News // Center for Building Communities

Tomorrow's Cities, Tomorrow's Suburbs

2009-06-02T08:59:00-04:00

Tomorrow’s Cities, Tomorrow’s Suburbs

2006. Planners Press. 354 pp. $55.95

Data hounds will enjoy this book; the rest of us can dig out some interesting thoughts. The two big points are that areas with housing built before 1940 seem to be doing better (pre-recession) than areas with housing built in more recent decades up to 1990, and that a case can be made that sprawl-type areas are less safe than inner cities. (The first point has more evidence behind it than the second.) If you haven’t kept up with the literature, the authors give thumbnail summaries and comments on ten recent viewpoints from prominent folks writing about these matters, including David Rusk, Anthony Downs, Bruce Katz, Myron Orfield, Andres Duany, and Peter Calthorpe.

The authors organize the book around a puzzle: old housing is not “trickling down” in the way it used to, with poorer people moving increasingly into aging neighborhoods. A nationwide trend toward some older neighborhoods booming has been going on since the 1990s. Why? No new federal policies comparable to the New Deal or the interstate highway system or anti-poverty measures have been put in place. The authors think that some beliefs about the safety of cities have changed, and that the small middle-aged houses of the 1950s are lacking in market appeal.

That lack matters, because people can afford to move a lot, and do so. “The economic status of each local jurisdiction is persistently in jeopardy. With an average metropolitan residential mobility rate in five years of 45 to 50 percent between 1995 and 2000, as well as from 1985 to 1990 and from 1975 to 1980, the character and quality of local jurisdictions can change substantially within a decade or less. Each local government, therefore, is subject to market tests about its attractiveness….” {23} Economists tend to think of home buyers shopping among jurisdictions for marginal differences in policy; the idea that they’re catching on to the merits of older construction seems plausible.

Lucy and Phillips could have rattled some windows if they had foregrounded some of their policy ideas. For instance, generations of planners have sought the holy grail of regional government; outside of Portland, Oregon, they have been disappointed and likely will continue to be. The authors suggest that they would probably be disappointed anyway: “More regional land-use planning will not hurt, but planning without implementation will not help. Interlocal revenue sharing, where it has occurred (Minneapolis-St. Paul, Hackensack, and Charlottesville-Albermarle), has reduced fiscal disparities, which is important, but it has not limited sprawl or reduced poverty concentrations. Affordable housing in new developments would need to be a substantial percentage of new housing for many years to have much impact on concentrated poverty” — and it goes without saying (by them, anyway) that no regional government with the power to impose justice on wealthy suburbs is likely to be born. {36}

Another potential window-rattler is the authors’ calculations relating traffic fatalities plus murders to density of population. In the Chicago metropolitan area, for instance, the city itself has a combined rate of 1.3 traffic fatalities and homicides by strangers per 10,000 people. Exurban counties Grundy and Kendall (the latter best known as the home of former US House Speaker Dennis Hastert) have much higher combined rates of 2.5 and 2.1 respectively. Other suburban counties such as DeKalb, McHenry, and Will are comparable to the city of Chicago; suburban Lake and DuPage counties are a bit lower. The authors unfold all the data, so you can also take the same kind of glance at metropolitan Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Houston, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. To the extent that this idea makes it into mainstream thought, the suburbs may be in even more trouble. The authors do contribute five additional reasons (again, pre-recession) why cities may continue to make gains on suburbs.

The book has little to say about design, but the authors are obviously thinking about it. Their final paragraph includes this statement: “Planning and design that create quality places where people want to be may be as or more important than public policies.” {336} To the drawing boards!

The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream

2009-05-20T13:08:01-04:00

The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream

Christopher B. Leinberger

2008. Island Press. 207 pp. $25.95

Several qualities set The Option of Urbanism apart from other books in the field: length (brief), tone (good-natured), and vision (wide-angle). Leinberger sets a high standard: if only every advocacy book included a chapter on the unintended consequences of what it was advocating!

It’s also an ideal book for those who want the big picture into which the impending end of sprawl and burgeoning of walkable neighborhoods fits, and for those who like things explained clearly, such as why much present-day construction is shoddier than that of a century ago despite increased wealth and improved materials, and why most present-day developments look so much alike. It’s not for those seeking detailed instructions on how to design walkable urban spaces.

Leinberger divides the built environment into two parts: walkable urbanism, which consists of almost everything built in human history until the end of World War II; and drivable sub-urbanism, which consists of almost everything built since 1945. (His choice of neutral invented terms is deliberate.) The pendulum has swung far in the direction of drivable sub-urbanism and is now swinging back, in part because drivable sub-urbanism has a tendency to undermine itself and not quite deliver on its promise of freedom and flexibility. The reason is simple: when you add another ring of suburbs you subtract wanted green space from the inhabitants of the previous ring and add to unwanted traffic congestion. By contrast, the logic of walkable urbanism isn’t so constrained: more density and more activities almost always adds to the ideal rather than subtracting from it. (The author even makes the audacious suggestion that walkable urbanism may give NIMBY groups “a reason to modify their generally negative approach.”) {133}

To advocates of walkability, the book’s message is, in effect, stop whining and start doing. Consumers are now demanding considerably more walkable urbanism than is being built, but it nevertheless faces serious obstacles. Market forces alone will not automatically get the job done nor will they get the job done in the best way. Local laws (mainly zoning) need to be revamped; federal subsidies for highways need to be slashed and/or spent on transit; the same incurious financiers who nearly derailed the world economy by packaging good loans and bad together need to be re-educated; and government must harvest some of the price premium being paid for walkability to insure that housing affordable to poor people and to key workers gets built as well.

Leinberger lists three known unintended consequences of the increased popularity of walkable urbanism, and expects more to be discovered as time goes on. They are: not enough affordable housing; too much large-lot single-family housing; and the difficulty of independent stores hanging on as chains move in to walkable areas. His take on the last is uncharacteristically obtuse: “The issue is not whether an establishment is locally owned or a chain; it is whether the retailer addresses the sidewalk in a pedestrian-friendly manner, modifies its offerings to the local tastes, and brings more people to the streets.” {148} Even if one’s urbanistic goal is thus narrowly defined, a locally owned establishment may go out of business — leaving a gap in the fabric — but it will not disappear because of an executive whim in a distant city.

The author combines insider knowledge with the ability to make it comprehensible to outsiders. Don’t miss “The Nineteen Standard Real Estate Product Types” as of 2006. {51} As he tells it, one result of the savings & loan debacle of the early 1990s was that Wall Street got into real estate and commoditized it into standard commodities. (Those who have read William Cronon’s historical masterpiece Nature’s Metropolis will recall that a similar process in the 1850s led to standards for grain that turned farmers from craft workers to mass producers of a product that could be retailed for a known price regardless of where and how grown.) Any product that’s “nonconforming,” i.e. not one of the nineteen, will either get no financing from the big boys or pay through the nose for it.

But over time new standard products can be brought forth. He notes how “lifestyle centers” — which began as bogus Main Streets with retail only, surrounded by giant parking lots — are starting to add second stories with residences and offices. {108-9}

Leinberger draws freely on popular culture, including the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the 1957 episode of the “Lucille Ball Show” where Lucy and Ricky move to the suburbs, and the movie “Back to the Future.” Happily, he does not draw on the bottomless well of snobbery and contempt that has animated generations of critics of suburbia and sprawl. He has no personal issue with the roughly one-third of consumers who still prefer to live where they have to drive to everything, although he acknowledges that climate change and oil dependence may require governments to take a stronger hand in encouraging walkable developments.

The book is optimistic in tone without understating the difficulties. At one point Leinberger compares walkable urbanism to the failed campaign to make the US go metric; that attempted change was far smaller in magnitude than moving away from drivable sub-urbanism. For one thing, “Drivable sub-urban development is simple: it is single-product-focused, all parking is inexpensively at grade, there are few conflicts between uses, everyone knows how to do it by now, financing is nearly automatic, and it is legally mandated.” Walkable urbanism requires design, coordination, financial, and management skills, most of which are not widely available yet.

In his conclusion, Leinberger enumerates five steps that need to be taken: changing zoning and land-use regulations to allow walkable urbanism; educating the financial community; ending subsidies for drivable sub-urbanism; “investing in the appropriate infrastructure, particularly rail-based transit” (which could also be described as adding subsidies for walkable urbanism); and “intensively managing walkable urban districts to ensure that the needed complexity actually happens on the ground.” {151} He makes no criticisms of the New Urbanist movement, but unlike some of its proponents he does not call for outlawing drivable sub-urbanism, and his last step pointedly acknowledges that following certain design rules may not produce walkable urbanism by itself — conscious management may be necessary.

And for policy wonks he flags several times the crucial importance of how the 2009 transportation bill is written: “Only minimal new highway construction on the fringes should be undertaken …. transportation funding should shift to fixing the transportation infrastructure we already have and diversifying transportation investments that support walkable urbanism — transit, bicycling, and walking.” More federal funds should be flexible, and metropolitan areas should have more power over their use, and state Departments of Transportation less.

Expanding Architecture

2009-05-14T11:25:00-04:00

Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism

Bryan Bell and Katie Wakeford, editors

2008. Metropolis Books. 287 pp. $34.95

There are at least two paths to this book. One is to begin as an architect, and wonder why your profession serves only a small (usually elite) percentage of the population, and how to enlarge that share. The other is to begin as a humanitarian, and wonder how architects can do more to alleviate suffering and injustice.

Co-editor Bryan Bell takes the first route in his preface: “Good design has the potential to benefit many more people than it currently does. … But currently the opportunity to create a built environment is reserved only for the very few, the elite, the highest income bracket served to excess by market forces. Designers have let these market forces alone determine whom we serve, what issues we address, and the shape of all our design professions: architecture, landscape architecture, graphic design, industrial design, planning, and interior design.” {15}

Contributor Thomas Fisher, dean of the University of Minnesota College of Design, takes the second route in his foreword: “The United States is becoming divided, like many developing countries, into small number of the super-rich and the majority, whose relatively stagnant incomes place the American dream permanently beyond their reach. However socially and politically divisive that gap may be in the United States, it doesn’t come close to the extremes of wealth and impoverishment or the depths of desperation experienced by billions of people elsewhere in the world. … we may soon find that we have too many architects skilled at designing museums and mansions and too few able to work with indigent people and communities in need of basic housing, sanitation, and security.” {10} (Note that you can’t get off the hook by arguing that Fisher overstates the direness of the situation. His premise could be false without invalidating his conclusion that there’s all kinds of important work not being done.)

