Preservation Institute Blog

Work Hours in Europe and America

2012-01-15T13:29:00.000-08:00

Since the end of World War II, the United States has devoted all our productivity growth to more consumption and none to shorter work time. We can look to Europe for a realistic alternative to this extreme policy.

In the graph, we can see that work hours have declined steadily in France and Germany since 1950 (as in other west European nations) but have hardly declined at all in the United States. Both France and Germany had much longer work hours than the United States in 1950, at a time when they had to work hard to rebuild after the devastation of World War II, but Germany's work hours declined from 2,387 hours annually in 1950 to 1,408 in 2010, and France's declined from 2,241 hours annually in 1950 to 1,552 in 2010. It is interesting that France is known for its short work hours because of its political battles over the 35 hour week, but Germany actually has shorter work hours than France, in part because it gives employees the choice of working part time.

Work Hours in the United States, Germany and France since 1950
source: Groningen Total Economy Database

The average American work week was much shorter than Germany's and France's in 1950, but it declined only slightly since then, from 1,909 hours annually in 1950 to 1,695 in 2010, so we now have much longer hours than Germany or France.

Even the slight decline in American work hours shown on this chart is exaggerated, because these international statistics are based on surveys of how many hours of work the average job requires. The graph shows that American work hours dropped by a small but significant amount from 1965 to 1980, but this was when large numbers of women were entering the work force, and many of them wanted part-time jobs so they would have time for their families; the average job took fewer hours because more people had jobs. In addition, the graph shows that work hours dropped a bit after 2000, but this graph does not show that it became more common for Americans to work multiple jobs after 2000, in response to stagnant wages during this decade. Household surveys that look at the average number of hours worked per worker (rather than the hours per job in the graph) show that our work hours have actually risen by 204 hours per year since 1973.

It is interesting to contrast the United States and Germany, because the difference in hours worked accounts for almost all of the difference in per capita output between them. The average German worker works 83% as many hours as the average American worker, and Germany's per capita GDP is 81% of America's.

Our conventional fixation on economic growth implies that Germans are not as well off as Americans because their per capita GDP is only about four-fifths of ours, and that they would be better off if they worked as long hours as Americans and brought their income up to our level. But Germans can choose to work part-time, and those who have chosen shorter hours obviously believe that they personally are better off having the extra time rather than the extra hours. Germans also seem to enjoy the paid four-week vacations and the 9 to 13 days of public holidays per year that their laws guarantee, while 29% of American workers have no paid vacations, and those who do get paid vacations average just over one week per year.

According to other common measures of economic success, Germany does better than American.

They have lower unemployment than we do during the current hard economic times, in part because they have a policy called Kurzarbeit (short work), which uses unemployment insurance to provide government subsidies to employers who cut workers to part-time rather than laying workers off, sharing the available work through shorter hours.
They have a lower national debt and a much higher household savings rate than we do: It seems that our work-and-spend economy leaves us less able to save than they are, even though we earn more money than they do.
They have perennial trade surpluses (over $184 billion in 2010), while we have perennial trade deficits (over $470 billion in 2010), showing that choice of work hours does not make a country less competitive economically.
They have longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, and higher educational achievement than we do.

Needless to say, the current American way of life is much more environmentally destructive than the current German way of life. The ecological footprint of the average American is 8 global hectares, while the ecological footprint of the average German is 5.08 global hectares. Their footprint will become smaller, as they plan to generate all of their electricity using renewable sources of energy by 2050. Though Germany is famous for its laws promoting clean energy and recycling, their shorter work hours and lower per capita GDP currently contribute about as much as their cleaner economy to their smaller ecological footprint.

After Modern Architecture: Postmodernism Without the Irony

2011-12-22T15:19:00.000-08:00

Mid-century modernism expressed the technological optimism of its time, but modernism no longer speaks to our more complex attitude toward technology. We could address the cultural issues of our time by reviving postmodernism - but without the irony that vitiated the postmodernism of the 1970s.

Mid-Century Modernism

In the early to mid-twentieth century, a spate of new technologies improved people's lives. Electric lights were better than kerosene lamps. Gas stoves were better than coal stoves. Electric trolley cars were better than omnibuses pulled by horses.

Modernist architecture developed during this time of technological optimism. If new technologies are better than older ones, then it also must be better to live in a modern steel-and-glass box than to live in an old-fashioned house.

Mies van der Rohe's steel-and-glass Farnsworth House is a famous example, but notice in the picture that the shades are closed. On days when Mr. Farnsworth wanted to keep the sun out, his glass box offered less of a view than a house with conventional windows and awnings.

Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House (1945-1951)

The steel-and-glass high-rises designed by Mies van der Rohe were even more influential, and they soon became a preferred design for office buildings as well as apartment buildings. Notice in the picture that almost all the residents of Mies's most famous apartment buildings have their shades completely closed.

Mies van der Rohe, Apartment Buildings on Lake Shore Drive, Chicago (1949-1951) (photograph by JeremyA)

From Technological Optimism to Technological Realism

Modernist architecture was part of the uncritical attitude toward technology that was common during the mid-century and that seems completely out-of-date today.

During the 1950s, the middle-class ate mass-produced white bread. Everyone believed that mechanized, chemical-intensive agriculture would give us better food at lower cost.

Today, the stores carry many different types of bread, including artisanal breads. Environmentalists tell us that chemical farming aggravates global warming and has created a dead-zone in the Gulf of Mexico, so we should move toward more organic farming.

During the 1950s, American cities had freeways sliced through their centers and suburban sprawl developed at their edges. Cities and suburbs where people drive were more modern and therefore must be better than old-fashioned neighborhoods where people walk.

Today, city planners tell us that cities and suburbs are more livable if they are designed to work for pedestrians, bicyclists, and rail as well as for automobiles.

During the 1950s, people believed that nuclear power would produce energy so cheaply that the utilities would not have to meter it, and the nuclear wastes would just be dumped in the ocean.

Today, we know that nuclear radiation is a threat to health and must be contained.

During the 1950s, progressives supported more federal spending on freeways, dams, and power plants.

Today, progressives spend much of their time opposing dangerous technologies, such as mountain-top removal and tar-sands pipelines, and supporting more benign technologies, such as solar power and wind power.

Some technologies clearly improve our lives: computers are obviously better than typewriters. But progressives today can see that we must be selective, using benign technologies and controlling destructive technologies.

Postmodern Architecture

In the 1960s and 1970s, the steel, glass, and concrete boxes that were filling our cities began to feel oppressive. Postmodern architects and urbanists began to criticize mid-century modernism at the same time that the new environmental movement began to undermine mid-century technological optimism. But the post-modernists fell into two camps.

At one extreme, post-modernists used traditional styles ironically. An example is Charles Moore's Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans, a garish replica of an Italian piazza that uses the five orders of classical architecture plus a sixth order with neon lights in its capitals, which Moore invented and named the "Deli Order."

This side of postmodernism was meant as a joke. No one could tale it as a serious attempt to develop a new style to follow modernism.

At the other extreme, post-modernists tried to learn from traditional architecture. For example, Christopher Alexander wrote that all traditional and vernacular architecture is based on certain patterns that people developed based on their experience of buildings that made them comfortable. In the twentieth century, these patterns were replaced by patterns based on the products of modern industry. We should move beyond modernism, Alexander says, by creating a new architecture based on the patterns of traditional architecture, returning to what he calls "the timeless way of building."

This side of postmodernism was meant seriously. It can still help us to understand why modernist architecture feels cold and sterile and how to develop a more humanistic architecture after modernism.

Outrageous ironic gestures got the most press, but the more serious side of postmodernism produced many modest buildings that have helped create more livable places.

Koshland Hall, Vernon DeMars, 1990

Koshland Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, is this sort of modest and serious postmodern design. It respects the older classical buildings of the campus, but it does not use a classical vocabulary itself. Instead, it uses the lessons of traditional architecture to create the sort of place where people feel comfortable.

Koshland Hall, Detail

More recently, many architects have forgotten the lessons of postmodernism and have begun to design buildings in a neo-modernist style that is more grotesque than mid-century modernism. Frank Gehry's buildings are the most famous examples, but more modest buildings are doing as much to create ugly, alienating places.

For example, Shing Center, which is now being built next to Koshland Hall, is as cold, sterile, and alienating as a Mies van der Rohe design but is grotesquely jumbled.

Shing Center, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership, 2011

The neo-modernist style does not express any social ideal. Mid-century modernism expressed the idea that modernization would bring a better society. Today's neo-modernism is purely an esthetic gesture, irrelevant to larger social issues: no one believes that Frank Gehry is pointing the way to a better society.

But one revival style follows another, and some architecture critics are predicting that the current neo-modernist revival will be followed by a postmodernist revival. The current exhibit about postmodernism at London's Victoria and Albert Museum and the conference "Reconsidering Postmodernism," planned next month by New York's Institute for Classical Architecture and Art, may be the beginning of this postmodernist revival.

The postmodernist revival can contribute to the most important cultural task of our time, but only if it drops the irony and bases itself on the serious side of postmodernism. If architects using modern technology can learn from traditional architecture how to design good places for people, then architecture will contribute to the larger cultural task of humanizing our technological economy.

Nudity and Human Nature

2011-11-20T15:11:00.000-08:00

From the early to mid-twentieth century, many “progressive” Americans and Europeans believed that nudity was natural, and any shame we had about nudity was caused by Victorian sexual repression. Some people called themselves “naturists” and vacationed in nudist camps. Many others occasionally swam nude with groups of friends or walked around their own homes nude. They expected that public nudity would become common, once society's Puritanical shame about sex disappeared.

Yet our society today is far from Puritanical, and public nudity is still uncommon.

Today, we know enough about evolutionary psychology to see why public nudity is unnatural - why humans evolved feelings of sexual modesty. We can reconstruct the long history of human shame about nudity by looking at the pattern of hair on the human body.

Other mammals must be covered with enough fur to keep them warm in the coldest environments that they live in. When the ancestors of humans began to use animal skins as clothing, they no longer needed fur to keep themselves warm. They were more likely to survive if they lost the fur, so their bodies could cool themselves more efficiently in hot weather or when they were running to hunt or escape predators. They did not need the fur to keep warm in cold weather and when they slept, because they could wrap themselves in animal skins.

Yet there are a few places on our bodies where humans did not lose their fur.

We kept the hair on our head for an obvious reason: you cannot wrap your head completely with an animal skin, so hair was still necessary to keep the head warm, particularly when you slept. Men were more exposed to the cold than women, because they went out hunting, while women kept the home fires burning. As a result, men retained hair on much of their face as well as on the top of their heads, and did not lose their bodily hair as completely as women did. They did not need this extra hair when they were boys and stayed with their mothers, but when they became adolescents and began to go hunting with the men, they grew beards and more body hair.

We also kept our underarm hair for an obvious reason. Our underarms are rarely exposed to the air, so you generally would cool off just as well with or without underarm hair. There was not any survival benefit to losing underarm hair.

But what is the reason that we kept our pubic hair? Unlike the head, this is a part of the body that is easy to wrap in animal skins, so there is no need for this hair to keep us warm. Unlike the underarms, this is a part of the body that is exposed to the air when we are not wearing anything, so losing this hair should have helped our ancestors to cool off, just as much as losing any other fur.

The only plausible explanation for pubic hair is that, shortly after they began using animal skins to keep warm and before they lost their fur, our hominid ancestors developed a sense of sexual modesty that made them keep their genitals covered. Even when they did not need to keep warm, they wore something like Adam and Eve’s fig leaves to cover their genitals. As a result, there was no evolutionary benefit to losing their pubic hair, any more than there was an evolutionary benefit to losing their underarm hair. Like the underarms, the pubic area was not exposed to the air, so they would cool off just as well with or without pubic hair. There was not any survival benefit to losing pubic hair.

Why would our ancestors develop a sense of sexual modesty that made them keep their genitals covered? Evolutionary theory provides an obvious answer: to avoid attracting people who already have mates, which would make those mates jealous and potentially violent.

Animals that pair-bond with their mates because the male helps to provide for the children, including most birds and some mammals, generally isolate themselves from the rest of the species during the mating season. Males are at an evolutionary disadvantage if other males impregnate their mate, because they have to make an effort to help provide for someone else's children. Females are at an evolutionary disadvantage if their mates are attracted by other females, because their mates might abandon them and their children, leaving the children with less of a chance of surviving. As a result, both males and females chase possible rivals away from their territory during mating season: You can sometimes see birds dive-bombing possible rivals to threaten them and drive them away from their nests.

But early humans lived in groups, and they did not have a specific mating season. A couple could not isolate themselves.

Though chimpanzees do not pair-bond, they give us some idea of the potential for violence among animals that live in groups. When a female goes into heat, males threaten or attack other males to drive them away from the female, in order to increase their own potential for mating successfully. The violence is sometimes fatal.

There was even more cause for violence among early humans. They pair-bonded, so females were jealous and possessive as well as males. They did not have a specific period of heat, so the potential for violence was always there. Hominids must have threatened and attacked potential rivals, just as birds threaten and attack potential rivals - but the difference is that hominids could not drive the rivals out of their territory, because they lived in groups. There must have been constant threats of violence from jealous mates.

There was a way to reduce the threat of violence: cover up your genitals so you were less likely to sexually attract someone else's mate. If you had a feeling of shame about showing your genitals, which made you keep them covered, you were less likely to be attacked by a jealous mate, so you were more likely to survive. As a result, evolution hard-wired that feeling of shame into the species.

Thus, the feelings of sexual modesty that we still have today evolved among our pre-human ancestors. They were ashamed to have any member of the opposite sex except their mates see their genitals, because these feelings of modesty helped them to avoid violence.

Because we still have pubic hair, these feelings of modesty must have developed before hominids lost their fur, which means it must date back at least to the early days of Homo erectus, almost 2 million years ago. Sexual modesty has existed among our ancestors for roughly ten times as long as our own species has existed. Sexual modesty has been part of human nature for as long as there have been Homo sapiens, and it has been part of hominid nature for much longer.

It is easy to see why "naturists" began to believe a century ago that shame about nakedness was just a result of Puritanical sexual repression. Victorians were so sexually repressed that respectable women were ashamed to show their legs, and men got excited if they saw "a well-turned ankle." Early in the twentieth century, as this repression began to ease, it seemed plausible that any shame about exposing one's body was just a result of sexual repression.

Today, we should know better. We should be able to see that the "naturists" missed an important aspect of human nature.

Income Inequality

2011-10-27T11:07:00.001-07:00

A few decades ago, the United States had about as much income inequality as the average developed nation. Now, the United States has the greatest income inequality of any developed nation.

The Congressional Budget Office released a study this week that highlights increased inequality. Between 1979 and 2008, after-tax income of the top 1% almost tripled, while after-tax income of other groups increased by much less. The graph shows clearly that, the lower your income, the less of a share you got in the increased prosperity of the last three decades.

There was some growth of income among all quintiles during the last three decades, but the growth of income decreases steadily as you move to the lower quintiles.

The graph below, which traces the share of the upper 1% historically, shows us one important reason for increased inequality.

During the post-war years and through the 1970s, the share of the top 1% was lower than it is today and decreased steadily. Prosperity was widely shared, with moderate-income groups showing even more gains than the highest income groups.

Then, in the 1980s, there was a drastic reduction of the top income tax rate under the Reagan administration, from a top marginal rate of 70% to a top marginal rate of just 28%. Republicans have continued to insist on lower taxes for the rich ever since, as inequality has soared. .

There are many causes of increased income inequality. One obvious cause is globalization, which has eliminated most of the well paying factory jobs that existed in the 1950s and 1960s, and that now is eliminating the jobs of call-center agents, computer programmers, and others who provide services.

But we could compensate for increasing inequality if we had a progressive income tax with a large Earned Income tax credit. Inequality would be reduced dramatically if we went back to the tax rates of the 1950s, when there was a top marginal rate of 90% on the highest incomes.

Republicans since Reagan have claimed that lower taxes will spur economic growth, and everyone will benefit. But the graphs show clearly that the benefits have gone primarily to those at the top. The average American would be better off if Republicans abandoned the economic policies of the Reagan era and went back to the policies of the Eisenhower era.

Flashy Architecture and Bad Urbanism at the Berkeley Art Museum

2011-09-21T16:30:00.000-07:00

There have been many favorable reactions to a review of the proposed Berkeley Art Museum that I published in a local newspaper. The review begins:

"The architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro have unveiled their design for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) on Oxford Street between Center and Addison. They were required to keep the old UC Printing Plant, and they have added a blob-shaped building coated with zinc.

"The new addition is in the avant-gardist style that has been typical of museums since Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao in 1997. The Guggenheim looks like abstract art of the 1920s and is coated with titanium. It does not work very well as a museum - some visitors say it gives them vertigo - but it was so new, so different, and so shiny that it drew large numbers of gaping tourists to Bilbao.

"Avant-garde architects are like teenagers who dye their hair purple to be different from everyone else, who consider themselves very original but obviously are just imitating the cool kids in their clique. Likewise, the designers of BAM/PFA consider its zinc facade very original but obviously are just imitating Gehry’s titanium.

"The inept urbanism of BAM/PFA is much worse than its flashy 'blobitecture.' Because the goal is to create a sculptural icon, this sort of design focuses on itself and ignores its urban context."

It goes on to show that they care so little about urbanism that they place a lawn in a dead zone north of the building, where it is bound to attract a homeless encampment.

It is a familiar story. The Federal Building in San Francisco was designed by Pritzker-prize-winning avant-gardist architect Thom Mayne and acclaimed by all the critics. I wrote a little blog post saying that, when you look beyond the sculptural design, you will see that it creates a bleak public space that no one would want to use. A couple of years later, the Chronicle reported that its public space had been taken over by the homeless: "What you see there all day, 24/7, is people drinking, you see people urinating on the walls, you see everything."

That is what you get when you design a building as a sculptural icon meant to attract attention rather than as a good place for people.

See my entire review in the Berkeley Daily Planet.
There are more pictures and some interesting comments on Berkeleyside.

Civic Art: Mario Chiodo's "Remember Them"

2011-09-10T20:45:00.000-07:00

Civic art was important to the general public from the Renaissance through the 1920s. Perhaps the last great example was Daniel Chester French's statue for the Lincoln memorial, which was a great popular success because it revealed Lincoln's humanity so clearly.

Since then, we have had many decades of modernist public art - abstract, pop, conceptual. Some tries so hard to be playful that it ends up being trivial, and some tries so hard to be intellectual that it ends up being art theory rather than art.

But now there seems to be a revival of the classical humanistic tradition of civic art. One example is the new Martin Luther King memorial in Washington, DC, though it has been criticized for not expressing King's character and instead making him look too harsh.

A more successful example is Mario Chiodo's "Remember Them," unveiled last week in Oakland, California's Uptown neighborhood, which was semi-abandoned a decade or two ago but now is being redeveloped with neo-traditional apartment buildings. It is good to see this neo-traditional art joining the sort of neo-traditional urbanism that has been challenging modernism for decades.

The project is not yet complete, but it will ultimately include four massive bronze pieces with sculptures of twenty-five people whom the sculptor chose because they represent ideals such as sacrifice and courage.

Many of them are excellent character studies, such as this face of Gandhi.

But the idealism of the sculptures do not prevent neighborhood children from enjoying them, as you can see in this picture of two girls climbing and playing between Franklin Roosevelt and the praying Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.

The San Francisco Chronicle had a story about the unveiling that was generally favorable but that also quoted a member of Oakland's modernist art scene who said: "The art community in Oakland is really thriving right now. It's an up and coming part of the arts scene. I'm struck by how out of tune this seems. ... It's not an of-the-moment piece." This typical modernist line does not care at all about the quality of the art and only cares about whether it is trendy and "of our time."

A letter to the editor responded: "I have seen the pieces. ... They strengthen my belief in humanity. They give me hope and inspire me when these days listening to or reading the news can be depressing. Out of tune? Not with me. These pieces are powerful and passionate. They will speak to a wide range of people, which cannot be said for some of the of-the-moment art."

If we want to recapture the impact on public life that the best civic art had from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century, we need pieces that move and inspire a wide range of people, not pieces that appeal to a small clique of terminally hip modernists.

Judging from the large crowd of local people who were admiring these sculptures, they are doing exactly that.

One person near me pointed at one of the sculptures and said to a friend, "That looks like Maya Angelou." I didn't understand her at first, and when I realized what she meant, I told her, "I thought you said 'It looks like a Michelangelo.'" After thinking for a moment, her friend answered, "You know, in some ways it does look like a Michelangelo."

Classical Liberalism

2011-08-16T12:29:00.000-07:00

I have just published a new book named Classical Liberalism. You can read or buy the book by going to its home page at http://www.preservenet.com/classicalliberalism.

Here is the book's front cover:

And here is the description of the book from its back cover:

“Classical Liberalism is a must read. For one thing, readers should not deprive themselves of the pure enjoyment of this engaging and clear-minded narrative of a broad swath of history. For another, anyone concerned about the state of democratic civil society in the West, and worried about its future, cannot afford to neglect this disarming analysis.”

- Prof. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Syracuse University

According to conventional historians, liberalism went through two phases, laissez-faire liberalism and modern liberalism.

This book rediscovers a lost tradition of liberal thought and shows that liberalism went through three phases.

Classical liberalism believed in positive freedom, the right of people to manage their own affairs and to govern themselves.

Victorian liberalism had two aspects. One of these two is well known: laissez-faire liberalism accommodated the industrial economy by inventing the ideal of negative freedom, the notion that freedom is nothing more than absence of government control. But there was also a more idealistic aspect of Victorian liberalism, which grew out of classical liberalism but which is largely forgotten today.

Modernist liberalism kept the laissez-faire idea of negative freedom but applied it to a narrow realm of personal behavior. It expected centralized organizations to make important decisions, so it believed that individuals could only have personal freedom.

Laissez-faire and modernist liberalism redefined freedom as negative in order to accommodate economic growth. To revitalize the liberal tradition for our time, we need to revive the ideal of positive freedom.

Fietsen Van Amsterdam - Bikes of Amsterdam

2011-07-04T11:46:00.000-07:00

This post is dedicated to all the Americans who have told me that most people can never bicycle, because (1) you cannot carry your groceries home on a bicycle, and (2) you cannot chauffeur children around on a bicycle.

These people cannot imagine that cities could be designed differently, so people travel shorter distances that are easier to bicycle (for both adults and older children). They cannot imagine that bicycles could be designed so they can easily carry groceries and younger children.

These pictures of bicycles in Amsterdam may open their eyes. One of these bicycles has a battery assist, which is rarely needed in a flat city like Amsterdam but which would be more useful in hillier cities.

The best known bicycling image from Amsterdam is the parking at Centraal Station. In fact, no single picture can show how much bike parking is there, because there are large surface lots in addition to the structure shown below, parking so extensive that you cannot capture it in one picture.

Even more revealing are the pictures of bike parking below, beginning with the parking at the supermarket nearest to where we stayed in Amsterdam, which is part of the largest Dutch chain, Albert Hein. The store does not provide any parking for cars, but it has striped diagonal parking for bikes on the sidewalk, to accommodate all the people who carry their groceries home by bike. (We always walked there, ourselves.)

Likewise, the heavy Dutch use of bicycles is shown in this picture of bike parking on a residential street ...

... and in this picture, which shows how just about every railing in Amsterdam has bikes locked to it.

The most common type bike in Amsterdam is an ordinary one-speed with foot brakes or three-speed with handbrakes. Notice that the chain is completely enclosed, so you do not have to worry about tying your pants cuff to protect it from grease.

People sometimes decorate these simple bikes.

Even these ordinary bikes are enough for carrying two small children, one in a child seat in front of the rider, and one in a child seat behind, as shown below. If you go to Vondelpark (Amsterdam's most popular park) on a Saturday, you will see hoards of bicyclists, many with one or two children on an ordinary bike.

The simplest improvement on this basic bike is an L-shaped bracket over the front wheel, which is built into many bikes. Sometimes people attach crude cargo carriers to this bracket, like this beat-up wooden platform.

Often, they attach baskets...

... and sometimes they attach locking cases, like this one, so they do not have to worry about leaving cargo in the bike while it is parked.

Some bikes have a small front wheel with a larger L-shaped bracket, which lets them attach larger containers ...

... and sometimes people decorate these containers in typically Dutch ways.

A big step beyond the ordinary bike is a cargo bike. The one shown below is most popular, so common that the bike rental places offer them to tourists who want to carry their children around.

These bikes are perfect for carrying large loads of groceries or small children. (Notice that the bike lane below is built into the sidewalk, which is typical on busier streets.)

They come with rain covers to protect your children from the Amsterdam weather. (Incidentally, I myself commuted by bicycle in Berkeley for seven years, rain and shine, and I was surprised to find that it is quite comfortable to ride in the rain if you wear a full rain suit and galoshes.)

Here is the same type of cargo bike with the container removed, so it can be used to carry cheese.

There are also cargo bikes of this type with longer compartments to carry larger loads ...

... and there are modified and decorated versions of this type of bike.

Here is a second type of cargo bike, which is also very common.

This type of bike also comes with a rain cover that does not block your children's view...

... and apart from children and groceries, cargo bikes can also be used to carry your best friend.

Flat-bed cargo bikes, which can carry larger loads, are also an every-day sight, though they are less common than these lighter cargo bikes. Here is one carrying supplies to a food vendor in Vondelpark ...

... and here is one carrying luggage at Centraal Station.

Though they are usually used for these sorts of commercial purposes, flat-beds are also used by individuals to transport their personal possessions.

Some of them have lids that can be locked to protect the cargo.

When they get old and beat up ...

... you can try to renew them by painting them bright colors.

In addition to these specialized cargo bikes, it is common to see trailers for ordinary bikes, similar to the bike trailers you sometimes see in the US.

Here is a cargo trailer with a locking lid and a Burley trailer to carry children.

Finally, it is common to see pedi-cabs waiting to carry tourists around Amsterdam, as it is in some American cities.

Here is my favorite design for a pedi-cab, meant to look like a yellow cab. (Incidentally, notice how quiet and peaceful this scene seems, even though it is near the center of a densely populated city. Now, imagine how much less peaceful it would seem if the bikes were all replaced by cars, and if the road were widened and given extra parking to accommodate those cars.)

Those are the common types of bicycles that you are bound to see if you spend a bit of time walking around Amsterdam. Next, let's look at a few types that are less common.

Here is a bicycle built for two that lets the riders sit next to each other rather than one behind the other. This elderly couple seems to enjoy being next to each other and talking as they bicycle along the Amstel River, a short ride south of Amsterdam.

Here is a conventional tandem bicycle for two, obviously not much used.

Here is a racing bike, designed to minimize wind resistance.

Here is a bike used by an ice-cream vendor.

Here is the pedal saloon, which you occasionally see in the park or in the more touristy parts of Amsterdam. Though it is a bit hard to see in the picture, all those people are sitting at a bar drinking beer and at the same time are pedaling together to propel the bar down the street.

Here is a tricycle ...

... and here is a tricycle with a battery assist. (Though they are not common in Amsterdam, where most people stay in good shape because they bicycle all their lives, tricycles and battery assist would be useful in the United States, where the streets are sometimes hillier and the people are less accustomed to exercise.)

The Dutch attitude toward bicycling is summarized by this bumper-sticker ...

... and by this sign for a bike rental store ...

... which I agree with completely.

Update: 9/19/2011

There is a good history of bicycling in Amsterdam here.

It points out that bicycling in Amsterdam declined after World War II: "In 1955, 75 percent of all trips in Amsterdam were made by bicycle. By 1970, that number had declined to only 25 percent." In addition, some well-known public places such as the Nieuwmarkt were converted to parking lots, and there was a plan to slice up the center of Amsterdam with a freeway. The environmental movement of the 1970s stopped the freeway, reclaimed public spaces from the automobile, and got the excellent system of separated bike paths that Amsterdam now has, increasing the portion of trips by bicycle to 38% of all trips in the entire city and 57% of trips in the city center.

There is also a good video with the same history here, named "How the Dutch Got Their Cycle Paths."

Amsterdam's success at making itself more bicycle-friendly should serve as an inspiration to other cities.

Charles Waldheim, Landscape Urbanism, and Modernism

2011-06-16T18:25:00.000-07:00

Prof. Charles Waldheim was invited to the nineteenth session of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU 19) to talk about Landscape Urbanism, a recent approach to urban design which some see as a rival to the New Urbanism. Waldheim coined the term “Landscape Urbanism” and is chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Waldheim gave some good examples of recent projects that show how landscape architecture can contribute to urban design, but he also tried to promote the modernist style of architecture and to rehabilitate the modernist style of urbanism. Waldheim revealed this larger cultural agenda when he said:

“Your cultural program vis-à-vis architecture is circa 1979. … For those who were at the foundational moment of the New Urbanism and those who are promoting a postmodern urbanism more generally, they hoped to build a kind of connection over the last 500 years to the western tradition of urban form in which the twentieth century was meant to be seen as a kind of historical anomaly. It was a kind of blip, and it was exceptional… But I think increasingly it is clear over the last ten or fifteen years that architectural culture has not in fact embraced that history … and to the extent that there is still as sort of latent or kind of core neo-classicism at the heart of the New Urbanism, I think there is kind of potential vulnerability there.1

As a model for urban design, he showed many slides of the Lafayette Park urban renewal project in Detroit, a mixed-income project designed by the arch-modernist architect Mies van der Rohe and others, which is one of the few mid-twentieth-century housing projects that has worked in social terms and that continues to attract people.

Lafayette Park: A Model for Urban Design?
(photo by Mike Russell)

Waldheim claimed that Lafayette Park meets most of the CNU’s criteria for good urban design; for example, it has shopping within walking distance of its housing. The only criterion that it fails to meet is that it has parking facing the sidewalks, and Waldheim claims that its success shows that the New Urbanists are too dogmatic when they say that shopping streets should not be interrupted by parking. You can look at this picture of shopping in Lafayette Park (which Waldheim did not show in his presentation) and judge for yourself whether it is as appealing as the old-fashioned Main Streets that the New Urbanists design.

This is one of the very few modernist projects that have been successful, while hundreds of projects in the modernist style have been so unsuccessful that they have been demolished under the HOPE VI program and replaced with traditional neighborhoods in the New Urbanist style. Isn’t it plausible that Lafayette Park is successful not because it is appealing but because most of Detroit is so forbidding that Lafayette Park does not look bad in contrast?

Waldheim over-simplifies the history of architecture and urban design when he says that everyone has moved beyond the theories of 1979, that now we now all know that modernism will endure.

What he says may be true of architecture. During the 1970s, post-modernist theorists such as Charles Jencks claimed that architects were rejecting modernism, but there was a modernist revival beginning in the 1980s. Modernism is once again the established academic style that is taught in almost all the architecture schools and that receives all the Pritzker Prizes (though the public still likes traditional architecture, there are a few schools that teach traditional architecture, and some noted architects, such as Robert A. M. Stern, David Schwartz, and Quinlan Terry build in traditional styles).

What he says in clearly not true of urban design. Because of the efforts of the New Urbanists, urban designers have virtually all rejected modernism in favor of traditional neighborhood design. There are still suburban sprawl developers who build in the modernist style, but it is so discredited that the New Urbanists’ traditional neighborhood design is now the dominant style of urbanism. In terms of urban form, the twentieth century is a historical anomaly,

Waldheim is trying to carry the modernist revival a step further. Modernist architecture has been revived, and Waldheim also wants to revive modernist urbanism by promoting Lafayette Park as a model.

As an academic, Waldheim is narrowly focused on his own field, and when he talks about 1979, he is thinking of the theories of Charles Jencks and other writers who are even less known to the general public.

He ignores the most obvious fact about 1979: It was the year before Ronald Reagan was elected president.

During the 1960s, criticisms of modernism became influential. For example, popular movements stopped the construction of many urban freeways, and there was widespread academic criticism of urban sprawl and of towers-in-a-park urban renewal projects.

During the 1970s, criticisms of modernism became much broader. The public’s faith in economic growth and modern technology was shaken by soaring oil prices and by books such as The Limits of Growth, which used computer models to show that growth would lead to collapse because of the earth’s limited resources and limited capacity to absorb pollution. These criticisms were so influential that, in 1979, a national survey found that 30 percent of Americans were pro-growth, 31 percent were anti-growth, and 39 percent were uncertain.2

Postmodern architecture was a hopeful development of those times. Though many postmodernist architects seemed to be most interested in being ironic and clever, many others were looking for a serious alternative to modernism. The mid-century faith in modernization and technology was not only leading to ecological collapse. Postmodern architects showed that it was also producing uncomfortable places for people to live. At the time, it seemed that they might develop a more humanistic architecture that could help us get beyond the myth of progress and build a more sustainable economy.

Then, in 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president, and he promised to revive the economic growth and the optimism of the 1950s. Not long afterwards, academic architects began to criticize post-modernism and to revive the mid-century modernist architecture of the 1950s. Waldheim is trying to carry this retrograde trend further by reviving mid-century modernist urbanism.

Since Reagan’s election, the country has spent several decades trying to restore economic growth, but now the old 1970s’ criticism of growth is beginning to seem more relevant than ever. Oil prices have soared during the last decade, as they did in the 1970s, and they have become a major obstacle to economic growth. The massive wildfires in Texas and Arizona, and the drought in Europe should remind us that global warming has already begun.

Andres Duany has predicted that postmodernism is the next architectural style that is up for revival, but that it should be a postmodernism without the irony. New Urbanism and postmodernist architecture are part of a larger revaluation of the modern economy that is needed as a response to our current ecological crisis. Lafayette Park’s celebration of modern technology and progress can only get in the way of this revaluation.

Lafayette Park: A Celebration of Modern Technology and Progress
(photo by Mike Russell)

When Waldheim criticizes the class of 1968 and claims to speak for a younger generation, we should remember that he got his undergraduate degree as part of the class of 1986, during the Reagan administration - and he seems to have absorbed some of the 1950s-revival spirit of that time.

His talk to CNU 19 did include good examples of how landscape architecture can be integrated with urban design, which could be a useful addition to the New Urbanism. He shows a wonderful project on the lower Don river on Lake Ontario,3 including restoration of a river and development of a new neighborhood around it, which could be a very useful model for New Urbanists who want to design traditional neighborhoods around restored natural systems.

But his talk also included a retrograde attempt to revive the modernist urbanism of Mies van der Rohe, which can only get in the way of the revaluation of the conventional faith in technology and progress that we need to deal with the current crisis of growth.

Modernists tend to judge buildings on the basis of whether they are “of our time” - meaning that they reject all traditional models and celebrate modern technology - rather than on the basis of whether they are comfortable and attractive places for people to use.

Waldheim takes the same approach in his talk. In a very revealing statement, Waldheim said that the landscape urbanists decided not to organize a congress, similar to the Congress for the New Urbanism, because they considered the congress to be a “twentieth-century form.”

You might as well say that you refuse to read books, because you consider them a “nineteenth-century form.” During the twentieth century, you abandoned books and spent all your time watching movies and television, because they were “of the time.” And in the twenty-first century, of course, you spend all your time watching streaming video on the internet, because it is “of our time.”

No one says we should give up books because only streaming video is “of our time.” Likewise, no one should say that we should give up traditional urbanism because only freeways and parking lots are “of our time” or that we should give up traditional architecture because only glass, steel, and concrete are “of our time.”

If we ask whether we are designing good places for people, rather than asking whether we are building places that are “of our time,” we can develop a humanistic architecture and urbanism that helps to humanize the larger economy and to move us beyond our current fetishism of technology and of growth-for-its-own-sake.

1. See Waldheim’s talk at http://www.webcastregister.com/cnu19/, 43:54.

2. Robert M. Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 164.

3. See Waldheim’s talk at http://www.webcastregister.com/cnu19/,1:03:30

Straten Van Amsterdam - Streets Of Amsterdam

2011-06-02T12:26:00.000-07:00

It is remarkable how little traffic congestion there is in central Amsterdam. The city is densely populated, and the streets were laid out between the middle ages and the seventeenth century, when there was little traffic except for pedestrians.

Though the streets are filled with pedestrians and bicycles, there are relatively few cars and trucks - and there are none of the traffic jams that are common in American cities that have lower densities and wider streets and freeways. Cars have to wait for pedestrians and bikes, but they do not get stuck in backups of cars. They are accustomed to driving cautiously, and there is little road rage. Drivers are willing to wait patiently for a moment in situations where American drivers would leaning on their horns to get people out of their way.

There are three major street types in central Amsterdam - in the area within the Singelgracht (which was the protective moat around the seventeenth-century city.

The most common type of street has one lane for traffic. The sidewalk generally is not at a different level from the street; instead, it is protected by bollards. Cars share the one lane with bicyclists. Usually, cars pass bicyclists, but the narrow street forces them to slow down to pass. Sometimes, bicyclists make cars follow behind them at bicycle speed, as shown in the picture below.

The narrow sidewalk areas are sometimes blocked by parked bicycles or by people who have stopped to talk. Sometimes, the steps of house protrude into the sidewalk area, as shown in the picture below. As a result, pedestrians are often forced to spill over into the street to avoid obstacles, which slows down traffic even further.

A second type of street has four lanes (in addition to bike lanes), one in each direction for mixed traffic and one in each direction for trams, as shown in the picture below. Even in these collector streets, the widest streets in central Amsterdam, traffic flows in one lane. Everyone drives at the speed of the slower cars, because there is no fast lane.

A third type of street is the steeg (alley), shown below, which is too narrow for cars to use except for occasional deliveries.

You would expect these medieval and seventeenth-century streets to be too narrow for the traffic of a dense, modern city. But notice that there are no cars in sight in the picture of the major street above. You can routinely cross major streets without going to the crosswalk because there are so few cars.

How is it that Amsterdam is far less congested and less frustrating for drivers than Los Angeles, a city that is less dense and that has wide streets and freeways?

In part, it is a matter of incentives. There is very little automobile parking in Amsterdam. Residents can buy permits that let them park in their own neighborhoods, but anyone without a permit must pay 8 Euros per hour to park on the street. As a result, people store their cars on the street but use their cars primarily to drive out of the city on vacation, and they bicycle to destinations in the city.

Even more important, the city was built at a time when walking was the most common form of transportation, so it works well for pedestrians and has been easy to adapt to the bicycle. It does not work for cars, which discourages driving. Thus, the city can charge so much for parking, because there is so little parking available.

Most important, the Netherlands has a strong bicycle culture, which is part of its larger cultural bias. International surveys have shown that more people have "post-materialist values" in the Netherlands than in any other country. In 1950, the Dutch worked longer hours than Americans; now they work 70% to 75% as many hours per year as Americans. Many of them would rather have more time to live well rather than consuming more - and one of the best ways to reduce expenses is by bicycling. This, I think, is the deepest reason that Amsterdam's streets are filled with bicycles and have not filled up to capacity with cars, as the streets of Paris and most other older cities have. They clearly live better as a result of this cultural bias, with less traffic congestion and less road rage than other cities.

Though Amsterdam's streets work very well, today's traffic engineers would never allow streets to be designed in this way. The first type of street that we looked at is the most common and the most pleasant type of street in the city. It works so well because pedestrians are constantly spilling from the narrow sidewalks into the roadway, slowing traffic. Traffic engineers would never allow obstacles to block the sidewalk, forcing pedestrians to walk in the street. They would say it is unsafe. But in reality, those pedestrians help to make the streets safer by slowing traffic.

The streets work well in the central parts of Amsterdam, where they developed over time with little planning - and with no planning to accommodate the automobile. But in the outer parts of Amsterdam, developed after World War II, the streets were designed by traffic engineers, who based their designs on projected demand for road space and for parking.

As a result, the outer parts of the city have commercial areas like the one shown below, with parking between the sidewalk and the stores. This works for cars, but does not create attractive shopping streets for pedestrians.

And the outer parts of the city have streets devoted to automobile traffic, like the one shown below.

Only traffic engineers could design such an ugly, pedestrian-hostile street - the same traffic engineers who will not let us design narrow streets and sidewalks like the streets that attract people to central Amsterdam.

Beluid In Amsterdam - Noise In Amsterdam

2011-06-02T00:07:00.000-07:00

Though it is much denser than most American cities, Amsterdam is quieter than most American cities. Here are some sources of noise that are common in America and absent in Amsterdam:

Gardening Noise: Houses in Amsterdam are allowed to have a strip of land only 30 centimeters (about one foot) deep in front of them for planting. Many have beautiful plantings, as shown in the picture below; most have simpler plantings such as rose vines; in any event, the space is so small that the plantings need only a bit of hand-trimming. There is none of the noise of lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and other gardening machinery that you always hear in America.

