Thoughts on Denver

After a week of sub-zero temperatures and seemingly endless driving through the Great Plains, we were really looking forward to this bastion of civilization in the endless expanse of middle America. We were a good 30 miles away from any area marked as "urbanized" by the map were were using when the corn fields and high density feed lots gave way to cookie cutter suburbs.Denver is an enormous city in an unlikely place. Its population is considered extremely health conscious and as far as we could tell, people were more active in this city than in any we had visited (we were in town during unseasonably warm weather...). This former cattle town's population has tripled over the last 50 years. The accommodations built for the new residence have shaped the entire city.

The Great Plains stretch endless to the North, South and East. To the West, the towering Rocky Mountains beckon. It's quite a view, especially to a couple saddle sore midwesterners. It seemed like every place in the city enjoyed some nice views of the mountains, from the swankiest condos to the parking lots of big box stores.Denver (and Colorado in general) is a colorful place. The older buildings seem very much influenced by the southwestern building tradition. Many employ stucco and a handsome brickwork that is often painted with great detail. The pre-WWII developments are laid out in the typical pseudo-suburb pattern that planners of the time would have referred to as "best practice". Some of the homes are nice, some are less so and they all sit in quiet neighborhoods with little pockets of commercial activity.The newer buildings are unremarkable and aside for some scale differences (i.e. double left turn lanes, six lane roads...etc), much of Denver is indecipherable from the suburb I grew up in outside Lansing. The downtown is packed with towering office buidings. Perhaps the architects in the area were attempting to convey the endlessness of the Great Plains when they designed these giants.Downtown Denver is very much the central business district advertised on the transit maps. A couple buildings stood out though, holdovers from another era.We were surprised to find street cars in Denver. They are oriented towards the downtown area and it seems like they were intended to reduce highway congestion during rush hour. In no way do these street cars attempt to increase the mobility of Denver residents or allow any person to get by without a car. The Denver bus system is incredibly highly developed, but since the development blocks are so large, multiple transfers--and lots of time--are needed to get around on the public transit system.Denver has a very highly regarded transit system. In my totally amateur yet critical opinion, the only reason anybody would use it is fluke route placement or economic necessity. Forcing under-privileged people onto an inconvenient and time consuming bus system only makes it harder for them to get a leg up in the world. This is an issue of social justice and as a society, we need to address it as such.

Denver is essentially in a desert, but you wouldn't really know it. It was astonishing the waste that is tolerated in a place that has such scarce water resources. They also make recycling practically impossibly for most residents. The critical concepts laid out in the "Reduce, Reuse and Recycle" slogan don't seem like they've caught on here.

Denver does take an interesting approach to bicycle transportation, one that we've seen repeated in other places across the west. There is enough space in cities of this sort that bicycles don't always need to share road space, instead they have their own rights of way where they hurtle over clean asphalt complete with on and off ramps. More on this in the Boulder piece.

We didn't see all of Denver, and allegedly we missed some interesting parts of it. Even so, I have no problem leaving the place thinking that rapid growth usually ends up being unsustainable growth.

It's a difficult challenge for a city to accommodate a burgeoning population. Most would argue this was the challenge that lead to the field of planning in the first place. From observation, the first 100 years of planning practice has accomplished much, but left even more to be desired.

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Chat with Adam Stenftenagel

In America, we spend our energy in three broad categories, making products, moving around, and occupying buildings. The building construction and occupation pieces of the pie have been targeted through a number of organizations and standards including USGBC, Energy Star, LEED and HERS. These groups have gradually reduced the occupational and constructive impact of buildings. Later in this post, we'll see just how advanced these buildings have become.

One of the most interesting standards is the Passiv Haus standard being developed in Germany (New York Times article here). A German ex-pat living in the Denver area was so enamored with the idea that he decided he would build an entirely new development based on the Passiv Haus standard just to show us Americans how easy it can be to build well. The development is called GEOS and I was lucky enough to talk about the project and other things with Adam Stenftenagel who runs an energy modeling company called Sustainably Built out of Boulder, Colorado.

The green building movement has begun to coalesce around the slogan "build tight, ventilate right" for good reason. Energy modeling shows that restricting infiltration is by far the best way to reduce energy usage. Standard building codes require a maximum air exchange of 0.35 air switches per hour and a good builder will tighten up a building to 0.1 exchange per hour. To eliminate energy usage entirely, you need to go as low as 0.04 per hours or only one exchange per day.

In addition, buildings in the GEOS development will utilize passive solar heating. The land covenant specifies that no house may cast a shadow on another during the Winter solstice. In a suburban development like GEOS, that means a somewhat unusual checkerboard pattern.
The southern walls of the buildings are full of windows. Carefully placed awnings let in the winter sun for warmth but block out the searing summer rays. The walls and roofs are heavily insulated, R-24 for the total wall systems and R-40 for the roofs.

"Tight" houses have been around for years but suffered from mold problems and stale air due to their insufficient ventilation. The GEOS homes solve the problem elegantly. Low speed fans run constantly, sucking 110 cubic feet or air per second from the bathrooms and kitchen. That air is used to condition outside air being brought into the house in a small heat exchanger located in the basement. That way, very little energy is used to heat or cool incoming air to the desired temperature. In addition, by the time the outside air makes it to the heat exchanger, it has already passed through shallow geothermal tubes running around the foundation, making the heating and cooling processes even more efficient.

These homes are designed to be net-zero energy. That means a somewhat conscious household will have no energy bills over the course of a year. Colorado's generous rebates and sunny weather make solar panels an amazing option. No gas lines will be run and electrical lines will connect the homes to the grid for storage.

In the end, the GEOS development is still a suburb, but it is a vast improvement over standard practice. Their work on the heat exchanger units will likely lead to the development of American Passiv Haus systems comparable to the excellent German ones.

If you are thinking about building a new home/building, it would certainly be worth it to check out some of these innovative homes starting to spring up across the county for ideas. And if you're tired of rising energy bills, it might not be a bad idea to look into the Passive House (into English now...) concepts for the next remodeling project. This page is a must. Depending on your location, you may be able to get financing at a rate that will offset your energy payments and leave you with a more comfortable and sustainable home.

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Chat with Christopher O'Hara

I finished my master's degree in structural engineering in December and the lack of "green" oriented jobs in the field is one of the reasons I'm on this cross country trek. It was with great surprise and delight that I stumbled across Studio NYL Structural Engineers in Boulder, Colorado.

Studio NYL is a small firm that specializes in sustainable structural design. None of my coursework even touched on the subject so I knew I had to find out more. I was fortunate enough to speak with Studio NYL co-founder, Christopher O'Hara, to get a bit of illumination on the subject.

Structural engineers are typically brought into the design process after the global decisions about a building are already made. We are compelled to follow a building code that sets design requirements for the parts of the building that keep it standing. We don't typically have much say beyond the structural details of a project and even then, it's a crap-shoot.

From the Studio NYL point of view, structural engineers can't do much, but they can do something. They focus on reducing material use. Christopher told me, "Using 10% recycled materials is great, but reducing material use by 20% is even better." Achieving that reduction means designing with modular materials in their natural increments, utilizing the most efficient structural systems and creating elegant structural forms that don't need to be covered up. Much of this takes early coordination with architects and the monetary savings from reduced material usage is mostly erased by increased labor costs.

Studio NYL is in an interesting position. There is no incentive (such as LEED certification) to reduce structural material use so the market is in no way crowded with sustainable structural design firms. Only builders who are genuinely interested in being sustainable will take the time to hire Studio NYL. That means the builder will have certainly hired a "green-minded" architect who is willing to cooperate. Breaking down the barrier between architects and engineers--or form and function--is what gives Studio NYL the ability to affect critical design decisions.

For a structural engineering office, operating as a sustainable firm makes a whole lot of sense. It means playing a greater role in the design process and locking in a more receptive clientele. For some reason, this hasn't really caught on. Christopher couldn't name another small firm doing the same sort of work.

I think this sort of firm will begin to multiply in the very near future. Green building is arguably (I'll prove it in the next post) the most advanced branch of the "green" movement and all of the green builders will soon be looking for ways to green the gaps in the design process.

As an added perk, the folks at Studio NYL were very well abreast with the most advanced developments in the structural engineering world. If you're interested in some cutting edge stuff, check out these links on carbon fiber retro-fits and bio-mimicking 3-D trusses.

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Hiatus Over!

I've taken a few days off to finish up some tasks but we're back into the swing of things! Hopefully two more posts by tomorrow night...

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Into the Mountains

The next few posts will be based on our visit to the Denver and Boulder area. The prairie stretches endless to the east and the mountains stretch endless to the west. It was quite a change of pace from the midwest that we had become accustomed to. More to come...

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Milwaukee - Wrap Up

Milwaukee is full of clock towers. The Allen-Bradley Clock Tower, largest in the world, is just one of an entire skyline dotted with clock towers, fancy and plain, big and small. This is not the sort of place where you can lose track of time.Milwaukee is much more than its clock towers; the distinctive neighborhoods and local character of the city are incredibly charming.

Milwaukee is surrounded by the type of sprawl typical of most cities. Vast tracts of housing sliced up by collector roads and interspersed only by churches and schools. These post-war neighborhoods are bland and unusually devoid of clock towers. Milwaukee's pre-war developments are much more interesting. Our hosts in Milwaukee proudly informed us that no place in Milwaukee is more than a block away from a bar. They weren't overestimating in the least.I wasn't able to find any studies linking this sort of neighborhood to a reduction in drunk driving but if you can walk to several different bars within three minutes, you're left without any reasons to drink and drive. Drinking isn't the only use for these buildings, many have been repurposed creating de facto mixed used neighborhoods.Milwaukee was fortunate enough to have some visionary political leaders over the last 35 years. It was one of the first cities to reject additional freeway construction through their downtown area and perhaps the first to permanently remove an undamaged freeway. The demolition of the Park East Freeway opened up the heart of the city to the north side and greatly in the increased the vitality of the city.The north side is very nice in a small town sort of way, but the south side is very nice in a big city sort of way. Large elegant buildings line the streets of the Historic Third Ward just south of downtown. This upscale district of warehouses turned condos is really breathtaking.It has some obvious problems though. It's streets, designed for heavy horse and wagon traffic are incredibly wide. The city addressed the problem by turning the center of the street into parking lots.This is a remarkably good way to create an unpleasant place. It seems like the district planners decided that instead of optimizing the ward for it's residents, they would try to bring in "tourists" to public markets and upscale shops. It's a good way to convince retailers to pay higher rates, but it doesn't work so well to make a place that survives beyond its initial hype. The issue of too-wide streets is not easily dealt with in our current development scheme, I'll have more to say about that during the Denver/Boulder issue.

Unlike the north side, the south side is conveniently cut off from the city by an enormous interstate highway (I-794). It happens to be elevated, so if community planners ever had the drive, they could make an effort to reduce the disconnection by carefully designed spaces under the highway. Milwaukee is full of rivers that naturally dice up the city, they don't need any more mobility barriers than the ones that nature provides.

One thing that Milwaukee residents seem to understand is the critical importance of restorative spaces in human environments. Throughout the city, we came across the sort of bright colors the liven up the sometimes somber mood of Wisconsin winters.It's always nice to see some play areas that actually look fun. Playgrounds of metal sticks and plastic panels ordered out of a catalog are only good at regimenting children away from their creative and innovative minds.Milwaukee's school stock is among the best I've ever seen. Even in cases where they're forced to board up windows to reduce capital and utility costs, they find ways to brighten up the picture.And let's not forget the roof tops. This light-hearted scene lay up against a major thoroughfare. The only apparent purpose was to provide tired commuters with something pleasant to dwell on during their nerve wracking dashes to and from work.

