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.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
On Masdar
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.
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