Category Archives: urban planning

Today’s briefs

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More briefs. Also, this is published post #1200!

1. Tomorrow’s Census 2010 initial data release will add a new column to this here table. 11AM EST.

2. Some notes from a recent book talk by Peter Calthorpe (book review).

Two laundry-list formulas that shape VMT:
VMT = location, density, demographic, transit, policy
VMT = policy, design, investment, intent

Percent of CO2 from built environment (transportation & buildings)
USA: 62%
California: 50%
Global: 37%

Think about how the world has changed in the span of 40 years — since we will have 40 years (2010-2050) to reach the -80% CO2 target. That might seem unthinkable, but much does change. From 1960-2000:
Cars per household doubled, 1.0 to 1.9
VMT per capita more than doubled, 11K to 24K
Meat consumption doubled, but grazing land per American fell from 1.35 acres to 0.16 acres thanks to feedlots

Each of these techniques will halve transportation CO2 emissions:
55 MPG standard
30% biofuel content
Smart growth
All are needed.

Regarding a slide about some silly building: “we need design as if pedestrians existed… instead, we see design as if magazines mattered”

Chris Leinberger: in recent survey, 25% of people said they considered walkability in their current house. 60% say they’ll consider it for their next house! (That’s a lot of demand chasing a little supply)

[Look up in Economist US GDP as % of GGP over past 10 years, very striking decline, overall decline narrative from Friedman and Tom Paine]

How do we talk to Republicans about these matters?
– libertarian rebuttal: drivable suburbia is “a coercive, dictatorial set of circumstances”
– sustainability measures that resonated in Utah: health impacts of air quality on children; land(scape) consumption, housing choices for children and seniors, fiscal conservatism
– my thought: are there low-carbon streetcar suburbs that vote Republican? Can’t point to Brookline or Oak Park or Bethesda or Rockridge or even Houston Heights with these people since it’s all culture war, all the time with them. Sure, “small town America” images might work, but more specific examples are needed.

3. Hath hell frozen over? “The 801 New Jersey Avenue [Wal-Mart] store would cover 75,000 to 80,000 square feet of the ground floor of a five-story mixed-use building. The remainder of the floors would be made up with 315 apartments as well as additional retail. The site is currently a parking lot.” [h/t Urbanturf]

4. One key way in which the #7 extension would be operationally superior to an additional NJT tunnel [adapted from comment at Market Urbanism]:
The two proposal’s “dead ends” have quite different contexts. The ARC tunnel’s Herald Square dead-end would still have to figure out how to distribute a huge stream of passengers within the already overwhelmed Penn Station area. Instead, the #7 extension’s Secaucus dead-end is at the Lautenberg station — making use of an already-built white elephant built to distribute passengers between the various NJT lines. A subway, with its higher-frequency and higher-capacity service, probably also activates greater TOD opportunities in the intervening areas, between the West Side Yards and Secaucus. The result is more balanced access improvements for more people — and all the better if it is indeed cheaper.

5. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s recent physical move to the northern suburbs is only the most overt manifestation of a metropolitan daily newspaper chasing readers in the city’s affluent suburbs. Even though most of these papers are locally stereotyped as liberal, they really reflect the tastes of their city’s favored quarter suburbs, long taking a cluck-cluck view of city government and banning anything that could possibly offend the business elite.

6. Oh, speaking of which, here are some maps (with commentary) of some cities’ “favored quarter,” as illustrated by where the highest proportion of advanced degree holders live in various metros. Atlanta, in particular, has a very clear 90-degree arc of northern neighborhoods and suburbs which have considerably higher levels of education and income. Historically, these favored quarters have been able to use their outsized political clout — with vehicles like newspaper editorial boards — to demand better infrastructure, which consolidates the area’s advantages. This theory, which is an extension of sociologist Homer Hoyt’s “sector model” of urban development, doesn’t necessarily play out in all cities (e.g., the Twin Cities have a halo of wealth and a bit of a southwesterly tilt), but it’s interesting to see how prevalent it is.

Atlanta

(Why focus on graduate degrees? These are the people who theoretically have the highest levels of capital and therefore the greatest locational choice. Interesting to note, per the recent Brookings “State of Metropolitan America”, that the best educated parts of metropolitan America are the dense suburbs — what Claritas, the demographics firm, has long called “Money & Brains.” The least educated part of America’s metros, with half as many college grads, are the exurbs — now riddled with foreclosures, but once key to Karl Rove’s 2004 realignment. I mentioned this over on Kaid’s blog recently.)

Data from 2005-2009 American Community Survey, generated using the NYTimes’ “Mapping America.”

7. Two interesting themes from the new Michelin Guide to Chicago:
– A map of starred restaurants shows that the highest density is in the near north side — not surprising, given that it’s also the densest area for dining (between its high population density and near-monopoly on hotel rooms). However, it’s quite fascinating that Logan Square and Lincoln Park are tied among the neighborhood community areas, with 3 restaurants apiece, and that there’s nothing of note from Lakeview north — confirming my long-held suspicions about the bland north lakefront.
– Strange to see “street team” guerilla advertising for the Bib Gourmand honorees, but that is indeed quite an impressive array of $20 dinners on offer. It’s this kind of creative but casual restaurant that’s sorely missing in DC.

8. Wow: Vancouver’s Olympic Village [my photos thereof] just went into receivership — and since the city fronted much of the cost ($740M), they now take ownership. Assuming that the city settled for $40M in cash plus ownership, that’s still $1.2M in debt on each of the 580 unsold/unrented residential units. No wonder that they were asking at least $1000 per square foot on the units.

An interesting affordable housing experiment is underway a little bit north, where removing parking is seen as key to affordability: “Not providing parking has two benefits. It lowers the cost of the units, since a single parking stall typically costs $30,000 to $40,000 to build downtown; that saving will be passed on to the buyer. As well, Mr. Gillespie believes the lack of parking will act as an automatic filter to keep out better-off households.” The land is essentially receiving a writedown, since it’s bank-owned by the progressive Vancity credit union; the projected unit mix is 45% workforce ($29-36K income), 4% Habitat, and 7% community workers. Yet “The Downtown Eastside’s most vocal advocacy group says it is opposed to the project because, even though its ownership is geared to low-income households, it will still bring gentrification and increased property prices to the neighborhood.”

And we’re back: demographics

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Well, hello there! No, I haven’t forgotten about the blog, but a lot of other things have been getting in the way. Anyhow, I’m going to try to work through this backlog of great ideas that I’ve been meaning to share by posting a few thoughts & ideas every few days.

Seven for 17 December, and heavy on demography:

1. The trade-offs of moving to DC, per Travel & Leisure: well, I gained better transit, intelligent locals, monuments and museums, and lost on pretty much every other count. Can’t say it’s too far off the mark, honestly, but

2. So, why does this feel like so much smaller of a city? Because it is, and somehow it didn’t really sink in until I ran some numbers via the ever-useful FreeDemographics.com (albeit Census 2000, of course). Why a little storefront food co-op could succeed in Logan Square but maybe not on Capitol Hill (where the H Street Community Market recently threw in the towel after years of organizing):

Dill Pickle Food Co-op: 87,979 people and 28,926 HHs within 1 mile
H & 15th NE: 42,252 people and 18,355 HHs within 1 mile

And why aren’t there more specialized businesses around where I live now, even though education and income levels are so much higher? Part of me thinks that it’s because ambitious people here all become star bureaucrats, rather than going off to open new businesses — it’s a comfortable life, and the cost of living is such that one really needs a desk job to get by. (Hence the general lack of hipsters.) Demographics is another reason, though: a Cafe Lula or Revolution Brewing counts on drawing from a fairly large area, and there just aren’t nearly as many people since the city itself peters out quickly and isn’t that dense to begin with. So while Columbia Heights is in some ways similar to Logan Square — it has a respectable 74,513 people within one mile and is the last bastion of multifamily density before the city dribbles out into the bungalow belt — it only has half as many residents within five miles (643K vs 1,338K).

3. Over at Human Transit, interesting counterpoint by Jarrett Walker to Patrick Condon’s advocacy of a streetcar (essentially bus-speed) transit option for western Vancouver, instead of a rapid transit alignment along Broadway. This is a difficult corridor to parse: it’s a high-ridership route with two high-density stretches (UBC at the west edge and central Broadway from Kitsilano to Mount Pleasant/C-Drive) separated by a long stretch of low-density residential, so both at-grade and grade separation have merits.

