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Category Archives: DC
Adaptation in housing, organically
A few housing-related tidbits that I’ve accumulated over the past week.
Richard Layman laments the lack of quality development, noting the difficulties involved with larger scale infill projects, especially when compared against smaller scale renovation projects of single rowhouses or small apartment buildings. The smaller scale renovations take on a more organic character, while the scale of the larger projects necessitates more centralized planning and development.
As for your point about “organic” development, in my experience, which I admit is relatively limited, my sense is organic (re)development that includes significant amounts of new construction is more about adaptive reuse of extant places, complemented by (hopefully high quality) infill.
Along similar lines, Rob Holmes over at mammoth points to a great discussion of housing in Haiti (Incremental House, Wired), with a particular focus on adaptation and organic elements. This isn’t the first time mammoth has mentioned the idea of incremental housing development, which Rob touched on in his very interesting list of the best architecture of the decade (including more infrastructural/engineered spaces like the Large Hadron Collider). Quinta Monroy, an incremental housing project in northern Chile, has a fascinating approach to both building shelter and also growing and adapting with the residents:
Quinta Monroy is a center-city neighborhood of Iquique, a city of about a quarter million lying in northern Chile between the Pacific Ocean and the Atacama Desert. Elemental’s Quinta Monroy housing project settles a hundred families on a five thousand square meter site where they had persisted as squatters for three decades. The residences designed by Elemental offer former squatters the rare opportunity to live in subsidized housing without being displaced from the land they had called their home, provides an appreciating asset which can improve their family finances, and serves as a flexible infrastructure for the self-constructed expansion of the homes.
Elemental’s first decision was to retain the inner city site, a decision which was both expensive and spatially limiting: there is only enough space on the site to provide thirty individual homes or sixty-six row homes, so a different typology was required. High rise apartments would provide the needed density, but not provide the opportunity for residents to expand their own homes, as only the top and ground floors would have any way to connect to additions. Elemental thus settled on a typology of connected two-story blocks, snaking around four common courtyards, designed as a skeletal infrastructure which the families could expand over time:
We in Elemental have identified a set of design conditions through which a housing unit can increase its value over time; this without having to increase the amount of money of the current subsidy.
In first place, we had to achieve enough density, (but without overcrowding), in order to be able to pay for the site, which because of its location was very expensive. To keep the site, meant to maintain the network of opportunities that the city offered and therefore to strengthen the family economy; on the other hand, good location is the key to increase a property value.
Second, the provision a physical space for the “extensive family” to develop, has proved to be a key issue in the economical take off of a poor family. In between the private and public space, we introduced the collective space, conformed by around 20 families. The collective space (a common property with restricted access) is an intermediate level of association that allows surviving fragile social conditions.
Third, due to the fact that 50% of each unit’s volume, will eventually be self-built, the building had to be porous enough to allow each unit to expand within its structure. The initial building must therefore provide a supporting, (rather than a constraining) framework in order to avoid any negative effects of self-construction on the urban environment over time, but also to facilitate the expansion process.
Obviously, applying this idea to a western city (as opposed to a slum) raises a whole different set of issues, but it’s a particularly interesting idea when contrasted against the highly planned and professionally designed structures Richard Layman notes. It provides a jumping point to look at the continuum between several of the elements that the Incremental House mentions in their self-description:
Much of the housing around the world occupies a space in between the planned/unplanned, formal/informal and the professional/non-professional, offering people a small space space to negotiate the tremendous shifts taking place in the urban landscape.
DC’s stability provides less of an opportunity to shift between those poles, but the idea is nevertheless interesting. Rob Holmes expands on what this means:
Elemental, in other words, have exploited the values and aims of ownership culture (which mammoth has suggested understands the house to be first a machine for making money and only second to be a machine for living) not to support a broken system of real estate speculation and easy wealth, but to present architecture as a tool that can be provided to families. While the project is embedded with some of the assumptions of the architects (such as that faith in the potential of ownership culture, for better or worse), this tool is primarily presented as a framework, a scaffolding upon which families are able to make their own architecture.
Framework is a good way to put it – much of the work in planning seeks to establish frameworks (legal, physical, financial) around which cities and grow, evolve, and adapt – Layman’s point shows there is more we can do on that front.
More ideas for the Eco-City Beautiful
I’ve been meaning to say something on some more water + city issues raised by mammoth a short time ago, but I haven’t gotten around to it. Mammoth points us to another entrant in the design competition for Toronto’s Port Lands (following up on some of the discussion about McMillan Two). The project, called River+City+Life, aims to re-imagine urban wetlands rather than simply recreate a faux natural setting.
The design team faced a complex challenge: to renaturalize the mouth of the Don River while simultaneously reengineering the flood plain and creating a new thriving edge to the city’s downtown. Working at the confluence of urban core and derelict waterfront, Stoss pursued an adaptive strategy based on the primacy of the river and its dynamics. Of particular significance is the project’s explicit emphasis on building resilience, which was to be achieved by recalibrating the mouth of the river and its floodplain as a new estuary — not a restored estuary, but a landscape transformed through the creation of a new river channel and “river spits” — sculpted landforms capable of withstanding changing lake levels and seasonal flooding, while also providing new spaces for recreation and housing.
River+City+Life - Site Rendering
By proposing new, integrated ecologies for the site, organized principally by the river and its innate properties, the Stoss plan “puts the river first.” This constitutes a complete reversal of a century and a half of straightening, channelizing and deepening the river for the economic benefit of the citizens of Toronto. Centered on renewal rather than restoration, the design strategy comprises adaptation to occasional flooding, mediation between native and alien species, and a thick layering of habitats and edges, both cultural and natural, seasonal and permanent. In this way River+City+Life weaves a resilient urban tapestry of public amenity, urban edge and ecological performance, conceiving the city as a hybrid cultural–natural space and setting in motion long-term evolutionary processes in which new ecologies would be encouraged not suppressed.
River+City+Life - Hydrologic Elements
River+City+Life - Massing Study
This is the kind of potential meshing of green infrastructure, site, and urbanism we should demand from McMillan Two. Though this specific example raises some questions in my mind about public space, streetscapes, and other urban design elements – the overall approach of the city and its infrastructure as a kind of living machine is fascinating.
River+City+Life - Aerial
With this specific proposal, a few of those renderings and massing studies scare me from an urban design standpoint – with arcaded buildings suspended over streets and sidewalks – but it’s a tremendously interesting idea to play around with.
Speaking of water…
A book that I really ought to add I’ve added to the reading list is Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. It’s the story of the American West and the battle for water resources.
Plenty of Parking
DCist takes note of a great photo of the Mt. Vernon Square area from 1992, looking south towards the Portrait Gallery and what’s now the Verizon Center:
It’s amazing to realize how much the area has changed over the past 15-20 years. Looking back at the historical images available from Google Earth, you can piece together the evolution of the area over the years. Google Earth’s imagery isn’t universally available over time, so there are some rather big gaps between some aerial sets.
North is to the left in all the images.
1949:
Note the fine grain of the urban fabric, almost all of the buildings occupy narrow lots with zero setback from the property line – and there are virtually no vacant lots. You can see the beginnings of site clearance at the top if the image for the enormous Government Accountability Office building. That structure would be dedicated in 1951.
1988:
In 1988, things have changed a great deal. Obviously, lots of surface parking lots here. Though the Gallery Place-Chinatown Metro station opened in 1976 with the first operable segment of the Red line, the North-South connection along the Green-Yellow lines wasn’t yet open when this picture was taken. The Mount Vernon Sq, Shaw-Howard, and U St stations all opened in 1991, just prior to the taking of the opening photograph in this post.
1999:
In 1999, the (now) Verizon Center has been open for business for about a year and a half. Site preparation is well underway for the new convention center, but there are still some significant parcels in key downtown locations occupied with vacant lots or surface parking.
2004:
Gallery Place is taking shape, the new convention center is done, and other vacant lots fill in. Still some significant vacant lots to the North of Mass Ave.
2009:
The old convention center has been removed, just about all of the once vacant lots in old downtown (i.e. the right side of this image) are filled in, and stuff to the north of Mass Ave is beginning to see some real development. There’s a little error in image stitching between L and M streets, with the aerials to the right taking a slightly more oblique angle, showing the heights of the buildings in Old Downtown.
Watching this section of DC devolve and then redevelop shows some clear trends. The newer buildings are all much bigger than their predecessors – both in terms of heights and footprint. The fine-grained urban fabric of the 1949 image is largely gone from the downtown portions of the images, aside from a few stretches where the original facades have been retained behind newer developments or a few blocks in Chinatown, where the finer grained structures remain.
The interesting thing to note is how much of Downtown DC turned first to surface parking before redeveloping back into urban forms. This intermediate, destructive step prevents preserving that kind of fine grained urbanism. Nevertheless, the redevelopment of the area is a rousing success, showing the versatility of the traditional city grid – particularly when reinforced with urban rail transit.
Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington
ACS – Answering my own question
(hat tip to Dr. Gridlock)
In earlier posts, I wondered what DC’s regional transit data looks like – and with the release of the 2006-2008 three-year estimates from the American Community Survey, we have some answers.
Data is available for the Washington, DC urbanized area. That area looks like this:
So, that includes a lot of stuff, and a whole lot of suburbia.
The transportation data is as follows:
| COMMUTING TO WORK | ||||
| Workers 16 years and over | 2,221,629 | +/-8,331 | 2,221,629 | (X) |
| Car, truck, or van — drove alone | 1,415,834 | +/-9,036 | 63.7% | +/-0.3 |
| Car, truck, or van — carpooled | 237,724 | +/-5,008 | 10.7% | +/-0.2 |
| Public transportation (excluding taxicab) | 363,334 | +/-5,319 | 16.4% | +/-0.2 |
| Walked | 77,067 | +/-2,795 | 3.5% | +/-0.1 |
| Other means | 33,023 | +/-1,979 | 1.5% | +/-0.1 |
| Worked at home | 94,647 | +/-3,018 | 4.3% | +/-0.1 |
So, 63.7% of the region’s workers commute in a single-occupant vehicle, with 16.4% using transit. For the same three year window (2006-2008), DC’s stats look like this:
| COMMUTING TO WORK | ||||
| Workers 16 years and over | 293,532 | +/-3,568 | 293,532 | (X) |
| Car, truck, or van — drove alone | 108,373 | +/-3,363 | 36.9% | +/-1.0 |
| Car, truck, or van — carpooled | 19,121 | +/-1,591 | 6.5% | +/-0.5 |
| Public transportation (excluding taxicab) | 108,687 | +/-2,469 | 37.0% | +/-0.8 |
| Walked | 34,455 | +/-2,033 | 11.7% | +/-0.7 |
| Other means | 9,421 | +/-1,023 | 3.2% | +/-0.3 |
| Worked at home | 13,475 | +/-1,451 | 4.6% | +/-0.5 |
36.9% drove alone, while 37.0% used transit.
Note that this is the rolling three-year sample, so the data is slightly different from the 2008 ACS data released earlier.
Visualizing DC’s commute
Matt Yglesias cites a great infographic from Wikipedia on national commuting mode splits. The data, from the American Community Survey, again is only for work commutes for those residing within the central jurisdiction listed. This is a nice visual representation to see how DC stacks up nation-wide.
Since DC’s geographic area is small, both the population and corresponding bubble for the number of workers will be smaller than other cities. Hence, Boston (population: 609k) and San Francisco (pop: 808k) have similarly sized bubbles to DC. I’d love to see this same graph for metropolitan areas rather than just core cities, since metropolitan areas are a far more realistic representation of the functional unit of cities.
Nevertheless, given the jurisdictional limitations of the data, it’s interesting to see all the cities represented. Looking at the data in list form, it’s clear that DC is second to New York in a number of areas, but this graph shows how big that gap is – as well as three tiers of cities. New York is in a class of their own, followed by a group of transit-oriented cities (DC, Boston, Philly, SF, Chicago, Baltimore, Seattle), and then everyone else.
Four ways to improve McMillan Two
(This is a follow-up post to Neil Flanagan’s initial post on GGW, as well as my own posts here and here)
The McMillan Two plan tackles a project of enormous scope, yet there are still several areas of the plan that need more emphasis. The plan should be praised for its scope, vision, and long timeframe, yet as it stands, it is an incomplete idea that needs more depth to meet all the challenges DC will face over the next 50-100 years.
Similarly, the plan should be praised for its limits, as it lays out a skeleton for DC to grow around, rather than prescript every nook and cranny. However, this limited breadth is also a major weakness in translating the plan from a handsome image into physical reality.
The following are four weaknesses in the current idea that could become strengths with the right amount of focus.
Transportation
The McMillan Two plan includes several implicit transportation initiatives. Most notably, the plan calls for the full removal of the freeways flanking the Anacostia – both the Southeast/Southwest and Anacostia freeways. Nir Buras notes that streetcars could be added to the plan, as his plan continues the framework of the L’Enfant grid and radial avenues, maintaining the wide rights of way that could be amenable to streetcars. However, any other discussion of transportation is strangely absent from the plan.
While the L’Enfant plan laid out the skeleton to the city and the McMillan plan made Washington into the City Beautiful, the element that’s added (or re-added) the meat to the city’s bones over the past 30+ years has been Metro. Metro has shaped suburbs and provided a mechanism for repopulating downtown.
Similarly scaled projects and plans around the world all feature substantial investments in transit infrastructure. Both Canary Wharf in London and La Defense in Paris feature large transit investments. Nir Buras might not like the form of these developments, but they fit the scope of McMillan Two. In London, Canary Wharf features both the Jubilee Line extension while also serving as the hub for the massive investment of the Docklands Light Railway.
Similarly, La Defense includes an extension of the Paris Metro line 1, while also serving as the terminus to the T2 tramway, as well as a stop along RER A.
Currently, the area along the Anacostia includes a couple of Metro stations in the vicinity, but if these new areas are to serve large new developments, they need infrastructure to support that growth – beyond just streets and bridges. Even without McMillan Two’s narrowing of the Anacostia, transportation investments will be necessary for redevelopments in Poplar Point, the River Terrace power plant, and Buzzard Point. These could be McMillan Two’s numerous bridges across the Anacostia, with or without the narrowed river channel. Still, that framework is only one part of the equation – imagine what DC could do with a transit investment in the area on the scale of the DLR.
Green Infrastructure
By building off the principles of the McMillan Plan, McMillan Two is also building off the principles of the City Beautiful movement. The City Beautiful asserted that grand, monumental spaces could foster moral and civic virtue amongst residents, and that a harmonious physical order would promote a similarly harmonious social order.
The track record for meeting these lofty goals is inconclusive at best, but the City Beautiful certainly left Washington and other places with many practical (and beautiful) enhancements. Beautification efforts also tackled basic problems of infrastructure – sewers and utilities, sidewalks and streetscapes. The common critique of the City Beautiful is that it is solely an aesthetic treatment for planning, yet many of its basic elements functioned quite well and continue to do so today.
McMillan Two appeals to the beautiful elements of that tradition, but it lacks the functionality. Combined with the serious ecological concerns about narrowing the Anacostia, the functional elements of the plan seem to be in short supply.
However, the plan provides an opportunity, as well. One impetus for the plan (as well as Buras’ selection of Paris as his case study) is DC’s currently poor relationship with the water. DC urban waterfronts are in short supply, with only small stretches along Maine Ave SW, Georgetown, and Old Town Alexandria providing places where the city meets the water. Likewise, concerns over ecology and the Anacostia’s hydrology ought to be far more prominent in the McMillan Two agenda.
Together, these elements represent the opportunity to make this plan as the large scale, urban application of green infrastructure. During his interview on the Kojo Nnamdi show, Buras rightly points out that the Anacostia today is in no way a natural river. However, I believe we can both better connect the city to the waterfront while also mimicking natural marshes and ecosystems through the use of permeable pavings, bioswales, and other sustainable urban drainage systems. To date, most of these applications focus on small-scale projects, but this plan provides the opportunity for a large scale application. Furthermore, most of these drainage systems mimic natural ponds and marshes, and take their visual cues from those influences – this provides a chance to implement such systems in both an urban environment and in an urban design. How can stormwater detention and infiltration areas be effective public, urban spaces?
Like the transportation elements, use of this infrastructure is not predicated on narrowing the river. It can be applied to any plan, and would hopefully become part of the best practices across the city.
