Category Archives: Planning

Things that matter

Museo Guggenheim Bilbao - from La Tête Krançien

Mammoth directs our attention to this post from LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, talking about the systemic flaws of lists of the best buildings (and architecture criticism in general):

When Vanity Fair magazine recently released the results of a survey ranking the most significant pieces of architecture of the last 30 years — with Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, topping the list — the poll was met with more than a little grumbling. Some people griped about the many architects, including Richard Meier and Daniel Libeskind, who voted for their own work (talk about a vanity fair!); others noted that the average age of those polled, a group including architects, critics and academics, seemed to be pushing 70.

Mammoth also notes the tendency for architects to nominate their own buildings to the list – particularly the ones that don’t show up on any other lists. Another criticism was the list’s complete whiff on any green architecture, spurring an alternative contest with an emphasis on sustainability. Hawthorne delves into the more fundamental issue:

Asking voters to submit a list of single buildings necessarily produces results that give a skewed view of the way architecture — and more important, the way we think and write about it — has evolved in recent years.Among critics and architects alike, there has been a growing understanding that architecture is not just about stand-alone icons but is tied inextricably to real-estate speculation, urban planning, capital flows, ecology and various kinds of networks. Similarly, ambitious architecture criticism now means a good deal more than than simply writing about impressive new landmarks, green or not, produced by the world’s best-known firms […]
Maybe, in other words, the most important achievement in green architecture over the last 10 or 30 years is not a single building at all. Maybe it’s a collection of schools or linked parks or the group of advisors brought together by a young mayor somewhere. Maybe it’s a new kind of solar panel, a tax credit or a zoning change. Maybe it’s tough to hang a plaque on — or photograph for a magazine spread.

Emphasis is mine. The same logic applies to the environmental benefits of urban density and city living, as opposed to just adding LEED certified buildings. How about hanging that green award on a carbon tax or the elimination of parking minimums.

Intersection density & centrality

What is the best method to quantify what makes a place walkable? The Journal of the American Planning Association recently published some powerful documentation from Robert Cervero and Reid Ewing on the value of pedestrian-oriented design (following up on yesterday’s links). Grist has the article (hat tip to Planetizen), citing Laurence Aurbach’s PedShed blog – again, the “Three D’s” or urbanism emerge front and center – density, diversity, and design:

Their findings? Of all the built environment measurements, intersection density has the largest effect on walking — more than population density, distance to a store, distance to a transit stop, or jobs within one mile. Intersection density also has large effects on transit use and the amount of driving. The authors comment,

This is surprising, given the emphasis in the qualitative literature on density and diversity, and the relatively limited attention paid to design.

In other words, intersection density is the most important factor for walking and one of the most important factors for increasing transit use and reducing miles driven, but gets relatively little attention in research and in public policy.

In other words, the other two D’s (density and diversity) get more play than design. Perhaps that’s because density and diversity (of land use, of people, of incomes, etc) were easier to quantify than something as seemingly subjective as design.

Kaid Benfield ties these principles to those angry about the ever expanding oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, hitting on another theme of the research – location:

The study’s key conclusion is that destination accessibility is by far the most important land use factor in determining a household or person’s amount of driving. To explain, ‘destination accessibility’ is a technical term that describes a given location’s distance from common trip destinations (and origins). It almost always favors central locations within a region; the closer a house, neighborhood or office is to downtown, the better its accessibility and the lower its rate of driving. The authors found that such locations can be almost as significant in reducing driving rates as other significant factors (e.g., neighborhood density, mixed land use, street design) combined.

The clear implication is that, to enable lifestyles with reduced driving, oil consumption and associated emissions, environmentalists should continue to stress opportunities for revitalization and redevelopment in centrally located neighborhoods. As Ewing and Cervero put it: ‘Almost any development in a central location is likely to generate less automobile travel than the best-designed, compact, mixed-use development in a remote location.’

Aurbach is quick to note the limitations of the study, but even with those this is an exciting quantification and potential metric for walkable and sustainable design. It builds off the Jacobs legacy of ‘short blocks’ and adds some science behind recent GGW posts from Erik Bootsma and Daniel Narin on the variety and histories of street grids. This kind of research lends weight to the anecdotal accounts of Portland’s small blocks resulting from the belief that corner lots were more valuable, as well as ideas of better utilization of alley space – such as this recent post from Richard Layman.