Milwaukee is a place full of serious people who manage not to take themselves too seriously. My guess is that all of this has something to do with the concentration of so much beer in such a small city. I'll leave you with one final picture that I'll call "The Future is Now".

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Update

We've been battling the mountains for the last couple days so posting has slowed down considerably. I hope to get up a post on Milwaukee later on tonight and maybe a couple on the Denver/Boulder area tomorrow. Hopefully I'll be caught up before too long.

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Disney gets it...

Or at least they did in 1950. This amusing cartoon nicely sums up the following 58 years.

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Milwaukee - Sewer District

The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewage District (MMSD) is arguably one of the best in the nation. Sewage districts, which span multiple jurisdictions, are forced to navigate difficult waters. Not only are they unable to force regulatory changes within their own boundaries, they often only cover portions of watersheds, leaving sections of waterways that drain into their area of responsibility totally out of their control.

For any sewage district to meet their mandate to treat sewage and act as a steward for waterways, they must forge political alliances between urban and suburban leaders. Two decades after the "Sewer Wars" in Milwaukee, it is clear that those alliances are now treated with great value. Outlying communities no longer threaten to break from the district and money flows into MMSD coffers to pay for infrastructure upgrades.

Before I get into what the MMSD is doing right and where they fall off the wagon, I'd like to give a brief overview of the treatment district, one of the largest in the country. The district covers 411 square miles over six different watersheds and dozens of local jurisdictions. They operate two separate treatment facilities, over 500 million gallons of storage capacity and 300 miles of collector pipe while managing flood control and mitigation for the entire area. Each jurisdiction owns and operates their own sewer pipes that feed into the MMSD collector pipes. Most of this area has separate sanitary and storm sewers, however 27 square miles in the heart of Milwaukee proper and a nearby community utilize combined sewers.

This small area of combined sewers collect so much water during rain storms and snow melts and that they often overwhelm the fixed capacity of the treatment plants. Each of the two plants can treat 300 million gallons of sewage per day but even a single inch of rain can add an additional 450 million gallons of water from the combined sewer area alone. Each storm event also brings additional groundwater infiltration into the 6000 miles of leaky pipes not operated or governed by MMSD.

For decades, rainfall in the Milwaukee area meant sewer overflows. If more water flowed to the treatment plants than they could handle, that excess water, usually a combination of stormwater and sanitary sewage, was discharged into the lake. The 1960's brought an environmental movement that no longer accepted 50-60 overflows per year and a solution was devised.

The decision was made (after much conflict) not to tear up streets in Milwaukee to separate the sanitary and storm sewers. Instead, 520 millions of gallons of storage capacity was built in tunnels burrowed deep beneath the city. The cost of this proposal (after much conflict) was shared between the city and suburbs.

$3 billion later, MMSD has nearly eliminated sewer overflows. Thanks to amiable communication between interested parties and ever evolving technological solutions, treatment efficiencies are increasing. Suburban communities have recently settled a lawsuit that will force them to upgrade their leaky pipes. Groundwater that flows into these pipes, greatly increases the risk of overflow and cost of treatment. MMSD operates hazardous waste collection as well as pharmaceutical collection as a way of avoiding costly treatment upgrades.

For over 80 years, the excess bacteria from secondary treatment is dried to create Milorganite, a popular commercial fertilizer. They sell 41,000 tons a year. The settled waste from primary treatment is anaerobically digested and produces $1.9 million worth of biogas a year. These programs are encouraged by the Wisconsin Beneficial Reuse Program which should act as a model for the nation.

MMSD has a website that shows they are striving for transparency. The have online tools showing sewage flow and treatment as well as river health advisories. Click on the link and you'll be able to find out how much sewage is flowing into each treatment plant at this very moment. All very cool stuff, if your city doesn't have informational tools like this, agitate!

But all is not well in metro Milwaukee. A recent watershed-by-watershed analysis revealed that most sampling sites in the watershed regularly exceeded acceptable limits for most pollutants, especially fecal coliform. A study by MMSD showed that only a fraction of this bacteria is now a result of sewage overflows. A vast majority of water quality problems are caused by runoff. The only place in the district with improved water quality is in the combined sewer area, where stormwater is treated to the same level as sanitary sewage.

This is a problem facing (or will soon face) all major sewage districts. They have exhausted the big fixes and are still left with big problems. We are entering the area of massively distributed little fixes. Rain barrels, green roofs, rain gardens and increased foliage are of little consequence if they are taken by their minuscule increments, but on a massive scale, they can have a massive effect.

MMSD knows this and to move in that direction, they have sold 10,000 rain barrels at-cost to district residents and subsidize rain garden plants. But they are unable to create the necessary vast scale of implementation under their current operating structure. Because they don't bill customers directly, they have no way to attach incentives to little solutions. To demonstrate their weak political position, it was only after years of cajoling that an informal agreement was put into place to limit the additional runoff caused by new development. Without legal authority, how can they possibly get communities to require rain barrel installation? Or implement green roof requirements?

I'm not sure if it makes more sense for the MMSD to evolve into an organization with some regulatory punch or if an entirely new body with a different mandate should be created. Since water-body quality is affected by activities throughout the watershed, one thing is overwhelmingly clear: effective management must be done at the watershed scale and it must have political authority. Those at the bottom of a river must have some say over what goes into the river at the top of it.

We can no longer rely on massive infrastructure solutions to clean up the mess we make. The most efficient and effective way to fix a problem is at its source. If that means new laws mandating rain barrels and green roofs, so bit it. If putting these new laws on the books takes a new political jurisdiction, let's make it.

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Chicago - Wrap-up

Chicago is a huge place and it's not easily described. Despite the daunting nature of this task, I'll give it a try here. The image below is from Wikimedia Commons.Chicago is a vibrant and thriving city--not without its problems--that offers many lessons about cities to even the casual observer.

