Tag Archives: urban design

Joel Kotkin

Joel Kotkin has penned a transparently political anti-urban piece, so transparently political that it’s in Real Clear Politics rather than a major newspaper. He creates a picture of “forced densification” – I imagine people being marched into cities at gunpoint and into Soviet-style high-rise apartment blocks.

Roughly four in five home buyers prefer a single-family home, but much of the political class increasingly wants them to live differently… it has been decided, mostly by self-described progressives, that suburban living is too unecological, not mention too uncool, and even too white for their future America. Density is their new holy grail, for both the world and the U.S. Across the country efforts are now being mounted—through HUD, the EPA, and scores of local agencies—to impede suburban home-building, or to raise its cost.

Of course, people who actually choose to live in cities know this is absurd. Sure, there are high rise apartment blocks and some people choose to live in them. But many people choose to live in row homes, town homes, brownstones, etc. These are single family homes, Joel. Let’s think about land use for a minute. Density is defined by residents per square mile. Density allows infrastructure, open space, and economically productive space to be shared more efficiently by more people. It also allows more people to get around under their own muscle power, i.e. by walking and bicycling. This promotes physical health and mental health, social activity, creativity and innovation. Time spent “commuting” to work on foot or by bicycle is not empty, useless, or wasted time.

Once density drops to a suburban level, most people have to make most trips by car. Cars require enormous amounts of space, for driving but especially for parking. This space is wasted – it is not available for housing or for recreation. It is not economically productive. The infrastructure cost in the suburbs has to be much higher per person, and the economic production and tax revenue has to be much lower per square mile. The enormous amounts of time spent commuting by car are just wasted time – they are not economically productive, supportive of physical health, mental health, or families. Add air pollution and civilization-crushing greenhouse gas emissions on top of all this.

So what does all this add up to? Resources are being sucked out of the efficient denser areas, where they are generated, and used to subsidize the time-, land-, money-, and health-wasting lifestyle in the suburbs. And yet, contrary to what Joel would have you believe, not only are people not being forced into walkable, bikable, communities, but these choices are not available to most Americans.

Forcibly marching people into high-rise apartment blocks wouldn’t be American. Some people really want privacy and large private open spaces to themselves, and certainly those choices should not be taken away. But many people would love to live in truly walkable, bikable communities, and those choices have been denied most citizens of the United States. Giving people true equal opportunity and a free choice of lifestyles, and letting them choose to pay the true cost of their choices, would be very American. Don’t fall for the deceptive double-talk people are throwing out there to try to convince you to support having your choices taken away.

green roofs

Everybody kind of likes the idea of green roofs, but water professionals are not always 100% confident we understand them well enough to promise they will meet water quality and flooding regulations. But the studies are gradually trickling in. Here is a new one from Ecological Engineering:

Increasing recognition is being given to the adoption of green roofs in urban areas to enhance the local ecosystem. Green roofs may bring several benefits to urban areas including flood mitigation. However, empirical evidence from full-scale roofs, especially those that have been operational for more than several years is limited. This study investigates the hydrologic performance of a full-scale extensive green roof in Leeds, UK. Monitoring of the green roof took place over a 20 month period (between 30th June 2012 and 9th February 2014). The results indicate that the green roof can effectively retain and detain rainfall from the precipitation events included in the analysis. Retention was found to correspond significantly with rainfall depth, duration, intensity and prior dry weather period. Significant differences in retention values between the summer and winter seasons were also noted. Regression analysis failed to provide an accurate model to predict green roof retention as demonstrated by a validation exercise. Further monitoring of the green roof may reveal stronger relationships between rainfall characteristics and green roof retention.

Beyond questions on performance, there is a kind of chicken and egg problem where they are not used much (in the U.S., at least) because they are expensive and they are expensive because they are not used much. That is true of many emerging technologies. Of course, this “emerging” technology has been used in Europe for centuries, not to mention it is also popular with hobbits.

alternatives to minimum parking

Seattle has a brilliant, and in retrospective obvious, idea for an alternative to required minimum parking requirements for development. Instead of taking them out of the code entirely, allow developers or landlords to provide transit passes or car share memberships instead. This makes perfect sense. If you wanted to be more equitable, you could channel some or all of the money into a fund that low-income people in the neighborhood could use for transportation. For those who are just catching up, most cars sit parked most of the time and take up enormous amounts of space, generally equal or greater than the space taken up by housing. By reducing this wasted space, you create more space for housing, businesses, parks, or some combination. Depending on what you convert the land to, you can also reduce water pollution, flooding, and heat; reduce stress; improve physical health; improve appearance and property values; and maybe even grow some food. It’s an obvious win for everyone – why are we still letting car industry propaganda drive our culture and shape our cities?

meta-analysis on designing active cities

This is a great example of meta-analysis in Active Living Research. There are a few things I like about it. First, it combines academic literature, other literature, and expert opinion in a very transparent and defensible way, by giving each a score. It takes a very wide array of urban design and planning choices and relates them to a number of outcomes (physical health, mental health, environmental sustainability, health and safety, and economic growth), and draws quantitative conclusions about the importance of each. Some outcomes challenge my pre-conceived notions, for example that street connectivity is bad for safety, but the methodology is very transparent, so I can dig in if I want and try to figure out whether I disagree with a particular rating, or whether I really should rethink my preconceived notion. Those of us dealing with complex planning and engineering programs (and many other complex systems) can’t realistically expect to optimize a handful of objectives any more. Instead, we can play the odds by making sure all our small, daily decisions have a better than even chance of nudging the system in a desired direction, based on the complete body of evidence out there, even with all its contradictions and confusions.

Philadelphia Bike Share

I always say Philadelphia will try things about 5 years after New York tries them. Well, here’s our bike share program.

Bike-Share Comes to Philly With the Launch of Indego from STREETFILMS on Vimeo.

I support this 100%. I know having more riders out there will make it safer for everyone, and I know the statistics on bike share safety are very positive across cities so far. Still, users are going to be hurt and killed eventually, even if the accident rate is lower than other forms of transportation, and the initial instinct will be to blame the users and the program. My only point is that having bike share is not the end of the battle, we need to be demanding safe street designs at the same time. Protected bike lanes and safer turning configurations and signals are the most important things, I think.

parking craters

This video is about how surface parking lots have crowded out actual development in many U.S. downtowns. An interesting thing is happening in Philadelphia, where I live. Surface parking lots that have been here as long as I have (1999) are suddenly turning into development sites, all over turn. This tells me that they were being held in a holding pattern waiting for the next boom. This works in Philadelphia because there were never huge areas of parking in the central city, just smaller lots scattered here and there. But there must be some critical mass where you have so much parking that you no longer have a city at all, and maybe it is hard to recover from that.

The lots that are “temporary” for only a few decades still cause environmental problems of course. Philadelphia has the good sense to charge industrial and commercial landowners by the square foot of pavement for stormwater management, a good policy that more cities should consider (disclosure: I have some professional ties to this program). This general idea of tieing taxes and fees to external costs – in this case the environmental impact of building materials – is basic textbook economics and it works!

In theory, you could cap and trade the right to pave. Initially the credits could be sold to real estate development companies. Then, when the cap is hit, a new development would have to buy enough credits from somebody else who is willing to part with an equal amount of pavement. The alternative would be to use porous materials or low impact development techniques. Credits could be retired over time – either because the government or non-profit groups buy them and retire them, or they could be retired when an owner goes bankrupt or falls behind on property taxes. Maybe they could even be accepted as payment for certain fees or taxes (for example, fees that would have been spent on stormwater management anyway), then retired. Set up a system like this and entrepreneurs would find ways to get in on the game, putting the private sector to work on behalf of the environment.

the suburbs are dying

To my good friends still thinking about buying property in the suburbs – I don’t recommend it! According to Ellen Dunham-Jones, author of Retrofitting Suburbia; Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs:

of the 1,100 shopping malls, one third are dead or dying. The 50,000 strip malls have a 11% vacancy rate. Within the 350,000 big box stores, 300 million square feet are vacant. However, you point out these dynamics have been around awhile, with the newest marker being the suburban office vacancy rates of 16-24%. What has changed to make these suburban offices less attractive?