In any case, the argument reminds me of the shift in Chicago’s mass transit ridership patterns over time. The self-contained, highly walkable streetcar communities that Condon advocates resemble the Chicago of yore: essentially an endless series of walk-to-work, walk-to-shop small towns knit together with slow(ish) streetcars. (The Surface Lines were still faster than today’s buses, though, because there wasn’t much traffic then — and way faster than they would be in mixed traffic today. I’ll grant that streetcars are sexy, but buses do have much greater operational flexibility.) Tourists may think of Chicago as the city of the “L,” but unlike NYC or DC, surface transit ridership has always accounted for the vast majority of transit riders in Chicago.

Contrast this environment with the modern city, where rapid transit to downtown plays a much greater role in the transit system (even though actual downtown employment hasn’t grown all that much). Thus, the demand for rapid transit (“L” to downtown, cars to big boxes) has increased relative to the declining market for local transportation (buses, walking to local stores). Why? Perhaps exactly the same capitalist tendency towards gigantism that has created so many other sustainability dilemmas in the first place.

4. Population decline in a “growing” neighborhood [GGW]:

When a neighborhood with low vacancy gentrifies, the resulting population loss can be quite steep indeed. Paris’ population is down by a fourth since its peak in 1921. The largely Latino neighborhood I lived in last time the census figures dropped had added literally thousands of loft apartments from 1990-2000, but smaller households completely canceled out those gains:
Households: +6,557
Occupied housing units: +6,221
Population: -268
Household size: -18.7% (-0.57 persons per HH)
Median HH income: +153% (for ZIP)

The 6,000 new apartments, and the new shops drawn to the new money, were quite visible to casual observers — but the quiet absence of one person from every other house, dozens of people from every block, was invisible to all but the census takers.

5. The Hubert Humphrey Metrodome’s roof collapse sounded familiar — and for good reason. A few years ago, I was in Vancouver when the air-supported roof of BC Place collapsed during high winds, and indeed JJ Lee from the CBC points out that the roofs were of the same design. And yes, the same firm later designed the tensile-fabric roofs atop Denver International Airport and Canada Place.

6. Puzzling: why is it that everything in Copenhagen and Tokyo costs more, except for building and operating rail transit? Alon Levy brings some numbers to this discussion in some Streetsblog comments about NYC’s transit unions. Part of the reason in Copenhagen is that their metro is driverless, which also means that it (like Vancouver) can run at fantastic frequencies at all hours — an essential enabler of car-free lifestyles.

7. Since I’m planning a car-free trip to LA (with my parents, who probably never took the bus despite living in LA for decades), here’s a Frugal Traveler quote:

To be honest, I had expected getting around Los Angeles by bike and public transportation to be a barely tolerable chore — a money-saving second-best way to see the city.
Why, then, was I feeling so elated about my trip and smitten by a city I had never particularly liked before? … These were true Los Angeles moments — moments that most visitors, stuck in freeway traffic behind the steering wheel of their rental car, never get to experience. Or, at most, happen only when they stop their car at a taco or banh mi truck.

He stayed around Santa Monica-Venice most of the time. I’m going to try basing us in Hollywood; we’ll see how that works out.

Speaking of LA, “Here’s the sordid history of the Los Angeles Green Line, the ugliest duckling of all light rail lines,” by “Wad.”

Nurturing innovation

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This month’s “urban issue” of FP features Margaret O’Mara warning that “you can’t build a new Silicon Valley just anywhere.” I was immediately reminded of one of the countless SV replicas out there, the Hong Kong Science Park:

Hong Kong Science Park

As O’Mara writes, “It turns out that sparkling facilities alone aren’t enough to create a high-tech ecosystem. The essential error is in thinking that Silicon Valley can be packaged into ‘innovation in a box’ that you can simply build overnight, unconnected to its surroundings, to the culture, to a moment in history.” That success has much more to do with freeing and feeding human capital than with creating a tidy physical setting.

Broad government policy can indeed nurture an innovation culture — witness the Research Triangle — but the manicured office park really has little to do with it. Creating Research Triangle Park (an initiative usually credited to then-Governor Luther Hodges, but obviously involving others [full story]) was undoubtedly a far-sighted achievement for its time, and the park thrived by catalyzing existing pools of talent within the context of a fast-urbanizing area. In retrospect, it seems that RTP’s strictly separate-use 100-acre corporate campuses (the archetypal nerdistan, to use a phrase from none other than Joel Kotkin) are a relic from a time when suburban campuses were thought to be free of stress and distractions. Today, that setting seems to encourage siloization compared to a more urban, mixed-use environment like the increasingly popular NCSU Centennial Campus down the street. (Centennial was always a long-off vision while I was a campus brat, but it finally now feels sort of like a real place. Interestingly, I doubt that anyone back in the 1980s thought that having the state farmers’ market on campus would be a selling point.)