The massiveness of Chicago is somewhat awkwardly connected by buses operated by CTA and PACE, city operated elevated trains (the 'L'), regionally operated commuter trains (Metra) and a highway system that I would consider comparatively un-obtrusive. While the 'L' is incredibly effective at whisking urban residents to and from downtown, it is a terribly time consuming way to go anywhere else. The 'L' allows many urban residents to have a sufficient, but not satisfactory, level of mobility without an automobile. The bus system is simply too slow and unreliable to totally eliminate the usefulness of automobiles.The layout of the city was greatly influenced by the illustrious planner Daniel Burnham whose work, The Plan of Chicago, laid out a vision of vast parks and wide boulevards. The City Beautiful movement, which Burnham lead, envisioned the break-up of active commerce in a city and a "return" to more leisurely endeavors like walks in a park. Chicago adopted three main elements of the plan, boulevards, enormous parks, and concentrated public expenditures. The boulevards--some well over 200 feet wide--are a greatly respected Chicago tradition. The realities of modern-day traffic patterns however, turn them into small highways instead of the leisurely drive through the park they were intended to be.

The older part of Chicago is ringed with some of the biggest urban parks in the world. They were created to provide respite to a population suffering from the horrific conditions of the stockyards and other unregulated industries of the late 19th century. Chicago has maintained the tradition of these enormous parks by adding Millennium Park--built above an old rail yard--to the already expansive block of parks downtown.I don't have any qualms with parks in general but scale is critical. Parks of the magnitude dictated by Burnham are so large that they can only be filled by expensive city programming that often falls away during difficult economic times. Parks like these are never full and often totally unoccupied. The lack of watchful eyes leads to parks that fall into lawlessness. Humboldt Park, shown above is one such example. For years it was considered an incredibly dangerous place visited primarily by criminals and malcontents. It has only recently begun to emerge as a place devoid of crime after twenty years of sustained economic growth and city attention.

Parks must fit the scale and context in which they are built. For example, a park in a more homogonized neighborhood must be larger in order to accomondate the rush of an entire population on the same schedule. In a thuroughly mixed neighborhood, on the other hand, parks, function just fine at a fraction of the size since differing schedules allow for continued use. These sorts of parks manage to fill themselves and don't require expensive city programs to draw crowds or police officers to keep an eye on them.

Thanks to Burnham, Chicago has an overabundance of enormous parks. The city would be much better served by smaller and more frequent restorative spaces that residents could enjoy on a regular basis. Fortunatley, private citizens have realized the many benefits of smaller parks. Through the urban gardening movement, many vacant lots have been converted into cozy restorative spaces.Much of Chicago is single family or duplex housing like in the image shown above. These tracts of housing are greatly supplemented by elevator apartments and walk-ups. Housing is finely divided by long stretches of commercial areas, shown below, that are characterized by greater density, more traffic and an active street presence.The following maps were produced by UrbanLab and more can be found at www.chil.us.Click on the maps for a higher resolution. They show the clear separation of commercial and residential areas but the scale of this granulation is much finer than in the megablocks of Detroit. These frequent commercial areas grant residents access to retail and office space at close proximity, often within walking distance. That the separation exists at all is as much a historical artifact of egotistic planning dogma than any logical or empirical demonstration.

Corridors along the various 'L' lines develop much more than areas distant from rapid transit access. Where even marginal transit access falls away, the automobile takes over, carving out vast swaths for driving and parking. Even worse than the overdependance on the automobile is the creation of underserved communities. Transportation justice is a serious issue facing most cities and Chicago is no exception.

Chicago is fortunate enough to have a sizable population dedicated to making the city a better and more sustainable place. These people, scattered throughout the city, work largely without government support. The city administration talks a lot about green building, but their excessive emphasis on new condo construction and little else is likely to lead the city into a great unbalance of local use. They like to fancy themselves on the forefront of the green movement but those that are serious about sustainability are very much aware that such a claim would be totally baseless.

They are willing to spend over $3 billion on deep tunnel projects to prevent combined sewer overflows but unwilling to provide any sewer rate reductions to properties with green roofs, rain barrels or rain gardens. The City is expanding a curb-side recycling program but most residents are very much unsure that all of the collected recyclables are actually reused in any way.

All in all, the city is becoming a better place. With the economic downtown and slowdown of condo construction, city government will have a perfect excuse to start dealing with other issues in the city. Some more rational thinking on their part will greatly aid the already herculean efforts of ordinary citizens in their goal to make Chicago a better place.

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Sustainability via Ken Dunn

Ken Dunn is the founder of the Chicago based Resource Center, a leading sustainability organization that works to re-use wasted resources. I spoke with him a few days ago both about his organization and the mission that guides it. I came away feeling that this man was one of the few that understand the enormous complexity and interconnectedness of cities.

Since his business is resource recovery, I asked him what two resources are the most valuable in a city. His answers--density and diversity--each deserve great consideration. My feelings on urban planning and design, that a good city brings different people together, neatly wrap around these concepts.

Diversity is necessary in cities. It is also something that we have managed to not mess up too horribly in America. Try as we might through enforced segregation, preferential treatment and limitations on mobility, diversity exists in all cities. A city that perfectly segregates itself is merely a collection of small towns. Those individual towns are doomed to the same fate as the mining towns and mill towns that fade into the history books when their profession is innovated into obscurity. Cities are places of innovation that adapt to changing times and economies.

Luckily, people tend to have at least some offspring that search for different human interactions than they are accustomed to. In small towns, these people head to the big city. In segregated cities, these people break down barriers that separate people. They fight a good fight, but our system works against them.

American cities have developed several mechanisms to limit diversity. Zoning, transportation, public schools and unequal services all work to divide communities along cultural, racial and economic lines. While they have been incredibly successful at partitioning cities into separate neighborhoods and homogenizing those neighborhoods, they have failed to totally prevent diverse interaction

A good city will actively work to blur those lines. It starts with zoning that encourages mixed real estate values instead of discouraging them, transportation that provides equal access to all residents regardless of their economic status, schools that provide opportunity equally across a region and infrastructure that doesn't leave out under served populations.

