Tag Archives: Planning

Missing a chance to create a great transit hub – New Carrollton

If you were to rank Metro station areas by some abstract measure of ‘potential,’ New Carrollton would have to be at the top of your list. It’s not in Washington’s ‘favored quarter,’ but as development moves east, it’s well positioned to take advantage of new and old transportation links.

The eastern terminus of WMATA’s Orange Line; easy MARC access to DC and Baltimore; Amtrak service to New York and the rest of the Northeast Corridor. For auto access, you’ve got freeway links in all directions via the Beltway and US 50 into the District and connecting to Annapolis. Now add in circumferential transit: construction is underway (if behind schedule) for the Purple Line light rail system.

Beyond just the transportation links, New Carrollton has land. Lots of parking lots and underdeveloped sites can support much more density – all within a short walk of these valuable transit connections.

There’s the opportunity to transform New Carrollton into a walkable, transit-oriented business district, but some of the Purple Line design choices might limit that potential.

The Vision: Mass Transit ‘Theater’

Start with MNCPPC’s 2010 plan for New Carrollton: It calls for, among other things, making the station entrance a civic place, surrounded by development and active uses. The stated goal is to create a ‘transit theater,’ not just connecting the infrastructure but creating a place to support adjacent walkable development.

Diagram of north side station area (including the Purple Line), 2010 TOD Plan. Note the existing IRS office building in the lower right.

The transit station is uniquely important at New Carrollton. Not just because of the transit links, but because of the development potential around it. While there’s substantial development potential on either side of the railroad tracks, there’s no way to get between the two sides except by going through the station. Even car circulation between the two sides requires getting on one of the adjacent freeways.

Fully realizing the development potential on both sides of the tracks means making the station itself the critical hub for all kinds of circulation. It’s the kind of place that doesn’t just need to function, it needs to be great. The success of the transit station and the surrounding development depend on it.

Executing the Vision with WMATA Joint Development

Complex development projects don’t move fast. Almost as soon as the MNCPPC plan finished, WMATA put out a solicitation to develop their parking lots – and the first phase of this development is just now taking shape.

Just to get a sense of the timeline: MNCPPC published their plan in May 2010. In September of that same year, WMATA and the State of Maryland jointly issued an RFQ for development partners to execute that plan. In 2011, the selected a development team (a joint venture of Urban Atlantic and Forest City).

Negotiations for the full development agreement concluded in 2015, when the developers released their vision for the south side of the station – fully embracing the 2010 plan’s vision. In April 2017, developers signed a tenant to anchor their office component, allowing them to break ground in October 2017 on the first phase.

Rendering of the WMATA Joint Development by Urban Atlantic/Forest City for the south side of New Carrollton

The developers and WMATA have taken care to create a sense of place, meet all of WMATA’s programatic needs (bus bays, parking, etc – documented in this lengthy report) and support a substantial development project. The lengthy partnership between the parties also helps align their incentives.

Purple Line Planning:

The 2010 plan located the Purple Line station next to Ellin Road, reserving space between the Purple Line and the Amtrak right-of-way for development.

Site Plan for New Carrollton – note the provision for future extension of the Purple Line to the south

By the time the Purple Line was in preliminary engineering, the plan called to shift the tracks and LRT platform to abut the Amtrak ROW and position the platform immediately adjacent to the existing Metro station entrance. Bus bays, kiss-and-ride, and short-term parking would occupy the rest of the space between the railroad and Ellin Road, suitable for future redevelopment and with logical circulation for both cars and pedestrians.

2013 Purple Line design, with the LRT platform as close as possible to the existing station entrance; bus bays and short-term parking configured around ‘normal’ signalized intersections.

Original Purple Line design for New Carrollton.

The original concept also included an extension of the existing WMATA station tunnel, new vertical circulation to connect passengers between the bus bays/LRT station to an extension of the existing tunnel to WMATA/Amtrak/MARC/South Side development.

As the Purple Line finally started construction, the contractor and State of Maryland agreed to several design changes to save money, particularly notable at Silver Spring. The contractor also put forward an Alternative Technical Concept for New Carrollton, which the State accepted.

As WMATA is involved in station planning to integrate the Purple Line at transfer stations, some of their Board of Directors presentations have hinted at the alternative designs.

Alt. Concept for New Carrollton, via WMATA. I believe the red box indicates the future north side joint development area.

The new layout limits costs by retaining the existing entrance (6 in the image above) and avoiding alterations to the pedestrian bridge. Bus bays and parking are re-arranged to allow the LRT station and tail tracks to shift north alongside Ellin Road.