(The same FP issue also has another dreary city ranking, and Christina Larson writing about Chongqing, Chicago on the [inland] Yangtze. Except, well, it has the population of California and is adding a million people a year.)

Oh, and since I’m writing about suburban offices (and since I keep looking for this info), here’s a graph comparing American downtowns, by office space — a useful proxy for white-collar job concentration.

For blog: downtown office space

July 2010 data from Cushman & Wakefield.

Crossing the line

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Metro briefs for today. (Whew, am I sick of food trucks, although I appreciate Jef Nickerson for saying what’s on my mind: “I’m not saying Food Trucks should be banned, far from it. What I would like to see is, the city thinking about ways to encourage other forms of street food, be they micro-storefronts, push carts, Food Trucks, or something else.”)

1. Chris Leinberger tries to make nice with Joel Kotkin by pointing out that the latter is stuck in the old city vs. suburb dichotomy, hung up on municipal boundaries. This is still necessary that many years after David Rusk‘s “elastic cities” hypothesis? And for a writer based in the southwest, with its highly elastic cities? I’m more inclined to chalk it up to willful ignorance.

(Since I grew up in an “elastic” city with a regional school district, all of which consisted principally of low-density sprawl that overran and embedded a few country towns, I’ve always thought this distinction was a complete canard. Of course “auto-dependent sprawl” and “walkable urbanism” can both exist in either city, suburb, town, or country. Duh.)

2. Delhi is following Singapore and writing traffic tickets based on photo evidence of infractions posted to Facebook. I typically would support measures to improve the ubiquity of traffic law enforcement, particularly as regards public safety, but this raises serious concerns about due process. I wonder how much supporting evidence would be necessary to verify that such photos haven’t been doctored: untampered EXIF data? GPS tracks showing that the car was at that location?

3. “Chicago taxpayers [will] cry” over the $11 billion that the Morgan Stanley joint venture [JV] will make over the term of the parking meter lease, according to Bloomberg’s Darrell Preston. (The JV also admits that the amount it spent on new meters amounts to a mere $40M.) Interesting that the JV is issuing what amounts to parking-meter revenue bonds — except priced as corporate bonds, not as tax-exempt municipal debt. (I’ve been saying all this time that an easier and more cost-effective way to tap into the future revenue stream would be for the city to jack the rates and issue revenue bonds. The primary reason for not doing this is that it would add debt to the city’s books, thereby lowering its credit rating — and that the proceeds from municipal bonds are subject to greater City Council scrutiny under Illinois law than the proceeds from a PPP. Well, the city got a downgrade anyways.)

Meanwhile, of course, San Francisco — which pioneered parking meter revenue bonds back in 1994 — has just launched SFpark, its municipally run advanced market-pricing scheme. The startup costs are underwritten via a loan from the MPO, interestingly, to be paid back with the enhanced revenues. And guess what else? The city still retains the flexibility to do cool things with its public space, like curbside bike parking. Imagine that!

4. An interesting participation exercise from the Next American City, sponsored by IBM’s Smarter Cities ad campaign: The Next American City Challenge on Tumblr.

5. Speaking of Tumblr, TakeMeWithYou is a WPB Make Believe project that used the “community disposable camera” model of storytelling. This was suggested as one idea for our WPB plan outreach process; glad to see that it came up with some fun results.

6. Great article by Fred Mayer on the Twin Cities (and Madison) bike economy, which he estimates at over $300M in revenues annually. One might think that the bike industry should prove to have a particularly lucrative local multiplier effect: it’s relatively light on capital and heavy on labor, and generates positive local externalities — quite unlike driving, which sucks money out of other sectors of the economy and sends almost all of its capital costs out of the local economy.

7. Park51, or the Cordoba Initiative, is obviously a local zoning matter — and as such, national Republicans have zero say. Perhaps that’s why they’re fast falling into line to “stand against the Ground Zero mosque,” since it’s completely painless: it will undoubtedly happen, and they can look like they’re doing something (paying lip service to the insane base) without actually affecting any real change. Yet watching this is frightening: for government to step in and “stop” Park51 wouldn’t just prohibit the free exercise of religion (1st Amendment) but also deprive the rightful landowners their property (5th Amendment). That this self-described “Don’t Tread on Me” crowd can show off that much contempt for personal freedoms just makes it all the more obvious that such “freedoms” only apply to their selfish selves.

