The Real Experts on Global Warming

The funniest statement I have heard about global warming - or maybe it is the scariest statement - was made by Senator Kit Bond during today's hearing about the Kerry-Boxer bill. Bond opposes action because:

“None of the farmers I have talked to in Missouri have expressed concerns about human-caused global climate change.”

Forget what all the climate scientists say. If you want to know whether global warming is a problem, ask a farmer in Missouri.

Sen and Stiglitz on Choosing Growth or Leisure

Two of the worlds most respected economists, Nobel Laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, are heading a French government commission on improving measurement of economic well-being. Among their many criticisms of the Gross Domestic Product as a measurement, they say the following in their overview document:

"Surely, if one society chooses to limit its consumption of material goods, enjoying more leisure, including time devoted to culture, the arts, and community engagement, it should not be counted against it. Citizens in such a society might be far happier than in one which works longer hours, spending less time both with the family and in the community. Citizens in the hardworking society complain that, while they are working hard for the family, they have no time left for the family. Yet, our conventional measures would attribute better economic performance to the harder- working and unhappier society: both incomes and growth would be higher."

http://www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr/documents/overview-eng.pdf

The Ultimate Freeway Interchange

Here is a prediction of what the world will look like if we continue to promote automobile dependence.


[Art Credit: hock / behance network. Used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND-3.0 license. ]

Eisenhower Was Shocked By Urban Freeways

President Eisenhower is usually blamed for slicing up American cities by promoting the Interstate Highway System. In fact, he did not know the the highways would go into cities and was shocked when he saw that they did:

"After the interstate-building program was well under way, the president also awoke to unexpected realities of the plan he had pushed. On a summer day in 1959, Eisenhower's limousine was on its way to Camp David, Maryland, when the president noticed a huge earthen gash extending through the northwest section of the city. Asking the reason for this massive intrusion of bulldozers he learned from an aide that this was his interstate highway system.

"Eisenhower recoiled in horror. His interstate concept, borrowed from the German model, had been to go around cities, not through them. Amazingly, he had been unaware during the lengthy congressional donnybrook that the only way the interstates could become a reality in this increasingly urban nation was to promise cities enough money to eviscerate themselves.

"The president immediately enlisted Bragdon and his staff to figure out how to stop the paving over of large sections of American cities. But the BPR (Bureau of Public Roads) dug in its heels at every turn. Nearing the end of his term, Eisenhower concluded that his hands were "virtually tied," and he reluctantly gave up, but not without reflecting on the wastefulness of thousands of motorists 'driving into the central area and taking all the space required to park the cars.' In a few years his comments would prove prophetic."

From Stephen B. Goddard, Getting There: The Epic Struggle Between Road and Rail in the American Century
Goddard gets the information from Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower the President, p. 587 and from Gary Schwarz, "Urban Freeways," Southern California Law Review, March, 1976.

Urban Fabric and Human Nature

An earlier post included a Photoshopped picture showing that you can have attractive urban design, even with sterile modernist architecture, if you have a varied, consistent urban fabric, with fabric buildings that have similar height, footprint and massing but that differ in detail.

As different as the individual buildings are, this picture of a modern city is slightly reminiscent of a vernacular Mediterranean town. Here, too, buildings are similar in overall massing but different in detail. This is necessarily the way that traditional vernacular urbanism was built. There were only a few available materials and there was a local tradition of how to build, but each family built its own house, so there was individual variation within general consistency of design.

Settlements among the earliest humans who built shelters must have been similar. Our earliest human ancestors were nomadic, and family groups hunted and gathered individually, so they had a large area of land to support themselves. But the entire tribe came together periodically so children could marry outside of their families, because a minimum of 3000 people is needed to create enough genetic diversity to avoid inbreeding and genetic disease. The sort of temporary settlements that people built when tribes came together must have had this combination of individual variation with general consistency, because each family built its own shelter but all used the same materials and the same tradition of how to build, like the people who built the traditional Mediterranean town.

Evolutionary psychology provides an obvious reason for why people find urban fabric attractive: During the period of evolutionary adaptation, if people were attracted to the temporary settlements that had the genetic diversity to allow mating, they had a better chance of finding mates and producing healthy children. Thus, evolution hard-wired us genetically to like settlements whose buildings have individual variation within general consistency.

This sort of urban fabric remained common during most of human history, in traditional cities and villages and into the twentieth century. One of my favorite examples is the upper west side of Manhattan, which has three types of fabric buildings: On Riverside Drive and West End Ave., there are 12 to 14-story apartment buildings; on Broadway, there are 12 to 14 story apartment buildings with shopping on the first floor; and on the cross streets, there are 5-story row houses. In each case, the fabric buildings have similar heights, footprints, and orientation to the adjoining sidewalk, but they are different in detailing, and the buildings were obviously designed and build individually. The apartment buildings date from the first decade of the twentieth century, and the row houses are left over from the nineteenth century.

During the twentieth century, though, we lost this timeless way of building (as Christopher Alexander calls it), for two reasons. First, larger scale development let us create mass-produced settlements in the style of Levittown, where each building is identical with surrounding buildings, with no individuality at all. Second, new technologies let us create modernist buildings that broke completely with the surrounding context, with no consistency at all.

The New Urbanists have shown that it is possible to avoid both these errors by using form-based codes, which create an urban fabric with the same combination of individuality and general consistency that we find in traditional cities and towns.

The most famous examples are walkable suburbs such as Andres Duany's Seaside, only because there have been more opportunities to develop new suburbs than to develop other types of neighborhoods. But Duany's Transect makes it clear that the same principles apply to neighborhoods at all densities, from small rural towns to dense cities.

Consistent but varied urban fabric is not the only thing needed to create attractive cities. The typical strip mall is an obvious example: the McDonalds, Burger King, and KFC all have buildings that differ in detail but have similar size, are located similarly on their lots, and are surrounded by similar parking lots, and the strip is ugly despite this varied, consistent fabric.

Though it is not sufficient in itself, urban fabric is one necessary element of attractive cities. If you think about your favorite urban places, you will probably find that virtually all of them have a this varied but consistent fabric, sometimes with major public buildings that stand out from the fabric buildings.

Some people will disagree, because they have been indoctrinated in modernist architecture and urbanism. But ordinary people show their preference when they flock to Europe as tourists so they can sit in sidewalk cafes and enjoy the traditional urban fabric.

Highrises and Urban Fabric

The opening of the Cathedral of Light near Oakland, California's Lake Merrit provides a perfect illustration of how highrises affect the urban fabric.

The first picture shows how the cathedral and nearby buildings actually look.


The second (Photoshopped) picture shows how they would look if there had been a height limit that stopped highrises and created a consistent urban fabric.


The second picture is particularly compelling because the architecture is so bad: the individual fabric buildings are modernist glass and concrete boxes with all the visual interest of a blank piece of graph paper.

But the urban design is fairly good despite the bad architecture. The facades of the individual fabric buildings are repetitive and monotonous, but the ensemble has variation of detail and placement with generally similar massing, which makes for good urban design. Because the fabric buildings have this consistency, the Cathedral stands out from the urban fabric, so it is clear at a glance that it is an important public building.

By contrast, in the first picture, the highrise overwhelms all the other buildings. If you want good urban design, you should not let the skyline be dominated by a fabric building like this - an office buildings or apartment building whose goal is to provide square footage for a repeated function.

The point here is not what the height limit should be. The point is that the height limit for fabric buildings should be consistent, allowing for different designs with generally similar massing. In Vermont towns, the fabric buildings are two-story houses and three-story commercial buildings, and the church steeple rises above the fabric. In traditional European cities, the fabric buildings were five or six stories, and the cathedral rises above the fabric. And in the second picture above, the fabric buildings are ten or twelve stories, and it still works fairly well as urban design, despite the ugly architecture.

Hope In Times Square

As this picture shows, the fact that New York has removed cars from Broadway in Times Square should give us hope.

From Smart Growth to Smart Shrinkage

Some smart-growth advocates are rethinking their principles after hearing that Flint, Michigan, plans to deal with its declining population by moving people from its sparsely populated neighborhoods to its more successful neighborhoods, and then restoring the abandoned neighborhoods as open space.

Smart growth has always been based on the idea that we need to accommodate population growth with minimum environmental impact by building denser, more walkable neighborhoods around the transit stops of existing cities.

