urban cartography

The CDM and building sustainable cities

Now even George W. acknowledges that the world needs to “confront the serious challenge of global climate change”. The scientific consensus is that if present trends continue, the world is due for a 1.4 to 5.8ºC warming by 2100. The current international policy response is embodied in the Kyoto Protocol, which sets binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions. One part of the Protocol, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), allows for emissions trading between developed and developing countries. I’ve been thinking recently about how the CDM may serve as an unexpected new source of funds to finance more sustainable urban development, of which all urbanists should be aware.

In the context of global warming, it is important to realize how massive the coming global urbanization will be. By 2030 there will be 1.7 billion new urban residents in cities, the equivalent of building a city the size of Vancouver every week. The two largest sectors of global energy use, transport and power generation, serve primarily urban residents and industries, and account for almost 60% of total energy use. Therefore the form that this urban growth takes, and particularly its density, will clearly affect energy use and carbon emissions, as has been argued so frequently by compact city theorists.

Consider a city in the developing world with a high population density but little public transit. What public transit exists is mostly motorbike and minivan taxis, with inefficient old engines burning gasoline. Suppose this city, with the help of some significant investment from an Annex 1 (rich) country or investment firm, build a new electric mass transit system, out of light-rail or bus rapid transit. Suppose they finance the switch to a cleaner burning fleet of taxis. Suppose they make sure new settlements in the growing city are designed to be easily accessible to mass transit, reducing private automobile use. A clear reduction in CO2 emissions would have occurred, generating a Certified Emission Reduction. Sale of the CER would cover most or all of the initial foreign investment. Moreover, the city would be left with a more livable, sustainable place. There are two significant hurdles to be overcome if these kinds of scenarios are to occur. The first is the calculation of the baseline (the “additionality”): what would have happened to emissions without the project? A strict interpretation of the Kyoto Protocol says the project should not have happened without the external funding to qualify for the CDM. The second hurdle is financial viability. Several studies have suggested the minimum viable size for a CDM project is one that stores about 100,000 tons of CO2  per year (or other greenhouse gases with an equivalent global warming potential). Only very big projects within cities are likely to reach this threshold.

As a small-scale example of this, Dhakal (2003) shows that a modest promotion of electric vehicle use in Kathmandu, converting all three-wheeled passenger travel to electric motors and 20% of the bus-travel to trolley buses run on overhead electricity, would save 20,400 tons of CO2 annually. As a CDM project to perform this upgrade could claim credit for several years worth of decreases in emissions, the value of the project on the global carbon market might be in excess of US$500,000, which would cover a significant portion of the project.

I believe the CDM may prove to be a grand opportunity for sustainable urban development. Estimates of the potential global market of the CDM have varied widely depending on assumptions, from $3-21 billion per year. Urbanists need to press for a broadening of the interpretation of CDM under the Kyoto Protocol. If even a small part of the global market for CDM could be used to leverage projects in cities in the developing world, it would make a huge difference. In the process, we would also build more sustainable, livable cities. In essence, I believe the world has the technical know-how to build more sustainable cities, but poorer cities simply lack the capital to enact this change. The CDM could be one of the important tools to close this funding gap.

--Hamlet's Dreams

East Dallas Gentrification

The Dallas Morning-News' Rod Dreher makes no apologies for homogeneity or gentrification; he has no problem with hundreds of people - often poor families - being priced out of their old neighborhoods and being victims of the ghettoizing of smaller and smaller areas (and this constant concentration of poverty is nothing new; it's been going on ever since the founding of this city and many others). Notice that he frames the entire conflict as one of progress vs. nostalgia, one of the most intellectually and journalistically dishonest arguments I've read lately, but should we expect less from a writer who gets belligerently defensive when his subtle racism is questioned?

There goes the neighborhood, thinks Jim Schutze. Actually, the Dallas Observer's city politics columnist didn't just think it, he wrote it as the cover story in a recent issue of the alt-weekly. He was talking about the decline and fall of Old East Dallas, a former hippie haven that is being slowly taken over by people like, well ... me. "I am frightened," he writes:

East Dallas, once a funky, diverse refugee camp for people on the lam from the real Dallas and maybe real life, is now well on its way to becoming the one thing none of us ever wanted. A nice neighborhood. ... Like that's a good thing? In the old days we took pride in how crappy our part of town was. It took guts to live here. But that's all gone now.

