-Part III of a series-
Click here for Part I: A Historical Perspective
Click here for Part II: Technology and Social Change
We've gone through some history of our built space--the how we got to where we are--and the technological drivers that are pushing our society. The question becomes, where are we headed? I would like to start by laying out a series of six benchmarks that any good city should aspire to.
A city should not infringe on the potential for future generations to exist. As a species of individuals that greatly value opportunity for their offspring, it seems obvious that we try to avoid conflicts of interest between opportunity for present individuals future ones. If a child wishes to attend a university several thousand miles away, or if a promotion is offered on the other side of town, the transportation costs to the present individuals are substantial, but they are nothing compared to the costs imposed on future generations through climate change and resource depletion. Our built space should encourage sustainable behavior.
Good built space promotes equality. What can I say about this? We live in America, the country that (claims to have) invented the idea of equality. While I think the rationale for this point is self-evident, any objectors to equality should consider the animosity and conflict that inequality breeds.
Cities are always places of opportunity. Good built space must maintain that opportunity and provide it especially for those working towards the common good. Those looking to take and not give (economically, culturally...etc) should be discouraged by the very built space of a city.
Good built space is pleasant. It looks nice, it smells nice, it sounds nice and it feels nice. How many of the paintings hanging on your walls do you consider ugly? How often do you linger by the tailpipe of an old school bus? Do you consider it a treat to be waken by the banging of pots and pans? Does anyone in downtown Chicago actually appreciate the 50 mph winds that throw grit and garbage into their faces? If unpleasantries can be avoided, they should.
Good built space takes investment, but money is only part of the puzzle. A good city encourages it's citizens to be personally invested in their built space. Money and the people that move it around are a distortion in the system. They have no interest other than an increase in the number of dollars at their disposal. Only the involvement of people just as--or more--interested in the quality of the space than the financial bottom line will result in good built space and the continual improving of it.
Lastly, good built space should encourage individual health, both physical and mental. Our interactions with our build space have an enormous and well documented effect on our physical health. As the last couple generations of social commentators can tell you, our mental health is not immune to the the dehabilitating effects of poor built space. There's no reason that our built space should hurt us.
I highly doubt if any built space has fully attained all of these characteristics, and I doubt if any space ever will. In the next installment, I'll discuss some of the implications that these six targets have for cities.
Update[7/22/09]: I should add that if you take issue with any of these, or feel some additions are required, the comments are wide open.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Space Shift: The Basis of Good Space
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Space Shift: Technology and Social Change
-Part II of a series-
Click here for Part I: A Historical Perspective
Click here for Part III: The Basis of Good Space
I'd love to be writing about a new generation of Americans that are shrugging off the allure of material goods and making communal decisions that promote the common good--but I'm not that delusional. I tend to believe that while people's mental tendencies change very slowly (generations), the expression of those tendencies can be altered quite rapidly by new technology.
Americans aren't lining up for the Model T or the new washing machine or the house in the suburbs with the white picket fence--they're lining up for the iPhone. They spend their time following each others social interactions on facebook and Myspace and interact in an increasingly cluttered world through tiny snippets on Twitter. The internet has brought the world to our fingertips and we've realized that it (the world) is larger than we could have possibly realized.
The internet is incredibly important to understand in the context of the problem it solves and the other solutions that it will displace.
As transportation capacity increased and societies became more mobile around 150 years ago, it became apparent that world was far too complicated for people to be able to make fully informed decisions. Simplifications were seen as increasingly desirable.
Where as before, a single butcher may have served a neighborhood on the basis of personal contact and trust, now, that population had access to a dozen different butchers and judging their relative merit was no easy task. The butchers that advertised the merits of their brand (reality notwithstanding) grew their client base and eventually drove others out of business.
Customers became consumers and personalities became demographics. Instead of a dozen small butcher shops catering to their customers needs, a handful of conglomerates extracted the maximum economic value out of each consumer. Though these conglomerates became increasingly complex to operate, to the consumer, they were a godsend. No more asking neighbors for advise, or buying dubious guides. Instead, wherever you go, that comfortable brand is waiting for you.
Though it's certainly not the only way (see Zagat), the internet casts away the need for extensive sleuthing when it comes to making consumptive decisions. Sites like Yelp cover the entire country with reviews and online product guides like Good Guide will soon be adding features that allow a consumer to scan any product with their phone to bring up detailed information. You certainly don't have time to learn about every single ingredient in the sunscreen you're buying, but someone else does. The internet can tell you all you want to know--without simplification.
The reason I bring all this up is because the re-customerization of consumers is exerting a pressure on society as the technology pushing it moves faster than our society seems willing to move. While one reason for the foot dragging seems financial (I think it will also be solved through the internet) another--arguably more important--is built right into our environment.
Most of our built space was designed for a top down approach to the economy, while the internet is ushering in a new era of massively distributed enterprise. Those places that are currently prospering are those whose built space supports a bottom up sort of economy. More than just offering low barriers to entry, these places bring throngs of people into close contact with one another to stimulate creativity and the growth of culture.
And though the modal choice folks might not yet realize it, the next guiding mantra is: "Bring people together."
Friday, June 26, 2009
Rep. John Mica (R) on Transit
Ranking minority member on the house Transit and Infrastructure Committee, Republican Representative John Mica has an interesting interview with PBS which gives me hope that Republican's may--at least temporarily--support public transit.
Here's Rep. Mica:I became a mass transit fan because it’s so much more cost effective than building a highway. Also, it’s good for energy, it’s good for the environment...seeing the cost of one person in one car. The cost for construction. The cost for the environment. The cost for energy. You can pretty quickly be convinced that there’s got to be a more cost effective way. It’s going to take a little time, but we have to have good projects, they have to make sense – whether it’s high-speed rail or commuter rail or light rail. We got to have some alternatives helping people--even in the rural areas--to get around.
So cars are bad and transit is good? I think his simplification is excessive. Cars are incredibly useful in rural areas and areas with insufficient density to support public transit. As the density of an area grows, the space required by the cars so eats away at the area as a whole that those places are essentially stripped of their comfortable social spaces, leaving isolated enclaves of leisure, work and commerce.
There are places where cars make sense and transit doesn't. There are places where transit makes sense and cars don't. We shouldn't add components to a system that destroy it's performance (economic, social, environmental...).
