On Neighborhood Gardens and Farmers Markets

A formerly vacant property is given new life as a functioning source of food, nourishing residents nutritionally and socially.

Talk is bubbling up around Dallas City Hall arising from neighborhood meetings in parts of the City expressing interest in creating neighborhood-based community gardens, as nationally we are seeing them sprout from Brooklyn to Oakland. The past five days have seen articles from both the DMN, as well as the Observer, a blog entry by BFOC, and the local twittersphere has been buzzing.

To start from the broadest perspective, the average American meal travels over 1500 miles to get to the plate. Food security in the age of peak oil will be of vital interest to address before it becomes a reality. The next time oil spikes will dallas families be able to afford a 3000 mile caesar salad? Will we be able to afford to continue to subsidize agricultural commodities if all we get in return on that investment is poison in the form of various corn syrups and starches?



Allowing for edible gardens is fundamentally important, to which it appears that everybody is on board, but there is some worry about defending the current downtown farmers market. I find the key distinction is one of definition. What is a Farmers Market? What is a Community Garden? I'll explain how they might be different birds of a feather, but will explain why the goose AND the gander are important moving forward.

The concern regarding the existing farmers' market isn't illegitimate. On one side, the existing market provides a central location for farmers from well outside the city to wholesale their produce falling under the same idea as providing predictability/access/centrality/synergy for retail, as the City has spent $ in support of the existing market. However, this location isn't the most convenient for many neighborhoods if they have to get in the car every time to visit. Furthermore, it's current format is adapted to a bombed out downtown. Eventually there might be a higher and better use for this land than a sprawling, low density farmers market and it adapts into a smaller, more compact market or linear market on a street as we'll see below or as a central square embedded within new development.

This is not an either or proposition, which Americans are either exquisitely skilled at turning every issue into, or the press is too lazy to find nuance within the mysterious gray abyss. What I don't seem to see is any understanding of the range of scales that local farming and neighborhood gardening can be realized. Providing for a flexible range must be permitted and able to thrive as neighborhood demand drives it.

Scale. There are a wide variety of scales of community gardens and in order to find common ground, a key distinction must be made with the downtown farmers market.



I often write about cities needing to identify and respond to demand drivers. This is one case where planners are important for reasons that I summarized above and stated in the recently published Smart Growth Manual (recommendation: this book provides a good overview for policy makers or concerned citizens, but lacks the depth for professional designers or planners):

...open space should be set aside for growing food, whether or not there is present demand for it.

Why? Jumping back a few sections in the same book [and reordering and in some case rewording, for clarification purposes]:

Cities that hope to thrive in the long run must secure and enlarge their [capacity for local and regional agricultural production...Otherwise, long-distance food sourcing will become increasingly untenable and metropolitan areas will have difficulty feeding themselves within their means.]

Fortunately, we are already seeing the initial stages of cresting white-capped waves of pent up demand bubbling up from the horizon, as if an unseen tectonic shift had occurred deep beneath the seas of present consciousness. To continue the metaphor, the majority of this demand, like the volume of a wave at its formational stages remains unseen. I predict it will be great enough to support edible gardening at all scales and in all sectors. This should be accommodated if and when the demand does arrive, even at the sake of any protectionist measures where the Farmers Market might object to local competition.

At the largest scale (of locally produced agriculture) are what we know as Farmers Markets, which typically consist of small, but professional farming families migrating daily or weekly into the City from across the State. These often have the widest market share, drawing specialty consumers from across the metropolitan area. An example of mid-scale local ag is the community garden that is tended by neighborhood residents and feeds mostly only nearby neighborhood residents. Smaller even are the yard gardens or raised beds of single family residents, who typically grow food to supplement or replace some of their grocery purchases. The smallest are the window boxes for residents of more dense residential buildings can grow small amounts of herbs and vegetables.

Another issue is that of local or neighborhood determinism. Bottom-up solutions are generally always effective once they reach a critical mass, because they are demand driven by local knowledge of the issues and needs, meaning any policy measures should allow for easy implementation and great flexibility.

Two areas that are getting the most attention - due to neighborhood demand and a well-educated, motivated, and younger bohemian class interested in getting their hands a little dirty - are in Deep Ellum and Oak Cliff - particular the Bishop Arts area.


Community gardens can work at any density.

Thus far, nearly all efforts to stimulate community development have come from top down agendas, which are fundamentally supply-side in their logic ("if we only get this there, if we only get that there, all will be well!"). These have been little more than attempts to remake South Dallas in the likeness of North Dallas. They have been unsuccessful as quite literally, much of South Dallas exists as a "food desert" - as groceries, especially (unfortunately) those with healthier options follow the rooftops, with a particular fetish for the oversized and grandiose stylings of kitchy North Dallas Palaces, with forward facing garages and the Range Rovers parked within them.

Editorial coming: If only the wealthy can be healthy, this is a fundamental indicator in a system failing its citizenry. When transpo/shipping costs rise, these disparities will only be exaggerated.

The last thing areas towards the poorer end of the spectrum need are the out-of-town chain retailers so commonly found mining for gold in the Northern sector. Particularly in this time of unprecedented cultural and economic tidal shift, it is time to allow them to find their own character niche, defined in their own image, by their own needs as neighborhood communities. Trying to entice/beg/subsidize retail into these areas has been and will remain to be failed policy (even more so now that most chain retailers are contracting rather than expanding to new locations), so allow for some ground-up community-based retail in the form of local agricultural production.

Future of groceries. One thing I feel like I always run into, and that is a sort of learned helplessness that the status quo will always remain. This only exists because we live on a day-to-day basis, but cities live year-to-year and decade-to-decade and century-to-century. Cities are forever changing, molting, adapting, and evolving. Similarly, so do the way businesses operate, and in this case, the logistics, delivery and supply of food.

Allowing the rise in local food production will certainly incite the eventual, desperate howls from the grocery chains. We can't fear change, especially not in the current turbulence, if it provides for something that the business sector refuses or is unable to provide: healthy, affordable food, as well as opportunities for personal learning and self-improvement, that are organically developed and become woven into the fabric of community.

The future of groceries in my opinion, within twenty years or so, will be primarily for packaged, processed, and pre-made "finished" foods, those with added value, as many or all regional/seasonal fruits and vegetables are produced and sold locally, at these various scales of farmers markets. Once again, increasing transportation/shipping costs (not to mention potential desertification of overworked agri-business soil) will make the mass production of what I'll call mid-level food groups (fruits, veggies, and some dairy/livestock which I'll mention shortly - as opposed to low-level like grains) untenable at the national and international scale. Commodities that travel a long way will once again return to their status as imported specialty or luxury items. THAT is an inconvenient truth.

There is nothing radical about this. The past visits the future when cheap oil no longer allows the illogic. I've discussed nearby agriculture in the Valencia case study and saw it first hand having lived in and studied Rome, the most time-adapted and molted city on the planet, where locally produced foods were sold at farmers markets like fruits, vegetables, fish, and free range livestock. Local bakers come to get selected grains, butchers can pick out the best piggies and moo cows, and restaurants can find the best fish (which is why good chefs always shop first thing in the morning).

As long as multi-modal transportation supports it (and I'm talking in several years or decades from now), each neighborhood based market can adopt its own character as they agglomerate naturally to support both business and community, but they need the chance to succeed and the time to adapt and grow roots. Eventually, these can even cater to broader market segments and take on the form of flea markets selling next level products and finished or even refurbished goods, such as woodworkings from lumber or working toasters or tv's from broken ones picked up out of the junk pile.

I know altruism isn't a good motivator for mass movements, but do we really want to keep throwing away stuff until we're all absorbed by the North Pacific Gyre?

Other local markets where goods find second homes, Porta Portese Flea Market in Rome:


The key to success and stability is clustering and relocalization of these various niche markets and services, embedding them as central features within walkable neighborhoods interconnected to the regional multi-modal transportation system for access from a larger base. This creates for predictable and known "macro-destinations" rather than a million different individual "micro-destinations" scattered across DFW in drivable-only locations. From an economic standpoint this allows for improved competition by proximity: a consumer can go to one place and compare similar goods/services/prices in one spot.

This is how you restore a healthy, sustainable, locally-based and supported economy that can withstand. Economic development isn't always about smokestack or conventioneer chasing as the conventional wisdom still rotting from the 80's. I've checked the fridge and yep, that is where the smell is coming from and I've hence thrown it out. Sometimes it is simply about providing opportunity, for the local citizenry to flex its entreprenurial and communitarian muscles, producing necessary goods and services in an attainable and accessibly participatory local economy.

In sum - and back on to the topic of food - cuz its lunch and I'm getting hongry (sic) - what community gardens do is provide cheap healthy food for residents, provide a source of income for unemployed and underemployed individuals, can be a source of community pride and togetherness. And in many ways, it becomes a form of crowd-sourcing, where different individuals bring various personal or newly learned skills to one task to improve the final product. For children, there is an opportunity to learn where food comes from, how to steward the land themselves, be productive and learn responsibility, as well as get nutrition cheaply rather than just cheap corn syrup byproducts.

Embrace this opportunity. It will be good to return some sanity and rationality to economics, and my guess is our economy and our citizens will all be healthier for it.



Other Recommended Reading:

P-Patch community gardens in Seattle w/ Links to Portland's Digable City.

Case Studies of Community Gardens and Farmers Markets from the Sustainable Food Center.

Local Harvest.org

In Defense of Food (book)

Fast Food Nation (book)

If Perez Hilton fused w/ Boss Hog

and became an architecture critic...

Person without Veins?

Frankly, I don't know enough about the Vancouver Sun to tell whether or not it is a reputable rag. Articles like this one aren't helping however.

Some parts of their "Rethinking Green" series come off as purely contrarian (I too questioned recycling, focused on the dirtiness of the toxins in the materials getting recycled and the pretense of "doing something good,"), and then others like the linked above are just outright self-serving propaganda. I say that because of the singularity of opinion of those quoted in the article.

There are a million terrible definitions and interpretations of sustainability out there. What sustainability implies a system, one built upon a foundation of both economics and ecology, both of which are systems that are not fully understood. So therein, one can see the incredible difficulty in boiling down to what is sustainable and what isn't without a more wholistic view.

Not to take this into an ad hominem direction, but to only quote Cox and O'Toole is some shallow and self-serving "journalism." Neither are credible, on the payrolls of the road lobby, and are incredibly deceiving will their well-framed "statistics." Cox and O'Toole are notorious for taking incredibly narrow (and increasingly shrill) views of statistics that are intended to dumb down the debate into something little more than "OMG! Transit is so expensive!" So is caring for children, should we stop that?

My point isn't that transit is a magical panacea, nor that it is appropriate for cities of all shapes, sizes, and geographical contexts. It is that the debate is well beyond their, or this authors, scope. And to further narrow the stance to only include essentially two hucksters is to further drown the level of dialogue in the puddle beneath are feet (or tires if you wish). Why not include a real academic from your own neck of the woods like Tod Litman from VTPI?
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The real issue that Cox, O'Toole and any other well-heeled faux libertarian simply cannot understand or argue with any sort of rigorous rhetoric effectively on their narrow view of statistics. Which is why you are seeing transit pick up steam the world over, and ironically generate more press for these two for anybody desperate for a sound bite in opposition.

"OMG, it's expensive!"

Simply put, car only subsidization has led to car only usage. Car only usage has led to incredibly wasteful projects like the high five in Dallas. While these types will argue that it improves economic development because it created jobs and improves connectivity and reduces traffic, , while it may temporarily reduce traffic (with nothing to say about the several years of construction and the resultant delays) the reduced traffic then has a negative effect by actually inducing more traffic b/c of the temporary gains, thus spreading people apart further. It also wrecks real estate values within any vicinity of it, because frankly, it is attrocious to be near (also, with nothing to say about the increased stress, birth defects, and respiratory issues by proximity to freeways).



Transportation can never be looked at in a bubble. You can't isolate any particular system and suggest definitively whether it is "green" or not, whatever that means. The reason is because transportation, of any form, is inextricably linked and largely responsible for the resulant built-form of the city. The built form then interprets how the city functions.

To isolate the pro forma of any transportation system is like removing the arteries, veins, and capillaries from a human being and then wondering why the blood discontinued to flow. A doctor has to examine the health of the entire patient, to determine the health of the cardiovascular system and vice versa. If the City is unhealthy, the cardiovascular system (its transportation system) has to become more healthy.

Second, no form of transportation has ever "paid for itself." What these biased takes fail to understand is that the more governments subsidize road construction and sprawl, the more they have to subsidize transit, b/c the excessive road construction leads to fragmented, sparse, and disconnected land use, unsuitable for transit use, and therefore a failing transit system.

Relatedly, as transportation has a direct effect on land use, density, and the interrelationship between land uses, forms of transportation have multiplier effects that are incalculable in terms of sustainability and economy. The way to measure the "greenness" of transport is not in the functionality of transit systems but the built form and the emergent operations of the city sprung from it.

Car only-based transport policy leads to low density development which is more energy-consumptive, generates incredible amounts of waste thru increased air pollution from the car use, reduced water quality and environmental degridation from runoff, waste of man-hours in traffic jams, as well as increased refuse from a low-density lifestyle, and waste in supply-chains having to diffuse the distribution of goods to sparse, low density development.

This is bad for the economy as well for a number of reasons. The government builds roads that creates a low density form of development that, in turn, can not pay for the upkeep of the over-extended infrastructure. Furthermore, because of the fractured and disconnected development that emerges based on car-dominated transport policy, people think they are getting cheaper goods.

But, the fact of the matter is, extra costs have been externalized to the consumer and siphoned off every single trip by way of car ownership/maintenance, road construction and upkeep, health and productivity losses due to traffic and collisions. While creating a highway that links the Houston area to the Dallas area is a good thing, forcing all trips throughout the day to the confines of a car is wasteful and exclusionary of proportions never seen on this earth.

(Once again, with nothing to say about the 1.3 million people killed per year in traffic related collisions.)

Lastly, and unfortunately for them, the ultimate decider in human decisions tends not to be an altruistic sense of right and wrong, and fortunately not even of $1 and 2$ but what makes life better? Would you rather live in a place like this?


or a place like this?


One could say, "how can you compare those two things? Of course, I'm going to pick the pretty picture!" The reason is because these are the two end states of the divergent policies being debated. Should we craft policy that supports only the car, oil, and gas industry or one that the end result is people places?

A complete street, equitable to all transportation types and attractive enough to be livable, and in turn, entice density. The density then reduces Vehicle Miles Traveled, which reduces pollution, reduces the need for context-coerced car ownership, and reduces traffic. The density also makes business and retail more successful because there is a customer-base within a short distance at all times. A business can easily market from its storefront to a hundred residents that live above, or 500 pedestrians that walk past each day.

That is why THIS will eventually win the debate, suggesting it is time to the afforementioned cast of characters on IGNORE.

Free Beer Friday - Guess the City Happy Hour - Old Skool Edition

What exactly is old skool about this week's GTC? I have no idea. Accept this as you wish, but all of this cold makes me wish for some summer sun. Old skool enough for you?

From what I understand happy hour will be at the old stomping ground, Porta di Roma, in downtown Dallas, aka DTD, or if your feeling equal measures dyslexic and snarky, DDT. I'm feeling a bit Dysnarxlic myself. Antidote? Two beers stat!





Today we're going on vacation unapologetically to a tourist town - not too unlike seaside, fl - as both were essentially enclaves popped from the ground up as we warned against with China's empty city. So, what can we learn here? Maybe that it works at the scale of tourist village with a healthy supply of sun, sand, palms, and salt water as natural resources.

With that said, it was actually amazingly hard to find pictures of this place with actual people in multiples. Unless, of course, they are doing typical touristy stuff like lying on the beach or freefalling from the sky:



Also, it was amazingly difficult to find pics of the streets...here is why:

The houses work somewhat backwards from what we are typically familiar in that the back of the house is to the street. Therefore, the streets aren't exactly worth uploading into the opensource atmosphere. So we've got no street side cafes. No couples strolling arm in arm down a narrow alley. No bicyclists.



To visit this place, you drive to the town, find your unit, park the car, where you actually might not need it during your week long excursion. Because what we have here in spades is water, docks, and boats. The typical front of the house, presenting its welcoming face to others, is on the water, presumably where the life happens, on the water..



And, despite having an array of densities from small lot villas, to attached townhomes, and multi-story condominiums, nearly every unit has direct access to water, with their own dock. often organized like water culs-de-sac off the primary canals. Furthermore, while the pictures mostly seem relatively low density, for an area less than 2 square miles, this place can pack nearly 100,000 people in-season.

Perhaps not the ideal of walkable communities, but I think I could still find some relaxation under the summer sun, ferrying to the corner store for sundries and supplies. Frankly, this might be the closest realization to one Eric Bell's dream of a neighborhood of buddies united by backyard lazy river.

(Perhaps not coincidentally, if you go to the beach, beware. You might just find a few too many fair-skinned, mid-continental types removing far more clothing than you might wish otherwise.)

Where might Eric Bell's fantasy land be? That's for you to find out and get a free beer on me at happy hour for being the first correct answer in the comments.

