Category Archives: Uncategorized

Norman Foster’s aerotropolis

Image via Foster+Partners

Norman Foster is working on a concept for a massive new airport complex for London along the Thames Estuary. I first saw this (via ArchDaily) thanks to a shared Google Reader item (alas, no more) from Neil Flanagan.  Yesterday, Planetizen points to an Atlantic piece on the subject, featuring new renderings from Foster + Partners posted on DesignBoom:

understanding the transportation challenges facing britain, london-based practice foster + partners, have collaborated with consulting firms halcrow (international) and volterra (UK) for a self-funded study producing the ‘thames hub vision’, a detailed report that uses scale and strategic cross-sector thinking to design an integrated infrastructure network. the masterplan proposes to replace the existing thames barrier with a new crossing that will extend london’s protection from floods into the 22nd century. it will mitigate the capital from rising storm levels, free up vital land for development and harness tidal power to generate carbon-free energy.

building on existing transportation lines to the north, east and west of london ‘the hub’ will avoid future congestion into the city. an orbital rail system with a four-track, high-speed passenger and freight route will link london’s current radial lines, with a future high-speed rail line to the midlands and the north, the thames estuary ports, high speed 1, and european networks. by minimizing the developmental impact the environmental strategy aims to provides new wildlife habitats landscaped within the spine.

This is more or less the Aerotropolis in a tangible proposal.  John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay’s book spends a great deal of time on Heathrow; the inability of various cities (Chicago, Los Angeles) to build new and needed airports for various reasons; and cities that have done so through planning or via accident (Dulles, Dallas, Denver). Heathrow’s capacity constraints serve as a drag on not just London’s economy, but as a drag on key link in the global transport network.

Having read the book but never gotten around to a review, I thought I’d take this moment to highlight some of the more interesting thoughts I’ve come across regarding the importance of aviation as well as the aerotropolis concept.

Recently, Aaron Renn penned a somewhat pessimistic review of the somewhat totalitarian implications of planned aerotropoli:

A few things jumped at me out of the book. One of them is the close linkage between the aerotropolis and its boosters with authoritarianism (and by extension, similarly for globalization and its boosters). The second is that, despite vast sums of money and authoritarian rule, I didn’t come away with a sense of anyplace in the world that had fully pulled off Kasarda’s vision. Indeed, there are as many or more failures than successes. And even those successes are far from perfect ones.

Renn does highlight the fundamental issue, regardless of Kasarda’s plans and predictions: that aviation is a tremendous force in globalization and the flows of commerce. (For more on the tension between singular vision and democracy, see Alon Levy’s post on consensus and vision)  Back in March, mammoth made the case that the aerotropolis is merely the symbol of globalization.  Air travel might be the sexy mode, but the real work of global trade should probably be symbolized by the intermodal cargo container and all of its associated infrastructure.

It seems to me that the “aerotropolis” (particularly on the more restricted Kasarda definition) is more a symbol of globalization than it is the ultimate instantiation of globalization.  Sea shipping is (and was for centuries before the invention of flight) the dominant mode of global transport.  To get an indication of the difference in magnitude between sea and air shipping, just look at Shanghai, the world’s busiest cargo port by tonnage, and Memphis, the world’s busiest airport by tonnage: Memphis sees about three million tons a year; Shanghai sees around five hundred million tons a year.  This is not a statistical aberration.

(As an aside, Matt Yglesias makes the point that even in the age of global trade, geography and proximity still matter.) Renn also points out that theaerotropolis is ultimately a measure of connections and networks – and the idea of the aerotropolis as a proscription isn’t nearly as strong as it is in description:

The lesson I draw is that while good air connectivity is critical for a city in the global economy – indeed, I almost draw my threshold population for what constitutes a minimum viable city in the globalized world in terms of whether or not it is big enough to support a major airport – the airport is only one ingredient needed for success, not the entire recipe. Cities that pin their hopes too heavily on airport led transformation are bound to be disappointed. And even if you go in with the best of intentions trying to do airport development right, you are far from guaranteed to have success.

