The new Regional Planning Board that will combine NIPC and CATS has launched online. It’s so cool that they’ve chosen the Sears Tower for their headquarters.
Bulwark and enclosure
bq. Roger in his book cites a number of accusations that make me respond, Dreiser-like, with a rueful feeling that, whatever may be the European biases, certain of those anti-American denunciations touch on something real, and we ought to pay attention and sometimes hang our heads. French writers, Roger explains, have waxed indignant for centuries now over the quality of American city life, sometimes for reasons that will not appeal to us — an outrage at racial mingling, for instance. Céline did not like Jews, and did not like blacks. The Judeo-negroid sidewalks of metropolitan America were not for him.
bq. On the other hand, some of the classic French indignation will strike us as well-directed. Sartre recoiled at the lack of public places in American cities — the lack of French-style cafés, for instance. What halfway intelligent American, having returned from a week of double espressos in the cafés of France, will think that Sartre was wrong? Sartre observed that European cities benefit from a sharp definition of the city limits, as defined by the ancient bulwarks, and American cities suffer from the lack of anything similar. This remark, too, has its truth. Bulwarklessness has done us in. The plazas and promenades of a thousand European towns offer a public warmth and aesthetic joy that hardly anyplace in America can rival — a chilly reality of American life.
— Paul Berman, reviewing “The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism” by Philippe Roger (among others) at The New Republic
Under that hat
The chief of the local Salvation Army “said that Ald. Dorothy Tillman objected to the [$135 million community center] because she said her ward would be better served by retail and grocery stores on the site.” — Jeremy Mullman in Crain’s
Right. As if there aren’t enough vacant _blocks_ in the bombed-out Third Ward to accommodate grocery stores.
Seattle’s carbon diet
Under Mayor Greg Nickels, Seattle has launched a nationwide campaign to “get cities to endorse Kyoto”:http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/mayor/climate/default.htm even if Washington does not. The city’s own efforts to cut its emissions of greenhouse gases were profiled on NPR’s “Morning Edition”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5028946 today.
Red-green urban politics
The recent local elections in Montréal might spark some ideas for attendees of the COP10 summit: a pro-urban, “red-green” political party has surfaced in City Hall.
The new Projet Montréal party secured a city council seat and possibly (pending a legal challenge) a borough council seat in the dense, diverse Plateau neighborhood, winning 12% of all votes in a three-way election against two established parties. Its platform brings the spirit of the red-green (social-democrat and environmentalist) urban coalition — the governing majority in major European cities like London, Paris, and Berlin — to North America.
Unlike most stateside Green political parties, which take a skeptical stance towards urban growth, Projet Montréal embraces population and housing growth as a way to curb car use and suburban population growth. Its leader, Richard Bergeron, is a transit-agency technocrat whose political heroes (link in French) include mayors Ken Livingstone in London and Bertrand Delanoë in Paris. In London, a wildly successful downtown toll has cut traffic by nearly 20% even while a crop of new, environmentally friendly high-rise office towers rises. In Paris, city officials heckle SUV drivers, close roads to cars for weekly “Paris Breathes” days, and will soon convert a riverfront highway into a beach. The “red” in the coalition comes from a strong appeal to working-class voters with new public works projects and affordable housing.
Projet Montréal’s ambitious platform promises “Montrealers a unique opportunity to gather around a sustainable urban development project,” with planks that call for a 2.5% annual reduction in traffic, doubling transit ridership, converting 250 km of bus routes to light rail, narrowing streets to calm traffic, and developing housing on parking lots.
Its call for setting a performance standard to actually reduce traffic has few peers: slowing traffic growth, much less reducing existing travel, seems well nigh impossible at times. Politicians understandably prefer laundry-list prescriptive solutions to performance measures, which introduce a higher standard of accountability but won’t necessarily move votes. Yet with enough shove, cutting traffic is possible: Cambridge, Mass. requires that new developments use “Transportation Demand Management” (TDM) to keep parking and traffic demand at existing levels. Even in Montréal, which boasts per-capita transit ridership 57% higher than New York City, driving has increased by 35% over the past ten years. Reversing that trend will require every trick in the book, plus many more — but at least someone’s willing to try.
Similar platforms focused on housing and transit, albeit often with more vague proposals, has elected Democratic mayors like Antonio Villaraigosa in Los Angeles, Jerry Brown in Oakland, Will Wynn in Austin, and Dave Cieslewicz in Madison, Wis. In 2003, San Francisco mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez campaigned for better transit and infill housing on the Green ticket; he lost 53-47 to Gavin Newsom, who has moved forward with initiatives like busways and high-rise housing downtown. One challenge facing American cities is that higher car ownership rates make it hard to explicitly attack overdependence on cars; Projet Montréal received its highest margins in high-density, working-class neighborhoods (like the Plateau and Park Extension) with very few car owners and voters hungry for a renewed commitment to transit. Another challenge comes from Americans’ greater skepticism of planning and stronger notions of property rights — sentiments that manifest themselves in local NIMBY movements that can undermine fragile local political coalitions.