Nostalgie de la boue, a French phrase that literally means "yearning for the mud," describes a sensibility given to romanticizing what is crude, lower, even degrading as somehow more authentic. Fine, dude, let your freak flag fly. But I've got little patience for this sort of thing.

Schutzism was alive and well in New York City in the Giuliani years. It came from the sort of liberals who loathed the mayor for cleaning up the porn theaters, forcing out the sex shops, and generally making Manhattan a place you might actually want to live. For that, he was routinely denounced as a fascist by the kind of leftie sentimentalists who thought there was something noble about decay and disintegration. Saner heads realized that you don't have to love Starbucks to prefer it to a porn parlor.

Manufactured Landscapes

Via mongrelmedia.com:

"MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is a feature length documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky makes large-scale photographs of ‘manufactured landscapes’ – quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines, dams. He photographs civilization’s materials and debris, but in a way people describe as “stunning” or “beautiful,” and so raises all kinds of questions about ethics and aesthetics without trying to easily answer them.         

The film follows Burtynsky to China as he travels the country photographing the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. Sites such as the Three Gorges Dam, which is bigger by 50% than any other dam in the world and displaced over a million people, factory floors over a kilometre long, and the breathtaking scale of Shanghai’s urban renewal are subjects for his lens and our motion picture camera.

Shot in Super-16mm film, Manufactured Landscapes extends the narrative streams of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our profound impact on the planet and witness both the epicentres of industrial endeavour and the dumping grounds of its waste. What makes the photographs so powerful is his refusal in them to be didactic. We are all implicated here, they tell us: there are no easy answers. The film continues this approach of presenting complexity, without trying to reach simplistic judgements or reductive resolutions. In the process, it tries to shift our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it."             

Urban Jungle Movement

There's a good thread on the "New Urban Jungle" movement over at Metafilter today, and it should generate plenty of interesting discussion.

 the new urban jungle ... is a growing movement led by cities like San Francisco, New York, and Leiden to restore active and vibrant natural systems in urban areas.  Far from the eden-like depictions of nature of yesteryear, i.e. the garden of earthly delights (nonetheless, still attracting some dynamic new christian converts), the movement has morphed into today's backyard and grassroots environmental movement which is more and more a picture of hybridity, compromise, mixed-use, and ultimately, taking nature out of the walled islands of zoos, aquaria, national parks and other thick-walled institutions and offering a different kind of everyday "unmediated" community experience with the new urban wilderness. VIDEO LINK

Lethem vs. Gehry: Fight!

Jonathan Lethem, one of my favorite authors, has written an excellent letter to Frank Gehry, creator of some of the most awe-inspiring and utterly out-of-place, out-of-scale, out-of-his-mind and locally unpopular structures in the world on Gehry's proposed plan for a nouveau Brooklyn. The first of several excellent points in Lethem's open letter, published in Slate:

Brooklyn-based architect Jonathan Cohn's rallying cry: "It's the scale, stupid." The primary objection to your project always was, and always will be, its outlandish disproportion to the neighborhoods around it. None of the array of low-scale, largely residential communities directly adjacent to this proposed "neighborhood from scratch" (your words) want or need such an intrusion. Residents have been enticed with goodies: major-league sports in Brooklyn, housing at a variety of income levels, an influx of jobs. Yet in this case, none of the carrots that have been dangled are worth it — or, necessarily, realistic. Let me quote Cohn from his superb article: "The ambitiously scaled projects of the 1960s failed … because interventions, at that scale, in existing fabric, were extremely traumatic to the urban morphology. This project (now 8.66 million square feet) would be like locating the former World Trade Center towers (only 7.6 million square feet combined) plus Madison Square Garden, somewhere near the West 4th Street transit hub because of all the trains there." With all due respect to your accomplishments, you've not made your career as an urban planner; your emphasis, rather, is sculpted steel and glass. The scale of this project was one of Ratner's company's preconditions for the site; it's not something that originates in your aesthetic. Guess what? It's a huge mistake — emphasis on the huge.

PARK(ing)

Stewf, a friend of UC's in San Francisco, sent us a link to this site recently, and I found it just enchanting. What he had to say:

This urban planning group installed turf, tree, and bench in a parking
space in our neighborhood. Passersby and users fed the meter. Why?
Instant park. Green space in a part of the city that's missing it.

Think you want to take part? Just follow the handy do-it-yourself instructions. With these simple transformations, the Rebar group shows us how any regular parking spot can function as a PARK(ing) spot, and how desperately such slivers of green are needed in the urban landscape.