Renn’s critique is well put, though I feel it ends up talking past some of the broader themes that Lindsay and Kasarda highlight in favor of deconstructing Kasarada’s specific, proscriptive vision for the future of air travel.  In many ways, their main thesis isn’t anything new, just another example of transportation infrastructure shaping human development.

Also disputing the tone of telling is what we want, Kazys Varnelis disputes the book’s tag line, “the way you’ll live next.”

The answer is that the Aerotropolis is already here and it’s really not all that exciting. I went on two international flights in the last two weeks. Newark International Airport is about a half hour drive from the apartment I rent while La Guardia is about a half hour cab ride from Columbia. Do I really need to be closer? Could I really be closer, like the inhabitants of Kowloon Walled City who had jets pass by a hundred meters overhead?

No. I am far enough away that I don’t hear the noise from the planes too often, don’t viscerally experience the pollution, and don’t feel something is going to crash on my head.

Today, the City Paper linked to some great photos from the National Archives from the 1970s, including one of the District as a parking lot during a 1974 transit strike.  Varnelis’ words echo the last image in the set of a DC-10 on approach into Logan Airport in Boston in 1973:

For more on Aerotropolis (the book), see this excellent interview with co-author Greg Lindsey at BLDGBLOG.

Innovative re-use along the low road

Screencap from Bundled, Buried, and Behind Closed Doors

Assorted (and tangentially related) links:

1. Stephen Smith also digs into Eric Colbert (see my previous post here):

I’m not sure I agree with her parenthetical about DC’s “historic fabric” being “so strong already” – in fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of a newer city on the Northeast Corridor than Washington – but she’s definitely right that that’s what Washingtonians, even the not-so-native ones, think of their city. Of-right development – that is, building within the zoning code in a way that does not trigger a subjective review – is on the wane everywhere in America, but in DC it’s even rarer, and therefore personal relationships like the ones Eric Colbert has (“an ANC 2B commissioner, who had worked with Colbert on previous projects, introduced him with affection”) are even more important than usual when compared to good design.

A few points. A) I’m not sure why Stephen associates the strength of a city’s fabric with age – DC’s fabric has the advantage of being largely intact.  B) Stephen more explicitly states the same thesis – that Colbert’s architecture is ‘boring,’ and boring is, by association, bad design.  I would disagree that fabric is boring – on the contrary, fabric is essential. C) It’s a mistake to conflate the countable and objective measures of development (square footage, height, density, etc) with more subjective measures like ‘good design.’  Stephen conflates two key elements here – development by right, and design by right. The regulatory structures and processes that govern both are quite different.

2. Cities are all about context. Atlantic Cities discusses a review of San Francisco by John King, from iconic buildings to more mundane (boring?) elements of the urban fabric.

3. Mammoth links to another Atlantic piece, discussing “Low Road” buildings and their importance in urban economics, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

The startup lore says that many companies were founded in garages, attics, and warehouses. Once word got around, companies started copying the formula. They stuck stylized cube farms into faux warehouses and figured that would work. The coolness of these operations would help them look cool and retain employees. Keep scaling that idea up and you get Apple’s ultrahip mega headquarters, which is part spaceship and part Apple Store.

But as Stewart Brand argued in his pathbreaking essay, “‘Nobody Cares What You Do in There’: The Low Road,” it’s not hip buildings that foster creativity but crappy ones.

“Low Road buildings are low-visibility, low-rent, no-style, high-turnover,” Brand wrote. “Most of the world’s work is done in Low Road buildings, and even in rich societies the most inventive creativity, especially youthful creativity, will be found in Low Road buildings taking full advantage of the license to try things.”

Being on the low road isn’t exactly the same as being a part of the fabric – the price point and the prominence don’t always correlate – but the concept is somewhat similar.  These spaces are easy to adapt and reuse. Not just easy, but cheap.