A century or so ago, there was a movement in architecture and allied fields that had among its goals change for the oppressed masses. “The modern movement conceived of progress and technological advancement as tools to be employed in the service of social equality,” write José L. S. Gámez and Susan Rogers in their introduction. “Modernist architects strove to create ‘universal’ spaces — rational, orderly, and accessible — that would give opportunity and freedom to everyone.” But “mainstream modernism as represented by the International Style was regarded as increasingly disconnected from the everyday social world.” And especially after the episodes of urban renewal and public housing, “the fruits of modernity seemed to have rotted on the vine.” What exactly went wrong is another long story, although in their opinion modernism was undone not by its internal problems so much as by capitalism and bureaucracy. {19, 20}

Within this general framework, editors Bell and Wakeford have collected thirty admirably concise accounts under eight headings: “Social, Economic, and Environmental Design”; “Participatory Design”; “Public-Interest Architecture”; “Asset-Based Approaches”; “Housing for the 98%”; “Prefabricating Affordability”; “Meshing with Market Forces”; and finally, “The Transformative Power of Architectural Education.” A few expound theory; most describe specific projects; any one might have the inspiring or instructive nugget you’re looking for. (And you’ll have to look, because the book sadly lacks an index.) The focus is determinedly international, including Zagreb, Sonora, and two remote villages in Taiwan, as well as Charlottesville, Atlanta, San Diego, and Oakland.

Almost every chapter has a fascinating tale or new idea, making it difficult to single any one out. Barbara B. Wilson describes the Social, Economic, and Environmental Design (SEED) Network, which offers support and communication among practitioners while hoping to create a LEED-like certification system. (Speaking of being undone by capitalism and bureaucracy, perhaps they could improve on it!) {28} Amanda Hendler-Voss and Seth Hendler-Voss describe an “asset-based” community design program in the Shiloh neighborhood of Asheville, North Carolina, which produced a bus shelter that also served as a landmark and park gateway. {124} If you think that’s a small accomplishment, read the whole thing.

How does one marry community organizing and architectural practice? Maybe the answer is the same as to the old chestnut about porcupines mating: “very carefully.” Advocacy books of this kind often whitewash the day-to-day problems and dilemmas. By contrast, the accounts in Expanding Architecture are disarmingly honest.

Russell Katz (whose activist quest led him to became a developer) reports that he maintained rigorous openness in his work on a green building with 52 apartments and two retail spaces near a transit station. As each design phase was completed, “I put a copy of the progress prints in the local library” and spoke anywhere he was invited. “The policy of openness was hard to maintain, but it paid great dividends. …Sometimes I received extremely negative feedback and was harshly challenged. But interesting things happened as a result of those challenges — for one, the design got better. As an architecture student I faced some tough juries, but those paled in comparison to a skeptical community group or an angry neighbor.” {223-4}

One classic problem is that the people don’t always want what professional designers want them to want. When indigenous T’au villagers were able to rebuild their own houses, writes Jeffrey Hou,

“Against the project team’s recommendations, the homes were constructed almost entirely out of reinforced concrete…. Each building was an attempt to be taller than the next. Outdoor spaces are almost nonexistent, given the large size of the new buildings. There is a seeming lack of hierarchy and coherence among the buildings and building elements, and no particular relationship exists between the dwellings and the larger landscape. … Though visually quite different from the traditional houses, the new buildings still represent the residents’ cultural identity.” {82}

This is not just an issue in cultures exotic to the US. Ryan Gravel recalls visiting Savannah, Georgia, with a friend:

“We were standing on the street near one of James Oglethorpe’s famous squares when she said to me, ‘Does Savannah have a real city?’ I didn’t know how to respond. After all, Savannah’s urban plan makes it one of the most ‘real’ cities in America. She could tell that I didn’t understand, so she rephrased her question: ‘I mean, does Savannah have a mall?’” {141} (No word on the current status of their friendship!)

And even those who arguably should know better, don’t. Gregory Herman of the University of Arkansas and his students “designed, fabricated, and installed operable cedar shutters for all windows” in a prefabricated house in Fayetteville, Arkansas. “After we were finished with the project, a field person privately hired by the modular manufacturer’s representatives returned to the house and permanently fastened the shutters to the cladding of the house. … These very visible changes were like wounds in the design….” {198}

The design disconnect takes different forms in different situations. Kathleen Dorgan (Dorgan Architecture & Planning) and Deane Evans (New Jersey Institute of Technology) note that affordable-housing developers “simply don’t believe that good design is achievable on their restricted budgets. Furthermore, many tend to be much more comfortable working with pro formas, service agreements, land deals, and financing arrangements … [than with] the design side of a project.” Architects, they add, have a corresponding characteristic weakness: cost management. “The capacity of architects to understand and manage costs, never their strong suit, appears to have little prospect of improving in the future,” yet it is crucial in the “unforgiving specialty of affordable housing.” {154, 156}

The authors and editors recognize that expanding architecture involves more than just battling the outrages of organized capitalism and organized bureaucracy. On one hand, architects know things that non-architects don’t. On the other hand, expertise is not a license to rule. There is no simple formula or general rule to resolve this tension, but the recipe includes a lot of interaction, persistence, and flexibility. The successes do seem to have one thing in common: everyone gets changed.

URBAN CLASSICS #6: Great Streets

2009-05-08T20:53:01-04:00

Great Streets

Allan B. Jacobs

1993. MIT Press. 341 pp. $42 (paperback)

How much can good street design contribute to public life? Any book touching on this subject has to steer between claiming too much (physical determinism) and claiming too little (what’s the point?). Great Streets negotiates this passage with aplomb, while conveying information unavailable elsewhere and providing the allure of a coffee-table book.

Author Allan Jacobs acknowledges that social and economic conditions may be more important than physical design. He even quotes architect Dolf Schnebli to that effect: “A good urban street is always good in a context. Its goodness can change — if Hitler is in charge of the city, all streets are bad.” {7} But Jacobs insists that even if Schnebli is right, “Streets still have to be laid out and designed. … It does no good for someone faced with determining the width of a street, the sizes of walks, whether or not there should be trees or benches and where they should be placed, and a host of other possible considerations, to demur and to say that these considerations don’t much matter. Even if they didn’t much matter, the possibility that they might matter at all raises the question for better or for worse.” {6, 8}

Clearly Jacobs thinks physical design matters a lot — otherwise, why write a whole book on it? His main purpose is not to argue the generalities but to provide comparable information about great and almost-great streets for the use of those who are concerned with physical specifications.

Eighteen streets get the de luxe treatment in Part One, with written accounts — often rhapsodic — interlaced with illustrations and diagrams for Roslyn Place (Pittsburgh); Via dei Giubbonari, Via del Corso, and Viale delle Terme di Caracalla (Rome); Strøget (Copenhagen); Paseo de Gracia and The Ramblas (Barcelona); Cours Mirabeau (Aix-en-Provence); Avenue Montaigne, Boulevard Saint-Michel, and Avenue des Champs-Elysées (Paris); Market Street (San Francisco); Monument Avenue (Richmond); Richard Road (Mills College, Oakland, California); Beijing; Bath; and Bologna.

Part Two gives a more image-heavy, bullet-point treatment to 27 additional streets grouped by category: ancient, medieval, central, small-town, residential, tree, one-sided, and more. Every street has plan, section, sometimes even paving details.

Part Three takes a more elevated view, with fifty square-mile maps to the same scale of cities from Ahmedabad to Zurich. (Berlin and Zurich get comparative views from different years.) Jacobs observes that “the scale of older cities is generally much smaller and finer than that of newer cities,” which is something of an understatement. (It’s hard to believe that Venice and Midtown Manhattan are really to the same scale.) Another way to measure this change is the number of intersections: within the mapped square mile, Venice has over 1,500 intersections, lower Manhattan about 220, and Irvine, California, 15. “The newer is almost always simpler, more regular, larger-scaled. Even in a relatively new city, like Oakland, California, the original grid was smaller and more complex than the newer grid to the north.” And as the reader braces for a full-voice rant about the evils of the automobile, Jacobs acknowledges, “Largeness started well before the auto, as the patterns of New York and San Francisco will attest.” {259}

After all this detail, Jacobs returns to the big questions in Part Four. While you were enjoying the pictures, plans, sections, maps, and meditations on particular streets and places, he was taking notes. From them he distills eight requirements — necessary conditions for street greatness. None of these qualities, separately or together, guarantee greatness, but streets without them have no hope of it:

places for people to walk with some leisure.

physical comfort.

definition, vertical and horizontal. This leaves plenty of room for variation, but “the height of buildings along the best streets is less than 100 feet.” This five-page discussion of human scale is the most technical material in the book, but likely the most rewarding for those who are ready for it.

qualities that engage the eyes, notably visual complexity and movement. (Yet, streets with detailed facades can be monotonous too.)

transparency, which usually (but not quite always!) means plenty of windows and doors.

complementarity (buildings respecting each other).

good maintenance — which often translates into the use of materials easy to maintain.

quality construction and design (which need not be expensive).

The author goes on to list thirteen additional features that usually contribute to great streets, but aren’t absolute necessities: trees, beginnings and endings, many diverse buildings, special design features like streetlights and benches, “places” (small plazas or parks) along the way, accessibility, density of nearby population, diversity, length, slope, parking (most great streets have some but not enough by traffic-engineering standards), contrast, and time.

Writing in the early 90s, Jacobs addressed a final question: has technology made cities and their streets obsolete? Perhaps for some, he writes with characteristic restraint. But even so, “Cities would still be desirable for many people. We can build and live in cities because we want to, not because we have to but because they offer the prospect of a fulfilling gregarious life.” {314} So far so good, but bear in mind that cities of choice are almost guaranteed to be less diverse than were cities of necessity.

Prefab Green

2009-05-04T08:16:00-04:00

Prefab Green

Michelle Kaufmann and Catherine Remick

2009. Gibbs Smith. 174 pp. $30.

You know something’s up when a rising young architect’s promotional book features factory-built modular “green” homes…and she owns the factory. Michelle Kaufmann’s designs have been featured in Sunset magazine and one of them — the “mkSolaire” — is itself an ongoing outdoor exhibit at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.

This book presents Kaufmann’s principles in the first half and her creations — the Glidehouse, Sunset Breezehouse, mkSolaire, mkLotus, and mkCustom — in the second. As explained by her and coauthor Catherine Remick, her “prefab green” ideas grew out of a frustrating search for a place to live in northern California, She and her husband finally realized that the green, affordable home they wanted “did not exist.” {16} So she designed it and now she’s selling it and more.

Modular construction, Kaufmann explains, is stronger than stick-built. It’s customizable, and she makes a pitch for designers to help improve its image. She also claims that it’s cheaper: “Our site-built home took fourteen months to construct. The factory built an identical Glidehouse in four months at a cost 15 percent less.” {17} Speaking more generally later on, her list of offsite modular’s advantages does not include cost savings, but she does say that factory-built housing saves time, reduces waste, allows for greater quality control, is stronger, and even requires less gas for transporting labor and materials. (Supposedly workers in the modular factories “typically live closer to work than the average contractor or subcontractor who drives to a remote job site”). {70-1}

Of equal importance (and, so far, more fashionable than factory-built housing) are Kaufmann’s five green principles.