Form follows human function

MIT’s new Stata Center lurches impressively over Vassar Street, a mélange of surfaces and cylinders intersecting at odd angles. Designed by Frank Gehry, it’s seen as the pinnacle of hip, postmodern architecture in Boston (which ain’t saying much), and supposedly is surprisingly functional inside despite its odd form. I therefore feel decidedly square saying it but I must: I think it’s rather ugly. More than anything, its ornamentation seems ostentatious to me, arbitrary, like a sculpture pretending to be a building. Part of me still believes in that mantra of modernist architecture, form follows function. Politically and spiritually, this at least seems like an honest goal, far more than mere irony and whimsy.

Yet as I’ve been reviewing the works of Mumford and Kunstler, I’ve been realizing how much of modern architecture and modern town planning has been a disaster. Often the scale of the projects has been all wrong, and the projects have not really been focused on human needs at all. There’s typically no respect for public space, no creation of places for human interactions. And they are often just plain ugly, all gray concrete and blacktop, which on our New England winters gets pockmarked with salt stains.

And so I’ve been struggling between these two parts of myself. I want architecture and urban planning to reflect some of the honesty of modernism, and yet I want beauty and even a bit of whimsy and ornamentation. It strikes me that both post-modernism and modernism have same fault, at least as they are often practiced: An utter lack of interest in what the users of the space want, and what will seem beautiful in the context of its surroundings. Form does not follow the true, human function of the building but instead a perverted function set by someone other than the users. For modern architecture, it became cheapness of construction; for post-modern architecture, it has become hip irony; for urban planners, it became moving cars efficiently. The solution, in my humble opinion (as an ecologist who is admittedly not trained in architecture), is not to abandon “form follows function” but to make sure society gets the function it wants.

As a counter-example to the Stata Center, I would offer the Levine Science Research Center at Duke University. It too is in a generally postmodern style, but all the whimsy is directed toward parodying and playing with the lines of the nearby gothic architecture, so it fits right in on campus. It has all the functional traits the Stata Center aims to have- good lighting, large conference rooms, flexible lab space- while also managing to form a large courtyard and quadrangle with other buildings, which are filled with students and staff just enjoying a beautiful public space. It may not make the cover of any magazine, but I'll take it over the Stata Center any day.

-Hamlet's Dreams

DIY Traffic Calming

When the cars whip through neighborhoods at warp speed, it endangers pedestrians and makes living on these residential racetracks mighty unpleasant. No one can better tell of the woes of living on such a street than Ted Dewan, an Oxford resident who lives on a street treated as a speedway. 

Fed up with the situation, he decided to employ his own "folk traffic calming," which involves the use of bizarre and homemade devices to slow traffic. According to this BBC news article, Dewan has used "an 11-foot high rabbit, a big bed (for a sleeping policeman), a Casualty-style fake crash scene for Halloween and the setting up of a living room in the middle of the road."

Dewan says in the article that "there's an element of fun and mischief, but underneath is the ambition to encourage people to re-examine how roads are used."

Unfortunately, these devices haven't always worked as hoped. Evidently, a disgruntled motorist actually ran into his street-parked furniture, after Dewan said the motorist "seemed to be made psychotic by the idea that roads could exist for anything other than him to drive on."

So sad, so common.

[Link to must-read BBC article]

Paris is burning: the concentration of poverty

The riots in France continued last night, albeit at lower intensity than the night before. They appear to be spreading, metastasizing beyond Paris to dozens of French cities, and now have sparked a few events outside France. There have been millions of bytes of text written about the riots already, by many people far more knowledgeable about the situation in France than I. If I can offer anything new to the discussion, it’s just to point out the similarities between the French riots and the riots by African-Americans in the late 1960s in the United States. In both cases, there is a poor class with high unemployment, particularly among the youth. In France, as in the United States, the first response to the riots by the government and the press (beyond anger at the rioters) was discussion about how horrible those economic conditions were, and some token redevelopment projects in the slums were proposed to try to rectify the economic disparity. It’s good to remember, however, that poverty alone does not breed riots. In France today, note that it isn’t first generation immigrants who are rioting, but second or third-generation immigrants, who are generally a little better off. Similarly, in the United States the large barrios of Hispanic immigrants have historically not had problems with riots (with the possible exception of the Zoot Suit Riots), while many of the African-American communities that have been poor for generations seem just as likely to have a riot today as in 1992 (the last major riot in Los Angeles).

