The entire country isn't Southern California.Originally posted by Pragmatic Idealist
The entire country isn't Southern California.
If someone said it was I missed it. I think PI has good points. High urban rents mean demand. The fact that artists regenerate urban neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Brooklyn or the parts of Oakland that they are in the process of making over proves that demand spills over the supply into areas that some might not be into. Besides, aren't most downtowns high density with residences over storefronts? Ours certainly is, and those spots are rarely vacant. I remember you saying you lived in downtown Buffalo for a while - care to explain why?
And as far as Jane, she concerned herself solely with the big cities, and could care about small cities or towns. She is irrelevant and says so many times in the planning of smaller communities.
I never lived in downtown Buffalo (very few people did until recently) but I did live in a working class city neighborhood called Black Rock for about 20 years. I also lived near downtown Troy, NY for a couple of years when I lived in the Capital District.
The dynamics of many of the formerly large cities in the Great Lakes area are very different from NYC or Chicago or the growing cities in the Sunbelt. These cities -- from Buffalo to Cleveland to Detroit -- were once very large and are now seriously depopulated. Real estate prices are low because there's so much of it available. People can buy nice houses in decent city neighborhoods for under $100,000. New built/new rehabbed condos in and near the downtown areas of these cities need to sell for for 2 and 3 times that amount for the developer to cover his costs. That really limits the number of people who are going to be interested in buying in downtown areas.
I've noticed that in general, people who live in the more high demand cities along the coasts and elsewhere in this country can not conceive of the conditions in the more troubled cities in the Midwest. And that people living in these troubled areas cant totally understand the dynamics in the more crowded urban areas. It's as if we live in different universes and don't speak the same language.
One has to question, though, whether or not the reason some of these places are in such demand is because they are urban and because they offer those amenities that come with population density and intensified land uses.
If everyone is clamoring to live in San Francisco but don't because the cost of living is too high, then why don't we just create more San Franciscos?
Having grown up in the Bay Area and spent my entire adult life in Boston, I am one of those in the I like to live in cities camp. I agree that there seems to be greater demand for these kind of places, because they are urban, then is being met.
But obviously others differ.
Because San Francisco is San Francisco and Des Moines is Des Moines. If I wanted to live in the "big city", I'd move to NYC or Toronto, not to Buffalo or Cleveland. When I lived in Albany, NY, I knew bunches of people from NYC who took jobs in Albany and lived Albany or its suburbs/exurbs because they didn't like living in NYC.
Among middle class people who can afford to choose where to live, people self-select their life styles. Most people who want big city urban life style try to move to those kinds of places, leaving many fewer people in their current place who want a big city urban life style. In contrast, people who live in big city urban places and want a slower paces life style try to move to smaller cities or out to the 'burbs, leaving fewer people in the city who want a small town life style.
I also don't think it's possible to create new "cities" from nothing in a short period of time and have these be successful as anything but city "wannabees". Isn't that the main criticism of many New Urbanist developments -- that they're little more than suburban subdivisions dressed up to try and look like small towns? Maybe building new cities from nothing works in very crowded places like China but here in the US, it just doesn't seem to be workable.
Do you think everyone can find where they want to live in every area?
Might not a group of people stay in buffalo or some other city if it offered the amenities of more successful cities?
Perhaps most people can find the kind of community they want at a price they can afford. But many, perhaps millions can not.
Fortunately, Buffalo has retained a few pockets of interesting, walkable urbanism among all the blight, vacancy and stable-yet-gritty working class neighborhoods. There has been steadily-rising demand for urban living in the city in areas that are already nice. And in the past few years, it's started to spill into previously-overlooked neighborhoods on the West Side that are close to the Elmwood Village. I live on a "fringe" block of the Lower West Side abutting Allentown. I think it helps that my own generation (I'm 30) has different attitudes about what is desirable. There is definite demand for city living here. I can't speak for our brethren cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, ect. but I know what I see here. I believe Pittsburgh has experienced a good degree of urban rejuvenation, despite their increased loss of overall population.
Right, much of what makes our best cities great is due mostly to cultural and economic inertia, not just the build form. Many urbanists are guilty of focusing too much on material aesthetics while ignoring the social and economic foundations of cities.I also don't think it's possible to create new "cities" from nothing in a short period of time and have these be successful as anything but city "wannabees".
I feel that that all those exurban NU developments have served as a sort of sales pitch for the whole movement. Each retro subdivision functions as a "model home" for what a completely rebuilt urban neighborhood could look like. Obviously, it's much easier to plop a brand new neighborhood on a pristine greenfield rather than try to actually redevelop a chunk of inner city; such an endeavour would involve having to navigate a minefield of red tape, race politics/ political correctness, bureaucracy, atomized land ownership and vested political interests. Antagonist interests would easily paint such a project as "urban renewal," a concept that is basically a persona-non-grata of urban planning thanks to its complete misapplication through a series of embarrassing, context-indifferent blunders carried out during the blazing era of high modernism. Of course, if executed correctly by experts who actually understand how cities function, urban renewal could greatly contribute to the proper rebuilding of our cities.Isn't that the main criticism of many New Urbanist developments -- that they're little more than suburban subdivisions dressed up to try and look like small towns?
My main beef with NU is the oppressive architectural conservatism that dominates the movement. It seems as if NUs favored architects have conjured up their own hodgepodge of American historic styles that fetishizes and romanticizes a handful of arbitrarily-selected periods of history. This constitutes a reactionary form of groupthink among a planning regime still reeling from the construction of so many ugly modern buildings our cities have been subjected to throughout the postwar decades. Looking around the world, there is a lot of awesome contemporary architecture out there being build. It's just we're too afraid to think outside our box.
One has to look at the intrinsic value of the land.
What makes certain parcels more expensive than others? And, what can be done to increase the value of the land?
In a global economy that is increasingly powered by human capital, quality of life is the only variable. Linda D. ostensibly doesn't understand the principles of the New Urbanism, which includes re-establishing the rural-to-urban Transects that have been decimated by the absolute domination of cars, oil, and freeways on our lives since World War II and whose re-engineering during that time has forced virtually all Americans to live in God-awful tract houses in the middle of nowhere.
The rural-to-urban Transect of the old pre-war cities provided a great public realm that was shared by a wide range of socioeconomic classes, and said Transect offered a choice for people to select how close to the city and the country each person wanted to live. Linda D., by continually characterizing the New Urbanism inaccurately, represents a tyranny that is destroying this nation, its economy, and both the natural and built environments here. The mentality she exhibits is the antithesis of personal freedom, the handmaiden to the interests of the oil industry, and the closed-minded devotion to a status quo that is, by almost all accounts, unsustainable.
Get rid of the parking requirements, the asinine setback laws, and the single-use codes. Stop the imbecilic investments in transportation infrastructure that only benefits the oil companies. And, let people live where they want to live, build what they want to build, and exist without being forced to own and use a car.
Incidentally, while the New Urbanism certainly advocates detailed form-based codes and development standards that ensure a high-quality built environment, the movement is not necessarily married to traditional styles of architecture, even though the middle class may prefer them and a developer may find them more marketable. Instead, a sensitivity to context is that, which is valued above everything else. Modernism, as a style, is alright as long as it fits well in an environment and as long as the style enhances or preserves walkability. As such, random visual detail that Modernist buildings provide at the pedestrian scale can be very important.
I don't mean to speak for her, but I do think she "gets" what NU is, she just doesn't see much value in high-density living, relative to her own life experiences. Either that or she's never lived in a real high-density habitat or any real urban environment that has bestowed a lasting good impression upon here. I used to debate with Linda over these same issues back on a Buffalo-oriented message board, so I definitely know where she's coming from. I think it's good to have a voice like hers here, otherwise it would be a dull echo chamber. What she vouches are more like populist, devil's advocate arguments rather than any sort of deep-rooted ideology. Her commentary echoes the silent majority's views that aren't really voiced that often (because most people honestly don't give these issues a whole lot of thought) and demonstrates well the pragmatic, ostensibly- sensible choices people make in their daily lives that feeds the unsustainable beast.
Rather than demonizing the average Joe who likes their big car and tract house in their mass-produced subdivision, we must realize that the average person has little-to-no concept of externality--that is the broader consequences of actions the benefiting party doesn't directly pay for. To an individual, having on-demand convenience of a personally-owned automobile is great. Living in a detached house on a patch of green offers the illusion of one being able to lord over their own manor. But, multiply these seemingly-innocuous actions by tens of millions and we now easily can see how this results in our chaotic land use catastrophe of epic proportions.
The average person doesn't think on the macro level. We can blame our appalling education system that exists not to cultivate critical thinkers, but to crank out obedient workers and consumabots. Garbage in, garbage out. People just can't grasp how their individual actions have an effect upon the greater society around them. Politicians merely pander to people's collective stupidity and we obviously see why almost nothing progressive ever gets accomplished.
Progressive architects and planners will know they have one the battle when they can design and build a high-density habitat that the LindaD's of the world would actually consider living in. Hint: Manhattan is not the be-all-end-all of high-density living.
Let's not romanticize too much. A lot of our prewar cities (or at least large swaths of them) were, frankly, never "all that" to begin with. Instead of just looking to the past we need to think in terms of how we can envision the future and do better.The rural-to-urban Transect of the old pre-war cities provided a great public realm that was shared by a wide range of socioeconomic classes, and said Transect offered a choice for people to select how close to the city and the country each person wanted to live.
True. As I said above, the personal car, personal house and personal patch of crabgrass offers the illusion of control over one's life.The mentality she exhibits is the antithesis of personal freedom, the handmaiden to the interests of the oil industry, and the closed-minded devotion to a status quo that is, by almost all accounts, unsustainable.
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So many Americans have a very cartoonish idea of what "freedom" really means.And, let people live where they want to live, build what they want to build, and exist without being forced to own and use a car.
Incidentally, while the New Urbanism certainly advocates detailed form-based codes and development standards that ensure a high-quality built environment, the movement is not necessarily married to traditional styles of architecture, even though the middle class may prefer them and a developer may find them more marketable. [/QUOTE]
I realize this. But until NU can crawl out of its retro-fetish hole, it won't be taken seriously by enough people.
I think the way people tend to build more San Francisco is to gentrify towns and neighborhoods adjacent to urban fabric that already exists. It's convenient in many ways. I'm going to use SF and NYC as examples.
People come to SF looking for the city life, but it's expensive; so, depending on their willingness to reside in sketchy areas, they may 'settle' for Oakland or Berkeley a few BART stops away, or dicier neighborhoods of San Francisco itself (ie The Mission, rapidly gentrifying). Eventually if enough people settle in this way the neighborhoods turn into safer, more gentrified areas, and the people who seek but can't afford the urban experience go further afield beginning the gentrification process in other towns/neighborhoods, etc.
This happened in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where artists slowly took over the neighborhood around the Bedford subway stop. Williamsburg became its own destination, and is now being, yeah, totally gentrified with huge houses going up (funny because the area is built on an oil spill). Hipsters and artists who are now being pushed out of Williamsburg by high rents are moving on to other, sketchier parts of Brooklyn and far-flung spots like Jersey City. Meanwhile in Manhattan, the upper east and west sides encroach further into Harlem every day.
You can't just build a city and expect people to come - this isn't Field of Dreams. What you can do is count on desirable areas in massive agglomerations to spread and scatter, and in this way more 'city,' in the sense I think is being discussed here, is created. And New Urbanism is stupid.
There seem to be widespread misconceptions of the New Urbanism, which is just as applicable to existing cities as it is to greenfield projects, most of which I dislike because they are not truly New Urbanist. Rather, they usually represent a developer's cherry-picking of New Urbanist principles to apply to what are essentially glorified shopping malls with gobs of parking and very little in the way of employment.
Additionally, the New Urbanism applies to hamlets and villages in addition to cities and towns, so the point of the movement is to provide people with greater choice, instead of giving everyone homogenized sub-urban places that are almost uniformly designed poorly. There is a sub-urban Transect Zone in the New Urbanism ideal, after all. Single-family detached houses, even those on large lots, can be New Urbanist, but these residential products have to exist within the pedestrian-shed, or, at least, within bicycling / N.E.V.-driving distance from the center or the core. The key is the compactness of the development and the use of high-quality public transportation to connect all the pedestrian-sheds together.
Ultimately, planners should never require people to own and drive standard-size cars when they design these environments. The privately-owned car must only be supplemental, never integral, to the transportation system.
Last edited by Pragmatic Idealist; 09 Oct 2010 at 11:16 PM.
This is a lecture Andrés Duany gave twenty years ago in San Antonio that describes the basic principles of the New Urbanism:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwd4Lq0Xvgc
Last edited by Pragmatic Idealist; 22 Oct 2010 at 8:08 AM.
Jane Jacobs was not a new urbanist. She lived in places like New York and Toronto. These are old urban if anything. Using her to espouse new urbanist principles of sprawl is folly.
We hope for better things; it will arise from the ashes - Fr Gabriel Richard 1805
"New Urbanist principles of sprawl".... ?
I have no idea what that means.
The New Urbanism is "old urbanism" applied to a world that has been dominated by the car over the last 60 years. So, even though Jane Jacobs and several others, including even Walt Disney, predated the term, "New Urbanism," they were addressing many of the same issues in much the same way.
The New Urbanism, or neo-traditional planning, is differentiated from traditional planning by the unique response to the car and the airplane that the present day requires. Jane Jacobs, herself, stated that accommodations for the car were a necessity, even though the role of the mode needed and still needs to be suppressed. This acknowledgment of the existence of the car makes her, by definition, a New Urbanist.
There seems to be some confusion about "New Urbanism" referring to greenfield projects. The New Urbanism relates just as much to infill, adaptive reuse, etc. Re-establishing the rural-to-urban Transect, according to pedestrian-, bicycle-, and/or N.E.V.-sheds, is the major goal of the movement. So, it, in that way, is also similar to the Garden Cities idea, which was intended to preserve wilderness and countryside.
New Urbanists are not proposing eliminating cars or forcing people to live in high-rises, and for some people to suggest otherwise reveals a complete lack of understanding of the most basic tenets of this kind of planning.
Duaney and others all say they were inspired by Jacobs to develop new urbanism.
The reason why there is confusion is because nearly every NU development IS in a greenfield! This is sprawl, particularly in a no-growth metro.
You can have new urbanism without TOD or infill. All it is is a loose word to make everything look like Disneyland. Whoops sorry Celebration!
Jane Jacobs biggest contributions were not design related. They were based on cities working as a unit and export-base models. NU does not even touch or mention principals of aglomeration or manufacturing.
Last edited by DetroitPlanner; 23 Oct 2010 at 5:19 PM.
We hope for better things; it will arise from the ashes - Fr Gabriel Richard 1805
I suppose I'm a little shocked at reading this thread because of some of the really basic misconceptions (at least as I see them) about Jane Jacobs' intentions with and the basic implications of Death and Life... I've come across in it.
For starters, and this was mentioned really briefly by someone in the thread but I absolutely think it needs to be reiterated, Jane Jacobs' thoughts on big cities really are just for big cities. Andres Duany and New Urbanists have pulled out really intelligent ideas about how to design communities as satellite cities around larger metropolitan areas and many of those ideas may trace their roots to Death and Life... but Jane Jacobs' focus was on how to treat big cities and she was very much not focused on satellite communities in that book. That being said if we're looking at the legacy of Jane Jacobs then it has to be mentioned that NU was greatly influenced by her, but as I think of Jane Jacobs I'm really just looking at the way she thought about the vitality and functionality of our large urban centers. When I read that people are talking about Buffalo, I feel like nobody got through the first chapter of Life and Death... because she separates her thoughts on big cities even from the medium city, let alone the small one.
This isn't a merely technical point either. I'm not yet even a formal student of urban planning, so I really don't have the skill set to cite technicalities. The very practical difference of small and large urban places is their inter-connectivity. Greenwich Village isn't something you can replicate in Buffalo because it doesn't have the rest of Manhattan wrapped around it. Now the NU people have pulled wonderful lessons from successful big urban centers but they're not scaling down Greenwich Village, or building another SF as someone suggested, they're just building towns the old way. Using the logic of town building that existed before we decided cars were more important than people. But I'm digressing a bit. Jane Jacobs was very keen to point out that neighborhoods in big urban areas weren't self-contained, modular units. They were part of the fabric of the city. When I lived in Brooklyn I lived near a subway stop so I could use lots of different parts of the city depending on what I needed to do and I also chose a neighborhood that was itself walkable and was walking distance to a couple of interesting places that wouldn't have been technically considered my neighborhood. When someone is planning a green field (new term for me) project or redeveloping a small city there aren't a lot of choices in "destination" neighborhoods (a neighborhood that gives a reason to go there aside from visiting your mother) and so when redesigning a "destination" neighborhood it becomes a totally different project with a different intent than anything one would find working in a neighborhood in a big city.
I think some of this confusion comes from how highly sensitive people are to integration and trying to get mixed-use projects going. Density is high. There might be a square, a cafe with outdoor seating off to one or more sides of the square, wide side-walks and absolutely no parking lots in front of the buildings. What the planner is doing is creating this space as a unit. It's a vibrant, community first perspective where the public space is active throughout the day and into the evening as desired. Mixed use, integration and density are all good things when trying to create a sense of place and community. The problem comes from planners thinking of their project as a single unit. When that happens you get people suggesting little skyscraper pods with a grocery store and a park in the middle and a ring road around it. Lots of density and mixed use and a little bit of green but the idea would be anathema to Jane Jacobs. Even with a little transit stop in the middle this project is not connected to the city. It is an island. It would be a mega cul de sac, which is to say an awful idea on a very large scale. A transit stop is not connection enough to have a neighborhood be a part of a city. The ring road around the development would be like a moat that kept the rest of the city out, and the residents within. Also, the specific desire for a ring road would serve to confuse and disorient any attempt to walk out of the place and return the same way. I don't know what people have against corners anymore. Maybe I'll learn, but Jane Jacobs loved corners.
Anyway, this got long and I feel like I didn't phrase what I had to say well... Why don't people like grids? Grids are good. Hard to get lost on a grid. Maybe Jane and I would have disagreed about grids...
Hagadin seems to get it. The connection between Jane Jacobs and NU is confined to the realm of physical design: short blocks, zero or short building setbacks, modest increases in density, community places at the front (read porches), etc. etc. There is no 'spiritual' connection as the NU design process has, to date, largely resulted in economically homogenous places for middle and upper middle class folks. The oft discussed, and sometimes useful, idea of the transect has value in understanding how large development decisions, taken over many decades, interact. It is an intriguing idea intellectually but, in my view, virtually useless as a decision making tool. Sprawl has inflicted great damage on the US that we will struggle with for decades to come but it is a reality.
It is the values of the urban places that JJ teaches. The Buffalo story is tragic. In the early 1970s arrogant university leadership and imbecilic city leadership caused the very large campus of SUNY Buffalo to move out of downtown. Then when a very attractive light rail system was built the same suburban mind-set blocked the extension of the line to the new campus in Amherst. The decision may well have had racial overtones -- the line would have made it easier for 'those people' to get out of the city. Fortunately, Buffalo has good 'bones' and an imaginative crew of artists, gays and small entrepreneurs (the usual suspects in spontaneous revitalization) have found blocks and small areas where the low rents and solid buildings allow them to thrive. Buffalo City Hall, an absolutely spectacular structure that was the final tower for the monster in the original Ghostbusters movie, is probably twice as big as is needed today and reflects the city's enormous power during and for a time after WWII. Buffalo deserves to make it, to reinvent itself.
The wonderful walkable cities of the US (i.e. Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco) have several key characteristics. The texture of buildings and uses is fine and complex -- they are endless opportunities for discovery; ample housing choices exist at many price levels so that newcomers can find a place even if in some cases the apartment is the size of a suburban closet; they have very lively arts scenes -- music, dancing, visual arts, etc.; and they usually have a strong presence of colleges and universities. It is very hard to cook these things up in the public policy stew. What can happen is that the public sector can nurture and value the texture, the renegades who move into the 'bad' areas, and accept the fact that urban neighborhoods are not static.
The last idea naturally leads to the topic of 'gentrification'. As a planner with over 30 years of experience I would comment that the concept is fundamentally bogus. Older cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland, Kansas City and dozens of others have suffered from 40-50 years of continuous disinvestment -- 20,000+ homes in Philadelphia are vacant now, despite a thriving center city -- and there is no prospect in any of these places that public sector investment can address this reality. It is absolutely essential that new people move in, that houses be improved, and thereby made more valuable, if our great older cities are to survive. Worry about the potential for economic displacement is understandable, but the cure is to help present residents become more successful themselves, not to point negative fingers at the newcomers. Let's talk schools!
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