8. Tom Philpott over at Grist notes that even most rural farms, much less urban farms, don’t make money. It frustrates me that so many people are so hopelessly naïve about farming’s poor economics: after the U.S. has spent trillions of dollars paving over farmland because it’s uneconomical, suddenly now farming will be profitable enough to underwrite demolition and infrastructure work to undo it all? This goes double for architects who concoct schemes featuring purpose-built “vertical ag” megastructures for agriculture (the very definition of a “factory farm”), or those positing urban farms as the solution for just about everything urban-decline related.

For instance, last year’s Re-Burbia competition finalists included exactly two approaches that comprehensively evolving suburbs through individual initiative. The rest of the schemes were a collection of inflexible (and therefore inherently unsustainable) megastructures (the sort of megalomaniacal thinking that got us into this mess of cloverleafs, malls, and McMansions), one-off tech gizmo wonder panaceas, or land-use transformations that betray a complete misunderstanding of economics (farms and wetlands are great, but they just don’t pay the rent).

As Alex Steffen (via Allison Arieff in Good) points out (and as SF Streetsblog commenters echo), it’s a folly to think that any vacant land (even in stagnant cities) should automatically be best thought of as agriculture, particularly permanently; in many cases, such land could best enhance regional sustainability (and the regional economy) if used to enhance walkability instead with more housing, retail, or workplaces. The difference between zero and ten food miles is nothing like the difference between ten and 2,000. Eliminating the first 99.5% of the food miles is easy and necessary, so let’s not obsess over the last 0.4%.

(And really, this has nothing to do with the orchard. Honest: that necessarily has to be open space of some kind.)

9. “[C]limatologists have long theorized that in a warming world, the added heat would cause more record highs and fewer record lows. The statistics suggest that is exactly what is happening. In the United States these days, about two record highs are being set for every record low, telltale evidence that amid all the random variation of weather, the trend is toward a warmer climate.” Justin Gillis [NYT]

Less serious:

10. Oh, how I’ve giggled at the now-repaired-again Milshire Ho sign. (Backup photo.) For the longest time, I just assumed it read “Wilshire.”

11. Oh, and while we’re in Logan Square, my friends’ HGTV makeover aired in June. Check this page for when it’ll re-run.

12. Not metro at all, but a recent party joke was about a theme band called “Ayn Rand Sex Scene.” Given her newfound popularity…

What I’m reading today

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[This started short and got quite lengthy. Maybe I’ll break off parts later.]

1. Citywide bike sharing arrives in the Midwest this week when Nice Ride launches in Minneapolis, using Bixi technology. (I had hoped to be there for the launch, but it looks like I’ll be there in July instead.) Interesting: (1) BCBS is the lead sponsor and (2) the city is not resting on its laurels (the article finds that the communitarian Minnesota culture is the key factor); the bikeway network is due to grow by 30% this year.

2. Jeff Speck in Architect uses the same taxonomy of New Urbanist critics — which he calls Lib[ertarian], Mod[ernist], and Saint — that I incompletely delineated in an earlier study of “Additional Myths About New Urbanism.” I used right, avant-garde, and left, but the themes are the same. Nice point in his final paragraph, addressing the Saints: new urbanism is a reform movement, not a revolutionary movement. We can’t fix everything all at once since we don’t aim to; it’s incremental change, not an entirely new world order.

Which reminds me: an offhand remark by Andres Duany about how crowds of suburban teenagers can “love the city to death” — suffocating the diversity of uses and people in the Sunbelt’s few-and-far-between urban oases — has drawn a storm of the same old Saint/Mod criticisms (only this time some bloggers are taking it personally!) about NU being exclusionary, authoritarian, static, hopelessly middle-class and middle-aged and middle-brow.

The answer to such critics is the same. Reform takes time, places evolve, and diversity must be managed as it’s actually not the natural order of human ecology. The same critics enthralled with “emergent, incremental, accretive” urbanism haven’t the patience to let Kentlands’ trees grow in, don’t understand that New Urbanists seek not to take away great places but to create new places that will, in time, evolve into great ones. Or, as I’ve said before, “today’s Old Urbanism was yesteryear’s New Urbanism, and therefore that today’s New Urbanism, in due time, will be tomorrow’s Old Urbanism… time is the most necessary ingredient to create the ‘authentic urbanism’ that many critics of New Urbanism cite in false opposition to NU.” In other words, give us a hundred years.

