Marginal Activities Belong on the Margins

The New York Times ran an op-ed piece today entitled What Tech Hasn’t Learned from Urban Planning. Allison Arieff catalogs the recent trend of tech companies moving from the suburbs of Silicon Valley into the city of San Francisco, while simultaneously adopting the terminology of urban planning such as town hall, public square, etc.

As she points out, these businesses are often failures from the perspective of good urbanism, given that as they enter an area they take over huge pieces of real estate, thus driving up rents and driving out the local businesses like coffee shops, cafes and restaurants that make up the current life of the street. There’s some excellent photographs in the article, showing these places, once alive with foot traffic, that are now deserted.

While I admire her for calling on tech companies to be more community minded as they move from the suburbs to the city, I think the very idea of tech companies being located in the heart of the city is a bad idea. To quote James Howard Kunstler: Marginal activities belong on the margins. What these companies do is a marginal activity, not from an economic perspective necessarily (because obviously these are multi-billion dollar businesses), but from what they provide directly to the public from their day-to-day activities, yes. A room full of code-monkeys churning out software, websites and apps can never really contribute to the vibrancy of street life, because they will always be holed up in front of computer screen. Couple that with the fact companies like Google offer their employees all of the amenities they could ever want within the company walls (restaurant, gym, daycare, etc.), and you have the perfect storm of anti-social business behavior.

The suburbs really are the best place for these businesses to exist in their current form. Their operations are what I would call the spaceship model: everything is self-contained, so that the employees never have to leave. It’s not sustainable, and we need to replace the Star Trek meets the Jetsons mentality that drives these businesses, but having them move into the cities is not the way to do that. While it is admirable (in a strange, “aren’t you so hip to the aesthetic zeitgeist sort of way”) that these companies want to leave the suburbs behind so that they can be part of the life of the city, they’re causing more harm than good in doing so because they haven’t altered their core operating principles. Urbanism is just as much a state of mind as it is the physical realm, and as the pictures from this piece show, with the wrong state of mind, even the best designed places will become lifeless hulks.

Don’t salute these companies for moving into the city based on their bogus ideals and sapping the life out of the great spaces they’re trying to co-opt. Salute them when they change their way of thinking about how those spaces work. Until they do, let’s keep their marginal activities safely on the margins.

Our Embassies are Ugly

Check out this piece that aired on all things considered:

Our Embassies are Ugly

Our newest Sec of State John Kerry said “We’re building some of the ugliest embassies I’ve ever seen”  Check out this episode of All Things Considered about the importance of designing our embassies to walk the tight rope of form v function.  Build them to be safe or to invoke our national values?

Here is the wikipedia entry about U.S. Embassies with a handy list including pictures.  Interesting to compare the buildings.  Which is your favorite?  Which is your vote for eyesore of the month?

Here is one of my favorites from the wikipedia page:
Would you go here for help?  Would you look to it for help? Or uphold its ideals?  It kinda reminded me of the menacing Elsinore Brewery from Strange Brew:

It also kinda reminded me of the Amazon.com headquarters in Seattle.  But when I looked up the photo of the building, it turns out amazon.com has a better headquarters.

Here is another embassy.  Looks more like what one would expect.  If we are going to export democracy, what do you want your outpost to look like?  Should it look like the white house? Or a bunker?

Sustainable Street Network Principles

2012 marked the 20th anniversary of the Congress for the New Urbanism. Drawing on the research and discussion that has gone on over the past 20 years, they recently published a small booklet entitled Sustainable Street Network Principles in conjunction with the Institute for Transportation Engineers and the Federal Highway Administration. They offer 7 principles for laying out a transportation network that takes into account all of the modes of transportation someone might choose.

1. Create a street network that supports communities and places
2. Create a street network that attracts and sustains economic activity
3. Maximize transportation choice
4. Integrate the street network with natural systems at all scales
5. Respect the existing natural and built environment
6. Emphasize walking as the fundamental unit of the street network
7. Create harmony with other transportation networks

You can read more about the background of the project here.

You can download the PDF of the full booklet here.

