Okay, I'm going to make this short, but this past week has been wonderful. I entered an urban design competition in September of this year for Transportation Alternatives "21st Century Street". The site was 4th Ave and 9th Street in Brooklyn's Park Slope.
On Tuesday the 9th of December, I went down to NYC to collect my reward: the chance to meet the jury and get a tidy sum. It was held at Galapagos in DUMBO. Very cool. Everyone at TA was kind hosts.
I've made a website for the competition entry. Check it out at www.4thand9th.com.
15 December 2008
10 September 2008
Saving Our Schools, Saving Our Planet
I have commented on this before, but I want to reiterate some ideas about the connections between public schools, race relations, urban design, energy use and personal health.
In an earlier post, I commented about how one of the best things about the Obama candidacy was that he was of African decent -- thus perceived in the U.S. as African American (though I disagree with this perception). The point is that the United States has a long and very tenuous race relations history -- as do all neo-European (Australia, North and South America, etc.) areas, if not nearly every nation on earth. Human nature, perhaps.
However, because the U.S. has been the "world leader" for a good 60 years, our rolemodeling on this is both indirectly and directly examined by all other countries. I don't want to sound too "U.S. is the best" here, but I think we can all agree that other countries have looked to us for comparison and as a model.
In any event, five things have been the driving force in the vast and sweeping changes experienced over the past 60 years.
1) The creation of the Interstate Highway System based partially on aniexies of the Cold War.
2) The subsequent policies that followed concerning taxes, mortgages and home ownership.
3) The quick integration through forced federal policy of our public school system.
4) Inexpensive energy through deals cut with the Saudis coupled with the explosion of petroleum finding technologies and the general hands off energy policy.
5) The Green Revolution (partially brought about by cheap energy) that led to very inexpensive food.
None of these events were conspiracy in nature, but rather they indirectly combined and grew over several decades to be a perfect storm of decisions that we now deal with through global warming, 40,000 traffic deaths a year (10 times more than have died in Iraq since the start of the war!), increased diabetes rates, a national fat problem and now lower life expectancies among the young compared to their parents (at that is only propped up through massive spending on pharmaceuticals).
However, the perhaps the biggest driver in our national loss of city life (and all the socialization of behavior that comes with it) is the general failing of urban public schools. Fix the schools, and the main reason to move to the suburbs, drive everywhere, use a lot of gasoline, rape our farmland and forests for subdevelopments, gain weight, develop metabolic diseases and take a bunch of pharmaceuticals to "fix" them goes away. That's a huge sweeping statement that doesn't apply in every situation, but I don't think you can argue with the general statistical curve of things that moves in this direction.
Our public schools, I think, failed due to white flight. I want to stress that it is not because white people made the schools good. Rather, as a statistical group, I would argue that they paid more taxes and were higher on the socioeconomic ladder than other groups thus (again, as a group) provided a critical economic support to the city that was not immediately replaced as they moved out of the cities over the course of a decade or two.
Part of the reason they moved was the rapid integration and/or social engineering of the school system. Some sort of fix was needed at the time and the federal policy probably seemed like a good plan. I'm not going to argue that point. Rather, many found it a shock. So they moved to new school systems, usually in new suburbs created by cheap land, in turn created by the new Interstate Highway System.
None of this is new thinking. But Obama presents us with an awesome choice to start a repair process. And my hope is that the economic realities of the energy market provide the kick in the pants to continue the process.
In this New York Times article, the reporter uncovers Obama's motives for really delving into the public school issue. His experience in failure gave insight into future planning. This, along with extensive advice from experts, has led to significant and systematic policy proposals.
That process alone is the making of an excellent leader.
Obama is not the perfect candidate. He's still a politician. But his presidency could bring us great long-term benefits.
So here's how I think it could roll:
An Obama presidency empowers the black community, bringing about long-term social confidence building and changing the outlook for millions of young black men (and women). It also begins the "healing process" we need to start to rebuilt public trust.
His education policies, over the course of several years, reinvigorate urban public schools leading them to par with the best of the suburban schools. In tandem, energy prices stay high and conservation is encouraged through both regulatory and tax policy. These two events, coupled with increased urban regeneration, draws new parents from all income levels back into the cities, allowing them to drastically reduce their energy use and injecting even more funding into the school systems through an increased tax base, allowing them to surpass suburban schools and fueling the cycle even further.
We'd save so much. We'd save a generation of children from both undue social trama and start a path to reduced energy use removing pressure to purchase foreign oil and reducing the overall carbon footprint of the average American household to that of Britian (which is still, from a sustainability standpoint is way high).
The urban design part is that we have to be ready for the new residents. We need to plan now for significant upgrades and expansions of train-based transit systems. We must create (recreate) quality shared public space throughout neighborhoods and city centers. Lastly, we must streamline zoning and tax codes to allow for rapid redevelopment and redensification of our cities that call for high architectural quality and a diversification of housing typologies. This last piece is especially important so that enough supply of housing is created to keep prices low enough to justify moving in the first place. This cannot be a subsidy-based system. It has to be affordable market rate housing (a whole other post!).
Anyway, my hope for the future....
The article that inspired this post:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/us/politics/10educate.html
In an earlier post, I commented about how one of the best things about the Obama candidacy was that he was of African decent -- thus perceived in the U.S. as African American (though I disagree with this perception). The point is that the United States has a long and very tenuous race relations history -- as do all neo-European (Australia, North and South America, etc.) areas, if not nearly every nation on earth. Human nature, perhaps.
However, because the U.S. has been the "world leader" for a good 60 years, our rolemodeling on this is both indirectly and directly examined by all other countries. I don't want to sound too "U.S. is the best" here, but I think we can all agree that other countries have looked to us for comparison and as a model.
In any event, five things have been the driving force in the vast and sweeping changes experienced over the past 60 years.
1) The creation of the Interstate Highway System based partially on aniexies of the Cold War.
2) The subsequent policies that followed concerning taxes, mortgages and home ownership.
3) The quick integration through forced federal policy of our public school system.
4) Inexpensive energy through deals cut with the Saudis coupled with the explosion of petroleum finding technologies and the general hands off energy policy.
5) The Green Revolution (partially brought about by cheap energy) that led to very inexpensive food.
None of these events were conspiracy in nature, but rather they indirectly combined and grew over several decades to be a perfect storm of decisions that we now deal with through global warming, 40,000 traffic deaths a year (10 times more than have died in Iraq since the start of the war!), increased diabetes rates, a national fat problem and now lower life expectancies among the young compared to their parents (at that is only propped up through massive spending on pharmaceuticals).
However, the perhaps the biggest driver in our national loss of city life (and all the socialization of behavior that comes with it) is the general failing of urban public schools. Fix the schools, and the main reason to move to the suburbs, drive everywhere, use a lot of gasoline, rape our farmland and forests for subdevelopments, gain weight, develop metabolic diseases and take a bunch of pharmaceuticals to "fix" them goes away. That's a huge sweeping statement that doesn't apply in every situation, but I don't think you can argue with the general statistical curve of things that moves in this direction.
Our public schools, I think, failed due to white flight. I want to stress that it is not because white people made the schools good. Rather, as a statistical group, I would argue that they paid more taxes and were higher on the socioeconomic ladder than other groups thus (again, as a group) provided a critical economic support to the city that was not immediately replaced as they moved out of the cities over the course of a decade or two.
Part of the reason they moved was the rapid integration and/or social engineering of the school system. Some sort of fix was needed at the time and the federal policy probably seemed like a good plan. I'm not going to argue that point. Rather, many found it a shock. So they moved to new school systems, usually in new suburbs created by cheap land, in turn created by the new Interstate Highway System.
None of this is new thinking. But Obama presents us with an awesome choice to start a repair process. And my hope is that the economic realities of the energy market provide the kick in the pants to continue the process.