Beepers on Trucks: Trucks in Amsterdam do not beep when they back up - a minor nuisance but one we constantly face in America. The federal government requires these beepers as a safety measure, but their absence does not seem to cause accidents in Amsterdam. This is undoubtedly because Amsterdam drivers are used to being surrounded by people and bicyclists and so are very cautious, while American drivers are used to barreling along with few pedestrians around them.

Sidewalk Repairs: Jackhammers breaking up concrete sidewalks are not heard all that frequently in America, but they are extremely loud and annoying when they are used. In central Amsterdam, the sidewalks are paved with bricks, and repairs involve pulling up and putting down bricks by hand, which makes little or no noise. This undoubtedly requires more maintenance expense than our concrete sidewalks, but because Amsterdam is much denser, there is much less sidewalk area per capita than in American cities, so it is plausible that sidewalk maintenance costs less per capita.

Traffic Noise: Cars are the number one source of noise in American cities, and people in Amsterdam drive much less than in America. In central Amsterdam, most streets have only one traffic lane, shared by cars and bicycles, so the cars drive slowly, reducing the amount of noise they make. The difference is very clear on residential streets: where I live in Berkeley, I cannot stand outside of my house for more than two minutes without a car pulling in or out; but where I am staying in Amsterdam, there are fewer cars, even though the street is about four times as dense as my street in Berkeley.

But there is one source of traffic noise that often disrupts the quiet of Amsterdam, the bromfietsen (motorcycles and motorscooters). I guess that there are about 5% to 10% as many bromfietsen as fietsen (bicycles) in Amsterdam. When you walk down the street, it is usually very quiet for a couple of minutes, with only pedestrians, bicycles, and s few low-speed cars going by, and then very noisy for 15 seconds or so, as a motorscooter or motorcycle roars by.

The bromfietsers ride on the bicycle paths, and because they go faster than bicycles, they weave between them dangerously. On major streets, bike paths are right next to the sidewalk, and when you are walking on the sidewalk, it is alarming to have a heavy, noisy, high-speed vehicle right next to you; they are more polluting than cars, and you can smell their fumes after they pass. They often park blocking the sidewalk, because they cannot be leaned against buildings and fences like bicycles. They tend to be aggressive: sometimes they barrel through a street filled with pedestrians, honking their horns and roaring their engines to get people out of their way.

If half the bicyclists in Amsterdam shifted to motorscooters, it would be a much noisier, more dangerous, and less livable city. The 5% or 10% who have shifted to motorscooters save themselves a bit of time at the expense of making the city less livable for everyone. They are just the opposite of the people who give a gift to the public realm by planting in front of their houses: they degrade the public realm to benefit themselves.

On the balance, I think that the benefit to the individual of the time the motorscooters save is not as great as the cost to the public of the noise and danger that the motorscooters cause. If it were up to me, I would simply ban them - with an exception, of course, for people who have health problems that prevent them from bicycling.

Then Amsterdam would prove to the world that it is possible for a city to be dense and urban and at the same time to be beautiful and very quiet. It certainly is beautiful, but its quiet is under attack.

Renzo Piano's Nemo Center

2011-05-29T10:22:00.000-07:00

Amsterdam is filled with very attractive traditional architecture and urbanism. It also has some bleak modernist architecture; the most prominent example is Nemo (National Center for Science and Technology), which includes a popular science museum. This 1997 building designed by Renzo Piano could be a textbook example of what is wrong with contemporary avant-gardist architecture.

In order to make it an icon, the building is designed to look like a ship rising out of the water of the Oosterdok. To get this striking effect, the building has to be at the end of the point of land it is on.

In the picture below, you can see the older urban fabric of Amsterdam to the right of this point of land, and you can see the Nemo building at its extreme tip. In terms of urban design, it would have made much more sense to locate the building next to the urban fabric, in order to create a lively urban place where they meet, but Piano is more interested in creating an icon that stands out on the skyline than in creating an attractive, usable urban place.

The picture below shows the view of Nemo from the part of the city that is right next to it. The freeway goes under Nemo and then continues in a tunnel under the Oosterdok.

Of course, a better urban design would have put Nemo over the freeway at the point where it meets the city, in order to heal this gash in the urban fabric; the freeway is low enough that it would be possible to build over it. Then it would have been easy to walk to Nemo from the city, and there would have been a vital urban place where they met.

Instead, Piano forces people to approach Nemo on a long, ugly, sidewalk overlooking this freeway - which the winds blowing over the Oosterdok make even more uncomfortable.

After you get beyond the freeway, you reach the empty plaza shown below, continuing your upleasant walk through a bleak, wind-swept space. During the 1960s, modernists were often criticized for designing empty plazas like this, and apparently they still have not learned.

When you finally reach the building itself, you pass by the Renzo Piano Cafe, shown below. The seating on the plaza is almost deserted, an amazing contrast to all the cafes in the city center that you passed while you walked here, which have all their seats filled and are surrounded by crowds of pedestrians.

The Renzo Piano Cafe, designed to look oh-so-stylish but little used and much ignored by the people of Amsterdam, is a fitting tribute to the architect who designed this building as an icon meant to attract attention to itself, rather than as a good place for people to be.

Modernist Nostalgia

2011-05-01T19:21:00.000-07:00

New York Times architecture critic Nicholai Ouroussoff, who is a typical modernist, often attacks New Urbanist planners for their “nostalgia” because they design traditional neighborhoods and often use traditional architecture.

But he admits that his own modernism is also a form of nostalgia in a recent review where he praises a new glass and steel tower for being “sleek and muscular,” his usual vocabulary, and then goes on to say:

“The machine aesthetic is everywhere. … The allusions to mobile culture suggest a version of the American dream straight out of the Eisenhower era. And even the building’s voyeuristic aspects can be read as a form of nostalgia: a Manhattan version of teenage lovers steaming up car windows… It suggests a longing for a world - free, open, upwardly mobile - that began to break down more than thirty years ago.”

He even titles the article “Nostalgia in Glass and Steel.”

Apparently, he believes that it is wrong for the New Urbanists to be nostalgic about the streetcar suburbs of the 1910s because they were human-scale and walkable, but it is fine for modernists to be nostalgic about the car culture of the 1950s because it was machine-based and mobile.

This admission that he is nostalgic for the 1950s shows us where Ouroussoff and the modernist architects he admires fit into recent history.

In the 1950s, Americans were in the grip of technological optimism. Nuclear power would let us produce energy so cheap that it would not have to be metered. Urban freeways would reduce congestion and make cities more livable. We would tear down the old slums and the old neighborhoods and replace them with modern housing projects in the city and with modern suburbs on the freeways.

During the 1960s, criticism of this view of the future became widespread. By the 1970s and 1980s, this criticism of modernism was a dominant theme of architecture, as post-modern architects rejected the glass box because it was sterile and dehumanized. For example, Philip Johnson’s famous “glass house” of 1949 was the ultimate example of the modernist esthetic; but by the 1980s, Johnson had rejected modernism, and he designed the AT&T building in Manhattan with serious traditional detailing at ground level and ironic traditional detailing at the roof level.

This change in architecture was one part of a larger rejection of the technological optimism of the 1950s that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. Everyone saw that modernist housing projects were failures. Political resistance made it almost impossible to build new freeways within cities. The environmental movement questioned the value of economic growth and focused on quality of life; and it was so influential that a 1979 survey found that 30 percent of Americans were pro-growth, 31 percent were anti-growth, and 39 percent were uncertain.

Then the country shifted to the right under the administration of Ronald Reagan, who was inspired by nostalgia for the 1950s and who focused on restoring economic growth and technological optimism. Before long, most architects went along with the Reaganite spirit: they abandoned post-modernism and went back to building modernist designs in glass, steel, and concrete.

These architects were different from Reagan, because they did not understand that they were conservative and instead modeled themselves on the progressive avant-garde of the 1920s through the 1950s. Today’s modernists still think they are progressive because they are building in the avant-garde style of more than a half-century ago.

Today’s architects generally ignore the social-reformist agenda of the 1950s, and consider modernism a narrow esthetic doctrine with no real social content. It is rare for them to see what their social agenda is and to admit that they are inspired by nostalgia for the 1950s, as Ouroussoff does in this article.

“Nostalgia” is an odd term. Originally, it referred to a medical condition, pathological homesickness. In the nineteenth century, romantics used the word to refer to a general longing for earlier times and for distant places, which were important parts of the romantic esthetic. And in the twentieth century, modernists began to use the word to condemn anyone who is inspired by the past. The modernists thought that it was fine to be inspired by utopian visions of a mechanized, glass-and-steel future, no matter how unrealistic these utopias were; but it was “nostalgic,” and therefore wrong, to be inspired by the past.

In reality, of course, it is perfectly appropriate to be inspired by elements of the past or by visions of the future, if they provide lessons that are useful today. The real question is whether we can learn useful lessons for our own time from the New Urbanists “nostalgia” for the 1910s’ streetcar suburbs or from Ouroussoff’s “nostalgia” for the 1950s’ car culture and technological optimism.

Your answer to that question depends on where you are located on the political spectrum.

On the left, environmentalists admire the New Urbanists’ walkable neighborhoods because they reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and energy use. Even more important, these old-fashioned neighborhoods are obviously more livable than conventional sprawl suburbs, though they use less land and less energy. They are a key element of an optimistic vision of the future that is appropriate to our era of ecological constraints, because they show that we can consume less and live better.

On the right, conservative Republicans are still filled with nostalgia for the technological optimism of the 1950s. They believe that global warming is a hoax, that we can do away with energy constraints by chanting “drill, baby, drill,” and that we can solve all our problems by promoting rapid economic growth.

It is grotesque that contemporary modernists believe that they are politically progressive because they are nostalgic for the1950s technological optimism that only survives among conservatives today. When they say that their machine esthetic is politically progressive, they might as well say that it is politically progressive to support urban freeway construction and nuclear power, two other symptoms of 1950s "optimism."

In reality, they are promoting a 1950s vision of the future that is bankrupt. They stand in the way of developing a new vision of the future that is appropriate to our time, because they are obsessed with yesterday’s vision of tomorrow.

For the 1979 survey about growth, see Robert Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 164.

Ouroussoff’s article is available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/arts/design/neil-denaris-hl23-tower-rises-in-chelsea-review.html

Life's Basic Needs Include Two Cars

2011-04-11T11:52:00.000-07:00

A recent article in the New York Times describes a group that has published a study of how much income it takes to meet life's basic needs. They say that their income calculations do not allow for frills like gifts or meals out: "It’s a very bare-bones budget."

For a family of two working adults with no children, they estimate a basic minimum transportation cost of $11,724 per year, more than 25% of this family's total budget of $42,504 per year and more than any other item in its budget. The second largest cost is housing, at $8,256 per year.

They say that they calculated the transportation costs in these budgets "assuming the ownership of a small sedan" - but they obviously assume that each working adult needs one of those sedans. Their budget for a household made up of one working adult includes about half as much for transportation as their budget for a household made up of two working adults.

What would the people of Amsterdam or Copenhagen, where more people commute by bicycle than by car, think of this notion that life's basic needs include one car for each adult? What would Americans have thought of it one hundred years ago, when the average family spent only about 2% of its income on transportation, though its income was much lower then than it is now?

Contrast their "bare bones" budget for transportation with my own transportation costs:

For many years, I commuted by bicycle, and my total transportation cost was about $100 per year for occasional tires, brakes, and overhauls. (I have had the same mountain bike for over 10 years and got it used.)

Now, I have a long commute by public transit, which costs $4.30 each way. I work at home some days, but if I commuted to work every day, transportation would cost me $2,150 per year. I still bicycle for my non-commute transportation, and that still costs about $100 per year. Even with a long commute, my transportation cost is less than 40% of their estimated basic minimum transportation cost.

Their basic budget for transportation, with one car per adult, does not look "bare bones" compared with the basic budget for transportation of someone who lives in a walkable, transit-oriented neighborhood.

There are other methodological flaws in this study. For example, they estimate the cost of "basic housing" as the 40th percentile cost of housing. This implies that 40% of all Americans live in substandard housing, which I think is an exaggeration.

But the biggest problem with the study is it legitimizes what Ivan Illich called "the modernization of poverty." Historically, poverty meant an inability to afford adequate food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities. Modernized poverty means an inability to afford the high level of consumption that modern societies impose on us.

Most parts of modern cities are built in a way that makes it impossible to get around without a car. This imposes a huge financial burden not only on the poor but also on the middle class. The proper response, and the response that urban environmentalists support, it to build walkable neighborhoods that reduce this burden by reducing auto-dependency. Walkable neighborhoods not only save huge amounts of money; they are also better places to live than auto-dependent neighborhoods.

Of course, this study is well intentioned. Most Americans do live in places where you need to drive to get around, and this group wants to make it possible for low-income Americans to get by economically in their actual circumstances.

But it is very destructive to accept the status quo of the modern American city in this way. Given the limits that energy scarcity and global warming impose on us, there is no way that that the majority of the people in the world can ever, in the foreseeable future, have a basic minimum standard of living that includes one car per adult.

If we define this as a basic minimum, then we are saying that most people in the world (including the prosperous middle-classes of Amsterdam and Copenhagen) will never have the basic necessities of life. And if other nations imitate us and attempt to provide this basic minimum, it will condemn the world to a future of energy shortages and climate change.

see the article at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/business/economy/01jobs.html?_r=1&ref=...

Derek Bok’s "The Politics of Happiness"

2011-02-27T12:28:00.000-08:00

The long tradition of political philosophy beginning with Plato thinks very rigorously about happiness, justice, and other concepts that are fundamental to a good society, but it does not do any empirical research.

Today’s social scientists do endless empirical research, but they think very little about the concepts underlying their work.