If Rep. Mica is truly interested in transit, the one sure way to promote it is to provide incentives for projects that don't promote daily automobile use and penalize projects that encourage it.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Space Shift: A Historical Perspective
-Part I of a series-
Click here for Part II: Technology and Social Change
Click here for Part III: The Basis of Good Space
New Urbanists and the like often claim that the suburbs are built for cars, not people. In reality, suburbs were built by people and sold to people. We should be precise about what suburbs are and what they aren't. While they are great places for people to go for a walk or a bike ride, all serious transportation--going from one place to another--requires an automobile.
The hot topic in urban planning circles is "modal choice", the idea that people should be able to choose how they handle their serious transportation needs. Walking, driving, biking, busing or training; in the cities of the future, the choice will be yours.
This poorly thought out idea must be fleshed out before the economy starts whirring again. The climate crisis makes it imperative that we avoid another 50 years of disastrous built space. We're currently seeing the gradual shift of the dominant paradigm away from the vast suburban areas to something quite different. I propose that we mentally skip over the intermediate phases of this shift that are heavily influenced by our current system to see if the premises being adopted by today's society will result in a sustainable future. In the end, I hope it will, but we must throw off the shackles of our current schemes.
Around 100 years ago, the premise that drove the dominant paradigm of urban development rapidly shifted, just as it seems to be shifting today. It seems worthwhile to examine that century old transition and the parallels to what's happening today.
For most of human history, the dominant paradigm of urban development was driven by one simple premise that was shared by most of society: closer is better. This was certainly not a necessity, but instead was based around the idea that cities drove societal and economic growth so their size should be maximized. Since all transportation was slow, functional size could only be achieved with high density. Steel production was impossible during this period so there was a fairly low theoretical limit on the absolute amount of space per given footprint. A handful of the densest of these places still exist and function at densities well over 100,000 people per square mile (150 people/acre).
The early 20th century brought two major technological advances based on plentiful steel--the skyscraper and the automobile. The implications of these technological additions are too big to pass over, I'll first address the skyscraper.
With the advent of the skyscraper, localized densities virtually lost their theoretical limit. While before, perhaps 20 families could share the same door, now that number increased by an order of magnitude and beyond. Strangers would literally come in and out of your front door. The notion of community that had been an integral part of cities from the dawn of time was obliterated. This is why we associate community with "that small town feel" instead of a street bustling with conversation.
More technically, skyscrapers resulted in enormous populations of people being able to live in the smallest (geographical) places. Developers no longer needed to look outward to expand, they could simply build up.
But a younger generation of developers had a different idea entirely. With the advent of the automobile, land on the outskirts of the city could easily be connected to the city itself, allowing residents of those outlaying areas to reap the cultural rewards of city life while inhabiting a countryside villa. And all of this could be done without any serious investment in transit infrastructure, which had been the precursor of successful development. As time went on, engineers discovered better ways to move people in their automobiles (paved streets, signals, lines on the road, highways...etc), extending the area around cities that could be converted to clusters of private villas.
To sell these outlying areas, developers really only had to convince people to two things. First, having to drive to get to most destinations is a good thing and second, that enjoying the culture that another community creates is just as good, or even superior than enjoying the fruits of your own community.
The first sell was easy. Americans jumped at the chance to drive a car; to a person who may or may not have even ridden a house, the automobile was the 19th century equivalent of the jet pack. The second sell was less easy, and indeed, communities persist in the hearts of cities that have been there for generations.
Often times, communities left urban areas en masse to set up anew in the suburbs. These communities often fared poorly. Suburbs, by their very nature, provide a competitive advantage to the import and consumption of culture, not the generation of it. All except the most tight nit suburban communities fell victim to the ravages of corporate America.
To convince people to make these decisions, these developers created a premise that few Americans at the time could resist: "Bigger is better." Bigger lots, bigger houses, bigger cars, bigger garages, bigger appliances...decency knew no limit.
The intense efforts of these early sprawlers shifted the course of American society. By the end of the 20th century, national pizza chains hawk "Chicago style or "New York" style pizza and intense effort is given to the parking provisions of new developments.
Now that it has been taken to it's logical extreme, the grotesqueness of suburban sprawl has spawned a new movement, one that rejects the basic premise upon which it was founded. We'll examine that new movement--and the technology that supports it--in detail in the next installment.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Quick Update
Hannah and I are getting married in a couple weeks, so expect posting to be fairly light, though I will try to get at least one more post out before the big day. I'm starting a series that will attempt to address the emerging trends in urbanism, coherence is the goal!
Stay tuned!
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
On Masdar
Most of us only know Abu Dhabi as the far off destination for Garfield's nemesis Nermal. The capital of the UAE is easily eclipsed by the towering skyscrapers and artificial islands of the next door city-state Dubai. Dubai has comparatively few oil reserves and they have been prudently investing (or so they think) their oil revenue in a tourist infrastructure that is second to none. Abu Dabi, on the other hand, sits on around a tenth of the known global oil reserves.
The ruling family of this tiny fiefdom made a decision to diversify their economy and they have been diligently working to attract international educational and research institutions. The leaders seem to have fully bought into the idea that green technology is the future and as a way to guard against falling demand for oil--I'm holding my breath)--they've made a major investment by way of a functioning demonstration project of a car-free city called the Masdar Initiative.
I had the chance to sit through several presentations on Masdar and was able to get a hold of several images used in them. All in all, Masdar is by far the most impressive undertaking by any developer that I'm aware of. Their discussion about sustainability is more than mere lip service to the green movement, and although their plan is far from perfect, it is a genuine step in the right direction.
There is a lot to talk about when discussing Masdar, but I'll try to keep it focused and. It will be necessary, of course, to provide a bit of background on the development.
The development will be constructed on stilts, about 12 feet above grade. This allows for freight delivery, emergency access and simple public transportation installation in the public basement--eliminating the need for wide streets. Narrow streets, once common throughout the world, are of particularly well adapted to this area of the world, where temperatures exceed 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
The development is integrated into Abu Dhabi with large parking structures (15k spots for residents and 15k spots for visitors), buses and a proposed rail system. Within the development, which will hold around 50k residents and another 50k workers on about 1500 acres, mobility is provided through a PRT system designed by 2GetThere.
