tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26845488322147710052024-03-05T04:37:22.227-05:00proper scaleWhen values lie unexamined, they are dangerous. - Kevin LynchEric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.comBlogger185125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-54243753685371198742020-11-27T15:40:00.002-05:002020-11-27T17:15:07.100-05:00Gangs, Tythings and Congregations - the First Levers of American Association <h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: large;">Insights from Gen. James E. Oglethorpe's Development Plan for Savannah</span></h3><h2 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: small;">Part Two</span></h2><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/23173631@N02/2698746516/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;" title="photo sharing"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><img alt="" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3211/2698746516_518dc611b0.jpg" style="border: 2px solid rgb(0, 0, 0);" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/23173631@N02/2698746516/">First Presbyterian Church, Synagogue and Wesley Memorial Church, Savannah Ga.</a>, originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/23173631@N02/">scadspc</a>.</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">American frontier settlers were a hardscrabble lot. But, in this trait especially, they were not the self-dependent pioneers we commonly romanticize them to be. They were individualists of spirit, but not of their society. George Jones’s 1734 perspectival drawing of Savannah (<a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-tactical-commons.html" target="_blank">see my previous post</a>) is but an early witness to the power of American civic association that Tocqueville would marvel about a century later in his observance of its untrammeled industry. The organization of Georgia’s first colony by Oglethorpe and the Georgia Trustees, indeed, was quite long in strategy to foster effective associations, and quite consciously so.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">In <a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-tactical-commons.html" target="_blank">Part One</a>, I treated the associations of labor, the work gangs that rapidly boosted the construction activity of the colony by giving it a robust footing for economic exchanges, enabling the colony to immediately benefit from potent forms of labor productivity. Beginning with the guardhouse and fortifications built in the first month, I want to emphasize once again that much of the settlement activity of the colony was created and sustained by public work projects. This was a brilliant stroke for forging a collaborative field of enterprise that creates springboards for private gain and productivity, and it has much to teach us today about an effective form of organizational development: the strategy I called the “Tactical Commons” in my first post. To focus less on the process, and more on the humans, we need to give the catalytic work gang orchestration a better name. To refer directly to the organizational framework, I am going to call it the "Kindling Cooperative", emphasizing here the economic dimension of the arrangement as well as to highlight the instrumental nature of that short-term arrangement, a temporary collectivizing of labor that can, with a few sparks, return a set of common goods and immediate public benefits. The most central and important return is the literal infrastructure needed to sustain the flames - the platform - from which the self-organizing embers of independent enterprise can subsequently emerge. A Kindling Cooperative should at the very least do everything needed to create the platform.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">The Two Moral Syndromes</span></h4><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">While the Kindling Cooperative represents a short-lived association, it was not the only corporate strategy established at Savannah's colonial start. I briefly touched upon a second lever of association that was longer lasting. Doubtlessly different from these initial work gangs, it comprised the militia units of ten members each called “tythings”. These were something like deputized units whose members were comprised of all the arms bearing men sharing a town block, and who also shared a jurisdictional square-mile tything unit of Savannah’s farm district (more on the latter to follow in future posts). </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">We hear surprisingly little about these militia units in the correspondence of colonists preserved, despite the fact that the colony’s master plan was anything but quiet about them. Unlike the work life of the colonists, we just don’t see these units coloring the thoughts and reports of the colonists first hand. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Why the tythings were hardly mentioned is hard to tell. Either they were so essential and second nature to quasi-feudal Britons that they did not bother commenting on them in their letters or, as I see hinted, they were rather irrelevant, weak or ineffective associations to these particular colonists. I suspect the latter was at play due partly to the fact that the arms bearing men of the colony were commoners, most of whom were aged well past that age when they might have been more successfully militarized. They are the folks who plied their trades in the commercial centers of London, such as the upholsterer Peter Gordon who I mentioned in the first post, and, as such, they were the kind of folks who very much held a preference for trading-based forms of corporate orientation. The ethos behind this preference is what the urban social theorist Jane Jacobs, in her work <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival" target="_blank">Systems of Survival</a></i>, called the “Commercial Moral Syndrome”. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Generalized across cultures, this “moral syndrome”, according to Jacobs, is comprised by a frame of mind tightly adhering to the following interrelated cluster of values (note: I rephrase or elaborate here and there on her descriptive terms for the sake of immediate relatability): </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p><u><span style="font-family: helvetica;">“Commercial Moral Syndrome” Values:</span></u></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Shun force</b>, e.g. shun piracy, costly policing, taking without trading</span></p><p><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Come to voluntary agreements</span></b></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Be honest </b>and trustworthy</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Collaborate easily</b> with strangers and aliens (cosmopolitanism)</span></p><p><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Compete</span></b></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Respect contracts</b> (versus yielding to privileged status) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Use initiative </b>and enterprise</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Be open</b> to inventiveness and novelty</span></p><p><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Be efficient</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Promote comfort and convenience</span></b></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Innovate/Disrupt</b> for betterment (“Dissent for the sake of the task”)</span></p><p><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Invest for productive purposes</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Be industrious</span></b></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Be thrifty</b> (and quick to the matter)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Be optimistic</b> </span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">These values quite interestingly stand distinctly apart from what Jacobs called the “Guardian Moral Syndrome”, a moral frame adhering to another cluster of interrelated values that are esteemed for certain non-commercial institutional endeavors, typically those based on protecting territorial interests. Religious practices, adjudicating courts in quarterly sessions, and conducting the militia duties are just a few examples of guardian tasks that were conducted by the Savannah colonists. According to Jacobs, basing her insights on the observations of Plato specifically, the cluster of values that comprise the “Guardian Moral Syndrome” is the following:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p><u><span style="font-family: helvetica;">“Guardian Moral Syndrome” Values:</span></u></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Shun trading</b>, e.g. avoid bribery, and quid pro quo dereliction of duty</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Exert prowess</b> (back up authority with force)</span></p><p><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Be obedient and disciplined</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Adhere to tradition</span></b></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Respect hierarchy</b> (and avoid ease in reorganization, unlike businesses)</span></p><p><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Be loyal</span></b></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Take vengeance</b> (back up authority)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Deceive for the sake of the task</b>, e.g. entrap criminals for public safety</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Make rich use of leisure</b> and create "art for the sake of art"</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Be ostentatious</b> (express ceremony, dignity and continuity)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Dispense largesse</b> (invest in power, influence and control)</span></p><p><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Be exclusive</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Show fortitude</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Be fatalistic</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Treasure honor</span></b></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">At first, this dichotomous framework will likely strike you as an odd and sweeping generalization of things. And there's a good reason for that, since today we might initially notice that much of what we would initially consider in the ethos of many kinds of associations today could represent an odd mishmash of all the values above pulled liberally from each syndrome. Certainly, commercial organizations, which Jacobs claimed should operate only with the first set of values, may to us today seem to operate with both sets of values. Today's commercial players, indeed, often do act vengefully and anticompetitively, submit to discipline and dispense largesse and lobby congress members. For instance, today we think of brand value, a core concern for commercial enterprises, almost exclusively in terms of consumer identity, but not that long ago “brand” was more about establishing trust, the confirmation of a promise of value, which relates to the commercial value “be honest and trustworthy”. But this has slanted this way to our contemporaries because a Faustian bargain was struck in the 1950s, and we discovered that the Marlboro Man could displace inconvenient hang-ups. So brands today, as with the “Trump” brand, are more about inculcating loyalty, a guardian prerogative, despite the obvious spin, deflection and tall tales to do so. Branding tactics likewise increasingly use hierarchy and tokens of prowess at the expense of transparency, trustworthiness and adherence to basic market honesty. One can circumvent the need for truth telling and trust setting in a brand by instead appealing to permanent markers of identity. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Jacobs, however, usefully labeled these occurrences of moral blurring in institutions and businesses as the work of “monstrous moral hybrids”. They lead to a lot of social and economic subterfuge, as when police work, a guardian pursuit, bends to questionable moral outcomes when commercial motives sneak in through procedural features (an example is the practice of booking arrestees, sometimes with cooked up entrapment strategies, at the end of one's shift in order to enable the arresting officer to register overtime pay). </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Knowing this and thinking carefully through the dichotomous sets of values, Jacobs's framing of them will eventually strike you as quite revelatory. It will change the way you think about organizations in profound ways. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Note, for example, how the values tightly interact within each “syndrome”, yet each set of values, taken point by point, seems to stand in opposition to the other set of values. “Promote comfort and convenience” in the first set stands variously in contrast with “Adhere to tradition” or “Show fortitude” in the second set. Each individual value of the one stands in corresponding contrast with two or three points of the other syndrome. Many of our social and economic malfunctions today boil down to the tensions inherent to the blurring of values, inclinations and tactics between both sets of syndromes when they get mixed in together institutionally. Very interestingly, we can spot these tension points in the correspondence of the Savannah colonists, to come back to our subject. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">First of all, the guardian inclination of mind is easily identified in all aspects of Oglethorpe’s activities establishing the Georgia colony. He was a general, of course, and his operational framework for leadership no doubt derived from the military, the guardian institution par excellence. Expressed in his letters through a cool comportment of the narrative details, his motives clearly lean a bit on a paternalistic orientation to the colonial undertaking - namely, his efforts to ensure that civil affairs and matters of defense take precedence over private interests. This often put him in direct conflict with some of the commercially minded colonists. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Several colonists penned letters to some of the governing Trustees relating such instances. One Robert Parker, a miller, airs his grievance to Mr. Hucks, a trustee, regarding Oglethorpe’s confounding strictures to his person. All of his complaints are reactions to Oglethorpe's guardian demands, including the matter of bearing arms for his tything. Evidently, Mr. Parker's sons would fill in for his obligatory watch every fourth night. It is easy to see why the general would regard the matter a dereliction of duty from the standpoint of guardian moral code, as the subbing practice would certainly have quickly undermined discipline and group cohesion and erode ongoing seriousness in the matter. This impasse doesn't seem to even register with Mr. Parker. If it did, his transactional remark that "the duty was never neglected" was in sum all he thought he needed to say about the matter. The main charge of his letter is that these duties could be better addressed through his more productive industry as a mill creator to better serve the colony thus. The trading mindset exactly illustrated.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Another good example of a guardian activity Oglethorpe devised were the marksmanship contests he directed on Sundays to develop the hunting and military skills of the colonists. He would award the best performer with a turkey. Contests, as Jacobs observed, are great opportunities to manifest exertions of prowess and make rich use of leisure time, as well as cultivate group loyalty and bonding.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">While held somewhat less prominently in the concerns of colonists, the tythings provided a lever of guardian association that was there - maybe mostly as a formality as the city matured, but a well defined and geographically circumscribed one. This is a defining characteristic Jacobs singled out for guardian work: it is typically oriented toward territorial interests and control. Indeed, the jurisdictional framework Oglethorpe provided for tythings would go on to define jurisdictional geographies, by fact and legal nomenclature, for more than few generations of Savannah’s history.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Congregations and Civil Society</span></h4><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">The third lever of association prominent in the daily lives of the first colonists was sustained by the assemblies of faith. The 35 families of the English tradesmen who first landed with Oglethorpe were likely all Anglican. In the summer of 1733, they were joined by 42 Jewish colonists from London who were, except for two of their families, primarily refugees from the Portuguese inquisition who had fled to London. For a time, these comprised the second largest grouping by faith, becoming the founders of the third oldest synagogue in America. Arriving in their number among this second settler wave was a physician who had helped stabilize the colony during a pandemic that blew through the colonies that first summer. Hitting on the heels of Oglethorpe’s first extended absence from the colony, the pandemic had proved deadly, for grifters and insurrectionists had also used Oglethorpe’s departure to their advantage, weakening the colonists with malnutrition, strife and rum-induced delirium as a consequence. Oglethorpe clamped down on the rum trade and noted the effectiveness of the physician’s therapies. He relished the recharge of industry as more settlers trickled in to new province, noting their salubrious contributions to the sober advancement of the colony.</span></p><p><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.75)" style="background-color: white; font-family: helvetica; white-space: pre-wrap;">This historical anecdote from Savannah’s foundational year, in retrospect, brings up an instructive attribute about the long-term effects of the Oglethorpe Plan. In particular, it provides a handle for us to think about the the subtle social dynamics set up by a settlement strategy impelling more than one lever of associative order. By grouping colonists into construction gangs and, separately, into militias and obligating them to farm labor as well as periodic judicial assembly, these duties altogether represented both “commercial” and “guardian” endeavors. A cross-associative framework for collective enterprises was set up thus that could neutralize the natural tendency to keep these fields of undertaking otherwise segmented within the tight bounds of trust-communities. With that layered associative order, requiring coordination across all settlement units in the colony, corporate fields of colonial activity could evade the cantonization effects that could have otherwise occurred with the entrance of minority communities. In Trustee Savannah, social life must in daily concourse expand beyond the tacit bounds of trust-communities and, instead, adaptively incorporate a plurality of ethnic-religious orientations within the greater polity of the colony.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">This layered cross-association, because it was so particularly circumscribed by the Oglethorpe Plan, allowed a miracle. It created an early path to maintain socio-political stability with the entrance of minority groups. Somehow, in a gingerly balancing act, the cross-associative order managed to nurture faithfulness to one's trust-community while establishing conviviality with the distinct ones of your neighbors in the maintenance of all other colonial associations and enterprises, thereby bypassing the formidable walls of religious and ethnic loyalties. The miracle is that the decision-making sphere actually rests on a homogeneous civic and commercial culture - a civil society - that envelops the entire colony, but it remarkably does not dispense with individual particularity nor cheapen religious affinity. The growing “homogeneity” of daily concourse rests on a plurality of association.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">But the miracle goes much further than that. The associative individualism that is a peculiar attribute of American Civil Society has a role throughout the remaining pieces of the Oglethorpe Plan that we have yet to touch upon, especially in its remarkable agricultural strategy, which was aiming to subvert the slave plantation economy. We will pick up on these many things in our future installments, and I shall engage the insights of the philosopher and social anthropologist Ernest Gellner, among others. It will only get more amazing. I hope that you will stick with me.</span></p>Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-37246201180812336822020-02-09T19:40:00.002-05:002022-08-13T17:53:00.953-04:00The Tactical Commons<div style="font-family: helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">Insights from Gen. James E. Oglethorpe's Development Plan for Savannah</span></h3>
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<span face="Helvetica-Oblique" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-style: italic;">Ten years ago, after a visit to Savannah at the end of 2009, I began to research the Oglethorpe Plan for Savannah and record my thoughts on this blog. Already back then, I was inferring things that I would never suspect would actually be backed up historically, such as the influence of John Locke on the plan. I already suspected then that I was scratching the surface of a deeply rewarding study, and by the middle of the past decade, my hunch had borne out in ways I could not have imagined. </span><br />
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<span face="Helvetica-Oblique" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-style: italic;">I shall begin posting the important lessons this past decade of thinking about Savannah has surfaced to me. This is just the first installment, and our introduction. Because these thoughts started on this blog, I think it only proper to revisit ProperScale and rekindle the love affair with Savannah's origins from whence we left them here last.</span></div>
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<span face="Helvetica-Oblique" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-style: italic;">For a shortish preview of my study, you can consult my 2018 <a href="https://twitter.com/ericorozco/status/994340969888845824?s=20"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: #0073b1;">Twitter thread</span></a> on the Oglethorpe Plan to peek at where my studies took me these past ten years.</span></div>
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A Subdivision Plan is Publicized</h4>
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">One of the most incredible artifacts of American colonial history is an <a href="https://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/viewer/?file=jp2files/hmap/sids/hmap1734g6b.jp2"><span style="color: #0073b1;">18th century sepia drawing housed in a repository of the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Georgia</span></a>. It depicts the early progress of construction for the settlement of Savannah, the first settlement of the charitable trust governing the Colony of Georgia then at the southernmost frontier of the colonies. Under the leadership of the sole attending member of the Georgia Trustees who had directed the settlement of the colony, Gen. James Edward Oglethorpe, 114 English colonists landed at this pine covered bluff on the 1st of February, 1733. They had erected a dockside crane by the first week of their landing, and within a little over a month, the 35 settler families had completed the timber magazine and its battery of cannon and had erected two clapboard homes on the lots staked out, with work in progress for others.</span></div>
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">This drawing depicts the state of the colony only a little over a year later. Very likely produced at the hand of a London draughtsman named George Jones in early 1734, it is a striking oblique perspective. Composed as a bird’s eye image of the town as viewed from the Hutchinson Island side of the Savannah River, it richly details the general situation of the town on the flat plain of the bluff on the southern bank. To an amazing level of detail, it depicts each individual home and public structure of the colony, including Oglethorpe’s tent, and charmingly illustrates the unmistakable characteristics of the surrounding Southern Pines, the tranquil commerce of trade ships and native canoes in the river, and the Trustees’ cattle lolling about Hutchinson Island in the foreground.</span></div>
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">These details were probably informed by the memory of the colonist Peter Gordon, an upholsterer from London, who had left the Savannah colony in early November 1733 after serving a stint there as Savannah’s first bailiff. Gordon had returned to London to seek medical care for a fistula and brought with him a copy of the town plat drawn by its surveyor, Noble Jones. Most likely with this, Jones had included instructions for the production of a perspective, which George Jones used to prepare a sketch by the February of 1734. The same general composition was later approved for printing in mid-1734 by General Oglethorpe himself, who had returned to London after leaving the colony at the end of March 1734 to seek military reinforcements. Hereupon, some additions may have been sketched in for the commissioned engraving, and so the perspectival view, as the printed engraving claims, likely represents the state of the colony as it had stood that March in just its fourteenth month of construction. </span></div>
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">According to Oglethorpe's December 1733 letter to the Trustees, however, three and a half of the wards had already been occupied by that time (at what state the housing was in, he doesn't make clear). This is substantially more than depicted on Jones's drawing. The sketch could actually be conveying the state of the wards as they stood the November of 1733 from Peter Gordon’s accounting. Regardless of the case, the general extent of the program of construction - considering the travails and hints of discord communicated in the preserved correspondence we have - is simply remarkable, both in the breadth of the execution and the thoughtful, thoroughgoing cohesion of the details. What’s evident from the correspondence, however, was that neither the colonists nor Oglethorpe seemed satisfied with the speed of progress. You almost get the impression that the drawing was more of a clarion call than a mere propagandist effort - a tool to convey the urgency of the work needing to be done. Rather than today's absurdly atmospheric architectural renderings, it instead shares a curious semblance to the kind of plat maps you see in subdivision sales offices, with a portion of lots marked “sold” with red tags. Functionally, it really did serve a similar kind of marketing prerogative in inducing immigration to the colony. </span></div>
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">Something formative in the long-standing frame of our culture is being conveyed on this sketch, and I don’t mean that cynically. Thinking over this composition of humble structures now for over a decade, a Promethean reflection of our development culture is brilliantly peering at us here. And yet, I have lately become aware in hindsight that this sketch has made our contemporary renderings of architectural utopias today read socially unambitious to me. They toot like the resolved lonesome notes of individualized futures, ill equipped and weightless in comparison to Savannah’s social project. My contemporaries have no similar faith in the might of voluntary mobilization for the public good. Not at this scale.</span></div>
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The First Levers of Association</h4>
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">What resourced this incredible scene? When inspecting the correspondence we have, the colonists of Savannah’s first year mobilized their work with at least three levers of association. Labor, naturally, was the first reason for company, comprised by the work gangs Oglethorpe organized at the start for construction tasks. These units were based upon the available abilities and trades of the colonists. Not all tasks, however, could be accomplished well by the gangs due to the inexperience of colonists, and so Oglethorpe found it necessary to supplement these often by hiring itinerant laborers and slaves from Carolina, explaining that the work had been proceeding too slowly. While they were short lived, the gangs were effective tinder to start the industry that created the scene depicted in Jones’s drawing. </span></div>
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">The construction tasks organized daily life for the colonists early on. What is important about these work units is that they initiated a collaborative framework for work projects, synchronized with all such units in the colony. Once that collaborative base was there to root from, construction roles could extend over to farming projects and other works. With the flow of newcomers, the aggregate of these embers would eventually glow stronger with the progressive specialization of work into professions and occupations. What George Jones captured in his drawing was the point in time when the furnace was beginning to get hot.</span></div>
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">Jones’s drawing shows the progress of tidy, identically-sized homes that each settler family was building on one of the 60 by 90-foot town lots they were granted. These were located in square “wards” near the protected bluff edge by the Savannah River. Each ward unit, which was centered on an open square fronted by public buildings, contained four blocks of ten homes each called “Tythings”. Six wards of forty homes each were planned, but the drawing only depicts four wards under construction, one of which, Derby Ward, is all but complete except for a vacant church lot (where today Christ Church Episcopal now sits facing Johnson Square). </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis-rTA-QN0Y0fBcTsH175BKGDg461W-vZmX18uakDImQOwfV2WEUKLJ6eMiFLQo45i64Yi3dD0iJ_1zopCID8NPopODSvojHiDjeJEVkQvwxC997dATmxh0mHhLf5QRVx45CAVUqTTrVg/s1600/Savannah+Ward.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1016" data-original-width="1600" height="406" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis-rTA-QN0Y0fBcTsH175BKGDg461W-vZmX18uakDImQOwfV2WEUKLJ6eMiFLQo45i64Yi3dD0iJ_1zopCID8NPopODSvojHiDjeJEVkQvwxC997dATmxh0mHhLf5QRVx45CAVUqTTrVg/s640/Savannah+Ward.jpg" width="640" /></a><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">In this <span style="color: #0073b1;"><a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2010/04/not-for-us-but-for-others.html">post</a> </span>from my early days encountering the Oglethorpe Plan, I noted that Savannah’s uniformly repetitive ward fabric of 60 by 90-foot town lots arose from the need to settle a colony of commoners in as fair and efficient a manner as could be contrived for this purpose. The cellular pattern of four Tything blocks to a ward was also useful for military reasons, as each Tything of ten households comprised a militia troop that kept the night watch of every fourth night, which was rotated with the other three Tythings of their ward. Note that this meant that the four day guard rotation didn’t coincide with the days of the week, always falling one day more advanced than the week before and thereby preserving strict fairness in the calendar cycle with regard to sabbaths. This is your first clue to the high degree of intelligent comportment riding with the geometric qualities of the plan. </span></div>
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">The Jones drawing also shows that the first public buildings of the colony were among the first erected, and, as with the homes, they appear to be very similarly designed gable roof structures, rectangular in plan, about double the size of the homes in length and height. Most of these were located in a “Trust Lot” belonging to the Georgia Trust, which overlook the central square next to each Tything block. Initially, Jones’s drawing shows that these lots served public uses, such as the public guest house (“House for Strangers”) and the “Publick Mill” for the colony, but the trustees would also grant some of these lots to congregations founded by the settlers. Thus granted in reserved prime locations near to all homes, the trustees could assign Trust Lots to spur the assemblies, charities and public halls of the town, as such associations could develop in due course in the colony. The Trust Lots, put in our terms, provide a prime reserve grant for civic enterprise, but, to access it, the common benefit must be clear to the greater colony, and the improvements must be collectively resourced. </span><br />
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The Tactical Commons</h4>
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">This Trust Lot civic strategy has some expedient features for organizational and economic development with quite some genius behind it. </span></div>
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">To construct the first public buildings shown on Jones’s 1734 sketch in just 10 months with all hands pitching in, for instance, the critical role of organizing the collaborative training and labor must be undertaken. The build tasks must be divided by skills required, the materials sourced and allocated, and the labor rotations rationalized in a planned sequence. Expediting development with teamwork, the collaboration will mobilize the drive to clear fields systematically and prepare lumber, bringing in organizational advantages, such as the forecasting and rationing of supplies with the processing of building materials. Moreover, the work gangs acting in necessary concert with one another will be passively eliminating hoarding behavior and wasted labor better by reallocating labor to where the need most benefits the whole.</span></div>
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">The total construction activity arising from the division of labor in the colony would have certainly exceeded, in scale, timeliness and quality, whatever would have been undertaken had each colonist been engaged only in his own separate homebuild project in some homestead in the wilderness at the start. The drawing is incontrovertible evidence of what happened. I know this is quite a difficult thing for an American to intuit today, particularly if you are a consultant type. Due to our irremediable gigging culture and emptied ranks of middle-management, we are no longer our daddy’s Organization Men. But, in a very true sense, the Savannah commons is creating the “social infrastructure” for town building. Without its public projects at the outset creating the setting of group labor and quickly normalizing exchange value concretely, the colony could have fared for the worse. </span></div>
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">The collaborative framework of the Savannah Trust Lot scheme hints at many upsides, but an essential one is that it grants private industry resources and economic information it would not otherwise acquire easily. Based on person hours, the collective labor to build the public projects will allow laborers to assess the value of work and goods first hand, granting all colonists insight to the quantifiable value of tasks - such as the labor value required for production of quality lumber, for example. They will probably assess immediately the total lumber that is generated on one’s own effort versus the vast more totals generated by a team of laborers. Once the initial construction of public buildings are underway, as colonists also continue improving their properties on their own, a maturing supply chain will be set in place, alongside a field of skilled labor teams with wage and material value intelligence. From this, a labor trading economy will ensue that families can tap into for their own home construction and farm projects. </span><br />
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">This is an incredibly important spark of industry that a “booster” project for the commons can grant a community. In a pioneering setting, especially, where the settlers are new to the skills and methods of development and most are still untested in the field, common uses that benefit the whole of them are themselves the fuel that can spark the enterprises, the organization, and the specialization required to advance their industry - creating the springboard for each individual’s options for betterment and self-actualization in the process. </span></div>
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">Talk about creating an effective startup team strategy... You would be creating, more than a startup, a startup ecology with this sort of work plan. Until a better term is availed, for now it is a development strategy that I will call the “Tactical Commons”. </span></div>
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">Besides the catalytic value of the Tactical Commons, however, the important feature I want to stress is how it functions in the Savannah economy to maintain a kind of dynamic equilibrium between individual and collective interests in the colony, and this it does as an ambient and unsupervised quality of the Oglethorpe Plan - namely, with the egalitarian layout of private lots and the formalized (also egalitarian) frame for association and governance with the Trust properties. </span></div>
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">Like the body’s vestibular system in the inner ear, to use an analogy, the plan guides forward motion unobtrusively, helping provide the sense of balance and motion with the processing of all external input received. In the body’s case, separate input streams are received from the eyes and the kinesthetic input received from the entire skeletal frame of the body. Both latter input streams are distinct and independent sensorial processes, while the vestibulary input, which is structurally aligned with them, is a mediating stream that helps the mind to synchronize the differentials between them. Savannah’s setting of one group effort for every ten contributors is literally baked into the structure, and people can’t help but to do the things they are hardwired to love, share and run with. It’s stunning that we haven’t learnt to plan this way 287 years later.</span><br />
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Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-56707505410971690152017-01-22T22:20:00.000-05:002017-01-22T22:28:59.120-05:00The Sancta Memoria of a BlogThis blog was begun almost nine years ago as a light-hearted quick take on the state of urbanism of the last decade. But in quick time, it became my outlet to ruminate on foundations of urban design theory. Most of that attention looked not at present events and trajectories in urban design but at the past, sometimes the ancient one.<br />
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When I was at the cusp of theoretical transitions and using the blog as a
forum of sorts with other bloggers I regularly interacted with, I was regularly churning out material that would take me weeks to frame and research and days to draft and re-draft. I would say that writing heyday on this blog was during those shaky years from 2009 to 2011, following the housing collapse and recession that rocked the architectural and planning professions. The crisis forced much invention in the planning and urban design world, and it was a kind of crucible that made my thought take a sober turn to questions of organized city building. (This happened not just to me, for that crisis generated the best thinking after Jane Jacobs on urbanism out there. The humility of the Strong Towns organization's thinking and, closely aligned, the "Lean" and "Tactical" approaches of urbanism are among the best creations of what that new alacrity in thought produced.)<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My wedding in Chippewa Square</td></tr>
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In 2012, my attention to the blog largely vaporized as I became very engaged in the event asset planning for Obama's 2012 Democratic National Convention, an experience that carried me more deeply into community work, which commanded not just my personal endeavors but my intellectual paths of discovery. Blogging about those things was untenable, even though the medium is in some ways more appropriate. I thought about blogging about that work of course, yet, somehow, blogging about that stuff seemed a disconnect from the nature of trust-building and situated work. Also, I just could not justify the extra cost to my personal time and relationships. To which point, I should add not incidentally, I finally got married last year. Note not a single post on Proper Scale since November 2014, the month I began courting my wife, Megan, in earnest. I got wed to this wonderful woman in, where else?... Savannah's Chippewa Square. Yes, at the heart of the Historic District and at the foot of James Oglethorpe's statue, a place meaningful to me partly because of my work for this very blog. <br />
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But since 2012, the blog has had a second life for me.<br />
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I can probably recount many of my blog posts from 2010 to 2011 to you from memory. That is partly the consequence of the nature of writing something that has become so meaningful to my personal and professional life. The blog posting drove me to realizations about the city that are irreplaceable in value, to which I keep returning in my thought and practice. Indeed, I find myself often linking to my posts in explaining things to others, and so the posts have become an inventive armature for my work and thinking. I often reread my posts to think anew about the topics that composed them.<br />
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This second life of Proper Scale has been very interesting to watch in hindsight. This is a courtyard filled with relics of my mind's wanderings and encounters. In a way I could not have foreseen then, it has become what I yearned for in an early post from 2009: a cathedral for <i>sancta memoria</i> - a story-filled dwelling for generating cross-thought and happenstance discovery often leading to spiritual awe.<br />
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So... to dust off the old blog after a two year hiatus, and to begin readdressing some of those new realizations from my journeys of late, I re-post that post below.<br />
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Here I celebrate the <i>sancta memoria</i> this blog has truly gifted me with. <br />
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<span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0); font-family: "verdana";">SANCTA MEMORIA</span><br />
<span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0); font-family: "verdana";">What Medieval Pictorial Narrative Has To Teach Us</span><br />
<span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0); font-family: "verdana";">(first post<span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0);">ed on Proper S<span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0);">cale on F<span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0);">ebruary 8, 2009)</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0); font-family: "verdana";">Place is something the soul itself makes for storing images.</span></blockquote>
<span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0); font-family: "verdana";">- Albertus Magnus, Dominican Friar in <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Cologne</st1:place></st1:city>, 13th Century</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigHiiO5_xcu4glubj0baS2LusguHpFKwjfzS2WNsVJ_1PVYhY2Xnvo7PrFGyMoxJiQH_s6X8bSQx7B5DQDcbBpWGgYCxWIrpLYbGve61Eh5vAG6nEsxkGmBkICN8PXYF3nX7Ss8MyEeXU/s1600-h/memory2.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5300625421106045826" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigHiiO5_xcu4glubj0baS2LusguHpFKwjfzS2WNsVJ_1PVYhY2Xnvo7PrFGyMoxJiQH_s6X8bSQx7B5DQDcbBpWGgYCxWIrpLYbGve61Eh5vAG6nEsxkGmBkICN8PXYF3nX7Ss8MyEeXU/s400/memory2.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 280px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 400px;" /></a><span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0); font-family: "verdana";">In the Middle Ages, the role of architecture was to shelter body and edify soul. I say “architecture”, but I mean to include “visual narrative”, for </span><span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0); font-family: "verdana";">art in that period was seen as an embellishment of architecture. The greater population in those days was, for the most part, illiterate, and so, for quite pragmatic reasons, churches had to convey the sacred stories of the Bible pictorially. </span><br />
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<span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0); font-family: "verdana";">But the role of transmitting sacred history in medieval architecture (and art) tends to be overemphasized. In fact, if you were able to ask an ancient learned person in Trecento Florence, particularly a skilled rhetorician, what role “Architecture” represented to him, you would probably have been surprised by the answer. He would have winked at you and said, “To remember”…or, “To prepare a lesson”, or, “To revisit topics that have long puzzled me,”…or, even, “To discover insights that I have long overlooked among the subjects of my learning”. Architecture, you see, was a physical embodiment of human knowledge. It served a rhetorical purpose. Not only was architecture used as a vessel to transmit knowledge, but it even provided the springboard to new insight.<br /><br />How could a 14th century philosopher be provided with such a conception about architecture? </span><br />
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<span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0); font-family: "verdana";">Simple<span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0);">. Y</span>ou need to first know that ancient thinkers did not have readily disposable pieces of scratch paper lying around to jot down their brilliant flashes of insight. Nor were some of them even trained to write well. Paper came only into common usage at the end of the fifteenth century. Previously, if they did have access to scores of papyri or vellum parchments, they would probably not have composed on them random notes of scattered thoughts, brainstorming exercises (yes…I know DaVinci was a quirky exception), annotative outlines or what you and I call “rough drafts”. Most thinkers certainly would not have recorded anything on them without first deliberating what was to be said to pain<span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0);">sta<span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0);">king </span></span>perfection, and that they would only write down slowly. That was not a process conducive to unbridled thinking through writing. One gained the temerity to pick up the quill <span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0);">pen</span> only after first deliberating long and thoughtfully where <span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0);">one was</span> going with a given thought. The medium was too precious.<br /><br />They did have wax tablets and sand, of course. Unfortunately, if you used these, you would soon find yourself, after a flurry of thoughts, suddenly running out of space. You would have to go back and erase what you wrote, defeating the purpose…Or, worse, someone just as eager to record a thought would inevitably erase your precious scraps of unformed discourses, mistaking your storage for later as a sign of neglect (or, someone would mindlessly step on your sand writing). So what these folks had to resort to, as strange as it sounds to us today, was to sit down and memorize the elaborate thoughts they wanted to recollect and rework later.<br /><br />Fortunately, they had incredible memory tricks at their disposal. One of the most important skills they cultivated was to use buildings and images as tools for recollection. First, they would <span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0);">carefully</span> memorize the spaces of memorable buildings, noting not only their rooms and structural elements, but also the various decorative reliefs and murals on the walls. They analyzed every square inch of an illustrative work or painting, noting what the subjects were doing, what they were carrying in their hands, and so on. They would then use these symbol-laden elements as associative hooks for thoughts they wanted to store. Literally, the architecture/artwork became a “place” for them to hang their thoughts.<br /><br />The role of art from antiquity through the early Renaissance, particularly in ecclesial art, was not only to embody human knowledge but to aid the practice most important to intellectual prowess in those days: rhetoric. Moral and philosophical thought, including prayer and spiritual meditation, were pursued using the techniques of rhetoric. <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">St. Augustine</st1:place></st1:city>’s writings, for example, are merely recorded works of rhetoric—“speeches”, really. The memory technique described here, called “architectural mnemonics”, was perfected by the early Greek philosophers, who were all skilled rhetoricians.<br /><br />Architecture served as a tool to aid the speech-maker. To understand how this worked, say you were composing a sermon. As you reflected and came upon a statement to make, you would look to attach it by association to an element or artwork of <span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0);">the</span> building you kn<span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0);">ew we<span style="color: rgb(204 , 102 , 0);">ll</span></span>, typically an image-laden church. For example, if you wanted to make a point about the capricious actions of a certain Medici boss (who shall remain unnamed) you would try to imagine him as King Herod in the nativity panel series. You did a similar thing with all the other parts of the sermon. As you composed the discourse in your head and strung your various points to artwork by associative links, the composition would literally start to take shape on the church walls. When it was time for you to deliver your speech, all you had to do was to retrace your prepared discourse through your mental image of the church, from element to element, art panel to art panel. As soon as you came upon the Herod image in your mind, you would think “Medici boss” and immediately recall the moral point you had stored for that portion of the speech.<br /><br />Imagine being able to recall an entire discourse spontaneously and without great difficulty! But there was a second advantage produced by this technique that was in some ways more significant than mere recall. Obviously, the image-laden church would force you to work with a pre-existing tableau for your own arrangements of meaning. This was not such a great a straightjacket as you might suppose. You just had to be pretty creative about your associative linkages. Maybe, instead of using the Herod painting, for example, you imagine the Medici boss with head of one of pigs in the Gerasene Demoniac painting. This would help you to better transition to one of your other related points regarding the abuse of ferrymen and farm laborers. In such a way, the church would invariably order your prayers, sermons or scholastic/philosophic discourses. Not only would the church hold your orations sequentially together—like a pastor’s notes on the lectern—but it would also prod you to reconsider and rework your thoughts as you extemporized new insights from the networks of pre-existing associative links you had already built up on the walls. This often led to surprising insights that one would not have found otherwise. The church would thus marvelously become a vessel for private revelation. What would inevitably happen is that an orator would deliver a better speech than he had prepared. He would have plenty of moments of unanticipated, inspired insight.<br /><br />Sometimes, among learned monks, the vessel of deriving “Holy Ghost insight” from associatively preserved memories was not a church or a panel of art but passages of scripture that they were thoroughly familiar with (which they typically were since some of them spent most of their time copying the same passages of scripture). For example, if they had the first chapter of Genesis memorized, they would use the seven day account of the creation story as a “place-holder” for their thoughts. By making associative links to the elements of each day, they could compose a seven-part prayer or sermon that could be recalled later to share with others or to reflect upon further. This insight to the latent creative function of Biblical narrative, the art of recollecting and composing ideas by using a narrative or poetic substructure, was called <i>sancta memoria</i>. Art panels in churches served a dual purpose, to provide communal narratives and to provide visual props for <i>sancta memoria</i>.</span>Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-67838960256618432752014-11-04T23:02:00.000-05:002014-11-06T12:37:38.730-05:00Will Google's self-driving cars turn your city into Charleston?Perhaps! But your vision for the city will determine that. While the
patterns of sprawl can not be transformed easily, I think self-driving
cars have incredible potential to change what we will build in the
future.<br />
<br />
Reducing parking spaces per capita is one of
the most promising ways, but by no means is it the only way. Planners
need to be aware that the potential of self-driving technology goes much
further than that. If Google's venture with self-driving technology
proves implementable, how we practice urban design will change in
dramatic ways. The consequences on urban form are not insignificant, and
the ways we move about the city could receive vast gains in energy and
cost efficiencies. How we plan and code for cities will certainly
change, and so it behooves us city planning folk to begin thinking about
this now.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3TS-XPIAIAnVzK9Gjn1zqvPUAA9lUSvJcAG5dAvZLGOXjAkopecIQMgsGxL-3KQ06tCDvaJ8yDG83hRj2OsxFV2VVf_eRNPdURusKBenQyUxdlBYa_Kcm1Z8SpuERvZwwm_XJKrcEpHw/s1600/IMG_0869.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3TS-XPIAIAnVzK9Gjn1zqvPUAA9lUSvJcAG5dAvZLGOXjAkopecIQMgsGxL-3KQ06tCDvaJ8yDG83hRj2OsxFV2VVf_eRNPdURusKBenQyUxdlBYa_Kcm1Z8SpuERvZwwm_XJKrcEpHw/s1600/IMG_0869.JPG" height="392" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">If
self-driving cars become ubiquitous, this Whole Foods on Magazine Street
in New Orleans demonstrates how I believe all big box stores will
relate to the street in the future. <strike>This store provides no off-street
parking. </strike> (corrected per anonymous comment).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Until very recently, I was openly
skeptical about the potential for autonomous cars ("robocars" for short)
to do much good for urbanism. In <a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2013/07/our-future-with-robocars-our-future.html" target="_blank">a previous post</a>,
for instance, I reflected on the potential of robocar traffic
synchronization technology to promote freeway construction. Yes, I
strongly suspect that robocar platooning might encourage expansions of
freeways and engineering of roads to maximize free-flow conditions for
high speeds, thus keeping freeways slicing through city centers. At the
very least, they will encourage the proliferation of high speed
interchanges. But will North American cities therefore stay fragmented
and sprawly?<br />
<br />
In that post, I was quick to suspect that
they would for a number of reasons. This was because I was highly
pessimistic at the time about the potential of automated driving to
significantly alter the sprawl-loving lifestyles of most Americans. I
also questioned whether autonomous taxis (ATs or "aTaxis") could do this
even if they have a real potential to change American consumer habits
for personal vehicle ownership.<br />
<br />
I still have some
doubts about ATs reaching high market share levels, but the growing
clout of Lyft and Uber, coupled with urban lifestyle changes, are
developments that make me pause to reconsider. I realize that the
business case for robocar carsharing (be it ATs or peer-to-peer) is
currently being forged and, indeed, is proving disruptively significant.
Except for sport, some are already theorizing that <a href="http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/176672-autonomous-taxis-why-you-may-never-own-a-self-driving-car" target="_blank">it could become the only way we use automobiles</a>.
Carsharing and ridesharing, as performed by companies like Uber
(including their UberPool service) and Car2go, are currently paving the
way to carsharing with robocar fleets. They are already building that
market, only with human drivers.<br />
<br />
So from the moment Google's self-driving cars start entering the marketplace, I suspect <a href="https://twitter.com/Quan/status/522162170906173440" target="_blank">Robin Chase</a> is
right to believe that much of the driving population will forgo vehicle
ownership in short order. That day could arrive with a speed that may
surprise us. The main reasons I suspect this are the advantages robocars
can provide in sheer convenience coupled with the many raw benefits of
the sharing economy. Moreover, any kind of carsharing that is able to
reach efficiencies of scale with wide adoption could literally blow out
of the water any rival form of automobile use, and robocars, for good
reasons, stand a chance of capturing that kind of level of adoption -
even if it is only a partial level of adoption by most individuals using
them.<br />
<br />
For one, automated driving helps us exploit much
better the lost resource represented in keeping cars empty and parked
all the time. It means the vehicle doesn't always have to be parked (at
least not at the place where you actually disembark from it). No coveted
spots to circle around. No repetitive circuits downtown trolling for an
open parking spot. A robocar has an inbuilt valet service, and while it
could continue circulating without you to go park itself, that
situation lends itself immediately to the cost and energy benefits of
sharing. The vehicle can now go on to serve another individual if not
pick up someone else at the very spot you dismounted. Parked vehicles
without occupants represent wasted space and rusting metal, not to
mention human time and expense. Driverless technology puts the pressure
on us to capture this latent resource, and I suspect Google and
entrepreneurs will quickly move to exploit it. Many have realized that
this simple move will drive down the number of vehicles we will need per
capita (and if coupled with empowered transit services, I suspect
significantly so).<br />
<br />
But the convenience granted in the
user's experience of robocars is the overlooked game-changer. That is
the salient factor that I completely missed before!<br />
<br />
First of all, everybody can enjoy the equivalent of "<a href="http://www.wheres-andy-now.com/culture/los-angeles-wants-its-doris-day-parking-los-angles-times" target="_blank">Doris Day Parking</a>"
with robocars. Like Doris Day dismounting from her vehicle at the curb
in front of her covered apartment entry, you will nearly always hop off
from your robocar directly at the curbside before your destination. That
kind of convenience is why even really well-off people heavily use
taxis in places like Manhattan in the first place: the relative
inconvenience involved in storing and retrieving personal automobiles
most anywhere you want to go in Manhattan is simply too much to bear.<br />
<br />
Since
the advantages of not actually having to drive a car or park it is
something taxis or Uber can provide us, the extra benefit granted to you
by a robocar is the fact that you never have to worry again about
maintaining your
driving eligibility or insurability. Think about that! If you have a
driver's license, you probably take this benefit for granted, but I will
call this a great advantage, since it is actually not insignificant. <br />
<br />
But
when a robocar is shared, instead of personally owned, the convenience
advantages continue to pile on. As a competitive advantage to vehicle
ownership, carsharing reaching the scale of ubiquitous adoption is
extremely compelling and disruptive, since, think about it, you as the
user no longer have to worry about owning the car, maintaining it, nor
housing it. Nor do you need to stay near its parked location. Your
mobility becomes completely unlinked from the automobile. What's more,
you no longer have to put up with the long-term necessities of
ownership, such as worrying about accommodating the near constant
mismatch between the vehicle you buy and your full array of vehicle
needs.<br />
<br />
So we have the following clear advantages with carshared googlecars:<br />
<br />
(1) The advantage of foregoing driving eligibility<br />
(2) The advantage of foregoing vehicle ownership<br />
(3) The advantage of tailored and atomized automobility <br />
(4) The advantage of freeing your rents and real estate from providing automobile storage<br />
<br />
By
"tailored and atomized automobility" I mean many things which we don't
typically account for as as car owners. These include being freed from
personal investment in the long-term
maintenance of a vehicle. A big one we don't think about is being freed
from our invested choice in one or two vehicles we can own at a time.
Being locked into one or two
vehicles to serve all your typical trip needs is a large burden that
locks us out of a full array of automobiles to suit a particular trip
need very specifically - that could include adding a utility, making
some trips more luxurious, or making others more efficient and cheaper. <br />
<br />
All
four of those benefits are actually one advantage: the advantage of
having your mobility completely delinked from automobile ownership.<br />
<br />
If
you own a vehicle, take a pause here to think deliberately about your
life without that advantage for a few minutes. Think about all the
obligations in your life to address each of its burdens, and all the
particular steps they involve, not only the scheduling and the payments,
but their indirect repercussions on your life choices. For example, if
you commute to your office job in an SUV or pickup, think of the
outright waste and inefficiency that represents. What would happen
should you suddenly be liberated from each of those deficits and
demands, and you discover that, hey, you have just about the same
mobility with a carshared service as you would with a personally owned
car? In fact, your mobility may go up, if for no other reason than you
can afford your mobility better and scale it to your actual needs.
Carsharing with robocars may be able to afford you this kind of liberty
even in the outlying scrublands of suburbia!<br />
<br />
Are you sensing how radically your life could be reconfigured?<br />
<br />
Now... Lets just <i>begin</i> to think about the land use and urban design changes that may be in our horizon...<br />
<br />
<b>Retail</b><br />
<br />
If
we share them collectively or use them as ATs, the potential of robocars to transform our sprawl pattern is quite significant because
they would dramatically lessen the need for parking spaces. That has
radical implications I don't have to explain.<br />
<br />
But there
is another important consequence we should anticipate and that is the
fact that the needs of retailers to capture customers will probably
change greatly - in fact, I speculate this need could catalyze the most
dramatic consequence of automated driving on urban form and real estate
markets. What matters here is not just that the parking can go away (or
at least the provision of parking near most destinations), it is how
uses are suddenly reoriented to serve their customers arriving via
carshared robocars. What happens when you discover that the greater
portion of your customers or users is now arriving via ancy robocars,
which can park themselves or be traded off between entering and
departing customers as if they were a public commodity?<br />
<br />
I
think businesses are suddenly going to sense a great need to
immediately front the parcel with their entries in order to receive
their customer competitively at the curbside drop-off point. At last,
the new urbanist street section has a compelling advantage over the
strip center in terms of the one factor that really matters in sprawl: <u>the convenience to the customer!</u><br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbz7c6X4gAlQPGmzYQjM6htxG3-TZSnxnPa3iuKIKNKaH-fVZLJXNzIpM7jSlLHLRvaomkdWd1NNYAB_l6ANUo6-0Km1_OSHXKXbIRlfYTNPwL95dXXYUlJCe-pv2P8U1D9NIvf7mXLrs/s1600/IMG_0866.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbz7c6X4gAlQPGmzYQjM6htxG3-TZSnxnPa3iuKIKNKaH-fVZLJXNzIpM7jSlLHLRvaomkdWd1NNYAB_l6ANUo6-0Km1_OSHXKXbIRlfYTNPwL95dXXYUlJCe-pv2P8U1D9NIvf7mXLrs/s1600/IMG_0866.JPG" height="480" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This Walgreens
on Magazine Street in New Orleans needs no exterior signage for the
"Walgreens" brand. Instead, its cosmetics section is prominently
situated at the storefront. Both this Walgreens and the Whole Foods in
Uptown New Orleans (above top) have realized that linear feet of
frontage near the curb is the resource that is vital. When you don't
need to provide parking and signs to attract customers, as in the days
before the car, all that matters is what you offer as an attractive
experience. <a href="http://www.tumblr.com/search/decorated+shed" target="_blank">No more decorated shed nor duck</a>. There is just "a shed with delights".</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
In terms of the way we value property with
robocar carsharing in denser areas, particularly retail and commercial
property, what this means is that we will probably return to the prewar
era of primarily valuing property in terms of a lot's curbside frontage.
Believe it or not, the shorthand way our predecessors evaluated
relative commercial property values formerly was in terms linear feet of
frontage (not building price per square foot). Indeed, that's the
reason we repeatedly built urbanism before the world wars. It was simply
the most important factor impacting commercial property value. It was
the comparatively high value we placed on street frontage that compelled
people to build right to the property line without setbacks, because
that was where you met all your customers and where you competed with
your neighbors for them. Building to the property line maximized
building value.<br />
<br />
As carsharing grows to allow stores and
restaurants to cut down and even eliminate the need to provide
off-street parking, expect linear feet of frontage to commensurably
become more expensive in real estate terms. Exact dimensions of
storefront length, actually, will more than likely be tied to customer
turnover rates at peak shopping hours. A sufficient expanse of window
space to catch the passersby's attention will be valued. I suspect
stores will start to become tall and multistory as a rule, like the
urban department stores of the past. The Fifth Avenue effect. Many of
these anticipated effects, in terms of real estate economy, strikingly
resemble the forms of the pre-automobile era of urban development!<br />
<br />
<b>Environment</b><br />
<br />
What the carsharing that is
propelled by autonomous cars will enable us to capture at significant
scales is the lost usable service potential of automobiles. Presently,
only taxi cab and Uber/Lyft fleets currently capture this efficiency.
Carsharing increases the number of trips an individual car can serve
over its usable life. With carsharing, you are, in effect, capturing
more trips per net pound of manufactured goods. In gross, the
efficiencies gained from carshared vehicles really will add a net total
benefit to the environment, enabling the same mobility to consumers for
less impact, representing less wasted energy, less material life-costs
(embodied energy) and less raw material intake for the same number of
vehicle miles traveled. A lot of these gains are simply plugging in to
the latent capacity that our present ownership-based transport system simply locks us out of. These are thus gains that
can help us offset rising energy costs if we address latent demand for
cheaper mobility effectively, using, of course, transit...<br />
<br />
<b>Transit</b><br />
<br />
Does
transit go away with robocars, by the way? Not at all! I believe
transit will in fact become stronger if for the simple reason that
divorced from vehicle-ownership, the economic advantage of using transit
as part of your daily trip routines pencils out financially.<br />
<br />
Where
one can, one will save money sharing trips with strangers. That math
could be easily compared with AT/carsharing apps that will more than
likely be tailored to showing you your best route and trip options
(Google-style) in terms of the bottom line: the actual dollar cost of a
trip. Moreover, transit will be vitally important
to reducing congestion in the peak times. To prevent hordes of robocars
suddenly causing gridlock in the streets (since they won't
necessarily be stored near their users any longer, remember),
municipalities will
probably build up their transit lines to move more people in and out of
the
downtowns and office centers. AT fleets will correspondingly charge
higher rates to prevent gridlock and to encourage modal shifts (gridlock
hurts them too - especially if it is gridlock produced by empty
vehicles).
In that situation, AT users entering the transit market will realize
that the longer they manage to stay on transit for their commutes the
cheaper and more reliable life gets. I think transit will suddenly be
valued politically more evenly in a toe-to-toe contest with its main
subsidized rival, the freeway.<br />
<br />
Because of the dynamic
of transit mixing, I think carshared fleets will operate
in home "sectors" that circulate people locally, expecting people to
plug into to high capacity transit lines for the longer/cross-town/peak
trips. AT
companies may prefer this situation because their fleets become more
manageable when most of their vehicles are circulating near one another
and they can
store and service their vehicles more readily in the down times
(otherwise they could be eating the costs of retrieving their empty
vehicles from other home sectors and far away places). So, in the
future,
I strongly suspect carsharing and transit will work hand in hand. They
will be thought
about together as one greater
system, rather than our present tendency to think of them as mutually
exclusive "options". This gets to the core of what I mean by the benefit
of "atomized" mobility. Yes, wealthier folks could use their shared or
personally owned robocars for all trips, regardless of time or
distance, but even they will benefit, because they will no longer be
stuck in traffic with hordes of other people with a 9-to-5 job who have a
latent demand for convenient transit, but are locked into needing to
store and look after their own vehicles. This is important to realize.
Folks that commute with singly occupied automobiles <b>are commuting as much to take care of their car</b> (because it must ultimately be stored where they sleep) <b>as they are to get from point A to point B</b>.
Robocars free them of this. It cuts an invisible umbilical
that many of us don't realize is suppressing our freedom. And when it
does, transit will reap the benefits.<br />
<br />
<b>Urban Form </b><br />
<br />
Without
transit in the mix to limit congestion, self-driving
cars will punish uses that centralize too much in the city, meaning
similar uses will have to scatter geographically. Cities like Houston
and LA and North Carolina's Research Triangle, with their scattered
metropolitan centers, will likely be in a good situation to ease their
way quickly into wide-scale robocar adoption. Both transit and robocar
carsharing are more efficient in multicenter metros. In more
centralized metros, like Charlotte, robocar carsharing will actually
compel
municipalities to devote more resources and attention to transit network
improvements lest they will mire their cores in robocar gridlock at the
peak times. I anticipate robocar commuting will be possible,
of course, but quite expensive in these cities since AT
companies will likely use dynamic pricing structures like Uber's to
mediate supply and demand. Expect to see most people commuting into and out of job centers using high capacity transit. <br />
<br />
Since
self-driving vehicles will tend to be always circulating with or sans
occupants, instead of spending their time parked somewhere off the
street, they will always be in the street grid swarming to the serve
their clients at their destination points. People will sense the
activity of an area by noting the rates of vehicle level changes on the
streets and discerning where the swarm of vehicles are gravitating to,
thus sending signals to everyone about the hives of activity in the
city. They will make viscerally clear the exchange of human meetings and
transactions geographically. The traveling "swarms" will give us an
interesting new and dynamic "psychogeography" of our cities because
traffic will no longer just represent humans moving through but the
thickening of human activity, corresponding to the numbers of people
entering and leaving specific areas. During business hours in the middle of the
day, for example, vehicles will move out of the city center to disperse
into the city and then start congregating downtown again at afternoon
peak time. What will be the new behaviors, land use distributions and
urban pathologies that will emerge? What words will need to be invented
to describe these? Urban designers should try to anticipate what they
might be, and what all of this entails, sooner rather than later! <br />
<br />
<b>Mapping for Traffic Control</b><br />
<br />
One problem
limiting Google's ability to introduce its autonomous vehicles is the
mapping infrastructure that is needed. But I think Google can largely
crowdsource the mapping from the early adopters who will have every
incentive to do so. After early adopters, cyclists will chip in, eager
to create de facto "bikeways" by cartographically indicating street
zones where cars better bugger off, thank you very much. We will see an
amazingly innovative period in street design using signalling and
feedback from Google Maps and the manual input of robocar users. This
feedback will eventually allow every street to "teach itself" how the
traffic should best navigate and flow through it. Urban Design is going
to get much more organic and decentralized. Google's robocar mapping
could empower local constituencies, or, on the other hand, it could
empower the mandates of dictatorial DOTs. It depends on who first uses the tool
effectively early on. As urban designers, we need to move in quickly to
ensure that we implement inventively to empower locals in the Wild West
period of robocar introduction and to make sure that we demonstrate the
raw of potential of allowing self-adapting, organic paradigms of
traffic control to emerge. <br />
<br />
<br />
There's still lot's more to say on all that and more, but it will have to wait till another good evening...<br />
<br />
To wrap up, while the new tool of autonomous driving will have many upsides, it can
serve sprawl and conventional ways of doing things every bit as much as
its latent ability to do great things for walkable, more congenial and
humane fabrics like the Charleston peninsula. The potential to sprawlify
or to make Charleston with this tool is equally there. Planners and urban designers can't be lazy. We
must be ready to spring to action when robocar fleets arrive to do what can make us prosperous in a new day. So, let's start thinking harder
about these potentials!Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-67899634890631589052014-09-22T00:56:00.000-04:002014-09-23T19:24:34.542-04:00Forays into an "Incremental Urbanism": Mashing Lean Urbanism + Strong Towns Resilience + Frequent Transit Grids <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRsrkizBl9ewo5eyIVjldTjNVcVDTI9lCtkgNIix6K7v_PYKFvRMfHl0_ZIMrz4G7cbOyeEkNEUnnvsERmtXMASnUPYxZMVKq3f6wFEdR5pdMvYPhzpWxs_JNOs5ScXk-ijeCSwNBrmoU/s1600/IMG_0683.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRsrkizBl9ewo5eyIVjldTjNVcVDTI9lCtkgNIix6K7v_PYKFvRMfHl0_ZIMrz4G7cbOyeEkNEUnnvsERmtXMASnUPYxZMVKq3f6wFEdR5pdMvYPhzpWxs_JNOs5ScXk-ijeCSwNBrmoU/s1600/IMG_0683.JPG" height="480" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Lean Urbanism" in Charlotte. My team's Park(ing) Day parklet, a shipping container "homestead unit" + microfarm.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
It has been quite an active past week and half! This event-filled September has granted me experiences that pique my interests with new possibilities. For the first time, I think, I sense that I have a story arc and trajectory that can tie together my hopes for my career in city planning. How exactly I can contribute to that arc is still unformed, but I know I'm at the cusp of new beginnings in my practice. What's more, I am finding a "home" of sorts, finally, in the streams of planning and design schools of thought out there. At times, I've felt adrift, without a fraternal abode I could call my own. At various times I've leaned late-modern Dutch and ecological and at others more infrastructure based and "new urbanist light". My intellectual grounding is still in what I call the "Kevin Lynch school", for lack of a better name. What I got from Lynch was an appreciation of the need for signposts and settings to check our conventional hubris, to recalibrate and think about how we think about the city, and to craft more nuanced design processes that enable designers to utilize feedback and, even, reversal. <br />
<br />
I find this ethic at work in three young currents emerging in planning thought. These are Andres Duany's solidifying thoughts on "Lean Urbanism", the Strong Towns "math" of Chuck Marohn and Joe Minicozzi, and Jarrett Walker's goal setting approach to transit network planning. Each leading front, obviously, focuses on the professional lens of these experts, so the first is not accidentally honed primarily on architectural processes, the second on the interphase of civil engineering and productive growth, and the last, obviously, on transit effectiveness. While these are each most effective, I think, keeping their primary focus on the interests of their leading thinkers, they each complement each other quite nicely with the nascent tools they are developing and the goals and ledgers they are progressively clarifying. An urban designer should appropriate the language they are working out, if simply to test it. What each incorporate into their lessons and techniques for planning practice is an appreciation for making effective strides incrementally, removing, or at least circumventing, the hubris and the waste of processes based on failed paradigms and the irresponsible chasing of growth with big projects. Andres is right: the need for PPPs has pole-vaulted to the apex of planning expertise today because we have regulated and expertified away fiscal clarity, bottom up pipelines for nimble-footed, resilient, incremental growth. <br />
<br />
I'm alert to how all three movements will inform and complement urban design practice and take it to a new place. Despite their independent trajectories, these three vanguards are to a great degree pragmatic and rational, discursive in their clarification of the problems they face, and revelatory in their way to think about the goals (Jarrett Walker's post "<a href="http://www.humantransit.org/2013/03/abundant-access-a-map-of-the-key-transit-choices.html" target="_blank">abundant access: a map of a community's transit choices, and a possible goal for transit</a>" is one of those rare language-shifting works of cut-to-the-chase rhetoric for distilled understanding that one only comes across a few times in one's professional life). But they are not unconventional and revolutionary movements in their respective scopes. Indeed, Andres, Chuck, Joe and Jarrett are instead highly conscious about how to rejigger conventional processes in a thoughtful, successive and thoroughly professional way. <br />
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My excitement is that I'm beginning to see how the three movements can each independently contribute to a practice honed to synergize with their insights... call that convergence of the triad maybe "Incremental Urbanism". I'm going to call the convergence L-M-N-O-P Planning: "be Lean when you can", "do the Math", "try the Network", "be Open" (to change my thinking), and "be a Planner, silly" - focus on planning for successive stages and don't do the opposite thing and create plans and ordinances that actually outlaw change. Incremental change is what cities often do and should be allowed to do, hence, why we actually need planners. (Zoning for "no change" is what creates sprawl, stupid.) Admittedly, the last two "O" and "P" points are my personal commentary.<br />
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Just be alert. In their ways, these three will each succeed, and that path will look very differently for each. But, quietly, beginning with precedent setting, they will begin fraying the edges of conventional and Ponzi-like approaches to city growth. Those of us bouncing deep in the bowels of the heavy armored artillery will begin to notice the pockmarks with the daylight of the three movements shining through. To the extent I'm allowed, I'm eager to bring in their methods into my activities, if not into my paid work in this early moment, then into my civic attentions.<br />
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By the way, if you are scratching your head and wondering how Jarrett's work of late appreciates an "incremental" approach to urbanism, I invite you to carefully read Chapter 15 "On the Boulevard" of <a href="http://www.humantransit.org/human-transit-the-book-table-of-contents.html" target="_blank">his book</a>. Jarrett's strategy actually addresses the "stroad" retrofit for incremental urbanism. We're quite fortunate to be witnessing the paradigm shifts that appear to be emerging in planning today. What an incredible time to be doing urban design.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We love Nicollet Av. in Minneapolis!</td></tr>
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THIS new light-footed trajectory in my thought has been percolating to the surface of my reflections since last weekend, when I felt the refreshing embrace of brother/sisterhood with planing activists and transportation people (who actually think like me!) at the Strong Towns National Gathering in Minneapolis. Yes, I actually attended a conference-like convergence on my own dime for the first time. It was an easy sell, not only because I'm a Strong Towns "Advocate" but, well, because this registration cost was in the low, low three figure range. It was thus cheap because Jim Kumon, the organizer, has, shall we say, a "lean" approach to event planning. Which means that at the cost of the holiday I planned to have with my brother anyway, I could actually attend without having to beg someone for money. How refreshing. How bottom up. I actually did spend some money, of course, but I got to spend it pumping it into all the delightful restaurants and local businesses I could on Nicollet Avenue and its diverse environs. As luck would have it, that Sunday at the conclusion to the Gathering, Open Streets Minneapolis closed off Nicollet Ave. to traffic, and my brother and I thoroughly enjoyed our time in the midst of what is surely one of the great neighborhood streets in the nation.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jane and Jezebel provided modeling services.</td></tr>
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On the heels of the Gathering, this weekend saw my first foray into "lean urbanism" in Charlotte during Park(ing) Day 2014. Along with Klint Mullis of Center City Partners, two of my Neighboring Concepts coworkers, Sandra Grzemski and Maria Floren, and the Lawrence Group's power duo ladies Aleksandra Borisenko and Keihly Moore (who both organized the entire event), we erected a homesteading greenhouse/"living room" and container microfarm. It was more symbol and tactical than "lean", true, but at least we put the meme out for homesteading with a shipping container provided by <a href="http://boxmanstudios.com/" target="_blank">Boxman Studios</a> (last year's fastest growing business in Charlotte) and a microfarm kit, chicken coop and all, courtesy local outfitter/supplier <a href="http://microfarmgardens.com/" target="_blank">Microfarm Organic Gardens</a>. As Andres Duany likes to say, every parking surface is a ready-made footing for light-imprint settlement, and I hope we made that argument at least visually. You want to homestead on your local vacant mall parking lot? No worries, we can get 'er DONE right here in Charlotte (Eastland Mall, we're looking at you).<br />
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During both weekends, I got to make new friends and meet very exciting people from whom I hope to learn more from. At the National Gathering, I got my introduction to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwKbgF-HeaU" target="_blank">Sara Joy Proppe</a>, <a href="http://restlessurbanist.com/" target="_blank">Edward Erfurt </a>and <a href="http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/motoring-majority-must-have-skin-in-the-game-419fk0n-204751861.html" target="_blank">Hans Noeldner</a>, and had crazy good discussions, the kind I rarely have, with many others. This weekend was also my chance to work with the Lawrence Group girls to erect four new Little Free Libraries in Charlotte, contributed by the participants of the Park(ing) Day parklets plus a few others (every parklet came with at least one LFL - so a more permanent tribute to our creativity lives on). This included the one in Keihly Moore's and my neighborhood, Wesley Heights. We still have five more to put up. I look forward to working more with Keihly (pronounced "Kee-ly") and Aleksandra. They blog at <a href="http://www.completeblocks.com/" target="_blank">Complete Blocks</a> and contribute to <a href="http://plancharlotte.org/">PlanCharlotte.org</a>.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Keihly (right), along with Wesley Heights Neighborhood Association President Shannon Hughes, inaugurates our Wesley Heights Neighborhood Little Free Library. This sharp design was the work of UNC-Charlotte students.</td></tr>
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<br />Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-19088571482159594572013-08-11T13:09:00.001-04:002013-08-11T13:33:37.993-04:00My Savannah DreamRecently, I awoke from a dream realizing that I had spent the entire dream wandering through a city with a grid patterned after Savannah's. Even in the densest areas of this city, where the structures of a Manhattan-like downtown had taken over the areas of entire wards, here the signature square layout of Savannah was architecturally integrated into the interior spatial layouts of high-rise megablocks. In the dream, the distinction between building space and open space seemed to have thoroughly blended, so that what carried through was the cohesion of the pattern rather than the clear-cut delineation of space. The squares of the city had taken extreme forms and qualities... a grotesque Savannah.<br />
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This Savannah was perhaps real Savannah's alter ego, in carnival drag. In real life, Savannah can't repress her natural stabilization: a mixed use, genteel and low-rise format which diversifies uses through the characteristics of streets and the countervailing pulls of its fabric dynamics (an interesting and measurable quality for <a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2010/07/how-savannah-generates-diversity.html" target="_blank">situating diversity resiliently</a>, urbanists).<br />
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But in the dream, distortions and extremities were the norm. Not just in terms of density. Some squares were pristine clearings still, filled with dewy light and new faux-Victorian homes just being erected, smelling like freshly cut timber. Another square, littered and abandoned, was domed over by a cavernous Hagia Sophia-like structure, with large facades of glass through which blue-ish, silvery light poured through. Another square was similarly domed but filled with chandeliers, mirrors and gilded furniture, and packed with revelers. There was even a spooky area where the city had collapsed in on itself and had reverted into a live oak wilderness. The sulking presence of swamp creatures could be felt as they coiled into crevices in the shadowy brick piles.<br />
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As usual, nothing that was occupying my attention in the dream made much sense upon recollection. One doesn’t apprehend the comedic logic of dream events while one is experiencing them usually. My city dreams, in particular, have the quality of tragic-epic pilgrimages, for, as in most dreams, the quest always seems curiously tottering and perpetually side-tracked. In this dream, it involved crossing the variegated city with a band of acquaintances, like a poorly planned, shoe-string expedition of urban explorers recruited on Craigslist.<br />
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My first realization in my bedside review of the dream was that the only mode of travel that was allowed in the city was walking, perhaps my internalized credit to the walkable superiority of Savannah's form. However, striking to me here was the fact that in the dream the walking excursion was curiously obstacle filled. Movement was frustrated primarily by carnivalesque throngs of people and the animated skeletons of, well, what must be classified as former pets. There was, however, a singular interlude through a bottomless hall-like section where passage was afforded with the help of trapeze acrobatics. (Is that a mode? Call it "catenary enabled pedestrianism"... except without streetcars, ha.)<br />
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What does this dream tell me about Savannah? Is Savannah now an urbanist folly lodged deeply in my subconscious?<br />
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I don’t know. All I can say is that dreams spent roving about through strange cities in festival time recur frequently for me. This, however, is the first time Savannah's grid featured tenaciously from the point where I could recollect the dream to awakening. Perhaps it is my subconscious guilt, a gamely kick in the pants from my Id, to revisit my glacially paced study of Savannah's grid? This kind of format, on a blog, is perhaps wrong for it. But I might revisit the thought.Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-78963642378281419752013-07-07T17:19:00.000-04:002013-07-07T17:58:44.444-04:00Our future with robocars: our future with guaranteed sprawl?<b id="docs-internal-guid-58023f08-ba04-582c-96d0-fe9ca18691c5" style="font-weight: normal;"></b><br />
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-58023f08-ba04-582c-96d0-fe9ca18691c5" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Planners and technophiles </span><a href="http://www.planetizen.com/node/63758" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">have begun to think a lot about autonomous vehicles</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> or “robocars”. Some are even creatively deliberating the possible upsides to this technology for green urbanism and land use. (There are some upsides, supposedly. See </span><a href="http://daily.sightline.org/2013/06/04/a-self-driving-future/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.) Most of these visions even entertain a vision of a future where no one owns a vehicle anymore or even knows how to drive one manually. So great things in store for vehicle share, apparently. Folks will simply hop on “automated taxis” (ATs) and zip around town purposefully to meetings on dew-drop shaped permutations of MIT podcars. Their attentions no longer demanded at the wheel, the imaginary occupants of these curiously slender cars (even traveling two or three to a lane we hear!) will now spend their time caressing their electronic devices, if not attending teleconferences in their capsule, at least writing a good bit of code, blogging about new products, or dreaming up their next start-ups. The fact that “productivity” benefits for robocars crop up while paying scant heed to their cultural underpinnings and land use implications is, well, interesting.</span></b></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-58023f08-ba04-582c-96d0-fe9ca18691c5" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-58023f08-ba04-582c-96d0-fe9ca18691c5" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Whatever the inevitability of automated driving might be, the belief that autonomous vehicles will lead to a future of pervasive carshare is not all that convincing to me. Yes, I am aware that the percentage of kiddos these days who are eschewing vehicle ownership apparently is </span><a href="http://bettercities.net/article/%E2%80%98driving-boom%E2%80%99-over-20241" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">on a steady trajectory to reach Edwardian era levels</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Should the driving boom be over indeed, however, it is too early to confidently predict the widespread disappearance of vehicle ownership just because people stop “driving”. Nor will robocars helpfully mobilize our efforts to convert infrastructure and development pattern to a car2go utopia, even if they are used predominantly as ATs. I suspect, in fact, the opposite. While carsharing in itself can remove vehicles from the road in per capita terms, we need to better factor here what automated driving represents in two aspects: in the cultural one, especially in how people and machine transition together toward full automation (if indeed they ever manage to), and, secondly, in consideration of the potential commuting dynamics of automated driving.</span></b></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-58023f08-ba04-582c-96d0-fe9ca18691c5" style="font-weight: normal;">
<br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-58023f08-ba04-582c-96d0-fe9ca18691c5" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">First the latter aspect. Possibly the most distracting transport models to talk about in discussing robocars are carshare systems and personal rapid transit (PRT). Distracting because both carsharing and PRT favor compact, walkable urbanism to support them and (at least in their early versions) outright confine their use to certain home areas. They have thus the problem of range. That is exactly the aspect which makes them favor urban and walkable environments. </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You need to walk to access them. </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But this is not a geographic limitation facing automated driving at all! In fact, it is a limitation automated driving, or a hybrid version of it, is perfectly suited to overcome. A more strongly correlating transport model to compare with are the mixed-mode carriage systems once proposed in the 60s. These transport models, now seemingly forgotten, were proposed in the heyday of the PRT-visioning years to serve low density development patterns. Basically these are like dual-mode PRT systems but adding the de-linkability of the vehicle so that the vehicles can be the conventional gas-guzzling, owner-operated kind.</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At their heart, mixed-mode carriage systems were intended to resolve the “modal dilemma”, the impossibility of having an efficient mass transit system that can service far-flung suburbs extensively, flexibly, and cheaply. And so the transit visionaries of the 60s and 70s proposed to create carriage guideways to link cars to belts or put them on trains, thereby lending automobile use some of the virtues of mass transit by escorting linked vehicles rapidly through densely traveled areas. But, as Kevin Lynch pointed out, “this not only requires a very expensive carriage and control on the main routes, but also that individual vehicles be made compatible with that device” (in K. Lynch, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Good City Form</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">; Camridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981, p. 423). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One can see the enormous physical barriers to overcome in implementing such a carriage system, and easily deduce good reasons why automobile manufacturers would be averse to adopt it to begin with. Autonomous driving systems, however, not only can potentially virtualize the entire carriage and control system, they remove the need to standardize vehicles for physical linkage. They also can, crucially, decentralize the control system and make it much less computationally complex. Robocars have the sensory controls needed to “platoon” them together safely at relatively constant high speeds, all you have to add is the vehicle to vehicle communication system to lend platooned traffic a super-human synchronization that prevents it from backing up. Information, in effect, then replaces the “carriage”. The carriage problem thus is 100% solvable. What’s more, the decentralized aspect of the system means that it can also be modular - adjustable locally so that if one link slows or breaks down (as vehicles are wont to do), the system can more easily handle mishaps safely and insulate a local disturbance from the performance of the whole. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Because the robocar “carriage” is virtual, furthermore, it has an inbuilt flexibility unavailable to any physical system. Thus, for example, access to a high-speed guideway is a much more fluid and safe dual mode transitioning process than its physical counterpart ever could be. So long as spacing is not too tight, vehicles can simply merge into and exit the guideway at any point. Platooned vehicles merely need to preserve a local “springiness” to receive and dispel individual vehicles in their group so that they will not hurt the overall speed of traffic traveling in the system. If and when local capacity is reached at any point, further merging into the guideway is simply disallowed. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While it appears complex, the mechanics of carriage-like synchronization become a matter of programming, probably a matter no more complex than can be handled by the programming capacity that is already inherent in automating vehicular driving, I imagine. (I’m no expert of system dynamics and control systems, of course, but reading E.O. Wilson’s descriptions of ant colony communication, I’m quite positive the coding solutions to such complex system-wide control dilemmas will surprise us both in their simplicity and in their elegant results.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The big hang-up, of course, is convincing humans to yield control of their vehicles, to, well, other vehicles. It kind of screws with our sense of ownership, control, and even privacy. Yet, I would never underestimate the capacity of early adopters to sacrifice much in their personal sense of self to demonstrate the merit of technological innovations. Why Google and carmakers are not already testing autonomous freeway platooning is puzzling to me, because it seems to be the low-hanging fruit within the scope of robocar technologies. But, possibly, they may have already realized the immense cultural jump it requires in terms of user adoption. They may have deduced that you need full automation at the outset before people are eventually acculturated to use it on highways. Besides, a dual-mode stage of operation has unique dangers. Google may just not be wanting to waste its time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Which brings us to the cultural questions surrounding automated vehicle use. Cultural adoption with the robocar guideways described above is easy to imagine incrementally. If reserved lanes for robocars can be deployed cautiously for early adopters in limited areas as a way to address the most hopelessly congested urban freeways, perhaps by using existing HOV lanes, progressive success with these will no doubt encourage further reservation of travel lanes for the system. The matter may be a deceptive fix, however, because all it does is displace the congestion to the entry and exit points of the system where guideway traffic will inevitably have to return to surface streets. It will thus drive the need to take even more space for ramps and merging lanes and even creating larger interchange loops to make them robocars keep their speeds going. In other words, we will be doing (and even adding to!) this kind of scary stuff...</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.ci.bloomington.mn.us/cityhall/dept/pubworks/engineer/streets/curr_proj/35w_494/turbine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="324" src="http://www.ci.bloomington.mn.us/cityhall/dept/pubworks/engineer/streets/curr_proj/35w_494/turbine.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Maybe we can, like, spin robocars right into the streets? A "turbine" interchange improvement project. <a href="http://www.ci.bloomington.mn.us/cityhall/dept/pubworks/engineer/streets/curr_proj/35w_494/35w_494.htm" target="_blank">Source</a>.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-58023f08-ba04-582c-96d0-fe9ca18691c5" style="font-weight: normal;"></b><br />
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-58023f08-ba04-582c-96d0-fe9ca18691c5" style="font-weight: normal;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-58023f08-ba04-582c-96d0-fe9ca18691c5" style="font-weight: normal;"></b></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-58023f08-ba04-582c-96d0-fe9ca18691c5" style="font-weight: normal;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-58023f08-ba04-582c-96d0-fe9ca18691c5" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I hope I’m wrong. I do hope robocar control systems somehow prove smart enough to reduce congestion while not adding lanes and speed-fixated freeway infrastructure. But if so, what’s to stop sprawl at the ends if increased capacity induces demand, as the iron law of freeway capacity improvement dictates? The need to continue improving and adding to limited-access roadway capacity within the city center will certainly not go away once it is clear that the mitigation of highway congestion using the superhuman and decentralized control systems of robocars is feasible. Horrifying as the thought is to me, cities whose current planning trajectory is to improve the speed and capacity of downtown freeways, such as my hometown of Charlotte, N.C., will be vindicated for poo-pooing the freeway-removal, “Ringstrasse” dreams of </span><a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2011/10/freeway-in-city-of-big-bosses-and-big.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">urbanists such as myself</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></b></b></div>
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<br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The capacity of robocars to extend the geographic range of work commuting and serve the expansion of sprawl should give every land conservationist pause (by the way, land/water resource and wildlife conservation is a primary reason I am an "urbanist"). Sprawl serves travel patterns that are already no longer confined to a metropolitan catchment area but are, increasingly, operating in a regional one. The interurban pulls of the Megalopolis are very real. As a private sector consultant, I’m not only attuned to the scale of far-flung development, I’m also constantly amazed by how much my own industry of urban development continues to transform - even in its operating bases - from a city-centric one into a regionally dispersed one. One of my projects here in Charlotte, for example, is managed by a developer who lives in the Raleigh area, who manages projects both in Charlotte and in Richmond, VA. The general contractor is based (and wisely so) in Greensboro, N.C., and its management team thinks it is nothing to expect its Triad based subs to mobilize teams to Charlotte. Two hour daily commutes are nothing to all these folks. You can forget slender pod vehicles. Most of them are the type of individuals who are served only by beefy looking pick-up trucks, as you might expect. And they are operating regionally, like, right now. Because of LEED, the materials that arrive to the job site often have a net transport life cost that is less than that exerted by the workers banging them together on any given day. What do you suppose automated driving represents for these folks? What do you think it means for other industries, however local their attentions?</span></div>
<br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The potential of another cultural transformation needed to support robocar use is important to note. It has more to do with how we relate to our vehicles. Driver attention and the communication between machine and driver is actually </span><a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/review/513531/proceed-with-caution-toward-the-self-driving-car/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a subtle technical horizon to overcome</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in the progressive evolution toward full automation. Innovation in this area is critical because the more dangerous mode of driving is not the human-operated kind and certainly not the fully automated kind but the hybrid in-between form of it where some capacities are automated and not others. (Humans also need to change the way they relate to smart objects, here-to-fore notoriously untrustworthy. But what if we improve the driver-vehicle communication too much? Will we, in fact, ever get to fully hands-off automation if that happens? What happens if we find a hybrid middle, or even semi-automated “enhanced driving”, more important to human emotion, especially to our notions of safety and comfort? What infrastructure, for example, will we need to build to handle what happens when a car system “crashes” digitally? Will we be caught in a perpetual adolescent lurch toward full automation?) </span></div>
<br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t think the auto industry will also ignore the latent capacity of enhanced communication to feed our endless ability to personalize our vehicles. With enhanced communicative traits, won’t vehicles, in time, become more pet-like? Remember KITT? Enhanced to discern your mood and to chat cheerily with you, they may become rather compellingly ownable extensions of personal and family identity, it seems to me.</span></div>
<br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perhaps robocars can be enhanced for share-ability by lending them the communicative qualities of Jane Jacobs’s “public characters” - quirky, talkative but not nosy, and precariously self-maintained</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. People may come in time to recognize some of their favorite AT personalities and create public nicknames for them (especially if some units are known to be moody). Preserving and caring collectively for them then better becomes a kind of public trust. They might even help with our sense of community. But if this be a tactic to get buy-in for ATs, not only is it strange to think it can replace vehicle ownership, we’d still have to ask toward what end if we succeed. The green merits of ATs, while lessening the need to own and park cars, are actually quite dubious compared to car2go enabled urbanism since ATs also remove the need to walk to parkspots. Like I said, that is the barrier automated driving is good at removing. Think of an AT fleet not only as carshare with valet service but carshare for the cul-de-sac. </span></div>
<br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For all those reasons, I don’t think the green advantages of carshare will lend themselves necessarily to our future with robocars. Neither in curtailing vehicle ownership and storage needs much and especially not in changing our infrastructural promotion of sprawl. In fact, I fear dedicating lanes to high-speed robocar commuting may endanger reserved BRT lanes, due to political pressure to convert them to an automotive use that is perceptually “equivalent” to rapid transit. As Jarrett Walker points out, exclusive lanes of successful BRT systems appear often as “empty” (and thus implicitly inefficient and share-able) to vehicle owners. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The only thing robocars could possibly guarantee to conserve our environment is allow us to park more efficiently in space-saving ways, but how in the world could that possibly offset the exurban sprawl they will no doubt induce? Let me know if I’m missing something here.</span></div>
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</b>Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-4403277558294782712012-12-11T23:26:00.002-05:002012-12-12T09:55:13.459-05:00Low Slung Texas-style TOD overtaking Charlotte's South End<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEVVFXELQ9OEwEtbqmI7hKyY-3pkEXF_j2jUYRSV7sqLQ5eJCKBvQaT3iNT83cEIAvLQTdHwDUpaJv4es-XqvnW1FLj35Dotx5SE2LVz51wJjGwpGVZH8hEK8z_x5Y6h0uR_SSvlPGho0/s1600/080325_lightrail_004.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Image by Sean Busher © Neighboring Concepts" border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEVVFXELQ9OEwEtbqmI7hKyY-3pkEXF_j2jUYRSV7sqLQ5eJCKBvQaT3iNT83cEIAvLQTdHwDUpaJv4es-XqvnW1FLj35Dotx5SE2LVz51wJjGwpGVZH8hEK8z_x5Y6h0uR_SSvlPGho0/s640/080325_lightrail_004.jpg" title="LYNX stop in South End; Image by Sean Busher © Neighboring Concepts" width="617" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">A LYNX Ligh<span style="font-size: x-small;">t Rail stop in Char<span style="font-size: x-small;">lotte's South<span style="font-size: x-small;"> End</span></span></span></span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">The <a href="http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/12/07/3711178/light-rail-attracting-apartment.html" target="_blank">cover story</a> on last Sunday's edition of the Charlotte Observer profiled the apartment development boom continuing in Charlotte's South End. The interesting point it raises is the relationship between land prices and density. The higher the land value, the higher the density developers have to pack into apartment projects, so market cycles are basically reflected in the density realized by Transit Oriented Development projects. At least in Charlotte. The Observer's Kerry Singe recounts amusingly how Proffitt Dixon Partners, the developer of the Fountains at New Bern (overlooking the New Bern LYNX station), took advantage of the market swing: </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">"The firm bought the land at a discount from the lender, cut the number
of units and added a lounge where tenants can wait for the train." </span></blockquote>
<div style="-moz-font-feature-settings: normal; -moz-font-language-override: normal; color: black; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 10pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; height: 1px; line-height: normal; overflow: hidden; text-align: left; text-transform: none; width: 1px;">
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/12/07/3711178/light-rail-attracting-apartment.html#storylink=cpy</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Singe quotes firm partner Wyatt Dixon: “We bought the property at an attractive price; we had a great design
for the site, and we weren’t forced to pay so much for land where we had
to over-densify.” Of course, the article makes a reference to the premium added to apartment rents by the "convenience" represented in the light rail. Numbers of similar reports on the South End tend to credit the light rail for the entire effort, but it
is worthy to recount some of the development history in the corridor to
follow up on this topic with a bit more nuance.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV_5Pp4J1u_nx82ZV2rKFPG1OsXLXnh0IBnFNyNPdgJvQabqoZl4sbU1c7tbXtNvW0TrzmANB8UaqwTb6xfDVI-tyajHil6Fu_C6dBRcdFEeyWdGRavNeSR-xFHoDuE9jQiFxRKXLM3cE/s1600/IMAG0292.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV_5Pp4J1u_nx82ZV2rKFPG1OsXLXnh0IBnFNyNPdgJvQabqoZl4sbU1c7tbXtNvW0TrzmANB8UaqwTb6xfDVI-tyajHil6Fu_C6dBRcdFEeyWdGRavNeSR-xFHoDuE9jQiFxRKXLM3cE/s320/IMAG0292.jpg" width="320" /></a>In the early
90's this district which had previously borne no name was rebranded the <a href="http://www.cltsouthend.com/" target="_blank">South End</a>, an old textile mill and warehousing district just a
ten
minute walk from Charlotte’s bank town skyscrapers. (Leticia Huerta's
cotton bulb mosaics in the base of the transit shelter columns on the
image above commemorate that past.) Light rail service was still two years away, but when I first arrived
in Charlotte in 2005 to begin working for an architecture firm involved
in the South Corridor project, the newly minted TOD zoning
district category was shortly to be <a href="http://charmeck.org/CITY/CHARLOTTE/PLANNING/AREAPLANNING/TRANSITSTATIONAREAPLANS/SOUTHCORRIDOR/Pages/South%20End.aspx" target="_blank">recommended</a>
for much of the South End. (Though I myself arrived too late to have a
part in it, my
firm co-designed the LYNX stations with Sasaki.) A year before I
arrived, the Charlotte Trolley restoration effort had reintroduced rail
transit to Charlotte by linking the South End to Uptown using an
abandoned rail line the City had purchased for the planned light rail.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOfb2F2Mkk1cTFu9Esuokj48ycepgxwVKAJeunxoobwHRGL2hvbVBWQyzsHFPe3ST9tmJJmpJ4AlCVYrwesmLpTeLa-d0IvNJyC0rqkfrgRtZC1tAGVvseIVsGlXw21OJvo4T4u9yPuZk/s1600/IMAG0287.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOfb2F2Mkk1cTFu9Esuokj48ycepgxwVKAJeunxoobwHRGL2hvbVBWQyzsHFPe3ST9tmJJmpJ4AlCVYrwesmLpTeLa-d0IvNJyC0rqkfrgRtZC1tAGVvseIVsGlXw21OJvo4T4u9yPuZk/s320/IMAG0287.jpg" width="320" /></a>In anticipation of the
light rail, this trolley-served strolling district was in 2005 in the
midst of a condominium building boom representing almost half a billion
dollars of private investment. That it was primed to do so already says
nothing
exceptional about the South End. Like many previously neglected old
mill districts in central areas of cities, the South End became a hot
market for new and adaptive reuse development when design firms began moving in and converting the mill buildings to good uses.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Moreover,
the district occupied the transitioning
edge between two distinct prewar neighborhoods, Dilworth and Wilmore.
The former had revitalized in the 80’s and was
among Center City Charlotte’s most affluent neighborhoods. The latter,
Wilmore, was challenged with high poverty rates and, arguably, was just
beginning the gentrification
process. The South End was thus at that seam of change in cities that
prove
enormously attractive to developers, not only because of the favorable
economic factors driving regeneration, but because much of the property
available is in large lots that are easy to purchase and assemble due to
accrued obsolescence, property underutilization or vacancies.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">But
<a href="http://nakedcityblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/rail-matters-south-end-lesson.html" target="_blank"> according to Mary Newsom</a>, "South End's development was sparked...by a
small-time, volunteer trolley run. So it was the hope of light rail, and
a modest little rail ride, rather than mass transit service itself,
that was key" (to South End's TOD building boom). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP_uO54APC2kRNHH2xrOjZIZLeD3Mxg7Hz9DQL2P-di4OJAxtpta68Zs80yj2VIvo-qCK4dpkqaqs6IRDcFO2c6AbbPZxRjy80jhKvbESr43MvK3L9Sh7zF5yESETGnh-5NSupTLcRK5g/s1600/IMAG0282.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP_uO54APC2kRNHH2xrOjZIZLeD3Mxg7Hz9DQL2P-di4OJAxtpta68Zs80yj2VIvo-qCK4dpkqaqs6IRDcFO2c6AbbPZxRjy80jhKvbESr43MvK3L9Sh7zF5yESETGnh-5NSupTLcRK5g/s320/IMAG0282.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Another new Texan-style TOD apartment complex in South End</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">For many
urbanists, mass transit is merely useful as a symbol. But the action of
developers, apparently, bear Mary Newsom out. Consider the story of the
Fountains at New Bern mentioned in the Observer article.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">The
sales information cheat sheet on the City's property records website
indicates that the prime corner piece of the property for the Fountains
at New Bern had changed hands numerous times between speculators,
beginning with the first $2.6 million purchase of the property from a
land holding company in October 2006, well over a year before the LYNX
inaugural run. Just a short while later, in the height of the South
End's condo building bubble and still a few months away from light rail
service, the property commanded a $9.25 million purchase price on August
7, 2007. LYNX service began in November of 2007, but shortly thereafter the
bubble burst. The property was therefore dumped for $5 million in April of 2009
just as the LYNX was hitting its peak ridership numbers, which were
hovering back then over 19,000 daily boardings (they have since slumped
down to 15,000 apparently). In June of 2011, Wyatt Dixon's LLC bought the land for a cool $1.567 million, which is a whole mil less than the
initial price spurred by TOD speculation in 2006!
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Other properties with new development on them indicate
a similar pattern of property exchanges. So, the early hopes for light
rail brought rampant speculation for TOD development that neither the symbol nor the reality of
transit was able to deliver to Charlotte. The actual rail service
itself has little to do with any of this. It is the public will for
higher density development that indeed drives the market, and that has a lot to do with other forces intrinsic to market dynamics and the politics of the area itself.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">I
would thus insert to Mary Newsom's take home lesson this: the City’s
participation in the effort is something that did matter greatly. The light rail
transit vision compelled the City to purchase the right-of-way, and it
was that vision that fanned the flames in plans, in zoning, in
capital improvements and in policy changes. These things
don't control the outcomes but they really matter. By merely becoming associated with the symbol of transit,
the tracks that had recently symbolically divided the well-off
neighborhoods on the east side from the somewhat struggling ones on
the west side were now speeding
the governmental choices promoting the development activity between them.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">The Observer article makes the pertinent observation that the South End caters to the
young professionals that are </span></span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">somewhat
averse to long commutes and mortgage traps and that makes it therefore
ideal for higher density apartment development. Judging by the
gated, Texan-style apartment products being built, it is these car-based
yuppies, more than the light rail service itself, that are the
compelling force behind "Transit Oriented Development" in Charlotte.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJplSh3FtNK5VbTK4ACxzKq6HUOVwXIWy_Y5WCmRVOkusgHc9Ksd8SSSw6qDy7RBCNq54k4SJoNnIMHFHhxdu31ouMWsbOGYPWfvymTF-EnRgKnoKSUprlRG-gNGcVQDmn2I_Em_CyxlE/s1600/IMAG0280.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJplSh3FtNK5VbTK4ACxzKq6HUOVwXIWy_Y5WCmRVOkusgHc9Ksd8SSSw6qDy7RBCNq54k4SJoNnIMHFHhxdu31ouMWsbOGYPWfvymTF-EnRgKnoKSUprlRG-gNGcVQDmn2I_Em_CyxlE/s640/IMAG0280.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Seeking more than crap? New commercial development spurred by the South End apartment boom.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">Trendy
apartments, indeed, are great magnets to attract the Creative Class set
and the associated development that population helps spur. I do think
the hipsters and the faithful taco trucks that the South End attracts
are a huge benefit for the corridor. For one, large numbers of young,
affluent people are likely to sustain new commercial activity along
South Boulevard </span></span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">(think: light rail bar crawls, Saturday markets and pet breed clubs)</span></span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">. Hopefully this brings much better quality, public realm enriching, mixed-use new development to what our former mayor </span></span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">Pat McCrory </span></span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">(now governor-elect) called a "corridor of crap". To that end, I look hopefully to the creativity in the halls of Government Center.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-90846146069059040522012-09-30T14:14:00.000-04:002012-09-30T14:29:17.389-04:00The "Grain" of a City Grid and What That Means for Mobility<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamtrevillian/5218463625/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" title="Drayton by adamtrevillian.com, on Flickr"><img alt="Drayton" height="400" src="http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4128/5218463625_664d1ec042.jpg" width="500" /></a><br />
<i>Not long ago, reflections on Savannah's Historic District prompted a study to examine the street roles of Savannah’s Historic District grid. The broad aim of my attempt to classify her street types </i><i>is to produce a kind of working classification system of urban streets that I call an“odonomy”, a taxonomy of grid streets giving names to distinctions that tend to remain unobserved due to present ways of thinking of streets. </i><i>Just providing names can provide a starting point for further reflection regarding their interdependent roles. This is needed because when it comes to grids, urban designers tend to focus only on quality of connectivity and intersection density, but then allow traffic engineers to dictate the section of the streets, who I believe apply</i><i> the inappropriate functional classification system of branching networks</i><i> to grid streets. A devastating lack of awareness thus exists in how you lay out or modify streets to actually create a traffic behavior supportive of fine-grained urbanism and multimodal balance. With a working and deepened odonomy, in contrast, a project team can employ network-defined categorical distinctions for street types from day one of design work</i><i> and remain highly conscious of network roles and the subtle advantages their functional strengths can provide for development. Trade-offs can be described and opportunities be made visible. For the context of what follows, I recommend reading posts tagged in <a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Odonomy%20of%20Savannah%20Series" target="_blank">The Odonomy of Savannah Series</a>. I especially recommend these two short posts on <a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2009/09/invisible-signs-of-savannah.html" target="_blank">The Invisible Signs of Savannah (on Intersections)</a> and <a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2010/05/avenue.html" target="_blank">The Avenue</a> in order to get a flavor of what this study is about. </i><br />
<br />
<b>An Odonomy of Savannah Recap: The "Grain" of a Grid and What That Means for Mobility</b><br />
<br />
Savannah’s historic grid affords clarity for the challenge of creating an alternative to the “functional classification” for the street types of grids, since it is almost unique to grids in the fact that it consistently differentiates many types of grid streets. The functional diversity of Savannah street types guides the evolution of Savannah’s urbanism in a way that can be easily read and brings their virtues to the surface. Thus far, I’ve uncovered two sets of obvious contrastive relations distinguishing Savannah streets from one another. Before I advance my odonomy of Savannah, a little review is in order. In this post, I shall review and build upon the first distinction I observed.<br />
<br />
The distinction immediately evident in Savannah’s street grid is the distinction between the streets traveling along the predominant “loading grain” of the grid and the streets traveling perpendicularly to that grain. Below is a conceptual representation of the predominant grid condition
we find in North American cities:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieHBX9j85wrkJ8NbLqNTdsz64NCVnj9-o0W6KfpqQTslJtiaM2W52Uyf3X5EcgtlOgR56e3oAlaJQUvd2j6e6YHvO25yaAfxKnVl-uS6lMxMD2ChjgNeY6lzsw3D1eTTA7Ma7ofE7-bcg/s1600/Illustrative+Grid.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="554" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieHBX9j85wrkJ8NbLqNTdsz64NCVnj9-o0W6KfpqQTslJtiaM2W52Uyf3X5EcgtlOgR56e3oAlaJQUvd2j6e6YHvO25yaAfxKnVl-uS6lMxMD2ChjgNeY6lzsw3D1eTTA7Ma7ofE7-bcg/s640/Illustrative+Grid.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
The “loading grain” is the orientation of the grid along which most of
the “street address” streets are traveling, the street orientation that is
favored for frontage. Previously, I called the grain traveling streets collectively “Loading
Streets” and the cross-grain traveling streets simply “Avenues”. I
have decided that the far more descriptive and accessible terminology
will be to refer to the former collectively as “Grain Streets” and to
the latter as “Ray Streets" or the "cross-grain" streets.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLcG3sensJ91w9P9VIeK24DkhK8eB6IscIj46XE2eAwg6hmK-DhwaGcPeXYa9Jyva1ne_rgAgX-ox0dXljzIYJIUkv8w4EfJSH_yxUI5Serd1tadhzKKiokmP_EwFRyYudpzZ96W0KYKI/s1600/Grain+v+Ray.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLcG3sensJ91w9P9VIeK24DkhK8eB6IscIj46XE2eAwg6hmK-DhwaGcPeXYa9Jyva1ne_rgAgX-ox0dXljzIYJIUkv8w4EfJSH_yxUI5Serd1tadhzKKiokmP_EwFRyYudpzZ96W0KYKI/s640/Grain+v+Ray.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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The contrastive term I've chosen for "grain" is "ray", a reference to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medullary_ray_%28botany%29" target="_blank">medullary rays</a> in wood. These are ribbons or sheets of cells that radiate outward from the heart of a tree trunk. If you look at the end-grain section of a cut of wood, these rays are the slight striations crossing the growth rings perpendicularly. (I thought also of using the term "Check Streets", in reference to the "checks" or radial splits that you often see develop in wood stumps, but I think this term would be far less accessible and lead to unhelpful associations.) I think "ray" is appropriate metaphorically also because I like the fact that medullary rays help with structural support and help protect the inside of the trunk by conveying resins to check and destroy pathogens. However, I mostly like the term "ray" because, in the general meaning of the term, it suggests directness. By using these botanical referents, moreover, notice that I am conveniently avoiding the use of terminology that leads to thinking of grids in purely orthogonal terms. A grid system can be thought more carefully as a polar system dependent upon the curvature of grain streets. Frederick Law Olmsted and John Nolen employed curvilinear street networks this way to create adaptive grid-like street patterns that curve with topography (the results are there for you to enjoy in the streets of Nolen's Myers Park Neighborhood in Charlotte). Therefore, we can talk about curving "grain" and converging "ray" orientations for curvilinear fabrics as well.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7U_CURGQYwJR6Mlw0hkeXXhTJvLy2o29GSWvpA2g1H4nCgRnVhi_eE6utqDcFwfli9ELYMsZiCEShenwgrZRwws38oqDAo_tHyV-IUJj-Qf-hO5LemtkSgh59K7aP-tC-PQUEaGJ3JoE/s1600/Myers+Park.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="344" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7U_CURGQYwJR6Mlw0hkeXXhTJvLy2o29GSWvpA2g1H4nCgRnVhi_eE6utqDcFwfli9ELYMsZiCEShenwgrZRwws38oqDAo_tHyV-IUJj-Qf-hO5LemtkSgh59K7aP-tC-PQUEaGJ3JoE/s640/Myers+Park.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The "curvilinear grid"of John Nolen's Myers Park - a curvilinear variant of the Simple A-B Grid type.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
The Grain Streets are the streets that prominently serve and access uses by providing the primary frontage for the majority of the parcels. The Ray Streets, on the other hand, primarily serve the grid by facilitating travel mobility in the grid. While Ray Streets take up real estate (the main reason these streets are largely absent in the street networks of postwar suburban subdivisions), having lots of these in your grid has a tendency to amplify transportation mobility, since, besides multiplying travel options, they typically remove or soften the conditions that lead to queuing and friction impeding vehicular movement. When employed well for their natural virtues, they not only distribute traffic efficiently throughout the grid, they actually help it move faster for all modes. <br />
<br />
Those ray street virtues are amplified even more in Savannah by treating the avenue traffic as one-way flow on north-south couplets bounding the cellular wards. Indeed, observing Savannah’s one-way, two-lane avenues in action affords
the easy realization that these streets do not have to be wide to
move large volumes of traffic rapidly. Clocking my travel times in my vehicle during peak times, I noticed it took on average close to half as long to travel in the north-south
cross-grain direction of the Savannah grid as it did to travel the same
distance in the east-west direction on grain streets such as Liberty Street
and Bay Street (except on those few occasions when I was lucky to catch all the green lights on Bay Street).<br />
<br />
Remarkably, those ray streets in Savannah also do not pose much of any
barrier for either pedestrians or vehicles crossing them since
one-way traffic “platoons” enough to offer sustained breaks for
crossings. Drayton Street, pictured in Flickr user adamtrevillian’s photo above, as well as in my “Proper Scale” banner at the very top, is one such
street. Notice how quiet and easy to cross it looks - that is often the predominant experience of the street to pedestrians encountering it, believe it or not. The traffic appears to be "missing" much of the time. Indeed, the photo above exudes the lonesome quality of <a href="http://www.areaofdesign.com/americanicons/sheeler.htm" target="_blank">Charles Sheeler's</a> or <a href="http://www.areaofdesign.com/americanicons/hopper.htm" target="_blank">Edward Hopper's</a> precisionist works. You wouldn't know that this is one of Savannah's most heavily traveled streets. (But notice, in the distance, the traffic platooning behavior in action in the far right of my banner image.)<br />
<br />
While
much of Savannah's avenue efficiency is gained by treating the internal avenues as
one-way couplets (such as the Whitaker Street and Drayton Street pair),
in fact, the "ray street" function in itself has a role in keeping traffic moving along
speedily. The predominant distinction of ray streets in the A-B Simple Grid is that they have many more intersections on average for the same length than grain streets. Queuing is minimized in Savannah's ray streets not only by removing opposing traffic
for left turning, it is also the result of the fact that these streets
cross a tremendous amount of intersections, allowing traffic to enter
and turn off at more points than just at major intersections, hence
allowing vehicles more options or more direct routes to their
destinations. In other words, queuing through traffic needs to wait less on the Ray Streets than it would otherwise need to do at major intersections. Astoundingly, the abundance of
minor intersections is not a great hindrance for avenue traffic because crossing grain street traffic must yield to these streets everywhere except at the crossings
with major grain streets, which only occur every 1/8th mile or greater. From Liberty Street to Gaston Street, avenue traffic doesn't have to stop on Drayton at all, a distance of almost a third of a mile! (A remarkable feat for a grid with a 600+ intersection per square mile density.)<br />
<br />
Strangely, this first-order differentiation just described between "Grain Streets" and "Ray Streets", as obvious as it might be, hardly seems to penetrate the consciousness of planners and road designers. I suspect this is the fault of thinking within the framework of the normative arterial-collector-local (branch-network) classificiation system.Yet this is the most important distinction between Savannah’s street types. These two characters also comprise the two predominant street types of most grids since almost all grids exhibit loading grains subarea to subarea. In truth, the distinction between grain streets and ray streets is not as important for the common "gridiron" Simple A-A square grids, especially the large block gridirons such as the one found in Uptown Charlotte, where the loading grain tends to change so often it could be irrelevant. But it is important for the common U.S. Land Ordinance or streetcar grids, which typically contain blocks twice as long in the loading grain direction as they are wide (660’ x 330’- a furlong by half a furlong). Savannah’s grid makes such an importance patently obvious. Try as hard as it may, Drayton Street can never become a Broughton Street, and there are several very good reasons for this that have little to do with travel lanes, sidewalks, building relationships and width. The functional strengths of each street are simply different for reasons of grid geometry.<br />
<br />
The functional classification systems used or being modified by engineers and planners today are terribly misguided for many reasons when applied to urban conditions, but one big deficit they all seem to share is that they tellingly ignore the Ray Street as a distinct urban type that needs special attention. I’ve argued that the humble, no-frills, frontage avoiding, utilitarian <a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2010/05/avenue.html" target="_blank">avenue</a>, in fact, is the most urban of streets. Without it, you tend to create grids that behaviorally imitate the branching street networks of the suburbs by attempting to maximize the loading condition (Jarrett Walker introduced an apt term for these tree-like suburban networks: “dendritic” street patterns). Urbanists seem not to be aware that the default street setting that they depict in their street sections actually imposes dendritic behavior into grid networks. Sometimes New Urbanist leaning planning departments codify frontage relationship by law regardless of street function. Such form codes will invariably encourage the creation of grids exhibiting dendritic behavior by stiffening access management, creating street sections that are friction prone (slowing transit), funneling traffic flows in grids and thus creating heavier queuing conditions at intersections (making pedestrian/cycling crossings problematic), and eroding mobility overall by cavalierly removing vehicular through connections. Even New Urbanists who are aware of network advantages keep themselves boxed in the same paradigm as their engineer brethren by distinguishing urban arterial streets primarily by width. Really? How helpful can that classification strategy be when what a street needs in terms of multi-modal capacity is primarily dependent on the transportation network and the area context? In my opinion, their latest <a href="http://www.cnu.org/streets" target="_blank">papa-bear, mama-bear, baby-bear urban arterial classification system</a> applies, properly speaking, only to the default setting of suburban street networks.Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-70362387005680577592012-05-28T15:43:00.000-04:002012-05-29T08:36:21.360-04:00Sketching the Duke Energy Center<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUgSE9hs3wGbQfs3z0QRiBr38jEGnDln8rJK7KGfAd2mNqLEktewn588EFfczgFcO4YQDGxcmlVNE5FgrhQGhmwt1AK8GW9JZQPwx5LD5WIUFoLqa4fG2kdaQWIui7taemcBd8kb3ys00/s1600/DEC+from+1230+W+Morehead.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="428" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUgSE9hs3wGbQfs3z0QRiBr38jEGnDln8rJK7KGfAd2mNqLEktewn588EFfczgFcO4YQDGxcmlVNE5FgrhQGhmwt1AK8GW9JZQPwx5LD5WIUFoLqa4fG2kdaQWIui7taemcBd8kb3ys00/s640/DEC+from+1230+W+Morehead.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Duke Energy Center, a few weeks ago after a shower (taken from the rooftop of my office building).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The recent CNU ballyhoo over the attack of the "vertical cul-de-sacs", has got me thinking about my love affair with tall buildings. My most recent crush is Charlotte's most recent addition to the skyline, the Duke Energy Center (DEC). Locals call it the "Voltron Building" because its outlines can glow every color on the spectrum throughout the evening (anticipate that it will be given frequent media play during the upcoming DNC Convention). These colors can represent causes, home games for our local teams, community events, and so on. On special occasions, the building grants variable light shows. Voltron even has its own twitter handle, @WellsLightsCLT, which daily tweets the color topic of the night. An email address exists where one can send requests for an evening's color treatment in order to represent your local cause or event.<br />
<br />
You can sort of think of DEC as a civic "weather-vane". Though I hardly ever go watch the woeful Bobcats play in the Arena, I do kind of like the fact that I know a home game is in progress by spotting the tell-tale blue and orange pride colors on the skyline. Not only is DEC an indefatigable civic booster, it's Charlotte's chirpiest (and brightest) fan. <br />
<br />
But the thing is...I already loved DEC even when it was just a pile of green slab and cement core methodically inching up the skyline. Luck had it that at the time I was subletting in a townhome in the South End that had a direct view to the construction site. Every pleasant evening I would go out to my balcony to take account of the progress. Eventually, when I had an hour to spare, I started sketching the progress of the skyline, attempting to sharpen my skyscraper drawing skills. Because I'm one of those sketchers without the patience to draw straight lines, this took an act of excruciating mental concentration and page-orienting calisthenics. But I stiffed it out for the sake of the record. My first result:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg51iFCCM_eDaP7SDbm2ctj9QygQKVP4r7bhCDz1SVM6kmDWA6sdd6f7uBn9dPPrHiCrWkL8BjxIG3U0-x9QbLHsU86RPOWGpYX1RgDiCGgIqoaNaQVJGWM7CeFFwEyGLFHFIvAjduhyyk/s1600/DEC+Sketch+%28Probably+Spring+2008%29.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="368" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg51iFCCM_eDaP7SDbm2ctj9QygQKVP4r7bhCDz1SVM6kmDWA6sdd6f7uBn9dPPrHiCrWkL8BjxIG3U0-x9QbLHsU86RPOWGpYX1RgDiCGgIqoaNaQVJGWM7CeFFwEyGLFHFIvAjduhyyk/s640/DEC+Sketch+%28Probably+Spring+2008%29.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
The DEC is on the very left. Unfortunately, I didn't date the above sketch, but I estimate it was
executed sometime in the Spring of '08, based on the adjacent material
in my sketchbook. The next sketch, however, is from the 9th of
September of '08. Notice that as the DEC got taller, the other buildings seem to have self-consciously grown as well:<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8Jpj_8mMN3XoBDZjc6laFZz9ONWAo2IsscUbncLgkNzfboGy4UwjQ8mMOL4lqOM36Tcy62bJLkOoNm9k9gGfCINgsd07sW0zMxWndkkwUEOgCBNZKDicCw1_hUKLyV_fgoEItoxq-Rpg/s1600/DEC+Sketch+09Sept08.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="420" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8Jpj_8mMN3XoBDZjc6laFZz9ONWAo2IsscUbncLgkNzfboGy4UwjQ8mMOL4lqOM36Tcy62bJLkOoNm9k9gGfCINgsd07sW0zMxWndkkwUEOgCBNZKDicCw1_hUKLyV_fgoEItoxq-Rpg/s640/DEC+Sketch+09Sept08.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
...I love the aloof attitudes of the resting cranes...their enormous beak-like arms slung out there hundreds of feet in the air so casually. They survey Charlotte with an air of unimpressed self-possession, like cowbirds perched on water buffalo.<br />
<br />
The next sketch, executed not long after, took full appraisal of a new situation. This time, it was the appearance of the next row of townhomes in my development, which would partially block my view to the DEC construction permanently (you can sort of see it partially behind the townhouse).<br />
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<br />
<br />
Since the DEC's construction completion, strangely enough, I haven't felt the lighthearted need to go out and sketch the results, although I've taken many photos of it, like the one at the top. Perhaps I'm such an architect type that I find the act construction itself the main event.<br />
<br />
I think the reason for my fascination with buildings undergoing construction is simply that I'm cognizant of the fact that I'm a kind of construction archivist, recording a passing event that will forever remain unrepeated. For some reason, that needs to be rescued in documentary amber. Notice that my archivist's compulsion went to the extent of recording
the state of the sheathing and curling house wrap on the sprightly
townhome... I can't keep myself from doing that. I want to state: This is where the construction stood at this time. This is when this building was green. It existed this way. You may not believe it, but the cranes used to hover over it like fussy attendants, coaxing it along impatiently. "There is so much to do here," they said. "So much to go over while we peck and preen"... <br />
<br />
I'm reminded of a Louis Kahn quote:<i> </i><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"A building being built is not yet in servitude. It is so anxious to
be that no grass can grow under its feet, so high is the spirit of
wanting to be. When it is in service and finished, the building wants to
say, 'look, I want to tell you about the way I was made.' Nobody
listens. Everybody is busy going from room to room"...</i></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
But enough of that. More than anything, I'm just fascinated by my changing city. I know that I'm seeing first-hand a small speck of what Spiro Kostof called the generative order of the "urban process", which tends to transcend the city's formal origins in such ways that even the careful historian cannot help but to marvel at these sometimes. This is why I remain unimpressed by spontaneously generative ("emergent") theories of urban design when wedded to formal theories of order. Such theories must thoroughly supplant the super-ego of the designer with a cosmology. Which is what Christopher Alexander's system is: a cosmology. It is hard to say whether this is an improvement, however elegant a fractal appears. His is a hybrid of the "cosmic model" of urban design being brought to the normative organic model. But the only truly "emergent" (spontaneously organic) model of city form may actually be the speculative grid, if anything. <br />
<br />
Regardless, Spiro Kostof's gentle reminder is always my forceful recourse of reflection: "...a city, however perfect its initial shape, is never complete, never at rest". That is good news. Representing that in sketch form, perhaps, is my delight in drawing.<br />
<br />
<br />Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-90432759986596504422012-03-27T23:50:00.000-04:002012-03-28T00:00:56.853-04:00Density in Los Angeles: a Matter of Tolerance?<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=los+angeles+ca&ll=34.053424,-118.289087&spn=0.00288,0.012789&hnear=Los+Angeles,+California&t=h&z=17&layer=c&cbll=34.053421,-118.289086&panoid=ivgE8viXYN9b2VQPnhBWmg&cbp=11,97.86,,0,-0.38" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh97moS1N9e537e_zm6N5lVu3xUVJ20DYz0UPWFWTYBuenTkL759J-s4v_YwBvMQ9AyD7hKean2GcgoNL52wI63araKeeiQqm-Bb9gApEc2wc5ojSeR0jCyNlQfYWd0Iu8-6Ax9LNa48F0/s400/LA+Tolerance+for+Close+Buildings.jpg" width="281" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Why LA can build densely. Source: <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=los+angeles+ca&ll=34.053424,-118.289087&spn=0.00288,0.012789&hnear=Los+Angeles,+California&t=h&z=17&layer=c&cbll=34.053421,-118.289086&panoid=ivgE8viXYN9b2VQPnhBWmg&cbp=11,97.86,,0,-0.38" target="_blank">Google Streetview</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In
the previous post, I claimed that building coverage for residential
development, based on North American block usage norms, likes to stay
under 70% building coverage since building layouts need to grant
adequate daylight exposure to dwelling units. As I began to think more
about this, I realized that there are notable exceptions, local norms
were high building coverage is possible and even tolerated. Some of
these exceptional places are the compact subdivisions of
Western/Southwestern U.S. and great swaths of urban Los Angeles. I have
actually never heard others remark on the unique qualities that make LA
well-suited for high building coverage, but its set of complimentary
conditions - including climate, building typologies, cultural history
and block morphology - should be appreciated more about LA. The
remarkable fact that a bountiful portion of LA's blocks incorporate
relatively high building coverages with multifamily development may be
one of the primary reasons why the city has such a high overall
population density (average people per square mile) in comparison with
other cities. (By the way, over at Discovering Urbanism, Daniel Nairn
has just <a href="http://discoveringurbanism.blogspot.com/2012/03/new-census-maps-tell-ambigious-urban.html" target="_blank">posted</a> a really handy synopsis of the city density trends revealed by the 2010 Census.) <br />
<br />
One
way to achieve high coverage density is through block morphology. You
can conceivably create a block pattern that accommodates
100% building coverage for multifamily lots. 100% lot coverage is
actually possible on the right kind of block: a very, very narrow block
of 130-feet wide at the most
(measured street centerline to street/alley centerline) so that you can
daylight the units on both sides of a building without providing any
private open space at all. You just use the rights-of-way to daylight
units. (Such a block structure would actually allow Ed Glaeser to <a href="http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/taller-buildings-cheaper-homes/?ref=business" target="_blank">claim</a>
we can build 150 1600 sq. ft. dwelling units per net acre without
having to go higher than six stories.) But in the prewar urban fabrics,
block widths rarely consistently go under 330 feet in most cities. Of
all the North
American city grids that I know, only historic Savannah has a block
width as narrow as 130 feet as a normative feature of its grid (these
are the "<a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2010/05/savannah-humanitarian-roots.html" target="_blank">Trust Lot</a>"
blocks that face the east and west sides of each historic district
square). But a
200-foot wide block, as in Manhattan and Portland, does allow these
cities to get high coverages, because relatively little open space can
be provided in the interior of the blocks when you have 100-foot parcel
depths. <br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=36.122715,-115.235703&spn=0.003116,0.006394&t=h&z=18" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz0GN3TAeDx7dZzCsdQIr0jekj8Sex29q81jKTf03TvbL46HQ7_I2BS2SSn3tiEeETnK6gh0xTrKmfygWn_gcQayClLQR5UfjZIir_gWUolf855SayX1qAwlMn0bSdqiwg8EiPJAOTiak/s640/Typical+Las+Vegas+Subdivision+Blocks.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A subdivision in Las Vegas, Nevada, demonstrating the 100-foot deep lot morphology that is pervasive there. (Source: <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=36.122715,-115.235703&spn=0.003116,0.006394&t=h&z=18">Google Maps</a>) </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In
the West and Southwest, subdivision blocks are also commonly this
narrow, allowing for some of the highest building coverages you can find
in single-family neighborhoods. These lots grant homeowners some of
the tiniest backyards in America. In time, as in Savannah (whose town
lots are also this deep), these 100-foot deep parcels can conceivably
redevelop into denser Savannah-style townhouses, apartments, offices and
mixed use
buildings. One might argue that it may take longer than the history of
Savannah to achieve Savannah's urbanism in these subdivisions, perhaps,
since their patterns are conceived mainly to keep strangers out, but the
hope to realize a modicum of urbanism is there theoretically. In these
cases, one may achieve Jane Jacobs's lower threshold for
urban
vitality (in the ballpark of 100 dwelling units per net acre) without,
perhaps, needing to build above 6 stories. The narrow lot just makes the
overall utilization of land more efficient. That assumes however that
you transition from single-family development to attached
brownstone-style walk-ups or mid-rise development created by assembling
rows of single-family lots. We'll call this strategy for
intensification of land usage the "Savannah Strategy": the strategy of
assembling and building higher on shallow single-family lots. The
morphology of the block pattern is important to this strategy: how
narrow the blocks are and how well the streets can be connected in time.
<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=boston+ma&ll=42.353613,-71.077777&spn=0.000642,0.003197&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&hnear=Boston,+Suffolk,+Massachusetts&gl=us&t=h&z=19&layer=c&cbll=42.353721,-71.077135&panoid=xPsis11LaZeTBA5TVEZ_eg&cbp=11,249.89,,0,-3.93" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWab0dOSv3w-3G1k5gQzhiiwoIFi-af1Ag9QSt9LzAs4qXnsAvFlelWQ3zcjwdLwKkeeaqkJ_DCYOhTNiimRANvcgtNuTHT36sRbovr-M3fLuGpF0ymsvcHjZizZPhHA7nyjcA7a8nxAE/s400/Boston+Back+Bay+alley.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A block interior in Boston's Back Bay. (Source: <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=boston+ma&ll=42.353613,-71.077777&spn=0.000642,0.003197&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&hnear=Boston,+Suffolk,+Massachusetts&gl=us&t=h&z=19&layer=c&cbll=42.353721,-71.077135&panoid=xPsis11LaZeTBA5TVEZ_eg&cbp=11,249.89,,0,-3.93" target="_blank">Google Streetview</a>)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
But
placing homes tightly together without actually going all the way and
attaching them grants an important advantage with respect to average
density. Actually two important advantages (the second of which we will
get to later). We mentioned already exactly what it is: granting
access to daylight. If buildings have to share walls, then they only
have the street-facing side and the back-side for daylight access. That
means the building will rarely get deeper than 70 feet. Boston's Back
Bay is an excellent illustration of this fact. See how much open space
in the interior of the block can't be used for building coverage...<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=boston+ma&ll=42.353613,-71.077777&spn=0.000642,0.003197&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&hnear=Boston,+Suffolk,+Massachusetts&gl=us&t=h&z=19&layer=c&cbll=42.353721,-71.077135&panoid=xPsis11LaZeTBA5TVEZ_eg&cbp=11,249.89,,0,-3.93" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="380" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0L-St6ZJaY_RB2APJcoN2IzIfztr_Snw9LixJcwHfHT9j2tUn8_cFYzhR3Yrj1wXIfyCtr92yvgxJIdY9lqwwrWUYogRLEDHJwxLzVz2efwSxwrNSRa8YCorbG_0zffEH-Ga51ogi1U8/s640/Boston+Back+Bay+building+coverage.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A typical block in the Back Bay with building perimeters highlighted for clarity. (Source: <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=boston+ma&ll=42.353613,-71.077777&spn=0.000642,0.003197&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&hnear=Boston,+Suffolk,+Massachusetts&gl=us&t=h&z=19&layer=c&cbll=42.353721,-71.077135&panoid=xPsis11LaZeTBA5TVEZ_eg&cbp=11,249.89,,0,-3.93" target="_blank">Google Maps</a>)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
However,
note also that for Boston's climate this is very good. You do
appreciate the adequate daylight that falls into the space, and notice
the pleasant balance between shadow and sunlight at midday in the
Streetview image above. Note that the open space to building height
ratio is 1:1, around what New Urbanists recommend for alleys and
pedestrian rights-of-way. At the ends of the blocks, taller buildings at
the corners of the block seal up the sides of the block, creating an
intimate semi-private environment in the block interior. You can maybe
claim that the Back Bay has the perfect block typology for Boston's
climate and the building coverage seems appropriate. <br />
<br />
Now compare the Back Bay with this plan view of multifamily buildings in LA...<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAoBK5WC88jYusIT2GuCbpaoLNpnYO8tcCwDTqdZUBZYWFujCxnVFW_PKi-TT3qv6elZSpFtyCVxTNAakpi_ZBo9Bf-hAIisvPx3JR84Oq6nukp1mqY1tpIoun2MTTejHrQfk9euPV_cY/s1600/High+Coverage+Tolerance+in+LA.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAoBK5WC88jYusIT2GuCbpaoLNpnYO8tcCwDTqdZUBZYWFujCxnVFW_PKi-TT3qv6elZSpFtyCVxTNAakpi_ZBo9Bf-hAIisvPx3JR84Oq6nukp1mqY1tpIoun2MTTejHrQfk9euPV_cY/s640/High+Coverage+Tolerance+in+LA.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
Both maps are at the same scale. If Jane Jacobs observed that
building coverage over 70% is "intolerable" in Boston's North End,
LA doesn't seem to care. As with the
shade-loving Western subdivision, this is where LA's sunshine-soaked
climate grants LA one dramatic advantage. In LA, people like shady
courts. Snug closeness between
neighboring buildings (instead of party walls) is tolerated because
direct
sunlight is just not as coveted and the fact that there is just an
accrued cultural tolerance for detached nearness. This means the
buildings can be very deep
indeed from front to back. The entire building perimeter serves that
all-important function of daylighting units and, therefore, you can go
deep into the block with many units at level, with units between the
front side and back side units.<br />
<br />
In sum, high density in LA is achieved with lot coverage, not
building height. To make the comparison visually clear, here's a block
to block comparison between the Back Bay and Central LA blocks at the
same scale...<br />
<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;">
<tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=boston+ma&ll=42.353613,-71.077777&spn=0.000642,0.003197&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&hnear=Boston,+Suffolk,+Massachusetts&gl=us&t=h&z=19&layer=c&cbll=42.353721,-71.077135&panoid=xPsis11LaZeTBA5TVEZ_eg&cbp=11,249.89,,0,-3.93" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="380" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0L-St6ZJaY_RB2APJcoN2IzIfztr_Snw9LixJcwHfHT9j2tUn8_cFYzhR3Yrj1wXIfyCtr92yvgxJIdY9lqwwrWUYogRLEDHJwxLzVz2efwSxwrNSRa8YCorbG_0zffEH-Ga51ogi1U8/s640/Boston+Back+Bay+building+coverage.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A typical block in the Back Bay with building perimeters highlighted for clarity. (Source: <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=boston+ma&ll=42.353613,-71.077777&spn=0.000642,0.003197&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&hnear=Boston,+Suffolk,+Massachusetts&gl=us&t=h&z=19&layer=c&cbll=42.353721,-71.077135&panoid=xPsis11LaZeTBA5TVEZ_eg&cbp=11,249.89,,0,-3.93" target="_blank">Google Maps</a>)</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=los+angeles+ca&ll=34.053424,-118.289087&spn=0.00288,0.012789&hnear=Los+Angeles,+California&t=h&z=17&layer=c&cbll=34.053421,-118.289086&panoid=ivgE8viXYN9b2VQPnhBWmg&cbp=11,97.86,,0,-0.38" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="379" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglF-sAlCl67rY3GVfXIvok6Aqa4R-n-NqOY2Jv_ihAhgJNisLQqO5T7pPJGbQ1QiASbfdlnxKNZHobP1yJIEU07E0aQYRpV-GTRgdIhAXrcPsaoLTGQNIvF2ZtnL3rURKYOLFePNUYOro/s640/LA+Courtyard+Apartment+Block+building+coverage.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A typical block in Central LA. Note the abundant perimeter available for daylighting units. (Source: <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=los+angeles+ca&ll=34.053424,-118.289087&spn=0.00288,0.012789&hnear=Los+Angeles,+California&t=h&z=17&layer=c&cbll=34.053421,-118.289086&panoid=ivgE8viXYN9b2VQPnhBWmg&cbp=11,97.86,,0,-0.38" target="_blank">Google Maps</a>).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The interesting thing about LA is that LA's
building typologies, a product of its cultural legacy, free it from the
need to achieve high lot coverages with the "Savannah Strategy", i.e.
using lots and lots of right-of-way land to daylight units. In fact, in
LA, the fatter the block the better. Part of the reason
the courtyard apartment typology suits it so well is that the
half-blocks are just deep enough (in LA, the 330-foot wide streetcar
suburb block pattern predominates). This is remarkable for one simple
reason: it cuts down on the amount of right-of-way land needed overall.
LA needs fewer streets! And so, it bumps up average density thus across
the city. Of course, from the standpoint of Jane Jacobs, this quality
of LA poses
liabilities. But it does suggest interesting ways to begin to work in
LA (and other sun-blessed cities in California and the Southwest) to
achieve urbanist goals with qualities other cities simply don't possess
in great abundance. We can intensify land uses by encouraging more
mixture of primary uses in the multifamily fabric, allowing some parcels
to go high, and connecting the city better with high frequency transit
and bike and pedestrian supporting urban design to lessen dependence on
automobile storage. We'll call this the "LA Tolerance Strategy": a
strategy where block morphology is just not as important as a cultural tolerance for alternative means.<br />
<br />Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-56990021347717948912012-03-11T21:28:00.001-04:002012-03-17T11:16:26.103-04:00Squeezing Jane Jacobs into Mid-rise Urbanism<div style="padding: 3px; text-align: left;">
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/asten/192945035/" title="photo sharing"><img alt="" src="http://farm1.staticflickr.com/51/192945035_5846a9eb6e.jpg" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/asten/192945035/">Hull Street, Boston</a>, originally uploaded by Flickr user <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/asten/">Asten</a>.</span><br />
<br />
It seems whenever urbanists discuss development and density issues, I often encounter an assumption that travels widely among urbanists: that the urbanism of Jane Jacobs looks no higher than the mid-rise building environment seen in the photo above. No doubt that the urban village Jane Jacobs loved in <i>The Death and Life of Great American Cities</i> is that mid-rise level urbanism of Greenwich Village and Boston's North End (photographed above). Clearly, Jacobs takes in the book what seems to be a kind of pragmatic, middle-ground position on the topic of residential concentration for urban vitality. If density is too low, she argued, it would fail to foster supportive diversity for primary uses, but if it went too high, it would risk imposing standardization of development with building mono-typologies and thus lose the housing variety needed to support a diverse enough population.<br />
<br />
The problem here is the numbers. Jacobs provided a very rough (and qualified) lower and upper limits for "optimal density" in the "Need for Concentration" chapter (Ch. 11), giving the range as 100 to 200 dwelling units per net residential acre. Urbanists, I'm afraid, widely assume the North End is the upper range for this kind of optimized typology and peg her as a mid-rise urbanist from thereon out, never bothering to take a careful look at the numbers provided. <i>Death and Life</i> here is taken wholesale as a paean for 4-6 story urbanity - that "just right" Mama Bear density that neither creates shadowy downtown canyons, nor 2-level rowhouse sprawl. Frankly, I suspect many urbanists interpret Jane Jacobs's requirement that "most blocks be short", her second condition for generating diversity for urbanity, as meaning staying short height-wise (she meant length-wise). <br />
<br />
In this 4-6 story vision of neo-Jacobsian urbanism, we urbanists are quite comfortable operating, I must say. Our personal experience of Greenwich Village and the North End bears it out. We jibe with that kind of close-fitting, yet not too high, urbanity. If buildings got any higher, our snug alleys and pocket parks become subsumed in ominous Gotham city shadows. <br />
<br />
But as a land planner, this chapter always startles me when I see the numbers. In no way do I associate, <a href="http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/taller-buildings-cheaper-homes/?ref=business" target="_blank">as Ed Glaeser does</a>, 6 stories with 150 dwelling units per net residential acre! This is at least 8 stories, and that's if parking areas/structures were not to count as part of the residential acreage. With parking,150 dwelling units per net residential acre (150 DUA for short) looks like a district with a healthy mixture of development that includes many 10+ story high rises. Think Portland's Pearl District.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrspiggy/4131813370/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" title="Pearl District, Portland, Oregon by Mrs Piggy**, on Flickr"><img alt="Pearl District, Portland, Oregon" height="500" src="http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2686/4131813370_141fe42536.jpg" width="375" /></a><br />
Why 150 DUA needs buildings taller than 6 stories is a matter of how buildings use blocks. Most importantly, residential units just do not like to get any deeper than 35 feet from the nearest window. This fact alone means that your footprint can't match the lot perimeter. When your blocks are 330 to 400-foot wide (as they are for the vast majority of pre-war urban districts in North America), mid-rise multifamily lots are pretty much stuck below 70% building coverage, not just for architectural taste, but for human needs. (In Portland, the smaller blocks help bump up coverage efficiencies. ...As Jacobs said, frequent streets are good!)<br />
<br />
Yes, architects can cut into the open space with projecting wings (like those skinny Brooklyn flats with the plans that look like the white piano keys), but, what that means - and why we are loathe to do so beyond 70% coverage - is that your lower units start losing access to sunlight at 4+ story heights. Even Jacobs notes the disadvantage of coverage that is too high in Chapter 11, discussing the North End in particular. The block on the left side of the North End photo at the top, for example, had <a href="http://www.densityatlas.org/casestudies/profile.php?id=58" target="_blank">72% building coverage in 1960</a> - way too high for comfort for her (actually, she called it "intolerable"). That is why it was 123 DUA in that 4-7 story height range.<br />
<br />
For most 1-5 acre lots, 60% lot coverage for 6+ story multifamily development is a sober number not to surpass for your development. If you want to hit 150 DUA with this, you will need to go to at least 8 stories to secure adequately sized multi-bedroom units. That's what 150 DUA looks like at a bare minimum with underground parking. If we elect to squeeze 150 DUA into 6 stories instead, we are going to be building too many one bedroom units - exactly what we shouldn't be building, according to Jacobs, if we want to promote diversity! To use her terms, that would "standardize" your development to stamp out diversity.<br />
<br />
In other words, the six stories Ed Glaeser allotted to Jacobsian urbanism is actually exactly what will undermine it by squeezing it from the other side: it will either not create enough density or not enough diverse housing with density. He would be making his point much more pungently if he enlisted Jane Jacobs as an ally in his argument for going taller. <br />
<br />
More than likely, you are going to be using a lot of high-rises to get anywhere near 150 DUA district-wide. <i>Especially</i> if you are going to be building a diversity of housing products.<br />
<br />
Part of adding diversity is building affordably, and for that you also need construction efficiencies that make it worthwhile for developers. Because the price of steel is so high compared to wood-frame construction (which can't get higher than 6 stories), developers don't like to use it in that vaunted luxury mid-range of 7-12 stories, unless they are building in a market that actually can support that product. I would argue that, in fact, we have to climb higher, up to 170 DUA at least, in order to get enough supportable high-rises that can add affordable family unit products to a district. We need to escape the middle!<br />
<br />
Moreover, this makes good sense for architectural reasons. The mixed-use buildings in the 4-6 level range are needed to provide "relief" for daylighting their taller brethren. That mixed typology in a district to me seems what we should be extolling as "neo-Jacobian urbanists" (the Vancouver strategy). By easing regulatory pressures to going higher, urbanist development is able to
become more affordable again to the middle class, and I can only see Jacobs
applauding Glaeser here. Where she would disagree is that we can settle on one solution to suit every frame; in fact, the mixtures and exceptions are important. Sometimes, regulation promotes. As an architect who has to think about things like daylight and the needs of humans and sheer construction realities, i.e. "regulations" of a sort, I have to add that the physical mixture of diverse architectural products, short and tall, side by side, can secure multiple benefits. <br />
<br />
In short, don't trust Ed Glaeser when he talks about architecture. <a href="http://www.cp-dr.com/node/2935" target="_blank">As Adam Christian states</a>, "Glaeser conceives of cities first and foremost as consisting of people
and connections, and secondarily of places and buildings." Indeed. (Only the cool imagination deduces six-story walk-ups for <i>one hundred fifty</i> 1600 sq.ft. apartments in an acre!) But, urbanists, we gotta take Ed's advice just the same, for his and Jane's reasons, ...and go high. Very high. </div>Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-60916951261869626292011-12-02T18:36:00.001-05:002011-12-03T15:24:14.699-05:00A Layout so Elegant, It Requires Comment (Geos development by David Kahn Studio)<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://dkahn.com/images/geos/siteplan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKQG4Gh7nQpxnLgtq90vijF3C2bidUUghT3aBlhxyX2FVACko29wth-85BPZ5yokfBHgUcsLZTTwn3_0sdpAKtbOFDU4cdgIzDA0sE7-q0zpaU_GJNQXHdDdFdiBVX1xVbLYDGBFgkTO0/s640/siteplan.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.discovergeos.com/index.php" target="_blank">Geos</a> Neighborhood Plan by <a href="http://dkahn.com/index2.html" target="_blank">David Kahn Studio</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
A former colleague of mine sent me a link to the above little gem of a plan. Sometimes I come across a layout so elegant, it requires me to pause and admire the thought that went into it. Like DPZ's minimalist <a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2010/01/alligator-urbanism.html" target="_blank">Habersham, SC</a> (which I need to get around to comment more about on this blog), the <a href="http://www.discovergeos.com/index.php" target="_blank">Geos</a> mixed-use neighborhood plan, by <a href="http://dkahn.com/index2.html" target="_blank">David Kahn Studio</a>, is one such of these. <br />
<br />
I can barely make out the lettering in the labels of the plan above, so the exact details are lost on me, but this plan view is enough to get the insights. Most architects will immediately appreciate the fact that the east-west building orientation scheme is well suited for passive solar gain and energy efficiency. Sustainable site planning along this line of thought is not new, of course, but it is rarely allowed to become an overriding concern because of site context and other development goals. What is nice here is not only that the planners insisted on it, they employed the scheme to allow and generate an easy diversity of housing and site responses.<br />
<br />
Designers are often hesitant to employ pattern "systems" because we are suspicious of any straight-jackets, but, in fact, here is a good case that proves that playful deployment of patterns often leads instead to creative ideas and a surprising variety of options. Geos's solar orientation scheme reminds me of Savannah's E-W block orientation system a little, but it is more elastic. One can imagine, for example, the central blocks above being elongated in the north-south direction in adapted versions of this layout scheme. (As I've explained before on this blog, Savannah's ward pattern is a rather
dimensionally bound and rigid system - which is neither a deficit nor a plus in my mind because enough
exceptions to the "rules" are employed liberally in Savannah as well,
leading to an interesting diversity of block conditions.) <br />
<br />
What is perhaps not so obvious above is that, like typical cul-de-sac subdivisions, the arrangement is also minimizing the amount of asphalt on the ground as much as possible. Notice that all the parking driveways and alleys are double-loaded. The double-loaded, stubbed parking lots are actually the most efficient parking lots you can devise. In a sustainable development, you want to look for these parking "feathers" to inform you that the planner actually has experience thinking about efficiencies for sustainable development. What these lots are doing is eliminating the need for extraneous surface paving for vehicular circulation. They are the absolute minimum condition for parking lot circulation surface. The minimum condition has only one entrance in and out, with as little bending of the aisle as possible and stubbed coldly at the other end. In principle, this is the same asphalt-minimization strategy being employed in a cul-de-sac subdivision. What cul-de-sac developers know about cul-de-sacs is that they are needed to saturate the site with as much single family lots as possible while also minimizing the amount of road surface being spent per lot. In Geos, the asphalt is being minimized for another advantage: to actually create a more dense (low-rise, predominantly single-family) development. It actually "saturates" the site with shared open space and building footprint with as little asphalt surface to serve it as possible. (I try to employ these single-access parking "feathers" as much as possible when developers give me a chance. <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJwvu1Nl7mq4f5WvTFfUx8sF9UTzt5gIH0A3rNw3nDmKdfe7ONl0N_vnhSvnfp9G7h7mSzWfhWSawoIOvDdxkeksYQ3TOAFGI9Emxt70XLK9UeH_jogZxCEYGIGUklBYAJuX3bKEO7FoB8/s1600/40sc+Parkwood+Green+Master+Plan.jpg" target="_blank">Here</a> is one example of a "fantasy plan" of mine, where I put parking underneath buildings or in walled-off courts with as little driveway access as necessary).<br />
<br />
The infrastructure trade-off here, of course, is that non-vehicular paths are employed very liberally in Geos. But this is what you want in sustainability! You want to discourage vehicular circulation and encourage the pedestrian and bike kind. It is the right trade-off: to replace vehicular infrastructure with the non-vehicular and green kind.<br />
<br />
Ideally, these "feather" lots should not be too long in order to discourage speeding and sloppy maneuvering. Yes, stubbed parking driveways are very unaccommodating to drivers. Drivers hate them because they force them, especially if they discover too late that the end spaces are full, to employ multiple-point turning to maneuver in and out of them (especially if they are devilishly narrow). But that's what you want. You want to put the driver at an inconvenience. No one says that sustainable development has to care about such driverly concerns. You want drivers to instead covet vespas!<br />
<br />
In fact, one quibble I have above is that the parking aisles on the north-east block above are too long, meaning they will encourage drivers to pick up higher speeds - an accommodation to the driver and something that creates less safety for pedestrians and pets. Ideally, one should cut them off at one end so that every served parking space has only one access point to the street network. I would advice the same for the alleys, if they were not needed for garbage truck access (in these cases, by the way, perhaps the wily planner can entertain inserting a gate on one end - or in the middle of a long two access driveway - that only the garbage truck company can activate).<br />
<br />
But what I love most about this plan is the checkerboard deployment of the single family residences in the middle of the center blocks (these are the bright yellow units). You can squint and see that buyers can have a choice of owning a front yard <u>or</u> a back yard. I'm not sure how they will actually fly in the subdivision market of today, but I like this scheme for several reasons:<br />
<br />
The obvious reason is that it creates for every unit abundant access to daylight, which is needed in places like Colorado where you have long and bitter cold seasons. But it also creates well-daylit and airy streets, which creates a neighborhood advantage over the densely packed houses of subdivisions going up today, where as little as ten feet clearance can exist between houses. That condition makes streets surprisingly desolate looking with all that driveway abundance and a straight wall of houses packed like sardines - so close you can feel the actual resentment building up between neighbors. If you do have any windows on the side walls, the lack of privacy between you and your neighbor makes you feel like you are living in a peeping tom heaven.<br />
<br />
Another advantage that exists with the checkerboard scheme is the one Kevin Lynch notes in <i>Good City Form</i>. It is a form with "reversibility" that thus gives the neighborhood an inbuilt resilience for future fit. Once homes have fallen into deterioration or have become socially obsolete (we don't know what the preferred forms or technologies for homes of the future will be), an owner might elect to develop a second up-to-date house in the present yard space. Once this is built, she can demolish the old house to create a new yard in place of it (or renovate the old home for the grandparents). What you get here is a cyclical strategy for long-term development. The sustainability of resilience. The fact that houses are either set back or at the front of the lot means that both conditions are perfectly allowed! Both are seen as equally valid and socially accepted alternates. Stability here arises from the multiplication of valid options.Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-6343828201557820342011-10-17T13:01:00.001-04:002011-10-17T20:54:01.201-04:00A "Master of Detail" Did This. Does Urban Design really matter anymore?<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/7/78/20101128184612%21L%27Enfant_plan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="508" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/7/78/20101128184612%21L%27Enfant_plan.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A "Master of Detail" did this. L'Enfant's parcel plan for DC (image from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:L%27Enfant_plan.jpg">wikimedia commons</a>).</td></tr>
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Last year, Frank Gruber published a series of provocative posts on his
Huffington Post blog pointing out that "urban design" had actual little
to contribute to the cohesion of today’s cities. The perceived missing bridge
between architectural practice and urban planning, he <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-gruber/a-coherent-metropolis-mor_b_703998.html">argues</a>,
would not lead to the healing of sprawl if it existed because the
factors that shape urban form are "non-design” factors.
Conveniently, Gruber lets the lamenting believers of urban-design-as-a-field
make it for him by referencing Richard Sommer’s essay in Alex Krieger and
William S. Saunders' book <a href="http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/urban-design"><i>Urban
Design</i></a>. Blaming utopian urban design for anything, claimed
Sommer, is "an almost total misreading of the material history of
urbanization in the United
States, in which suburbanization, industrial
disinvestment, racial segregation, and the popularity of the automobile played
infinitely more decisive roles in the dissolution of centralized cities than
Corbusian aesthetics." Precisely, says Gruber. (BTW, note the <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/10/american-public-housing?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/whythehousingprohectfailed">recent
corrective</a> to the Charles Jencksian mythology of modernism's failures in
the pages of The Economist.)<br />
<br />
Point taken, Frank. So is there any reason to persist in the belief that
urban design as an endeavor can produce antidotes to sprawl? What is so
different now to allow this possibility?<br />
<br />
That one is a good head-scratcher. Besides making me question the purpose of
my professional life, and perhaps sending me into the early maw of a mid-life
crisis, I gotta admit, every time I read a Gruber post, I can’t help feel a bit
like a poseur when I’m done. What kind of elitist am I to think *my*
design conceits have a defining role to play in making the conditions for
public life in the city better? You could, of course, question the same
role for architects and planners in general, but the peculiar ones of us that
appropriate the title “urban designer” are somehow a more star-crossed lot.
(Dang it! I knew I should have opted to first grind it through IDP.)<br />
<br />
But I have to concur with Gruber. Urban design, as the physical result of urban
planning, cannot really redress conditions that require more interventions than
what primarily falls in the rubric of urban planning. Urban design is
toothless without a proactive developer or an effective planning authority behind it. Good urban design is the result
of good planning. Period.<br />
<br />
Nonetheless, I would point out that what we call the work of the “urban
designer” is not really engaged where it is often most needed. The cases
in which city leadership spearheads pro-urban visions and policies are, not
surprisingly, the best opportunities for urban designers to shape urban
form. But only sporadically are the urban planner types ever engaged at
the urban form-making level (the level of urban designing) to deal with sprawl growth at the first stage. This role is far more likely to be placed
in the hands of metropolitan transportation authorities and managers of various
municipal departments tasked to expand the regional road network to serve
corridor growth and to implant the local utility and public sector services
that support it. The urban designer - or committee of urban design
(representing the various characters and citizen participants who most often
undertake the work of “urban design”) - is at a great disadvantage here for
many reasons that Gruber has ironically begun to mention with his recent <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-gruber/history-interstate-highways_b_984069.html">post</a>
reviewing Earl Swift's <i>The Big Roads</i>. To a certain extent, subdivision
developers play the only “design” role here, but this role is rarely a
proactive one so much as a speculative one engaging preexisting and latent
opportunities, both legal and financial. Unfortunately, under these conditions, the developers' incentives are all stacked in
favor of autonomous subdivision design, the enemy of good-boned urbanism.<br />
<br />
<br />
I would claim that the best service urban planners can do for urbanism is to
compete with technocrats and city leaders in controlling the
climate of urban form outcomes in the new urban growth areas, via zoning,
influence in policy and in area planning. In these arenas, urban planners
typically go mano a mano with these two rivals anyway. Good naturedly, of
course. Sometimes proactively, yet most often reactively, friendly
cajoling or poky nudging is enough to win over politicians and technocrats to
consider new formats for growth, but, typically, the backing of citizen
activism or a powerful mayor or constituency on your side is often
needed. <br />
<br />
As single contributors, architects can and often do serve
urbanism by creating civic-conscious designs for individual built projects
while pleasing their clients at the same time (a tall order many times).
And because architects are gifted copycats while also being quite jealous of
one another, they will often engage in attempts to “out-perform” each other in
the public eye (this is largely what motivates architects' patience with LEED
design). This usually can only happen in settings already sufficiently
urbanized to be able to afford such design services from architects. But,
where it can happen, architects sometimes establish precedents the public loves
that pave the way to more easily entitle projects following in kind.
Thus, collectively, they end up doing iterative, piecemeal urbanism that
sometimes achieves noteworthy urban design. Only rarely, if they are
gifted, reputable and lucky, are they handed large enough projects to author an
urban design project of an extraordinarily cohesive nature (see DPZ's <a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2010/01/alligator-urbanism.html">Habersham, SC</a>).<br />
<br />
Sometimes, an amalgamation of both design opportunities takes place in a city
district, where architects build on the synergy of multiple-sized efforts,
usually where ample underutilized parcels and former industrial retrofits can
be had in ample supply in proximity to downtowns (the Pearl District, Denver’s LoDo).
These places, notably, are easy to retrofit to an urban pattern because the
city grid either pre-exists or is easy to connect to and to expand. While the
consultation of urban designers can be employed here, note that it is not
really needed. Much of that effort is not an act of authorship, but an
open, on-going, discursive act of negotiation (and, yes, a political act) that
most likely circumscribes – and appropriately so! – the work actually to be
designed by people that stamp drawings. “Urban design” here is a matter
of straightforward problem solving to exploit available funding
mechanisms. Some sizeable single-firm contributions, like eddies in the
flow, may occur here and there wherever developers control chunks of land
single-handedly. The rest of what is important beyond transportation system
integration, though some like to call this “urban design”, is just, let’s face
it, landscape design (and some large-scale infrastructure design) taking
advantage of obvious features to exploit (e.g. the S. Platte River
and 16<sup>th</sup> Street
promenades in LoDo).
<br />
<br />
Thus, Gruber is on to something. Urban designers like to think their work is
a distinct contribution in cities, but, in reality, they are just architects and
landscape architects doing their basic stuff. The important urban design is
already done for you: the no-brainer, pro-urban extension of the city
grid.<br />
<br />
Is there a place where urban design can begin to break out into its
own field as a distinct sub-specialty of “design” inquiry and practice? I
actually believe it begins in transportation network design (including transit
network design) and the associated design work integrating multiple modes into
street design. That is because the greatest piece usually involved in the
control of urban form is the initial shaping of the transportation network, and
this is one that today’s transportation engineer dominates from the beginning,
via expert technical counsel and forecasting, to the stamped construction
drawing. The urban designer needs to push back gently on his engineering colleagues via the developmental constraints they enact. I’m not saying that the Urban Designer is tasked to rival transportation
planners here, but just to become intimate with their work, and to understand
the physical and performance dimensions of it, both at the facility level and the
network level. <br />
<br />
Note that I said "begins".
This transportation arena is not the critical piece for the urban designer
to control. The most important piece of the pie in the act of city-shaping is
the act of parcelization. The act of <a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2010/04/not-for-us-but-for-others.html">subdivision</a>. The parcel, as a legal
and financial instrument, is actually the most persistent entity driving city
form in our modern societies. To put a
new spin on the "figure-ground" focus of urban design, I claim that a
professional role for an "urban designer" is to specialize in the act
of parcelization via a more careful synthetic design of the street, parcel and public
realm. This is a largely unplumbed area of design inquiry that has of late (because of obsessions with building form) been subordinated, underestimated or flat-out ignored in contemporary city
planning. But it is an area of design inquiry that needs to be constantly
queried, debated, experiment with and expanded generation to generation. This is exactly where a case for Design, with
a capital "D", can be had for Urban Design.<br />
<br />
Once, the surveyor's act of
parcelization was an art form that L'Enfant's ilk regarded as noble as the Vitruvian
act of architecture itself. I suspect Gruber might ascribe this role also to urban
planning, but, if so, actually architects are most likely to perform this role day
to day ...and perhaps should, since they are the most acquainted with the
dimensional needs of buildings (hmmmm..., is this an actual missing bridge between
architecture and urban realm planning?).<br />
<br />
Urban designers are perfectly cut out for this role because we are the
people who always have to think with the street section - that is, the building envelope,
ground plane and the transportation typical. As a team partner standing between
building and road designers, the urban designer is always being clued in to the
primary challenges facing both horizontal and vertical development in her
city. Her planning background also
allows her to guage and measure the physical requirements of transportation,
ecology, and humans, and such experience gives her clear conceptions about the
give and take between them. All these things need to be thought about to
apply the art of parcelization well. <br />
<br />
But to create such a role of Urban Design specialization, we have to rehabilitate
the name "urban designer" a bit. For one, the meaning of the
term has been eroded from the original open design praxis Kevin Lynch imagined
for it, simply because of its close association with dogmatic or binary-minded
schools of thought (CIAM modernism, New Urbanism). But, primarily, I think we
have a really big problem with just the term “designer”. There is a
general Mid-American distrust of the word “designer” that I think sidetracks others
from the value of the service. Design disciplines, especially urbane
ones, are distrusted, period – partly the fallout of the media-turning
theatrics of pop-artists such as Andy Warhol. The aloof artist-designer figure,
in popular imagination, defines our material culture by observing autonomous
design movements in the undercurrents and margins of culture and ingeniously
teasing them out to their ultimate forms. The artist-designer is too
caught up in these autonomous discourses to apply *real* material value, beyond
a (short-lived) fetish dividend, to the object being designed. Notice
that civil and transportation engineers, who actually have the upper hand in
effectually shaping urban form (at least its sprawl based alternative) can
evade this popular distrust due to the easy confidence we place on
“value-neutral” engineered solutions – a predilection going back to the
Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. (It is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Popular Mechanics</i>, not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Popular
Design</i>, for a good reason.) Actually, such prejudicial attitudes
favoring design by engineered solutions represent a continuation of modernism.
Engineers, like prewar modernists, don’t claim their obvious pursuit of
autonomous discourses. Supposedly, they only measure, re-synthesize and
codify what careful observation has “deemed” efficient, safe, cost-effective
and functional for society. This is how they then end up designing – yes
designing! – the most unsustainable and inhospitable urban environments
imaginable. <br />
<br />
Maybe I should call myself an Urban Realm Mechanic…or, better yet, a
“Surveyor”, like the architects and city planners of yore, who, like L’Enfant,
actually were entrusted with the role of city form making because they knew
about the all-important act of parcelization, which they executed with uncanny
brilliance. L'Enfant's more magnanimous title “Major of the Corps of
Engineering, Master of Detail” is also instructive. (Privately, I have called
myself a "master tile-layer", but this personal handle, admittedly,
will not allow others to see the full roles I have entailed here, why…”Master
of Detail” seems far more evocative!) <br />
<br />
<br />Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-14528093442876298422011-10-03T12:49:00.001-04:002011-10-03T20:10:14.472-04:00A Freeway in the City, Of Big Bosses and Big Digs<div style="padding: 3px; text-align: left;">
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/91828644@N00/3071272016/" title="photo sharing"><img alt="" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3197/3071272016_6b8a4de224.jpg" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/91828644@N00/3071272016/">Rose Kennedy Greenway</a>, originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/91828644@N00/">Dan Bock</a>.</span></div>
<br />
The story of America has always been a story of large personalities. As 21st Century urbanists, we look at the transformation of late 20th Century urban America and can’t help noticing how large personalities like Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Robert Moses played a role seemingly promoting the postwar demise of America’s cities, a reading partly propped by Jane Jacobs’s <i>Death and Life of Great American Cities</i>. Interestingly, this reading may be one of the ways that we continue to flatter ourselves as urban designers. As products of planning and design school, we like to believe the enterprise of urban design matters greatly to the illth and health for America’s cities. Now that we got our utopias in line or much sobered up and humanized, why, let’s clean up the splatter left by the reign of modernists. <br />
<br />
Uhm… Was it really Wright and Corbu that did us in in the first place? Was it the boing-o headed utopias of these bad boys of architecture that gave us separated land uses, dehumanized cores and sprawl-burbs? What actually did contribute to the postwar demise of America’s cities?<br />
<br />
Frank Gruber has been doing a lot of careful thinking <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-gruber">on his Huffington Post blog</a> on this topic. As an entertainment lawyer and Santa Monica Lookout News columnist, Gruber sure does an exorbitant amount of reading and thinking on the topic of urbanism. But (maybe because he is not an architect?) Gruber does not spend much time on contemporary urbanism’s favorite whipping boys and, in fact, thinks little of them in his attempt to figure out why America destroyed its great cities. In a provocative arc that has been unfolding over the past year on his blog, Gruber’s attention has turned to his current working lineup of “suspects” behind city-murder. Interestingly, his <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-gruber/history-interstate-highways_b_984069.html">latest post</a> is a review of Earl Swift’s <i>The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways</i>, in which Gruber has come across some really big bosses who may have actually played a leading role in the demise of urban conditions in America, and they are not the persons most urbanists have probably even heard of. The biggest one of these was the technocrat Thomas MacDonald, who spent a whopping three plus decades (from 1919 to 1953) as head of the Federal Bureau of Public Roads (the predecessor to the Federal Highway Administration). It was MacDonald who crafted the flesh and bones of the 1944 highway bill that created the downtown slicing interstate system of highways, which the 1956 appropriations bill implemented wholesale without anyone really inspecting the particulars, much less the implications, of the national plan.<br />
<br />
While superhighway construction helped disperse industrial activity and middle class habitation to the periphery, a real devastating effect was taking the freeways into the center cities themselves. Gruber summarizes why this was important to our postwar cities since, unlike Europe, where cities preserved the traditional fabrics of their transit-served cores by stopping suburban limited access highways at a ring road around the core, Americans wanted freeways to connect to the center “under the profoundly mistaken view that their cities would revive if they were connected to the suburbs by high-speed roads.” Gruber notes that the key decision to bring freeways into cities, “was never debated in a meaningful way”. <br />
<br />
I would add to this: we still have not had this debate! Gruber lists the epic Big Dig among the efforts to repair the freeway incisions, which is a seriously wasteful example to contemplate in repairing freeway incisions to the core. In fact, it demonstrates the opposite. We should not have had a Big Dig, except maybe to park the cars right there. (Louis Kahn’s plan for terminal parking in Philadelphia at immense parking-deck “harbors” serving the downtown thresholds was a pretty darn good solution for a modernist, I must say.) The right to go <i>right in</i> to (and in fact, more accurately, <i>through</i>) downtown via freeway is so tied up to our unconscious conceptions of how the city should function, that we don’t even bother to question it. Not long ago, Jarrett Walker’s fictional city for a transit network planning game he devised <a href="http://www.humantransit.org/2011/05/fictional-city-seeks-reality-check.html">was roundly critiqued</a> for its seeming lack of freeway "completion" on his blog Human Transit. Jarrett was surprised that he had to defend his decision to stop the freeway before the core, pointing out some obvious North American examples that spared the core.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH9NjsGbvTC9TPCMUBblzYDQ5Dj5miXc_Be9pix2Y6KjIZTvCgwis-rHvEi8JugZvy9Qu3TIOAbjjMgGcg1ATD_JM1HGyXAeRdl938h2ruR6p3UAVJATtHepsP4j3dzxOTH4knAcn-FP0/s1600/Freeway+removal+idea+for+Charlotte.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="322" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH9NjsGbvTC9TPCMUBblzYDQ5Dj5miXc_Be9pix2Y6KjIZTvCgwis-rHvEi8JugZvy9Qu3TIOAbjjMgGcg1ATD_JM1HGyXAeRdl938h2ruR6p3UAVJATtHepsP4j3dzxOTH4knAcn-FP0/s400/Freeway+removal+idea+for+Charlotte.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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That we have not yet had a holistic debate about this even among urbanist circles is telling enough. Still the urbanist solution appears to come down to "capping" downtown freeways. An image of the wind-howling linear park over the Big Dig was used to tout it as a good precedent recently by the consultants presenting the Charlotte Center City Partners’ 2020 Vision Plan (a similar park is being proposed to cap a portion of our downtown loop). Tellingly, (unlike the photo above) not a single person appeared in the photo. A transit engineer I know and I looked at each other, each of us thinking the same thing. Immediately, he started sketching on his napkin. He sketched a map of the downtown freeway loop and started “X”-ing out the lower southern section (the part we call the John Belk Freeway), implying to take out the redundant lower section of our very small and tight-curved inner freeway loop. Easily, I grasped the immense power of his solution (yes, engineers can think brilliantly about urbanist solutions too!). Immediately, visions of a wide boulevard with a welcoming median replacing the loop came to us, with multiple rows of trees and maybe with active and passive uses in it, as in <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeanlouis_zimmermann/5176408898/in/faves-52919708@N00/">median promenades in Paris</a>. Such a boulevard – by also separating faster through traffic from slower local traffic – could easily improve the traffic needs of the city by granting drivers immediate access to the grid, instead of bringing them to limited interchange chokepoints that actually slow everyone down. This very act of healing the sutures, by removing all the ramps and network barriers to funnel off traffic to them, would also open up the highly fragmented conditions of the adjacent grid two blocks deep in either direction, greatly connecting the city vastly more than imagined by the said meager capping, which just covers over the traffic backing chokepoints (a proposal for the capping can be found <a href="http://www.urbanplanet.org/forums/index.php/topic/38067-cap-over-belk-freeway-277/">here</a>; in fact, this particular proposal would even worsen traffic since it would demand additional rerouting in the fabric).<br />
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By offering a grand boulevard to front to instead, suddenly you are not only augmenting, but creating more value to all parcels adjacent to John Belk Freeway. Instead of looking at an immense freeway chasm, buildings will be facing a green boulevard supporting urbanism! All of a sudden you’ve created an amazing asset for the city around the entire southern periphery of our downtown, a far greater impact than the three-block long capping park proposed.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>There is plenty of room here...</b></span> <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=35.21641,-80.842606&spn=0.00284,0.013379&t=h&z=17&vpsrc=6&layer=c&cbll=35.216259,-80.842875&panoid=0-m52oJRTTGYu5KgGl7Y4Q&cbp=11,321.32,,0,-4.04" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJq-yKG53Iyg-1YZkhAtktqfYYBoSqpwbt0siJOFZNXBCUgzes_z_KOe555hwHTjX7dlnSjrrDFb4aEcuTFSW3fpH8ly_MTbZt0aSAKFojsVae1YbvYF3heGAvmFFMePUkL3oP2KZkEq8/s640/John+Belk+Freeway.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Click on image to view in Google Maps</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>...To do this in Charlotte:</b></span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=48.867277,2.368004&spn=0.005046,0.013379&t=h&z=17&vpsrc=6&layer=c&cbll=48.868773,2.36742&panoid=ag87Ct_XQs9cCGNDnAaGvw&cbp=11,160.47,,0,0.79" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1Pvcq1TAGPjU8sEIFBL5nXtgbvHk2lX1Pj4LR1efoibnIrnKFvBCRlH_XuhHaT6yjofUl_fPZskcmrHXrj3JfxXkW0I9Sq2Z9Wf-n9B-2FhRgX9dqYneExFX2auTVZusVNwwKmxOoViA/s640/Boulevard+Jules+Ferry.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Click on image to view in Google Maps</td></tr>
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Part of the reason why we haven’t had this debate meaningfully in our country about the actual need for freeways to go through our downtowns, I think, is because of that form-obsessed, architecture-based mythology of urbanists that blames modernism for everything. This myth constantly sidelines urbanists from talking cogently about freeways (we prefer to talk about the problems with <i>buildings</i>). For someone who talked so much about the street and who was a key activist fighting Robert Moses’s plans to cut a freeway through Manhattan, Jane Jacobs notably does not mention Thomas MacDonald even once among her historic cast of evil-doers in <i>Death and Life</i>, all of whom have by now become the “usual suspects” of separated use, road-based, sprawl promoting planning. (I find this dearth of freeway talk in <i>Death and Life </i>very strange. Jacobs, notably, left Frank Lloyd Wright’s name off the list but disparaged Lewis Mumford amongst the gang of the usual suspects—who, ironically enough, actually led the late counter-charge against MacDonald and his downtown-slicing plans.) <br />
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Perhaps in obsessing on the forms, the hubris of the profession has detracted us a bit from the energy transferring mechanics that would most effectively “retrofit” America’s cities back to their greatness.Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-32152093170307116872011-09-18T16:46:00.000-04:002011-09-18T17:00:18.887-04:00Jérusalem, nouvelle épousée et maîtresse des cités<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDA9O-5_mLAtcLewa6pzuAGCsyqVIjuzvZBe6Io2RLTj8N4Aimou0v8E0u0Awhvf7784WuBVr3GmAZzBRhHbpZcK7JSiX7mAysk4rmsrLgzOqUzQVd1dGZSp6RrokNyYRa3g36Di6EeWc/s1600/At+the+Tayelet+in+Jerusalem.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="478" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDA9O-5_mLAtcLewa6pzuAGCsyqVIjuzvZBe6Io2RLTj8N4Aimou0v8E0u0Awhvf7784WuBVr3GmAZzBRhHbpZcK7JSiX7mAysk4rmsrLgzOqUzQVd1dGZSp6RrokNyYRa3g36Di6EeWc/s640/At+the+Tayelet+in+Jerusalem.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Students at the Tayelet Haas in Jerusalem</td></tr>
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In the suspenseful anticipation leading to the momentous advent of Palestinian statehood, a generous <a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2007/12/ismael-writes.html?showComment=1316369922673#c4622817141854471671">commenter</a> has posted French translations of Ismael's poems to my blog. Ismael's original Arabic and (somewhat rough) English translations can be found <a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2010/10/when-you-are-this-far-from-jaffa-gate.html">here</a> and <a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2007/12/ismael-writes.html">here</a>. It is much appreciated, Bruno!<br />
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As if on on cue, Ismael's poems remind us that Jerusalem is already a "shared" state. Perhaps to an extent greater than any city, a city beyond state. Maybe Jerusalem is, in this respect, more a city than any other city. I certainly felt that in my three years as a student there. To me, she is my eternal home city. Returning to architectural studies after I left her, it was thinking of my life in Jerusalem that led me to focus on urban design in my graduate design studies (my thesis was on "sharing Jerusalem").<br />
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Jerusalem is like the earth: despite our mutual hatreds, we must learn to share this "Bride of the Cities". Few standard-bearers, among the possessions of mankind, can be as great instructors of peace as this "Citadel of Light". Or claim such an incredible stake in it. <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhliqrT3MeuvRXu1krJBZicudhmTV4yKQG4wXOkkjsKCRnu27ZNioDAaoXThChFuMPrQIemJY7V6kZIBU8eyLputkPz8M2ReoLUCRy72hyjnrlz1vz6bH_FIifCAwq3NQeAiS-al4Ew2s/s1600/Jerusalem+from+the+Tayelet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="478" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhliqrT3MeuvRXu1krJBZicudhmTV4yKQG4wXOkkjsKCRnu27ZNioDAaoXThChFuMPrQIemJY7V6kZIBU8eyLputkPz8M2ReoLUCRy72hyjnrlz1vz6bH_FIifCAwq3NQeAiS-al4Ew2s/s640/Jerusalem+from+the+Tayelet.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jerusalem at sundown (the sunlight is falling on Palestinian East Jerusalem)</td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC67E6OM-dGUvNQK4gNNRLpfElYFSJ1u1uU6A79pX3UBHlA5BhgHy7drnB8S5HrsFevMptC92W9NLtmvwWs7dRSDcpLrAET3jdv-P7hXpU2CPRBXHIizh8ZO1IQ16GtVxxw2P4Lb_Q4IA/s1600/footpath+leading+to+mt+zion+gate.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhliqrT3MeuvRXu1krJBZicudhmTV4yKQG4wXOkkjsKCRnu27ZNioDAaoXThChFuMPrQIemJY7V6kZIBU8eyLputkPz8M2ReoLUCRy72hyjnrlz1vz6bH_FIifCAwq3NQeAiS-al4Ew2s/s1600/Jerusalem+from+the+Tayelet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br />
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Here is Bruno's translation of Prof. Ismael Obydat's "<a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2007/12/ismael-writes.html">Bride and Mistress of the Cities ...Jerusalem</a>".<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC67E6OM-dGUvNQK4gNNRLpfElYFSJ1u1uU6A79pX3UBHlA5BhgHy7drnB8S5HrsFevMptC92W9NLtmvwWs7dRSDcpLrAET3jdv-P7hXpU2CPRBXHIizh8ZO1IQ16GtVxxw2P4Lb_Q4IA/s1600/footpath+leading+to+mt+zion+gate.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC67E6OM-dGUvNQK4gNNRLpfElYFSJ1u1uU6A79pX3UBHlA5BhgHy7drnB8S5HrsFevMptC92W9NLtmvwWs7dRSDcpLrAET3jdv-P7hXpU2CPRBXHIizh8ZO1IQ16GtVxxw2P4Lb_Q4IA/s320/footpath+leading+to+mt+zion+gate.jpg" width="240" /></a>Entre les collines elle se dresse hautaine et coquette<br />
Sublimée par le Très-Haut frappé d'ébahissement<br />
Nouvelle épousée toute parée des étoiles du firmament<br />
Bénie par le Tout-Puissant et ennoblie par les prophètes.<br />
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A son nom les oiseaux répondent en chantant le matin<br />
Et le soir les colombes encore somnolentes roucoulent sur ses murailles<br />
Pendant que les chevreaux se laissent plonger dans la torpeur suave de son giron<br />
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Mon esprit s'est unifié au tien<br />
Tout comme la lumière à la clarté... nulle obscurité<br />
Tout comme l'eau à toute substance aqueuse... nulle soif<br />
La mort ne peut nous séparer<br />
Ni personne ne peut attenter à notre amour<br />
Toujours nouvelle épousée... toujours plus câline et provocante<br />
Jérusalem, ville des lumières<br />
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De par mon esprit je m'élance vers toi<br />
Chaque jour je franchis en courant le seuil de ta porte<br />
Et m'envole très haut et très loin emporté par la brise<br />
Des senteurs de l'encens et des parfums<br />
S'exhalant de chacune de tes cours et marchés.<br />
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Je monte sur tes balcons garnis de drapeaux<br />
De paix, d'amour, de fête<br />
Et promesse de bonheur.<br />
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Tout comme l'esprit porte les germes de l'amour envers toi<br />
Et les a ensemencés.<br />
Mon esprit se laisse porter à œuvrer à la floraison croissante de <br />
Tes étendues incommensurables.<br />
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Au lever du soleil j'embrassechaque lopin de tes terres<br />
Et les soirs de pleine lune je te chuchote à l'oreille<br />
Mon amour passionné.<br />
En t'aimant je suis roi et toi tu es ma reine et le reine universelle<br />
De tous les coeurs... Jérusalem<br />
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Je te resterai fidèle en amour Jérusalem et t'en fais la promesse.<br />
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Mon amour est immortel.<br />
Quand tout passe, tout s'en va pour toujours.<br />
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Toujours gaie, lumineuse et coquette<br />
Nouvelle épousée et maîtresse des cités<br />
Cités des prophètes... cité de prospérité et de lumière.<br />
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(Poéme composé à Jérusalem par le professeur Ismael Obydat)
Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-41178063821944857222011-08-31T19:44:00.000-04:002011-10-03T20:11:40.572-04:00Jerry the Mapmaker. It is things like this that make me realize...<iframe frameborder="0" height="330" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/6745866?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="600"></iframe><br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/6745866">Jerry's Map</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user2352465">Jerry Gretzinger</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
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Maybe there was another way to get my urban planning fix.<br />
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That magic card thing, by the way, is exactly the kind of method I relate to. They beat the snot out of it in design school.<br />
<br />Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-64133363388810778902011-06-10T11:47:00.188-04:002011-10-03T21:41:56.366-04:00Dreams of the New Edge Mega-City<div style="padding: 3px; text-align: left;">
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kasiahein/2950858993/" title="photo sharing"><img alt="" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3225/2950858993_17d6231258.jpg" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kasiahein/2950858993/">Oshodi Market</a>, originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kasiahein/">kasia hein</a>.</span></div>
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I am fascinated with dystopian cities. Some of my favorite city visions are depictions of infernal cities, such as <a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2007/12/mentally-sunny-day.html">Blade Runner’s LA</a> (the anti-LA that always rains, and where no one really knows anybody). I think all exciting cities do contain a right admixture of paradise and inferno. Perhaps because the city of my birth, Mexico City, contains some of the best examples of each (and is still the most exciting urban environment I’ve experienced), I’ve always known that thriving cities are dwelling purgatorially in the precipice of heaven and hell. Cities are the ultimate dwellers of the breach. It is not an accident that apocalypses and cacotopoi feature cities prominently, as do dreams and nightmares.<br />
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The edge is what makes 21st Century Mega-Cities grow, and, boy, they are so riven with them. Yesterday's lead article in the New York Times featured the lawless growth of Gurgaon, New Delhi's Blade Runner version of an Edge City. Gurgaon has grown so rapidly and tremendously that almost no public infrastructure has been built to serve it. Yet, it has become a hyper-burb - one of those freaks of gigantism, who, seeded into soil so unimaginably fertile at the cross-streams of global capital, and so unregulated, has outpaced all attempts to plan it. It is a Shenzhen without the socialism. To understand what makes a Gurgaon is to realize that it is the Edge City that skipped places like Dublin, Ohio. It has "leap-frogged" the slumbering and conventional developed world, with its stultifying 30 year transportation and land use plans, and went straight to the source of wealth production. The place where the American Dream actually exists most desperately in our young century. It is the 21st Century Edge City: the city actually at the precipice of the networked global order. <br />
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Such "edge cities" of floating populations seem to be uncontrollably springing on the edges of today's developing world "Mega-Cities", who, themselves are drinking at the steep banks of the globalized world economy. In fact, you can accurately call them "Edge Mega-Cities". As Rem Koolhaas intuited, no Mega-City dwells more in the precipice than Lagos. In this regard it is the restless <a href="http://www.ekoatlantic.com/">Dubai that Wants to Be</a>... <br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/GkxiVBkmMkU" width="480"></iframe><br />
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I find it very interesting that the first phase of Eko Atlantic to rise out of the sea next to Lagos will be the Financial District. Lagos is becoming an Instant Mega-City. It is a Mexico City and Sao Paulo that is just about to attend her first social, one of those "21st Century" freak-cities whose hyper-cultures are global in scales...in scales of grinding desperation, dreams, and empires of wealth. These are cities that have transcended their states in their complete "lawless" growth, except for the fact that they enact their own fascinating internal organization. An improvised organization of orders so bursting with nuclear energy that even Koolhaas can hardly put the right words to them. In an <a href="http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/rem_koolhaas.shtml">interview</a> for Index magazine (back in 2000), for example, he recounted this aerial observation of Lagos:<br />
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<blockquote>
...We made an unbelievable video about a traffic jam in Lagos, which is really scary because the sheer pressure makes everything liquefy. There are these jams that are mostly buses — rivers of yellow trying to go through arteries that are too narrow. Huge trucks — almost everything is public transport and trucks — really colliding and squeezing. And in between them, there are these people — almost like cement. According to the myth, they are dismantling the vehicles that are in the jam. Not only are you stuck in the jam — you're also being disassembled. Maybe that's the only solution to the jam. So it's not just a traffic jam. It's actually a traffic jam turning into a car market, turning into spare parts turning into a smoldering ruin. All in consecutive phases. It's really about metabolism and flows and scale. And unbelievable organization.</blockquote>
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One can sense here that even Rem, the expert of lawless architecture, is almost at a loss about what to do in that "organization". How in the hell can anyone "plan" with these spontaneous orders abounding all around? He is like Michelangelo enviously beholding his Belvedere torso. Can even the sea stop these people?<br />
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It is easy to romanticize these urban landscapes where wild things do so grow. But I find it interesting that even in Lagos land use and transportation planning has a place. Evidence the sand-pumping, Dutch engineered (of course), Eko Atlantic coastal "restoration" project in the video above. ...Still, surely you would suspect that the saturated market/arteries of Lagos would be the last place on earth where a dedicated right-of-way for a BRT system could exist. But one such has actually been recently introduced!...<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/4Tp_GR7QXDI" width="480"></iframe><br />
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Heck, if Lagos can do it, what are LA's freeways!? I find Rem's choice of the word "metabolism" to describe the commerce and transitions of scale in the nascent Mega-City an apt metaphor to guide our thinking. Some of these orders exist because of the jam in the gulch. In Lagos, the challenge of urbanism is to remove the clog in the streams of global finance that the people of Lagos seek so energetically. The challenge is to transfer the energy "liquifying" market and transport together in Lagos to global outlets. <br />
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That BRT can be implemented successfully in Lagos should tell us that the frustration of the jam was partially keeping that burgeoning Edge Mega-City behind. We need not fear planning for these cities. But, we must be as tolerant and improvisational as their metabolic processes and build on them. You just need to first legitimize these orders and give them access to the outlays of the global market that they actually seek. In this case, yes, that involves laying down a dedicated right-of-way. The planners of Lagos can do stuff to Lagos, actually! Who'd a thought? <br />
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In our century, the hungers of the global economy, as well as climate change, will produce population drifts to the Mega-City in scales that we have yet to see in history. Even rising sea levels, I suspect, will not be able to stave that trend, because coastal cities are the most interconnected hubs of the global economy. They will, like Lagos, pump sand into the sea if need be. Do not be amazed if other cities "out-Lagos" Lagos in our century, and in places we least expect. The central challenge of urbanism in our 21st century: How do we bring the urban migrants of the world into the world economy in a way that lifts them out of poverty? What can we do for them? <br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/5tgY72yyb18" width="640"></iframe>Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-53324745241926899582011-05-24T22:50:00.023-04:002011-05-24T23:22:48.148-04:00Apocalyptic Paralysis<div style="padding-bottom: 3px; padding-left: 3px; padding-right: 3px; padding-top: 3px; text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/96214630@N00/2187087985/" title="photo sharing"><img alt="" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2138/2187087985_b24ed7c515.jpg" style="border-bottom: #000000 2px solid; border-left: #000000 2px solid; border-right: #000000 2px solid; border-top: #000000 2px solid;" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/96214630@N00/2187087985/">Snow-cholera-map-1</a>, originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/96214630@N00/">ccxtina</a>.</span></div><br />
This past weekend, I was thinking a lot about apocalypses (thanks in part to the May 21st "rapture"). Because my profession has been one that deals with the crisis of sprawl at the first stage, I often feel that part of my design duties is to educate my clients of beneficent sustainable means to alternately meet (and improve) their goals. In this task, I’m just a polite and productive version of an angry doomsday prophet pointing out to the feckless masses the impending catastrophes of our collective evil-doing. The irony is that my role as an urban designer, which is connected to both the transportation and building sectors, actually exists to coordinate the projects of the greatest energy hogs in the environment of all, representing together 70% of all carbon-based energy use in our nation. My guileless industry, in the end in net terms, will produce even more global warming impacts, however much I’m off-setting the even worse impacts of less urban, sprawl-based design alternatives. While replacing energy-inefficient sprawl is as worthy a green endeavor as one can have, I’m of even less advantage here than the boy with the finger in the dike, since all I can do is to bend down to the ground to try to drink up some of the overflow. In contemplating this, my doomsday gloom is not lightened any less bit by the salient fact that my own profession seems to have become but a tinier niche service in the ecological nooks that make up the US real estate economy, still reverberating from a post-bubble apocalypse that has produced even less opportunity for the leadership of architects and urban designers. …So, any previous influence I might have had to turn the Titanic around seems to have become more pipe dream than green dream. So much disaster swilling before and around me!<br />
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It is tempting here for me to sulk a bit like Jonah before Nineveh. So it was useful, that, in this dark mood, I was reading Steven Johnson’s <em>The Ghost Map </em>(covered in my last post). One grand point of the book is that the disaster itself, the apocalypse, is a lecturer of its own undoing. It just needs an attentive pupil. No one can design a utopian alternative without becoming an expert of its dystopian forebear. Besides, as Kevin Lynch noticed, utopian visions always turn out to be rather disappointing bores anyway. Their cacotopian evil-twins are always more engrossing. <br />
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As John Snow knew, you have to embrace the caco a little. You have to acclimate your nose to the stench to see the hidden pattern creating the fulmination. A dystopian condition not only points to its own redemption, it makes it astonishingly clear…if only you can get past its miasmic vapors. Like the ghost map, recording with brutal acuteness for posterity the habitual lives and footsteps of people that one random summer day in Victorian London, we must, as John Snow did, engage in a patient dialogue with the Angel of Death, and become unbiased observers of his deft moves. Knee-jerk reactions can place us only with our back to the answers. In much of the urbanist apocalyptic thinking I come across, I see these habitual responses, a condition which, Steven Johnson points out, actually distances us even further from effective solutions. An urbanist diatribe indeed seems suspiciously filled with the over-determined “Gradgrindian” logic of Victorian miasmists, often labeling symptoms for causes. It’s easy to see why so much of it has that ominous apocalyptic tone and can’t help betraying (however subtly couched in distance) its contempt for the naïve, or worse, greedy agents of disaster-making. <br />
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Take, for instance, <a href="http://nuonline.arc.miami.edu/preview/index.html">this bit of urbanist apocalyptic</a>, which attempts to isolate the agents of the sprawl economy, of which, no. 4 is:<br />
<blockquote><strong><span style="font-size: large;">Specialization within the real estate industry</span></strong><br />
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Over the past six decades the real estate finance and development industries have become increasingly specialized in single-use development formats. The evolution of the industry can be traced through the Community Builders Handbook series published by the Urban Land Institute (ULI), the real estate industry's leading non-profit think tank on urban land use and development. The original Community Builders Handbook, published in 1947, presented the collective wisdom and experience of leading developers of mixed-use master planned communities, including ULI founders such as J.C. Nichols, the developer of the Country Club District and Country Club Plaza in Kansas City. Subsequent handbooks focused on ever more narrow segments of the real estate industry: subdivisions (Residential Development Handbook), shopping centers (the Shopping Center Development Handbooks but also other handbooks for factory outlet centers and urban entertainment centers), office and business parks (Business Park and Industrial Development Handbooks), and residential segments (e.g., condominiums, multi-family housing and workforce housing).</blockquote><blockquote>Real estate analyst Christopher Leinberger has written that the development industry is now focused on building the same nineteen real estate product types in every community in America. These generally represent single-use, stand-alone properties with floor-area ratios from 0.1 to 0.4 (i.e., where buildings cover only between 10-40 percent of a total site area, and the rest is devoted primarily to parking). These standardized product types have been refined by the industry over many decades, making them relatively easy to finance, build, lease and sell. In recent years the growth of real estate investment trusts (REITs) have transformed these real estate properties into commodities that can be bundled and traded as investment portfolios. </blockquote><blockquote>Together with a lowering of interest rates, such commoditization has provided much of the basis for the present U.S. building boom. Clearly, these development products have been successful at meeting the functional needs of businesses and consumers, and such development now pervades the fabric of our metropolitan areas. Yet, the staunch opposition to growth in communities nationwide also reveals that satisfying basic functional needs is not enough. While the real estate industry has become very good at building these single-use, automobile-oriented projects, the projects themselves are not very good at building communities. Ad hoc aggregations of single-use projects have proven to be ill suited for building communities that are socially diverse, environmentally sensitive, and economically sustainable.</blockquote><br />
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Overall, the first two paragraphs are quite informative. But the last leaves me puzzled and betrays the author’s dismissiveness with the whole speculative closed-loop cycle of cellular single-use development. Why not end instead with a note on what could be done here with this interesting situation? But this approach does not avail the apocalypser, because this author already has a utopian paradigm and pre-determined conception of community building. The insights that the information preceding could give, without this bias, are literally screaming at you. Consider the perpetuating commoditization loop bundling performance based assets to stiff parameters, for example. Couldn’t simply adding a layer of metrics to compare the performance of urban, mixed-use products, e.g. collocation metrics, walkability metrics, etc., etc., suddenly give analysts a rich base of information to craft urbanist packages for REIT’s? Wouldn’t, in the end, strategies like that prove the case for urbanism, making developers more liable to produce urban results for equity in their projects? Maybe “specialization” can actually play a determining role here. And, with respect to “community building”, maybe communities aren’t looking for “community” as much as the Nimby lifestyle that guarantees property value stability. What they don’t like is the intrusion, period, ad hoc and discombobulated or not. Here again, a predetermined utopia has lurched the author off from what one suspects would be a more productive route of inquiry.<br />
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Perhaps a better approach to sustainable urbanism is to start with the baseline cacotopia, and rather than try to enjamb it to urbanism, observe it patiently to learn where the handles can apply the gears. This is why I actually do things like observe traffic and market behavior patiently. For me, apocalypses create a kind of music to appreciate.Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-70649501176316546792011-05-22T21:53:00.212-04:002011-05-22T23:14:27.822-04:00Lessons from John Snow<div style="padding: 3px; text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrlerone/2954514725/" title="photo sharing"><img alt="" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3293/2954514725_c26b225d23.jpg" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrlerone/2954514725/">John Snow pump and pub</a>, originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrlerone/">mrlerone</a>.</span></div><br />
I have a new role model. Today, I finished reading Steven Johnson's <a href="http://www.theghostmap.com/">The Ghost Map</a>, one of those fun books that zeroes in on a seemingly minor event in history to unpeel its strangely significant ramifications impacting the way we live and even think today. That historical event was the cholera epidemic that struck London's Soho area in 1849, which at that time was a fecund Jane Jacobs-ville in Victorian England (in fact, London's most densely populated district).<br />
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I found great succor in the life example of the central protagonist, the polymath father of anesthesiology and nascent epidemiologist John Snow, who, in proving the water-borne transmission theory of cholera, indirectly made urbanism at the colossal scales of these past few centuries possible (well, ok...more possible). Dr. Snow's detective work married his lab-based experience interrogating the physiological responses to gases with sociological sleuth-work and mapping at the urban scale, a product of "consilient thinking" bridging heretofore unconnected fields of inquiry. While his genius was unappreciated in his day, it eventually solidified a plank for a science-based approach to public health works and policy. It's a rich book and one that offers much great fodder for urbanist self-examination today. <br />
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I especially recommend it for the cautionary lessons it has to offer about modes of "expert" thought that remain immured in group think. To be truly visionary and creative in your profession, you have to keep a hard-nosed grasp on observed fact while at the same time preserving an amateur's curiosity and nurturing what I dub a cross-polinating "syncretism" of divergent intellectual pursuits. John Snow's example vindicates my amateur pursuits. I will now pursue them with greater relish. I've been holding myself back. What strikes me about John Snow is that he did not hold back. Of course, he was inventing new fields of inquiry (anesthesiology, epidemiology to be exact, ...and perhaps add modern geography to that list), but, the fact is, he did not put brakes and limits to his "amateurism". I tend to think it is a kind of hubris to be self-aggrandizing about your hobby pursuits, especially where others have credentials. But John Snow didn't hesitate to whip out monographs on his side projects. A socially awkward loner like he was, this is a great lesson to me. Nor was he shy about engaging his critics, politely but thoroughly. <br />
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The "monographs" of today are blogs, we have to note. (I know...I wish we had more old-school print forums). So ... I will not apologize if Proper Scale becomes a little bit more "syncretistic". After all, what rich topics this weekend has given me with plagues and doomsday prophets feeding my obsessions. Surely I won't hold back! (Stay tuned.)Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-32312421194434864782011-05-18T22:50:00.001-04:002011-10-03T20:13:40.806-04:00The Unity of Urban Design (Admiring the Dutch)<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.hulu.com/watch/67736/design-e2-adaptive-reuse-in-the-netherlands?c=Green#s-p1-so-i0" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="353" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFa7TnTKjwvYCKKR-FegM3eM4UO2cEVa08md5q_ukw1hA2vgCm9CZwRuzJTW3PJnFi7wd-rEskElo74KDcVLb5n1IztK6a_yN9gvA16iDE0oKHbzS80FF80o6EdsmA-Ru3Nw_yNeyoAXM/s640/Adriaan+Gueze.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Adriaan Gueze explains why this "bridge" is not a bridge in PBS's <a href="http://www.design-e2.com/">Design:e2</a> show "<a href="http://www.hulu.com/watch/67736/design-e2-adaptive-reuse-in-the-netherlands?c=Green#s-p1-so-i0">Adaptive Reuse in the Netherlands</a>"</td></tr>
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I keep repeatedly watching <a href="http://www.hulu.com/watch/67736/design-e2-adaptive-reuse-in-the-netherlands?c=Green#s-p1-so-i0">this installment</a> PBS's <a href="http://www.design-e2.com/">Design:e2</a> series, which focuses on one of my favorite urban design projects, Borneo Sporenburg, the creation of Adriaan Geuze (above) and part of the greater waterfront redevelopment of Amsterdam's Eastern Docklands. I thought it well worth sharing. <br />
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If I were to belong to a society of professional urban designers I could find a home in, it would probably be dubbed the "Congress of Dutch Urbanism". I forgot who it was who said this, but it is very true: "In the Netherlands, modernism has never died." (That was not a statement in reference to mid-mod style, but a statement of the CIAM-like ambitions of modernism as tempered by the relaxed attitudes of Dutch designers.) Those festively creative polder planners across the Atlantic have much to teach about the value of well-applied urban design. Amsterdam is the Place of the Example, as Louis Kahn might have put it. To those who say that urban design has no real success stories, the Dutch, obviously, merrily go on believing. Creating urban places. Actually. For more than singles, retirees and DINK's! Only in the Netherlands, ...sigh... Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-17857141672134986962011-05-06T23:48:00.000-04:002011-10-03T20:15:00.662-04:00My Firm's Job Growth<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoT1gjRy6JlFk7Mfwmg1qdnDSDsd3X0jWL_GVlM-wpMWNU0bXFfdy5rM8bCRahIEsm2vzmS7XrShe7WMitQkPizd9M-llY9AM_uq57BT681ynBeZGRNka_LXzZbaI1NYHgYN8StDxMthQ/s1600/Members+of+the+firm+of+Neighboring+Concepts.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoT1gjRy6JlFk7Mfwmg1qdnDSDsd3X0jWL_GVlM-wpMWNU0bXFfdy5rM8bCRahIEsm2vzmS7XrShe7WMitQkPizd9M-llY9AM_uq57BT681ynBeZGRNka_LXzZbaI1NYHgYN8StDxMthQ/s400/Members+of+the+firm+of+Neighboring+Concepts.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Members of my firm (rendered versions)</td></tr>
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Listening to NPR today on my way to Boone, I heard news about the national uptick in new jobs. This past month, US companies added nearly 250,000 employees to the payrolls. Modest growth (apparently “household employment” is still down), but this is something nonetheless. </div>
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This tidbit of information confirms my personal experience. What has been happening in my firm of late is probably a small picture of what is happening nationally with firms in 2011. To explain my sustained silence on my blog, ...I’ve simply been inundated with work!</div>
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No…. I haven’t abandoned Proper Scale! In fact, I’ve been longing to catch up on my reflections, especially since so much of my experiences in my professional life since my last post have enriched them (I can’t believe that last post was made last year…really??). </div>
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If any indication there exists for a turnaround in the economy, it is that those fortunate few architecture firms still alive after the fallout of the housing collapse and real estate boondoggles are now inundated with work. Charlotte firms that trimmed their workforce to bare-bones staff to hang on are now demanding much of the similar workload they saw in the boon times (and, in some cases, greater) from the fortunate few architects that they retained. To be fair this is a survival tactic. </div>
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It was a scary moment last summer, no doubt about it, when for the first time ever in my professional experience, I had no project in the front burner. I am happy to be busy today, because for a while through last year, I had only the tail end of the Charlotte Streetcar Project to hang on to. I mainly depended on those random small assignments from civil and consulting firms needing maps and visuals to feed me some billable hours (much of this from government-related work…think the stimulus doesn’t matter?). </div>
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But toward the end of 2010, my, how things rapidly turned around! The inundation began for me this January and hasn’t let up (after my Summer Scare, the thought and extra effort I put into my fall proposals paid of!). Finally, after four telling months, my firm took pity on my situation and hired a planner on contract toward the end of last month. We also hired a part-time business developer last month. This was not an easy choice for our principals to make. After the bumpy lean times of the past three years, one could understand their hesitation. </div>
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If my firm’s experience is any indication, there was a big time pent-up demand for new hires building up throughout this past winter. Suddenly in April, the continuing inflow of work must have caused some skittish employers to dust off those empty chairs. </div>
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Of course, part of the reason we’ve also added a business developer to our payroll is we have to redouble our marketing efforts to feed the new planning position. The burden suddenly lifted off my shoulders on my backburner projects and responsibilities writing proposals is palpable on this fair day in May in the mountains. Believe you me. It also helps that we took on a part time intern that I can plug in when needed.</div>
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So… Very glad to report that Neighboring Concepts (with a net total of 13.5 employees now) contributed about a net of one and a half created positions in that jobs figures report. For us, this represents a size-able personnel increase of 11%. Firms in our orbit, I hear, are also doing the same. </div>
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With our new employees, I will hopefully be finding more leisure time to post reflectively on this blog. (Leisure time! The term feels almost tooooo luxurious on my typepad….Can I actually have leisure time???). </div>
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Things being what they were, I’m very sad for neglecting this blog so long. My fair readers, as soon as one project was down, I just had to catch up on the others. </div>
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But, I’m more than fortunate that the things of late that have kept me burning the midnight oil have so engrossed me and have been amazing professional stepping stones. I hope I can blog about some of that. With gas prices doing what they are, I believe, …yes, …I’m paddling on the course of a sustainable career here, as a transit-focused urban designer. </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">Thank you, President Obama, for your administration’s multi-pronged stimulus program. My firm is living proof that the lifeblood of federal grants and federal infrastructure stimulus projects allowed our firm to preserve its “human capital”. While our bread and butter projects are now private institutional work, it was those federally sustained projects that allowed us to hone our resources and increase our productivity in the lean times. As a result, we are only too eager now to add private sector jobs!</span>Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-67235731385632025482010-11-28T11:34:00.005-05:002011-10-03T18:55:03.511-04:00Taliesin West Bakersfield<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.onlinepot.org/images1/meanie_c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.onlinepot.org/images1/meanie_c.jpg" width="266" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Meanie". Originally posted at <a href="http://www.onlinepot.org/">www.onlinepot.org</a></td></tr>
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Daniel, the always observant (and now well-schooled) follower of urbanist dialogues, sniffs a subtle hankering amongst us landscape urbanists for reverting seriously to Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian idyll: <a href="http://discoveringurbanism.blogspot.com/2010/11/is-broadacre-city-worth-reviving.html">Is Broadacre City Worth Reviving?</a>.<br />
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What Daniel (following Michael Mehaffy) is spotting is the long-standing Hegelian allure for "mashing" agronomy and urbanism as evidenced by American intellectuals hankering for Wright's (Jeffersonian) Usonia. I would add Corbu's centralized (Hamiltonian) Voisin plan to the list. While, in the fist-fight between these modernist utopias (or "paradises", as <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=5RELRDb6bRwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+architecture+of+paradise&source=bl&ots=hCub6ve2gd&sig=ukBQL8szIJhWPfFb62qqHDzsAPs&hl=en&ei=oGbyTOvlGIW0lQenpuTDDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">William McClung appropriately calls them</a>),Wright's model apparently proved victorious in the last half-century, Voisin has never really left us either (and, in fact, as Witold Rybczynski points out in <a href="http://books.simonandschuster.com/Makeshift-Metropolis/Witold-Rybczynski/9781416561255"><i>Makeshift Metropolis</i></a>, Wright's own oeuvre did not evade it either).<br />
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Might the garden + city movements, in their various ideological camps and manifestations, essentially be a part of the American cultural condition? Wright's nativist idealism may be an irreducible part of our American mental model for ideal living, as American as cranberry sauce, even if hardly any Americans ever own a pair of overalls. This much Wright got right about his fellow Americans. To swing our urbanist scimitars at American Gothic, like Corbu did, would be to alienate us forever from our fellow Americans (Canadians too) and that would do us no good. We designers then have no choice, essentially, but to shrug our shoulders and try to sublimate it. <br />
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Full disclosure: I am myself a product of the academy, which, though we never claim it outright, holds the movement towards a landscape urbanism, or landscape + urbanism, if you will, with a venerable light not reserved for New Urbanism. Vehemently so. But, at least I will admit here that my love for landscape+city+semiotics is essentially a romantic one (er..., blushing evidence <a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2008/01/totally-random-post-of-month-liminal.html">here</a> and <a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2009/08/urban-pastoral.html">here</a>). I am, yes, aware that the way we use landscape (for recreation, ecological regeneration, or agriculture) is primarily a cultural question that the designer can engage (and perhaps influence) but never quite control. All design, let's face it, is a utopia. The reason that landscape urbanism appeals to us urban designer types is the way it engages the fourth dimension in the planning challenge, in pointing us to the ecological and changing conditions of the city. It is a relaxed and appealing view of urbanism. Sometimes, it too loses track of society and reality and economics, but that's design. That's life in fact.<br />
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While I don't consider Wright's "democracy in overalls" essentially realistic, I have always admired how robust and undiluted in spirit Wright's infrastructural vision was. People seem to miss this subtle attribute of Usonia. I would like them to squint more carefully at the models and notice that Wright's Usonian roads, bridges, and ramps are nothing like the flimsy and dispersed and decapitated infrastructure of today's suburb. The suburb has never replicated the soaring infrastructural heart of Usonia, grided and resilient and direct and exorbitantly expensive as it was relative to what it served. This is not the amorphous and flimsy and branched infrastructure of today's suburb. That is the constant mistake of urbanist paradises: to essentially get the economics wrong at the outset. They always have to transmogrify to lesser versions of themselves. Simply, Usonia can not support that kind of dispersed infrastructure with an agricultural-based economy of one acre per farmer. Wright's Usonia was never replicated because it made no industrial sense whatsoever. It did not scale. The problem with landscape/agronomic urbanism since Wright and Corbu has always been that sticky implementation piece. Van Valkenburgh's <a href="http://dirt.asla.org/2010/10/13/interview-with-michael-van-valkenburgh-fasla/">wilderness in the wharf</a> and New Urbanism's <a href="http://www.serenbefarms.com/">Serenbe, GA</a> are sort of our alternative responses to this problem. One focuses on implementation with high-stakes public projects and one takes advantage of Americans' market preference to seek out a quietude in (essentially suburban or small town) community life. Both of these responses seem somewhat limited and situated and ineffectual blips. But what is the alternative? How else do you support agriculture at an industrial scale in the urban fabric that makes sense? What is the soft (social and market) infrastructure that you need? <br />
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So, while I'm at it, let me point out one place where I do see Jeffersonian Usonia as feasible in an industrial scale. That is in the anti-federalist pot-growing communities that are now forming in the edges of urbanized California. Essentially, what you have in Cali is a great condition for a great resurgence in a "democracy in overalls" which actually gives economic incentives for agronomic production with small-scale farms. Watch, oh fearful planner, what happens when Cali eventually adopts the "100 square feet" per grower rule. Suddenly, you have the economic leverage you need for single families to buy up those foreclosed homes in the Valley's grided landscape, which seems ready-made for the spirited Usonian infrastructure of Wright's vision. Taliesin <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&q=bakersfield+ca&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Bakersfield,+Kern,+California&gl=us&ei=CVjyTNukMsL_lgfx_uGEDQ&oi=geocode_result&ved=0CB0Q8gEwAA&ll=35.372955,-119.159603&spn=0.044511,0.07596&t=h&z=14">West Bakersfield</a>!Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-67891988757769758392010-11-19T23:42:00.003-05:002011-10-03T18:29:03.766-04:00The Joy of Biking DC<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1M0ld2qy72bQB0RsCiv7auPusO7_1lzjQ-Ntsg0UDWfK1ecp8tlFF2JV5iD6tJJGyXmvB4o5ZCbyBWAEhYNQGCRX5ylOVVERxQKLCLFOUiX2u1LJXpARLwghHpU01PG04Rt_JX5pqkLY/s1600/Eastern+Market+Capital+Bikeshare+Station.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1M0ld2qy72bQB0RsCiv7auPusO7_1lzjQ-Ntsg0UDWfK1ecp8tlFF2JV5iD6tJJGyXmvB4o5ZCbyBWAEhYNQGCRX5ylOVVERxQKLCLFOUiX2u1LJXpARLwghHpU01PG04Rt_JX5pqkLY/s640/Eastern+Market+Capital+Bikeshare+Station.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bike share station in DC's Eastern Market</td></tr>
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I spent much of my Halloween weekend in DC on a bike. I was in DC to run the Marine Corps Marathon on Halloween, my first time ever attempting 26.2 miles, but on the days leading up to the race, I couldn't stop myself from punching it down those DC avenues on my rental, swerving from from one multi-lane avenue to another. Pedaling around our capital city was an exhilarating experience. Yes, my virgin marathon began with a little bit of telltale tightness in my hams, but it was worth it. (Yes...I finished the marathon. The whole experience running MCM was thrilling...It certainly will not be my last 26.2!)<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmK-_wnUoVpnG4YoV5U1wNEHszMGpMiz5CJKO15il50R-iQkIBkChp9NLuBsdxirsElYWuLMiUpNPZzjcHe1gTGDe7yVeh8uFadfCyj381jQRSLrw0P2lWKkmjXlbUMvTYt56Y6seGhOg/s1600/Stewart+Colbert+Rally+%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmK-_wnUoVpnG4YoV5U1wNEHszMGpMiz5CJKO15il50R-iQkIBkChp9NLuBsdxirsElYWuLMiUpNPZzjcHe1gTGDe7yVeh8uFadfCyj381jQRSLrw0P2lWKkmjXlbUMvTYt56Y6seGhOg/s200/Stewart+Colbert+Rally+%25281%2529.jpg" width="155" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Surprisingly lucid thinking in DC</td></tr>
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Short and sweet though my time was, I have now run and biked the District enough to become convinced that DC just might be the perfect city for both activities. It is also the perfect city for rallying, which I did (along with the sign-bearer at right) that Saturday at Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity. That's an aspect of DC's virtues that requires travel of that more noumenal variety (the kind that tends to gum up Proper Scale enough), so I'll avoid it for now.<br />
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As for biking, never before have I traveled so happily down trafficky streets and avenues. The thought dawned on me quite fast that this was not my typical urban biking experience. I had to pause a moment to ponder about what made DC feel so different... <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZtrxxxqD15MBk0l5hT9kw0iR2T3x16kkXvcr1rl5z5mvYAnLO33CIEejBtoAVa_crKyO7GJ2gIjaisQgSFBe2MS8uBXEBgfzruj69O2cRpKKmycEzhIzdbwqR7CElGpckTooxeQqWlcY/s1600/Pennsylvania+Avenue+Bike+Lanes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZtrxxxqD15MBk0l5hT9kw0iR2T3x16kkXvcr1rl5z5mvYAnLO33CIEejBtoAVa_crKyO7GJ2gIjaisQgSFBe2MS8uBXEBgfzruj69O2cRpKKmycEzhIzdbwqR7CElGpckTooxeQqWlcY/s320/Pennsylvania+Avenue+Bike+Lanes.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pennsylvania Avenue</td></tr>
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Was it the wide avenues? Perhaps the generous amount of pavement everywhere in the District allows enough traffic slack to grant the cyclist some breaks to get in and out of traffic lanes easily, but (with the exception of Pennsylvania Ave. at left) you take your life into your own hands down many of these. Let's put it this way, you need to be comfortable with clearances just inches between yourself and moving vehicles. The thing that made a positive difference in my experience getting around on a bike in DC, as compared to my experience in Boston and Jerusalem, is hard to tag (in Charlotte, people, I don't even try). But this I noticed was something I appreciated about DC's Avenues: they run enough interference on faster traffic (due to congestion produced by plentiful merging points and intersections) to keep traffic at an even keel and closer to cycling speeds, while at the same time offering longer stretches of uninterrupted travel, which make both cyclists and drivers happy. For cyclists, stops are just as annoying as for drivers in the grid; in fact, even more so, since having to stop at an intersection means breaking your hard-gained momentum, which is what allows you to stay at travel speeds matching the traffic alongside you. Staying at these higher speeds allows you to safely share the road with vehicles, and, in fact, take command of a lane when necessary. These kind of sharable arteries, with highly pedestrianized urban street fronts, are rare here in the States. But DC is thick with them! Because they are everywhere, traffic tends to be evenly distributed. Even if they mess with your sense of orientation, these wide streets have a certain predictable pace, almost a kind of ordered, lolling behavior, that the cyclist picks up on intuitively and can use to his or her advantage. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzjoVd0aCoCYRlYqDXQ9EUAUlQqsHy7LR18Fiuw1f839lA0An16SwvYJ5zXeoGQ2-JgGqiUx3fFGMb_KZBEGByClZb1F2WqL5K9EaiHLF4_xwAUHD468cmJ9Fg-inX0235KvmubbjtLY/s1600/A+bike+lane+in+the+Eastern+Market+area.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzjoVd0aCoCYRlYqDXQ9EUAUlQqsHy7LR18Fiuw1f839lA0An16SwvYJ5zXeoGQ2-JgGqiUx3fFGMb_KZBEGByClZb1F2WqL5K9EaiHLF4_xwAUHD468cmJ9Fg-inX0235KvmubbjtLY/s320/A+bike+lane+in+the+Eastern+Market+area.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Approaching Eastern Market</td></tr>
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Was there a difference also in the amenities? That signature bikeway on Pennsylvania Avenue is a joy to ride down, certainly. Some of the world-class city offerings, including the Capital Bikeshare program, were there, and I am sure these do much to encourage bike travel in DC. The bikeway network, on the other hand, was the limited-run variety rather than the comprehensive kind. But I noticed that the bike lanes that do exist are actually necessary and do go a long way to make a difference, <i>especially </i>when they are actually needed to create some clearance for the cyclist to bypass backed up traffic, therefore granting the bike mode a coveted edge (and also allowing the cyclist to stay off the sidewalks to bypass such conditions). Some of these lanes, as in the busy narrow streets in the Eastern Market area, make very obvious why bike travel in DC has long gained the favored mode status for many locals.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp-WKptLFuWz_UA19GQSN6cKc6FFkcRpPdmRbPqlSw-lY-vrzk68No-GwGTem3nJMWDrafqalWwXmPdC52GpM-VzlNHBpoZVmswF0_KI1HvyjQN7iCc4S1DqTqWmMTel__xPngCuKj8mw/s1600/Cyclist+and+son+at+the+National+Mall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="138" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp-WKptLFuWz_UA19GQSN6cKc6FFkcRpPdmRbPqlSw-lY-vrzk68No-GwGTem3nJMWDrafqalWwXmPdC52GpM-VzlNHBpoZVmswF0_KI1HvyjQN7iCc4S1DqTqWmMTel__xPngCuKj8mw/s200/Cyclist+and+son+at+the+National+Mall.jpg" width="200" /></a>While planners like me riding around DC might quibble that the bike lane network is patchwork at best, I would say that not all the conveniences and provisions for bike travel across greater distances in the city are really needed. Sure, judged by mere infrastructural capacity, DC's travel split on the surface is still skewed heavily toward the automobile. As the images on the blogosphere today betray, New York today and, certainly, Portland are doing somersaults over our capital on this score. But DC has a whole lot of other pluses and lessons for improving bike travel. Some of these may even obviate the need for the white stripes and pavement dedications.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-DX0xc6LWIT5WAx47DCwKbwyoQWldiUr8U77F2vc0ACJmRNYFJGqGazvTVU3_a7imNNBzbme62NSkgwchwj5j60n0xza4Ff_PMm2r4_wwaxh_drCjjuXSlpimQTFIOY9vyiwFfNq_W7s/s1600/a+coffee+party.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="428" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-DX0xc6LWIT5WAx47DCwKbwyoQWldiUr8U77F2vc0ACJmRNYFJGqGazvTVU3_a7imNNBzbme62NSkgwchwj5j60n0xza4Ff_PMm2r4_wwaxh_drCjjuXSlpimQTFIOY9vyiwFfNq_W7s/s640/a+coffee+party.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A very sane cyclist observes an outdoor performance of the Pirates of Penzance unfolding at Eastern Market</td></tr>
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Of course, the key ingredient making DC special is L'Enfant's grid. It is, to be brief, a difference of amenity inherent to <i>city form</i>. When it comes to biking, city form is the first thing bike-supportive planning should think carefully about. Too few of us spend time thinking about it, although we deal with it implicitly if not directly in design. When you are working with the right fabric, maybe you don't need the Portlandian exuberance with bikeway infrastructure. DC seems to teach that maybe these solutions should be implemented only when they are actually necessary. <br />
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After a couple weeks mulling over my experience, I have slowly come to the realization that, in fact, L'Enfant's grid just <i>might be</i> peerless in its advantages for integrating multi-modal transportation effectively in heavily traveled districts ("might be peerless" ....I'm not yet ready to claim it outright, though I'm tempted). The advantages that make bike travel special in DC are also the same advantages that make travel of all other modes there effective. L'Enfant did DC a huge favor not only in giving the heart of DC wide, Parisian-style rights-of-way but in designing radial avenues that lace across DC's grid <i>diagonally </i>with respect to the rectilinear infill grid, giving DC plenty of what I call (as I've <a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2010/05/avenue.html">modified</a> for my private odonomy on this blog) "Grand Avenues". Grand Avenues help everyone. They help motorists, cyclists, pedestrians, buses and even the underground subways with stations leading out to them (I'll explain why later). Even when the pavement stops, Grand Avenues may still continue for pedestrians (such as across the rolling lawn of Capitol Hill for the pedestrians headed from the Eastern Market area to the Rally to Restore Sanity at right). A city's Grand Avenues, it seems, get inside the heads of its citizens. They seem to amplify the pulse and vitality of the city with <i>what</i> they connect.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bike parking at our national public forum</td></tr>
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DC, unlike every American city I know, splits traffic flow with avenues (instead of simply channelizing it to them). It disperses and modulates traffic flows enough to make wide surface streets sharable between cyclists and vehicles. All those skewed intersections simply multiply travel options. In the cases where it doesn't, and the traffic is simply too thick and relentless to allow the cyclist the direct route option, the cyclist often has the option to navigate quieter local streets that circumvent the artery traffic. <br />
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Previously, the precedents presented by places like Copenhagen and Portland led me to believe that the urban design challenge was to find ways to claim more pavement for the bike. But DC seems to have taken the opposite tact, brazenly maximizing surface provisions for the automobile instead. With all its rights-of-way, L'Enfant's city seems to have passed a sweet spot. Instead of corralling and flagellating it, avenues here seem to placate traffic behavior, letting it switch often and lead more directly to its destinations. Sure, radial avenues intersecting at odd angles with the grid insert even more intersections than needed into it (maybe these serve a good purpose we're not appreciating?), and often these are the skewed kind of intersections that imagination challenged DOT's detest (and don't allow you to design, that's for sure!). But, ...I rode a bike in DC, and I can't remember the last time I had as much fun on a bike...<br />
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Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2684548832214771005.post-8461347925412709572010-10-24T23:30:00.067-04:002010-10-25T09:05:48.458-04:00When you are this far from Jaffa Gate, all one can do is post love letters...<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZF3AG5EJMn0B0TaPl8-KHmJbwjnjHD3VkVeZDoKD8CWElkB8qdNu9ihnC3STBKWf_eGhvzWWpcMoU0-y19Q-BiF8DNazMnzpoLkAkqot8pNhHYLUzwQiOG5HtvHiy-1a8ccFssrQ7EIw/s320/YD2J1852.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="213" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: verdana;"> <span style="font-size: 85%;">Photo by </span></span><a href="http://www.iralippke.com/"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: verdana; font-size: 85%;">Ira Lippke</span></a></td></tr>
</tbody></table><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZF3AG5EJMn0B0TaPl8-KHmJbwjnjHD3VkVeZDoKD8CWElkB8qdNu9ihnC3STBKWf_eGhvzWWpcMoU0-y19Q-BiF8DNazMnzpoLkAkqot8pNhHYLUzwQiOG5HtvHiy-1a8ccFssrQ7EIw/s1600/YD2J1852.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a> Ismael writes again. Periodically my Palestinian friend Ismael, Jaffa Gate's bard and genuine Professor of Peace to the visitors of Jerusalem and the peoples of the world, updates his plea to rejoin him in Jerusalem. His emails are always piercingly terse, warm little notes of heartfelt expectation:<br />
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<blockquote style="color: #444444;"><div>How are you I hop you are doing will, ..., i send you the translation of "bride and mistress of cities jerusalem" in arabic i wish you fo publish it so the people can find it on google.</div><div>in holand an old man "75 years old" he make a music and they sing it.</div><div>now we are doing a music to sing it in arabic.</div><div>hop to see you soon in jerusalem</div><div>I love you, your Bro Ismael.</div></blockquote><br />
Heaps of love back at you habibi! First of all, I'm flattered (though skeptical) that anyone could think my blog is a portal to feed the Google bots. But on behalf of a worthy author, I will not expend any effort in diffident dawdling and trepidation to get this baby out there. I'm happy to oblige, dear friend...<br />
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I'm most glad to post this in its original, unadulterated form, knowing that the authors of Ismael's Arabic-English dictionary are probably fans of late-18th century British Literature. Not that the <span style="color: #333399;"><a href="http://properscale.blogspot.com/2007/12/ismael-writes.html">intriguing</a> <span style="color: black;">English translation is not without its merits, but one suspects a little work is needed to contemporize things a bit. Unfortunately, I don't know Arabic to be able to contribute my thoughts usefully for a modern English translation. </span></span><span style="color: #333399;"><span style="color: black;">(Maybe any Arabic readers out there can help us out.) </span></span><span style="color: #333399;"><span style="color: black;">But I can read just barely enough to see that the poem Ismael sent is more expressive, unabridged and heartfelt. Here is </span>"The Bride and Mistress of Cities...Jerusalem" </span>as penned by Ismael Obydat in its original language... <br />
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<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">عروس المدائن...يا قدس</span><span dir="LTR" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;"></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">سيده المدائن...ياقدس</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">بين التلال تزهو في بهاء</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">سماوي ودلال</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">عروسا تزينت بنجوم السماء</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">باركها العلي...وشرفها الأ نبياء</span><span dir="LTR" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;"></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%; text-transform: uppercase;">الله اكبر الله اكبر الله اكبر الله اكبر</span><span dir="LTR" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%; text-transform: uppercase;"></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">باسمها تشدوا البلابل في الصباح</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">وعلى أسوارها يهدل الحمام</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">وفي المساء يغفوا الحمام</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">وبين أحضانها تغفوا الأطفال</span><span dir="LTR" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;"></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">تتحد روحي مع روحك</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">كما يتحد النور بالنور...فلا ظلام</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">وكما يتحد الماء بالماء...فلا عطش</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">لا الموت يقدر أن يفرقنا</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">ولا أحد يقدر أن يقتل حبنا</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">تباهي وازدادي دلالا وشموخا</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">ياقدس ...يامدينه الضياء</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">أسري بروحي اليك</span><span dir="LTR" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;"></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">بالحب ازرعها فتنمو وتزهر حين تراها العيون</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">تسبقني قدماي الي أبوابك كل يوم</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">أحلق عاليا...بعيدا...بعيدا...مع النسيم</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">تأخذني رائحه البخور...رائحه العطور</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">في الأسواق...في الساحات...وفي كل فناء</span><span dir="LTR" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;"></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">أعتلي الشرفات التي تلوح لي برايات النصر</span><span dir="LTR" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;"></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">تلوح لي برايات السلام</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">تلوح لي برايات المحبة و الهناء</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">وكما تحمل الروح بذور الحب اليك تزرعها</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">احمل روحي معها...أزرعها</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">فتنمو فتزهر بالحب حين تراها العيون</span><span dir="LTR" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;"></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">اقبل وشمس الصباح</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">كل شبر من أراضيك</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">ومع بدر المساء أهمس حبي بعشق أناجيك</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">بحبك أنا ملك وأنت مليكتي</span><span dir="LTR"></span><span dir="LTR" lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;"><span dir="LTR"></span> </span><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">و مليكه القلوب في كل مكان</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">يا قدس عهدا سأبقى على حبك...يا قدس</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">فحبك خالد</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">حين يذهب كل شئ...كل شئ الى فناء</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">تباهي وازدادي دلالاً</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">يا عروس المدائن...يا سيدة المدائن</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;">يا مدينة الأنبياء... يا مدينه الا سراء يا مدينه الضياء</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; unicode-bidi: embed;"><br />
</div><div align="right" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: left; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">اسماعيل عبيدات</span></div><div align="right" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: left; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">استاذ باحث في علم الاجتماع</span></div><div align="right" class="MsoNormal" dir="RTL" style="direction: rtl; line-height: 150%; text-align: left; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span lang="AR-SA" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">موبايل0525420473</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Eric Orozcohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00320742140050171881noreply@blogger.com0