In this New York Times article, the reporter uncovers Obama's motives for really delving into the public school issue. His experience in failure gave insight into future planning. This, along with extensive advice from experts, has led to significant and systematic policy proposals.
That process alone is the making of an excellent leader.
Obama is not the perfect candidate. He's still a politician. But his presidency could bring us great long-term benefits.
So here's how I think it could roll:
An Obama presidency empowers the black community, bringing about long-term social confidence building and changing the outlook for millions of young black men (and women). It also begins the "healing process" we need to start to rebuilt public trust.
His education policies, over the course of several years, reinvigorate urban public schools leading them to par with the best of the suburban schools. In tandem, energy prices stay high and conservation is encouraged through both regulatory and tax policy. These two events, coupled with increased urban regeneration, draws new parents from all income levels back into the cities, allowing them to drastically reduce their energy use and injecting even more funding into the school systems through an increased tax base, allowing them to surpass suburban schools and fueling the cycle even further.
We'd save so much. We'd save a generation of children from both undue social trama and start a path to reduced energy use removing pressure to purchase foreign oil and reducing the overall carbon footprint of the average American household to that of Britian (which is still, from a sustainability standpoint is way high).
The urban design part is that we have to be ready for the new residents. We need to plan now for significant upgrades and expansions of train-based transit systems. We must create (recreate) quality shared public space throughout neighborhoods and city centers. Lastly, we must streamline zoning and tax codes to allow for rapid redevelopment and redensification of our cities that call for high architectural quality and a diversification of housing typologies. This last piece is especially important so that enough supply of housing is created to keep prices low enough to justify moving in the first place. This cannot be a subsidy-based system. It has to be affordable market rate housing (a whole other post!).
Anyway, my hope for the future....
The article that inspired this post:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/us/politics/10educate.html
11 July 2008
The High Cost of Death
I was thinking on the way home from work tonight about the cost of gasoline. Everybody whining (like Phil Gramm says!) about the prices. It's about $4.25 these days. Listening to NPR over the weekend report on how our Congresspersons went back to their districts over the 4th of July and got an ear full. One guy told his Representative, "If you want a revolution, let the gas prices keep going up."
It's pretty funny I think. I was thinking about this in terms of the cost of cigarettes, which Massachusetts and New York recently raised taxes on (in Mass, it was raised by $1 a pack!). Not many people are complaining about that. And yet we are just addicted to gasoline as we are to tobacco.
In the early 1990's, a pack of cigarettes was something like $1.35 ($2 in 2008 dollars). Now they are $7.50 -- a 375% increase. I think this is all good though. Cigarettes are a horrible pleasure for one person, but in the end, we all pay the monetary costs (the smoker pays the mortal costs, which of course, cannot have a price put on it unless you are an insurance adjuster). Smokers put a strain on the health care system and the economy. On the health care side, many smokers are getting some sort of government subsidized insurance, either because they are lower incomes or because they are of the generation that has a pension. On the economy, money spent on cigarettes cannot be spent or invested other places, so we loose out there too.
Gasoline is similar in that the immediate user is the person in the car, living miles from everything. They have to fill up their tanks and pay the costs for the vehicle. But we all pay for the climate change, the pollution, the kids with asthma, the environmental degradation, the noise, the loss of farmland. It's not much different: Tiny individual choices with costs involved for broader society.
Gasoline in the early 1990's was like $1 a gallon. It's only $4 now. With inflation that's a change from $1.5o to $4 - a 260% increase. That's a big jump, but way less than the rise in cigarette prices. And it's worse though, because a lot of the costs of cigarettes go to taxes funneled into health care, to child prevention and community education, to those courts have determined are victims of the tobacco industry. But the rise in gas prices have only benefited the oil producers. It's not paying for mass transit, sprawl mitigation, highway removal, farmland restoration, education programs on how to live without a car, or paying the doctor bills of those asthmatic children. And that's deeply sad.
We need to understand that oil is just as much as an addiction as tobacco. We lived without it for millennia, yet now, because everybody's a user, it's difficult to face up to fact that we're addicted.
It's time for an intervention.
It's pretty funny I think. I was thinking about this in terms of the cost of cigarettes, which Massachusetts and New York recently raised taxes on (in Mass, it was raised by $1 a pack!). Not many people are complaining about that. And yet we are just addicted to gasoline as we are to tobacco.
In the early 1990's, a pack of cigarettes was something like $1.35 ($2 in 2008 dollars). Now they are $7.50 -- a 375% increase. I think this is all good though. Cigarettes are a horrible pleasure for one person, but in the end, we all pay the monetary costs (the smoker pays the mortal costs, which of course, cannot have a price put on it unless you are an insurance adjuster). Smokers put a strain on the health care system and the economy. On the health care side, many smokers are getting some sort of government subsidized insurance, either because they are lower incomes or because they are of the generation that has a pension. On the economy, money spent on cigarettes cannot be spent or invested other places, so we loose out there too.
Gasoline is similar in that the immediate user is the person in the car, living miles from everything. They have to fill up their tanks and pay the costs for the vehicle. But we all pay for the climate change, the pollution, the kids with asthma, the environmental degradation, the noise, the loss of farmland. It's not much different: Tiny individual choices with costs involved for broader society.
Gasoline in the early 1990's was like $1 a gallon. It's only $4 now. With inflation that's a change from $1.5o to $4 - a 260% increase. That's a big jump, but way less than the rise in cigarette prices. And it's worse though, because a lot of the costs of cigarettes go to taxes funneled into health care, to child prevention and community education, to those courts have determined are victims of the tobacco industry. But the rise in gas prices have only benefited the oil producers. It's not paying for mass transit, sprawl mitigation, highway removal, farmland restoration, education programs on how to live without a car, or paying the doctor bills of those asthmatic children. And that's deeply sad.
We need to understand that oil is just as much as an addiction as tobacco. We lived without it for millennia, yet now, because everybody's a user, it's difficult to face up to fact that we're addicted.
It's time for an intervention.
19 May 2008
Stranded No More
It seems that we're actually starting to have this national discussion that I find ABSOLUTELY thrilling. It's a discussion about place.
Like a giant brain, it takes us a little while to get our heads wrapped around something. Sure, there's always the person who stands up in front of 5, 20, or 150 people and says things that sound really logical and forthwright, but decision making on a national level doesn't work like this. There needs to be 150,000 logical and forthwright people standing up, and then there needs to be, of course, columnists to write about what these people say. Then bloggers post bits about them, then...maybe, it becomes a news story. Then a bunch of news stories that sustain themselves over several months. Then, maybe, we get some watered down action in a similar trajectory that those 150,000 logical and forthwright people were talking about.
It's like that Saturday morning cartoon.
Have this happen several hundred times and we find ourselves with a new reality.
This is roughly my interpretation of how urban renewal came about. And it will be about the same way we'll start to dismantle our suburbs and move deeper into the city and create multi-modal transit/living centers. But it's going to take a lot of work. And a lot of people are going to lose money. And when that happens in America, people sue. Which just makes the whole process much longer, more expensive and painful. So prepare yourself.
Now that gas has been hovering around $4 a gallon for several weeks, we've started a new chapter in this discussion about energy we've been having since gas sustained itself at $2.50 a gallon.
First, it was about pairing back on trips. Then, it was about fuel economy. Then, it was about smaller cars. And now, we're reaching this new point where we start talking about (gasp) no cars. OH MY GOD!!!!! HAPPY DAY!!!!!
I remember when I was like 19 years old and would say things (because I was angst-ridden and contrarian) that it would be great if gas was $5 a gallon. So much would change. I even wrote a paper about it for a college class. Of course, it couldn't go to $5 a gallon overnight. Even at 19, I knew that was a recipe for economic disaster. Okay, then I thought, how about over several years, like 10. My thought wasn't market driven though. It was a tax. The government would say that in 10 years, gas will be $5 a gallon and every so often, we'd raise the tax toward meeting that $5 a gallon point. And all the money would be invested in transit.