[Originally found via SpacingWire]
[starting with this post, many environmentally related posts will be cross-posted to “Gristmill”:http://gristmill.grist.org, the blog at the timely and lively environmental webzine “Grist”:http://grist.org.%5D
One another
From a Sprol.com report on HFCS production: “I heard recently the claim that health depends less on how we take care of ourselves than how we take care of each-other.”
Carbon calculators
Oil companies are beginning to hint “in their advertising”:http://flickr.com/photos/paytonc/63444879 that “oil will not last forever”:http://willyoujoinus.com. Still, I was a little surprised to find “this at BP’s site”:http://www.bp.com/iframe.do?categoryId=9005522&contentId=7011382, a cheeky little Flash-animated household carbon emissions calculator complete with little Fisher-Price men. (More interestingly, it was advertised at “Slate”:http://www.slate.com/id/2131024/fr/rss alongside an article on Jayanta Sen’s idea to set up an oil importers’ cartel to take OPEC oil profits and invest them back home; the BP tagline is “Small carbon footprints can make a big difference… Learn about ways to reduce your carbon footprint.”)
Since the calculator updates the totals dynamically, you can very easily see how going car-free will *very* substantially cut your household carbon emissions — the gases that cause global warming. Example: a hobo living in a sedan and driving 20,000 miles a year (less than the average American car) produces more carbon dioxide than my entire household, even with my frequent-flyer habit.
The Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology, the folks who own I-Go car sharing, also runs two air pollution calculators, one that measures “carbon emissions from transportation”:http://travelmatters.org and another measuring “toxics from all household activities”:http://airhead.org. “Ecological footprint” analyses come in “simple”:http://earthday.net/Footprint and “more complex”:http://www.mec.ca/Apps/ecoCalc/ecoCalc.jsp flavors.
[adapted from CCM list]
Take action for safer streets: ride
“It’s wonderful to live in the city and ride but isn’t always possible for all.”
Okay, so what can we do about this? In many other cities, I see plenty of old folks on old cruisers, mothers and fathers with children, and regular middle-aged folks riding bicycles. Why not here?
To a certain extent, I’d say that Critical Mass has already accomplished one broadening of the bicycling demographic in Chicago: cycling here isn’t just for college students and Lycra clad racers. On the streets of Wicker Park, I regularly pass bars or parties with bicycles crowded outside — in the past, I’d usually know what or who was going on or at least recognize some of the bikes, but no longer, as our “scene” has grown far too vast. Ongoing education efforts like Bike Winter and “Cycling Sisters, and CBF’s new diversity initiatives, can further help.
Maybe people don’t ride because traffic is dangerous. “Studies have shown [“full text] that pedestrian and bicycle accident rates decrease where there are more bicyclists — because drivers, the #1 hazard to peds and bikes, start looking out for peds and bikes, and indeed are more likely to walk or bike themselves. So, what can you do to help make our streets safer *today*? Get out there and ride! In the long term, let’s think about political changes that will reclaim our streets from speeding, menacing traffic. Our streets belong to the people who live here, not to the people who drive through — but effecting that change will take a lot of work and a lot of talking. Well, we seem to have plenty of people who can talk, but what about people who will work?
Let’s think constructively about how we can improve our city and our bicycling experiences, instead of pointing loudly at the shortcomings.
[also adapted from post to CCM today]
Melbourne’s investment in public spaces pays off
The office received, courtesy of “Jan Gehl”:http://www.rudi.net/bookshelf/classics/lifebetweenbuildings/index.shtml, a copy of the “Places for People 2004”:http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/info.cfm?top=202&pg=2602 report [“full PDF”:http://www.gehlarchitects.dk/images/melbourne_2004.pdf%5D chronicling the public space improvements made in center-city Melbourne. (Gehl not only believes in improving public spaces as places to travel through *and* linger in, but also in quantifying pedestrian traffic the same way that car traffic is quantified, so as to better represent pedestrians in the transportation decisionmaking process.) A plethora of changes to the street environment and land use over the preceding decade resulted in:
* 830% more residents
* 71% more public space on streets and in squares
* 62% more students
* 275% more cafes and restaurants
* 39% more pedestrians on summer weekday daytimes/afternoons
* 98% more pedestrians on summer weekday evenings after 6pm — 30% of all pedestrian traffic!