Implementation
The single greatest aspect of the McMillan Two plan is its breadth of vision and scope. Such breadth is also a challenge. Both the L’Enfant and McMillan plans featured a grand vision and scope, but they were also easily broken up into manageable chunks, making implementation easy. L’Enfant’s street grid took decades to build out, but surveying streets is a relatively easy task. McMillan’s monuments and public spaces evolved over the course of several decades as well.
McMillan Two’s big move, narrowing the Anacostia, cannot easily be broken up into chunks (if it can be done at all in good environmental conscience). For a plan with a scope of 100 years, you also need an implementation plan.
Potentially, it’s possible to meet all of McMillan Two’s goals without actually narrowing the river. If you were to combine base re-alingment (as the plan displaces the Navy Yard, Bolling AFB and the Anacostia Naval Air Station) with the construction of new bridges, but without the narrowing of the river, you’d still have a large area to redevelop according to the plan without the hydrologic hurdles.
Input
Neil’s inital post on the subject generated quite a few comments. This kind of plan requires public support, and gaining that support requires input from stakeholders through mediums like this. Comments and criticism will make this a stronger plan. My personal initial reactions to the plan have shaped my view of it, but only through a robust dialogue will the plan evolve beyond just the ideas of Mr. Buras and into a true civic vision for Washington DC.
Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington
America's Metro
Last week, GGW’s daily links thread noted Metro’s consideration of moving to automated station announcements within trains, instead of the current announcements made by train operators. The link included a look back to when Metro’s 7000 series railcars were first announced, more than a year and a half ago.
Automated announcements are one of those things that make it easy for those unfamiliar with the system to navigate it. I can’t think of anyone saying this would be a bad thing, but it certainly removes a bit of the local flavor from the system. DCist noted this last January, when the new car designs were initially revealed:
- Automated station announcements. So no more “Judishuwary Square”.
This kind of local flavor is a small sacrifice in favor of greatly improved usability for most riders. The more troubling aspect of the new car design, however, isn’t the loss of local character, but the bizarre rejection of Metro’s local connections.
As borne out by the DCist comments, perhaps the single most objectionable piece of the 7000 series design was the addition of the new “America’s Metro” logo. Some see it as an egregious example of poor graphic design (and it is). More troubling, however, is the fact that Metro is a local asset with a federal role.
Frankly, this isn’t America’s Metro. It’s DC’s Metro. Perhaps this logo was an olive branch to the Feds as a means to conjure up support in Congress. However, the Metro is one of DC’s federal investments that’s paid tremendous dividends to the day to day life of the city’s residents.
The implications for Metro’s identity aren’t too promising, either. Metro’s always had a strong, modern brand – thanks to the architecture, the unity within the system’s design, and the brand itself. Since its creation, WMATA hasn’t always been the best steward of that design legacy. However, the new bus liveries are promising and functional – hopefully this logo will be dropped from the final design for the 7000 series.
Washington Post Newsgraphic on 7000 series
Technically, the 7000 series should be a welcome addition to Metro’s fleet. However, let’s not sacrifice the system’s visual integrity. Thankfully, those seat color schemes have not yet been decided.
These are not minor details, they matter. Metro has bigger problems these days, to be sure. That’s no excuse, however, to lower standards.
Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington
ACS Data – How DC stacks up
Bike Pittsburgh, courtesy of Streetsblog, has some great, sortable data of how various cities stack up on the transportation aspects of the recently released American Community Survey data. Bike PGH provides the context, ranking cities based on their percentages using transit, walking, biking, etc. Looking at how DC stacks up against the other major cities in the United States gives a great deal of perspective as to how we’re doing as a city.
Again, remember that these are commute trips only, and for city residents only. It’s important to understand the limitations of the data, but this is an even comparison for all the cities involved. Obviously, this is still not an apples to apples comparison, as many ‘newer’ sunbelt cities are still aggressively expanding their city boundaries via annexation, while cities like DC remain both constrained by static political boundaries and surrounded by substantially urban jurisdictions (Arlington, Alexandria, etc).
Nevertheless, taking all of the statistics together gives a good sense of how DC stacks up.