What’s Good for the Goose is Good for the Gander, Or, Plank-Eye Hank and the Tale of Two Hundred (Sprawling) Cities

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” Matthew 7:3 (NIV)

We have, from the NY Times, this op-ed piece written by investment banker, turned treasury secretary, turned consultant at large Hank Paulson.

And what does good ol’ Hank recommend for China? A New Urbanist approach to city planning and development!

Now, granted, this is a very good idea. China has the tremendous opportunity to get things right from the start; they have the opportunity to learn from our mistakes. If it’s true that China will have 200 cities with populations over 1 million by the year 2025 (and I have no reason to doubt that they will), they will have to do something drastic to make that sort of growth realistic and sustainable. So why not just skip the intermediate step (backwards) of sprawling development, and take an approach that has worked for thousands of years: traditional neighborhood design.

But, Hank, this all seems just a bit disingenuous. The history of Chinese urban development that you recount has a familiar ring to it. Eerily familiar.

Let’s take a look at the diagnoses:

“Unsustainable urban planning has yielded polluted cities that are destroying [the] ecosystem.”
Check.

“…appropriating farmers’ land and seizing land on the outskirts of cities to sell to developers. But these practices contribute to urban sprawl and often feed corruption.”
Check.

“Within city centers are countless “superblocks” — half-kilometer-square developments interspersed with huge boulevards that create monster traffic jams and skyrocketing pollution.”
Sounds like most downtowns to me.

“China’s future requires continued urbanization, which, absent a new approach, will only make the problem worse.”
Uh huh.

And the prescriptions:

“To achieve the country’s goals of raising living standards for a broader share of the population, cities must be better designed to yield energy efficiency and environmental sustainability.”
Yup.

“An approach that featured smaller blocks and mixed-use neighborhoods and accessible public transportation would alleviate these unintended consequences [that is, traffic congestion, sprawl and pollution].”
I agree.

But hold on just a second, Hank. Are we talking about China, or are we talking about ourselves? It’s all well and good to recommend that China adopt these smarter approaches to city planning, but don’t we face the same problems here? In fact, aren’t the problems worse here because “vast infrastructure investment makes the current model irreversible”? Ouch.

And, Hank, you totally miss the point. Well, you sort of get it, but you miss the main point. While it’s true that sprawl is a major contributor to global pollution that affects the standards of living for people everywhere, and has affected mass climate change on the world, taking a top-down approach to these problems is what got us into this mess in the first place. There are so many  ways that people’s lives are enriched by living in real communities as opposed to the vast warehouses of the proletariat that are typical of most modern cities.

I hardly think it’s fair to compare the view from your house on Lake Michigan, which I’m sure you paid millions of dollars for, commute to and from every day in a luxury car (most likely driven by someone else), separated by miles from the squalor that exists in so many of our own cities, with the view from a hotel room in Beijing. It’s not apples to apples. Not even close.

Do China’s cities need a New Urbanist approach to their design and building? Absolutely!

But do OUR cities need it? Absolutely!

The rules are globally applicable, not just as a policy prescription to aid in the economic development of select parts of the world.

New Book

Jeff Speck, co-author of Suburban Nation with CNU founders Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, has a new book out called Walkable City!

The people over at CNU have posted this little write-up of it, as well as a brief excerpt from the book as a PDF.

It Just Makes Sense

I always get asked the question, “What is New Urbanism exactly?” As I start to explain things like traditional neighborhood design, walkable neighborhoods, places that matter, ending sprawl, etc., people get it. It seems that most people intuitively understand the benefits of all of these things, and the downsides of suburban and exurban developments, but lack the language to really explain it. I recently came across this article, which illustrates just that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/nyregion/rebounding-from-9-11-lower-manhattan-sees-population-growth.html

Nowhere does the article mention any of these technical terms that the New Urbanist movement has developed and defined, but people notice these sorts of things that can make the city a desirable place to live. Be that access to talent for small business owners, the ability to walk everywhere you need to go, shorter commutes, there is certain irrefutable logic to living this way. And people notice, whether they can enunciate that or not.

No city is perfect, and Lower Manhattan is certainly not an ideal urban environment by any stretch of the imagination. But there are some real, tangible benefits to be gained from living in cities as opposed to some manufactured “utopia” in the countryside, isolated from the rest of mankind. You don’t need to define these terms or read books and articles on how we should design our built environment (though, by all means, please do, because education is essential to solving these problems in the long run), because at a basic level, it just makes sense to us.

Window Farming

Most of us who live in cities live in apartments, which don’t tend to lend themselves well to farming. But as Britta Riley explains in this video, it is possible to build simple hydroponics systems out of readily available (and mostly free) items that are suitable for food production in compact urban settings.

http://www.ted.com/talks/britta_riley_a_garden_in_my_apartment.html

There’s a whole online community dedicated to further refining the concepts of window farming, based on the open-source software model. You can find the instructions for building your own window farming units and their discussion forums here: http://our.windowfarms.org/

Out of the Desert…

If you’ve ever been to Las Vegas, you’ll know that it is a new urbanist’s nightmare: streets 15 lanes wide, towering hotel casinos, concrete everywhere, cars filling every inch of roadway, with no walkable spaces to be seen; it’s the perfect distillation of everything about American excess and vanity that has upended the urban environment. It’s not unexpected, especially of a city that has based its international reputation on the old maxim that “a fool and his money are soon parted.” There is a certain amount of anonymity that that environment demands: people go to escape, and part of that escape demands that you remain unknown.

And whether or not you agree with that assessment or not, there is the possibility of something great happening in Las Vegas. Tony Hsieh (pronounced shay), founder and CEO of Zappos.com has a plan for revitalizing the downtown core of Las Vegas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/magazine/what-happens-in-brooklyn-moves-to-vegas.html

Fremont Street, Downtown Las Vegas

As I began reading the article, I was skeptical, and rightly so. When I hear the words “urban revitalization” coupled with funding coming from big corporations, it brings to mind images of smooth-talking real estate agents bulldozing the ghetto to make way for some antiseptic steel and glass monstrosity. There is no true revitalization that really happens, except in the esoteric economic sense: the company gets cheap land, builds a monstrosity and increases the property tax base, throwing out all the poor unfortunate souls that called this place home.

Not so Tony Hsieh. As I read the article, even I started to get excited about the possibilities that his project presented. His vision is to turn downtown Las Vegas into a community. Not a shiny bauble that has limited use and dwarfs human scale, but a place where people can live, work, walk, bike, and have, as he puts it, “serendipitous encounters” with one another.

Can this be transformed into an urban landscape worth caring about?

At the center of his plan is the Zappos headquarters, now located in the old Las Vegas city hall. When the company was looking for a place to relocate their headquarters, they initially considered building a campus like Google, Nike, or Apple, where anything the employees might need or want was available. A closed campus. One that didn’t interact with the community at all. Hsieh made the decision to locate his headquarters somewhere where it could be a part of a community. Where his employees could have those serendipitous encounters and enhance their own lives and the lives of the people in the surrounding community.

Take a look at the website for the Downtown Project for more info about what their plans are for Downtown Las Vegas.

Cycling in NYC

Here’s a brief piece by Lizzie Widdicombe that appeared in the Sept 3, 2012 edition of the New Yorker about a morning in the life of a New York City bicycle messenger. It has some great descriptions of the dangers involved in riding a bike around the largest city in the country. While the profession of bike messenger has been on the wane, the rising cost of oil over the next few decades will most likely make it more common, cost-effective and respectable again.

Article (PDF) – Unfortunately the New Yorker doesn’t keep stuff on their site unless you’re a subscriber.

Design for People, Not Awards

Another interesting TED Talk by Timothy Prestero. While he’s talking about the medical devices that he’s been involved in the process of developing, it’s not much of a stretch at all to extend this principle to the built environment: design with people in mind, not awards or accolades for innovation. In the end, it’s people who will have to use and inhabit the built environment, therefore it makes sense for those environments to be habitable and useful. As you watch the video, think about some of the buildings in your city that have won awards for their “innovative” designs, but are practically a nuisance. That’s not to say that there isn’t a place for impressive and artistic, beautiful, and sometimes even perplexing buildings in our cities, but they must be the exceptions, not the rule.

http://www.ted.com/talks/timothy_prestero_design_for_people_not_awards.html