Of course, Duany doesn’t speak for the entire movement, and his admiration for civil libertarian’s bugaboo of Singapore — which actually does a better job than the USA of guaranteeing its citizens human rights like health, housing, education, and safety, not to mention protection from rights violations — is not exactly a plea for tyranny. I disagree with Duany about democracy’s utility: not a surfeit of democracy per se, but rather a fake populism that empowers a vocal [small-c] conservative minority, has impeded urban evolution.

3. Speaking of history and democracy, Charles Siegel writes about “Unplanning” over at Planetizen, arguing to some extent that planners caused the auto domination of American cities — whereas politicians should have kept them in check. While that may be true around the margins — different cities on the same continent have chosen rather different paths towards relative auto domination, as Patrick Condon (links to PDF) points out — my own reading of history (relying on Peter Norton here) says otherwise. Auto domination was a conscious political choice made in the 1920s, before the era of professional planning (or rather, traffic engineering), by political elites who sided with affluent auto drivers in their fight to claim road space from working-class pedestrians and middle-class transit riders. Indeed, overt attempts to politically legislate exactly the slow-traffic conditions that he outlines failed miserably: a 1923 initiative in Cincinnati (placed on the ballot with 42,000 petition signatures) that would have mechanically prohibited autos from going faster than 25MPH went down to defeat after a furious campaign by the Auto Club and newspapers.

4. More history: an oral history documentation project of LA Chinatown during my grandfather’s era.

5. From The Atlantic‘s special city issue, a reminder by Benjamin Schwarz that “Manhattan never was what we think it was” — or what Village writers like Sorkin and Zukin think it was. The bohemian, deindustrializing Lower Manhattan (itself hardly static) that so many exhibit a false nostalgia for was “pretty much limited to the years of the LaGuardia administration,” and itself was quite an exception within a vast urban “agglomeration of mostly self-sufficient, inward-looking, lower-middle-class communities.” Yes, Jane Jacobs wrote convincingly about how that city worked, because she lived in it. Yet many take the wrong message away from Jacobs: the look and feel of the industrial city were just the backdrop; her principles say nothing about post-industrial gentrification. Jacobs loved watching systems emerge and evolve from market interactions; heavy-handed intervention was most certainly not her style.

Yet the paralyzed political climate that has resulted from empowered neighborhood “activists” (see #2 above) has stunted urban evolution — always driven by markets’ creative destruction — in the name of this faux “authenticity.” These “activists” don’t realize that the problem they seek to solve isn’t with architects or planners or even with developers, it’s with “all that is solid melts into air” capitalism itself. There are ways around this, and I’m excited to see that authors like Matt Hern get this and are doing something about this: shutting down streets and setting up collectives to reclaim space, not just a setting, for society. The planners, cops, and Tories he antagonizes turn out to be mostly reasonable people, doing pretty good work within a flawed system larger than all of them. Sure, he has his share of “can’t we all just get along” platitudes, but even those are grounded in a sense of possibility and progress. Perhaps it’s due to his base outside the Greenwich Village snowglobe, in a peripheral city simultaneously tossed about by globalization, blessed with a surprising degree of autonomy, and relatively unweighted by hidebound tradition. It’s a much fresher take on “finding real place” than I found in either Zukin or Sorkin’s books.

6. More authenticity: Hong Kong, which made an interesting decision to conserve and rehabilitate one of its original public housing blocks, will now preserve Wing Lee street. It gained notoriety principally for being an actual movie set, the only place where directors could recreate a feel of 1950s tenement life.

7. Just nudging urbanism along in California could cut CO2 emissions in half — and by 75% over a business as usual scenario, according to new research by Peter Calthorpe. The household savings angle is an interesting one to push: the less people spend on cars and oil, the more they’ll have to spend on houses — preserving the property values which are so incredibly paramount to California politics. Jarvis League, are you listening?

8. “You want to know who Sarah Palin is? She’s the False Maria in Metropolis! That’s who she is.” — Peter Trachtenberg

9. The world’s thirst for oil has outpaced humans’ capacity to “safely” (if we ever could) drill for (and burn) it. Sickening pollution is intrinsic to oil; the act of driving is drilling. And as we’re finding out, drilling technology has advanced faster than spill-cleanup technology. Boycotting one company won’t help; they all have tar and blood on their hands. Alexandra Paul at HuffPo:

There is a story about a scorpion asking a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is afraid of being stung, but the scorpion reassures him that if he stung the frog, the scorpion would drown as well. So the frog agrees to be carried on the scorpion’s back across the river. Mid-river, the scorpion stings the frog, dooming the two of them. As they are sinking, the scorpion explains, “I’m a scorpion; stinging is my nature.”

Ocean drilling is the nature of oil companies. It is what they do, even if it dooms us all. We can be angry about how they are ineffectively dealing with their mess, but in the end, BP is drilling for oil in environmentally sensitive areas for one reason only: we need the oil they provide.

Axis of warmth

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At a seminar this weekend, I heard from political consultant John Neffinger that “charisma = strength + warmth.” Warmth is the dimension that separates Dick Cheney from Bill Clinton — or, as I was thinking, Robert Moses from arch-nemesis Jane Jacobs. That’s the juxtaposition that makes “Boozy,” wherein Jacobs snarls and Moses tap-dances his way to success, such a brilliant inversion of history.

Anyhow, another key takeaway is that true charisma wears a peculiar expression: angrily-lidded eyes with a broad smile. (My attempt at constructing such a face sent a room into peals of laughter.)

“No recipe for urban funk”

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Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future by Matt Hern

This book offers a rare viewpoint: a thoughtful inner-city leftist who understands both New Urbanism and capitalism (and apportions the blame correctly), Vancouver and the world, direct action and policy prescriptions. A useful tool for focusing my own thoughts on density and diversity, and how they combine to create interesting, humane places. (Some, like architect Neal Payton*, add a third D of design, but sometimes I think that enough of the first two can counterbalance even the worst design.)

* Not my namesake, even though by strange coincidence I was named in LA, where he lives. His last name was anglicized generations ago.

Ped malls have it backwards

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[sent to NextGen list, responding to Lydon]

Prime downtown shopping streets rarely work as ped-exclusive streets. 3rd Street or Lincoln Road are exceptional places on many levels: most of America is not Santa Monica or South Beach (nor Boulder, Aspen, Burlington, nor Times Square). Instead, why not focus on smaller streets with an entertainment focused tenant mix? East 4th in Cleveland (official site) actually seems to work okay (a single owner is a huge advantage), especially relative to its surroundings. Even in Europe or Asia, grand retail corridors aren’t pedestrianised (Stroget

being the exception rather than the rule); it’s the side streets, where cars always felt like a huge intrusion anyways.

Shown here is Sai Yeung Choi Street in Kowloon’s Mong Kok district, which is car-free from 4pm-midnight every night — a switch only undertaken in the past few years. As you can see, a pedestrian street is not defined by the absence of cars: it’s about the abundance of pedestrians.

Kowloon’s main spine, Nathan Road, continues apace a block west, and alleys (really, just wide enough to push a cart down) are on either side should deliveries still be necessary. Of course, the other side streets are just as choked with pedestrians — often browsing at retail stalls, as on Tung Choi Street just east, and often sharing the space with the few cars who dare to brave the streets.

Of course, having stupendously high densities helps to sustain retail on both the arterials and the side streets, and the American tendency to have fewer but larger shops certainly doesn’t help.

Insisting that shoppers will materialize out of thin air just to see a place that’s interestingly designed, but inconvenient to get to — an “if you build it, they will come” approach — is backwards. Instead, retail is all about making things easy for customers, and the converse is true: “if they come, then you build it” (a nice echo of the aphorism that “retail follows rooftops”).

This strategy kind of mirrors the suburban lifestyle center approach: the arterial is still there to handle circulation, but the inviting environment is off to the side.

A similar approach here in North America was taken on Rue Prince-Arthur in Montreal’s lively Plateau neighborhood, a pedestrian street that links two parallel main streets (St. Laurent and St. Denis).

Nuances of housing density

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[h/t Kaid and Irwin Dawid/Planetizen for the video of Dan Zack’s density game]

Of course housing density is something that we must properly understand, and it’s a necessary (but insufficient) precondition for so much of what makes a great city — particularly the sustainability of services like retail and transit. However, there’s a danger in making it an end rather than a mean. So many other factors, like unit size, household size, parking ratios, landscaping, and occupancy rates (a high percentage of high-rise units are second homes) can have a huge effect on how density “lives” once it’s built.

