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.

Book Review: Prosperity without Growth?

When a British government commission publishes a report calling for an end to economic growth, it suddenly seems that our world is changing. Growth has been the central goal of economists since the beginning of the industrial revolution. But Prof. Tim Jackson, the Economics Commissioner of the UK's Sustainable Development Commission has written a book that sums up the current state of our knowledge about economic growth and shows convincingly that growth should end.

We have all heard about the environmental effects of growth, such as resource depletion and global warming. The conventional wisdom is that we can deal with these effects by shifting to better technology, but this book argues that there is no plausible scenario in which better technology alone can reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently if growth continues at its present pace. "The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2100." This rapid rate of growth is likely to overwhelm attempts to use better technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

If we are serious about avoiding the worst effects of global warming, we must move beyond this sort of technological fix and deal with economic growth itself.

Ending economic growth does not have to involve sacrifice. The evidence shows that, beyond a certain point, growth does not increase our well being. For example:

• International comparisons of self-reported happiness show that higher per capita income correlates with greater happiness until income reaches about one-half to two-thirds of what it is in the United States today. Beyond that level, there is no correlation of higher income and increased happiness. In the United States and several other developed nations, higher income has not brought increased happiness during the last several decades.

• Indexes that correct the GDP to measure well-being more accurately have similar results. For example, the Genuine Progress Indicator shows that, until the 1970s, American's well-being increased as income increased, but since then, Americans' well-being has declined, though per capita GDP has continued to increase.

• International comparisons of other measures of well-being, such as life expectancy and educational achievement, have also similar results. Increased income does not improve well-being after per capita income reaches about half of what it is in the United States today.

We in the developed nations are at a point where economic growth does us little or no good. But growth threatens to do us and the rest of the world great harm by causing global warming, higher resource prices, and potential ecological collapse.

Yet it seems hard to break our addiction to growth. The conventional wisdom says that growth is needed to reduce unemployment and to promote economic stability. As we can see during the current recession, when growth falters, businesses reduce their levels of investment and lay off workers, making the economy les efficient and increasing unemployment. It also seems that we need growth to pay off our high levels of personal and national debt.

In response to these concerns, this book cites the studies of Peter Victor, a Canadian economist, who has run computer models of how the Canadian economy would react to the end of growth. Results are dramatically different as he changes the values for macroeconomic variables such as the savings rate, the rates of public and private investment, and the length of the work week. In one run, the end of growth brings economic instability, high unemployment, and rising poverty. In another run, the end of growth brings economic stability, cuts both the unemployment and poverty rates in half, and reduces the ratio of debt to GDP by 75%. In part, the difference comes because the second scenario has a higher savings rate, a lower rate of private investment, and a higher rate of public investment.

In addition "unemployment is avoided ... by reducing both the total and the average number of working hours. Reducing the working week is the simplest and most often cited structural solution to the challenge of maintaining full employment with non-increasing output." The end of growth would make life easier by reducing the amount of work we have to do.

There are very few macroeconomic studies of this sort, and far more are clearly needed.

The book consistently emphasizes that a two-fold change is needed for an end of growth: in addition to these economic changes, we need social changes that shift our emphasis away from materialistic values. Unfortunately, the book is weaker on these social changes than on economic changes. It calls for a shift from an economy that aims at opulence or utility to an economy that aims at human flourishing, but it never provides a convincing vision of what life could actually be like in a society where people have a comfortable standard of living and have abundant free time to develop their their talents and their humanity as fully as possible. There is a long tradition of philosophical writing about this subject, going back to Aristotle, but this book, written by an economist, is not strong on philosophy.

Despite this limitation, Prosperity Without Growth? is the best summary available of the economic issues involved in ending growth. It is required reading for everyone working to avoid ecological collapse.

The fact that it is published by a British government commission offers hope that we may do better than just avoiding collapse. If we follow the suggestions here, we could have a far better world at the end of this century than we have today, with widespread prosperity that is devoted not to empty consumerism but to living well .

Prosperity Without Growth is available to read at
http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications.php?id=914

This review was also published in Common Dreams at
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/28-4

Gehry To Be Coated With Titanium

The Pritzker Prize committee revealed today that, according to the newly released details of his will, the architect Frank Gehry will be coated with titanium after his death, and the statue will be given as a trophy to the Pritzker Prize winner for the following year.

In an industry where architects develop flamboyant designs purely to attract attention to themselves, Gehry is noted for his humanistic architecture, designed to create comfortable public places.

The Pritzker committee said that, because of the current economic crisis, they may not build Gehry's Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, and they are trying to cancel part of his contract in Miami, but the Pritzker winner who receives his statue will be required to include it in a future building, guaranteeing the titanium coating its rightful place as an element of today's architecture.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic of the New York Times, commented: "This edgy work of conceptual art will be a strikingly gritty alternative to the sacchrine, sentimental architecture purveyed by the New Urbanists."

(April Fools Day can be fun.)

New Urbanism and Smart Growth

New Urbanism and Smart Growth are two environmentalist movements in city planning that are generally consistent but that have a different emphasis. Both believe in building higher densities around transit stops to create walkable neighborhoods.

The New Urbanism believes in traditional urban design. Though it is a movement in city planning, it was founded by people who were trained as architects, not as planners, and who are primarily interested in creating attractive places. It has been extremely successful with the public because it has done such a good job of creating attractive places.

The Smart Growth Movement believes in transit-oriented develoment. It is promoted by people who are planners rather than architects and who are interested in quantitative abstractions rather than in designing urban places, so it tends to want as much housing as possible around transit nodes. It doesn't think much about whether this design will be attractive and popular with the public, because it relies on planning laws to get the designs built.

New Urbanism is compatible with Smart Growth. The sort of traditional development that New Urbanists want to build around transit nodes is a form of smart growth.

But Smart Growth is not always compatible with New Urbanism. The extreme wing of the smart growth movement wants to max out the square footage built regardless of whether it is good or bad urban design. Smart Growth planners sometines promote things like "point towers," which squeeze in more square footage but are not good urban design at all.

The ideas are generally compatible, and we all want to move in the same direction. The differences are in the details of how we move in that direction.

Unfortunately, because it does not focus on designing attractive places, the Smart Growth movement may build projects ugly enough that they provoke a backlash against transit-oriented development.

Producer-Side and Consumer-Side Politics

It is time to rethink the direction that a radical political movement should take in the modern economy.

Traditionally, the left has believed that we need to move from a capitalist economy to a government-directed economy - that government agencies running will be industries will be essentially benevolent.

But we should know by now that big government tends to promote its own growth as surely as big business does. That is the lesson we should have learned from what New Deal and post-war policies did to our cities by building freeways and promoting suburbanization. The government's freeway builders were just as intent on aggrandizing their own function as General Motors was.

The left always used the Tennessee Valley Authority as a key example of benevolent government, but the TVA has become one of the nation's biggest promoter of nuclear power.

Agencies like the TVA made sense at a time when we needed the government to promote economic growth to relieve poverty, but they are not central to dealing with our current problem of reining in growth.

Today we need direct political limits on growth - including growth managed by the private sector and the public sector. We tend to think of ourselves as passive consumers who are dependent on big business and big government to provide us with goods and services, and we need to start thinking of ourselves as citizens who can use the law to limit both big business and big government.

It is not a matter of socialism versus capitalism but of moving beyond the general faith in technology and economic growth that cut across all political parties during the twentieth century.

Through the nineteenth and twentieth century, leftist politics focused on the producer side: it wanted to reorganize the system of production to promote economic growth in a way that benefited most people.

Now, I believe we have to focus on the consumer side: reorganizing the system is not as important as making it possible for people to downshift and consume less.

Growth and Work Time in the Inaugural Address

We can't make any predictions about the Obama administration from the inaugural address, which we would expect to be filled with the most conventional rhetoric, but it is striking that he echoes the conventional wisdom that we should promote economic growth purely to create more work.

He does mention shorter work time, but he considers it a sacrifice that people might have to make during the current economic emergency:

"It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours."

The shorter work time movement will not get anywhere until people realize that working less is a benefit, not a sacrifice. But here Obama says just the opposite.

After the levees break, we want to rebuild homes as quickly as possible, so people no longer have to make the sacrifice of giving up part of their home to strangers. Likewise, it seems that, after people cut their hours, we want to stimulate the economy as quickly as possible, so people no longer have to make the sacrifice of working less.

And how will we stimulate the economy and promote growth? The first thing on his list is roads:

"For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act — not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges,..."

I think Obama is carried away by his stimulus package here, and he actually does realize that roads are environmentally destructive. I expect a shift to transit under the Obama administration.

But that makes it all the more telling that he wants to build roads to stimulate the economy. Even if they are useless, even if they are destructive, we need to build them purely to promote growth and create more work.