that quintessentially American grid in about fifty downtowns around the country. Of course, there are variations in block proportions within downtowns, but I tried to pick cities that had more uniformity than average to come up with a single prototype. Here's an image of it, or shoot me an email if you want a poster-quality version. (I personally don't have the web space for it right now).

Exploring these grid proportions messed with my preconceptions. I assumed the more western and newer cities would have larger grids than the more eastern and older cities, but no obvious pattern is discernible to me. Mobile, AL, settled by French colonists in the early 18th century, Tulsa, OK, a 19th century farming town, and Anchorage, AK, a 20th century frontier town, all share the same 300' x 300' internal block (street widths vary a little). What compelled the early settlers of these towns to choose, say, 220' over 440' lengths? I can't say I have any idea right now.

Manhattan is also a curious story. According to Witold Rybczynski, the expanding nation unequivocally chose the 1811 Commissioner's Grid of New York City over L'Enfant's baroque-influenced plan for Washington, DC as the model for new towns. While this is surely true, it begs the question: why are New York's long and skinny blocks not found anywhere else in the country? You would think at least one group of western settlers would seek to emulate their home town of New York more exactly.

I'm leaving aside the interesting value questions around block size. Ever since Jacobs, conventional wisdom has held that smaller blocks are preferable for walkability, but urban designer Fannis Grammenos challenges this somewhat in a recent Planetizen post.

How might rail shape Charlottesville?

2010-05-22T08:56:00.002-04:00

When Amtrak introduced new rail service between Washington DC and Lynchburg last fall, they hoped to meet an annual ridership projection of 51,000. Virginia DRPT was ready to start investing in intercity passenger rail, and this was the initial pilot project. Supporters were hopeful, but the less than ideal schedule for the daily train made some nervous.

Now, actual ridership has blown these projections out of the water. Halfway through the year, the service had already exceeded both revenue and ridership goals for the whole year. As more people become aware of the new transportation option, monthly ridership growth is set to accelerate. March was the best month yet.

This exciting news prompts me to speculate about where this trend may be leading. So I'd like to engage in a little futurism here, some hypothetical storytelling. If I turn out to be right, I can point to this timestamped post and claim prophetic powers, and if I'm wrong this all will just float off into blogging oblivion where it belongs. So here goes ...

After the three-year pilot project is complete, DRPT decides to implement another daily trip leaving Charlottesville around 8:30 in the morning, as the Piedmont Rail Coalition is now recommending. Fares can be lowered on both services, because the high ridership levels easily offset the fixed fuel and labor costs of operation. With the help of expanded federal funding in the next Transportation Reauthorization bill, rail alignments are updated throughout the corridor, allowing for increased speed and reliability. All of these improvements together kick off a virtuous cycle of substantial growth in ridership and more options.

Charlottesville is able to tap into new economic possibilities just pushed over the tipping point. AMTRAK installs Wi-Fi on all services, allowing workers to be productive during the trip back and forth. Firms from DC decide to open a smaller office in downtown Charlottesville, where they can tap into the labor market and establish a connection with the University. Some consulting firms base themselves out of Charlottesville completely. Many employees work remotely from Charlottesville, traveling to the main offices in DC a couple times a week, and businesses like OpenSpace thrive by catering to them. Tourism grows, as urban residents in DC realize they can get away to Charlottesville for a weekend without needing a car. The Landmark hotel gets built. At the same time, stronger connections are made between the downtowns of Charlottesville and Lynchburg.

A major debate arises over what to do with the existing train station. One side says the old station on West Main is no longer large enough to meet demand for parking, and a new station needs to be built in Albemarle County north of town. This would serve as a park-and-ride for automobile commuters throughout the region. The other side insists on expanding the facilities in place. They advocate building a parking garage and greatly bolstering local transit options to grant more access to the station without a car. This goes on for many years, and in the meantime the market responds by spurring a large amount of building activity right around the station. City planners carefully zone the area to encourage attractive transit-oriented development. Before long, many people start walking to the station anyway, and AMTRAK decides to keep it in the center of town.

The Charlottesville metro area, which had started as a rail town and then became a highway town, is gradually transformed into a rail-highway hybrid town. New tracks a laid between Richmond and Staunton, allowing additional east-west connections. Motorcars are still used to access much of the existing uses outside of urban areas and concentrated corridors, but a robust regional network of transit is also built that spreads out from the core train station. Walkable hubs are grown around stations throughout the US-29 corridor up to Hollymead/Airport and Ruckersville, and westward to Crozet. All of the new compact development relieves pressure on growth in the rural areas, thus the primary political challenge shifts from stopping sprawl to maintaining adequate affordable housing in the growth areas.

Planning for adaptive post office reuse

2010-05-19T22:54:00.000-04:00

Mixing public and private uses in St. Louis' Old Post Office. Flickr: Kodamakitty

The author of the blog Connecticut Yankee Out West has raised an intriguing question. Recognizing an art deco post office for sale in Eugene, Oregon, he notes:

"Unfortunately, the United States Post Office is going to sell hundreds of buildings like these because the USPS just isn’t going to need as much capacity going forward. Yet, these structures are strikingly unique and immediately recognizable symbols of our civic culture."

He wants to know who's looking ahead of this transition to make sure these important buildings not only remain in existence but continue as civic institutions and public amenities. Post offices have tended to be toward the very center of cities in prominent locations, and in some very small towns the post office practically is the city. The best use of the space into the future probably will not be sorting and distributing physical letters and parcels. But what will it be?

Because post offices are federal property, their resale is governed differently than just any other historic building. The federal General Service Administration is in charge of the process, called the Real Property Disposal progam, and they have the obligation to offer the sale to other government agencies, non-profits, or homeless use before putting it out for a general auction. According to the GSA, about a third of the $3 billion in sales has, in fact, been transferred to such "public benefit" uses.

Ever since reading his posts, I've been rummaging around for some post office adaptive reuses that have maintained public use in some way. Here's a few I've found:

The Old Post Office in St. Louis was redeveloped over the last decade by a public-private partnership and is now used as Webster University, a state Court of Appeals, plenty of retail and food service, some non-profit offices, and other offices for public agencies.
Of course, there's the Moynihan Station. With a boost from stimulus funds, the old Farley Post Office will be redeveloped into a train station in New York City.
A former post office in Natchez, MS was converted into an African American History Museum in the 1990's.
A former post office in Devil's Lake, ND is being used as a heritage center and for special community events.
A former post office in Charlottesville, VA is in use as a downtown library.
This is a little different, but the U.S. Courthouse and Dallas Post Office will retain the post office on the ground floor and reuse upper floors for a hotel, office, or condos.
The U.S. Post Office and Courthouse in Brooklyn had always contained both USPS and courts, but in the 1990's the building was renovated to take space away from the shrinking post office and reallocate it to the expanding courts.
A couple of former post offices are being used for school administration offices, but I can't find any reuses as a school itself (probably because of tight requirements for school design).

There has to be hundreds of other configurations that have been attempted. Are there any other creative ideas out there?

The future does need to be paid for

2010-05-16T01:40:00.002-04:00

This month's Atlantic is a special Future of the City edition with a number of thought-provoking features and essays. Before getting into the actual material, I just have to say ... it's interesting how cities have always been associated with the future, and countryside the past. We picture the gleaming skyscraper and the quaint red barn, when, in reality, today's farms are as tricked out in chemicals and high-tech machinery as a heavy pharmaceutical plant and cities are a repository for layers and layers of cultural artifacts. Still there's something about cities that stoke the imagination, and countryside a nostalgic sense of comfort. This seems appropriate to me.

Anyway, Chris Leinberger writes a follow-up to his landmark The Next Slums? piece from 2008. As a real estate developer, he knows that the old model of building housing as quickly and cheaply as possible on the metropolitan fringe is no longer viable. On the other hand, building the kinds of walkable urban neighborhoods that are in demand (and in short supply) is difficult to do given the infrastructure and local regulatory systems currently in place. To roll with this paradigm shift, rail lines have to be built and zoning has to be reformed to open up the ensuing development potential.

His solution for doing this is simple,

"Transportation drives development, so development can and should help pay for transportation"

To me, Leinberger's argument has echos from 19th century economic reformer Henry George, only told in reverse. George noticed an injustice in the way the benefits from public improvements were distributed throughout society. Selected landowners, because they possess a natural monopoly over a particular geographical space, are able to capture much of the value of new infrastructure, parks, and other public amenities, when they have not put in the labor to produce this value. Essentially, they are just lucky or well-connected. George advocated a land value tax to redistribute the benefits back to the community, and Leinberger is saying the "landowners" should be the ones paying for the improvements in the first place.

Financing transit with private capital will certainly be complicated. In the days when a streetcar line could be extended out into fresh greenfields, it made sense of the fields owner to foot the bill for the transportation in order to bring people to his land. But retrofitting a rail system on top of existing development requires a much more complex financial calculation and enough buy-in from numerous property owners, some of whom are more interested in redeveloping than others.

Still there's lots of smart people thinking about this financing strategy. Here's a 2008 report from Reconnecting America, Capturing the Value of Transit. Another from the Victoria Transport Policy Institute in 2009, The Value Capture Approach To Stimulating Transit Oriented Development And Financing Transit Station Area Improvements. Finally, a 2009 report to the Minnesota Legislature from a group including David Levinson, Value Capture for Transportation Finance.

Portable shelter for Grandma

2010-05-13T18:22:00.000-04:00

Credit: MEDcottages

A really cool idea out of Blacksburg has just won over the Virginia General Assembly. It's called the MEDcottage. Kenneth Dupin, a Methodist pastor, devised a portable housing unit for elderly people who need special medical facilities. Instead of being sent off to a nursing home, grandma or grandpa can set themselves up in their children's backyard with a high-tech fully equipped temporary shelter. It would be leased for about $2000 a month, and the family can ship it away once it's no longer needed.

I don't believe much of the design work has been completed yet, but there are all sorts of ways to make these units attractive. Modular and adaptable housing is getting a lot of attention from architects these days, and I'm sure there are no shortage of designers who would like to hook up with this new company. Trailer homes are certainly not what they used to be.

In urban and suburban areas, Accessory Dwelling Units like this are often severely regulated by local zoning ordinances, written to appease neighbors who do not believe they fit the character of their living environment. But the MEDcottage may be different. Because the Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination against necessary provisions for disabled individuals, Dupin makes the case that local zoning codes may have to allow them. At any rate, the General Assembly's decision will supersede local codes, at least under certain conditions. This may open up a door of opportunity for creative densification, diversification, and intergenerational bonds in neighborhoods throughout the state.

Learning from Savannah

2010-05-12T19:24:00.000-04:00

Eric Orozco has been mining some valuable lessons from the City of Savannah for over nine months now, making his blog series one of the longest-running and insightful I've read. My only experience with Savannah consists of a three-day stay in an historic district Bed and Breakfast, filled with hours of wandering and eating and more wandering. I came away with a fascination for the city and the intangible sense of magic everyone attributes to it. Eric's posts help me put words on some of this.