First and most important is smart design — that is, thinking ahead for several purposes: to make smaller spaces seem larger (using outdoor rooms and multifunctional spaces); to produce a building that takes maximum advantage of natural heating, cooling, and lighting; and to produce a building that will be long-lived and adaptable to future uses. {37-44}

Principle #2, “eco-materials,” encompasses a hodgepodge of related ideas. Generic materials that are “renewable” (bamboo), “sustainably harvested” (FSC-certified wood), recycled, and reused, are all touted, but the priorities among them aren’t made clear. Specific materials like green walls and wheatboard are also enumerated. Barely mentioned is the notion (found in LEED and environmental thought generally) that locally procured materials may be “greener” simply because they require less energy to be brought in. Kaufmann mentions the value of long-lasting, low-maintenance materials, but doesn’t elaborate on how this opinion rests on broad issues of embodied energy and life-cycle costing. {44-8}

Principle #3, “energy efficiency,” is in part a reprise of #1, as in Kaufmann’s observation that “simply shading a home from the sun can be the most efficient way to cool it.” {50} Principle #4, “water conservation,” explains that sprinkler watering wastes more than half of the water used. Alternatives include drip irrigation — and a “weather-tracking system” to shut off a watering system if rain is predicted.

Principle #5, “healthy [indoor] environment,” calls for no off-gassing materials and little or no carpeting. It also includes one just plain strange recommendation, given that many of the author’s creations are for exurban sites — air filtration for every home. “If a HEPA filter is good enough for nuclear labs and hospitals, it is certainly good enough for use in your own home.” {55}

Overall, the five principles mix sensible low-tech ideas like shading with techie notions that will be neither green nor affordable when they break down. Absent from the discussion is siting. Is a Glidehouse in the middle of nowhere really any greener than a conventional stick-built duplex on an infill lot in the city next to a bus line? Those aren’t the only alternatives and the answer may not be obvious, but surely a book about green architecture should address the question.

Kaufmann is at her best when she lets us glimpse her mental workshop, acknowledging that building choices such as this one (or the choice between imported bamboo and local wood) often involve tradeoffs. Different ways of being green have to be weighed against one another. “Skylights are tricky,” she writes. “You don’t want to use too many or have them in the wrong places, creating solar heat gain.” {40} Later, she advises balancing replacement and reuse. “Replacing existing wood flooring with eco-friendly renewable wood like bamboo might not be as sustainable as simply refinishing the existing floors.” {58}

The presentation of Kaufmann’s actual designs seems more oriented to potential customers than architect colleagues — there are no plans or sections, and the allure of the featured creations is much more thoroughly presented than their price tags. The locations tend to be well out in the countryside, which again raises the question of green siting.

Denser community development (in projects in San Leandro and Denver) and infill (places unspecified) get a passing glance late in the book. If Kaufmann can emphasize and make a living in this kind of work, that will be a triumph to be documented in later writings. From exurban yuppies to real average people in town — that kind of prefab green could really make a difference.

URBAN CLASSICS #5: The Drive-In, The Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space

2009-03-31T20:28:01-04:00

The Drive-In, The Supermarket, and The Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914-1941

Richard Longstreth

1999. MIT Press. 266 pp. $92.50

Richard Longstreth’s admirably concise history of now-commonplace building types covers more ground than its own title gives it credit for. He carries the story up into the 1950s, and includes less obvious centers of innovation including Houston, Kansas City, Long Island, and Washington, DC.

If you want a condemnation of “sprawl” and everything that led up to it, look elsewhere. Longstreth observes that Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Broadacre City” was astonishingly prescient as to the look of latter-day shopping centers, but he’s less interested in visions and visionaries than in the pragmatic merchants and speculators who inched their way from one adaptation to another on the way from the pedestrian-centered city to the automobile-centered metropolis.

The first step was to break the street wall. But it wasn’t thought of that way. “Filling stations” had to get gas and oil into cars somehow. Putting pumps at the curb was problematic for many reasons; putting them on the alley made it hard to attract customers; putting them indoors would be at best cumbersome and expensive. Therefore “property frontage was left open so that motorists could pull off the street and maneuver on the premises. …Since the building needed to be no more than an enclosed kiosk, it was easily located back from the street.” {7, 8} And so it all began. If anyone had the idea that they were making a major departure in urban design, Longstreth doesn’t mention it. For decades to come, the idea of off-street parking didn’t catch on.

Following quickly behind, around 1914 the Washburn-Walker Company put up the first “super service station,” with six bays fronting a courtyard of buildings for “lubrication, body cleaning and polishing, crank-case cleaning, battery repairs, tire repairs, and accessories.” {10} And all this three full miles from downtown LA on Western Avenue. “The most prominent feature was an ornate, freestanding canopy sheltering rows of gasoline pumps and visually functioning as a gateway to the entire complex. This practice of architecturally addressing the street continued throughout the decade.” It still seemed like the respectable thing to do. {14} The most successful design came to be an L-shape located on a corner lot.

From the super service station it wasn’t a big step to the drive-in market — basically a three-sided courtyard open to the street, containing a variety of small independently owned stores, and often located on a main artery far from other businesses. The author quotes an advertising agent of 1929: “Distance is a negligible consideration; the automobile is a convenient shopping basket.” {38} It’s worth noting that locally owned stores saw the drive-in as a way of combating the big chain stores. {41} Every now and then second-story offices or apartments were tried.

If you’re thinking it’s hard to appreciate all this without pictures, rest assured that the book itself more than satisfies this desire — an especially important function since most of the places discussed have long since disappeared, overrun by the automotive economy they pioneered.

Superseding drive-in markets during the 1930s were supermarkets, which originated simultaneously in several cities. Supermarkets were designed for low prices, high volume, and minimal overhead (self-service); all this meant a parking lot was a necessity. They didn’t look like the drive-ins; much of their innovation was internal; but they satisfied the appetite drive-ins had created for one-stop shopping by car.

For the time being, writes Longstreth, “the supermarket reclaimed the street. Frontality regained the importance it had had before the advent of the drive-in concept; but now this arrangement was devised to attract the eye of the passing motorist more than that of the pedestrian.” {81} Ralphs was the dominant player and LA pioneer of the form. Its innovations included open, nonhierarchical space and a single checkout stand. (In conventional stores or drive-in markets the customer had to make her purchases department by department). Once again, local owners paved the way; the Safeway chain, for one, long resisted larger stores.

When Ralphs began a second store-building campaign in 1935, it drew on the work of architect Stiles Clements, who went for a streamlined look on all sides. “Indeed, new units no longer possessed a front in the traditional sense….each store was planned to be seen from all sides so that it would not just stand out as a landmark for motorists approaching some blocks away, but at closer range, would seem accessible and inviting.” {117-8}

Meanwhile the drive-in neighborhood shopping center was catching on. Its compactness appealed to contemporary planners Clarence Stein and Catherine Bauer. But its implications went far beyond. “Pragmatism guided the development,” concludes Longstreth. “Yet the collective results were revolutionary.” {180} No doubt the road back will be the same.

Genius of the European Square

2009-03-17T09:27:00-04:00

Genius of the European Square: How Europe’s traditional multi-functional squares suport social life and civic engagement: A guide for city officials, planners, architects and community leaders in North America and Europe

Suzanne H. Crowhurst Lennard and Henry L. Lennard

2008. Gondolier Press, International Making Cities Livable Council. 232 pp. $49

Suzanne H. Crowhurst Lennard and the late Henry L. Lennard’s Genius of the European Square is a heartfelt tribute to a medieval innovation in urban space — “the most important invention of city-making.” {15} While beautiful, the book is no substitute for being there. And while fervently expressed, it’s no substitute for a more systematic consideration of this embattled and perhaps endangered architectural form.

“The key to a livable city,” the authors write, “is its public realm…. If we want to understand how to make public places that reduce social isolation, teach children social skills, foster community and civic engagement, we must look at the traditional, multi-functional European square. From its first appearance in Ancient Athens as the ‘agora’ until the present, the traditional European square has functioned as a catalyst for democracy and civic engagement because of its power to draw people together and generate social life.” {7} Of course, these places need not be geometrically square, and many aren’t.

The book condenses thirty years of observant travel into 28 chapters arranged in three sections:

“Genius of the European Square,” which takes up such square-related themes as community, democracy, building uses, urban fabric, and transportation policy;

“Celebrating European Squares” (by far the largest part of the book) with chapters on five squares in Italy, three each in Germany and the Czech Republic, two each in the Low Countries and France, and one each in Spain and Poland; and

“Evaluating the Square Today,” where the authors attempt to distill the lessons learned into 41 principles for designing multifunctional European-style squares in the United States.

The authors’ architectural and urban design recommendations in the final section are familiar and hard to fault: mix uses that serve residents, exclude motorized vehicles within reason, no single-use areas, and no stylistically jarring or out-of-scale buildings to destroy the sense of being in a comfortable and well-proportioned outdoor room. They emphasize the importance of key retailers, namely “bakeries, pharmacies, groceries, delicatessens, and newspaper stalls.” {51} In fact, although they strongly favor squares’ having both civic and commercial uses, they acknowledge the supremacy of the farmers’ market: “It is more powerful than any other activity on the square, more potent than the square’s design characteristics, and even more influential than surrounding buildings and building uses.” {68}

Although it could be viewed as a bit off-topic, the authors also squeeze in their uncompromising verdict on new urbanist developments as so far practiced: “The lack of true urban fabric and the emphasis on formal design rather than multi-functionality will still prevent them from reaching their potential as catalysts for community engagement.” {213}

Less persuasive are the authors’ analysis and rationale. They associate squares with democracy and imply that the demise of the square as a meeting place for locals might threaten democratic government itself. But even the correlation (not to mention the direction of any causal arrow) seems shaky based on their own evidence. Some squares played a part in the development of urban self-government, notably in Italian city-states; but Plaza Mayor in Salamanca — which they describe as “one of the world’s liveliest and most successful urban spaces” — was built only on the sufferance of King Philip V, and designed to provide “a splendid reflection of the power and grandeur of the monarchy.” {167} If anything, Salamanca’s story suggests that the square has been the plaything of larger social forces: in 1954, the square had fostered democracy to such an extent that Salamanca University awarded an honorary doctorate to the fascist dictator Francisco Franco. For this purpose the plaza was asphalted, and spent the following three decades as a parking lot. {169} (Seven sequential photographs show how many different guises the square has donned just since 1867.)

The authors maintain an admirably tight focus on their subject, but that makes it difficult to tell whether their recipe for square-based urbanism will turn out well. In the past, the viability of urban squares as incubators of public life has depended on people having limited options. The authors implicitly acknowledge this in their discussion of the Czech town of Olomouc, which now has malls and superstores on its outskirts. “As residents of Olomouc buy more cars, these commercial developments will profoundly affect commerce and social life on the square.” {181} Emphasis added.

In the past, social life in the square was not a choice. Now it is. That may change the equation. The authors are greatly enamored of Siena’s semi-annual Palio festival, with its pageantry and good-natured competition among neighborhoods (contrada), especially the way the festival supposedly brings adolescents into adult society in a harmonious way. “In historic costume,” they “parade through the city playing the drum and singing their neighborhood song.” {97} One would like to hear from some of these young people themselves to see just how this determined provincialism, centered around racing horses on a tricky track, sits with the World Wide Web and transcontinental instant messaging. Is quaint the new black?