When I heard that Derek Bok, former president of Harvard, had written The Politics of Happiness, a book discussing the empirical research about happiness and the policies that we could base on it, I hoped that he might give us both empirical research and rigorous thought about concepts. But I was disappointed: he is worse than most of today’s social scientists, citing one empirical study after another, but never even trying to think clearly about the concept of happiness.

The trouble becomes obvious early in the book, when he says that Jeremy Bentham was the first to try to develop a politics of happiness by looking for policies that promote “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (p.4). Anyone who has studied the history of philosophy knows that Bentham used the word happiness to mean pleasure: he wanted to add up the quantities of pleasure and pain that any policy caused to everyone it affected, and to adopt policies that cause the greatest net pleasure.

This focus on pleasure is very different from what is measured in many studies of happiness, which ask people how satisfied they are with their life. But throughout his book, Bok slops together pleasure and the different types of happiness that our empirical studies measure - and to loosen his conceptual grip even more, he uses “well-being” as a synonym for all of them.

There are two different types of empirical studies that claim to be about happiness.

One type asks people how happy or satisfied they are with their lives overall. Even within this type, people answer differently depending on how the question is phrased: you get different results by asking people how happy they are and by asking people how satisfied they are with their lives.

The second type is called “experience sampling.” It asks people to think back over their activities of the day and to rate each activity for how much it contributes to their happiness. This method tends to make people think about how pleasant or unpleasant each activity is as it occurs, rather than about how much it contributes in the long run to their satisfaction with their lives.

When you use experience sampling, for example, people give the time they spend on child care a very low happiness rating - lower than anything except working and commuting - and they give eating dinner a very high happiness rating. But we all know that when people look back over their lives, many think that raising their children was an important part of a satisfying life, but relatively few think that eating dinner was an important part of a satisfying life (unless it involved other activities, such as being with your family).

Taking care of your children is often difficult and sometimes annoying while you are doing it, but it can seem like a very satisfying part of your life in the long run. Eating dinner is relaxing and pleasant while you are doing it, but it does not seem all that important a part of your life in the long run. The same is true of many things: learning to play the piano, training intensively for a sport, working in a political group, writing a book, and most other activities that develop and use your skills are difficult rather than pleasant while you are doing them, but they can bring more satisfaction in the long run than pleasant and easy activities such as eating dinner.

This distinction has an important effect on policy. For example, when Bok talks about raising children, he seems to assume that happiness involves pleasant and easy activities. He accepts the studies that say Americans today have more leisure than they did a few decades ago because they spend less time on work and child care combined, apparently influenced by experience sampling studies; he recommends more spending on child care, which would give people even less time than their children. By contrast, many social critics say that our lives are less satisfying because we work such long hours that we have less time to be with our children than we did a few decades ago, thinking of happiness as long-term satisfaction.

In many cases, Bok’s imprecise concept of happiness does not have much effect on his policy recommendations. He spends much of The Politics of Happiness talking briefly about conditions that everyone agrees make people unhappy, and then talking at great length about very conventional, narrow policies to address these conditions.

For example, he says that clinical depression is much more common in the United States and Canada than in other countries; you do not need much research to know that clinical depression makes people unhappy. As a policy to make these people happier, he recommends psychotherapy and drugs - and “For those who do not respond to any of these treatments, electric shock therapy is sometimes successful” (p. 134). Shock therapy is controversial, but Bok devotes just this one sentence to it - typical of his perfunctory attention to many policy issues in the book. He makes no attempt to think about why depression is so much more common in the United States and Canada and to suggest social changes that would make them less common - typical of his narrow approach to many policies issues.

Bok is most frustrating when he deals with the subject of economic growth, because happiness research does challenge the conventional wisdom by suggesting that growth should not be our goal, but Bok’s discussion of economic policy is so conventional and so ill-informed that he says we cannot act on this research in any significant way.

He shows that, though there are some disagreements, most happiness research shows that growth does not increase happiness, and so he asks: “If it turns out to be true that rising incomes have failed to make Americans happier, as much of the recent research suggests, what is the point of working such long hours and risking environmental disaster in order to keep doubling and redoubling our Gross Domestic Product?” (p. 63) But then, after a very shallow discussion of the economic issues involved, he concludes that we cannot slow growth significantly.

For example, he says that “America is such a major market for other nations that stopping expansion or even slowing it severely could easily throw the world into recession” (p. 72). He does not even mention all the studies showing that our continued growth could drive resource prices up enough to cause scarcity in developing nations and could cause global warming that brings crop failures to hundreds of millions of people. Bill Clinton recently made the point that our use of corn ethanol to power our cars is contributing to world hunger by driving up the price of grain, but Bok does not even consider the economic effects of this sort of competition for resources. He also does not consider whether developing nations could base their growth primarily on their own markets, as Western nations did, rather than being so dependent totally on the American market. He devotes only one paragraph - a total of three sentences - to these issues.

He also says that “There is also little reason to believe that many countries would agree to follow America’s lead in stopping growth. India, China, and other developing nations with per capita incomes far below ours would surely be reluctant to do so” (p. 72). If he looked at the numbers, he would see that slowing growth in the developing nations alone could make an important contribution to controlling global warming. He would also see that, if their current growth rates continue, China will reach America’ current levels of per capita income in a few decades, and India will follow a couple of decades later. Then the billions of people in those two nations will face the same issue that Americans face now: should they continue to promote rapid growth even though it does not contribute to their own happiness and threatens environmental disaster? Their answer to that question will determine whether the world faces environmental collapse by the end of the century, but Bok is blissfully ignorant of all these facts. He devotes one paragraph of four sentences to these issues.

He also does not consider -and seems never to have heard of - the most important policy measure that could slow our economic growth and increase our happiness: giving workers the choice of working shorter hours with the same hourly earnings, a policy already adopted in the Netherlands and Germany.

This policy could slow growth significantly. In 1950, Dutch workers worked longer hours than American workers, but now they work only 70% - 75% as many hours per year as American workers. Because they choose more free time rather than more income and consumption, they have slower economic growth and less impact on the environment than they would if they worked as long hours as we do.

This policy is viable economically. The Dutch economy is as successful as the American economy, and it has a much lower rate of unemployment.

This policy is supported by research that tells us growth does not make Americans happier - and by research that tells us the Dutch are much more satisfied with their lives than Americans are.

Anyone who thinks rigorously about the concept of happiness and decides that we should promote people’s long-term satisfaction with life, rather than promoting easy and pleasant activities such as eating dinner, will support choice of work hours, because it allows people more time to spend with their children, to develop and use their skills, and to do the other things that require effort and provide long-term satisfaction. By reducing stress and giving people time for satisfying activities, choice of work hours might even reduce the incidence of clinical depression and the need for electric shock therapy.

Anyone who understands the issues underlying our economic and environmental policies will support choice of work hours, because it significantly increases our chances of avoiding painful resource shortages and catastrophic global warming. But Bok pontificates about economic growth without understanding the issues. As we have seen, he spends one short paragraph each on two key issues. He apparently has never heard about the success of choice of work hours in the Netherlands, which slows growth but does not stop it. And so he concludes that “Even if it should turn out that growth does not bring added happiness, there is no way at present to stop the economy from growing without creating problems that would outweigh any hoped-for benefits” (p. 207).

No matter how much empirical research you do about happiness, you are not going to come up with better policies, if you do not understand the policy areas that you are working with, and if you do not think clearly enough about the concept of happiness to develop a vision of a better society.

All page references are to Derek Bok, The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being (Princeton University Press, 2010).

Ouroussoff Discredits Contextualism

2011-01-12T19:46:00.000-08:00

Respect for architectural context became a rallying cry fifty years ago, when it was used to defend historical neighborhoods from modernist architecture that did not respect their character.

But we should be able to see that respect for context is not the real issue, now that New Urbanists are changing the character of modernist developments for the better. For example, if a New Urbanist planner develops an urban code that gradually changes a strip mall into a pedestrian-friendly Main Street, the new buildings do not respect the existing context.

Now that New Urbanists are improving modernist cities in this way, certain reactionary critics who are still defending mid-century modernism have begun to use contextualism as an argument against more humanistic architecture and urbanism.

For example, in today's New York Times, Nicolai Ouroussoff criticizes Eli Broad's Los Angeles museums on the grounds that they do not respect the historic Los Angeles context of freeways and urban sprawl.

Ouroussoff begins by saying that Eli Broad does not "grasp the peculiar beauty of Los Angeles, its oddly hypnotic blend of flimsy houses and muscular freeways .... His urban ideal, to the degree that he has one, seems to be based on the Upper East Side of Manhattan or on central Paris - models that, however attractive, have little to do with Los Angeles’s sprawl." If a city is made up of freeways and sprawl, we should respect that context by building more freeways and sprawl!

A bit later, he looks at the more immediate context, and says that the design for Broad's new museum is "in keeping with the mood of the avenue, which over the years has developed its own kind of eerie stillness, especially at night, when it is mostly barren." If a place is eerie and barren, we should respect that context by designing new buildings that keep it eerie and barren!

He concludes by saying that the original proposal "included a parking entry at ground level along Second Street, which would have ... added a crucial dimension to the narrative: the interweaving of pedestrian and automotive life that is central to the experience of Los Angeles generally, and of Grand Avenue in particular, with its views onto nearby freeways. But the entrance was removed during the design process, and what was once a more complex reading of urban mobility has been reduced to something more banal." If the city is so sliced up by roads that there are no pedestrian-friendly places, we should respect that context by designing new places around roads rather than making them pedestrian friendly!

Needless to say, Ouroussoff is only a contextualist when it comes to defending mid-century modernist urbanism of freeways and sprawl, not when it comes to defending traditional urbanism. He complains that Eli Broad does not respect the context of Los Angeles because his urban ideal is Upper East Side of Manhattan or central Paris. But Ouroussoff himself supported Norman Foster's proposed tower for the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which the neighborhood stopped because it obviously did not respect its architectural context. And I am sure that he will write articles fawning on the avant-gardist highrises that will soon begin to tear up the traditional urbanism of Paris.

Though Ouroussoff is inconsistent and only advocates respect for context when it furthers his own cliquish modernist esthetic, his ideas should serve as a warning that contextualism is not enough.

When we were on the defensive because traditional urbanism was constantly being threatened by modernist projects, it made some sense to talk about design that respects its context. But now that we are beginning to transform inhuman modernist developments into good places for people to be, it is time to start talking about design that respects human nature. It is time to move from architectural contextualism to architectural humanism.

If you do not believe that Ouroussoff could focus so narrowly on his cliquish esthetic that he actually supports freeways, sprawl, and designing eerie, barren places, you can verify the quotations in this post by reading Ourossoff's article at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/arts/design/12broad.html

Shorter and Flexible Hours in Accounting Firms

2011-01-08T19:03:00.000-08:00

There is another article in today's New York Times about choice of shorter hours. Like the last one it focuses on worker satisfaction and overlooks the environmental implications of shorter work hours.

It also says shorter and flexible hours have the economic benefit of reducing employee turnover, but it says nothing about the effect on productivity (which I would be very interested to know). But notice that the last person quoted in the excerpt below says she was promoted to partner based on performance even though she was working part time, which implies that her productivity was high.

Some excerpts fom the article are below. The full article is available at
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/08/business/08perks.html?_r=1&ref=business

Flex Time Flourishes in Accounting Industry

...when it comes to respecting the work-life balance of employees, the accounting industry far outshines the rest of corporate America, workplace experts say.

Some firms allow employees to take off the entire summer to devote to their children; some let employees work just three days a week during nonpeak months. The big accounting firms generally give 12 weeks of paid maternity leave, with fathers often receiving six weeks — and that is on top of the 12 weeks of unpaid leave provided to parents under federal law.

Several firms grant sabbaticals of three or six months at 40 percent pay and full health benefits, so employees can chase life dreams like climbing mountains or building schoolhouses in Africa. And since these are bean counters we’re talking about, they’ve done the math: flexibility enhances the bottom line.

“The nation’s accounting firms excel at this for a boring, accounting reason — they’ve looked at the numbers, and they see it helps,” said Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute.

Jennifer Allyn, managing director in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ office of diversity, said stepped-up flexibility policies had helped cut turnover to 15 percent a year, from 24 percent. Firms estimate that the cost of hiring and training a new employee can be 1.5 times a departing worker’s salary, so reducing turnover by 200 employees could mean $30 million in savings. Sharon Allen, Deloitte’s chairwoman, said her firm’s flexibility policies saved more than $45 million a year by reducing turnover.

Working mothers, especially, are drawn to employers that offer flexibility, although all employees want some control over their work hours.

“Flexibility is the No. 1 issue for women, but it’s also the No. 2 or 3 issue for men,” said Cathy Benko, a vice chairwoman at Deloitte. She created its much-praised “mass career customization” program in which all employees work with management to factor their individual goals and needs — like raising three children — into their career plans.
...
Michelle Hickox, an accountant with McGladrey, the nation’s fifth-largest accounting firm, based in Bloomington, Minn., said her firm’s Flexyear policy had helped keep her from quitting. For the last nine years, she has worked full time September through June, while taking off July and August to spend time with her two school-age daughters. She opted to do this even though she feared it would damage her chances of making partner.

But things took a surprising turn. “One day, my partner-in-charge came into my office and was adamant that being in this program shouldn’t make a difference in my goal of becoming a partner,” Ms. Hickox said. “It felt awesome.” Soon after, she was promoted to partner.
...
Among Ernst & Young’s 23,500 United States employees, 1,700 women and 300 men are on flexible arrangements. Women are so confident that adopting such a schedule will not hurt their chances of promotion that 25 percent of the firm’s female senior managers — the step before partner — are on flexible arrangements.

Brooke Sikes, an Ernst & Young partner in Dallas, took six months of maternity leave when her first child was born and then spent four years working a 35-hour-a-week schedule, down from her typical 45- or 50-hour weeks. The firm promoted her to partner even though she was working less than full time.