For instance, the Cabrini-Green building shown is being replaced with three-story walkups that might have:
– the same DUA density
– higher occupancy rates
– higher impervious surface cover
– more living space per capita
– lower population density (much smaller households)
– higher income density (much higher household incomes)

Lower population density might mean lower transit ridership, but higher incomes mean that more retail space is needed.

Two leaps forward

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How’d another few weeks disappear? Recent news: the Wicker Park Bucktown Master Plan, a three-year effort by WPB that I initiated and chaired the steering committee for, will receive the American Planning Association’s 2010 National Planning Excellence Award for Public Outreach. Our public outreach strategy centered on three Open Houses, designed as a fun and interactive way for residents and visitors to learn about the plan and share their ideas on their own schedule. Credit for the creative campaign that supported the Open Houses goes to Country Club Chicago for print and transit ads, and Interface Studio (our planners) for their video installation.

In an earlier post, I wrote about the potential of the PEIR “urban sensing” project developed at UCLA and featured at Wired’s NextFest. Now this ubiquitous-computing strategy has found an even better vehicle, with the MIT Senseable City Lab’s Copenhagen Wheel. The customizable wheel incorporates a hub that goes far beyond three speeds: it adds ambient air quality, noise, and temperature sensors along with GPRS data and Bluetooth wireless to share that information with the network and your smartphone. What’s even better, it adds dynamic regenerative braking (with a motor, batteries, and torque sensor) — another long-held dream of mine. (Too bad their test bike looks like a ghost fixie.)

The Bluetooth connection might be an interesting way of integrating place-based rewards — a method that a shopowner could “validate” someone’s bike trip just like car-parking charges. The University of Minnesota will soon launch a program wherein frequent bike commuters with RFID tags on their bikes will get rewarded with discounts at an on-campus bike station, for example — and, if they’re employees, that benefit can come from pre-tax income under the new bike commuter benefits.

Wary of the next spatial fix

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Recently was skimming Jason Hackworth’s The Neoliberal City, wherein a primary argument is that gentrification is a spatial manifestation of neoliberal urban policies. I’m not entirely convinced — if anything, the relatively minor scale of gentrification as a force shaping cities (relative to, say, deindustrialization or large-scale immigration) points to the weakness of said policies — but in any case it reminded me of what David Harvey (PDF) called the spatial fix:

capitalism’s insatiable drive to resolve its inner crisis tendencies by geographical expansion and geographical restructuring… as an example, the key role of suburbanization in the United States after 1945 in absorbing surpluses of capital and labor.

It’s rare for these various fixes to be unwound, although it has happened before — the reversion of farms to forests in the East or the abandonment of railroad ROWs could be seen as repudiations of earlier expansionary policies. More likely, these earlier fixes were just forgotten and consigned to history’s dustbin as even bigger fixes (industrial agriculture and highways) took hold. Sure enough, we see two tendencies afoot: the immediate one being bailouts. Chris Leinberger refers to “the bailout of sprawl” as massive sums go into propping up the mortgage giants: “America has overbuilt auto-oriented fringe housing well beyond what the market wants… it is quite possible that this housing stock will continue to have a market price less than replacement value, as it is the case today.”

Meanwhile, cheerleader Richard Florida celebrates the idea of a new spatial fix, one which will knit together megalopolises:

It may well be impossible for sustained recovery to come from breathing life back into the banks, auto companies, and suburban-oriented development model. A new period of geographic expansion – or what geographers term a “new spatial fix” – will eventually be needed to spur a renewed era of economic growth and development.

As much fun as this “green Keynesianism” (Mike Davis) might be — and I’m sure it will bring fantastic new job prospects to the planning sector — there’s always a danger afoot. Richard Wells reminds us that prior spatial fixes existed to solve capital’s problems, not society’s, and that they’ve always involved considerable displacement, conflict, and struggle.

Hadn’t seen the Davis article before; it’s kind of “The Emerging Democratic Majority” all over again. Nice to see that even radical critics get that, though. Here’s a cute chart:

Edit to add: here’s a fun idea for a cartogram: take this table and size the states by their total property value, and by their total home equity. Yes, indeed, Nevada would vaporize in the latter!

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.