Tax the Pigs

With a pigovian tax, argues Wired.UK:

To create a low-carbon economy we need to become a nation of city dwellers. We tax cigarettes to reflect the harm they do to our health: we need to tax lifestyles that are damaging the health of the planet - and that means targeting people who choose to live in the countryside. We need a Rural Living Tax. Agricultural workers and others whose jobs require them to live outside cities would be exempt. The revenue raised could be used to build new, well-planned cities and to radically upgrade the infrastructure of existing cities.

We have an opportunity to create an urban renaissance, to make cities attractive places to live again - not just for young adults, but for families and retired people, the groups most likely to leave the city. Turning our old cities into "smart cities" won't be easy or cheap, but in a recession this investment in infrastructure will boost the economy. We need to learn to love our cities again, because they will help us to save the planet.

An article with this thesis really needs about 10,000 more words minimum, but we'll expand on it a touch.

What the article is essentially asking for is to tax citizens of bedroom communities which is a really over-simplified or abstract way of looking at it. There are a number of ways to apply the kind of bowling alley bumpers to steer people into the right places. These can include:

• Health Impact assessments on new development,
  
• heavy development impact fees for new infrastructure and impact on greenfield,
• limits on the extension of public infrastructure based on densities and design,
• urban growth boundaries (which are not much different but sound like a big boogieman),
• toll roads
• carbon taxes
• VMT taxes as some cities are contemplating,
• congestion taxes
• etc...fill-in similar punitive measures for wasteful suburban development/living here.
  

I'm not advocating all, any, or even some of these. What makes any of these financial mechanisms so difficult is (despite what any economist will tell you), it is virtually impossible to accurately value-assess every impact of city and suburb, thus making any formula or libertarian idea for cities null and void.

What is certain, is that with so many people in all the wrong places, any new measures such as these will have serious impacts, particularly on the poor considering real estate policies like, "drive til you qualify," and will have to be implemented in a sort of feedback loop program with new housing incentives from the generated revenue to provide the adequate housing for all market segments where it is needed.

"build new, well-planned cities..."

Gawd, no. We've seen what happens when we try to build pop-up book style cities. As I've said before, clustered populations like cities are the fractal arrangement of humans based on positive and negative "magnetic places," ie factors that make places attractive or repulsive.

For example, cities are the built form representing the economy within, the phenotype and the genotype, if you will (if you factor in laws and coding into the genotype). Things that are magnetic can be part of economies (like natural resources, transportation hubs, means of production, etc) or they can be social (good schools, quality of life, safe).

Point being that there has to be an economy in place and cities have proven remarkably resilient to adapting to the current needs of its people. Why? Because we adapt them over time to meet those needs, with the inherent understanding that despite the fifty year hiccup (or cholera-induced bowel movement if a more apt visual is necessary).

What we need to do is actually reposition our current cities to handle greater densities in an economic, ecological, equitable, and elegant manner. Some cities like those of the SunBelt have the most work to do, but fortunately, were built the most ephemeral and as such, are the most malleable. YAY, we have an advantage!!

Times They Are A-Changin'

I received this email from a friend and reader today:

You’ll like this…

So I got a call last night from Rusty Wallis VW where I bought my last car in 2004. Apparently they are going down their list of previous clients and cold calling them to see if they are “due” for a new car. I mentioned that I sold the car in 2006 when my wife and I moved downtown and went down to one car. I said we only needed the one car, and it is in great condition. He responded with, “So, you like…walk to work?” I said “actually, I take the DART, and my wife walks to work”. There was a long pause, and he just said in a defeated tone, “I guess I’ll take you off the list”.

I’m guessing he had a series of responses ready for other rejections. Things like interest rates are down, don’t worry about your credit, we have new financing programs, guaranteed value for your trade-in, we’ll help you out of an “upside down in your loan” situation. But, when came to “I don’t need a car, period”, he was dumbfounded.

The caller's change in tone tells the tale of a changing economy and a worker coming to grips with the fruitlessness of his current job.

Steven Holl Does Urbanism

Exactly the way you would expect it be done. Hollystyle: immaturish and child-like.

I came across this new book on Urbanism, by architect Steven Holl, and have yet to purchase it. I doubt I will, after reading this product description from Amazon:

(description in black/interpretation in red):

Contemporary urban development is increasingly characterized by a reliance on diagrams to convey the rational statistical point of view of the professional urban planner. In his new book Urbanisms architect Steven Holl suggests that just as modern medicine has recognized the power of the irrational psyche urban planners need to realize that the experiential power of cities cannot be completely rationalized and must be studied subjectively. (You silly people with your facts, figures, and insistence upon empiricism should let me do the kind of self-indulgent "exploration" of my own choosing, because you see it is way to complex for you to understand.)

With a selection of urban and architectural projects from his thirty year practice Holl stretches urban planning into the domain of uncertainty. Analyzing a wide range of matters from everyday experiences to spatial data Urbanisms examines how perception and the senses are intertwined with the material space and light of urban form. (I thought you said data was too rational? Or how about you are just dealing with the incomprehensive nature of statistical abstractions and incalculable "externalities" like an adolescent?)

A comprehensive exploration of each project illustrates this much-celebrated and influential architect's perspective on large-scale planning. (Because I, being Stephen Holl, am the embodiment of Neitzsche's overman. The only human capable of harnessing the power of the irrational and administering it upon all of you lesser beings.)

Say no more Steven, pictures sometimes say a thousand words. This one says, "ugh."

Ask the CarLess Guy Vol. III - Retail and a Homeland Marshall Plan

Recently I have received some questions within the comments section of recent posts, some were aimed at me, and others more general. I began to respond to them in the comments, but realized they might be better off here. Both questions regard retail success, one directed towards the one-way to two-way roads and the other is about chains vs. local retailers.

Question 1 - Reader Himanshu asks:
Philadelphia's downtown has one-way streets yet retail seems to thrive there. Walnut St is a great example. On the other hand, Market Street east of City Hall is two ways and yet suffers mightily. The issue is perhaps more complex than simply one-way vs two-way. I suppose overall street size, something you have discussed on your blog in the past, is also important. Walnut St almost feels like an alley compared to many streets in Dallas!

This is true. And, if memory serves South Street is one-way as well is it not? Either way, it's a very narrow street which is the point you are getting at. First things first though. With cities, complexity always rules the day making it virtually impossible to be both succinct and comprehensive, which is why I'm guessing very few people get cities on a very deep level. I mean, who really wants to read all of Space is the Machine, basically Bill Hillier of Space Syntax's grand 360-page manifesto of his life's work. Or, that everybody OWNS The City Shaped, because it looks so great on the bookshelf but who has actually read it? /Sheepishly raises hand in both cases.

Cities, if you buy the fractal nature of cities theory, which I do, are both infinitely complex, yet remarkably simple because there are so many factors participating and influencing each decision, yet the physical results are remarkably similar the world over. But, you are correct, it is not the ONLY determinant factor, but it is one of the critical ingredients that only help, not hinder.

The first thing RETAIL requires is CONVERGENCE, or to put it in the over simplified terms of an over simplified auto-oriented status quo, "access." By nature, a 2-way street will have more "convergence" or passersby than a one-way street and provide the increased locational predictability for the tenant, which I'll discuss later. The future of retail will require the convergence of streets, which one can see quite simply 2-dimensionally in a Baroque layout of streets as opposed to the Grid.

Let's take a look at Paris, DC and NYC as as gradated degrees of each to illustrate this point. First, Paris is one of the most obvious examples of Baroque planning and the creation of very obvious points of 2-D convergence. What this (and convergence) in general does, is that it creates very predictable and obvious points where the most people will be passing by, which is exactly what retail needs.



Next, we'll look at DC. Everybody is aware of the L'Enfant plan, but what many may not be aware is that the original L'Enfant plan was much more like Paris than the current iteration. The reason is because Thomas Jefferson favored a grid pattern because of the implied equality (or democratic nature) of each street, whereas Baroque planning creates very strong and clear hierarchies, a caste system of streets if you will, where certain streets will ALWAYS have prominence. The end result is a compromised hybrid where Baroque formality is overlaid upon a grid, kind of like a Republic rather than a pure mob rule Democracy. Rather fitting no?



Now lastly, NYC, and more specifically Midtown Manhattan which is predominantly a very rigid grid system, but with one key distinction of course. And that is Broadway. Not coincidentally where it intersects the grid at the most acute angles, it creates the most important spaces in the City, ie the crossroads of the world, Times Square, and very dramatic buildings, like the Flatiron building.



SunBelt Cities however, have similar systems except horrendously bastardized versions. In DFW, there is still a grid (mostly b/c the city is relatively flat and for the simplicity of real estate transactions/entitlement), but it is set on an approx. 1-mile square increment and there is a clear hierarchy of streets, ie the dendritic highway/arterial/collector/local system.

While we have talked ad nauseum about the chicken/egg feedback loop of road subsidies and suburban development, the facts on the ground today are that these are all designed STRICTLY for the automobile. And the Sisyphean goal of Level of Service 'A' streets and the supply-side nature of the solution to achieve that goal, have led to increasingly wider streets, which brings me to the next point.

Which is SYNERGY, and the key component to synergy is distance and complementarity of uses. To simplify the point, I'll reiterate what you said about the Walnut street being much narrower than a typical Dallas street. Cross-shopping is a key component in ambience in the creation of a destination of a place. People like getting all their shopping done in one place, but they also prefer doing it on a cool, interesting place composed of a variety of shops and experiences in one area rather than a mall (which is the 20th century version of a shopping street) or the one-stop shopping of a WalMart.

Mall developers and architects (disclosure: I used to work for the architects responsible for probably more malls than any other firm in the world), if they have a redeeming quality is the boiling down dimensionally of the shopping experience. By this, I mean every foot/every inch is understood for how far apart stores should be, how wide the Mall or "shopping street" should be to encourage wandering from one to the other, how far will people walk, or that a constantly deflecting axis makes people walk further as well as continually changing storefronts.

But, in the end, malls were still missing something, which has brought about their demise. And, IMO, this was due to the private, securitized, and "controlled" nature of malls (ya know, beyond the whole drive-in experience of malls).

The interesting irony here is that one-way streets are able to be narrower than a typical two-way street (duh, because it will have half the lanes), which is why Peter Calthorpe often compromises and creates one-way couplets as the key arterials through his plans. He does this to limit the distance to cross the streets and ensure that building uses can still interact with those across the street.

This was a by-product of DOTs only accepting very few and limited formulaic street types and widths. Fortunately, however, that is changing, because streets need to be context-sensitive and we shouldn't have to throw the baby out with the bath water. Narrow, two-way roads will typically be better for retail, and as part of a gridded road system allows for the traffic to be diffused, providing choice to the driver. (Note: this doesn't mean strict rectilinear grid. Intersections per square mile is generally a good guide for street/intersection density.)

The other part of convergence comes into play as well, and I'll call that 3-dimensional convergence. 3-D CONVERGENCE refers to multi-modal transportation and rather than just being in plan view, looking at street networks from above and pinpointing hierachies of cross-streets and intersections, this can be looked at in section. West Village in Dallas is a good example here.

If you looked at this area in section, you would see a subway running below 75, you would see a trolley running on the street, and you would see residential above the shops/restaurants. There is convergence created not just by McKinney/Blackburn/Cole/Lemmon and the exits from 75, but also by the transit stops, as well as residents WALKING down the stairs to the street. This is why West Village/CityPlace as well as (eventually) downtown, will be the primary retail areas within twenty years. As I wrote previously:

They are currently below the LoMac area which is a joke of tangled spaghetti arterials, deep setbacks, narrow sidewalks despite having nearby freeways and the MATA trolley line. This area is exactly the end result when getting the details right is paid zero attention and the only effort is to cynically deliver "product to the market" not places for people. This means that the value of this place is ultimately limited whereas in CityPlace and Downtown, it is infinite.

Lastly, the difference between your examples and nearly all shopping in the SunBelt is the nearby residential baseresidential base, which is the key difference b/w your examples and the majority of Dallas streets, the neighborhood and urban fabric remains largely in tact - which gets me to the next section...

Question 2 - Reader Peter asks
i'm still not all that clear on that 'local businesses vs. chains' study/argument. what is 'economic impact' and why does it matter? and if chains are so bad, then why is chain-hating SF in such bad shape? and what of this 'job growth'? what does that actually mean? anything? does it mean that if we let/encourage the opening of four independent stores instead of one big, box, we'll see more people hired? does that go on indefinitely or is there some equilibrium point?

The first answer is, unfortunately, very little retail, chains or mom and pops, are doing well, which is two-fold. First, we're out of fake money. Living off credit and second mortgages, etc. is over. The other part of that can be positive: we're at a transitional time.

I'm intuiting that "chain-hating SF" is that way, because 1) there is a long history of family-owned business, particularly restaurants in San Francisco. But, the key fact of the matter, is that with locally-owned businesses, a greater percentage of their money is spent within local communities. For example, if I own a shop that purchases widgets and doo-dads to make gadgets, the majority of my purchases (or my personal profits) are spent locally. I'll have to dig up the reports on this, but IIRC the % of revenue spent locally by chains vs. locally owned businesses was something like 40% to 90%. For example, all of WalMarts profits get electronically zapped in the middle of the night to Bentonville, AK, which then get redistributed to shareholders throughout the world.

The other issue is, while WalMart claims to bring in "new jobs," a congressional study released about ten years ago (and I'll have to dig this one up as well), stated that for every two low-paying jobs that WalMart "creates," they are really replacing three higher paying jobs. The math makes intuitive sense if you subtract all that money that gets beamed to Bentonville.

The problems with this are that people will 1) scream, "that's consumer demand," which is true...sometimes. I'm a full believer that WalMart is no monster, but rather a natural byproduct of the world we have constructed. The real question is do we wish to remain working for $5/hr and buying garbage goods in a miserable experience of a store? and 2) that at least for the time being, chains like WalMarts or Targets were necessary "anchors" to allow small, locally owned-businesses to succeed based on that synergy, particularly for downtowns or so the thinking went.

What the WalMarts and Targets of the world need to address, is can they continue their global supply chain business model in an era of $20/gal gasoline? I use $20 only b/c it is the title of a new book. The real point is that with increasing demand for oil (particularly from China, India, and Brazil) and stagnant or decreasing ability to supply at low cost, while oil producing countries are beginning to use more and more of their own oil (for example Mexico is a net importer for the first time EVER), there is no place for oil prices to go but way up.

The last point is that because of road building subsidies and sprawl and all that yadda yadda, we are a country that is spread too thin. Local governments don't have the tax base to support themselves, let alone pay for the upkeep, maintenance and proposed new infrastructure projects. Functioning, sustainable communities require a certain amount of density. Retail requires density as well, and moreso than density, they require locational predictability.

Because the residential base was smeared so thinly across the toasted SunBelt countryside, retail followed, spread as equally thin, meaning many stores than necessary - only chains w bare minimum profit margins AND extreme leverage when it comes to negotiating prices from suppliers - see WalMart, could compete. Mom and Pops 1 can't compete without being embedded in neighborhoods and their costs can be higher b/c they can't buy in mass bulk like chain.

As Lewis Mumford correctly saw in the 1950s we were constructing "anti-cities," and now we are at the point of reckoning for all the worthlessness we have wrought. We are all misplaced and it will take incredible leadership to pull this country into one concerted direction. Fortunately, I have a lot of faith in the Millennials once they fully exert their enormous power over the conflicted dichotomies of baby boomers.

A healthy community (at least for the time-being) will have both chains and locally-owned businesses, b/c chains will be able to pay the highest rents in the prime spots, ie the touristy areas, BUT, mom and pops as I alluded to with holes in the wall, are still viable, because 1) often supported by viral "word of mouth" (or twitter) they provide a better experience for the "consumer" AND they generally provide a higher quality product. Mom and Pops can succeed in dense urban neighborhoods because the consumer has choice. 2) they have a residential base within walking distance...they can be tucked away but still have the "rooftops" to support thier biz

As for job growth, I would be speaking for CoolTown Studios here, but I'm of the opinion that the only place for job growth is from entrepreneurs and startups. Yes, many will fail (especially because in the last ten years we have essentially stripped away all of the safety nets making the entrepreneurial spirit this country was built upon (ie American Dream), all too risky), but many others will succeed b/c so many needs/demands are not being met by the status quo, not to mention all of the talented people possessing innate entrepreneurism, feel so grinded down by the machinery of their corporate institutions.

The key to job growth and economic recovery is in education, job training, and startup businesses combined with a vast relocation and reconstruction of our cities into more dense, walkable, livable interconnected collection of diverse neighborhoods.

Look at it this way, we keep looking at the Stock Market as if it is some kind of indicator of recovery as it slowly inflates with federal subsidies. However, the market is full of Fortune 500 companies that have peaked in the 20th century economy and are receding due to the inherent flaws in corporatism. We're investing money in companies that have no choice but to shrink? When the power of global capital really needs to be put to work on main street rebuilding housing and teaching people how to run a business that could be set in the ground floor of that new building where the growth possibilities, when multiplied thousands or million times over, could borderline on infinite.

As Kunstler put it in Geography of nowhere our cities like Detroit and Dallas look far more like they experienced WW2 than do Dresden and Heidelburg, this may take a level of concerted effort along the lines of a Homeland Marshall Plan for housing construction and walkable infrastructure, but that makes a lot more sense than shoveling money at banks that have already burned us several times does it not?

The Work of None or All

In this age where we're all so unskilled, under paternalistic, yet broke and and in turn feeble nanny states, I see a future for CrowdSourcing like this: DIY Cities.