A riot requires not just poverty but a prevailing sense of injustice among a people, whether from police abuse or from job discrimination (as in both France and the US). This sense of not really belonging to a society, and not really having any say in the political process, is just as important to the formation of a riot as the economic component. It is, unfortunately, much more difficult to change, which is why governments tend to respond to riots by just addressing the economic component and ignore the issue of racism.

There’s another important lesson that came out of the 1960s U.S. riots and is now apparent in the French riots: the failure of modern urban planning. The French made a decision to construct large affordable housing projects out in the Paris suburbs, and did it the cheapest possible way, using tall skyscrapers that I’ve heard referred to in French as “bunny cages”, to describe how cramped and ugly they are. Similarly, the U.S. constructed large skyscrapers in huge projects in urban areas in Chicago and New York. These projects are now widely recognized as failures. The concentration of poverty, whether by affordable housing projects or more subtle techniques like zoning, multiplied the problems caused by poverty many times over. While newer housing projects in the U.S. and France recognize this and are generally more dispersed across a region, the old projects mostly persist as a blight on the landscape. There’s a real need for a wholesale dismantling of these projects, either physically (by demolition) or socially (by redeveloping portions of the projects). This won’t happen overnight- it took 20 years to build the “bunny cages”, and it will take at least that long to construct an equal number of affordable housing units in more dispersed settlements.

The reason this is so important is that cultural assimilation of poor groups into the broader society, the stated goal of both the French and the U.S. governments, is impossible without physical proximity. Immigrant neighborhoods form naturally for first-generation immigrants, and are invaluable for survival in their new country. However, after the first generation, or in the case of native poor groups such as the African-American urban poor, government policy must enable the movement of people into the broader society. Currently, both U.S. and French policy aim, effectively, to isolate their poor from the broader society, with disastrous results.

via Hamlets Dreams

Biggest Commuter Cities - Where Does Yours Rank?

Les Christie, CNN/Money staff writer, reports on the latest Census 2000 data release:

Ever notice that on weekends you have a lot more elbow room? Maybe you live in one of those cities where the daytime population is a lot higher than at night and on weekends. 

The U.S. Census Bureau has released its first ever report highlighting the differences between the residential populations of various towns and the numbers of people present during the work day. "The concept of the daytime population," says the report, "refers to the number of people, including workers, who are present in an area during normal business hours, in contrast to the resident population present during the evening and nighttime hours."

According to these data, the wee City of Sacramento CA, grows by over 100,000 people during day (about 25%), due to commuting workers. Where does your city rank? [via]

Mississippi Planning "Mega-Charrette"

In the news surrounding Post-Katrina devestation comes this hopeful and optimistic news via New Urban News. The governor of Mississippi is asking Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. to conduct a massive scale design process for the towns devestated by the hurricane. In essence, DPZ and a slew of other firms in the "new urbanism" vein will make standardized plans for the region available for any town that desires. It's basically like getting a free design consultant for each town damaged. That doesn't necessarily mean that every town is obligated to accept and use these services, but it's a great incentive.

Don't Drive-Through East Aurora

Residents and planners of East Aurora, NY, have been diligent about abstaining from big-box development. The importance of maintaining a "sense of place," as well as their dedication to preserve and reconstruct historic sites, has led their planning decisions. Shoot, they've even gone as far as nixing drive-through restaurants! In an article for The Buffalo News, Elizabeth Cheteny, a preservationist and planner, says that East Aurora can be a model for other communities. 

"All too often, developers want to impose faceless, nameless architecture anywhere," she said. "They hit a wall here. We don't want to be anywhere; we want to be East Aurora."

Colonial architecture and the Westerner

I’ve just returned from traveling in Morocco the past couple weeks, and while my mind is full of lots of vivid images of the places, my thoughts keep turning again and again to … architecture. In an earlier post on this site, I wrote about how I’ve fallen in love with Boston, its curvy, chaotic maze of streets that center on important places and squares. I in fact now prefer this kind of arrangement to the more utilitarian, and more boring, grid city. Yet I find that in Morocco my sentiments are reversed!

During the period of colonial occupation the French (and to a lesser extent the Spanish) laid out their own neighborhood in each city, now universally referred to as the ville nouvelle. These were usually near the main gate to the old, walled medina, but in strong contrast to the medina have broad, straight avenues, with columned arcades. Generally, to my eyes the ville nouvelle seem a success of urban planning. There is better pedestrian flow here than in the medina, which generally lacks sidewalks (and cars, if the streets are truly narrow!). The streets in the ville nouvelle provide beautiful vistas of nearby mountains or oversized fountains. And, as Louis Mumford might cynically add, they are far easier to police and suppress than the narrow medina, which may go a long way to explaining the French motivation.

