Category Archives: public space

Finding space on the LES

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CNU has given a few awards to projects which knits new urban fabric into the leftover space around still-standing Modernist spatial objects — effectively finding underutilized “new” space for infill. (This differs from other approaches which remove the offending highway, housing project, etc.) These have included parking lots in Portland, lawns and plazas in Arlington, backyards in Takoma Park, mall ring roads in Columbia, even highway viaducts in Columbus.

I’ve wondered whether a similar approach could be used to heal the wounds that urban renewal left around me, in particular around the CHA senior housing projects that dot many lakefront neighborhoods. Many of these locations plopped open space down where there was — and could once again be — economically productive, vibrant neighborhood fabric, and yet there’s no reason to demolish the existing buildings. And such an approach could yield really big: a UMich graduate studio calculated that new development alongside NYCHA’s Lower East Side projects could accommodate up to 8,000 new apartments, or 22 million square feet of new space — two World Trade Centers or 3.6 Rockefeller Centers worth.

Findings (23 Nov)

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Oh, all right, this’ll be another miscellany post.

1. I was reading Sunday’s Frank Rich column on Sarah Palin while walking down Lincoln Avenue — the sadly silenced “German Broadway.” The fiercely nativist, “politically incorrect,” anti-intellectual, non-reality-based far right certainly deserves the moniker “New Know Nothings”

Back in 1855, Chicago’s immigrants electorally vanquished the old Know-Nothings after the Lager Beer Riot. With that, the right-wing elite lost power over the city for centuries — over the right to drink beer. Which of today’s wedge issues is a sure loser for today’s right? Bear in mind that nationally, they ended up winning (and then losing) the war over beer.

2. I ran my new address through the magic new TIF Search. Even though the Fullerton/Milwaukee TIF was only authorized in 2000, it already takes over 2/3 of my tax bill. pie chart

3. Monée Fields-White has a cool profile in Crain’s this week about the Bensidoun public-market operation that’s coming to the C&NW concourse.

4. Hint from Tom Vanderbilt:

One recent study conducted by officials at the Paris Metro—which looked at “missed connection” ads placed by urbanites looking for love in the city—found that the Metro “is without doubt the foremost producer of urban tales about falling in love.” The seats closest to the door, it seemed, offered the best opportunities for falling in love with the proper stranger.

5. I keep meaning to finish off an essay on the parking privatization deal. One of these days…

Spaces (13 Nov)

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Coffee bar Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Star Lounge in Ukrainian Village was built as a bar, but now serves coffee & tea. The bar and counters lining some walls create a nice mix of seating options instead of the usual plethora of half-empty 2-top tables that typify coffee houses; there’s plenty of space for people to work solo or to strike up a conversation. There’s also the communal-table option, but I get a feeling that’ll never really catch on in Chicago. (I do remember one hotel breakfast room in Japan which had communal tables with low dividers — similar to what appears to be called an index table, often seen in library reference areas — which pretty effectively divided the table but not the room.)

Earlier, I’ve posted that walking, cycling, and transit (les modes doux = “sweet modes”) are subject to a positive feedback loop (virtuous circle) as usage grows, while driving creates a negative feedback loop (vicious circle). Now, the quintessential U of C question: but how does it work in theory? David Levinson and Kevin Krizek in Planning for Place and Plexus call these Complementors vs. Competitors. The other pedestrians on the sidewalk are (usually) complementors. The other drivers on the road are competitors. Both of these effects follow from transportation’s network effects, but also result from the peculiar dynamics of automobility vs. other modes — in particular, the very high marginal cost of adding capacity due to the vehicle’s immense demand for space. More compact, space-efficient modes can be scaled up at little cost; and when so scaled they also contribute to the “more is better” positive feedback loop underlying good urbanism.

We do this because

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A recent conversation turned, as many do, to travel — but not so much the logistics thereof, about which any flyertalker can expound for hours, but rather what it is that we’re seeking away from home. Is it better weather, time with loved ones, a tastier cup of tea, or just that weightless sensation of being lost?

It seems that I like to see the world as a laboratory of urban policies. Untangling and uncovering the layers of human interventions that result in our built environment still interests me more than even the most stunning of natural settings. We can’t understand a decision without understanding the assumptions and the context surrounding it: how the rationales made sense at its moment in space and time. Steve Mouzon likes to repeat the line “we do this because” throughout his pattern books — although that genre typically tells you how to do things and how they’ve always been done, but rarely why. Such practices are meaningless if not grounded in a place and its history.

Similarly, it always troubles (and frankly astonishes) me when I meet small-c conservatives who apparently listened when the Wizard declares, “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” To be blind to history, to accept that the world was evidently created just yesterday without any human intervention, to accept that the status quo shall always be such and that any attempts to change are futile, dangerous, and heavy-handed — this attitude strikes me as willful disbelief. When those with libertarian tendencies parrot this, it amounts to (to quote Sondheim) “keep the status quo permanently so!” For instance, I recently had occasion to point out that “making driving ‘as unpleasant as possible’ is no more heavy-handed an intervention than 80 years wherein government strove to make driving as pleasant & easy as possible.” A society’s attitude towards driving has nothing to do with economic freedom, either: by far the two most free economies in the world, Hong Kong and Singapore, have some of the world’s strictest policies discouraging car ownership — punitive registration taxes, high road tolls, and high gas prices. Why? Because they’re also the world’s two most densely urbanized economies, and mass car ownership — and the pollution and congestion that would ensue — would impinge on others’ freedom of movement, and damage the economy besides.

Access road
“It is amazing to go out to the end there, look around, and wonder just why they did this.” (Jack Hartray was speaking of Wacker Drive, pre-Lakeshore East, which resembled this Indiana steel-mill viaduct.)

In the past, I’d study these things more closely here in North America: it’s easier to sell an idea once it’s been tried somewhere with a substantially similar legal or cultural background. Besides, it’s also substantially easier and cheaper to get to. And yet it’s sometimes more interesting to stumble across a great public policy idea implemented amidst greater odds. It’s humbling, for instance, to see carefully built public infrastructure (like TranSantiago’s efficient prepaid bus stops) in countries much poorer than the US, land of the affluent society.

So anyways, here are some highlights from the past few months of wandering about:
– Of course, I walked The High Line in July. It was, indeed, pretty magical to be suspended over the city, but plenty enough’s been written about that.
– I’ve written about Liberties Walk [full set of photos] before, a small-scale pedestrian mall flanked with townhouses over independent shops in scruffy Northern Liberties, Philadelphia. Another, much more ambitious phase recently opened, called the Piazza at Schmidt’s, and the Walk itself has been extended two more blocks. Future phases will add more multistory buildings, notably including one building fronting Girard (an adjacent arterial) with a supermarket and parking. (That phasing strategy is notably offbeat: usually you’d lead with the supermarket anchor to build traffic and then follow up with specialty shops, but this has proceeded in exactly the opposite manner.) The architecture might seem aggressive at first glance, but its weight and massing do strike a balance between industrial buildings on the east and residential on the west. The public spaces themselves are pretty sparse, which works for the narrow Walk but not the broad Piazza. Critics have weighed in on the Piazza, notably Philly Skyline and the Inquirer’s Inga Saffron.
– I’m always intruiged to see other instances where off-street retail has been introduced to an urban neighborhood, so two examples from Santiago de Chile caught my attention: the block-sized Patio Bellavista complex on Pio Nino, and the tiny but elegant Plaza del Paseo Barrio Lastarria.

Easy street reclamation

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Reclaimed street stub Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

The WPB plan calls for reclaiming street space along Wood and Hermitage, little stub-end streets on the 1300 block of N. Milwaukee that were cut off by the subway trench. They’re “the big empty streets to nowhere,” as the plan calls them, and their purpose could be served by just a single lane of traffic. (A similar opportunity exists at Milwaukee & Diversey.)

Here’s an example of how a similar street, off Washington Ave. in downtown St. Louis, was reclaimed through the simple addition of some planters. In theory, a car could still drive through here for emergency access, about where the people are standing. An even cheaper option — the ECObox temporary garden in Paris, built by ringing the site with discarded wooden pallets and backfilling with dirt — is profiled in the cool “Actions: What You Can Do With the City” exhibit up at the Graham Foundation right now.

Two other cool things I noted at the exhibit:
– The emotion map, which is kinda what happens when mood rings meet GPS and GIS. It locates “areas of communal arousal.”
– From Atelier Bow-Wow and firmly in the vein of chindogu, an idea for the “left bike battery charger”: that passerby could ride parked bicycles to feed electricity into their devices’ batteries. Maybe the “green gym” could offer such a service as an incentive for people to stop in and recharge daily.

“Scofflaws?” Scoff.

