Book Review so you don't have to...

BOOK REVIEW

I like that the cover graphic sort of reminds of a DNA double helix, no?

I've got another post for today in the works, but before that I want to plug a book I'm currently sifting through which is not suitable for a lay audience.  It is The New Science of Cities by Michael Batty, a professor at the University College of London, the epicenter for emerging theory on cities and city form, a counterbalance to Copenhagen's pragmatic living laboratory towards livability.  This book is graduate level and above.  So unless you want to wade into its 500 pages, just see my next few paragraphs.

There seems to be a rush to quantify cities into something, ahem, quantifiable, which is a good thing as long as you understand that they very may well be unquantifiable in sum or at least admit this science is still in its infancy or adolescence at best.  Batty understands and admits this immediately.  However, UCL and Batty are at the forefront of beginning to formulate a new way of looking at cities and a new way of understanding them, which is rooted in complexity theory.  This is simply setting the foundation, righting the ship which has been for too long facing in the wrong direction, towards anti-city.

I have written and often present this concept as intro to how we need to also be thinking about cities and get over our obsession with the visual.  Godmother of Complexity theory Donella Meadows even explicitly writes that in systems we focus the most on that which matters the least, which is the visual, the sensual, those things we can touch and see.  And it's understandable since those are things are both the most apparent and that which we have the most immediate contact.

With cities, those things are buildings, architecture, businesses, ie land uses, parks, etc.  By doing so, we are in effect trying to build a forest ecology through raking leaves.  So I've used Meadows' hierarchical framework that all complex systems are built upon: ELEMENTS, CONNECTIONS, and PURPOSE.  And there is an inverse relationship between causality and attention.  For cities these same categories can become: BUILDINGS AND USES, TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE, and POLICY.  Or as I like to quip: the invisible hand, the invisible arm, and the invisible brain.

The policy is the most effectual but the hardest to change.  Buildings and uses are the easiest to change, but the least impactful on the larger system.  Policy drives infrastructural shape which drives land use and behavior patterns.  They are merely an outgrowth that is nudged this way or that by 1) policy and then 2) the infrastructure following that policy.

So what is policy or purpose of cities?  Any simpler living system's purpose is first to stay alive and perpetuate life.  Similarly, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is does the best job of outlining the purpose and priority structure of cities.  Thus, you'll see that the most "livable cities" are those that may not have the best art or airports or most robust economies, but they're the cities with the broadest base of Maslow's pyramid.  They meet the basic needs of the greatest percentage of their inhabitants.

The key as Meadows shows for living systems and urbanists is knowing the correct place and manner of intervention.  My interpretation for a defined purpose of cities throughout history is an "improved quality of life through choice and opportunity for social and economic exchange."  I've had to add the "choice" part in to what was a more simple and elegant statement because it is vital.  As I've mentioned the science of cities is a race.  And physicists at the Santa Fe institute have begun to change the language of cities to that of a reactor.  And in a reactor, there is fusion.  Two things coming together and creating an entirely new energy or vitality.  Social and economic exchange.  Laughter, ideas, trade, genes.  These are the things we're transacting.

Such is the language of Batty's book.  Except from his clinical lens, his framework is similar to Meadows' but a bit different.  His three hierarchies are as follows:  FLOWS, NETWORKS, and FORM.  When you begin to unpack the concepts and translate the language between sciences, you start to see the inherent similarities to all of the complexity sciences, which interestingly have a similar godmother in one Jane Jacobs.

FLOWS refers to demand flows or desire lines.  Batty writes that these are a constant.  They are permanent and proportional to a population.  Specifically, these are our needs and wants, which is social and economic exchange.  Buying things.  Hanging out with friends.  Make money to buy things by going to work.  Etc.

Except those things can't all be in one place.  Therefore there is a tension in place that creates a "bipartite" (his word) bond between two things.  There is demand to access these things as efficiently as possible, but not be literally in the same place as all those things.  For one, those things can't all fit in one place.  And two, sometimes you want to get away from those things, such as the bustle of the trade (modern or historic), or more directly, your job.

Interestingly, if we begin picking components of various urbanists throughout time with our modern ability via the internet to take polls and exchange information we start to see increasing relationships between these ideas.  Australian professor Peter Newman's hour-wide city theory suggests that all cities throughout history are about one-hour wide.  You can traverse from one edge though the center to the other in one hour, from the edge to the center in 30 minutes.  What gives size and shape to the city is contemporary transportation technology.

If you look at average commute times across the US, you see that every city falls within a range of about 25 to 35 minutes.  Looking at polls, you see that the "ideal" commute time is about 22 minutes.  Not quite the 30+, but also not too close to work because many want time to decompress (fro) or prepare (to).

That brings us to Batty's next order of hierarchy, NETWORKS.  He writes, correctly in my estimation, that those demand flows between our various origins and destinations are first, abstract.  They exist invisibly.  They are only given shape as they align to networks.  All of a sudden there is a geography in place.  Invisible links now have physical alignments via infrastructure.  The question is how well does a specific city's infrastructural networks respond to these desire lines, and deeper, to our need for expedient and efficient social and economic exchange?

See two examples:

The road above is clearly not responsive to efficient links between desire lines.  It doesn't enable.  And in fact, it spreads us out to the point (based on car movement) that more efficient forms of movement are nearly prohibited.



The above is 'top-down' designed Rome to the left and 'adapted' Rome to the right, some 2000 years later.  Desire lines optimized the city, maximized route choice and land use premiums by maximizing ratio of interface to land area.

It is the NETWORKS we design and build which give our cities, our inherent need for socio-economic exchange, geography, place.  Whence those networks and in turn places are established, demand driven, then we can practice placemaking.  The building, shaping, and programming of of places to make the FORM of cities that we operate within, love, and remember.  Or don't.

To optimize the greatest invention (and reciprocally the tool and enhancer of civilization), our cities, and their ability to meet our needs without expensing those of the future, (in other words, our ability as an complex organism to perpetuate life), we have to understand cities for what they are, a tool for improving quality of life.  In turn, we have to set our policies as such and align them in such a way, at every level, to maximize the ability for one and all to enhance the lives of one and all.

For now, we'll just build some bigger roads then.  That policy is king currently.

Mayors Innovation Project

Apparently there is a group in existence called the Mayors' Innovation Project, which defines itself thusly:

The Mayors Innovation Project (MIP) is a learning network among American mayors committed to “high road” policy and governance: shared prosperity, environmental sustainability, and efficient democratic government.

More relevantly, they've recently(?) released a report entitled, ReThinking the Urban Freeway.  Feel free to click at your leisure as I call out a few important bits below (HINT: they cite ANewDallas).  However, I do have to take issue with the use of the word 'urban,' which unfortunately has lost much of its meaning.  Urban is not merely a geographic location.  For example a freeway running through the middle of a city is not 'urban,' but an Inner-City Freeway (and freeway shouldn't be freeway but highway since nothin' more expensive than free).

A freeway is inherently disconnective by nature.  It makes places around it less walkable if not unwalkable entirely.  Further, it disaggregates people, their neighborhoods, and the economies of place.  "Urban" is about free and easy social and economic exchange.  The highway makes that not free nor easy.  Therefore, using Lewis Mumford's terminology it is anti-urban.  That's why we use Inner-City rather than Urban.

Now, to some of the interesting bullets therein:

• The by-product:  New commercial activity shifted to outside the city boundaries to isolated strip development accessible primarily by the automobile and not integrated into neighborhoods.
• Important note: Urban freeways occupy valuable real estate without contributing to the tax base, while increasing blight and decreasing property values nearby.
• Indeed: Freeways in urban settings were designed to focus on throughput rather than promoting the city’s economy or connecting travelers with destinations within a city
• True: The construction of freeways did notorious damage to neighborhoods, and had a disproportionate impact on neighborhoods that were primarily African-American and/or low income
• I can't believe it's not butter: The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates the US surface transportation system needs a total of $1,732 billion in investment to restore it to good condition – and that we need to invest $20 billion for bridges and about $170 billion for urban highways every year.40 As the gas tax declines and transportation funds become scare, that’s money we don’t have.
• This is new and interesting information: truck traffic also has a measurable effect on residential property values. One recent study estimated that a 1 percent increase in truck traffic on an urban freeway results in a 0.5 percent decrease in property values for homes 100-400 meters from the road
• Also had never found property valuation data from Big Dig before: In Boston, MA, increases in value of commercial properties along the former Central Artery outpaced citywide increases by more than 30 percent

Complexifying the Street Grid

There is a post up over on blog-friend Strong Towns that is getting quite a bit of linkage play about differentiating street grids based on geometric size of the block pattern and the ratio of the quadrilateral "private" developable block and the size, scale, and amount of public infrastructure that inter-meshes with that private space.  Here is a graphic the Atlantic Cities used to demonstrate the difference between Portland  (left) and Salt Lake City's (right) grids



Beyond just the visual geometries, they went a step further to show the relationship between public space and private space.  The implication being that less public space is better.  After all, if we're going by some definitions of urban design, the entire practice (of design as well as governance) is about maximizing private utilization of land through the layout and design of public space and the conduits through which the economy happens (ie roads).  In general, that would be the least amount of public for the most amount of private.  However, that is not always the case and there is no performance measure based on this except that Manhattan/San Fran are low.  Those cities are in high demand and thus high value, therefore...good.

However, the connection is pretty loose.  Both are on the water where land supply is restricted.  Furthermore, can we definitively state that the inherent efficiency of the street grid had much to do with the various local economic sectors are in hyper-drive due to that singular efficiency?



This is an interesting development in the quantitative understanding of cities, but it is only one sub-set and there are far many more factors to also be considered that do play a role in the qualitative function and behavior of cities and those inhabiting them.

SHAPE and REGULARITY
First and foremost is shape.  This measurement only works if the grid is highly regular, uniform, and repetitive.  While it was used in a number of American cities simply as a quick and easy way to survey and convey land from public to private hands for development, many more are highly irregular, change shape and size, and/or vary angles.  See: Dallas.

And Dallas (at least historic Dallas) is fairly regular in that it still has gridiron forms.  There are also the irregular medieval-ish patterns such as in Boston, the Baroque-ish patterns of DC, and the exceedingly highly irregular, oft-curvilinear patterns of cul-de-sacs and sprawl.

I don't want to get into a debate of the merits to the grid vs more irregular shapes.  Because in all likelihood there is no objective right answer nor definitive metric for concluding such a debate.  Either way that decision is generally best determined locally, if not hyperlocally at the actual site and determined by geography.

Which brings me to another way to measure cities that is not dependent on grids being highly regular.

INTERSECTION DENSITY
Civil Engineering Professor from UConn, Norman GARRICK (ed. I mixed up Mailer and Garrick into Garrick.  I'm getting old.) has pioneered this work which is more translatable across the various geometric patterns of all of our cities, which is intersection density per area, typically square mile.



Typically, the grid has higher intersection density than the loopy doopy model.  So what, amirite?

Well, it turns out that Gailer's work actually has performance based results.  Once intersection density gets above 225 intersections per square mile, safety improves (there may not necessarily be less traffic accidents, but they get less severe and therefore, less deaths and severe injury or damage) and walkability increases, including higher mode share for all forms of transportation.



 I explored this locally in Dallas and showed that some of the most depressed areas of the city are that way because BIG infrastructure was introduced, thus reducing intersection density, thus reducing connectivity, which thus reduces opportunity, which then leads to disinvestment and decay.  That sounds complex, but it's actually quite simple.  It's the chain reaction (plus many of the biases that we overlay upon these issues) that makes it seem more complex than it is.

There is plenty to be said about the benefits of high intersection density vs low in how it alters behavior as well as real estate values and patterns.  This is something I'll be exploring in detail in a future post called the Funnel vs. the Filter.

However, this too is still a fairly simple arithmetic that doesn't say much about one-ways vs. two-ways, the scale of the streets in question, etc.  Intersection density does however play a role in another issue that is not taken into account...

FRONTAGE PREMIUM
All land within a block is not created equal.  In a post entitled the value and efficiency of small street and block structure (which, yes, implies high intersection density), I explore the hypothetical notion that 'storefrontage' is worth more than 'storehouse'.  In other words, the land at the perimeter of the block is worth more per square foot than the land interior to the block.  And this goes for just about any high intensity land use, whether that be office (the boss gets the window), retail (the 'lures' go in the shopfront), or residential (where you're often paying a premium for views while the unleaseable square footage associated with storage units, corridors, elevator shafts, etc are relegated internally).

I say hypothetical because the value increment between storefront and storehouse is in all likelihood also highly localized, a variable that changes not only from street to street but from city to suburb and city to city.  Who knows, there may be a relative constant, but oh my the research that would entail.



Ancient Rome vs. Modern Rome, "eroded" to be more useful, adaptable, and maximize value and performance.

Ancient Big Blocks: $46.53 / sq.ft.Modern Small Blocks: $31.5 / sq.ftVerdict: In other words, about a 50% premium for the small street and block structure.

In this scenario, where you have a tighter grid and more frontage you will likely have greater utilization of land and greater overall value.  According to the simple geometric model, Portland comes out looking poorly because its blocks are so small, but that also means a greater proportion of private land is higher value 'frontage' in relation to the sum total of private land because the depth of that gradient premium is a relative constant. It's the tightness of the grid which enforces a discipline upon private development.

CENTRALITY
Lastly (but certainly not last since there is no end to the potential ways to measure cities), there is the concept of centrality or the centeredness of something with regards to its surroundings.  This has some relationship to intersection density.  However, it could be argued that the intensity of the network is a response to centrality.  Greater demand to be near a 'centered' point of gravity creates demand for tighter grid and more streets.  Space Syntax is measuring this concept with their spatial integration models:



You may recognize the above map as London.  These spatial integration maps were used in the planning of the London Olympics, and were striking enough to director Danny Boyle, that he recreated them as part of the opening ceremony.  THAT was London.  Real London, evident of the beating heart of social and economic activity occurring.

What spatial integration maps do is measure the degree to which things are connected, allowing the definition of centers of activity to emerge.  In turn, understanding the direct relationship between movement, accessibility, and value.  The researchers that advanced this mathematical understanding of cities have shown the direct relationship between high degrees of connectivity (real connectivity) with land value, walkability, and crime reduction.  What they're showing is the direct impact infrastructure has upon real estate patterns, ie performance.

Utilizing this model on this side of the pond, I took the spatial integration software and applied it to resilience scientist Eric Klinenberg's work in Chicago to show why similar demographic profiles reacted so differently to catastrophic events, ie performance.  What happened is changes to local infrastructure networks severed physical networks which in turn severed social and economic bonds, the glue of resilience.  A neighborhood center was decentralized and in turn it ended up killing its function as a neighborhood center, which had the unfortunate butterfly effect of eventually killing many people during the Chicago heat wave because of the severing of connectivity and local centralization.

CONCLUSION
So what does the grid actually say about our cities?  Less than we think, but also probably more.  We just haven't put all the right metrics together yet.  But saying low public space to highly private space is a dangerous oversimplification that needs to take performance measures into account.

Pitchin' Slate on NIMBYism

There is a good interview with Chicago's [out-going] head of transportation, Gabe Klein, right here.  Klein is a big bike advocate.  And as a reformist inside of city halls, he's familiar with push back against change.  Any change:

In the public sector you have a tremendous amount of resources, and my argument’s always been that the biggest problem in the public sector has been career-level bureaucrats saying “no.” Because it’s easier to say no. It’s safer to say no. Saying “yes” means you might actually have to do some work, and you may have to change something. And to be honest, in big corporations you encounter some of the same stuff.

All of that is 100% true.  What I want to do is take that same argument and apply it to a common problem, dealing with NIMBYism (Not In My BackYard), a pejorative term developers and consultants give to local neighborhood groups that are hostile to whatever they're pitching.  Many on twitter raised the valid point that NIMBYs represent only the irrational fear of change.  However, I worry that we're also lumping rational skepticism into that group and the shouting down of NIMBYism ends up quieting the rational voices.

So what we may be getting into an issue of semantics.

Let's first dig into why there is such a thing as NIMBYs.  As I said, NIMBYs tend to be hostile to development.  Often any and all kinds of change which is where the rational and the irrational NIMBYs get lumped together.  The funny thing is, and this gets to the stream of thought I was exploring this morning on twitter, is that neighborhood groups can actually exert power over development.  However, they generally have little to no power to exert over transportation agencies without Herculean (or Jacobsian?) effort.  We'll get back to that.

Now, if 99% of what you see get built around you is terrible, even at some visceral, subconscious level, it's pretty natural to be skeptical of any new development.  Even when a good developer with a good development comes along, they can get shouted down by an angry mob exerting its one and only remnant form of power.  Some developers slog through the process seeing light and profit at the end of the tunnel suitably worth the effort.  Others don't want to deal with it.  Both reactions are unfortunate.

However, that isn't the root of the problem.  Those developers that want to do high quality, walkable urban development are the extreme minority.  In the previous decade, only 17% of new housing starts in DFW metro area were in infill sites.  Flipping it around, that means 83% of new housing was on the bleeding greenfield edge.  Development form and typology is a direct outgrowth of transportation.

We subsidize and our policy ensures favoring the ever bigger, ever faster road in order to alleviate the congestion bogeyman. Therefore, the majority of development is going to be a direct, car-centric outgrowth resulting in ever lower densities, parking used as a buffer between big bad roads and the human interface of buildings.

Yep, your house was cheaper because of this policy of subsidization and centrifugal inertia and you made the rational financial choice to move there.  And because so many others made the same rational choice, there are better schools there.  Win-win.  You love the cozy insides of your home, but the world around is inhumane.  And you know it.  So you don't want any more of it.  But it's inevitable as long as our transportation policy ensures similar development output, except for that one noble developer.  But how can you know the difference?  All he's showing is renderings.

The reason is neighborhoods are lied to so often that they can't decipher the truth.  I was working with a city's economic development staff once and I was told that with both the city council and the citizens I wasn't allowed to use certain terminology.  The reason?  They had already had every single big name consultant come through town promising things that weren't delivered upon, either by them or their developer pulling a bait and switch between design and implementation.

Why?  Because it was a car-centric place with car-centric transportation infrastructure so that any efforts towards something else were superfluous, costly add-ons and the first to find the cutting room floor during value engineering stage.  What's the point of the sidewalk if there is nowhere to walk to?

Here is the worry:  being too harsh on NIMBYs as a reactionary castigation to any and all skepticism is a cheap design school rhetorical parlor trick.  Because in design school where everything is subjective and only subjective, design is reduced to rhetoric.  It's easier to pander to your professor's biases for grades.  In development, it's easy to pander to neighborhoods and promise things that sound good.  Usually that means more greenery that won't be maintained properly because it is a superfluous add-on rather than an integral outgrowth of good development patterns that start with good policy and transportation infrastructure.

Suggesting people just say yes, is like the argument that a benevolent dictatorship is the ideal form of governance.  Well, it is if it's you and you just want to get your way.  It's short-term-ism and can allow for all sorts of bad development.  We're lucky enough that urban design happens in the court of public opinion.  Therefore, the burden of proof is on the change agents.  Because the renderings with photoshopped people deserve extra scrutiny.  As do the "world-class" object architecture and anything suggesting walkability and sustainability.  Why?  Because they're probably full of it.  The transportation dictates it.

Now if only we can change the underlying transportation policy and infrastructure, where local neighborhoods have no countervailing power or oversight to "improvements."

Distilling for Posterity's Sake

There are some great nuggets in this Guardian piece on commuting and happiness, which itself is an extract from this recently released book.  I present:

People were choosing commutes that made their entire lives worse. Stutzer and Frey found that a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40% more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office. On the other hand, for a single person, exchanging a long commute for a short walk to work has the same effect on happiness as finding a new love.

How we overvalue the immediacy of now:

"Most good and bad things become less good and bad over time as we adapt to them. However, it is much easier to adapt to things that stay constant than to things that change. So we adapt quickly to the joy of a larger house, because the house is exactly the same size every time. But we find it difficult to adapt to commuting by car, because every day is a slightly new form of misery."

Implicit understanding of the subjective push and pull of livability, on demand and the inevitable undesirability of the desirable:

The sad part is that the more we flock to high‑status cities for the good life – money, opportunity, novelty – the more crowded, expensive, polluted and congested those places become. The result? Surveys show that Londoners are among the least happy people in the UK, despite the city being the richest region in the UK.

The driver as Mr. Hyde:

Driving in traffic is harrowing for both brain and body. The blood of people who drive in cities is a stew of stress hormones. The worse the traffic, the more your system is flooded with adrenaline and cortisol, the fight-or-flight juices that, in the short-term, get your heart pumping faster, dilate your air passages and help sharpen your alertness, but in the long-term can make you ill.

The dinosaurs in transportation planning:

"We all know old mobility," Britton said. "It's you sitting in your car, stuck in traffic. It's you driving around for hours, searching for a parking spot. Old mobility is also the 55-year-old woman with a bad leg, waiting in the rain for a bus that she can't be certain will come. New mobility, on the other hand, is freedom distilled."

New Yorker: Longread on Driverless Cars

If you can get past the inside baseball history of this New Yorker piece on driverless cars it starts to get into the far more interesting and impactful stuff than merely the technology.  Remember that cars were once invented and were a novelty but many of our cities weren't ready to adapt to them or to fully gave themselves over to the new technology to a destructive extent that disrupted the economy of place.

And that's what most engineers don't get or care to get.  They're too focused on the technology, rather than policy.  The could vs the should.  And to their defense, that's their job and its self-governance's role to determine the appropriate adoption of a new technology (smarter cities curbed the car more quickly than others).  That's comforting to hear Google founder Sergey Brin actually be the first involved to discuss the impact rather than the technology:

“As you look outside, and walk through parking lots and past multilane roads, the transportation infrastructure dominates,” Brin said. “It’s a huge tax on the land.” Most cars are used only for an hour or two a day, he said. The rest of the time, they’re parked on the street or in driveways and garages. But if cars could drive themselves, there would be no need for most people to own them. A fleet of vehicles could operate as a personalized public-transportation system, picking people up and dropping them off independently, waiting at parking lots between calls. They’d be cheaper and more efficient than taxis—by some calculations, they’d use half the fuel and a fifth the road space of ordinary cars—and far more flexible than buses or subways. Streets would clear, highways shrink, parking lots turn to parkland. “We’re not trying to fit into an existing business model,” Brin said. “We are just on such a different planet.”

The other critically interesting point is when it gets into mistakes and perhaps more of a barrier, the potential for mistakes:  liability.  In this way, the fallibility and liability of the driver is actually a buffer for car companies:

Still, sooner or later, a driverless car will kill someone. A circuit will fail, a firewall collapse, and that one defect in three hundred thousand will send a car plunging across a lane or into a tree. “There will be crashes and lawsuits,” Dean Pomerleau said. “And because the car companies have deep pockets they will be targets, regardless of whether they’re at fault or not. It doesn’t take many fifty- or hundred-million-dollar jury decisions to put a big damper on this technology.”

Driverless Cars and Technology

I've been struggling with driverless cars for some time.  Partially due to the poor coverage and discussion about them and their future impact, but mostly because the future isn't written nor easily deciphered.  It's difficult to see how it will all play out because the expectation is that they become ubiquitous.  But can they?  And if not, then what?

Most of the coverage is still fascinated with the technology like a baby that found its first shiny object and sticks it in its mouth.  Finally, Dan Hill of City of Sound starts asking some of the more pertinent questions:

Again, this is the inherent conservatism within the Californian Ideology - they actually don't want to change the socio-cultural patterns that they have done well by. To them, technology enables them avoid talking about changing an unsustainable lifestyle.

And that's the crux of the issue.  It's a fantasy that we can simply continue the failing state around us with the mere addition of new technology improving the same old, same old when the real problems are different than the solutions.

REALITY PROBLEM
At the end of the day, what is driverless technology solving?  Human fallibility.  We're pretty horrible drivers by and large.  But does it even do that?  Can the technology scale up so that every single car on the road?  Can everyone afford that?  What if then there are still faulty human drivers on the road?  What if one runs a red light while shaving and texting and applying makeup and shushing a whiny toddler in their backseat car seat?

That's the thing about the techno-religiosity (and I like technology!  Cars too!  What I don't like is fantasies and being trapped in someone else's).  It only imagines a utopia.  All that free-flowing traffic that will never collide huh?  Well, as I posed to a group of Masters level design students in a crit session as they worked on a competition about a city with driverless cars:

Why does the engineering have to follow contemporary standards and strictures?  And that's an open-ended question.  These cars apparently can sense pedestrians.  What if I walked right out into the middle of a highway and stopped traffic?  Does that allow us design to be more adaptive and less top down in our design of street and block networks?  Will desire lines and behavior then govern design as it emerges?   

Does that allow more medieval block patterns (along with smaller streets via smaller cars) because the cars can navigate them via GPS better than humans could?  Will that increase the mixing of cars and pedestrians?  I suspect not because of the ease at which any person place or cow wandering across the street could disrupt the holy grail of flow.  Instead, it will increase the segmentation and segregation of disparate transportation modes, forcing a competition that ends up being parasitic economically in terms of the developed economies that emerge around diverging movement patterns.   

But to understand that, you have to first understand that traffic equals value but that congestion can be good or bad.  It's not either or but a design problem.  For example, Champs Elysees is some of the most valuable real estate in the world because it moves 600,000 people/day.  100k in cars and 500k pedestrians (which presumably count the metro riders who disembark to then walk along it).  It's high value because it is high design and high traffic.

635 is the center of life of DFW.  It has the most traffic.  250k-300k vehicles/day (and presumably no sentient, living beings).  It's bad traffic because it is high speed, dangerous (when it's moving at all) and sociofugal.  It scatters people rather than attracts into clusters which is necessary for economic clustering, development.  It still happens because of the traffic numbers but it is undesirable because the movement patterns are inhumane.

Now take McKinney Avenue and the Katy Trail.  We could argue that those are both good forms of traffic (although McKinney isn't great, but it's getting better).  However, the value associated with being near one or the other is less than that if those two sets of movement were combined, ie the pedestrian, bicyclist, and vehicle movement all through one corridor is super-linear in terms of economic clustering, greater than the sum of the two parts because those two parts compete rather than cooperate.  I'm not saying one or the other is bad, but that Champs Elysees works so well is because it manages to concentrate activity without eroding quality of place (which they did from the 60s to 90s when it went to all car and businesses closed because they lost pedestrian activity, their lifeblood.  The place became less desirable.).
------
And that's where we start to get into the real question, just drop the tech part.  Can we all afford compulsory car ownership, forget for a moment about the technology?  The answer is proving that we can't nor should we be coerced into debtor status simply to participate in the economy.  Not everybody can afford it and then there are people like me who just don't enjoy the experience of being boxed into a fiberglass and metal and glass chassis.

FISCAL PROBLEM
That's just the car part, the tool of the trade.  What about all of the supportive infrastructure it takes to allow the illusion of free flowing traffic to infect parts of our minds?  All that expectation of expansive, available parking, free roads, and free of traffic roads?  How do we afford all of that as our over-extensive and poorly designed infrastructure is crumbling all around us?  We're in the final act of that Greek tragedy and driverless technology is a last ditch effort to maintain that captive market to be separated from their time and money.

SPATIAL PROBLEM
And that's the bigger issue, the spatial problem of compulsory car culture.  The long trip separates us, dilutes tax base, while adding tax burden (infrastructure + car ownership/operation/maintenance).  The funny hilarity is that Tea Party/Agenda 21 types 1) hate taxes and 2) think people like me are trying to take their freedom by providing choice of transportation to others.  They don't understand that the costs of driving are only going to go up in the form of 1) taxes, which people won't want and then 2) user fees, which are a pigovian tax and thus will compel more people to shift away from the automobile meaning less revenue and more costs on fewer and fewer freedom lovers.

And guess what?  I'm in favor of driverless cars.  Because you're too busy texting to see where I'm walking.  But that still doesn't solve the deeper question and problem of compulsory car dependence coerced by possibly corrupted and certainly economically ignorant transportation network design.

Thinking in Complex Systems

Draw your own analogies:

Koch: There’s a theory, called Integrated Information Theory, developed by Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin, that assigns to any one brain, or any complex system, a number — denoted by the Greek symbol of Φ — that tells you how integrated a system is, how much more the system is than the union of its parts. Φ gives you an information-theoretical measure of consciousness. Any system with integrated information different from zero has consciousness. Any integration feels like somethingIt's not that any physical system has consciousness. A black hole, a heap of sand, a bunch of isolated neurons in a dish, they're not integrated. They have no consciousness. But complex systems do. And how much consciousness they have depends on how many connections they have and how they’re wired up.

"That Sounds Too Much Like Work"

Here is Dallas Morning News architecture critic and known carpetbagger and I discussing the very basics of the proposal to tear-out IH-345 between downtown and Deep Ellum:



I would like to add some of the more incisive questions Mark asked me during our very first conversation about the topic, since few have ever dug down into my motivations or the specifics of the design and plan.  I'm paraphrasing from memory here:

Q:  What do you stand to gain from this?  Is anybody funding your work?

A:  I'm covering all of my own costs.  We've set up a 501c3 to potentially offset future costs as well as when we pivot ANewDallas into other projects in the future.  If there is anything for me to gain, it's a better city to call home.

Q:  Why not more green space?

A:  First of all, this has to be understand as a financial exercise.  The design is a place holder for a more inclusive public design process.  However, the public will always want more amenity and open space.  Usually too much.  We just wanted to see what kind and how much development could fit on site.  However, with that said, Dallas is "over-parked" as it is and has trouble maintaining what it does have because of the same problem we're attempting to address, an infrastructure (in this case green infrastructure of parks) to tax base imbalance.  What is needed more than anything in Dallas is walkable, affordable urban housing, increased density, housing and neighborhood choice, and increased choice and convenience of transportation alternatives (which come from density and highly interconnected grids).  Furthermore, the Trinity River is proposed to one of the great, large urban parks in the country, so that pretty much has open space covered on the grand scale.  What is needed is more small-scaled, intimate neighborhood parks to serve as focal points of sub-districts.  It's open space that is scaled appropriate to the development that we're proposing, which is high density, walkable neighborhoods.  

------

To read his full piece on the subject, you can go here.  The crux:

Studies may be useful, but too often they are tools for delay, inaction and manipulation. Dallas, a city of action, should not settle for excuses or stopgap repairs that will themselves cost millions and do nothing but propagate the status quo. 

The city stands with its future before it. In the coming weeks, the finalists of the Connected Cities Competition will present their visions of a city reintegrated with the Trinity River to the public. Combined with the proposal to tear down I-345, Dallas will have visions for the reinvention of both the west and east sides of downtown.

As always if you want to see/read more about it, you can go directly to the ANewDallas website or see some of my past powerpoints available online.  Or read my D Magazine piece from earlier in the year.

My favorite part though is where TxDOT belly-aches over having to coordinate with other agencies at national and local level.  Because what is city building if not collaboration.  Especially if you're used to steam-rolling your way from point A to point B, consequences be damned.  One lesson I picked up from convos with former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist was actually how easy it turned out to be despite the fears of bureaucracy getting in the way.  345 is a stub on the US Interstate system.  Considering the natural subsidiarity occurring of agencies off-loading maintenance burdens wherever and however they can, I don't think it will be a problem getting the feds to de-list the segment and turn it over to the state.

So here's a recommendation.  1) Get the FHWA to de-list 345 from the US Interstate system.  2)  TxDOT can just walk away by abandoning the right-of-way.  3)  If and when that happens, the land is turned over to the State of Texas who is in position to benefit from a) one less weight on overburdened TxDOT and b) land $ale$.  4) Set up a development agency composed of state and city representatives to manage phasing, land sales, and street level infrastructure reconstruction.  At this point the state is really just the passenger, but they get the initial revenue.  The city gets the tax base, which is where the real, on-going revenue is.

If we've done nothing else here, at least people now know the road's official name.

Imagine This Great View of the River

...and then put a highway there.

You Can't Keep a Good Idea Down

No. I'm not talking about the Connected City competition, unveiled last night at the Dallas Museum of Art, but rather the www.anewdallas.com proposal to tear-out IH-345 between downtown and Deep Ellum.  I mention that because it was mentioned last night by local architect and juror Bob Meckfessel during the Q&A which tellingly revolved around transportation and highway issues rather than the actual schemes proposed.

Now about the Connected City Competition.

"None of these are implementable."  That was Larry Beasley, another juror and former planning director for Vancouver.  A city which lacks freeways, by the way.

First, a couple of truisms:

• Value equals degree of connectivity.  Therefore Demand is driven by degree of connectivity.  This is pretty much understood (at least subconsciously) by the very nature of the competition.  Furthermore, value is a product of local connectivity (walkability, the stabilizer) and global connectivity (the amplifier, these are your trains, planes, and automobiles).  However, you can't allow the heavy infrastructure of global connectivity create a negative sum outcome, which it too often does.  This is why subways are subways, EL trains are elevated, but still somewhat disconnective, and trains at grade create the "other side of the tracks" phenomenon.  All of these are also true about highways but multiply the impact of each several fold.  
• You also can't increase connectivity with mere lines on paper.  It's pretty common for designers to overvalue the connectivity of the lines on the paper to the impact those lines have on real connectivity, thus real demand, thus density.  Draw one line and all of a sudden we're building the next Dubai.  For example, people generally don't walk under freeways no matter how much art, lighting, or sidewalks you add.  Getting back to the first point, this is why freeways are generally bad for downtown environments because they are more disconnective than connective, no matter how much traffic is flowing past.  This is also why the real estate market badly overvalue(d)(s) freeway frontage.  It's actually really hard to get to those when you're moving past at 60 mph.  We've built hotels along them which are slowly degrading to parking, vacant land, and great sites for billboards.
• Real estate finds its demand = value = supply = density equilibrium point, but usually it can take a generation or about 20 years to find it (see the part about overvaluing freeway traffic as value despite its movement being more repulsive than attractive).  The area along Industrial Boulevard turned Riverfront Boulevard is gas stations and pawn shops and liquor stores.  This is a direct relationship, response, and organic outgrowth of the degree of disconnectivity to the land.  It is also what the competition is trying to address.  It's also important to note (and this is a good thing) that most of the schemes addressed the connectivity to the sites along the Riverfront Boulevard corridor to increase the value of the land and thus, hopefully, turn into development projects.

Now, a disclaimer.  I've distanced myself from the competition.  When people have asked what my ideas for Connected City are, I say 345 tear-out and let's figure out a way where development can reinforce the levee on the West Dallas/Oak Cliff side, thus making the levee more structurally stable, adding a promenade along the top of the levee, and putting buildings right up against the levee so that they can interface directly with the promenade.  That makes a lot of sense to me.  

I've never felt that the properties along Riverfront could be connected to at an infrastructural cost (investment) that would get the demand high enough to yield the Dubai's and mini Vancouver's being fancifully imagined so that the new tax base can pay off all of that infrastructure investment.  As for all of the schemes, I think this one did the best and most realistic job.  I'm the only vote for it at time of this writing.  It has the lower heights that I think the market would actually bear if we can find a way to afford the infrastructure.  And just eye-balling it, I think I'm seeing at least $2 billion in public investment (only considering the green infrastructure component) for about $2 billion in private investment.  

---- side note to the author of that plan for redeveloping the area around the Hyatt which is currently a quaint little suburban island of horror in the middle of the city ----

That's a 1:1.  You want at least a 1:5 and preferably 1:10 ratio (if not more) to make it work.  And that's the most realistic.  The Bofill scheme, is like $10 billion in infrastructure investment (including green infra, ie parks) for $50 billion in development, which is completely unrealistic unless we've got Dubai $$ laying around and Dubai, ahem, labor standards to build the two Dubais flanking either side of downtown Dallas in the section elevation shown at the bottom of their submission board. 

Who knows, maybe through subsidiarity eventually leading us back towards something more akin to city-states, money stops flowing upwards to the federal government's highway trust fund to build more antiquated, anti-city infrastructure and begins being (staying?) redirected back towards city needs and city level projects like these to attract re-investment and re-population in abandoned downtown cores.  Maybe it's possible to exchange gold plated freeways (gray infrastructure) for gold plated green infrastructure.  Personally, I don't think either is terribly wise or responsible and we should be thinking more small-scale and incrementally.

Speaking of highways and that the conversation gravitated more to them than the actual competition, let's think about the nature of this competition from the jump.  Larry Beasley added to his "not implementable" statement that these are all multi-generational, 100 years-ish plans.  That's admirable for us to be thinking that long, but then in that case, we're not thinking big enough.

Vision competitions are inherently about finding the ideal.  If we're going to be thinking about what Dallas will be in 2050 or 2100 and spending billions upon billions, rather than the mental, fiscal, and physical gymnastics trying to contort development in and around these freeways which inherently repel density and development, wouldn't a better vision plan look at what the city ought to be in terms of what the best infrastructure is for the entire city by 2050 and then incrementally work from there?

Big vision plans ought to address the underlying problem rather than work around them.  Beasley said once downtown gets to 100,000 or 200,000 people (his words not mine, up from the 6,500 today) then we can consider removing freeways, conveniently leaving out the part about the highways displacing demand from the core to the bleeding edge.  How do we get to 100,000 if the highways are suppressing 1) demand and 2) the critical mass of continguous, interconnected neighborhoods to achieve density?

We had jurists from London (no highways), Vancouver (no highways), and San Francisco (ripped out two and is about to expand one of the tear-outs further).  All cities with high degrees of local connectivity (walkability) while still managing to have high degrees of global connectivity without inner-city freeways.  They're all also attracting oodles of talent and capital, which is what it takes to make these development visions happen.

We lament the lack of or flagging DART ridership yet we still believe the "cure" to "congestion" is more highway building.  That, or we just really like coercing a captive market onto roads to then charge them for oil, gas, and tolls.  That's a very short-sighted way to build a city.  If that's our direction, we might see 2050 like Detroit sees 2010, as all the money bleeds into increasingly few pockets or out of town/state/country altogether while opportunity, and thus people follow.

Instead, let's envision the BEST Dallas that Dallas can be in 2050 and incrementally work towards there.  Do I think the Horseshoe is going away?  Nope.  But maybe it can be decked over like the preferred option I linked to above did, but it's probably down the way a bit.  We need more density and tax base elsewhere to make that work.  Do I think I-30 is going away?  Nope, but it can also be decked if not re-routed around South Dallas.  Do I think I-345 can be removed.  Absolutely.  And it's just phase 1 of a newer, better, more inclusive, and more empowering Dallas.

In Disaster, There is Opportunity

It has now been a full month since I've last posted.  And it feels kind of great actually.  To take a break and be back, now that I actually have a time for yet another stitch.  This one is about, like every other post, the inherent failings of our transportation policy, funding, and design and the havoc the inertia has wreaked upon our development forms and (hand in hand) our ability to maintain that infrastructure.

However, I don't need to rehash all of that same ol' same ol'.  The news does it for me.  Exhibit A, B, and C:

• Chunks of Concrete are falling off of I-20 overpass and that is perfectly normal.  The new normal, of course.

• TxDOT will turn some rural state roads back to gravel roads.  Because there is literally no tax base to maintain it.  This makes perfect sense to me.  This may be the sanest thing TxDOT has ever proposed.

• Lastly, TxDOT wants to turn the maintenance of 1,900 miles of state roads back to the local cities.  Meanwhile, local authorities are all like, "nuh uh, man."  That neither want to handle that hot potato of a bill is pretty telling about the fundamentally broken nature of our 20th century infrastructure problem in a 21st century world.

This is the best news ever.  TxDOT is tossing what it thinks is a bone to the cities, saying they can now control "driveway access, speed limits and maintenance schedules."  No thanks.  Not enough.  If I'm the cities and want to seize this opportunity, I want full control over these roads.  I want the right-of-way.  

The problem and solution is the vague idea of 'value capture.'  Not just in the land itself, but in the ability to design networks to leverage investment, development, and a tax base that is actually in proportion with the infrastructural burden.  That means more complex, more walkable streets that are not only context sensitive in terms of the existing surrounding but conducive to the kind of context that we want to achieve, which, again is more walkable, empowering, desirable, and livable neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, value capture is a hideously and corporately vague term that is a useful rhetorical device because it has not meaning besides $$.  People can fill in the void with their own interpretation and all too often that can be the conventional wisdom that conventional highway/road building is healthy, productive economic development.  Which, sure.  It's spending at first and money flows around the system, until it has so dispersed the tax base into density too low and design and form so repulsive, it becomes unsustainable due to a lack of care (and that pesky infrastructure/tax base imbalance).   

Since there is effectively two qualitative interpretations of how to design and build roads (the filter vs the funnel - a future post.  See also: dendritic vs reticulated), one good/one bad, there are two directions cities can take with this new "infrastructure burden."  Maintain it as a burden, as it currently exists.  Or, they can see the opportunity in controlling the design of these streets so they're integrated with development, are safe, attractive, empowering for a variety of forms of travel, particularly walkability, and thus encourage social and economic exchange.  The very point of cities.

In effect, this is the concept of subsidiarity.  Or decentralization of control to the lowest or smallest authority that can handle it effectively.  The smart cities will leverage these in a way that benefits them the most, not arbitrarily standardized from Austin.  Those that take advantage of this opportunity will be those that recognize this opportunity and seize it, and by doing so, improve livability, quality of life, will be more attractive to talent and businesses alike, and will thus win the future.  So to speak.

How Detroit went Broke

This is much more helpful than the typical "auto industry and unions killed Detroit" intellectual laziness.  The Detroit Free Press dug into the history of the city's finances and put together some terrific infographics, as such:

In general, it's a story of diminishing tax base (population + wages) during periods of increased cost burdens (infrastructure + pensions) and the sum total of many attempts to paper over the cracks with increased fees, revenue sources, and symbols of progress, none of which actually addressed the underlying issue of population loss which was the real key.

The key points:

• City debt actually dropped below revenue during the late 1970's/early '80's.  

• Detroit had pretty significant debts back in the 1950's when the population was at its peak

• Absurd pension payments are still a prob, obv.

• Debts REALLY spiked in the late 1990's when the state drastically reduced state-wide tax revenue sharing.

• Oh, and then there is Kwame Kilpatrick's pension refinancing which was lauded at the time, but turned out to double the city's burden, while in all likelihood landing him in jail.  More jail.  On top of what he's already in.

Mark Lamster at the DMA and a Defense of CNU

Last night I was able to attend the Dallas Architecture Forum event at the DMA featuring new DMN architecture critic Mark Lamster.  It was as uncomfortably formal as it sounds (through no fault of Lamster's) and the audience seemed a perfectly Dallas split between "tell us how to fix everything, Howard Roark" and "tickle our belly and look on our works, ye mighty, and despair."

You may or may not be surprised to find that I agreed with everything he said, from the slight subjective critique of Klyde Warren Park's busy overclutteredness (something I echoed about Main Street Garden and the nature of public design processes turning into wish lists and the designer into geometric arranger of over-programming) to the more objective poor urban interface and relationship between KWP's off-ramp/barrier next to the children's play area and the Perot Museum (I have yet to enter the Perot so I can't comment on his perception of claustrophobia in its interior display spaces) to Museum Tower's alien presence in the Arts District (which is too bad, because something OTHER than performing arts venues is exactly what the Arts District requires).

Where you might think I would disagree is with his criticism of the Congress for New Urbanism, or CNU, of which I'm not only a card carrying member, I'm also the President (of the North Texas chapter - one of the nation's largest).  In his analysis of CNU he is right to point out that CNU has had the biggest effect on city coding.  The reason is CNU is fundamentally viral.  It has infected all things, from transportation to architecture to planning.

His criticism is that CNU is overly conservative from both an architecture and social standpoint.  The picket fence, the retro-1950's leave it to Beaver house and family.  He's both right and wrong.  There's also a notion (which he didn't repeat) that seems to be swirling in the NYC design illuminati circles that CNU is somehow racist, which is absurd.  I'll get to that in a moment.

He's right in that these are the exact same issues I fight against.  I detest Celebration, FL and all of the off-center "town centers" built as Potemkin Villages to hide their true nature as malls without roofs.  They're walkable!  See: sidewalks!  You just have to drive to get there.

This is one of the reasons (as new president of the CNU-NTX chapter) I've been visiting various local architecture firms to introduce CNU and the pending national congress in 2015 to talk about what CNU is and more importantly what it is not (which are often the common misconceptions about style).  Please, read the charter if you have the chance.  Linked here: http://www.cnu.org/charter

He's wrong in that he's merely responding to one perception of CNU (which has some merit, which I'll get to).  From the perspective of the charter, it is much like the constitution, with 20-something fairly generic adopted bullet points, that serves as a framework of an operating system.

And like the constitution it is merely an input.  We, as designers, developers, and consumers, the market, are the throughput.  What comes out, we may not always like, but that has more to do with the filter that is the market and the inherent politics, economics, and culture of the day.  For example, as Americans we believe in the constitution, though we may not believe in the manner that some parts of it are currently interpreted, like the 2nd amendment (don't shoot me, I'm a Kennedy and that would look bad this year).

Similarly, the CNU as based on the charter can't possibly be blamed for the faux 1950's new suburbia.  That is simply one way in which the market interpreted it.  Similarly, CNU can't possibly be racist, but people or outcomes could be (within any organization).  Therefore those that buy or espouse that notion are being small-minded and petty, usually because they're worried about loss of market share.

Shocking, I know, but there is still racism in the country and that is abhorrent.  There is also some pretty terrible aesthetic sense out there.  Because the CNU and its viral nature infects all things, it is somehow blamed for these two maladies.  Instead, maybe it should be given more credit for that which is good that it is directly responsible for, which is the return of interest in downtowns and walkability, the development of places like Pearl District in Portland or State-Thomas, which catalyzed the rest of the urban infill that comprises uptown Dallas.

There is also nothing about architectural style in the CNU charter.  And frankly, within CNU circles the debates between modernism and traditional are nauseating, something that are entirely subjective and not within the realm of the charter.  I avoid them at all costs (and will hopefully prevent them from occurring at CNU2015).  Instead, the underlying theme of the Charter is connectivity, buildings to the street, streets to the network, uses to compatible other uses, etc.

This is why CNU is a big tent.  It houses modernists and traditionalists alike.  I, for one, am a design agnostic, particularly with regards to the exterior of buildings.  My personal aesthetic for interiors is a weird post-industrial/modernist style that I wouldn't push upon anybody.  Yet those that do push styles on others and litter the world with their own personal aesthetic seem to be those that are most critical of CNU for just a mere subset of by-products that are quasi-attributable to CNU.  Instead, the problem is the filter, the throughputs, and that means the body politic and economics of the day producing that which is worthy of scorn.

In terms of style, there is a time and place for just about anything, just don't be terrible, internalized, nor destructive to your surroundings.  The CNU shouldn't be blamed because one market output is a terrible suburban fake town center nor because there are stoops on a house with picket fences in some ode to an imagined history of the previous century (which does indeed seem to appeal to a wide market on a political level).  Perhaps it's the market's preferences, the economics of the day, the politics, or the transportation that warps the charter into something less than desirable.

What DOES matter and where those projects went wrong had nothing to do with style nor really the market but the underlying rules that the system of cities play by, their inputs.  This is why CNU is most effective at trying to re-write codes so that mixing of uses isn't prohibited or why we're trying to breakdown the inertia of transportation planning by formula and standards that produces sprawl and inhumane, unwalkable roads.

This is why I consider architecture (and Dallas's obsession with object architecture) to be the tail wagging the proverbial dog of local design culture and dialogue.  The architects are merely working within dystopian, hellscapes as context, engineers are just following the standards imposed upon them, and developers are just playing by the rules of zoning and market- and spatial- response to the transportation system that is wholly inequitable and destructive to the city as a functional system for social and economic exchange.

All that matters is that cities focus on that which effects us all, that which is universal: equality of opportunity, accessibility, walkability, choice in housing type, neighborhood character/density, choice in mode and route of transportation.  Through those form of universal empowerment, and once they're taken care of, then we can get to the less critical, subjective items such as style.

This is why I think we can create a lot of positive change through two simple fixes to the DNA of the city: 1) take power back from TxDOT (which just so happens to be serving it up on a silver platter) in determining how our streets and blocks look, feel, and function, and 2) rewrite the parking code to be sane, contextually-based, and market-oriented.

NYC Owes Jane Jacobs Soooo Much Money

Manhattan was supposed to have more freeways than it does.  Not only did the West Side Highway crumble and replaced by a surface boulevard (the only perimeter road around Manhattan NOT to be a highway), but there were supposed to be two cross-town connectors that never were.

Robert Moses originally conceived of the Lower and Mid-Manhattan Expressways in the 30s and 40s, but plans weren't finalized for them until the 60's.  At which point, there was a woman named Jane Jacobs living in the way (in more ways than one).





Combined the two crosstown connectors would've cost about $150 million.  Calculating for inflation, that's about $1.2 billion in today's dollars to give you a sense of what such a thing could cost today (however, as we'll discuss Manhattan property has outpaced inflation).

Perhaps my favorite aspect of this story is the fanciful belief in progress that underscored Moses and the highway builders as exemplified by the image below:

Oh yeah.  Just add the freeways and then new high-rises will spring up along the freeways.  Even showing graduated heights of buildings rising towards the edges which is the opposite of how real value and demand graduates towards centers.  Best illustrated by taxable value heat maps like below:

This is why I despise the term value-capture.  It's a meaningless word.  Had it been around in the lexicon of the day, Robert Moses surely would've used it in conjunction with this drawing and talked of all the economic benefits or "value-capture" if people would just listen to him.  And most did.  Like so much rhetoric, the term value-capture is an empty vessel for an audience to fill with their own personal meaning and happy thoughts.

----------------------
To see how much value was actually spared from capture, I've decided to highlight all the properties these two highway plans would've directly affected.  I've had to leave out those indirectly affected because we just don't know how the nearby properties would've reacted despite pretty ample evidence that these properties would've been depressed and in all likelihood become the highest and best use for highway adjacent property, parking.

As you  can see the Midtown Expressway would've razed 23 city blocks and the Lower, a much more significant 51.  Those numbers may not seem like a lot given how big some freeways have expanded, but Manhattan has very large blocks.  The blue areas I've highlighted represent 90 and 118 acres respectively.  Of Manhattan dirt, that's a pretty penny indeed.

So I wanted to find out exactly how much.

The areas in question.  Picture them without buildings. Or people. But keep the cars.

So I dug up various NYC assessment maps, graphs, figures, and statistics and slowly building a database of all the properties in question.  Doing so, I've found that some of these blocks can have dozens and dozens of parcels within them, each with their own owner, assessment value, and approximate market value (which NYC keeps track of, luckily).

Needless to say, it's going to take a long time to build this database.  But one thing is clear, NYC is better off without the highways and surely doesn't regret letting a little beer-loving lady from Greenwich Village stand in the way of progress.

Here are some early numbers, having only fit a few so far into the database and then extrapolating them across the full acreage:

Combined market value of the study areas in question currently sits at $13.38 billion.

Furthermore (and again these are VERY preliminary numbers, like .1% of the total data), I'm estimating the city gets $192 million each year in property taxes from these areas.  Factored over 50 years (in 2013 dollars), that's $9.6 billion into the city's coffers.  And none of these statistics "captures" all of the social and economic exchange that occurred within these sites, how many sales, and sales taxes generated.  How many leisurely walks which might've been prevented by elevated expressways.  How many friends met.  You get the idea.  I hope.

As I have time, I'll continue to build the database and update the projected numbers.

PS Oh, and I also hope to build a formula based on the Austin data about how the negative effect of freeways on property values increases based on proximity to roughly determine how much value could've been lost within the quarter- to half-mile range (or whatever it turns out to be) of the freeway.  The numbers could be staggering.

Reduncacy Department Redux

I promised (perhaps to myself) that I was finished writing/talking about Museum Tower.  Everything had been said I thought.  Then new DMN architecture critic Mark Lamster took a tour of the building and actually reported from the inside. Go read his review of it here. It's accurate, often funny, and perfect.

There is one point he makes within it that I want to dig into further because it's something that infects quite a bit of the public understanding of urbanism and cities.  And that's the idea of what should have been done.  Mark writes about the need for a retail base that engages the public realm and transitions the tower to its context in a way that ingratiates itself to its context, forming the seam between private and public spaces while further activating what is an incredibly dire streetscape.

And he's right.  It should've been more like the typical Vancouver point building where the tower occupies a smaller volume, set back further then the 1- to 4-story base that fills out the entire block.  See image below or more from my trip to Vancouver from a few years ago.



It's telling that Dallas seems to want to be a cheap knock-off of Vancouver while mimicking the building it's most known for when what Vancouver ought to be best known for is the rejection of any highways through the city.  The point tower is simply a by-product of the protection of the walkable, pedestrian-scaled street and block system uninterrupted by car-first engineering.  The city needed to accommodate the demand for density (again, by-product of underlying conditions) while mitigating the negative impact that towers can have on the public realm below (too much shade in a cloudy city, windshear, and scale as towers loom uncomfortably out over the sidewalk) so they created the concept of the point tower where buildings had invisible volumes they were allowed to fill.

Again, that part is fairly irrelevant except for the fact that hypothetically it would be better than the defensive posture and isolation that the final design of Museum Tower instills.  Isolation is anti-urban.  Urbanism is fundamentally about connectivity.  Dallas struggles to understand what connectivity means and that it should be the priority rather than a rube-goldbergian after thought.  Why?  I answer that in this post on the Prime Directive.  Ease of car movement and the perpetual struggle against the bogeyman of congestion trumps every other consideration.  The actual function of the city as an efficient machine for social and economic exchange for all is subservient to car movement.  Don't have enough money for a car?  Don't enjoy driving? Don't feel safe with your life in the hands of the lady applying make-up passing you on 75?  Or the teen texting?  Or somebody heading back to Wylie after having a few too many in West Village?  Tough cookies.

That's important to understand the hypothetical of what could've been done to Museum Tower.
There are systemic issues preventing what SHOULD'VE been done from being what COULD'VE been done.

The first is of a formulaic nature.  During the development process I can see somebody suggesting the idea of adding retail to the development and design program.  At which point it could be derailed by a million different players along the decision chain.  The lender is afraid of mixed-use.  The developer doesn't want to deal with the complexity.  The brokers say no retailers are interested in the site.  The retailers plug demographic data from the surrounding 'customer shed' (a 1-, 3-, or 5-mile radius) and decide that there aren't enough people, or dollars, or pedestrians, or vehicular traffic to trigger their decision making process.  It could be any or all.  And based on those backwards or sideways looking metrics, they'd be right.  Formulas can't see into the future.  Only thoughtful people.

It's the other issue that underlies all of the above.  And this is what I wrote about three years ago when the Museum Tower design was first unveiled.  The building's design did nothing about the cloverleaf exit ramp of Woodall Rodgers, essentially making a defensive posture for the design a rational response to harsh physical conditions.

To generate pedestrian activity, it's less about the supply of ground floor retail or towers in the sky, but more about the soil conditions being right to foster life to grow.  And that requires pedestrian-scaled street and block system.  But unfortunately that is subservient to the free flow of cars.  Watch out kids!  Car comin' thru!

It is that which drives demand and pedestrian activity from which ground floor retail and density responds.  Because we refuse to do the hard work of tilling the soil (restoring a pedestrian-scaled street and block network and rightly prioritizing it), we're left jamming shiny aluminum Charlie Brown Christmas trees into the dirt.



In case you're wondering, yes, the vestigial walkable pockets of Main Street, Deep Ellum, Lower Greenville, Bishop Arts, etc., are the little, actual living thing.  Perhaps they could use a bit more stewardship if we want to the full flowering ecology of Vancouver.

THINK and Thinking Some More

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of being on THINK with Krys Boyd talking about Deep Ellum's past, present, and future as well as ANewDallas, which would have a direct impact on Deep Ellum (it was also concocted partially in response to the need for affordable, walkable urban housing in support of both downtown and Deep Ellum businesses.

It was a great treat as I've listened to Think for a long time, a show that could and should be considered a Dallas treasure.

However, I can't possibly listen to it (you can get the podcast here).  I detest listening to myself.  It's agony and I'm not so in to S&M.  If I were to listen to it, I would constantly be thinking of how and what else I could've said.  For example, as I was having lunch after the show I thought of a joke I could have included with the discussion about third places being places of both social AND economic exchange rather than pure economic exchange.  You don't go to Walmart to become buddies with the greeter (even if the Costco greeter loves you).

The history of Deep Ellum has always fascinated me, specifically its etymology.  'Ellum' referring to Elm Street and 'Deep' being the far side of it as Dallas's natural growth pattern was away from the railroad hub (which creates an edge and thus a natural sociofugal force which pushes people towards centers or the creation of centers away from edges).

It was also interesting that Elm would be the primary driver rather then Main.  Perhaps because the Ross angle was the other primary direction of early Dallas expansion thus putting Elm as the spine of the Elm-Main-Commerce trivium that served both.  It became the seam of Dallas north and south and thus was home to many important buildings historic architecturally and culturally.

This concept of a street as a seam is important, particularly in relation to segregation, both in Dallas and in general.  There are three ways segregation occurs.  The first is through policy, such as Jim Crow laws, repealed in the 60s.  Another way is through physical barriers, borders, or boundaries.  And the last is by natural self-selection and self-organization, which is the one I primarily want to focus on with regards to urban form and how people interact or are allowed to do so (see: point 2).

Self-organized segregation is not the worst thing in the world when it is indeed by choice, however it can be indicative if inherent biases and prejudices.  In other cases, it can simply be a case of people wanting to be near those more like themselves (did I move to downtown 6 years ago (and stay ever since) because I was looking for diversity or looking to be around others like me who also value diversity?), particularly when it comes to language in multi-lingual places.  Not being able to speak the language can be tremendously isolating and disempowering, so in highly multi-cultural places, there tend to be self-organizing clusters of ethnic and racial similarities.

A demographic map of New York City is highly illuminating on several levels:

There are actually very few places that are highly inter-mixed.  Perhaps the most heterogenic mix is along Jamaica Ave area of Queens.  Reading between the lines however is even more telling.  There are two primary types of boundaries between the surprisingly homogeneous pockets of NYC: physical water bodies and city streets that actually function as seams, blending the cultures, and cauldrons of cultural and intellectual fusion, which is exactly what the city does, brings us together to expand our horizons through interconnection with each other, particularly those different from us with different backgrounds, histories, and approaches to the world around us.

The homogeneous pockets become more like a necessary evil.  A transitory phase of acclimation for newcomers, the fearful, etc.  The heterogeneous seams are then the baby steps for individuals to step out of the Applebee's and into a Pan-African fusion restaurant, so to speak, and experience new things.

In terms of Dallas, this is what Deep Ellum was (even though there was legislated segregation) and could be again, the seam between North and South Dallas.  The form of the city allowed for more intermixing then than it does now.  The self-selection and self-organizing process is limited by our transportation network. Choice is limited, therefore making an extremely fragile monoculture of neighborhood type and transportation mode.

Our physical barriers are constructed.  The highways are the walls between us, but also the reason to leave.  Not only has Dallas experienced white flight, but also black flight.  The highway network has carved the city into isolated pockets and undermined the grid as a system of seams, of intellectual and cultural foment.  It has undermined interconnectivity and walkability.

Without those things, living in or around the urban core loses its primary advantage, which is proximity and walkability.  So if you have to have a car, rich or poor, black or white, why would anyone stay in the city if you have the opportunity to not do so?

The only choice is and has been to leave central portions of the city and that's a sign of a dysfunctional system.