This is certainly not the sort of car-free development proposed by JH Crawford, rather this scheme has a massively implemented personal--yet public--transit system. There will be dozens and dozens of PRT stops, removing any need to travel by foot at the street level and in my opinion, obliterating the idea of local character.
While the designers seem to have solved scores of problems associated with cars, they have failed to correct a significant drawback of auto-based transit--universal access. While we generally think of access as a good thing, auto-based access leads to people's desires to build cul-de-sacs and wall off communities. When you create the type of universal access shown in Masdar, you homogenize the entire place. You don't allow little crevices to develop their own local culture. Borders are impossible to define because they can be so easily crossed underground and out of sight. I'm not opposed to the similar effect that mass transit has on limited areas around transit stops, but when the closest stop is never more than 175 feet away, you alter the urban fabric for the worse.
On to some better things. I'll skip over the freight delivery, garbage collection, emergency access, and climate orientation strategy--though they were all handled in an impressive fashion. What I'd like to focus on is the platform that Masdar itself is built on.
I like this a lot. There are an outrageous number of highly technical issues associated with cities. We bury most them underground, but some of them--most notably transport--are done at grade. Working under the soil is difficult and expensive. By building on a platform, we can establish a different bifurcation between the technical and the social city. Free from onerous technical requirements, users--not just developers--could construct buildings on a scale to their liking.
Just as importantly, by constructing a platform, we can create an additional bifurcation between the city and the country. Urban areas lie on the platform, rural areas lie off of it. Suburban-esque densities would never be built on such a platform because those areas of high infrastructure quality would create scarcity, the true driver of density. When the city needs to expand, more platform is built. Especially in seismically stable regions, the cost would not be so great.
Monday, June 1, 2009
GM Bites the Dust
Today brings news of GM's long awaited bankruptcy. Now that the public seems to own a major manufacturing operation, perhaps we'll get into the business of building things the further the public good--trains, buses, etc...
The great irony of this whole situation is that the strategy that drove GM under was an unrelenting focus on heavy vehicles at the expense of their lighter, passenger counterparts. In my mind, heavy cars are the only cars that should exist in the country.
Of course, GM wasn't just selling half ton chunks of steel to farmers, loggers, miners, construction workers... etc. They were marketing these vehicles to ordinary (sub)urban dwellers, who had no other use for them then towing their outlandishly large boat 150 miles each weekend (why not rent out some marina space?).
I'm not opposed to cars and I'm certainly not opposed to big powerful ones. Millions of Americans need a car to do the work they do--not just a car to get there. While Michael Moore thinks "It will take a few years for people to get used to the new ways to transport ourselves"--I suspect we need abrupt changes in virtually every area of our society to make our urban areas function normally without the car, and it will probably take a few years just to start.
Our expensive and unwieldy legal system leaves too many disputes outside the law and any other enforcement mechanism--the car spread us out to avoid those disputes. Our corporate system has identified every conceivable way of externalizing their costs to the society as a whole--the car brings people from miles around to big box stores. Most importantly, we have created a built environment on the basis of profit alone--and nobody noticed because you can't see the sad looks on people's faces through the windows of their car.
Somehow, this made sense in America, the land of unlimited land and opportunity. But it seems like we are running into the design limits of the infrastructure that our predecessors left to us. Freeways are getting to expensive to expand and maintain, water systems need rebuilding, schools are crumbling and the electrical grid is dying. It's time to forget the frontier.
Now we have the chance to revisit our built space, take stock of what we have and what we need.
Most of all, we need to find a way to live that does not encumber future generations with debts that they cannot manage and damage they cannot restore. I can't see how driving a car to work fits into that.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
And we're back!
It's been almost two months since the last post, so I suspect enough decompression time has gone by to get back into the blogging game. For starters, a quick life update. Hannah and I are living in a duplex about a mile from downtown Detroit in a neighborhood formerly known as Briggs but now associates with a nearby neighborhood and has adopted the name North Corktown. It's a wonderful place and I'll have much more to write about it in future posts.
On the employment front, Hannah is busy with her practice and I've taken a job as a doctoral student at Wayne State University. The perks are a stable income, benefits, a pleasant bike commute and enough autonomy to work on the things that interest me the most. I am in the Transportation Research Group, which, unfortunately, operates mainly as a traffic engineering research outfit and doesn't do much in the way of transit or walkable communities. Hopefully this will slowly change.
In between working on our half completed apartment (long story) and setting up a fly breeding operation in our basement (really long story) I haven't had too much time for blogging, but I have been reading some fascinating books. Thor Heyerdahl's The Ra Expedition was a fascinating exploration of the remarkable skill and drive of our ancestors and the ever present forces of diffusion in our world community. Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic read more like a textbook, but after studying the same material for the last month I forgive him, traffic engineering is much more pseudo than science.
I had the time recently to read a review of Julian of Ascalon's Tretise on Building. I would strongly recommend any interested in the creation of medieval cities to take a look at Besim Hakin's website. Also, I've just recently picked up a copy of J.H. Crawford's Carfree City Design Manual (the WSU library shelved it Wednesday) which has proven very fascinating. I hope to have a review of it out shortly (and perhaps one on Traffic as well).
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Monday, April 6, 2009
"Green" Space
Coco Chanel once said "Fashion fades, only the style remains the same." That truth of fashion also applies to development. There are some needs that have remained remarkably persistent over the years while others have been more of a fad. With talented Realtors hawking properties (Those brushed nickel appliances are really going to hold their value), there is a certain resistance to, and acceptance of change. Change that comes from within is pushed, from outside is resisted. The insider driven business is strongly supported by a study kicking around linked receiving expert advice to a reduction in cognitive activity.
In development, there are certain norms that become established and are enforced by the the professionals in the field. One common norm that has recently taken a dive is the "bigger is better" mantra. We tend to take things too far, we catch a good thing and drive it into the ground. Is a 2,000 sq.ft. house better for a family than a crowded tenement? Sure. Is a 20,000 sq.ft. house better for the family than the one a tenth of the size? I would say no, others would disagree, and the kids would do coke.
One of the enduring fads of development is "green space". It is proudly thrust forth in development plans as a gift to the community. The developer is kind enough to not develop all of their space, and leave it all "green" and shiny. Communities love this space so much that most require certain percentages of green space for every development parcel. Yet developers love green space too, and they often exceed green space requirements. So what is really going on here.
There is very influential research that demonstrates that people have a better quality of life if they can see a tree out their window. The theory goes that the fractal makeup of the natural world has some restorative effect on the brain. Without appropriate urban spaces--think of that nice picture of an ancient city hanging on your wall--that mimic this effect, it becomes important to provide natural ones--green spaces.
In addition, cities are afflicted with storms that dump massive amounts of water onto newly (on a geographical scale) impervious surfaces. It would ease the burden on the city to move all of this extra water around if some of it were allowed to seep into the ground. A norm was born.
It turns out, that certain landscapes are cheaper to provide than others. Trees are expensive, so are flowers, plants and bushes. The cheapest way to provide greenspace turned out the be the lawn. In the US alone, there is over 31 million acres of it. That's more land than all of New York--the state, not the city.
Every American is endowed with over 4,000 sq.ft of lawn. The funny thing about lawn is that it doesn't contain the natural fractals found in trees and other plants. It is almost indistinguishable from the latest generation of AstroTurf. It doesn't even do a particularly good job of absorbing stormwater. It's much better than concrete, but much worse than a forest floor.
In reality, developers use lawn as fudge space. If they don't provide enough green space, buildings begin to define the space, instead of just residing in it. When buildings define space, developers are forced to make a host of decisions that go against dozens of norms that are based on the "building in space" model.
Just as people have limits on their time and money, so do companies and cities. They can landscape a bit of open space, but most of it ends up lawn in the end. Instead of finding ways to economically "deal" with our space, perhaps we should be finding ways to distribute land so that individuals, businesses and institutions have the right amount of land at their disposal. Enough to meet their needs, but not so much that they feel compelled to waste it on grass.
Space is precious in cities. If there were 10 square feet less space in your yard, would you miss it?
Friday, April 3, 2009
End of Exurbia
For generations, we have relied on novelty to maintain our spaces, ring upon ring of development hawking the latest fad to the upper crust of society. We slowly drew people out of the hearts of cities, promising them addmittance to the middle class way of life through a change in address.
The farther from the center, the higher on the social ladder you went. In American, we can make even the stupidest ideas happen. Bring on the highways, the strip malls, the collector roads, parking lots and the cul-de-sacs. Somewhere along this line, several things began happening in concert. The lot sizes of suburbs grew so large that they lost their name and became a new place called exurbs. These places bore no sembalance of the small towns that suburbs are meant to emulate. Instead, this was the country, 100% rural.
It doesn't take a Nobel Prize to realize that the sticks are a losing proposition. The urbanization of the world will not decrease for a very simple reason, people like cities. Even in their neutered and sprawling state, urban and suburban areas run the table in attracting young people, families and the elderly. The biggest realization of the trip was this--development is war.
This type of warfare had become incredibly advanced, optimized by years of experience of study. It is a PR war, a war of public perception. It is a war of many fronts, and the exurbs presented a difficult choice for suburbs. The suburbs, which were based on the argument that away is better, had to switch gears. They were facing agressive challenges from exurbs that could hollow out their communities in the same way their own growth cased massive migration. This is what they faced, from a 2006 article:"As far as we are concerned, this is very good news indeed," said Christine Brainerd, spokeswoman for Elk Grove's city government. "It's a sign that the development strategies the city has put in place are working and that we have become a place where many, many people want to live."
What ensued was a massive battle for public perception. Newspapers, tv shows, books, academics and magazines all weighed in. The growing forcefulness of the climate change community helped push the message. In is good. Density is good. Walking is good. Out is bad. Sprawl is bad. Driving is bad.
The exurbs ended up losing the battle, but the suburbs failed to win. It was the sleeping giant, the city, that truely took the day. This was the battle for the young. The singles or couples without children. It is this group that has been captured by cities. While cities still lose families and the elderly, they have soundly won their first battle in generations. Swayed by the argments of their own communities, suburban children abandon the "American Dream" in search of walkability, clubs and culture. Cities, for their part, must struggle not to just to keep these new residents, but to adapt in an effort to maintain them.
The next battle brews.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
San Francisco Post Canceled
I was going to do this post yesterday, but didn't want anybody to think I was fooling. I've decided to cancel the San Francisco overview post since I've already done posts on most of our interesting observations there. It would have been nice to be able to explore the vast network of suburbs that ring the city, but the expense involved in such an adventure would have far exceeded our budget. Next time, we'll have sponsors!
In any case I'm working on a post for a bit later on this afternoon, so stay tuned. I left an image below the fold for those hoping for one last shot of the city by the bay.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Bisbee - A rare village
After a long day of ghost-towning along the Mexican border, we set our sights on Bisbee Arizona, the biggest dot on the map for miles in any direction. Rumor had it, it was once the most happening place between El Paso and San Francisco. We drove into the town--or so we thought--and began searching for the town built into a hill that a tipster had told us about. As the sun began to set, we were hopelessly lost amongst a smattering of early 20th century small town developments. We found refuge at a hotel along the Mexican border. The next morning, we headed for Old Bisbee, allegedly the place we were looking for but had missed the night before.
The first place we came to, pictured above, wasn't Bisbee at all but a nearby suburb known as Lowell (to historians). Lowell had hit some hard times. A food co-op and a breakfast place were the only places still open on the main drag, outside of that, well...
It turns out the town of Lowell had been eaten by a pit mine. A mining town suffers a percarious existence.
Continuing down the highway, we finally found Old Bisbee. It didn't take long before we realized this town was a special place. It bore little semblance to the "small town-big suburb" monotony seen across the US. Instead, it felt like a big city. We spent the next couple days trying to figure out what sort of conditions spawned such a place.
Bisbee was established in the 1880s on a massive copper deposit along an incredibly narrow winding valley. The mines were successful and soon silver and gold were discovered. Though the mines ceased operation in the 1970s, there is speculation that recent mineral prices could cause the operation to reopen. Later in the 1970s, the village had hit rock bottom. The mining company was unable to find any local takers for the Copper Queen Hotel (which now commands upwards of $200 a night) but a pair of enterprising artists and actor John Wayne caught wind of the place and realized it's inherent worth. Real estate prices rivaled modern day Detroit and Old Bisbee became something of an artists colony, who, in their later years began attracting tourists.