The authors’ discussion of tourism is antagonistic and unhelpful. They’ve seen how mass tourism displaces local businesses and residents — it’s almost always more lucrative to serve well-heeled foreign trippers than local apartment dwellers. Venice and Prague have pretty much lost their cities to this economic juggernaut, and the authors’ legitimate dismay spills over into their derisive descriptions of tourists themselves: “You can always identify them [in Venice’s Pizza San Marco] by their shorts, tea shirts and sandals, inappropriate dress for the Piazza’s elegant and romantic urban setting.” {78} Padova’s interconnected squares are “untainted by the tourist industry.” {105} One Czech town is plagued by “mobs of tourists from bus tours meandering around and sitting at the restaurant terraces on the square.” {204}

True, squares crowded with strangers are not hotbeds of indigenous social life. But those strangers are people too — indeed, people who are paying homage to some of the world’s great architectural creations (and, if they’re using tour buses, are causing less damage than if they came in individual cars). Disneyland was built to welcome and withstand such an onslaught, and of course it was never a real community anyway. Even the built fabric of Venice and Prague cannot withstand it for long. But how do you ration history? The authors’ impassioned rhetoric about fighting mass tourism obscures the fact that this is a conflict, not between good and evil, but between two goods.

That may be why this book, thick as it is with descriptions and illustrations and admiration, seems thin in the end. It’s as if there were no cost to having a square and no benefit to anything else. The traditional social life of the square comes at a certain price in mobility and variety. (For example, if I jest and play chess with whoever happen to be my neighbors around my home square, I don’t get to know the stronger players across town or two cities away.) The idea that European squares are unrelievedly good and the alternatives unrelievedly evil is not helpful in dealing with people who appear to have chosen evil for no reason. Sienese are moving into suburbs, and according to the authors may be suffering from increased rates of alcoholism and social breakdown as a result. {204} What were they thinking?

When there was nothing to do indoors and no easy way to travel far, squares were the only social option, and a good one. Now there is a choice. Understanding how and why people may be induced to make that choice in the 21st century will require more than invoking the undeniable architectural genius of the 13th.

URBAN CLASSICS #4: Finding Lost Space

2009-03-16T09:28:00-04:00

Finding Lost Space: Theories of Urban Design

Roger L. Trancik

1986. Wiley. 256 pp. $95.

Before there was smart growth, new urbanism, or a downtown Renaissance, there was “lost space.” Landscape architect Roger Trancik’s 1986 book revolves around this rather plaintive phrase — characteristic of a time of transition, when the gods of modernism still had to be propitiated even as new ones were being painfully born. Trancik described how modernists “abandoned principles of urbanism and the human dimension of outdoor space established in the urban design of cities of the past,” with bad results, but then felt it necessary to add: “in criticizing the form of the modern city, the intention is not to imply that the architecture and urban design of the last half-century has been an utter failure.” {10-11} This would come as news to a later generation of architects and planners who show little hesitation in using the term as a dismissive insult.

The book’s final chapter remains a good introduction to the basics of good urban design. Besides listing five principles of design and four steps in the design process, the author enumerates six close-to-the-ground guidelines for the actual work:

(1) maintain continuity of the street wall,
(2) respect the existing silhouette of buildings and landscape,
(3) prevent building masses that are out of scale,
(4) match and/or complement materials,
(5) respect existing rhythms of facades and spatial elements, and
(6) enhance patterns of public space usage.

Nothing to quarrel with here, although today we might want to say more, or differently, or more specifically.

Yet in other ways, at the ripe old age of 23, this book is already part of history, and no less interesting for that. Of course the case studies (Boston, Washington DC, Göteborg, and Newcastle) are dated. More interestingly, the thought process is unusually explicit because it was taking place during an in-between time. Finding Lost Space is not the Summa of a mature doctrine; it’s a journey in which the author seems to be picking his way with some care, almost thinking out loud, returning again and again to make another run at the book’s central question: What exactly is “lost space”?

The definition changes and shifts chapter by chapter. At first Trancik defines the phrase by enumerating examples. Lost space, he says, is “the leftover unstructured landscape at the base of high-rise towers….the surface parking lots….the no-man’s-lands along the edges of freeways that nobody cares about maintaining, much less using….abandoned waterfronts, train yards, vacated military sites, and industrial complexes….vacant blight-clearance sites….residual areas between districts….deteriorated parks and marginal public-housing projects that have to be rebuilt because they do not serve their intended purpose.” {3}

So far this definition sounds more like a manifesto — “These are bad things, here I stand, come join me.” And if you can draw a big enough crowd, a manifesto doesn’t need a lot of explaining or justifying. But somehow in 1986 the manifesto still seemed to need some supporting argument. So the author took another tack: “Generally speaking, lost spaces are the undesirable urban areas that are in need of redesign — antispaces, making no positive contribution to the surroundings or users.” {3-4}

But of course this begs the question: Who says they’re “undesirable” or “in need of redesign”? Why isn’t parking a “positive contribution”? Trancik is trying to say something, to make a feeling explicit, yet when he does so he falls back on the seemingly self-evident nature of that feeling.

Later on he cites Steven Peterson, who had described “space as conceivable and antispace [lost space] as inconceivable volume. Space can be measured; it has definite and perceivable boundaries; it is discontinuous in principle, closed, static, yet serial in composition. Antispace, on the other hand, is shapeless, continuous, lacking perceivable edges of form. The Piazza del Campo, Siena is space, while…the Las Vegas strip” is antispace. {61} But again, who is doing the conceiving? And who is unable to measure the Las Vegas strip? Surely it’s still a definite number of feet from the front door of one casino to the next.

And what about parks and the countryside? Trancik calls them “soft space,” exempting them from Peterson’s strictures, and adds, “As a meaningful space with a distinct use and clear purpose, rural space, although architecturally unenclosed, is not lost space. Enclosure of rural space is derived from natural features of topography and land form, water, vegetation in the form of hedgerows, forests, and plantations, as well as manmade enclosures of fences and stone walls. Therefore the natural landscape can also be defined as positive, structured space accommodating patterns of settlement and human activities.” {89-90} Perhaps, then, lost space is meaningless space with no distinct use and no clear purpose — but while that might include the edges of interstate highways, it would seem to leave out surface parking lots and strip shopping centers, even if their distinct uses and clear purposes are banal.

He goes on to denigrate the mixing of urban and rural spaces, when “both suffer.” Yet it is easy to imagine a contrary suburbanite echoing his language: “Enclosure of suburban space is derived from natural features of topography and land form, water, vegetation in the form of hedges, shade trees, and garden plots, as well as manmade enclosures.” Suburban structure is certainly looser and vaguer than a San Francisco street, but it’s still structure of a sort. Obviously Trancik finds something wrong with it, but if the reader doesn’t already agree, she never quite learns what it is.

In his discussion of figure-ground theory comes another try: “When the dialogue between the urban solids and voids is complete and perceivable, the spatial network tends to operate successfully. Fragments are incorporated into the framework and take on the character of the district. If the relationship of solids to voids is poorly balanced, fragments become disjointed, falling outside the framework; the result is lost space.” {106} It seems like we might be getting somewhere, but it’s still all intuitive — you’re just supposed to know when a “dialogue” becomes “perceivable”, or when a relationship of solid to void is “poorly balanced.” Of course, if you know, then you probably don’t need it explained to you. And if you don’t know, then it’s a mysterious although possibly comforting incantation.

Perhaps the element this book hints at but never quite makes explicit is human scale. As erect bipeds who range around six feet tall and whose eyes are a few inches apart, we tend to be more comfortable with some dimensions of empty space than others. We perceive them more easily than much larger ones, we measure them more easily with our eyes and with our bodies. And as creatures of habit, we tend to be more comfortable in built environs that reflect layers of past time (and hence are at least partly familiar) than in those that don’t. Such things were harder to say in 1986 precisely because modernist thought was still alive then in a way that it is not today, and one of its tenets was that there is no such thing as human nature.

Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs

2009-02-26T07:56:00-05:00

Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs

Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson

2009. John Wiley & Sons. 256 pp. $75.

If you stick it out in the suburbs, eventually urbanism may come to you. Coauthors Ellen Dunham-Jones, AIA, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, and June Williamson, RA, LEED-AP, of the City College of New York/CUNY, want to see it happen ASAP. While they pay much more than lip service to one-lot-at-a-time infill, they also defend big projects occupying 40 acres or more:

“We contend that….the zoning codes and land use practices that produced the conventional suburban form of the twentieth century are simply too entrenched and pervasive for piecemeal, incremental projects.” {viii} Whatever will reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is their mantra, since that saves people money, builds community, reduces pollution, and cuts greenhouse gas emissions.

The authors’ sharp wits cut them a path through the jungle of egotism and controversy surrounding their subject. Their book’s two-part strucutre has its own pleasing asymmetry. The first part, “The Argument,” contains one chapter that sets the stage and introduces their terminology. The second part, “The Examples,” contains eleven chapters alternating between more general discussion and close-up analysis of case studies.

In turn they take up the various suburban landscapes that need retrofitting: garden apartments and residential subdivisions (case study: Levittown); commercial strips (case study: Mashpee Commons); regional malls (case studies: Cottonwood in Utah, Belmar in Colorado); edge city infill (case study: downtown Kendall/Dadeland); and office and industrial parks (case study: University Town Center in Prince George’s County, Maryland). These are not easygoing quick-draw case studies. Among other things, they include figure-ground diagrams of the same place spaced 20-40 years apart, showing which patterns resist change over time and which do not. The authors are no longer crying in the wilderness, they’re documenting and spurring on an established trend.

But is this a trend toward real urbanism? The authors warn against cheap shots. It’s easy to compare suburban retrofits to real cities, and find the reconstructed suburbs still “lacking the culture, excitement, diversity, conflict, grit, and suffering that coexist in core cities.” But they’re not core cities, they’re hybrids, neither prototypically suburban or urban. For example, they have
suburban parking ratios and urban streetscapes, privately owned public spaces, urban building types filled with suburban chain retail, new single-ownership parcels masked to appear old and multiparceled, transit orientation and auto dependency, local placemaking by national developers and designers.

But are these irreconcilable contradictions or evolving tensions? Is the glass half full or half empty? More to the point, is the glass continuing to fill? Time will tell. The authors, however, stoutly defend what’s happened to this point. “Although instant cities and suburban retrofits are neither as sustainable nor as urban as older established cities, they are more sustainable and more urban than the conditions they have replaced.” {14}

The authors also defend their emphasis on suburbs, for fix-the-worst-first reasons: “The focus for redevelopment should be those parts of the metropolis with the highest auto dependency and VMT, highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions and per capita runoff, and least diverse social, housing, and transportation choices.” {231} Of course these will also be the places where, at first, the glass may not even be quite half full. And the question remains, as they acknowledge, whether the urban glass will continue to fill, or will it halt halfway, blocked by NIMBYism centered on resisting diversity.

