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

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

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

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.