Many remark that Bisbee looks more like a small European village than the frontier town that it is. The are no wide roads. Many houses are not accessible from the street. People stroll up and down the valley walls on sets of stairs. The few cars on the streets move at a snails pace, often ignoring the "one way" signs that exist on almost every road. Some roads are incredibly narrow, and the walkways that stretch into the hills are narrower still.
Somehow, this little town built a different fate for itself than the scores of deserted communities that surround it. The Bisbee difference, if you will, is scarcity of space. At one point, 20,000 people filled this little corner of the valley. Scores of saloons lined Brewers Gulch on the rowdy side of town. Churches and the county courthouse occupied the wealthy side of town. Miners made enough from working in the mine to put up humble domiciles, many of which are occupied to this day. Few owned cars and the city was not laid out with them, or even wagons in mind.
Bisbee was, and continues to be incredibly walkable. Looking at a road map, the city seems like a pain to navigate. But on foot, there are no shortages of short-cuts, walk-throughs and stairways to get to any destination. The lack of abundant space requires that the small space that does exist be used very efficiently.
We visited several establishments that could have been no more than 60 square feet in size. Everywhere art mingled with history in a way that is both refreshing and respectful.
For all its buildings--seemingly stacked on top of each other--Bisbee remains remarkably empty. Vacant lots and decaying buildings lay scattered throughout the city. Somehow though, the city in no way looks blighted. Each empty lot looks more like an opportunity than a blight.
This is a village that seems to understand that positive change is not defined by growth. New projects are rarely bigger, or better buildings. More often, they are art projects or retrofits of existing buildings. We found at least a dozen small independent hotels in the city and it seemed that even the smallest infrastructure project require a healthy dose of free spirit.
I left Bisbee with the notion that one of the most important factors for the growth of a healthy city is scarcity of space. This is a difficult proposition. In Bisbee, the scarcity was provided by steep valley walls. These same walls that helped create such positive space ultimately limited the growth of the city. How then does a city create a movable boundary? Is the legal urban growth boundary that Portland uses the answer? And how can a city keep real estate prices low enough to accommodate every economic condition?
In coming days and weeks, I'll try to answer some of these questions. As the grand tour of the nation (at least the west coast) comes to a close, Hannah and I are returning to Detroit. The focus of this blog, and the commentary contained herein, will turn its focus to that perplexing city. 
Monday, March 30, 2009
Tombstone - A Small Town
Small towns have long served as the model for urban development in the United States. Suburbia is certainly more closely modeled after the small town than the city. Aside from the vastly different scale on which suburbs operate, there are remarkably many similarities. The feeling of security derived from isolation, the lush greenery intertwined with the built environment, the total reliance on personal--not public--transit and the necessity of knowing your neighbors business are all shared characteristics of suburbs and small towns. 
I have made the claim before that suburbs--like small town--are resource based, and when that resource dries up, the town--or suburb--dies. In a suburb, the resource being harvested is the innovation of a neighboring city. The suburb supplies regimented workers to perform mundane (typically corporate) tasks. The small town is no different. Small towns spring up around valuable resources. In southern Arizona, the entire life cycle of the small town is on display.
Without vegetation to cover the traces, dead and dying downs dot the landscape, as do the sources of their former glory. Vast quantities of minerals were extracted from deep beneath the earth as the scarred mountains can attest.
But when the minerals run out, there is nothing left to maintain a population that is fundamentally unsustainable. A community that must import virtually all of their goods and has little time to develop alternative economies after the mines run out.
We did find some telling and amazing places in this back corner of the country, and this post will be the first on our adventures there. Without minerals to export and little production capacity due to water scarcity, a clever town would turn to tourism to prop up the economy. 
We visited Tombstone, the little town that is home to the famous clash between the Earp and Clanton families. Tombstone is a fascinating place because the form of the old main drag was carefully preserved. The vast expanse of the street was entirely closed to traffic, making this one of the largest pedestrian malls in the country and certainly the largest we saw on our trip.
In seeing Tombstone, it becomes remarkably clear how significant an influence planners had in the development of even the smallest frontier towns. The street is wide enough to accommodate teams of wagons and riders. Pedestrians are granted a wooden sidewalk, complete with a wide awning to keep away the intense sunlight. Even in the dead of winter though, only a few people ventured into the street, the rest kept on the sidewalks. The total sense of enclosure provided by the arcade is incredibly comfortable and is much preferable to the vulnerability offered by the street.
This town, kept alive for a time by holding the county seat and then later by playing host to tourists interested in some of America's rowdier history seems like it will fall off the map one day soon. While many champion tourism as a sustainable industry, I suspect that a prolonged economic downturn will drive this whole town out of business. As we headed out of town looking for something a bit more desolate, I wondered if the modern day residents of Tombstone all lived in the square street grid around the historic district. As we rounded a corner, the sight above came into view.
The suburb is generally the fraud of a city, emulating a small town on an massive. In Tombstone, the small town itself is the lie; the suburb on its edge is the truth.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Weekend Update
Hope the weekend is treating you well, here are some interesting posts to keep you going.
I talk a lot about space on this blog. This story illustrates some of the most common transportation uses of space and their relative consumption.
If you were ever wondering how we should really be building our infrastructure, this story might provide some guidance. The first image is the kicker.
John Norquist, the Congress for New Urbanism president gives an interview about CNU work trying to influence the upcoming transportation bill. I'm not convinced that our built environment needs an infusion of cash to support an old (but better) kind of road. I think we should be thinking about new (and even better) sorts of roads.
J.H. Crawford has an enormous collection of remarkable pedestrian places at his website, carfree.com. In honor of not being able to check out his recent book at the library (my privileges expired last week...) I'll present one of his photos. Find more here.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Southern California
Before I do a post on San Francisco, I'd like to briefly discuss southern California. Quite honestly, we had planned on avoiding the entire area out of pure fear but since we decided to cut the east coast out of the trip, we figured we ought to really focus on the west coast. So, without any real plan or strategy, we circled around LA and headed to San Diego, drove back up to the heart of LA, then fled eastward.
