LivableCitiesSustainableNeoUrbanism
(Copyright. Dr. Bruce M.
Firestone, B.Eng.(Civil), M.Eng.-Sci., PhD.)
Introduction
“Livable cities” means different things to different
people. “Sustainable” means different things to different people. Perhaps “neo
urbanism” is the only concept in the title that is (arguably) clear as to what
it means. More on that later.
The topic for this lecture is: what is the
relationship between the design of the city and sustainability? Does urban
design matter in this regard? I maintain that it most certainly does matter.
A compact urban area with higher densities means, prima facie, shorter origin/destination
trips, more pedestrian traffic, higher utilization of
public transit. A mixed use community means more work at home, which in turn
implies fewer trips, less demand on public infrastructure and higher utilization
of private infrastructure as homes become offices and offices become homes.
My next door neighbor in
I don’t get it. But what is clear is that building
greater sustainability into our cities is not just about more insulation in the
walls, or better positioning of s.f. homes wrt the sun angle and so on.
We can do more with institutional changes, political
changes, policy and regulatory changes, design changes, technological changes,
lifestyle changes than we can with a simple focus on technical improvements, no
matter how clever they may be.
Some of the policy changes we will be looking at
include allowing:
a. mixed use
b. in home apartments and
granny flats
c. reverse metering
d. densification
e. density bonusing
f. work from home and the
architectural uses of stereo space.
The home of the future will almost certainly be a
place for multi tasking. While I was writing this speech at my home in
My wife insists, quite rightly, that we fish the
cable through the walls and floors and not leave unsightly wires running down
the baseboards. We not only connect to the Internet in five bedrooms but also
in three offices on the premises—used by my wife, me and my Communications
Manager who comes in every weekday to run my life for me.
My kids also run their own business from the home (www.StreetPaddletennis.com) and
they need Internet access for school and for online gaming and Instant
Messaging too. Nothing is more
important to my kids’ education than their Net connections.
We also have one of my students working on the
premises as he gets some mentoring for his new startup (www.TrashAndTrinkets.com).
Our cleaning lady was in today too and we took
delivery of some TrashAndTrinkets.com promotional items. The kids sold one
bundle of StreetPaddleTennis.com gear to one of the gradeAstudent.com
representatives that came to visit our home because one of our PC’s fans broke
down and the PC was overheating. Another gradeAstudent.com repair person come
over today too—to deliver another PC that was taken away earlier for repair. He
didn’t buy a StreetPaddleTennis.com bundle probably because the kids were still
in school and didn’t get a chance to put the hard sell on him.
The kids just ordered pizza and they were arguing
about the preferred vendor.
The home probably took over 50 phone calls today on
three separate lines and almost certainly had several hundred email enquiries.
I am unsure how much data flowed into and out of the house—through cable for
television and Internet, which supported not only email traffic but also
browser functionality for ws supported by various members of the home
community. I would guess that each member of this community has at least three
separate email addresses—I have one at Hickling, one at the University, one for
StreetPaddleTennis.com, one from our cable provider, one for my personal ws,
which I maintain for my students and probably others I have forgotten about. My
kids have their StreetPaddleTennis.com addresses, the cable company addresses
plus hotmail.com. In addition, they all use IM as do all the adults.
I have over one hundred and fifty hundred passwords.
The home has not one, not two, not three but four
outside sheds completely full of stuff and we have a 10 by 20 foot U-stor-it
locker 20 minutes from the home, also full of stuff. But that isn’t enough
room; we also have an enormous barn (more than 3,000 square feet with a shed of
1,000 square feet and a loft of 800 square feet), full of stuff.
My two sons have a cabin at
We used to have a live-in nanny but the kids are too
old for that now so this reduces the head count and complexity by one.
And it is still early—just
I almost forgot—we also have two cats, two budgies,
and some fish but not Hercules, our gerbil—he has recently gone to the big
gerbil house in the sky. My kids also want to have a dog just so it will give
Mom and Dad and Nana more to do and pay for.
The house has two furnaces and two ACs.
The house and grounds are used for:
a. a survival machine for the
inhabitants;
b. office work;
c. teaching;
d. warehousing;
e. a laundry service;
f. a place of domestic and
workaday employment;
g. research;
h. writing;
i. retailing;
j. sports and exercise in a
fully equipped gym;
k. entertainment;
l. communication;
m. manufacturing;
n. packaging;
o. consumption of mass quantities of data,
electricity, natural gas, food, clothing, gasoline, beverages, water, paper, oil,
windshield wiping and other automotive fluids, office supplies, school
supplies, Canadian art, furniture, bedding, camping equipments, sports
equipment, gardening supplies, packing materials, and more;
p. the home consumes services like snail mail,
couriers, faxing, email, browser, telephone, flyers, local newspapers, national
newspapers, coupons, door-to-door salespeople and petitioners;
q. restaurant;
r. parties;
s. events;
t. handicrafts;
u. tool room;
v. repair shop;
w. hobbies;
x. education;
y. gaming;
z. mating, caring and feeding
babies;
aa. school;
bb. library;
cc. dance studio;
dd. art gallery;
ee. personal
grooming;
ff. clothing repair and much
more.
I would guess that if I were redesigning the place
now instead of 1988 with this functional program in mind, it might look a
little different than it does. But the fact is, almost no one is really giving
much thought to how the world is changing and how this can impact on design and
how that could impact on sustainability.
If I were building it now, the home would be an
office building and a residence and a store and a warehouse and a gym and an
entertainment place and a manufacturer and a party place and a school and a
multi tenant building where my Mother-in-law, Nanny, students, employees could
live, co-operatively.
The point of this story about our home is that
sustainability needs to become a concept that embraces the idea that we are
designing systems of interconnected functions. What’s the point of designing a home
to efficiently accomplish all these tasks if zoning By-laws prohibit
work-at-home businesses?
The NIMBY (Not-In-My-Backyard) movement is
incredibly powerful—it is based on two primeval human emotions: greed and fear.
People are fearful that any change in their neighborhood (like allowing people
to work from home) will negatively affect their property values and they are
greedy to see property values increase.
Dennis Miller, the Comedian, has defined an
environmentalist as someone who has a cabin-in-the-woods and a developer as
someone who would like to have a little cabin-in-the-woods too. The NIMBY
movement is allied with the environmental movement in a powerful combination
that is very conservative.
There are many serious environmental concerns on this
planet but rousting someone who is working from their home is not one of them.
There are hundreds of other examples of this type of behavior, which resists
change and compromises efforts to move our communities to higher levels of
sustainability.
In
We have to recognize that a large part of the
challenge to increasing levels of sustainability is to convince people and
their institutions to change policies and regulations, not just improve
technology and technical prowess in how we build things and do things.
(For students interested in exploring more about
these issues, please check out a new course being offered in the summer of 2003
at
Pop Quiz—on Urban Design
Well, I hope we have established the need for
Government leadership in our City-State economy and we are starting to have
some ideas about what a few of our priorities might be.
We have also alluded to the differences of opinion
that have manifested themselves between the pro- and anti-development forces,
which I happened to feel are completely misplaced.
There is no real difference between them in my view
and I will set out to try to illuminate this fact.
But first let us try a pop quiz:
- The most noticeable thing about this satellite photo of
- I did not know it was
- If I was in charge of the NCC:
- I would build cafés and loft apartments along the banks of our
great rivers?
- I would build car only highways (aka, ‘parkways’) next to the
Rivers and cut off pedestrian access to our waterways?
- If I was an
- I would rip up the streetcar tracks that allow a ten-year old boy
to go the films for 5 cents a ride and replace them with diesel buses at
25 cents a ride.
- I would tear down beach houses at public beaches that provided
folks with change rooms, meeting rooms, dance halls, and snack shops and
replace them with … nothing.
- I would tear out rail lines and transform the old Union Station
into ... nothing.
- I would tear down the grand old Capital Theatre and replace it
with a non-descript Headquarters for Regional Government staff.
- I would move the central railroad station to a suburb.
- I would do all of the above.
- If I was a planner in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s:
- I would encourage intensification or densification by outlawing
in-home flats in single-family homes.
- I would encourage densification by disallowing granny flats to be
built in a person’s backyard by either outright banning them in the
zoning code or by regulating them out of existence (by charging a
Development Charge for new infrastructure even when there is none, by
making them temporary structures that have to removed after five years,
by only allowing related persons to live in them even if through death
they become vacant).
- I would encourage densification by either outright banning
duplexes and triplexes or by hitting them up for two or even three DCs
even though they do not impose any additional, higher costs.
- I would encourage densification by ensuring that apartment
buildings have a much higher property tax rate than single-family home.
- None of the above.
It wasn’t long after my wife and I and our five kids
moved to a western suburb of
We had moved to
The not-in-my-backyard (nimby) movement generated a
lot of support (we did not sign on) but, in this instance, they were
unsuccessful-- the town homes were built and property values in the area did
not suffer.