The authors’ detailed research is as thorough and provocative as their thinking. In a discussion of a development outside Charlotte, we learn that Whole Foods can be a breakthrough tenant, causing NIMBYism to melt away — but the giant organic retailer has its own unsavory baggage. “Whole Foods comes into a suburban project with a laundry list of nonnegotiable, antiurban demands…. In this case, Whole Foods required an exact number of dedicated parking stalls, configured to discourage shoppers from visiting other retailers while parked in their lot.” {35}

Big thoughts, small details, and ways to keep the process moving — this book has it all.

Urban Transformations: Understanding City Design and Form

2009-02-24T10:32:00-05:00

Urban Transformation: Understanding City Design and Form

Peter Bosselmann

2008. Island Press. 310 pp. $90 cloth, $45 paper.

Peter Bosselmann’s new book is more like a series of conversations than a sequence of arguments leading to a definitive conclusion. Bosselman starts with seven activities typical of urban design — comparing, observing, measuring, transforming, defining, modeling, and interpreting. Instead of pontificating on these terms, he simply lets us watch over his shoulder (the many visuals are tightly integrated into the text) while he does each of them. The resulting book is unique, at once informal and rigorous, and unexpectedly charming.

Those with some acquaintance with the literature will take heart when he names among his valued colleagues Christopher Alexander, Allan Jacobs, and Dan Solomon. Many of his sentences keep on thinking as you read them; one imagines they might have grown out of that roundtable — for instance, “Cities are not a form of art, but the process of city design involves the art of creating cities that heighten daily experiences, preferably good experiences, but the bad cannot be ignored.” {xix} After remarks of this kind, the reader can proceed with some confidence that he or she will not simply be indoctrinated.

“To Compare” is by far the longest chapter, and in many ways the most striking. It’s centered on 41 maps of world cities (as of 1995), all drawn to the same scale. Among other things, Bosselmann pulls out three places with populations around 7 million (the San Francisco Bay area, Hong Kong, and the Randstad in the Netherlands) and sets their maps side by side. Those seven million people take up amazingly different amounts of space in these three different places. {6}

Of equal interest is different cities’ different scales — Beijing, where in many places “it seems as if a gigantic rake has plowed through the fabric eradicating narrow lanes and small-scale housing, leaving equally spaced high slabs of buildings” in superblocks. By contrast, even Rome’s monuments “are embedded in a small-scaled texture of a very fine grain. … It is not the age of buildings in Rome that determines the scale. The buildings surrounding the historic monuments of Rome are not old; most date from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, the property configurations and parcel dimensions are much older. The ownership pattern of relatively small parcels has been resilient and continues to define the scale of Rome’s urban fabric to the present day.” {98-9}

Because the book is in part an introduction to the subject, Bosselmann does not assume that the reader knows all the implications of a fine-grained city: ""A person stepping out of the National Archives on 700 Pennsylvania Avenue and walking across Ninth and Tenth avenues will reach the entrance of the Old Post Office in four short minutes and encounter six buildings. On a walk of identical length a person walking at the same pace along Copenhagen’s pedestrian street will encounter in four seemingly much longer minutes forty-two buildings." {99}

This point becomes salient in the later chapter on transformation, because the cardinal sin of urban renewal was not simply that it involved leveling whole neighborhoods, but that it assembled many small parcels into single units, obliterating the area’s past and coarsening the texture of the city. That chapter focuses on Oakland’s history as embedded in its early grids and lot sizes, and how alternative proposals for transforming its shaky present make all the difference as to whether they respect and build on that past. Bosselmann admits to some astonishment that the narrow urban-renewal view of efficiency still holds considerable sway in planning circles even today. {219-20}

In “To Measure,” we get to look over Bosselmann’s students’ shoulders, as they seek out “natural experiments” that allow them to compare otherwise similar streets with different income levels, or different densities, or different traffic levels, and try to measure the slippery and overlapping concepts of vitality, livability, and sense of belonging. The students’ hypotheses often don’t prove out, or the results are confusing — this is the real stuff. One group hypothesized that unique and easily distinguishable street forms would produce a strong sense of place and community, but interviews didn’t show this. In a followup, they compared a street segment where the dwellings were set back a few feet from the street with one where they weren’t. “The team found that on the block with transition zones people knew more neighbors and more by name,” but at the same time residents of both blocks gave similar answer to questions about friendliness and neighbors’ concern for each other. Bosselmann writes, “This suggests that the physical qualities of a space do not necessarily influence perceptions of social behavior, even if they do affect the behavior itself.” {185} We’re a long way from dogmatic intuitive statements about how space and community life relate. Don’t miss this treat of a book.

Architecture by Birds and Insects

2008-12-17T18:23:01-05:00

Architecture by Birds and Insects: A Natural Art

Peggy Macnamara

2008. The University of Chicago Press. 141 pp. $25.

“Nests,” writes Peggy Macnamara of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, “are little works of art, built with care and precision, confident and complete.” {xvi} She divides the architectural works of birds and insects into six categories: those made by sewing, weaving, and binding; those made of paper; those made of mud; those made with depressions and mounds; those made by carving wood; and those found close to home.

Macnamara’s 42 exquisite watercolor plates transcend both these categories and the argument whether animals can “really” be architects. What animals can indisputably do is inspire artists, human architects, and maybe even HVAC engineers: “To regulate the temperature of their nest, termites create an air conditioning system. Air enters tunnels built on the side of the nest and escapes through the top.” {88}

Her captions give exact species identifications of her subjects, which range from storks and robins to termites and high-rise spiders. The notes also suggest that nature does create waste (although she does not put it this way). Male house wrens, for instance, build “as many as twelve dummy nests,” only one of which is ever used. Cliff swallows whose nests are severely infested with bloodsucking insects sometimes abandon the nests, leaving their own young to starve. Nature may make a better inspiration than a detailed model. {30, 58-9}

As the architect most like her subjects, Macnamara nominates Auburn University’s Samuel Mockbee, although the work of carpenter ants nesting in an aspen stump also put her in mind of Antonio Gaudi. {xx, 106} Her suggestions for “further reading” include Karl von Frisch’s 1974 classic, Animal Architecture (available in snippet view on Google Book Search), and a much older book I’d never heard of, Homes Without Hands by J. G. Wood, first published in 1866 and available in full on Google Book Search (just beware of some possibly outdated biology). {140-1}

This elegant book is ornamental as well as instructive, and would make a cute last-minute gift if you’re caught short.

P.S. For those with special interest in this topic, a day after posting I learned that Norton has three books (which I haven’t seen) delving into it differently: Inspired By Nature: Animals (2009), Inspired by Nature: Minerals (2008), and Inspired by Nature: Plants(2008), all by Alejandro Bahamon and Patricia Pérez, with Alex Campello on the third.

Creating Vibrant Public Spaces

2008-12-15T16:52:01-05:00

Creating Vibrant Public Spaces: Streetscape Design in Commercial and Historic Districts

Ned Crankshaw

2008. Island Press. 215 pp. $35.

If you want a book that explains why people like traditional urban design, read Ned Crankshaw’s Creating Vibrant Public Spaces. If you just want a book with specific ideas about designing for surface parking that enhances neighborhood and small-city commercial districts, read Ned Crankshaw’s Creating Vibrant Public Spaces. If you want some thought-provoking reflections on the tensions between good design and historic preservation, read Ned Crankshaw’s Creating Vibrant Public Spaces.

Few authors pack this much punch into so few pages. (And if you don’t believe me, you can read the first 22 pages for free at Google Book Search.) Crankshaw, who teaches landscape architecture at the University of Kentucky, starts with a chapter called, “A Philosophical Basis for Downtown Design,” which rests on four basic design imperatives:

(1) Balance familiarity and intrigue, because people want both “a level of complexity that will keep [them] involved in a place and a level of predictability that will help [them] stay oriented and comfortably master a location.” {4} As Crankshaw says, nobody advertises “Visit Our Predictable Downtown,” but at the same time nobody enjoys being completely disoriented.

(2) Balance prospect and refuge, because people want both to see what’s going on and to be able to get out of it if necessary. “A street that affords a high degree of refuge would have a street wall that appears to be easily penetrated and a sheltering edge that continues with few interruptions. A street that affords a high degree of prospect would have reasonable open views along its length and would perhaps connect into other open spaces.” {15} In nature and landscape design, savanna-type (“parklike”) landscapes usually satisfy this need best. (That’s why it’s good for long blocks to have permeable buildings rather than blank walls!) Scary places are those that are all one way or all the other: a sidewalk threading its way between a busy arterial street and a parking lot is all prospect and no refuge, while the inside of a parking deck is all refuge and no prospect. {20}

(3) Maintain a compact mix of land uses with short walkable connections between them — which ties in with from 1 and 2.

(4) Use materials and forms that authentically express various ages of buildings and landscapes. This too is a balancing act, because of the central dilemma of preservation: “Preservation is motivated by the urge to maintain something with authenticity, but the act of preservation creates varying levels of artificiality in the artifact.” {22} Crankshaw describes an extreme case of this — when a 1940s garden club deliberately added to Henry Clay’s mansion an elaborate garden unlike anything there before — but simply designating a place as historic or repairing it begins a process of change. “That physical change will inevitably take away some level of authenticity or genuineness,” he writes. “No matter how carefully thought out, preferences for particular historic time periods, biases toward certain styles, and the building technology of the period in which preservation takes place will have a standardizing effect.” {24} His message as I understand it is not to do nothing, but to be self-aware, and conscious at all times that you are not Henry Clay.

As the book goes on, Crankshaw moves from general principles to specific practices. His historical perspective helps, including the realization that classic downtowns usually date from the 1920s, a time when the automobile had increased local business traffic and caused commercial areas to densify, but had not yet led to the creation of outlying low-density development. And he’s willing to learn from more recent periods, paying tribute to the genius of shopping-center design, and finding ways for downtowns to approximate it while remaining true to themselves.

But expertise and professional knowledge isn’t everything. Crankshaw calls attention to how “designer’s eyes” can miss places valued by local inhabitants. In Manteo, North Carolina, locals identified as important some visually ordinary places including “the post office, a downtown boat launch, and a gravel parking lot that held many town festivals and the town Christmas tree.” {84} Later in the book, when Crankshaw takes up his home town of Winchester, he writes that “As a resident and a frequent visitor, I have discovered repeated patterns of experience that I would have disregarded if looking at the district with only a designer’s eyes.” {110} Designer’s eyes are necessary but not sufficient: a happy and common-sensical medium between modernists’ dogmatic claims to expertise and postmodernists’ dogmatic denial that any such thing exists.

The closest Crankshaw gets to being, well, cranky, is in his discussion of how historic preservation conventions can work (with the best of intentions) against their goal. Successful nominations of downtown historic districts focus on the best surviving examples, and exclude places (often on the edge of downtown) where historic and non-historic structures are mixed up together. “In other words,” he writes, “the area left out of the proposed district is the area most in need of assistance. Along with being a ‘poor representation,’ historically, it is probably a poor human environment in which the few remaining good buildings are isolated by desolate parking lots and leftover space. But the effect of district designation [nearby] will be to allow this area to continue to weaken, even as the designated area improves.” {36} Fix the Worst First!

His most intriguing insight in the later chapters is obvious if you think about it: “Each circulation pattern is a continuum that converts auto drivers to pedestrians and then back again. The point of conversion from driver to pedestrian is a significant change in the experience.” {111} Hence, “The walking experience after leaving a car in a parking lot should be as convenient as the auto access to the parking.” {178}

This thought grows naturally out of Crankshaw’s good-natured approach. Note how unlikely it would be to come from someone who used the antisprawl rhetoric about “designing for people, not for cars.” That language is shrill and inaccurate, intended to disgust, not inspire. As such it works to shut down the creative mind — to prevent it from recognizing that because people use cars, a walkable downtown needs (among other things) good connections between where people park and where they are going. Some will walk downtown from nearby neighborhoods (more, if good walkable transitions exist), but no downtown has ever derived its economic sustenance only from its immediate neighbors.

Crankshaw concludes with a lengthy but deliberately undogmatic set of guidelines for designing streetscapes and public spaces. “Design guidelines,” he writes, “do not remove the privilege of making design decisions; rather, they provide criteria for considering the appropriateness of specific design decisions involved in a project.” {168}

Creating Vibrant Public Spaces is neither a sacred text nor a movement manifesto. It’s a thoughtful, instructive, and inspiring book that should help designers find ways to do better work and enjoy it more.

URBAN CLASSICS #3: Eden By Design

2008-12-04T09:18:00-05:00

Eden By Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region

Greg Hise and William Deverell

2000. University of California Press. 314 pp. $25.95

In 1927 the business leaders of Los Angeles, represented by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce’s blue-ribbon Citizens’ Committee, asked two of the best urban planners of the 20th century for their advice. Three years later, after careful study, Harlan Bartholomew and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. gave it in their 138-page report, “Parks, Playgrounds and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region.” They covered everything from tiny beaches to the entire region of (then) two million people, and they offered Los Angeles something rarer than a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: the chance to preserve and enhance the glorious Southern California landscape that had made their city a synonym for paradise. Their offer was rejected, and it’s no coincidence that other places, viewing the results, have long used Los Angeles as a synonym not for paradise but for its opposite.

“The Region is noted for its many natural charms and its varied human interests,” the planners wrote in their stiff-collar but straightforward prose. “Especially attractive, and especially subject to destruction, are the opportunities offered in the Region for enjoyment of out-of-door life…. with the growth of a great metropolis here, the absence of parks will make living conditions less and less attractive, less and less wholesome …. In so far, therefore, as the people fail to show the understanding, courage, and organizing ability necessary at this crisis, the growth of the Region will tend to strangle itself.” {83}

Strictly speaking, “the people” never got a chance to fail. Few copies of the report were printed, and it was never publicly discussed. After a brief initial announcement in the newspapers of March 16, 1930, it was disappeared, sunk as deep as an informant wearing concrete booties.

Historians Greg Hise and William Deverell don’t put the situation so luridly. They do note that during the months that the planners worked with the Citizens’ Committee, the Chamber’s leaders “could not seem to keep track of the Citizens’ Committee” that they themselves had authorized. Many of the Chamber’s leaders had wanted to seize primacy in recreational planning, but shrank back when they began to realize that would mean a regional authority with taxing and planning powers. “Thinking about an integrated park system, one that incorporated beaches and playgrounds, was one thing,” Hise and Deverell write. “Making the agency that could oversee such a thing was an entirely different matter.” {38}

Hise and Deverell sought out, scanned, and reprinted the plan, along with images of Southern California in the 1920s, and added some 100 pages of history, commentary, and analysis. The quality of the color maps in the original is greatly diminished by their being reproduced in grayscale, but the quality of the thought isn’t. Interviewed informally in a postscript, landscape architect Laurie Olin expresses amazement at the planners’ ability to master the detail without losing track of the big picture. {302} They note, for instance, that the beach at Coney Island had an average of 56 square feet per person “under conditions reported to be unduly crowded,” while on July 4, 1928, the beach at Santa Monica had just 15 square feet per person. {153} At the same time they marshal facts in an attempt to persuade their client to go for a reorganized government and tax structure in order to preserve paradise.

Mountain development drew their attention and (eventually) sharpened their prose: “It costs so much in the long run to adapt rough mountain lands satisfactorily to ordinary intensive private uses that their real net value as raw material for such use is generally far less than their value for watershed protection and for public recreation. Unfortunately in the local speculative land market this fact is often ignored and subdivision sales are made which commit the community to extravagantly wasteful private and public expenditures for converting a good thing of one kind into a poor thing of another kind.” {92}

Nor did they shrink from comparing LA to Paris, which transformed itself at great expense between 1850 and 1890. Now it’s the world’s travel center, they write, despite the fact that “Paris had far fewer economic possibilities, a much less advantageous location, and a smaller population than Los Angeles; and a climate that compares unfavorably.” {131}

The message, as is often the case with environmental issues, is the choice between paying now in capital expenditures (for acquiring parkland), or paying endlessly later in day-to-day ongoing operating expenses (to bail out flooded homes built where parkways should have gone), and paying implicitly in the decreased willingness of people to migrate there. “Study has unearthed no factor which indicates that the people of this Region will be permanently satisfied with lower standards than those of other great communities, .. . The big question is whether the people are socially and politically so slow, in comparison with the amazing rapidity of urban growth here, that they will dumbly let the procession go by and pay a heavy penalty in later years for their slowness and timidity today.” {126}

Some really big pictures are almost impossible to grasp. Eighty years ago “pleasure driving” was rather like “surfing the web” is now — the leading edge of a new and unfamiliar reality. The authors unhesitatingly count “pleasure driving” as one aspect of recreation, along with tot lots and football fields. The possibility that their projected pleasure parkways might get morphed into sterile interstate highways doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. Olin observes wonderingly, “Even the most thoughtful, environmentally conscious, prescient people in America had no idea of the transformative nature of the automobile.” {303}

Still, the idea of parkways that ran through linear parks in flood zones remains cutting-edge almost a century later. Less so is their idea of walling in the Santa Monica harbor with a trafficway. {158, 298}

For lovers and would-be lovers of LA, the words and images are a treasure trove of recovered knowledge, the kind that it almost hurts to have. For planners and designers, they’re “a textbook example of the distance that separates a plan, a vision of the future, from its realization.” {53} Dark as it was kept, even this plan influenced future work in the area. Professionals to the last, Olmsted and Bartholomew didn’t withdraw in disgust, they drew on the knowledge gained and kept working.

Connoisseurs of the planning process in growing cities may see the book from a different angle: it’s also the story of a sales pitch gone awry, a deal undone, a long-term investment plan turned down in favor of a long series of nights on the town. Olin puts it most crisply: “Great clients rise to the occasion.” {309}

And lest we find it too easy to look down our noses at the long-gone leaders of a booming city, Olin adds some perspective. Back in the 19th century, cities like New York and Boston and Chicago “bonded themselves heavily to undertake these projects [such as Central Park], projects they considered important public deeds or public works. But now cities aren’t doing that. Cities today aren’t putting themselves in hock to build public parks the way they did when the Olmsted office was active. … If the public wants this public good, the public has to get involved.” {306-7} These days we seem to want something for nothing. And like LA, nothing may just be what we get.

The Social Impacts of Urban Containment

2008-11-23T16:36:01-05:00

The Social Impacts of Urban Containment

Arthur C. Nelson, Casey J. Dawkins, and Thomas W. Sanchez
2007. Ashgate. 174 pp. $99.95.

Three experts from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University have gathered and updated their research of almost 20 years and assembled what they call “a coherent argument that urban containment planning and policies may make society better off than the status quo” of largely unregulated urban expansion. {xi} The authors distinguish various forms, but “all containment schemes have one thing in common: a line drawn on a map clearly separating urban from rural land uses through urban growth boundaries, urban service limits, greenbelts, or other means.” {xv} Their specific research points:

Urban containment has not accelerated gentrification in Portland, Oregon — a city where containment has long been policy — “at least into the early 2000s.” {Chapter 5, 71-81}

Urban containment policies seem to have speeded the pace of racial desegregation. The contrast between Portland and Kansas City is instructive. {Chapter 6, 83-92}

“Urban containment is associated with higher housing prices, but also with higher supplies of affordable rental housing” — at least in places where metropolitan-wide containment has been coordinated with metropolitan affordable housing programs. Containment policies that don’t extend across a whole metropolitan region — as in Boulder, Colorado, and Montgomery County, Maryland — seem less likely to increase supplies of affordable housing. {Chapter 7, 93-101}

“Adjusted for population size, metropolitan areas with urban containment had 30 percent more new construction than uncontained areas. The entire difference appears to be attributable to rehabilitation investments.” The authors acknowledge that this finding could use additional work with newer data and more controls for interfering factors. {Chapter 8, 103-107}

“Central cities located in metropolitan regions with containment programs attracted more development per capita than central cities in regions without containment programs.” This leads the authors to ask, provocatively, “if one effect of this form of containment is to induce the market to pay more attention to opportunities in central cities, is this not potentially a more effective method of revitalization than existing federal programs?” {Chapter 9, 109-118}

“There appears to be a link between land use patterns and public health quality.” This result is described as “preliminary.” {Chapter 10, 119-131}

“On the whole, neighborhood quality of life appears to improve over time with respect to the number of years urban containment is in effect.” Trends in perceived neighborhood quality may take twenty years or more to measure. {Chapter 11, 133-142}

This book sets the standard. Those who favor laissez-faire sprawl policies will have to engage the details of the research it presents (not just this summary!).

Urban Tidbit #5: Should federal bailouts require smart growth?

2008-11-20T16:28:01-05:00

Over at CEOs for Cities you can read economist Joe Cortright’s Driven to the Brink: How the Gas Price Spike Popped the Housing Bubble and Devalued the Suburbs (PDF, 30 pages), read the press release (PDF, 2 pages), or watch a video on the subject (3:50).

The argument, much more carefully phrased in the actual study, is that high gas prices are shrinking suburban housing values and boosting city housing values. The actual numbers are a little squishier. Check out the bubble charts on page 13: the pattern is more obvious in LA and Tampa than in Chicago or Pittsburgh, and it’s not clear if the results will hold up when you change your precise definition of city and suburb. For that matter, it’s not clear how the pattern holds up over time — if, just to take a wild example, an economic panic should reduces gas prices and everybody’s incomes at the same time.

That hasn’t stopped Peter Katz from proposing that official Washington should “get tough”:

Washington, he writes, is “emerging as lender of last resort, asset manager for the wounded American taxpayer, assuming the responsibility for thousands of toxic mortgages on property that more diligent local planners might never have allowed to be built. So why could Washington not advocate — maybe even require as a price for the potential subsidies and loan insurance it may offer — compliance with planning rules aimed at promoting more economically robust, resource-efficient communities? Indeed, with solid place-based, home price data like Cortright’s, we now have information one could ‘take to the bank’ in the form of ‘smart growth’ underwriting standards to push qualified projects to the front of the line for speedy loan approval.”