The city of San Diego literally sits in a desert, yet lush green foliage occurs in such abundance there that you could be tricked into thinking you were in a rain forest. I can't say for sure if this city will exist 50 years from now, but I would be incredibly surprised if they manage to maintain their lush greenery. More striking is the sprawling pattern of development that we saw in both San Diego and Los Angeles. It is almost as if nobody took the time to question the dominant form of development. I should add, that the outermost ring of suburbs was almost totally vacant, or in various states of incompletion.
They say you get what you pay for. In southern California, I think people paid a bit too much. It's important to understand that California is an incredibly beautiful state, with incredibly diverse scenery and ecosystems. Plus, who gets up for the sunrise, the sunset is where it's at.
So why not live in a place like this, a paradise, an oasis in the desert? Well, first off, it's not an oasis, it's a desert. Water is piped in from as far as Colorado to supply people with their feeling of comfort. And everybody has a piece of of the pie. Their little 1/6 acre tucked away from the collector roads and interstates and covered with green green grass.
It becomes incredibly clear, just by visiting this place, why plastic surgery is so celebrated and strip malls look like 1500 year-old Italian villas. This is a place uncomfortable with the truth. Their vision of California--with its overflowing springs and lush orchards--did not exist in southern California and it had to be forged out of the dusty desert with imported water and imported labor.
Nothing, near or far, is left untouched. A suburban recreation of Venice sits outside of LA proper. This is truly the epitome of all that is off with southern California. It is a place of superficial illusion, driven by an industry of illusion (film) and full of a people who have enormous illusions about its worth. At least, I suppose (and so must they), it looks a bit different.
Southern California is a place of great wealth. Their film and music productions, software, agricultural products and consumptive culture are exported across the world. I suspect, though, that the place they have built sits on the very edge of what their wealth can maintain. I would not be surprised to see massive transformations in this place driven by economic necessity.
As a disclaimer, I am well aware that there are a lot of good people doing good things in these places. They are, unfortunately, completely overwhelmed by people who don't care or don't know how they should help.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Thoughts on Santa Cruz
I'm going a bit out of order here, but my mind today is on Santa Cruz and its interesting history. Like many small towns with liberal universities, Santa Cruz plopped onto the pedestrian mall bandwagon of the late 1960s. By the 1970's, the city had closed off traffic along it's main drag and created a winding pathway through an 80 (or so) food wide swath of maintained public access. Businesses were generally unhappy about the arrangement due to insufficient maintenance of the street and its accessibility to the homeless, yet change is difficult even for the business community and they were unable to reopen the street to traffic.
Yet today, Santa Cruz has a downtown that is totally open to automobile traffic. The main drag is incredibly pedestrian friendly and the entire place looks like an advertisement for the New Urbanism movement. What changed? In 1989, an earthquake destroyed (more or less) the entire pedestrian mall. With the car-free inertia gone, the business community was able to force a bit more of their vision onto the main drag.
There are loads of problems associated with having a downtown shopping district but before we get to those, we can use the Santa Cruz example to look into what goes into a good walking district. I think the mantra to keep in mind for any pedestrian area is controlled, enclosed space. If you consider the space between the buildings as the street (the cars stay on the road), it is important that you give plenty of space to pedestrians if you want them to use it. As you can see from the picture above, the sidewalks are ample. With all of this space, it's important to provide enclosure, a sense that you're not wandering around Tombstone Arizona (post on that later).
The cheapest way to provide enclosure is with buildings (they pay for themselves), of which there should be no shortage of in a city. Of course, the buildings are probably not arranged properly to provide enclosure to pedestrians, so you'll need something else; trees work tremendously well, though they take a while to get up to size. Santa Cruz has relied mostly on trees, though there are a few beautiful kiosks that terminate vistas quite nicely. A sense of enclosure is almost never planned into an auto based development because people take their enclosure with them.
The third, and arguably most elusive element of a successful district is control. Every inch of the walking district must be stewarded. There is rarely sufficient pedestrian traffic to justify an 80' right of way and that space must be consumed productively or it will become a haven for beggars, ne'er-do-wells and miscreants. It is imperative then that this space be effectively controlled by somebody--anybody will do. While it doesn't particularly matter who takes control from a planning perspective, consider the economics of a situation with an 80 foot wide street. A typical store front might have 20 feet of frontage with 30 feet of street (allowing for an ample 20 foot sidewalk) to design, maintain, police and landscape. While that may seem like an incredible expense, the aim of the business is to create economic value so it's likely they'll find a way to make the situation profitable. After all, they pay rent to be able to do the same indoors.
But that never happens. Instead, the city is stuck holding the bag. They try desperately to landscape, police and maintain thousands of square feet of space. The end result is disaster, either from crushing taxes to pay for the operation or from neglect. In Santa Cruz, the neglect came crashing down during an earthquake. The planners realized that given the space they had, they could provide an excellent pedestrian space while consuming half of it with a road. Roads are incredibly cheap to maintain and they are self-controlling--especially with the aid of some speed "humps". An even more clever solution would have been to fill that space with buildings but there were likely restrictions on infrastructure that would have made that sort of operation particularly cost prohibitive.
Now that we can have a wonderful pedestrian shopping district, we might consider some reasons why we shouldn't have one. Pedestrian shopping districts are for tourists, whether they come from nearby or from afar. Nobody lives in them, and there are few jobs outside the retail sector. Except for the most environmentally conscious, these outside tourists arrive with their cars and need a place to park them.
Here's the dirty (no-so) secret that the New Urbanists didn't want you to see. These pedestrian districts require an enormous amount of parking. Think mall-sized parking lots and structures. With these valuable parking lots surrounding the walking area, the entire district's growth is stunted. As real estate prices rise, landlords begin to squeeze every penny out of their tenants, and those that can't pay get the boot. That's how unique places slowly lose their charm as their unique and different walking mall full of independent shops morph into a run of the mill out-door mall, full of Starbucks and Cheesecake Factories.
Functionally, these shopping districts are barely better integrated into the fabric of a city than the suburban malls that they compete with. By concentrating creative entrepreneurs and mixing them with tourists, a city exports their brand but in doing so, they slowly starve it. Instead of specializing and separating their districts, cities should focus on diversifying their districts as a method of creating unique character and culture.
