James Lileks on an old photo of a Minneapolis hotel: *This is the city that was smaller than the one in which I live today, but seemed so much more bigger.*
Was it television? Automobiles? The city seemed bigger because people filled its public realm in a way we only see in the very largest cities today. Have people left out of free will, or coercion?
A follow-on to the “Healthy Places Act”:https://westnorth.com/2006/12/31/three-in-brief/ from San Francisco’s department of public health:
bq. The Healthy Development Measurement Tool is an evidence-based practice to consider public health objectives in land use planning. It provides land use planners, public agencies, and community stakeholders with a set of metrics to assess the extent to which urban development projects, plans and policies affect health.
And an interesting resource: some great “metro area profiles”:http://diversitydata.sph.harvard.edu/profiles_main.jsp compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health, including (school & residential) segregation and poverty indices by race/ethnic group.
I somehow never noticed that Inga Saffron, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s architectural critic (and blogger), referenced my old Promenade Plantée photos in a column of hers about the Reading Viaduct Project back in February 2004:
bq. The Penn design teams were partly inspired by Paris’ success in transforming an elevated train trestle near the Place de la Bastille into an elegant, 2.4-mile-long landscaped path called the Promenade Plantee. (Excellent photographs can be found at http://homepage.mac. com/paytonc/promenade.) Such obsolete viaducts are fast being transformed into sky parks in cities around the world. New York City is working on plans to convert Manhattan’s High Line, which runs through Chelsea, into an elevated park.
A cool tool for those of us who often stand in the middle of the street to take photos, then count steps to get the dimensions: “StreetSections.com”:http://www.streetsections.com/go.asp?a=worldtour_gettingstarted gives a view down the street side-by-side with an illustration of said street’s measured section.
Robert Sullivan got a prime op-ed page placement for this paean to PPS’s principles. The irony is perhaps that his research was funded by Saturn, the GM division, and written up for Dwell magazine. Hmm.
The simple and elegant cure for the loss of New York’s inner pedestrian is to open up car-clogged streets and public spaces. Another of Mr. Schaller’s surveys, sponsored by the citizens’ group Transportation Alternatives, showed that 89 percent of people questioned on Prince Street in SoHo got there by subway, bus, foot or bicycle, and that the majority would gladly give up parking for more pedestrian space.
With a million more New Yorkers scheduled to arrive by 2030, true sustainability requires the city — or at least its residents — to make a bold move. Some neighborhoods are already working on it. The Ninth Avenue Renaissance Project, sponsored by a coalition of residents and businesses, has held community workshops on converting Ninth Avenue from Lincoln Tunnel access ramp to boulevard.
The now chic Meatpacking District plans to bring back a space that, since the area was a Native American village, has been a natural gathering place for people without combustion engines: wider sidewalks, public seating and a piazza in the restaurant-surrounded open field of paving stones could be more like Campo dei Fiori in Rome and less a spot for crazed U-turns. In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the city’s Department of Transportation has replaced parking spaces near a subway station with rows of bike racks.
But these are tiny steps. Boston’s mayor has endorsed converting Hanover Street in the city’s North End into a car-free pedestrian mall. Why don’t we do the same in part or even all of SoHo? In Los Angeles, some traffic lights are programmed to change for approaching buses (a signal in the bus alerts the light). Why can’t the same happen on 14th Street?
“UrbanSpoon”:http://urbanspoon.wordpress.com/2007/01/10/cities-at-night/ has scatterplot maps of restaurants in several large cities. It’s amazing how well the shape of the landscape and population density can be revealed with just restaurants.
* MTC, the Bay Area’s MPO, has a “Pedestrian & Bicyclist Safety Toolbox”:http://www.bayareatrafficsignals.org/toolbox/Index.html of education, enforcement, and engineering tools at various price points: from brochures to bike boulevards.
* The Pew Climate Center has published “reports on buildings”:http://www.pewclimate.org/global-warming-in-depth/all_reports/buildings/index.cfm that I should read, notably “this one”:http://www.pewclimate.org/policy_center/policy_reports_and_analysis/buildings/index.cfm
* Another worthy cause: Obama and Solis cosponsored an APHA written bill to spend more federal money so that planners can examine “healthy places”:http://www.apha.org/nphw/2006/pg_newsletter_4-4-06.htm, including sponsored research on the built environment’s role in health and local Health Impact Assessments. It turns out that CNU board member Dhiru Thadani heads the Washington practice of “ASG”:http://www.apha.org/nphw/2006/pg_newsletter_4-4-06.htm, which rents office space from APHA.