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Something else, posted as comment on Chris Swope’s Urban Notebook, in the vein of several other posts:

Traffic rules as we know them weren’t codified until car traffic overran cities in the 1920s, and even then were created to prevent cars from running over everything else. If the intent of a stop sign is to keep traffic from speeding through an urban neighborhood, then any 10MPH cyclist is observing the intent of that law even if she doesn’t follow the letter of the law. (Not that drivers do, either: stings here in Chicago found 80% speeding through school zones and almost none yielding at crosswalks.)

Cyclists in Amsterdam or Copenhagen get not just bikeways, but also a completely different set of road rules tailored around cyclists — even green lights are timed to move bike, not car, traffic. Actual full stops are relatively rare; instead, signs oblige vehicles to yield. Yet both driving and cycling there are much safer than in the US.

This “yield if it’s safe” approach exists in North America: in Idaho, cyclists may treat stop signs as yield signs; in British Columbia, pedestrians and cyclists may treat flashing-green stoplights as stop signs; and in Portland, stops have been replaced with yields along 100 miles of “bike boulevards.” These acknowledge that a full stop for a cyclist isn’t like tapping the brake pedal in a car, since the car wields 500X as much horsepower (and thus deadly force). It’s more like demanding that drivers stop, shift to park, engage the parking brake, turn off the ignition, remove the key, and start up again. It’s akin to asking pedestrians to sit down before getting back up and crossing the street.

Instead of more enforcement, better laws would go a long way towards improving safe and orderly traffic flow for everyone.

Edit: Here’s an interesting intervention. Installing a “bike scramble” at one intersection in PDX increased cyclist compliance with the signal from 21.9% to 95.8%. [PSU study, h/t Twin City Sidewalks]

Privatization is not NU

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{Posted to The City Fix}

[C]ritics conflate New Urbanism with the broader but contemporaneous neoliberal trend towards privatizing space. This is perhaps understandable, but neoliberalism well predates New Urbanism by many years. The plazas or lawns surrounding Modernist office buildings, the golf courses and greenways that wrap around Houston tract houses or Arizona retirement homes, the atria of 1980s shopping malls — none of these are New Urbanist in any way, and all arguably predated New Urbanism, but all involve private governance of what would otherwise be public space.

Diggs Town is a curious example. I don’t know the specifics there, but here in Chicago, the public sector had more or less abdicated control over the common spaces within and around the buildings. Without any clear understanding of who was in charge of these spaces, they fell into deep neglect, with dire consequences. Redevelopment of these sites places a clearer boundary around such spaces, either enclosing them into the private realm of yards or creating actual parks. I’m not sure how that “privatizes governance that was not previously private” so much as assigns governance over that which was previously ungoverned.

The false notion that New Urbanist subdivisions have stricter or more nefarious homeowner covenants than conventional suburban subdivisions is an unfortunate result of Celebration — which, I might point out, has CC&Rs that are in many ways less strict than many comparable Florida golf-course PUDs.

A history of “jaywalking”

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Here’s a fascinating bit of etymology from the era of street commodification, showing how auto interests (which ultimately led to the city’s ruin at the hands of their road-hogging rural contraptions) turned city dwellers’ cosmopolitanism against themselves with the term. From Peter D. Norton’s Fighting Traffic (MIT, 2008), pp. 72-79:

A ‘jay’ was a hayseed, out of place in the city; a jaywalker was someone who did not know how to walk in a city. Originally the term applied as much or more to pedestrians who obstructed the path of other pedestrians—by failing, for example, to keep to the right on the sidewalk. As autos grew common on city streets, jaywalkers were more often pedestrians oblivious to the danger of city motor traffic… ‘Jaywalker’ carried the sting of ridicule, and many objected to branding independent-minded pedestrians with the term. In 1915 New York’s police commissioner, Arthur Woods, attempted to use it to describe anyone who crossed the street at mid-block. The New York Times objected, calling the word ‘highly opprobrious’ and ‘a truly shocking name.’ Any attempt to arrest pedestrians would be ’silly and intolerable.’ […]

In 1921 a National Safety Council member from Baltimore confessed to his colleagues that, at least in pedestrian control… ‘You are affecting personal liberty when you keep people from crossing the streets at certain places.’ […] The cleverest anti-jaywalking publicity effort was in Detroit in 1922, where the Packard Motor Car Company exploited the new fashion for monuments to traffic fatalities. Packard built an oversized imitation tombstone that closely resembled the monument to the innocent child victims of accidents in Baltimore. But Packard’s tombstone redirected blame to the victims. It was marked ‘Erected to the Memory of Mr. J. Walker: He Stepped from the Curb Without Looking.’ […]