I don't have much to add beyond attempting a general summary of the posts thus far, in hopes they will keep coming!

(By the way, read the posts and expect to be drawn from Savannah into meaty philosophical dialogue and then back again.)

1. Odonomia and the Garden of Good and Evil. When it comes to shaping cities, we like to classify our approaches as either form-based or use-based, when in reality this taxonomy breaks down on a number of levels. Most of the activity of real city building happens "illicitly," that is outside of the neat taxonomy we envision and apply in advance to a place. The unique wards of Savannah are an example of a rigid order that exhibits a wonderful diversity in both form and function in it's application throughout the city. I can't resist the money quote:

"It is as if the Platonic pattern from the mind of Oglethorpe (conceived for reasons very different than Savannah's needs today) was dropped into a fecund soup and allowed to copulate with the wonderful imaginations of every square district."

2. Savannah's Kind of Blue. Miles Davis, like the city itself, creates beauty by improvising on theme.

3. The Invisible Signs of Savannah. One of the aspects of Savannah's attractiveness is what it lacks: street signals and signs. Compared to a similarly connected street grid in Charlotte, a much lower percentage of Savannah's intersections have signs or signals. Instead, this city allows "the intimate scales of its fine-grain environment to dictate traffic control."

4. What the Savannah Square can do better than the Roundabout. While roundabouts have been a trend over the last few years for regulating traffic flow at intersections, the Savannah square is a similar alternative better suited for multimodal and urban settings. This is a brilliant post with diagrams that just needs to be read in it's entirety. The conclusion,

"Consider employing the Savannah square-flow strategy as smarter way to handle traffic flow while promoting a density-efficient land use mixture and bike and pedestrian friendliness. I would only use a roundabout when at least one of the intersecting streets (preferably both) is a thoroughfare or high-volume traffic street. Otherwise, I'd prefer to square it."

5. Admiring a Beauty. Like the medieval penchant for systematic order, the street grid of Savannah holds together nicely while creating a truly immersive experience for those traveling through it.

6. From Savannah to the Burbs: The American Art of Subdivision.The American suburb presents a puzzling question. How did a country that praises non-conformity and individual expression end up with an overall landscape of sameness? And what drives us to cluster around people like ourselves? The large-scale repetition of form has deep roots in American culture, and Savannah itself has its origins in a strictly egalitarian subdivision of land. Every settler was given a "tything" of 10 lots of 60' by 90' each, compactly arranged in town and a 45-acre allotment parcel for farming outside of town.

Savannah was built specifically to reproduce itself in a cellular fashion at a regional level,

"Carefully inspecting the arrangement of the 45-acre farm tracts, however, one can discern that they were arranged in a manner to encourage the future formation of hamlets and townships in the countryside, suggesting a fractal strategy of expansion for the entire colonization scheme of Georgia."

7. "Not For Us But For Others" -- The Humanitarian Roots of America's First Subdivision. The original planners of Savannah must have had Chistopher Wren's London in mind as they laid out the street pattern. The British Enlightenment led to forms of city planning that were open to various possibilities of adjustment yet tightly geometric at the same time.

One difference between Savannah and the contemporary subdivision is the altruistic intent that the original trustees committed to while engaging in design. The town was explicitly for the poor and religiously persecuted.

"We would not be exaggerating to claim that Savannah is veritably America's first planned "habitat for humanity". The city was founded to give down-and-out British folks a second chance at life and prosperity."

The original Savannah had no center. Each of Oglethorpe's wards stood alone, and no hierarchy existed between them, keeping with the underpinnings of England's nascent movement toward liberalism. Interestingly, Oglethorpe himself never accepted a permanent lot, preferring to reside in tent directly along the river. He truly wanted it to be a city "not for us but for others."

8. John Locke's Savannah. The form of Savannah is not only shaped by the liberal ideals of equal opportunity for everyone, but also the everyday give and take of trades and services inherent to a dense urban marketplace. This type of human interaction should make us cautious about criticism of the suburbs on the basis of appearances of homogeneity and segregation. The real driver of community is not merely proximity of homes to each other - some urban areas can be as stratified as any suburb - but the existence of real people who serve as connectors across social groups. These connections can be surprisingly active in many of today's suburbs.

Following the lead of Savannah can help planners retrofit existing suburbs and, at the same time, help our urban areas become friendlier to the demographic conventionally attracted to suburbs. The city can teach us how to mix equal economic opportunity with truly vibrant community.

The setting of a food revolution

2010-05-10T21:38:00.007-04:00

After getting recommendations from three friends independently I felt obliged to check out Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution (It's still on hulu until June 5th). Definitely well worth the 4+ hours. You've got the drama of clashing personalities and the group hug scenes perfected by a decade of reality TV, but this show simply has the traction to carry real change beyond the scope of the show itself. I've decided it's not actually reality TV at all, but a documentary of a grassroots movement in progress.

Could this be a revolution that is televised after all? (that is, if you can look passed the irony of sponsorship from Healthy Choices pre-packaged dinners). The prize selection committee at TED seemed to think so, and Jamie Oliver's acceptance speech is a good introduction to what he's up to.

Pullman Square in Huntington, West Virginia. Flickr Credit: Sarah.WV

What I'm interested in is the deeply place-based strategy he has taken. He recognizes that eating well is not only an individual choice, but it's also profoundly influenced by the structure of the community you find yourself in. Do the markets stock healthy food at reasonable prices? Can you get to them? Do schools serve genuine food? Is there an overall culture of self-reliant food preparation? Seeing the problem this way naturally lends itself to picking one place, Huntington, West Virginia, getting every local institution on board, building enthusiasm and the synergy of community action, and finally creating a model city.

This movement needed a physical space to launch from. It needed Jamie's Kitchen (now Huntington's Kitchen) to be, not only a useful space for gathering, but an architectural expression of the whole idea. It is noteworthy that he chose the very center of the city, right off the beautiful Pullman Square on 3rd Avenue, for the location.

When I drove across the country the summer before last, I made a point to ask everyone I met this question: "where is the very center of your town?"

View Larger Map

In some towns, people would be puzzled by the whole concept. There was nothing to latch on to. Maybe the Walmart, but probably not. In other towns, the response would be immediate, and it was always some place they were proud of. It was a public living room for the whole community. I stopped briefly in Huntington but unfortunately never had a chance to talk to anyone. I have a feeling they may have said Pullman Square if I had.

Jamie also knows that public space is the lifeblood of any grassroots movement. He closed down the street out in front of the kitchen and set up forty tables for one big cooking lesson. He organized a flash mob in the central gathering area of Marshall University to drum up interest from students. Once again, the center counts. The airwaves and cables could get his message into every private living room and every driver's seat, but the true source of energy happened when crowds united in one place. The fact that this occurred outside on public streets meant the whole city was the arena.

Right, I know the show is really about food. But it's also about place. These are the questions that I'm naturally asking while I watched. How can we physically structure our communities so that someone like Jamie can come in and have a fighting chance at starting a revolution?

Two responses to the terrorism question

2010-05-04T17:26:00.000-04:00

Both the New York response and the Washington response to security threats just happen to be on display in the same week ...

The New York response to terrorism has been "see something, say something." These were the words that the T-shirt vendor who alerted a mounted police officer of the smoking SUV told reporters as he stepped into a taxi cab. As Fred Kaplan points out in Slate, this is not unlike the message of the great New Yorker Jane Jacobs.

"Jane Jacobs observed that sidewalks and their users are "active participants in the drama of civilization versus barbarism" (by "barbarism," she meant crime) and that a continuously busy sidewalk is a safe sidewalk, because those who have business there—"the natural proprietors of the street"—provide "eyes upon the street...

This may explain why busy areas like Times Square aren't attacked by terrorists more often. The crowds make them tempting targets: lots of people mean lots of potential victims and subsequent media attention. But those same crowds—especially the regulars, who are always looking out on the street—make an attack harder to conceal and, therefore, to pull off."

The Washington response is the opposite. It is to keep people out of sensitive areas entirely. This is what happened yesterday when the decision was made to close the front doors of the U.S. Supreme Court. Now the public will have to enter through a secured underground entrance to the side. Justices Breyer and Ginsburg were not amused.

"To many members of the public, this Court’s main entrance and front steps are not only a means to, but also a metaphor for, access to the Court itself.

This is why, even though visitors will remain able to leave via the front entrance, I find dispiriting the Court’s decision to refuse to permit the public to enter. I certainly recognize the concerns identified in the two security studies that led to this recent decision (which reaffirmed a decision made several years ago). But potential security threats will exist regardless of which entrance we use. And, in making this decision, it is important not to undervalue the symbolic and historic importance of allowing visitors to enter the Court after walking up Gilbert’s famed front steps."

I'm not trying to suggest that one is better than the other. How would I know? Times Square is a target because of its many people, and the Courthouse is a target because of its symbolism (and the Justices themselves). It makes sense that different questions would yield different answers.

American [new urbanist] Makeover

2010-05-04T13:02:00.000-04:00

Excellent video series. It's a viral self-fundraising campaign that depends on building support as more episodes are filmed. I'm looking forward to its continuation. (ht Smart growth America)

"American Makeover is a six-part web series on new urbanism, the antidote to sprawl. We need backers - please make a donation to help greenlight this series! Episode 1 was filmed on location in Atlanta, Georgia and Glenwood Park, a new urbanist influenced neighborhood near downtown Atlanta."

Urban places and authentic marketing

2010-04-29T21:41:00.003-04:00

This month's Harvard Business Review features a story on the many businesses that are deciding to move back to the city. A few decades after the great push to relocate to the suburbs, the tables have turned as the business climate in general has changed.

What's intriguing about this story is not simply the locational decision-making, but how the urban and the sprawl environment lead to very different ways of doing business. For example, take the standard retail or food service operation. If you've set up shop in sprawl, you have a matter of seconds to make your potential customer want to stop and come in. This is simply because he is traveling 45 miles an hour and experiencing the outdoors through a windshield.

This forces you to decouple the marketing from the actual customer interface and reconnect it back again through branding. The hope is that Joe driver has built enough of a positive experience through television commercials and other ads beforehand that they all come rushing back to him the moment he sees your brand hoisted on a sign above the highway. This process tends toward economies of scale in a big way, hence the dominant position of franchises and multinational companies.

The customer interface in an urban environment has the ability to be more prolonged and textured. The proverbial window shopping experience piques the imagination of customers by putting actual products right in front of them. The window display can be changed, so the experience changes with time. The chalk board announces the special of the day. Perhaps there are smells wafting out from the bakery, or the familiar clanging of glasses alerting the customer to the bustle of a restaurant inside. The retail environment can spill out onto the public realm and beckon passers-by to ease themselves in, something William H. Whyte called the "sensory street." Most importantly, the customers themselves are on display, either siting outside at cafe tables or browsing the goods in the window. People are attracted to the hub-bub.

The whole urban marketing experience is more relational, playing off both the merchant-client relationship and the client-client relationships. Branding may always be important for establishing trust and connecting experiences to each other, but in cities that function as cities it's not the only game in town. This arrangement allows local businesses to vie head-to-head with the major franchises.