DIY city
The city could be an open platform that connected citizen service-providers and problem-solvers with opportunities to serve. There would be a transparent database of needs of the community, and instruction or guidance on ways to help that situation. SeeClickFix is an excellent model of capturing and making needs transparent from which to build. Cities would extend this to include matching people with particular skills and availability with the right cause. For example, if there is a family that is struggling to care for its children while parents are working, other parents can offer to babysit for the hours needed. If there is a pothole reported, someone from the city can go fix it and report back. Tasks are also tagged related to required skills or experience.

So, there could be physical requirements (strength) and intellectual requirements (marketing) that help direct citizens towards the right kinds of tasks. There could also be an exchange or “trade” for services—e.g. trade babysitting for dog walking, plumbing for legal advice. The platform would go far beyond traditional city services, as this exchange and participation could become a way of life. Ultimately all citizens would have a complete and growing profile of their skills, experience, and contributions in a Facebook-like citizen social network paired with opportunity matching.

= self-empowerment. We have to become the change we wish to see. Frankly, my guess is that the age of the single career is pretty much kaput and people will be taking several odd and part-time jobs, which they might enjoy quite a bit more (variety, getting hands dirty, etc) rather than pushing paper in an office.

The people behind SeeClickFix asked me to put their link on my blog, while I like the idea, seeing that they are already tied to the DMN, I'm not sure my blog would reach that many more people.

The Life Raft

CoolTown Studios has an excellent post up describe the critical components of what many of our cities need, sun belt cities primarily, in the worst way.

Local, independent businesses on the ground floor. Not only do local businesses have four times the economic impact over nationals, but the entrepreneurs who run them are a key source for job growth. The ideal business in this building would be a third place restaurant/cafe/coffeehouse/lounge.

I've described something similar at this post:

we are working to develop a multi-family prototype geared to the needs of Millennials. It generally consists of smaller units, but more embellished common areas and amenities to accommodate their highly social nature and attract talented college graduates to Dallas.

A focus on urban infill housing and creating a more livable city will provide the foundation for getting out of this rut. The will is there, even if it is subcutaneous, but we also need leadership to guide us there through the darkness.

Well That's Certainly One Way

...to calm traffic: Molten hot magma...

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2 is Better than 1

Finally, returning one-way roads to two-way is starting to get some play in the press. I have often referred to Dallas' one-way, overly wide downtown streets as "escape routes," but had NO idea that they were literally designed that way.

After the war, a couple of things happened. Civil defense planners, taking seriously the threat of nuclear attack, worried that residents trying to escape would create gridlock on the crowded two-way streets, imprisoning themselves in smoldering cities and causing many more casualties. The arterial streets were the only escape routes they had. Making them one-way, on an alternating basis, would speed things up and save lives. Or so it was thought.

Funny world we live in. So, without a Cold War clouding our skies, must we keep them?

Meanwhile, local governments were slowly learning that the old two-way streets, whatever the occasional frustration, had real advantages in fostering urban life. Traffic moved at a more modest pace, and there was usually a row of cars parked by the curb to serve as a buffer between pedestrians and moving vehicles. If you have trouble perceiving the difference, try asking yourself this question: How many successful sidewalk cafés have you ever encountered on a four-lane, one-way street with cars rushing by at 50 miles per hour?

More:

Among the critics are traffic engineers and academics who were taught some fixed principles of transportation in school decades ago and have never bothered to reconsider them. Joseph Dumas, a professor at the University of Tennessee, argued a few years ago that “the primary purpose of roads is to move traffic efficiently and safely, not to encourage or discourage business or rebuild parts of town . . . . Streets are tools for traffic engineering.”

Jumpin Jeezus on a Dinosaur that is so precious I wanna hold it and pet it and caress it, like a new puppy to my Lenny.

Now, once again, I'll let a far more intelligent person describe the fundamental function of transportation systems:

"The purpose of transportation is to bring people and goods to places where they are needed, and to concentrate the greatest variety of goods and people within that limited area, in order to widen the possibility of choice without making it necessary to travel. A good transportation system minimizes unnecessary transportation; and in any event, it offers change of speed and mode to fit a diversity of human purposes."

His point is that distance becomes a barrier economically and behaviorally, carving off efficiency through distance and excessive infrastructure that becomes a negative (or positive depending on how you look at it) and self-perpetuating feedback loop. What dipshit technocrats as above fail to see is the interconnected nature of things, particularly in the workings of cities and that a city's ability to function is fundamentally driven (haha, pun) by its transportation. Microeconomics require walkability, which begets diversity, which begets talent, livability, and a more robust economy.

Lastly, I'll leave it with Dr. John Gilderbloom of Louisville, KY who has done excellent work in the area of studying the broad effects of one-way streets vs. two-way who has shown a significan drop in business and revenue as streets go from two-way to one-way, up to 20%, which often erases the margins for which the local business operates. It makes intuitive sense, two-way streets create predictability. With one-ways do you locate on the going home street or the morning go to work street? With two-ways there is both.

Why is planning aimed at enhancing suburbs but hurts downtown neighborhoods? You cannot find three and four lane one way streets in suburbia, as it decreases housing appreciation and quality of life..

This is one of the fundamental issues of retail in a broader sense. We have spread so thinly that retail has equally spread thinly across the landscape with too many businesses and stores operating in too many areas. Retail needs synergy, it needs predictability, it needs diversity, it needs integration with the urban fabric. It needs less shops doing more business. Malls were an attempt to create all of this in a "driven" built environment. We're seeing now the failure was inherent in the simulacrum that are malls and the inefficiency in the local economies that distance and driving instills.

I Hope You Are Well Compensated

...for which to look so foolish. Those that I lack respect for in the world of City building consist of the cheerleaders, the whores, leeches, and the sycophants. This falls under all of the above, I do believe:

I'm writing to give a proper introduction to the city where I live and work, given partly to correct some misconceptions about Dubai -- a common one being the notion that Dubai is little more than an upstart Las Vegas alongside the Arabian Gulf. In reality, Dubai is a complex, multi-ethnic and multi-layered city, and far older than Las Vegas. (Actually, I can't understand the comparison at all, since there's no gambling here and the Dubai economy is far more diverse than tourism-based Las Vegas; with its large trade and financial sectors, the economic profile of Dubai is probably more similar to Hong Kong or Singapore or even Miami.

It must suck to come off looking like a mouthpiece for Dubai (at best). This particular planner works for a giant corporate conglomerate. Like all giant corporate conglomerates, they are both product and producer of the economy that just crumbled, much as Dubai will like a sand castle under foot of a rambunctious, destruction-minded 5-year old wreaking the havoc of time, history, and economics.

I personally left such a giant, publicly-traded, corporate conglomerate because I refused to fall into a similar trap and be beholden to nothing more positive than profit-motive at all costs. This planner, who lives in Dubai, must like his slaves servants to feel compelled to defend this:

As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

Of course, if he wants to continue collecting paychecks from such debt-ridden insolvent companies like Dubai World, he has to say the right things if you wish to remain out of prison in the country. But, my question is, where are your ethical standards? As Simon Jenkins wrote:

A true city is a mirror, in which the blemishes are our own.

Dubai is the ugliest of all cities. One in which I drew criticism for refusing to do any work in or for. I find it hilarious now, however, how many architects are coming out now criticizing the City and the irrational building exuberance that they were all too gleefully accepting as a chance to build their phallic monuments to themselves. All, will rightfully sit empty as a reminder of an ugly time and all the planners and architects that have participated in this wittingly or otherwise (more likely), are just as ugly of humans.

Now, I'll let Edward Glaeser, a far more intelligent and thoughtful person than the quoted planner above, discuss Dubai more freely:

Fifty-story buildings are an efficient way to deliver plenty of space, but extreme height is far more expensive and a bellwether of irrational exuberance.

Five of the 10 tallest buildings in New York City today were planned at the tail end of the ebullient 1920s and completed in the early 1930s. In their day, they were the tallest structures in the world, but it took more than a decade for the Empire State to stop being the “Empty State Building.”

And lastly, I leave the final thought with an American interviewed in Dubai:

"All the people who couldn't succeed in their own countries end up here, and suddenly they're rich and promoted way above their abilities and bragging about how great they are. I've never met so many incompetent people in such senior positions anywhere in the world." She adds: "It's absolutely racist. I had Filipino girls working for me doing the same job as a European girl, and she's paid a quarter of the wages. The people who do the real work are paid next to nothing, while these incompetent managers pay themselves £40,000 a month."

Monday Linkages - Back Atcha

...whilst watching Cash Cab and realizing that I either need to move to NYC or die trying to bring a similar measure of urbanity to DFW. Is there anything more satisfying than the street shoutout working?? Speaking of:

Interesting interview of author Carlene Bauer, who discusses moving to NYC and the urbanity that helped her find herself:

Also, I seemed to have a predilection for the urban from birth. Apartments over storefronts on main streets—not a feature of the suburban cul-de-sacs I was raised in—were fascinating to me. Who lived in those lighted windows? I wanted a lighted window. I thought if you had a lighted window, rather than a whole big house, you were living an anonymous, autonomous life.

Hmmm...I think she touched upon a future Livability Indicator that I've been putting together.
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I may have linked this one before, but who cares. It's about a city removing a giant gash freeway from its connective tissue in order to increase revenue thru property value increases. In this case, it's Providence RI:

In a similar fashion, about 20 years ago the city uncovered the Woonasquatucket and Moshassuck Rivers, which were largely paved over in downtown Providence, and moved the point of their convergence for aesthetic purposes.

Next year, the old highway overpass will be demolished and the city will begin to create a new street grid, which will better connect surrounding neighborhoods to the waterfront, said Michael P. Lewis, director of the state Department of Transportation. This work will continue into 2011 and 2012, while the state prepares the surplus land for development.

I created a diagram to show how many parcels would be affected by similar efforts in the Big D:

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Zoinks. Haven't talked Housing in some time, because I no longer need to convince people of the impending, nay, now imploded doom. But, Case-Shiller is suggesting another 48% fall.

More on housing, Wells Fargo's Chief Economist tells the awful truth, "there is no easy way out."
And there, hopefully, begins the long way road to recovery. There are no free lunches.
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Dubai. My favorite Vegas on Steroids. One of my personal fav oped guys, the man who brought to life such excellent insight and turn-of-phrase (also regarding Dubai),

When prices go up, buildings go up. When prices come down, buildings tend to stay up. Until recently visitors to Dubai returned gasping. This was truly a city designed from start to finish by autocrats and architects. It was the last word in iconic overkill, a festival of egotism with humanity denied. It was an architectural chorus line of towers, each shouting louder and kicking higher. People were ants.

Simon Jenkins, weighs in again:

I still have no doubt that Dubai will survive, despite its lack of oil or other natural resources. But it will do so as a benighted settlement on the Gulf shore, in hock to neighbouring and more cautious oil-rich states, such as Abu Dhabi. Its luxury apartments will become tenements to an ever shifting army of refugees from the torments of the Islamic world. Its towers will stand empty, unable to afford their energy-guzzling services. Its fantasy islands will be squatted or will rot and sink back into the sea. Where fresh water will come from, who knows?

It's fundamental problem is that it is entirely a product of the supply side thinking that created much of the economic catastrophe the world over. If you build it, they will not come. And if they do, they will then leave because noone else is there, like a tide rising, only to retreat back to the ocean. There has to be demand in the first place and demand comes from economic purpose, which typically comes in the form of natural resources, transportation, or increasingly, human capital.

Funny thing? There actually was a demand that they have managed to exploit which until further notice will be the economic foundation of Dubai. That, as the world's black market, for anything and everything that black markets exist for.

And, anybody that quotes PB Shelley in a newspaper article is always well worth the read. Expect the readers to come to your level, don't ever write down to theirs:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

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Park Slope CoHousing. The article is only strengthened by the presence of Alex Marshall.

Co-housing has yet to be tested anywhere as dense as New York City, but as Alex thought about it, he came to believe that, in fact, the city was perfect co-housing ground. Throw a bunch of organic leeks in Brooklyn right now and you will hit some kind of a communal-living situation—a vegan house in Bed-Stuy, a bunch of young renters in Clinton Hill who Craiglisted up to pursue like-minded goals. Surely he wasn’t the only middle-aged New Yorker who wished he had real relationships with his neighbors.

If you haven't read How Cities Work. You are missing out. See my post discussing the potential for high-rise cohousing:

This stems from the idea that any one person's community, the amount of people they can ever really "know" at one time is approximately 150. I probably need to track this back to source the info, but something tells me it was one of those tidbits that stuck with me from a psychology class in college. In this case, the vertical co-housing would be the person's "community." Whether they choose to know everybody within their building is beside the point, but the opportunity is there.

The vertical cohousing was based on the idea of eliminating excess inefficiencies of excess individual plumbing lines, savings on sharing of electricity and appliances, and all but elimating inefficient floor space, meaning, no hallways. The elevator opens directly into a shared kitchen/dining area that would be shared by 4 to 8 units per floor and potentiall two floors per kitchen area. This would be organized as a tenants "nuclear family."

The rest of the common amenities would be structured similarly based on the amount of people to use it. Meaning every four or so floors there is a common gathering area, be it a workout facility, a pool, game room, home theater, etc. These areas would be the "extended family."

The idea of which has been done with many high-rise towers in europe that create garden floors every fifteen or twenty floors in modern "green" office towers, ie creating social spaces for subsets within the larger unit. However, as I have said, to some extent this minimizes the person/place/thing interactions or feedback loops that create more intelligent places, ie rather than being 100 on the street, there might be 20 every 100 feet in elevation (although I imagine diminishing returns based on the exponential overlapping that occurs in these semi-lattice networks).

The base of the building, would have a community-wide amenity area. One building we worked on was supposed to have a wii station for resident use.

The last level of the hierarchy is the public, which is the street, or city at-large, and this is where the building would have its "third places"; how the building engages the street and the city. Here could be some overlap with the community-wide amenity area as I have seen in my building with the bar/grocery store as a popular hangout after work for building residents.

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Lastly, on Rio's Favelas, Gangs, Drugs, and Crime. If you haven't seen City of God you are missing out on the best movie of the last twenty years.

Ask the Carless Guy Vol. II

Not really a question, but I received an email from a former colleague with this article attached, and this particular quote called out:

George Ablah, a prominent real estate developer who was a leader on the steering committee in 1989, foresaw a parking problem — and still sees it.

He said the old rules of development were "location, location, location, location." Now it's "location, parking, no social problems, location."

He said he suggested that the city buy vacant and blighted buildings, tear them down and use the land for parking.

Development would follow, he said.

But that didn't happen.

"We would have had a booming area," he said. "I could be wrong. But we didn't do it, so we can't prove it."

Or, you might be a dinosaur of the 20th century economy. While certainly a smart and savvy developer, this guy doesn't know the first thing about cities. And I'm talking about understanding the underlying dynamics at work shaping cities. The following is really my general advice to understanding articles like this:

Whenever you read quotes from somebody or an op-ed, or any article for that matter, you have to understand the person's point of view. W hat's their angle? Ablah, is a developer, so he's looking for the city to make his life easier by assembling land, writing down his costs, and providing parking, that is all costs the developer doesn't have to bear in his pro formas.

It's certainly one strategy, and not a terrible one (b/c i can't comment on the state of the buildings he is referring to), but it is one of a different era as I will describe. I will tell you that anybody that says any city "needs more parking," they really don't know how city evolution works.

It worked for Portland, catalyzing development by building sub-grade publicly funded parking garages, b/c they were systematically removing the blight on neighborhoods and development that parking is. Furthermore, they are, again, removing a hard cost the developer would normally bear as parking is externalized from the development.

In this circumstance, however, I get the feeling that this particular developer is (to some degree) thinking about retail (since he's harboring sentiment from the 1989 masterplan) and making the parking accessible for suburbanites to come in once in a while to this imaginary downtown shopping wonderland is a mistake. When what is really needed is a vast influx of residential (of broad market segments), repositioned into walkable, livable downtowns, cutting the transportation barriers out of the local economy, and allowing the retail/commercial/jobs to "emerge" or follow the new market created via the demand of new residents.

But most importantly, b/c most cities right now are too broke to be assembling land and tearing down buildings. There are however, creative policy measures that incentivize (or "incent" if you prefer actual English) the selling of underperforming land at prices much lower than the owner imagined they would be getting in the condo boom of the past ten years (or if they were holding on cash generating business that drags down the City and, in turn, the City's economy, i.e. privately owned/managed surface parking lots).

These strategies (without getting into particulars) include varying degrees of carrots and sticks if you will, that amortize the carrots in favor of bigger sticks the longer you go. This is somewhat counter-intuitive to the common wisdom of incentivizing initial catalyst developments via a variety of subsidies and then voila! the market will be established and naturally fill in the rest.

When what we've actually found is that the market gets set by the subsidy and the city gets held at the barrel of a gun for similar subsides on every single project. (See: Dallas and the Merc, then the Convention Center Hotel)
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Second piece of news: nobody asked me this, but I'll opine anyway. Dallas feels left out of new $1.85B highway bill. Frankly, Dallas should feel so lucky. The LAST thing any Texas city needs is more highway construction. Unfortunately, people are too stupid or corrupt and think spending taxpayer money for short term jobs and long-term disasters is good economic policy.

Friday Free Beer Happy Hour - Guess the City

Downtown Dallas edition in order to see the lights and the new park grand opening, and due to that, we have another BIZARRO BEER FRIDAY!!!!

**edit: Perhaps as readership expands beyond an email list, perhaps I should advertise the Happy Hour location. A personal fav, the Cheers! of downtown Dallas residents: City Tavern.
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Yes, Lindsay gets it!


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For this BIZARRO BEER FRIDAY, we'll take a tour to an example of what happens when pegging goals/actions to meaningless, abstract statistics such as GDP; the blind creation of unnecessary infrastructure and the epitome of overly centralized planning and development. The opposite of a favela, if you will.









Lacking understanding of emergent nature of cities and the economic foundation underpinning population demand driven evolution.



Not wholly unlike the creation of edge cities in the US decades ago a la Las Colinas - of course, people had to go bankrupt first, and somebody will do so here as well.





Creating an architect's fantasy land, a clean slate, a blank canvas for ahem self-gratification architectural expression.



I'd show more, but I'm afraid you may have seen them plastering every page of architectural record since a google image search of the city turns up a smorgasbord of unbuilt architectural portraiture, ignorant of all/any context, the type of humanizing and participatory complexity of urbanity. But of course, there is no context. Next stop, city building in Siberia!

ZOMG! Behold our masterpiece of arbitrary geometric shapes!


The world will know thy name!




In the end, it is too rightly ordered, too overly masterplanned to ever be usable in its current form.





"Novelty is often mistaken for progress."

Thirsty Thursday Linkages

While pondering the following articles tonight, my happy go lucky beverage of choice will be...

Drifter Pale Ale by the Widmer Brothers Brewing Co., Portland, OR. Hmmm, ever wonder what beer choice says about you?

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Vancouver says YES! to more density. Money quote provided by a councilperson:

“I am an advocate of density,” Anton told The Vancouver Sun. “I think it makes a city more interesting, I think it makes it more livable, and most important, I think it’s better for the environment.

“However at the same time, if you’re going to ask people to live in high density, you must, as a city, provide the right amenities.”

If only we can follow Vancouver's footsteps, which happens to have a high willing homeless population, btw. City officials just need to learn that the "stuff" they want that the Vancouvers and Portlands of the world have, are all merely byproducts of policy changes. Altering the urban "genotype" reveals itself through changes in the urban "phenotype." Urban Design n00bs have a naive understanding of causality and emergence.

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A photographer does some photoshopping to create LA w/o traffic. In Dallas, often you don't need photoshop wizardry to find big roads with no cars. We just built too damn many.


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Understanding the human mind to battle climate change. If you recall, the Obama campaign changed American politics forever by tailoring the campaign based on consultation w/ behavioralists. Powerful new field of study.

"Human social behavior is at least as complicated as the climate system," added Leiserowitz, who has done public opinion research internationally and focused on the United States. "And, in fact, I'd argue it's more complicated -- because a carbon dioxide molecule doesn't change its behavior when you ask it a question.
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And lastly, the museum that sunk the Battleship Starchitect? London Times Online in All Hail the New Puritanism:



Not that it's a pretty building. In fact, just the opposite. Oh, good gawd is it not! Resembling a warehouse more than an art museum. Or, perhaps we're once again looking at a piece of art. Because what else is an art museum but a warehouse for stuff of debatable merit?

Is it a statement on our diminished social value on art and culture? Is it ironically displaying our necessitation towards extreme frugality? Either way, I'll always take the stance that architects should leave their artistic expression to artists. Just make buildings that are durable, sturdy, look nice, and are lovable. As Steve Mouzon says, "if it isn't lovable than it won't last and isn't sustainable." (paraphrased for rhetorical purposes)

In a brilliant paragraph, the writer summarizes (feel free to read only the bold and it makes just as much sense):

The times they are a-changin’ in British architecture. You can sniff it in the air. Maybe it’s the recession, not just because building projects are stalling — more because values are changing. Two years ago you could propose a revolving skyscraper bedecked in golden columns and purple unicorns and be taken halfway seriously. Now...architectural excess is sniffed at with a disdain approaching distaste. The icon project...is having a good lie down in the post-Noughties age. There is no more public or private money in the kitty for revolving skyscrapers, and Dubai is sooo 2005.

Once again, the words matter far more than the pictures. Err, the pictures don't live up to the words? Sounds like both Duany and Rem, no?

Architects like to be "of their time." Well, in a global recession, now it's time to prove it. So put down your notions of a swoopy roof, an amorphous shape, and your platinum cladding.

Prefab = Predetermined Fate?

The originators of the Prefab movement are tossing their idea, formed on the basis (presumably, since it was the strongest message) of simplified production process, reduced waste, and recycling of materials from other industries into attractive housing, as if it were nothing more than an empty bag of cheetos. Or perhaps, that is how they saw the idea which was its fundamental failing. Another throw away. Oh, irony.

The greatest weakness of many architects, particularly the more (in)famous ones, is often one and the same with their particular greatest strength: the desire to be different. You can see it in how they defeat their own purpose. My understanding of the architecture and design professions is, to put it as simply as possible, to make life better: more efficient, more affordable, more profitable (in the triple bottom line sense), more elegant.

Yet, in the examples they hail (and here I'm referring both directly to this particular case of the pre-fabists, but also to any of the architectural "fashion trends" that lack purpose or fundamental grounding beyond self indulgence), you can see how they defeat their own purpose. The buildings are off in the middle of nowhere. There is nothing around. A blank canvas for which nothing can interrupt the glamour shot of their baby with a proverbial finger on the lens.

Hence, there is nothing else for the building to converse with, no dialogue with other buildings, no synergies, no humanizing effect on the city. The more ingredients in an equation, the richer and more complete, complex, diverse, and resilient is the elaboration of life. Biology has something to teach us about architecture and city building.

Furthermore, and more specifically, we are facing overwhelming needs to relocalize; to reorganize where and how we inhabit cities, particularly in the Sun Belt and more importantly, in this age of decreased wealth and need of affordable, yet quality, housing that contributes in a positive manner to the City without stigmatizing those who live within it. Not urbanizing the poster children of a movement immediately makes it irrelevant when its fundamental strength is the cost and mass production capabilities.

I, for one, KNOW there is still opportunity in prefab housing. It just now has to be stacked from reused (and prefabricated to be livable) "capsules" of bygone industries, similar to some of the container housing that has gotten some publicity. One challenge, like any new idea, is beautifying the concept. Ya know, the job of architects if all they plan on being is style guides.

One of the beauties of such housing, is the potential for flexibility. It has always bothered me that contemporary apartment and mixed use buildings engrain an inflexibility to their unit counts, i.e. 50% 1-bedrooms, 30% 2-BRs, 20% studios, etc. They lack a fluidity where unit leasing rates are often held hostage by guesstimated market research.

This fluidity and constant evolution and flexibility to the market's needs (aggh, by "market" I mean by the local community's needs) can be had in modular housing. If one module is 400 sq.ft., roughly studio size, it can be expanded to two modules for large 1-BRs or small 2-BR units. Add three modules together, you can have small 3's and large 2's. Each module comes with a specific cost increment. Furthermore, these can be segmented or arranged by tenent vertically or horizontally.

They prefab heroes claimed accessibility and affordability, but by locating and designing the product in the middle of nowhere you are in car culture, enslaving any potential "poor" that might be able to afford your "high design" to their car, or effectively isolating and alienating them from participating in the economy. This is THE fundamental failing of a City designed entirely by the car. Putting everyone in cars, having tax rates to afford the excessive infrastructure, carving off disposable income, it creates undue barriers to the local economy.

Once again a lack of economic fluidity as expressed through design without the fluidity of adaptability; effectively bankrupting cities as well as States. Read: California.

Like the Tallest Midget?

Ray LaHood, quickly becoming either my favorite Republican or the most effectual cabinet member (seemingly), blogs about his meeting with Transportation 4 America and the Dangerous by Design report:

But, as much leadership as DOT can offer, only Congress can authorize federal funding for such programs. And, as the petition urging my leadership on safer roadway planning reminds us:

"The Transportation Bill comes around just once every six years, and we can’t afford another six-year delay on building the 21st Century transportation system our country craves."

That's why, when we hold our upcoming open meetings on new transportation legislation, I urge all of you who care about this important issue--from experts to everyday pedestrians--to come forward and tell us how strongly you feel about this. Then, we can let Congress know how much momentum is truly behind safer road planning.

I can only offer my regrets to the name chosen for his blog, "Fast lane." I'll chalk that one up as a choice made before he got fully situated into the job and the learning process began.

The key point however is that health factors related to good or bad urban design are the ones that are gaining traction at a political and personal/behavioral level. The fact that matters most, is that transportation is the number 1 dictator of development design, form and type of buildings for cities - as I'll call coding/zoning a byproduct of the predominant transportation network/goals.

Friday Non-Productive Happy Hour Guess the City

Hi. I'm a city of almost an identical population to the Big D. Except the populous has organized itself on much less land, allowing plenty of agricultural production within the city boundaries. Because of this, during any potential disruptions in global food production, I'll be able to meet many of my citizens' most basic needs.


[Populated areas overlaid on Dallas - Highways in Black]

Highways, as we know them, barely exist within the city, only enough to bring people to the city (macro to macro), before turning to appropriately scaled boulevards and lesser hierarchies (all of which are heavily tree-lined) for the local economy, to connect micro destinations to micro.

Like the earliest portions of Dallas, much of the city is arranged in rigid orthogonal grids intersecting each other at different angles. Each sub-district is punctuated by interconnected "Savannah-like" squares named after silly notions like Liberty, Independence, and Constitution. Silly Wabbits. The interconnection of these squares w/ important public buildings situated on them, create for a strong axial hierarchy within the city center.

What City am I?

The Mating Game

The offspring of...


The Church Lady and...


Sutler from V for Vendetta, and you get...

Post Monday Linkages

Kunstler discusses the eventual collapse of the Rube-Goldberg machinery of all American institutions and the potential outcomes:

Reality unfolds emergently, and this ought to interest us. For instance, I have maintained for many years that we are approaching the twilight of the automobile age - and the implications of this for daily life in the USA are pretty large. For a long time, I had assumed that this change of circumstances would proceed from our problems with the oil supply. But reality is sly. It has thrown two new plot twists into the story lately. America's romance with cars may not founder just on the fuel supply question. It now appears that our problems with capital are so severe that far fewer people will be able to borrow money from banks to buy cars at the rate, and in the way, that the system has been organized to depend on. Our problems with capital are also depriving us of the ability to pay to fix the hypercomplex system of county roads, interstate highways, and even city streets that make motoring possible. What will we do?

He goes on...

For now, a cashless government gives out cash-for-clunkers, which is basically a self-esteem building program designed to make the government feel better about itself because it is ostensibly taking 11-miles-per-gallon cars off the road and replacing them with 27-miles-per-gallon cars, thus forestalling scary problems with climate change.

Except a new report suggests the Cash for Clunkers program hasn't been nearly as successful as those numbers imply. (I don't know if those are pulled from thin air by JHK or were goals set forth by the administration.) Notice this report has nothing to do with the $24K claim that is the main talking point for the bickering:

The single most common swap — which occurred more than 8,200 times — involved Ford F-150 pickup owners who took advantage of a government rebate to trade their old trucks for new Ford F-150s. The fuel economy for the new trucks ranged from 15 mpg to 17 mpg based on engine size and other factors, an improvement of just 1 mpg to 3 mpg over the clunkers.

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Andrew Sullivan opens up an IEA report on peak oil.

"Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources," he added.

A second senior IEA source, who has now left but was also unwilling to give his name, said a key rule at the organisation was that it was "imperative not to anger the Americans" but the fact was that there was not as much oil in the world as had been admitted. "We have [already] entered the 'peak oil' zone. I think that the situation is really bad," he added.

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Thankfully, there is growing support for legislation to end this "too big to fail" nonsense.

"The lesson of Lehman should not be that the government should have prevented its failure," David Einhorn, head of hedge fund Greenlight Capital, said in a recent speech. "The lesson of Lehman should be that Lehman should not have existed at a scale that allowed it to jeopardize the financial system."

All that matters here, is that anything that is "too big to fail" is SO big that it equates to an agglomeration of wealth and power that they (singular individuals or the corporations they represent) are above any justice system and can either bribe or threaten the very foundations this country was founded upon. Once again, as soon as something approaches "too big to fail" it immediately means that it is "too big to exist."
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And more from the BackAsswards land of bizarro Keynesianism and stupid or corrupt economic development:

But it was the odd story of a parking structure in Columbia Heights, built by the city with $40 million of taxpayers' money, that may be the most pertinent data point in the future of parking. Here was a classic case of how good intentions can get fouled up with old-fashioned civic extortion. The retailer Target demanded the garage as a condition of moving to the city. The city built it. But something strange happened along the way: The expected hordes of drivers didn't materialize. They came by foot, by Metro, but not in cars, at least not in the numbers projected, and now the lot is losing money, costing the city some $100,000 per month.

Lesson: it rarely pays to bend over for any business, let alone one with a suburban business model in an urban setting.

Your Neighborhood Sucks and Soon Your School Will Too

First, from Kaid Benfield's blog at NRDC, where he discusses ULI/PriceWaterhouseCooper's newly released emerging trends in real estate, and wouldn't ya know it. They got it right.

In the near term, the report advises investors to "buy or hold multifamily" as "the only place with a hint of hope, because of demographic demand" as a large contingent of echo boomers seek their first homes.

I've talked for some time about the demand of the "communitarian" generation, eschewing the conventional factors for relocation (jobs) for things like diversity, sense of place, URBANITY. Clearly, they are the demand driver that will pull us out of this mess. As I previously wrote:

Boomers are retiring and desire the type of freedom found in ideal “retirement communities” like the Upper East Side or Key West rather than being “warehoused” in an actual retirement village. Millennials want to escape similar confines of suburbia for more authentic and diverse (yet affordable) experiences and ways of life.

I often say that cities progress from being Viable to Livable and finally to Memorable. To the City’s credit, they are undergoing several projects that would register as “memorable,” in some cases admirably so, but we still have not yet achieved livability (the hard part) in downtown (and this coming from a downtown resident).

We just need to put our brains together to make the numbers work for smaller residential space per resident (efficiencies or roommates) while getting land values and expected returns by current land owners back into the realm of practicality.

Interestingly, the report even arrived at conclusions that I had expected but not yet seen evidence of, at least locally, :

The report even questions the continuing supremacy of suburban school systems, noting that increasing numbers of them will start to falter as their supporting tax bases decline.

This is, of course, completely logical, as suburban schools are forced to compete for municipal dollars for their own student transportation infrastructure necessitated by the very thing they're competing against, the upkeep of overextended infrastructure for a too sparse (and increasingly less rich) tax base.

Conclusion, not everybody can afford all of those suburban houses that we've built. And, we're seeing that reality played out before us. As mentioned before, the demand for positive urbanity, which will create more localized and efficient economies, is there. We just have to define and overcome all of the barriers to the delivery of the supply to meet the demand.

Where to Walk if You Want to Die

New Study from Transportation 4 America: Dangerous by Design - Most Dangerous Large Metro Areas for Pedestrians. I've mapped the top 20 list of their Pedestrian Danger Index (PDI), largest dots are the top 5, medium dots top 10, and the smallest dots round out the top 20.

Dallas, if you're lazy, but not lazy enough to lack a modicum measure of wonder comes in at 13 amongst such destinguished urban wonderlands as Detroit, Charlotte, and Las Vegas.



Certainly looks bad for Florida. But, nearly the entire top 20 is located in the sun belt. The only outlier being, not so ironically, the car capital of the world, Detroit. A city so turned over to all things automobile that it matches Sun Belt cities for being designed for the car, despite once being called the Paris of North America (20s and 30s).

I think it is safe to assume, that any city designed to be walkable, is safest for pedestrians.

Free Golden Boy!!!

Broken record time. I've harped on Golden Boy here and here. Now see him out and about!

AT&T Plaza Before.


AT&T Plaza After.

Free Beer Friday Guess the City

I have a surprisingly extensive highway system, none of which actually effect the city center, which buffers it from the highway and industrial riverfront via a rigidly geometric ring road, which replaced city walls. Internal to the ring road is an equally rigid orthogonal grid pattern and extremely pedestrian friendly with numerous carfree roads.

I may or may not have friends and relatives in a recent post. Who am I?

(ed. note: as always, first correct guess in the comments and find me at happy hour gets a free beer. Except for reigning champ Toby who apparently is accepting Carbon offsets instead of beer.)

Ratcheting Down Roads to Crank Up Density

This post begins with the assumption, which I would call observed fact, that all development is a direct response to the primary mode of transportation serving the site (primary mode can also include multi-modal). When specifically applying a mode of transportation and accommodating it on a site, this assumption makes logical sense. It is the single most important determinant

For example, if everybody is travelling by car, the parking necessary takes up valuable FAR. Similarly, ports/docks are low density b/c everybody is on a boat b!tch. People arriving via transit are all on foot, pedestrians are on foot, and don't exactly need a place to put their shoes. And if they did, the foot lockers wouldn't exactly take up much space. That extra room for parking is either immediate for access (ie in front) or hidden to ameliorate the effect parking has on a building's ability to engage the public realm and participate in the multiplier effect of the "urban buzz."