A St. Louisan, defending pedestrians’ traditional rights to the street, tried to turn the ‘jaywalking’ label against those who promoted it. ‘We hear the shameful complaint of jay walkers, to console jay drivers,’ he wrote. ‘It is the self-conceited individual who thinks people are cattle and run upon them tooting a horn.’ ‘Make every machine stop and wait,’ he demanded, ‘until the road is clear, and give precedent to people who are walking. The streets belong to the people and not to any one class, and we have an equal right, in fact more right than the automobile.’ Nine months later the Washington Post argued that ‘the jay driver is even a greater menace to the public than the jay walker,’ and in 1925 Washington’s deputy traffic director I. C. Moller endorsed the term… But promoters of the epithet ‘jay driver’ failed. Critics of motorists could call them cold-hearted, tyrannical, or selfish, but a motorcar’s power, modernity, and worldly sophistication made its owner anything but a jay…

In 1920, when the wave of public safety campaigns was just beginning, ‘jaywalker’ was a rare and controversial term. Safety weeks, more than anything else, introduced the word to the millions. Frequent use wore down its sharp edge, and it passed into acceptable usage as a term for lawless pedestrians who would not concede their old rights to the streets, even in the dawning motor age.

What preceded the invention of jaywalking? A 1926 report notes “a Common Law principle which developed centuries ago… This ancient rule is that all persons have an equal right in the highway, and that in exercising the right each shall take due care not to injure other users of the way.” (Miller McClintock for the Chicago Association of Commerce, “Report and Recommendations of the Metropolitan Street Traffic Survey,” p. 133, quoted by Norton on p. 289.)

Modest punishments

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Since the citizenry (as exhibited, for example, in blog comments following the incident at Seattle’s Critical Mass in July) is crying out for a vigilante response to the menace of bicyclists blocking traffic, I hear that state legislators have passed a bill declaring “inhibiting the free flow of traffic” to be a capital offense — punishable by cruel and unusual forms of the death penalty (like, for instance, having one’s bones crushed by a speeding car and then left to bleed to death in the middle of the road). Let’s see what kind of “appropriate” punishments have already been meted out just in the first few minutes after the new law’s passage:

double parking
Double parkers, like the violator being dealt with here, no longer receive “the Denver boot.” Instead, the “Spanish boot” was applied: “high boots made of spongy leather had been placed on the culprit’s feet, he was tied on to a table near a large fire, and a quantity of boiling water was poured on the boots, which penetrated the leather, ate away the flesh, and even dissolved the bones of the victim.”
(photo: toner/Flickr)

Tow Away Zone
For the crime of standing in a No Parking/No Standing/Tow Zone, the delivery truck driver was “estrapaded”: “they raised the victim, with two hundred and fifty pounds attached to his feet, to the ceiling by means of a capstan; he was then allowed to fall several times successively by jerks to the level of the ground, by which means his arms and legs were completely dislocated.”
(photo: Thingo/Flickr)

red light runner
The driver of this car, which ran a red light and caused a crash which tied up traffic, was executed by the wheel: “a rope was attached to each of the limbs of the criminal, one being bound round each leg from the foot to the knee, and round each arm from the wrist to the elbow. These ropes were then fastened to four bars, to each of which a strong horse was harnessed… These horses were first made to give short jerks; and when the agony had elicited heart-rending cries from the unfortunate man, who felt his limbs being dislocated without being broken, the four horses were all suddenly urged on with the whip in different directions…” You can guess how that ended.
(photo: SFPD via SF Weekly/The Snitch)

blocking the crosswalk
This driver drove past the stop line and into a crosswalk, thereby blocking the free flow of pedestrians through the intersection. The driver will be dragged “from the prison to the place of execution upon an hurdle or sled, where they are hanged till they be half dead, and then taken down, and quartered alive; after that, their members and bowels are cut from their bodies, and thrown into a fire, provided near hand and within their own sight, even for the same purpose.”
(photo: Brother Grimm/Flickr)

(Gory medieval execution details excerpted from The Middle Ages Website)

Playing chicken

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1. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because s/he has the right of way in the crosswalk, dang it! [Photo: Chris Brunn, via Flickr]

Northwest Chicago Drive with Care Rally-2.jpg

2. Something’s amiss here: Michigan’s governor now bikes to work, while Illinois’ governor still takes a private jet. [Tim Jones reporting in the Trib via bike blog]

3. How good is the bike business these days? Clever, a utility-focused shop in Portland, is going on a two-week hiatus — partly because they’ve plumb sold out.