Like many such efforts, they are based on two primal
impulses—greed and fear. To a large extent, we are seeing the results of these
emotions in the built form of our cities—large expanses of low density
structures of similar uses (houses) on curvilinear streets that lack charm and
activity—mono cultured suburbs, if you will.
Local politicians, not unlike politicians at all
levels, do one thing superbly—they count noses. They use this as a very
effective filter—if you can get enough people against something, it is a goner
no matter what the social good today.
|
Hominid Group |
Era |
Number in their Social Group |
|
australopithecines |
3,000,000 B.C. |
67 |
|
Homo habilis |
2,000,000 B.C. |
82 |
|
Homo erectus |
1,000,000 B.C. |
111 |
|
neanderthals |
80,000 B.C. |
144 |
|
Modern humans |
2002 A.D. |
150 |
(Robin Dunbar and Leslie Aiello, Anthropologists as quoted in Thomas Homer-Dixon’s brilliant work, The Ingenuity Gap, Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2000, pp. 210-11.)
How many people here have:
- more than 150 people in their email address books?
- more than 1,000?
How many people here get:
- more than 20 emails a day?
- More than 75 emails?
What Dunbar and Aiello’s research tells us is that
for all our modern and advanced technology, our brains do not have room for
more than about 150 people in our personal social and business circle. It
obviously implies that when we are taking in input from a much greater number
(my personal email book has more than 3,000 names in it), we bog down and
effectively lose our ability to cope.
In the local government arena, I believe that if you
can get 150 people excited and passionate about any project (either against it
or for it), then you have a very good shot at getting
it done.
This means that very small numbers of people in a
jurisdiction like
Nimby activists have long understood this principle
and have very often outwitted, outplayed and outlasted (a la Survivor
hit series) developers and Municipal officials as they try to build their
cities.
Today, I advise all my clients involved in the
worlds of planning and development to bring the neighbors on side, in fact, to
bring all stakeholders on side before attempting a change in use.
You can look at the zoning process two ways as long
time former West Carleton Councilor Sheila McKee once told me—either as a
confrontational process where the loudest and most patient tends to win or as a
process for affirming land uses amongst neighbors.
Again, my advice is to take Sheila’s advice—it just
works better.
You just can’t get your plans approved unless you
present Council with a beautifully pre-packaged, gift wrapped, be-ribboned
project with all the noses in the chamber nodding up and down rather than side
to side.
I think the whole debate about whether development
should be through infill or by extending the City’s boundaries is still born.
It does not matter—life will find a way. It jumps
boundaries and succeeds where you might otherwise expect it to fail.
The debate is not about sprawl, it is about the type
of development we are witnessing. This is what neo-urbanism is all about and
Jane Jacobs says that we will win.
Have a look at the above sketch—this represents the
ultimate in urban planning circa the beginning of the 2nd Millennium.
Here are the salient features:
- every street empties out onto the collector
road.
- the collector road has to be designed for high
speeds with geometry to match.
- every trip requires a car trip.
- you can’t be a first class citizen without a car.
- the school is located on the cheapest land—next
to an industrial “park” and a transmission line.
- the monster home suburb is in the west—because
the prevailing winds are westerlies and rich folks prefer to live upwind.
- burger fry joints and strip malls line the collector
road—no one else would think of locating there.
- all shopping is concentrated at the regional
shopping mall—no commercial uses are permitted in residential areas.
- because all the traffic is on the collector
road and all trips to the office, to the shop, to school require a car
trip, collector road speeds are not much better than walking speeds
despite the 50 mph (80kpf) speed limit.
- lower income folks can not live close to where they work (ie., working for rich folk in the west or cleaning
their office buildings) because they can not afford monster homes—so they
live in the trailer “park” or in the lower socio-economic status areas in
the east and they have to own a car which further impoverishes them.
- public transit, ie,
buses do not work very well and are expensive to operate.
- the monster home suburbs do not allow any towns
or in-home apartments or granny flats which force their elders to
relocate in vertical warehouses (aka as retirement “homes”).
- opposing jurisdictions will not allow even
through traffic into their areas.
- older neighborhoods refuse to allow newer
ones to connect to them.
I teach part time in the School of Architecture at
Carleton and I tell my students that I blame the profession—architects in
Canada and the US (unlike many European nations) have let our cites be designed
by urban planners with a near complete disregard for the fine detailing of
urban design and the public room—shame on the profession.