Biking commute mode share:
- Portland, OR – 6.0%
- Minneapolis, MN – 4.3%
- Seattle, WA – 2.9%
- Sacramento, CA – 2.7%
- San Francisco, CA – 2.7%
- Washington, DC – 2.3%
- Oakland, CA – 2.1%
- Tucson, AZ – 2.0%
- Albuquerque, NM – 1.8%
- Boston, MA – 1.6%
Walking commute mode share:
- Boston, MA – 14.3%
- Washington, DC – 12.1%
- Pittsburgh, PA – 11.1%
- New York, NY – 10.3%
- San Francisco, CA – 9.4%
- Seattle, WA – 9.3%
- Philadelphia, PA – 8.6%
- Honolulu, HI – 7.9%
- Minneapolis, MN – 6.1%
- Baltimore, MD – 6.0%
Public transit commute mode share:
- New York, NY – 54.8%
- Washington, DC – 35.7%
- San Francisco, CA – 31.9%
- Boston, MA – 31.2%
- Philadelphia, PA – 26.8%
- Chicago, IL – 26.7%
- Pittsburgh, PA – 20.9%
- Baltimore, MD – 19.5%
- Seattle, WA – 17.7%
- Oakland, CA – 17.1%
Drive alone commute mode share (presented lowest to highest):
- New York, NY – 23.3%
- Washington, DC – 37.2%
- San Francisco, CA – 38.4%
- Boston, MA – 41.1%
- Chicago, IL – 50.5%
- Philadelphia, PA – 50.7%
- Pittsburgh, PA – 52.8%
- Seattle, WA – 52.9%
- Baltimore, MD – 57.9%
- Oakland, CA – 58.1%
All in all, that’s a strong set of rankings. Bike PGH has the full sortable data if you want to take a deeper look. For the sake of brevity, I’ve only listed the top ten in each category here.
DC stacks up well in these numbers. The biking mode share is quite western (Albuquerque?), and transit mode share strongly correlates to cities with heavy rail rapid transit systems.
Commute Flows
Earlier this week, Lynda Laughlin at GGW noted a few key statistics about the District of Columbia, released as part of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Matt Yglesias honed in on the transportation mode share for DC residents:
When it comes to urban transportation, path dependency issues are everywhere. The more car-dependent people are the more political support there’ll be for car-promoting policies. Conversely, the more there retail and job opportunities are already accessible through non-automotive means, the more realistic it is for new residents to get by without a car, or for a family to get by with only one. And one interesting thing about the District of Columbia is that according to the Census Bureau we’re nearly fifty-fifty in terms of commuting patterns.
I don’t know that I buy Yglesias’ notion that DC is near a tipping point. Certainly, non-auto transportation allows for density, which allows for more street level retail, which can allow more people to shift their lifestyles, etc. These linkages are well documented, but the path isn’t linear, nor is it purely a market-based reaction – it requires infrastructure, policies to enable it, etc.
The more interesting discussion was on what this data represents. This data comes from the American Community Survey, showing the mode of transportation of DC residents only (not workers) for their commute trips only. This is significant because the focus on DC residents alone doesn’t give a full picture of the overall dynamics of the DC Metropolitan area, and the focus on commuting trips alone doesn’t capture the full use of the transportation system, since most of our trips are not commuting trips.
The latter point touches on Yglesias’ assertion that DC is close to the ‘tipping point.’ Arguably, such a point in an urban area would be when there’s sufficient density, diversity, and design to enable non-auto modes to dominate all of those trip types, not just the commute.
The former point, however, notes the Metropolitan emphasis. And all of this was basically a roundabout way for me to link to this from The New Republic’s blog, noting the importance of emphasizing metropolitan policy over the loaded ‘urban’ policy terminology. It’s not just arguing semantics, it’s a reflection of how our cities actually function.
Meshing that together with the commuting discussion, TNR has a great graphic of commuting flows in Chicagoland – which still has a huge and dominant downtown office market, yet still sees a wide network of commuting patterns:
I would love to see a similar image for DC. Considering the relative size of downtown DC, with transit-oriented employment centers in Alexandria, Arlington, Silver Spring, Bethesda, and others, sprawling agglomerations in Tysons and the Dulles corridor, as well as proximate centers in Baltimore and Annapolis – I’ll bet it would make an interesting graphic.