The Midtown Greenway is a sunken rail-to-trail-with-future-rail traversing the diverse (and dense, by Twin Cities standards) neighborhoods of South Minneapolis, from yuppie haven Uptown, through Midtown and past the Midtown Exchange, crossing the Hiawatha light-rail-with-trail, and eventually landing in Longfellow. The trail very nearly links two major park systems: the Chain o’ Lakes to the west and the Missisippi River on the east. Current proposals would put either LRT or a streetcar along the south half of the former freight ROW, as part of a LRT service to the near southwest suburbs.
There’s no view whatsoever — neither the babbling mountain brooks of Denver’s flood control ditches nor enchanting murals on the concrete retaining walls — and the plants have died. Still, the rhythm of all those bridges crossing overhead looks pretty neat at bicycle speeds.
As with all grade-separated trails, it’s not cheap: a good number of the bridges have been replaced, a new grade-separated crossing is underway at Hiawatha Avenue, and a CCTV/”blue light” security system had to be installed. Yet the trail is definitely encouraging new investment, like the lofts on the left.
Earlier, “I blogged”:https://westnorth.com/2006/11/23/safe-streets/trackback/ a photo of a PSA ad promoting safe driving around pedestrians. Today, Hilkevitch’s “front-page column”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0612180161dec18,1,413615.column?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true in the Trib offers details on the overall “Safe Streets for Chicago”:http://egov.cityofchicago.org/city/webportal/portalContentItemAction.do?BV_SessionID=@@@@1658248418.1166469198@@@@&BV_EngineID=cccdaddjjfemidgcefecelldffhdfhg.0&contentOID=536939798&contenTypeName=COC_EDITORIAL&topChannelName=Dept&blockName=Transportation%2FMaking+Chicago+Pedestrian+Friendly%2FI+Want+To&context=dept&channelId=0&programId=0&entityName=Transportation&deptMainCategoryOID=-536895918 strategy, including:
* a Mayor’s Pedestrian Advisory Council, to launch in January
* design strategies, like bulb-outs, median refuges, raised crosswalks (“sleeping policemen”), and zebra crossings
* motorist stings, with EMC/TMA and police cooperating to catch speeders
* road diets (four to three lanes)
* installation of more pedestrian countdown signals
* greater education
The last point is perhaps most important: the driving culture can, in fact, be changed, given enough education and enforcement.
Our SSA commission will be meeting with the police department at some point to discuss sites for camera installation; I’ll ask whether the red-light cameras are smart enough to catch other infractions, like intruding on crosswalks and not yielding before turning, and whether sting operations can be set up at our intersections.
Dan Solomon’s “Whatever Happened to Modernity?” plenary (we don’t have keynotes at CNU) is still the most-requested item from CNU XIV. We have a transcript, a PDF slide show, and even a video “available for download”:http://cnunext.org/icharrette/info/sessions.html#926.
bq. Daniel Solomon, co-founder of CNU, will build on the special address by discussing contentious design issues. In the United Kingdom, as in the United States, New Urbanism is pinned in the crossfire of style wars. On one side are jihadists who regard the entire modern world as cultural nihilism; on the other are critics and powerful institutions relentlessly embracing novelty in the name of an historically ordained modernity. Between these extremes, New Urbanism steers an unsteady course, snipped at from all directions.
bq. The situation is made more intractable by the Germanic strain of modernism that infected the teaching of architecture and town planning. However, other, more useful modernist traditions infuse cultural phenomena such as fashion, dance and music with different historiography and different conceptions of the relationship of the tenses: past, present, future, and future perfect.
Sometimes, PPS gets a bit tiresome with its Cosmo-style “Ten Ways to…” ledes, but hey, they seem to draw attention.
Nine Ways to Transform New York into a City of Great Places is different: it’s a genuinely gutsy set of recommendations, starting with:
bq. The highest and best use of New York’s street space is to support pedestrian activity and access.