I think the debate is not between infill and
densification on the one hand and relentless suburbanization, i.e., the dreck
shown above.
I believe that the real debate is about how to build
great spaces and great places and these can just as easily be at the City
boundary as downtown. In fact, you can see plenty of infill projects
where instead of putting up interesting mixed use, medium density kinds of
places, they built ranch-style bungalows in, for example, downtown NYC (the
Zoning codes with their endless prescriptions and
prohibitions including maximum densities, huge setbacks, ridiculously low
height limits, enormous open space requirements, minimum lot sizes, insistence
on mono-cultured single family zones, office nodes, massive, centralized
shopping areas, industrial ‘parks’ and so on are the single biggest cause of
urban sprawl. The debate over placing the urban boundary here or there is
irrelevant, in my view, if we apply stupid zoning ordnances everywhere
including ‘downtown’. We just get the same bad ‘hoods everywhere.
Zoning codes cause urban sprawl. Sorry about that
but it is true.
European cities have shown that you can get amazing
densities with low rise but clever design.
And we do not have to reinvent the wheel—just look
at 19th Century cities and towns and copy them!
What are some of the guiding principles at work?
- people can live and work at home.
- people can shop nearby.
- there is a mixing together of folks from differing
socio economic strata.
- people build close to the road.
- they have front porches.
- roads are narrower.
- densities are higher.
- elders can stay in their communities.
- the gardener, nurse, school teacher can find
affordable housing in the neighborhoods where they actually work.
- in-home apartments and granny flats and
apartments above the garage increase property values not decrease them.
- rooming houses and live-in students are
tolerated.
- apartments above shops are built.
- there is a tolerance for diversity.
- problems are solved at town hall meetings.
- schools, government offices, post offices,
libraries, places of worship get the best sites in town not the worst.
- roads are grid based.
- every road is two way.
- on-street parking is allowed (this buffers the
pedestrian and encourages pedestrian traffic).
- left turns are permitted.
- connectedness is the underlying
principle of town design.
- everyone suffers some through traffic so that no
one suffers all of it.
- grided systems prove that the slower the individual vehicle goes,
the faster you move traffic over the entire system (i.e., average vehicle
speeds are higher not lower even though there are no ‘collector’ roads
designed by traffic engineers to move vehicles at 80 kph (which they never
do because every trip is a car trip and all cars have to be on the one
collector)).
- there are no beggar-thy-neighbour policies whereby
you put speed bumps, no through traffic, no left turn, one way and other
self defeating traffic management policies in place.
- cities use vertical transition lines and the
wow effect (window-on-the-world, where all buildings open to the street at
grade).
- density bonusing is coming to encourage mixed
use (read residential use) in downtown commercial zones.
City building is essentially a positive exercise by
positive people.
According to James Howard Kunstler (Home from Nowhere and The City in Mind) if we want great
cities, burn (Kunstler’s term) the
zoning codes and allow your city to grow organically.
Today, people drive 100s of kilometres and take a
ferry to park their cars to wander around a place like
Well, they like the walk-about feel of the place.
They like to see people sitting on their front porches. They like that there
are sidewalks and that houses are close to the street and each other. They like
the fact that there are trees overhanging the street providing shade in the
summer and some protection from winter winds.
Tree in the Boulevard (not
permitted in some municipalities)
Isn’t it ironic that people need to go to Disney
World to experience Main Street America?
In the mid 1980s, I was asked: “How do we fix the
Sparks Street Mall (a pedestrian only street in downtown
Want safer streets after sundown? Have more people living
downtown. When the NCC was looking at redeveloping a downtown
Where was consideration of urban design,
sustainability, environmental impacts and crime? The true costs of bad urban
design—people forced to live in distant suburbs and commute to work downtown;
of unsafe streets after dark—are nowhere to be found in the NCC’s calculations.
And if the GOC won’t do it (despite
Density bonusing (giving developers incentive to
densify the City) is part of the answer. I am not keen on Government coercion
but incentives to private markets are efficient, democratic and fair. The City
of Ottawa should be incenting developers to add ‘residential’ uses to their
downtown towers—condos, rental apartments, town homes at grade, travel
apartments, hotels, co-ops, anything that brings people to stay overnight
downtown.
Neo-Urbanism
and Sustainability
|
Neo-Urbanist Position |
No. of Trips |
Length of Trip |
Car Ownership |
Public Transit Utilization |
Pedestrian Traffic |
Utilization of Home and Business |
Recycling. Reuse |
Energy Use |
Synergy, Trading, Skill Sharing |
|
Minimum Densities |
n |
dd |
d |
ii |
i |
n |
n |
d |
i |
|
Mixed Use |
d |
dd |
dd |
n |
n |
i |
n |
dd |
i |
|
Build-To Lines |
d |
n |
n |
n |
i |
n |
n |
d |
i |
|
Left Turns Permitted |
n |
d |
n |
n |
n |
n |
n |
d |
n |
|
No One Way Streets |
n |
d |
n |
n |
n |
n |
n |
d |
n |
|
On Street Parking OK |
n |
n |
n |
n |
i |
n |
n |
d |
i |
|
Apartments Over Retail |
d |
d |
d |
i |
i |
i |
n |
d |
i |
|
c-Stores Permitted |
d |
d |
d |
n |
i |
n |
n |
d |
n |
|
Granny Flats |
d |
d |
d |
i |
i |
i |
n |
d |
i |
|
Density Bonus |
d |
d |
d |
i |
i |
n |
n |
d |
n |
|
In Home Apartments OK |
d |
d |
d |
i |
i |
i |
n |
d |
i |
|
WOW Effect |
n |
n |
n |
n |
i |
n |
n |
d |
i |
|
Front Porches |
n |
n |
n |
n |
i |
n |
n |
d |
i |
|
Duplexes, Triplexes, Rooming Houses OK |
d |
d |
d |
i |
i |
i |
n |
d |
i |
|
Gentrification |
i |
i |
i |
d |
d |
i |
i |
i |
i |
Notes:
n = neutral factor
i = increase
d = decrease
Neighborhood
Safety and Land Values
Much of neo-urbanist thinking depends for its
success on neighborhood safety. We started off by discussing sustainability in
terms of what is affordable and secure. As Professor John Callahan told me:
“Nothing is sustainable unless it is also economically sustainable.” Fine. I
agree.
But nothing is affordable or economically
sustainable, if you prefer, unless it is also secure. Many years ago, an
experiment (the Broken Windows Syndrome)
showed that a vehicle left in a downscale neighborhood could remain there for
quite some time with minimal damage. But throw a rock through a window and, in
just minutes, vandals and thieves would descend on it and strip it to the
bones.
Prima facie, increasing density (by
allowing granny flats, duplexes, apartments above retail and so forth) should
increase property values not decrease them. Higher property income means higher
property values, all else being equal. The ‘all else’ here is neighborhood safety.
In the Glebe (an
So NIMBY’ites have nothing to fear from
intensification of their neighborhoods, per
se. But we must maintain civic
order for this to be a reality.
Conclusion
I had this funny insight when I was considering all
this—there is so much change going on, almost no one works for anyone for a
career, which got me to thinking. What if every kid had something, a personal
business, say, that they had when they were a kid and that stayed with them for
life that they could always fall back on? They never sold it. They nursed it
along and it was always there for them through the ups and downs of
professional/work life. Something uniquely their own—maybe a Paddle Tennis
business, maybe a Personal WS (PWS) that does something useful for money. I
tell all my students—start and build a PWS, one that collects all your personal
IP throughout your life. A ws that will one day create value for you,
independently (aka, make money for you while you lie on a beach). Want
to live forever—start your PWS today. (You will need a user id and password
to access this!)
I said above that there is nothing more important to
my kids’ education than their Net connectivity. Nothing. I realized this when I
started doing more work with the 20 to 30 year olds. You know they didn’t have
the net when they were in grade school. They didn’t grow up with it from the
age of three.
When the net exploded in popularity in 1994, these
young people were already in High School or University. They think that they get
the web. They don’t.
They think the web is all about using a word
processor or a spreadsheet program or scheduler or power point or email. They
just don’t understand what the web is doing and they have incredibly bad web
skills.
Work flows are being integrated into the
web—everything is being created to shareware with other folks so that the
default position will be that only those things we don’t want to share, will
not be.
Reversing out the work, source control, change a
document, data base or file here will be reflected everywhere in the community,
weightless computing and much more…
If you can’t master the web, you’re toast. The next
generation that is playing Sims online is going to bury this generation of
students if they don’t change.
These little kids are going to move to cyberspace.
They are already comfortable there. They
are going to take advantage of the next great technological frontier—creating
virtual spaces in stereo where people can meet, trade, entertain, educate and
much more all without moving either goods or services or people in the physical
reality.