Diversity carries its risks. Social norms are not always easily translated even between similar cultures. Awkward interactions can and do result and this creates a isolationist tendency. When this isolationist tendency is allowed to grow larger than the human desire to connect with others different from themselves, they disengage from the city and flee it. They go off to live in the mountains or the suburbs, where those around them look and act the same. Great care must be given to force continual positive interactions between people. Walls must be discouraged, never encouraged.

The biggest wall is distance. Distance divides people by their most valuable personal resource, time. One easy way to gauge the vibrancy of a place is to count the number of nearby people and places as a function of travel time. As number of people and places within a five and ten minute range decline, the number of attractive options drop exponentially since area increases exponentially with radius and trips become more difficult to combine.

It is therefore necessary to pack places of interest nearby to places of habitation and work. This is the part that no American city even comes close. The densest American city, Los Angeles, barely makes it into the top 100 of the world's densest cities.

Yet America certainly has cities. Density is not necessary for a city, it is only necessary for a good city. Density is necessary for a desirable city. The lack of density in American cities has allowed cities to decay. Those that could escape their tainted urban bleakness bought up untainted suburban bleakness. European cities with sufficient density fared much differently. It was the poor that were forced into the suburbs of cities that allowed them to be constructed as urban residents solidly rejected the notion of leaving such a pleasant and attractive place. A sustainable city must be one that people want to stay in, just as a sustainable building must be one that people want to rehabilitate as it ages instead of wanting to tear it down.

The common thread tying these two ideas together is mutually beneficial interaction. The key to maintaining the desire to remain in cities is to provide nearby diverse options for every individual. Our cities and suburbs fail miserably at providing these critical goods and few have put forward alternatives that seem to differ in any way. As I progress on this trip, I'm hoping to find people attempting to solve this problems.

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Posting Schedule

Posting has been a bit slow recently because Hannah and I have been busy getting out of Chicago and on to Milwaukee. There are at least two more posts I want to do about Chicago, one inspired by my conversations with Ken Dunn and one that focuses on an overview of Chicago itself.

Milwaukee is a beautiful place and we caught some views of their art museum yesterday, I dropped some pictures below the fold.

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Chicago - Resource Center

Sustainability can be split into two fairly distinctive parts. One branch is based on a reduction or optimization of consumptive patterns while the other is centered around the capture and re-purpose of available resources. The Resource Center in Chicago is dedicated to the latter.

Cities are full of unused resources, some stand out while others often go unnoticed by the average urban resident. The most obvious waste in a city is space but most wastes are less obvious. For example, a single shipping depot in Chicago dumps 1000 tons of produce per day. The Resource Center concerns itself with any and all ways they can to re-purpose various waste streams. This post will focus on the organization and I'll throw up a post a bit later on its founder, Ken Dunn.

One of the main focuses of the organization is to connect people with nutritious foods. This is an obvious goal for the group since so much nutritious food is wasted everyday. Standard methods of diverting excess food from landfills to low-income communities are limited to non-perishable foods. The resulting poor nutrition provided by these foods only serves to exasperate deteriorating public health conditions in lower income communities.

The Resource Center works to solve this problem on two fronts; first, they help create economically viable farms on vacant lots and second, they collect perishable food and distribute it before it has a chance to rot. City Farm manages pay their farmers a living wage by selling much of their food to high-end restaurants downtown at a premium while maintaining affordable prices for neighborhood dwellers. The farms are incredibly fertile due to the enormous volume of compost they are able to collect.

The Resource Center collects two tons of perishable food per day from from caterers, shippers and grocery stores which they deliver to hungry mouths before it has a chance to spoil. A vast majority of this food is sourced from Whole Foods since they pull their perishables days before they expire.

The Resource Center does not limit its operations to nutrition. The organization finds innovative ways to deal with other potentially valuable wastes. Unwanted bicycles are delivered by the truck load to a bike shop run by at-risk youth. Proceeds from the bike shop sales fund educational resources for the children that work there. As the children age, they progress through an educational curriculum that encourages achievement. This program not only keeps bikes out of landfills, it helps develop the minds of young children, the most important and most often wasted resource that any place has.

Many retail outlets donate their unsellable goods to the Resource Center for sale at the Resource Center headquarters. They are searching for a larger space after losing their old warehouse to a university expansion.

The Resource Center once had a contract to pick up recyclables throughout the city but it was promptly canceled when Mayor Harold Washington unexpectedly died. They are now reduced to providing strategic drop-off points for recyclables. The revenue generated from sales of collected materials has been greatly reduced over the last several months due to the crashing market for many recyclables. The Resource Center is now funding some of its operations with donations.

Talking to Ken Dunn reminded me of a story about a friend's grandfather when he was very young. In the late 1910's, a Detroit businessman heard about a factory that had accidentally produced a thousand extra left shoes. For some reason, they had no way of producing matching right shoes and they planned to throw the extra left shoes away. The businessman who had caught wind of the mishap purchased the lot of shoes for a few pennies and then, with the aid of my friends grandfather, looked up every amputee--there were many due to the recent war--in town. They could offer some amputees a better deal on shoes than they could find at a store where they had to buy a pair and throw away their right shoe.

If you're living in Chicago and looking to help out the cause of urban sustainability, check out this organization. If you're in other cities, use the Resource Center as a model. Identify a resource, connect it too a need. It's a timeless way of doing things and one that we must all engage in if we're going to move towards a sustainable society.

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Finishing up in Chicago

My time has been incredibly busy in Chicago so I haven't had much writing time but I met with Ken Dunn of the Resource Center earlier today. He's a very interesting guy running a very interesting organization. I think I'll be writing at least two posts about our talk. I'm also working on a post for the Center for Green Technology and a general Chicago overview but it's kind of tricky since the place is so outlandishly big.

For your viewing pleasure, I've posted a couple images of Chicago taken today below the fold.