“The firm very much rewards you for your performance,” she said. “It’s not about punching a clock. It’s not about face time.”

See the complete article at
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/08/business/08perks.html?_r=1&ref=business

Dutch Work-Time in the New York Times

2011-01-08T18:43:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times had a very favorable article about Dutch work-time policy, saying "The Dutch culture of part-time work provides an advance peek at the challenges - and potential solutions - that other nations will face as well in an era of a rapidly changing work force."

But the article did not mention the environmental implications of part-time work - which I would say is the number-one blindspot of contemporary politics. When this sort of article says that the Dutch culture of part-time work provides an advance peak at the potential solutions to an era of global warming and scarce resources, then change will come

Some excerpts from the article are below. The full article is available at
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/world/europe/30iht-dutch30.html

Working (Part-Time) in the 21st Century

UTRECHT, NETHERLANDS — Remco Vermaire is ambitious and, at 37, the youngest partner in his law firm. His banker clients expect him on call constantly — except on Fridays, when he looks after his two children.

Fourteen of the 33 lawyers in Mr. Vermaire’s firm work part time, as do many of their high-powered spouses. Some clients work part time, too.

“Working four days a week is now the rule rather than the exception among my friends,” said Mr. Vermaire, the first man in his firm to take a “daddy day” in 2006. Within a year, all the other male lawyers with small children had followed suit.

For reasons that blend tradition and modernity, three in four working Dutch women work part time. Female-dominated sectors like health and education operate almost entirely on job-sharing as even childless women and mothers of grown children trade income for time off. That has exacted an enduring price on women’s financial independence.

But in just a few years, part-time work has ceased being the prerogative of woman with little career ambition, and become a powerful tool to attract and retain talent — male and female — in a competitive Dutch labor market.

Indeed, for a growing group of younger professionals, the appetite for a shorter, a more flexible workweek appears to be spreading, with implications for everything from gender identity to rush-hour traffic.

There are part-time surgeons, part-time managers and part-time engineers. From Microsoft to the Dutch Economics Ministry, offices have moved into “flex-buildings,” where the number of work spaces are far fewer than the staff who come and go on schedules tailored around their needs.

The Dutch culture of part-time work provides an advance peek at the challenges — and potential solutions — that other nations will face as well in an era of a rapidly changing work force.

“Our part-time experience has taught us that you can organize work in a rhythm other than nine-to-five,” said Pia Dijkstra, a member of Parliament and well-known former news anchor who led a task force on how to encourage women to work more. “The next generation,” she added, is “turning our part-time culture from a weakness into a strength.”
...
Seventy-five percent of Dutch women now work part time, compared to 41 percent in other European Union countries and 23 percent in the United States, according to Saskia Keuzenkamp at the Netherlands Institute for Social Research. Twenty-three percent of Dutch men have reduced hours, compared to 10 percent across the European Union and in the United States; another nine percent work a full week in four days.

When Jan Henk van der Velden, one of Mr. Vermaire’s law firm partners, joined 21 years ago, there were no female partners and no man would have dared ask to work part time. Today, six of the nine partners do. It works because the lawyers are flexible — when Mr. Vermaire has a court hearing on a Friday, for example, he swaps with his wife, who is normally off Mondays.

Of the 85 specialists at the Ziekenhuis Amstelland hospital south of Amsterdam, 31 are female and two-thirds work part time. Some surgeons even train part time, meaning a daily struggle to unify treatment of patients by several doctors.

“This would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago,” said Jacques Moors, the hospital’s chairman. “But if we insisted on full-time surgeons we would have a personnel problem: Three in four of our junior doctors are female.”

In male-dominated fields, the picture is more mixed. After Martina Dopper, a civil engineer at the company Ballast Nedam, requested a three-day week in 2007, she was given to understand that part time meant no promotion.

This month, however, she was promoted. “I hope this means more of my male colleagues will get an opportunity to spend more time with their families,” she said. So far, her own husband, also an engineer, does not dare for fear of jeopardizing his career.

Dutch fathers are becoming more vocal. A crop of recent books and Web sites advise men on combining career with family. Last year, a women’s magazine, Lof, set up the “Working Dad Prize,” which went to a man who won a court case against his employer enforcing his right to work part time.

The government awarded its own “Modern Man Prize” for breaking gender stereotypes. Rutger Groot Wassink won for co-founding a campaign that promotes part-time work for men — and for working four days a week himself. “Men have been excluded from this debate for too long,” said Mr. Wassink, noting a poll showing that 65 percent of Dutch fathers would like to work less.
...
96 percent of Dutch part timers tell pollsters they do not want to work more; the Netherlands is that rare country where — even taking housework and child care into account — women work less than men.

see the complete article at
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/world/europe/30iht-dutch30.html

Better than Cost-Effective

2010-12-02T17:34:00.000-08:00

Environmentalist point out that there are many cost-effective solutions to climate change. For example, many energy conservation measures pay for themselves in energy savings and give you a good rate of return on the money you invest in them.

We clearly need these cost effective solutions, but we also need to think about solutions that are better than cost effective - solutions that are a matter of not doing things that are environmentally destructive and that make our lives less satisfying. Two prime examples are:

Walkable neighborhoods: We can reduce emissions and make our cities more livable by building walkable neighborhoods (including streetcar suburbs) rather than auto-dependent neighborhoods, as many New Urbanists say. Auto-dependent sprawl suburbs are not only environmentally destructive; they also make our lives harder, more expensive, and less satisfying.

Choice of work hours: We can reduce emissions and improve our work-life balance by offering employees choice of work hours, as they do in Germany and the Netherlands. Because shorter hours are voluntary, people only choose them if they think their lives will be more satisfying if the work and consume less and instead have more free time. Our standard 40-hour work week is not only environmentally destructive; it also makes our lives harder and less satisfying.

Cost effective solutions involve spending money and getting a good return on your investment. These two solutions are better than cost effective because they give you the environmental benefits by letting you spend less and enjoy life more.

Technological Optimism

2010-11-01T09:55:00.000-07:00

I am a technological optimist in this sense: I believe that, if technology is used wisely, it can bring bring economic comfort and abundant leisure to everyone.

This sort of optimism was common in the early twentieth century. For example, Keynes wrote in his famous essay "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" that "From the earliest times of which we have record ... down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilized centers of the earth." But now, because new technology makes production more efficient, "mankind is solving its economic problem," and "a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes." When that time comes, "man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well."

That seems to me to be an optimistic view of the future.

By contrast, today's economic conservatives say that new technology and economic growth will solve our problems, and they seem to have a fairly bleak view of the future. There will be series of problems - beginning with those we are facing now, such as global warming, traffic congestion, and peak oil, and presumably continuing indefinitely - but don't worry, because technology will come up with a solution to each of these problems before it becomes a disaster.

They have no vision of a better future. We just continue the same consumerism we have now, but on a larger scale, even though international comparisons have shown that we in the United States have gone far beyond the point where consuming more makes you happier. We will keep promoting waste, even when it is an economic burden: for example, we will defend sprawl neighborhoods where people cannot leave their houses without driving, even if it means that people have to spend 20% of their income on their cars.

Conservatives consider this optimistic only because environmentalists have an even bleaker vision of the future. At best, they call for austerity: we should all hang out our laundry on clothes lines to conserve energy, regardless of the nuisance it causes. As worst, they say that austerity will not work and we are heading for disaster.

Environmentalists need to recapture some of that old optimism of Keynes and to start saying that our lives could be much easier and much more satisfying, as well as more sustainable. We need to give ourselves the choice of working shorter hours, moderating our consumerism, spending more time on our families and our own interests, and learning how to occupy our leisure to live wisely and agreeably and well.

John King's Icon-Mania

2010-10-09T20:57:00.000-07:00

John King, the "urban design" critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, once again provides a perfect example of how ignorant modernist critics are of the fundamentals of urban design.

His latest column is about an overpass near the Pleasant Hill BART (rail transit) station, going over Treat Boulevard. Like a typical modernist, he thinks of the overpass purely as an esthetic object, a sort of abstract sculpture:

"instead of tapering inward, as is common for bridges of this type, the arches fan outward from the deck.... From the street, it's as if enormous silver bows were poised above you. On the deck, you move amid sculptured butterfly wings ... Robert I. Schroeder Overcrossing shows what an icon can be."

Anyone who has the slightest idea of how cities work will have a very different reaction when they look at this picture of the overpass.

On the far side of Treat Boulevard, you can see the transit village next to the BART station. The transit village has stores facing the sidewalk of Treat Boulevard, but anyone who uses this overpass will touch ground far beyond that sidewalk. This overpass makes it more likely that the sidewalk will be empty of pedestrians and the storefronts will be vacant.

There is an office park right across Treat Boulevard from the transit village. It would be very convenient for people from the office park to walk across the street to the stores in the transit village. But in order to use the overpass to get there, they would have to walk about a half-block away from Treat Boulevard to the place where the overpass touches down on their side, and after crossing , they would have to walk a half-block back to get to the stores. They would have to walk two blocks out of their way to get to the stores right across the street - and instead, most of them will find it more convenient to drive somewhere to do their shopping.

In addition to not working for pedestrians, the overpass does not work as placemaking. Anyone on the sidewalk of Treat Boulevard feels like they are next to a freeway, a street so dangerous that you need an overpass to cross it. (Almost anyone: the only exceptions are architecture critics who do not notice the dangerous traffic and narrow sidewalk because they are contemplating the esthetics of overpass design.)

They could have made the crossing safer and made the street more pedestrian-friendly for much less than the cost of this overpass. Notice in the picture that the intersection has free-right-turn lanes to speed up traffic at the intersection. In addition, though you cannot see it in the picture, the sidewalk is cut back in front of the transit village to speed up cars making a right turn there.

The obvious first step to make this intersection more pedestrian friendly is to eliminate the free-right-turn lanes and the cut-back in the sidewalk, in order to slow cars down by giving them a tighter turning radius and give the transit village a full sidewalk for the customers at its stores. In addition, they could retime the traffic lights to slow traffic a bit and to give pedestrians more time to cross. These minor changes would encourage more people to walk across Treat Boulevard to shop.

Currently, the world of urban design is split between New Urbanists, who want to design good places for people to be, and avant gardists, who want to create striking sculptural objects.

What I have said about this intersection is very basic New Urbanist design, and it is very obvious to anyone who cares about creating good places for pedestrians.

But the Chronicle's urban design critic does not think for a moment about placemaking or about pedestrians. He does not even notice the obvious fact that, to use this overpass to get to the shopping across the street, people in the office park would have to walk two blocks out of their way.

If you want to know the one thing that he does think about, you do not even have to read his article. It is enough to read its title "Footbridge an Elegant New Icon."

see John King's article at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/10/08/MN051FP8EM.DTL

Economists' Tunnel Vision On Global Warming

2010-09-02T11:45:00.000-07:00

Some economists have studied the return on our investments in controlling global warming by using the typical methodology of their discipline: They assign a money value to the costs of global warming, and then they use a discount rate to determine the Present Value (PV) of the future costs.

The problem is that global warming will have costs that last for many millennia, and this sort of discounting assigns a Present Value of close to zero to any costs that are a few thousand years in the future.

It does make sense to discount future financial costs in this way, because we can earn compound interest on the money to compensate for that future cost. But money will not compensate for the cost of global warming completely, as it would for a financial cost. If we do not control global warming, then even if people living thousands of years from now are very wealthy financially, they will still be living in a world that has lost most of the species that now exist, that has dead acidified oceans, that suffers from widespread desertification, and so on.

The two best known studies of this sort are by Richard Nordhaus, who uses a discount rate of 3% and concludes that most investments in controlling global warming are not justified economically, and by Nicholas Stern, who uses a discount rate of 1.4% and concludes that massive investments in controlling global warming are justified.

But even at Stern's low discount rate, most of the future cost of global warming is discounted to a PV of near zero. Using very rounded figures to give a general idea of the orders of magnitude involved:

At a discount rate of 1.4 percent, a cost paid 1000 years from now has a PV of less than one one-millionth (10^-6) of the payment.
A cost paid 2000 years from now has a PV of less than one one-trillionth (10^-12) of the payment.
A cost paid 3000 years from now has a PV of less than one one-quintillionth (10^-18) of the payment.

To put that in perspective, if our current policies created a one-time environmental cost 3000 years from now that is 100 times as great as the total of the world's current GDP (which would involve overwhelming environmental damage, greater than anything predicted from global warming), we would calculate that cost has a PV of less than 1 cent using Stern's discount rate.

If people in the year 5000 live on an earth with dead oceans, with most of the land turned to desert, and with most of the species that now exist extinct, they will be shocked to look back and sees that, when the decisions about controlling global warming were being made, 3000 years earlier, even the economist who wanted to do the most to control global warming valued the environmental devastation they face as a cost of less than 1 cent per year.

It does make some sense to use that sort of discounting for flows of money, but it does not make sense to discount massive environmental destruction in a way that makes us conclude that it is not worth spending 1 cent a year today to avoid having a mostly dead earth 3000 years from now.

I sometimes feel that academic disciplines today are a bit like scholastic philosophy during the Renaissance, when the humanists ridiculed the scholastics for debating about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. In these debates about discount rates, economists are trying to decide exactly how many years in the future it will be before a mostly dead earth is counted as a cost of less than 1 cent.

The problem is that academics have to publish in peer reviewed journals to get tenure, and the best way to get published is by using the conventional methodology of the field and applying it to a problem. You don't get very far by rejecting the conventional methodology. That means economists study global warming by assigning a money value to environmental destruction and using the discount rate to determine its PV.

