Forget Widening them, Let’s Narrow the Roads: an architect’s success story

When the shelter industry is in a tizzy over Obama’s forthcoming infrastructure plans, which will naturally entail shovel-ready projects such as road widening and lengthening, one builder/developer asks a municipality to narrow its roads. “We asked to reduce impervious surface area and avoid overheating of the microclimate,” says Pacific Northwest-based architect Ross Chapin in an Architect magazine online article. The project of subject is Wyer’s End, in White Salmon, Washington.

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Filed under: architecture, sustainability, transportation, urbanization

Shovel it: More mass transit

Congressmen discussing the econ. stim. bill are indeed calling for funding for shovel-ready projects, just as Carol Coletta forecasted in my interview with her earlier this month. View the WSJ online article.
The govt cannot be serious about 1) doing shove-ready projects (those can wait); 2) put more $ toward highways than public transit projects/alternative energy stocking along highways (for that would certainly be the perpetuation of America’s reliance on fossil fuels).
It’s already becoming the norm for people to not only move closer into the cities but also to consider public transit. Everyone who drives complains about traffic and the cost of gas. Public transit is a must!
I also do not agree that airports need anything. Let the airline industry take care of itself. After all, didn’t American taxpayers give them a big financial lift after 9-11, much like the bank industry after the real estate bubble/credit lending debacle crashed?

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Filed under: construction, legislation, Obama, transportation, urbanization

How we live today: Heed universal design

Here are some eyebrow-lifting stats from the AIA:
In 1973 60% of American kids walked to school. Remember that? Today it’s 13%.
Married couples with children comprised 61% of households.
The two largest groups of our population live in cities: baby boomers and millennials.

These are some stats Susan Szenasy., editor in chief of Metropolis mag, wrote in her letter from the editor last summer. She also wrote that one in six children has attended at least three schools. One speaker at the May AIA conference in Boston blamed this “instability” on “unhealthy… housing that forces people to move too often for their own good.”
That’s silly, almost preposterous. People don’t move (at least not a majority of people) bc their housing is poorly built. They move bc this is the 21st century, a transient era. They move bc the American public has been convinced by realtors, builders, developers, the Joneses, etc that only one housing type will function properly for each step in life. There is one style for post-college, one for newlyweds, one for young families, one for growing families, one for empty nesters, another for your golden years. C’mon now. Pay attention to the verbiage your peers are using; stop blaming it on shoddy housing. Point the finger of truth at materialism, socio-economic competition, and the lack of ability to think for oneself.
Go for universal design! It’s not just for wheelchair bound denizens.

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Filed under: AIA, community, universal design, urbanization

Solomon speaks: the WPA and New Urbanism

“The idea that is emerging from many sources in different forms is to retool America – its cities, its industry, its infrastructure and its landscape – to flourish in the post-oil economy of the mid-21st century. The post-oil economy will be as profound for the 21st century as the railroad was for the 19th, or the automobile was for the 20th, and it will be carried with a force of inevitability greater than either.”
So wrote Dan Solomon, co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism in the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday (as brought to my attention by Filmanowicz’s twittering/blog).
“Now American housing faces new challenges. Most Americans cannot afford housing in the great urban centers that are served by public transportation and should be the locus of economic activity. There are no policy tools to address the growing disparity between the costs of producing housing, particularly housing that does not depend upon automobiles, and what middle class people can afford.”
Read his piece in the SFChronicle.

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Filed under: architecture, community, construction, housing, Obama, real estate, transportation, urbanization

Solomon speaks: the WPA and New Urbanism

“The idea that is emerging from many sources in different forms is to retool America – its cities, its industry, its infrastructure and its landscape – to flourish in the post-oil economy of the mid-21st century. The post-oil economy will be as profound for the 21st century as the railroad was for the 19th, or the automobile was for the 20th, and it will be carried with a force of inevitability greater than either.”
So wrote Dan Solomon, co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism in the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday (as brought to my attention by Filmanowicz’s twittering/blog).
“Now American housing faces new challenges. Most Americans cannot afford housing in the great urban centers that are served by public transportation and should be the locus of economic activity. There are no policy tools to address the growing disparity between the costs of producing housing, particularly housing that does not depend upon automobiles, and what middle class people can afford.”
Read his piece in the SFChronicle.

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Filed under: 1429145, architecture, community, construction, housing, real estate, transportation, urbanization

Expanding Architectural Conversation

Metropolis editor in chief Susan S. Szenasy will discuss the publisher’s new book Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism with some of its contributors on Sat., 22 Jan., in Atlanta. Contributors include designers, developers (yes, they can fit nicely in the same sentence), manufacturers, policy makers and others.
Learn more about this free and participatory event through Metropolis.

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Filed under: AIA, design, events, urbanization

Look back to go forward

“As America rebuilds and readjusts for the 21st century, we might do well to remember what the Italians have known since the earliest Etruscan settlements: cultures thrive, survive, and grow when they relate their buildings and cities to the sun, wind, and terrain while employing invention and technology– all in the service of supporting life,”
Susan S. Szenasy, editor in chief of Metropolis magazine

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Filed under: architecture, urbanization

Coletta Interview Part 2: Smart cities and where we’re going

Richard Florida and Carol Coletta. Photo credit

I’ve been listening to Carol Coletta’s Smart City, a weekly public radio program, for more than a year. So full of information it is, that I archive each episode. Among other things we discussed during Friday’s interview was Obama’s infrastructure plans and the likelihood they’ll be akin to a WPA program. Her show the week of our interview just happened to be on that same subject.

But first, let’s start with what makes Carol Coletta an international name in urban planning. Coletta served as president of Coletta & Company, a Memphis-based consultancy that creates strategic community investment plans for major corporations. She’s served as executive director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, a partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts, U.S. Conference of Mayors and American Architectural Foundation. Carol was a Knight Fellow in Community Building for 2003 at the University of Miami School of Architecture and is currently a candidate for a Master of Design Methods at the Institute of Design at IIT. She is frequently interviewed as an expert on urban issues by national media and is an active speaker on the success formula for cities and creative communities.

What are three characteristics smart cities share?
“They have a lot of talent. That is, human capital. They know how to attract it, keep it, and develop it. They have dense connections between people and resources and money. They also understand and act on their distinctiveness. They have strong vital cores.”

And what are some examples?
“Chicago; Portland, Oregon; Austin, Texas; San Francisco; Seattle and Boston.”

Obama talks a lot about a major infrastructure initiative, which might employ some 3 million people. What will that entail? Will it proliferate car-centered development or encourage public transportation or perambulation? Will it lead to some sort of WPA programming?
“If the states drive the list of projects– the shovel-ready projects– it will be business as usual. These are new roads, new bridges. We don’t need new capacity; we need to think beyond the system we’ve built for the last 50 years and say, ‘Is that really 21st-century infrastructure?’ (For Obama) the idea is to put people back to work. If the governors drive this, it’s not going to be pretty. Read Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl’s Transport Revolutions. They pointed out that electricity is a carrier, it’s not an output. You can create it with water, coal, nuclear, bio fuels… in many ways. We could retrofit autos and buses, etc. to use those alternative electricity sources. I think a WPA program would be terrific, but even that takes time to gear up, like the sustainable infrastructure plans.
“Smart Growth America (A nationwide coalition promoting a better way to grow; one that protects farmland and open space, revitalizes neighborhoods, keeps housing affordable, and more) has provided good ideas for how to find the right workers and projects…. What you could do to put people to work really fast is to retrofit schools and government buildings. We could also retrofit residential buildings with funding from projected utility/energy savings. The Clinton Initiative (for example) worked to retrofit office buildings.”

How will the recent real estate boom and its resulting economic woes help shape land planning and urban design?
“The notion that you can take any piece of land in America and build whatever the heck you want to on it is over. You can see it in increased transit use. People have more incentive to live closer in. Other means of transport won’t be seen as a sacrifice but as a preference. People will rediscover the joys of real community and look for public transportation options, living more conveniently. The age of megamansions is dead. People will stop wanting to have so much space and so much storage and so much materialism. They say, ‘Do I want a backyard or Millennium Park two blocks from my house? Millennium Park, thank you!’”

The following books and URLS served as props for the interview and/or were recommended by Coletta.
Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl’s Transport Revolutions
SmartGrowthAmerica
Richard Florida’s Who’s Your City?
Duany, Plater-Zyberk, Speck’s Suburban Nation: the Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream

See part one.

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Filed under: books, community, green, housing, real estate, urbanization

Doyenne of Smart Cities: An Interview with Carol Coletta

Carol Coletta is president/CEO of CEOs for Cities and host/producer of the nationally syndicated public radio show Smart City.

Radiohead’s early music plays a little too loudly at the Intelligentsia on Randolph, within walking distance of Millennium Park and the Chicago Cultural Center, so I edge my pseudo-aluminum chair to hear what Carol Coletta’s saying. With her blonde, stylishly disheveled coif and subtle makeup seemingly perfect, you’d never guess she’d awoken at 430 a.m. in Memphis to catch her plane to Chicago. Having homes in both places, she’s a frequent traveler, and in her gently Memphis dialect she also discusses her trips to Australia, South Africa, and China.
The conversation was extensive, though certainly I would have loved to talk to her all day. I didn’t get to ask her about the likelihood of cohousing and cooperative communities making it into the mainstream as an indirect result of this tired economy. I didn’t get to Rorschach quiz her on homeowners associations. Nor was I able to ask about her initial thoughts on NIMBYism. And while I didn’t get to ask her about what books or resources she’d recommend for space design aficionados or experts– she did slip some into our easily flowing and jam-packed conversation; you can find them in part two of the interview, coming tomorrow.

Do you lean toward Thomas Friedman’s theory that information technology erases distance and therefore enhances anyone’s creativity and productivity tools anywhere, or toward Richard Florida, who says there’s something uniquely, intellectually, creatively inspiring about metropolitan areas?
“Tom Friedman is correct in that tech makes us more productive and lets us work from anywhere. Richard Florida is right because the chance meetings that cities enable makes us more productive. Bill Bishop has done wonderful work in that same area, making the same point of (Florida): the more educated you are, the more mobile you are. People from 25 to 34 years old are more mobile.”
–From 1990 to 2000 these people went to 16 of the top 50 metropolitan areas of the U.S. That means the other 34 major cities lost those people.

How do we know New Urbanism isn’t just another Radiant City or City Beautiful?
“New Urbanism has been phenomenal in terms of its packaging and marketing. They have succeeded in building much better suburbs and have been good advocates for better roadways, smaller roadways. Doug Farr wrote a book called Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature, which is a brilliant piece of work. He’s on the board of the Congress for New Urbanism. LEED ND is trying to promote a different sort of planning. The two are very compatible in a lot of ways, certainly not incompatible. New Urbanism is better than traditional suburbs, what without their sense of place and location away from core area of cities.”

When asked how New Urbanism has helped or hindered the redevelopment of New orleans, Coletta pointed out Brad Pitt’s underwriting a design competition.

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“New Orleans is just as vulnerable to flooding again and the development hasn’t taken that into consideration. The great miscalculation is that everyone would come back, but they haven’t. It’s become a shrinking city like Cleveland, Detroit, Youngstown and Buffalo.”

In tomorrow’s post I’ll discuss shrinking cities, Obama’s infrastructural plans, the economy’s long-term effects on land planning, and more.

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Filed under: architecture, community, construction, green, housing, Jane Jacobs, real estate, urbanization

What would Carol Coletta do?

Later this week I’m meeting Carol Coletta, host of the weekly public radio talk show Smart City, which I’ve glowingly referenced on this blog. Of course I’ve prepared numerous questions– she’s a guru to me!–, but I’d like some input from my readers.
What would you ask Carol if you had an hour to chat over tea with the Doyenne of Urbanism?
Email me at Spacedesign232@gmail.com by Thursday night.

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Filed under: community, housing, urbanization