But clearly Morrocans prefer the medina for their shopping and (with the exception of some rich suburbs) for their living. The street network is so complex in some places, like Fez, that even with a map this Bostonian got lost, and yet the residents have memorized its layout. The enforced elbow-to-elbow contact in the medina, while hard for Americans with our huge personal space bubbles, is truthfully far more conducive to personal exchange and window-shopping than the huge arcades of the ville nouvelle.

In the end, I have realized that my love for the ville nouvelle arises out of my fear of the medina, its complexity, its lack of privacy, its overwhelming intensity. And so in some sick way I feel akin to the French colonialists, who must have had the same fear of the medina that I do today. I suppose the truth is that curvy, organic designs are often perfect for locals. Foreigners (in the broadest sense of that term), however, love the straight line.

www.hamlets_dreams.blogs.com

What View of Density?

A co-worker sent around a link to the The San Francisco League of Conservation Voters’ density calculator. The SFLCV is an organization whose mission is to “promote environmental protection participation” through education and legislation in San Francisco’s political system (although many issues on their accomplishments page are state and federal). The online tool they created allows the user to enter a specific density value and see how it changes a variety of local variables. It also gives some examples of what density looks like. A simple, yet interesting tool.

However, I am not certain how useful this tool is in San Francisco, which has fewer problems battling low density sprawl developments as a community like Sacramento. Perhaps something that looks at transit ridership as an alternative means of commuting would be more suited to San Francisco. Plus, it would make Central Valley residents jump for joy as they get most of their poor air quality from Bay Area drivers.

If this is truly about sprawl, they should include some examples of medium density developments and target other Bay Area suburbs that are more vulnerable to sprawl. These outlying areas need far more help, and would benefit more from a realistic medium density of 20 dwelling units per acre (something that might actually get built) than a 90 dwelling unit per acre high-rise that will drive most NIMBYs back to their 1 acre McMansions.

For LA, Utopia or Dystopia?

The Los Angeles Times recently printed an article - For LA, Utopia or Dystopia? - investigating how "prestigious developments" cause detrement to surrounding neighborhoods due to traffic and increased housing and service costs. Further, the article addresses sprawl, car-dependency, the housing-squeeze, and other issues in communities similar to the densely populated, mostly-sprawl, and big-box infested Los Angeles.

The Climax of Humanity

A recent article - The Climax of Humanity in Scientific American - looks at demographic, economic and environmental transitions occuring in this century and how these characteristics are transforming individually, each other, and the world around us.

How Far is too Far?

A developer in Washington DC plans to build 4,300 houses 100 miles away from DC - and 50 miles away from the nearest city. The Washington Post article How Far is Too Far explores the extent to which people are willing to commute in order to work in a city and live in the suburbs, and the social and economic repercussions of this decision.

Cooler Cities via Sprawl?

Planetizen links to Irish Independent article reporting that certain cities have had reduced warming effects thanks to urban sprawl:

Figures released yesterday show that 13 out of 16 European cities studied have seen their average temperatures rise by at least one degree over the last 35 years. And although there has been a rise in Dublin's temperatures of 0.7 degrees since 1970, it have not been as extensive as those suffered by capitals like Madrid or London.

As global warming continues to impact, Dublin's relatively low building density has prevented a build up of heat which has afflicted most of the major European cities in the last 10 years.

Shrinking Cities

The Leipzig Gallery of Contemporary Art, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and Archplus magazine are collaborating with Germany's Federal Cultural Foundation on the Shrinking Cities project - an investigation (by architects, academics and artists) of the physical and cultural/social effects of shrinkage in Detroit, Ivanovo, Manchester / Liverpool and Halle / Leipzig.

Is a Road Diet a Safe Diet?

Road diets are catching on in some communities. No, they are not another "low-carb" fad. A Road diet is the conversion of a four-lane roadway into a two-lane road that will accommodate other modes (such as biking and walking) and provide better accessibility to adjacent developments.

It comes as no surprise when some traffic engineers become hesitant with plans to restrict the flow of traffic since they are especially concerned with safety. And they should be!  No traffic engineer in their right mind would recommend a solution that would put lives at greater risk. However, it appears obvious that a road diet would help reduce vehicle vs. pedestrian and vehicle vs. bicycle conflicts. But what about vehicle to vehicle crashes?