They do this despite the fact that there is no way in the world to come up with a plausible discount rate to apply over thousands of years. A modern financial system has existed for only a few hundred years, and we don't have the slightest idea of what the appropriate discount rate will be in a few thousand years.

They choose the discount rate based on the conclusion that they want to reach - a low discount rate if they believe we should control global warming and a higher discount rate if they believe we should not. But even Stern's low discount rate gives far too little value to effects that are millennia in the future.

When people think concretely about global warming, about what it would actually be like to live in the worst-case scenario that we might be leaving to future generations, no sane person would say that we should not pay 1 cent per year now to avoid having a mostly dead world 3000 years from now.

Global Warming Hits Russia

2010-08-12T17:35:00.000-07:00

As we watch food prices rise, Americans should consider what Dmitry Medvedev said when he banned grain exports from Russia because the worst heat wave in their history has devastated their wheat crop:

"Everyone is talking about climate change now. Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past."

If we do not control climate change, the same sort of devastation will become a habitual feature of agriculture in the American mid-west and in much of the world.

New York Then and Now

2010-07-29T15:29:00.000-07:00

The book New York Then and Now has pictures of the same locations early in the twentieth century and in the 1970. This pair of pictures is one of my favorites: the buildings have hardly changed, so it shows very clearly how the automobile has transformed the city.

The first picture shows East 116th St. west of Lexington Ave in 1915. It is striking how spacious and calm it seems. This was a middle-class neighborhood - all the men are wearing suits - but it was a time when the middle class did not own vehicles. In pictures of wealthy neighborhoods from the same period, you see horses and carriages parked at the curb, but here there are no vehicles at all except for one horse-drawn wagon doing road maintenance work and one streetcar. Notice the sign on the left that says "All cars transfer to Bloomingdales"; of course, when they say "cars," they are talking about streetcars.

The second picture shows the same location in 1975. Density is slightly lower than it was in 1915, because a three-story apartment building with stores on the right has been replaced by a one-story grocery store. Yet the neighborhood looks congested rather than spacious. The street has been widened and the sidewalks narrowed. A tree has been removed to allow the street widening. The streets are filled with cars, and there is a conflict between pedestrians crossing and a truck turning. The Bloomingdales sign is still there, but so faded that you cannot read it.

There are many similar pairs of pictures in this book: Edward Watson, New York Then And Now (Dover, 1976).

José Rafael Moneo Blights Columbia

2010-06-08T19:55:00.001-07:00

I was saddened to go back to one of my favorite places, Columbia University, and to see how the entire campus has been blighted by one building in its far northwest corner, the high-rise multidisciplinary science building designed by José Rafael Moneo.

You can imagine how the view below looked before the glass box was added, with the skyline defined by two symbolically important buildings, Low Library to the right and the tower Riverside Church to the left. Now the skyline symbolizes the idea that: "we will sacrifice all other values in order to add as much utilitarian square footage as possible."

The new building violates McKim, Mead, and White's original master plan for the campus, which makes a clear distinction between utilitarian fabric buildings and symbolically important buildings. For example, the three dormitories in the left and center of the picture below are all in similar styles, while Butler Library to the right is in a different style that stands out from the fabric.

All the older utilitarian buildings on campus, both classroom and dormitory buildings, are in a similar style, while the important buildings such as Butler Library and Low Library are in contrasting styles - an object lesson in a basic principle of urban design, that there should be a consistent urban fabric that major buildings stand out from.

Newer buildings on the campus are generally uglier than the old McKim, Mead, and White buildings, but they were the same general scale as the older buildings, so they still formed a more-or-less-consistent urban fabric that showcased the major buildings, until Moneo's building blighted campus by ignoring this basic principle of urban design.

By contrast, consider a new building on the UC Berkeley campus that is even worse architecture than the Moneo building but that is not as bad urban design. The new molecular biology building, to the right below, is a grotesque pastiche of modernist and post-modernist themes. You can see how jarring it is by contrasting it with the buildings to its left below, which were built a couple of decades ago and are consistent with the UC campus' original classical design.

Nevertheless, because it is roughly the same scale as the buildings around it, it does form a decent addition to the urban fabric when you step back from it and see in its context. It actually improves the view up University Ave., as you can see below, because it is about the same size as the two city buildings in the foreground and as the campus building in the background, filling what was a hole in the urban fabric, and because it is small enough to be partially screened by the tree next to it.

By contrast, imagine what a blight it would be if this grotesque building were a high-rise that stood out from the fabric and redefined the skyline of Berkeley's downtown and campus, as Moneo's building redefines the skyline of Morningside Heights and the Columbia Campus.

Moneo's building would be less of a blight if it were better architecture rather than being a sterile glass box. But remember that Moneo is one of the world's most acclaimed architects, a Pritzker Prize winner. If you chose an even more prestigious architect, such as Thom Mayne or Zaha Hadid, you would get an even more brutal and grotesque design.

Given the current state of architecture, we would do well to remember the New Urbanists' principle that you can create good urbanism, even with bad architecture, if you control building envelopes to create a consistent urban fabric. This view up University Ave. is a good illustration of that principle.

Update: June 2011

The post above wrote about the effect of Moneo's building on the skyline of Columbia. Now that the building is open, I can also write about how well it works at ground level.

Nicholas Ouroussoff has written that "the building is a gleaming physical expression of the university’s desire to bridge the divide between the insular world of the campus and the community beyond its walls."

In fact, the building has a cafe on the second floor with a dramatically high ceiling and glass walls that give it a dramatic view of the surrounding neighborhood. But the building does nothing to draw the surrounding neighborhood toward the campus.

You can see in the picture that the cafe on the second floor cafe is a pleasant space for students but that the entrance (facing north on 120th St.) is not inviting to outsiders.

Even worse is the blank wall facing west on Broadway. You can see that Moneo varied the granite siding, which I am sure is very artsy but which does not make the building any less forbidding or any more interesting to walk by.

If Moneo really wanted to open up the campus to the surrounding neighborhood, it is obvious what he should have done. Put the cafe on the first floor, in a traditional store front with windows facing right on the sidewalk. Put some cafe seating out on the sidewalk.

That would have done much more than artsy granite patterns to make this an appealing place for people to walk and to heal the divide between the campus and the surrounding neighborhood.

Even if they did not want to have a cafe that is open to the public, they could have done much more to create an appealing place with a design similar to Brinckerhoff Hall, the traditional university building that is right across Broadway from this new building. You can see that this traditional building is broken up into smaller elements, which gives it human scale, and it has ledges where people can sit.

When you compare the inviting face that Brinckerhoff Hall presents to the sidewalk with the blank-faced entrance of Moneo's building on 120th Street and its sheer granite wall on Broadway, it is obvious that Moneo does not care about creating attractive and usable public spaces.

Juliet Schor on Employment and Environment

2010-05-14T12:33:00.000-07:00

Juliet Schor has an excellent article in The Nation, based on her new book Plenitude, making a point that should be obvious but that is usually ignored: The only way we can reduce unemployment and preserve the environment is by shortening work hours.

Here are a few quotations from the article:

"... a return to business as usual - 'jobs and income will trickle down via growth' - is a disaster, on economic and ecological grounds."

"First, it won't work. The Economic Policy Institute calculates that we'd have to add half a million jobs each month for three years to get back to the pre-crash unemployment rate ... an order of magnitude larger than what we can realistically expect."

"The other flaw in the 'grow our way out of unemployment' approach is that it's ecological suicide. ... We must reduce atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million as quickly as possible .... It's nearly impossible to meet emission targets only by reducing the carbon intensity of each dollar spent. But we can get results immediately by changing the path of aggregate output. As American GDP fell in 2008, so did greenhouse gas emissions."

"Progressive economists have mostly responded to the economic crisis with retro-policy, advocating financial reform and spending on infrastructure, including on green jobs, [which] still relies on climate-destabilizing growth."

"The alternative is to transform the labor market by introducing downward flexibility in hours of work. If jobs are restructured to require fewer hours, employers will have to hire more people for a given level of sales. If work time were allocated more equitably, it would not only reduce unemployment; there would be wider benefits to all workers, their families and communities."

"Nations with lower hours of work have smaller ecological footprints, after controlling for income and other variables."

read the entire article at
http://www.thenation.com/article/beyond-business-usual

Unplanning: Livable Cities and Political Choices

2010-04-11T14:34:00.001-07:00

I have just published a new book named Unplanning: Livable Cities and Political Choices.

I suggest that you start by getting a quick overview of the book by looking at the preview at:
http://www.preservenet.com/unplanning/UnplanningPreview.html

Then read or buy the book by going to its homepage at:
http://www.preservenet.com/unplanning

I have also written an article based on the book that is available on planetizen at http://www.planetizen.com/node/44299

Here is the book's front cover:

And here is the description of the book from its back cover:

“Unplanning is a wonderful read! It is beautifully written, it takes up extremely important and timely topics, and it offers a new and concrete approach to democracy and sustainability. I enjoy going back almost at random to read and re-read pages and passages from it. It’s very engaging and stimulating - and it should be read by every environmentalist.”

- Prof. Charles Derber, author of Greed to Green

Planning or Political Choice?

The conventional wisdom says that we need strict planning to build walkable neighborhoods around transit stations – even though these neighborhoods are like the streetcar suburbs that were common in America before anyone heard of city planning.

Yet many of our greatest successes in urban design occurred when we treated the issues as political questions – not as technical problems that the planners should solve for us. The anti-freeway movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the anti-sprawl movement of recent decades were both political movements, and citizen-activists often had to work against projects that planners proposed and approved.

This book uses an intriguing thought experiment to show that, in order to build livable cities, we should go further than the anti-freeway and anti-sprawl movements by putting direct political limits on urban growth.

Political choices about how we want to live can transform our cities more effectively than planning.

The Last Reform of the Twentieth Century

2010-03-23T09:40:00.000-07:00

The new health-care law is the last of the great liberal reforms of the twentieth century, passed ten years after the century ended.

In 1900, the average American income was just slightly above what we now call the poverty level. Liberals wanted to establish a social welfare system that provided everyone with certain basic necessities, such as education, health care, and income during retirement. We have finally passed a law to provide almost universal health care, so that a curable disease will no longer present some people with the choice between bankruptcy and death.

Now it is time to move on to the urgently needed reforms of the twenty-first century.

In 2000, the average American income was more than seven times as much as in 1900. At the end of the nineteenth century, most Americans did not consume enough. But today, most Americans consume too much.

To create a sustainable future, we need a series of reforms that let us downshift economically, that let us live simpler and more satisfying lives. This is the challenge to liberals in this century, just as providing the basics of social welfare was the challenge to liberals in the twentieth century.

Berkeley's SOSIP

2010-02-13T19:21:00.000-08:00

I have created a little web site at http://www.preservenet.com/sosip/myfocus.html illustrating the changes that could occur as part of Berkeley's Street and Open Space Improvement Project (SOSIP).

Though it is a local issue, it is of wider interest because the University of California is demolishing the State Health Dept. Building, a highrise surrounded by a parking lot that represents everything wrong with modernist urbanism.

The SOSIP gives us the opportunity of transforming this site and the area around it into a fine-grained network of pedestrian-friendly streets.

For me, there is a strong symbolic resonance to replacing a modernist highrise with an urban fabric of walkable streets. It is a rejection of modernist urbanism that reminds me of the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project. But it is even better, because the modernist urbanism is being replaced by an urban fabric created in a piecemeal way, like traditional urban fabrics.

If these two pictures from the web site about the SOSIP intrigue you, then look at the entire site at http://www.preservenet.com/sosip/myfocus.html.

George Leonard’s "Education and Ecstasy"

2010-02-02T10:08:00.000-08:00

Author and educator George Leonard recently died, and the obituaries said that his 1968 book Education and Ecstasy made him a “voice of the counterculture.”

That book was written a few decades ago, but it looks like it comes from a different world. Looking back at it may help us understand why the radical counterculture of the 1960s failed - and why it really was not radical at all.

Leonard’s premise was that programmed learning, developed by the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, would make education so much more effective that children could learn academic subjects in one-sixth the time it now takes, leaving the rest of their time for non-cognitive education.

He describes what it might be like for parents to visit a school in the year 2001, after programmed learning has been enhanced by new computer technologies that tailor learning based on everything the child has learned in the past and that also incorporate brain-wave feedback to tailor the learning to the child’s mood.

The parents drive their electric car to the underground parking lot of a school that is made up of geodesic domes and tent-like structures scattered in the woods.

They see their young daughter in the Basics Dome, where each child sits at a computer with video appearing on a large screen and stereo speakers playing. A recent enhancement of the system lets each child’s screen be affected by what is on the surrounding screens, so if a child is studying primitive hunting in Africa, a spear thrown on that child’s screen might fly across a half-dozen other screens, so it appears to travel through the room.

Their daughter is learning spelling. After she types “cat,” the computer asks her for other spellings of the word and gets her to type “kat” and “katte.” This school is based on the idea that there is not just one right answer that the teacher knows and the child should repeat.

A child at the next computer is running a program about Africa, animals from it also enter her screen, and as a result, her computer asks for several creative spellings of “leopard.” After twenty minutes of this learning, the computer suffuses her with a blue glow, brain-wave feedback showing that she is totally content, and she goes to play in the woods for the rest of the day. This school practices “free education,” and children are not compelled to learn, so twenty minutes of creative spelling is all the cognitive learning she gets today.

One young child in the Basics Dome is completely absorbed in learning calculus on his computer. He apparently is not distracted by the different sound tracks playing on the two-dozen different computers in the Basics Dome or by the images entering his computer from nearby computers.