There are several converging factors here. The one most frequently cited by CEOs is the need to relocate to the cities that are attracting the educated 25-34 year-olds that they most want to hire and who, for the most part, find the idea of working in a Dilbert-like suburban cubicle un-creative and toxic. Additional factors include the fact that computers have automated many of the clerical jobs that used to be done in the suburban back-offices at the same time that space/employee standards have significantly reduced. The wave of ’80′s office parks and corporate campuses are aging and increasingly out of date, while the cities have become immensely more livable than they were in the ’70s. So, we’re seeing the tide reverse itself as a wave of corporate relocate out of suburbs and back into cities and newly named “innovation districts.”

new grocery delivery services

This article is about some new subscription-based grocery delivery services. This could make it even easier to live in car-free walkable communities for those who want to do that. You can shop for fresh food at a market when you want to do that, but have a steady stream of basic staples delivered on a reliable basis. Combine this with smart appliances – meaning your refrigerator and cabinets know what is in them – and you should never have to run out for an item in the middle of the night again. The only possible concern I have is whether this will push us even more towards processed, packaged food.

planning theory

This article in the Journal of Planning Education and Research (free for the month of February only apparently) is a nice review of planning theory. It amazes me that the profession of planning seems to be so unsure of itself, and yet has so many important theories and tools to offer to other disciplines. There is a lot of planning going on outside the small field of academically trained urban and regional planning. I like to think of planning as similar to mathematics – it’s a profession for a few, but its theories and tools are used every day by professionals across many fields. Many of us can do moderately complex math by ourselves, and we know we can call on the mathematicians and statisticians for help with the really complex stuff. Similarly, a lot of professionals like engineers and economists are entrusted with the keys to the planning machine. But often, we do it badly because we are not well trained in the theory and tools of planning.

Almost all professionals – planners, engineers, and economists at a minimum – would benefit from better education in general systems theory – what the building blocks of systems are, how they interact with their boundaries, and how their behavior over time is driven by their structure and interaction with boundary conditions, and how they can be manipulated to achieve desired outcomes. Among the professions, engineers and economists probably have the best understanding of systems today, but we tend to define the system boundaries, and the range of desired outcomes that can be achieved, much too narrowly. That is one place planners can come in – facilitating the interaction between technocratic problem solving being done by engineers and economists with the larger socio-economic and environmental context.

What I call “technocratic problem solving” here is essentially what the planners call “rational-comprehensive” planning. In my view, it works very well for the elements of systems that we understand well (managing water resources, food production, and employment, for example). Where it has come under criticism (for example, the failed “urban renewal” programs in the U.S.), I believe the problem is not in the approach, but rather applying the approach to systems we do not understand well has given us a false sense of precision and a false confidence, which has led to failure. A hybrid approach that works very well, in my experience with water resource and environmental planning, is to apply the rational-comprehensive approach to the parts of the system we understand well, and then feed the results into a stakeholder or political process that can deal with the social aspects of the system we understand much less well. Planners can play the critical role in making this process reach a functional outcome. This is how I like to think of the planning profession – as the critical glue that can hold together a coalition of engineers, economists, bureaucrats, businesspeople, interest groups, and members of the public into a coherent whole that can set a direction for our society, then continue to guide it with incremental course adjustments as we go forward.

2014 Report Card

It’s taken me a while to get out a “year in review” post for 2014, but anyway, here it is. This won’t be a masterpiece of the essay form. I’m just going to ramble on about some interesting trends and themes from the year, along with a few relevant links.

The critical question this blog tries to answer is, is our civilization failing or not? I’ll talk about our human economy, our planetary system, and make some attempt to tie the two together.

Overall Human Health and Wellbeing. First, there are some very happy statistics to report. For example, worldwide child mortality has dropped almost by half just since 1990. What better measure of progress could there be than more happy, healthy childhoods? And it’s not just about increasing wealth – people in developing countries today have much better health outcomes at the same level of wealth compared to developing countries of the past (for example, Indonesia today vs. the United States when it passed the same income level). It’s hard to argue against the idea that economic growth and technological change have obviously eliminated a lot of human suffering. So, I think the important questions are, will these trends continue? Is the system stable? Can the natural environment continue to support this trend indefinitely? There may also be an important question of whether we had the right to exploit the natural environment to get us to the point where we are now, but that is an academic question at this point.

Financial System Instability. Let’s talk about the stability of our human economic system. The U.S. economy may finally seem to be picking up from the aftermath of the severe 2007-8 financial crisis, but it is certainly far below where it would be if that hadn’t happened and the prior growth trend had just continued since then. The rest of the world isn’t doing so well, however – Europe and Japan are looking particularly slow if not in an outright deflationary spiral, at the same time developing countries appear to be slowing down. Some are calling this a “new normal” for the world economy. More scary than that, the industry-written regulations and perverse incentives allowing the excessive risk taking that caused the crisis have not been fully addressed and the whole episode could recur in the short term.