I was promptly written off. Hey, I was 19.
Cars are becoming like cigarettes. In the 1960's, after it was becoming apparent that we'd all been sticking death in our mouths, people started smoking a little less. Then, every cigarette became filtered. Then lights. Then just when you were out at a bar. Then, about 1985, it was like, "hey, should I be smoking at all?"
And right now, we're starting this most excellent discussion. "Should I be driving at all?" I'm so happy and excited that I get to see this stuff not in the APA journals, but by perhaps the most mainstream of newspaper columnists, Paul Krugman at The New York Times. Read the question right here.
I can't wait to not sound like a fool by harrasing everyone I know about the pleasures of living without the need of an automobile. I'm not stranded anymore.
Like a giant brain, it takes us a little while to get our heads wrapped around something. Sure, there's always the person who stands up in front of 5, 20, or 150 people and says things that sound really logical and forthwright, but decision making on a national level doesn't work like this. There needs to be 150,000 logical and forthwright people standing up, and then there needs to be, of course, columnists to write about what these people say. Then bloggers post bits about them, then...maybe, it becomes a news story. Then a bunch of news stories that sustain themselves over several months. Then, maybe, we get some watered down action in a similar trajectory that those 150,000 logical and forthwright people were talking about.
It's like that Saturday morning cartoon.
Have this happen several hundred times and we find ourselves with a new reality.
This is roughly my interpretation of how urban renewal came about. And it will be about the same way we'll start to dismantle our suburbs and move deeper into the city and create multi-modal transit/living centers. But it's going to take a lot of work. And a lot of people are going to lose money. And when that happens in America, people sue. Which just makes the whole process much longer, more expensive and painful. So prepare yourself.
Now that gas has been hovering around $4 a gallon for several weeks, we've started a new chapter in this discussion about energy we've been having since gas sustained itself at $2.50 a gallon.
First, it was about pairing back on trips. Then, it was about fuel economy. Then, it was about smaller cars. And now, we're reaching this new point where we start talking about (gasp) no cars. OH MY GOD!!!!! HAPPY DAY!!!!!
I remember when I was like 19 years old and would say things (because I was angst-ridden and contrarian) that it would be great if gas was $5 a gallon. So much would change. I even wrote a paper about it for a college class. Of course, it couldn't go to $5 a gallon overnight. Even at 19, I knew that was a recipe for economic disaster. Okay, then I thought, how about over several years, like 10. My thought wasn't market driven though. It was a tax. The government would say that in 10 years, gas will be $5 a gallon and every so often, we'd raise the tax toward meeting that $5 a gallon point. And all the money would be invested in transit.
I was promptly written off. Hey, I was 19.
Cars are becoming like cigarettes. In the 1960's, after it was becoming apparent that we'd all been sticking death in our mouths, people started smoking a little less. Then, every cigarette became filtered. Then lights. Then just when you were out at a bar. Then, about 1985, it was like, "hey, should I be smoking at all?"
And right now, we're starting this most excellent discussion. "Should I be driving at all?" I'm so happy and excited that I get to see this stuff not in the APA journals, but by perhaps the most mainstream of newspaper columnists, Paul Krugman at The New York Times. Read the question right here.
I can't wait to not sound like a fool by harrasing everyone I know about the pleasures of living without the need of an automobile. I'm not stranded anymore.
06 March 2008
Giving Up
I've been having a lot of thought lately about the act of giving up. A lot of was going on in our cities 50 years ago and since is the act of giving up. Here was this thing, this social urban life that we had created for millenia over and over again, around the world. And we walked away. We just became frustrated with our construct and we gave up. We moved out, left them to rot, and ... forgot. We decided to be guided into a false representation of urbaness, sanitized, distant and cold.
The popular history regarding this I think really glosses over a lot of things. I didn't live during those times, of course. I can only look at the urban anthropological evidence and see the pain left behind. It is easy for us to see the bandages. Some see the scars. I'm nothing special, to be sure, but when I look at our cities -- and I've looked at many -- I see the pain that is still there.
Cities, to me, are living things. The beauty they have is that they outlive us, by generations. They are the thing, the non-human thing at least, that we leave behind, for others to enjoy. And every wound that we give them is perhaps, bandaged up by the next behind us.
Our cities 50 years ago were really horrible places to live, I think. We look back now and see old images of what looked like thriving metros, full of little shops and bussling with people. But those are only the photographs. It must have been conditions which we, living today, can't begin to understand. Why else would carve them up and destroy every essence of realness that was once there? If they were so wonderful, why would we walk away?
Photographs are images, and images only. Your shoebox (or your hard drive) I'm sure is filled with images where everyone looks happy. But I doubt they are, inside the back alleys of the mind, pressed inside the tenaments of the frontal lobe, choked with the mental pollution that comes from waking up everyday.
Obviously, our collective love affair with the city was all for naught. We too quickly ran away from them when things were bad and ran into ourselves, our perfect homes and perfect lives. Perfectly separated from having to deal with other people and all the shit that comes with that. Now we've come to delude ourselves that cities are about glamour, entertainment and wealth. But they are not. That is the city that we don't try to get to know, the one we take out on the weekend, but never discover the true essence of it.
We gave up.
The popular history regarding this I think really glosses over a lot of things. I didn't live during those times, of course. I can only look at the urban anthropological evidence and see the pain left behind. It is easy for us to see the bandages. Some see the scars. I'm nothing special, to be sure, but when I look at our cities -- and I've looked at many -- I see the pain that is still there.
Cities, to me, are living things. The beauty they have is that they outlive us, by generations. They are the thing, the non-human thing at least, that we leave behind, for others to enjoy. And every wound that we give them is perhaps, bandaged up by the next behind us.
Our cities 50 years ago were really horrible places to live, I think. We look back now and see old images of what looked like thriving metros, full of little shops and bussling with people. But those are only the photographs. It must have been conditions which we, living today, can't begin to understand. Why else would carve them up and destroy every essence of realness that was once there? If they were so wonderful, why would we walk away?
Photographs are images, and images only. Your shoebox (or your hard drive) I'm sure is filled with images where everyone looks happy. But I doubt they are, inside the back alleys of the mind, pressed inside the tenaments of the frontal lobe, choked with the mental pollution that comes from waking up everyday.
Obviously, our collective love affair with the city was all for naught. We too quickly ran away from them when things were bad and ran into ourselves, our perfect homes and perfect lives. Perfectly separated from having to deal with other people and all the shit that comes with that. Now we've come to delude ourselves that cities are about glamour, entertainment and wealth. But they are not. That is the city that we don't try to get to know, the one we take out on the weekend, but never discover the true essence of it.
We gave up.
04 March 2008
Killing Us Softly
We're pretty funny, I think.
About 100 years ago we unlocked this amazing energy source, oil. It's really efficient and because it's fairly primitive (just light it on fire), the technology can spread easily. It doesn't require advanced degrees or complex ways of seeing it. No. It's intuitive and fit our Victorian mindset (at the time) pretty well. Take this stuff, burn it. Oil is pre-science. We've tried to upgrade it to our modern world, but it's very last century.
Oil is liquid. All the other stuff we found (aside from oils derived from animals, which has to go through a process that isn't as direct and is far more constrained in its supply) wasn't as liquid. We had to dig for little coal rocks. Trees can be wiped out in a generation and take two to return the same energy production. Oil, well, oil can be dug and the inherent pressure alone allows us to pump it anywhere.
Basic economic theory holds that when there is vast abundance of anything, it gets used up wastefully. This hold true for oil as sure as it does human affection or fame. If you don't appreciate what you have, you'll loose it. Religion and philosophy have told us this for millena.
It took the earth millions of years to store up this energy. And while some call for the end of oil, who knows where we'll find more. But we do know that we've burnt a lot of it, most of it at some ungodly level of efficency. (My brand new water heater -- which runs on natural gas -- oil's cousin -- has an efficency level of 52%. That's like getting a paycheck for $1,000, then taking $480 and setting it ablaze.)
But energy is never created or destroyed, right? Correct. All that wasted energy did end up somewhere else. Some of it in the form of cash for those taking large profits on inefficently designed machines that use the energy (instead of paying people to make the machines more efficent). Some of it in our national GDP because our input energy costs were lower than our competitors, fueling economic growth. Most of it though is floating around us, in the form of pollution.
We have an amazingly inefficent and primitive economic system that places sole value on growth. There is no other measure. So because of this, our "lifestyle" is also about growth and consumption. Massive consumption. But we don't pay for it, at least not with a quantified cost. They are all hidden. In children's asthma and the melting ice caps. In the loss of species. And all the other things environmential types say we've destroyed.
And since most of the oil in the world is under the feet of those we don't really agree with, and since we think we can make fuel from food (like our bodies?), we seek to instituionalize those ideas and pass laws making that sort of production easy and cheap (at least to those doing it directly).
Our society reminds me of the laptop computer. Laptops are amazing, right? All this power in this little box. But its achilles heel is the battery. Another 100 year old technology powering this very 21st century concept. We have a pretty modern society, but its fuel is pre-science, pre-rationality, pre-post-modern. We might as well have real horses under the hoods of Porsches. Oil isn't that far removed.
So when we start using food to prop up an unsustainable system that BOUND TO FAIL, it isn't surprising that we start sending out massive ripples in our interconnected economy.
Luckily, mainstream media (at least the big newspapers) aren't idiots like those making policy. I just want to say THANK YOU New York Times. Not that anyone will listen, but you guys got it out there. And you got it right. Bless you.
One last thought. We erased blantant racism with the institutionalized version about 30 years ago. Hide it behind the "policies". For the past 10 years, when that form of racism started to be uncovered, we've moved it to economic racism. So yeah, feel guilty. It's your fault after all. And mine too.
Priced Out of the Market
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/opinion/03mon1.html
About 100 years ago we unlocked this amazing energy source, oil. It's really efficient and because it's fairly primitive (just light it on fire), the technology can spread easily. It doesn't require advanced degrees or complex ways of seeing it. No. It's intuitive and fit our Victorian mindset (at the time) pretty well. Take this stuff, burn it. Oil is pre-science. We've tried to upgrade it to our modern world, but it's very last century.
Oil is liquid. All the other stuff we found (aside from oils derived from animals, which has to go through a process that isn't as direct and is far more constrained in its supply) wasn't as liquid. We had to dig for little coal rocks. Trees can be wiped out in a generation and take two to return the same energy production. Oil, well, oil can be dug and the inherent pressure alone allows us to pump it anywhere.
Basic economic theory holds that when there is vast abundance of anything, it gets used up wastefully. This hold true for oil as sure as it does human affection or fame. If you don't appreciate what you have, you'll loose it. Religion and philosophy have told us this for millena.
It took the earth millions of years to store up this energy. And while some call for the end of oil, who knows where we'll find more. But we do know that we've burnt a lot of it, most of it at some ungodly level of efficency. (My brand new water heater -- which runs on natural gas -- oil's cousin -- has an efficency level of 52%. That's like getting a paycheck for $1,000, then taking $480 and setting it ablaze.)
But energy is never created or destroyed, right? Correct. All that wasted energy did end up somewhere else. Some of it in the form of cash for those taking large profits on inefficently designed machines that use the energy (instead of paying people to make the machines more efficent). Some of it in our national GDP because our input energy costs were lower than our competitors, fueling economic growth. Most of it though is floating around us, in the form of pollution.
We have an amazingly inefficent and primitive economic system that places sole value on growth. There is no other measure. So because of this, our "lifestyle" is also about growth and consumption. Massive consumption. But we don't pay for it, at least not with a quantified cost. They are all hidden. In children's asthma and the melting ice caps. In the loss of species. And all the other things environmential types say we've destroyed.
And since most of the oil in the world is under the feet of those we don't really agree with, and since we think we can make fuel from food (like our bodies?), we seek to instituionalize those ideas and pass laws making that sort of production easy and cheap (at least to those doing it directly).
Our society reminds me of the laptop computer. Laptops are amazing, right? All this power in this little box. But its achilles heel is the battery. Another 100 year old technology powering this very 21st century concept. We have a pretty modern society, but its fuel is pre-science, pre-rationality, pre-post-modern. We might as well have real horses under the hoods of Porsches. Oil isn't that far removed.
So when we start using food to prop up an unsustainable system that BOUND TO FAIL, it isn't surprising that we start sending out massive ripples in our interconnected economy.
Luckily, mainstream media (at least the big newspapers) aren't idiots like those making policy. I just want to say THANK YOU New York Times. Not that anyone will listen, but you guys got it out there. And you got it right. Bless you.
One last thought. We erased blantant racism with the institutionalized version about 30 years ago. Hide it behind the "policies". For the past 10 years, when that form of racism started to be uncovered, we've moved it to economic racism. So yeah, feel guilty. It's your fault after all. And mine too.
Priced Out of the Market
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/opinion/03mon1.html
25 February 2008
New Luxury Condos Coming Soon
A talk, given by me for Pecha Kucha #3 at Harvard Graduate School of Design on Feburary 22nd.
---------------------------
Last summer, I attended a conference on global competition hosted by IBM. About 10 years ago, IBM was in trouble. They had been a powerhouse in the technology industry, but were finding that it was increasingly competitive to turn a profit in manufacturing. Everyone could make computer hardware, as it is based on standardized production using modular components. The only place to compete was price. Every year, the price kept going down and they were expected to innovate with each round of machines.
IBM realized that they were competing at just one end of the scale – that it was difficult to add value and were not able to make their product special.
When the world is standardized and those standards are institutionalized, we loose the freedom to innovate. This lack of innovation will ultimately ruin you. Innovation is the way to adapt and grow to changing conditions over time.
About 50 years ago, the Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa started developing an idea that was a reaction to modern design, the machine age of architecture. Corb gave us a machine for living. Ford gave us the Model T. The idea was that if we could simply perfect something, it could be useful for everyone. To them, there was an ultimate and absolute Good, and thus universal.
Kurokawa developed the concept of Symbiosis, as a move away from the age of the machine to the age of life. The underlying thought here is that in all things there are multiple possibilities, that the world is not static perfections but is composed of unlimited and sometimes opposing value systems constantly in flux, like an ecosystem. There isn’t a universal good.
Kurokawa’s ideas influenced a generation of architects, including Moshe Safdie. Safdie’s first acclaimed work, Habitat 67 in Montreal is a good example of Symbiosis in that rather than being a regular apartment building with a long double loaded corridor with some fancy façade, he added value by throwing out baseline design standards. He made it buildable by using modular blocks, so that there is repeat, but it isn’t as inhumane as the average building.
IBM is now a very healthy company. They don’t sell computers anymore. In fact, they’re trying hard not to sell much of anything that physically exists. IBM sells concepts and methods. They don’t compete in a world of institutionalized standards anymore. They come into a project to learn from the client and innovate, keeping things exciting and full of passion.
We all like the passion.
As designers, we have a passion to fix things. Architects are hired to fix the client’s design problems. Industrial designers fix products. James Dyson was famously frustrated with vaccum cleaners and decided to fix them. That’s what we do. And we’re so passionate about fixing things, we’ll go to school for years, work for little or no pay, late into the night. Just so we can say “I fixed that.”
We always create finished products, be they buildings, master plans or shoes. We always want to figure out everything, fixing them in time.
Designing a new city, a neighborhood or a building and we emphasize some values over others, but it is nearly impossible to design an large urban environment that functions past the return on investment. Maybe that’s why we don’t do it.
Of all the new developments that seek to stitch the city back together or even the creation of new cities in Dubai, what is really being created are billboards proclaiming “Welcome Back City Life”
Urbanity isn’t necessarily about density, but rather diversity and scale. Diversity of owners, uses and age combined with scale of structures. But we create today bound by standardization.
In architecture and urban design, these standards are concerned with three things: the perception of life safety; institutionalized ideas of accessibility; and lastly profitable space. Everything else is just window treatments.
The first two are required by law and to keep from being sued, and greatly influence the third. Profitable space is determined by spreadsheets, which try to factor what any renovation or new construction will offer a return on investment. If your client’s spreadsheet doesn’t put out the right numbers, you will be changing your design.
But spreadsheets don’t take into consideration the hidden and intangible profits, because they are hard to quantify. Spreadsheets are a relic of the machine age, a supposed absolute truth good for every instance.
This drives urban designers to keep building up in scale until that magic number is reached in the spreadsheet. These spreadsheets gave us suburban sprawl and now give us megablock developments in our cities, wiping away the intricate urban fabrics that existed before. They create dense single-use spaces that cater to only one socioeconomic value.
Many ideas to counter this are centered on some modular form that can grow as needed. But that method still has limitations though because it based on systematic understanding of growth. What if growth occurs outside of this developed system? Kawneer has developed a large system of modular storefronts, but end up looking the same.
I think we fail to see value in mishmashs, the beauty of time and decay. We tend to think that broken buildings need to be replacement or renovated and that the downtrodden areas of our city need to be revitalized in order to have value.
We fail to see the dynamic interaction between new and old, fixed and broken, things that don’t work and things that do. Not just their intrinsic value, but how the urban matrix support each other with thousands of unquantified connections. Making a city requires a passion for the random and an allegiance to time.
It is improbable and unwise to create Rich Urban Fabrics. We should be more like the new IBM, selling concepts and ideas, focusing on creating urban threads that can be woven by thousands of people without our input.
Within our current value system, if we want to create true urbanity we have to create new spreadsheets. We cannot continue to develop our cities on cost alone. As has happened in the manufacturing industry, we will reach a point where we cannot add value to our product and will be forced to exit the industry, leaving us with passionless and commoditized collections of New Luxury Condos Coming Soon.
22 January 2008
Did You Just Double Dip?
This post is a little more personal. I live in a Boston neighborhood that 45 years ago reached its zenith in terms of actual families with kids living here, like many urban neighborhoods around the country. The neighborhood is full of triple-deckers - turn of the century house with three floors - built primarily to house established immigrants (mostly Irish in our case) and their extended families and/or boarders. Basically, the guy who built my house worked at a local brewery and I assume was about 30 years old, had saved some cash, and had this house built. He then probably moved in with his wife and kids, and I'm sure an aunt, uncle, grandparent and ol' Francis who needed a place to stay. There were probably 18 people living here when it was built. Today there are 9, and it's really meant to be 7.
In any event, about 45 years ago, the people in the neighborhood left for the suburbs. More accurately, the children or grandchildren of the first generation to move in here moved to the suburbs. This loss of bodies, i.e. taxpayers and children, was a huge blow to the city and the neighborhood. Schools declined with them the neighborhood in general. Which made more people leave. We all know the story.
The houses then became rentals, usually to students in the nearby universities. The disproportionately high number of students puts these strange ripples into the economy. First, the rents are paid by a third party (the student's parents). So a four-bedroom apartment is being rented, in effect, to at least four - perhaps even eight - incomes. And they are incomes of moderately well off people - I mean, their kids are going to college. Somewhat expensive colleges too.
So this purchasing power is amazing. Say each family that sends their kid to college has an income of $100,000. That's like someone with a $400,000 salary renting that apartment. And the price of anything is what the market will bear. This is essentially renting to the same people that shop at Louis Vuitton when they need a new handbag.
Put that next to a family of four that does well, say, brings in $70K a year. There is no comparison, even at that level.
The triple decker has three apartments in it. Each has usually 4 bedrooms. Each bedroom goes for about $800 a month - putting it on par with a dorm room. So your typical triple-decker brings in $9600 a month. This makes the defacto price of a triple decker about $950,000 (the mortgage of which would be paid for in the rent money, leaving a little each month for maintenance).
This prices out that family of four even more. I suppose they could buy the triple decker at $950,000, live in the top floor and rent out the two other floors. But that means that they are effectively paying $3200 a month in rent. Which is impossible for a family making $70K a year.
This ripple in the housing economy further denegrates the neighborhood and the city, if you go by the notion that familes with children need be of a good population proportion in order to grow economically and address social instability.
So here's the kicker. The neighborhoods that this sort of market has been affected most are the areas around Northeastern, Wentworth Institute of Technology and Boston University. The majority of students from these schools are from...the suburbs and exurbs of Boston. Produced by parents whose parents and grandparents who moved out there from...the neighborhoods where the students now live.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
In any event, about 45 years ago, the people in the neighborhood left for the suburbs. More accurately, the children or grandchildren of the first generation to move in here moved to the suburbs. This loss of bodies, i.e. taxpayers and children, was a huge blow to the city and the neighborhood. Schools declined with them the neighborhood in general. Which made more people leave. We all know the story.
The houses then became rentals, usually to students in the nearby universities. The disproportionately high number of students puts these strange ripples into the economy. First, the rents are paid by a third party (the student's parents). So a four-bedroom apartment is being rented, in effect, to at least four - perhaps even eight - incomes. And they are incomes of moderately well off people - I mean, their kids are going to college. Somewhat expensive colleges too.
So this purchasing power is amazing. Say each family that sends their kid to college has an income of $100,000. That's like someone with a $400,000 salary renting that apartment. And the price of anything is what the market will bear. This is essentially renting to the same people that shop at Louis Vuitton when they need a new handbag.
Put that next to a family of four that does well, say, brings in $70K a year. There is no comparison, even at that level.
The triple decker has three apartments in it. Each has usually 4 bedrooms. Each bedroom goes for about $800 a month - putting it on par with a dorm room. So your typical triple-decker brings in $9600 a month. This makes the defacto price of a triple decker about $950,000 (the mortgage of which would be paid for in the rent money, leaving a little each month for maintenance).
This prices out that family of four even more. I suppose they could buy the triple decker at $950,000, live in the top floor and rent out the two other floors. But that means that they are effectively paying $3200 a month in rent. Which is impossible for a family making $70K a year.
This ripple in the housing economy further denegrates the neighborhood and the city, if you go by the notion that familes with children need be of a good population proportion in order to grow economically and address social instability.
So here's the kicker. The neighborhoods that this sort of market has been affected most are the areas around Northeastern, Wentworth Institute of Technology and Boston University. The majority of students from these schools are from...the suburbs and exurbs of Boston. Produced by parents whose parents and grandparents who moved out there from...the neighborhoods where the students now live.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
It's The Energy, Stupid!
Energy is the earth's salary. We've been being paid for about 4 billion years, from our employer, the sun. For the first 3,999,999,799 years, we only used a very small portion of the salary and threw the rest in million year CDs. And each time one of those CDs matured, we just bought more. But now we cashing those things out. Like a gambling addict with a bad run at the table. Now those CDs are becoming scarce and we're trying to figure out how to spin gold from straw. It's as if we hired Enron to cook the energy books.
But thankfully, some people are starting to wonder, look a little closer.
Why is Europe always so cool? (see article link at the end of this post) I mean, they have manufacturers that love to pollute just as much as anywhere. Mercedes and Porsche produce cars that makes most American SUVs look positively green! The EU bureaucracies must have just as many crazy lobbists as the US Congress. So why is it that Europeans seem to actually look into things before jumping on the bandwagon and even if they do, they seem to be able to stop in their tracks and change course for the better?
My prediction: we will soon realize that much of any green hype is just an energy shell game, and will be forced to do two things to survive: bring up the standards of solar, wind and tidal to the efficency level of fossil fuels and concurrently cut our energy use in half. HALF! Then, each year, drop it by another percent.
There is hope. Fossil fuels have had 100 years to reach their efficency level (mostly in the past 30, as we've started to run out of the easy stuff) plus they were the main product on the market, so they had the production and distribution in place to work all the kinks out. As we get closer to $200 barrel oil, we'll start killing each other en masse for the stuff (as opposed to the few thousand or so we murder each year now). Then, maybe we'll start thinking about the way forward.
The article that inspired this post:
Europe, Cutting Biofuel Subsidies, Redirects Aid to Stress Greenest Options
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/business/worldbusiness/22biofuels.html?pagewanted=all
21 January 2008
The Oil Hurricane
I’m not going to rant about this too much, but I think all these things about the side affects of energy useage is the top issue facing us today as a nation and world, as it is directly related to healthcare, economy, environment, immigration and war. And I have yet to see anyone – aside from Bill Richardson, perhaps Ron Paul or Bruce Babbit – speak in these terms.
Two great stories on energy that illuminate the issue.
Did Oil Canals Worsen Katrina's Effects?
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jnnbJOkWvrj9pYlZIpA-XEEM9eRAD8U9OMF80
A New, Global Oil Quandary: Costly Fuel Means Costly Calories
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/19/business/worldbusiness/19palmoil.html?em&ex=1201064400&en=ebc8e54eb8913c3d&ei=5070
Two great stories on energy that illuminate the issue.
Did Oil Canals Worsen Katrina's Effects?
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jnnbJOkWvrj9pYlZIpA-XEEM9eRAD8U9OMF80
A New, Global Oil Quandary: Costly Fuel Means Costly Calories
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/19/business/worldbusiness/19palmoil.html?em&ex=1201064400&en=ebc8e54eb8913c3d&ei=5070
15 January 2008
Build It And They Will Come
The UAE is amazing. The competition between Ras al-Khaimah, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi is becoming a spectator sport. Each want the best of the world built or rebuilt at its doorstep, in hopes of creating a world city that will rival all the rest. It is difficult to pass judgement over this (wait for it) because every other city in the world has done and is doing the same thing to some degree for at least the past century. The difference here is these places have the funds, courtesy of the G8 and their oil-based economy (at least partially; there is a financial industry too. Ras al-Khaimah actually doesn't have much oil). So the scale of this desire is unprecedented.
Last year, there were announcements of franchises of the Louvre and the Guggenheim. The former was somewhat unexpected, but the latter not so much. And what self-repecting city wouldn't want a solid cultural institution to add to the foundation of a metropolis?
When I used to live in West Virginia, small towns would hope for a McDonalds so it would put them on the map. Dubai's intentions are on the other end of that. Stratospherically on the other end, but the end result is the same. It gives them clout in hopes of creating sustainable growth.
(Financially sustainable should be stressed here).
But when I read the latest tit for tat game going on in the UAE, I was shocked. Dubai now will recreate Lyon, France. Not just a street or two, but the whole damn thing. Apparently, a Dubai businessman fell in love with Lyon and wanted to take it home with him. I'm wondering the real motivation here though. This is a place that hasn't known urbanity in the sense of the 20th century form. It was generally a tribal prior to the British showing up, and I think the emirates reflect that heritage. Like Las Vegas, everything has to be new. And it's easier to copy than innovate.
Ras al-Khaimah is the most innovative of the three (they recently hired Rem Koolhaus to do the master plan for a new city), but even here it has the glitz of Vegas: bigger, shiner, newer.
But urban centers, I would argue, to be sustainable (both environmentally and financially here) must be granular and geologic. I mean that they must be developed on the intimate scale and must lay down new layers as time goes on. They are not works of art. They are process. This is the same reason a new downtown civic center/stadium/office tower/et al. never reinvigorates a neighborhood. Cities are not linear ideas.
Master plans are great. They solidify and document a concept at one point in time, and hopefully guide development for several years. But they change too. The best places know this, this sort of vernacular planning approach. The successful cities didn't begin with a plan. Not that they didn't have planning concepts, but there was no one thing that said this goes here and that goes there and that is the way it will be for all eternity. Like life paths laid down in this way, planned cities are existentially barren.
So the idea of both Ras al-Khaimah to start a whole city (not a town) from scratch or Dubai to import one in totality is short sighted to say the least. I see the motivation. The competition at home is tough and all the other cities around the world have had a head start. But what's the goal here? A place to live? Or a showpiece that is only interesting as long as it is new. This stuff is urban design porn. Some of it, a little more arty perhaps. And in reality, it is no different than going out to the middle of Cobb County Georgia and putting in a subdevelopment. Blowing your wad all at once is fantastic for a few moments. Then the whole place is becomes flacid and only the instigator is satisfied. Come to think of it, for the next trick, how about Cobb County - Dubai? It would make a better fit philosophically.
Read this version of the Lyon Dubai story:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/01/04/wdubai104.xml
To see what Ras al-Khaimah is doing, watch this excellent piece:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/uae/index.html
Last year, there were announcements of franchises of the Louvre and the Guggenheim. The former was somewhat unexpected, but the latter not so much. And what self-repecting city wouldn't want a solid cultural institution to add to the foundation of a metropolis?
When I used to live in West Virginia, small towns would hope for a McDonalds so it would put them on the map. Dubai's intentions are on the other end of that. Stratospherically on the other end, but the end result is the same. It gives them clout in hopes of creating sustainable growth.
(Financially sustainable should be stressed here).
But when I read the latest tit for tat game going on in the UAE, I was shocked. Dubai now will recreate Lyon, France. Not just a street or two, but the whole damn thing. Apparently, a Dubai businessman fell in love with Lyon and wanted to take it home with him. I'm wondering the real motivation here though. This is a place that hasn't known urbanity in the sense of the 20th century form. It was generally a tribal prior to the British showing up, and I think the emirates reflect that heritage. Like Las Vegas, everything has to be new. And it's easier to copy than innovate.
Ras al-Khaimah is the most innovative of the three (they recently hired Rem Koolhaus to do the master plan for a new city), but even here it has the glitz of Vegas: bigger, shiner, newer.
But urban centers, I would argue, to be sustainable (both environmentally and financially here) must be granular and geologic. I mean that they must be developed on the intimate scale and must lay down new layers as time goes on. They are not works of art. They are process. This is the same reason a new downtown civic center/stadium/office tower/et al. never reinvigorates a neighborhood. Cities are not linear ideas.
Master plans are great. They solidify and document a concept at one point in time, and hopefully guide development for several years. But they change too. The best places know this, this sort of vernacular planning approach. The successful cities didn't begin with a plan. Not that they didn't have planning concepts, but there was no one thing that said this goes here and that goes there and that is the way it will be for all eternity. Like life paths laid down in this way, planned cities are existentially barren.
So the idea of both Ras al-Khaimah to start a whole city (not a town) from scratch or Dubai to import one in totality is short sighted to say the least. I see the motivation. The competition at home is tough and all the other cities around the world have had a head start. But what's the goal here? A place to live? Or a showpiece that is only interesting as long as it is new. This stuff is urban design porn. Some of it, a little more arty perhaps. And in reality, it is no different than going out to the middle of Cobb County Georgia and putting in a subdevelopment. Blowing your wad all at once is fantastic for a few moments. Then the whole place is becomes flacid and only the instigator is satisfied. Come to think of it, for the next trick, how about Cobb County - Dubai? It would make a better fit philosophically.
Read this version of the Lyon Dubai story:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/01/04/wdubai104.xml
To see what Ras al-Khaimah is doing, watch this excellent piece:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/uae/index.html
07 January 2008
Patches: City Life is a Spreadsheet
I have this whole "thread" of thoughts lately about the urban fabric. I brought it up in the last post even, but want to talk a little more about it.
Cities all over the globe have been experiencing a real change in land ownership. Most older cities were made up of "city parcels," with dimensions like 40' x 100'. Even downtowns, originally at least. The big shift in sizes downtown came in the 1950's (30 years earlier for larger cities like New York). That how urban centers changed from pedestrian scaled blocks with many buildings and tons of doors to mega blocks and four doors (one for each face of the block). This really screws up the nature of the city. As a pedestrian, you have to walk a lot farther to reach the laundromat, the bank, the shop, etc. Even when new development that takes whole block tries to replicate the old with many doors along a sidewalk, the regularity of the building (being designed and developed by a single party) gives this Disney impression of fakeworld.
The interesting thing is that this is now moving out of the urban centers to the next ring or two out as the "way to develop". Don't let anyone fool you. All development is about the economics of the thing, never about design or best scenarios for life. The costs of development must be repaid as soon as possible. Developers don't set out to make something that last for 100 years (they never did, even 100 years ago). They need to get their returns and then turn a certain about of profit (usually 25%) as soon as they can. So with all the talk about "pedestrian" scale or "lifestyle center", don't forget that those are just labels and perhaps minor adjustments make to designs to get things built faster (with less community or city interference) and see their returns.
City life is a spreadsheet.
The spreadsheets say that footprints need to be X size, because stairways, hallways and entrances take away from leaseable or sellable space. All builings, now with modern building codes, need to have two staircases, an elevator and be accessible. By law. All of it steming from local fire departments and the Disabilities Act. So to a developer, that's like a car maker putting air bags and doors on cars. They gotta do it.
So ten 40' x 100' buildings in a block, if they are all new, require 20 staircases and at least 10 elevators. Plus accessible bathrooms on each level. You can get around some of this, but it requires time and headache. And that's money.
But one 400' x 100' building in a block would require much less than 20 staircases, and definately less than 10 elevators. And a lot less hallways. You can't lease hallways, so when development happens, we get the 400' x 100' building. Development always wants to consolidate parcels and build bigger buildings. Not because developers hate us and want us to drive everywhere. Because the spreadsheets they use, or rather, the spreadsheets that their bankers use (or actually, the ones the banks buying the loans from the bank that is lending to the developer use). These aren't bad people. They just can't go to their investors and say they are giving Mrs. Big Developer $300 million dollars so he can make pedestrian friendly urban centers. "Where's proof of our return?" the investors say. And the nice bank says just believe in them. "This new development is gonna work, dangit, I CAN FEEL IT!"
If lending worked like that...wait, that's EXACTLY how we got into the housing mess!...but alas, another post.
Anyway, the best urban centers are a bunch of thin threads that make a fabric. They are knitted together, hopefully by people who were not paying attention to the directions. That way the fabric is all knotted up with irregular holes in it. It doesn't really lay flat, like the first time you tried to knit a scarf. That's the best urban centers (see Tokyo, London, Barcelona, the left bank of Paris, downtown Boston, lower Manhattan, et, al).
So when new development happens in these places, they gotta buy up a bunch of parcels, and combine them to build a big ass building so they can see that return on their investment. But instead of being nice threads reweaving the hole, the easiest thing to do (as any mother fixing a hole on their children's jeans will attest) is to patch it.
Eventually, we get a city of patches. And that never looks good.
One interesting note. I've seen a lot of new buildings in Tokyo that are 10 stories tall and still occupy that 40' x 100' plot. And see four or five together. They look pretty cool. But from up high, you can see new developments, like Roppongi Hills, that totally disenegrate the surrounding fabric. We know Roppongi is successful, economically. So what spreadsheet was the guy that built the little thin thing? (Aside from different egress and accesibilty requirements?)
Secondly, a lot of new development in The City (London) (again, aside from the Gerkin), is taking a whole block of old buildings, keeping the exterior shells and then putting in whole new cores and keeping all the doors on the street -- maybe adding a couple floors. Again, what does this spreadsheet say?
So when people lament that new development destroys cities, tell them to write a better spreadsheet. Marching like a hippy to change the "bad" developers is pointless. Get a real estate degree and start a company. Development is ESSENTIAL for cities. They gotta change, always. We just need to show that good change can be more profitable than what we've been doing.
Cities all over the globe have been experiencing a real change in land ownership. Most older cities were made up of "city parcels," with dimensions like 40' x 100'. Even downtowns, originally at least. The big shift in sizes downtown came in the 1950's (30 years earlier for larger cities like New York). That how urban centers changed from pedestrian scaled blocks with many buildings and tons of doors to mega blocks and four doors (one for each face of the block). This really screws up the nature of the city. As a pedestrian, you have to walk a lot farther to reach the laundromat, the bank, the shop, etc. Even when new development that takes whole block tries to replicate the old with many doors along a sidewalk, the regularity of the building (being designed and developed by a single party) gives this Disney impression of fakeworld.
The interesting thing is that this is now moving out of the urban centers to the next ring or two out as the "way to develop". Don't let anyone fool you. All development is about the economics of the thing, never about design or best scenarios for life. The costs of development must be repaid as soon as possible. Developers don't set out to make something that last for 100 years (they never did, even 100 years ago). They need to get their returns and then turn a certain about of profit (usually 25%) as soon as they can. So with all the talk about "pedestrian" scale or "lifestyle center", don't forget that those are just labels and perhaps minor adjustments make to designs to get things built faster (with less community or city interference) and see their returns.
City life is a spreadsheet.
The spreadsheets say that footprints need to be X size, because stairways, hallways and entrances take away from leaseable or sellable space. All builings, now with modern building codes, need to have two staircases, an elevator and be accessible. By law. All of it steming from local fire departments and the Disabilities Act. So to a developer, that's like a car maker putting air bags and doors on cars. They gotta do it.
So ten 40' x 100' buildings in a block, if they are all new, require 20 staircases and at least 10 elevators. Plus accessible bathrooms on each level. You can get around some of this, but it requires time and headache. And that's money.
But one 400' x 100' building in a block would require much less than 20 staircases, and definately less than 10 elevators. And a lot less hallways. You can't lease hallways, so when development happens, we get the 400' x 100' building. Development always wants to consolidate parcels and build bigger buildings. Not because developers hate us and want us to drive everywhere. Because the spreadsheets they use, or rather, the spreadsheets that their bankers use (or actually, the ones the banks buying the loans from the bank that is lending to the developer use). These aren't bad people. They just can't go to their investors and say they are giving Mrs. Big Developer $300 million dollars so he can make pedestrian friendly urban centers. "Where's proof of our return?" the investors say. And the nice bank says just believe in them. "This new development is gonna work, dangit, I CAN FEEL IT!"
If lending worked like that...wait, that's EXACTLY how we got into the housing mess!...but alas, another post.
Anyway, the best urban centers are a bunch of thin threads that make a fabric. They are knitted together, hopefully by people who were not paying attention to the directions. That way the fabric is all knotted up with irregular holes in it. It doesn't really lay flat, like the first time you tried to knit a scarf. That's the best urban centers (see Tokyo, London, Barcelona, the left bank of Paris, downtown Boston, lower Manhattan, et, al).
So when new development happens in these places, they gotta buy up a bunch of parcels, and combine them to build a big ass building so they can see that return on their investment. But instead of being nice threads reweaving the hole, the easiest thing to do (as any mother fixing a hole on their children's jeans will attest) is to patch it.
Eventually, we get a city of patches. And that never looks good.
One interesting note. I've seen a lot of new buildings in Tokyo that are 10 stories tall and still occupy that 40' x 100' plot. And see four or five together. They look pretty cool. But from up high, you can see new developments, like Roppongi Hills, that totally disenegrate the surrounding fabric. We know Roppongi is successful, economically. So what spreadsheet was the guy that built the little thin thing? (Aside from different egress and accesibilty requirements?)
Secondly, a lot of new development in The City (London) (again, aside from the Gerkin), is taking a whole block of old buildings, keeping the exterior shells and then putting in whole new cores and keeping all the doors on the street -- maybe adding a couple floors. Again, what does this spreadsheet say?
So when people lament that new development destroys cities, tell them to write a better spreadsheet. Marching like a hippy to change the "bad" developers is pointless. Get a real estate degree and start a company. Development is ESSENTIAL for cities. They gotta change, always. We just need to show that good change can be more profitable than what we've been doing.
05 January 2008
The Magic Negro
Spike Lee once wrote about The Magic Negro and Barack Obama has been referenced as this person in the political spectrum. I'm not sure how much of this I can see in the thread, but I've noticed a little parallels.
Pantone, the company the gives us color, has selected our new colors for the year, a somewhat innocent blue-purple. The excutive director of the Pantone Institute says "Emotionally, it is anchoring and meditative with a touch of magic." There is a touch of irony to all of this. First, Barack is a democrat - commonly associated with blue. Second, Barack's media spin says he speaks across party lines, which nicely references the purple. Lastly, the director specifically mentions that it is "anchoring" and has a "touch of magic." Barack is seen as the guy who can unite this (still mostly white) country. Maybe he is the Magic Negro.
Perhaps I'm crazy, but here's my take. Remeber that EVERYTHING is connected to urban design. (See earlier posts.)
One of the main reasons we live how we do today, as one of the main pieces of a series of disconnected events that coincided to feed off each other, is racism. Specifically, blacks in the US demanding (asking?) for more equal rights and becoming more upwardly mobile and the the federal government forcing desegregation. First, I'm all for desegregation. Completely! But in the 1950's, 60's and 70's, most whites were not. Not even in the North. In fact, some Southerners might say that Northerners are actually repressed racists. But anyway, look at Boston, which I think plays out as an example (though with differing conditions) across all cities in the US.
Boston got busing, forcing "equal" schools and most of the whites living in Boston said "Okay, fine. But I'm leaving. Johnny isn't going to school with black kids." They never said this, but they did it. They moved to the suburbs. They took with them the capital that gave cities economies. I'm not saying this is the only reason, but it certainly was the icing on the cake. The chocolate icing. And these were yellow cake vanilla icing people.
I've spoken to old timers from one Boston neighborhood, a once incredible well-knit (if perhaps highly racist) urban and social fabric woven by church, friends, and family. "Why did you move?" I'd ask. I mean, these people lived here their whole lives. Their grandparents lived here. The uncles, etc. This was a real PLACE. "Well, it was the busing." Perhaps it wasn't so much that blacks and whites were in school together (which probably wasn't a big deal, really), but more about the fact that the government said "Black and whites must be in school together." Oh, and, we're gonna bus them all over the town to make equal schools. Most parents don't like that.
Urban fabrics are like sweaters. The best are made up of fine and intricately woven threads. Neighborhood grociers. Churches. Small shops. Daycare centers. Elementary schools. People who care about each other on some level or another. Once the sweater begins unraveling it is hard to stop. You can mend it, but eventually, the weave is too loose and falls apart.
Taking away neighborhood schools was a big thread. Whites resented blacks because of it. They shouldn't have, but they did. And that is a tough thing to get over. It has taken us 40 years to even start the conversation. And I think that the conversation started last night with the Obama win. He's not black, as in American black. No, he's an international student's son that happened to be from Africa. But in America, we gloss over that. The good thing is that he doesn't carry his own historical baggage that any black in this country (save all the wonderful people in Prince Georges County) carry with them. So he can leap ahead of that, which is great. But to black Americans, perhaps the most accepting and loving group of people in the US, he's one of them (at least the media will have you believe that). And that is awesome.
We were divided until last night. Because of this, white people give black kids asthma as they drive on freeways into the city to their bank jobs and make so-called "sub prime" loans with high interest rates to black families trying to move their kids away from the freeways. Nobody planned it that way. Nobody even thinks about that.
The suburbs gave us obesity, diabetes, processed foods and global warming. They fueled/reinforced our consumption and trashed our planet. The suburbs were a product of racism. So, welcome Magic Negro.
Now, somebody get this man an energy secretary that knows what he's talking about. Obama's doesn't seem to have a clue (he likes coal and nuclear). Richardson! I hear you're good at this.
Pantone, the company the gives us color, has selected our new colors for the year, a somewhat innocent blue-purple. The excutive director of the Pantone Institute says "Emotionally, it is anchoring and meditative with a touch of magic." There is a touch of irony to all of this. First, Barack is a democrat - commonly associated with blue. Second, Barack's media spin says he speaks across party lines, which nicely references the purple. Lastly, the director specifically mentions that it is "anchoring" and has a "touch of magic." Barack is seen as the guy who can unite this (still mostly white) country. Maybe he is the Magic Negro.
Perhaps I'm crazy, but here's my take. Remeber that EVERYTHING is connected to urban design. (See earlier posts.)
One of the main reasons we live how we do today, as one of the main pieces of a series of disconnected events that coincided to feed off each other, is racism. Specifically, blacks in the US demanding (asking?) for more equal rights and becoming more upwardly mobile and the the federal government forcing desegregation. First, I'm all for desegregation. Completely! But in the 1950's, 60's and 70's, most whites were not. Not even in the North. In fact, some Southerners might say that Northerners are actually repressed racists. But anyway, look at Boston, which I think plays out as an example (though with differing conditions) across all cities in the US.
Boston got busing, forcing "equal" schools and most of the whites living in Boston said "Okay, fine. But I'm leaving. Johnny isn't going to school with black kids." They never said this, but they did it. They moved to the suburbs. They took with them the capital that gave cities economies. I'm not saying this is the only reason, but it certainly was the icing on the cake. The chocolate icing. And these were yellow cake vanilla icing people.
I've spoken to old timers from one Boston neighborhood, a once incredible well-knit (if perhaps highly racist) urban and social fabric woven by church, friends, and family. "Why did you move?" I'd ask. I mean, these people lived here their whole lives. Their grandparents lived here. The uncles, etc. This was a real PLACE. "Well, it was the busing." Perhaps it wasn't so much that blacks and whites were in school together (which probably wasn't a big deal, really), but more about the fact that the government said "Black and whites must be in school together." Oh, and, we're gonna bus them all over the town to make equal schools. Most parents don't like that.
Urban fabrics are like sweaters. The best are made up of fine and intricately woven threads. Neighborhood grociers. Churches. Small shops. Daycare centers. Elementary schools. People who care about each other on some level or another. Once the sweater begins unraveling it is hard to stop. You can mend it, but eventually, the weave is too loose and falls apart.
Taking away neighborhood schools was a big thread. Whites resented blacks because of it. They shouldn't have, but they did. And that is a tough thing to get over. It has taken us 40 years to even start the conversation. And I think that the conversation started last night with the Obama win. He's not black, as in American black. No, he's an international student's son that happened to be from Africa. But in America, we gloss over that. The good thing is that he doesn't carry his own historical baggage that any black in this country (save all the wonderful people in Prince Georges County) carry with them. So he can leap ahead of that, which is great. But to black Americans, perhaps the most accepting and loving group of people in the US, he's one of them (at least the media will have you believe that). And that is awesome.
We were divided until last night. Because of this, white people give black kids asthma as they drive on freeways into the city to their bank jobs and make so-called "sub prime" loans with high interest rates to black families trying to move their kids away from the freeways. Nobody planned it that way. Nobody even thinks about that.
The suburbs gave us obesity, diabetes, processed foods and global warming. They fueled/reinforced our consumption and trashed our planet. The suburbs were a product of racism. So, welcome Magic Negro.
Now, somebody get this man an energy secretary that knows what he's talking about. Obama's doesn't seem to have a clue (he likes coal and nuclear). Richardson! I hear you're good at this.
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