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. 
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Bisbee - A rare village
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...
Subscribe