4. Why is Mexican food ubiquitous in Chicago but scarce in NYC? The quick answer is that Illinois has the third-largest Mexican population of any state (after California and Texas) whereas New York is 11th, between Georgia and North Carolina. But this surprised me:

Hispanic/Latino population of New York City.: 2,267,827
Mexican: 260,622

Hispanic/Latino population of Santa Ana, Calif.: 351,894
Mexican: 254,794

(Source: 2006 Census ACS)

5. Of all the neighborhoods in Chicago, the office of tourism chooses to highlight Wicker Park in its Summer in Chicago promotion — and does a pretty good job of it.

6. “Broadway Boulevard” will add about 3,000 sq. ft. of open space per block (about half an acre in total) using semi-temporary treatments, at a cost of about $2M/mile. The Times describes the treatment thusly: “painting the bike lane green, buying the chairs, tables, benches, umbrellas and planters and applying a coat of small-grained gravel mixed with epoxy onto the pedestrian areas, which will set them off from both the street and the bicycle path.”

7. A recent Obama-on-the-trail puff pieces in the Times displayed this bit of transect-awareness on the candidate’s part:

Many of the regional distinctions in the United States, he said, “in terms of culture, politics, attitudes, people,” have been muted. After 18 months of traveling extensively across the country, he said, “the biggest differences have more to do with rural, suburban, urban, as opposed to north, south, east or west.”

8. Alderman, there might be a reason why you’re not in the real estate market research business — or, apparently, the “reality based community.” Tom Corfman in Crain’s:

Alderman Anthony Beale (9th) prefers a smaller development of about 200 homes with prices between $350,000 and $500,000, well above the 2007 median price of $124,500 in Pullman… “We are going to build a suburban community within the city,” says Mr. Beale, whose ward includes the Ryerson site. “We’re looking at curved (streets), a gated community, the attached three-car garage.”

9. Someone arrived at this blog yesterday looking for “why cities grow to the west.” What I had heard is that, in Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes at least, prevailing winds blow from the west. Therefore, the freshest air to be found in an industrial city would generally be found in the western part of town. Obviously, this is not always the case (in NYC, still fresher air can be found by the ocean, which is southeast, and many other cities there are still-stronger “nice” draws like lakes or hills to the east), but it might partially explain why the “favored quarter” often sits west of town.

Which lawbreakers are at fault (updated)

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The ordinance whose introduction by Daley inspired “Hello, Criminal” made its way through the legislative apparatus. The Tribune apparently thought it wise to celebrate by splashing my photo on the front page of its website yesterday. John Greenfield has the full story of the ordinance’s passage in Gapers Block. How this became controversial is beyond me; all that the ordinance does is codify penalties for rudely, dangerously, stupidly, and (already) illegally cutting people off in traffic. Anyone who speaks in favor of that deserves to be, well, cut off.

What motorists probably don’t know (but which astute readers here do) is that several detailed multiyear crash studies (Portland, NYC) have found that most bicycle crashes are caused by drivers breaking the law — not cyclists. The entire point of traffic regulations, historically, has been to defend against the deadly and reckless use of automobiles, and particularly against the shocking brutality of hit-and-runs. Even today, three generations after the first requirements that drivers and cars carry licenses, four Americans die every day in hit-and-run crashes.

Perry Duis’ Encyclopedia of Chicago article on “Street Life” notes that for the first half of their history, the parade of varied workaday activities — few of them related to speedy transportation — on Chicago’s streets even proved a tourist attraction:

In 1900, Scottish author William Archer proclaimed that “New York for a moment does not compare with Chicago in the roar and bustle and bewilderment of its street life.” Similarly, many of Chicago’s greatest writers—especially those of rural origin—wove their fascination with the energy and variety of the public spaces, especially downtown, into their works.

It all ends sadly.

[T]he automobile age… dramatically changed the relationship between Chicagoans and their streets. The auto not only benefited from the growing disdain for the street by providing the kind of isolation from street life that had once been enjoyed by only the wealthy… Drivers also demanded speed and the elimination of peddlers, plodding wagons, playing children, or any other street use that interfered with getting from here to there. By the 1920s the growing volume of fast-paced traffic produced intersection hazards that encouraged the introduction of mechanical traffic signals… The idea of the street as a place for getting from here to there was about to triumph… During the 1950s the press began to note a loss of neighborhood social life that had traditionally grown out of public places. The front porch or stoop, which had fostered neighboring on warm evenings, had begun to give way to air conditioning and television.