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Chicago - Talk with Richard Kosmacher

Automobiles aren't the problem with cities, they're just the wrong solution to the problem of mobility. When they were first introduced, their vast advantages over the horse and carriage/wagon were only matched by their enormous cost. An early question must have certainly been posed: how can we share this resource effectively? In New York, the only American city with a large swath almost totally dependent on shared cars, the answer was the privately owned and operated taxi. The expense of the car is shared by many users and though the cost of the automobiles themselves have declined, in places like Manhattan, the cost of parking makes ownership totally impractical.

It turns out there are other, more socialistic ways to share cars. Take out the driver, jumble around some other details and the taxi service becomes a car-share. Successful car-sharing was pioneered in Europe in the 1980s the most wide-spread American flavor is the for-profit Zipcar however, several city scale operations exist throughout the country, many of them non-profits. One of those is Chicago-basedI-GO Car Sharing, brainchild of the Center for Neighborhood Technology. They've had a very exciting week and I was lucky enough to speak with Richard Kosmacher, the Business Development Manager at I-GO.

First a bit about I-GO itself. They maintain a strong collaboration with their parent organization, the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a true pioneer in urban sustainability movement. Both organizations are located in an amazing LEED Retrofit Platinum building in Chicago's North Side, one of one two Platinum buildings in the city. I-GO is a non-profit and fills its small operational shortfall with grants and DOT highway funds.

The group has 13,000 members and 200 cars scattered throughout the city. The cars have dedicated spots and members have cards that they can use to unlock and rent them. Members pay a low yearly fee and a flat hourly rate, under $10/hour. Gas, insurance, maintenance and cleaning are all done by I-GO.

According to surveys, half of the group's members either gave up a car when they joined the program or decided not to buy a new one. Studies have shown that each car that I-GO puts on the road replaces 17 private cars. Individuals most likely to use the program live near dedicated I-GO parking spots. These spots are located in neighborhoods that are dense, close to public transit and have a lack of parking.

Last Tuesday, they unveiled a pilot program with the Chicago Transit Authority to bundle the usual train and bus passes with an I-GO card. The program is the culmination of over a year of collaboration between the CTA and I-GO and has generated an enormous amount of interest.

According to Richard, for people who live near an I-GO car, the economics of car sharing make it an obvious solution. The average car owner in America spends about $8,000 a year on their car, or 17% of household income. Someone using a car sharing service may spend about $1,000 on public transit, $1,000 on car share fees and around $500 on taxi and rental car service. In all, the saving can exceed $5,000 a year.

Car sharing is such a good solution to the collateral damage that car-usefulness causes. Businesses and individuals can maintain their mobility at a reasonable price in cities whose public transit leaves a bit to be desired. The reduction in the total volume of cars would theoretically devalue parking. Surface lots could be re-purposed, parking lanes could become bike lanes and wider sidewalks. Garages could become shops or yards and since auto use would be totally pay per time, people would avoid using their shared cars as much as possible. Fewer cars reduces congestion which allows those using cars and trucks to use them more effectively and reduce trip time.

For places that that are too sparse or poorly thought out to allow for public transit only, car-sharing fills a necessary mobility gap. If you think you might be able to abandon your car, check out this list to see if a car-sharing operation has sprouted up in your city.

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Chicago - Interview with Greg Raymond

A lot of cities in this world have a lot of problems and Chicago is no exception. A couple years back, the city's mayor, Richard Daley, realized that a growing body of evidence pointed to green roofs as a way to reduce runoff, flooding, the urban heat island effect and air pollution. Either that or he was impressed with their aesthetic qualities on an European trip. Returning from the trip, he began a very well publicized push to dramatically increase green roofs in Chicago.

I had the chance to speak today with Greg Raymond, founder and chief of ecogardens, a leading Chicago based design/build firm that specializes in green roofs and gardens. It made for an interesting conversation and I've summed up the more critical points after the fold.

The green roof industry has enormous potential, but it is only economically viable if cities stop allowing developers and property owners to externalize the enormous costs of stormwater, increased heat exposure and air pollution. Greg told me that the only people making the decision to add green roofs were people who included an environmental component in their bottom line and institutions that had the lasting power to recoup their initial capital costs. Private developers are greatly reducing their interest in green roofs as the economy collapses and they don't have the capital to front for the 15-20 year payback.

The city, which mandates partial green roofs for all new public buildings but has no requirements for private buildings, seems to have allowed this issue to fall to the back burner. Aside from the apparently non-existent public money pledged to support capital costs, the city has no incentive system to encourage green roof building. European cities that have successfully fostered green roof development have done so by heavily taxing stormwater that leaves a development; that is reasonable since the city bears the cost of dealing with that water. Developers in those cities find buildings without green roofs hard to sell since they have significantly higher taxes. Chicago should get moving in that direction.

Greg told me that 75% of structural inspections, the first step of any green roof retrofit project, show insufficient building strength to carry the additional 20-30 pounds per square foot of dead load that a green roof requires. Talk about bad future planning. As buildings age, they must maintain the capacity to be upgraded without significant alteration. So while new buildings in Chicago don't typically have green roofs, they do have one advantage. A recent code change stemming from a porch collapse increased the live load requirement on Chicago roofs to 100 pounds per square foot. For some perspective, this is 250% of the live load requirements for parking garages. As far as I know, this regulation is not nationwide but it will greatly assist future generations of Chicago property owners who want to upgrade their buildings with green roofs.

Greg is hoping that federal buildings may see some stimulus money to increase energy efficiency through green roof construction.

The expense our society is willing to incur for the sake of acute human health (stronger buildings) relative to how little we are willing to pay to improve chronic human health always astonishes me. Green roofs keep sewage out of waterways, they decrease the need for polluting energy production and most importantly, they reduce the intensity of the biggest natural disaster killer, heat.

Since civil engineers have created a separate mechanism for addressing issues that affect their profession (International Building Code), I would recommend that the IBC increase roof live loads so that buildings built today will one day be able to support green roofs without extensive structural renovations. I don't see any reason why that change needs to wait for politicians to make fairly obvious policy changes.