Now can anyone think of a dumber industry than the
newsprint business? We destroy huge swaths of forest, denude the planet of its
most important natural agent for protecting biodiversity, to float logs down
rivers (and polluting them too with mercury and much more), to take the logs to
pulp and paper mills that pump huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the
atmosphere (to say nothing of the chorine killing fish and aquatic life forms
as a by-product of making pulp and paper), to truck the stuff to printing
plants to print mass quantities of daily newspapers, to truck the newspapers to
airports and distribution centres to be hauled to distant cities and towns
where they are put in some poor sucker’s old beater so that he scuttle around
neighborhoods at ridiculous hours so that you can read the gossip, lies,
distortions, fabrications, exaggerations of fatuous columnists, self important
editorialist, indulgent reporters, ego intoxicated politicians in your favorite
newspaper for less than 20 minutes
with your coffee, eggs and bacon to then be put in a recycle box to assuage
your conscience, to be picked up by another truck to be taken to another plant
where it is recycled in another hugely energy intensive process so that the
cycle can be repeated the next day.
I’m sorry—now that is something I don’t get.
You want more sustainability, then stop frigging
around the edges. Design better cities and towns that reduce impacts on the
planet (there is no such thing as a completely sustainable system). Policy
changes, lifestyle changes, social changes, regulatory changes, technological
changes can make a huge difference much greater than saying to industry or
consumers, you need to do better. Want to do better, then replace the internal
combustion engine with a hydrogen economy? Can’t be done? Right. The human race
went from nothing in the dark ages to
the moon in a thousand years. Went from telegram boys to the Internet in 75
years. And, if
I am involved in a proposal
to build a Canadian Sustainability Lab (CSL) here at
Engineers will like this part of the proposal—when a
thing can be measured, then a
direction can be established for industry with some confidence that, a move in
that direction, will lead to improvement. The CSL is a two part proposal—one is
to evolve a measurement of sustainability, the other is to create a Stereo
Space Lab where we can look at some very promising technologies that will make
the work-from-home experience much richer.
The CSL will measure key variables including:
proportion of inputs that can be recycled or reused; environmental impacts at
all development stages from source to completion of inputs; energy intensity of
inputs; energy use over the lifetime of development; sustainability of design
over the project’s lifetime; lifecycle costs and benefits. The CSL will include
equipment and infrastructure for on-site testing of materials and off-site
monitoring of key variables in an index of sustainability. Industry will be
able to apply to the CSL for assistance in measuring the level of
sustainability of given projects. The impacts of public policy decisions and
lifestyle choices on levels of sustainability will be evaluated.
The Lab will also have the capacity to use computer
models of city development with a view to assessing the impacts of change on
the level of sustainability of the city.
The part of the Lab that could potentially have the
most far reaching social impacts is the Stereo Space Lab. It will demonstrate
the architectural uses of stereo space and its impact on sustainability. Stereo
space harnesses individual left eye and right eye feeds for graphics, text,
animation and video together with sound, vibration and music so that
architectural spaces can be used in new ways to: educate, entertain, inform,
data mine, interact, travel, meet, communicate, work, cooperate, produce,
research, consult, sell, market, host and teach—all without the physical
requirement of moving people, goods or services around the planet. It will
revolutionize workspaces, kill distances and affect older industries like the
newsprint business.
The impacts of stereo space on the software of our
cities will assist the system in moving to higher levels of sustainability both
in terms of reduction in environmental impacts and much higher utilization of
existing infrastructure as homes become workplaces and workplaces become homes
leading to both a safer environment and a more efficient form of urban
agglomeration with fewer pressures on transportation and other systems.
“The best way to predict the future is to
invent it,” Computer Scientist Alan Kay, Founder, Xerox’s
Professor Greg Andonian told me that the proportion
of new buildings devoted to materiality is shrinking as the proportion that is
devoted to intelligence is rising. Buildings are becoming lighter as we develop
better materials and better techniques of using those materials in the
construction process. I believe him—my example of the home is certainly
reflective of this trend. If it were being built today, we would pay a heck of
a lot more attention to the intelligence of the house.
I happen to believe that we are going to have to go
back to the future—there is no need to reinvent the wheel—perfectly sound
models for village, town and city development exist in the way we designed our
urban agglomerations, circa the late 1800s and early 1900s. In all likelihood,
we will find that the way we have developed cities like
Having said all of this, I believe that the future
is an exciting and challenging place. Jane Jacobs, the guru of neo-urbanist design
(even if she doesn’t call it that) says that all economic progress comes from the synergy and teamwork
inherent in the development of villages, towns and cities. She adds that the
battle is fully engaged now between the conservative forces of NIMBYism and
false environmentalism and neo-urbanists, and that the neo-urbanists will win. We
have to, in order to ensure that society can move to higher levels of
sustainability and the planet survives and we do too.