Two concerns with the new design: first, the Purple Line platform is now further away from the Metro station entrance, asking more walking of passengers making the transfer. Second, the design doesn’t improve on the current north-side passenger experience – theres no sense of destination. Third, the barriers around the LRT station and tracks (including retaining walls) means that pedestrian circulation to the potential development sites to the north are limited and indirect.

All pedestrians from points north must use either the existing pedestrian bridge or the LRT entrance via the far side of Ellin Road/Harkins Road

Ellin Road’s current condition as a suburban stroad isn’t welcoming to pedestrians, so this hardly seems like a loss under the circumstances. But the potential of New Carrollton as a walkable place depends on the quality of the walk to and from the station.

Most of the parking shown here is part of future phases of the WMATA Joint Development, so this isn’t a permanent condition. Additionally, the developer’s efforts to improve the south side bus bays is encouraging. Still, there’s a big contrast between the importance of place to the development team (as shown on the south side) and the incentives to shave costs by the Purple Line team on the north.

Precedents for DC’s population growth

On the heels of the recent announcement from the US Census Bureau about DC’s continued growth, it’s worth asking how exceptional this growth is. Ask around, and you’ll find commentary about DC’s unprecedented building boom – or about how this growth isn’t particularly exceptional. So, which is true?

DC’s Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development released their economic intelligence dashboard, compiling various economic indicators for the District. The population data from the US Census Bureau is displayed both in absolute terms, but also showing year over year change:

A few observations:

DC’s current trend hasn’t been seen since the 1920s and 30s. While there have been a few years of growth here and there post-WWII, there hasn’t been a decade of sustained population growth like we’ve seen in the past ten years. The longest streak of years with consecutive population growth was over a period of 5-6 years in the early 1960s. In the lifetime of a resident, chances are they haven’t seen a boom like this – only 11% are 65+ years old.

Does that make this growth truly unprecedented? Not in terms of magnitude. Even with that sustained growth, DC’s current boom pales in comparison to the rate of growth seen before WWII. The current growth of ~2% seems paltry compared to 5% or 10% annual growth.

To be fair, those years were the last of greenfield development inside the District; but it’s not a surprise that about half of DC’s housing stock dates back to this era. Those kind of large-scale development sites are few and far between, as the frontier for Washington’s urban area pushes deeper into the suburbs.

DC’s current growth is largely based on the center city and redevelopment of low-density industrial and commercial areas. Without actively planning for additional development and incremental land use change, it’s not clear if that pattern alone can continue to sustain this kind of population growth.

The zoning straightjacket

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

DC is nearing the end of a lengthy process to re-write the city’s zoning code. The re-write is mostly a reorganization, combining overlays and base zones in an effort to rationalize a text that’s been edited constantly over the better part of half a century. While there are a number of substantive policy changes (all good and worth supporting – reducing parking requirements, allowing accessory dwelling units, allowing corner stores, etc.), the intent of the re-write is to look at the structure and policy of the code, rather than look for areas of the city where the zoning classification should change.

Actual re-zoning will require an update to the city’s comprehensive plan (as all zoning changes must be consistent with the comprehensive plan). As promising as the policy changes in the zoning re-write may be, they do not represent any kind of change to the basic city layout – areas currently planned for high density will see more development, and areas zoned for single-family homes will not.

Last year, the District Government and the National Capital Planning Commission worked on dueling reports (see the documents from DC and NCPC) at the request of Congress on the potential for changing DC’s federally-imposed height limit. Leaving aside the specific merits and drawbacks of this law, the planning team needed first to identify areas that would likely see taller buildings if the height limit were to change.

I’ve borrowed the title of this post from Charlie Gardner, to try to show how little room we’ve planned in our cities for change. Even with the perception of runaway development in growing cities, the amount of space that’s set aside for a physical transformation is remarkably small. Zoning is a relatively new force shaping our cities – about a century old. We’re now seeing the effects of this constraint.

Consider the following examples of freezing city form in place via zoning codes:

Old Urbanist – The zoning straightjacket, part II, writing about Stamford, Connecticut:

In general, the zoning maps continue to reflect the land use patterns and planning dogma of the 1920s, with a small, constrained downtown business district hemmed in by single-use residential districts through which snake narrow commercial corridors.

This, if nothing else, seems like a fundamental, if not the only, purpose and challenge of city planning: accommodating population growth in a way that takes into account long-term development prospects and the political difficulty of upzoning low-density SFD areas. In light of this, can a zoning code like Stamford’s, with a stated purpose of preserving existing neighborhoods in their 1960s form, and resistant to all but changes in the downtown area, really be called a “planning” document at all? The challenges that Stamford faces are not unique, but typical, and progress on them, as zoning approaches its 100th birthday, remains the exception rather than the rule.

Better Institutions – Look at the Amount of Space in Seattle Dedicated to Single-Family Housing, writing about Seattle:

Putting aside the issue of micro-housing and apodments, [ed – I wrote about Seattle’s apodments here] what I’d actually like you to draw your attention to is everything that’s not colored or shaded — all the grey on that map. [ed – here is a link to the map] That’s Single-Family Seattle. That’s the part of the city where most people own their homes, and where residents could actually financially benefit from the property value-increasing development necessary to keep Seattle affordable. It’s also the part of the city that’s off-limits to essentially any new residential construction because preserving single-family “character” is so important. And it’s why residents in the remaining 20% of the city can barely afford their rents.

Dan Keshet – Zoning: the Central Problem, in Austin, Texas:

Zoning touches on most issues Austin faces. But with these maps in mind, I think we can get more specific: one of the major zoning problems Austin faces is the sea of low-density single-family housing surrounding Austin’s islands of high residential density.

Daniel Hertz – Zoning: It’s Just Insane, in Chicago, Illinois:

So one thing that happens when I bring up the fact that Chicago, like pretty much all American cities, criminalizes dense development to the detriment of all sorts of people (I’m great at parties!) is that whoever I’m talking to expresses their incredulity by referencing the incredible numbers of high-rises built in and around downtown over the last decade or so. Then I try to explain that, while impressive, the development downtown is really pretty exceptional, and that 96% of the city or so doesn’t allow that stuff, or anything over 4 floors or so, even i n neighborhoods where people are lining up to live, waving their money and bidding up housing prices.

Chris D.P. – The High Cost of Strict Zoning, in Washington, DC:

Across town, the Wesley Heights overlay zone strictly regulates the bulk of the buildings within its boundaries for the sake of preserving the neighborhood character. Is it ethical for the city government to mandate, essentially, that no home be built on less than $637,500 worth of land in certain residential neighborhoods?

The largest concentration of overly restrictive zoning (from an economic perspective) appears to be downtown, along Pennsylvania Ave and K Streets NW. If we value our designated open spaces, and won’t concede the exclusivity of certain neighborhoods, but understand the environmental and economic benefits of compact development, then isn’t downtown as good a place as any to accommodate the growth this city needs?

DC’s height study shows a similar pattern. The very nature of the thought exercise, the hypothetical scenarios for building taller and denser buildings in DC requires first identifying areas that might be appropriate for taller buildings. As a part of this exercise, the DC Office of Planning identified areas not appropriate for additional height based on existing plans, historic districts, etc.

These excluded areas included: all federal properties, all historic landmarks and sites; low density areas in historic districts; all remaining low density areas, including residential neighborhoods; institutional sites and public facilities. Those areas are illustrated in the Figure 4 map below. The project team determined that sites already designated as high and medium density (both commercial and residential) were most appropriate for the purposes of this study to model increased building heights because those areas had already been identified for targeting growth in the future through the District’s prior Comprehensive Plan processes.

Put this on a map, and the exlcuded areas cover 95% of the city:

Now, this isn’t analogous to the comparsions to areas zoned for single-family homes in other cities, nor are all of the areas in red innoculated from substantial physical change. However, it does illustrate just how limited the opportunities for growth are. It broadly parallel’s the city’s future land use map from the Comprehensive Plan, where large portions of the city are planned for low/medium density residential uses (click to open PDF):

The plan’s generalized policy map also illustrates the extent of the planned and regulatory conservation of the existing city form (click to open PDF):

The areas without any shading are neighborhood conservation areas.

All of this should be reassuring to those concerned about the proposed zoning changes, since all changes must be consistent with the comprehensive plan.

The Unwinding: Erosion of our institutions and the concern that you picked the wrong profession

I’m working through my pile of books I collected at the end of the year. I just finished George Packer’s The Unwinding, a book telling the story of the Great Recession through the eyes of several main characters (factory worker turned organizer Tammy Thomas; civil servant turned lobbyist turned civil servant again Jeff Connaughton; truck stop owner turned biodiesel entrepreneur Dean Price) as well as vignettes of famous ones (Jay-Z, Oprah, Robert Rubin, Elizabeth Warren, among others).