Cities would be better off promoting increased density and an appropriate mixture of uses. Shopping districts don't seem like a terrible idea, but without incredibly good public transportation for the locals, they are destined to morph into predictable tourist attractions. I suppose they do fit a need, but I would strongly contest any argument that these places should be the model for creating our built environment.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
San Francisco - Hunters Point
You won't find a city in the world that doesn't have some dark little secret of a place. Perhaps it's a vast expanse of decaying factories, a massive tract of decaying public housing, an unseemly large highway interchange or any other experiment in urban planning gone awry. As the value of the proximity of this space becomes more apparent to those in the development world, the obstacles that once impeded development look smaller and smaller.
San Francisco is no exception to this truth. In the south east section of the city, an abandoned naval yard sits vacant. As the Navy nears completion of radiological clean-up of the Hunters Point Shipyard, the city is gearing up to develop the area. I have a lot of experience with a similar brownfield project (Southworks in Chicago) so I thought I would try to talk to somebody at city hall to see if San Francisco was doing anything differently than Chicago. Luckily, I managed to snag Thor Kaslofsky, the Hunter's Point Project Manager for the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. As for any glimmer of hope that this "liberal Mecca" would be doing things differently...
When remodeling an old house, one of the first things to get an update is the kitchen. The reason for this is not technological advances. Rather, it is a result of sexism. Kitchens in old houses were designed by men who rarely--if ever--had to use the kitchen. Their ignorance about the use of a kitchen lead to remarkably dysfunctional spaces. After much scientific study, quantitative measures (the kitchen work triangle) of the kitchen were developed to aid designers yet truly excellent kitchens weren't introduced until people who used them began to design them.
It should come as no surprise then that the people tasked with designing an entirely new development are only working with their experience, some buzz words and a few blunt quantitative tools. Take a look at this document, the proposed streetscapes for the first phase of the re-development. You'll notice the excruciating detail given to the variety and location of plants to be used. You'll also find no explanation why the smallest streets are 60' across. What is all that space for?
Space is important. The number of inches between the sink and refrigerator is important. Why is it that we don't consider our urban space important? It is certainly more difficult to remodel a city that it is to remodel a kitchen. I can only come up with two potential answers. First, planners consider architect's designs so thoroughly appalling and distasteful that they feel compelled to provide a pedestrian with a visual escape from the sidewalk view: the vast expanse of the street. The second--and more likely--answer is that planners do not value space, in fact, they are only concerned with filling it.
Consider this situation: you are a planning firm that has just received an assignment to draw up a "Master Plan" for a given parcel. Luckily, you're not starting from scratch. The city has implemented a series of laws the govern how space should be developed. The number of housing units is likely prescribed, as is the minimum width of streets and the percentage of (non-street) open space. Is there really any decisions that the planner can make other than the exact placement of each street?
The short answer is no. Making any changes would require tedious meetings ($) to prove their worth, variances from the various code enforcement boards ($$) and enormous risk associated with making something slightly different ($$$). The longer answer is that the city--which essentially controls the entire process--has a vested interest in using space wisely. San Francisco in particular, has an enormous need to increase the amount of housing available in the city. They have an enormous incentive to find ways to hold as many people as they can in the little space the have remaining. Instead of providing quality living space for orders of magnitude more people, the city is left with thousands of plants and play structures to maintain.
Luckily for the country (though not San Francisco), business as usual seems to have taken a bit of a break. Here's to hoping that its departure is a permanent one.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Bookkeeping Day
As we near the end of the truncated cross country tour (apologies to the east coast), I've decided to make the archives a bit easier to navigate. You'll not only only find a new panel on the right side of the page, you'll also find a photo below the fold.
Update: Side links work now...
Monday, March 23, 2009
San Francisco - The Mission
It seems that every city and town from San Francisco south and all the way east to El Paso had some sort of Mission District, Mission Hill, Mission Valley, Mission Street...etc. We were lucky enought to stay in the San Francisco Mission District which turned out to be a very interesting place. As it happened, it was our first true city stay since we were in Chicago. If you'll recall, Chicago was typified by large blocks of residential areas with a grid of commercial areas around them. By contrast, the Mission is a collection of long, thin strips of commercial areas with similarly long, thin strips of residential areas in between them.
Just by form alone, this was a new kind of place for us. The development of these sorts of near-by strips was likely a result of the frequent stops of a streetcar line along a main roads as opposed to the distant stops of subways. One of the most interesting aspects of these strips were their independent character and functionality. Valencia Street for example, runs just 500 feet parallel to Mission Street yet has its own unique character and feel.
While staying on Valencia Street, we witnessed a public display of one of the rarest actions in cities; the public got its way. Two doors down from the apartment building we were staying in, American Apparel had posted a massive sign in an empty storefront, appealing to an unwilling community for support in their bid to open up shop along Valencia St. In 2006, San Francisco began a tedious certification process for new chain stores opening up in the city. Most stores, especially those like American Apparel (kind of progressive), are granted approval.
The residents of Valencia St were not keen on the idea of a major retailer moving onto their block though. They were proud of the myriad of local shops that had taken decades to establish themselves on the street and they'd be damned if they'd have to bask in the glow of American Apparel's ever-burning high-intensity fluorescent lights. If you're interested in urban activism, and how a healthy neighborhood flexes its power, read this entire blog, it details the unfolding efforts to stop the new shop from moving in. Over the course of 20 days, an entire neighborhood was able to mobilize sufficiently to prevent one of the nations largest retailers from opening up shop in a vacant building. That's a symptom of a pretty good city. For those out there that think that this was a stupid issue, consider that the people who live in a place had some say in defining it. That is far more important that any single issue. Moving on...
A distance that gets kicked around a lot is 1/5 of a mile. According to research (hmmm), that's about the distance that most people are willing to walk to get somewhere. Those 1000 or so feet are used to design and layout New Urbanist developments across the country. There were probably at least a dozen coffee shops within that radius from where we were staying yet every morning we went to the same one that was two doors down. As it turns out, convenience knows no limits. If there had been a coffee shop on the floor we were staying on, we would have gone there instead.
