Today is full of preparations for the big trip so I don't have too much for you but I did find an interesting article in the local weekly at my parents house. They live in a suburb of Lansing and the article was an extended interview with the township supervisor. At one point she lamented the board's recent approval of a mixed use development code that had allowed a very large project to be approved. As she described it, the project was clearly inappropriate for the township as a whole as well as its immediate surroundings. In addition, she showed great concern that businesses would be drawn there from more traditional strip malls which would then face bankruptcy and blight.
I think this illustrates the difficulty that suburban governments--which often lack the authority or funds to fight off unwanted development--face as they transition to mixed use zoning. I don't think that zoning is a particularly effective tool. Zoning isn't the only reason that suburbs all have the same feel, the economics practiced by seasoned developers all come from the same place and all come to the same conclusions.
Mixed use zoning simply does not result in vibrant self-sustaining developments. I'm not certain whether this is caused by uninspired developers superimposing strip malls on tract housing or by archaic code restrictions that have yet to be updated to the new code. I suspect the problem lies with both the developers and with concerned citizens who don't know what to be concerned about.
This is my main problem with New Urbanism, it doesn't accurately reflect the differences between cities and outlying areas. Specifically, it doesn't accept that cities are inherently good and productive places.
Towns are small places. People know one another. They don't want strangers coming near their places of habitation because the only protection towns offer from outsiders is isolation. The Garden City concept that has been duplicated over and over again was never intended to function as a city, but as a town where everyone knows their neighbors. Geographic isolation provided safety.
Modern day suburban planners have tried to introduce this isolation with dead ends, tangles of streets, a lack of through streets...etc. New Urbanism tries to roll back these and other alterations to the Garden City concept without realizing (I'll give them the benefit of doubt) that it is the assumption that must be challenged.
Isolation is folly. Unlike Ebenezer Howard's turn of the (last) century England, we have the technology to build clean, healthy and pleasant cities that people would flock to live in. There is no need to "escape" from the city. All we need is to start building real ones. High density, high building footprint, no silly zoning restrictions. New Urbanism, with their "prescriptive" zoning only creates the appearance of cities (or of towns that were emulating cities) while maintaining the limited functionality of small towns.
In the end, mixed use New Urbanism isn't right for suburbs. The suburbs are a wrong. The solution is to let them devolve into the agriculture that they once were and carve out the suburban projects from cities so that they can become wonderful urban places.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Thoughts on New Urbanism
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
City List
Detroit is just the beginning, I've posted a list of cities I hope to visit over the next few months. If you know people in these places that are pushing the frontiers of sustainability or just doing good work, let me know, I'd love to chat with them.
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Monday, December 29, 2008
Detroit - Part II
I visited some of the newer suburbs of Detroit today. The camera is off line for the day so no pictures but I do have plenty to recount. For readers outside Michigan, it is important to note that the housing market crashed in Michigan well before it did in the rest of the country. This gives me the strong feeling that the behavior of (sub)urban areas in Michigan--and Detroit in particular--is leading those of the rest of the country.
Suburban designs are remarkably predictable and try terribly hard to offer any surprises. I had business at a particular strip mall that was a bit unusual in that it was oriented perpendicular to the main road that it fronted. Even stranger, it was sandwiched in between a housing project with what must have been well over 100 units and a collection of run down looking two story condos. Could this be an aberration in suburban design? Could this be mixed use?
Looking more closely...
The entire back side of the strip mall was walled off. The condo dwellers, lacking a sidewalk, would need to drive from their homes around the corner to visit the various services offered at the strip mall, parking literally 200 feet from where they had left. The front side of the strip mall faced an enormous parking lot close to the road, it was virtually empty when I was there. Farther in though, the large residential complex encroached upon the parking lot so that it was only one lane in width. Luckily another wall was constructed to prevent these hapless residents from being subjected to the scurrilous activities of those visiting the so-called "Doctor" or "Dentist" that had rented space in the strip mall.
Even more interesting was a small city park that had been placed opposite the strip mall on the road edge of the parking lot. The small pavilion there would have been an ideal place for lunch if any patrons of the strip mall eateries would be willing to cross the hundreds of feet of asphalt that divided them. The residential project had decided to do some landscaping as well, a paved sidewalk meandered out from the parking lot in front of the project terminating in a grassy spot where a bench was situated facing the road. The designers chose not to continue the sidewalk on another 15 feet or so to connect it to the small city park.
Around half of the units in the strip mall were vacant, and a third of the condos had for sale signs in the windows. It was impossible to tell the occupancy of the residential project but only a small fraction had placed furniture or decoration on their outdoor patios.
All in all, it was a place designed without much thought of it being a place that people might like to use. Indeed, even the mall's closest neighbors needed to hop in their autos to visit instead of chancing a pleasant stroll. No potential for pleasant social interactions. No development of ties to the place, only to the auto. In short, this place will proceed down the path that all suburbs will eventually face: middle class replaced by poor, poor replaced by indigent, decay, condemnation, selective removal and finally agriculturalization.
Once the suburbs are no longer able to support the lavish subsidies that made their existence possible, they will slowly slide into nothingness. Only the communities that manage to retain a stable population will survive and in a country full of lures, the grass always looks greener on the other side.
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Detroit - Part I
'D' IS FOR DISASTER... -- So reads the headline on Drudge Report tonight after the venerable Detroit Lions lost their 16th game of the season, setting a new NFL record. Tomorrow I'm sure we can expect the obligatory columns throughout the sports world and beyond about how the Lions are the worst team ever in the worst city ever that makes the worst cars ever. The day after will bring rebuttals extolling the virtues of the other sports franchises and how kind the people of Detroit are. They all miss the point.
I'm not from Detroit and I've never lived there. There is a great deal that I don't know about the city but even a fool could see that something amazing is happening here--provided he could be coaxed off the highways for a moment. The transformation of Detroit is so important from a planning perspective that I believe we must understand it if we are to succeed as a nation.
First a bit of background...
The development of Detroit is entirely and unsurprisingly based around the automobile. There are no substantive differences between the vast majority of the city (around 1 million) and the metro area (over 4 million) in their development schemes. The strip malls get nicer, parcels larger, houses bigger, streets more curved the farther you travel from the city center, yet the layout is virtually identical. Masses of impenetrable tract housing blocks are carved up by a tangle of highways and a mostly square grid of collector routes where commerce occurs.
Outside the small downtown core, no part of the city is in any way walkable. A bus system that offers palatable service to the few lucky enough to be on a route is the only form of public transportation. The towering remains of the old Amtrak terminal loom over the Corktown neighborhood as a lasting reminder of a by-gone era.
So here we have a city, funded by the automobile, built around it, drained by it and left to rot along with it. Yet a drive or stroll through some of the Detroit neighborhoods most drastically affected by the shift to the suburbs, the riots and the corrupt governance reveals something entirely unexpected. These places are not the slums of the outer reaches of the city (or soon the inner suburbs). Their residents are not desperate or destitute. These are some of the strongest people you will ever see and they have learned a powerful lesson that must instruct the rest of us. They have learned how to unslum the suburbs.
I am not talking about the beautifully renovated neighborhood of Woodbridge or the old money of Indian Village. I am talking about North Corktown and the east side. Places where is not uncommon to see one, two or no houses on an entire block. These developments were among the first suburbs, thrown up to house the factory workers of the early auto industry. They proved insufficient to retain the newly emergent and union backed middle class which was siphoned away to ring after ring of suburbs. They became slums, they burned in the riots, they fell victim to drugs and racism in an endless downward spiral.
But people aren't trying to leave these places anymore. The in between spaces are filling in with row upon row of vegetables. Chickens and goats now mingle with guard dogs. Pheasants (known locally as "City chickens") roam freely. The lax code enforcement and inexpensive real estate have drawn a crowd of motivated young suburbanites searching for something beyond the bland dullness of their childhood. One particularly involved suburbanite exclaimed to me that, "In my 30 years here, I've never felt that anything good was happening until now."
As the era of the ever expanding suburb comes to a close, the rings of development march towards their inevitable demise. They are no better equipped to maintain their residents than were the suburb-esque developments of interior Detroit. Yet if they pay close attention, they will hopefully learn to cope with their lot with the least amount of cost and trouble.
Stay tuned because I'll be speaking with some Detroit residents over the next couple days and hopefully have some insight to share.
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Sunday, December 28, 2008
FAQ
Feel free to leave additional questions in the comments, or send them to me.
Whats with the name?
Pretty Good City is a play on the encryption standard "Pretty Good Privacy" which is somewhat of a classic code in the computer science world. PGP has been the encryption standard for over a decade and shows no signs of losing its grip. It's inventor stole the term "Pretty Good" from Garrison Keillor's brainchild, "Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery" in Lake Wobegon.
Wow, did you think of that yourself?
Nope, it was my brother Aaron, he has lots of good ideas. Make sure to pre-order his upcoming book at Amazon (perhaps a bit premature).
Do you have an irrational hatred for suburbs?
No, it's entirely rational.
Would you like a job?
Most certainly yes.
What cities are you going to on your "Grand Tour"?
Only time will tell.
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About
This is a blog about the re-creation of cities. It is about the end of the suburbs, the end of the pseudo-suburbs that have infiltrated cities and the end of a hundred years of mistaken thinking about cities.
To introduce myself, my name is Jon Koller, I am a recent graduate from a Civil Engineering program in a cozy midwestern town. My training focuses on structural engineering and I have interests that stretch from chickens and pigs to kombucha and banjo. Most of all I like cities.
It deeply saddens me that so little regard is given to our social interactions within--and with--built places. Cities must provide comfortable, regenerative space. Cities must be places of great safety and resilience. Cities must be sustainable in every sense of the word.
I was lucky enough during the final semester of my Masters coursework to take a class focusing on a specific brownfield redevelopment project in Chicago. This opportunity truly opened my eyes to the greenwashing surrounding the New Urbanism developments which I have strongly supported in the past.
Since then, I have been greatly affected by the works of Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander and J.H. Crawford. I certainly don't agree with everything they say, and in many cases they directly contradict one another, yet they all offer a great deal of sense and reason that continues to guide my thoughts.
My advice to people trying to get their start in this world has always been to start a blog, so here this one is. The beginning of this blog also happens to coincide with a cross-country urban tour through 15 or so American cities. While this blog was not created solely with the "Grand Tour" in mind, a great deal of the learning from that trip will be reported here.
My fiancée, Hannah Lewis, has graciously agreed to become the Supreme, Number One In Charge, Editor-in-Chief and ensures that my grammatical inventions fail to see the light of day. If you see photographs that you might consider well composed, they were most likely taken by her. Unless otherwise noted, all photography on the site is original.
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Saturday, December 27, 2008
Finishing up the domain
PrettyGoodCity.com is now online and humming, I'll post an intro and some other stuff as soon as I get this template looking better.
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