There can be no doubt that humans are tied to this
planet. We live in a deep gravity well—it is difficult and expensive to get off
the planet. We are tied to the planet at the molecular level too—the recent
discovery that our cells rest and grow on a cycle of 12 minutes on and 12
minutes off , 60 times a day (i.e., a 24 minute cycle time with 60 repetitions
a day, which just happens to equal 24 hours, exactly) confirms this. We may
never leave the planet of our birth, who knows, maybe we can’t.
Appendix: Catalysts For Urban Growth and
Development- Promoting the Health of Cities
"Common traits found within cities, boroughs and communities
that are experiencing prosperity."
· Education
· Employment
· Honest City or State Government (a precondition for economic take-off)
· De-Regulation of Zoning By-Laws- use of 'performance zoning', reliance on
building code, health code, fire safety and 'do no harm' rules
· Mixed Use Development (i.e. Commercial, Residential, Recreational,
Educational, Markets, Cultural and Entertainment)
· Adequate Public Transit System- big time people movers allowing higher
densities
· De-Segregation of Social Structure
· Distribution of populations- mixing of income groups and socio-economic
strata, dispersal as opposed to concentration of 'unwanted' uses such as
shelters, halfway houses, rooming houses, duplexes, triplexes, jails and other
'less desirable' development amongst many communities to create less
threatening environments
· Mixing together of building forms to produce a variegated skyline and
individuation of address
· Requirement for architectural intervention to give building forms
individualized expression and design promoting civic pride and a sense of self
worth while avoiding tract housing look and feel as well as inferior
construction and materials
· Renewed Civic Presence
· A Visible Police Presence & (On-the-Beat) Interaction Within the
Community
· A General Respect for Public and Private Property and quasi public spaces
(the 'public room')
· Zero Tolerance Towards Acts of Vandalism, police on the beat and out of their
police cruisers
· Investment by Public and Private Interests- encouagement
of gentrification through tax holidays and other special assessments including
reconstruction of public infrastructure including roadways as beacons
(initiators) of economic development
· Strong Public Interest & Motivation
· Supportive Political Advocacy instilling a sense of hope and civic pride back
into the community
· Land Growth Potential
· Establish and Maintain Basic Social Infrastructure (i.e. Health, Education,
Sanitation, Day Care, Recreational Facilities etc.)
· Municipal and Collective action re. Funding and Tax
Incentives with Respect to Civic Reform and Urban Renewal.
· Involvement of various Community and Urban Interest Groups (i.e. C.N.U. or
Congress for New Urbanism etc.)
· Build UP not Out! (minimum densities not maximums!)
· Look to 'Smart Growth' Solutions and innovative design to exploit
underdeveloped sites
· Home Ownership and belongingness (identification by the people with their
surroundings giving them mental, physical, spiritual and, eventually, financial
stake; a feeling of possession)
· Mixing of uses, variation in housing types and dispersion of 'less desirable'
uses leaves a buffering role for the single family home
· Sense of ownership cause people to remain in the same neighborhood even as
their financial situation improves
· Institutions (cultural, educational, ...), domains of shared values and interests,
neighborhood participation and programatic ideas and
themes (festivals, street dances, mural art, ...)
· Gardens, market gardens, urban farms
· window-on-the-world architecture (retail and residential uses at grade
emptying onto the street with zero frontyard
setbacks)
· use of glazing and portals at grade
· presenting your buildings to the street (+.5 to 1 metre
to road grades)
· o sideyard and frontyard
setbacks
· traffic calming including on street parking, left turns permitted
· grided streets and connectedness between neighborhoods
· connected open space, conservation subdivision design
· parks need active recreation to act as a hub for the community- passive
recreation is not sufficient to improve community safety
· uniform transition lines (eg., retail at grade with
different treatment transitioning to offices and residential above at
prescribed height above grade)
· parking underground or at rear or on-street
· vertical windows
· golden section design
· steep pitched roof lines with eaves
· complete roof treatment
· consistent street planting and uniform tree placement
· boulevard design instead of collector streets or freeways
· front porches
· granny flats, in-home apartments, above garage apartments, duplexes,
triplexes, brownstones, row housing, rooming houses permitted
· work from home, in home businesses permitted with employees- increase in use
of expensive infrastructure including housing stock and increased daytime block
safety
· Civil dialogue between urbanists and environmentalists
· Consensus or, at least, a process for reaching civic consensus (eg., charettes) amongst community
groups, urban planners, municipal politicians, developers, residents,
conservationists and other special interest groups
· clear legal title
· legal process for obtaining clear legal title thorugh
power-of-sale process
· sancitity of contracts
· protection of private property rights from confiscatory policies restricting
uses including building form and type of use, rent control, density limits, downzoning, signage, wind rights, air rights, riparian
rights, subsurface rights, grazing rights, ...
· protection from arbitrary expropriation
· broadband access
· adopt-a-cop programs- direct community interaction with police
· higher density residential communities using low rise, street oriented
housing forms instead of high rises, encouraging development of 'theatre of the
street' and block safety
· home grown solutions, local initiatives, taking matters into 'your own
hands', community 'buy-in' supported by appropriate public policy
· enterprise zones
· government supported micro-loans to local entrepreneur start-ups
· tax abatements (realty taxes, excise taxes, duty free zones, ...)
· mortgage availability for purchase and renovation of derelict,
abandoned and deficient buildings and homes
· repopulation of downtown
· repopulation of abandoned sites
· replacement of parking lots and unsafe parks with residential buildings
· Feng Shui- letting the
light in, managing building pressures and the wind, respecting the top of the
mountain and high places and views, nestling structures into hillsides,
locating windows and doors and people spaces so they relate to inside and
outside realities
· Constructing welcoming buildings- bringing the outside in and the inside out (tropical
climes and northern climes too)
· 'Organic' architecture- structures that seem to have grown on their sites
rather than having been constructed
Anti-Catalysts
"Common traits found within cities, boroughs, and communities which have experienced serious urban decay."
· Corruption in city or state government
· De-Industrialization
· De-Population- flight to gated communities and suburbia
· Property taxes levied on improved values instead of unimproved land values (a
tax on renovation)
· Racial, Social and Economic Segregation
· Crime ("Value can only be created when social order prevails")
· Neglect- 'holes' in the urban fabric
· Abandonment- land and buildings achieve negative value (rent curves are
negative)
· Tax sales- city repossessions for unpaid taxes
· Obsolete, Oppresive and overly specific Zoning
By-Laws
· "Broken Windows Syndrome"
· Rent Control
· Homelessness
· Neighborhood Pollution (i.e. litter, air, water, soil, etc.)
· Suburban Exile/Suburban Apartheid
· Lack of Adequate Public Transit System
· N.I.M.B.Y. Mentality
· Building OUT instead of UP
· Social/Economic Dependence
· Lack of Public Resonance, Concern or Civic Pride
· Low Development Density
· Shortage of Urban Infill
· Dis-Investment by Public and Private Interests
· Lack of Basic Social Programs (i.e. Health, Education, Sanitation, Day Care,
Recreational Facilities etc.)
· Tenements (a.k.a. "Towers In The Park") and derelcit
and abandoned buildings
· Unemployment
· Home invasions
· Criminal and disruptive elements living in neighborhoods and the 'next door'
apartment
· absentee ownership
· failed renovations
· fraudlent speculators
· mortgages in excess of FMV (fair market value)
· shoddy workpersonship and incomplete work
· mortgage defaults
· tax liens and foreclosures
Defining Characteristics of Urban Deterioration*
* North American Physical Clues that distinguish areas of urban decay
· Overgrown, derelict sites
· Street lights out.
· Peeling Paint
· Broken windows
· Numerous "For Lease/For
· Prostitution
· Drugs
· "Panhandlers"
· Homeless
· Roaming Gangs
· Absence of police, or excessive police presence
· Graffiti
· Ports
· Heavy industry
· Air pollution
· Noise Pollution
· Abandoned cars
· Defended institutions and homes
· Razor wire, barb wire, security fencing, video surveillance
· Large recent immigrant population and those just starting out.
Bounding Characteristics of Urban Class Distinction
· Highways and freeways
· Railroad tracks
· Racial Segregation
·
· Waterfront access
· Elevations (higher elevations imply higher rents except where access to water
and waterfront takes priority)
· Wind Directions… west side is usually the prosperous areas are located, while
depleted areas are more commonly seen to develop on the east side. ("Go
west young man, break bread in the new land…" First immigration began from
the east and as people began to prosper, they generally moved west.)
· Car traffic directionality (well-to-do people live in the west end, drive to
work later and drive home later to avoid glare from sun; industrial workers in
the east end leave for work earlier and leave for home earlier)
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