The article concludes:

"In many ways, New Urbanism and the trends it captures are part of broader recent changes businesses already accept: the shift to an experience economy, consumers’ and employees’ demands for greater corporate social responsibility, an emphasis on work/life balance, and the importance of interaction between companies and their customers. The demographic aspect is simply the newest part of an ongoing conversation. Companies that recognize the larger trend, however, and seize the opportunities that it presents will contribute to its social impact—and may gain a competitive advantage in the process."

The H&T Index is not "muddled" at all

2010-04-28T09:43:00.000-04:00

Wendell Cox thinks he has poked a hole in the Housing and Transportation Index from the Center of Neighborhood Technology:

"The H and T Index is particularly susceptible to misinterpretation by ideological interests contemptuous of America's suburban lifestyle, who would use public policy to force people to live in higher densities. While the H and T Index reports data at the neighborhood level, it is not a neighborhood index. However, the H and T Index does not compare neighborhood housing and transportation costs with neighborhood incomes. Rather, the H and T Index uses the metropolitan median household income."

Cox thinks a true "neighborhood index," as he phrases it, would grab the income number for each block group instead of fixing it for the whole metro area. This would be an accurate portrayal of the housing and transportation cost burden being felt by the current residents of the block group.

However, Cox's alternative quickly descends into absurdity as a measure of affordability, which is the question that an affordability index is naturally asking. For instance, it's quite possible that Cox would have to consider the Beverly Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles County to be affordable, simply because the preponderance of it's uber-weathy denizens happen to have plenty of money to afford living there. We all know that different income groups separate themselves out according to their ability to pay - indeed this is the definition of exclusivity - but the point of the affordability question is to ask how the rest of us would fare in the particular location. Someone finds a job (income is now fixed) and wants to know where within the metro area she can afford to live. That's the question being asked.

All of the peer-review mechanisms we have don't share Cox's problem with the methodology. From the CNT report on the index, Penny Wise Pound Fuelish.

"The H+T Index represents a body of research spanning 20 years that has evolved from location efficiency research in the late 1990s to its vetting in 2008 by transportation experts and subsequent publication in the Transportation Research Record, the Journal of the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies."

Perhaps Cox is so diligently watching out for those "ideological interests contemptuous of America's suburban lifestyle" that he doesn't want to see even accurate data give them any crazy ideas. Besides, as Cox sees it, automobiles are about to get a whole lot more affordable for Americans anyway:

“Transportation costs will be reduced in the future by the far more fuel efficient vehicles being required by Washington.”

I'm tempted to just let this quote sit as a beautiful testament to the desperation of Cox's ideological position, but I can't pass up the chance to hand this one over to Michael Lewyn.

"In other words, don't worry about Americans being impoverished by the cost of a car for every man, woman, and 16-year old in the House: the technological miracle of fuel efficiency will save us.

Now, this argument has a grain of truth: new EPA regulations will require the average vehicle to get 35 miles per gallon by 2016, so cars will become somewhat more fuel efficient if next year's Republican Congress or the federal courts don't get in the way. But even so, the benefits of fuel efficiency may be canceled out by gasoline price rises - and even if they don't, gasoline costs comprise only about 30 percent of vehicle-related expenses. In 2007 the average household spent $2384 on gasoline and motor oil, $3244 on car purchases, and $2592 on other vehicle-related expenses ...

Tomorrow's Wonder Cars of the Future will drive the problem away."

Libraries as food desert oases

2010-04-26T19:43:00.000-04:00

NPR reports on a clever strategy being rolled out in Baltimore to provide fresh food to underserved neighborhoods. It's being dubbed the Virtual Supermarket. Two library branches have been selected in urban locations where the nearest grocery store is basically inaccessible to anyone without a vehicle. The city public health department helps residents place food orders online using the library computers, and the bag of groceries is delivered the next day from a local grocer.

This program is up and running with the help of a $60,000 federal stimulus grant. According to the NPR story, there are currently a couple of dozen subscribers. This number may grow as people wade into the technology.

There's so much to appreciate about this innovative approach to food access. Delivery costs are held down, because the the orders are aggregated for each day and condensed into a single drop-off point. Libraries get to broaden their horizons a bit, a trend Wendy Waters discussed a little while ago. Some more assistance with computers can only help knock the digital divide down a notch. And, of course, more people get to enjoy the nutritional food at fair prices most of us take for granted.

The department plans to expand Virtual Supermarket to other sites with additional programming, such as cooking demonstrations. Apparently, other cities are watching all of this very closely. Philadelphia has long been known for being on the forefront of food access solutions, but it looks like Baltimore is finding it's own niche.

The following map is from Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. It's their first swat at measuring food deserts in the city.

Kunstler is not really the face of smart growth

2010-04-24T20:48:00.000-04:00

Kunstler and O'Toole meet for the first time. Source: Brown PTP

I just watched a debate held last week at Brown University between James Howard Kunstler and Randal O'Toole entitled "Building America: who should control urban growth?" Halfway through, I began to wonder whether the debate organizers had taken two separate presentations and spliced them together with Adobe Premiere. They were not only not actually disagreeing (which is helpful in a debate), but they weren't even starting with the same questions.

Kunstler, with his characteristically vivid language ("Phoenix is going to dry up and blow away. We're done with that"), spells out the inevitable collapse of the entire American energy and financial system, while O'Toole compares charts of data for federal subsidies of various modes of transportation. The closest Kunstler gets to addressing O'Toole's (rather flamboyant) charts was simply to point out how easy it is to lie with statistics. That, and the fact that it's all coming to a crashing end. Case closed, I guess.

I have no interest in throwing Kunstler under the bus, but I want to stress that he has to be considered in the right context. He's a writer and provocateur. He's not at all a policy wonk nor a strategist. He's not even particularly interested in solutions. I like the way Eric Jacobsen characterized him a few years ago, as prophet, straight out of the Old Testament, proclaiming "repent for the kingdom of god is near." I would no more expect a detailed economic forecast from Kunstler than I would from the ancient itinerant Ezekial in sackcloth and ashes. A different mode of communication altogether.

Highway proponents like Randal O'Toole recognize Kunstler's eccentricities and are happy to characterize him as the face of smart growth. The fact that Kunstler is intensely critical of government planning and dismissive of larger cities doesn't seem to matter. In a recent blog post, O'Toole told his critics to "get their noses out of Kunstler’s biased diatribes," as if the writer himself were issuing marching orders to the hordes of planners and activists from his command post up in Saratoga Springs.

Suburban proponents have a lot to gain from casting Kunstler in this mastermind role, which helps explain why John Stossel keeps trying to get him to appear on his Fox Business show. A message of impending doom, whether true or not, is not particularly winsome to most Americans. Keep in mind that Kunstler's primary argument these days is not so much that compact, walkable neighborhoods are more desirable than sprawl, but that sprawl will be unavailable to us whether we prefer it or not. Telling an American they cannot have something makes us want it more, which is not necessarily a bad trait if it's coupled with hard work and ingenuity. This deep-rooted optimism does not work in Kunstler's favor.

Secondly, his writings are a veritable gold mine of quotable nuggets for anyone seeking to cast the central smart growth argument as aesthetic in nature, something opponents do all the time. Jarrett, from Human Transit, explains this tactic well,

"The standard move in these works is to treat environmental concerns as though they were aesthetic ones, and then take a long view in which these aesthetic arguments look narrow and culturally contingent, as aeshetic arguments always do. This move -- ridiculing environmental judgments as though they were aesthetic ones -- is sadly common these days."

Find a quote calling all suburbanites clowns, or something equally unfair and derisive, and then earnestly defend these Americans' right to have their own housing preferences. Nevermind public health, social equity, environmental constraints, fiscal feasibility or any other reasoned arguments. The other side is only right-brained impressions and personal preferences, as O'Toole recently summarized the debate.

Finally, Kunstler's bluster, which is part of the show, doesn't always play well when it comes to actual policy debates. Calling his opponent a "rogue in the services of evil enterprises," as he did in a podcast prior to the debate, may get a laugh out of many of us but it also blurs the lines between entertainment and serious problem-solving. This comment also dives head first into the genetic fallacy. Even if O'Toole receives funding from highway interests, his arguments really need to be evaluated on their own merits. I know I'd be cool if someone wanted to pay me to say something I already believed.

For a truly fruitful critique of O'Toole, I would direct you to two places. Austin Bramwell, writing in the American Conservative, fires some posts back and forth with O'Toole. Bramwell's basic point is that the number of regulations and subsidies that mandate sprawl and motoring far outweigh those that encourage compact development and walking. He questions O'Toole's highly selective market approach. Or check out Matthew Yglesias's similar take. Although a progressive, he's fully willing to put on the libertarian shoes for the sake of debate. These are the kinds of responses that O'Toole's followers, at least those who are at liberty to have their own opinions, are likely to find more persuasive.

I still think Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere are classic polemics. Kunstler can turn a phrase wonderfully and boil down the essence of an observation into a pithy and humorous line. He's just as witty in his weekly podcast with Duncan Crary. He's a showman, who once wrote that "an audience doesn't hunger for the truth so much as authenticity. They know the truth can be slippery."

In the spirit of niceness, I'd like to end with a great passage from Home from Nowhere,

"I feel an obligation to paint the landscape of my time, so I often paint the highways with cars on them and even roadside monstrosities like McDonald's and Kmart. I especially like the contrast between the artificial light of the electric signs and the natural twilight in the background. The result on canvas is oddly beautiful, but of course what's left out is the roaring traffic and smell of exhaust fumes. A few years ago, I was painting a McDonald's with my easel set in the bark mulch bed of a Burger King parking lot across the highway. I was well underway when the manager bustled out and barked, "that ain't allowed here!" I dared him to call the police. I would have loved nothing better than to be arrested for painting."

But this is not my bible. I don't think it was intended to be.

Necessity is the mother of vegetation in Havana

2010-04-21T18:01:00.001-04:00

If you want to know how society might function in event of a serious economic downturn, Cuba is not a bad case study. When the Soviet Union imploded and no longer had the wherewithal to prop up an economy across the world, Cuba was thrust out on their own with very few options for trade with the outside. These dire circumstances have compelled local communities and individuals to devise creative and efficient ways to meet their own needs.

The movement of urban gardens in Havana seems like a natural outgrowth from this. It answers the question of how to help provide food for four million people without abundant oil supplies and transportation infrastructure.

A 2008 BBC segment sings the praises of Havana's urban gardening movement:

Although the basic need to eat certainly inspired these projects, the farmers are quick to point out all of the auxiliary benefits as well: the beautification of the city, a rallying activity for the community, and jobs for locals. The gardens range from green spaces squeezed tightly between walls on an urban lot to suburban small farms in close proximity to homes.

Church-based transit oriented development deemed legal

2010-04-19T13:25:00.005-04:00

An Arlington, Virginia church, First Baptist Church of Clarendon, may have just paved the way for religious organizations to become more active players in affordable transit-oriented development. Last week, a U.S. District Court judge threw out a First Amendment lawsuit against the church's subsidized housing development, which claimed that their partnership with the county violated separation of church and state. This was only the latest in a series of attacks lodged against the development by affluent nearby residents, who claim the eight floors of apartments above the remodeled sanctuary ruin the character of their neighborhood. The proposed 116-unit addition (70 subsidized units) happens to sit one block from the Clarendon metro station.

My intention here is not to get into the legal details of the case, but just to point to the clear green light the church was given. The basic allegation was that Arlington County's support for the project was a veiled attempted to prop up a struggling church with public money. Barry Lynn, of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called it "secular salvation." The judge, however, disagreed. He determined that providing highly accessible affordable housing is, in fact, a public purpose and there is nothing unconstitutional about the government partnering with a religious organization to meet these goals. It is relevant that all funds for the sanctuary remodel and preservation of the steeple did come from the church itself.

The NIMBY vs. TOD story is all too familiar, but the involvement of a religious organization in the process adds an interesting twist. If this development does come to fruition, and it is expected to by 2011, it will represent a win-win-win situation for housing advocates, the county government, environmentalists, and the church itself. The church gets to leverage it's valuable property assets to reinvigorate itself, while contributing toward it's mission for social justice at the same time. A number of families get a decent home right in the thick of everything they'll need. The rest of the community gets more density near transit and all of the attendant social and environmental benefits.

Church's have a long history of incorporating subsidized housing on site, going back to the ubiquitous parish house that was built to allow staff to live right on premises. The cooperative strategy modeled in Clarendon can be a wonderful opportunity to renew this tradition, especially for older congregations who occupy important urban sites but currently don't have the parishioners to fully utilize them. Adapting church preservation with new construction can breath new life into the building and mix uses that are quite compatible. I'm looking for this kind of partnership to spread to communities around the country.

The paradox of smart growth

2010-04-12T23:31:00.000-04:00

Kaid Benfield's blog for NRDC has probably been the most consistently insightful of all of my regular reads. I still recall the first post I read back in the summer of 2008, on the carbon emission benefits of density. Prior to getting hooked on his blog, I was mostly interested in the the urban form for its benefits to community - think Robert Putnam - or for purely aesthetic reasons. The environment was always a part of it, but Kaid's persuasive and passionate reasoning helped shift the focus of my priorities on this blog. I'm sure I've stolen an idea or two over the last two years.

Images of Rockville's Twinbrook Station from NRDC Switchboard blog

I bring all of this up now, because his two recent posts are an excellent introduction to his blog. I'd encourage anyone who has not stopped by to head over there now. No reason to finish reading this post.

The first post presents the paradox of smart growth among environmentalists, something he undoubtedly encounters on a regular basis.

"Environmental impacts will occur with development; to limit them, we must concentrate them, and this can mean increasing them in some places. This is what I call the environmental paradox of smart growth. Only if we understand the paradox can we address it. Only if we address it can we really create better places in which to live, work, and play – and surely that, not just lowering pollution numbers, must be our real goal."

(why are you still reading here? It's all just quotes and paraphrases at this point)

What is needed is density, diversity, and design. Approaching smart growth from an overly analytical perspective misses those intangible qualities and details that make a place truly livable. Kaid is always mindful of the fact that people have to want to live in the places that are built. The whole game is off if nobody actually lives in the whatever fully sustainable development we've imagined.

The second post seeks to address this design question. Rather than spelling out the "top 10 principles of good urban design" or something, Kaid simply provides some examples of recent compact developments that have also been beautiful. It's a refreshingly optimistic take on smart growth.

Gardeners and urbanists unite

2010-04-11T18:27:00.002-04:00

Michael Pollan is known for writing about food, but his first book still stands as a classic gardening autobiography. One of the enduring premises of Second Nature (and an earlier NYT feature) is his eloquent description of the strangeness and pervasiveness of American lawn culture: those sheer-cut acres of the same Kentucky Bluegrass layering the ground from coast to coast. Today, there are burgeoning lawn reform movements among gardeners to question the convention.

Research has measured the total acreage of lawns in the U.S to be about 40 million (and growing), making turf grass the number one irrigated crop in the country. Although yards may literally be green, there is very little environmental benefit to them. The compacted soil functions as an impervious surface for stormwater run-off, and grass under six inches does little good for erosion control. The species monoculture of most lawns creates habitat dead space. A large chunk of household water use goes to lawn upkeep. Although they may sequester some carbon, the methane released by trashed grass clippings cancels a lot of this out. And the big one is the pesticides and fertilizers applied and washed into surrounding waterways.

Pollan asks: Why do we still do this?

The easy answer is because we have to. Many HOA covenants and zoning laws prescribe specific requirements for mowing and upkeep. If this doesn't do it, the often intense social pressure to mow will get the message across. But, sure, how did that regime come into existence? According to Pollan, the lawn conveys a number of important social messages:

"The American lawn is an egalitarian conceit, implying that there is no reason to hide behind hedge or fence since we all occupy the same middle class."

And

"We are all property owners here, the lawn announces, and that suggests its other purpose: to supply a suitably grand stage for the proud display of one's own house."

The lawn also represents, and dramatizes on a weekly basis, our dominance over nature:

"For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one's neighbors, with respect to nature it is authoritarian. Under the Toro's brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly."

His recommendation is to convert the lawn into a garden, that is, to subdue our patch of nature artfully, working with the rhythms of time and particularities of place. Sounds good, but this is where a sense of urban scale may help this transition along. It's hard for me to imagine the average large-lot suburban homeowner finding the time to creatively arrange a significant portion of his plot. Short of a sizable landscaping budget or loads of free time, most people will opt to simply fire up the riding lawnmower. You can even set your beer in the cup holder.

Small-lot homes on well-appointed streets are a much more manageable scale for most people. And there will be plenty of passers-by stopping on the sidewalk to admire the handiwork. A move toward more thoughtful and ecologically beneficial lawns is unlikely to be successful without a concurrent reform in overall land use patterns in America.

The accompanying pictures are of front yards that I found attractive on a quick ride around Charlottesville yesterday. Some are from more affluent neighborhoods and some less so, but they are all fronting a good street.

What is centralized planning anyway?

2010-04-07T16:12:00.002-04:00

Witold Rybczynski in his last Slate column critiques public-sector planning, specifically the Obama administration's Office of Urban Affairs :

"According to Carrión, smart planning involves a combination of walkable communities, mass transit, and bicycle paths, and who could argue with that, except that in the last 40 years, our faith in centralized city planning has changed radically. In short, we've lost it."

Planning as a discipline is used to shouldering frequent attacks from libertarians and property rights activists, but Rybczynski's voice resonates more loudly in these circles because of his noted career as an urbanist thinker. His book City Life was one the first I read and reviewed here. When he makes the claim that "a vision of the future city will best emerge from the marketplace," it does make you rethink the value of planning in general.

But this particular piece is fraught with confusion throughout, not, I assume, on the part of the writer but on how its provocative stance could easily be interpreted. He means something much more specific by the word "planning" than most people engaged in the art of planning cities mean by it.

My first instinct, whenever I hear the mention of centralized planning, is to ask: centralized to what? Are we talking about global domination or a neighborhood association cooperating on a shared playground? There's a wide breadth of levels of governance. Presenting the options as either centralized or decentralized with regards to all planning and development activities is not very helpful. The same goes for neatly dividing responsibility into either the public or private realm.

Bus Images used from DragoArt

The best planning policies follow the medieval principle of subsidiarity. The scale of the project matches the level of authority, or better yet the project is divided into levels of detail and passed along the chain of command. So, the federal government opens up some funds for a specific purpose, requiring a minimum eligibility criteria be met to receive them. They pass the program on to the states, who each hold a competitive grant competition among localities to disburse the funds. This is how lots of government programs currently work.

Adolfo Carrión seems to understand this process well, which makes him a strange target for Rybczynski's attack. In an interview, Carrión explains the purpose of the office,

"Our success will be that we encourage local communities to steer their way into the future in smarter ways, that local municipalities understand that they are part of a new complex of regional economies or metropolitan areas, and that they have shared destinies."

I don't see any muscular nationalism here at all, at least nothing reminiscent of the disastrous urban renewal days. All I see is a national interest in strong cities and the goal to help facilitate smart planning among communities.

"The purpose is to go and identify and amplify those creative solutions that communities have come up with."

Sounds more like a cheerleader than the quarterback. Characterizing this posture as too strong of a federal role is simply swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction.

Rob Goodspeed redirects Rybczynski's question in more fruitful direction,

"The more interesting and accurate conclusion to draw from the failures of modernist city planning is to consider which forms of government planning are still active and desirable. In this sense, Rybczynski’s article is a bit behind the times. The tremendous interest in high speed rail, urban transit, green building codes, the government’s role in wind power and broadband, and housing finance regulation has reminded us of the central role of government in shaping our cities."

A practical art of sharing space

2010-04-05T10:59:00.000-04:00

Some comments from last week’s post from Peter Sigrist and Eric Orozco stimulate a really interesting conversation about the feasibility of a pluralistic society living compactly. In Peter’s words: “could so many people with different values and customs avoid disastrous conflict” in a very dense living arrangement? Scrambling to come up with a response, it seemed worthwhile to launch a whole new post.

Has our diversity tended to spread Americans out from each other?

Pietro Nivola of Brookings thinks so,

“One may wonder whether nations that have lacked this spatial buffer, or that prefer to compress their urban populations into much closer physical proximity, could have kept a lid on urban social pressures comparable in duration and intensity to those withstood historically in America.”

From the anti-Catholic violence of the mid-19th century to the riots that shook inner cities in the 60’s, there’s ample evidence to suggest that the space available for outward movement served as a sort of “escape valve” for cultural tensions. Various groups responded by simply moving away, sometimes the affluent seeking greener pastures and sometimes dispossessed minorities being coerced to move on. This is an unavoidable part of the American story.

Multiculturalism is one of those ideas that have been investigated by the academy with a fine-toothed comb for decades. I was taught in elementary school that we were a “melting pot,” then we became the “salad bowl,” and now you may hear every imaginable metaphorical variety in between. I suspect this debate is a manifestation of what William James called the ancient question of “the One and Many.” How is everything unified? How is everything diversified? According to James, it’s unanswerable in the abstract - otherwise it would surely have been answered by now. All we really can do is see what arrangements along this spectrum meet our goals for specific, concrete situations.

Stanley Fish is probably the current torch-bearer of American pragmatism:

“We may never be able to reconcile the claims of difference and community in a satisfactory formula, but we may be able to figure out a way for these differences to occupy the civic and political space of this community without coming to blows.”

This is a call for strategy over theory; mitigation over solutions. It seems to me that this is the role urban planners have been playing in communities for years.

One strategy for “resolving” differences has always been privatization - an avoidance tactic. Another strategy is forging a common set of compromises that can govern peaceable use of the public (and the inevitable overlaps of the private). Each approach has its pros and cons, and probably both approaches are needed to some degree.

I live in a neighborhood in which I am a racial, and in some ways cultural, minority. This was an intentional choice, and warm evening walks passing families sitting out on their front porches remind me of the commonalities I share with my neighbors. Yet there are differences as well. To cite a trivial one, the same warm days allow me the opportunity to listen to loud music from passing cars that I definitely would not listen to in the comfort of my own home. This can be annoying to me, and the motorists are undoubtedly annoyed that I’m annoyed. Yet friends who own a bed and breakfast down the street are seriously advocating enforcement of noise ordinances for cars. It hits them in a different way.

I have no conceit that I’m experiencing an absolute pluralistic lifestyle. Not even close. Even given my relatively diverse spatial living arrangement, my life is predominantly privatized nonetheless. It’s not as if I’m hanging out in the neighborhood community center every day. I always have the opportunity to close the doors and retreat inward, or travel outside of the neighborhood. Diversity is nearby, but I'm hardly immersed in it.

All of this to preface the point:

I tend to be fairly optimistic about our chances for peaceful cohabitation of space, because it can be supplemented with reasonable doses of self-segregation, regulations for conflicting behavior, and the simple practice of closing the door or walling off the private garden. Every locality, indeed every household, will surely land on a different balance in their approach, but there are tried and true strategic options available for sharing space nonetheless.

Review of Foreclosing the Dream

2010-03-27T16:35:00.010-04:00

There may been no shortage of monday morning quarterbacking over the housing crash, but University of Virginia planning professor Bill Lucy sits in a unique position to offer a more comprehensive analysis of how the recession may be reshaping our communities. Having studied for over thirty years the spatial ebbs and flows of the housing market, and publishing in 2006 with colleague David Phillips Tomorrow's Cities, Tomorrow's Suburbs, he is prepared to fit this event into the longer view and wider frame of the contemporary situation. His recently released book Foreclosing the Dream tells this story.

Last week's numbers from the National Association of Realtors reveal that home values have turned downward again, dampening hopes that the economy may be out of the woods. We've already heard all of the blame being poured onto predatory lenders, credulous homebuyers, negligent oversight agencies, and maybe a corrupt politician or two, but we're left with the feeling that there must be some deeper undercurrent to all of this. Do we really think a few tweaks in the financial system and legal structure will patch things up for good? Bill Lucy suggests that the "American Dream" itself, or at least how it's currently visualized, will have to be adjusted to thrive in a new economy.

"We are at the threshold of some sort of reversal," Lucy writes.

There's evidence of a reversal of the conventional flight to the suburbs, according to a variety of indicators.

Studying the spatial distribution of foreclosures in the 35 most populous metro areas, Lucy found that many of the farthest flung exurbs were hit the hardest. Of course, every city is different and foreclosures were very clustered in certain geographic areas (Nevada, California, Florida). Some inner cities like Cleveland and Detroit were hit hard, but cities such as San Francisco and Washington DC show a clear spectrum of foreclosures emanating outward. More often than not, this is the evident pattern.

Sale prices have confirmed a similar pattern in many cities. Washington DC saw an 8 percent increase in home values between 2007 and 2008, while exurban Loudoun County homes lost 17 percent of value. (The difference in sale prices in the DC metro have stabilized slightly in the last year, but that could just be a blip when viewed in context.)

For the last couple of decades, the age-old formula of "trickle down housing" has seen a new twist. It used to be the case that homes had their highest value when they were new, and the value dropped through time as they aged. Since the 1990's, this pattern is still the case with the exception of the oldest bracket - homes built before 1940. These are valued, on average, more highly than the newer houses built in the 50's and 60's. Apparently, their location in predominantly walkable neighborhoods closer to an urban center overcomes their age disamenity.

The gas price spike of 2008 alerted many homeowners to the volatility of living in a high-mobility environment. Prices may have dropped since, but there is more awareness now of the fixed costs of transportation associated with a particular housing choice.

Demographics nationwide are moving toward more households that are elderly, emptynesters, and singles. These are all cohorts that tend to favor urban or inner suburban settings. Perceptions of school quality and safety continue to make suburbs attractive to families of all races, but this may be changing in some places. The Lower Manhattan School Board recently ran into trouble when they grossly underestimated the number of children that would be enrolled in public schools.

However, there are strong entrenched interests that push back against this changing market (and the interests of the planet):

Local governments in metro areas are fragmented, more suitable for the much smaller population centers they once were, and they tend use zoning to protect their tax bases by pushing residential growth to the edges. The federal government has been slow to move away from the preference for highway funding over other transportation options. Many homeowners still don't want density for other people near their own home, and they rally against it. Some developers and corporations have hefty financial interests tied up with continued outward expansion. For these reasons and more, there's considerable friction involved in moving toward a more sustainable urban future.

Yet against all of these forces, it seems to be happening anyway in many cities.

The thesis of this book received some confirmation this January with an EPA study of building permit distribution over that last few decades:

"The permit data showed that, in several regions, there has been a dramatic increase in the share of new construction built in central cities and older suburbs."

Even throughout the housing crisis, many multifamily developments in denser areas remained stable. Urban development was particularly strong in major global cities and medium-sized cities known for smart growth policies. The study sounds a lot like Foreclosing the Dream. They call it a "fundamental shift."

Affordable living data released for 337 metro areas

2010-03-24T08:10:00.003-04:00

The Center for Neighborhood Technology has been working on a Housing + Transportation Affordability Index for at least five years. Census block by census block, the index evaluates the cost burden, relative to area incomes, for housing and transportation on the average family living there. They released a pilot project for the Minneapolis-Saint Paul region in 2006, then expanded the analysis to major metro areas all around the country.

The index has made a big splash. It has been used to inform mortgage underwriting practices as well as regional housing public policy. Today they release data for a broader range of metropolitan areas, including the Charlottesville MSA. The newer website also allows users to break all of the data down into owners costs and renters costs, different income classes, greenhouse gas emissions, and a variety of other factors.

Screenshot from CNT Housing + Transportation Affordability Index for Charlottesville region

Andres Duany made the following point about affordable housing ten years ago,

"Affordable housing must be provided in a form and a place that allow for affordable living, even if it comes at a greater cost. Although land may be cheaper on the urban fringe, that location fails to provide residents with easy access to jobs and services."

Working toward the availability of truly affordable living requires a coordinated effort between the various spheres that make demands on the family budget, housing and transportation being the two largest. For too long the affordability goal has been set strictly at spending no more than 30% of income on housing, a rule of thumb based not on data but on convention. (It's also migrated upward over time. No more than 25% used to be advised.)

The trouble is that the old measurement leads to a systematic bias in favor of a low-cost housing/high-cost transportation arrangement, what is known in the real estate business as "drive until you qualify." If you can't afford a home closer to jobs and services, just head outward toward the urban fringe where land costs are cheaper. Or from a policy perspective, outer suburban jurisdictions appear to be performing better on affordability goals because, strictly speaking, housing costs are relatively in line with area incomes.

In reality, transportation costs are not only substantial, about 18% of expenditures, but they are volatile and tied directly to housing choices. One gas price spike can squeeze a budget to the breaking point, and families can only cut back so much with a lifestyle tweak if they've chosen an inaccessible home location.

If housing costs are the only measurement we have to work with, it makes some sense to run with it as a rough estimation of affordability. That's why these CNT numbers are so important. Maybe some day we'll see this model shimmy its way upward into the Census Bureau or coordinated federal agencies and built into policy, like the current convention is. The State of Illinois just adopted the H+T index as a benchmark for their own agencies. The affordability index will become that much more robust and accurate to a finer grain as it evolves.

... then maybe we could start talking about incorporating affordable food access (12% of the budget) into it.

Update: Elana Schor provides a nice outline of how this index is already being used at the federal level.

Americans could fit within New Hampshire

2010-03-23T09:06:00.006-04:00

The folks over at Good magazine (update: Shane Keaney to be precise) are the masters of pithy, attractive charts that make you think. How about this one?

Ryan Advent adds that the whole global population, living at the density of Brooklyn, would be able to fit within the borders of Texas. And if we were willing to get things as tight as Manhattan, the land area of Virginia would serve us just fine.

Ok. This might need a little preemptive defense. Nobody is suggesting a federal ordinance requiring everyone to move en masse to the "Live Free or Die" state. And, yes, agriculture and most industry are not included within this hypothetical situation. It's not as if Brooklyn right now is exactly a self-sufficient community hermetically sealed from the rest of the world. There will need to be extra space provided for this.

But, that being said ...

Doesn't this create an interesting frame for the density discussion? Promoters of suburban lifestyles always raise the trope of density, more often than not conjuring up images from Blade Runner or high-rise soviet bloc apartments, to express how horribly crowded a smart growth scenario would have to be. Last week, Joel Kotkin's piece "Forced March to The Cities" interpreted some attempts to have motorists pay for their own parking as "social re-engineering" and a "cramming policy." A smog-filled downtown of skyscrapers is pictured to accompany the text. Kotkin's overall goal is to create a sharp dichotomy between a suburban lifestyle of yards, natural surroundings, your own detached home, and a visceral picture of an urban extreme - the kind of place that elicits the proverbial, "I enjoy visiting, but I wouldn't want to live there." Then he wants you to choose between the two.

But is Brooklyn really that bad? People spend good money to live in those brownstones on tree-lined streets. The homeownership rate isn't as high as most places, but many people do own (and there's nothing about the physical form itself that would prevent more ownership, or more tree-lined streets for that matter). The scenario already accounts for the addition of more parks to allow access to natural areas. On top of this, even in Brooklyn, plenty of space is currently devoted to motor vehicle access. Reduce driving, and we have an even more livable and spacious environment.

Then there's the fact that this scenario is scalable: How about half the density of Brooklyn on twice the size of New Hampshire?

Sometimes its useful to step back from economic analysis and debates over policy to take a moment to look at the raw physics of the matter. This is one possible scenario we could live in if we choose to. Once calibrated to reality, then we can talk policy.

The managed chaos of a Zoöpolis

2010-03-20T20:18:00.008-04:00

Black-tailed Prairie Dog. Flickr: blucolt

I drop quotes from A Pattern Language often on this blog. There's one section that seemed especially outlandish to me when I first read it: #74 Animals. The architect Christopher Alexander inverts our notion of the zoo and of pet ownership and recommends we integrate wild and domesticated animals alike into the heart of the city, allowing them to roam along connected greenways or in private fenced pastures. He notes that everyday contact with "animals in their animalness" enriches our lives, especially children.

"Examples of ecologically useful animals in a city: horses, ponies, donkeys - for local transportation and sport. Pigs - to recycle garbage and for meat. Ducks and chickens - as a source of eggs and for meat. Cows - for milk. Goats - milk. Bees - honey and pollination of fruit trees. Birds - to maintain insect balance."

Another professor at UC Berkeley, Jennifer Wolch, uses the term Zoöpolis to describe the "reintegration of people with animals and nature." In a recent article in the Journal of Urbanism, she describes efforts being made in the exurban planned development of Harmony, Florida to do just that. According to their website, it was "consciously designed to offer a peaceful balance with animals and nature." Wolch's ultimate goal is to raise the stature of animals in the eyes of humans, and she believes that everyday exposure to other species will naturally lead to a stronger ethical commitment to protect them.