As for Chicago, they need to get their act together. They certainly advanced green roof design at one point, but that crown has gone on to other cities. The priorities of the city's government no longer seem to include green roofs.

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Detroit - Part V (Farms)

There are a lot of good parts in Detroit and a lot of bad parts, but there are also some truly unique places. The agricultural movement in Detroit is arguably the strongest in the nation, driven by bountiful space, economic necessity, institutional support and a lack of government interference. The intensity of agricultural activity varies greatly across the city but some neighborhoods look downright rural. So rural that some unusual species add to the urban ecosystem here.
But domesticated animals far outnumber the pheasants that roam freely throughout sections of the city. Driving through North Corktown reveals quite a scene.

One enterprising woman has acted as something of a livestock distributor for much of the city, and her expanded yard looks the part.These places act as focal points in neighborhoods. Near-by residents congregate on their way to and from work to visit the friendly goats and chickens and to donate the crusts of their bread. The only rule is to keep the treats unprocessed (no chips). In the country, animal pens like this would be totally ordinary, but in the city, it's one step away from visiting the zoo.
This neighborhood is interesting because it is not particularly devastated. In fact, the local neighborhood corporation recently constructed a few dozen new residences in the area targeted to lower middle income occupants, greatly filling out the area.Despite this reduction in available space, gardens and livestock pens have popped up in spaces big and small. Some gardens are fenced in, some are community run and some are just a plot of land with neat rows of collard greens sprouting from the earth.One gentleman has even taken it upon himself to make enough compost for every community garden in the city. Of all the compost piles in all the world, this one was the most pleasant to walk through.It's really quite amazing what a person can do with a bit of space, time and know-how.

I'd like to briefly discuss the conditions that made all of this possible, and to consider whether those conditions will arise in other decaying suburbs around the country. This particular quasi-suburban neighborhood was originally designed with features that modern New Urbanist thinkers find ideal. The uniform setbacks, connected street grid, local corner store, proximity to public transit and totally residential make-up defines this place as one of the pseudo-suburbs of the early 1900s. This pre-cursor to modern suburbs decayed much like other poor neighborhoods in the Detroit area. However, a variety of factors have created the perfect conditions for this place to turn from a slum to an agricultural paradise and I wouldn't be surprised if these factors become more and more common throughout the country.

1. A lack of government intervention. Detroit's police force has enough problems to deal with, they have no need to waste their time enforcing zoning provisions that prohibit agriculture. Suburban police might not feel the same way right now, but as crime increases in the suburbs, they'll soon discover that they too have bigger fish to fry.

2. Enough space. It doesn't take much. A lot here, a back yard there. In newer suburbs, people certainly have enough lawn space. In older ones, decaying houses will turn into open lots that will be gobbled up first by community gardens and then by individuals.

3. People want free food. If you have some extra time but no extra money, growing your own food makes a whole lot of sense. As unemployment increases, urban farming will only increase as people search for something beyond their government provided soy and corn rations (bleak eh?).

4. Institutional support. A wide range of organizations have come together to make this agricultural movement work. The Greening of Detroit, an established organization in the Metro Detroit area, provides the monetary aid and necessary connections. Michigan State University provides the technical know-how. The recently minted Garden Resource Program effectively delivers all of the necessary services to communities and individuals. The Garden Resource Program tests soil for heavy metals, delivers compost, distributes seeds and plants, connects local gardeners with one another and provides inexpensive educational lectures. Without any one of these pieces, the face of Detroit would look entirely different.

If suburb managers are wise, they'll take an interest in these places so that their communities can effectively cope as the same symptoms that began showing in Detroit 40 years ago, begin to show up in their neck of the woods.

That's it for Detroit, quite a place. I'm off to Chicago for the next couple days.

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Detroit - Talk with Rick Bowers

Part of this trip is to get an understanding of which cities are getting serious about being sustainable and which ones are getting serious about greenwashing. My impression is that the current administration is very serious and turning the corner in Detroit.

The recent history of Detroit has been marked by enormous effort striving for a sustainable region, yet almost none of that effort was generated by the city's government. The new mayor, Ken Cockrel, seems to really care about reversing that trend. As one of his first acts as mayor, he started the Office of Energy and Sustainability (OES). Its head, Rick Bowers, an attorney in the mayor's office, seems able and committed to the job. I had the chance to speak with him yesterday and I've summed up our discussion below.

Demolition

I was very happy to hear that the city would begin encouraging LEED certified demolition of blighted housing stock. One of the main focuses of the OES is to encourage "green-collar" jobs. The best way to do that is to encourage sustainable behavior in every sector that you deal with, and I'm glad they didn't consider demolition any exception.

Construction

The OES takes on construction on a building to building basis, promoting LEED certification. I like LEED and it pains me when people see LEED certification as a goal instead of sustainable practices for a given place. Rick was very aware of this and described LEED as a starting point on the sustainable education curve. He told me that they were planning on going through the entire building code to make sustainable building more attractive and possible. He also mentioned a local modular housing start-up that was hoping to use sustainable building materials. I think that I'll file "Sustainable Building Materials" under the "Upcoming Posts" section.

The only real let down was the lack of focus on the effect that these new green building will have on their surroundings. For a building to be sustainably constructed, it must last a long time. That means the neighborhood it's built in must be stable for a long time. Though most of Detroit's upper income neighborhoods are intact (and incredibly beautiful for that matter), a majority of the middle and lower income neighborhoods have had their physical impression totally changed over the last 40 years. We need to find ways of building poor neighborhoods so that they can one day become middle income and then upper income neighborhoods.

To be fair to Rick and the OES, they have no shortage of things they want to get done, so I don't begrudge them this point in the least.

Transit

I very much appreciated Rick's take on transit in Detroit because it is such a difficult issue. Detroit is enormous--138 sq mi--and that word doesn't even begin to describe the vastness of the suburbs. A light rail line will finally be constructed along Woodward now that suburban opposition has crumbled. Rick advocated the union of the city operated DDOT buses and the suburban SMART buses; this seems like a fairly sensible idea to me. In addition, he informed me of additional walk/bike greenways because of the success of the Dequindre Cut, completed late last year.

Energy

One of the main thrusts of the OES is to improve energy efficiency and reduce waste in city buildings and throughout city departments. The first step will be energy audits of city buildings. It will be interesting to see what direction the office takes from there. It's surprising that this wasn't done before and its good to see that this effort is finally happening.

Green Thumbs Up

This program will lease out vacant lots to individuals and groups interested in "adopting" them. It feels like a winner and Rick was well aware of it. Whether the lots would become productive or just decorative, this initiative will allow people to make some lasting investments into the land. Unlike a similar state program, lease terms should be very favorable to gardeners as long as they continue to maintain the land. No word on whether animal husbandry will be allowed, I would hope that it could be incorporated but with strict density limits.

Car Free Areas

Not in the motor city, the best I could get out of him was internal-combustion free areas. Not a bad start. If he keeps reading the blog, perhaps I'll change his mind.

Vision

In all, it was clear that Rick had a strong vision of what a sustainable Detroit might look like. A contraction of habitation into denser areas, connected by strong public transit options. The in between zones would either revert to their natural state or become intensive agricultural operations. Infrastructure would be scaled back, car lanes removed, bike lanes added, traffic calmed and dissipated. I like the way Rick thinks and only see good things from Detroit.

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Detroit - Part IV (Quasi-Burbs)

Quasi-suburbs are areas in a city that bare little resemblance to modern suburbs but function in much the same way. The main difference between these pre-WWII developments and their post-WWII counterparts is the lack of intended isolation. Quasi-suburbs have through-streets and easy to navigate street grids. Their commercial areas are separate from their residential areas and they emphasize greenspace and moderate density. They contain too few people for a city and too many for a suburb. 95% of Detroit was once made up of these places.

After the construction of the highway system in the 1950's, the white flight, the riots, the drugs, the attempts at "urban renewal" and the lack of money for upkeep, these neighborhoods were left decimated. The following pictures are from the Brush Park area--very close to downtown--and show three adjacent blocks.
This is a typical view in Detroit. A handful of abandoned buildings, a handful of occupied buildings, all sitting in the middle of a field. It is a stark reminder of the wealth that some in Detroit once enjoyed. We can take a look at the two development options these places face.

The next block over would have been better off left alone. It was cleared to make way for a new development. This is the very worst of suburban design. Fences are installed to keep people out and trees to keep their eyes out. The basement fill is dumped around the perimeter to act as a further barrier. It is as if this place is not in Detroit at all. Its inhabitants are discouraged from venturing into the city.
The only benefit these people derive from their residential location is a reduced commute. Other than the taxes they pay, they offer little to the vibrancy of the city. This is the sort of development that New Urbanism rightfully decries.

The street in the other direction is much improved but still insufficient. Decaying houses on this block have been restored to their former grandeur and new townhouses are being constructed to match the character of the existing block.
This is a special place and its residents seem well aware as evidenced by their well cared for homes and gardens. But as the area around it improves, it will become less unique and its lack of vibrancy will begin to emerge as black hole, sucking out younger generations who won't be able to avoid noticing the lack of activity.

This area is close enough to downtown that it is conceivable that it could support a healthy intermingling of commercial and residential space but it is unlikely that the neighborhood association will want anything but a return to the old days. This sort of place is the type championed by the New Urbanists--visibly urban yet functionally suburban.

There is something else going on in Detroit, something entirely different. I'll get a post up about it a bit later on tonight.

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Detroit - Part III (Downtown)

The entire metro area is focused on downtown Detroit as a place of work. Downtown is an office district--approximately one square mile--framed by highways. Towering buildings casually mix with single story store fronts amongst a street layout inspired by L'Enfant's Washington DC-style radiating hexagonal spokes. A park lies at the "hub" of each collection of spokes. This hub and spoke plan didn't make it farther than the downtown limits and there are only two hub parks.A recent renewal of the central hub park, Campus Marius, created ice skating that draws crowds throughout the winter and late into the night.

It is a dense place with roads that seem to be just the right width. They carry traffic from the suburbs and quasi-suburbs to the scores of parking garages located throughout the district.These parking garages are some of the prettiest I've ever seen, and while that isn't saying much, it is a good indication of which sorts of business ventures are money makers in the City on Wheels.

Buses ran frequently and seemed heavily used even on a Saturday. The only other public transit is the "People Mover" which I have included a picture of below.It circles the perimeter of the downtown area at a snails pace and I suspect the only groups of people use it are grandparents and their young grandchildren who can enjoy an amusement park ride together.

Many of the street level businesses are chains and in fact, many Detroiters brag of the Jimmy John's and Quizno's that dot downtown since they are a vast improvement over vacant storefronts. With more people beginning to take up residency in the area though, many local shops have begun to sprout up including the Urban Bean Co. shown below which sits next to a once-a-week speakeasy and across the street from a local strip club.As soon as this district can draw a more reasonable balance between commercial and residential use, it will become a vibrant and thriving place. It does face issues though, many buildings--new and old--were not designed with pedestrians in mind, the block shown below doesn't seems too appealing for those walking by...Places like this will need a retrofit so that they can contribute to the liveliness of the place, instead of acting as dead zones.

Enough of downtown for now, next on to the quasi-suburbs.

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Monday...

We're headed to Chicago on Monday and then to Milwaukee by next weekend, if you know people in those places interested in sustainable urbanism or the "green economy" in general, please do let me know, my email is in the contact section.

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Quick Update

I'm finally moved out of Ann Arbor and Hannah and I are currently staying in Detroit. We got some great pictures today and I'll write up a few posts with them later on tonight. In addition, I'm working on a urban planning background piece that I'll try to get up later on this weekend.

I dropped a nice pic below the fold.

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