New Media for the second oldest profession

A review of Steve Mouzon’s new book New Media

First off, this book is friendly. That’s the stand out first impression.  It is innovative in its use of iBook technology and it is thorough in its explanations of new media, but overall it comes across as… friendly.  And that’s no surprise because its author is Steve Mouzon, author of The Original Green.

Mouzon has previously written about sustainability as a green concept for how we live our lives.  Now he turns to the sustainability virtue inward toward marketing the work we do.  How best to share our vision of the world?

Town planning, urban design, etc. are fun topics to discuss in an academic setting.  But get outside of that small circle and you find you’ve lost your audience.  Even though people use sidewalks everyday they rarely think about how and why sidewalks are built the way they are built.

Mouzon sees New Media as a way for architects, planners, etc. to re engage their audience in a direct way.  If we reach the general public through new media, then we can have them on our side when we go to council meetings to talk about master plans.

With “Noodles & New Urbanism” our mission has always been to take the principles of New Urbanism, break them down, and make them more accessible to people in our community. So if you architects, urbanists, planners, and designers, take Mouzon’s book to heart, that will really make our mission a lot easier.

Geared toward designers and builders, the book could be used by anyone attempting to engage new media on behalf of their traditional practices.  I will be referencing it in communications meetings in churches, at the theater I manage, and when talking to various artists.  We are all trying to better the world, and using new media can make it easier. And Steve Mouzon makes new media easier. So it all wraps up nicely.

The Noodles & New Urbanism book group will be discussing New Media at our next meeting.

Wednesday Oct 16^th 9pm at Mao’s Kitchen on Melrose

CNU21 and New Twitter

We’re at CNU21 in Salt Lake City this week. You can follow us on Twitter now too: @NoodlesNewUrban

Block by Block we will get there!

Another TEDx talk regarding design.

This guy kind of lays out the model for what we are doing here at Noodles&NewUrbanism: create a website and people will come.

By designing a website, he created a hub for other interested parties to attache themselves too and pretty soon they had an entire movement!

TED Talk on Retrofitting Suburbia

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.

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.

Why the “New” in “New Urbanism”?

Why is it called New Urbanism? Well, quite simply because it is not Urbanism.  Urbanism was a movement in the 1960s that sought to solve the problem of population growth through efficiently organized cities designed on modernist themes, valuing logic and reason and science and efficiency.  The best example I can think of are the “Arcologies” from Simcity2000

Very cool looking to the 12-year-old version of me.  But even back then I remember thinking sadly of the boy who has to ride his bike or swim in the lake and look up at the sun through glass.  Like a pet.  And those two were the best ones.  Nevermind the all black ones: they were so gruesome and foreboding I could never bring myself to build them in the game.

I wasn’t the only one to find these type of “hyperstructures” as gruesome.  They were in fact seen as sources of torment in another childhood remembrance of mine: the tripods sci-fi young adult fiction.

These hyperstructures were not the invention of sci-fi writers.  They were designed by real architects.  Le Corbusier’s famous Radiant City:

The towers serve as residential, retail, commercial, travel, and industrial centers.  Each with their own specialization. You never have to go outside!

If you are an LA native you may be thinking that is similar to those horrible apartment complexes located in mid-city between 6th and 3rd and Fairfax and La Brea.

And if you thought that, then you are a very astute architectural observer because the Park La Brea apartments are in fact built in homage to Le Corbusier’s Radiant City. (Although they look more like soviet block depression era mental facilities)

Why radiant city?  Because it was Corbusier’s redesign of… Paris, city of lights.  That’s right, Le Corbusier wanted to redesign Paris.

Clearly Corbusier with his higher level of thought won the day.  How many Parisians come to LA to stare in wonder at the great inspiring efficient architecture of the Park La Brea apartments.

Urbanism addresses problems. Ecology, the environment, travel, population management.  But it does not elevate the human spirit.  It does not create spaces worth caring about.

New Urbanism is a reaction to Urbanism.  New Urbanism addresses similar problems with the message to live simpler, smaller, compact, walkable, create spaces worth caring about.  Yes, dense, compact, mixed use, are characteristics shared by both.  But one feels better. It’s built for humans. To human scale, dignifying individuals, and extolling cultural values. New Urbanism is a new kind of urbanism.

For a palette cleanser, here are some pics of new urbanism in action: