proper scale

A Layout so Elegant, It Requires Comment (Geos development by David Kahn Studio)

2011-12-02T18:36:00.001-05:00

Geos Neighborhood Plan by David Kahn Studio

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 Habersham, SC (which I need to get around to comment more about on this blog), the Geos mixed-use neighborhood plan, by David Kahn Studio, is one such of these.

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.

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.)

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. Here 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).

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.

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!

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).

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 or 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:

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.

Another advantage that exists with the checkerboard scheme is the one Kevin Lynch notes in Good City Form. 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.

A "Master of Detail" Did This. Does Urban Design really matter anymore?

2011-10-17T13:01:00.001-04:00

A "Master of Detail" did this. L'Enfant's parcel plan for DC (image from wikimedia commons).

Last year, Frank Gruber published a series of provocative posts on hisHuffington Post blog pointing out that "urban design" had actual littleto contribute to the cohesion of today’s cities. The perceived missing bridgebetween architectural practice and urban planning, he argues,would not lead to the healing of sprawl if it existed because thefactors that shape urban form are "non-design” factors. Conveniently, Gruber lets the lamenting believers of urban-design-as-a-fieldmake it for him by referencing Richard Sommer’s essay in Alex Krieger andWilliam S. Saunders' book UrbanDesign. Blaming utopian urban design for anything, claimedSommer, is "an almost total misreading of the material history ofurbanization in the United States, in which suburbanization, industrialdisinvestment, racial segregation, and the popularity of the automobile playedinfinitely more decisive roles in the dissolution of centralized cities thanCorbusian aesthetics." Precisely, says Gruber. (BTW, note the recentcorrective to the Charles Jencksian mythology of modernism's failures inthe pages of The Economist.)

Point taken, Frank. So is there any reason to persist in the belief thaturban design as an endeavor can produce antidotes to sprawl? What is sodifferent now to allow this possibility?

That one is a good head-scratcher. Besides making me question the purpose ofmy professional life, and perhaps sending me into the early maw of a mid-lifecrisis, I gotta admit, every time I read a Gruber post, I can’t help feel a bitlike 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 forpublic life in the city better? You could, of course, question the samerole for architects and planners in general, but the peculiar ones of us thatappropriate 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.)

But I have to concur with Gruber. Urban design, as the physical result of urbanplanning, cannot really redress conditions that require more interventions thanwhat primarily falls in the rubric of urban planning. Urban design istoothless without a proactive developer or an effective planning authority behind it. Good urban design is the resultof good planning. Period.

Nonetheless, I would point out that what we call the work of the “urbandesigner” is not really engaged where it is often most needed. The casesin which city leadership spearheads pro-urban visions and policies are, notsurprisingly, the best opportunities for urban designers to shape urbanform. But only sporadically are the urban planner types ever engaged atthe 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 placedin the hands of metropolitan transportation authorities and managers of variousmunicipal departments tasked to expand the regional road network to servecorridor growth and to implant the local utility and public sector servicesthat support it. The urban designer - or committee of urban design(representing the various characters and citizen participants who most oftenundertake the work of “urban design”) - is at a great disadvantage here formany reasons that Gruber has ironically begun to mention with his recent postreviewing Earl Swift's The Big Roads. To a certain extent, subdivisiondevelopers play the only “design” role here, but this role is rarely aproactive one so much as a speculative one engaging preexisting and latentopportunities, both legal and financial. Unfortunately, under these conditions, the developers' incentives are all stacked infavor of autonomous subdivision design, the enemy of good-boned urbanism.

I would claim that the best service urban planners can do for urbanism is tocompete with technocrats and city leaders in controlling theclimate of urban form outcomes in the new urban growth areas, via zoning,influence in policy and in area planning. In these arenas, urban plannerstypically go mano a mano with these two rivals anyway. Good naturedly, ofcourse. Sometimes proactively, yet most often reactively, friendlycajoling or poky nudging is enough to win over politicians and technocrats toconsider new formats for growth, but, typically, the backing of citizenactivism or a powerful mayor or constituency on your side is oftenneeded.

As single contributors, architects can and often do serveurbanism by creating civic-conscious designs for individual built projectswhile pleasing their clients at the same time (a tall order many times). And because architects are gifted copycats while also being quite jealous ofone another, they will often engage in attempts to “out-perform” each other inthe public eye (this is largely what motivates architects' patience with LEEDdesign). This usually can only happen in settings already sufficientlyurbanized to be able to afford such design services from architects. But,where it can happen, architects sometimes establish precedents the public lovesthat pave the way to more easily entitle projects following in kind. Thus, collectively, they end up doing iterative, piecemeal urbanism thatsometimes achieves noteworthy urban design. Only rarely, if they aregifted, reputable and lucky, are they handed large enough projects to author anurban design project of an extraordinarily cohesive nature (see DPZ's Habersham, SC).

Sometimes, an amalgamation of both design opportunities takes place in a citydistrict, where architects build on the synergy of multiple-sized efforts,usually where ample underutilized parcels and former industrial retrofits canbe 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 thecity grid either pre-exists or is easy to connect to and to expand. While theconsultation of urban designers can be employed here, note that it is notreally needed. Much of that effort is not an act of authorship, but anopen, on-going, discursive act of negotiation (and, yes, a political act) thatmost likely circumscribes – and appropriately so! – the work actually to bedesigned by people that stamp drawings. “Urban design” here is a matterof straightforward problem solving to exploit available fundingmechanisms. Some sizeable single-firm contributions, like eddies in theflow, may occur here and there wherever developers control chunks of landsingle-handedly. The rest of what is important beyond transportation systemintegration, though some like to call this “urban design”, is just, let’s faceit, landscape design (and some large-scale infrastructure design) takingadvantage of obvious features to exploit (e.g. the S. Platte Riverand 16^th Streetpromenades in LoDo).

Thus, Gruber is on to something. Urban designers like to think their work isa distinct contribution in cities, but, in reality, they are just architects andlandscape architects doing their basic stuff. The important urban design isalready done for you: the no-brainer, pro-urban extension of the citygrid.

Is there a place where urban design can begin to break out into itsown field as a distinct sub-specialty of “design” inquiry and practice? Iactually believe it begins in transportation network design (including transitnetwork design) and the associated design work integrating multiple modes intostreet design. That is because the greatest piece usually involved in thecontrol of urban form is the initial shaping of the transportation network, andthis is one that today’s transportation engineer dominates from the beginning,via expert technical counsel and forecasting, to the stamped constructiondrawing. 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 transportationplanners here, but just to become intimate with their work, and to understandthe physical and performance dimensions of it, both at the facility level and thenetwork level.

Note that I said "begins". This transportation arena is not the critical piece for the urban designerto control. The most important piece of the pie in the act of city-shaping isthe act of parcelization. The act of subdivision. The parcel, as a legaland financial instrument, is actually the most persistent entity driving cityform in our modern societies. To put anew spin on the "figure-ground" focus of urban design, I claim that aprofessional role for an "urban designer" is to specialize in the actof parcelization via a more careful synthetic design of the street, parcel and publicrealm. 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 cityplanning. But it is an area of design inquiry that needs to be constantlyqueried, debated, experiment with and expanded generation to generation. This is exactly where a case for Design, witha capital "D", can be had for Urban Design.

Once, the surveyor's act ofparcelization was an art form that L'Enfant's ilk regarded as noble as the Vitruvianact of architecture itself. I suspect Gruber might ascribe this role also to urbanplanning, but, if so, actually architects are most likely to perform this role dayto day ...and perhaps should, since they are the most acquainted with thedimensional needs of buildings (hmmmm..., is this an actual missing bridge betweenarchitecture and urban realm planning?).

Urban designers are perfectly cut out for this role because we are thepeople 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 betweenbuilding and road designers, the urban designer is always being clued in to theprimary challenges facing both horizontal and vertical development in hercity. Her planning background alsoallows her to guage and measure the physical requirements of transportation,ecology, and humans, and such experience gives her clear conceptions about thegive and take between them. All these things need to be thought about toapply the art of parcelization well.

But to create such a role of Urban Design specialization, we have to rehabilitatethe name "urban designer" a bit. For one, the meaning of theterm has been eroded from the original open design praxis Kevin Lynch imaginedfor it, simply because of its close association with dogmatic or binary-mindedschools of thought (CIAM modernism, New Urbanism). But, primarily, I think wehave a really big problem with just the term “designer”. There is ageneral Mid-American distrust of the word “designer” that I think sidetracks othersfrom the value of the service. Design disciplines, especially urbaneones, are distrusted, period – partly the fallout of the media-turningtheatrics of pop-artists such as Andy Warhol. The aloof artist-designer figure,in popular imagination, defines our material culture by observing autonomousdesign movements in the undercurrents and margins of culture and ingeniouslyteasing them out to their ultimate forms. The artist-designer is toocaught up in these autonomous discourses to apply *real* material value, beyonda (short-lived) fetish dividend, to the object being designed. Noticethat civil and transportation engineers, who actually have the upper hand ineffectually shaping urban form (at least its sprawl based alternative) canevade this popular distrust due to the easy confidence we place on“value-neutral” engineered solutions – a predilection going back to theEnlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. (It is Popular Mechanics, not PopularDesign, for a good reason.) Actually, such prejudicial attitudesfavoring design by engineered solutions represent a continuation of modernism.Engineers, like prewar modernists, don’t claim their obvious pursuit ofautonomous discourses. Supposedly, they only measure, re-synthesize andcodify what careful observation has “deemed” efficient, safe, cost-effectiveand functional for society. This is how they then end up designing – yesdesigning! – the most unsustainable and inhospitable urban environmentsimaginable.

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 knewabout the all-important act of parcelization, which they executed with uncannybrilliance. L'Enfant's more magnanimous title “Major of the Corps ofEngineering, Master of Detail” is also instructive. (Privately, I have calledmyself a "master tile-layer", but this personal handle, admittedly,will not allow others to see the full roles I have entailed here, why…”Masterof Detail” seems far more evocative!)

A Freeway in the City, Of Big Bosses and Big Digs

2011-10-03T12:49:00.001-04:00

Rose Kennedy Greenway, originally uploaded by Dan Bock.

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 Death and Life of Great American Cities. 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.

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?

Frank Gruber has been doing a lot of careful thinking on his Huffington Post blog 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 latest post is a review of Earl Swift’s The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways, 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.

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”.

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 right in to (and in fact, more accurately, through) 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 was roundly critiqued 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.

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 median promenades in Paris. 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 here; in fact, this particular proposal would even worsen traffic since it would demand additional rerouting in the fabric).

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.

There is plenty of room here...

Click on image to view in Google Maps

...To do this in Charlotte:

Click on image to view in Google Maps

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 buildings). 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 Death and Life, 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 Death and Life 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.)

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.

Jérusalem, nouvelle épousée et maîtresse des cités

2011-09-18T16:46:00.000-04:00

Students at the Tayelet Haas in Jerusalem

In the suspenseful anticipation leading to the momentous advent of Palestinian statehood, a generous commenter has posted French translations of Ismael's poems to my blog. Ismael's original Arabic and (somewhat rough) English translations can be found here and here. It is much appreciated, Bruno!

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").

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.

Jerusalem at sundown (the sunlight is falling on Palestinian East Jerusalem)

Here is Bruno's translation of Prof. Ismael Obydat's "Bride and Mistress of the Cities ...Jerusalem".

Entre les collines elle se dresse hautaine et coquette
Sublimée par le Très-Haut frappé d'ébahissement
Nouvelle épousée toute parée des étoiles du firmament
Bénie par le Tout-Puissant et ennoblie par les prophètes.

A son nom les oiseaux répondent en chantant le matin
Et le soir les colombes encore somnolentes roucoulent sur ses murailles
Pendant que les chevreaux se laissent plonger dans la torpeur suave de son giron

Mon esprit s'est unifié au tien
Tout comme la lumière à la clarté... nulle obscurité
Tout comme l'eau à toute substance aqueuse... nulle soif
La mort ne peut nous séparer
Ni personne ne peut attenter à notre amour
Toujours nouvelle épousée... toujours plus câline et provocante
Jérusalem, ville des lumières

De par mon esprit je m'élance vers toi
Chaque jour je franchis en courant le seuil de ta porte
Et m'envole très haut et très loin emporté par la brise
Des senteurs de l'encens et des parfums
S'exhalant de chacune de tes cours et marchés.

Je monte sur tes balcons garnis de drapeaux
De paix, d'amour, de fête
Et promesse de bonheur.

Tout comme l'esprit porte les germes de l'amour envers toi
Et les a ensemencés.
Mon esprit se laisse porter à œuvrer à la floraison croissante de
Tes étendues incommensurables.

Au lever du soleil j'embrassechaque lopin de tes terres
Et les soirs de pleine lune je te chuchote à l'oreille
Mon amour passionné.
En t'aimant je suis roi et toi tu es ma reine et le reine universelle
De tous les coeurs... Jérusalem

Je te resterai fidèle en amour Jérusalem et t'en fais la promesse.

Mon amour est immortel.
Quand tout passe, tout s'en va pour toujours.

Toujours gaie, lumineuse et coquette
Nouvelle épousée et maîtresse des cités
Cités des prophètes... cité de prospérité et de lumière.

(Poéme composé à Jérusalem par le professeur Ismael Obydat)

Jerry the Mapmaker. It is things like this that make me realize...

2011-08-31T19:44:00.000-04:00

Jerry's Map from Jerry Gretzinger on Vimeo.

Maybe there was another way to get my urban planning fix.

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.

Dreams of the New Edge Mega-City

2011-06-10T11:47:00.188-04:00

Oshodi Market, originally uploaded by kasia hein.

I am fascinated with dystopian cities. Some of my favorite city visions are depictions of infernal cities, such as Blade Runner’s LA (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.

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.

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 Dubai that Wants to Be...

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 interview for Index magazine (back in 2000), for example, he recounted this aerial observation of Lagos:

...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.

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?

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!...

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.

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?

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?

Apocalyptic Paralysis

2011-05-24T22:50:00.023-04:00

Snow-cholera-map-1, originally uploaded by ccxtina.

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!

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 The Ghost Map (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.

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.

Take, for instance, this bit of urbanist apocalyptic, which attempts to isolate the agents of the sprawl economy, of which, no. 4 is:

Specialization within the real estate industry

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lessons from John Snow

2011-05-22T21:53:00.212-04:00

John Snow pump and pub, originally uploaded by mrlerone.

I have a new role model. Today, I finished reading Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map, 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).

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.

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.

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.)

The Unity of Urban Design (Admiring the Dutch)

2011-05-18T22:50:00.001-04:00

Adriaan Gueze explains why this "bridge" is not a bridge in PBS's Design:e2 show "Adaptive Reuse in the Netherlands"

I keep repeatedly watching this installment PBS's Design:e2 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.

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...

My Firm's Job Growth

2011-05-06T23:48:00.000-04:00

Members of my firm (rendered versions)

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.

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!

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??).

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.

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?).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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???).

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.

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.

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!

Taliesin West Bakersfield

2010-11-28T11:34:00.005-05:00

"Meanie". Originally posted at www.onlinepot.org

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: Is Broadacre City Worth Reviving?.

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 William McClung appropriately calls them),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 Makeshift Metropolis, Wright's own oeuvre did not evade it either).

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.

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 here and here). 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.

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 wilderness in the wharf and New Urbanism's Serenbe, GA 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?

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 West Bakersfield!

The Joy of Biking DC

2010-11-19T23:42:00.003-05:00

Bike share station in DC's Eastern Market

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!)

Surprisingly lucid thinking in DC

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.

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...

Pennsylvania Avenue

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.

Approaching Eastern Market

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, especially 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.

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.

A very sane cyclist observes an outdoor performance of the Pirates of Penzance unfolding at Eastern Market

Of course, the key ingredient making DC special is L'Enfant's grid. It is, to be brief, a difference of amenity inherent to city form. 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.

After a couple weeks mulling over my experience, I have slowly come to the realization that, in fact, L'Enfant's grid just might be 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 diagonally with respect to the rectilinear infill grid, giving DC plenty of what I call (as I've modified 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 what they connect.

Bike parking at our national public forum

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.

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...

When you are this far from Jaffa Gate, all one can do is post love letters...

2010-10-24T23:30:00.067-04:00

Photo by Ira Lippke

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:

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.
in holand an old man "75 years old" he make a music and they sing it.
now we are doing a music to sing it in arabic.
hop to see you soon in jerusalem
I love you, your Bro Ismael.

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...

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 intriguing 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. (Maybe any Arabic readers out there can help us out.) But I can read just barely enough to see that the poem Ismael sent is more expressive, unabridged and heartfelt. Here is "The Bride and Mistress of Cities...Jerusalem" as penned by Ismael Obydat in its original language...

عروس المدائن...يا قدس

سيده المدائن...ياقدس

بين التلال تزهو في بهاء

سماوي ودلال

عروسا تزينت بنجوم السماء

باركها العلي...وشرفها الأ نبياء

الله اكبر الله اكبر الله اكبر الله اكبر

باسمها تشدوا البلابل في الصباح

وعلى أسوارها يهدل الحمام

وفي المساء يغفوا الحمام

وبين أحضانها تغفوا الأطفال

تتحد روحي مع روحك

كما يتحد النور بالنور...فلا ظلام

وكما يتحد الماء بالماء...فلا عطش

لا الموت يقدر أن يفرقنا

ولا أحد يقدر أن يقتل حبنا

تباهي وازدادي دلالا وشموخا

ياقدس ...يامدينه الضياء

أسري بروحي اليك

بالحب ازرعها فتنمو وتزهر حين تراها العيون

تسبقني قدماي الي أبوابك كل يوم

أحلق عاليا...بعيدا...بعيدا...مع النسيم

تأخذني رائحه البخور...رائحه العطور

في الأسواق...في الساحات...وفي كل فناء

أعتلي الشرفات التي تلوح لي برايات النصر

تلوح لي برايات السلام

تلوح لي برايات المحبة و الهناء

وكما تحمل الروح بذور الحب اليك تزرعها

احمل روحي معها...أزرعها

فتنمو فتزهر بالحب حين تراها العيون

اقبل وشمس الصباح

كل شبر من أراضيك

ومع بدر المساء أهمس حبي بعشق أناجيك

بحبك أنا ملك وأنت مليكتي و مليكه القلوب في كل مكان

يا قدس عهدا سأبقى على حبك...يا قدس

فحبك خالد

حين يذهب كل شئ...كل شئ الى فناء

تباهي وازدادي دلالاً

يا عروس المدائن...يا سيدة المدائن

يا مدينة الأنبياء... يا مدينه الا سراء يا مدينه الضياء

اسماعيل عبيدات

استاذ باحث في علم الاجتماع

موبايل0525420473

Brat Pack Urbanism

2010-10-21T13:55:00.000-04:00

Molly Ringwald in John Hughes's Pretty in Pink. From avoidantconsumer's Brat Pack mashup

Coming to a city near you. Brat packs around the world appear to be taking to the rooftops, bridges and streets of their cities to put their spin on the "Lisztomania" dancing-mania viral challenge.

It started when a group of Brooklyn hipsters shot themselves dancing on a Brooklyn rooftop to Phoenix's Lisztomania:

I first saw the "Brooklyn Brat Pack" video via a link by Cerre, who came across it on a Craigslist ad for a Brooklyn apartment. I don't know if it was the urban waterfront and scripted dancing, but the video made me very wistful for my early-90's undergrad days in Boston when I myself first became an urbanite. So I tagged the video in my faves. I noticed then that a group of SF kids had also imitated the video. I thought it was kind of geeky of SF youth....not wanting to be out-hipstered, of course, but I noted the way the production lovingly profiled the city:

Phoenix - Lisztomania (SF BRAT PACK MASH UP) from chinorockwell on Vimeo.

That was it. I knew that we were on to something viral here. Sure enough, coming back to check later, here are a few other entrants to the Lisztomania bobo-city challenge:

Amsterdam:

Winnipeg:

Rio:

Riga:

And hey...Boston. If there ever was a Brat Pack U, it's gotta be BU:

As you can see, some are rather slickly produced, others more "carefree".

I didn't infer early on that the "Brat Pack" in the Brooklyn video title was a reference to the memorable dancing scenes in 80's John Hughes flicks, so I was a bit disappointed when I discovered that the original rooftop dancing was all choreographed to roughly imitate the dance sequence in avoidantconsumer's Brat Pack tribute (currently found here), which features the dancing highlights from the Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink,...with a smidgen of Mannequin's(?) thrown in. The dancing revelry in all the above renditions is quite genuine and delightfully city-scaped, but, so far, none of the dancers I notice seem to have captured the utter abandon of the original references. The unloosed ecstasy of Jon Cryer and Anthony Michael Hall. And the undeterred expressions of Molly Ringwald (perfect example above), which in their aped versions I kind of mistakenly thought were sweet and artful montages. (C'mon, do our census-snuffing bourgeois youth have to be blase even in this?)

But,...then did I fully grasp that undercurrent of nostalgia striking me subconsciously. There was nothing necessarily "urban" in the pop-saturated angst-paraphernalia and upstart don't-hand-me-down attitudes of the Breakfast Club, but we, the kids of the Boomers who were weaned on this stuff, sure brought the mantle of Brat Pack couture into the city in the 90's. I remember Urban Outfitters back when it was just another thriftster dive in Harvard Square. We turned the city into our urban lab and accidentally created the condo-boom of the early Ought-as. To see these dancing Millennials fooling around on our prized rooftops is both endearing and upsetting, lets face it. Envy-producing. It brings poignant waves of reflection, especially as many of us, with mates and babes now in tow, face the prospect of heading back grudgingly to the burbs, to the wastelands and old haunts of that vacant consumer culture we thought we spurned.

Life moves a full circle. It's hard sometimes to see that so it can be with urbanism. That the "choice" of urbanism is as banal as a tolerance for sharing flats with Friends. What was our love for the city, really? A passing fancy? A sinister fetish? A dance on the rooftop with the fortunate only?...Sentimental, no, not sentimental. Romantic and disgusting. From the mess to the masses...

A Savannah in the Desert?

2010-10-17T22:19:00.003-04:00

An Odonomy of Savannah VII: A Tale of Two Grids

~ part ii ~
inertness and porosity

Of all the random, visually interesting development patterns I've stumbled across on Google Maps, the trailer/RV parks of Mesa, Arizona sure compose some intriguing aerial ruminations. Unlike the garden a la francaise interests that sometimes appear in aerial photos of suburban subdivisions, what strikes me most about Mesa's patterns are the rectilinear and simple geometries they playfully vary in Mesa's half-mile arterial grid fabric. Here are examples of what I mean:

The brutally efficient compactness of these trailer park patterns, jiggling and permuting different ways within their self-absorbed perimeters, makes one's eye squint a bit at the optical glare produced. Indeed, the bright roofs of the densely packed units are a noticeable feature of Mesa from earth orbit. The bright band in the center of the Mesa area aerial below represents these trailer parks from on high, which are abutting Mesa's Main Street/Apache Trail east-west artery, cutting right between a contrastive greenish swath of sprinkler-squirting Arizona subdivisions:

One can't help to wonder if these trailer parks reflect a lot of solar radiation away from the Phoenix area, and one even suspects a collective recoup here of sorts in lieu of Mesa's heat-island contribution to net global-warming impact. I wouldn't even be surprised if they also help make up for that indeterminate bit of glacial retraction and polar snowmelt that Mesa's emissions produce.

Regardless, I, of course, can't help but to notice the formal similarity between these developments and a Savannah Ward.

Here, for example, is a typical Mesa/Apache Junction trailer park development:

Compare with a (more residentially comprised) Savannah Ward...

For the heck of it, here are other variants of Mesa's trailer parks:

In the above examples, notice that the community/leasing complex usually in the smack center of the development appears as a staple Mesa trailer park amenity. Notice also the way the main drive of the development ties head-on to the complex, much like Savannah's signature north-south streets that lead directly (and encircle) the garden squares. Moreover, these entrance drives tend not to be loading streets, but what I define as "avenue" types that channel travelers directly (and sometimes ceremoniously) to destination points as their predominant function. Of course, the Mesa developments are much larger than a Savannah Ward, up to six times in size even, but the shared community amenity is, very interestingly, roughly the size of a Savannah garden square.

What's most interesting to me about the above comparison, however, is the near similarity in dimensions between Savannah's original town lots, which vary slightly more or less than 60'-0" by 90'-0", and a typical Mesa trailer lot, usually sized around 55'-0" by 80'-0". In some locations, Mesa's developments even have what appear to be woonerf-like open, semi-shared "backyard" spaces in the block interiors (between the rows of mobiles), a tantalizing equivalent to Savannah's intimate residential service alleys. While it, of course, developed more densely and compactly over time, Savannah's present form has evolved out of town lots just a little bit bigger than these Mesa trailer lots. In fact, in some of the more residential squares, Savannah's lots have subdivided further into lots much smaller than the trailer lots, but in a hardly noticeable manner. It's hard to imagine that two or three stately Savannah Victorians can fit in an area not very much larger than a Mesa trailer lot, but they do...and this they do in Savannah with a kind of quiet, comfortable manner that brings added intimacy to their street-setting:

The three detached Victorians on the left share what was originally a single 60' x 100' Savannah town lot

All this begs the intriguing question, could Mesa evolve over time into a kind of "desert" version of Savannah? Well, if you just glance at the image of a Mesa trailer park by Flickr poster kevindooley (at the top of this post), one can easily begin to imagine suggestive possibilities for a desert-scaped woonerf. (Why, my landscape urbanists out there in AZ, just turn that couch into a Diller Scofidio park bench and you're already 50% of the way there!) Unfortunately, the challenges for such a transformation are more daunting than that, of course. Which brings me back to a critical asset of Savannah's "Two Grids".

I mentioned in part i that Savannah has two literal overlapping grids. One primary grid handles most of the vehicular traffic work-load, and serves as Savannah's equivalent for Mesa's half-mile segmented arterial grid. But the other grid of Savannah, which handles the local traffic and much of the ped/bike movement, is not just a discontinuous local/collector/service network but, in great distinction with Mesa, is a true grid, which holds its own integrity from ward to ward. Savannah's contiguous secondary grid is the unique asset of its form, a profound quality of Savannah's form worth interrogating and experimenting with in our form investigations for cities. The two-grid system synthesizes Savannah's economic diversity to the very specific circumstances of its public realm and harmonizes its transformations.

In part i, I went so far as to claim that Savannah's fabric is "open" in its synthetic function, in that uses and their interrelationships are not pre-determinately set or stiffly delimited and are seemingly allowed to transform over time, in distinction to top-heavy and ready city planning approaches. But, I'm realizing "open" might be a bit of a misleading term, and misapplying the takeaway, if one interprets this modifier as "randomizing" or politically-neutering the act of development or, even more, as contemplating some theory of libertarianism. Rather, I dealt at length in that post with exactly the more mundane and determinate exertions of Savannah's form on land use and transportation decisions in Savannah. The truth is, Savannah's form must be socially negotiated continuously, as all inhabitants must in every city, but, what is somewhat novel, is exactly how Savannah's system-like form "tunes" and harmonizes these negotiations. Form and negotiation travel here hand-in-hand in a noticeable way, and both build upon each other. They make Savannah's invisible "rules" of city transformation legible to the historically reflective eye. Today, however, Savannah's form has closed like a trapdoor on itself, at least to conditions of transformation in our time scales of experience. Historical preservation priorities have reinforced this. A harmonized stasis it might be, but a stasis nonetheless for our present-day vantages of development. In this respect, we may look with interest at Mesa's potential to urbanize.

Unfortunately, Mesa's discombobulated collector/local/service street fabric exerts a dubious influence on its potential for Savannah-like urbanization. These small-lot trailer park conurbations are not likely to see any evolutionary development along the lines of Savannah's historical trajectory (even if these fabrics made urbanistic sense - which they don't, really, but I won't treat that topic in depth now). Simply, Mesa's private street networks only serve the abutting users of the street; they do not avail themselves to the greater traffic of the city. This is by no means a trivial distinction. Not only that, but these developments often have a single and highly controlled point of entry, their sole link to the primary grid. They might as well be gated entry, conventional garden apartment developments, and their only likely fate is to be likewise redeveloped wholesale once their conditions of deterioration become unbearable.

In Savannah, small-grain local negotiations produced gradual urbanization and gave birth to land use diversity, but Mesa's single-use developments and disconnected private fabrics transform only with transactions involving what Jane Jacobs called "cataclysmic money": upon the decisions of leveraged landholders somewhat removed from any slow-forming communities that they might impact. Savannah's land use diversity evolved under conditions of "porosity" both of travel and of capital flows, catering to locally modulated conditions of access, adjacency and travel pattern in ways that guaranteed that local investments would need to weather the test of time. But such conditions are not permissible in a Mesa trailer park, both due to the lack of its users' agency in land-investment decisions and their sole dependence on vehicular links to employment and consumption resources that lie outside of the development. Their money, whose source is more than likely from the outside, likewise travels only in one direction: outside. It cannot be invested within except to be immediately consumed or parked there intermittently on wheels. Their interests (and hopes) lie elsewhere. Their TV's and iphones guarantee it. Mesa, simply, has too much flux within and without and the inert edges between inside and outside are its most stable condition.

What would happen if this street had more cross connections?...

View Larger Map

Might intermittent residency, economic disadvantage, social powerlessness and isolation continue to haunt Mesa's trailer parks? Might they see their trailer lots become individually owned investment assets? Might they connect their wealthy, land invested neighbors to the north and south of them in interesting ways to create the ripe connections needed for urbanizing Mesa's "Main Street" from a drive of strip centers to vital centers that can also concentrate social capital?

What are the inert conditions that are responsible for this?...

Mesa's Crime Rate Map ...Not just bright from space.

Of Unconferences, Incubators and Worlds

2010-10-11T09:04:00.003-04:00

Yesterday, I attended Charlotte's fourth Barcamp at Area Fifteen. Area Fifteen is a former industrial space re-purposed ad hoc to serve a bevy of small businesses. Of the ones I know about, these outfits include a bicycle re-cyclery, office spaces for small businesses, a dance studio, a concrete furnishings workshop, a "free store", a barista training center, a prayer room, a coffee shop, a jewelry/accessory storefront, a massage/tea blending happiness center, artist spaces, Jared's rabbit hole and ...who really knows what else? Located throughout the complex are many break out areas and assembly spaces, including decks and transition areas/docks, with a large side yard for event parking, outdoor art markets/gatherings and a vegetable garden. There's something about the loose organizational structure of Area Fifteen that lends itself very well to the equally loose, ready-to-mix ethos of a Barcamp "unconference". The fact that Area Fifteen has enough leftover space within it to host a random gathering of geeksters and entreprenuers says quite a lot about the virtues of this place.

In don't think these sorts of venues can exist without a ready-to-use informality to them that suggest an atmosphere of easy adaptability and freedom. The sheer diversity of users and rapid turnover of activities always amazes me about Area Fifteen. I expect the place to be literally different every time I step inside. Area Fifteen, of course, is an "incubator space" of sorts, except without much of the pretension. Some activities prosper there for profit, others for not. Characters come and go. Some uses flop and others, becoming resilient, grow and move out to bigger and better things, much as Jane Jacobs observed some 50 years ago about the tendency of Brooklyn's small industrial flex-spaces to spin out ventures to the suburbs.

Members of Area15 are introduced at one of the Barcamps

But Area Fifteen, like Barcamp itself, is a resource for a community. Both can be launching pads or catapults. Area15's mission uses adaptable space resources, Barcamp's emphasizes ready-to-share, moment relevant information that a community values - particularly, concepts and topics that are just percolating from the bottom of coding/media industries - adaptable knowledge resources. Unlike the community resource that Jacobs observed was disappearing from Brooklyn in favor of the suburbs, Area15 and Barcamp seem to have found a way to catalyze on a draw back to a community. I realized at this Barcamp that the success of these entities is not predicated on their ability to launch "start-ups", but in their ability to create launching communities - pockets of people with common interests that do often share and leverage each other's resources and talents.

There was an insight here about approach. What is the resource? Compare the gregarious workspace of Area 15 with the acres of mostly vacant air-conditioned carpet at your local convention center. Conventions are useful and nice, and pretty darn expensive to run and attend. But what is the return on their value really? I would say that the horizon for your industry is rather limited if you depend on conventions to tell you what's next. I mean, just a thought. You're not really at a convention to integrate what's new, but to kind of participate in, well, conventional adoption. People go to Barcamp to find out why conventional wisdom is wrong. The claim of one session at Barcamp was that volume of (automated!) posting can catapult your presence on Twitterspace. Which led to some interesting discussions. You're not at a barcamp to find out how you are falling short of next-wave normal. You're at a barcamp to "network", but the kind of networking that is a heat-seeking learning process, testing the idea space, hopefully leading you to bump into others who can help you move an idea. I would argue that it is these kinds of situated, local connections made in a ripe time and place that bring sparks to a city's industries.

It got me back to thinking about the world-scenario ingredients of the Institute for the Future's 2010 Map of the Decade. In Aesop's parable of the Oak and the Reed, a strong wind uproots a rigid tree, but a reed, being able to bend in the wind, survives. One lesson: The mighty are usually not very adaptive.

The IFTF four world-scenarios (briefly described in my last post) are presenting four points on a conceptual two-item sliding scale of world-future possibilities. This single-contrastive line is traveling along an imaginary axis measuring the extent of organizational adaptation/innovation under different global realities and constraints. Toward the one end of the sliding scale are worlds that see relatively little organizational adaption that lead to fundamental changes in infrastructural systems. These are the Growth and Collapse scenarios. These are the Oak worlds. The Growth world sees progress as conventional growth - the bigger the oak the better, and the Collapse scenario is that tree uprooted by the storm. On the other end are worlds that employ fundamental changes to the extent that they are able to - these are the Constraint and Transformation scenarios. Both of these worlds allow "reeds" of progress to adapt to uncertain conditions. In the case of the Transformation scenario, circumventing institutional, oak-ways of doing things is de rigueur.

It is easy to argue that the Transformation scenario is the one furthest along the process of infrastructural restructuring (or at least has the greatest capacity for such). The Constraint scenario is undergoing some fundamental restructuring due to its institutional refocus on ledgers assessing "Gross National Happiness", but, in a low-capital world, it has less investment capacity and broad cross-organizational ability to employ wholesale and unfamiliar infrastructural changes (what the IFTF calls "superstructuring").

Here is the thing I notice about the denizens of Area 15 and barcamps ...the people there are the sort that sniff for the kind of changes and "reed" models that lead to fundamentally new ways of doing and valuing things. Growth constructs lead to convention center ways of approaching industries, effective while the wind behaves, but Area Fifteens are where I suspect our next decade's reeds will sprout.

What will the Next Decade look like? Some fun with Scenario Mapping

2010-10-05T00:25:00.003-04:00

I recently came across the 2010 Map of the Decade, created by Silicon Valley's Institute for the Future (IFTF), and I have lately been having fun with forecasting and scenario mapping. IFTF is a non-profit think tank that forecasts/evaluates the new social and infrastructural transformations impacting global forces. The Map of the Decade project is part of the IFTF's Ten-Year Forecast Program, which hosts a yearly "game event" for collective prognostication among social tech folks, marketing futurists and the like. This year's map is an intriguing (game-board like) table for conversationally imagining the transformations in key areas of human activity that are likely to emerge over the next ten years.

I am blessed by my friends, but, well, they are not nearly as geeky as me. So it is highly unlikely that I may find willing volunteers who would join me to play the IFTF's forecasting "game", but ...I enjoy nonetheless thinking about the construction of this alternative reality table. The game's contrastive scenario mapping presents to me one of those engrossing random occasions where interesting topics from my MITSAP studies envisioning the city intersect with my interests in ancient rhetorical devices. The deep past and next decade collided here. ...But, I may have to get to that part later. For now, let me just explain this simple but intriguing "gameboard".

The table synoptically maps the structural transformations of five forces in four alternative world-scenarios. The columns of the table represent the five forces that will emerge - or undergo some extent of structural transformation - in the coming years, which the IFTF dubs: (1) the Carbon Economy; (2) the Water Ecology; (3) Adaptive (Political) Power; (4) Cities in Transition; and (5) (Social/Personal) Molecular Identity. (Parenthetical modifiers mine). The rows of the table represent the four contrastive world-scenarios in which these transformations could play out. The world scenarios represent four different trajectories of global economic, environmental and political circumstances that the world could progress into as we travel the next decade. They are:

A Scenario of Growth, "Staying One Step ahead of Disaster" -- This is a world-scenario in which the current "growth paradigms" of the global economy continue to be the measure of personal and national success, but where infrastructural adjustments basically attempt to just plug the leaks in our Gaya bucket. In this world, political activity tends to shore up national self-interests. Investment is motivated by crisis management. Instead of encouraging a fundamental restructuring of a wide variety of human activities, knowledge resources remain uncoordinated, and current societal circumstances (e.g. increasing income disparities) continue in their present trajectories.
A Scenario of Collapse, "Local Disaster, Regional Conflicts" -- This is a world-scenario in which local instabilities lead to widespread regional conflict and societal upheaval, sparking mass migrations. The de-legitimization of institutions "signals the end of the globalization era". In this world, political activity is opaque and distrustful. But, as cities go "feral", some local-system restructuring takes place at the small-grain scale as communities adapt to new circumstances (e.g. the coalescence of urban farming communities).
A Scenario of Constraint, "Sustainable Paths in a Low-Capital World" -- This is a world-scenario in which the current wealth-production paradigms of the global economy can no longer be sustained. Instead, national and personal happiness is measured in non-monetary terms. In this peer-measuring LEED version of the world, lessening one's carbon/water footprint is the path to success. Infrastructural adjustments are policy based and draw on participatory self-monitoring strategies. In this world, political activity is policy-focused and concentrates on the scientific management of resources.
A Scenario of Transformation, "Superstructured Systems" -- In this world-scenario, the barriers preventing wholesale restructuring of human activities are removed as new paradigms of organizational/social coordination arise (employing neural innovations for one). Conventional institutional paradigms of management are quickly outmoded (much as the cell phone has outmoded the need for erecting land-lines in developing countries, for example). Rapid innovation leads to biomimetic technologies and ecological infrastructures, enabling human colonization of the oceans and harsh environments. All aspects of human activity, including politics, are approached (or circumvented) through diffuse and cross-disciplinary activities. In this world, integration is the norm as new frames to approach systems draw to the surface and become widely engaged in a highly networked world. This is a world of wholesale "superstructuring" of basic human activities into novel forms. Think World 2.0.

For a force transformation item isolated in each square of the world-scenario grid, players of the game are asked to imagine how "happiness" and systems of "resilience" are created within that transformation, and how interventions could leave a "legacy" our posterity would value . "Happiness", "resilience" and "legacy", however, must employ the evaluative paradigms of social value and self-identity extrapolated for that potential world, which is a kind of role-playing turn which puts the fun into this exercise of wonkery.

The really fun part for me is that the game naturally leads you to ponder the spring points impacting important arenas of human activity, from the wholesale to the particular, in a wider matrix of possibilities that expand imaginative outcomes and lead to a better way to grasp the transforming subjects themselves.

More on that later.

For now, let me just say that in the Southeast, this whole "Water Ecology" business is a force indeed to be reckoned with. Over the next ten years it will increasingly shape our local and regional policies, priorities and conflicts. Urbanists need to engage the water problem more and bring it front and center into the way we think of physical contexts. Atlanta, for one, has long been staring at a water crisis and has already adjusted mentally more than other cities to the large-scale implications of water ecology management challenges. We should not underestimate the potential for regional conflict over management of water ecology. Already, my city, Charlotte, is an embittered party in a cross-state debate over our water management issues.

I like the fact that the IFTF uses the term "Water Ecology" (rather than the easy go to "Water Economy"). So often when we think of water, we think in terms of water pipes and utilities and things with dollar signs preceding them. But if we think in terms of ecological systems, suddenly there's more ways to think of water. The water systems and interrelationships between kinds of water you may be overlooking. Buildings in our Southeastern climates, for one, generate enormous amounts of condensate from air conditioning equipment. Typically, this water is fed directly into the wastewater stream, instead of being put to good use. The design team for one of the projects that I'm doing some LEED consulting work for is thinking of ways to take advantage of absolutely enormous amounts of condensate. It is a cold storage facility. When the design team proposed the idea it blew my mind away when they presented their figures for how much water they could capture. There you go... a new water source to think about, for a facility of which, heretofore, I thought of only as a sink. An ecological cycle of water there all along invisible to me. Designers, plot those sources on your map.

Getting Greener in Charleston

2010-08-08T12:48:00.176-04:00

I Forget About It All, originally uploaded by Giancarlo D'Alessandro.

This week I took a day off work to see what was going on with alternative transportation in Charleston. Charleston is the closest link to the coast to us here in Charlotte, so I periodically take a day-trip there to enjoy a little sun, seabreeze and urbanism. It struck me that I never really paid attention on my trips there to the alternative transport situation in Charleston. This Thursday, I took a little more careful look.

Charleston's automobile dependency is reflected in its traffic congestion downtown and consequent difficulty getting around its walkable core. Part of the reason for this is the poor links the peninsula geography provides to the core, meaning car-owning folks living on the isolated urbanized islands and peninsulas have little if any incentive to abandon their vehicles getting to primary destinations around Greater Charleston. This includes travel to and from the historic peninsula. Unfortunately, its historic street fabric, well-connected as it is, just does not have the generous boulevards required to handle the automobile volumes this well-beloved destination produces. As a consequence, cyclists and pedestrians have to jostle with a relentless stream of vehicles around the narrow traffic-clogged spines of the city. You'd think urban form here (much more so than, for example, right-of-way lovin' Savannah) would help spur the mode shift to inch somewhat to alternative modes, but that appears not to be the case so much.

The freeway pipes leading to the urban core may do nothing to discourage the primacy of the auto, but one has to suspect here an under-performing, under-privileged and unappreciated transit system may also be an issue. Suspecting this, I concentrated my exploration of the transit question around the neighborhoods connected by Charleston's busiest bus corridor, the Route 10 corridor, which connects the large population of North Charleston with historic Charleston.

My observations confirmed the under-performance of the bus system. Dramatically so. Because my observations also revealed the terrific capacity of the Route 10 corridor to truly amplify the effects of transit performance. Indeed, I left a little envious of the relative advantages Charleston's urban form and geography has on cities such as mine. The potential of this corridor and others in Charleston to generate a mode-shift to rapid transit is quite impressive. Here are just a few of the things I noted:

There are a great number of existing and underutilized rail rights-of-way running along or parallel the Route 10 route that appear readily available to easily retrofit to commuter and/or light rail use. In a significant stretch of Spruill Avenue, in fact, the right-of-way is directly adjacent to the road and is presently unused (you could tell by the saplings growing in between the rails).
The communities along the Route 10 corridor are relatively well-connected (except in newer areas further north) or are easily connectible (as in isolated complexes such as the former Navy Yards at Noisette). Since rail rights-of-way tend to create some of the greatest divisions between neighborhoods, TOD's located strategically could create new and exciting possibilities for interconnection. Significant locations of aging commercial and warehouse facilities can also benefit from tie-ins to transit related development.
The communities of the corridor are using the Route 10 buses to standing room only capacity and stop areas were crowded...A sure sign that existing demand for transit is simply not being met and could grow significantly with added capacity.
Rivers Avenue has a long stretch with a significant right-of-way in North Charleston (about 200 feet wide), which means it could easily be adapted to a multiway boulevard with dedicated transit lanes.
Pedestrians and cyclists populate the entire corridor, but they are not well accommodated. TOD and transit infrastructure can certainly help improve things. Segmenting the road into multiple travelways for those wide sections of Rivers Avenue, for example, would certainly aid pedestrian crossing, which is a significant challenge at the moment.
Because the Route 10 Corridor parallels the I-26 freeway, and parking/congestion is a clear deficit to automobile transport in historic Charleston, rapid transit would have a great strategic advantage attracting commuters as a viable transportation alternative. Charlestonians, however, need to be aware that the speed and frequency of the service is critical to court commuters with the auto choice, not just convenience. The near interchangeability of the commuting options is one critical factor that has made the light rail option very attractive to folks in my city.
The employment and university/college destinations of North Charleston are very important for commuters arriving the other way, meaning a rapid transit corridor would have commuting demand both ways, which generates a clear advantage for the effectiveness of the transit system. A well-placed end of line in Charleston near Charleston Southern University, the large medical park, and the interchange with I-26 would not just be a commuting entry to the transit system but an important destination point as well. In effect, the Route 10 corridor connects two important destination districts, Historic Charleston and one of North Charleston’s most dynamic employment districts, one which has tremendous capacity for future growth.

In a lot of ways, the above points remind me of the critical advantages of the South Corridor here in Charlotte, the first light rail development corridor in the Carolinas. The South Corridor is also a retrofit of an underutilized rail right-of-way running parallel to an interstate freeway that connects a thriving suburb with the core city. What's great about the South Corridor is that it attracts ridership from a wide demographic base, including automobile commuters. Charleston’s recent Green Plan highlighted Charlotte's South Corridor as an aspirational transportation solution for Charleston, particularly for that reason.

My word to Charlestonians: we're flattered for the profile, but aim for what is great about Charleston. It seems that here in the South aspiring communities tend to pay way too much focus on enhanced transit solutions as an amenity choice (and hence an expendable or political choice) and not transit as an advantage choice (as an investment tool to capture and unplug latent benefits seeded in the city and currently being frustrated). Don’t just pay homage to a coveted amenity. Think first about why, indeed, you really need it and - especially! - the special way that you need it.

Instead, aside from mentioning the propensity of the peninsula to favor more compact and dense development forms, Charleston’s Green Plan just seems oblivious to many of these pertinent points of geographic advantage. Transportation talk should always start with discussion of urban form and geography. Nowhere does the Green Plan even seek to posit Charleston's unique metropolitan geography as a unique attribute to interrogate and build upon. There's a reason Charleston produces 40% of carbon emissions through transportation. But, in fact, such a unique geography may just be Charleston's greatest asset in a solution. The peninsula geography has myriad virtues that would begin to inform the process of thinking about what “sustainability” means for Charleston and its region. Thinking about the peninsulas and islands would begin to craft unique solutions bearing on the Green Plan's aspirations. A sustainability plan for Charleston should not just look like a sustainability plan that could have been crafted anywhere.

As an outside observer from Charlotte, let me point out that, even if I suspect the transit-related development opportunities are more constrained in Charleston, in some ways, Charleston's unique geography gives it a holistic advantage that Charlotte simply can't match. Please don’t miss this opportunity, Charlestonians! I would begin by studying carefully some of the observations and recommendations transit consultant Jarrett Walker outlines in his discussions of peninsula geography and chokepoints (here and here). Those strongly delineated peninsula areas, which will continue to reinforce compact and dense infill development in the future, and all those chokepoints between the peninsulas and islands, represent a unique edge for transit in Charleston. But this is if, and only if, transit is treated as a mode of primary choice, a mode that may indeed demand exclusive lane dedication in your constrained geography. Transit really stands a chance in your peninsula city, as in Seattle, Vancouver and the Big Apple, to become a mode of choice, not just forever play second (and neglected) fiddle!

...And, as a regular visitor to Charleston, I would certainly enjoy Charleston's charms better with improved opportunities to walk and bike the historic core. Of all the commitments the Green Plan makes, this one is especially relevant to me. A little more right-of-way dedicated to these needs and/or a little less congestion to go with it sure would make my experience of Charleston that much richer. Even if I'm probably not going to use transit services frequently during my visits, at least I would appreciate streets that are a little more accommodating to my tourist needs because of enhanced transit effects. Choice transit does indeed benefit both locals and guests.

LEED-ND - urban design as architecture?

2010-08-01T08:46:00.237-04:00

Inukshuk, originally uploaded by tom.glanz.

I would be returning now my beloved blog theme (of late), Savannah, were it not for the fact that I've lately been been absorbed with the task of evaluating a facility design for possible LEED-NC (2009 v. 3) certification. I find the LEED assessment process an intellectually rewarding and informative experience for much of the same reasons I enjoy thinking about Savannah and researching timely issues of development, transit, and urban design in the blogosphere.

What is interesting about LEED-NC to me is the way it opens up the architectural task of designing buildings to the greater task of design for the user and his/her community. The surrounding context of design, both local and global, comes into the primary purview of the architect's design enterprise. LEED for New Construction and Major Renovations, in effect, repositions the role of the architect as the role of the urban designer. LEED-NC tells you that location matters. That site decisions matter. Suddenly, the community and its public realm, with their exorbitant diversity and interconnection, become entities to think about with bearing on the design work.

Of course, an architect worth his salt out there will stamp his feet and huffily tell you that good architectural practice always does address the purview of urban design concerns and matters and more. Urban designers would just as well spare us the pretense and worry themselves more with becoming good "architects". Urban design is just hip at the moment, because the trend-setters suddenly love that word "urban", but really...is it not just a weightless distinction, especially since planners, architects and landscape architects can seemingly claim the role at will?

Well, I think urban designers do matter, regardless what they call themselves. (Of course, everyone's definition of "urban design" is probably more expansive and generous than it needs to be.) First of all, urban design as a special field of focus and professional specialization matters because places like Savannah exist. Some designers actually did dream up Savannah and Philadelphia. Urban design mattered in the inception of those communities. We say not just "Paris" but "Haussmann's Paris", not just "DC" but "L'Enfant's DC", for a reason. But, of course, urban design continues to matter even after the inception and the broad-broad stroke. It matters in how communities continue to adapt their environment incrementally during changing circumstances, often at the behest of their changing self-identities. The process of change is why you need planners, but the physical fact of change is why you need a subset of architects and planners that specialize in urban design. In spite of how invisible or unappreciated their "small strokes" might be, you simply need people who have a professional focus on design of the public realm and who work in that area of environment where the public is the primary client and where design decisions are shaped by the diversity of actors who have a stake in the public realm. When architects do get public commissions their primary role switches to urban design. The urban designer is the architect who never stops thinking about the city. The commission is just a component of that broader enterprise of shaping the public realm in a manner that represents more than the sum of its constituent parts. This to me has always been what distinguishes the work of good architects: the city is their true client and commission. People like Gehry, Richard Meier and Rem do not have just the building in focus. Maybe they do deserve to be in the pantheon of architects we call "starchitects". Whether by luck, talent or both, they obtain their distinction through what I call "urban design". Depending on your critical stance that may be unfortunate or not, but the critique itself must also engage a theory of "urban design". Urban design is an interpretive stance, more so than architecture, because it is the will of the public that it is interpreting, and for that, it deserves to be critiqued. It deserves to be a field of professional endeavor.

Of course, my particular stance is that urban design is "messy". Often, urban design happens in the vacuum, without anyone driving a vision. But if the best urban design is ad hoc, unplanned and after the fact, that is because communities are adaptive and resourceful enough to practice urban design. Pedestrians and their needs enact a kind of low level urban design, day by day, much as bees create hives. True, part of urban design is knowing when to step out of the way, and for that you need more robust theory and professionalism...more thinking and sharpening (Rem style), not less. Urban designers wield a dainty scalpel. That scalpel can matter and it cannot, it can succeed and it can fail.

Two kinds of urban design are present in the image above. One in the background and one in the foreground. What process led to either, who can really say? Whatever professions were involved, the result was urban design. However, some things can be said. The one in the background, Vancouver's Olympic Village, was shaped by the process of applying urban design criteria clambering to earn the project as many LEED-ND pilot program points as possible. Here is a work of master planners, architects no doubt, who not only embraced the role of the "urban designer", but, in fact, applied urban design prerogatives much like builders do placing together the elements of a building. The LEED-ND pilot program criteria was the driver and the straight-jacket that they had to tectonically coordinate with their client's even more demanding program. Its design was shaped by the need to stack the right stone on the right stone to find a new sweet spot...rising and falling they went together until a strikingly good balance was found. If LEED-NC brought architects back to urban design, LEED-ND brought urban designers back to architecture.

...And my, oh my, what a great development this is for the trajectory of urban designers everywhere.

In a day where architecture as a field is becoming less relevant, as BIM technicians replace practicioners with AIA stamps (in paycheck if not in effect), here is one bright note where we can smile at the future of architecture. The introduction of LEED-ND is one place where architecture matters as a profession. And where it meets urban design.

The Inception

2010-07-18T13:33:00.009-04:00

Leonardo+DiCaprio+Ellen+Page+Filming+Inception+-8k7-5S5xLXl, originally uploaded by Cine Fanatico.

Yesterday, I watched the new DiCaprio flick, Inception, which is a visual treat for architects (trailer here). The movie goes beyond the sexy visual gimmickry to raise interesting themes about dreaming and architecture, as well as design and visual representation. One interesting thematic exploration was the way design work arises from a reflexive and complex interchange between the designer, "the dreamer", and her subconscious. This struck a powerful chord for me. In my private journaling, I have often remarked on the seeming ease with which some design just seems to manifest itself, and dies on the boards the moment a greater meaning is "imposed" upon it.

There is an element to design that is spontaneous and uncontrolled, and very hard to argue for critically. Whenever I watch these design competition reality TV shows I often spot the stark contrasts between the narrative-led designers and the spontaneous designers. What I notice is very interesting. Spontaneous designers have a very clumsy time framing their design decisions to others, which puts them at a great disadvantage in the competition. I notice judges tend to favor narrative-oriented design, because it communicates easier, and relates to an easy reading of the designer's "confidence", his control and mastery over his work.

I often found it very difficult to argue for design decisions in my studio classes in architecture school (which were very easily picked apart before me as a result). If I could argue that my subconscious personal life played a "narrative role" in my design work, I suspect most critics and clients would become summarily unimpressed. I have thus become very good at inventing a practical meaning for my purely creative work, which usually has very little to do with its actual inspiration. My private narrative, and relationship to my subconscious, really, is perhaps something best left unsaid.

I really enjoyed that theme of Inception. It gives me a way to explain this, perhaps, to my more sensitive clients. A second theme, dreaming and architecture, also struck a personal chord. If anybody cares to know what an architect dreams, Inception does a great job showing you. This is because architects (and urban designers) inhabit daily that fluid space where they virtually interface with their design work, a "reality" in itself. This blending between virtual worlds and reality comes together seamlessly in dreams. The movie made a very clear point that architects I hope take to heart: never lose track of reality, learn to be good at discerning the difference between your own private, virtual and interior reality and the complex, dynamic and real world around you. I often like to caution Revit-clan: Please don't stop drawing by hand. Every once in a while, take a break from the screen, and go out and walk the city and sketch it. Reality will feed you with creative thoughts and mature your work much more quickly and effectively than the screen world.

On that wonderful topic of dreaming, I still remember that formational dream I had as a fifteen year old where I beheld a remarkably intricate, visually complex building. There was a feeling, walking through it in my dream, of a longing to meet the designer. I felt I had to know him and pursue his work as a way to aspire to something. Waking up all of a sudden, you can imagine my joy in that bleary moment, realizing that my own subconscious had been the dreamer of the magnificent building. From that point on, of course, I pursued my career as an architect. During my unwise years as an undergrad, I often had many "all-nighters" in studio, as every architect I'm sure remembers now both fondly and queasily. During some of my epic "double all-nighters" in my first studios, I actually experienced the sensation of dreaming while being awake. My body somehow fanagled some REM-like activity while I was working on my models. I imagined (really "dreamt") narratives of little people, living and going about their day in my little rooms and landscapes. I actually interacted with the little people in a very real way. I'm not kidding! I actually participated inside these events with half-dreamt, half-daydream people as if they were naturally a part of the everyday world around me, and it was only after a good, strong cup of coffee that I realized I was having hallucinations.

Of course, during grad school, I acquired the sagacity of getting sleep at all costs, so I no longer experienced these double all-nighter events. However, I noticed that my design work had become a lot less "spontaneous". That was part of the maturing process, and change of tastes maybe, but I also realized that I could not be a designer of intricate buildings. I simply get too immersed and caught up in the "labyrinthine madness" of designing buildings. I like my intricate and complex buildings, simply, way too much. I've also learned the beauty of "readability", especially of the "readability" of cities. Readers of my blog will notice that I'm a fan of grids and "readable" cities. I hope none mistake this for a love for "simplicity". In fact, it is the seemingly paradoxical virtue of complex cities that they are in many ways "readable". How does one work with the city to create the benefits of systems and effective relationships between its diverse components? Even a place as wonderfully complex as the Old City of Jerusalem (where I spent three years) has its own peculiar readability and beauty. This to me is a far more interesting design exploration to me than designing complex architectural works (and all buildings of great value, no matter how simple and utilitarian they appear, are remarkably complex).

So, after grad school, I ended up instead becoming an urban designer (primarily). Interestingly, I no longer dream about epic buildings. My dreams have become much more "geographic" in nature. Of course, being the only map-maker in my firm must have an influence. But I think it is also the fact that most of my work has a transportation focus. One recurring dream I have is traveling together with a group of people over mountains and valleys, deserts and forests. Sometimes, these groups of people are huge, whole communities of people wandering in caravans through dramatic landscapes. I don't understand really why the "pilgrimage" theme recurs in my dreaming and why map-making seems to inspire it, but that's the narrative that my subconscious plays with me. In my dreams, my fellow travelers and I often travel through cities, which seem like great Nineveh-like bazaars that take us days and days to travel through and are, many times, remarkably circus-like (that could be partly as a result of the fact that one of my favorite allegorical movies is Big Fish, in which the Big City was represented as an actual circus with clowns and lion tamers and the like). Of course, I would never relate my dream-life to my clients!...Especially if some aspects of it may, hmmm, directly feed my creative work. ')

How Savannah Generates Diversity

2010-07-02T20:28:00.003-04:00

An Odonomy of Savannah VII: A Tale of Two Grids

~ part i ~
how savannah generates diversity

Four-way intersections really do make an active city.

A round of interesting posts on the blogosphere lately concern the attributes and forms of American city grids. While some have questioned their utility or highlighted their shortcomings (at least those of prominent precedents), there are some really good reasons for valuing city grids. I'd like to point to another (which is more important to me): grids multiply route options and thus help generate land use diversity in open conditions that contribute to a city's economic prospects and resilience. How well different grids functionally and efficiently connect people is the important attribute that needs measurement and observation. Perhaps, Jarrett Walker brings up, we avoid the topic of travel efficiencies because Urban-ist discourse tends to devalue so prominently the virtues of "purposefulness", seeing as we American flaneurs all tend to prioritize the qualities of places with the complexity of texture that invites spontaneity, slow and not-so-purposeful wandering. Speed and directness of travel are goals that we have learned all too well tend to erode the design quality of our urban places. But, I see Jarrett's point. The fact is, the well-designed network is functioning best when it works to meet and preserve multiple functions. Some of those functions may include speed and "cold" efficiency. How grids find ways to meet these cross-purposes in mobility and land use economy simultaneously -- all important factors in the life of cities and many of which are seemingly at conflict on paper and in much of our urbanist discourse -- may just be one of the most important of their attributes.

Jarrett's vantage points have resonance with my experience. My formative travel and collective graduate school experience taught me that cities, even their forms, always find their sweet spots. The cultural endeavors of mankind (including languages and their products, written works) tend to have this inside quality. They serve their peculiar and diverse cultures in ways that are often hidden from direct observation. However, such observation is possible if you have the patience of a insider or a philologist. A philologist inspects form, the transmutation of words or their use, to tease out the cultural development of meaning. Observe the city well, Jane Jacobs (that philologist of urban form) suggested, and you will discover why many well-intentioned interventions mistranslate the city and often miss their mark. The underlying purpose of the grid, similarly, is to hit one of the sweet spots of cultural work that actually generates urban vitality. This work of the grid, like language itself, may be invisible at our scales of experience and to generational observation often. Such transmutable vitality of the bones is what Miss Jane called the inherent "diversity" of cities. She pointed out that local interventions into grid functions often frustrate the "generators of diversity", some of these traveling at the scales of time so slow they are epochal, and we just haven't taken notice of their dynamic economy. An undisturbed, well-connected grid will naturally advance and balance the simultaneous, diverse pulls of the urban economy. Savannah's Historic District form, more than any other grid I know, crystallizes this fact and, in fact, employs it to generate commercial and civic vitality in manner we can plainly read.

In fact, Savannah does this well and transparently, because, almost unique among cities, its historic fabric does not contain one grid, but two. The second major division in the Odonomy of Savannah's Historic District is the division between Savannah's two grids. The 3/4 mile x 3/4 mile Historic District is a composite grid created out of two overlapping grids. Understand the virtues of these two grids and you apprehend one of the generators of urban land use diversity in Savannah's grid. I call these complementary grids the "Fast Grid" and the "Slow Grid" due to the relative speed of vehicular traffic on them.

Conceptual Map of Savannah's "Fast Grid"

The Fast Grid, or Ward Grid, is a simple squarish grid composed of Savannah's "primary" loading streets and avenues, which divide up the 3/4 mile square district into a 6 by 5 array of modules averaging 680x820 feet. These modules are the signature wards of Savannah. At the center of the majority of these modules are thus the signature garden squares (depending on what you include, 22 squares presently exist, but some might want to include the Colonial Park Cemetery as the honorific 23rd). This Fast Grid, really, represents what most grided cities have typically for their gridiron. Usually, the interstitial circulation inside this primary grid is discordant, discontinuous and un-patterned or simply serves parking or service uses, if it even exists at all. With most cities, including my own, the story of the grid stops here, and that is where it also stops conceptually, by precedence, in the minds of planners, discerning designers, public officials, lawyers and not-so-discerning developers.

Broughton Street, the "Main Street" of Savannah

The most important streets in Savannah are the east-west loading streets of the Fast Grid, including Broughton Street at left. They are the two-way streets depicted in teal in the 9x9 "conceptual map" here for the Fast Grid. They are spaced between 735 and 875 feet (centerline to centerline) and get progressively more distant from one another further south. These streets are valuable for two main reasons. Firstly, they are the streets in the district with the widest right-of-way and that represent the most direct and/or prioritized routes for the important regional east-west direction of travel, the direction of regional commerce between the bay areas to the east and the access points to the coastal commerce routes (including I-95) on the west. Secondly, they are the only streets in the district that are continuously fronted by buildings on both sides of the street. These two attributes together makes them valuable for commercial activity, real estate investment, and overall use vitality. While these streets are in many ways similar, they often exhibit dramatic differences from one another in terms of their activity, use-mixture, transportation and environmental qualities. Each has a peculiar valence that is not coincidentally tied to local conditions and to the subtle and manifold adjustments traveling through the grid or creating disruptions to its normative fabric. I don't have time to get into the details now, but be assured that this fascinating order of land use diversity generation will get further treatment down the road.

A car stops for a cyclist on Drayton St. ..Is this any barrier to crossing?

Savannah's primary avenues (the purple streets in the conceptual "Fast Grid" map) represent the north-south streets of the Fast Grid, and these are spaced 620-730 feet apart, with the widest Ward "columns" being in the center. Unlike the primary loading streets, these streets often have very narrow rights-of-way. The perimeter avenues of the Historic District, MLK on the west and Broad Street on the east, are wider two-way streets, creating natural terminations to loading street travel, while the central Fast Grid avenues are two lane one-way streets (like Drayton Street in the foreground of this image). The fact that these central avenues in the interior of the grid are one-way is handy since one-way, two-lane travel poses comparatively little hindrance for east-west crossing traffic of all modes. Traffic on one-way streets tends to "platoon" in bunches and so offers plenty of opportunity for traffic and pedestrians to cross with little, if any, wait times. The one-way travel also allows easier turning oppurtunities and to thus avoid queuing. To me, these one-way avenues are the second-most important asset for fluid travel in Savannah's grid (we'll talk about the top-most later). Vehicular travel on these one-ways is effortless, relatively unhindered (except at the intersections with the primary loading streets) and fast, as it should be for one-way grid streets - an important factor since Savannah is oriented north-south geographically and therefore these streets serve their function well as conveyances of cross-town and internal commuting traffic.

Since these primary Fast Grid streets (both loading streets and avenues) are the most heavily traveled by vehicles in the grid, the intersections of the Fast Grid streets represent the largest conflict points for vehicular travel. The majority of signalized intersections in Savannah (which, by the way, occur far fewer times per square mile than in a typical grid, like Charlotte's) are therefore at the four-way intersections of the Fast Grid streets. Since the Fast Grid loading streets usually have two to three extra traffic-controlled intersections to navigate across the grid and have lots of pedestrians and opposing turning movements to deal with at the intersections, these streets can stack appreciably and can congest at times. Because of the heavy east-west traffic volumes sometimes produced by the "cross-bay" traffic, they can present formidable challenges for pedestrian and bike crossing, and, at places, such travel along them. Thankfully, with the exception of Jones Street, they are given much attention in terms of traffic control. Only one of the streets, median-less Bay Street (at the top near the waterfront), represents persistent pedestrian and traffic problems around the clock. Bay Street is easily the greatest traffic deficit of Savannah's grid, especially since the right-of-way is very narrow for its volumes and much of the cross-bay and industrial/port trucking traffic is forced to route through this bottleneck. But many waterfront boulevards in touristy and busy port cities usually are a bit congested after all (and perhaps should be).

As I mentioned, all of the primary loading streets are given priority except for Jones Street. Avenue traffic does not stop anywhere for Jones Street. The fact that you only have only up to five potential stopping points, thus, between Bay Street and Gaston Street, the southern-most Historic District street, really makes travel on those avenues unhindered, especially as you move further south away from the most urbanized portion of the district near the waterfront. Despite covering the same rough distance (actually, a little bit greater distance) than the east-west Historic District streets, you can usually manage to travel the entire district from Bay to Gaston in a car during rush hour in about 3 minutes, by far the fastest average travel times I recorded among all of the grid's through streets. (Yes, I timed this in my car, keeping pace with the traffic, timing runs between 7:30-9:00 am and 4:30-6:30 pm on most of the district's through streets at least twice). In normal rush hour traffic, I was usually a full one to two minutes slower on the primary loading streets getting across the grid east-west from Broad Street to MLK. (See...These kinds of useful facts are what I wish people recorded somewhere about grids--hopefully, real-time GPS data might some day prove to be a boon for this kind of research.)

Conceptual Map of Savannah's "Slow Grid"

Almost all of the intersections along the Fast Grid streets are four-way intersections (most exceptions happening at the streets on the perimeter of the Historic District). However, the second grid of Savannah, the Slow Grid (which I shall nickname the Southern Grid!), is distinguished by its three-way vehicular intersections and its consequent predilection for more aimless, prevaricating, and unburdened travel. This grid is composed of the streets that all create T-intersections with the sides of the garden squares.

I like to think of the Fast Grid avenues as creating a "pressure drop" in the grid, pulling out traffic circulating in the Slow Grid, much as anteater snouts would suck termites out of a mound (or "java chips" through a straw...you pick your metaphor). The garden squares help this process by introducing centrifugal forces to vehicular traffic in the Slow Grid. They induce "high pressure" in the vehicular flow network. (Of course, some drivers like to travel in the "high pressure" zones nonetheless. They just like driving around the squares, enjoying the scenery. That's ok! Savannah gives them that option. You can be a slow poke in Savannah just fine. ...There are your slow grid people and your fast grid people everywhere, but, normally, they just don't travel separately.)

Not really a barrier to pedestrian mobility (a T-intersection on a square)

This relationship, however, is exactly inverted for pedestrian traffic. Pedestrians, as well as cyclists, bike taxis, horse buggies, and the like instead gravitate to the squares, for a multitude of reasons, including shade, attractive uses, slower traffic (sometimes including foot traffic on the travel way), very wide and generous streets (reserved for aforementioned slow traffic and "jaywalkers")... and the much greater ease and safety of crossing streets (partly the reason for the ubiquitous jaywalking), ...just to name a few. 3-way or T-intersections, by the way, when they limit pedestrian movement to only three directions do discourage pedestrian travel...NOT so the case in Savannah! Around Savannah's squares, T-intersections just discourage walking in only four directions (therewise folks even feel free to push their strollers along the travel way).

The garden squares and "low pressure" avenues exert two forces that create the land use diversity that is relatively evenly dispersed in Savannah's historic district:

Along Drayton Street. ...A city in flux.

1. First, they divert vehicular traffic away from the garden squares and therefore direct it to the Fast Grid. This helps commerce along the loading streets, by giving their frontage more passing eyes to attract users, and creates a need for commercial frontage serving convenience (stop and go) services to concentrate on the avenues, where frontage is not as important to preserve and thus vehicular access can be accommodated. For such convenience commerce to take a hold on the avenue, however, it has to creatively make space for parking and compete directly with civic and residential uses to do so. Thus, it has to make a lasting case for itself. In the image here (and in my banner at the top) is an old garage site on Drayton Street, one of Savannah's one-way avenues. As you can see, this garage is trying hard to re-open a case for itself. I can't help but to notice how it is now trying to do this. To me, it represents a city in flux. Like my blog name, it is an image I place on my banner in order to posit it as a question: what is the "proper scale" to understand this? (I chose to name this blog "Proper Scale" in order to query the starting assumptions of transportation and land use discourse...and to be open to reconfiguring my own, especially for my Southern context). Unfortunately (or fortunately?) for this garage, now a Vespa dealership, it is on an in-bound avenue, not an out-bound one, where I suspect its original use could have fared better. Perhaps, it should have been a donut shop instead. In Savannah, these things matter. With a form like Savannah's, they can't help but to matter.

2. Secondly, they pool pedestrian and slower traffic to the interior of the wards. The garden squares thus support amiable uses geared to attracting walking and more leisured traffic. They also invite the frontage of civic uses that are not always open around the clock, but, nonetheless, need a ceremonial front addressing a public place with foot traffic. The uses on the Trust Lots east and west of the gardens are therefore perfect for civic uses since they are tied directly to both kinds of traffic, creating a presence on both the Fast Grid avenues for the convenience of users and the Slow Grid squares for their ceremonial frontage.

A corner use on Bull Street

On the north and south sides of the garden squares, the corners created by the intersecting north-south Slow Grid avenues tend to support street-level commercial uses, since these are important funnel points for pedestrian traffic. The uses best supported here are corner coffee shops, galleries, cafes, museums and shops catering to leisure, ...not convenience. The attractive pull between the central waterfront area and Forsyth Park to the south on Gaston Street makes Bull Street, the central north-south avenue connecting the garden squares between, the most important concentrator of pedestrian-geared uses in Savannah.

Because of its form, Savannah attracts a remarkable density of civic uses, but not even Savannah can support so many, so, where civic uses are less supportable, other uses, typically gorgeous Southern mansions, take their place on those prominent trust lots. The garden squares along Bull Street especially attract a high concentration of civic uses. Going away from Bull Street east to west, the garden square character progressively becomes more quiet. The squares on the perimeter form the communal heart of attractive little urban neighborhoods that, surely, still must preserve something of the original serene quality of Oglethorpe's early Savannah.

But the connection to Forsyth Park is not the only reason higher intensity uses concentrate on Bull Street and its squares. Simply, Bull Street is in the center. Uses in the center have more access to other uses and thus more users. Uses on the perimeter have less. Intensity of use steps higher in two directions in Savannah. Intensity steps higher going north towards the waterfront; this is the response to the pull of the attractive edge. And, intensity steps up going to the center in the east-west loading direction; this is the pull of centrality. So Savannah adapts to its regional shape, as well as its modular dynamics.

SCAD saw low overhead in Savannah's old uses. The economic relationship reciprocated.

Savannah's form, as one can hopefully begin to see here, provides simultaneous-countervailing centrifugal and centripetal pulls that ensure a distributed land use diversity, stepped in intensity and navigating transitions of use dictated by internal form, greater geography and a patterned but variegated transportation network. You can read Savannah like a book, and see stories within stories just walking square to square, without even needing to purchase a guidebook. You just need to learn her alphabet, her grammar and her thought patterns of time. For a primer on that language, here is a good starting point.

The Avenue

2010-05-27T10:58:00.006-04:00

The Reader, originally uploaded by True_Bavarian.

An Odonomy of Savannah VI: The Avenue

For the purposes of this blog and my odonomy of Savannah, I co-opted the Commissioners’ Plan for Manhattan to name the streets that travel against the loading grain of a grid “avenues”. In Savannah, the avenues are coincidentally also the north-south traveling streets. (The fact that these streets travel north-south in both Savannah and Manhattan’s case has nothing to do with their functional strengths …Sorry Chicago, but your street nomenclature system is perfectly useless to an odonomy of grids.)

I think of avenues as having two tempers, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. When they are square to the grid, they are in the Dr. Jekyll temper. They are usually lean and no-frills in this temper. Except for the seasoned commuters, no one really pays them any attention. But when they tilt and slant and become radial, suddenly they become strapping, boulevard-like Mr. Hyde streets that dominate over the fabric. Due to its nomenclature system, the streets named “avenues” in L’Enfant’s DC, happily, are true avenues as defined in this odonomy. For these special Mr. Hyde avenues, I will modify them as “grand avenues”. Grand avenues function very similarly to loading street boulevards, except for the fact that their tendency is to be less curvilinear.

(And so the Odonomy begins.)

Avenues are not the streets that diverse uses are loaded onto or accessed. These streets are not focused on serving abutting uses. They are not the streets with the “destination”. They are the streets, rather, that lead you there. This is not to say that these roads can’t be fronted by uses, they are just the streets that are obsessed with the travel experience itself: the strolling in the shade streets, the promenade streets taken with a friend for an ambulatory discussion, the streets for “taking” (or “crossing” or “collecting together”). Ideally, they should evoke in the traveler the sense of “going to” or “arriving” at a place. In landscape design terms, avenues are associated with long rows of trees planted with equal spacing along the travel way. Such repeating elements evoke the sensation of discerning your progressive arrival to a “place”. I think design applied for these sensations of travel appreciation, paced progression and place-arrival is proper, instructive and useful for designing good avenues in the urban context.

Avenues can of course be grand, well-loved streets tremendously busy with pedestrian activity. In Manhattan, they are so active, by the way, in part because of the primary north-south orientation of the island and in part because the blocks in the loading dimension are really long, making the breaks in the loading grain critical concentration points for travel. While their tendency is to be lean, many avenues are wide streets, and they often also have separated travel-ways.

Here are several tendencies to notice about avenues:

1) Simplicity/utility: Avenues are not fanciful, variegated streets at the fine scale. Their short sections seem to keep them from carrying through a complete thought block to block. So they simplify to a simple beat, a staccato. Avenues are not your royal “Main Streets” or “Grand Boulevards”. They are your lean and gravitational rook and bishop streets.

2) Directness: Avenues tend to have straight segments. Often this gives them long, dramatic vistas. This is another reason why repeating elements are great streetscape elements to give them: to emphasize the perspectival lines and lend readability to distances, which is nice in a city every once in awhile. These vistas give us a sense of a city’s breadth and size and that directness is important for our mental image of the city as well.

3) They Like to Climb: Avenues travel against the grade as well. This is by default, since loading grains like to follow contours rather than travel against them. Your steepest streets in the city will therefore tend to be avenues (of course, in grade tolerant cities like San Francisco, this tendency does not hold).

I have begun a gallery in Flickr, called Carrying, which captures the qualities of environments that are inspirational for designing good Avenues. Next time I need to design a streetscape for an avenue kind of street in my work, these kinds of images will be part of my design wall.

Price Street, one of Savannah's "avenues".

I hope you are beginning to sense why such a proposed street taxonomy would be useful and important in design and discussion of city form. Savannah had to teach me this. To understand the way street networks function in highly interlinked (urban) contexts, we need exactly this pronounced and precise taxonomy in order to work for the city in more sensitive ways. We need to know what the warp and woof of the fabric are so we can realize how to thread and tweak the streets for interesting effects. Savannah, however, shows us that all roads are joyfully not the same. Certain functional hybrids can coexist happily in the fabric…so fluent is Savannah with these lessons of exception. It is, in fact, one environment where seemingly small fissures and disruptions and rules of exception have interesting consequences, an interesting jazziness.

Why is Savannah’s ward grid is so musically tuned that way? Well, this is what this effort is about. We need an Odonomy to apprehend that. First sit back and let this primary conceptual distinction between the “loading street” and the “avenue” stew a little in your head. Allow it to live a little with you, and tell me if you do not begin to read the city in a new way. Please let me know what you observe. Delightful realizations about your local street network probably await you.

Vamping the Street

2010-05-23T18:37:00.030-04:00

Savannah Street shots 02-08.jpg2.jpg, originally uploaded by "Big dog".

An Odonomy of Savannah, Part V: Loading Streets and Avenues--the First Division

Before we can understand the interesting jazz of Savannah’s streets, we need to first master a few necessary chords. We need to first discern her vamps and primary riffs. We will then be able to see how she breaks from them and how she improvises her music.

Savannah's "Loading Streets"

The highest road division category in Savannah is the division between what I call the grid “loading streets” and the grid “avenues”. Loading streets are streets that are oriented along the dominant “loading” grain of a street fabric. Uses tend to be “loaded” consistently onto the loading streets—that is, most of the lots in a grid tend to front loading streets consistently across the grid. Loading streets are thus your “street address” streets. Main Streets are typically loading streets. Wide boulevards, such as Allan Jacob’s boulevards, tend to be loading streets. Loading streets also include the service alleys that access the rear of the lots. What I call grid “avenues”, in contrast, are streets that travel perpendicularly or diagonally against the dominant loading grain of a grid fabric. When oriented perpendicularly to the loading streets, avenues are typically traveling along the short sides of the majority of the blocks. They also slice diagonally across the grid at times, especially in cities designed in the Grand Manner. The streets diagonally oriented against the grid, as in L’Enfant’s DC and Haussmann’s Paris, are “avenues”, even though they, of course, function much like loading street boulevards and likewise invite frontage along them (but, this is the important distinction, they do so in disruption to the adjacent loading grain). Many arterial avenues tend to attract building frontage onto them even though they may travel against the dominant loading grain of the adjacent fabric. (Note: Savannah does not literally name its grid avenues “avenues” – I’m using the term “avenue” as a functional category of grid street that I have chosen, as I’ll discuss later, because of historical associations with the character of “avenues” and because of important precedents of this particular street type in America).

Savannah's "Avenues"

Note that above I am using the term “loading street” and “avenue” to signify the role of the street in relationship to the greater grid fabric. Just because a street segment has uses fronting it does not necessarily distinguish that segment as a “loading street”. What matters more in this “odonomic” classification system is how streets relate to the greater grid. For now, I’m not dead set on these terms, “loading street” and “avenue”, I just can’t think of a better way to name these important grid street classes at the moment (suggestions welcome!). I don’t know if there is a form theory of city grids somewhere that has a name for these two street characters already, but I wouldn’t know, since planners never seem to be even aware of this important distinction between grid streets. It seems they usually are happy resorting to talk instead of functional classifications of roads that apply, really, to branching, suburban, non-grid contexts, and they coerce that terminology to fit urban/urbanized street networks. This kind of talk, in fact, is precisely my biggest hang-up with the new ITE manual Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares. (Overall, DWUT represents a positive step forward for walkable thoroughfare streetscape design in America, but ironically to me, this manual, which was first unveiled back in March at the ITE 2010 Technical Conference in Savannah, could use a careful look at Savannah itself to understand how its so-called “contextual” approach might be hampered by its papa bear, mama bear, baby bear urban thoroughfare classification approach; …I’ll get to that later.)

What creates the distinction between loading streets and avenues is the fact that most parcels want to front the same streets. Human-beings, being commercial and civic creatures, like to concentrate access to lots on the same public streets. This tendency creates well ordered street fabrics and also churns out higher real estate values. Why? The value of the frontage is a result of the fact that the middle parcels of most blocks can only be accessed from a chosen side of their block. Thus, block subdividers typically favor the loading grain of the most important adjacent street. This puts the access to at least half of the lots in their blocks at the important frontage side, where they are most likely to capture more eyes and potential customers/users. Another way to look at the value of favoring the nearby loading grain is to realize that when adjacent uses have access points on the same street, the travel time of users traveling between them decreases. A greater diversity of destinations of nearby uses within closer distance to each other reinforces the overall value of their street’s frontage. We may not be cognizant of the hidden economic and very rational reciprocating choices behind our drive to create and perpetuate loading grains in the grid fabric (although individuals obviously intuit it), but we create cities this way because of our social intelligence. A lot about city form is realizing that much of productive human activity is a collective phenomenon that may escape the notice of most of its individual agents. Such beautiful creatures we are.

Loading streets tend to travel along the long dimensions of the blocks. It makes sense that blocks want to be long in the loading grain direction as that loading frontage is value and avenues have less direct access to uses. Thus, minimizing the avenue side dimension of blocks makes sense for land use efficiency and infrastructure investment purposes. But I think the block short dimension also represents an advantage in itself. Avenues increase the overall value of the grid network. Their shorter segments mean they intersect more often with loading streets and thus produce the global economic advantage of the grid gained from connectivity. Sometimes, they also use this connectivity value to increase value to themselves. They actually create higher pedestrian activity and related real estate value on their abutting parcels especially when certain geographic and geometric conditions are in play. Both Bull Street in Savannah and Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue are avenues that powerfully attract activity and offer real estate advantages for similar—but also different—reasons that are instructive to me.

Yes, by the way, even city grids composed of perfect squares have dominant loading grains. They always do. In such places, as in downtown Portland, the greater geography and geographic features, such as grade change and water frontage, and important internal features, such as linear parks, help create the dominant direction of the loading grain in subareas (although, the direction of that grain is prone to change, subarea to subarea, more often in these open fabrics).

Because every use in the suburb needs to cater to vehicular access, any of the street patterns that create the suburb stem from underlying, locally-focused, proforma-driven imperatives to maximize the loading condition. An avenue type of street is just a waste of infrastructure for subdivision designers. A cul-de-sac, not coincidentally, is a loading street by default, and, in fact, it is the utter maximum condition for the loading of uses unto a street, an accommodation to the fact that cul-de-sac residents do not have an economic advantage to maximize access to their homes (making internal avenues unnecessary); in fact, the economic advantage goes the other way. Even though some collector streets in a subdivision have to be avenues (or avenue/loading street hybrids), the residential suburb detests the avenue.

In part because of that suburb many of us have grown up in, loading streets are what most people have in mind when they think of a street, so much so that we may miss the network utility of the humble avenue, if indeed we are even aware of it as a distinct type. I certainly did not think about the urban avenue much before I got really acquainted with Savannah’s historic grid. New Urbanists are no exception to this tendency either. Judging from their default donut block plans and default street typicals, New Urbanists love maximizing the loading condition as well.

The avenue is the most urban of streets. In my next post, we will get more acquainted with this stranger who quietly serves us. This humble, utilitarian street type has many strengths. It is a street type that tends to be neglected by planners. It is not often as stately as the Main Street or the Boulevard. It is not as intimate or human scaled as the rear-yard alley. But the Avenue is the workhorse street of the grid. It provides the cross-bracing and the hanging threads of the structure. As you can probably tell by now, I like it a lot.

Thinking About Savannah

2010-05-19T09:15:00.000-04:00

It was a surprise to me to discover on Discovering Urbanism how much content I’ve posted throughout this year long journey thinking about Savannah, following my first visit to the city in Dec. ’08. I’ve begun my forays into Savannah’s Odonomy quite tentatively. That visit to Savannah made me invent this term. Odonomy is the “study of roads”, the study, more particularly, of how to classify their qualities in relationship to one another. More than a taxonomic endeavor, it is an act of synthesis. I have yet to even begin that discussion, I’m still trying to synthesize my fragmentary notes and unwritten thoughts. And still uncovering new realizations that make me reframe my thoughts.

If I plod, it is because the associated topics are both interesting and slippery to me still. Like the cities we love to walk in, they deserve the honor of slowly getting acquainted with. Of letting them soak beneath the skin a little. Of distilling with greater clarity in some warm evenings sitting on the balcony in thought. I had and have a lot to learn yet.

So far, I’ve focused on the easily isolated features of Savannah’s form (or features lacking thereof) that bear immediate comment and can apply straightforward lessons. These can be found on the links graciously provided by Daniel on his post of my efforts …Thank you so much Daniel for providing me the valuable service of indexing and summarizing this! My own fragmented notes turn out to be amazingly more discursive, I now see, when I put them on this blog to communicate to people. I go through the bother, I should mention to you my readers, in order to invite you to perchance help and guide me in the journey. Lend me not just your ears but your insights, please. :)

Too, I haven’t been prepared to really start an Odonomy. Before I really could get into the task at hand, like Louis Kahn, I knew I could not authentically face Savannah before I first sook her “Form” (which I attempted my previous three posts). That is the search for the big “F” Form of Savannah. Big “F” Form, as Louis Kahn preferred to capitalize it, is the Origin, the spirit of Savannah’s “wanting to be”. Big “F” Form leads to the Design, the result of the Form. Today’s Savannah is a result, it is the “answer” of a process. But the process began with the Big “F” Form, the Question. And Louis Kahn knew that, in essence, the quest for the Form was a spiritual Quest, one which the original posers of the Question would not necessarily know they were asking. The Question is asked in “Volume Zero”, not Volume One.

What does Savannah want to be? I don’t think I’ve managed yet to unlock Volume Zero yet, or read its first page, but at least I could sniff for her Form by reading Volume One and asking, “What did Savannah want to be?”.

It was interesting discovering what some of those What did’s entailed and how many insights they led to as I ploughed Savannah’s colonial earth for the Question. Most notably to me, Savannah’s colonial Origin has a lot to say about the subdivision fabrics our society prefers. Our society prefers these repetitive patterns for simple economic reasons, sure, but ones that are quite clearly inflected by the confounding social tendency to segregate by class in open, liberal societies. It is a settlement segregation tendency, yes, but, as ABC's Lost and John Locke’s Savannah show us, not the default position. This clumping tendency is in fact in constant tension with our predilection for creating egalitarian relationships when the social stakes are heightened (as in times when groups face common enemies), which can sometimes bridge the barriers of socio-economic divides. This bridging process, instigating the “middle class churn”, does not occur naturally or happily in our liberal society always, but it does occur in contexts of pioneering tension. Urbanism can be a social lubricant of sorts when it invokes a return to Hobbes’ “state of nature”. This is an interesting thought, because the very state that can make life in the city “nasty, brutish and short” is also the same state that, under heightened stakes, sparks the drive to create a muscular civil society and start new economic enterprises. The Others just need to find each other in new reciprocating contexts, something that often requires the coaxing of humanitarian connectors (as well as transformative leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr.).

Savannah’s Origin, in its subdivision strategy, also teaches us how to create the kind of subdivisions with the fourth dimension in mind. She tells us that “zoning” or “transects” may not be all that helpful in that enterprise. What matters more than anything is city form. How streets relate to parcels and how streets relate to each other. That redirection to the system structure points us to a physics of land use form that can adapt with the natural tensions that develop in cities, the unpredictable transformations that occur in cities, legally and illicitly. These are transformations with simultaneous centrifugal and centripetal pulls, transformations that do not meld in a stepped or layered order, that are the result of those unstoppable exercises in low-level conflict that cities never cease to enact and re-enact. The real “transect” of the city, my friends, is fissured and layered. In real and normal cities, there are always cracks and bumps and islands and abrupt disruptions living in and between those so called “transect” zones. These families of errata actually make cities resilient, and make them work socially and churn economically. The ideal section of a healthy and dynamic city is more a fault line slip than a transect, I suspect.

…Interesting philosophical ponderings, but, for the purposes of this present Odonomy, just background issues to think about. For now, let me pull aside from the Quest a little. Let’s leave it for another warm evening on the balcony.

The task now at hand is what is. The lower case “form” of Savannah today. This form represents quite a different city, both in its present structures and its transportation dynamics, than the city Oglethorpe founded and intended to perpetuate across the young, hot earth of Georgia. By narrowing in simple terms on what is—by asking simple, straightforward questions about Savannah’s form—is how we will get quickly to her deeper insights. The way I first began to ply open the book of Revelation quite usefully in contrast to my apocalyptic brethren, for example, was to ask far, far simpler questions than they. Questions philologists ask; not the questions dispensational televangelists, misanthropes or psychopaths ask. I asked not who the “beast rising from sea” represented and not if the “beast standing on the land” might be Obama. I asked, “Why does the beast from the sea arrive first?” Hmm…funny that succession seems familiar. Oh, hey, that’s interesting, the first beast that appears, actually, is the beast that falls with some of the stars from the heavens in the chapter before. Wait…Star Creature, Sea Creature, Land Beast...Doh! Genesis One again. …Boy, does this author have a literary method!

So,…the question is: What is Savannah’s present method?

Well, like Genesis, I’ll begin answering that with simple, higher-order divisions and proceed down from there. Next week, we will revisit the primordial garden of Odonomia and begin naming, dividing and pairing things. No longer will we just tip our toes in to feel the temperature of the water. Finally, our journey is on toward an Odonomy of Savannah…

John Locke's Savannah

2010-05-08T02:08:00.004-04:00

, originally uploaded by armless.

An Odonomy of Savannah IV: Origins

~ part iii ~
the middle class churn

If John Locke had a hand in shaping Savannah, what insights can he give us to understand life in the latter day suburb of America? Our love for civil society, as represented in our love for religion, volunteerism, campaigning, fundraising, organizing and any noble service (particularly military) were abundantly present in colonial Savannah, but more than anything I think of the respect paid by the Savannah ward plan for the family unit. As in today's suburbs, every individual dwelling was given an equal shot at independent enterprise, the right to “the pursuit of happiness”. Savannah’s equal lots posit the importance of occupations as mutually interchangeable and equivalent in a way. I cannot help but to think how much this same respect for work life and occupations similarly forms the bedrock of many of the conditions that comprise America’s economic and social fabric today.

Americans, like people everywhere of course, take great pride in their occupations, a matter of core identity to most of humanity. What is behind this pride is the more humble sentiment that one is plugged into one's community. Most people want (or allow) others to know exactly how they are contributing to their greater community. How they are reciprocating. How they are useful or how they are advancing things and even shaking things up. In the suburban context, it is simply easier to “reciprocate” in communities of peers not distant from one’s own class, ethnicity and upbringing because the exchanges are less burdened and less open to question. (My friend Tamara Park prodded exactly this American psychosis for creating reciprocal tacit expectations in her book Sacred Encounters; I myself was a ...hmm... bungler in that exchange).

When pioneering in hostile or shifting territories, the ante to reciprocate is upped further. Interestingly, during these exact times of heightened stakes, where social relationships return to Locke’s “natural state”, questions of status may suddenly become fluid and “peer” categories can be pricked to transcend the divergent social backgrounds and contexts that separate them. We can embrace the Other in such times. Savannah tells us more about this dynamic.

An example of where this reciprocating pioneering phenomenon can be found on display is in ABC's series Lost, a tale of “shipwrecked” fault-ridden/down-and-out strangers marooned on a mysterious island. Lost works so well as an American fable, I believe, because, for one, it shakes up traditional peer networks (American story-telling, like the Bible, is so filled with a love for the topsy-turvy tales of the table-turning, social-leveling, come from behind, little man gets his day, David vs. Goliath variety). Secondly, especially by using the device of counterposing the background stories of its characters as they navigate their new relationships on the island, Lost raises the antes of peer connection that Middle-America so appreciates in the gut. Lost tells us why we love to a fault our sharp Jacks and Kates, our deadly Sayids, our hey man Hurleys and our resolute but unpredictable Sawyers. These are the kind of people we reciprocate with, even if it is often done by the seat of our pants against the grain of good reason. We relate to the characters in Lost because we are the children of pioneers after all. Lost returns us to Locke’s “natural state” of man, where life is a shifting stage of allegiances held in tenuous balance (interestingly, the character in Lost most grafted to the Island is not accidentally named “John Locke” himself). What drives the action in the island is the tension between our need to reciprocate with our tribe and the desire to correct or transcend our fate. Towards evil ends these dual motivations diverge, towards good ends, they converge. This double-pronged pioneering heat-seeking state, pitted and expanded as it has been by the American Dream, is not going away any time soon. It behooves the urban designer to think more about it. Could it actually be in the egalitarian ethos that patterns our culture?

Case in point: Savannah's utopian, equal-lot ward grid was so successful in Savannah that Savannah did not depart from propagating it to as late as 120 years after its founding! In that tenacity alone, Savannah was very prophetic about the dominant equal-lot pattern of residential land subdivision in America's centuries since. (Sadly, the injunction barring slave ownership did not last as long in Savannah--perhaps a good reason Savannah’s economy never usefully industrialized and diversified from its agrarian dependencies to grow into a harbor-fed metropolis like America’s historic port cities elsewhere on the Eastern seaboard).

Savannah's Origin tells us that settlers are simply seeking a fair chance at prosperity and the succor of fellow travelers, who, if not always peers in their ambitions, are certainly to be treated as such. The sawyers, the smiths, the millers, and tanners of colonial Savannah created the economic churn of Savannah and they formed the bedrock of a startlingly active civil society (here is where the first orphanage in America was founded – not, may you duly note, in Philadelphia or Boston!). The benefit of not existing alone in the homesteading enterprise, that on your street or in your church or school district is a community of folks of similar life experience – with mutually beneficial talents and skills and philanthropic motivations – actually inspires, sharpens and shores up independent enterprise. This is especially true for pioneering communities. I call this generative drive the “middle class churn”. At its root is an ethos of egalitarianism, a mutually reinforcing social drive, which produces the economic conditions that lifts the boats of all the participants that support and surround it. The labor unit in the egalitarian and liberal context is one which becomes exponentially more generative the better connected and coordinated and socially level people are with one another. This connection does not necessarily imply a personal connection, all it implies is that the services and products it produces can be enjoyed and accessed by more than a select subset of individuals. In fact, the middle class churn is an impersonal drive, to borrow from Adam Smith, an “invisible hand”. The difference between colonial Savannah and today is that the ipod and the networked office cubicle, not the need to farm and homestead, causes us to reciprocate in concert and share information and so create greater value and demand for our products and services.

Behind the less useful urbanist kind of polemic we often engage in (admittedly myself included) is a disdainful strain that treats the burb as so much blanched snooze-land of conformity thrown up in the landscape. Perhaps, like Savannah, we need to tolerate the condition of “sameness” a little more and poke and prod its squishy surface to see if the filling is not actually more diverse and dynamic than we suppose it or can easily get at with our urbanist forks. We may be judging the book by the cover and dismissing the insight it could offer. Like it or not, our burb-lovin’ North American folk (and Aussies/Kiwis) are the children of the British (humanitarian and pragmatic) Enlightenment. We need to explore and appreciate more the “snooze” condition of suburbia, as Lars Lerup encourages us to. “Snooze”, as Lerup posits it, can refer to the liminal state between dream-land and wakeful activity, where exciting things actually do happen and ideas, actions and new consequences are teased and resourced into being.

Moreover, the need to mow that lawn and the need to generate a new economic enterprise may actually spring from the very same desire to plug into – not check out of – community. We have underestimated the suburb’s role in tossing the ethnic “salad bowl” in better more generative more socially transcendent ways than we give it credit for. Just try to convince me that your gentrifying urban neighborhood is any less socially stratified and clumped than today’s outer ring communities. Yes, I realize that the “Others” in the urban neighborhood are more physically proximate and commercially connected to each other than in the burb, but, often, this is not represented in actual social terms. What bridges the social distance rather are Lost-like transgressions of social order as well as the connections that are created by the actual concentration of socially active connectors…i.e. real people with trans-communal or humanitarian agendas, which increasingly are just as likely to converge now in the suburb as in the inner city.

In short, urban planners of America, we need to understand that the greater challenge is inviting that American society (that we have, after all, helped to create) to incorporate better the advantages that small-footprint urbanism could provide it. We need to unplug urbanism to create greater reciprocating investments that increase the returns of the middle class churn. We need to get the smart phone to do exactly what the auto did for the last half-century. That implies for us urban designers a search for forms like Savannah’s, where creating access to opportunity for the greater number of inhabitants is for the benefit of everyone. Where the single-unit enclave is in contact with the open conditions that benefit social/civic identities, urban economic processes (what I call “zoning for the fourth dimension”), civil plurality and social integration.

Savannah, which was zoned single-family at its outset, is a double-arrowed sign post of where we came from and where we could be headed. Ask not how we can retrofit the suburb, but how urbanism can be emboldened to create a home for our suburban peeps. These are the same people, after all, that made that previous half-century in America the single most outrageous leap, in gross per capita terms, of personal wealth generation that history has ever known (and which, despite our early 21st century bungles, is in the process of scaling out globally now at a colossal and more interesting and more urban form directly as a result of it).

"Not For Us But For Others" -- The Humanitarian Roots of America's First Subdivision

2010-05-04T01:57:00.002-04:00

First Presbyterian Church, Synagogue and Wesley Memorial Church, Savannah Ga., originally uploaded by scadspc.

Not a Single One To Dominate Above Them ALL: The old postcard image above is one of the best representations of Savannah's pluralistic love for civic institutions I know. The Synagogue in the foreground to the right is the Temple Mickve Israel facing Monterey Square. It was founded by the descendants of the first Jewish settlers of Savannah, who arrived in Savannah's founding year of 1733 after fleeing religious persecution in Portugal. They established the third oldest Jewish congregation in America. Doubtlessly, the principled laissez-faire approach formulated by Savannah's trustees in devising Savannah's pluralistic trust lot strategy can trace its moral and theoretical underpinnings to 17th century British liberalism inspired in part by John Locke. John Calvin's pragmatic hands-off approach to religious sectarianism might also have had a contribution here.

An Odonomy of Savannah IV: Origins

~ part ii ~

the natural state of man

Savannah's fabricke, I suspect, was the conceit of colonial experimentalists and humanitarians, young scientists of city form on the march, who, without a doubt, eclectically mined an array of ancient sources and contemporary precedents, but who, nevertheless, aimed to consciously evoke something that was yet to be formed to history. In this latter respect, I think the legacy of Christopher Wren must have been foundational to them, if indirectly so. I do not claim of course that Sir Christopher Wren, Britain's "Leonardo daVinci", must have invented a Form that Savannah derived from; no, merely, I believe that he was one of those seminal minds that laid the groundwork to propagate an approach to thinking about cities in experimental and unresolved - yet systematic - ways. These ways would prove useful to inventing conceptions of city form that are fundamentally "open", able to travel, profuse in options, and able to copiously adjust despite their obsequious dependency on burdened geometry. (Some would go so far as to call these patterned plans "fanciful", “rigid”, “artificial” and "abstract", as if of our other contemporary conceptions of city form, including supposedly "organically" derived plans, somehow evaded these terms). Richard Sennett's The Craftsman owns a gem of a discussion on how Wren's strange impositions of "clarity" tended to wonderfully leave his works paradoxically more open and tolerant of ambiguity and irresolution. (Indeed, this is a mystifying quality exhibited in Savannah's repetitive fabric that has delighted more urban design thinkers than myself.)

But Savannah's colonial settlement also is an approach to city-making that could only result as a consequence of a synthetic, rationalized approach to sympathetically address human needs and shortcomings. That is an Enlightenment approach, we note, particularly an approach of the British Enlightenment. As such, probably no need laid the cornerstone for Savannah's conceit than the socially patronizing need to rationally reconstruct the heart of London after the Great Fire of 1666, as is quietly evinced in Wren's proposal for the reconstruction, which Sennett so incisively treats in The Craftsman. Because of Sennett, I now refer to Savannah’s Form as "London's Spring". Savannah is London rising from the ashes at the behest of the British Enlightenment and then latent Protestant social activism. O a humanitarian's delight it is!

As I touched on my last post, Savannah's form sprung from the need to create a particular kind of planned settlement, the equal lot subdivision. An equal land apportionment system was devised to create reciprocal economic stakes and to facilitate communal cooperation, particularly in the vital matter of the colony's defense. In creating equal lots for settlement, Savannah was an early and peculiarly prophetic manifestation for the dominant form of America's settlement pattern, the suburban lot subdivision--even though Savannah cannot claim to be the progenitor of any such thing.

Savannah's town grid is functionally similar to the endlessly propagating suburban lot subdivision in some important ways (mentioned in my previous post). This is an accidental fact of history of course. But unlike most of the contemporary developers of the latter, Savannah's founders did not seek any personal ROI. Savannah's trustees, including Oglethorpe, were the kind of wealthy people who were into advancing the second chances of debtors. Their altruistic conceit not surprisingly resulted in an early manifestation of utopian city and regional planning. Indeed, their motto for the Georgian colonial prospectus (which is to this day on the seal of the state of Georgia) was taken from Augustine’s Confessions: NON SIBI SED ALIIS, "Not for Us, But for Others", which Augustine offered as the stance of principled humility that permeates Christian intellect. Literally, as far as the trustees were concerned, Savannah was “not a place for us”. A divested utopia. We would not be exaggerating to claim that Savannah is veritably America's first planned "habitat for humanity". The city was founded to give down-and-out British folks a second chance at life and prosperity.

Savannah was also, from its inception, purposely designed to be a haven for Protestant sects persecuted for various reasons. Huguenots, Portuguese Jews (Oglethorpe unilaterally expanded the sectarian envelope to include Jews), Moravians, Salzburgers, and Gaelic speaking Scots were represented among its earliest inhabitants. Partly for that reason, Savannah was designed to be incrementally augmented, ten families to one trust lot (in proportional but not necessarily actual terms). There was no one “central square” in Oglethorpe’s Savannah, no central axis, no landmark devised to dominate, no imperial terminated vista, no wayfinding schema. Not a single thought or provision of prominence for any single civic/religious or governmental edifice was implied in Savannah’s founded form. The concern for establishing a civil society with fundamental parity at all social scales is shown by the respect of the ward-grid plan for individual property and its conscious—indeed utopian and obsessive—concern for creating a plurality of civic institutions. This is physically represented by the reserved Trust Lots of the squares, of course, arranged with such cardinal parity that, just as the individual town lots represented the currency of reciprocally honored contracts created between free and equal men, the squares exist to facilitate the contracting between the semi-autonomous societies needed to formulate the consent of the governed. This contracting civil society, as the colonial experimenters would certainly be well-conversant about by the early eighteenth century, is what post-Hobbesian British reformers suspected upheld government and created healthy republics.

Savannah’s ward plan manifests, with imposed, Christopher Wren-like geometric clarity, the liberal, early modern (17th century) response, which was best represented by John Locke, to Hobbes’ more pessimistic prefiguration of the “social contract” in man’s nasty, brutish and short-lived “state of nature”. Savannah celebrates the pre-monarchic social contract. While I cannot claim that the writings of John Locke were the theoretical underpinnings of the Savannah plan, this systematized egalitarian utopia has the scent of Locke through and through (as well as the scent of John Calvin too – not to simply nod at the interesting contrastive referents provided by a popular comic strip). Savannah’s plan suggests a return to the “natural state” of man, a more open and ambiguous, pluralistic and irresolute state, where “equal” men establish contracts for government, and where free people condescend as a matter of civic piety to protect one another’s property, security and moral freedom.

Aside from English Common Law, no capricious hierarch or legal artifice would be allowed to circumscribe the colonists’ rights in immediate terms. In fact, the trustees (most of whom where members of Parliament) were so concerned with the threats that bureaucratic bugbears or legal disputes might impose on the colony’s developmental stages that they – I kid you not! – banned lawyers from entering the colony. The trustees hoped to create a plural and open civil society, free of even the burdens that their own wealth and attendance might impose upon it. (Although, of course, while Oglethorpe was present there in the first few years of the colony, he did not hesitate to impose it by signifying his commands with “You may think about....” and “Perhaps you are right, but...”. Every utopia, as Corbu found out, still needs a benevolent despot to found it.)

View of Savannah 1734. Source: UGA Hargrett Library Rare Map Collection

Probably no historical artifact tells me more about the Origin of "Lockian Savannah" than, in fact, the earliest image we have of the city. During Oglethorpe's entire on and off ten year stay in Savannah he had refused to take or erect a permanent domicile, electing to stay in a tent next to a few Southern pines that had been left standing for scant shade near the bluff's edge on Bay Street. A romantic to the end, Oglethorpe had never budged from the spirit of the prospectus motto. His court was a tent opening like that of the itinerant judges of the Old Testament. The image depicts a small battery off to his left to face the Spanish threat. In front of him, the first four wards are being infilled by identical houses in America's first equal lot subdivision. On the river below, passes the tranquil commerce of ships and native canoes. All around extending to the horizon is the flat wilderness ready for clearing and cultivation. A fertile land non sibi sed aliis.

View of Savannah 1734 (Detail). Source: UGA Hargrett Library Rare Map Collection

From Savannah to the Burbs: The American Art of Subdivision

2010-04-15T23:55:01.323-04:00

Suburban Surreal, originally uploaded by Ann Douglas.

An Odonomy of Savannah IV: Origins

~ part i ~

the insight of subdividing

From the air, the suburban subdivision is a puzzle. If E.T.'s ever came to earth and sized us up, the subdivision would probably first strike them as a bizarre social experiment in utopian egalitarianism. But then they would notice its preponderance across the North American landscape. Looking out of airplane windows, I’m always struck by its almost comical ubiquity. We, however, would argue that a subdivision's denizens pursue nonesuch experiment. How then to explain the penchant to settle in the burbs? Why does the subdivision struggle so heroically to be repetitive...to seemingly synthesize, codify, endlessly erect sameness? Doesn't this seem a little bit at odds with Americans' hedgehog compositions and our open admiration for the rugged nonconformist--the James Dean rebel who has little if any regard for the sized-up Joneses across the street? That cul-de-sac above is a curious form for the land that loved Thoreau and Robert Frost, even if it is literally a road "less traveled by".

What is this need to create the monocultural clumps of that suburb? Is this tendency to segregate into one's general social strata the fault of pro-forma driven developers that do not like to offer variety? Directly, yes, people buy what they have available to them to buy, and they tend to buy the best of what they can afford. Developers simply deliver the baseline expectations for what Americans expect in a home of a certain price range, and it is convenient for them to knock out those homes assembly line style.

But would Americans easily purchase that same new home in a subdivision development whose overall pricepoints and socio-economic target demographics varied greatly at the outset? I suspect not. I suspect people would still prefer neighborhoods where their home “fit in”. And I think they do take into careful consideration what kind of neighbors they are going to live around. I don’t know if it is necessarily something wired into the human condition that we prefer our neighbors to look as if they are equally well off (or poor) as ourselves, but obviously the subdivision is a testament to the fact that folks like to be around the kind of people they relate to (even if they never get past “hi”).

Perhaps we need to unpack this cultural condition more. Savannah shares an interesting characteristic with the typical suburban subdivision. I want to attempt a taxonomy (odonomy) of Savannah's streets in this series, but first I have to puzzle over the question of Savannah's origins, for to fail to see its essential module, the 60' x 90' town lot repeating ad infinitum, is to miss the functionally critical progenitor of Savannah's form.

Savannah's streets are a consequence of this city's colonial settlement pattern, a grid of town-lot wards that are interlaced with a 7-street order of contiguous streets, creating a cohesive and variegated street fabric that (nonetheless!) was arranged to serve identically sized lots. These town lots were much more size-constrained than the typical homesteading parcels given to settlers elsewhere in the colonies and curiously close to the size and shape of bungalow lots in our prewar suburbs. Even William Penn’s grided plan for Philadelphia assumes a much greater variety of residential parcels, some of its estate lots larger than an entire Savannah ward. Judged by contemporary standards, Savannah’s historic district was at its outset not much different than the typical prewar (grid-type) subdivision often found in our inner ring suburbs.

Savannah’s fabric of repeating wards of 40 identically sized town lots arose from the need to settle a colony in as fair, attractive, effective and efficient a manner as could be conceived for its purpose (seems familiar, huh?). A single formal syllogism drives Savannah's form: because all the lots are to repeat in size, the wards are to repeat in fashion.


Source: UGA Hargrett Rare Library Map Collection

Founded in 1733, Savannah's parcelization schema was a partial solution to the trustees’ desires to establish a Southern colonial economy not predicated on slave labor (you could say Savannah's trustees were early forerunners of the kind of social reformers that spurred the abolitionist movement). Thus, settlers had to be accommodated with homesteading tracts of land, which single families could then independently farm. But Savannah was also a frontier port on land heretofore and precariously claimed by Spain, and the needs of defense required that all families also be able to live in close proximity. So, a tiered land-allotting strategy was devised. Not only were all the settler families to receive identically sized town lots, where their actual homes would be erected, but they were also given rights to equal allotments of 45-acre farm plots in the hinterland south of Savannah. In addition, they were given smaller garden lots of five acres each closer in to the city, in a kind of "greenbelt" phalanx on either side of the common land held directly south of the city.

Plan of the Forty-Five and Five Acre Lots in the Township of Savannah

Source: UGA Hargrett Rare Library Map Collection

Carefully inspecting the arrangement of the 45-acre farm tracts, however, one can discern that they were arranged in a manner to encourage the future formation of hamlets and townships in the countryside, suggesting a fractal strategy of expansion for the entire colonization scheme of Georgia. One must appreciate the trustees’ clever anticipation of the regional diversification of labor over time. As the countryside developed into farming communities, Savannah's trade port economy would allow it to urbanize, allowing more of its residents to sever from field labor as they transitioned to more service, manufacturing and trading occupations over time. Using their town lots as the family business center, this is in fact how Savannah urbanized. Eventually the satellite allotments were anticipated to be parceled out to posterity or to others, as the city expanded and the hamlets urbanized with an influx of colonial migrants. At the outset, however, everyone was encouraged to contribute to the needs of defense (hence the town lot) and cultivation (hence the satellite garden and farm plots).

Close-up Detail of the Forty-Five and Five Acre Lots Map

What is noteworthy about all this, especially in accounting for the agrarian based economy of the American colonies, is that Savannah did not socialize or replace (with slave labor) the need to homestead. Rather, it sook a different way to make the cut. In Savannah, the act of subdividing itself represented a generative, economic act (as well as a pragmatic solution and moral imperative). It reconciled the acts of urbanization and agrarian development, which were so awkwardly accounted for in the plans of other colonial settlements, William Penn’s included. It had the insight of the fourth dimension.

Already at its founding, this arrangement between private allotments, town-garden-farm, set up a north-south commuting pattern, which, to this day, is a functional strength of Savannah’s grid (I’ll discuss how later in a future installment to this Odonomy series).

I find the trustees’ tripartite subdivision strategy quite inspirational on a number of levels. It is certainly suggestive of applications for sustainable regional planning and urban design today. …The thing that amazes me about Savannah, America’s first equal-lot subdivision, is how many planning insights it never ceases to evoke. In this case, we really should contemplate revisiting one of our starting blocks.

To be continued...

(Next week, I’ll discuss Savannah’s conceptual origins and tackle that tricky matter of “equality”.)

What the Charette could do for BarCamp

2010-04-11T20:08:00.004-04:00

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Yesterday I attended BarCampCLT III. Again, an energizing experience. Too bad I'm a city planner... all this web app development stuff is a bit far removed from my typical day-in and day-out. I feel like I'm missing out in the real action in this city. ...Nevertheless, I have a suggestion as a planner who deals quite often with community participation. BarCamp, I think, needs to take advantage of all the latent talent in the room through participatory strategies that involve team-building and idea-generating. BarCamp needs to employ a Charette, an intense design and problem-solving session. Charettes prove very useful in getting informed groups of stakeholders to propose novel solutions to problems while also steering them to share visions and create ownership in the project/solution/plan.

Here's my suggestion:

I think BarCampCLT should try out a "Start-Up" theme next time around.

Keep the morning round of sessions the same, but for the second (afternoon round) have everyone in the room pitch ideas instead for start-up business concepts...perhaps based on what they heard in the morning sessions. These could be serious concepts or totally joke concepts. Just as sessions are typically voted on, then, the actual start-up concepts compete right from the bat to become sessions. (An aside to my planner readers: We planners could also take a lot of great ideas from the BarCamp "unconference" participatory process. See also other related "unconference" approaches). The more successful ideas will then be able to attract an eclectic and informed and expert crowd of creatives to put their mileage on the start-up concept...at least for an hour and half or so. Instead of having individuals lead session topics, let them instead hone their start-up management skills by leading the participants to outline a business plan and marketing strategy.

If the start-up session is well-attended, have the participants divide into smaller groups of 5-8 people so that everyone has a chance to participate and have those sub-sessions come up with their own approaches to the same concept. (Alternatively, you can follow the Charette Procedure, but that would require a really adept organizer). These sessions, easily, will be more convivial and interactive than your typical BarCamp session (except for those sessions that involve massage-therapy or D.I. von Briesen, of course). Dedicate the last 20 minutes or so of a session to have the session participants practice their "live commercial" skits of the hypothetical product launch ...Face paint, "costumes" (made out of flip-chart paper), and-AHEM-balloons might come in handy here...(we all missed you Balloon Boy!!).

At the end, have everyone gather to view the live-demos. It would make for a fantastic conclusion to BarCamp that's for sure! Which is what is TOTALLY missing in BarCampCLT. I mean, ok, that post party was nice...but think what a beer party could be right after a total laugh-fest of a "concluding ceremony"! (Again, live-demo commercial skits. Enough said.)

Admittedly, the kernel of my Start-up Theme idea is totally stolen from Startup Weekend (one of the sessions I attended was about the lowdown on Startup Weekend)...only the "speed-dating" version of Startup Weekend. Who knows if one start-up idea is serious enough to fly off the bat to become an actual start-up in hunt of an angel investor, but maybe in these interactions BarCampers will quickly discover the complementary minds and skill sets they need to actually create a formidable start-up team in real life.

NOTE: The important thing about a Charette session is that it has a time-limit. You have to time it and announce the count-down. It should be an intense period of activity...particularly the last 5 minutes. Like in Iron Chef, you have to wrap it up at the cut off, except, traditionally, the only alterations allowed in a Charette product are done "en-route" to the presentation/judging venue. Unfortunately, planning "charettes" have lost the non-mechanical, intense spirit of their original conception over time, and now what planners call a "Charette" is a period lasting two or three days which often result in products that are often very polished, predetermined/formulaic that make their way into final deliverables ....I believe this approach to charetting is totally lacking the ("unconference", fly by the seat of the pants) spirit of a real Charette and, worse, often ends up leaving stakeholders suspiciously out of the actual decision-making process. Charettes should not be an abbreviated stand-in for the planning process.

Understatement of the Year

2010-04-06T00:13:00.042-04:00

THE TEMPLE MOUNT, originally uploaded by Yaniv Ben Simon.

"If an agreement is reached, then in religious and national terms, the two sides will have agreed to the idea of more than one truth existing in Jerusalem — that there’s more than one way up God’s mountain," Mr. Gorenberg told Ms. Sontag nearly ten years ago. "But," he added, "that’s a big if."

So ends a Robert Mackey post at the Lede: "Can an Undivided Jerusalem Be Shared?"

My own sense of Jerusalem is that Jerusalem is best shared undivided. Jerusalem taught me that cities are the best teachers of the practical art of sharing space, of coexistence. Someone once asked me what bearing Jerusalem's urban form played in the conflict. This was my reply:

...You’re asking me, who experienced this urban realm for three years. To be perfectly honest, the urban realm of Jerusalem’s Old City is an altar to coexistence. No artifact of man seems more suited to this sacred purpose. Jerusalem is a peace machine. She took away my hatreds. She would make me hang my grudge at the gate when I walked in, and how easily I forgot to take it back on the way out! The walls of Jerusalem are harmony screens that weather with remarkable resilience against external and geopolitical rivals to coexistence. The folks that wield power outside have discriminating agendas, but Jerusalem’s streets are shared indiscriminately by all. Her private and religious spaces are, ...well, particular to folks who share meals together, but surprisingly not overmuch. Yes, if you have blood on your hands, don’t pass through your neighbor’s gate (the blood here cries louder from the earth than in other places). But her public realm always welcomes you. No city I've experienced is a better peace-maker. Among the spice tables and racks of prayer beads, between the furry caps and kufiyehs, Jerusalem taunts your hatreds. She thinks little of toleration. “See,” she says to you, “you can’t tolerate better than you are tolerating me right now...Isn’t that remarkably easy?” She wonders how you multiply one love without another. If we do not notice her loves, it’s hardly her fault. She herself is fierce with her love for muezzin calls, she gathers trails of colorfully capped pilgrims into the wings of clucking churches, her soul elevates in the soothing murmur before the Western Wall. No she is not good with the thoughts of humans. But I had to live with her. Before I met her, her loves I made my hatreds, and then I sent prayers of deliverance on her behalf. She taught me to cancel one with each.

Admiring a Beauty

2010-03-31T09:03:00.013-04:00

I am periodically re-enchanted by the charms of Savannah's fabric. Part of the appreciation I have for Savannah's Historic District to me is no doubt the love I have for anything manifesting an "esprit de systeme". For this reason, I can stand for hours in front of the panels of Ghiberti's Baptistery door in Florence...literally, and contemplate for days the thematic order of Giotto's campanile medallions, composing dissertations of order in my head. I think I have a medieval brain. (Which in my book is a good thing).

These things (I apologize ahead of time to my readers) do not bore me. I was a student philology at one point in time for a reason. I have been and still remain, as far as I'm aware, the only student of New Testament era texts to see that the composition of Johannine books remains fixated on the structures of the creation narrative in Genesis. Rigorously. Playing with the order of chronology, but with rules of adaptation not unlike jazz. To this day it startles me that contemporary scholars do not notice these things..., but I'm a medieval-brained thinker, and the deep point of philological inquiry, as Gershom Scholem usefully pointed out once, is to dispense with the illusion that we can truly understand our ancient subjects. ...But I digress.

Savannah's rigorously patterned urban fabric creates many rare opportunities to see what would work in cities when a greater order is allowed to exist. Savannah's deep order actually does exist in less structured city fabrics (or is it more correctly, more structured fabrics,...more imposed or restrained?). But in Savannah, the order of traffic form comes to the surface. It becomes legible. More compact. More synapsed.

If one walked with horse's blinders, one could walk across the entire Historic District in ten-twelve minutes, but probably no one ever realizes this (much as no one ever notices the creation template in the murky depths of the most popularly read New Testament book, due to all the distracting surface sights). So enchanting is Savannah that it steals your notions of time. It is larger than itself, and there is something to be said about that. For that reason alone, Savannah is worth contemplating. I will begin sharing some of its beautiful order. This beauty is manifest in the traffic pattern (diagram below), which is a dissertation in system logic. Deep rules to a city's traffic circulation do exist, and have application even in amorphous, non-rigidly patterned fabrics. What Savannah can teach urban designers is very useful indeed, but orders need named elements. They need taxonomic categories, and thus a humble "odonomy" awaits our sensitive patience to name and to prod.

...Before I get to that (which might be a little while yet), I would welcome any observations you might have. As always, better insights are gleaned by listening first to others. In the diagram below, I depict the one way streets in purple, the 2-way streets in teal. The size of the arrow roughly indicates the intensity (in volume, speed and priority) of vehicular flow. The block and right of way widths are exact to reality, although I made the blocks more uniform for clarity's sake. What is depicted here is the ideal platonic traffic flow of the city...It's normative, not its actual (exceptions, as in all systems, abound).

So ...any observations about the pattern below that you think are worth mentioning?

Welcome to the Next American Suburb

2010-03-21T17:54:00.020-04:00

A New Model of Suburban Development? This photo demonstrates some smart neighborhood development features of note. Here are just some of the elements: (a) A greenway crossing in the foreground; (b) Bike lanes, but more importantly, roadway and neighborhood conditions that generate frequent bike trips; (c) Children (in the background crossing the street); (d) Townhomes (at right) populated by households that include said children and which suavely wrap around a super market and its parking lot; (e) In the background to the left is UNC Hospital's Wellness Center - basically a Y souped up with clinical services, therapy/rehab services and a rich array of preventative health-care and community supportive programs; (f) In the background, in the distance, is a retirement village center

I have recently come across an interesting community development that I believe is a compelling model for the next stage of "edge city" development. This is Meadowmont in Chapel Hill, N.C. I see in Meadowmont a transformational model that can re-mix and consolidate the separated uses of a typical suburb into a form whose smart-growth strategies effectively liberate Americans from that 7-day-a-week vehicular co-dependency that leads to sedentary lifestyles. This, and doing it in such a way that Meadowmont may actually represent a viable market model that has the thoughtful ingredients for successful replication. If LEED-ND has a version of Levittown (a development model that replicates), this might be it.

Among other things, Meadowmont offers yet another great example of what can be achieved with more tightly coordinated commercial, institutional and residential development - working in tandem with a cohesive, multi-modal neighborhood transportation strategy. As an urbanist, I have to be attuned to what is working in the market, and I think Meadowmont is an implemented precedent that offers great lessons to appreciate and chew on. I share here just a visual survey and some cursory comments. I think we can easily spot in Meadowmont (following in the trope of family-appealing New Urbanist developments such as Denver's Stapleton) some subtle but significant innovations to integrating a richer array of lifestyle services with neighborhood development, and which can create a market draw for them and can potentially entice capital markets to - not just embrace - but promote smart(er) growth. There are enough ideas here to warrant further contemplation, which I hope presage where development in the suburban periphery may be heading soon. (I must say... I would not mind it at all if Beazer, Centex and Pulte began to copy and paste some of the innovations Chapel Hill's signature development affords us.)

1) The interesting heart of the community is the UNC Wellness Center at Meadowmont, an impresive, greenway-hugging, environmentally friendly preventive health care and fitness center facility. If hospitals actually thought their job was to keep their clients healthy (not just treat their illnesses), they would probably create wellness centers right smack in the middle of their clients' communities.

2) Every generation shares a piece of the pie. The elderly are thoughtfully accommodated within closer proximity to the services of the community. T he Cedars of Chapel Hill below is a continuing care facility facing a central, generous green and full-service community center. The Cedars are in close proximity from the town center and directly across the street from the Wellness Center above and the grocery store. An apartment complex buffers the retirement village from the busy arterial road.

2) The grocery store (a Harris Teeter) is located centrally near the arterial and surrounded by townhomes. Where you would typically have a 20-40 foot commercial use setback filled with berms and water-needy plantings, you raise instead townhomes that eventually become populated with loyal customers who arrive and depart by foot and who no doubt visit you more frequently than other customers. Cha-ching.

3) Greenways and multi-use trails connect all the dots. The central spine trail follows the main valley streams flowing through Meadowmont, the primary conveyances of storm water. This trail connects to crossing trails that offer crossing points across the stream, helping to tie the different parts of the neighborhood and its uses together. They actually offer a completely equivalent transportation facility (see below) which more directly connects uses to one another than the actual winding vehicular streets, meaning, walking and biking become more enticing options. Notice, by the way, that the backyards often open up to the greenway, giving the trail an intimate connection to the community. This means residents, especially children, have great access to the greenway and help keep it secure. (Contrary to logic hinged on parental paranoia, the presence of children is actually the very thing that helps keep an area safe and secure - if children are present, others use and enjoy the facility much better, and fear encounters with strangers less. More people on the trail then help keep the facility safer. It is a mutually reinforcing phenomenon.)

4) The neighborhood elementary school is located unobtrusively in the neighborhood, in a lower plain by the stream, well-below the tree line of the overlooking street. All the classrooms are directly connected to the outdoors via a colonnade which shades the outdoor learning spaces associated with each class room (like the arcade schools of the classical era). The school itself is generously daylit and is smartly comprised of three east-west oriented wings. But the most noteworthy thing about the school is that it can be accessed by the greenway trails connecting to the residential subdivisions surrounding it. I loved the covered bike parking facility (by the way, there is only one bike because I took the photo at 5 pm ...this bike is probably a teacher or staff-person's).

5) Luxurious townhomes ring the hill tops much like fortified Italian hill towns. Unfortunately, we see here some examples realizing current urban design fetish for employing greens-in-the-round, but at least the circular form here is suggested by hilltop topography ...unlike the useless usual. However much I sincerely doubt Jane Jacobs wanted us to invert the Panopticon, for all I know, these residents will want their "eyes on the park" in order to jealously guard their greens and to kind of hold each other accountable in an amicable way, like suburban people like to. I know I was scared silly walking through this uncanny space as a stranger. Alas, we must, as urbanists, offer some sort of midwife alternative to the cul-de-sac.

6) These soccer moms can punt the minivan. This soccer field, I kid you not, does not have any vehicular access to it! Located across the stream from the elementary school, the only access afforded is via a bike path.

7) A head-turning mixed-use strategy represented by Meadowmont is the attempt to mix residential uses in an office building. Office uses represent a security liability, being depopulated at night, and thus typically require night-time security. The upper level of this office building helps to secure the building by allowing the upper (terraced) level to be used as luxury residential condominiums, granting it 24-hour use. This office building, along with the large detention basin it overlooks, also helps buffer the community from the arterial road. A bike path tunnel, crossing underneath the road, connects it to the office park across the road. I'm not sure how successful this residential-mix strategy is going to play out (the building is not rented out yet), but the sign advertising the potential uses definitely made me do a double-take.

8) But ...Meadowmont's strategic, multi-modal transportation integration is what really gets me excited about the future of suburban expectations in Chapel Hill. I note that planners have been insistent on providing an "equivalent facility" approach to bike-path integration (photo below left). Along the limited access arterials, that's where you put your wide bike thoroughfares on both sides of the road, and you create crossings wherever you can. This is the policy of Hilton Head Island as well. I welcome the raised expectations this will create for future development whole-heartedly. I also am warmed by the fact the office parks along Raleigh Road (the arterial I've been mentioning above) are circulated by compact, express buses at commuting times (photo below right ...taken between 6-7 pm).

...But of all the things I'm warmed the most about future of Meadowmont, and its potential long-lasting success as a model for greenfield development, is the fact that it has a good shot to be serviced directly by the TTA's future LRT, on the link connecting Chapel Hill to Durham. We all need to congratulate Chapel Hill planners for very conscientiously locating this TND, as Jarrett puts it, to be on the way. Between just the handful of smart growth principles mentioned above, think of how many vehicular trips Raleigh Road has been spared in the long-term.

What the Savannah Square can do better than the Roundabout

2010-02-20T18:57:00.029-05:00

An Odonomy of Savannah, Part III

I am a proponent of using roundabouts to lubricate traffic flow in many contexts; however, a new precedent has become my default alternative to signalized intersections. I often see transportation and development plans employing roundabouts where their traffic flow advantages are not really necessary. A roundabout intersection is an a auto-centric option in my book, which should be used only when vehicular through-put is an important goal. Savannah's squares, I believe, offer urban designers a relatively uninterrupted traffic flow alternative with more urbanistic and multi-modal advantages.

As I pointed out in Part II of this series, Savannah's one-way flow pattern is primarily controlled by yield signs (and no sign at all where the grid simply splits one way flow). Savannah's squares, like roundabouts, can thus provide relatively smooth traffic flow, which, while not as fast and effective as a roundabout, are quite appropriate for a highly pedestrian and bike-friendly urban context.

I hope the figures at left are useful for understanding the urbanistic advantages of Savannah's "square-flow" strategy. The figure on top represents a roundabout of 100 feet diameter, a typical size for a single lane roundabout. The second figure is a typical Savannah Square at the same scale (note the dashed 200'x200' "Portland Block" superimposed over both figures).

While the square has obvious disadvantages in terms of volume and speed of traffic flow, here are some of the advantages I note in the Savannah square-flow:

1) While the typical Savannah garden square (approximately the size of a "Portland Block") can inscribe a typical roundabout intersection, the square's T-intersections remove the long merging distances required. Ignoring for a moment how comparatively rare the radial convergence of more than three streets appears in cities, note that for a roundabout to distribute traffic effectively for eight converging street segments (as the Savannah squares do), the central island diameter would have to double in size, a need that would demand slightly more right-of-way than the Savannah square. (Actually, in the real world an eight-access point roundabout would probably effectively appropriate considerably more real estate for right-of-way due to the need to radially align the converging streets.) Moreover, just imagine how sadistically delirious an eight-access point roundabout would be for most drivers to navigate. The square actually ingeniously adapts the roundabout's radial flow for compactness, by removing the merging distances, as well as simplifying the geometry for drivers, preserving their sense of navigation by conforming to the gridiron (roundabouts, on the other hand, attract an overabundance of signage partly because they don't work all that easily with driver intuition).

2) The T-intersections of the square increase drivers' attention to bikes and pedestrians, since both pedestrian and traffic flows converge at the same location. Drivers have to yield and pay attention to all modes of intersecting traffic, as opposed to roundabouts, which divert pedestrian crossings and bike lanes away from the roundabout. Moreover, all the intersections in a Savannah square are 90-degree intersections to one-way flow, an obvious safety advantage.

3) Due to channelization standards, higher speeds, and, sometimes, merging distances needed near the roundabout, driveways and on-street parking locations will be pushed further away from the roundabout on the streets. I've seen numerous driveways access generously sized roundabouts, as at the Circle in Waco, TX, but try replicating those quirky throwbacks to bygone ways nowadays! In contrast, the Savannah square's straight segments and lack of merging/weaving needs encourages parallel parking to be safely provided on both sides of the square's streets. (Driveway locations are also possible on the square, but thankfully Savannah's alleys typically remove this need.)

4) The 90 degree turning is a natural traffic calming measure. For this reason, bikes are able to easily share the road around the square, removing the need to create bike lanes (or to demarcate "sharrows") or to put bike and pedestrian travel into conflict (a typical condition for all roundabouts but the residential "minis").

5) For sustainability purposes, this important advantage has always endeared me to Savannah's peculiar take on a gridiron fabric. The Savannah fabric creates east-west oriented development patterns, perfect for our Southeastern climate. Had Oglethorpe consciously invented it for this reason, along with all the other modern advantages it provides, I would consider him a genius pushing DaVinci level caliber. The perimeter development strategy of the roundabout option above is hard to adapt to this need. This is one of the things that makes me honestly suspect that an angelic power gave Oglethorpe his inspiration!

6) The land-use advantages are numerous. First, Savannah's squares are functional city parks, easily accessible on all sides, which by virtue of being what they are, attract strollers. Look at all the safe crossing points the square affords (as opposed to a roundabout's...uh...none). A roundabout island might be pretty, but it is a seldomly used open space resource by humans. Secondly, note the development footprints shaded in gray in the figures. In the top figure, I represent the typical development pattern we encounter nowadays, which both developers and municipal codes increasingly prefer for urban mixed use districts (if not require by law as form-based codes do): namely, the building envelope is moved to the perimeter of the block. I suppose this creates an attractive roundabout intersection, but notice that it allows the block interior behind the buildings to be typically conceded to vehicular needs. Savannah's form instead promotes on-street parking and more compact lot patterns. Because of the shallow lot depths (usually no more than 70 feet) surface lots and parking garages, where needed, can't be tucked behind other development. This allows them to become a competitive use along with all other development, making them a competitive land use resource rather than an isolated one that is insulated from potential conversion to other real estate uses.

Just some handy numbers to illustrate the land use advantage. Each of the figures above represents the same land area, which is the size of the central Savannah grid modules at 600' x 600' (8.3 acres). The total right-of-way area in the roundabout figure at the top is 34 % of the 8.3 acres. Four 250' x 250' lots abut the roundabout and the typical double-loaded corridor building footprint coverage shown is 45% of the total lot area. To achieve an overall FAR of 1.5 (a great base target for mixed-use, urban development), the four lots would need these buildings to average 3.3 levels overall. Based on Charlotte's MUDD code, the white space behind each building is, in fact, exactly enough space for a surface lot to park a 3.3 level apartment building or a 2.5 level mixed-use building with retail/office on the lower level (this means that you would need to build at least one parking deck on one of the four lots to reach an overall FAR of 1.5 if you want retail or office space as part of the mix). Alternatively, you could build townhomes or four small (relatively inefficient) "Texas Donuts" of 220' x 250'. (More than likely, developers would want larger block areas than the four 250' x 250' lots above can provide to achieve the efficiencies they need, but let's for comparative reasons entertain them here).

Savannah's development pattern is finer grained and with a much greater percentage of area dedicated to right-of-way: 45% of the total 8.3 acres! The advantage is that you accommodate a lot more on-street parking, including diagonal parking on the wider streets, reducing the amount of off-street parking needed. You also end up with smaller blocks, a highly linked street pattern and more than double the street frontage of the hypothetical MUDD code buildings surrounding the roundabout above. Admittedly, Savannah's pattern encourages less parking intensive residential uses, but you would be surprised by how many civic, office and retail uses Savannah's fabric accommodates without a seeming shortage of parking spaces. Yes, you do see a lot of surface lots punctuating the potential development coverage, but I believe the pressure to convert these lots to other uses is a healthy one and helps set off-street parking prices closer to their real value. Moreover, let's say only 1/2 of the lot areas in Savannah's 600' x 600' grid module have building coverage (the rest being open space or space dedicated to vehicle storage). An overall FAR of 1.5 can be achieved with an average of 3 level buildings throughout, something that Savannah achieves handily. The denser squares in Savannah easily exceed FAR 1.5 by more than double this factor (any seasoned planner/architect will confirm this with simple visual inspection of the Google Maps aerial). By virtue of its compact and shallow lots, Savannah far exceeds the density efficiency of the large block perimeter, auto-centric development regimes that roundabouts encourage.

In short, consider employing the Savannah square-flow strategy as smarter way to handle traffic flow while promoting a density-efficient land use mixture and bike and pedestrian friendliness. I would only use a roundabout when at least one of the intersecting streets (preferably both) is a thoroughfare or high-volume traffic street. Otherwise, I'd prefer to square it.

VMT and Congestion geo-tagging. Bueller ...Bueller?

2010-02-11T01:25:00.002-05:00

106. beating the congestion charge 106/365, originally uploaded by KevanLiz.

Over at the Bellows, Ryan Avent wonders why everyone is still so tight-ass about VMT...

I think the place to start is with congestion pricing, although I’d also like to see a share of revenues from carbon pricing devoted to transportation. But I don’t think it’s absurd to put a VMT tax on the table. Policy merits will be balanced in Washington against political acceptability, and clearly there are legislators who feel that the idea of a VMT tax — of paying for the miles you drive on public roads — might make sense to drivers. I don’t think that’s nuts.

I know that many people feel that the civil liberties issue is a dealbreaker, but I have a hard time believing that. These days, people don’t blink at the prospect of unwarranted domestic surveillance, they walk around with multiple mobile devices, and they live half their lives online. A gizmo that keeps track of how far they’ve driven isn’t likely to phase most Americans.

Not nuts...and in fact, it is only fair. Americans love fairness. And if you can measure it, and present it, consistently, air-tightly, logically and comparatively, so much the better. This is what Google does after all. We get it.

As far as the actual tracking system used for implementing a VMT system, we have a myriad ways to think about this. Getting hack-proof "gizmos" to track VMT, in itself, is not going to do it. Any implementation has to fine-tune a fine and audit system. It works for transit boarding. Primarily you have to think hard about the incentives for fraudulent behavior and learn the best ways to police against it in a fair and efficient way. No one likes deadbeats, so we will get innovative. Big deal. We do this for far more complicated things. If we're smart, we'll jigger our wireless technologies to pick up our slack ...and do it more neutrally and fairly while they are at it.

We also need a system that is graduated and offers rebate incentives (just like income taxes). VMT should be graduated on weight of vehicle anyway. And (as Ryan suggests) we can combine all tax approaches, taxing fuel inefficiency, congestion zone travel and VMT as well. We're not far from having the capability to monitor this in a smart and decentralized way. Look at the god-awful amounts of data banks have on you already.

And...I don't know why some are suggesting vehicle-installed (and "hack-proof") devices to begin with. It seems to me we need to think about a more robust monitoring system, utilizing multiple data points. You can use a wireless geo-tagging system for starters. The central monitoring interface can still be at the pump. The wonderful thing about pumps is they are already wired to exchange information and they don't move (easily). What information is exchanged at the pump and how is what we have to think harder about. How we work in incentives should also be pondered and debated, e.g. the greater the VMT per last deposit's gallons and the lesser the percentage of (time/location-dependent) "congestion geo-tags" your vehicle has acquired in that time, the greater the rebate you will see lopped off the fuel charge...right there at the pump! This way, the monitoring equipment works in the driver's favor sometimes. Convenience store owners will need to get deals themselves for relaying the data, perhaps with an opt-in voluntary data-sharing program that rewards customers with deals as well....Kinda like Google-style marketing.

C'mon, people, we gotta get all American about this.

The iPad is going to be transformational for architecture

2010-01-28T21:51:00.004-05:00

Apple iPad, originally uploaded by iLounge.

...We just need some savvy app developer to create a multi-touch drafting tool, probably jigging up a knock off of SketchUp. You will see architects picking it up once they realize how much 10 fingers working in unison can triple their modeling production. They will simply outproduce their mouse-bound brethren. Here is the interface I was waiting for! Of course, since I already carry a "man bag" for my sketchbook and pens, it won't be a great adjustment for me to tote around. The architectural digirati, who have long left the manual arts, will probably adjust to it grudgingly. Eventually, it will come to the architecture office in the form of a more ample cousin "the iTable" (Steve Jobs are you listening?). ...Yes, I cannot wait to sit at a semblance of a drafting table again!

I predict that it will be graphic artists who will pick up on the multi-touch drawing utility first. So if Adobe has its act together it should already be working on a multi-touch version of Illustrator. Keeping my fingers crossed...

Architecture: 5¢ (Vision: $120/hr) ...Why the World Needs More Architects

2010-01-26T19:52:00.004-05:00

Architects all over are preparing for lean times. With 20% of of them laid off since last summer, many are facing the stark reality that they may never return to the career (or pay scale) that made the grinding misery of grad school and their long slog of internships pay off. A NYT report about laid-off architects searching novel ways to find clients or strike out in new directions is stirring quite a discussion among architects in Charlotte (and I'm sure nationwide). So I thought I'd take this opportunity to add my own 2 cents to the discussion.

In Charlotte, the statistics of laid off architects are miserable. Last June, our local business journal reported the claim that a whooping 40% of Charlottean architects had been laid off since the recession started. When I read this I wondered whether the nation now had twice the number of architects it could employ. But I have plenty of reasons to think otherwise.

First off, hats off to the laid-off architects who are branching out from their traditional client base and putting their hard earned skills to work creatively in fields that may not be associated with "architecture". There are plenty of Design problems out there that architects can contribute to, even if a building is not involved. So kudos for going out and finding them. Thankfully, I'm a product of architecture graduate school, so I know what we were really trained to tackle from our earliest Level I studio. If your professors were even vaguely competent, they did not "teach" you architecture...rather they trained you to think like a designer. A designer deals with the world as we encounter it. This recession too is a problem of an architectural malaise, spurred by our own work or the work that left us, and therefore, architects need to creatively design the solution.

Secondly, architects need to be doing more to put their design skills to work in big infrastructure projects. Architects have something special to bring to the table that those more analytically minded people that tend to run governments and build roads do. Working with DPZ Charlotte on the Charlotte Streetcar Project last week reminded me of the great gifts that architects bring to all complicated projects as generalists (DPZ is a town planning firm that is led by generalist-minded architects). (More on DPZ Charlotte's streetcar work later.) (BTW, DPZ Charlotte are the creators of Habersham).

Large city projects need architects. Not just for visualizing what the planned transformations will be, but to actually help define and refine the task of transformation. If cities were smart, every big infrastructure project would involve an architect at the earliest stages, where decisions can have the greatest impact in the direction of a project. What you need architects for is to see the larger context with greater clarity, to understand the potential for unthought-of options, and to frame the vision.

I often wonder what many projects would have been like had their task definition not gone first to in-house bureaucrats or analytically minded consultants who apply a decision branch tree approach to things... defining a project's scope with narrow circumstances in mind and not seeing that perhaps the basis of the project’s approach to addressing the needs is partly the problem. Ever notice that architects like to poke around guts of the project definition list first, before they trust the scope items as defined, asking a whole bunch of why and what if questions (and not just because they are fee curious)? They are big picture minded. Architects are folks that gauge things from the broad perspective and from the particular, simultaneously. They then tend to interrogate each piece of the project wonderfully for its "potentialities". More than the project task matters to them, and their design work will pull from a broad range of precedents (globally) and address those transformational steps that the project will undergo in its context long after their services are warranted. After all, they are on the hook for the long-term success of the building.

What makes architects good “generalists” is what they do. Architecture is difficult. This is why it often takes until late in life before they become masters. Architecture requires a lot of knowledge, thought and experience. It also requires Vision. The creative yet practical and circumspect kind. An architect’s work forces her to jump in and out of a number of scales constantly. She has to keep in mind and to juggle an immense array of pecuniary demands in the messy soup of moving parts that is the building process (a degree to which us planning types are not experienced with, trust me). Yet she is always aware of the building in its completion, the goal that must be attained to meet its aesthetic and social purpose. This adds a layer of cultural demands other professions do not have to bother with in the forefront. Architects think about the intangibles and their sensitivity for the aspirations of the community need to be listened to. The mode of thinking that the architectural design process cultivates can be a gift to any complicated project. Yes, planners and engineers complain that the architect’s proposals may overshoot pragmatic concerns, yet architects are extremely competent at responding to limitations because they are daily finding novel solutions to problems that don’t sacrifice design goals, project unity and quality. Actually, architects train themselves to overshoot because they distrust limitation. They definitely do not want limits to set the tone. This mentality they take for granted. Indeed, competent architects typically find much more goals for a project and obtain more solutions to limitations than their clients are ever aware that they need.

So…Even if an architect peddles his “architecture” services for 5¢ at the village market, be aware that the rest of the fee he will charge you for is his broad-banded Vision. Architects are consultants of Vision. And every project requires Vision (and corrective lenses). Please hire these guys and gals for more than just for “architecture”. ‘)

Cracks in the Building Blocks of Mixed Use Vitality

2010-01-10T20:43:00.008-05:00

Green Grocer Legos - Storefront, originally uploaded by Firey_Ram.

On my recent trip surveying many recent urbanist developments in South Carolina and Georgia, one of the worrisome conditions I encountered in some of the neighborhood developments I came across was their relative lack of continuity with existing business corridors and neighborhood centers. Even the most excellent of the urbanist developments (such as DPZ's Habersham and Dover, Kohl and Partners' Glenwood Park) seemed to be inwardly focused; as a consequence, their mixed use neighborhood centers and most of their retail assets seemed to suffer from relative lack of business exposure. I just hope the depopulated conditions I encountered only reflect the post-holiday winter doldrums. Nonetheless, I was left quite discomfited by the supportability of their storefronts. The notion of empty storefronts overtaking these developments should really worry us as urbanists. The UK's High Street Blues and the empty storefronts popping up all over Manhattan, aren't exactly a great argument for Jane Jacobs style urbanism. I shudder to think how the failure of recent LEED-ND worthy development can sell urbanism to banks and developers.

There are enough special challenges to overcome in the implementation of mixed use development...enough to make even a well-meaning architect stay up at night. Yes...it's easy to build a vital city streetcape in Legoland, but in reality, it is almost a miracle to design and execute. And once realized, the vitality of mixed use buildings continues to remain tenuous, primarily because retail downstairs tends to have a much higher turnover and inherent fragility than the residential portion of the development, which places extra challenges on those wanting to invest in such real estate options.

A friend of mine, who lives in the Iveys Building on Tryon Street in Uptown Charlotte right in the shadow of BOA Headquarters, tells me BOA is desperately trying to unload foreclosed units, so right now they are going for a steal. Yet my friend recounted to me his frustrating experience finding financing to purchase another condo unit in the building, which he is eager to invest in. He can't find a willing lender as the Iveys contains retail space that is more than 20% of the total building area. FHA will not allow loans for that condition, as retail failure would impact the solvency of the HOA. The fact that the retail fronts our High Street in Charlotte bears no impact. Like the UK's boneheaded empty shop tax, FHA regulations and compliance standards pose a withering blow to the continuity of mixed use investment on Charlotte's Tryon Street. Are High Street Blues coming soon to Charlotte?

Alligator Urbanism

2010-01-03T19:36:00.011-05:00

I'm back from my favorite town...Savannah, and new thoughts on odonomy abound (more later). I just spent a week surveying great developments in South Carolina and Georgia.

The development work I was most struck with were the interesting developments on the Marietta Street Corridor in Atlanta and DPZ-planned Habersham, near Beaufort, SC (all the photos here are of Habersham).

The biggest surprise of the trip was my first visit to Hilton Head Island, which I may blog more about later. Hilton Head showed me that a sustainable type of sprawl actually exists. Its really remarkable job integrating infrastructure for bike/ped transport was some of the most stellar I've ever seen. Of course, Hilton Head was built for bike use from its inception, and its relentlessly controlled planning represents a resort-style urbanism (or sustainable sprawlism?), the kind that is way out of the adoptable range and integrative capacity of most suburban communities. But the respect to the landscape was superb. Hilton Head's nearly unbroken sea pine canopy and high standards for vegetated screening are a work of amazement. You really do get the impression that alligators coexist happily with humans in that sprawl. I'm surprised as a planner that I haven't heard more about Hilton Head, especially as we are now increasingly confronted with the problem of sustainably "retrofitting" our suburbs.

Both Hilton Head and Habersham made me appreciate the potential of landscape design to make sprawl more sustainable...and a rich experience - the kind that appeals strongly to most Americans. Call it golf-cart urbanism if you like, but I really like it when golf-course tested landscape architects get involved in urban design. The results are very interesting, and I was quite surprised at the level of thought we can glean from these experts to carry over into our TOD's and urban developments.

So far, Habersham is the best TND sprawl I've seen (but...my...what beautiful and interesting sprawl!). While Habersham for sure appeals to the second home 55 and over crowd that populates these places around Hilton Head, evidence abounds that a fair amount of families with children live in the neighborhood.

If you are an urban designer, landscape architect or planner, a good vacation to consider is a trip to Savannah/Hilton Head. You are guaranteed at least three treats: Savannah's Historic District (with its unparalleled grid of insights - yes more odonomic contemplation is in order!), Hilton Head Island's tremendously cohesive and well-integrated bike paths (with a trail system featuring boardwalks through the swampy areas, BMP's and parks), and Habersham.

Habersham, in a way, represents a more urbanistic approach to do Hilton Head, and it employs road and landscape design at a level of subtlety that left me there for hours carefully observing the details. To me it represents the best imaginative work of DPZ I've seen so far. You can tell they really went out of their way to prove that design for 18 mph can be interesting - never "one size" and "one solution" and always respecting and purposefully integrating the existing trees and site conditions.

If you do go... Do NOT forget...Be sure to bring a bike!

A Week of Professional Loitering

2009-12-28T09:36:00.008-05:00

The Charlotte Streetcar Project, amongst others, has lately been commanding much of my energy (sorry for the absence). So I'm making the most of my holiday break to wind down. For me that is gallivanting around the vicinity to visit new places in the Southeast. Currently, I'm checking out recent urban developments in the Atlanta region. Anyone out there have a tip for recent urban developments I need to check out in upstate Georgia,...let me know.

On any trip of mine, I like to think of myself as a professional loiterer. Anytime I come across a "No Loitering" or "No Skateboarding" type of sign, I like to hang out there until I figure out what it is about that place that would attract life. Outside North America, these signs have not been invented, so I'm glad they appear frequently in the most random places here. These signs are handy indicators of the subversive Flaneurship of skateboard-loving teenagers and otherwise automotively liberated folks. However, I consider it a somewhat rude surprise to encounter these signs in brand new development. The pre-emptive strike is unfair...and, quite frankly, tactless. How do you know that your new development will successfully attract the sportive activities listed there?

I spotted the sign above in a park in Greenville, SC's new Verdae development. Verdae is a top notch New Urbanist development, with only a few model homes completed...so young, so smug, so self-confident.... Ah but, alas, it is probably right about its future. It sports a grid plan with community greens, a promised variety of housing types, and a complete streetscape with bike lanes and landscaped roundabouts. The park in which the sign above is located is Legacy Park, the signature element of Verdae. Surely, New Urbanists, you created this place... I just hope the intolerant folks doing the guidelines posting can ease it up a little, ...just a little... to allow your vision to take root. Just let the life have a fair chance to grab a hold on first...before you throttle the sucker. Maybe you do want dogs chasing frisbees across that wonderful rolling green. Maybe you'll discover you don't need the sign. Maybe the community will love the Park just enough to respect it and watch over it without being overbearing. Just a hunch.

Settlers of Catan, TOD Version

2009-10-31T11:28:00.001-04:00

Settlers of Catan, originally uploaded by gadl.

Every city planner, city politician and professional dealing with economic development should become good at the game of Settlers.

I began playing the Settlers of Catan in Jerusalem, where a friend, Sharon Alley, introduced us to the game after her trip to northern Europe. Some of my favorite memories include the long hours of play I had among my expat friends in some winter school breaks in Tiberias, overlooking the Galilee. Part of the beauty of the game is the combinatorial board's simplicity, so simple, indeed, that the fact that the instructions and development cards where all written in Danish (or something) somehow did not hamper us much. It was in the play though that things got very interesting quickly. Right from the start, when players take turns placing their pioneering settlements, the game immediately makes Monopoly seem monotonous.

Thinking back on what motivated me as an architecture student to focus on urban planning, I seriously list the influence of the Settlers of Catan. One reason why my educational tract veered into the Department of Urban Studies + Planning during grad school was the theoretical analogues the game presented me as I studied the roles and interrelationships of transportation, trade, politics and industry in improving urban development and regional competitiveness. By a combination of diplomacy, haggling, and economic resourcefulness, players are forced throughout the game of Settlers to fight for competitive advantages over a simplistic board of resources. This is the only game I know where direct competitors can actually trade game (resource) cards in open negotiation after each dice-roll. (Imagine, for example, what would happen to chess if a player could haggle with his/her opponent to convert a rook to the other side in order to get back his/her queen). This simple and ingenious alteration to the board-gaming norm forces strategies and impromptu alliances to become fluid, crafty and subtle. Some of the dramas of Poker are manifested. Any player of Settlers develops both a an economic resource strategy beholden to the fate of the dice roll as well as a political strategy to deal with his/her opponents. The best players, therefore, can't help but to gain a sense of the underlying politics and economic strategies influencing regional competitiveness in the real world. Part of the value of the game is that it teaches you to think about the resources of cities in systematic, simplified, physical terms while allowing you to see the value of the soft and open social/political dynamics involved that promote development in more non-deterministic terms.

During my run yesterday, I thought about Settlers as I reflected on my work as a transportation-focused urban designer. (Curiously, as my friends well-know, I was always a Settlers player that favored a road-building strategy over a city-development harvesting/mining focused resource strategy). I suddenly realized that the game could use a rail and transit-oriented development strategy to make it more reflective of the life and health of cities. Here then are my rules for "rail-road" building in Settlers, Transit Oriented Development (TOD) Version:

All the rules are the same except for the following additions:

1) A player can upgrade a road link into a rail track by purchasing a second road and laying it next to the existing road link (a "track" is thus two planks side by side). A track counts as two links in determination of links for the "longest road".

2) A player can't instantly purchase a track. S/he must wait at least one round before upgrading a road link just purchased, and s/he can only upgrade those road links between linked settlements. Players cannot begin to upgrade roads to tracks until the game's first two complete rounds are played.

3) A player can substitute a sheep resource card for a wood or clay resource card in order to upgrade a road to a "track" (my opinion is that sheep need to become a more useful commodity to a game of Settlers - there's always way too many of them). It is probably best to not allow a player to substitute two sheep cards to upgrade a road link. In other words, you will still need at least one of the road building resource cards to upgrade to a rail track (we don't want to tempt players too much from using sheep to draw development cards).

4) This is the money rule: Settlements (including cities) connected by tracks allow the settlements to collect resource cards from one another's tiles, as if they shared the same spots on the board. However, only the next adjacent settlement connected by rail can collect from its neighbor's tile. So in the case that three or more settlements are connected by tracks in series, each settlement can only draw from the tiles of its immediately linked neighbor.

5) No circumventing the Robber allowed. ...A Robber also plunders the train!

...Test it out, Settlers playas, and tell me how it works. I believe these rules can serve as a useful analogue to teach your friends about the value of rail.

The rules above may need adjustment because of the new dynamics it adds. It may be necessary to play Settlers TOD to 12 points (instead of 10) due to the fact that players will be drawing more cards toward the end of the game and you may want more time to have interesting scenarios play out. That's another thing Settlers teaches planners, btw: all things must have their balance and sweet spot. E.g. you want settlements connected by rail, but you don't want that at the expense of drawing development cards. Cities are full of caveats. Codes and planning rules should not over-emphasize one thing at the expense of another thing necessary to the civic life, health and competitiveness of a city.

Cheers!

A Smarter Charlotte

2009-10-17T20:56:00.000-04:00

Attendants of "BarCampCLT 2"

This week I had opportunities to attend two events featuring smart people here in Charlotte. At one event, Charlotte Viewpoint's "A Smarter Charlotte", co-hosted by Civic By Design, we spoke about the disconnect that arose in Charlotte's position between two recent national rankings of cities. One put Charlotte in the 6th overall position as the "brainiest" city in America in terms of college degree attainment, while the NRDC ranked us as only 38th overall on its "Smarter Cities" list for large cities, which evaluates cities for sustainability. We had a wonderful discussion, sometimes tense and lively, as my fellow attendees and I pondered various reasons why Charlotte's educated populace seems to consist of many cutthroat "rugged individuals" who avoid civic engagement and who pursue lifestyle choices that impede adoption of a city-wide, corporate vision for sustainable living in Charlotte.

So...poignantly to me, the session topics at the next event I attended, BarCampCLT2, seemed to feature two striking themes: the world of social media entrepreneurship (which aims to cater to the world of online - sometimes civic - communities where autonomous and private life seems to be in rapid retreat) and sessions on sustainable living initiatives and technologies that were led by CPCC's and g dwell's damned intelligent and agitatively so D.I. von Briesen (here below - one of the most remarkable characters I've ever encountered in Charlotte, I hafta admit).

D.I. diverts Barcamp's waste from landfill

The collective IQ-rubbing and agitation/perturverance/"destruction" (inside joke) at an event like Barcamp is always a visceral pleasure for me. Especially when evaluated in light of the Smarter Charlotte event's lamentations. Barcamp 2 is a wonderful manifestation to me that indeed there is hope for Charlotte. In people like D.I. and the Barcampers, there are present among us smart souls willing to take upon our greatest challenges by steeping themselves - with seeming abandon - into the very social dimensions ...and technologies!...that will create a truly smarter, civically cooperative and economically prosperous Charlotte. I feel like Charlotte is in great hands. You just have to look in the marginal places and corners of our city to find these busybodies, but, indeed, they are here and gleefully at work.

Sketch Culture at Peril

2009-10-12T19:43:00.001-04:00

With the advent of Insta-Virtual Urban Design (a typical example here), I believe that we Urban Designers today are at a critical juncture in terms of our personal cultivation of design intelligence. The intellectual investigation afforded by the examination and perfection of the drawing hand is being displaced by the primary reliance on visualization tools such as Sketchup and Photoshop. I am very afraid that many young gifted designers are quickly losing not only their manual sketching, modeling and rendering skills, but their ability to explore their world in terms of the whole, lived-in experience. A kind of design mastery is gained from experiencing the urban world through the discipline of sketching it and, in turn, imagining urban spaces creatively on the drawing board or notebook. Despite the promise of virtual design becoming more "manual" and the tantalizing possibilities still latent in digital media, hand-sketching culture is languishing, and I am not sure that our virtualization tools are good surrogates.

An important thing to develop design intelligence is to exercise the mind to mentally translate three-dimensional space into perspectival understanding, transforming cityscape into a place of memory (an experienced environment). There is a hard-earned intelligence that is gained only by slowly honing the drawing craft. Drawn spaces are remembered spaces. Spaces you've taken from image to memory.

I discovered Edouard Vuillard in the National Gallery of Art last month, and I've been doubling my sketch-training efforts since, in an attempt to recover some of my atrophying drawing abilities. Don't get me wrong, I see the usefulness of Illustrator, yet, I definitely feel the eroding of ability that comes with primary reliance on it. Vuillard finally made me aware about what I have been losing.

Album, 1895, originally uploaded by Maulleigh.

As Donald Goddard reflected about viewing Vuillard's work: "Not only is everything, including human figures (women), given equal importance, as most writers notice, but everything is given special importance in an infinitely various world that is also an integrated whole". Vuillard's art fills out thus the rich space of perspectival memory. As Goddard continues, I reflect over what we urban designers are losing in engaging the disembodied virtual spaces we are now inhabiting day by day.

There are distinctions but no gaps, even when there are disruptions. Vuillard painted Place Vintimille, the park he saw from his window in Paris, three times for decorative works. The last time was in 1915-16, when the sidewalk was being torn up and renovated in the middle of World War I. We are confronted directly by the trench that stretches across the foreground (perhaps a reference to the battlefield) where workmen prepare the new sidewalk. Still, children play in the park, people sit on benches, the trees spread out singularly but in abundance, and through them can be seen the line of apartment buildings on the other side of the park. Near the very center of the painting are the tiny figures of a man and a woman seated on a bench on the far side of the park, the man reading a newspaper, the woman wearing a red skirt. It is the only spot of real red in the painting, as though it were saved just for her, and it makes us notice every other detail of this grand tapestry. More than any of his confrères, Vuillard, the citydweller, was a man of nature, echoing the philosophy of the American conservationist John Muir, who wrote in the late 19th century, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything in the universe," and of Muir's contemporary, the English naturalist and novelist W.H. Hudson, who wrote, "We are no longer isolated, standing like starry visitors on a mountain-top, surveying life from the outside; but are on a level with and part and parcel of it."

If Urban Designers are to have one skill on Architects and Landscape Architects it is Vuillard's immersed experience of illustrating memory-scape...level with and no longer outside of the spaces of dwelling.

No Longer Empty

2009-09-19T01:17:00.001-04:00

No Longer Empty, originally uploaded by TheHotelChelsea.

As an update to my previous post, check out what creative New Yorkers are doing with empty store fronts (from the spectacular new blog Polis).

High Street Blues in the UK

2009-09-14T22:56:00.000-04:00

...I keep one of my search widgets on my Netvibes web portal looking for Miles Davis related YouTube postings. Imagine my surprise when I viewed the above post by UK retailing consultant Brian Moore. Sometimes these kind of nuggets of information to what is happening in the world of markets and urbanism arrive by sheer happenstance.

The video commentary deals with the rampantly imploding town centers of the UK and is interspersed between the depressing photos of mixed-use towncenters turning into, well, into mixed-use ghost towns. Imagine that. Old/New Urbanism going caput...Makes me wonder how long before similar things begin happening in our spanking new walkable town centers and revitalized downtowns. Among the things that Moore says about Britain's retail landscape is that the recession has been driving businesses "out-of-town and online at the expense of high street", a stark contertone to the retool and re-localize recessionary panacea we keep offering as urbanists.

The photos look convincing and with scary figures and forecasts interspersed, Moore makes a claim that this recent phenomenon is more than a blip in the UK. Britain's bone-headed "empty shop tax" might be reinforcing the process of decline, and one of the things Moore claims is that "store closures (represent) a long-term structural issue, rather than simply a short-term cyclical effect of the recession". I wonder how much of that is true, and what Moore is implying about the ability of UK retailers to pare down for High Street. Is the downtown eviscerating donut back in our horizon? It will be interesting to watch whether British urban consumers get used to online retail or commute out of town for laptops and groceries. My oh my...a lot to watch and think about here.

The Invisible Signs of Savannah

2009-09-07T14:55:00.000-04:00

The Odonomy of Savannah II: The Case of the Invisible Signs

Savannah is well loved by this blogger for its active street frontage, its romantic buildings, its strangely abundant rows of townhouses (strange, that is, here in the South), its demure and pleasant gardens, and those redolent live oaks making the streets of the city beloved, well-shaded and well-lived. But among the things that I love about Savannah the most is what it doesn't have. Thanks Carfree and Eli for pointing out some missing items that should draw more attention to the elegance if Savannah's fine-grained street grid: the strange scarcity of stop signs and signalized intersections in this city.

To draw out my point better, I've decided to compare the First Ward of Charlotte, which has a typical downtown grid, with an equivalent area in the Historic District of Savannah. (Much of First Ward was formerly the Earle Village projects of the Charlotte Housing Authority, which is a well-known, early '90's Hope VI redevelopment that was among the first - and very successful - introductions of New Urbanism to Charlotte.) Below are images of the block pattern of First Ward and of Savannah's Historic District, each showing an area of exactly 1/4 square miles:

CHARLOTTE'S FIRST WARD (0.25 sq. mi.)

SAVANNAH'S HISTORIC DISTRICT (0.25 sq. mi.)

I should first mention that the street areas depicted in white above are the public rights-of-way only (I don't include internal drives). In the case of First Ward, I decided to include the present and future light rail right-of-way (which is part of the "transportation grid" and also creates/will create signalized intersections in the transportation grid; it is the north-south right-of-way corridor furthest to the left).

Charlotte's First Ward is relatively well-connected in terms of street connectivity and represents about the best we can hope for in most southern cities. With more development coming, the large meaty blocks (many are still surface parking lots) represent a lot of future revenue for our city. There are also only 40 intersections in the First Ward study area--much, much less intersections to control or maintain than Savannah. Savannah's study area, in contrast, has a whopping 203 intersections, more than five times First Ward's! But here is one surprise. First Ward has 16 signalized intersections (40% of its total intersections), while Savannah, in all that arabesque madness, only has 13 such intersections (6.5% of the total; these are located along the main east-west boulevards of Broughton, Oglethorpe and Liberty streets). Using Google Streetview I've counted all the intersection types for each study area. Here is the breakdown totals of intersection types for your reference:

Charlotte First Ward Intersections:
1 (2.5%) with a roundabout
16 (40%) with signalized stops
23 (57.5%) with at least one stop sign
40 Total Intersections

Savannah Historic District Intersections:
13 (6.5%) with signalized stops
51 (25%) with at least one stop sign
66 (32.5%) with only a yield sign
73 (36%) with no stop/yield signal or sign at all
203 Total Intersections

The majority, over two-thirds, of Savannah's public right-of-way intersections contain a yield sign or no sign at all. I wonder if such a remarkable feature can even be contemplated by Charlottean planners. Yes, the number above is right, folks, 36% of the Savannah Historic District public right-of-way intersections have no sign controlling intersection traffic! These "implicit yields" are controlled by the environment itself. Intuitively, we all recognize that a narrow and constricted entrance to an intersection with a wider street is a "stop" or "yield"--even if we don't see a sign. Everybody understands that the intersection of an alley with a street represents an implicit stop, just as everybody understands that you don't need a stop/yield sign at the end of your driveway. Savannah knows this and allows the intimate scales of its fine-grain environment to dictate traffic control. In reality, most of the yield signs are not really needed at all, much like yield signs are not really necessary for roundabouts. Traffic engineers just seem to want them there for liability reasons, but, so long as one understands the direction of traffic flow, Savannah's grid is so driver intuitive, that I'm probably right in saying that most drivers do not even register or think about the yield signage as they meander through the city grid.

Can you spot what is missing here? (Savannah Odonomy Series, no. 2)

2009-09-05T00:11:00.000-04:00

View Larger Map

Just follow the cyclists and ride around the park. There are actually several elements missing present in most city grid streets. Warning. Neither Copenhagen nor Portland will be of much help to you here. There is one really obvious element missing (that I will base my next discussion on here). But you may find one missing element or two that I have not thought about. For now, just stay on the loop. Once you think you know the obvious element that is missing, branch out to the next parallel loop of surrounding streets (or alleys) and see another surprise.

The way I was taught to read "great design" in school was to start with what was missing. It always stunned me what other people observed about good design. I hope the same can be true of the blogosphere! Happy sleuthing.

Urban Pastoral

2009-08-31T10:52:00.001-04:00

"The Garden of Machines (Dwell)" by Nathan Freise, from Unseen Realities

Strange what grips my imagination sometimes. Since I've seen the Nathan Freise prints over at BLDGBLOG (via Landscape Urbanism), I've just not been able to get them out of my head. I keep returning to look at them. Admittedly, they remind me of the situationist surrealism we used to conjure up in our dreamy photoshop years in grad school, but they keep reminding me of the pastoral possibilities presented by the leftover spaces of urban infrastructure. There are a lot of places of pastoral idyll in the city that we don't take advantage of. I've contemplated how to appreciate and use these underutilized spaces before. Architects tend to think we need to populate these non-places with aid of landscaping and programs that make sense. But what if the program is just creating a place to lie in the savannah grass? Meanwhile, a lot of our uber-programmed, ultra-terraformed and mowed parks and recreation areas remain eerily empty.

The West Bay Street canal and shipping yard overpass in Savannah needs a kind of Freise Brother Pastoral treatment. Pastoral Liminal Crossways.... The light in the imagine department is blinking, folks...

Savannah's Kind of Blue

2009-08-17T01:37:00.000-04:00

Today is August 17, 2009. Exactly 50 years ago Miles Davis and Bill Evans's Kind of Blue was released, which, not only introduced modal playing to jazz composing, but has remained the best selling jazz album of all time. In the spirit of Flamenco Sketches, I present here variations on a theme. This is the lively and sad moods of Savannah's historic district squares. Enjoy.

With much love and respect for Miles Davis, who, along with Savannah and Jane Jacobs, teaches me much about the art of planning without planning...improvisational urban design.

Odonomia and the Garden of Good and Evil

2009-08-09T12:29:00.000-04:00

Graffiti Taxonomy by Evan Roth of Graffiti Research Lab

The impulse to classify, to seek a systematic way of communicating things - to describe the order of order - has a strong appeal to humans. Whether we do it consciously or not, perhaps there is no more striking and persistent quality to human intelligence and communication than this taxonomic inclination. As a student of religion and communities (aka philology) and then, later, a student of cities (aka urbanism), I have often been fascinated by the classification schemes and methods used to frame world-views. The way we name/order things has tremendous implications on the way we choose to use those things, in the way we create relationships and hierarchies between them and ourselves, and in the way we create new things and new concepts. When phenomena escape our attention, it is likely because we haven't the taxonomic agents to describe them.

"Taxonomy" itself combines the Greek words taxis, meaning order, and nomos, meaning law or method. It is the study of classification or order...or, somewhat redundantly, the "method of order", which the Greeks themselves would have probably called philosophy.

Contemporary zoning codes are a mish-mash between two asynchronous taxonomic impulses, both of which help humans frame laws governing the environment according to a certain philosophy of urban order. These philosophies spring from the impulse to classify Use and the impulse to classify Form. While tight relationships are always formed between Form and Use (implicitly or not), it is easy to see that Euclidean codes choose to frame categories by Use. They categorize by Use and create rules for their Form. The fixation of "form-based" codes, on the other hand, is the physical form of the environment itself, where the urban transect, a monistic conception of the complex organism that is the city, is conceptualized first, bypassing the need to categorize by Use. It categorizes by Form and then applies rules implicitly for Use, making sure that lamppost C is appropriate for supposed District T-2 uses, even though the city is not known or existent in any place but a Platonic heaven. In many ways, the noumenal Transect has superceded the City...a whole bevy of human operated functions previously unregulated suddenly becomes beholden to abstract (and unattainable) codes of Form.

However, the fact is, both classes of codes do legislate both Form and Use, and they are not only driven by a common approach to nomenclature, conceptually and legally they are driven by the same desire to delimit property rights, mediating between the rights of the owner and the rights of the surrounding community. Form-based codes (to me anyway) seem to heighten, not remove, the Euclidean taxonomic burdens imposed on design. These burdens may perhaps order the environment, but it is not always clear that they help move communities to optimal economies and/or happier/healthier societies. They represent a kind of legal artifice that the actual urban environment and its functions often have to evade to function well (if not altogether misbehave from). All economies often operate by tacit and legally invisible (sometimes illegal) rules to survive and flourish. We even give the name "illegal" to people who help the city function thus. The designer, as a consequence, is always mediating between legally describable/governable needs and often illicit or ungovernable aesthetic, social and economic needs. Euclidean codes segment the city into broad categories and thus are more fluid and economic means of governing city form, and thus tolerate certain conditions of the city needed for its social and economic good. Form-based codes, on the other hand, legislate aesthetic concerns on behalf of an ideal city, which may be far from what that actual governed city has the means to become.

Is there perhaps a third taxonomy of "good" and "evil" that can help govern the city? What could it be? Well...let me posit that the problem of governing city form is that our taxonomy of urban form is not excogitated enough yet. Maybe what we need to better describe first is a true taxonomy of urban form, a method or philosophy of contextualized urban design - what Allan B. Jacobs has always pursued in his work, especially in his work to describe/categorize the various forms of the "great streets" and the beloved places of wonderful cities. But as the work of Kevin Lynch and Julian Beinart points out to us, the city is apt to evade every Platonic order that its designers (and I mean designers in the broad sense) try to impose upon it (by code or social power), ignoring the social, artistic and ungoverned needs of its various communities.

I see the start of a more excogitated taxonomy being explained to me when I contemplate the fabric of squares and "Tithings" in the Historic District in Savannah. The Historic District observes a wonderful order...An order with rules, and, yet, multifarious exceptions and modulations to these rules exist. It is a template that systematizes the order of the street/public realm (an order that is neither use nor transect derived - but street derived), with legal consequences, and yet is completely promiscuous in application, so that every square and street is indeed unique and in some way unlike its sisters and analogues in other places of the grid, in both form and function! It is as if the Platonic pattern from the mind of Oglethorpe (conceived for reasons very different than Savannah's needs today) was dropped into a fecund soup and allowed to copulate with the wonderful imaginations of every square district. Savannah sheds light on certain rules of its city form that are not easily catalogued in other taxonomies. It is a vivid lesson...a gem of urban design theory. It teaches an Odonomy, a method of classifying the hierarchies and orders of the street. It has created a strange order of transportation-integrated land use forms, which, in some ways, represent departures and even inversions of "good" and "evil" with respect to late and contemporary manifestos. What is wonderful about Savannah is often what can't be transferred...It invites a respect to what can't be copied.

I will get around to describing more...This won't be easy. I'm still soaking lessons. ')

I am blessed

2009-08-05T22:18:00.001-04:00

Union Square Market, originally uploaded by Kym Rohman.

Sorry for not posting lately...I've simply been underwater attempting to catch up with, yes, work, but also my rest and my activities in life. Blogging is something interesting to keep my mind focused and explorative, and it is a blessing that much in my life has kept me occupied in these departments. Plus, I have plenty of interesting things to do online...like read excellently reflected and thoughtful blog posts and I count my blessings in that department to know so many excellent bloggers. I am blessed to know you all. To be fair, I will try to share my experiences and realizations as I'm able.

Primarily, I've been working of late on two small plans for outdoor markets - one in one of my favorite of all cities (believe it or not!) Savannah. Savannah never ceases to teach me, and I can't believe I actually get to work on a project here. I can't share much yet, but believe me, we'll get to it. I am blessed to see what began this year as an exploration proded by a small pro bono project (which is about to get started) to wind its way more fully into my actual design work. I see that, indeed, the holy one above works all things for the good of his creatures.
On the other side of the coin, nothing about my work comes very easily...and nothing in life is straightforward (which is why I recognize more the importance of Sabbath). Design is hard, because people are ...well... all different one from the next and all relationships involving power need delicacy and respect. My naivete has been often exposed during these times. Designers, I've had to realize, do not live in a world to their own, and, well, ...I think that's a fortunate and good thing.

Why My Streetcar -Loving Self

2009-06-07T00:24:00.000-04:00

On the Infrastructurist blog, a debate broke out recently concerning the relative advantages of streetcars over buses. While the Infrastructurist’s 36 Reasons Streetcars Are Better Than Buses post merely summarized the remarks that had began to appear after a challenge first broke out in the comment section of Yonah Freemark’s post (posted a month ago), some felicity-challenged folks immediately drew up lists contradicting every (or most) of the 36 arguments.* My goodness…LOL.

Anyway, this debate, amusing and unproductive as it is, has nevertheless induced me to delve into a bit of careful thinking about the urban design advantages of the streetcar. The obvious way to start thinking about this is, actually, to go back to the topic Yonah Freemark’s original post, and ask, “Why, indeed, is it the case that Portland, Oregon, has had such success with the streetcar?” To hunt for the answer, of course, one should consider walking around Downtown Portland first to get acquainted the streetcar route. On my recent visit a few weeks ago, it was obvious that the streetcar alone did not in and of itself lead to the remarkable variety of street life and uses appearing on the route (shown here), but it certainly was evident that the streetcar was actively reinforcing them.

Unlike bus routes, the streetcar route is a physical part of downtown Portland and has become a loved component of the urban fabric--an urban spine for agglomerated activity. Its physical permanence enables predictable, easily located, and frequent transport and thus fosters commercial activity. Besides its frequency, such transport benefits from the added advantages inherent to its information/messaging system, a kind which, btw, is never matched by inner-city bus transport or downtown circulator systems in this country…Commuter convenience thoughtfulness is 9/10ths of the formula needed to replace the auto-dependence. (Note, I specify “inner city bus transport or downtown circulator” here because those are the only relevant bus route types to discuss in the streetcar vs. bus debate). The guideway, moreover, serves as an orienting and wayfinding device for citizens and helps them to both use and image their city, which has long-term social and economic benefits for the districts and neighborhoods along the route. Because the streetcar stops are frequent enough, it has been demonstrated that the entire corridor in Portland (and not just the stop areas) have been benefitting from development and value creation (see this book for that and other helpful details).

Streetcars pedestrianize environments and do not overburden the street with heavy infrastructure that separates travel modes and segments the public realm (the tracks are shared with traffic while producing traffic calming effects, making urban streets more multi-modal friendly and safe). As a consequence, these streets inevitably draw pedestrians along with greater public attention. All of this has long-term economic impact and it is not accidental that businesses like to be next to the tracks for many reasons.

Simply, streetcars have the advantage on buses in that they successfully demonstrate that they are pedestrianization (net increasers of pedestrian traffic) and economic development tools. Much like streetscape improvements, they are public realm improvements as much as transportation improvements.

Moreover, this last point leads us to a particularly useful distinction:

Streetscape improvements and public realm beautification projects are passive pedestrianization and economic development tools. They can only draw pedestrian activity locally. They limit pedestrian activity to walking distances and do not replace overall vehicular dependence among car-owning individuals. The success of these common capital improvement projects ultimately depends on their upkeep, existing economic stakes and the ability to (conveniently) park the automobile close to destination uses. Streetcars, on the other hand, are active pedestrianization and economic development tools. They successfully draw in regular commuting foot-traffic from the entire route, generating long-term demand for walking/biking across the urban center, while actively replacing primary dependence on the automobile for many typical urban activities across all income-level groups, thus increasing capacity for higher and better land uses along the route, which, in turn, rewards the street.

All that is made clear in Portland, where the streetcar endeavor was not only vital to secure smarter land use planning initiatives that ensure mixed-use and dense developments, but has now all but guaranteed their continued vitality and implementation. This self-reinforcing “Streetcar Oriented Development” strategy (as Charlotte’s Planning Director Debra Campbell aptly terms this) mobilized the remarkable transformation of the Pearl District and encouraged the realization of an urban design remarkably conscious of its directive to serve not only DINK’s and students, but even (yes even!) the middle-class kids and families that are now beginning to make Downtown Portland their home.

_______________________
*Full disclosure here: yours truly is contributor to Infrastructurists “reasons” #33 & #34 (the last one I term the “Kevin Lynch advantage” heh, heh). I came in late there at the end after noticing a few particular advantages still missing in previous commentary. I, as with probably the rest of the contributors, am not particularly obsessed with the advantages of streetcars over buses (I care only about the advantages of the streetcar for urbanism), and I most certainly did not in any way intend my arguments to be taken in support of murdering/lynching/debasing all forms of bus-transit on the face of the planet.

I love communities with Hope

2009-05-26T18:13:00.000-04:00

Yours truly was a member of one of the many teams to interview this week for a chance to participate in the healthy communities initiative for the Sterling community in Greenville, S.C. The Bon Secours/St. Francis Hospital in that neighborhood is the lead organization of the Phoenix League, which is spearheading the effort to help Sterling rise from the ashes. There are rumors that there was a healthy competition among planning consultants for this job....including 30 firms, some from as far away as Philly and Denver...Yikes!

Greenville is a way cool city and I can see why folks would be eager to get work here. It has a pedestrianized downtown that is always well populated with people of all stripes and is strung with an enormous variety of local businesses (a sign of a truly healthy and attractive downtown). It has the rare asset of tumbling river with a roaring waterfall passing right through downtown, and wonderfully landscaped streets, parks and greenways. On top of all those assets it has a well-lived character, retaining many of its historic buildings, and you can tell Greenvillians really love their downtown.

Unfortunately, like many minority communities in the South, the Sterling community, which is just a fifteen minute walk from downtown, hardly has anything in terms of infrastructure & Greenville like amenities...except it does have a wonderfully intimate and neighborly character, mainly due to its very old, tight-knit neighborhood fabric. This community also has a keen sense of its history. Among the Sterling High School's alma matter include none other but Rev. Jesse Jackson.

And it does seem to have plenty of hope. I love the plaintive spirit in the Phoenix League's video. Who can help not wanting to be part of this project? Stealing great ideas from Vancouver's Crown Street and Seattle's SEA Streets (and various Flickr images), the video actually inspired me to create my own improvement concept for Sterling's wonderfully intimate streets: