LivableCitiesSustainableNeoUrbanism

January 14, 2003

Enterprise of the City—Livable Cities, Neo Urbanism and Sustainability of the City

(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 Kanata Lakes established his home based consulting with two employees some years ago. Within days the By-law officer was at his door—there had been an anonymous complaint (everyone town and city seems to have a 1-800-rat-line so you can put the finger on a neighbor). He was told to cease and desist and fined too. (He eventually got fed up and moved to … New Zealand!) Why should we force people to leave the suburbs to go to downtown offices, leaving behind empty streets and easy pickings for BnE artists, just to turn around and leave downtown, as the sun sets, so they can become unsafe, deserted places where night creatures prowl?

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 Kanata Lakes, I had lunch with my Mother-in-law, a woman I adore. We talked about the uses our home gets put to in a typical day, this being Friday January 10, 2003. Today, we had a couple of trades people in to improve the home’s connectivity. My wife and I have five children and each bedroom needs to be wired for Internet—not something we considered when we built the home in 1988.

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 Dunrobin Lake, also full of stuff.

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 6:12 pm—still lots of time for more complexity, before the day is over.

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 California, people have additional incentive to add solar collectors and wind generators to their home or place of business. Any power they generate, that is surplus to their needs, can be pumped into the public grid and their meter will run in the reverse direction—that is, they are compensated for their power. What’s the point of investing in these types of technologies in, say, Ontario, where reverse metering is not allowed?

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 Carleton University by the Lecturer called Enterprise of the City.)

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 Ottawa is:

I did not know it was Ottawa until I saw it spelled out?
Ottawa is at the intersection of three rivers (and a canal)?

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 Ottawa planner in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s:

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 Ottawa in the late 1980s before a group of our neighbors circulated a petition in the neighborhood. They were concerned that a development of town homes about five blocks away in the largely single family home suburb would devalue property values in the area.

We had moved to Kanata because my wife felt it would provide a better place for our five children to find friends and develop a social life beyond the nuclear family unit.

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 Ottawa can either stop stuff from happening or make it happen. As Archimedes said: “Give me a lever long enough and a balance point, and I will move the Earth.”

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 2^nd 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 Bronx). And it was just as crappy there as it would have been in Queens or Cumberland.

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 19^th 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 Nantucket. Why?

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 Ottawa)?” The NCC (National Capital Commission) had been looking for solutions for many years (and still is in A.D. 2003). There is no secret to how to bring more life to downtown streets in major N.A. cities. The solution was obvious then and is just as obvious today. You need to have people living downtown before restaurants, shops and services will work properly.

Want safer streets after sundown? Have more people living downtown. When the NCC was looking at redeveloping a downtown Ottawa property that they own in 2001, they looked at a number of options—more office buildings versus an office building and a residential tower. They hired a consultant (when doesn’t the GOC (Government of Canada) hire a consultant)—a financial analyst, by God. And guess what he found? That the IRR (Rate of Return or, more properly, the Internal Rate of Return, was higher if only office buildings were built).

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 Canada’s acceptance of the Kyoto Protocol recently, there is scant evidence that the GOC intends to do anything about its own practices preferring to focus on Industry compliance instead), what hope is there that the development industry will do it?

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