Thoughts on Ecosystem and Economic “Pulsing”. 2007-8 was a textbook financial crisis – although it was caused by novel forms of money and risk taking beyond the direct reach of government regulators and central banks, it was not that different from crises caused by plain old speculation and over-lending back when there were no central banks around. It’s hard to draw a direct link from the financial crisis to ecosystem services, climate change, or natural resource scarcity. However, if we think about natural ecosystems, they are resilient to outside stressors up to a point – say, moderate fluctuations in temperature, hydrology, or pressure from non-native species. However, say a major fluctuation happens such as a major flood or fire that causes serious damage. In the absence of major outside stressors, the system will eventually recover to its original state, but in the presence of major outside stressors, even if they did not cause the flood or fire, it may never bounce back all the way. In the same way, our human economy may appear resilient to the effects of climate change, ocean acidification, soil erosion, and so forth for a long time, but then when something comes out of left field, like a major financial crisis, war, or epidemic, we may not be able to recover to our previous trend. This probably also applies to the effects of technology on employment, as discussed below. In the absence of major shocks coming from outside the system, we’ll see a long, slow slide in employment and possibly a long, slow rise in energy and food prices, with so much noise in the signal that it will be easy for the naysayers to hold sway for long periods of time. But when those major events happen, we may see sudden, painful changes that we have no obvious way of mitigating quickly.

Technological Change: Artificial Intelligence, Robots, Automation, and Employment. After decades of slow but steady progress, these technologies are really coming into their own. Robots are being used to keep miners in line and to drive cars, for example. Manufacturing has become a high-tech industry. As computers and machines get better at performing more and more skilled jobs (book-keeping is one example), there is gradually less demand for the medium-skilled workers who used to do those jobs. High-skilled workers like computer programmers are doing very well, although I presume the automation will gradually creep higher and higher up the chain, so today’s safer jobs will be less safe tomorrow. At the same time these medium-skilled workers in developed countries are getting squeezed out, developing countries are not benefiting like they used to from their large pools of low-skilled workers as manufacturing becomes more and more automated, and can be done cost-effectively closer to consumers in richer countries.

Will our society recognize and solve this employment problem? American corporate society, and its admirers around the world, are unlikely to. Something very similar to this happened with agricultural automation in the early- to mid-20th century, and with globalization in the mid- to late-20th century. As agriculture became more automated, many displaced workers moved from rural areas in the U.S. southeast to urban areas in the U.S. northeast, looking for factory work. Unfortunately, the factory jobs that existed previously were being moved to developing countries with abundant low-wage labor. The pockets of poverty, unemployment, and social problems created by these forces have not been adequately addressed to this day. To the individual worker, it doesn’t much matter whether your job is being taken by a local robot or an overseas human. Unemployment created by technological forces today could resemble what was created by globalization yesterday, only on a much larger scale. We can only hope that the larger scale will drive real political solutions, such as better education and training, sharing of available work, and more widespread ownership of the labor-saving technology.

Of course, one of the earliest and probably the most shameful example of a modern capitalist system generating wealth for an elite few at the expense of workers is the American slavery system of the 18th and 19th centuries. We just can’t trust amoral, self-interested private enterprise to maximize welfare in the absence of a strong moral compass coming from the larger society. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.

Another example of extreme corporate immorality: Public apathy over climate change in the U.S. may have been manufactured by a cynical, immoral corporate disinformation campaign over climate change taken right out of the tobacco companies’ playbook.

The Gospel of Shareholder Value. There is an important debate over whether people who run corporations have any ethical responsibility to anything other than profit seeking. Well duh, everyone on Earth has an ethical responsibility. Case closed, as far as I’m concerned. There is even evidence that the ideology of profit maximization is a drag on innovation. Except billions of people out there who have worshiped at business schools would disagree with me. And I don’t want to offend anyone’s religion. Noam Chomsky had a quote that I particularly loved, so I am going to repeat it here:

