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Friday 5: Articles for Urbanists [September 17th-23rd]

This week’s news and views for urbanists… (and a few from last week too!)

Photograph courtesy Ian Lockwood, via Atlantic Cities

Debunking the Cul-de-Sac: The design of [North] America’s suburbs has actually made our streets more dangerous. (Atlantic Cities)

5 Things That Inspire Me: During these harsh economic times, planner Melissa Hege looks at 5 things that have inspired her inner planner. (Planetizen)

Five Solutions to the “War on Cars” Madness: Seattle city councillor Sally Bagshaw looks at some actions we can collectively take to promote détente. (The Stranger)

Digital Placemaking–Authentic Civic Engagement: Digital placemaking is the integration of social media into placemaking practices, which are community-centered, encouraging public participation, collaboration, and transparency. (Project for Public Spaces)

Modeling Open Source Cities: Peter Sigrist looks at the open source movement as a promising approach to urban development and governance. (Polis)

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A Brief History of Urbanism in North America: 1940-1949

After a longer than expected hiatus, my series on the history of urbanism is back! I can’t promise a return to a weekly posting schedule, but I hope to post at least on installment a month until the series is complete.

The 1940s

The 1940’s saw rise of the first American planned communities. It also saw the passing of a wave of federal legislation in the United States. Combined, these events initiated what became known as suburban sprawl. The decade was bookended by the publication of an influential book and the created of an important organization.

The Planning Function in Urban Government. 1941

A Brief History of Urbanism in North America: 1940 1949 A controversial but influential book by Robert A.Walker that argued that planning needed to move away from association with independent commissions. Instead, Walker argued that planning should be closely connected with the local legislative body, the chief executive, and related administrative agencies. In other words, Walker was the full integration of planning agencies within local government.

The book was named one of the 100 Essential Books of Planning by the American Planning Association in 2009

Serviceman’s Readjustment Act and Federal-Aid Highway Act 1944

rooseveltgibill A Brief History of Urbanism in North America: 1940 1949

Source: VA.gov

In 1944, the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act, commonly known as the GI Bill, guaranteed home loans to veterans. The GI Bill provides returning veterans with college education and loans to buy homes and start businesses. The result was the rapid development of suburbs.

Passed in the same year, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944 designated a 65,000 kilometer national system of interstate highways. These highways were to be selected by the state highway departments. While this act authorized the highway system, it did not give any funding.

Park Forest, IL and Levittown, NY 1947

12levittown.CA01 A Brief History of Urbanism in North America: 1940 1949

Source: New York Times

Park Forest was the first privately financed, completely planned community ever built in the US. It was designed by Elbert Peets in the tradition of planned communities around the nation to offer housing for veterans returning from World War II.

Located on Long Island, Levittown gets its name from its builder, the firm of Levitt & Sons, Inc. founded by William Levitt. The town was built as a planned community between 1947 and 1951. Levittown was the first truly mass-produced suburb and is widely regarded as the archetype for postwar suburbs throughout the country. As a result,William Levitt was named the father of modern suburbia.

National Housing Act 1949

Source: Wikimedia Commons

This was the first comprehensive American housing bill. It initiated the concept of urban renewal, focusing on slum clearance and new housing construction. The act authorized construction of 810,000 public housing units and renewal of urban areas by eliminating slum neighborhoods and redeveloping central cities.

The legislation’s legacy is mixed, particularly with regard to the success of the urban renewal and public housing elements. The government fell far short of its goal to build 810,000 units of new public housing by 1955. In fact, the Act’s urban redevelopment programs actually destroyed more housing units than they built. At the same time, the massive urban redevelopment efforts prompted by the Act came under fire for poor planning; failings with regard to social equity and fairness; and—sometimes—corruption.

National Trust for Historic Preservation 1949

national trust historic preservation A Brief History of Urbanism in North America: 1940 1949 In 1947, a meeting convened by David E. Finley, Jr. culminated in the creation of the National Council for Historic Sites and Buildings. This group was able to get the congressional charter for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which President Harry S. Truman signed on October 26, 1949. The Trust supports the preservation of historic buildings and neighborhoods through a range of programs and activities. Today, twenty-nine sites are designated as National Trust Historic Sites.

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Friday 5: Articles for Urbanists—Canadian Premiere Edition

Here’s the Canadian premiere of my articles for urbanists. Different city; same urban goodness.

Liveable v lovable: The world’s best cities are beautiful, clean and efficient. But why does no one want to live in them? Financial Times

Dense, Denser, Densest: Witold Rybczynski asks if concerns about costs and the environment will push Americans to rein in sprawl. The Wilson Quarterly

Jane Jacobs: Honoured in the Breach: Five years after her death and 50 years after her greatest book, Jane Jacobs’ ideas will inspire thousands last weekend to go on Jane’s Walks. But they still aren’t understood well enough to spawn the cities she dreamed of. Globe and Mail

The Term “Urban Pioneer” and Media Portrayals of the City: We’re subtly told that cities are dangerous and that no sensible person would chose to live in such a place. Hence the newsworthiness of the “urban pioneer” narrative. But is it true? Rustwire.com

Walkability and the new urbanism:Urban expert Christopher Leinberger says demand for homes in urban, walkable neighbourhoods is outstripping supply and that for the first time since the 1960s, housing values there have fallen below those of their urban counterparts. TheSpec.com

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A Brief History of Urbanism in North America: 1930-1939

The 1930′s saw two distinct trends with long-term impacts of the future of urbanism in North America, and particularly the United States. First were the unique, and diametrically opposed utopian visions of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. Second was the advent of major government investment in urban infrastructure and housing to help stabilize the economy and end the Great Depression:

The Disappearing City 1932

A Brief History of Urbanism in North America: 1930 1939 Frank Lloyd Wright’s book The Disappearing City, presented his vision of the landscape in which each home was situation on at least an acre of land and someone in each household owned a car. It was rewritten in 1945 as When Democracy Builds and again in 1958 as The Living City.

The central idea presented in the book was Broadacre City, a suburban development concept. A few years after the book’s publication, Wright unveiled a detailed 12’x12’ scale model representing a hypothetical four square mile community. Wright would go on refining the concept in later books and articles until his death in 1959.

Broadacre City was the antithesis of a city and a shining example of the emerging concept of suburbia. All important transport is done by automobile and the pedestrian can exist safely only within the confines of their private plots of lands. Wright appears to have been influenced by the earlier garden city idea of Frederick Law Olmsted and Ebenezer Howard.

Public Works Administration 1933 and Works Progress Administration (WPA) 1935

Steam shovel WDC 1933 A Brief History of Urbanism in North America: 1930 1939

PWA Construction Site in Washington, D.C., 1933

The Public Works Administration (PWA) was part of the New Deal, President Roosevelt’s 100 hundred days plan to help fix the Great Depression. It concentrated on the construction of large-scale public works such as dams and bridges, with the goal of providing employment, stabilizing purchasing power, and contributing to a revival of American industry. Of specific interest to urbanists, the PWA provided 85 percent of the cost of public housing projects. This represented the first federally supported public housing program. The administration was abolished in 1941 during WWII.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA), a rival , and better known program was formed two years later and continued or extended relief programs. It offered work to the unemployed by spending money on a wide variety of programs including highway and building construction, slum clearance and rural rehabilitation. Almost every community in the United States had a park, bridge or school constructed by the agency, which especially benefited rural and western populations.

The Radiant City 1935

Images from The Radiant City, (from NYU.edu)

French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret—better known as Le Corbusier—promoted the idea of the Dream City, or Radiant City, publishing a book on his ideas in 1935. His ideal city was composed mainly of skyscrapers for very high density development, surrounded by commonly owned parks.

Le Corbusier imagined large-scale grids of arterial street, supper blocks with high-rise towers and individual zones for different uses. He was a bitter critic of sprawling garden cities (suburbs) for the time wasted commuting. Because of its compact and separated nature, transportation in the Radiant City was to move quickly and efficiently.

Federation of Canadian Municipalities 1937

logo FCM A Brief History of Urbanism in North America: 1930 1939 The Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) is a civic advocacy group representing many Canadian municipalities. It is an organization with no formal power but significant ability to influence debate and policy, as it is main national lobby group of mayors, councillors and other elected municipal officials. It negotiates with the Government of Canada‘s departments and agencies on behalf of municipalities, and administers a number of funds.

It was formed in 1937 with the merger of the Union of Canadian Municipalities, (created in 1901) and the Dominion Conference of Mayors (established in 1935). The federation was known as the Canadian Federation of Mayors and Municipalities until 1976 when it took it’s current name. FCM was instrumental in negotiating the federal government’s 2005 “New Deal for Cities” program under which Canadian federal gasoline taxes are remitted to municipalities.*

Fannie Mae 1938

A Brief History of Urbanism in North America: 1930 1939 The Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) commonly known as Fannie Mae, was founded in 1938 during the Great Depression as part of the New Deal. It was set up as a government-sponsored enterprise, but it converted into a publicly traded company in 1968.The corporation purchases and securitizes mortgages in order to ensure that funds are consistently available to the institutions that lend money to home buyers.

Many urbanists are frustrated by Fannie Mae as it will not deal in mortgages for properties with
more than 20 percent of space set aside for non-residential use; plans for walkable, mixed-use developments do not qualify. In this regard, Fannie Mae is said to be a continuing contributor to suburban sprawl.

Matt Yglesias on Motivating Density in Phoenix

Progressive blogger (and budding urbanist) Matt Yglesias was in Phoenix last week for a speaking engagement. When he was here, he checked out our downtown and light rail system. Here’s what he had to say:

Motivating Density

Phoenix is largely a stereotypical sunbelt “no there there” sprawling auto-oriented city. But it does feature a smallish, but very nice, walkable urban downtown core. And it also has a new light rail line, with more lines to come. These developments are, it seems to me, very beneficial to the city and should keep paying off down the road.

But with my wonk hat on, it’s hard for me to imagine that the light rail system passes a cost-benefit test relative to just improving bus service. That is, however, a bit of a narrow-minded way of looking at the situation. The key element to downtown Phoenix’s success is that there’s been a lot of different rezoning initiatives (here’s one) to allow for increased density, more mixing of uses, and reduced parking requirements. It’s this rezoning to allow for more economically efficient use of the land that’s driving the benefits. And a city could—and should—do this without necessarily waiting for the construction of expensive light rail systems.

But when you’re talking about political change, you can’t leave the politics out and in this case it seems to me that they largely come as a package deal. Real estate developers and businesses like the idea of fixed rail stations to anchor development. And they also can serve as key elements of a political coalition for rezoning. Meanwhile, the idea of rail construction paints a picture for the city’s residents of urban transformation instead of “exactly the way it was before, but more crowded.” So the package works.

But of course the converse is also true. If a new transit system does anything useful, it will raise the price of station-adjacent land. Whether that constitutes a private benefit to landowners or a broader economic benefit to the community is almost entirely contingent on upzoning the land to increase the number of people able to take advantage of its increased value.

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Rob Carter’s Metropolis (Weekend Watch)

Rob Carter’s stop-motion paper animation film, Metropolis, is like ”a pop-up book on speed.” The nine-minute stop motion animation chronicles the urban expansion of Charlotte, North Carolina from a Native American trading post to a sprawling megalopolis.

This clip is the last three minutes of the film, showing the last 70 years of a city’s development and projecting an apocalyptic future.

From Vimeo:

Charlotte is one of the fastest growing cities in the country, primarily due to the continuing influx of the banking community, resulting in an unusually fast architectural and population expansion that shows no sign of faltering despite the current economic climate. … Ultimately the video continues the city development into an imagined hubristic future, of more and more skyscrapers and sports arenas and into a bleak environmental future. It is an extreme representation of the already serious water shortages that face many expanding American cities today; but this is less a warning, as much as a statement of our paper thin significance no matter how many monuments of steel, glass and concrete we build.

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X-Urbanism: Catchy but not Compelling

Photo Credit sulamith.sallmann on flickr

X-Urbanism is a theoretical framework for analyzing the American city and it’s architecture, particularly that of the late 20th century. The term was coined in the 1999 book X-Urbanism: Architecture and the American City by architect and professor Mario Gandelsonas. The book provided a new way of envisioning cities by examining various configurations of urban space. The term serves as a visual representation of the formal properties of American urbanism—fabric, void, grid, wall—that reveal the hidden structure of urban areas.

While an interesting premise (and a great term), it never really caught on outside academic circles. This is, in part because while Gandelsonas’ research is exhaustive, it is also somewhat convoluted. Another shortcoming is it falls into a common architecture trap by describing the city solely as the object of architecture, without mentioning realities such as land ownership, property values, or even urban design. Finally, as it took over 15 years to research and write, by the time it was published the book’s methodology and graphic representations were dated.

Indeed, while Gandelsonas was researching books such as Joel Garreau’s Edge City and Jonathan Barnett’s books The Elusive City and The Fractured Metropolis were published. These books cover much of the same theoretical ground as X-Urbanism, but in a more compelling manner. Indeed Edge City has become a classic study of ex-urban sprawl, and ‘edge city’ appears to have taken the place that ‘x-urbanism’ sought in the urban lexicon.

Nevertheless X-urbanism remains a compelling concept; it just needs a new, updated perspective. Perhaps it is time for Mario Gandelsonas to revisit his framework. After all a lot has occurred in American cities in the 25 years since the book was conceived and the decade since it was published.

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Walkable Urbanism: Back to the Future

Photo Credit: Eva The Weaver on Flickr

Walkable urbanism focuses on creating and enhancing pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use and mixed-income places.

While many observers connect walkable urbanism with large, high density places like Manhattan or downtown Chicago, walkable urban places have great variability. They are found in lower-density small downtowns like Lawrence, Kansas; suburban town centers such as Dublin, Ohio, and higher-density neighborhoods in larger cities like LODO in Denver. Such places are often characterized by efficient mass transit systems and higher density, mixed use developments. These factors enable residents to walk almost everywhere for everything— whether it be home, work, the grocery store or the movie theaters.

Walkable urbanism is nothing new; it was the way towns and cities were from the first urban settlements about 5,500 years ago to the mid 20th century. After World War II, government policy began encouraging drivable suburbanism. This led to the sprawling, low-density cities most North Americans are familiar with.

In recent years, interest in suburbanism has begun to wane. The pendulum is swinging back towards more compact walkable neighborhoods—the type of places that existed before the wide-spread use of the automobile. The return to walkable urbanism is due to several factors:

A car dependant lifestyle does not serve an aging population well.
The need to drive everywhere has begun to take its toll on our health and environment, with driving and long commutes being linked to an increased rate of obesity and higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
Creative young professional, influenced by television shows like “Seinfeld” and “Friends,” are seeking a more connected lifestyle, for both economic and social reasons.

This return to pre-war urban form has led Christopher Leinberger, author of The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream to coin walkable urbanism as “Back To the Future” in reference to the fictional community of Hill Valley.

Other ‘W’ Urbanisms

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Friday 5: Articles for Urbanists

Five posts for the urbanist in all of us:

How Pedestrian! The Walking Movement Flexes Its Muscle: Although walking is good for our heart rates and waistlines, modern road design can make it hazardous to our health. (DC StreetsBlog)

Public Art, Public Space and Great Places: Public art shows that residents have an interest in their city—their blocks, neighborhoods, streets and fellow citizens. (The City Fix)

Moving to the suburbs for your kids? Think again: If you live in a sprawling, auto-centric community that requires you to drive your kids to the supermarket to buy their organic produce and to the local play-field to get their exercise, you’re not doing them—or the planet—any favors. (Grist)

The Revolution Will Be…Built: The importance of understanding infill development as alternative to suburban sprawl. (aribra)

Creating a Culture of Civic Engagement: How organizations and governments can use technology to encourage public participation on important urban issues (Next American City)

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Retrofit Urbanism: Creating People-Oriented Places

While sprawl remains the dominant growth pattern in the U.S., many people are leaving the suburbs for more walkable areas. Some are getting fed up with the costs of commuting (in both time and money). Others are looking to live in places with character or community.

As an increasing number of people want an urban lifestyle, the question of what to do with the suburbs remains. It would be unwise and unsustainable to simply abandon them. In addition, even the most optimistic urbanist realizes that not everybody can, nor wants to, live downtown. At the same time, they want a more livable option that what current exists.

Instead of starting from scratch and creating an ideal new urbanist development, retrofit urbanism is a hybrid form of urbanism that acknowledges these realities. It looks to incrementally change existing suburban forms to encourage multi-modal transportation, including transit, walking and cycling. in addition it includes a cultural shift towards an increased sense of community and “interconnectivity. The goal is to transform auto-reliant neighborhoods into vibrant, people-oriented communities.

Retrofit urbanism is not as sexy as building a new urbanist utopia from scratch or building a mega development in the urban core. it does, however, represent a more effective way to meet increasing demands for the urban lifestyle and mitigate the worst effects of auto-dominated sprawl.