This would be a conscious attempt to do the opposite of what the Federal Housing Administration did in the post-World-War-II era, favoring homogeneous greenfield suburbs over diverse city properties and rentals. (See Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, pp. 204-8.)

And it might be a good idea if the data hold up. But beware the sleight-of-hand. The now-toxic mortgages weren’t questionable because they were out in exurbia. And they didn’t become a financial time bomb until financial wizards mixed good and bad mortgages together in such complicated ways that no lender wanted to touch anything.

Even so, the design question actually remains. In a high-gas-price future, can just any suburb, anywhere, no matter how far away, be made as desirable as an infill location in Chicago with existing transit and retail connections? The large-scale pattern matters as much as the small-scale one. Assuming the Obama-Biden administration wants to get into this issue, those hypothetical smart-growth underwriting standards may not be as easy to devise as it looks from a distance.

URBAN CLASSICS #2 Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies

2008-11-09T22:18:01-05:00

Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies

Reyner Banham

1971. Harper & Row. 256 pp. $22.95. BBC video here

Indoors? Outdoors? In Los Angeles, it doesn’t matter much. This distinction organizes the lives and minds of easterners and architects, but it floats away in the soft Southern California air. But in a subtler form it remains, as Rayner Banham observes in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. “As the car in front turned down the off-ramp of the San Diego freeway, the girl beside the driver pulled down the sun-visor and used the mirror on the back of it to tidy her hair. Only when I had seen a couple more incidents of the same kind did I catch their import: that coming off the freeway is coming in from outdoors. A domestic or sociable journey in Los Angeles does not end so much at the door of one’s destination as at the off-ramp of the freeway, the mile or two of ground-level streets counts as no more than the front drive of the house.” {213}

In a way, Banham knew this before he knew it. As he says at the book’s beginning, “Like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.” {23}

Banham added his book to the pile of Southern California architecture books already on the table in 1971 because he felt the others took too narrow a view of architecture, omitting the exotic and fantastic vernacular buildings, the freeways, and the customized cars. {22, 221-2} Both in explicit words and in its gentle, rhythmic form, his book denies the claim that Los Angeles is ugly and incomprehensible. His four ecologies – surfurbia, the foothills, the “Plains of Id,” and “Autopia,” alternate chapters with four architectures – the exotic, the fantastic, the exiles (the first generation of professionals), and the latest style (the next generation of professionals including Eames). And each of these is modulated by chapters on downtown, the freeways, and transportation.

Banham treats his modernists with a respect hard to find these days, but his book doesn’t overwhelm the reader/viewer with full-color plates piled inside a volume the size and weight of a tombstone. Johnie’s hamburger stand gets the same basic black-and-white treatment as Case Study House 22 (you’ll recognize it even if you don’t know it by that name).

If Mike Davis (writing Ecology of Fear a generation later) growls, Banham gives a sophisticated purr. But Banham isn’t just about purring. He blows away two all but universal misconceptions of LA – that it was created by the automobile, and that it sprawled outward from the central original pueblo. In fact, the skeleton of today’s Los Angeles was laid out by its railroad system, most notably the Pacific Electric’s Big Red Cars. Check out the map on page 80 if you don’t believe it. LA was there, in outline, by 1880, when Henry Ford was still a teenaged tinkerer. {78} “Los Angeles,” Banham writes, "has no urban form at all in the commonly accepted sense. But the automobile is not responsible for that situation, however much it may profit by it.” {75}

Nor did LA spread outward from a once dominant center. It’s the creation of many centers. Again, check out the maps on pages 202-203 if you don’t believe it. “To speak of ‘sprawl’ in the sense that, say, Boston, Mass., sprawled centrifugally in its street-railway years, is to ignore the observable facts.” {203}

Writing all but 40 years ago, Banham had not given up on the suburban American dream (or on the right of others to pursue it). In a characteristically mild way, he proposed that the hodgepodge system that created LA be allowed to continue {139} and observed an analogy in the helter-skelter mix of institutions (public pavement, private cars, obtrusive signage, radio broadcasts) that make the freeways work. {219}

Banham called the intersection of the Santa Monica and San Diego freeways a work of art. {90} But his love of LA and freeways didn’t blind him to inconvenient truths he encountered:

Convenient and fast and pleasant as he found the automobile then, he also wrote, “What seems to be hardly noticed or commented on is that the price of rapid door-to-door transport on demand is the almost total surrender of personal freedom for most of the journey.” {217}

An admirer of Disneyland, he put his finger on its great irony. “One can only compare it to something completely outrageous, like the brothel in Genet’s Le Balcon. . . . Set in the middle of a city obsessed with mobility, . . . Disneyland offers illicit pleasures of mobility,” in the form of transportation options that don’t exist outside of its confines: “steam trains, monorails, people-movers, tram-trains, travelators, ropeways,” as well as steamboats, submarines, and space trips. {127-8}

The classic view south from Griffith Park {170-171} gets a double-page spread. Banham regards this as one of the world’s great urban vistas, but he’s well aware that many regard it as the visual proof of Los Angeles’s dismal nature. Here he slips the knife in gently: “One of the reasons why the great plains of Id are so daunting is that this is where Los Angeles is most like other cities: Anywheresville/Nowheresville. Here, on Slauson Avenue, or Rosecrans or the endless mileage of Imperial Highway, little beyond the occasional palm-tree distinguishes the townscape from that of Kansas City of Denver or Indianapolis. Here, indeed, are the only commercial streets in the US that can compare with the immense length of East Colfax in Denver; the only parts of Los Angeles flat enough and boring enough to compare with the cities of the Middle West.” {172-173}

This kind of honesty allows his work to resonate even with those with 21st-century interest in (re)urbanizing cities. Take a gander at the story of Wilshire Boulevard – a solid commercial streetfront with parking at the rear and residences back of that. Banham sees it as a period piece — “a unique transitional monument to the dawn of automobilism” {87} -– but that doesn’t mean we have to. Of similar interest are his observations of small plazas and pedestrian shopping malls. {152, 156}

Banham encountered a distinguished Italian architect who "doubted that anyone who cared for architecture could lower himself to such a project and walked away without a word further.” {235} This book is his reply. “Any city that could produce in just over half a century the Gamble house, Disneyland, the Dodge house, the Watts Towers, the Lovell houses, no fewer than twenty-three buildings by the Lloyd Wright clan, the freeway system, the arcades of Venice, power-stations like Huntington Beach, the Eames house, the Universal City movie-lots, the Schindler house, Farmers’ Market, the Hollywood Bowl, the Water and Power building, Santa Monica Pier, the Xerox Data Systems complex, the Richfield Building, Garden Grove drive-in Church, Pacific Ocean Park, Westwood Village paseo, Bullock’s-Wilshire, . . . is not one on which anybody who cares about architecture can afford to turn his back . . . at least insofar as architecture has any part in the thoughts and aspirations of the human race beyond the little private world of the profession.” {243-4}

Getting Density Right: Tools for Creating Vibrant Compact Development

2008-11-03T12:31:01-05:00

Higher Density Development: Myth and Fact

Richard M. Haughey, Urban Land Institute.
2005. Urban Land Institute. 36 pp. Free PDF here.

Getting Density Right: Tools for Creating Vibrant Compact Development

Richard M. Haughey et al., Urban Land Institute
2008. Urban Land Institute. 145 pp. $49.95, $39.95 members.

How fast can you revise the American Dream of every family on its own large lot? Pretty fast, if you’re the Urban Land Institute.

In 2005, ULI put out a short book, CD-ROM, and PowerPoint® in an effort to debunk eight “myths” about higher-density developments, such as the beliefs that density overburdens infrastructure and promotes crime. Now, just three years on, ULI asserts that myth-busting is no longer necessary: “In many growing, urbanized communities,” writes Richard Haughey in the introduction to Getting Density Right, “the debate over whether to build compactly – up rather than out – is over. For these communities, the debate is now over where to increase density and how best to encourage, facilitate, plan, and design new compact development.” {3}

Instead of eight myths, now ULI presents eight detailed case studies of places where denser development has proceeded successfully. Of course each place is starting from a different point along the density spectrum, which might make the discussion a bit vague. No problem, though — ULI’s not targeting some ideal density for all to achieve, just encouraging increased densities at all levels.

Each place has taken a somewhat different tack. In order of size: Huntersville, North Carolina (population 40,000), changed its zoning ordinance. Evanston, Illinois (76,000), allowed taller buildings in return for developers’ providing public-space amenities. Plantation, Florida (85,000), enacted a new master plan and zoning for its Midtown District, including a street classification system. (It also allows developers to build fewer parking spaces if they pay into a fund for structured parking.) Ontario, California (170,000), devised a mixed-use plan for “New Colony,” a former farm that will ultimately hold 100,000 people. Arlington County, Virginia (203,000), enacted a form-based code [see review] to encourage development along Columbia Pike, its “Main Street,” which had suffered from not getting a Metrorail commuter line. Seattle, Washington (580,000), revised downtown zoning to allow dramatically taller buildings, effectively reversing a 1989 initiative. Austin, Texas (735,000), established an incentive-based overlay zoning district near the University of Texas campus. San Diego (1,300,000) established five mixed-use villages near transit, each taking a different approach to denser development.

Without making a big deal of it, this book is rigorously ecumenical. It’s about increasing density, not about any particular branded way of doing so. New Urbanism, Smart Growth, and a host of more local initiatives rub shoulders on an equal basis. And the places described in the case studies don’t seem to be micromanaging the details of the new arrangements.

But these policy strategies only go so far. No incentivized form-based code ever created a beautiful building, or a neighborhood with flourishing public life. The authors recognize that density by itself guarantees nothing, observing that “the infamous Pruitt Igoe public housing project in St. Louis and Greenwich Village in New York City were equivalent in density.” {12}

Developers, land planners, and intelligent opponents of sprawl have long favored building at higher densities. Now there’s an opening, well described in this book. But an opening is all it is. Badly designed (or badly managed) dense developments will re-energize those myths.

Even indifferent design may not be good enough. Higher Density Development: Myth and Fact contains a picture of a new development in Minneapolis, with a caption referring to the value of having “eyes on the street” — but there’s not a single person in sight. {20} Without design that actually promotes public life, increased density can be a recipe for trouble.

Planners accustomed to routine approval of sprawling subdivisions have had to undergo some professional re-education to cope with the novelties of denser development. The same may be said of other design professionals. One lesson Huntersville learned was to offer an architectural design book to guide builders unfamiliar with non-sprawl design. In the absence of some such cheat sheet, “Initially developments suffered from a limited number of housing plans and too much repetition.” {36} In Plantation, some developers cut out the middleman, “engaging architects with demonstrated experience in compact development to design appropriate projects that are likely to require less review and modification for approval.” {53}

Even if well designed, compact development could become the new urban renewal — by acting as gentrification with a happy face, pricing out long-term residents and less affluent people in general. The authors don’t address this issue head-on, but some of the local activities described suggest that others have. Halstead @ Columbia Pike, the first project approved under Arlington County’s form-based code, will include 7500 square feet for a free medical clinic, as well as apartments and retail space. {73} Edenglen, the first community to open within Ontario’s New Model Colony, includes both single-family and multi-family residences. {65} Seattle’s new zoning code requires developers to contribute toward affordable housing and child care. {80, 83}

There’s little doubt that a more densely populated America will be thriftier in terms of energy and environmental costs. With the proper policy, design, and management, it will be more diverse, inclusive, and lively as well.