The closing essay by Gehl is well worth excerpting:
For a number of years it has been common urban planning theory that improvements to the pedestrian environment might result in a more lively and attractive city, where more people would like to walk and spend time in the city. Evidence from various cosy, old European cities with crooked streets and romantic buildings has been plentiful… Melbourne now adds a new dimension to these tales. A young colonial grid city, with wide, straight streets and no built in squares whatsoever, and furthermore a city studded with uncoordinated high rise development… a monofunctional, empty, and useless city center by 1980… Many cities across the New World will fit this description. And in most of these, the car continues to be the king and the “doughnut syndrome” is still prevailing.
This definitely is not any more the case in Melbourne. A carefully planned and executed process for turning the city into a people oriented city has been gradually implemented since the first plans were made in 1985, but especially during the past decade following the “Places for People 1993” evaluation, many achievements have been accomplished.
Of all the things a city can do to improve the city environment Melbourne has done most everything: more students and residents, more people streets, squares, lanes and parks, wider sidewalks, quality materials, active shop frontages, fine furnishings, new street trees and several art programmes. The invitation to walk and to linger has indeed been extended. Also, sustainability issues such as the greening of the city and the upgrading of the public transport systems and bicycle infrastructure have been systematically addressed.
Most of this has been accomplished over a short span of years, and the outcomes of this effort comes out strongly in this report. Life in Melbourne has changed dramatically. Many more people are walking the streets: on weekdays, some 40% more, and in the evenings twice as many as in 1993. And many more people come to town to promenade and to spend time enjoying the city, the surroundings, and especially the number one city attraction: the other people. An estimated two to three times more people are using squares, parks, street benches, and cafés as compared to 1993.
Summing up, an empty, useless city center has in 20 years been turned around to a vibrant, charming 24-hour city center — more lively, more attractive and safer than most other city centers found anywhere in the world…
The “Melbourne Miracle” which is documented in this report gives hope for cities in all parts of the world struggling with the “doughnut syndrome.” A further incentive can be the positive tidings about the substantial improvements to the city center economy derived from the growing popularity and attractiveness of the city center.
Contrast this, of course, to the current campaign to scare pedestrians off Chicago’s sidewalks by mowing them down with high-speed traffic.
Under the microscope
Chris Barsanti of In These Times has a review of Richard Lloyd’s _Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City_. (Odd that a Logan Square-based magazine would assign a Brooklyn writer to the piece, but oh well.) Lloyd, a contributor to “_The Baffler_”:http://thebaffler.com/excerpts.html and now teaching at Vanderbilt, has written a serious ethnography of a not-so-serious neighborhood. Personally, and maybe because I was there to witness its last throes, Wicker Park’s gentrification has been far more explosive and fascinating than any number of East Village accounts. Compared to New York, Chicago’s lack of rent control, tenser race relations, better overall fiscal health, pro-business and pro-development attitudes, and far deeper deindustrialization combined to put gentrification on fast-forward here. (Incidentally, I once mentioned this opinion to Terry Clark, who replied with something about one of his graduate students. Turns out that was Lloyd, of course, and I gave it nary a thought until seeing the book.) What’s different is that Chicago is only a regional center of media and “content creation”; not only does news from here tend to spread slowly, but the creative first-line gentrifiers (literally, the cultural capitalists) are fewer in number and less self-consciously or self-referentially creative.
Somehow, thinking of Wicker Park as “over” reminds me of a conversation with a scruffy, underemployed resident of Montréal’s Plateau, a favorite landing pad for hipsters who’ve tired of Toronto or Brooklyn, who stated after a moment of thought that “you could live here pretty easily on $10,000 Canadian a year.” Plus free healthcare!
Atlantic Station retail
Neo-Georgian “lofts” with 22-30′ ceilings surmount shops facing the green at Atlantic Station. The scale of the dual-height windows and overall massing are problematic, given that Georgian is so strongly associated with residential scales: if you’re going to build a loft, make it look like a loft building, not a house in Georgetown. The penthouses are trying to disappear, but definitely don’t. The ground floor seems awfully underscaled relative to the rest of the buildings and given its economic importance to the building.
More importantly, all of this sits atop a parking podium of equal height — hidden thanks to a slope, but nonetheless one heck of a lot of parking. The dozen-odd entrances to the parking are a little too well visible at times.
Annals of science
As heard on “Wait Wait”:http://waitwait.npr.org, Ali Rahimi, Ben Recht, Jason Taylor, and Noah Vawter from MIT’s EECS and Media Lab have done some breakthrough research easily deserving of an “Ig Nobel”:http://www.improbable.com/ig/ig-top.html: On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study. Shockingly, the abstract states: ” Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities.” Also has some shots of scientists hard at work inside the Stata Center, which was designed to enhance just this sort of interdisciplinary collaboration.
west north 