4. Where Stewart Brand discusses the space of innovation, Ryan Avent has another (follow-up) piece on the geography of innovation:

I think that the authors have basically gotten the state of innovation right: we are approaching a critical point at which impressive progress in information technology becomes explosive progress. And I think that the authors are right that the extent to which we are able to take advantage of these technological developments will hinge on how successful America’s tinkerers are at experimenting with new business models and turning them into new businesses. But I also think that there is a critical geographic component to that process of experimentation and entrepreneurship and, as I wrote in my book, I think we are systematically constraining the operation of that component.

High housing costs constitute a substantial regulatory tax burden on residence in many high productivity areas. These are the places where the tinkerers are having their ongoing innovative conversation. But if the tinkerers are driven away, the conversation loses depth and breadth, and we lose many of the combinations that might go on to be the next big company — the next big employer. That, to me, is a very worrying idea.

5. When considering both the versatility of space as well as the institutional and infrastructural momentum (as well as touching on the importance of information technology), Mammoth also links to a short documentary of the infrastructure of the internet: Bundled, Buried, and Behind Closed Doors:

 

Scale, urban design, and architecture

CC image from MV Jantzen

Last week’s City Paper cover story, a profile of DC architect Eric Colbert by Lydia DePillis, contains several jabs at Colbert’s not-so-daring designs:

You may not remember precisely what they look like, though. They form a background blur in neighborhoods where much of Colbert’s work is clustered, blending together quietly in the mind of people walking down the street—just the way the neighbors, developers, and bankers intended.

Throughout the article, there’s an undercurrent of disappointment about this blending in that Colbert accomplishes, as if the lack of a bold design is the sign of a bad design.  What’s missing in this conception, however, is the difference in scale between architecture and urban design, between the scale of a building and the scale of a city.

Colbert is now a major influence on entire neighborhoods, not just individual blocks. Nowhere is this truer than greater 14th Street, where Elinor Bacon had accorded him the status of the Creator. But unlike his more imperialistic architectural predecessors, who knew they’d get to design large chunks of the city at once (and often had their own money in the deal), Colbert doesn’t think about leaving an imprint on the built environments he’s played a huge part in shaping.

“You know, it’s hard, because each project comes to us individually, with a different client, a different set of neighbors,” he says, when I ask whether he thinks about molding a place like 14th and U. “We really look at the block. It never occurred to me that we would be doing four projects on 14th Street, with potentially two more in the wings. So it wasn’t possible to know in advance, and say, ‘This is how I’m going to shape 14th Street.”

“Not that I would want to be that controlling,” he adds.

Even the more “imperialistic” predecessors DePillis mentions (Harry Wardman, for example*) weren’t really ‘shaping’ their areas of the city so much as they were styling it.  The shape of the city is a product of urban design and the way that the buildings frame public spaces, as opposed to architecture that operates at a smaller scale.  In unpacking Colbert’s appeal, DePillis hints at the real forces shaping that design:

In Washington, where knowing local zoning codes and historic districts saves time and angst, hiring an architect remains a model of shopping locally. With the exception of Georgetown-based Eastbanc and local heavyweight JBG, who are willing to spend a bit more on a name-brand architect from out of town, most developers have a stable of local architects and rotate through them. “It’s a small town feel to it, and nobody likes outsiders,” says Four Points Development’s Stan Voudrie, who retained Colbert for his Progression Place project in Shaw. “D.C.’s a little bit of a closed loop.”

What’s Colbert’s competitive advantage? In large part, it’s that Colbert isn’t just an architect. He’s a development partner through all stages of a project, from conception to interior design to city review processes to working with contractors through the mundane details of construction—which a snootier designer might consider beneath him.

Emphasis mine.  In short, the codes shape the built form of the city, if not the architectural style of the individual buildings.  Building a narrative about an individual’s style and his ability to shape the city accordingly is enticing, but the more important forces are legal ones. Now, whether those codes are shaping the city as intended or not is another question.

The other question is if bold architecture is wanted. Every city needs the kind of urban fabric that provides the bulk of the buildings but tends to blend into the surrounding context (more often, it is the surrounding context). That Colbert aims to contribute to this shouldn’t be a negative. Jahn Gehl has repeatedly noted how Dubai’s emphasis on monumental architecture with no surrounding context (“birdshit architecture“) fails to create a sense of place.  If every building tries to be unique, then none of them are.

*I’ve been meaning to link to this map from Park View DC, showing the development of various tracts of land over time in Park View. The key takeaway is that almost all of our cherished residential neighborhoods were once created via for-real estate development. Too often, NIMBY attitudes seem to denigrate developers, but this is merely the process of city building in action.  These old rowhouses are no different, they’ve just aged over time.

The new Google Reader

Pass the crow, please.

Last week, I noted that the hullaballoo about the impending changes to Google Reader were likely overblown.  Insofar as we’re talking about the sharing and social features migrating to Google+, it probably is overblown.  But the new user interface stinks.  From Google’s official blog:

A new look and feel that’s cleaner, faster, and nicer to look at.

Cleaner?  I guess.  Faster?  Not in my experience so far.  Easier to look at?  I don’t use Google Reader to look, I use it to read.

The functionality of the old interface is completely lost.  The buttons are all in the wrong place.  Simple features (such as ‘mark as unread’) are nowhere to be found. The color scheme is harder to read, fewer RSS items appear on my screen, the spacing is awkward, there’s excessive and wasted blank space, the hierarchy of information is all wrong (why is the subscribe button so big and red?), etc.

What a mess.

The least Google can do is to offer users the option to retain the old interface.  Gmail offers this for users (via themes), Google Docs and Google Calendar’s recent interface redesigns offer the option to switch to the older, more compact, more information-dense interface as well.  Google should make the same option available for reader, or I’m going to be in the market for a new RSS feed reader.

The initial reaction isn’t good.  Not that most UI changes are universally embraced, but this is more than a Garth Algar ‘we fear change‘ moment – this is a step backwards in utility.

Pass the crow.  For the time being, the reader items in the sidebar won’t be updating.

Generational regulation and institutions

Two somewhat linked thoughts from the feed reader in the last week.

Neil Flanagan, on the generational shifts amongst environmentalists from the literal to the abstract:

My (undeveloped) conjecture is: the older generation sees environmental problems from an intuitive (fishkills & pesticide) perspective, whereas the later generations see the issue in terms of abstractions (%CO2 over 10,000 years). I think I can say that ecology is based on systems thinking. “Ecosystem,” after all, precisely refers to an interrelated organization. That complex activity can only be understood through abstractions that make consequences more intuitively threatening.

But the older generation seems to approach an environmental issue as perceptible, in that anyone can readily see the links and the loops and understand their consequences. You cut down a tree, and this directly harms the environment and limits one’s access to it. A particular, standing in for the general, is irrevocably lost. Building where there once was a grassy patch is paving over paradise, and a building that brings any cars to the neighborhood is causing pollution.

The primary enemies of the 1960s were intensely graphic horrors such as the burning Cuyahoga, broken bird eggs, and the disfiguration wrought by thalidomide. The problems were so obvious, you could see them with your eyes, and that his how we noticed in the first place. For the generation brought up during an era of global warming, the agents are more nefarious. How does one picture a rise of water over decades? How do you draw the cancer cluster caused by dioxins in an aquifer? You have to rely on the numbers.

This kind of paradigm shift obviously impacts the way we regulate our environments.  We, as a society, structure our response (often via regulation) to how we’ve defined the problem.

Alon Levy on highways and cost control, and the role of a particular moment of time in shaping our regulations and institutions:

Second, it reminds us that many of the rules that are currently associated with government dysfunction were passed with opposite intent and effect back in the Progressive Era. Lowest-bid contracts were an effort to stamp out corruption; civil service exams were an effort to reduce patronage; teacher tenure was meant to make teachers politically independent; the initiative process was intended to give people more control over government. All of those efforts succeeded at the time, and took decades of social learning among the corrupt and incompetent to get around. Although programs built under these rules often turned out badly, such as the Interstate network, with its severe cost and schedule overruns, this was not due to the contractor collusion seen in the 1910s or today.

Combine the effects of unintended consequences, changing paradigms and a shifting understanding of the issues at hand, institutional momentum, and you can end up with the kind of slog we have.

There are questions of rigidity and enforceability to ensure that regulations have ‘teeth,’ but adaptability is also key.  Defining the scope of the regulation is also a critical element.  Frankly, aside from constant review and reevaluation, I’m not sure there’s any way to future proof these kinds of institutions.

The evolution of infrastructure: 4-track subways and parking decks

With Rail~volution complete, several recaps of conference sessions have sparked some interesting discussion.  One panel posed the hypothetical question – what would DC look like today if we had never built Metro?

WMATA’s Nat Bottigheimer emphasized the linkage between high capacity rapid transit and the ability to support dense urban development, drawing a contrast to the spatial inefficiency of automobile-based systems:

Bottigheimer gave an analogue for Washington, DC, saying that the parking needed to serve all the cars that would come in place of Metro could fill the entire area from 12th to 23rd Streets, Constitution to R (including the White House) with 5-story parking decks.

That’s a lot pf parking.  It’s an absurd amount, really – but it shouldn’t be a surprise.  Consider an auto-oriented business district like Tysons Corner:

Tysons’ dependence on the automobile, and a place to park it, is dramatic when compared with other areas. With about 120,000 jobs, Tysons features nearly half again as many parking spots in structures, underground and in surface lots. That’s more parking, 40 million square feet, than office space, 28 million square feet. Tysons boasts more spaces, 167,000, than downtown Washington, 50,000, which has more than twice as many jobs.

Of course, downtown DC never would’ve developed in such a fashion.  Bottigheimer’s hypothetical is meant to draw a contrast rather than represent a plausible alternate universe.  Never the less, the ratio of space devoted to parking compared to space devoted to other stuff (offices, retail, housing, etc) is striking.  An auto-based transportation system requires the devotion of half of your space to just the terminal capacity for the car.

While acknowledging Metro’s power to shape development and growth when paired with appropriate land use and economic development policies, the GGW discussion turned (as it often does) to Metro’s constraints.  Several commenters ask – why not four tracks like New York?  Why not have express service?

Sample of Midtown Manhattan track maps from nycsubway.org

New York’s four-track trunk lines are indeed impressive pieces of infrastructure, but it’s worth remembering that they are essentially the second system of rapid transit in the city.  New York did not build those four-track lines from scratch, they built them to replace an extensive network of elevated trains. Consider the changes from 1904 (left), to 1932 (center), to present (right):

Red lines are elevateds, blue lines are subways – source images from Wikipedia. The process of replacing older elevated trains with subways is clear, particularly in Manhattan and around Downtown Brooklyn. The relevance to DC is that four-track subway lines don’t just happen.  The circumstances in New York that desired to get rid of most of the elevated tracks provided an opportunity to rebuild all of New York’s transit infrastructure.  Metro is not provided with such an opportunity.  Adding express tracks to the existing system would require essentially rebuilding the entire system, and without a compelling reason to do so (such as New York’s removal of Els), it’s simply not going to happen – no matter if it were a good idea and a cost-effective idea or not.

Perhaps the single biggest opportunity for an express level of service would be the conversion of MARC and VRE into a through-running S-Bahn-like transit service. Portions of the Red Line do indeed have four tracks – its just that two of them are for freight and commuter rail.  Likewise, should there be future expansion of Metro within the core (such as a separated Blue line) there would be the opportunity to study making such a tunnel a four-track line.  That concept would have to include a number of different ideas, however – future expansions to link into that capacity, surface/subway hybrid service for streetcar (such as in Philadelphia or San Francisco), etc.

Railvolution DC 2011

Having done some work to help with the 2011 Railvolution local program committee, I’ll be spending part of this weekend and next week up in Woodley Park for the 2011 edition of the conference.  Anyone from internet-land making the trip to the District for the conference?  Anyone from DC interested in swinging by the adjunct (and free!) local program on October 19?  Anyone doing both?

Drop a line in the comments or via email if you’ll be in town and/or if you’re dropping by the conference.

Quick links on rising rents, density, and housing supply

CC image from Eric Wilfong

Some quick notes:

1. DC rents continue to rise:

While the vacancy rate for the Metro area is indeed low, it is most pronounced among Class A buildings in the District where just 1.6 percent of apartments are vacant. Class A rents in the city in the third quarter averaged $2,582/month, up from $2,448/month in September 2010. For Class B buildings, the situation for renters in the city looked a little better; the vacancy rate sat at 2.2 percent (up from 1.8 percent last year), but rents also increased to $1,886/month from $1,793/month in September 2010.

From the report:

“…while all submarkets are chronically low [in the area], there is notable vacancy variance among District submarkets. The Upper Northwest submarket posted the lowest stabilized vacancy at 0.5%, while Columbia Heights/Shaw posted a stabilized vacancy of 2.4%.”

2. I’d say there’s some strong demand in this market. Clearly, room for more development, yes? Yet Housing Complex notes that some developers are concerned about their new projects all hitting the market at the same time.

“There is just a ton of supply coming,” he said. “In certain markets, there will be spot oversupply.” Which is developer-speak for holy shit guys slow down so my building will still sell.

3. Payton Chung with some important synthesis of recent growth and affordability discussions, noting the key distinctions between micro and macro levels:

– as Rob points out, housing is a bundle of goods whose utilities vary for different audiences
– housing construction can induce demand, particularly by adding amenities to a neighborhood
– housing construction can also remove amenities from a neighborhood, like a low-rise scale, thus changing other intangibles included in that bundle of goods
– construction costs don’t increase linearly; rather, costs jump at certain inflection points, like between low- and mid-rise
– housing and real estate in general are imperfect markets, since land is not a replicable commodity
– the substantial lag time for housing construction, even in less regulated markets, almost guarantees that supply will miss demand peaks

Pro-active planning remains the best and most time-honored way of pre-empting NIMBYs. Get the neighborhood to buy-in to neighborhood change early on, and then they won’t be surprised and upset when it happens.

I’ve often cited Chris Bradford’s short post on filtering as a good summary of one of the dynamics at play, but there’s no one thing you can point to for a full explanation.

As for Payton’s last point about the best offense against NIMBYs being a good defense (or maybe it’s the other way around), I hope to write more about that soon as a part of a more complete response to Ryan Avent’s The Gated City.

eBooks and Cities

Ryan Avent’s recently published Kindle Single on urban economics entitled “The Gated City” finally enticed me to venture into eBooks.  I’ve tested out friends’ Kindles, but never felt the urge to spend my cash on one – I still like the feel of a real book and don’t care to carry yet another device around, particularly one with the limited application of the Kindle.  Likewise, I’m not yet willing to drop the money for an iPad, so my device stalemate continues.

Presented with something I want to read and a product that’s only available in one electronic medium or another, I took the plunge.  Likewise, knowing that other electronic-only publications I’d be interested in are coming down the pike only hastens the point.  Not wanting to hurriedly invest in new hardware, I downloaded the Kindle reader for my computer, as well as the Kindle app for my Droid smartphone.  I already do quite a bit of reading on the go via my phone, mostly through Google Reader and various mobile news sites (anytime the Washington Post wishes to adopt a better mobile site format, it would be welcome).

While I’m not wild about reading long-form works on my laptop any more than I already do, I’ve found the Android reader to work quite nicely.  The added advantage of not being entirely reliant on a wireless signal while underground on the Metro is an added bonus.  I already carry my phone with me all the time, thus there is no need to haul along another device.

Converting to e-books isn’t completely without remorse.  Alon Levy noted (in the comments) his refusal to buy an e-book, noting “they are to browsing at a bookstore what driving is to walking on a commercial street.” Given recent discussions in DC about the loss of third places (that just so happen to sell hardcopy books – not without a bit of irony, given B&N’s foray into e-readers as well), this isn’t a change to take lightly.  At the same time, I’m sure Ryan Avent would note that rapidly increasing rents for your local bookstore are a more worthy culprit – as well as the fact that the innovation that takes place in cities can often be disruptive.