But world population will peak and begin decline in a few decades. All over the world, people are moving to cities and having fewer children. The fertility rate is already below the replacement rate in the developed nations, and it is dropping rapidly in the developing nations. Because of these demographic changes, the United Nations projects that world population will grow about one-third beyond its current level, will peak in the 2050s, and then will begin a long decline.

Declining American cities, such as Flint, are early signs of a trend that will spread around the world as population growth slows. Some urban planners are already talking about how to take advantage of future population decline. For example, the Shrinking City Institute at Kent State University in Ohio says it wants to:

“explore the idea of planned shrinkage as an alternative to the quest for continuous growth. This alternative model could include the demolition or dismantling of under-utilized housing and other building stock … and downsizing of municipal infrastructure to correspond to declining population. … opportunities may arise for restoring native landscape ecologies …. Planned shrinkage can identify opportunities to establish lively and attractive development clusters … while improving air and water quality, enhancing wildlife habitat, and establishing exciting new recreation opportunities.”

The same principles of “smart growth” apply whether population is growing or shrinking. To reduce our ecological footprint, we need to build walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods that are denser than conventional suburban sprawl.

We can see the environmental benefits very clearly if we compare neighborhoods at two different densities. One million people would take up 500,000 acres at 2 people per acre, a typical suburban sprawl density. One million people would take up only 100,000 acres at 10 people per acre, the density of the old streetcar suburbs that were popular with the American middle-class a century ago.

The denser development would benefit the environment in many ways:

• Only one-fifth as much land would be developed.
• Driving would be cut by more than half because of shorter distances alone. Driving could be reduced by even more, because higher density can support better transit service. There would be a dramatic reductions in gasoline consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
• Water use would be cut dramatically, because people would have smaller lawns, the biggest urban use of water.
• Land for growing food would be available nearer to the city, reducing the distance that food has to be transported.
• Large parks would be available nearer to the city, providing wildlife habitat and providing easily accessible recreation.

In reality, density could increase even more than this, because many people would want to move to urban neighborhoods rather than streetcar suburbs as the population ages and fewer households have children. With a combination of streetcar suburbs and traditional urban neighborhoods, densities could easily go up to 15 or 20 people per acre, saving as much as 90% of the land consumed by sprawl.

But it is interesting to compare streetcar suburbs with sprawl suburbs, because both appeal to the same people, and because streetcar suburbs are so obviously more livable than sprawl in addition to being more environmentally sound. It is obviously better to have a home in a neighborhood where you can walk to Main Street shopping than in a neighborhood where you must drive to a strip mall.

The smart-growth movement has already begun to make our cities more livable. New Urbanist planners have converted some strip malls to Main Streets and some regional malls to traditional town centers. Some declining, semi-abandoned inner-city neighborhoods, such as Uptown in Oakland, California, have been rebuilt in the style of traditional European neighborhoods with housing above shopping.

But it will be much harder to improve our cities in these ways after population begins to decline, when there will be little need to build new housing and shopping. If we want to transform our cities, we must focus on smart growth for the next few decades, so we can focus on smart shrinkage when population starts to decline.

Smart growth advocates would do well to talk about this larger change that includes both smart growth and smart shrinkage. They usually say that growth is inevitable and we need smart growth to reduce its impact, which makes it sound like they are calling for the lesser of two evils: any growth will damage the environment, but smart growth will damage it less. The movement would be much more appealing if they talked about the larger way in which our cities could be transformed during the coming century.

For the next few decades, we need to focus on smart growth to revitalize suburbs by replacing strip malls and shopping centers walkable neighborhoods and to revitalize urban neighborhoods by developing their parking lots, drive-ins, and abandoned sites. This smart growth will reduce the environmental impact of population growth during the relatively short time that it continues, helping us to deal with climate change, peak oil, and other ecological threats in the short run.

Later in the century, we will need to focus on smart shrinkage as population declines, developing laws and financial mechanisms that let us remove the worst sprawl and restore the land as parks and farms. Sprawl takes up so much land that a 10% population decline could let us reclaim 30% of the land that is now suburbanized in the United States. In a few generations, we could get rid of the sprawl and build cities that are sustainable in the long run.

If we do not build the smart growth during the next few decades, while there is still a need to build more housing for a growing population, we will be locked into the sprawl pattern for the indefinite future: there will be little opportunity to build more housing after population begins to decline.