The fourth main character in Packer’s story isn’t a single person, but the story of Tampa, Florida. Packer weaves several individuals together as a part of the storyline, including Mike Van Sickler. Van Sickler now writes for the Tampa Bay Times’ Tallahassee bureau, but reported extensively on foreclosures, mortgage robo-signing, and general planning and development issues in sprawling Tampa. Packer introduces Van Sickler, the journalist who once pondered a career change:

When he was covering city hall at The Palm Beach Post, he’d gotten deeply interested in urban planning – for a while he even thought about switching careers, until he realized that city planners had even less clout than reporters.

I had mixed emotions reading this. It’s a shot at my chosen profession that strikes awfully close to home, but also because it speaks to the challenges facing our institutions across the board – not just those involved in planning, development, and all things urban. It’s one of those uncomfortable statements we know to be true.

Packer’s focus on narrative means telling the story from the viewpoint of the characters, rather than offering an overarching analytical framework. This approach threw off Chris Lehmann (“a chronicle of the fraying of our productive lives that shuns cogent ideological or political explanations of the causes of our present crisis in favor of a thick narrative description of its symptoms”), accusing Packer of letting Robert Rubin off too easily for his role in the unwinding.

Lehmann clearly doesn’t prefer the subtlety of Packer’s method, using the perspective of different characters to critique someone like Rubin, rather than state so explicitly. Packer isn’t trying to be Chris Hayes (another good read, by the way) and lay out a theory of institutional decline. Even for Lehmann, however, adding Van Sickler’s character to the story helped provide some critical thinking:

Van Sickler’s story led to a high-profile federal indictment of Kim on money laundering and fraud charges, but the reporter wasn’t satisfied. He pushed against the complacent truisms about the mortgage meltdown that were being retailed by the other prominent outposts of his profession: “We don’t know why, we just got really greedy, and everybody wanted a house they couldn’t afford,” he says, summing up the prevailing consensus in the mediasphere. Van Sickler adds, “I think that’s lazy journalism. That’s a talking point for politicians who want to look the other way. We’re not all to blame for this.”

After Kim pleaded guilty, the United States attorney for Florida’s Middle District announced that more indictments, of far bigger fish in the mortgage food chain, were in the offing. They never came. “Where are the big arrests?” Van Sickler wonders. “Where are the bankers, the lawyers, the real estate professionals?” Packer finishes the thought for him, in a refrain his readers by now know quite well: “Kim was just one piece of a network—what about the institutions?”

Of course, urban planning isn’t separate from the unwinding. The foreclosure crisis, sprawl, and the decline of the middle class are all linked and all have spatial consequences. And these outcomes are all shaped by our institutions, often with substantial unintended consequences. Perhaps that was part of Van Sickler’s hesitation about a career change. What does that say about the planner’s role, both operating within our institutions and outside of them?

How Jane Jacobs killed city planning

I ran across this excellent piece from Thomas Campanella in Design Observer, discussing the deadly impact of Jane Jacobs on the planning profession. Campanella is a professor of planning at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of City and Regional Planning. I share it because I’ve encountered many of the same issues in my relatively brief time in the profession. An excerpt:

And all along I kept wondering: Why did this have to come out of a coffee shop and a classroom? Where were the planners? Why didn’t the town or county planning office act on this opportunity? A moment ago I argued that the public lacks the knowledge and expertise to make informed decisions about planning. If that’s the case, what does it say about our profession when a group of citizens — most with no training in architecture, planning or design — comes up with a very good idea that the planners should have had? When I asked about this, the response was: “We’re too busy planning to come up with big plans.” Too busy planning. Too busy slogging through the bureaucratic maze, issuing permits and enforcing zoning codes, hosting community get-togethers, making sure developers get their submittals in on time and pay their fees. This is what passes for planning today. We have become a caretaker profession — reactive rather than proactive, corrective instead of preemptive, rule bound and hamstrung and anything but visionary. If we lived in Nirvana, this would be fine. But we don’t. We are entering the uncharted waters of global urbanization on a scale never seen. And we are not in the wheelhouse, let alone steering the ship. We may not even be on board.

Lots of interesting stuff to chew on in the piece. I will say that vision isn’t in short supply amongst individual planners – from directors down to new staff – but articulating that vision within planning’s narrowed authority can be difficult.

Anyone in the field (or observing it from afar) should give it a read. I’m curious to hear what others think.