While thumbing through a recent edition of ITE Journal I found a link to this article that presents the results of a study on the effects of road diets on crashes and injuries. The study looked at sites in cities such as San Francisco, Oakland and Seattle. Basically the study concluded that road diets for the selected sites resulted in a reduction of crashes by 6 percent or less although there was no difference in crash severity.

Now I'm not suggesting that every urban street to be thinned for the sake of providing multi-modal transportation. Even this study explained that road diets with average daily traffic (ADT) above 20,000 will result in a greater risk of increasing congestion to the point of diverting traffic to alternate routes.

Nevertheless this effort of studying the safety aspects of road diets has led to positive results, so that we may continue to cut out the trans fats.

Mike Davis Strikes Again

Some of you surely have come across the latest Mike Davis "shock and awe" campaign that hit the blogosphere. He sets his sights this time on Dubai. I think it is a logical step after Southern California. The TomDispatch entry is perhaps misnamed. It goes "a Paradise Built on Oil." But what it's really all about is indentured servitude: the invisible hands that erect what seem to be impossibly tall skyscrapers.
via Archinect

Instant City

In ten years, and with a $25 billion dollar investment, South Korea will have created an instant city for 100K people. Metropolis Magazine has the story. Almost makes me want to scrap some small cities and just start over from scratch. Watch out Elk Grove, CA! Watch out Waco, TX! Cambridge, MA! Berkeley, CA! Ah... I'm only teasing. Well, okay, not about Elk Grove.

First China & Zimbabwe, Now Here: More Eminent Domain Abuse

GWB's "ownership society," my ass: in a short update to last Thursday's SCOTUS decision in Kelo v. New London, I thought it would be good to see which communities will prove that abuse of eminent domain for the sake of private profit will be the rule rather than the exception. I think we'll find far more communities using this decision to simply purchase properties for far less than their market value, and turning the land over to private developers to reward campaign contributions.

This is no different from the (in)famous case of the City of Detroit and State of Michigan, at a time when unemployment in that state was close to 15%, paying to utterly destroy Poletown to build a plant for General Motors - an action which on appeal, almost 20 years later, caused the Michigan State Supreme Court to drastically restrict government right to take land using eminent domain laws - especially when such seizures were primarily to profit private enterprise - in that state.

As of last week, the ironically-named town of Freeport, Texas is getting ready to seize several pieces of property from local seafood companies, one of which has been operating for more than fifty years at that location, to construct a multi-million dollar private marina - because as the city of Freeport estimates, the current $37,000 a year in property tax revenue will be increased to at least $400,000 a year after private development.

Harare, Zimbabwe

Once, for a Planning Ethics and Politics course, I wrote a paper about catastrophic urban destruction. One cause I neglected to explore was the kind of urbicide being done in Zimbabwe. From the BBC:

The homes of some 200,000 Zimbabwean city dwellers have been demolished in the past three weeks, according to the United Nations.

The complex, post-colonial political rationale for this horrible action are described in the BBC article. This kind of city-clearance cannot be allowed to continue. Some people are noticing - but there doesn't seem to be much action as of yet.

Eminent Domain Expanded (or, all your property belong to KB Homes)

For light Friday reading, take a look at the Chicago Tribune article about yesterday's Supreme Court ruling, and learn how it's okay for local governments to take away your home and give the land to private developers in the name of "renewal."

Of course, the image used here isn't really accurate; SCOTUS wouldn't be your new landlord, but rather KB and Centex Homes and other assemblers of houses and commercial properties vastly inferior than those residents were trying to hold onto in this particular case.

A Look at the Other Side

Ever wondered what's behind those private community gates? Take a stroll down to Los Angeles and look for yourself using the viewing platforms installed at various housing developments by Heavy Trash:

What is Heavy Trash? An anonymous arts organization of architects, designers and urban planners, Heavy Trash creates large, disposable art objects that draw community and media attention to urban issues. By explaining a particular urban problem and suggesting a solution, Heavy Trash seeks to provoke dialogue among the residents of Los Angeles.

[via Beyond Brilliance, Beyond Stupidity]

The Dream of Gold Rush Park

Capital Public Radio airs the story of Sacramento's struggle to keep up with its (big) sister city, San Francisco. An excerpt:

Backers say a proposed massive new park in Sacramento would be the city's answer to Golden Gate Park. But is the so-called Gold Rush Park the best use of hundreds of acres of prime land?

Faced with the opportunity to develop a a large chunk of land adjacent to the downtown area, will Sacramento make the investment of a lifetime, or continue on with fragmented development? Also, Comstock's Magazine gives an in-depth look at the advocates and opponents of this movement.