Whether or not we want to completely collapse the boundaries between human and non-human habitat, the fact still remains that animals currently do share cities with us, and we may be able to expand our tolerance - in certain strategic ways - for sharing this space more amenably. The only other options are expensive relocation or unpopular extermination. Much attention has been paid to the loss of animal habitat due to the encroachment of suburbanization, but it's also worth considering those that have stuck around and adapted to us.

Animal control and protection is something that all cities have to grapple with. My personal favorite is this single sentence lifted from a Columbia, South Carolina ordinance.

"It shall be unlawful for any person to kill, maim or otherwise annoy with firearms, air rifles or slingshots, or in any other manner, the squirrels and birds within the limits of the city or within the limits of any park or playground owned by the city, or to disturb the nests of such birds and squirrels; provided that any owner, authorized agent, lessee or tenant of real estate in the city frequented by squirrels in number sufficient to create a nuisance on or cause damage to any property thereon may apply to the police department for a permit and may be authorized by the police department to trap squirrels on such premises and dispose of the squirrels, provided that the disposal of such squirrels is accomplished in a humane and sanitary manner and that the disposal of the squirrels is not accomplished by the use of firearms, air rifles, slingshots or poison"

The Smithsonian magazine tells the story of the "street-smart prairie dogs" of Denver. The black-tail prairie dog has been depleted in population throughout the western states, but researchers are finding that some colonies have actually been adapting fairly well to urban conditions. Surveys of residents show an almost even split between those who want to protect them and those that want them dead. They apparently can't decide whether they are lovable, cuddly creatures or pests that burrow through their yards. If we can be assured that there is no significant threat of disease, it seems reasonable to me that humans could adjust our own landscaping preferences a little to make room. But what do I know.

As far as urban domesticated animals go, chickens have certainly been in the forefront of the movement. Friends of ours have a flock in the city that's just about ready to lay eggs. They somehow ended up

An eclectic, but not entirely unusual, street scene in Cuba. Source unknown.

with a rooster by accident, which are too noisy for cities, but fortunately their warranty allows them to exchange him for a hen. The two-year-old neighbor spends hours in the coop, chasing the hens around and attempting to hug them. Soon our friends will have their daily protein taken care of, right from their backyard.

Exploring Cuba the other day on Google Earth, I came across a number of interesting uses of donkeys, mules, and horses throughout the streets of Havana. Without easy access to oil or parts for automobiles, Cubans have been forced to improvise in their transportation. In the year 2000, there were 16,000 registered public transportation operators using animals. Many cities in the United States have horse-drawn carriages as a novelty experience, but this is an everyday reality for Cubans.

About a hundred U.S. cities have a mounted police unit, but many are just now falling victim to budget cuts. Boston ended their mounted police program last year, prompting one citizen activist to lament,

"Except for police dogs, they are the last working animals in this country who are around people who aren't around animals because they are in the city."

Is this something that has value in its own right?

LaHood announces a "sea change" at the DOT

2010-03-18T07:56:00.006-04:00

DOT Secretary Ray LaHood stood on top of a table to address the National Bicycle Summit last week, but he waited until a few days later to reveal on his blog a new federal approach in transportation priorities:

"Today, I want to announce a sea change. People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.
We are integrating the needs of bicyclists in federally-funded road projects. We are discouraging transportation investments that negatively affect cyclists and pedestrians. And we are encouraging investments that go beyond the minimum requirements and provide facilities for bicyclists and pedestrians of all ages and abilities."

League of American Bicyclists says,

"It is simply the strongest statement of support for prioritizing bicycling and walking ever to come from a sitting secretary of transportation."

I imagine that LaHood enjoyed a little reprieve from press conferences on spontaneously accelerating vehicles. This announcement comes a few days after new numbers were released showing another drop in highway traffic fatalities for 2009, partially attributed to Americans' decisions to drive less. Transitions seem to be happening on a number of levels.

The new policy is available on the FHWA website, and they encourage state and local agencies to adopt a similar statement.

From hope to choice in federal housing

2010-03-12T18:25:00.007-05:00

Boston's Maverick Gardens HOPE VI development. flickr: Urban Mechanic

The back incorporates defensible space principles. flickr: Urban Mechanic

Chicago's Henry Horner housing projects before demolition. source: Calthorpe Associates

It's HOPE VI redevelopment by Calthorpe Associates. source: Calthorpe Associates

Back in July of 2009, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan announced the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative, which the Obama administration considers the next stage after HOPE VI in the evolution of public housing rehabilitation. Much like the Sustainable Communities program that has been generating lots of positive press, Choice Neighborhoods is intended to create a bridge across federal agencies that had previously been rather insulated - this time also drawing the Department of Education into cooperation with the housing administration. To cite the language of the draft bill itself, the purpose is to:

"transform neighborhoods of extreme poverty into sustainable, mixed-income neighborhoods with access to economic opportunities by revitalizing severely distressed housing, and investing and leveraging investments in well-functioning services, educational opportunities, public assets, public transportation, and improved access to jobs."

That's ambitious. The president is asking for $250 million this year for Choice Neighborhoods, in addition to the $65 million that Congress allocated last year. All of this before the actual details of the grants program have been hammered out and passed through the necessary committees. Housing advocates are waiting in anticipation.

When HOPE VI was launched in 1992, the primary purpose was to integrate households of various income levels into one neighborhood, and from an urban design standpoint alone it represented a major paradigm shift in policy. Most conventional public housing had been notoriously unlikable. Modernist architects, unable to attract willing residents to living in Le Corbusier's vision of towers in the park, were allowed to experiment with people who had no other choice. Streets were demapped into superblocks and abundant common spaces attracted vandalism and crime. Even the Garden-style varieties almost universally turned inward as fortresses on the urban landscape. Without tying into their surroundings, they had a deadening effect on the neighborhood. As Jane Jacobs noted, it wasn't long before there was little adjacent urban fabric left for them to relate to.

To be fair, the lack of resources allocated to design was probably the greater problem. Back to the Housing Act of 1937, Congress put tight limits on per-unit budgets. What seemed to be a financially prudent move ended up being anything but, as the projects decimated property values of everything around them. In Secretary Donovan's words, they become "warehouses for the poor." The median income of residents dropped from 57% of the national median in 1950 to 20% by the time HOPE VI was announced. It was obvious that something had to be done.

Almost two decades into HOPE VI, most evaluations of its success have been positive. Fiscally speaking, it has leveraged about twice as much private investment as it spent. The innovative Main Street branch allows smaller towns to tie affordable housing into downtown revitalization. Most importantly, HOPE VI neighborhoods have shown a successful record in attracting middle-income residents, and evidence shows measurable improvements in the workforce participation and earnings of the original residents and surrounding neighbors. Less tangibly, the face of public housing has changed for the better. In a Brookings report:

"Soviet-style subsidized apartment blocks have been replaced by walkable, diverse, livable communities. Public housing that isolated the poorest of the poor has given way to places where low-wage workers and families transitioning off welfare literally live next door to teachers, police officers, and other professionals."

The Housing Choice Initiative, as it's currently being presented, takes HOPE VI and expands it in at least three ways:

HOPE VI was focused entirely on severely distressed public housing, but Choice Neighborhoods seeks to "broaden the scope of the program for broader impact" beyond public housing.
Education reform, and early childhood education in particular, are being incorporated into the program.
There is an explicit requirement for one-to-one replacement of existing subsidized housing stock. This addresses one salient criticism of HOPE VI, that it resulted in a net loss of subsidized units. (This is a fair point, but the loss in occupied units has been smaller. About a third of the severely distressed housing units were vacant.)

As of now, the expanded scope of the program has not been matched by an expanded budget request. HOPE VI began in the 90's with a $300 to $500 million a year and climbed steadily into the latter years of the decade. If Obama gets what he wants, Choice Neighborhoods will start off with approximately half of this.

In the competition for design ideas, there is no doubt that healthy urbanism has won the day through the HOPE VI program, and it will likely translate seamlessly into the next phase of federal housing policy - however it's finally arranged.

Google adds bicycle directions to maps

2010-03-10T08:33:00.008-05:00

Cycling blogs are all over this already, but Google has released a "Grab Your Bike and Go" feature to give cycling directions for all maps. Google's Shannon Guymon is the opening plenary speaker at the National Bike Summit and she's expected to announce the new feature this morning and give a demonstration.

Screenshot: from Jefferson's Rotunda to the Charlottesville Downtown Mall in 8 minutes

The feature

Identifies cycling facilities (for now in "hundreds of US cities")
Shows which routes are considered safer than others, including paths that have limited or no driving
Uses elevation grades to estimate times and recommend routes

It shouldn't be too long before many localities and non-profit organizations are able to feed their information to Google. Unlike transit routes, there's nothing proprietary about safety recommendations. Right now Google lists the Charlottesville pedestrian mall as a recommended route, although its actually prohibited to cyclists. Google accepts feedback on all of these recommendations, so we can all take part in building the most accurate and useful mapping tool.

This addition from Google coincides nicely with U.S. Representative Earl Blumenauer (Ore.) introduction of H.R. 4722, the Active Community Transportation Act of 2010 in the U.S. House of Representatives last week.

Pedestrian Survival Techniques

2010-03-08T07:35:00.007-05:00

For the last few months, I've left my bike at home and made my way throughout town mostly on my own two feet. During this time, I've observed a clever strategy, used by countless walkers, for crossing two or three-lane streets. It's especially common among the regulars - the truckers of the pedestrian world - who have optimized their safety and efficiency by repeating the same trip over and over again. It's quite possibly the perfectly rational cross.

The way it works is simple: As you're walking toward your destination, you remain constantly aware of the vehicular traffic coming from either direction. Once a clear break appears, you cross at that moment. There's no wait time, because you continue walking while you watch for the opening. It's highly safe, or at least you have maximum control over your own safety. Before "jaywalking" was stigmatized and banned through a campaign by automobile lobbyists, this was a perfectly acceptable way to approach a typical dilemma.

Walkers are now supposed to wait until they reach the intersection before crossing, but for obvious reasons they do not want to do this.

Vehicles could be approaching from a number of directions and its impossible to simultaneously monitor all of these possibilities.
Turning lanes increase the total distance that must be crossed.
Stoplights encourage a certain number of drivers to speed to try and beat the red light. The severity of a hit would be much higher.

The only three times I felt my safety compromised over this period was while legally crossing. On one occasion, watching the walk signal I almost stepped out in front of a truck careening through the red light. On two other occasions, right-turning cars were not paying attention to the crosswalk and had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting me. None of these were near-death experiences, but they underscore the tension pedestrians feel between trusting in official protection and using their own safety intuition.

When walkers must cross at intersections, pedestrian buttons can make things more problematic. In Charlottesville and many other towns, a walk signal will not be displayed unless the button is pressed. This means that if you push the button one second after your cycle begins, you will need to wait for another entire cycle before your signal is given. Research shows that only half of pedestrians press buttons at all, and most folks who do press will not wait unnecessarily. They attempt to cross anyway, only deprived of information about how much time remains in the cycle. Unless the button is "hot" and adjusts signal timing or activates lighting, there's no reason to have it at all.

