Developing Stories

Land and Lenox

2011-12-29T22:01:00.002-05:00

The man at the counter at Nejaime's was wistful, retelling a relative's account of continually falling snow, inch after inch, somewhere, but not here. The lack of snow and mild temperatures (until very recently), hampering even snow-making operations, is dragging down the economy of Berkshire County and its smattering of ski areas, though not in a way that seems terribly unusual. Folks around here are used to a certain amount of economic pummeling.
I am in my room at the Yankee Inn, having brought my family to the old stomping grounds, when I lived in Richmond as a reporter for The Berkshire Eagle in the 80s. Though I was physically fit from doing things like team triathlons in those days, I remember the March when I decided it was time to go -- marveling at the phenomenon of frozen mud. There's a barren quality to the landscape that feels familiar. Here on Pittsfield Road, Route 7, Lenox has grouped all its big-box commercial retail close to the Pittsfield city line, drawing in the customers and confining the ugliness and the traffic close to its municipal neighbor to the north, while realizing all the tax revenue. Places to eat are in walking distance, but not really; the four lanes of the sidewalk-less arterial almost dare you to venture out by foot. The Stop and Shop plaza looks like it was carved out of glacial rock; indeed the premiere corner at Dan Fox Drive is just that, jutting black cliffs of rock, the blasting cores visible in neat rows. Dan Fox would have been the first leg of the Route 7 Bypass, just like Melnea Cass was the beginning of the Inner Belt in distant Boston.
Earlier we walked the trials of the Pleasant Valley sanctuary just south of here, and saw the work of busy beavers. Back at the hotel, the carpeted corridors feature pictures by Bill Teague, a veteran editor at the Eagle, who used to chain-smoke Marlboros in the newsroom and ask me if I had any news from the city council meetings. They show Greater Pittsfield in the 50s, all Norman Rockwell potraits, kids eating pizza and ice cream, singing at performances, women in those flared white sunglasses, crewcut teenagers by a lifeguard chair at a local lake beach. We'll see if they've made enough snow to ski down at Bousquet in the morning.

Worcester's next steps

2011-10-26T15:13:00.003-04:00

I'm reprinting my Community Voices This Land blog posts here:

WORCESTER -- It's painful to walk around the common here and see the devastation still apparent from urban renewal -- the vacant parcels, the surface parking lots, the double-wide arterials, the monstrosity of the Galleria mall -- a hulking white spaceship plopped downtown as if it was a deliberate attempt to destroy the urban fabric. But perhaps equally sad has been the repeated attempts to recover from that era --not only urban renewal in the 1950s and 60s but the delcine of manufacturing and the flight to the suburbs -- with reinventions and grand new schemes aimed at finally putting the City of Seven Hills back on the map. If only -- and this is what cities like New Haven are thinking, too -- some of the magic of Providence could catch on.
So it is with guarded optimism that Worcester is wecloming yet another plan to breathe new life into downtown, based around the rehabilitated Hanover Theatre, and covered by the Worcester Telegram & Gazette -- itself a property that is poised to be part of surgical but ambitious redevelopment of the area. The Worcester Business Development Corporation, which has been successful retrofitting the area north of downtown, at the site of a shuttered vocational school, with new and rehabilitated space for bio-tech and life sciences, is signing a memorandum of understanding with the city to assess how the emerging "theatre district" might be embellished and reconfigured. The Cambridge firm of Chan, Krieger-NBBJ has been hired to draw a master plan. All of it will accompany the ongoing redevelopment of the Galleria mall, the $583 million CitySquare project set in motion initially by Young Park and Berkeley Investments, and now an undertaking of Hanover Insurance Co.'s Opus Investments Management group. In that redevelopment, new towers will be accompanied by the demolition of some of the fantastically ugly structured parking and the squat mall section that was blocks Front Street like a giant tree lying across the road. Opening that street up so it once again leads to the elegant Union Station will be like Worcester's own version of the dismantling of the elevated Central Artery (if anybody still remembers that).
But this is a tricky business, trying to cultivate downtown living in Worcester, given the current market -- and also the legacy of urban renewal, which messed things up so much in the first place. Civic leaders are essentially saying trust us, we'll get it right this time. There isn't much appetite for tearing down buildings if they have the slightest historical significance, or using eminent domain, ever since the Kelo case prompted by failed redevelopment efforts in New London. The signs at the CitySquare construction site read, "Coming Soon: Mixed Use." What that really means is "Coming Soon: More People." Worcester can only hope, and keep the shoulder to the wheel.

Roaring Ireland

2011-10-08T08:50:00.006-04:00

Recently returned from Ireland, to report that the Celtic Tiger is still showing strength. The taxi drivers all bemoaned the recession in that way that taxi drivers do. The Irish Times business section ran headlines like "Cleaning up after the bust," the Irish banks and the Euro remain in tumult, and the roadside is dotted with the equivalent of foreclosure notices. But the streets and the pubs were full in Dublin. Plenty of tourists and unusually sunny weather. The way down probably felt more intense because of the heights that had been achieved.
I was in Dublin presenting at the 1st international Conference on Age-Friendly Cities, co-sponsored by the World Health Organization, the International Federation on Ageing, and Ireland's Age Friendly County Programme. Age-friendly cities are those that accomodate the growing cohort of older persons -- including aging baby boomers like me -- and allow them to age in place, walk or take transit. In other words, the way great urban neighborhoods function for anyone. I suggested in my talk that the 21st century city needed both attention at the neighborhood scale using the urban owner's manual left by Jane Jacobs, and a vision for regional planning and infrastructure demonstrated by Robert Moses. The concept of age-friendly cities is taking hold especially in countries with low fertility rates and where the older population is quite out of balance with under-35 year olds.
P.s. Hotel of choice in Dublin? The Merrion, fashioned out of four Georgian townhouses at the streetfront, and with fully modern facilities out back, a nice adapative re-use, and exceptionally attentive service. A nap was prerequisite by the fireplace in the lobby sitting area, having arrived at 5:20 a.m. on the short Aer Lingus flight from Boston.

Cape by design

2011-08-16T09:18:00.004-04:00

Staying at the goose hunting shack converted to country retreat by Ben Thompson, on a bluff in Barnstable overlooking Sandy Neck, prompts me to re-post this dispatch on Jane Thompson's wonderful book Design Research, first appearing at my boston.com Community Voices blog:
Every once in a while an enterprise comes together that helps define a place -- that captures a time but lives on and becomes part of the story of a place, even long after it's gone. Such is the case with Design Research, housed in the concrete and glass structure that also houses offices and the Harvest restaurant, designed by D/R founder Benjamin Thompson, at the corner of Brattle and Church streets in Harvard Square.
Thompson (1918-2002) was the man behind Fanueil Hall marketplace and Harborplace in Baltimore, a pioneer in the now-familiar practice of revitalizing industrial waterfront areas. He was a founding partner along with Walter Gropius of the Bauhaus in The Architects Collaborative (TAC), which designed the equally pioneering Six Moon Hill community in Lexington, a planned neighborhood with a common modernist aesthetic that is cherished to this day.
And he was also the driving force behind Design Research, a general store for modern living -- undisputed precursor to Crate and Barrel, as well as influence for Design Within Reach, Esprit, and West Elm, for that matter. Walter Gropius and Jose Louis Sert brought modernism here in association with Harvard University's Graduate School of Design; Le Corbusier built the Carpenter Center, his only building in North America; but TAC and Six Moon Hill and Design Research all brought modernism to New England in a somehow more accessible, comfortable way.
Design Research was founded in 1953 in a clapboard house at 57 Brattle Street, replaced by the building now occupied by Harvard's Graduate School of Education. Then Thompson designed the award-winning new home for the general store of design, fittingly home to Crate and Barrel until recently -- "concrete without brutalism, glass without glossiness, contextual without imitation," as aptly described in the wonderful new book Design Research: The Store that brought Modern Living to American Homes (Chronicle Books), by Jane Thompson (Ben's wife) and Alexandra Lange.
At Design Research the showrooms of dinnerware and furniture coincided with some big-name collaborations, from Marimekko to Julia Child. I was honored to be at a Loeb Fellowship gathering at holiday time not long ago, where Thompson brought out all her Marimekko prints and umbrellas and scrafs, and they were arrayed all over the empty store (in transition to its current occupant Anthrolpologie). Not a moment went by without people knocking on the door, hoping to get in, thinking it was a museum exhibit or groovy new emporium. The building itself is understated and welcoming, a low-pressure place for people to gather, though the concrete reminds one a bit of Boston City Hall. It was spared the rock-throwing students of 1970 around Harvard and won numerous awards; the New Yorker came up to see what the fuss was all about.
Today Harvard Square has changed in many ways, but walking around the complex is a marvelous throwback to the 1970s. Give me some bellbottoms or at least a wide tie, and let's order martinis at the Harvest.

A Sense of Place Quiz for Boston

2011-05-10T16:36:00.000-04:00

In honor of Jane's Walk this past weekend, held around the world to explore the kind of great urban neighborhoods celebrated by Jane Jacobs, whose seminal The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published 50 years ago, herewith a test of knowledge of the Boston area:
1. At what spot are there are four layers of transportation possible, one on top of the other -- a boat on water, a train on tracks, pedestrians, bicycles and cars on a roadway, and an aircraft in the sky?
2. The Massachusetts Avenue connector and Melnea Cass Boulevard form the beginning of what was to be the Inner Belt, an expressway that would have provided an alternate route around the Central Artery. What is the other evidence of the Inner Belt, still in place today?
3. Where is Scott Harshbarger Square? (Not a trick question)
4. Kendall Square was the site of the first telephone call and a booming tech center, home to Microsoft and Google. Back in the days of John F. Kennedy's administration, what was originally supposed to go there?
5. What city is the densest city in the Commonwealth?
6. What town famously refused to be annexed by the City of Boston, and in what year?
7. Frederick Law Olmsted's Emerald Necklace was originally intended to loop back around down what street, ending where?
8. The Rose Kennedy Greenway is littered with unbuilt dreams, from the botanical gardens at Dewey Square to the YMCA. What is the only public building to actually start construction?
9. What is the area north of Charles Street in Beacon Hill known as?
10. Where in Cambridge can the view to the Charles River never be obstructed -- from the front door of what house?
Write your responses in the comment section. Answers in a forthcoming post.

Reflections from Vermont

2010-08-21T08:28:00.002-04:00

Back in Peru, winding up another August, and therefore time for the Priest Lane observations collection:
-- My son and I took the Prius to see "The Other Guys" in Bennington a few days ago. The pilloried vehicle served us well as always. The movie, preceded by stops at the Gamer Grotto and the Rattlesnake, was amusing; my son is a big Will Ferrell fan, though I thought Mark Wahlberg really stepped up. Downtown Bennington is an interesting case. No critical mass of people living downtown as far as I could see. But coming down from the north on the "new" Route 7 you would think it was a huge metropolis, with wide, sweeping off-ramps and massive interchanges. This got us talking about why there's a new Route 7 in the first place, through such a rural area. It's great for trucks, and it certainly whisked us from Manchester in a hurry, but how many trips like that are in demand? The answer is, even in crunchy, local-food, local-energy Vermont, we can't shake our love affair with bigger and better roadways. Patrick Leahy has clearly steered millions in stimulus money for repaving here; Route 11 is as smooth as could be. Departments of Transportation are as single-minded as they have been for decades. They were trying to create a Route 7 bypass in my hometown of Wilton, Conn. nearly 40 years ago; the neighbors fought it, Jane Jacobs-style, though the Norwalk segment was built. They wanted the same thing around Pittsfield, Mass., when I was a reporter at The Berkshire Eagle. The road construction work around Bennington seemed to suggest the same old thinking -- that somehow a lot of big roads and bridges and overpasses will save a city. On this point, at least, there is little recognition that the fossil-fuel era is over.
-- The farmer's market in Londonderry continues to be a wonderful experience. We are veterans now. We take out a lot of cash to be prepared, but we spend wisely. You have to pick and choose. We're big supporters of locally grown produce and meats and everything, but $13 for a pound of bacon, $4 eggs and $7 unprocessed milks tests one's principles. Like moths to a flame, however, we are heading back this morning, our last Saturday here.
-- Wildlife sightings included a big heron swooping down to the pond and departing at the first sign of dawn movement in the kitchen; a wild turkey mother who seemed like she was six feet tall with a half-dozen (chicks?); Eastern newts and red eft salamanders with their neon blue dots, which I am convincing my middle son we can't keep as pets; springy frogs, Monarch butterflies, crickets and grasshoppers, finches, jays, hawks, and hummingbirds.
-- Something about being up here and real estate. We made an offer on the new house while here on Memorial Day; we accepted an offer on the old house also while here, in both cases borrowing printers and fax machines from stores and neighbors.
-- My youngest son, being toilet-trained here (with great success!) just sprinted from the training potty and out the door, naked, scampering on the dew-soaked lawn in the sunshine. That ain't happening back in Boston. But for everything there is a season.

Blogging comes around

2010-07-05T21:18:00.003-04:00

I sheepishly admit that "Developing Stories" has suffered from neglect. Facebook and Twitter have taken the greatest toll. I spend a lot of time writintg At Lincoln House. And now, nearly a year after I took that run in Vermont, the launch of This Land, an addition to the Community Voices group at The Boston Globe / boston.com, covering architecture, urban design, public space, and the built environment in the Boston area and beyond.

Can't get there from here

2009-09-29T15:33:00.002-04:00

I've been Facebook-posting my frustrations with the Acela, which should be a three hour (or less) "high speed" trip between two major cities, Boston and New York. I put that in quotes because if the train went anywhere close to 100 miles per hour, sluggish by European and Asian standards, it would be welcome indeed. Instead in crawls along through New Rochelle (what is New Rochelle's raison d'etre?) and stops so other Acelas can pass on single tracks while workers toil away at some obscure thing or another. Today I had to take the USAirways shuttle, because I had a live land line interview on WICN public radio from Worcester at 8 a.m., and a taping for City Talk on CUNY-TV at 12 p.m. A 10 a.m. pushback, wait on the taxiway at Logan to take off, and then circling over White Plains because as the pilot said, "It's just a busy time." Of course there was the inevitable backup on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (a Robert Moses creation); I did get to midtown, hard by the Empire State Building, by a little after noon. But I was still left wishing for surface transport that takes less than three hours. One additional annoyance: everyone else in the world is recycling, but the airlines throw newspapers in the trash? I offered to take a bunch to a recycling bin at LaGuardia -- only to discover they have none. Happily, here at Union Square Starbucks before heading to the Jane Jacobs Medal reception sponsored by the Rockfeller Foundation and Municipal Art Society, at the new Thomas Mann building at Cooper Union (they are giving copies of "Wrestling with Moses" out in the gift bag!), and before that a guest lecture for a Pratt Institute course on infrastructure. Returning tomorrow on ... the Acela.

Diary of a book tour

2009-08-29T22:39:00.002-04:00

I've been Tweeting and Facebook-posting since the launch of Wrestling with Moses, but am now pausing here in Peru, Vermont to reflect on my experiences sharing this book thus far:
-- Tonight was Northshire Books in Manchester, Vermont, a very happening place, Howard Dean tomorrow night, hen Tracy Kidder and Richard Russo. Lots of New Yorkers with very good questions, including how we can possibly solve the gentrification dilemma. Today as well John Barber of the Toronto Globe and Mail weighed in with this piece: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/was-jane-jacobs-a-saint/article1269333/.
-- Earlier this month I was in Toronto for media interviews and the Ramsay Breakfast forum at the University Club. The city is home to a great many Jane Jacobs fans; she moved there in 1968, in part to protect her sons from the Vietnam draft, and became a Canadian citizen. Her son, Jim Jacobs, was kind to meet with me and we talked for hours and walked around the city. He gave me a mason jar of some peach jam Jane had made, dated 2005, the year before she died.
-- Before that, the turnout at Politics and Prose in Washington DC was inspiring, lots of interest and people who care about cities and citybuilding. A number of Loeb Fellows attended, including DC city planner Harriet Tregoning and David Goldberg from SmartGrowth America. I dutifully took the Metro and walked a mile to the bookstore -- another wonderful independent institution.
-- The first talk was at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, and another good turnout for a Tuesday evening in August. That followed the launch party at Tory Row in Harvard Square July 30. That morning my old car overheated on Storrow Drve, and I figured it was the ghost of Jane Jacobs chiding me for using it too much (though I have low VMT). I traded it in for a 2010 Prius and I'm loving it.
The weeks ahead include New York, at Urban Center books, The Skyscraper Museum and the Tenement Museum; the University Club in Boston; Powell's Books in Portland, Ore., where we're screening the Lincoln Institute film "Portland: Quest for a Livable City," and after that a lunchtime talk hosted by SPUR in San Francisco.

Thoughts on run for first time in a year

2009-08-20T13:02:00.003-04:00

1. Nothing like waking up in Vermont to see one's op-ed essay about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses has been published in The Boston Globe: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/08/20/in_2_visions_a_blueprint_to_a_livable_city/
2. Need to get life insurance.
3. Gorgeous hawk in the swaying trees overhead, peering down at me, hopping from branch to branch like a parakeet. Usually only see them soaring.
4. This isn't so bad.
5. I think I might need an oxygen tent.
6. Do sweat flies have any useful purpose in the ecosystem?
7. What do they do when I'm not here?
8. Around here, it's like the real estate equivalent of a red light district.
9. Does this vacation have to end?
10. Downhill ... margarita ... nachos.

Back to Boch

2009-08-01T21:19:00.006-04:00

Faithful readers may recall my bittersweet experience at Boch Toyota for the premium-price purchase of a hybrid Highlander. Today I drove my 1998 BMW 238i 4-door sedan down to the dealership to get what I could for it -- I couldn't qualify for "cash for clunkers" because the car is listed at 20 miles per gallon at 130,000 miles, and the threshold is 18 miles per gallon. Pulling off Route 1 with steam billowing from the hood wasn't exactly a position of strength. I said at my book party Thursday at Tory Row in Harvard Square in Cambridge that it was the ghost of Jane Jacobs, scolding me for using the car so much; accordingly I took the T to get my seersucker suit at Brooker Brothers, and lugged a jerry can of coolant in a tote bag. Anyhow, Boch granted me a pittance for the beemer, and I must say I was a tiny bit emotional leaving the old rig, 10 years later. The car served me well, and I loved the peppy way I could drive it, the singular and slightly smug feeling, pulling up to a valet. It's a window into American culture -- car as identity, the vehicle you love to care for and pull through the car wash. As of today I have moved from car that symbolizes other things, to car as transportation. From the vehicle I dabbed with Armour-All wipes, to the car that keeps my eye on the Tie-fighter like readout, displaying how I'm getting 50 miles to the gallon, how I'm on battery power, emitting no greenhouse gas emissions. I'm finally walking the walk. It's a new era, and one I think we're all going to have to enter.

Eyes on the street

2009-07-28T22:33:00.003-04:00

So my neighbor locked herself out of her house two doors down tonight, and her two-year-old is inside, thankfully occupied watching TV. We were having Chinese takeout when she rang the doorbell. I went over, surveyed the locked windows and doors, and discussed the options: breaking in (a sensitive subject these days in Boston), calling the police, or calling Broadway Locksmith in South Boston. I loaned her my phone and we opted for the latter and they were there in five minutes and the shaggy-haiored locksmith picked the lock in about a minute. This could have happened in a subdivision, I suppose, but our urban neighborhood, with the kids out on their scooters and us on our stoops, naturally made me think of Jane Jacobs, and the way that neighbors are around and close by in the city. "I owe you," the neighbor said. But not really. We're there for each other, just like the 75-year-old man next door shovels the snow in front of our house when in winter. It's our own kind of sidewalk ballet.

Jane Jacobs Way

2009-07-13T23:08:00.003-04:00

The block between 11th and Perry Streets including 555 Hudson Street, Jane Jacobs' home from 1947 to 1968, has been renamed Jane Jacobs Way, the New York Times City Room blog reports. I submitted this comment: "I’ve spent a lot of time on this block researching a book I’ve written about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. I went into 555 Hudson Street and took some pictures out the second floor window. It’s a fascinating stretch of urbanism, and one marvels at how Jane Jacobs moved there in 1947, how the neighborhood has come to be some of the most desirable real estate anywhere, and how it’s beome a role model for human-scaled, mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly environments that we could use alot more of these days."

Duany: No mas

2009-06-12T20:42:00.004-04:00

DPZ principal and New Urbanism founding father Andres Duany, reflecting on his experiences building the Katrina cottage on the Gulf Coast and modular housing, told the Congress for the New Urbanism gathering in Denver today that he had reluctantly come to a surprising conclusion -- that the design professions should give up on everything else on economical home design and concentrate efforts into designing a better mobile home. Trades contractors and government-imposed permitting and inspection requirements obliterate the savings achieved in low-cost housing construction, he said. The comments came as the New Urbanists wrestled with issues of infrastructure, going green, and financing of projects in these dark economic times. I presented the Lincoln Institute report, Smart Growth Policies, in the session "Selling the Green Urban Advantage," as an example of what can happen when the impact of sustainable development policies are measured (results are not the home run most would hope for), alongside Carol Coletta from CEOs for Cities, Robin Rather from Collective Strengths, and the intrepid Steve Filmanowicz from CNU. Another fine session looked at New Urbanism's focus on transit-oriented development and President Obama's high-speed rail initiative holds much promise with the group.
-- LEED-ND in the works. Standards for the green good-housekeeping seal of approval for entire neighborhoods and not just individual buildings are coming together, and several Denver-area projects, such as Stapleton and Bel-Mar, were put to the test. Interestingly, the Highlands Village neighborhood scored low on some measures because a street was deemed too wide and there was only one floor of street-fronting retail in one section.
-- Dark age ahead. Author James Howard Kunstler was in fine form with his analysis that the US financial system is broken "at every level," making it impossible to return to the oil-based arrangements to which we've grown accustomed. He argues that a much more locally based economy is on the horizon, with small cities depending on proximate farmland.
Blog posts and tweets are abundantly available via the conference Web site, www.CNU17.org, plus dispatches at The Huffington Post.

Expect more

2009-04-28T15:35:00.001-04:00

Big-box retailers are an easy … target, when it comes to the window-dressing that’s often done on sustainability. “We’ve heard a lot of that … that word,” said our guide on a dazzling tour of Target’s corporate headquarters on Nicolett Mall in Minneapolis, where some 5,000 planners and others have descended for the annual American Planning Association. We were in the company’s 60-person architecture and engineering division, which if it stood alone would be the fourth largest such firm in Minnesota, after strolling through the Café Target and the art-adorned Great Hall, where pairs of employees talked earnestly on simple fabric furniture. What of the green innovations? The ubiquitous green roof, of course, skylights, recycling plastic hangers, tote bags to replace those bright white bullseye-dotted plastic bags, minimizing and decking parking, and plantings (Japanese maples, red of course, and “perennials with a neat appearance that align with Target’s brand image,” according to guidelines). Our guides were subdued about the greenest thing Target can do, which is to build or rehab in urban locations – the Minneapolis store is a nice example, with its slightly Dutch-feeling shopping-cart escalators, very well used when I was there. Depends on the cost of land, the market analysis, and whether it’s part of a development project, they said: “It has to be practical.” One factor is the delivery and handling of products in cities – from more compact loading docks to the need to move goods to multiple floors – which can raise labor costs. Over the nearly 200 projects in the works, most were conventional big buildings with big parking fields (though I did spot a nice roundabout drawn in to replace an intersection in one set of plans). The claim is that more building rehab is being done; no word on ending the practice of tear-downs after 10 years. Through a program of overhauling libraries and in other ways, Target proclaims interest in building communities. Truly harnessing its branding power could broadcast a message of green amid all that red.

Buckminster Rem

2009-04-03T22:25:00.002-04:00

Rem Koolhaas was at Harvard tonight, and did not disappoint. He was the keynote for the Ecological Urbanism conference at the Graduate School of Design, a role he confided he first thought was some kind of "cruel joke." He suggested that green sensibilities began at least with Vitruvius, and continued with Ian McHarg and Buckminster Fuller, in a co-existence of culture and nature, and the ventilating walls and other features of "tropical architecture" he learned about as a young man. He was scornful of the "apocalypitc streak" of those predicting environmental calamity, citing the Club of Rome's "Limits of Growth." Showing a collage of contemporary skylines including Dubai, London and his own CCTV building in Beijing, he acknowledged that "that's out," in terms shortcomings in green performance. But he said "our responses are not that deep, equating responsibility with literal greening" -- green roofs, lining walls with grass -- and pilloried Renzo Piano's California Academy of Sciences building in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Piano's defense of the grassy-knolled creation was either "outrageously innocent or deeply calculation, and probably both," he said. In a house-of-mirrors moment came when he criticized Nicolai Ouroussoff's praise of the building. A more effective approach that goes beyond "good intentions and branding," he said, was the Nordzee wind power project in The Netherlands, in combination with the harnessing of tidal and solar power southward across Europe. That was the kind of marriage of "politics and engineering" that Buckminster Fuller was getting at some 40 years ago, Koolhaas said. Fair enough. I regard Koolhaas much the way that Jane Jacobs appreciated Louis Kahn or Mies van der Rohe; the Kunsthall and Seattle Library are certainly compelling. His take on the green mandate and architecture's response was nothing if not provocative.

Audacious stimulus

2009-02-04T21:48:00.006-05:00

As the stimulus package moves through the Senate this week, urbanists are tracking the jockeying on transportation and public works infrastructure. How much of the spending will be for new highway and bridge construction, and how much for transit, "fix it first" roadway and bridge repair, and other aspects of green infrastructure? And how will the money be spent -- by state departments of transportation as they see fit, or with some green-oriented strings attached? The House version of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Economic Recovery Bill called for roughly $30 billion for highways and $10 billion for transit and inter-city rail. In December, Lincoln Institute senior fellow Armando Carbonell urged achieving multiple goals – including energy-efficiency and targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions -- and using a new framework of megaregions for making the investments, in this op-ed essay appearing in The Boston Globe. He was also a signatory in the "Call to New Administration: Only One Chance to Do this Right, Invest Wisely," a blueprint to guide these dramatic new investments, composed after a coalition of leading civic, business, environmental, and transportation leaders came together at Pocantico, N.Y. The blueprint, posted at The New York Times Economix blog and available at the America 2050 Web site, calls for an emphasis on repair and maintenance, projects that foster energy independence, compact communities, and emissions reductions; a phasing-in of spending to allow for strategic planning; workforce training; and a new system of oversight to ensure the projects have desired outcomes. Thus far, the legislation has few of these characteristics. Good reading on the infrastructure aspect of the stimulus can be found by Michael Grunwald in Time magazine, Nicole Gelinas in City Journal, Libby Tucker in the New York Times Green Inc. blog, David Leonhardt in the New York Times, and among many opinion essays, this one by Congress for the New Urbanism president John Norquist on Planetizen . The Los Angeles Times has a good summary of this extraordinary, evolving package, and a good place to keep up with highway vs. transit news is at the Transportation for America blog.

Best and worst of times

2008-12-31T11:31:00.003-05:00

On our block here in Boston, the men threw all our carefully separated recycling into the garbage truck today, including all the cardboard boxes from Christmas that we spent time breaking down and stacking into paper bags. When I asked how this could happen in such a green city as Boston, the crew said their instructions came from City Hall, because there was no recycling truck available. It was a fitting end to 2008, which was a jumble of good intentions and harsh realities. I finished my book on the clash of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, to be published by Random House in the summer of 2009, bought a hybrid Toyota Highlander, spent a wonderful two weeks in Peru, Vermont, my son started a new school; soaring gas prices seemed to make more Americans aware of how dependent we are on our cars, particularly in our dispersed suburban areas, and the country elected a president who valued cities, embraced smart growth, and seemed to understand transit. But then of course the economy tanked, the stock market had its worst year since 1931, decimating 401(k)s and endowments; gas prices dropped to $1.50 a gallon, and the Obama administration looks like it's succumbing to business as usual for state DOTs and the highway lobby in the planned investments in infrastructure in the economic stimulus package. John Massengale has a nice post on this last most troubling subject. In the closing days of the year, our nanny quit abruptly and moved to Maine. But, onward: this morning we met someone new. Tomorrow we start the two-week jump-start for the South Beach diet, and we'll get the ship righted once again. Happy new year.

Riding the rails

2008-11-10T14:57:00.003-05:00

I want to love the Acela. But it just keeps confounding me. Earlier in the fall, I booked a seat from Boston all the way to Washington. I viewed it as an experiment: yes, it takes more time than flying, but you can get work done, and six hours is worth it for the reduced energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. I stacked appointments behind my scheduled arrival at Union Station. Somewhere in Connecticut we came to a dead stop; a drawbridge ahead failed to close properly. OK, I thought, a little mishap, but maybe we’ll make up the time. Not only was that not the case -- when we finally pulled into New York an hour late, we were told we would remain in Penn Station for an hour. I asked a conductor and she said something about "missing our slot." The afternoon's appointments were obliterated. On a more recent trip – ironically to a conference, Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design after the Age of Oil, on the way to New York we were told we would be late because conditions were “slippery” and slowing things down. Doesn't it rain in France and Japan? Don’t high-speed trains work there in all kinds of weather? Finally, after meeting with my editors at Random House, I went to Penn Station to catch a 7 a.m. Acela for the short trip to Philadelphia. Train canceled. No explanation. Finally, a barely audible announcement: there was an equipment shortage. The Carolina was scheduled to depart at 7:05, and Acela ticket-holders herded toward that platform -- only to get attitude about honoring the more expensive Acela ticket on the less expensive service. Several other people were delayed getting to the conference -- the same gathering Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Ian McHarg and others attended 50 years ago. One prominent topic was of course infrastructure, and the Northeast corridor service is the model for the rest of the nation -- but it needs to work. The original, perfectly reasonable goal was a three-hour trip from Boston to New York. The train can't seem to make three and a half hours. As a reporter for The Boston Globe I covered the various reasons why there were so many problems with the Acela, but I still don't understand them or why they can't be addressed. The staff seems to have a blasé attitude about being on time and going fast. The traveling public needs to go fast, and we need reliable service, for short-haul regional trips by rail to catch on. As reauthorization of the federal transportation bill approaches, and after voter approval of a $10 billion bond issue for new high-speed rail service in California, policymakers will be asking the question: how does it actually work? By the way, former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis will be at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Nov. 19 at noon to talk about the future of rail in the U.S., as a more transit-friendly administration prepares to move into office.

Jane Jacobs and Barack Obama

2008-10-01T17:08:00.003-04:00

At this event on the campaign trail, the Democratic nominee took a question from a gentleman who talked about cities and then handed over a copy of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library hardcover edition). Obama called it a great book and seemed to indicate he'd read it; he promises a coherent policy for cities and metropolitan areas if he's elected.

Reservations

2008-07-15T21:49:00.002-04:00

The pair of hawks soared over the treetops at the Mashantucket Pequot reservation, swerving closer to the scallop-shaped pool with the MGM lion etched in black on the tiled bottom. Were they looking for an unfinished pina colada? We splurged on a weekend at the new MGM Grand at Foxwoods in North Stonington, Conn., staying over after the 9 p.m. Carole King concert. (Yes, it was fine, disappointed she didn't play Jazzman, and boy did the aging boomer behind us get to be annoying singing, out of tune ... every ... word. I'm surprised AARP didn't have a sign-up sheet at the exits). We were struck by how the 26-story hotel tower rose up in the middle of nothing, just woods all around. But Native Americans would surely require, we thought, tough environmental standards for the development. Doesn't seem to be the case. The top of the giant parking garage was a massive impervious surface, and easily could have been planted as a green roof. No swales, no rainwater collection, can't open the windows. The flourescent light in the closet was activated by motion. Of course, the casino was replete with cigarette smoke. The Indians don't care any more than Wal-Mart does.

Tomorrowland

2008-04-02T20:02:00.002-04:00

Just back from Orlando, where I spoke at a conference on redevelopment and infill put on by the Orange County Government. They don't make walking easy there, but I hoofed it back from the convention center to the Hilton, along grassy shoulders of dual carriageways; sidewalks begin and end. We could see Sea World out our hotel window, and I insisted we walk there, across a giant parking lot. At the Magic Kingdom, I was struck by how urban the arrangement is. You park your car, get on a tram, and then take either the monorail or a ferry boat into the park itself. Once there, you walk around, and there aren't too many places to sit. Were it not for the sugar- and carb-laden food offerings every few feet, it's a place to burn off calories. The most efficient way to see Tomorrowland is by hopping on the Tomorrowland Transit Authority's Blue Line, an elevated subway. Walt Disney loved highways, but he knew the role of transit, and the virtues of compactness and density. Meanwhile, in Orlando, there's a recognition that they can't keep spreading outward, and instead must turn inward to vacant lots and parcels with great potential. Florida gave us Seaside and the South Beach Diet; maybe the Sunshine State will become a model for re-engineering our car-oriented environments as well.

Hybrid heaven

2008-03-02T17:37:00.003-05:00

So we took delivery on the 2008 Highlander Hybrid, submitting to the classic, and so completely backwards, stick-up job whereby pople who actually care about the future of the planet pay out the nose, while the buyers of old-school cars and trucks at Boch Toyota get the deals. It's a big yacht of a vehicle, and we're learning the mores of driving a hybrid: the wonderful quiet, the gentle touch with the accelerator to stay on electric power as long as possible, the joy of being able to park and idle without feeling guilty (the better to let the DVD run a bit more). We needed to accomodate three boys and do mostly city driving, and of course the mileage is better in stop-and-go because the battery kicks in at low speeds, and actually recharges in braking. Any longer trips we take have the whole family in one vehicle so we're always trip-bundled. When you drive a hybrid, it's true, you view the rest of the road differently: all those folks doing exactly the opposite of what we need to do, continuing to practice the great American tradition of driving a single-occupant, gas-guzzling vehicle for long distances. In Boston, as well, there's a particularly interesting cultural clash. At traffic lights and stop signs, I never gun it anymore, because I have one eye on the "EV" display that indicates my locomotion is emissions-free. My fellow road warriors seldom seem to be in this frame of mind. The honking began the instant the light changed to green the other day, and at the next light, where of course I caught up to the offender -- in a big non-hybrid SUV with New Hampshire plates -- I asked, why were you honking at me? To which he replied, "You weren't moving." No, I just wasn't moving fast enough for you. And off he went, pedal to the metal, secure in his ignorance with his brethren in the land of subdivisions north on I-93, unaware that the oil we use and the stuff we spew into the atmosphere is the slightest concern.

Hybrid havoc

2008-01-31T20:46:00.000-05:00

An expansion in the family required five distinct seats and storage, so we faced the dreaded middle-aged American dilemma -- minivan, SUV, crossover -- but with a but one mandatory requirement: our new, bigger car needed to be a hybrid. The auto industry, sluggish to respond to the demand from people like us (or equally likely, keeping supplies limited and prices high, knowing we'll pay), only offers a smattering as of 2008. We considered the Mercury Mariner, but they are hard to come by -- September at the earliest, we were told, and that was by a friend in the business. Aside from a Lexus, that left the Toyota Highlander Hybrid; Boch Toyota in Norwood said come on down for a test drive. "Great day to by a Highlander," said the welcoming sales director. "A hybrid Highlander," I clarified. Toyota is an interesting company in the context of the planetary emergency. The Prius has made history, but the showroom that day was full of huge cars and trucks -- the monster Sequoia SUV, the Tundra pick-up, a minivan here and there, some economy compacts, and no hybrids. We were told we got the last Highlander in stock. As such, Boch wouldn't take a dime off the $38,373 list price, despite the bubbly claim on the telephone that inventory needed to move before the end of the month. Why aren't there more choices? Does anyone seriously think we're all going to be driving gas-powered vehicles in 15 years? Toyota refuses to sell its hybrid minivan in the US (for sale in Japan only), though it would sell briskly in these parts and elsewhere around the nation. We don't need a huge SUV; we just need some extra seating. We would jump at the lightest vehicle possible with the most space and the best fuel economy. The Hybrid Center keeps tabs on how the car companies seem to be making this inevitable transition as difficult as possible. On the way out of the showroom, I asked if there was a recycling bin for the can of Diet Coke I had bought in Ernie's cafe. "Nah," said the cashier. "Just throw it in the trash." I squeezed past a hulking Tundra and headed for the door.

Yankee thrift and warming

2007-12-30T11:51:00.000-05:00

The next few years, climate change experts agree, are our last chance to start reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to have some impact on the planet fifty years from now. Putting a price on carbon, wind farms, new technology for cars, and concentrated land use are all important, but perhaps the most pressing need is in changing behavior now: using compact flourescents, turning off lights, eating local food, bundling trips, leaving the car parked and taking transit, and ride-sharing with such services as GoLoco. Yet it turns out there's one behavior I don't have to change, because it's been good for the planet all along: my habit of wearing clothes until they are threadbare, shoes far beyond their life expectancy (record: a pair of wingtips from Scotland, twenty years). And being loathe to throw out any article of children's clothing, because it can be re-used. I have been exposed to much criticism and psycho-analysis about this, but now I have the ultimate defense -- I'm saving on the energy needed to manufacture new things. I knew there was something visionary in the old New England Yankee credo: use it up and wear it out. The New York Times ran a piece in the Thursday Styles section on jackets insulated with recycled plastic bottles and tote bags patched together with rags. Recycling clothes from your own closet, the reporter concluded, may be the greenest statement of all.

Jane's turn

2007-09-22T22:33:00.000-04:00

Earlier this year, New York was abuzz with a series of exhibitions put on by Columbia University, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Queens Museum: “Robert Moses and the Modern City,” with a subtitle noting the “transformation of New York,” in contrast to the “fall” of New York in the subtitle of Robert Caro’s epic biography The Power Broker. The series was a fresh look at the master builder, and suggested, implicitly and otherwise, that maybe Moses wasn’t as terrible as he was made out to be, particularly in Caro’s tome. Some of the dialogue that emerged centered on the question of whether the pendulum of community participation had swung too far, and the need for someone with Moses’ vision if not another Robert Moses, to push for big projects and critical infrastructure to keep New York an economic powerhouse and a good place for people to live. Now comes “Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York,” a two-room multimedia exhibit at the Municipal Art Society -- 457 Madison Avenue, New York NY, opening Tuesday Sept. 28 and running through Jan. 5, 2008 (www.mas.org). The exhibit is sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, the same folks who gave Jacobs a grant that enabled her to write The Death and Life of Great American Cities almost a half-century ago. There is no revisionism in this presentation, curated by George Washington University’s Christopher Klemek. The message is that Jacobs was vindicated in her recommendations for short blocks, diversity and density, and a mix of uses; tenacious in taking on the planning establishment and officialdom to show them the errors of their ways -- and, critically, that all New Yorkers should feel empowered to question plans and projects in pretty much the exact same way today. For each of the battles that Jacobs took on – blocking traffic in Washington Square Park, fighting urban renewal in the West Village, and beating back the Lower Manhattan Expressway (all of which I will chronicle in my upcoming book on the clash of Jacobs and Moses being published next year by Random House) -- the exhibit cites a battle happening right now in New York, over landfills, environmental justice and other assorted projects, and the neighborhood group that is engaged in the cause. The Municipal Art Society, currently looking for new leadership and a clarified role in the civic affairs of New York, clearly seeks to empower and educate, and laudably, reach new audiences. The fact is a great many people don’t know who Jane Jacobs was. A television producer, for example, told organizers that the exhibit and related panels and walking tours all sounded very interesting, but wanted to know if Ms. Jacobs would be leading any tours or speaking herself (she died last April). Thus, the first room of the exhibit is an introduction to Jacobs and primarily the principles of urbanism she espoused. In a nice touch, guests can look through a Lucite panel to a stretch of Madison Avenue outside, and consider the mix and massing of buildings, or the pulse of people on the sidewalks. (When I was there I was fixated by the artistry of a worker scoring some freshly laid cement on the sidewalk along 51st Street, and had to tear myself away – but it was all in keeping with Jacobs’ admonition to observe and look closely at the urban environment). The second room dwells more on taking on the establishment, and includes a wonderful section of nasty letters about Jacobs from two men, Moses and Lewis Mumford. The fight against the plan to raze 14 blocks in the West Village circa 1961 gets thoughtful treatment; this is the area of Klemek’s greatest expertise. Jacobs, during this time, developed a no-compromise approach and dabbled in trying to do housing development herself, with the West Village Houses, the 5-story red-brick alternatives to the towers in the park that Jacobs and the community managed to build near the Hudson River. The fight against the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which Moses wanted to build to connect the Holland Tunnel to East River crossings, is made vivid by a digital composition photograph showing a graffiti-strewn elevated highway structure – it looks like the Bruckner – plunked down in the middle of trendy Broome Street in SoHo. On the way out, visitors see a photograph of Jacobs in jail with Susan Sontag after being arrested in an anti-Vietnam War protest, and the quote from Jacobs on she resented how much time she had to spend fighting government plans when she says she would have been happier writing books. The exhibit, which relies heavily on the contents of the Jane Jacobs papers at the Burns Library at Boston College, suffers somewhat from imprecision; the wrong date is given for her arrival in Greenwich Village, and the idea of putting a sunken roadway through Washington Square Park is misattributed to Moses (the man behind the submersion was Manhattan borough president Hulan Jack, whom Moses pilloried for daring to suggest an alternative to his surface-level park-piercing). The photo caption in a magazine showing Jacobs with various planning and design luminaries at the University of Pennsylvania in 1958 misidentifies the legendary urban and environmental scholar Ian McHarg as “Ian McHard,” and the mistake is repeated in the exhibit copy. There are also a few typos that suggest a sense of being rushed. Do we need another Moses? Did he do good things? This tribute to Jane Jacobs was seen by some as a kind of retort to the Moses exhibits, almost as if it was audacious to suggest that Jacobs’ primary foil might be redeemed. No, actually, she was right and he was mostly wrong; she had an intuitive sense of what makes a successful city and Moses and the planners of the day didn’t; she had the gumption to challenge authority, and all New Yorkers should engage in the future of their city with her energy and verve – those are some of the messages inherent at the Municipal Art Society. How can big plans and big projects and infrastructure co-exist with community participation? Has NIMBYism led to paralysis that threatens to turn the city into a museum? How can affordability stay marbled into the urban neighborhoods that Jacobs knew the wealthy, in droves, would begin to value? Those are some of the trickier questions raised in the juxtaposition of Jacobs and Moses that are not so fully addressed. The exhibit will be accompanied by a series of panels and guided walking tours, the first of which was today through the Greenwich Village neighborhood Jacobs called home.

Fixing it first

2007-08-03T10:06:00.000-04:00

When I worked briefly in state government, one of the proudest accomplishments was what we didn't do. Under Governor Mitt Romney's "Fix it First" policy, what we didn't do was build new highways and interchanges and new bridges and the like -- not a single new lane mile in Massachusetts over four years. (The unfortunate reconfiguration of the Sagamore rotary, the gateway to Cape Cod, was the closest the administration got to this very common indulgence). Instead, Romney, a Republican now running for president, had a different priority: making sure that existing infrastructure was in a state of good repair. By definition that meant stuff that was in and around existing cities. Ed Rendell and Jennifer Granholm, governors of Pennsylvania and Michigan respectively, had similar policies. It is one of the most solid tenets of smart growth -- the makeovers make cities and older suburbs more liveable and functional, while sprawl-enabling highway construction is limited. In Massachusetts, when the engineers looked around and checked out what needed fixing up, the list was sobering. If the Longfellow Bridge connecting Boston and Cambridge over the Charles River doesn't get a $60 million restoration, it could crumble in stages like an unstable sand castle. One engineer said his official assessment was that the Storrow Drive tunnel absolutely will fail within five years, but his unofficial view was that it could cave in any day now. Even with an affirmative policy to fix it first, scores of bridges are deficient. All of this is relevant, of course, after the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis. We don't know what happened -- the span was deemed deficient but passed inspection; cracking from fatigue is suspected. Maintenance is never a sexy thing for politicans, but one report suggests that $9 billion a year is needed to address aging infrastructure, over four times more than what is being spent now. Money is still getting poured into new highways out into the cornfields. Maybe the tragedy will make that kind of highway and bridge construction a bit more shameful (see the bridge to nowhere, courtesy of Rep. Don Young and Sen. Ted Stevens from Alaska). The Minneapolis bridge collapse came after a weekend spent in Amagansett on Long Island, which featured power outages and brownouts the days we were there. The Gucci storefront went dark and the pinot grigio warmed. It all gives one a creepy sense of being on borrowed time.
p.s. I have been trying to post more regularly but have been deterred in recent weeks because Google, new owner of Blogger, gave me no way to sign in. I'm a Google fan generally, but not when this champion of freedom of information freezes me out of my own blog.

Should I stay or should I go?

2007-06-14T14:17:00.000-04:00

I had the honor of moderating a terrific panel the other evening on the subject of Boston City Hall: should the 1969 Kallman, McKinnell and Knowles structure be abandoned to the wrecking ball, as the mayor has proposed? Don't do it, said three out of the five assembled, namely Joan Goody of Goody, Clancy; David Fixler, principal at Einhorn Yaffee Prescott, who has done a number of spruce-ups and rehabs of modernist buildings; and Nathan Glazer, author of the recent book, From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture's Encounter with the American City (Princeton University Press, 2007). Glazer was mostly convinced that contemporary architecture wouldn't give us a City Hall any better; Goody and particularly Fixler made the case that the building was neglected from the start -- light fixtures never replaced, finishes left undone, etc. The structure could be retrofitted, colorized and accessorized, and its barren plaza given edges and life. (A good first step would be to stop using the plaza as a parking lot and storage/staging area. The next step is to tear up the bricks and restore Hanover Street from Congress to Cambridge). While Mayor Thomas M. Menino has proposed a super-green new City Hall on the South Boston Waterfront, Fixler and Goody pointed out that demolishing the old City Hall, with all its stored energy, would take half a century to recoup. George Thrush, chair of the hard-charging architecture school at Northeastern University, dismissed that argument, and pressed for a re-envisioning of the entire Government Center/urban renewal area. Tamara Roy of ADD Inc. urged the same. I was interested in this subject for a number of reasons. One, I worked in the building from 1997-2000 in the Boston Globe's City Hall bureau; I covered the story the first time Menino proposed jettisoning City Hall, or turning it into a big handball court, as he remarked at the time. In addition, in my work on a new book on Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, I wondered what Jacobs would have thought. The West End was slum clearance at its worst, but Jacobs didn't have a knee-jerk reaction to all modernism -- she liked the Seagrams building in New York -- and somehow I think she would have considered working with the building rather than tearing it down and starting over. One universal point of agreement on the panel, put on by CommonBoston with support from the Boston Society of Architects: putting a new Boston City Hall on the South Boston Waterfront is a bad idea. Two things point towards keeping the much-maligned City Hall, coming up on her 40th birthday (Goody's helpful guide to reading the building: its base a reflection of historic red-brick buildings surrounding it to about the 5th floor; City Council and mayor's office, where democracy happens, prominently in the middle; supporting bureaucracy above). One, the city might not be able to get top dollar after all, for a massive redevelopment of the site (and which must include relocating the federal JFK building, the ultimate NIMBY because of security concerns). Second, sources tell me that city officials are reluctantly acknowledging that the proposal to build a new City Hall on the harbor's edge beyond D Street on the South Boston Waterfront is all but dead. If it was 50 years from now, I would say dead in the water.

An organic relationship

2007-05-29T22:41:00.000-04:00

Last weekend we did one of those Boston things that tourists normally do: take a ride on the swan boats in the Public Garden. Stepping off at the end and walking past the gift shop set up at the dock, I noticed the blurb on the back of the classic book for sale, Make Way for Ducklings, in big letters that said: "Boston's busy streets are too dangerous for these eight ducklings!" But all around the park, pedestrians stepped into crosswalks and cars, taxis and trucks yielded. The foundation for this behavior has less to do with danger, fear, or enforcement, but a simple reality: that drivers and bikers and people on foot -- and ducklings -- share the public realm. They must deal with each other. Cities and their street networks encourage this kind of recognition, because drivers in these environments have either just become, or are about to be, pedestrians too (they have either parked, or are headed to their cars). But the strip mall near my neighborhood features a de facto woonerf as well, in front of Target and Home Depot. The slow speeds and yielding that goes on, I'm convinced, is because every driver knows he or she is about to cross, on foot, to the store entrances themselves; they expect the same courtesy. I thought of all this upon reading a story about how many crosswalks in Boston need a fresh coat of bright white paint. The message here of course is that drivers and pedestrians desperately need help managing a relationship that can occur more naturally; yes, the word "danger" is in the headline. There was also an incident in Baltimore of a car running into a sidewalk cafe, as if tables and chairs near a street was somehow an arrangement that was inherently unsafe. Context and design are important, but for subtle visual cues more than flashing lights and bright paint and the culture of danger and us vs. them. See www.walkinginfo.org for more ideas, though darned if they don't start from the premise of safety.

Bangkok and New York

2007-05-04T12:49:00.000-04:00

The clarion call for sustainable development, alternative energy, and cleaner-burning power plants was issued in Bangkok today by the International Panel on Climate Change. But for the real action on a huge part of any agenda for reducing emissions, New York is the place to be. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who proposed the sustainable growth plan called PlaNYC on Earth Day last month, addressed the general assembly of the Regional Plan Association, which focused on steps that big cities can take to cut emissions and reduce energy use. Later this month, leaders from over 30 of the world's largest cities will gather in New York for the second C40 Large Cities Climate Summit 2007, where the model New York and London climate action plans will set the standard for what big cities can do. It's slowly sinking in that a key climate policy centers on how we grow, develop and arrange ourselves physically on the land, and that cities have the most to offer for being green, super energy-efficient places. They're the places that can maximize transit use and eradicate energy waste, through building retrofits and green building standards. Bio-fuels and better technology for coal plants is all great, but cities remain an obvious solution to avert a baked planet. The planning, environmental and smart growth agenda have become the climate agenda.

Caro on Moses

2007-02-12T15:38:00.000-05:00

You have to love intellectual celebrity events. C-Span instead of E!. People walking out discussing the finer points of the talk rather than what anybody was wearing. A waitlist for tickets and overflow rooms with closed-circuit TVs. Such was the case at Robert Caro's much anticipated talk for the Museum of the City of New York Sunday, when at the conclusion, hundreds streamed across 103 rd Street from the packed auditorium of the Academy of Medicine for signed copies of The Power Broker, briefly in hardcover but now only in paperback. Caro did not inveigh against the trifecta exhibitions, "Robert Moses and the Modern City." He had only been to the "remaking the Metropolis" at MCNY, which he called "fair and even-handed," not the other exhibitions at the Wallach Gallery ("The Superblock Solution") and the Queens Musem ("The Road to Recreation."). There was no calling out of curators Hilary Ballon or Kenneth Jackson, for the rehabilitation of Moses' reputation (although at least one person actually hissed at the mention of Ballon's name). What Caro did do was marvel at the creative genius of Moses in the construction of Jones Beach, a populist campaign and an effort to restore grandeur to public works; this was contrasted with the callousness and arrogance of "RM," in the devastating relocation of citizens happily living in the path of the Cross-Bronx Expressway in the East Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx. Caro is clearly saddened by the slum that East Tremont became when the highway sliced through it, because prior to that it was a well-functioning urban neighborhood. More comfortable with writing than public speaking, by his own admission, Caro made no grand pronouncements, no mea culpa for putting a black hat on the subject of his prize-winning biography, and no shift from his answer – "no" -- at cocktail parties when people ask him he thought it was time, in New York, for a new Robert Moses. "He had great accomplishments," among them Jones Beach, the Triboro Bridge, and Lincoln Center, in Caro's view. "It is right to celebrate him," Caro said, "but it is also right not to forget the human costs." Side note re: previous post: the Amtrak Regional 161 whisked me down to Penn Station arriving ten minutes early; the packed 6:03 Acela raced through the darkness and also pulled in ahead of schedule.

California (urban) dreaming

2007-02-11T22:18:00.000-05:00

It’s true what they say about LA – the poster child for sprawling, dispersed developed and an unrivaled car culture really is rediscovering its center and the functionality of transit. Beyond the Museum of Contemporary Art and Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall, downtown is thriving, with lots of downtown-living projects like the renovation of a building called The Roosevelt. It is a slow process, this New York-ification of LA. Over a mojito at Cuidad, I asked my friend, the producer/director Jim Burke (most recently, “Aurora Borealis”), if I could get from my hotel, the Westin Bonaventure downtown – site of this years New Partners for Smart Growth conference -- to visit my actress sister Julia Flint in Burbank by transit. He gave me a puzzled expression. Probably best to take a cab, he suggested. I’ve turned into a transit nerd, so I didn’t give up. The trip planner on the LA MTA site suggested taking the Sherman Oaks bus at an hour-plus. But taking the Red Line to North Hollywood looked like it would get me up to decent latitude with Burbank. Sure enough, not only was North Hollywood a promising transit-oriented development site and a jumping-off point for bus rapid transit to the west, it was a cinema and arts center, pretty rough around the edges, but full of urban potential and a true hub. Signs were unhelpful to get east to Burbank; I walked down the street and asked in a pizza place and was told the 183 bus ran straight down Magnolia into Burbank. Forced to estimate the location of my sister’s number address from a map in Where magazine, I alighted a bit prematurely at Buena Vista, but still made it to within a few blocks on foot before my sister rescued me in a Prius. I can’t help myself. But neither can LA.

Climate change and how we live

2007-02-05T22:10:00.000-05:00

If we want to reduce greenhouse gases there are lots of things we can do. We can bury carbon. We can make sure the 1,400 coal plants xoming on line in China and India have the right technology. We can put a price on carbon, and hold countries and regions to reduction standards through cap-and-trade regimes under Kyoto or RGGI, the emissions-reduction pact among nine Northeast states, which Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick recently joined (his predecessor, Mitt Romney, a Republican presidential candidate, had a big role in negotiating the agreement but backed away from signing it last year, before the politics of global warming shifted). But the great unsung action to reduce emissions is in land use: supporting development patterns so US citizens don't have to drive as much. There are lots of other reasons to plan for more concentrated, mixed-use, transit-oriented growth -- chief among them the looming scarcity and expense of fossil fuels. There is also a growing consumer demand for urban living. But global warming is the ultimate rationale for smart growth. Fostering growth other than separated-use conventional suburban development -- revitalizing cities and older suburbs through investment and zoning reform -- has never been a more important goal, yet climate change activists don't talk about it much. Writing from California, where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's emissions reduction plan is leading the nation, Bill Fulton makes the land-use connection http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-fulton4feb04,1,4840839.story?ctrack=1&cset=true (registration required). Look for this ultimate light bulb to contine to go off.

Moses and Jane

2007-01-12T13:22:00.000-05:00

Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs are still among us, haunting our planning and our ideas about city-building. My forthcoming book on these two towering figures, to be published in 2008 by Random House, will tell the story of showdowns over urban renewal, Washington Square Park and the Lower Manhattan Expressway. The Moses worldview and the necessity of urban infrastructure is getting a fresh blast of scrutiny starting next month in New York, with three concurrent exhibitions: Robert Moses and the Modern City: Remaking the Metropolis, at the the Museum of the City of New York www.mcny.org; Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Road to Recreation, at the Queens Museum of Art (www.queensmuseum.org); and Robert Moses and the Modern City: Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution at the Wallach Gallery at my (journalism school) alma mater Columbia University (www.columbia.edu/cu/wallach). The exhibitions run through May and are accompanied by panels and symposia, starting with "Lessons from Robert Moses," Thursday, February 1, at the New York Academy of Medicine and the Museum of the City of New York. James S. Russell, the architecture critic for Bloomberg, will moderate following a keynote address by Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff. Robert Caro, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Knopf, 1974), will offer reflections February 11; there will be a panel on Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs on March 7. Columbia University professor Hilary Ballon is curator. The exhibitions will be accompanied by a book, Robert Moses and the Transformation of New York (W.W. Norton), co-edited with Kenneth T. Jackson. I could sure use some ultimate transportation infrastructure: reliable three-hour train service from Boston to New York!

I'm walking here

2006-11-17T15:08:00.000-05:00

While taking a tour of the Macalaster College campus area in St. Paul earlier this month, I noticed a nice planted median down some busy streets, with a cut-out to accomodate a pedestrian walkway at key points where the street bisected the campus. But there were no painted crosswalks and none of the cars were stopping for students waiting to cross. I inquired of my host, and it turns out there is no state law in Minnesota requiring motorists to yield to pedestrians in a mid-block, unsignaled crosswalk. The infrastructure for a pedestrian-friendly environment is there, but the laws work at cross purposes. I've been thinking about this a lot lately -- the way we're struggling with a better built environment in a problematic system of transport rules. I think it's clear more people want walkable, mixed-use, more urban neighborhoods, but they have to be able to walk around them safely and with pleasure. In Massachusetts, the yield-to-pedestrians law is routinely flouted. Coming out of the World Trade Center the other day on Northern (or I should say Seaport) Boulevard, I entered the bright-white crosswalk with the neon-yellow sign nearby indicating pedestrian crosswalk, and a westbound driver, on a cell phone, actually sped up and just missed me in the crosswalk. Rhode Island plates. No amount of visual regulation was going to penetrate our muscle-headed friend from the Ocean State.
What if the answer to rules that are ignored is to take away the rules? Europe is exploring just that -- the Dutch concept of the woonerf, which blends the turf of the car and the walker, and the even more intriguing notion that unsafe is safe: that if you take away the blaring signs and signals and rules and danger warnings, drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians will revert to a more natural state, of slowing down to assess each situation, make eye contact, and proceed with deliberate caution. The way you go slowly down Newbury Street, because there are pedestrians and all sorts of other activities all around. The safest intersection is the one without any signs or signals, where everyone has to figure it out every time. If there wasn't a law telling drivers they either had to stop or they didn't have to stop for people walking in a crosswalk, common courtesy and human nature might take over. When we make eye contact we can be incredibly deferential. The only question is whether it's too late in the US for a change in culture. Here's a link to a piece on the relevant conversation in Europe:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,448747,00.html

Let it sink in

2006-11-09T16:17:00.000-05:00

Post-election day musings:

-- The defeat of property rights ballot initiatives in Washington state, California and Idaho appeared to planners and smart growth advocates to be a triumph of common sense. Washingtons's Measure 933 was a version of Measure 37, passed with 62% of the vote, in neighboring Oregon. The basic idea is that if land use regulation negatively impacts the value of your land, you're entitled to compensation, or you should be able to build what you want. But voters seemed to view this notion with great caution. The most potent ballot measures combined the concept of regulatory takings with restrictions on eminent domain, part of the continuing fallout from the Kelo vs. New London Supreme Court decision last summer. More straight-up eminent domain restrictions passed in nine states.
-- The majority of transportation ballot measures including significant new investments in transit passed [http://cfte.org/success/2006BallotMeasures.asp], but many of them also included equally significant funds for future roadway expansion. Typical of these initiatives was in Minnesota, where transit got an unprecedented boost, right alongside new highways [http://www.startribune.com/587/story/796137.html]. This of course flies in the face of the Fix it First policy (repair the infrastructure you have before you build anything new) in place in Massachusetts, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
-- Flying back from St. Paul after delivering the High Winds Fund Anniversary Lecture at Macalaster College -- a fine institution with impressive students who asked probing and tough questions (what about public schools? what if both sprawl and smart growth continue to happen? how can New Urbanism be for people who aren't rich?) -- I noted two New York Times stories, one on the single-family housing bust in Phoenix [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/07/realestate/07land.html ], the other on the construction of new coal power plants in Texas [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/07/business/07coal.html]. In both cases, I expected a writing-on-the-wall conclusion, but in both cases, the upshot was closer to denial. The builders faced with the prospect of vast empty subdivisions acknowledged no shift in preferences for how we live, or any imperative for energy independence and reducing transportation costs, but instead assured themselves that things would get back to normal soon. The builders of the coal plants, TXU, didn't dwell on state-of-the-art emissions and carbon storage technology, but instead vowed to move ahead as quickly as possible before new emissions rules are put in place. There are 1,400 coal power plants in the pipeline in the years ahead, mostly in China and India. If they all use the old technology they'll dump as much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as we've seen since the industrial revolution.
-- A few days before the Minnesota trip, returning from Las Vegas, a very popular conference destination (keynote at the Land Development West conference), I left the glittering desert with two observations. One, the desirable places are downright Parisian in their cultivation of exclusivity. (I accompanied my wife covering the Paris fashion shows; the line most often delivered at the velvet rope is, "I'm sorry -- je suis desolee -- but you're not on the list.")(Even when you are). At the Palms I am met by a handomse woman at a podium and given an escort to the elevator up to Nove Italiano and its very lively bar. I am instructed to ask the manager on that floor to go up to the newly opened Playboy club. I acted like I was on a list and was in a suit and tie, but I must admit the screenings create an aura, and you gladly hand over $16 for a vodka martini. Observation No. 2: there's an awful lot of smoking in Vegas. Maybe it's coming from Massachusetts, but I was aghast as folks lit up virtually everywhere, even in elevators. I wanted to exclaim: you can't do that! But there is election day news on this front as well. Nevada voters approved Question 5 by 53%, which requires workplaces and public places to be smoke-free, with the exception of casino gambling areas and bars that do not serve food.

Barreling ahead

2006-10-30T15:48:00.000-05:00

Just back from Denver (Urban Land Institute, Placematters conferences), a city that never fails to impress in the reinvention of urban infill spaces, whether Stapleton, failed shopping centers like Bel-Mar, or the Brownfields slated to become transit-oriented development sites for the expanded light rail system. USA Today's Haya El Nasser has an oustanding piece on how this kind of development will be needed in the years ahead as the country grows to 400 million http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-26-100-million_x.htm. Off again for Las Vegas and the Land Development West conference, talking about how we've got to change our physical arrangements to make a dent in the global warming crisis and for energy independence -- but the good news is, the American consumer is already starting to demand urbanism, for its energy efficiency and its amenities. Finally, Keith Schneider writes for the New York Times on cities tearing down freeways and replacing them with a regular street grid http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/automobiles/autospecial/25cities.html which leads me, seamlessly, to what in journalism is the sin known as "burying the lede": I sold my next book proposal. It's on Jane Jacobs taking on Robert Moses in Greenwich Village and SoHo during the 1960s, including her successful fight against the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway along Broome Street. My wife, just back from her 10-city book tour (www.tinacassidy.net) and I walked through the Village just this past weekend, through Washington Square Park and along Hudson Street where Jacobs lived. We also ducked into the Metropolitan Transportation Authority museum in Brooklyn, where a mostly positive exhibit on Robert Moses and the construction of the Triboro Bridge is still running. http://www.mta.info/mta/museum/whatsnew.htm. The book will trace this David and Goliath story in rich detail; it will be published by Random House http://www.randomhouse.com/ in 2008.

Tale of Two Cities

2006-09-16T21:22:00.000-04:00

I've just returned from Boston's South End, which is the site of Open Studios this weekend, the time when artists, well, open up their studios to throngs in the market for an oil painting or piece of sculpture. What's amazing about this exercise is that there are artists left in the South End at all. Those with cash-flow issues have long since moved to Jamaica Plain, or Haverhill. The neighborhood, where I used to live, was lively and full of people and street performers and good food and florists selling orchids --I bought a dozen to mark the launch of my wife's book, "Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born" (Grove/Atlantic) (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0871139383/ref=pe_5050_2910950_pe_snp_383) (Note how the Amazon "people who bought this book also bought ..." algorithm churns out my book, "This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America" (www.anthonyflint.net) -- not due to a national surge of interest in both childbirth and land use, but based to date on the kind purchases of common family and friends). But when I bought those flowers at "Twig" -- mini palm-frond greens a dollar apiece extra --I couldn't help thinking about affordability in reviving urban neighborhoods. I'm convinced that people are going to start turning away from sprawl, as gas prices rise. It's going to be the worst outcome in the world if the alternatives are prohibitive. Then again, some cities would like to have a little more gentrification. Or more revival. The premiere of a new documentary film, "Cleveland: Confronting Decline in an American City," is Sept. 28 and Oct. 1 on the Cleveland public television station, WVIZ. The film is a collaboration of Northern Light Productions and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (www.lincolninst.edu) -- which, by the way, is my new professional home. The Lincoln Institute is a think-tank in Cambridge that does research and holds conferences on land and development issues.

Report from the hustings

2006-06-28T10:59:00.000-04:00

Back from a book tour that took me through Denver, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Chicago, following stops earlier in New York (Mayor's Institute on Long Island sponsored by the Regional Plan Association) and Washington (Brookings Institution, National Building Museum, Politics & Prose bookstore). Two observations. One, people are very eager to talk about growth and our living circumstances and the physical environment we arrange for ourselves. Two, every one of these cities, while wrestling with schools and infrastructure and crime, is entering a new kind of golden age. The condo towers are rising in Seattle's Belltown, the sidewalk cafes in Denver's LoDo, Chicago's stunning Millennium Park -- all clear evidence of a continuing resurgence of interest in cities and city living. With the greater demand comes higher prices, and that led me to address, everywhere I went, the central challenge of the smart growth movement: affordability. My own prediction is that more Americans will be turning away from sprawl in the years ahead, turned off by crushing transportation and energy costs, that will quickly wipe out any inititial savings from lower sticker prices for single-family homes miles from anywhere. But for middle-class families, the worst outcome would be alternatives that are equally expensive. Inclusionary zoning and affordability requirements can help. The best solution, however, is to make livable urban neighborhoods and older suburbs as ubiquitous as sprawl. That means investment, cutting red tape and reforming zoning so the revitalization can extend well beyond what we're seeing in LoDo and South of Market and the Pearl District today. The message is sinking in. San Francisco Chronicle urban design writer John King had this to say about This Land: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/06/06/DDGOGJ7OF51.DTL. Syndicated columnist Neal Peirce also wrote on the need to get busy on viable alternatives to sprawl, given our unfolding energy crisis: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/3981110.html.

Tipping point

2006-05-17T22:21:00.000-04:00

Deciding where and how to live is the most personal choice we all make. With gas prices over $3 a gallon, the true cost of that choice -- the energy and transportation costs embedded in housing -- is changing the calculus. It's costing a lot more to heat and cool big homes, and $60 or $70 a week for gasolineis going to loom large in the family budget. Add that to quality of life and time spent in the car, and sprawl may soon seem like less of a bargain. Alternatives to a half-century of dispersal gain new prominence, I argue in this Op-Ed essay on the on-line journal PLANetizen: http://www.planetizen.com/node/19750

Expanding possibilities

2006-03-31T23:06:00.000-05:00

Sprawl is getting celebrated these days, by the likes of Joel Kotkin and Robert Bruegmann and others. Their analysis can be convincing. But there is an awful lot of interest in smart growth, too -- that is, living in something other than conventional, spread-out, separated-use suburban or exurban development. The free market is driving the trend; the rules of development -- zoning -- just needs to be changed to allow more alternatives. R.D. Sahl explores current trends in land and living on Business Day on New England Cable News March 31, http://www.boston.com/news/necn/Shows/business_day/.

No end in sight

2006-02-27T21:21:00.000-05:00

Believers in the Oregon land use regulation regime were sorely disappointed that the state Supreme Court reversed a lower court ruling claiming that Measure 37 -- the ballot initiative passed in 2004 that gives landowners either compensation or broad leeway to develop outside the zoning framework -- was unconstitutional. Oregonians in Action, the triumphant property rights group that so successfully campaigned for the measure, framed the Marion County Circuit Court ruling as the work of activist judges. In basic terms, what the ruling said was that the measure created a special class of people and ran afoul of other constitutional processes. But the high court rejected the premise, and 1000 Friends of Oregon, the organizers of the lawsuit prompting the ruling, said it would not appeal. 1000 Friends is working on other ways to limit what the group says is Measure 37's most problematic consequences. Oregonians in Action, meanwhile, is back in victory-lap mode. "I'm surprised and relieved and hopeful again," the group's top lawyer, Ross Day, told Laura Oppenheimer of The Oregonian. "We had law, fact and common sense on our side. But I was still wondering if we were going to win." This battle is obviously far from over -- not in Oregon, not in nearby Washington, which is looking at a similar ballot measure for the fall, nor across the nation. I vaguely expected the Oregon case would be taken all the way to the US Supreme Court -- which not incidentally agreed to hear two cases on the Clean Water Act, one of which is based on the grievances of landowners who were unable to build on their property.

Changing horses

2005-12-04T22:31:00.000-05:00

After 16 years at The Boston Globe, my desire to do something different coincided with an attractive "voluntary separation" package, and I have moved on from the daily newspaper business. The industry is in considerable tumult right now, as any review of a media website like Romanesko will attest (http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45), and as I acknowledged in a set-up piece for Emily Rooney's "Greater Boston" program on public television WGBH http://www.greaterboston.tv/ last week. I'm going to continue to write freelance, contribute to this weblog, and my book -- "This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America" (Johns Hopkins University Press) http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/8961.html -- comes out in the spring. My new day job is doing research and writing as smart growth education director at the Office for Commonwealth Development, the state agency in Massachusetts coordinating housing, transportation, environment and energy. I wouldn't have predicted this coming out of journalism school twenty years ago, but there are obviously many more formats and forums today where this voice can be heard.

What next for Smart Growth

2005-11-08T11:03:00.000-05:00

Post-Katrina, post-Prince Charles, smart growth and New Urbanism don't seem like outrageous ideas. But what does the future hold for these extraordinary planning movements? I am scheduled to talk about the recent history of sustainable development initiatives, the complicated political, cultural and economic landscape, and emerging strategies Wednesday Nov. 9th at noon at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, co-sponsored by the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and the Taubman Center for State and Local Government. The dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Design, Alan Altshuler, will be moderator http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/rappaport/. The talk will be based in part on my forthcoming book, "This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America," due out in the spring by The Johns Hopkins University Press http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/8961.html

Evolving sprawl

2005-10-02T21:25:00.000-04:00

While researching my new book I must confess I came away from several far-flung subdivisions thinking the development pattern wasn't my cup of tea, but wasn't so bad. I saw African-American families unloading cars in the driveways. The homes started at $120,000 (closer to the cost of a parking space than a studio in Boston). The houses were close together, and there were schools and community centers that were at least for some in walking distance, or skateboarding or scooting distance. In today's Ideas section of The Sunday Boston Globe I analyze Robert Bruegmann's new book and the general defense of sprawl -- and how the argument for it doesn't hold up for very long. Sprawl giveth, but ultimately it taketh away: separation of uses, long everyday trips and commutes, total car dependence, high gasoline prices, fiscal strains to extend the infrastructure, and inevitably, all the social and economic fragmentation that comes with the relentless abandonment of established urban areas. I point out that the smartest smart growth activists aren't spending a lot of time hammering sprawl these days anyway -- they just want the barriers removed to allow some alternatives to flourish. Then the market can decide. Here's the link to the piece:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/10/02/the_virtues_of_sprawl?mode=PF

The Density Dilemma

2005-09-19T10:29:00.000-04:00

As the New Urbanists infiltrate the Gulf Coast to make sure reconstruction maintains urban fabric, I'm reminded once again how most Americans want to be in spread-out rather than dense settings, whether for the personal space or a sense of safety. Acceptance of density plays a critical role in the smart growth revolution, and I include a chapter on it in my forthcoming book. I also wrote a working paper on density for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Mass., which is now available on the institute's website:
http://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/pub-detail.asp?id=1053. The paper looks at transit-oriented and compact development in the Bay Area, Oregon, Texas, Maryland and Massachusetts.

Rebuilding

2005-09-06T10:58:00.000-04:00

My deadline for the manuscript for "This Land" -- a look at sprawl and smart growth to be published in the spring by Johns Hopkins University Press -- was the end of August, so I can now return to the weblog. In Katrina's wake, both sides of the development debate in this country have jumped into the fray on how flooded neighborhoods in New Orleans and Mississippi should be rebuilt. The New Urbanists see the disaster as a big chance to make a statement, urging the restoration of traditional urban fabric just the way it was, and more compact reinventing of lower-density areas, with a rethinking of transit at the same time. Meanwhile, Randal O'Toole of the Thoreau Institute, a critic of smart growth, observes that anyone who owned a car could get out of New Orleans or Biloxi, while those without that crucial mobility could not http://www.ti.org/vaupdate55.html. Since Sept. 11, "rebuilding" was a term and a debate limited to lower Manhattan; the decisions about how these devastated stretches of human settlement are reimagined will reveal even more about attitudes toward the future landscape.

Walk this way

2005-07-31T10:39:00.000-04:00

I've just returned from a pleasant Sunday morning walk on Broadway in South Boston to get a coffee and a gallon of milk. I also got a doughnut so in terms of calories burned it's doubtless a wash. Still, it's always so refreshing not to climb into the car. The way urban neighborhoods promote walking is a big topic among planners and architects and, increasingly, public health experts these days. It's just common sense that when your physical surroundings allow you and indeed encourage you to walk, you're more likely to make physical activity a routine part of your day -- one way all those French women don't get fat. I have a piece on physical activity and design in today's Boston Sunday Globe Ideas section, which features innovative thinking in the Greater Boston area; communities around here are working on Safe Routes to Schools and better sidewalks, clearer wayfinding for those on foot and multi-use paths: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/07/31/activity_oriented_design/.

Terror's toll on cities

2005-07-09T10:26:00.000-04:00

I was asked on the Chet Curtis Report on New England Cable News July 7 http://www.boston.com/news/necn/Shows/chet/ how transit systems could be better secured following bombings on the London subway and bus system. The answer is, it's much harder compared to air travel -- although $18 billion has been spent on security for aviation, while $250 million has been spent on transit security. There are 32 million trips on transit on an average weekday in the US. You can't screen everybody who enters the systems. Here in Boston, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority conducted random baggage checks using a GE-built explosives-sniffing machine during the Democratic National Convention, built new hub monitoring stations in the subway, and started the "See Something, Say Something" campaign, to enlist riders as eyes and ears, on the lookout for bags that have been left unattended. More police officers will be riding the rails, and plainclothes marshals may as well. Since many of the hundreds of injuries seemed to have been caused by shattered glass and flying debris, subway cars may be required to have shatterproof windows in the future -- now common in many secured government buildings. It's going to mean a lot of expense, and more reminders for urban dwellers of a creeping -- and justified, in the years to come, I think -- lockdown state. It is cities, their landscape and their system for getting around, that are the target. My most recent article in Planning magazine http://www.planning.org/planning/nonmember/default1.htm gauges the impact of physical security strategies, and a chapter in my forthcoming book on development trends in America www.anthonyflint.net looks at whether the age of terror is encouraging exurban dispersal.

Kunstler v. Kotkin

2005-05-31T11:20:00.000-04:00

One believes the suburbs will be rendered useless by the disappearance of cheap oil. The other says the suburbs are the future and need only be fine-tuned. Both have new books out. James Howard Kunstler, author of "The Long Emergency" (Atlantic Monthly Press), explains how the auto-dependent, spread-out development pattern is the most ill-suited system imagineable for the coming fossil-fuel crunch, which he argues will be the death of suburbia (Interview in Grist magazine: http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/05/25/little-kunstler/). Joel Kotkin, author of "The City: A Global History" (Modern Library / Random House), says, quite correctly, that the suburbs rule and are America's choice, for convenience, jobs and affordability; America's cities, Kotkin says, are enjoying very narrowly defined comebacks and aren't properly planning for the future (essay in The New Republic online: http://tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w050523&s=kotkin052305). Town and country has never been so polarized.

A new take

2005-05-30T22:52:00.000-04:00

What if homeowners in the inner city claimed that government policies encouraging sprawl had decreased the value of their property so much, it was the equivalent of a "taking" and they were entitled to just compensation under the Fifth Amendment? That was one of the more intriguing ideas to emerge from the 2nd National Summit on Equitable Development, Social Justice and Smart Growth in Philadelphia earlier this month, put on by Policy Link and the Funders Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities. Former Albuquerque mayor David Rusk and Myron Orfield, director of the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota, said legal specialists were reviewing the possibility of such a landmark lawsuit. The idea is to flip around the accepted notion that government action can result in a de facto taking, the standard approach of property rights lawsuits coast to coast. In this lawsuit, property owners in a hollowed out city -- and one or two distressed first-ring suburbs -- would make the argument that government action to promote growth at the periphery sucked all the economic vitality out of their neighborhoods, leading to sharply decreased property values. It's too early to say whether this would go forward, but the legal papers in such a suit would have to include an exhaustive and detailed account of how state and local governments actively supported sprawl. It would be interesting reading.

Ways the wind blows

2005-05-11T11:21:00.000-04:00

Wind is all the rage in the renewable-energy crowd, though the harnessing turbines pit environmentalists against each other, what with the disruption to the natural environment that wind farms can have (messing with migratory birds, for example). Nantucket Sound has been the latest scene of this battle, with a proposal by Cape Wind for a "wind park" at Horseshoe Shoal (www.capewind.org) But a whole new set of issues for planners is on the horizon with the growing popularity of personal windmills or “residential wind turbines” for single-family homes – blades about two feet long, on a two-inch diameter galvanized pole about 10 feet tall. Depending on the location of the home, the devices can cut electricity bills in half; they provide the energy as the wind blows and reduce the draw from the local utility accordingly. They can also produce electricity during power outages. Town planners are thumbing through the zoning laws in Massachusetts and can’t find any references to this latest breakthrough in green technology. Solar panels, yes, and ham radio antennae, but nothing on wind energy for individual property owners. The wind turbines appear to be by right under many zoning bylaws, which allow projections of up to 75 feet on a single-family house, although that seems a tad high. This will be just one feature of green building and sustainable living that gradually transfers from big commercial buildings to individual homeowners. Pretty clever. Links are http://www.wind-works.org/articles/RoofTopMounting.html and http://www.awea.org/faq/tutorial/wwt_smallwind.html#How%20do%20residential%20wind%20turbines%20work for more information.

The interchange index

2005-05-01T08:15:00.000-04:00

Smart growth states are pulling back, being a bit more obsequious and targeted as more comprehensive initiatives struggle in a tough political climate. Current regimes prefer to suggest voluntary compliance and provide technical assistance and promote things that are selling in the marketplace anyway, like transit-oriented development. More conventional development keeps coming, however, and states have to deal with it. In Massachusetts, state transportation planners agreed to study a new interchange for Interstate 93 in Tewskbury, which would serve a planned 750,000 square-foot retail and entertainment center proposed by the Virginia-based Mills Corp., the shopping-center giant trying to establish a foothold in New England. The local political establishment badly wants the commercial development for its revenues, and the administration is respectful of local control, but Romney's Office of Commonwealth Development has also made it plain that access roads to industrial parks and other state-sponsored roadway improvements serving conventional suburban development are largely a thing of the past: state aid is being channeled to places that embrace smart growth principles. Cities and towns can't get housing funding unless they prove their smart-growth mettle.

Easy Being Green

2005-04-08T11:46:00.000-04:00

Washington, D.C. and San Francisco aren’t far behind, but Chicago under Mayor Richard Daley has perhaps the most energetic campaign to make urban living appealing, that goes well beyond the Soldier’s Field makeover and the Frank Gehry stuff at Millennium Park. Daley years ago picked up the idea to make the Windy City as green as possible, putting flowers and plants along some 70 miles of street medians, planting 400,000 trees, and replacing 125 asphalt schoolyards with sod. Municipal buildings must get LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification, and developers are being required to make their buildings green as well, with recycled building materials, waterless urinals, and systems for natural sunlight and ventilation. At the Center for Green Technology (http://www.cityofchicago.org/Environment/GreenTech/) they can tell you how to make an elevator run on vegetable oil. The city is dramatically reducing parking requirements, and is home to a two-story Home Depot in Lincoln Park that has no dedicated parking. The latest building to debut with a green roof – they reduce the heat-island effect in summer and absorb runoff – is a McDonald’s. Green building has caught on in a big way in the United States, but I posed this question to Daley’s staff (he was in Cambridge this week to accept MIT’s Kevin Lynch award): won’t a bunch of new requirements for sustainable building be in conflict with the overall goal of cutting red tape for developers who build on urban infill parcels? Builders in the city need fewer rules, note more (see below). The city’s answer is to appoint a team of building-code officials who are solely dedicated to green requirements – a kind of express lane for satisfying the new codes. I suppose it’s reasonable to make sure everybody does it, but the private sector is doing a lot of green building on its own.

Code blues

2005-03-11T09:12:00.000-05:00

The press pulled out the black tie for the MIT Council for the Arts party for the “poet of glass and steel,” Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava (http://web.mit.edu/arts/announcements/prs/2005/0202_calatrava.html) last night at University Park in Cambridge. But a compelling tale of citybuilding was also being told across the river in Boston in the offices of Utile, above a 7-Eleven in Downtown Crossing. There, architect Tim Love and Tim Pappas of Pappas Properties were explaining plans for an infill development called First + First – two dozen townhouses at the spot where East First Street meets West First Street in South Boston, where the residential neighborhood meets a more industrial zone. The townhouses are touted as a model for city living, with rear-entry two-car garages on the ground floor and flexible living space on the three floors above, including a terrace at the top for all units. City officials have made it clear they want to see more of this kind of housing built, on the hundreds of vacant parcels that are longstanding gaps in Boston’s urban smile. But the designers had to work within the restricting confines of the city’s building code, which requires, just as one example, a second stairwell if the floorplate is so much as a foot wider than the townhouse limitation. Developers willing to try new things in urban redevelopment need more flexibility. Newark recognized that, and cut red tape for builders re-knitting run-down blocks. Creative ideas can get stymied because of rigid rules put together by bureaucrats years ago, and that goes for buildings and street design, as well.

Eminent case

2005-03-01T22:29:00.000-05:00

The property rights movement in the US has been on a tear over the last 20 years, proving with its myriad high-profile court cases that it’s not just about ranchers in the West. The quest has been to prove that regulatory actions in land use are the equivalent of a taking – based on the last clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Us Constitution, which says, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The movement seems unlikely to come away with a big victory in Kelo v. City of New London, set for a ruling by the US Supreme Court. In that case the “public use” part is at issue, and the court seems uninterested in revisiting 50 years of judicial deference in the justification of local eminent domain. But even in defeat – if that’s what happens – the case will have an impact. Governments and developers may think twice about using eminent domain, and will undoubtedly strive to make a more solid case for how the public will benefit from redevelopment of a site, a prediction made by Leonard Zax and Rebecca Malcolm in the January issue of Urban Land magazine (http://www.urbanland.uli.org/). One other thing to watch in the aftermath: lingering hard feelings between developers and property rights lawyers, usually hand-in-hand, but on opposite sides for Kelo.