Copenhagen bike parking, compact and not sociofugal like a car park.

The two solutions are various shades of bad: very bad and less bad, because as I said it takes up valuable building/leasable space and it disconnects a building from its context thereby turning the building into a "non-sequitur" building, meaning it does not participate in the synergies that create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Furthermore, the parking provision (and in cities where land and development is more expensive) has become a barrier to development, often accounting for upwards of 20% of a project cost.

To further the linguistic metaphor, in syntax, there are certain rules for things to come together to make sense (in cities these would be livable places). Once the rules are satisfied art can be applied to create poetry or prose and invoke even greater meaning. In cities, these become lovable places.

We obviously can't just start building without parking, as everybody (but me) is still stuck in a car on the road. But, we can alter the transportation network that informs the development density (and quality). I don't mean removing roads altogether, but slowly and incrementally ratcheting down the scale of many of the roads in the city and pinpointing any road designs that negatively affect urban tissue, creating places less than the sum of the parts.

Dallas is in the top five in the country in constructed freeway miles per capita. Extrapolated, it is probably pretty safe to assume that American cities dominate in the world list for this statistic as well, meaning that D/FW has nearly as many freeway miles per capita as any city in the world. Top Five WooHoo! Time to celebrate? No sir. And we're gonna drive from Dallas to Darmstadt, Germany to see how much money we're wasting.
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As I posted the other day, Prof. Bill Hillier discussed development density, how it is created and defined by the density of the local grid network. The combination of the two components combine to create "urban buzz," or as I would describe as the facilitation of synergistic economic activity.

Obviously, economic factors have to exist to have demand for population to be there in the first place, the grid is then the application of a platform for increasing economic activity. The economic purpose makes for a VIABLE city. The grid allows for a LIVABLE CITY. And, as I said earlier, applying CIVIC ART then creates for MEMORABLE or LOVABLE cities.

You can't just start laying out a grid in the middle of nowhere and expect "urban buzz," but that won't stop people from trying apparently:

The visual mind virus of Bizarro Keynesian Meme. Build roads, expect development = stupid supply side urban development, rather than incrementally allowing demand for new development and expansion of the grid to accommodate it. This is what we mean by not overextending yourself financially by way of infrastructure.

Looking further into why Cities have roads and what purpose they serve, Hillier also talks of the necessity of local and global connections. Let me refine this dichotomy to include a greater range of: local, city, metropolitan, regional, global. Extracting Jane Jacobs, highways are essentially global connections b/c they link global hubs ie airports to cities (as macro destination), as well as cities to cities - for example Houston area to Dallas area. The grid then allows the connections from microdestination to microdestination, or intermideate destination (such as a transpo hub) to microdestination (your house, your job, third places, etc.). As Hillier suggests, the local grid connects everywhere to everywhere and allows the necessary flexibility of choice to get there without all traffic funneled to overly hierarchical dendritic arterial systems.

So we have our five road "connections, which I'll number by intensity or volume:
1. Local
2. City
3. Metropolitan
4. Regional
5. Global

Each of these connective "purposes" has an appropriate design solution that either can engender high quality, dense urban development or do just the opposite. This post will show examples of both.

Oft repeated schematic illustrating spatial relationship and densities of people by mode of transpo. As you can see accommodating modes other than cars allows for greater capacity. Moving greater capacity is supposed to be any transpo engineers job. Greater capacity moving by a site, equates to a higher "highest and best use," meaning more predictably successful commercial enterprises, more "urban buzz." Oh, and as we'll see, it just looks nicer, feels nicer.

Looking specifically at Dallas, anyone that approaches downtown from the North via the Dallas Tollway arrives into the City experiencing a descension of hierarchy from road type 5 all the way down to 1. This is what we mean when we say context sensitive design. The street capacity is reduced as the road descends further into the City. However, as we'll see, Context Sensitive Design can be poorly sensitive or misinterpreted as the roads are all poorly designed, strictly for the maximum amount of cars and little else (like a DART bus or two) meaning not operating to full capacity as the picture above shows.


This entry experience will follow a 2-mile stretch of roadway as the Tollway as it merges with and becomes Harry Hines, until it turns into Akard St. until it terminates at AT&T and Golden Boy!


Category 5 (failed autocentric version): Characterized by flyovers, overpasses, cloverleafs, and related over-engineering. Notice that no development wants to engage with roads like this in any way and some futile attempts to "green" it up is made to make it barely palatable, ie more sunk costs.


Category 4 (failed autocentric version): I believe we are near Harry Hines and Wolf here. The street now has traffic lights, six! lanes (all each too wide as well), and a pointless sidewalk right up to the curb. Often has surface parking in front to provide "access" and the only thing noticeable is a KERA billboard for drivers b/c nobody is expected to be on this road on foot. You'll also note that this is one-way here, meaning it has a mirrored overly wide, poorly design street running parallel one block to the East.


Category 3 (failed autocentric version): It's actually two-way with some on-street parking here, yet it isn't exactly helping business, except that we're greeted by a porte cochere and two curb cuts. Prime example of a building relating to the form of transportation. You're obviously arriving by car, we'll design our entry to greet cars. Oh, and a blank wall.


Category 2 (failed autocentric version): Back to one-way. Apparently, we have yet to learn that businesses need two-way streets to maximize predictable visibility and locational choices. As we said earlier, commercial success (and urban buzz) requires as many people moving by as possible (a focusing of the energy of human movement). Two-ways is better than one. Also, on-street parking is available at points along this street but it is spotty. We see another covered porte cochere and a sidewalk with no buffer from moving vehicles.


Category 1 (failed autocentric version): Given that this is at the intersection of Main Street (the one area of successful urbanism in downtown) and the Harry Hines/Tollway funnel, this should one of the most important and successful streets in Dallas. Main Street works, but as of yet, the "buzz" hasn't spilled southward toward the poor, imprisoned Golden Boy. This is partially due to the design of the street which doesn't convey its importance (and I don't mean widening). It feels like a back alley.

So what have these roads bought us? Well, because they are design to be sociofugal (and repel people), they become escape routes. As I suggested earlier this week, countering the argument that big roads deliver people to a city, it's a zero-sum game in terms of people coming and going on those roads, but when you factor in what they have done to the real estate, the extra cost of widened (virtually) car-only roads has decimated real estate development and urban density.

The density WE DO have is designed to be entirely auto-centric as well, with large parking garages as well as front doors that are little more than car drop-offs/porte cocheres.


The street edge is even defined by walls. agggh, more tree lawns!!! kill me!!!!

Furthermore, all of this high-rise residential/condominium development dotting lower McKinney is entirely a by-product of the falsely created, irrational housing exuberance of the past ten years. If it had to do with actual demand (one, it would be filled), it wouldn't be so poorly designed in how it engages the public realm.

So what are examples of roads that these should look like? Well, I'm glad you asked.


A better #5 - limited to the outskirts of the city. Very few $750 Million overpasses/interchanges, because highway to highway interaction is rarely four-way and they don't intersect every two miles. Lined mostly by natural buffers, development is rare except at the highway to boulevard hubs. There are no frontage roads, which bleed the "movement economy" energy from the lower level streets, which can better accommodate development.


A better #4 - ignore that this is the Champs Elysees which acts as a "main street" of Paris. 4's should be the primary vehicle traffic movers of any metropolitan region and can accommodate development directly interfacing with and benefitting from the energy moving by on the street because of the buffers created by the allees of trees, a browsing/parking parallel "slip" lane, and ample sidewalks. These streets still require a development coding maintaining a linear street wall to maximize use to use adjacency/synergy.


A better #3 - a lesser version, or lower scaled "complete street" from #4.


A better #2 - Main Street in downtown Dallas would be a good number 2. However, I would categorize it in the Dallas hierarchy as a 1, the lowest capacity because the road hierarchy is on steroids. The theme of this post is that in Dallas, all of the roads, need to go on "road diets" and scale from bad 2's to good 1's. Bad 4's to good 3's.


A better #1 - Rather than alleys, we start using terms like woonerf or mews. Examples include Stroget (the carfree area in Copenhagen) or even the small side streets with cars near Stroget that will probably go carfree soon anyway. Point being, cars can still get through as you see above, but it's primarily only delivery vehicles. Who else would want to try to drive through there? Curbs aren't necessary b/c bikes, pedestrians, strollers, pedicabs, you name it all have equal right-of-way to the space. This is the epitome of street as space.

So what does all of this mean for Dallas? Dude, you're full of something, not sure if it's questions.

I thought we were driving to Darmstadt. Are we there yet?


Yes. This is Darmstadt, Germany. When placed over Dallas at a similar scale, we get this:


Darmstadt is a city of 142,000 people. The orange shows all of Darmstadt minus the "boroughs" of Eberstadt, Arheilgen, and Wixhausen (all compact suburban satellites off the map, but still within city proper) taking the total population of the orange area down to approximately 100,000.

It should be noted that Darmstadt also barely has any buildings over ten stories, other than the middle finger building (shown below), of course. Most of which are steeples or various other associated vertical elements with civic/cultural edifices.


I wonder where or towards whom it is facing? Probably Munchen.

While not entirely accurate, the orange area covers the equivalent of Dallas zip codes 75201, 75202 (downtown) and 75204 (uptown), meaning we're probably looking at a max residential population of about 25,000, or one-fourth of Darmstadt's density.

As you can see from the aerial, its compact nature allows for preservation of nearby agricultural land for food production as well as natural forests/habitat. The freeways are all exterior to the actual city preventing them from having the corrosive, deleterious effect upon the urban fabric which we know all too well. The city is then accessed by roads lower on the hierarchy.

If as the saying goes, "density buys amenity," apparently in Dallas we just buy entirely too much car infrastructure which means that much less in the way of amenity and livability.

P.S. I have a much more in depth post looking at Darmstadt that has been about half-way done for about a year. I'll try to get that finished within the next week.

Lazy? Or Lack of Time?

More articles. What can I say, good week in the wonderous world of the interwebs all about building real, sustainable economies. Not the imaginary kind.

Mostest excellent article in the Financial Times today about taking the economy back from finance:

In the 1980-2007 era of cheap credit and deregulation, banks had every incentive to move from real-economy projects, yielding a profit, towards lending against rising asset prices, yielding a capital gain...

A promising policy avenue is tax reform. During the asset boom of the last decades, taxes on capital gains in the US, UK and most other OECD economies have fallen sharply relative to value added tax and labour taxes. When the banks have recovered, they need a regulatory and policy climate that discourages the pursuit of capital gains for their own sake, and which favours growth of the real economy. Finance should be the economy’s handmaiden, not the other way round.

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For the last damn time, quit trying to make vertical farms. They're the equivalent of parking garages and we have plenty of arable land near cities...just so happens they're beneath schlocky tract homes that will begin crumbling upon themselves in, oh...about five more years and change.

A farmer can expect his land to be worth roughly $1 per square foot...if it's good, fertile land. The owner of a skyscraper, on the other hand, can expect to pay more than 200 times that per square foot of his building. And that's just the cost of construction. Factor in the costs of electricity to pump water throughout the thing and keep the plants bathed in artificial sunlight all day, and you've got an inefficient mess.

See my Valencia post for proper allocation of food as well as industrial production in relation to the City.
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Speaking of water, cash strapped governments are looking to the negawatt to save water and energy (negawatt = the cheapest form of energy, the kind that never gets used.)

Chasing negawatts, the energy that you don't use, is a popular pursuit these days for cash-strapped states, and California is turning out to be excellent at it. Negawatts (a term Amory Lovins came up with) can offer a lot more bang for the buck, so to speak, then building new power. And asSteve Fleischli at HuffingtonPost reports, when faced with choosing a $550 million salination plant that would require lots of water and lots of power but produce fresh water, or a Coastal Restoration $187 million project to swap out 455,000 existing urinals for waterless alternatives and save water and generate negawatts

Waterless urinals are the future...speaking of water...
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Lastly, and most depressingly, more on cities/counties/states chasing businesses thru various forms of buyoffs. In Milwaukee which has more access to fresh water than the city itself needs, is offering cheap water to businesses. Ok, so what. No harm no foul. Until the whammy:

Cities and states routinely use tax incentives, loan guarantees and infrastructure investments to entice companies to relocate operations. Iowa last year offered IBM $52 million in tax incentives to create 1,300 jobs, while Michigan recently gave Johnson Controls $148 million to create 500 jobs for a battery facility.

Jumpin' Jeezus on a Dinosaur! That's $296,000 per job that Michigan forked over. I'd like to think each of those positions would make more than that. How else does that make any fiscal sense whatsoever for the state of Michigan? As I tweeted about this the other day, I suggested why not just go to the top of the tallest building and drop cash on people with balloons filled with smilex gas. That should have the same effect.

When will governments ever learn? At least in the current business climate, 1) the best investment is to invest in your citizenry, meaning a) training programs/education b) if your going to offer incentives offer low-interest loans w/ bankruptcy protection and c) big businesses are only getting smaller. The way towards job growth is investing in small businesses (right now). There are an awful lot of talented people out there, that can be competitive if you lessen the burden of startup (and failure).

Entrepreneurism. The REAL American Way.

All Housing All the Time

B/c realtors are unaccomplished middle-men, sometimes they rig the game. It's the American way! Nope, this is in Canada, where the gub'mint is threatening to cap their fees.

With a membership of more than 96,000, Ottawa-based CREA is the largest real estate organization in Canada and represents the majority of the nation's realtors.

"The Bureau is concerned that CREA's rules have restricted consumer choice and limited the scope of alternative business models," says an internal memo by CREA president Dale Ripplinger. "Unfortunately, the Bureau seems to believe that CREA's rules ... create restrictions and barriers."

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Housing is bankrupting families.

No matter how much money the government puts into the housing market to stimulate sales, a recovery won’t be on firm ground until people stop viewing homes as commodities, said Joe Carson, head of global economic research at AllianceBernstein LP in New York.

Say no more brother.

So let's work our way up from the bottom. Buyers whether ignorant or wreckless overbought. They were given loans by banks who shouldn't have been giving said loans because various regulatory agencies were either crippled or willfully ignorant. Bigger banks buy those crappy loans, bundle them with better loans for resale. Bond rating agencies take a look at them (not really) and grease the pig by giving them an A for effort. Bundles get sold, brokers skim off the top. Put that in the spin cycle about ten times for effect b/c once again regulating agencies weren't paying attention or couldn't. Prices spike b/c of the surplus of buyers. Who pays the piper?

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They haven't found their bottom yet.
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And...it's still a "crisis."

“It’s just a very bad idea to expect home prices to bounce back and solve all these prices,” Emmons says. “There’s just no good reason to expect that.”

Because? They're disconnected from wages. Tadaaaaa.

More Quotable Quotes

This from Bill Hillier, Professor of Urban Morphology - University of London, in his 1996 essay, "Cities as Movement Economies."

Land uses and building density follow movement in the grid, both adapting to and multiplying its effects. The urban buzz, or the lack of it when it suits us, is the combination of these, and the fundamental determinant is the structure of the grid itself. The urban grid through its influence on the movement economy is the fundamental source of the multifunctionality that give life to cities.

Therefore, grid, aka interconnectivity, and level thereof, is revealed thru density and intensity of movement which then equals density and intensity of land use/built form to serve that movement.

Backtracking for rhetorical purposes, he writes:

Urbanity...is not so mysterious. Good space is used space. Most urban space is movement.

Rightly so. But in order to "Dallas appropriate" Professor Hillier's work (obviously London hasn't been completely decimated by the car), I would then expound on this to suggest that urban space can be one of three things, a) for strictly movement, b) for movement and space, or in the rarest of circumstances, c) strictly as space.

If I am to arrive at local examples of each, I might suggest that a) would be any of the highways or to a lesser extent by design Elm and Commerce which is their fundamental failing on downtown. b) would be Main Street in downtowns, much of State and Allen, portions of McKinney and West Village - basically the areas that work b/c they are situated in a buffered position from the corrosive effect of the freeways. c) Lastly, space that is only "to space" and not in anyway "through space" could be a rooftop plaza or something similar.

All of which adhere strictly to design intent (whether the designers consciously knew what they were intending or not. Intent is revealed through functionality only after put into practice). What is this road for? Is it a road through space, or to space (the fundamental question asked by the context sensitive movement)? Is it flexible enough to change character when needed to allow for both movement and the "eddies" that swirl in and out of stores, niches, plazas, offering that "urban buzz" or latently being observers in the landscape.

Therefore, if Main Street is a "place" and Elm, Commerce, and the like around it are the delivery roads to it, how do we expand the success of Main Street (the one and only living portion of Downtown Dallas - despite what any marketeers and cheerleaders might tell you)? Well, the only way is to change the character of the roads IMMEDIATELY adjacent to the three block stretch of Main Street to accommodate people along with the cars.

As of now they are escape routes when they should be places themselves, building on Main Street and adding to the multiplier effect of cities, rather than being the subtractive elements they are. This means taking one-ways to two-ways, narrowing travel lanes, if possible widening sidewalks where necessary, and hell why not the typical streetscape accoutrements as well. But, the reclaiming of car space for people space and slowing traffic, as well as the facilitating the ease of pedestrian crossing of those streets are the functional changes necessary. If you don't see anything like this in the on-going downtown plan, then it's toothless.

What do we want our streets to be? Level of Service A, so they're empty the majority of the time or would we rather they have babies pushed in strollers? new businesses interacting with the streets? Attractive Young Females sauntering by?
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**ed. note: I want Dallas (and Downtown specifically) to succeed as much as anyone. I want it to achieve the standards that said cheerleaders have set for it, ie "world class." But, I'm not willing to lie (to myself or others) about what works and doesn't work. It's the only way to address the real impediments to the "urban buzz" and multiplier effects, Professor Hillier discusses that are revealed in the truly world class cities, like London.

Quote to Get You Up On The Wrong Side of the Bed

From Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

Instead, Wall Street now serves, in the words of one former investment executive, as "Lucy to America's Charlie Brown," endlessly creating new products to lure the great herd of unwitting investors into whatever tawdry greed-bubble is being spun at the moment: Come kick the football again, only this time we'll call it the Internet, real estate, oil futures. Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.

You sure you want to play that game America?

Which reminds me how right my instincts can sometimes be...

Monday Linkages

Had to make more out of Ourrossoff singling Dallas out again, so now on to the regularly scheduled links o' the day:

If 'greening' up buildings was a cultural leftover of the dying economy like extra gadgets in a kitchen or add-on features of a new car, what will be the cultural expression of the next economy (if we ever get there)?

Planetizen asks if the current crop of architects can adapt to changing needs.

I would add that I believe the younger, more aware, and less self-serving generation of architects get it inherently.
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A related discussion of form in time and space but with computers and their subsequent developmental ecologies.
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The indispensable Tod Litman on a sensible transportation policy. If you need to save time, just check out the graphs illustrating traffic fatality rates per capita and per VMT. It's quite literally a failure of elected officials and public agencies to subject a populace to such hazards. Corruption via DOT, isn't it great!
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Interesting and timely article on amateurs rivaling professionals these days. I am of the opinion that it isn't so much amateurs stepping up (although there is certainly evidence of that to some extent), but also the watering down of professional standards. I associate the former with lack of educational opportunities for talented but perhaps underprivileged, or even disenchanted by the state of the American educational system. The latter is most certainly a biproduct of "credentialism" as Jane Jacobs points out in Dark Age Ahead. Think about this, how many architects strive for the letters LEED AP behind their name but don't know Herman Daly from a tack-on doodad for more greenwashing?
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With the potential complete collapse of California as a failed state, Governing.com asks, "Are States irrelevant and would Metros better and more appropriate governing bodies?" Think about it, what relationship does Dallas have to San Antonio moreso than OKC? Ok, other than state law.
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On a related note, Mayor Villaraigosa of LA is still bullish on his transit plans. Good on'ya.

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Tales of the Depression - Oh, Brother Were Art Thou proves right again, as "hard times do flush the chumps." Florida sees spike in God, Booze.

More on Arts District and Tearing Repairing Scars

NY Times Architecture Critic Nicolai Ourousoff has clearly been spending some time thinking about the unveiling of the Dallas Arts District and what it means within a global context, a bit self-referential if you ask me of his own maturation from starchitectural sycophant of days gone by. Nonetheless, it is the most comprehensive and best understanding of the issues I have ever seen from him:

Yet as the dust settles on the last of these projects, what begins to emerge is a more complex image of America’s cultural values at the birth of a new century. The formal dazzle masks a deeper struggle by cities and architects to create accessible public space in an age of shrinking government revenue and privatization. At their most ambitious, they are an effort to rethink the two great urban planning movements that gave shape to the civic and cultural identity of the American city.

And in a brilliant summation:

The problem with freedom, after all, is that it allows for horrifying imaginative failures as well as works of stunning genius. When artists fail, you can ignore their work. When architects fail, you walk by their buildings every morning on your way for coffee shaking your fist. (The Milwaukee and Denver art museums come to mind.)

Now back to Dallas:

This was especially true in Dallas, where the freeways that border the arts district site to the north and east were built with money partly from the 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. In a pattern repeated across America, these projects were bulldozed through thriving African-American and Latino communities, cutting them off from the city center. By the time planners unveiled the first proposals to build a new arts district, in the 1970s, much of the site had deteriorated into a wasteland of empty lots, industrial buildings and corner bars. Planners envisioned a necklace of cultural institutions along a 68-acre site that extends east from the Museum of Art along a tree-lined street.

Aside from the socio-economic and physical scars, he touches on the key issue. The Dallas Arts District, situated on Woodall Rogers Freeway, is a roadside attraction. There is a key distinction there between that and a PLACE. It is a curiosity. The thing about curiosity, once you scratch that itch, attention to it wanes.

To save the Arts District and give such cultural institutions the monumentation that they deserve (after all, I'm in no way against the Arts, but rather in the sloppy execution of the District), the freeways have to come down and be replaced by a similar effort as the Ringstrasse in Vienna. Given the nature of the rails and the freeway on the West side of downtown, I imagine that is the most difficult side to transform, but certainly a horseshoe can be created around the North, East, and West sides, turning the highways into boulevards, the highways as the extend into the city slowly retreat and give way to a dense system of gridded city streets. Stitching back together the various neighborhoods torn apart by the freeways and reinstituting the multiplier effect that dense cities have, instilling what one urban historian described, "the winds of intellectual advance blow strong in cities..."

I am fully aware of the time frame, but cities operate much longer lifespans than any of us. This is at least a fifty year plan. Using the incrementalism of Copenhagen's reversal from city turned over to the car into the most livable city in the world as a model, the plan has to start with baby steps. First, you convert the existing inner loop's system of on/off-ramps into a more urban context, by getting rid of any high speed on/off ramps as drawn geometrically in the form of cloverleafs and flyovers. These are poison to cities. As I've pointed out before, they are like a single point source for rainwater runoff, collected and gathered into one pipe, then released into a stream channel not meant for the load, thereby eroding the banks and killing the ecosystem. On/off-ramps release too many cars into a single point, thereby eroding the urban fabric.

This weekend I had an ahha! moment when thinking about the conventional argument that this is a crazy idea and that "highways deliver people to the city." While that is somewhat true, they also take those same people away from the city meaning it's a net zero sum game. However, when looking at it deeper, one realizes that because the highways so ruin the urban character and livability, those are all the people that choose to live elsewhere, but still commute into the city for their daily grind, because commercially it still makes sense for businesses to be part of that intellectual and financial foment.

Furthermore, as we see in Dallas, all development receded from anywhere near the freeways. Therefore, the highways have been a net loss. Even moreso when calculating for the cost of maintenance (roads and personal autos), the cost of running a bus system to reach delocalized destinations, personal injury/healthcare costs of the direct injuries (crashes) and indirect injuries (birth defects, asthma, random gunshot wounds), etc.

So we built the highways (similar idea with suburbanism) as some bastardized form of bizarro Keynesianism, to stimulate economic development, but we got a whole lot of (continual) cost, and zero long-term benefit. Little by little, bankrupting all of our cities and states.

Mr. Ourroussoff, anything else to say?

The results could have been worse.

Well, yeah. I suppose nothing could have been done.

And the divisions that continue to separate this enclave of high culture from the nearby communities remain deep.

As deep as a sunken freeway?

So far these proposals have come to naught, and just as in Dallas, vast lots bulldozed decades ago remain undeveloped.

The disconnection he refers to from downtown, isn't as severe as those in the other directions as created by the freeways. Those can be repaired with an upturn in the development market (easier said than done right?). Rather than being a roadside attraction, they could each be a centerpiece along a similar Ringstrasse, thus creating a system of open space linkages around downtown, with the Arts District, City Hall, the Convention Center, the West End, and Victory, all benefitting (or in most cases, salvaged as integral parts of the City) as the inner loop becomes a seam for the City rather than a scar, or in other words, a magnetic place that attracts rather than repels people as is currently the case. No amount of deck parks will change that.

Pardon this Short Station Break

/Migraine debilitated.

Thirsty Thursday Linkages

Lee Corso says the weekly article linkages "shot their wad," on Monday, so it's a little sparse around here today.

First, economists are finally getting around to reading some Jane Jacobs and discover, gasp!, that she had a more intuitive sense for economies that work than their neo-classical, world without limits, training instilled in them:

"Jacobs pointed out that to boost an area's economy, the normal plan is to bring in a branch of some big business. But then you have an industry without roots. They're not using local accountants and local printers," says Susan Witt, executive director of the E.F. Schumacher Society in Great Barrington, Mass., which, since its inception in 1980, maintained a close working relationship with Jane Jacobs. "It's through those roots that you get the economic multiplier effect of small businesses. And a branch or factory based elsewhere can leave as easily as it arrived."

I do believe that I've mentioned similar things around these here parts. What they need to understand, is that Cities, once established for safety, then continued to grow and agglomerate because they are the ultimate construct of wealth creation, via trade of ideas, goods, yadda yadda...Point being, ignoring the term organic city, that gets thrown around too often, that fully mature neighborhoods are like a turbo-charged race car engine for economies. The world built since the advent of the car is nothing but barriers to trade and commerce by way of distance, cost of excess infrastructure, lack of connections, exertion/cost of energy traversing said distances b/w connections, etc.
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A list of the safest cities in the country and clearly safety prefers hot cocoa on chilly days. (spoiler: 1. Minneapolis 2. Milwaukee 3. Portland 4. Boston 4(tie) Seattle)
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Stackable housing. Remiscent of ideas spitballed for the disasterous Re:Vision Dallas Competition, if you squeeze your brain really, really hard.

See, I'm Not the Only One

This article is a bit old, but I just came across it. From Wick Allison at FrontBurner on the failings of the Dallas Convention Center Hotel:

Make a site unfriendly to humans, and no humans will come. If you have to start big, as a convention hotel necessarily has to do, make sure the smaller, more intimate, more human-friendly buildings are there at the start to give your hotel some cover and context. Otherwise, we’re going to end up with another beached Dallas behemoth.

Truer words never written. Beached Whale. I like it. That may have to join the bad building CataBlog.

My takes on the Convention Center Hotel, here and here.

A sampling:

The purpose (ed: should have been) of carving the site up into three smaller blocks is simple. This is an urban site, constrain the design as much as possible even though there are vast amounts of undeveloped blocks around it, b/c there will be development.

Second, it allows for that two-sided retail I mentioned above; necessary in the creation of a destination. Plus, it creates a greater amount of residential, thus providing 24/7 activity (ed: from day one).
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But then what is the problem (ed: with the selected design), you ask? Well, to expand upon Cullen's metaphor, a building is just a building. It's like a postcard. You glance at it and toss it away. Maybe, if it is of unique brilliance, you slap it on the fridge with a corny touristy magnet.

And cut and pasted, directly out of our design team's submission to the City (I wrote every word). The plan was good, our tower was bad, I admit. With that said, someday people in this City will realize that the Urban Genotype (the underlying dynamics) is a far better prescription for success than the "Phenotype" (the actual architecture):

Dallas Convention Center Hotel
"It's Place within the City"

Thesis

The primary goal in the urban planning and development of the Dallas Convention Center Hotel is to understand and overcome the challenges of the site chosen by the City as well as the site’s place within the city. The site, we believe, is the best possible to engage and interact with the Convention Center physically and architecturally, while being ideal for setting the stage for the next generation of development in the evolution of Downtown Dallas into a world class city.

In order to accomplish that goal, the development of the Dallas Convention Center Hotel parcel must first create an attractive destination immediately to stir excitement and entice people to an area of downtown long neglected and ignored by locals and visitors alike.

Next, it must lay the groundwork for a grander vision as the first phase of a new district that begins to connect back into existing and on-going successes in the city with the ultimate goal of creating a downtown that is a series of successful, interconnected, yet distinct in character, neighborhood sub-districts rather than merely a handful of disparate and isolated parcels of success.

The truly great cities of the world, Rome, Paris, New York, Copenhagen, and Barcelona feed off the created synergies by seamlessly stitching together various pieces of the puzzle, that are unique and therefore cooperative rather than cannibalistic, to create a sum greater than its parts and ensure continued success and positive incremental steps throughout the city.

What makes these cities great is not the individual buildings, but the experience of the spaces and a number of special neighborhoods. This vision proposes to help Dallas create a series of great neighborhoods with the Dallas Convention Center Hotel being the start of one of them.

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Urban Analysis

Q: The primary issue facing not only the hotel site, but the convention center as well is that the area is entirely disconnected from its surroundings. Positive redevelopment has found its way to the Main Street area of downtown and the Cedars because of DART, TIF, and other initiatives, but the Convention Center area remains a barrier between Main Street, the Cedars, and the West End. Overly scaled streets, highways, in some cases buildings, and an abundance of surface parking lots have made the area hostile to pedestrians, the vital ingredient towards urban vitality.

A: We are of the opinion that the Convention Center Hotel development must be part of a larger vision that bridges these gaps between successful areas of the city and believe that with this holistic vision, the hotel as a piece of urban acupuncture stimulating the development of a new neighborhood in downtown Dallas with the Convention Center as its anchor reaching out and blending into its neighbors while lessening the impact of all barriers adjacent.

Q: The second major issue to overcome is the lack of intuitive wayfinding or sense of arrival in the current layout of the Convention Center. The new primary entrance is often overlooked for a below-grade entry that is lacking experientially. One can not confidently point to a single place and declare it as the “front door.”

A: The solution to this issue must orchestrate the seemingly opposite intentions of creating a new “address” or front door for the Convention Center while improving the connection to the redesigned main entrance. As the architectural solution will show, we believe that our team has found this solution.

Q: The third and somewhat related issue is the scale and feel of the roads adjacent to and approaching the Convention Center Hotel. These roads are simply about moving traffic and must become “complete streets” that provide for the equality of mode of transportation whether it is by foot, bike, car, bus, or even in some cases mass transit. They should be aesthetically designed and detailed to be pleasing and a hierarchy created to help define their role and character within the city.

A: The design team believes that while it is important to access the site, once there the street grid within and adjacent to the site should immediately take on a more pedestrian-friendly urban character, that character or experience then becomes the defining point for the start of the city. A transition and hierarchy in scale of roads allows a decompression and that sense of arrival.

In particular, one potential idea within a grander, more holistic vision for the Convention Center neighborhood, is that each of the streets takes on a distinct character within this scheme. For example, the Market Street entrance into downtown will gain in significance as the Trinity River and its frontage in Oak Cliff redevelop. As it transitions from Jefferson into its Market Street incarnation downtown, it should hit a gateway point and immediately take on an urban character. It is suggested that it should become a two-way street with the Houston Street viaduct become pedestrian only, potentially with a trolley connection to Oak Cliff long-term.

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Urban Design

The Urban Vision proposed herein is one of contrasts and compliments. The detailed architectural design solution for the Hotel is a microcosm of the theme chosen for the larger vision. The Convention Center should ultimately be the anchor of a district that bridges Downtown, the West End, and the Cedars and to do so, it must have two faces reaching outward. Similarly, the specific architecture and site planning of the Hotel should accomplish two tasks.

First, it should be iconic to take advantage of its location. It should be a highlight of the “postcard view” of the skyline over the Trinity River Corridor. Secondly, it should contrast the grandiosity of the top of the building with subtle urban fabric of a pedestrian-scale and neighborhood character.

The success of the Southwest portion of downtown Dallas is contingent upon a masterplanned vision. The vision proposed here is one of 7 phases, the development of the Convention Center Hotel is the first step.

Stage 1

It is fundamental to this plan that the hotel succeed on day 1. In order to ensure that success, it must generate excitement and be a destination. The plan accomplishes that goal by dissecting the roughly 700 foot long by 550 foot wide parcel into three more pedestrian- and urban-scaled blocks. The hotel would sit on the largest and southernmost block, as a new face for the Convention Center, and the first step in its “reaching out.”

The northern portion of the site would then be subdivided into two mixed-use blocks in a scheme that we are calling “Barcelona Blocks.” This scheme accomplishes three things. By creating two outparcels for development, it creates a source of revenue for the City.

Second, the mix of uses combined with the design of essentially a hard four corner site, on-site, terminating in a public urban plaza immediately creates a “there” there; a destination. The vision for the vitality and mix of uses is similar to the RTKL design for LA Live in Los Angeles, but appropriately designed within the existing Dallas Context.

Third, the blocks created are similar in size and scale to the blocks moving northward towards El Centro Community College. This allows the design to be transferrable, implementable, and repetitive into a coherent district which is Stage 2.

Stage 2

As the previous paragraph states, stage 2 creates a direct connection between the central plaza of Stage 1 and the green space of El Centro’s recent expansion. It extends the destination created by Stage 1 to the north creating a new neighborhood for the city of Dallas. Austin Street should be amenitized, streetscaped and extended to the parcel to take on the character of a linear plaza, directly linking the Hotel site with El Centro and portions of the West End, amplifying and expanding the destination quality of the Hotel.

The “Barcelona Blocks” infill the undeveloped parcels in each of the blocks bound by Main and Young Streets to the North and South, and Market and Lamar Streets to the West and East. This allows Lubben Plaza to feel like a space; and urban square as it is intended, with active uses facing it on each side.

While the blocks are not intended to mimic the detail of Barcelona architecture, they are intended to reference the principles within the subtlety and genius of the scale and spacing found in the repetitive blocks of Barcelona neighborhoods.

Stage 3

Stage 3 creates a coordinated streetscape for Lamar Street. Lamar is the one singular linkage between the future Convention Center District, the Historic West End, and the present day Victory. The intent is that the West End would be the beneficiary of the energy and movement created between the Convention Center and Victory and that lifeblood would ultimately play a part in rejuvenating it.

Stage 4

Stage 4 is the ultimate creation of the second parallel DART line through downtown. We are aware that the final alignment and construction has not yet been determined, it will play a part in the revitalization of the Southern portion of Downtown. Young Street seems ideal because of its dimension, distance from the original downtown line, and proximity to both the public services along Young and the underdeveloped parcels near these buildings.

Stage 5

The revitalization around a stop at City Hall Plaza and a stop in front of the Convention Center hotel would go a long way towards blending the Convention Center neighborhood with the Main Street area via the activation of the Civic District centered on City Hall.

Stage 6

Cities throughout the world are working to minimize the affect of highways on their downtowns and the civic life within. The Woodall Rogers Deck Park has already had an effect on development to its North in uptown. Stage 6 proposes to create a similar deck park over the sunken portion of RL Thornton Expressway to the South of the Convention Center. Immediately the parcels between the Convention Center and the highway become valuable for Convention Center Expansion, new office, and perhaps residential. The feasibility of this idea would require more study.

Stage 7

The RL Thornton deck park begins to create the Southern-face for the Convention Center. No longer would it be parking lots, service, and largely unsuitable land for development. The park and the buildings fronting it become the seam between downtown and the Cedars and at this point in the grand vision for Southern downtown, Dallas is a long way down the road towards being one of the world class cities.

Chutes n Ladder in Candy Land

Going for a walk.

So last week, I decided to make a leisurely stroll across the River Styx and check out the Arts District myself after all the hubbub of the grand opening had passed and I could be in it, when it actually is (sic). Urban Existentialist-style.

In general, I should provide some background. I was out there about 5 pm on Friday. Perhaps, the entire City was at happy hour, but I must tell you that I counted never more than 13 people outside on or near Flora at one time (in the area of the Meyerson, Winspear, and Wyly). Three of which appeared to be workers on a smoke break, four of whom were valet guys, there were two or three random solos curiously checking out the place (including) myself, and one tour coming out of the Wyly.

In other words, a bit dreary, although the weather didn't help (neither did any of the design work). I'm not going to rant much about the meta-issues of why there is so much FAIL built into the place, but rather the "on-the-ground" details of WTF? that I could touch, feel, and photograph whilst on site. (apologies for the Iphones crappy pics)


Out in front of the Winspear. I was always under the impression that the shading device and the siting of the building towards the back was intended to shade and frame a plaza in front. This plaza has since been carpeted with sod and bizarrely place planters(?). More on that in a bit.



There is no denying that it is a pretty slick structure, with high quality fabrication and material selection.


But, this plaza (not a plaza) is anti-urban. I don't even begin to fathom the purpose of these planters, perhaps besides the screening of the ventilation pipes from the underground heating and cooling of the building. This is hardly an appropriate design solution for what is intended to be "a vibrant, urban destination."



The lone dining/outdoor seating area (not at One Arts Plaza) has been removed from Flora and place back in a nook on the North side of the Winspear (the opposite side of where the outdoor "Artist's Square" will be located. Outdoor dining should have something to look at, the outdoor performance area would have been it...(sigh).



Another look at the ridiculously out of place native grass planting in sterile, placeless, and pointless geometric patterns, non-sequitur planting if you will. Meaning that it was zero relationship to its context. Kind of like each and every one of the building's in the Arts District.
Even the official website is designed with that urban malapropism (if I'm to keep the grammatic narrative metaphor running) in mind:


(The website header: Little toy-scaled model buildings, indiscriminantly placed near each other)

But this isn't a model, it's our city and here we have them, as individual objects, accessed by the far flung via highways, ramps, and garages, just as if one were in Plano, one in FArlington, one in DeSoto (oh, wait - South Dallas wouldn't get that kind of attention), and they have been designed and organized with as much relationship and synergy as if they had been. This does not a City make.

The buildings at this point are what they are, only a coherent and tightly drawn concept for the landscape and streetscape could hold it all together. As of now, we've got some sod and square plantings of native grass, like elbow patches on a tweed jacket.
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Warning: Coincidental Anecdote. Relatedly, I was recently touring with a potential client (and a very well-traveled one at that) and the dialogue turned to Fountainplace, the iconic green-glass tower of Downtown Dallas, as it came into view. When I suggested that it was intended to have a mirrored twin, he rightly snapped, "no. It should never have a second one," because it would dilute what is special about the first one.

(Five(!) Calatrava Bridges anyone? I know that number has dwindled considerably but not for 'want to', but for 'can do'. If we can't beat'em, we'll just build more of 'em, I suppose).
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Speaking of watering things down, that brings me to the Wyly.

First, I'll get my one compliment out of the way. The idea of the transforming stage/audience platforms is a pretty incredible one, not terribly creative, but one that is a bear to pull off. The Can Do/Should Do question is appropriate here.

As for the rest of it, ie the form and skin, I'm not sure how anybody can possibly like it unless you happen to be starchitectural sycophant, knowing no better or perhaps a masochist that enjoys being laughed out by outside intelligentsia (or maybe even that we are all merely hypnotized by the existential, decontrunctivist gobblety-gook spewed at the presentations, "you descend down the plaza to disorient the audience, and prepare them for what is to come.")


And here we have that plaza. Disorienting only to the conception (or my misconception as Prince-Ramus would probably have me believe) of what a plaza actually is.

"Plaza." For all intents and purposes, language is a symbol. Like the formation of religion, sciences, statistics, etc. it was a tool for explanation. In the wrong hands however, all of these tools (in this case, words) can be twisted, and an audience's understanding of those words and conception of the ideas behind them are used against the audience at the will of the manipulator.

Here, plaza = not a plaza, but some sporadically placed small trees on a ramp lined by barren concrete retaining walls. At this point, I think most words in urban planning have been compromised and ultimately mean nothing more than, "shutup, lemme do what I want. And quite frankly, I don't give a damn about you or your city, beyond using you to express my engrained ideology through objects."


The front door on Ross. More grass. As if it were back in its rightful home of Plano, or FArlington, or you get my point.

Place for people, this ain't. No one will be taking prideful ownership of it. But, rather a lame museum exhibition worthy of visiting once for the shock value as if a Ripley's Freak Show were in town.

Constructing an Innovation District

In Barcelona, 22@Barcelona, as covered on Citiwire by the indispensable Neil Pearce. And here is an excellent presentation covering the intellectual exercise that brought it into fruition:

22@Barcelona 2009 English

View more presentations from Ricard Garriga.

Monday Links

A lot of stuff to get thru, so right to it. First, some Dallas content:

DMN editorial: Urgent blitz Needed for Southwest Center Mall:

But so far, no long-term plan has emerged. No public investment has been made. No vision for the property has been sketched.

The Urban Land Institute wisely suggested creating a tax-increment-financing district to spur redevelopment and offered ideas for transforming the mall into a mixed-use village that would draw people to shop, eat, work and live.

A couple of problems here. First, is the fact that we're dealing with a dead mall. There are three variant directions to go with Dead Malls: 1) Infill the surface parking lots with garages and density while sparing/renovating the mall in roughly its current form. 2) Break down parts of the mall to create an outdoor complement to the indoor component, or 3) scrape it entirely and reposition/reenvision what the site should be within its larger context.

I'm afraid the ULI went with the most generic solution possible; one that I don't believe is a reality given its location (not so much being in South Dallas, as being disconnected from real transit opportunities). Conventional planner's reflexive answer for all sites: "Mixed-Use!"

A better solution would be one that follows a larger vision and gives the site a purpose. If we were real about transforming our City into a world class City, we would be systematically removing all the freeways entering the City from the outer 635/20 loop and converting them to more location specific and redevelopment friendly boulevards.


This location at 20 and 67, with an airport and freight rail w/in a mile, would be at the ideal spot for a distribution center for inter-metro shipping for intra-DFW/Dallas delivery with 67 inside of the loop being repositioned as a context-sensitive "complete street."

The fundamental problem w/ highways within Cities is that they are like drain pipes that gather rain from a storm into a single point and release all of that water into streams that can't handle it, eroding the ecosystem. Freeways (for macro-connections) entering Cities (micro-destinations) unloads too many cars at single exits, thus "eroding" the urban fabric.
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Dallas fashion at the Sartorialist. Sadly, compare the cities providing the backdrops.
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Similar look in the mirror provided by others, first a tweet from Urbanophile:

"Dallas is the epicenter of the generic," quoting Rem Koolhaas. Then, his (Aaron Renn) take on Dallas from a 2007 visit:

Given the size and affluence of the metro area, and the good things I know from talking to others that it has, I was very surprised to see the poor face it presents to people attending conventions there. This is the only time many people will ever see the city. It’s the first and last impression many folks will ever have of Dallas.

On the plus side, the road geek in me loves the freeways in Texas. They’ve got very wide highways and impressive interchanges. As I flew under a four level stack heading back to the airport, it really drove home to me how unambitious the plans of INDOT and other midwestern transportation agencies are. They’d be well served to hire some people from Texas who have actual experience in big city road building to design and run their major urban projects.

No offense to this dude, but jumpin jeezus on a dino, if he doesn't get the direct correlation b/w highways and "cities that suck" then anybody that pays for his consultation is doing themselves a disservice. I expand in a tweet, as limited by 140 characters:

Methinks baby boomers have inherent bias to freeways bc growing up in 50s 60s highways were billed w all things progress

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Excellent article by Richard Florida at What Matters on innovation and density that parallels many points I've made in the past:

There is a deeper, more fundamental reason, rooted in economics. Increasingly, the most talented and ambitious people need to live in the means metros in order to realize their full economic value. The physical proximity of talented, highly educated people has a powerful effect on innovation and economic growth. Places that bring together diverse talent accelerate the local rate of economic evolution. When large numbers of entrepreneurs, financiers, engineers, designers, and other smart, creative people are constantly bumping into one another inside and outside of work, business ideas are formed, sharpened, executed, and—if successful—expanded. The more smart people, and the denser the connections between them, the faster it all goes. It is the multiplier effect of the clustering force at work.

Point, distilled to 120 proof: Innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum.
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Other brief links:

Cohousing catching on in the PacNW. I discuss some ideas about high/mid-rise cohousing here.

CNET on the prob of plug-in cars. Answer: 1) they still take energy AND 2) they still require extensive infrastructure that rips apart economic and social bonds. Any attempts at maintaining a car industry at its current bloat is a waste of time and money. Worthless Endeavor.

NYT on the rise in going CarFree.

Vancouver plans on being greenest city by 2020. What happens when we no longer have catchy dates to peg our plans to like 20/20?

Free Beer Friday Happy Hour

First person to get it right here in the comments then find me at Liar's Den, gets a beer on the CarFree Guy.

Ur Doin It Wrongz

I appreciate the attempt. I do. There is nothing wrong with bricking up some streets (in this case Elm), but there is the issue of spending money but not changing what is fundamentally wrong with Elm Street in the first place. More lipstick on a pig, I suppose.

But the point of the photograph is to show the 1' wide curb at the nexus of the two crosswalks. To keep people from walking diagonally, I'm sure. Apparently, we have a problem with that in Dallas and if we could only just walk diagonally across this intersection, we could get to the bar that much sooner. But, DRAT! if this curb directing us down the yellow brick road weren't in the way.

I could ignore both crosswalk paving pattern, little blinky white walk-signal man, and the on-rushing traffic of one-way streets driving entirely too fast through a downtown environment, if it weren't for you little curb, tripping hazard, appearance: ridiculous getting in my way.

Thirsty Thursday Links

Esta noche, I'll be riding a bicycle to happy town on Fat Tires, if ya catch my drift, replete with baseball cards in the spoke, penant flapping in the breaze and an a-wooooo-ga horn to warn of impending disaster.

Onto the news:

David Brussat, Architectural Critic for the Providence, RI Journal, discusses the public's preference in architecture without patronizing, just polling:

Last May, Le Figaro asked Parisians which buildings they’d like to have demolished. Tops with 33.4 percent was the Montparnasse Tower (1972), the only tall slab in central Paris; next was the Beaugrenelle Towers, a set of modernist skyscrapers outside Paris, with 31.4 percent; third (and to me the most gratifying), 22.7 percent wanted to raze the Centre Pompidou. Parisians clearly have good taste.

CarFree In Big D guy is stylistically agnostic. He just hates obnoxia and any attempts to "disorient" the public (ahem, burp, excuse me), so they can "get" your masterpiece or whatever the hell you call your self-indulgence. Styles are fleeting, just as Classicism could define any hundreds of different "phenotypes," to the point that any dialogue is ultimately meaningless. As long as buildings are contributive to the public realm, I could give a shit.

From the article:


For example, 1, 2, and 3, are all perfectly acceptable (the narrow sidewalks not withstanding). 4 deserves a full body massage by the wrecking ball wreaking havoc to the parking garage outside of my building. "New" does not always mean good and "can" doesn't mean you "should."

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Green Metropolis is reviewed by hippies, and I mean that pejoratively in the Eric Cartman sense, not the tone my girlfriend uses when she calls me a hippy. I hope. And not the good kind that might point out some of the circular arguments made throughout the book when it came to, "well, this would keep traffic out, so it makes driving more palatable, so it would then induce more driving, and then there would be traffic, but not the kind that produces CO2, but maybe the moving kind, or not..." What? The rest of it is worth the read, though.

But, actually the stupid kind of hippy, that really is just bubbling over with anger that their coonskin cap and moccasin fantasies are just that:

For one, New Yorkers generate a lot of garbage -- some of which is shipped as far as 300 miles away (although Owen doesn't figure this into his calculations of New Yorkers' carbon footprints, nor does he even mention garbage).

Maybe because there are 15 million people producing that waste, which by the way has nothing to do with the people inherently being New Yorkers or urbanites (because suburbanites produce more waste), but rather the packaging and material composition of American commerce. Recycling has the same problem, but people like to tout it as being "green" even though the process is incredibly dirty and the materials to be recycled are constantly in a state of devolution.

Portland saved its natural and agrarian surroundings by urbanizing. The "call" towards nature means if everyone follows, which they have, nature disappears under surface parking lots, drive-thrus, and the metaphorical big gulp of the "American Dream." More bullshit, like your plastic picket fence.

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Going "local" is the new "going green" for the corporate world. Actually, this is more important and more likely to have a positive impact if it is followed through (if it's not more corporate bullshit, which marketing typically is, and why Millennials distrust you), meaning real changes to supply chains, transport, source material and locations, and the like:

This new variation on corporate greenwashing—localwashing—is, like the buy-local movement itself, most advanced in the context of food. Hellmann’s, the mayonnaise brand owned by the processed-food giant Unilever, is test-driving a new “Eat Real, Eat Local” initiative in Canada. Frito-Lay’s television commercials use farmers as pitchmen to position the company’s potato chips as local food, while the poultry giant Foster Farms is labeling its packages of chicken “locally grown.”

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City of Odense, Denmark sets in its masterplan a goal of carbon-neutrality by 2025. Ha! Don't those peasants know their King is hoodwinking them? Oh, it's a freely elected republic now? Don't those commies know it's bad for business? Oh, Denmark is a capitalist country with the most free and fairest marketplace? Shit. I'm out of excuses. DEY TOOK AR JOBBBSSSS! Stupid, well-educated Danes.

He's Apparently Electrified. Is He Magnetic?

I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about how many principles of the natural sciences apply to urban studies and settlement patterns, particularly spurred on by the article Math of Cities. The obvious correlations that have been made already are biology (the Transect), Sociology (anything William Whyte related), Psychology (Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs), Ecology (natural preservation via density), etc.

The introduction of Math on a level beyond the "dismal science", however got me thinking about the idea of Fractals, which are infinitely complex yet typically defined by very simple rules. For example, water wants to find its own level, yet the manner in which it does provides us with stunning waterfalls, lakes, rivers, puddles that have soaked the bottom three inches of my pant legs, yada yada.

I always liked my old Physics classes and have been captivated by the boundless applications of the principles of attraction and repulsion.


Attractive public space vs. Repellent public space as personified by my models here.

Without getting into the fine-grained detail of it all, in sum I've discovered that all places (streets, parks, plazas, cities (macro), or even businesses (good food, good company to work for, etc) are either attractors or repellents. They are magnetic. Of course, there are always barriers to magnetism such as distance, access or lack thereof, awareness, etc. A street for example, can either be a barrier (too wide, traffic to fast moving, etc.) or a conduit (something that facilitates access) or a seam, becoming an attractor itself (many of the great streets of the world could be defined in this manner).

This is my point about sociopetal and sociofugal. All places and all details within those places contribute in some degree to whether a place attracts people or repels them. Agglomerate enough of a certain "polarity" in a specific location and the magnetic pull is multiplied. Writ large, these become the great cities of the world.

This background brings me back to my most recent walk through AT&T's plaza and my last post about Golden Boy extending the success of Main Street as an attractor.

If I was to have one criticism of AT&T and the plaza improvements, I would have put Golden Boy outside in the center planter, at its most prominent point. Frankly, it's a pretty cool and unique statue. AT&T occupies all of the buildings surrounding the plaza, so why not use it to tie all the pieces together.