Pedestrians should be empowered by engineering solutions to follow their own safety intuitions. They have a huge incentive to protect their life, and the truly reckless (or inebriated) will ignore signals or legalities anyway. FHWA sponsored major studies of various pedestrian safety devices in high-crash intersections and last year released a treasure trove of information about what techniques proved effective. In many cases, focusing on modifying driving yield behavior and speeds was more effective than attempting to herd pedestrians.

Engineering is incredibly important, but the best engineers will tell you that they offer sets of trade-offs not absolute solutions. The relative values between pedestrians' right to life, motorists' right to convenience, and costs of implementation cannot be calculated but must be provided subjectively by the ones who make the final decision. Hopefully in a democracy, that's you and me.

Some limits to emergence (or why planners are still needed)

2010-03-01T00:50:00.008-05:00

The continued maturation of the internet, from a select set of information-providers to a huge crowd of users who create our own content, has been a defining shift for my generation (well, at least for some of us). We have some real examples of how collective efforts of informally organized actors have successfully developed into highly sophisticated systems. The crown jewel of this era is probably Wikipedia's decisive win over Encyclopedia Britannica. Hundreds of thousands of mostly-benevolent volunteers have incrementally grown a body of knowledge from the bottom up that surpasses in breadth and depth the prevailing institution of experts operating from the top down. This is an amazing feat, and it keeps growing.

Many have made the conceptual connection from this online paradigm shift to the physical world of cities. Steven Johnson's 2002 book Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software has been highly influential in this regard. The concept of the emergence of urban complexity, whether of medieval cities filled with meandering donkey paths or of the slums of Mumbai, has reverberated throughout social media and academia ever since. Australian Dan Hill's recent article on Emergent Urbanism flirts with the idea of the unplanned city:

"One might even argue for the removal of all planning guidelines and structures. After all, most of the world’s great cities are not the product of planning, no matter how enlightened. Certainly some have been well-formed by benevolent dictators or patrons, yet their personality has come from the slow accretion of individual citizens adopting and adapting those spaces, like ficus thriving on béton brut monuments."

I'm fairly sympathetic to these ideas, and I certainly recognize that the self-organizing potential of cities goes back to Jane Jacob's organic metaphors (the last chapter of Death and Life) and certainly well before this. Still - and maybe this is just my personality - I want to reach for the brakes just as the concept reaches a level of exuberance. Pure self-organization can be taken too far.

Equating the bottom-up potential of online networks with the human construction of the physical space of cities has some deficiencies that should be recognized before deciding on a balance between fixed structure and fluid evolution:

The internet does actually need a foundational structure to function. Online networks are both dependent upon and shaped by multiple layers of structure that are, at least to some degree, fixed and imposed "from above." There is the hardware of computers. There is the fundamental software (operating systems, programming languages) and the web-based platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube). From the perspective of the end users, it appears as if the operative force is each of us collectively shaping the complexity of networks through individualized actions. But this is only because the underlying structure is much less visible than its surface level expressions. In reality, they both work together.

To follow the analogy, cities would be formed by a similar wedding cake of authority, ranging from a federal government defining loose contours, to local governments refining them, and to individual actors painting within the lines. The relative weights given to each layer will perpetually be debated, but this seems to be how decisions that affect the public realm are actually made. This is planning, as far as I understand it.

Unlike the internet, physical space is made up of fixed relationships. Our only experience of physical space is through an embodiment in a particular place at a particular time, and movement through space requires energy. Therefore, individual places are fundamentally and immutably connected to each other in a way that nodes on a online network are not. An adjoining website cannot block your sun, cut off your access, influence your property values, pollute your air. You do not have to see, smell, hear the adjoining website unless you choose to. Of course, there is no such thing as an adjoining website. The relationships of an online network are completely voluntary and malleable almost instantly. This is not the case with land.

Land is more limited than online real estate. During the era of manifest destiny in United States history, it appeared as if the western frontier was a limitless expanse of land ready to be formed by European settlement. We eventually ran into some hard limits of productive land and natural resources, hence the birth of the modern environmental movement. Although there are technically limits to the capacity of the internet, it is still in the stage of apparent limitless expansion. The emergence of online networks does not necessarily teach us lessons about how to arrange complexity within constrained space.

Modern land development happens at a scale and with an irreversible impact that is not necessarily conducive to incremental change. Wikipedia has emerged through the collective action of millions of tiny additions and alterations from thousands of actors, each operating with the benefit of instant feedback from prior changes. The economies of scale and financial structures of modernity compel most development to happen in large chunks: mega-projects, entire subdivisions, shopping malls. Raymond Unwin, back in 1909, noted that this distinction is what makes modern development different than the fabled medieval organic models of growth:

"The very rapidity of the growth of modern towns demands special treatment. The wholesale character of their extension almost precludes the possibility of our attaining that appearance of natural growth which we have admired in the medieval town, where additions were made so gradually that each house was adapted to its place, and assimilated into the whole before the next was added. We already see in the modern suburb too much evidence of what is likely to result from any haphazard system of development. Modern conditions require, undoubtedly, that the new districts of our towns should be built according to a definite plan"

Although it seems counter-intuitive, emergent systems online depend upon a civic bargain and mechanisms for self enforcement of these rules. Clay Shirky explains how this works for Wikipedia:
"The basic bargain of a wiki means that people who care that the site not be used for pranks have the edge, because it takes far longer to write a fake entry than to fix it."
So even the anonymous mobs of the internet have a code of conduct, a shared sense of mission, and a means for enforcing it. Those who construct physical space may have been governed by a similar set of purely social moral suasion at one time, but the scale of modernity once again seems to require a more rigid set of laws to protect the common good. Spiro Kostoff on this point:
"The structure of city-from - the integration of uses, the concatenation of passages and nodal points - could possess the sort of coherence demonstrated by Old Dehli, and this is in the absence of municipal authority to police and an articulate public space, only because the social structure was well formulated, and tradition stood as the guarantor of a consistent modus operandi. Without the force of tradition and a consolidated social agenda, unsupervised city-making will succumb to disorder."

Why Tolkien sold his car

2010-02-23T17:52:00.004-05:00

Many people recognize the mid-20th century Oxford university professor J.R.R. Tolkien for his fantasy world of Middle Earth, revealed through the Lord of Rings trilogy and other novels. A little fact that most people do not know is that he sold his car shortly after World War II ended and carried on most of his life by bicycle.

According to a biographer:

"Tolkien became a familiar figure cycling along the Banbury Road, travelling between home and Pembroke College on his extraordinarily high-seated bicycle while wearing cap and voluminous gown."

By itself this may be a curious piece of trivia, but a closer evaluation of Tolkien's belief system begs us (or at least me) to speculate over why he made this choice. The decision to go car free was clearly deliberate. Tolkien bought his first family car in 1931, and in a letter he recalls his first trip into Oxford by automobile in 1911. As a devout Roman Catholic and life-long political Tory, he doesn't exactly fit the contemporary stereotype of the cyclist. What inspired this?

When the editor of the New Republic wrote to ask Tolkien whether Lord of the Rings contained allegories of contemporary England, he declined to draw any precise connections. But he did hint that, as an author, he could not help but write through the lens of his own experience living in Oxford. At one point he responds,

"Though, the spirit of ‘Isengard’, if not of Mordor, is of course always cropping up. The present design of destroying Oxford in order to accommodate motor-cars is a case."

Quick translation: Modor = pure evil; Isengard = corrupted. In his books, Isengard began as a pristine place, but Sarumon (the villain) camped his armies there, cut down all of the trees and soiled the land. Like the ruin of Isengard, the partial destruction of Oxford left him distrustful of modern town planning efforts in general.

(By the way, if you're a Lord of the Rings fan please cut my simplification some slack. I think this is right.)

The idea of disrupting nature for the personal automobile arises in another letter to his son in 1944.

“It is full Maytime by the trees and grass now. But the heavens are full of roar and riot. You cannot even hold a shouting conversation in the garden now, save about 1 a.m. and 7 p.m. – unless the day is too foul to be out. How I wish the 'infernal combustion' engine had never been invented. Or (more difficult still since humanity and engineers in special are both nitwitted and malicious as a rule) that it could have been put to rational uses — if any.”

It may be tempting to dismiss Tolkien's antagonism toward modernity as a romantic appeal to the pastoral England of his childhood. Yes, he may have been a bit of a Luddite (He didn't like general household appliances much either). Yet from another perspective, his view of human nature as easily corrupted by power can provide a healthy skepticism in the right doses. Not many in the 40's and 50's were questioning the absolute sovereignty of technological progress to solve all the problems of humanity, and most people would agree now with Tolkien that the often utopian promises have fallen far short. There is certainly a place for cautious, if sometimes grumpy, conservatives like Tolkien.

An honest question about minimum school acreage

2010-02-18T05:18:00.010-05:00

Many building codes require large sites for public schools. Flickr: Valarie Renee

I heard a story the other day about a major flood that hit Albany, Georgia in 1994. As is usually the case, many of the poorer neighborhoods in the core of the town, set along the river in the low-lying land, were hit the hardest. The U.S. FEMA agency had funds set a aside to help the community rebuild, including the reconstruction of two schools that were completely lost in this neighborhood. However, one of the stipulations was that the new schools had to be placed on at least a twenty acre campus. Naturally, the only suitable parcels were in the outlying suburbs, which happened to be more affluent, so not only did these folks have to get their own lives back in order but they had to start busing their children outside of the community from that point forward.

The obvious question: why a twenty acre minimum? Where did we get this fortress mentality that requires all schools to be set apart on a separate campus?

This brings me to some personal anecdotes about two schools:

Hellgate High School occupies a site very close to the center of Missoula, Montana. It was built in 1908 and somehow managed to not be destroyed in the intervening century. The school is nicely woven into the urban fabric of Missoula, and on any given school day the extensive row of bike racks in the back are filled to the brim. There is very limited motor vehicle parking.

Students are allowed to leave the school for lunchtime, and many of them walk to the local shops and restaurants across the street. I'm sure there are some who worry that the students will engage in the practice of shenanigans while let loose, but, as a nearby worker in downtown, I never saw a problem. What they did get was a half hour to explore the real world everyday in a relatively safe environment, even those who did not yet have their own drivers licence.

Newark High School in Delaware is where I attended school. The school abandoned its urban site in 1954 for a more spacious modern building further out of town. Although it is still relatively close to downtown Newark (we're talking 1950's after all), the site is designed for driving only. It's set back from the street, fenced off on two sides, and accompanied by a large parking lot.

When I was there, school administrators were not willing to risk the liability of letting students out for lunch, but many of us did anyway. Because teachers took turns patrolling the borders, we literally had to run out the door, cross a four-lane divided highway, and trek through a strip mall parking lot just to get to an Auntie Anne's fast food joint. I look back wondering why we were will willing to exert so much effort for a pretzel. I don't think we were being deviants for the sake of deviancy; I think we just wanted to act like adults.

The one student in our class who did die during school hours perished when his automobile rammed into a tree. He was running late for school in the morning. The self-contained fortress school design may be able to keep students sheltered while they are on its premises (that is, while the school district is legally liable for their safety), but all of those cars in the parking lot have to arrive from somewhere. In reality, all other threats of accidental harm are negligible in the shadow of teenage driving fatalities.

It turns out that Newark High School may have to move further yet out of town. Delaware has updated the school building codes, now requiring a minimum of 25 acres for the school site. Newark is in non-compliance, and some are starting to complain about the lack of parking.

Again, what is the reasoning behind requiring larger and larger lots?

City: Rediscovering the Center

2010-02-16T12:54:00.004-05:00

University of Pennsylvania Press has done a great service by reprinting William H. Whyte's classic text City: Rediscovering the Center. I consider this book to be part of the core of the American urbanist canon, alongside Death and Life if Great American Cities, A Pattern Language, and The City in History.

William Whyte was the foremost empiricist of cities in the 20th century. He sought to turn the planning and design process on its head - to start with detailed observations of how the smallest scale of an urban place is used by people and work outward from there, designing places and writing codes accordingly. City: Rediscovering the Center begins with lessons drawn from sixteen years of meticulously recording plazas, streets, small parks, and marketplaces with time-lapse video and scientifically parsing out the patterns of behavior. Once the basic observations of human nature have been identified, he launches into an evaluation of the health of downtowns in their entirety.

What jumps out right away from Whyte’s study is the attention he pays to the most basic human needs. How does the provision of food impact the life of a place? Where do people use the bathroom? How can one find light on a cool day and shade on a sunny day? In other words, he doesn't travel very far up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which I find to be a refreshingly humble and practical disposition toward the power of physical space in our lives. He never reaches for transcendence by design; that’s reserved for what happens in these places.

This leads to Whyte’s most important insight of all, one that really underscores each chapter of the book, that is: people want to be around other people. We are inherently social beings. As simple as this insight seems, it actually ran head on against the prevailing notion in planning at the time that people want as much space for themselves as possible. Whyte noticed that not only did friends clump together when sitting in a plaza, but even strangers tended to take seats in reasonable proximity to each other rather than evenly disperse themselves throughout the space. Well-used places were safer, both in perception and reality. People who stopped for conversation on sidewalks would typically not step out of the way, preferring to be in the center of movement. Parks and sidewalks that were outsized for their activity tended to swallow up its life and repel visitors. People like to be crowded, but not too much.

Whyte’s design principles are simple and flow naturally from these foundations:

People want places to sit. Steps are the best way to provide this, and there are specific proportions that can either encourage or detract from their use. Movable chairs offer a flexible counterpart to steps, and they won’t get stolen if they are cheap enough and locked up at night.

People want things to look at. Storefront facades have to be designed to pull in onlookers with entrances that form a seamless transition between the street and building. It’s good for business and good for the city. Street trees, the larger the better, are terrific implants of nature into the heart of the city. Playful art is the best public art.

Exclusion leads to unintended consequences. Impromptu street theater and music, illegal vendors and eccentric characters all add to the life of the street rather than detract from it. Attempts to discourage “undesirables” (his name for the indigent population), such as using spikes to prevent sitting, end up making the place inhospitable to everyone. Defensive enclosure does more to keep criminals in and well-hidden than it does to keep them out.

Places are used differently at different times. Because of the movement of the sun, outdoor places will be used more during different times of the day depending also on the season. The city should protect its light from tall and wide buildings, but buildings can also be used to reflect light if placed well. The cycle of the traditional work day and home life will dictate the primary hours of use.

Places need ongoing management. Although most people will walk a reasonable distance before throwing away trash, there will always need to be regular cleaning. Special events should be arranged, particularly to fill in time slots that are underutilized.

Separation of vehicles and pedestrians usually favors vehicles. Skywalks and underground concourses force pedestrians either up or down a level and can suck the life out of a street. They can be useful in cold climates, but only as a complement to the street. Pedestrian malls are usually too wide or too long to be successful.

The latter half of the book is much more sporadic but that’s alright. He’s developed his model and now he applies it to a variety of problems contemporary to 1988. Each chapter raises a different debate over the future of cities in the United States, and he weighs in quite resolutely for a particular position.

Remarkably, he happens to get almost all of his predictions correct (at least in my opinion):

He notes the “corporate exodus” to the suburban office park in the 80’s but insists that the most creative firms will still not be able to live without the vitality and constant interactions of the city.

Five years before Joel Garreau wrote Edge Cities, Whyte describes the phenomenon with at least as much precision and insight. He calls them “Semi-cities” (I'm not sure why the strange term “edge city” was the one to stick). He predicts that they will need to be shaped into the form of a traditional town, with a strong center and opportunities for walking. This is exactly what Tyson’s Corner is moving toward now.

He compares the two transit movements of the 80’s: light rail and the people-mover. He sees much promise in light rail, but not people-movers. He considers the overhead structures to be cumbersome. When was the last people-mover installed?

He forsees the predictions that communication technology will bring about the “the new geography,” allowing everyone to living in isolation in the suburbs or rural areas. He concludes that face-to-face contact will be as necessary as ever. This decentralization forecast was popular in the 90’s but reality has gone the opposite direction.

He warns against downtowns competing with the suburbs on suburban terms, by building self-enclosed megastructures in the heart of the city. He tells cities to play to their strengths of street life and integration.

Well before The High Cost of Free Parking, Whyte points to parking as the single most destructive force in the life of cities. He advises municipalities to switch from requiring it in large amounts to limiting it and allowing the highest and best use for downtown parcels.

An historic day for Broadway

2010-02-12T08:08:00.004-05:00

New York City mayor Bloomberg has announced yesterday that the Broadway public space experiment through Times Square and Herald Square will, after an eight month trial period, be made permanent. From the press conference:

"I think the issue is, are the roads for multiple uses – everybody, pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists – or are they just for motorists? And in this day and age, if you go around the world, all the other great cities have already tried to reduce the number of cars on their streets and convert some of the open spaces into space for other people."

Janette Sadik-khan, the city DOT commissioner, expressed the intent to "transform the plazas into iconic spaces worthy of their iconic setting."

To show how historic this decision is, I've dug up a couple of Times Square illustrations from previous decades. The first drawing of Times Square is from the the 1974 book Pedestrian Revolution. The source is not cited, so I assume it is the vision of authors:

This 1981 drawing of Times Square is from NY Office of Midtown Planning:

Finally, the illustration released by NY DOT last year:

A walkable grocery thought experiment

2010-02-11T09:14:00.006-05:00

Randal O'Toole has proposed a thought experiment that he uses to "debunk the smart growth myth" of the ideal walkable neighborhood grocery store.

"For smart growth to work, then population densities must be high enough for businesses to have enough customers within walking distance to keep them going. Smart growth won't work if businesses in pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods must attract hordes of auto drivers from other areas in order to survive. A modern large supermarket needs to draw patrons from a community of about 40,000 people. This is known as the trade population for this kind of store.

Joel Garreau says that, as a rule of thumb, 'the farthest distance an American will willingly walk before getting into a car' is 600 feet. However, 'if you do everything you can to make casual use of the automobile inconvenient at the same time that you make walking pleasant and attractive, you maybe, just maybe, can up the distance an American will willingly walk to 1,500 feet'...

The population density required to place 40,000 people within 1,500 feet of a grocery store is almost 124,000 people per square mile. That's about two-and-one-half times the density of Manhattan."

Therefore, smart growth won't work. QED.

O'Toole has asked a worthwhile question but plugged in the wrong numbers to answer it. Out of curiosity, I'd like to take a closer look at this hypothetical scenario to see how feasible the walkable grocery may really be.

Customer Base. O’Toole uses the concept of trade population, but this is begging the question. His trade population number is generated assuming an automobile-oriented environment, which is exactly what the proposed scenario is an alternative to. The more objective measure is the actual pool of customers a large grocery draws from. To get a feel for this I counted all of the food sources that serve the Charlottesville-Albemarle area. I came up with 14 large "modern grocery stores," between 30,000 and 60,000 sq. feet. This does not include:

medium-sized full-service grocers
about a half dozen health food stores
specialty ethnic food stores
big box stores like Target that sell food
dozens of small convenience stores

I'm only counting the kinds of places O'Toole considers an unreasonable sacrifice to do without.

Taking the combined service area's population to be 134,086 from current ACS data (Charlottesville and Albemarle County), this breaks down to about one large grocery store per 9500 people. APA has determined the average customer base for a supermarket in the U.S. to be 8,412 , but I’ll just stick with my more conservative 9500.

Modal Split. O'Toole, as usual, characterizes the smart growth position as something far more extreme than anyone would actually propose: a 100% walking grocery store, as if bicycles, transit, and automobiles do not exist at all. The term walkable means able to be walked to, not only walked to. Every smart growth proponent I know would actually hope to see a multimodal balance to allow an array of transportation options. For the sake of this scenario, let's suppose our store has 50% walkers (with some cyclists included in here), 25% transit users, and 25% drivers.

Walking Distance. If you ignore Garreau's snarkiness, the 1,500 foot number is an alright estimate for typical behavior in a pedestrian-friendly environment. Walking 600 feet will seem intolerable if it's between the Best Buy and the Bed, Bath, and Beyond through a parking lot and grass berm, but Charlottesville's downtown pedestrian mall is 2,100 feet long and people will regularly walk its length for an errand because it is so enjoyable. A more objective way to go about this would be to fix the travel time. Apparently, the average drive to the grocery store currently takes about 20 minutes, including the walk from the parking lot. At a leisurely pace, the average walker could traverse about 3,000 feet in 20 minutes. I'll stick with the 1,500 foot number, noting that this will cut the travel time in half even for the furthest walkers.

Needed Density. Considering all of these conditions, a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that this grocer could be supported with a population density of 18,885 people per square mile surrounding it. This is about half the density of Brooklyn. If this still seems unreasonably high, it should be noted that this is only the density for one quarter of a square mile area. In theory, it could be surrounded by a greenbelt of parkland and have no effect on the calculation.

Charlottesville's new Market Street Market serves a walkable neighborhood

The more important question that I have not addressed is whether easy access to a “large modern grocery store” really adds much to quality of life. Granted that more choices are usually better than fewer, but is a whole wall of ketchup options that much more preferable than one or two choices. Psychologists for a while have been pointing to the phenomenon of too many choices, leading to customer confusion and even anxiety, so much so that major retailers have begun simplifying their selections and stepping up quality control. New corporations like Trader Joes are mastering this market.

There’s no reason why a medium-scaled grocer could not carry almost anything the average household would want on a much smaller footprint. And rather than singling out a one-size-fits-all shopping location, whether you're preparing Thanksgiving dinner or picking up milk, it's easy to imagine a full spectrum of grocery stores organized between convenience and selection. Walk to the neighborhood store twice a week; take a longer trip to Costco every two months.