URBAN CLASSICS #1 Ecology of Fear

2008-10-28T16:15:01-04:00

Ecology of Fear:
Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

Mike Davis
1998. Vintage. 484 pp. $15.95

Mike Davis knows all about LA, and he knows that almost everything you think you know about it is wrong. Behind the benevolent Southern California climate lies the potential for all kinds of disasters — and behind those disasters lies a century and a half of systematically foolish and ignorant development choices, choices that have turned a beauty spot into a trouble spot. “Blade Runner” wasn’t nearly imaginative enough.

How can a book with this theme be so compulsively readable? When you really understand a place, you know where to find the inconvenient truths, which are usually the best stories.

There’s the late great Los Angeles River. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. and Harlan Bartholomew preferred to control its flooding by “strictly limit[ing] private encroachment within the 50-year floodplain.” Instead, the choice was to pave “a narrow width of the river’s channel in order to flush storm runoff out of the city as efficiently as possible, and thus allow extensive industrial development within the floodplain.” {69}

Suppressing fire is no more likely to succeed than repressing water. Instead of prescribed burning every few years, we have the CL-415 “Super Scooper,” described by Davis as “a gigantic amphibious aircraft capable of skimming the surface of the ocean and loading up to 14,000 gallons of water per fire drop.” {145, 146} California taxpayers foot the bill so that a few can keep building in the firebelt suburbs.

Try eradicating predators and nature will bite back. Davis unearths the story of 1926, when “an estimated 100 million house mice overran the gritty oil town of Taft” in the San Joaquin Valley — likely the result of predator eradication campaigns that allowed the rodents to breed unchecked. {234-236}

You can’t even pretend to suppress tornados, but you can regularly forget about them. “Although tornadoes are ordinary citizens of Southern California’s ‘normal’ climate regime, they have been persistently construed as aberrations,” usually as “freak winds.” {155}

Suburbanites who move to the wild expect only the tame. “The ideal suburb,” Davis writes, “is adjacent to nature but never directly implicated in it. Wild creatures are no more welcome across the crabgrass threshold of a subdivision than are urban ones. Indeed, in the minds of most suburbanites, the unruliness in the center of the metropolis is figuratively recapitulated at its periphery. It is not surprising that predators are criminalized as trespassers …. [while] the urban underclass is incessantly bestialized as ‘predators’….” {208}

The book isn’t all bad news. Davis pays tribute to modernist architect Richard Neutra, whose 1942 Baldwin Hills Village “consists of 630 row houses and apartments, in five styles, arranged in a continuous S plan around garden courts opening onto three large greens connected by tree-shaded malls. … a superb dialectic between private and communal space … [that] remains one of Los Angeles’s most vibrant neighborhoods.” {73}

You don’t have to agree with all of Davis’s conclusions to realize that he’s on to something; no matter what, Southern California will never look the same to you again.

Reforming Suburbia: The Planned Communities of Irvine, Columbia, and the Woodlands

2008-10-22T15:25:01-04:00

Reforming Suburbia: The Planned Communities of Irvine, Columbia, and the Woodlands

Ann Forsyth

2005. University of California Press. 379 pp. $65 hardcover, $34.95 paper, $15.95 eBook at ebooks.com

“We don’t understand our new urban areas very well,” wrote UIC’s Robert Bruegmann in Sprawl: A Compact History, in part because “many of the individuals who are best equipped to describe them — historians, social scientists, planners, urban theorists — have been so quick to condemn that they have never looked carefully.”

Ann Forsyth, now teaching planning at Cornell, is one of the people who looks carefully, and who’s sufficiently undazzled by current fashions to treat them as ideas and practices to be evaluated, rather than holy writ. Her book ReForming Suburbia: The Planned Communities of Irvine, Columbia, and the Woodlands, is three years old but unfortunately it hasn’t spawned a lot of imitators yet.

Irvine, Columbia, and the Woodlands were the largest and most successful of many new towns attempted in the 1960s and 1970s, and they were born of many of the same ideals that animate today’s New Urbanist projects. How do they measure up? What can they tell us about the ability of private greenfield projects to turn development around?

Forsyth is nothing if not thorough in tackling these questions. At one point, she formulates six different definitions of density in order to compare the New Towns with New Urbanist creations. Her thoroughness isn’t new, but where she points it is. Irvine, Columbia, and The Woodlands, she concludes, "really do what most proponents of smart growth and new urbanism think should be done in urban development and, in this, have distinguished themselves from generic sprawl over a period of decades. Where they have weaknesses, so do the current proposals for a new generation of best practices . . . . They have done better at such tasks as developing systems for incorporating natural processes into suburban development and creating a new suburban aesthetic than they have at providing housing for very-low-income population and real alternatives to the car. They show how providing transportation options does not necessarily lead to people using those options as an alternative to the automobile. They demonstrate that urban designs emphasizing open space, recreation, habitat, and water quality are not always consistent with those emphasizing energy conservation." {271}

In a better world this last point might be obvious: more green spaces = less concentrated population = less feasible mass transit. This doesn’t mean that either green space or mass transit is a bad idea; they’re good ideas that don’t harmonize easily. There may be a design solution lurking here at somewhat higher densities: public light rail or bus as part of a Burnham-like boulevard system, with mid-rise apartment buildings, should allow both ideas to flourish.

Individual villages within these three large developments have about the same density of population as do current New Urbanist developments like Kentlands. On the larger development-wide scale, neither the New Towns nor the New Urbanists meet the density standard that Newman and Kenworthy suggested in Sustainable Cities would be needed to support mass transit. {256} And across the board, the New Towns were larger and more ambitious than more recent efforts.

Forsyth is also good on the many difficulties (which few of us have occasion to contemplate) faced even by very wealthy developers who want to change US cities by building something different. The Irvine family, James H. Rouse, and George Mitchell made their fortunes in industrial agriculture, shopping malls, and oil and gas development, respectively — all enterprises that require “patient money” willing to wait years and decades before seeing any profit. But even patient money must eventually be replenished or it becomes mere philanthropy. Hence, a new town has to be similar enough to old towns that people will want to buy and move in. (Rouse specifically wanted to make so much money with Columbia that its success would inspire more. This ambition was not fulfilled.) And as the new town grows and develops it acquires inhabitants with their own ideas, which often run against increased density or attached housing. “The complexity of new community development is a warning about the difficulty of change, particularly in situations with less coordinated, persevering, wealthy, or influential proponents.” {290}

It does make one wonder. If big greenfield projects are very hard to steer far from convention, perhaps the notion that we have to build big to make a difference may be radically false. It may be that comparatively small-scale infill projects have a chance to make an outsize difference. The buck has to start somewhere.

Visioning and Visualization

2008-10-06T21:45:01-04:00

Visioning and Visualization: People, Pixels, and Plans

Michael Kwartler and Gianni Longo
2008. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 94 pp. $35.

The ever-improving technology of real-time 3-D immersive visualization can give everyone a taste of the architect’s gift of being able to envision what’s not there yet. Specifically, these technologies can empower communities to determine their own future in more detail than ever. That’s the overall message of the new book by Michael Kwartler FAIA and Gianni Longo: these software packages can enhance public participation, not just in “visioning,” but in actual planning, design, implementation, and subsequent fine-tuning.

The fanciest software they describe allows you to “stroll” through a proposed neighborhood and “see” it as if you were there, and then allows you to change the neighborhood and see how the change looks and feels from “inside.” Similarly, it can be used to show, for instance, how the neighborhood would look and feel if its population density were doubled. No long turnaround times for new drawings, no misunderstandings about what someone said at last month’s meeting.

Especially for those not yet deeply involved with these technologies, this book will serve as a useful introduction. Kwartler and Longo are busy developing and using these technologies, and the book’s illustrations do seem to come disproportionately from their shops (the Environmental Simulation Center and ACP-Visioning & Planning, respectively, both in New York City), but in general they manage to avoid overselling. They aren’t, however, always in a position to offer an outsider’s critique of these technologies. And there are at least four reasons critique is needed:

1. This software is not foolproof. In particular, it works better if it’s part of a good public process. One of the book’s case studies describes how an unnamed “lead consultant” introduced three-dimensional real-time visual simulations only after a good deal of discussion had already taken place, and then didn’t explain them well. As a result, “the workshop participants assumed [not unreasonably] that the 3D walk-throughs were being used to sell the lead planning consultant’s conclusions, rather than to inform the community-based decision-making process.” {74}

2. Like maps, simulations condense a great deal of data and a whole network of assumptions about how different kinds of data fit together. They look concrete but are based on all kinds of abstractions. In this regard, the authors discuss the difference between nonverifiable and verifiable digital photomontages. Verifiable photomontages include information about dimensions, density, floor area by use, number of dwelling units (and presumably the sources of the information)—and are accordingly more time-consuming and expensive to create. “Verifiability becomes important,” they write, “once stakeholders agree that the images are what they like, and then need to understand how to implement them.” But verifiability is always important, given that participants need to be able to check whether the visual impressions being provided are trustworthy. Otherwise there’s plenty of potential for sophisticated deception. The authors acknowledge that members of the public who’ve learned to suspect architectural drawings may not be as wise to 3D simulations. They should be. “These prepathed simulations may involve editing, cropping, and the control of the ‘camera lens,’ and therefore ultimately manipulate the viewer’s experience.” {67}

3. The authors wax eloquent in contrasting the rigid factory-like design of 19th- and 20th-century regulations with newer approaches that “are dynamic, embrace complexity, and respond to the flows of available information in iterative ways.” {63} They like the idea of “just-in-time” planning, conceived on the analogy of Toyota’s production philosophy of just-in-time production of parts. The new software’s fast feedback “suggests the possibility of rethinking the land use regulatory structure—for example, moving from static, predetermined zoning regulations to a development code that is dynamic, just-in-time, and capable of tracking change and evaluating changes against performance indicators.” {67} But what’s just-in-time from the inside can be an unwelcome surprise from the outside. How would a developer respond to discovering that a proposal conforming to last month’s rules is now irrelevant because the rules had been altered by an “iterative process”?

4. Like the advocates of form-based building codes, these authors would like their innovation to end divisive conflict. A good process backed with good technology, they write, “saves time and money, minimizes dissent, creates a positive investment climate, and provides an incentive to elected officials to make tough decisions.” {23} Insofar as many people have mistaken ideas about, say, what a given increased density might look or feel like, this makes sense. But most disagreement about development policy is not based on simple misunderstandings. No community worth having is going to be unanimous about much. The very formulation of the ideal is contradictory: if a community-wide consensus exists, why are the elected officials’ decisions “tough”?

The tools the authors describe are here to stay and to be improved. Future books will hopefully pay additional attention to their political and philosophical implications, and what they can and can’t accomplish.