Yes, I'm saying it again. Who's got two thumbs up and is a broken record? This guy.
/remembering his Frederick Douglass, "Agitate, agitate, agitate."


**side note. Kudos to AT&T for showing the Red River Rivalry on their new LED boards in the plaza. I was in the plaza pre-game and only noticed a few people who had lugged out fold out chairs to watch the game. Two things: I don't believe this was advertised in any way. Those that found out, most likely just heard the game from the loud speakers resinating throughout downtown. Second, there needed to be some concessions. Hopefully, my theory that this plaza will be an asset to the Main Street area will prove right and this will become a more successful plaza then Victory (other AT&T plaza), as it is a convergence point rather then at the end of a virtual cul-de-sac (Victory).


Golden Boy's previous home. Sad, isn't it. He's so lonely. And jumpin' jeezus is that a hideous building. See, architecture can be sociofugal as well.

Now, he's only available during "regular business hours" but who cares about it him if he's indoors? Why take him out of the suburbs, bring him into the City (for which AT&T is admittedly doing boatloads for), and then lock him up? He's obviously weather-proof and they have twenty-four hour security in and around the plaza to protect him (not to mention the increased activity he would generate would help protect him as well). If he was outside once, he can be outside again.



If he was outside in the middle of this plaza, he would become an instant attraction for what is otherwise mostly just a well-landscaped and fountained cut-through. People would take pictures of him, they would sit around him and have lunch, etc. Furthermore, he would show how committed AT&T is to the City and how intricately tied together in mutual vision the two entities are, while tying together their own campus as its central feature.


See, look. He brightens up the plaza already!!!

Lastly, and this gets to the point of attraction as well, is that he would terminate Akard St. from the South. Providing a dramatic, visual terminus and make a nod towards South Dallas as well as all of that vacant land near City Hall and the Convention Center (too great big repellents themselves - although they don't have to be) that "you are part of the city too." It's just a shame we're asking a private enterprise to do the City's work.

Privatized urban planning. Hooray!

Best View in the City?

The views from downtown are overrated. All you see is highways and flat, punctuated intermittently by high-rises at the various interchanges of North Dallas. At least this way, we've got some foreground (McKinney Ave - Uptown's Main Street), middle ground (State Thomas - fully built out after being bombed out via office speculation in the '80s), and background (Downtown).

Taken from a friend's balcony during the Red River Rivalry. In the full panorama (via auto-stitch - heart you Iphone), you can see the scoreboard during the game.

Gracias, Mi Amigos

Be sure to make you daily trip over to Streetsblog for your daily info fix on issues related to the public realm. Their info comes at you raw and straight. Mainlined, just as I like it. No elaborate contraptions for intellectual inhalation, necessary.

Oh, and they picked up my Jaywalking Post to put on their page. Daily traffic is already up over 800% from normal.

Livability Indicator #15 - Jaywalking

Making my way thru Green Metropolis, I've realized two things. The first is that the author David Owen has reached similar conclusions as to some of my previous Livability Indicators, from a similar freakanomics "you wouldn't expect it" sort of way. The other is ones that I've been planning on writing for sometime have also been covered in his book. Boohoo for me and my imagined originality.

So, I'll let him take the start, and I'll add from my own experience:

New Yorkers don't necessarily appreciate the real reasons that walking is such an important element of their daily life. In the late 1990s, Rudolph Giuliani, then the mayor, undertook a campaign to eradicate jaywalking - a major issue for him. Pedestrian barriers were erected near a number of midtown corners, stoplights and pedestrian crosswalks were shifted away from some intersections, and the police were instructed to issue summonses to pedestrians who crossed streets mid-block or against a light. The policy was almost universally ignored, by cops as well as pedestrians, and it was widely ridiculed.

The policy was also thoroughly misguided. In Manhattan, creative jaywalking is an environmental positive, because it makes traveling on foot easier: it enables pedestrians to maintain their forward progress when traffic lights are against them, and to gain small navigational advantages by weaving between cars on clogged side streets - and it also keeps drivers on their guard, forcing them to slow down.

This is a key point in general. Make drivers worry about dinging their car or having to spray annoying pedestrian brain matter off the grill of their hummer will make them slow down a bit. When they are channelized and the driver can zone out b/c of engineering for dumb drivers rather than forcing us to be smart and aware is when accidents actually DO happen, in the places where street space is designed for peds/cars to have the least amount of interaction.

The real purpose of anti-jaywalking laws is not to protect pedestrians but to make life easier for drivers. That's why anti-jaywalking rules are enforced (and observed) in Los Angeles, where the cars are entirely in charge.

On what planet does it make any sense whatsoever to put in place policies in order to protect a 4,000 lb piece of death-wheeling machinery vs. a human armed with nothing but a pair of tennis shoes, and perhaps a leashed puppy or two?

Rather than banning jaywalking, cities should take steps to enhance and enforce the rights of pedestrians, and to impede cars in areas where traveling on foot is feasible. (One useful step would be to follow New York City's good example and make it illegal for drivers to turn right on red lights).

Have you ever noticed how much safer and more polite Dallas drivers are when traffic lights are out, operating as blinking reds and the drivers are left to their own devices, responsible for their own safety. Interesting how they begin to cooperate with other drivers, no? Well, I have noticed.

Similarly, four-way stops are drastically much safer than any other form of regulated intersection. One reason is b/c of reduced speed in areas where stop signs are utilized rather than signals. The other primary contributive factor, is that (although not necessary due to literally written protocol for who goes first at 4-way stops) there is a necessary communication to some extent between the drivers: eye contact, a slow roll to indicate that "I'm moving. Hold back buddy," maybe even a honk or two...or this.

That communication, whether verbal or nonverbal, makes something infinitely more intelligent because there are now feedback loops.

Tightly controlling pedestrians with a view to improving the flow of car traffic just results in more and faster driving, and that makes life even harder and more dangerous for people on foot or on bikes.

Not to mention it allows drivers to tune out by funneling them virtually (and sometimes literally) into cattle chutes.

In fact, studies have shown that pedestrians are safer in urban areas where jaywalking is common than they are in urban areas where it is forbidden.

Essentially, it's creating some measure of chaos in the streets. Ewwwww, engineers hate chaos. Their theocratic formulas can't dictate, their metrics can't measure. Can. Not. Compute. But, you can via safety statistics, measures of happiness, quality of place and real estate development on the street. For example - when the Champs Elysees went all travel lanes, all of the businesses died. When returned to parallel slip lanes w/ parking and wide sidewalks, it has become some of the most valuable floor space in the world.

To some extent, it is pushing the idea behind the Woonerf, or shared living space. The name comes from the fact that this is more residential in nature, the street as front yard for the residents, where children can play safely in the middle of the street w/ mother's watchful eye peering out the kitchen window. And they can, because the business (visually) of the street, the narrowness of the travel lanes, the lack of definition of the travel lanes (ie there are no 12' wide rights-of-way dictating direction), slows traffic. In sum, it's a free for all. See some pictures here (bottom of the post).

But, that is strictly for less busy streets, what about for the traffic flow worthy of New York streets? Rome has busy streets, with absolutely batshit insane cab drivers. Having lived there long enough to emerse one's self into the culture at some level deeper than tourist, you find out funny idiosyncracies only possible thru thousands of years of evolved urbanism.

One such custom is that it is commonly accepted that if a car were to strike and injure a pedestrian in Italy, the driver is at fault no matter the circumstance and fully responsible for all care necessary. Whether this is real or imaginary (it isn't written anywhere), it is clearly taken root as an effective deterrent. No matter the road, cars will stop for you if you start crossing the road. Be it at a crosswalk without the proper signalled permission or at mid-block.

Corso Vittorio Emanuelle is the actual road, where I would often test the custom, and do the proverbial test of trust: falling blindfolded and seeing if the Roman Customs would catch me in a shielded coccoon of safe pedestrian passage. Why? Well, b/c I crossed it every day and it was probably the busiest road I saw the majority of my days.


Corso Vittorio Emanuele - This road feels so much smaller, revisiting in Google Earth. Seven years in Texas plays tricks on perception and memory, I suppose.

What's the moral of this story? Power to the people, that's what...and away from the honking machines and you'll see positive returns for your city by way of renewed vitality, caramelized and cooked to a tender medium rare with a side dish of nicely seasoned safety.

End of Weekend Sausage Links

NYC is thinking about Light Rail. Something it really doesn't have yet.

StLou is rolling out a "sustainable street" prototype that does all the right things and gets funded by the stimulus for doing so:

The new design reduces four traffic lanes to three, changes the timing of traffic lights, adds curb “bulb-outs” to reduce the amount of yardage pedestrians need to cross from 56 to 40 feet, and increases lighting and landscaping. About $2.7 million in federal stimulus funds have been awarded for the work.

“The goal is to have 50 percent of the new sections porous surfacing or plantings,” Culbertson said. “If we do that, then the majority of the water that falls will actually percolate into the ground.” St. Louis has a combined sewage-stormwater system, which can be overwhelmed during downpours. The landscaping and permeable pavements are seen as key to improved drainage. New trees will get bigger rootbeds to soak up more water. Rain gardens will be built into the sidewalks. Downspouts will empty into landscaped areas.

CNU has approved LEED-ND. I need to see how the project or two I worked on in the pilot phase faired.

NYT is burning up the frequent flyer miles reviewing Dallas's latest and greatest, this time, what lelse? The Arts District. On the Raccoon Trap:

"The walls and ceiling of an upper-level terrace are covered in artificial turf, a superficial flourish that is out of character with the rest of the design." And: "The building's unevenly striated aluminum surface, meanwhile, feels dull and its facades surprisingly tame."

Denver has doubled its transit ridership:

Instead, Blueprint Denver took the radical tact of not projecting how many vehicles would be needed to get people around the growing city, but instead projected the number of "person trips": driving, transit, walking and riding bikes.

Another strategy was the Living Streets program, created by the public works department in collaboration with a range of civic and commercial organizations, including Kaiser Permanente. "The idea was that roads are for cars: streets are for people," said Park

I'll give credit where it's due, the same group did Denver's plan as is doing Downtown Dallas's plan even though they weren't ranked first after any of the rounds of interviews.

Lastly, an op-blog(?) at DMN, can Dallas duplicate Zurich?

It really is exciting to see the transformation of the Arts District with the new opera house and new performing arts center. But sooner or later, the newness will wear off. When it does, I'm worried that we'll be left with knock-your-socks-off Arts District that is detached from the rest of downtown. Which is why we have to get busy and support efforts to get streetcars up and running in downtown Dallas.

Livability Indicator #14 - Homeless

"May society be judged by how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable."



Well sort of. Perhaps, it might be better stated, as "homeless" by choice rather than by force. I've been contemplating this post for some time but couldnt find the right tone until it was inspired by a quote at Dallas Progress's downtown post:

A good friend of mine in real estate made an interesting statement about the homeless, which was "if you had more people downtown, you wouldn't notice the homeless because they would blend in with everyone else." When you compare Dallas to other cities, there are not a lot of homeless people. I have seen cities with a much higher population of homeless revitalize their downtown. What city lets 10-15 people walking around during the day asking for change affect what is going to happen in a given part of town? See how much sense that makes? The people that don't travel downtown because of the homeless folks probably will never come downtown anyway.

It is very true. Of all the places that I've lived in, studied in, or spent any significant amount of time, every single one still had homeless, except for one - the suburbs of my upbringing. However, the fundamental problem with that is when you talk to someone who has bought a house in PHX, or DFW, or ATL in the nether reaches of the metropolitan area replete with brand new shiny roads (sometimes with stars on them, high five!), these people will tell you they love their homes, their two car garage, their yard, their 2.5 baths, then you ask them what they don't like? Well, there is nothing to do. Or, what they spend most of their time doing? Watching TV.

These are people who have, for the most part, unwittingly withdrawn from society. How is this any different than the homeless who have done similarly either consciously or have been thrown out for any number of reasons and are castigated, ridiculed, or spit upon?

They're effectively saying, "I'm taking my ball and i'm going home. I don't want to deal with all the messiness and realities of cities and humanity itself." All take but no give. One could respond, "well, if cities are so dreadful, why would I want to live there?" Or, "that is why people left cities in the first place." The problem is that cities offer the only opportunity for real wealth creation, economic development, AND staving off of potential environmental catastrophe. Cities are the greatest engine of wealth generation ever devised in human history by the agglomeration of collective human capacity.

Instead, I would like to order one super highway to deliver me to the office twenty miles away. Yes, I would like a side of entertainment district and a stadium on top, where I can go once a year. Yes, I want a new arts district. More on that later, but back to the original quote.

The most powerful word from the oft-attributed quote at the top is "its" b/c whether we like it or not, they belong to us, in the extended family that is our city, that are our neighbors. We're all in this thing together. Investing in people is the greatest investment there is (with the greatest return)...or else we end up spending on ways to warehouse people in prisons or shelters.

In my personal experience around town as a downtown Dallas resident for over 18 months, never have I had anyone be anything but polite to the point of deference - although I have heard stories to the contrary. This, of course, is not surprising given the ever increasing amount of people who are being put on the streets or even entered life without opportunity or the ability to pursue happiness, as Jefferson decreed. I shudder to think as more and more get backed into a the corner of survival. Do they react like the animals we are? Does the veil of culture and civilization that has failed them (and keeps our animalistic heart at bay) get dropped for tools of violence and striking back?) Or are they suitably conditioned enough to accept their fate like puppies on electrified flooring?

Personally, I'm almost ashamed to admit that I very rarely give out anything to those that ask. One, because I rarely carry change or small bills. Two, b/c its illegal (although illegality rarely has anything to do with behavior). But lastly and most notably, b/c I can't offer them shelter, nor treatment, nor training or whatever else is needed to get them on their feet, perhaps justifying in my own mind that it's a lost generation that society has cast down its corporate toilet and that I'm better suited to build a city more capable of paying for itself, building wealth, and being more just. Offering the ability to pursue happiness to its newest and youngest members.

As for those already on the street, collectively however we can afford to do so and there are people who possess the skills capable of doing so. This was the original point of congregating together in packs, forming the original cities; caring for the most basic of human needs: common necessities such as food, protection, shelter, and safety. If we can't even support the most basic of human needs, what are we doing spending a billion dollars on cultural components, at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs?

In much of scandinavia (thinking mostly of Sweden and Denmark) the WORST problem their societies face is people taking advantage of the free education and staying in school too long. They too have homeless. Some are refugees from the middle east, others are squatters who chose to do so, b/c you know what, a society that provided free healthcare and education just wasn't for them. They willingly "opted out" choosing instead to make a life at the edges of the economy.

Take the hippy commune area Christiania, in Copenhagen, for example. People began camping out and set up essentially a squatters village. It's not a place I would like to spend more than ten minutes in again ever in my life, but they successfully defended what is now their home from eviction in favor of real estate development. It's essentially an "opt out" area and I'm ok with that.

The point is that homeless are everywhere and the issue comes down to that of fear. We certainly can't be fearful of those that are appropriately described as the weakest in our society. In actuality, what we are fearful of is directly addressing our societies inner problems; confronting the reality that our policies driven by whatever ideology are failing us. We'd prefer to spout off some spoon-fed dogma, because it's easier that way. Our conscience is clear when we redirect the blame.

A few weeks ago, I personified Dallas as a plastic surgerized divorcee. I'm starting to think that a better description might be that of Buffalo Bill...no, not the buffalo bill of Dallas's fantasized cowboy mythology, but the Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs; a thoroughly corrupted individual that wants to dress himself in a literal epidermal veneer in order to feel 'pretty'.

So all of this brings me to the grand opening of the Arts District here in Downtown Dallas put on to much fanfare. And certainly it was quite the occasion, 30,000 people, fireworks, tours of the grand performing arts halls. Jewels each of them no doubt, of which Norman Foster has said about his own gem-shaped icon (of which I do think is a gorgeous individual building),

"This(winspear opera house) project is about the creation of a building that offers a truly democratic experience of opera for the 21st century,"

Is that so? Something bestowed by the kings of the city upon a people that turned down the bond package for the same project in an open election to be entirely privately financed? A gift to the people. Feels more like a gold plated, pre-reformation catholic church. Call me old fashioned, but I'd like to think that I would be able to come up with at least one hundred ways of better spending the hundreds upon hundred of millions of dollars that went into this rather hollow concoction.

Maybe with goals like, building wealth from the ground up or restoring the middle class, rather than one dependent upon the gifts of the gods - a middle class is democratic. Norman, generally admire your work, but i wonder if working in a singular crowd for so long has distorted your notion of what democratic is. Patronizing paternalism isn't it, but providing opportunity is. Maybe it takes Thomas Jefferson to say it:

"That liberty [is pure] which is to go to all, and not to the few or the rich alone."

To my last breath I will argue that the Wyly is the uglier of the two buildings when accepted as a building of the cityscape, but perhaps it's prison cell like configuration is more fitting for the rats running in place, hoping to one day be that multi-billionaire on-stage cutting a ribbon. The unending nihilism of the twin-architects (who now despise each other, btw - perhaps their belief in themselves in fact trumps their nihilism?) doesn't make for attractive buildings, but it does make for the kind of deep objectivity necessary for critical analysis of its audience. In that way, the Wyly actually is a work of art.

Homeless, public school kids, to whom it may concern, et al. I have a message for you. "It puts the lotion in the basket or else it gets the hose again."