Greenfield Development Looms in UK

50 years ago, the United Kingdom created policy that banned development around its metropolitan areas to preserve agricultural land and undeveloped countryside. These circular areas, known as Green Belt land, are continually under threat, despite the Campaign to Protect Rural England's attempts to save and maintain it. However, foes of the protection of Green Belt land call for its end. Dan Lewis, a writer for the Centre for the New Europe, asserts that preserving this land hurts the economic vitality of the UK, and will ultimately lead to a poorer and less biodiverse nation. Lewis calls the Green belt "one of the greatest environmental planning disasters of all time."

Proud of Sprawl

It ain't easy being proud of sprawl, but Andy is here to tell us why we should be.

Great Interview with Dolores Hayden

This is a great interview with Dolores Hayden about her new book A Field Guide to Sprawl. Her previous books (Power of Place, Redesigning the American Dream) really influenced my decision to get into planning. She has a lot of powerful insights about sprawl and the process of sprawl – historically, psychologically, aesthetically.

I looked at this new book a while ago and didn't think it was anything special. It's like a picture book for planners. Did any of you read it, like it?

Cookie-Cutter Infill

The City of Sacramento, California, attempts to speed up the infill development process with their model-house pilot program. The solution? Homogenation. The pilot program has a set of four pre-approved plans from which interested persons can choose.

The streamlined planning process is intended to make urban infill more attractive to developers who want to build and sell homes in the urban core and for the individual builder-owners trying to build themselves a starter home.

All four of the plans are for modestly sized homes (from 1,500 to 1,800 square feet) that retain the historic character of the neighborhoods where they would be built. Although small in comparison to most new homes, the infill models all come
with at least three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a garage.

And each of the plans adheres to the "new urbanism" design priniciples required by the City.

Read more in the  Sacramento News and Review. Anyone know where else a program like this has been instituted? Or perhaps variations on this theme?

Melbourne in 2030?

The Victorian State Government is trying to look ahead and plan for the next quarter of a century. The result is Melbourne 2030, an ambitious and multi-faceted approach emphasising de-centralising in favour of suburban hubs, extensions to both road and public transport infrastructure and an emphasis on higher density housing (especially in the inner city)  as a means of reducing urban sprawl.

Critics have been quick to point out the shortcomings of the plan (see here, here and here for three different perspectives on it), although this mostly takes the shape of complaining about the parts of their submissions that were ignored.

Gentrification: Don't Believe the Hype

WorldChanges notes a new nation-wide study by Lance Freeman showing that "gentrification drives comparatively few low-income residents from their homes." If the data and analysis are good, does this sink the primary opposition to smart growth - the (faux) criticism that new mixed-use urban development gentrifies neighborhoods and thus further marginalizes low-income residents? Of course, this is not the primary reason that self-identified anti-new urbanism folks have for opposing this type of development in their own areas, but rather a way to deflect criticism by appearing to embrace leftist ideals of equal opportunity and a sensitivity toward their lower-income neighbors.

Green Chicago (in three parts)

I recently was introduced to Mayor Daley's "green vision" for Chicago - one important facet of this plan was the manditory green roof on new construction. Even without the energy savings - green roofs make economic sense because they just last longer than standard roofing technology. Next time you're in Chicago get to the tallest building in the loop you can find and ride the elevators (Don't pay to get to the top of the Sears, it's just not worth it) this initative really is taking form on top of the city.

Meigs Field was an airstrip cushioned between the Windy City and Lake Michigan. It's been closed since 2003 and is now owned by Chicago Park District. But what will they do with a barely accessible 91 acre strip of grass? Bison perhaps? (via a daily dose)

Dixie Square Mall - the infamous mall that the Bluesmobile drove through - is getting a bit of attention from developers even though it looks like some kind of urban forest. See the full metafilter thread. (And stills from Blues Brothers!)

Detroit's Mass Exodus

How can a city survive when it's experiencing an exodus of taxpayers to the tune of 1,000 people per month? It can't. But aside from building a massive wall to keep residents from moving out, Detroit will have to build upon its assets, and make some tough decisions.

Not for Sale

In his two part series, Not for Sale: City's Uniqueness, Mitchell Gordon presses heavily on how the unique attributes of a location are what draw people and businesses in, and maintain a sense of place.

We, at least in part, are defined by our surroundings. If we are to be a unique and interesting people, this will be reflected in the built environment, celebrations, and community activity that we allow to happen.

Read parts one and two from two April issues of Philadelphia's The Weekly Press.

(Almost) Everyone Loves the Monorail

The Green Line, the proposed 14-mile monorail project which would connect Seattle's north-south corridor, has gotten one step closer to finalization. According to Monorails.org, the Cascadia Monorail Company submitted a refined, bonded proposal to the Seattle Monorail Board of Directors on April 6th, which should move the project to a final negotiation stage. Despite opponents' attempts to block the project with a lawsuit (one which claimed that using the auto tax to build a monorail was illegal), the Green Line seems to be on the one-track path to actuality. And speaking of monorail, did you ever hear about the monorail advocate who built a monorail of his own?

McDonald's Goes Local

Project for Public Spaces announces in its April 1st, 2005 online newsletter, that McDonald's is indeed making the a shift to a more community-based fast food organization:

In an abrupt departure from current practice, the McDonald's Corporation [NYSE:MCD] announced today that its 30,000 franchises will now acquire all their produce from local farmers markets. The shift is expected to generate demand for new farmers markets wherever there is a McDonald's restaurant.

The switch to local suppliers is the first phase of McDonald's new strategic plan, which will be ushered in with the marketing catchphrase "Go Local!"

Oh, and by the way, happy April Fools' Day. If you haven't traversed the PPS website in its entirety, I highly recommend doing so now, and then donating to keep the organization on its path to Placemaking. Thanks to Shin-pei Tsay from PPS.

The City

In 1939, a movie was made by the American Institute of Planners that presented an alternative to urban chaos. Is it suburbia or is it smart growth? One may draw their own conclusions as to how this "new city" would have been realized. If the music and camera work don't grab you, perhaps you'll enjoy the entertaining narration. One tasty soundbite from this flick: "You can't tell where the playing ends and where the work begins. We mix them here." Sounds like my kind of utopia.

NIMBYism and Fair Housing

Why it's not illegal for NIMBYers to put the kibosh on affordable housing developments:

On March 25, 2003, the US Supreme Court ruled that city of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, did not violate the Constitution by allowing voters to initiate a referendum to block a low-income housing development. The twists and turns of this complex decision have many people wondering what it means and what is next. In this special report, KnowledgePlex explores the range of opinions.

Why I don't love Richard, FL

Found on Metropolis magazine, Karrie Jacobs discusses the Florida phenomenon of the "Creative Class." I found this line toward the end fascinating:

One cool business district looks pretty much like the next, just the way one suburban mall looks pretty much like the next. And once you start thinking about creativity in terms of class, hipness as a monoculture seems like the inevitable outcome.

Read the full article.

A City is Not a Tree

What needs to be done to fix inhuman urban form? Urban/architectural theorist and professor of mathematics Nikos Salingaros' essay explores and critiques both Christopher Alexander's A City is Not a Tree (1965) as well as the uniformly inorganic "tree" patterened city design so popular among urban planners, instead suggesting a more modular node > module > city model. Essentially, Salingaros argues that we need to get away from architectural modes of thought and see a city not as a single organism but rather as a community or organisms, using the mathematical models usually reserved for modeling complex systems to break down a city into small, organic and interactive pieces. This "parcellation" of the city allows Salingaros to test some theoretical complex-system analysis models, and his results are quite interesting, although written in a dense academic language that was, unfortunately, somewhat impenetrable to me: "the connections responsible for a city's 'life' themselves define alternative decompositions of city form. A clear picture emerges, of a city whose complexity is based on many short-range connections (rather) than long-range connections. Cities need to re-establish a vast number of nearest-neighbor couplings..."

Short Sharp Shock

SFGate's 15 seconds that changed San Francisco offers some insight into how a city's approach to planning and building after a natural disaster can drastically change the character of space. In six sections, each dedicated to a particular project or area of development or reconstruction, the authors profile the marks that the 1989 Loma Prieta quake left on San Francisco's downtown.

Old and Trashy

The archived website of the Big Apple Garbage Sentinel depicts the history of New York City's life among the detritus. One notable fact about the now-defunct Fresh Kills landfill, gleaned from this 10-chapter saga, is that its highest mound was only slightly shorter than the Washington Monument (555 feet). Oh yeah, and also that it was the largest landfill in the whole world (allegedly).

Today, Fresh Kills is filled over and covered with wild grasses. Staten Islanders have been eagerly providing their ideas in a series of community outreach efforts that will determine its future use as it transforms from landfill to landscape.