The article very justly attacks:
* starchitects’ Corbusian indifference to the city beneath their floating glass palaces (compared with the Empire State Building, “so human-scaled at the sidewalk level that people standing in front… stop to ask where it is”);
* the city bureaucracy — schools, small business, culture, health — for sitting in silos, blind to the value that great public spaces could bring to their departments (see the Richard Jackson piece below);
* the reactive, antagonistic, opaque Community Board process, which is effective at neither gathering broad input nor regulating change, and for which blame lies on both the CBs and the developer-city-designer combine for being too afraid of forward planning;
* BIDs for not thinking beyond just picking up trash:
bq. BIDs have proven effective at the basics of maintenance, security, and beautification, but they have yet to explore a broader public role. Small Business Services, the agency that manages their funds, should lead BIDs to form more community partnerships, program their public spaces, and implement streetscape improvements. BIDs themselves would relish the new role. Some are already raring to work with surrounding communities on bold visions for what their public spaces could become–they just need the go-ahead.
James A. Bacon writes about how a Virginia Beach intersection metamorphed from planners’ laughingstock to a vibrant urban oasis.
|Before (from _Suburban Nation_) | After (from CMSS, via Bacon’s Rebellion)|
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Andres Duany, the New Urbanism evangelist, carries a carousel of slides to illustrate his speeches with real-world examples of atrocious urban design. For years, one of his favorites — for all I know, he uses it still — was an aerial shot of the intersection of Independence and Virginia Beach Boulevards in the Pembroke area of Virginia Beach.
This suburban abomination consisted of 20 or more lanes of traffic colliding at a single point. Flanking the thoroughfares were acres upon acres of mostly empty parking lot. And shoved off to the edges of the image — separated by vast distances that no sane person would negotiate on foot — were isolated stores and office buildings. Clearly, Duany would dead-pan with his inimitable sarcasm, Virginia Beach had designed the community for the care and feeding of automobiles. People evidently did not figure into the equation.
It may be time for Duany to find a new slide.
Pembroke, the least likely of locations, is undergoing a thorough-going transformation. Several blocks are blossoming with high-rise towers, parking decks, condominiums, stores, offices and restaurants. The streets are bustling with business executives, lunch goers, errand runners, even joggers….
In what had been an asphalt wasteland a few years ago, developers have brought online 300,000 square feet of office space, a comparable amount of retail, 342 apartment units and a 176-room hotel. Under construction today are another 42,000 square feet of retail, a 1,200-seat performing arts center and a 37-story hotel/residential tower — which will be the tallest building in Virginia. All told: about $400 million in investment….
In [architect Burrell] Saunders’ [principal of CMSS Architects] view, Virginia Beach’s main contributions were twofold: scrapping the zoning codes and other regulations that locked development into expensive and inefficient “sprawl” mode, and creating a Tax Increment Financing District for the development of structured parking and infrastructure improvements. Once the city let developers exercise their problem-solving ingenuity, growth took off.
A coalition of private business interests — led by Saunders, Gerald Divaris, Frederick Napolitano and Richard Olivieri — willed the urban center into existence in the face of initial skepticism and apathy on the part of city government. The city eventually came on board with funds of its own: contributing to parking, streetscapes, and other infrastructure improvements with the increased tax revenue flowing from the new development itself.
For those who think that re-working failed suburbs is a process that will take generations, Saunders’ assessment of Pembroke is profoundly optimistic. Yes, developers and city officials should approach their task with a 50-year planning horizon. “A city,” he says, “should be built to serve generations.” But Town Center has demonstrated that it’s possible to transform large pieces of the physical environment in just a few years…
Saunders “insists [that] Virginia doesn’t need to spend mega-billions of dollars on new road and transit projects to ameliorate traffic congestion,” since the urban form along those roads (“the road edge,” in engineer-ese) can take care of much of that. In a pioneering example of New Urbanism, “1000 Friends of Oregon”:http://www.friends.org/resources/lutraq.html launched a regional modeling process entitled “LUTRAQ: Making the Land Use, Transportation, Air Quality Connection,” but the message has yet to fully sink in: not only are all three so deeply intertwined that they’re effectively different sides of the same issue, but today we can now safely extrapolate from air pollution to water and climate, the emerging hot topics in environmental management.
bq. Transportation is not an issue that should be left only to the traffic engineers. Their solution is to add more lanes of roadway. A better approach is to change where people live, work and play. “We have enough roads,” Saunders says. “We have enough asphalt. It’s a question of how you organize the use of the asphalt.”
Given that Duany always uses that slide to show just how far overboard the highway engineers and zoning engineers (aka planners) have gone, it’s quite a revelation indeed.
west north 