A sprawling synopsis

Image from Dean Terry on flickr

There’s been a great back and forth across the blogosphere in the past few days on sprawl, zoning, land use regulation, and market forces. A brief synopsis and chronology:

3/18, 8:47 am – Randal O’Toole – complete with terms like ‘poppycock’ that completely fit the mental image I have of him:

This is all balderdash and poppycock. People who believe it should get their noses out of Kunstler’s biased diatribes and look at some real data and see how zoning actually worked before it was hijacked by authoritarian urban planners. It doesn’t take much to show that areas without any zoning or regulation will — if developed today — end up as what planners call “sprawl.” Until recently, all that zoning has done has been to affirm the kind of development that people want.

3/18, 12:58 pm – Matt Yglesias -Yglesias argues that our sprawling environment isn’t a manifestation of market demand:

I’m not personally interested in debating the “smart growth” slogan. My point is that from a policy point of view excessive regulation of land use in already developed areas is bad for the economy and for the environment. And to be specific and clear about this, I don’t think the problem is “libertarian” hypocrites per se, the problem is specifically John Stossel and Randall O’Toole who are stridently opposed to anti-sprawl regulations but seem totally uninterested in sprawl-promoting ones.

3/18, 7:28 pm – Kevin Drum – we have exclusionary zoning regulations because people really, really want them.

I need to be clear here: I’m neither praising nor condemning this, just describing how things are. To get an idea of how strongly people feel about this, you really need to come live in a suburb for a while. But failing that, consider the balance of power here. Corporations would like to be able to build wherever and whatever they want. Wealthy land developers would like to be able to build wherever and whatever they want. And local governments hate single-family neighborhoods because they’re a net tax loss: they cost more in services than they return in property tax remittances. And yet, even with corporations, wealthy developers, and local governments all on one side, suburban zoning is ubiquitous. This is a triumvirate that, under normal circumstances, could get practically anything they wanted, but in this case it’s not even a close fight. Suburban residents have them completely overwhelmed.

3/19, 11:18 am – Ryan Avent – zoning is about exclusion and control – it is a manifestation of NIMBY attitudes and not one of popularity:

So people build where it’s easiest and cheapest to build, which is on the urban fringe. And walkability is difficult to build on the urban fringe because transportation will be overwhelmingly auto-oriented (the fringe being distant from employment and retail centers and unserved by transit). So you get acres of tract housing, which subsequently become filled with people, who then do what homeowners everywhere in the country do, which is try to exclude new people from moving in to their neighborhood. And development then moves further outward.

But the notion that suburban sprawl wins out simply because it is so popular is belied by housing cost data. People live where they can afford to live, and if they can’t afford to live in a walkable area, then they’ll opt to live in sprawl rather than go homeless. And once there they’ll act to defend their investment by fighting development projects that may have unpredictable impacts on the value of nearby single-family homes.

3/19, 2:28 pm – Matt Yglesias – exclusion is a general phenomenon (see NIMBYism), not just suited for suburbia and sprawling places.

It’s true that the problem of overly restrictive land-use rules is in large part a problem of voter-preference. But it’s not a problem of voter-preference for sprawl per se. It’s a general problem of homeowner eagerness to exclude outsiders. It’s politically difficult to build dense infill development in Washington, DC and that’s not because DC residents want to live in sprawling areas or because DC residents approve of sprawl as a phenomenon. It’s a mixture of selfishness, misunderstanding, and poor institutional design. As Ben Adler reminds us, surveys indicate that about a third of Americans would like to live in walkable urban areas but less than 10 percent of the country’s dwelling units are in areas that fit the bill. That’s why houses in walkable central cities (Manhattan) and walkable suburbs (near Metro in Arlington Country, VA for example) are so expensive.

3/19, 2:45 pm – Kevin Drum – No, people like sprawl. Honestly.

Sure, exclusion is part of the dynamic here, but by far the bigger part of it is that lots and lots of people actively like living in non-dense developments. Seriously: they really do. It’s not a trick. So they vote with their feet and move to the suburbs and then vote with their ballots to keep big-city living at bay. Given an ideal world, of course, they’d love to have a nice 3,000 square foot house with a big yard right in the middle of Manhattan, but one way or another, they want that house.

3/19, 7:07 pm – Ryan Avent – Price data shows a clear preference to walkable, urban places. Moreover, the density that creates that value also raises productivity – urban walkability is expensive for a reason, the positive externalities of urban lifestyles compound on one another. Suburban residents, however, fight added density and walkability because they never see the benefits of those positive feedback loops:

Say New York started selectively zoning parts of Manhattan for single-family home only use. The first few folks to buy would have a glorious time of things. But as additional people moved in, density would fall. Declining density would ultimately reduce the walkability of Manhattan, but perhaps more importantly, it would lead to a deterioration of the positive externalities associated with the high level of density. Density raises productivity and wages (see this, or this). And because of this benefit and positive spillovers associated with density, we find increasing returns to scale in cities. In many cases, the addition of another person to a dense area increases the return to others of locating in that area. And things work in the opposite direction as populations decline. The fact that residents of dense cities don’t internalize these benefits is one of the reasons they fight new development.

Low density suburban development eats up a lot of land while contributing relatively little to the positive urban externalities associated with density. And meanwhile, the combination of auto-centricity of suburbs with the inability of governments to correctly price congestion externalities means that suburbanites end up limiting urban growth in an economically unfortunate manner by reducing potential wages and raising the real cost of commuting into (and therefore within) the city. One reason sprawl is attractive is that the people living in it aren’t facing the true cost of their decision to live in sprawl (and this is without ever bringing carbon into the mix).

All in all, some very interesting points on sprawl, economics, design, land use, and so on. I wanted to aggregate these posts here as a baseline for more discussion – because this post is already long enough. I didn’t even get a chance to touch on the discussions of High Speed Rail and sprawl – with posts from the CA HSR blog, as well as the Transport Politic.

Olympic transformations

The 2010 Winter Olympics kick off today in Vancouver, British Columbia. Design Observer has an excellent interview with Vancouver’s planning director Brent Toderian. These kinds of major sporting events can be a huge opportunity to re-shape areas and integrate larger planning projects into the public support for the games. Salt Lake City’s first light rail line was built in advance of their hosting of the 2002 Winter Olympics, and that starter line has since proved popular enough to warrant massive expansion, even in a fiscally and socially conservative state.

Vancouver’s Olympic Village. Images from City of Vancouver.

Vancouver has seized the opportunity to shape the city through their host duties. Those include the Olympic Village, the Olympic Streetcar pilot program (mentioned previously here), and the rapid transit expansion of the Canada Line. Toderian discusses the physical transformations possible with the focus from events such as the Olympics:

NB: From an urban planning perspective, what impact do you think the games will have on the city?

BT: We’re going to have significant physical legacies of the Olympics, not the least of which is Athletes Village. And on top of that we have our new Canada Line subway that connects the airport to downtown, and a number of athletic facilities, either new or upgraded, that will be sport legacies for the city. But there’s also physical infrastructure and what we call “look-of-the-city” legacies that will make Vancouver more livable. In fact, we’ve spent over 6 million dollars on public art pieces scattered across the city, integrated into the urban realm, that will make the city more attractive long after the Olympics are over. So from a physical city-builder’s perspective, the legacies will be powerful. From a policymaker’s perspective, we have a legacy of new attitudes and standards and policies that have fundamentally changed business as usual for Vancouver. Almost everything we learned in the development of Athletes Village has been translated into new approaches in our citywide zoning, citywide policies and guidelines, or just new attitudes.

When you’re doing a place like Athletes Village, and you very much want it to be a model, our perspective is: What good is a model of it doesn’t change business as usual, if it doesn’t make everything that comes after it better? So in our case, even before the Athletes Village was completed, it was substantially influencing the regional discussion on city building. Many of the exemptions we built into the development approvals have now been built into our citywide zoning bylaw — even before the Olympic buildings were open. Our learnings on passive design have been translated into a passive design toolkit. Our urban agriculture learnings have been translated into urban agriculture guidelines. Our learnings about district energy — we did our first neighborhood energy utility using sewer heat recovery to heat and cool the Athletes Village — has already raised our bar with other major projects. We’ve emphasized that these new projects have to be even better than Athletes Village, and that’s being translated into a new district energy policy for the city. So you see the point of the power of a model. Unfortunately, too many cities do model developments, but years after nothing’s really changed. That’s something we very much wanted to prevent here.

NB: A lot of people think of these big events — Olympics, World Cups — as being a spur for development and physical infrastructure creation, but it seems like you’re taking it further and using it almost as a lab for urban policy.

BT: You have to remember that the second most important moment in Vancouver’s city building history was Expo ‘86. That event changed the way we do things as city builders and really sparked what is now called the Vancouver model. I say the second most important moment because the first most important moment was the refusal to put freeways in Vancouver, particularly through our downtown. But Expo ‘86 was a turning point. It gave the city a huge amount of confidence and started an era of city building that has really defined the Vancouver model. So we’re well aware that this is our second great event, that the Olympics, like Expo ’86, will be transformative not only in our attitudes, but in the way we do business.

We set out from day one to make sure that we were positioned for that transformation. The fun of this challenge is that Vancouver is the most populous urban destination ever to host the Winter Olympics. Our population is about 600,000, in a region of about 2.1 million. And even for most Summer Olympics, the event areas for the Olympics are often on the urban outskirts. Much of the activity of the Vancouver Winter Olympics is in the middle of our most urban environment. So it’s a huge operational challenge to accommodate an Olympics and the huge influx of people.

All too often, the legacies of these games quickly fade into memory rather than physical transformation. Both Athens and Beijing have been saddled with seldom-used venues. Even more frugal Olympic implementations, such as the 1996 Atlanta Games, lack the kind of physical legacy. Perhaps most disappointing was the lack of emphasis on transportation and infrastructure in Chicago’s failed bid for the 2016 Olympics.

However, as Salt Lake City has shown (and Vancouver is positioned to show), these kinds of events can galvanize the kinds of civic investments that will pay dividends for the city long after the last event concludes.

Jarrett Walker at HumanTransit.org is also planning a series of urbanist posts on Vancouver and the Olympics:

What’s special about Vancouver? It’s a new dense city, in North America.

Vancouver is the closest North America has come to building a substantial high-density city — not just employment but residential — pretty much from scratch, entirely since World War II. I noted in an earlier post that low-car North American cities are usually old cities, because they rely on a development pattern that just didn’t happen after the advent of the car. In 1945 Vancouver was nothing much: a hard-working port for natural resource exports, with just a few buildings even ten stories high. But look at it now.

Now, if they can only get some snow. We’ve got lots of extra here in DC.

Gehry to Planners: Drop Dead

From Catherine V on flickr

Can’t help but mention this – from the UK’s Independent, a conversation with architect (but not a fucking starchitect, damn it) Frank Gehry: (hat tip – planetizen)

“I don’t know who invented that fucking word ‘starchitect’. In fact a journalist invented it, I think. I am not a ‘star-chitect’, I am an ar-chitect…” Just 10 minutes into the interview, Frank Owen Gehry, the world’s most feted building designer, is already a bit irate. A short, owlish man, who looks younger than his 80 years, he speaks quietly when left to his own devices, and meanders, never quite finishing one train of thought before it segues into the next. When he is tackling something more contentious, though, he relaxes and becomes animated. His head rises and so does his voice. He even smiles. This is a man who likes a scrap.

Fiesty!

But other charges are a little harder to dismiss – or at least they rile him rather more. Shouldn’t he make some more socially relevant buildings? Aren’t his designs too extravagant? Times are tough, after all. This lights the touchpaper as effectively as the s-word. “We are architects … We serve customers!” he barks. “I can’t just decide myself what’s being built. Someone decides what they want, then I work for them. Look, I went to city planning school at Harvard and I discovered that you never got to change a fucking thing or do anything. Urban planning is dead in the US.”

So that’s urban planning dealt with. Gehry doesn’t really do discussion.

Thanks for the kind words, Frank. Infrastructurist chimes in with their thoughts:

Is urban planning in fact dead in the U.S.?

Short answer: No, but it has some serious health problems. When you consider the massive projects in areas like Tysons Corner and the efforts of New York’s Janette Sadik-Khan, it’s clear that innovation in urban planning hasn’t entirely met its demise — though granted, there are certainly problems with our accepted paradigms for city planning, such as the idea that cars should be the locus of urban design.

It’s always interesting to me to see what ideas and topics people will pawn off on the faceless profession of ‘urban planning.’ So, the field gets no credit for innovative policies and designs, yet has to bear the burden of past mistakes and zoning codes? In the comments, BeyondDC nails the real reason planning and planners are so important:

Only an egomaniac would think Gehry’s stylistic contributions to pop culture make a bigger difference than writing the laws that guide development. Please.

It’s easy to think you’re providing real change when you’re creating shiny titanium monuments, but that doesn’t do much for the everyday spaces we inhabit and use on a daily basis. Planning isn’t (and shouldn’t be) about doing what Gehry’s done for architecture – deconstructing buildings and making everything a bright shiny object – so it’s no wonder he thinks the profession is dead. That’s not how cities work, nor is it how they are built.

But, if we’re in need of a new sculpture or a new monument, we know just who to ask.

City Block

a work in progress…