In market systems, you don’t take account of what economists call externalities. So say you sell me a car. In a market system, we’re supposed to look after our own interests, so I make the best deal I can for me; you make the best deal you can for you. We do not take into account the effect on him. That’s not part of a market transaction. Well, there is an effect on him: there’s another car on the road; there’s a greater possibility of accidents; there’s more pollution; there’s more traffic jams. For him individually, it might be a slight increase, but this is extended over the whole population. Now, when you get to other kinds of transactions, the externalities get much larger. So take the financial crisis. One of the reasons for it is that — there are several, but one is — say if Goldman Sachs makes a risky transaction, they — if they’re paying attention — cover their own potential losses. They do not take into account what’s called systemic risk, that is, the possibility that the whole system will crash if one of their risky transactions goes bad. That just about happened with AIG, the huge insurance company. They were involved in risky transactions which they couldn’t cover. The whole system was really going to collapse, but of course state power intervened to rescue them. The task of the state is to rescue the rich and the powerful and to protect them, and if that violates market principles, okay, we don’t care about market principles. The market principles are essentially for the poor. But systemic risk is an externality that’s not considered, which would take down the system repeatedly, if you didn’t have state power intervening. Well there’s another one, that’s even bigger — that’s destruction of the environment. Destruction of the environment is an externality: in market interactions, you don’t pay attention to it. So take tar sands. If you’re a major energy corporation and you can make profit out of exploiting tar sands, you simply do not take into account the fact that your grandchildren may not have a possibility of survival — that’s an externality. And in the moral calculus of capitalism, greater profits in the next quarter outweigh the fate of your grandchildren — and of course it’s not your grandchildren, but everyone’s.

Our Ecological Footprint. WWF issued an updated Living Planet Report in 2014 suggesting that our annual consumption of natural resources (including the obvious ones like energy and water extraction, straightforward ones like the ability to grow food, but also the less obvious ones like ability of the oceans and atmosphere to absorb our waste products) is continuing to exceed what the Earth can handle each year by at least 50%. We’re like spoiled trust fund babies – we have such incredible resources at our disposable, we never learn to live within our means and one day the resources run out, even if that takes a long time. As we recover from the financial crisis, we have a chance to do things differently, but the connections are not being made to the right kinds of investments in infrastructure, skills, and protection of natural capital that would set the stage for long-term sustainable growth in the future.

Other Big Stories from 2014:

  • World War I. 100 years ago, World War I was in full swing. Remember The Guns of August? Well, that was August 1914 they were talking about. Let’s hope we’re not about to blunder into another conflict. But (and I’m cheating a little here because I read this in 2015), the World Economic Forum named “interstate conflict” as both high probability and high consequence in its global risk report.
  • Ebola. Obviously, Ebola was a very bad thing that happened to a whole lot of people. To those of us lucky enough that we weren’t directly in its path, it is a chance to selfishly reflect whether Ebola or something even worse could be coming down the pike. Let’s hope not.
  • Severe Drought and Water Depletion in the Western U.S.: California has been in the midst of a historic drought, although they got some rain recently. Some are describing this as the new normal. Besides rainfall, glaciers, snowpack, and groundwater all seem to be disappearing in some important food-growing areas.
  • Solar grid parity is here! At least some places, some times…

Conclusion. Yes, I think we are on a path to collapse if nothing changes. And I don’t see things changing enough, or fast enough. There are glimmers of hope though. Lest you think I offer only negatives and no solutions, here are two solutions I harp on constantly throughout the blog:

  • Green infrastructure. This is how we fix the hydrologic cycle, close the loop on nutrients, begin to cleanse the atmosphere, protect wild creatures and genetic diversity, and create a society of people with some sense of connection to and stewardship over nature. Don’t act like it’s such a big mystery. It’s known technology. There has been plenty written about trees, design of wildlife corridors and connectivity, for examples. There is simply no excuse for cities to do such a crappy job with these things.
  • Muscle-Powered Transportation. Cars are clearly the root of all evil, the spawn of Mordor, as I pointed out several times (sorry, I just sat through 6+ hours of Hobbit movies). Unless you are perhaps that rare hobbit who can own a car without your morals being completed corrupted by its evil powers. But for the rest of us, I explained several times why getting rid of cars would be good. Here is just one example:

One of the most important things we can do to build a sustainable, resilient society is to design communities where most people can make most of their daily trips under their own power – on foot or by bicycle. It eliminates a huge amount of carbon emissions. It opens up enormous quantities of land to new possibilities other than roads and parking, which right now take up half or more of the land in urban areas. It reduces air pollution and increases physical activity, two things that are taking years off our lives. It eliminates crashes between vehicles, and crashes between vehicles and human bodies, which are serial killers of one million people worldwide every year, especially serial killers of children. It eliminates enormous amounts of dead, wasted time, because commuting is now a physically and mentally beneficial use of time. There is also a subtle effect, I believe, of creating more social interaction and trust and empathy between people just because they come into more contact, and creating a more vibrant, creative and innovative economy that might have a shot at solving our civilization’s more pressing problems.