Observations from San Francisco

As a nice respite to DC’s heat, I was able to spend the last week in California – including several days in San Francisco. Some thoughts and observations from the trip:

Hills and Grids: Gridded streets have plenty of benefits, to be sure – but the downside is that they do not react to topography. San Francisco provides the extreme example. The city has even preserved the right of way where topography makes streets impossible. My own adventure to the top of Telegraph Hill included ascending the Greenwich Street stairs.

Surely, relaxing the grid would offer opportunities for a more understanding development pattern. Nevertheless, the spaces along the staircases are certainly interesting, as are some of the extremely steep streets. Such a pattern would not work in a colder climate that has to deal with ice and snow on a regular basis, however – lest you end up like these poor folks in Portland.

Trucks and Buses not advised. Um, yeah.

Trolleybuses: As a direct response to the city’s grade issues, the electric-powered trolley buses are a great solution. The overhead wires for the buses can be a little obtrusive – but they are not nearly as much of a visual blight as the broader patchwork of utility wires strung from house to house and pole to pole.

Zero emissions, but the wires (like rails) do act as a visual cue for a newcomer to the city (like myself) to find a bus line when I need one. That’s a plus.

Signage: Actual signs telling you where you are or what transit line to take, however, are sorely lacking – particularly for Muni and BART.

We can do better than this – the BART platform at Montgomery station. The boarding signs for various train lengths is nice, but not all that intuitive – but actually determining which station you’re at when the train arrives is another challenge entirely. Similarly, on the Muni lines that turn into streetcar routes in the outer neighborhoods, signage at the larger stations is almost non-existent – certainly not useful for a first time rider.

That said – Muni’s route symbology is incredibly easy to understand. Each line is assigned a name (corresponding to the main street it travels on), a letter (as a single symbol) and a color. It’s something I think Metro could learn from as its route structure becomes more and more complex.

Wayfinding signage around town, however, was much better. Kiosks offered maps, highlighted transit routes, and in general provided very useful information – even potential ferry routes, for example:

My favorite ‘signs’, however, where the ones doing double duty – the public toilets:

Granted, the actual map here is faded and hard to read, but the presence of a self-cleaning public toilet in a popular tourist area like this is priceless. Thanks to nature’s urges, I never had a chance to actually use one – but the process seems quite self-explanatory. If not, there are simple instructions:

This particular toilet is from JCDecaux, the same outdoor advertising firm that operates Paris’ Velib bikesharing system.

Streetcars: The F Market line’s heritage streetcars are both interesting to see on the street and also an effective part of the transit network. They’re also quite popular:

One note about these old PCC cars – when you’re standing (as I was while taking this picture), it’s extremely difficult to see out the small windows of these old rail cars to determine where you are – especially with Muni’s aforementioned lack of quickly visible signage. The PCC car wiki page talks about “standee windows,” but these weren’t of much help to me.

From the outside, the diverse colors of the various liveries from around the world Muni opts to use are fantastic.

The liveries include this lovely pastel DC Transit paint job.

More (perhaps) to come later.

Olympic Investments

CC image from marcmo

Several weeks ago, Colorado released an ambitious high speed rail plan. The $21 billion plan would feature two trunk lines: one running north-south connecting the cities along the Front Range, and the other running east-west along the I-70 corridor connecting Denver International to the state’s mountain ski resorts. Colorado’s ski resorts along I-70 are a crucial economic engine for the state, but the interstate is jammed on the weekends. Mountain geography provides an ideal choke point for successful rail transit, as there simply is no room for I-70 to expand, and adding capacity on alternate routes would only induce more demand.

At the Transport Politic, Yonah Freemark notes that such a large investment might make sense for Colorado, but isn’t a national priority. These ideas sneak forward in the absence of a national high speed rail plan.

Enter the Olympic Games. David Williams at the Colorado Independent sees the prospect of the 2022 Winter Olympics as the catalyst to encourage some long-range transportation vision for the state.

Denver was awarded the 1976 Winter Olympics, only to later reject via referendum the funding to pay for the required infrastructure, forcing the IOC to award the ’76 Games to recent host Innsbruck. Thanks to this slight, it’s not certain the IOC would ever award the Games to Denver again – to say nothing of the recent feud between US officials and the IOC.

Nevertheless, at least the prospect of winning the Games has Colorado thinking big and long term. Vancouver stands to benefit from multiple infrastructure investments in the run-up to the 2010 Games, and perhaps Colorado can do the same – even if their corridors are not a national priority.

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…