As planners begin to try and provide conveniences to residents by zoning in special use areas, they misunderstand how people relate to use and space. For example, a coffee shop 1/5 of a mile away gets added to the "places to go" mental file, but not to the "place you're buying" file. A coffee shop downstairs means you don't even have to get dressed to go there, it's an extension of your house. That adds to the price people are willing to pay. But enough about density and convenience.
The Mission is an economically and ethnically mixed neighborhood, to the benefit of all. The variety of retail options was astounding, from a high end health food store to vendors hawking produce on the street and from $4 burritos to $9 burritos. This district exemplified the benefits of living in a city.
One thing that struck me as I first began wandering around the Mission was the wideness of the main streets. Mission Street, pictured above, is an enormous street. Valencia Street was so wide that it seemed planners didn't know what to do with all the space; the bicycle lane was 10' wide! All my thoughts about cities would have left me thinking that with so much street, you couldn't get sufficient density to support such lively districts. As I continued to explore, the answer became clear.
It was the incredible density of the residential areas--tall, modest homes set along narrow little streets--that allowed enough people to live in close proximity to these districts to make them functional. Even with the wide main streets, the districts are compact and dense enough to support some of the old-school sorts of freight delivery.
These people care about their neighborhood, and one of the easiest ways to tell is from the murals that adorned any exposed and undecorated building surface.
The climate and wealth of the place make it an excellent place to paint, even the trucks have a pretty amazing look to them. If this is how all automobiles looked, I think I might be more supportive of them.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Weekend Update
Some reading for the weekend, plus a picture below the fold...
The urban agriculture front gets a presidential boost, this is one of the most refreshing things I've seen in a long time.
Less cars are being registered for the first time in a very long time. Does that mean that there are less cars on the road or just more unregistered ones?
Here's a bit of interesting commentary on the plan to close some traffic along Broadway and in Times Square in NYC.
Speaking of NYC, Mayor Bloomberg made some cycling enemies by astutely noting that bicycles take up a lot of space and shouldn't be allowed on subways. Cyclists, in their crusade against global warming, don't seem to realize that there are indeed some drawbacks to bicycles, they aren't perfect for everyone and they do take up a lot of space. Perhaps they'll start adding bicycle racks to the trains.
An interesting article in a business magazine (for a younger generation though) reveals how permeating the dislike of suburbs is. If the author was trying to be clever, he could started with "The downturn accomplished what the downtown could not: it has turned back the tide of suburban sprawl." Oh well, maybe Fast Company will want to offer me a writing job. The title of the article is Suburbia R.I.P.
Ready for a bit of auto history? Don't forget to click the links on the right hand side for some images or click here for a Google image search of Fordlandia.
And perhaps the most important issue of the last week, the Department of Transportation (the federal one) declares that they'll be taking into account the total cost of living in concert with HUD. That total cost will include the cost of various transportation options, especially automobiles. Follow both links for more.
Don't forget the pic on the other side of the fold. A shiny prize for anybody who can place it.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Book Review: Getting Green Done
I'd like to take a momentary break from our whirlwind tour of the country to review Auden Schendler's first book, Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution. Schendler works as the Aspen Skiing Company's (ASC) executive director of sustainability, a post many organizations have created but few know how they should function. He has turned ASC into a company that operates well beyond their stature on the sustainability front. Here's a quote from 2006 after they filed an amicus brief against the EPA for failure to regulate GHG emissions:
With Massachusetts and the Sierra Club in the lead, this crucial legal battle challenges the EPA on grounds that the Clean Air Act requires action against climate change in a case that has made its way through EPA channels and federal courts since 1999.Schendler is clearly an effective director, and his book is strongest as a how-to guide for the up and coming generation of climate crusaders.
...
The Skico filed an amicus brief supporting the petitioners in the case, which include 12 states, numerous cities, the Sierra Club, National Resources Defense Council and other environmental groups.
Schendler begins with refreshingly truthful report of the current state of the green revolution. He argues (correctly) that individual action is insufficient and massive coordinated action is non-existent. While I think he comes across as a bit harsh on the bead-wearing, long haired climate-do-gooders, he makes a good point that those wearing suites tend to march in packs, an they have learned to avoid those that are poorly clad. If we're going to get serious about the climate thing, we need the suits on board.
For Schendler, the true meaning of "green" revolves around stopping climate change, and from his perspective, that makes sense. Living in a community that is totally dependent on cold air (snow really) makes stopping global warming the number #1 priority. To this end, much of the book is tailored towards increasing energy efficiency and it tends to cast aside other issues (water, food, air and health). While Schendler does seem to grasp the total insufficiency of programs like office paper recycling, he doesn't seem to accept the impossibility of halting global warming.
Schendler is convinced that if green leaders become more effective and if massive government programs are put in place, we'll avoid climactic disaster. Personally, I doubt that even if those things did happen we would be able to prevent very bad things (disease, famine, pestilence, war, plague, drought, exodus, death, destruction....) from happening within the next 50 years. His argument is that we still have time to avert the disaster, my argument is that we still have time to prepare for it. The book is still very much worth a read.
My only real issue with the book is a tangential chapter about the relevance of the Aspen, Colorado where ASC is located. ASC operates a five star resort that people fly--in their personal jets--to get to. While I think this chapter was illuminating of Mr. Schendler's character and his line of work (every discussion is a battle and you ought to come armed) I don't think his argument was especially effective or necessary. This book is supposed to be about how everyone can be an effective climate warrior (with or without the beads) so why throw in a chapter that proclaims Aspen, with its uber-wealthy community, the location with the most inherent impact? Why not Detroit, a place of great poverty that exports some of the least sustainable products across the globe? Or any other place for that matter...
On the upside though, he provides an enormous amount of insight on issues like Renewable Energy Credits, sustainability progress reports, capital impediments for efficiency upgrades, selling green to those who need to buy it, fighting back against the most effective arguments against greening programs and actualizing green building. He even provides a compelling defense of greenwashing. If you're interested in doing something "green" yourself, or learning more about "green"--and especially if you're going to try and convince others to work with you--this book is for you.
At 250 pages, it's a quick and pleasant read. I'll give it my inaugural rating of "Pretty Good Book" that I only hand out to books that do justice to their topics. You can pick it up at Amazon or your local bookstore for less than $20.
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