Leonard says that his idea for the Basics Dome was inspired by what he considers some of the most educative environments in the world, the light-and sound auditoriums that hosted rock music concerts during the 1960s: “Two walls overflow with swirling, ever-changing visual images…. Images race from one end of the panorama to the other while liquid colors flow in slow eddies. …powerful ultraviolet lamps pour out black light. … From a side wall, a jarring strobe light flashes. Slowly at first, then quickening with the intensity of the music and the dancing, the flashes approach ten cycles a second, the approximate rate of the ongoing alpha waves in the brain. Some dancers surrender their brain-wave tempo to the light … and enter another realm … dreamlike, they glide above a floor that no longer seems necessarily level and fixed.” (p. 190)

Leonard tells us that he knows these shows are educative, because his own daughter used to draw very carefully, trying to keep the colors inside the lines, but her drawing became much more creative after he took her to one of these light-and-sound shows. No doubt, this anecdote proves that a similar environment provides the best way to learn calculus.

The parents also visit the other domes in the futuristic school of 2001, which are used for affective learning (unlike the Basics Dome, used for cognitive learning). In the Body Dome, physical movement is used to express emotion and alter perceptions, and body feedback is used to teach the children to consciously control their blood pressure and heart beat. In the Quiet Dome, every interior material absorbs sound so there is absolute silence that helps the children practice meditation. The Water Dome has a swimming pool filled with naked children: there are no lifeguards in this school for 3 to 10 year old children, because the older children spontaneously take care of the younger children.

Then they visit the tent-like structures where educational environments are set up temporarily. One looks like the jungles of southeast Asia, and the children there are learning the sort of dreamwork practiced by the Senoi who live in those jungles. Another looks like the nineteenth-century laboratory where Faraday made his discoveries about electricity, and the children are devising their own experiments that will let them make the same discoveries. No doubt, these 3-to-10 year olds have learned enough college-level physics in the Basics Dome to be able to devise the same experiments as one of the greatest scientists in history.

This book was very well respected in 1968, when it was published. Look magazine called it “the most influential book on education in modern times.”

Today, its flakiness is very obvious. Its technological optimism - though not as obvious - is just as pronounced.

Leonard believed that the new technology of programmed instruction, based on scientific psychology that B.F. Skinner developed by conditioning pigeons and rats, would make academic education so much more efficient that it would only take one-sixth the time it did traditionally. And multi-media computers would make programmed instruction even better.

Today, we can see that programmed instruction was a fad that just lasted briefly, but Leonard expected near miracles from that new technology.

Likewise, Leonard expected that technology would make our economy so productive that people would not have to work and would live lives of leisure. In the future (Leonard quotes a description that he says is simplified but is very true and moving) people’s main function would be “to sing, and dance, and interact.” We would no longer have to work, and “The end of the ‘job’ means the end of the eight-hour day and the beginning of the twenty-four-hour day. Lifelong learning, lifelong creative change, is an exhilarating and dangerous endeavor….” (p 131)

Leonard could already see the change happening in his own time. “The U.S. housewife drifting dreamlike along the mazes of a supermarket is example enough. No Civilized Calvinist is she, but rather a Polynesian plucking breadfruit as she wanders [in] an ample Eden.” (p. 84)

This is the premise of Leonard’s utopian vision: technology would create such abundance that people could devote their lives to indulging themselves.

But was this really a radical vision, or was it just an extreme exaggeration of the ideology of postwar America? In fact, it was very like the promise of the consumer society of the time: in 1968, most Americans believed that technology would create such abundance that life in the future would be something like wandering through a supermarket and taking what you wanted.

There were other strands of the counterculture that went in the opposite direction. Leonard was a technological optimist who believed that technological progress would provide us all with electric cars and underground garages. By contrast, Paul Goodman became a voice of the counterculture by questioning technology and calling for a ban on all cars in Manhattan.

But the consumerist self-indulgence that Leonard represents was an important strand of the counterculture of the 1960s, so it is not surprising that this cultural movement ended up accomplishing so little.

(Quotations from George B. Leonard, Education and Ecstasy (New York, Dell Publishing Delta Books, paperback edition 1969, copyright 1968)

The Transamerica Pyramid and the Empire State Building

2010-01-07T11:45:00.000-08:00

San Francisco Chronicle architecture critic, John King, recently wrote an article about the success of the Transamerica Pyramid. When it was proposed forty years ago, King says, Progressive Architecture called it "insensitive, inappropriate, incongruous," and Newsweek said it would "wrong in any city" and "particularly wrong in ... San Francisco." But today, it has become a beloved icon on the San Francisco skyline.

We can see the limits of King's vision - and the limits of modernist architecture - by comparing two icons: New York's Empire State building, which was designed in the 1920s, when principles of traditional urbanism and architecture were still influential, and San Francisco's Transamerica Pyramid, designed at a time when modernist urbanism and architecture had taken over completely.

The illustration below shows a view of the Empire State from across the street. It obviously fits into the surrounding urban fabric and creates a place that is interesting and attractive to pedestrians.

The next illustration shows a view of the Transamerica Pyramid from across the street. It obviously tears a hole in the urban fabric and creates a place that is uninteresting and unattractive for pedestrians.

This is particularly sad, because it was built right next to San Francisco's historic Jackson Square district, shown in the next illustration. The very appealing, fine-grained urban fabric of Jackson Square shown below is right across the street from the view of the pyramid shown above - as if this one block of Washington Street were designed to show the contrast between human-scale traditional urbanism and anti-human modern urbanism.

Now, let's step back to the medium distance and look at these two buildings from a few blocks away.

The Empire State building stands out because of its size, but it also fits in with the architecture of the surrounding neighborhood.

The Transamerica pyramid looks like an alien that was dropped into the surrounding neighborhood from outer space.

The Empire State building fits in, despite its large size, because its overall massing is divided into smaller sub-masses. By contrast, the Transamerica Pyramid is a simple geometric figure - an example of what Nikos Salingaros calls "geometrical fundamentalism."

Both Salingaros and Christopher Alexander have argued persuasively that large buildings that people find appealing have always been designed with intermediate scales like this, which mediate between the mass of the entire building and the mass of smaller elements such as windows. They claim that we like these buildings because the same sort of range of scales occurs in nature: for example, a tree has a massive trunk, large boughs, medium size branches, and small branches, and it would look very strange if it just had the massive trunk and small branches without the intermediate scales.

Modernist buildings usually lack this intermediate scale: typically, a building with a glass-curtain wall is a big slab with a steel frame dividing it into glass windows, and with no masses mediating between the building as a whole and the individual windows. Early modernists defended these slabs on the grounds that they were functional, but an odd-shaped building does not have this defense: the sloping walls of the pyramid make its spaces more difficult to use and are dysfunctional.

Now, let's step back to the far distance. There is no need for pictures, because everyone knows that both of these buildings became icons because of their distinctive silhouette on the horizon. In fact, any building that is the tallest building in a city and that has a distinctive shape will become an icon, whether the Transamerica Pyramid, the Empire State building, or the Capitol dome in Washington.

I think it is best for the building that dominates the skyline to be an important public building, like the Capitol dome, or like the cathedral of a traditional European city. No office building could have the symbolic resonance of this sort of iconic public building.

But there can be an immense difference in the quality of iconic office buildings that dominate the skyline. The Empire State building works as an icon on the distant skyline, and it also works when you are a few blocks away from it or across the street from it. The Transamerica Pyramid works as an icon on the distant skyline, but it does not work for people who are near it.

Yet the only picture in King’s article shows the pyramid as it appears on the distant skyline. He very briefly mentions its connection with the surrounding neighborhood, but even then, he thinks of it as a sort of a modernist sculpture to be viewed with esthetic detachment, and he does not think about whether it creates a good place for the people who actually use the spaces right around it.

This is a common flaw in King's criticism and in most of today's architecture criticism. For example, look at another review that King wrote about a new parking structure at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/16/DDTE1AIUFM.DTL. Click on the pictures in that review to enlarge them, and you will see that anyone walking by it on the sidewalk will experience this garage as a bleak glass-and-concrete wall; it is hard to imagine worse urbanism. But King calls it "an urban-scaled work of sculptural art" with an "abstract modern design." He loves the parking garage because he thinks of it purely as an artsy sculptural object. He doesn't care about whether it creates a good place for people to be.

In the last forty years, architecture has moved backward as urban design has moved forward. During the 1970s, post-modernist architecture critics were criticizing some of the same obvious flaws of modernism that I mention here by saying that architecture should be aware of its context. When Progressive Architecture called the Transamerica Pyramid "insensitive, inappropriate, incongruous," and when Newsweek said it would "wrong in any city" and "particularly wrong in ... San Francisco," they meant that it ignored its context.

Now, architecture critics have forgotten the lessons of post-modernism and moved back to some of the worst dogmas of modernism, at the same time that urban designers have rejected modernism and gotten better at creating good places for people.

Any New Urbanist commenting on the Transamerica Pyramid would focus on how badly it tears up the urban fabric of Washington Street.

Any ordinary person walking down Washington Street recognizes intuitively that the Transamerica Pyramid has torn up the urban fabric of the street.

Only someone who has been indoctrinated for many years in the dogmas of modernist architecture would ignore this plain fact and would consider the Transamerica Pyramid purely as an abstract sculptural object without thinking about whether it creates a good place for people to be.

Our cities have so many bad places for people to be, precisely because of this sort of thinking among modernist architects and architecture critics.

Kings article is at http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-12-27/news/17461446_1_grand-canyon-fitting-civic-icon

Al Gore and Jane Jacobs

2009-12-17T14:14:00.000-08:00

As much as I admire the work that Al Gore is doing on global warming, I cannot help but shudder when I compare his Inconvenient Truth with Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities, and I see how much American culture has changed in the last half century.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities is what everyone used to think of as a book: a few hundred pages of solid text meant to be read from beginning to end. Jacobs was not known before it was published. She became famous for writing this book, because it presented new ideas that challenged conventional thinking about city planning. People read through hundreds of pages to learn about these ideas.

An Inconvenient Truth is more like a very long magazine article: much of it is color photos with captions. Magazines are designed this way - and some books now are also designed this way - because people are not expected to read them from beginning to end. Most people skim through this book, looking at pictures and reading their captions, to get a general idea of what it is saying. It is an excellent summary of the mainstream science of global warming, but it has no original ideas. Gore did not become known because he wrote a book with interesting ideas; he became known as Vice President, and people bought his book because he is a celebrity.

It is easy to give more examples of the same contrast.

Fifty years ago, the most popular writer on economics was John Kenneth Galbraith, a professor who became famous because he wrote a book who challenged conventional thinking about economic growth.

Today, the closest equivalent we have is Thomas Friedman, a journalist who became popular by writing punchy 800 word columns, whose books people buy because he is a celebrity, and who repeats the very conventional idea that we need to invest in clean technology to promote economic growth.

To deal with global warming, we need fundamentally new ideas that challenge conventional thinking about growth. But Americans seem to have developed such a short attention span that they will not do the concentrated reading needed to grasp new idea. I cannot think of any writers today who first became well known because they wrote books about complex new ideas, as Jacobs, Galbraith and many other did a half century ago.

Soon We Will Be Worse Than Herman Kahn

2009-11-25T11:40:00.000-08:00

During the 1970s, Herman Kahn was a prominent critic of environmentalism and supporter. At that time, environmentalists were beginning to say that growth would have to end because natural resources and the earth's ability to absorb pollution were both limited, and Kahn was the most influential voice saying growth could continue. Because he was obese, he looked like an allegorical figure representing consumerism and greed.

But if we reread his book The Next 200 Years and do a few simple calculations, we find that soon we will be worse than Herman Kahn.

In this book, Kahn attacked environmentalists by arguing that limited resources and pollution would not stop growth in the short run, but he also predicted that growth would end in the long run because of “modernization, literacy, urbanization, affluence, safety, good health and birth control, and governmental and private policies reflecting changing values and priorities…” (p. 8). At this point, he said people would be free to devote themselves to leisure activities (p. 22-23).

Kahn predicted that growth would end when the per capita GDP of the entire world reached $20,000 in 1975 dollars (p. 6), which equals $52,880 in 2000 dollars.

When he wrote, in 1975, America’s per capita GDP was $19,961(2000 dollars). In 2004, America’s per capita GDP was $36,883 (2000 dollars).

If we project America's growth rate of 1960-2000, we find that in 2017, America’s per capita GDP will be $52,218 (2000 dollars), about the level where Kahn said growth would end because people's changing values and priorities would allow them to devote themselves to leisure activities.

I don't hear anyone saying that growth in the United States will end or even slow in the next decade. By the end of the decade, the average American will have carried consumerism and growth further than even Herman Kahn recommended.

The Real Experts on Global Warming

2009-10-27T15:50:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-18T14:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-03T13:18:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-04T19:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-12T17:05:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-03T15:28:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-03T14:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-25T21:22:00.000-07:00

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 residential 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.
Far less land would be paved for roads and parking lots.

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?

2009-05-03T19:55:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-01T22:35:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-12T12:46:00.000-07:00

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

2009-02-25T10:00:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-20T14:48:00.000-08:00

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.

Food For People Or For Cars?

2008-12-17T16:34:00.000-08:00

The Korean company Daewoo Logistics has negotiated a 99 year lease on 3.2 million acres of land in Madagascar, which it will use to produce corn and palm oil for biofuels.

It will build new roads and infrastructure on land that is now open space to service its farms. Daewoo says it may not have to make any money payment for the lease. The four regional governments that it is leasing the land from want to gain jobs, roads, and experience with advanced agriculture.

This land is about half the area of Belgium, and about half the area of all the farmland currently cultivated in Madagascar.

Half the area of all the farmland currently cultivated in Madagascar! This is one more piece of evidence that the biofuels industry is based on the fact that the affluent people of the world can pay more to feed their cars than the poor people of the world can pay to feed their children.

The grain needed to fill up the tank of an SUV could feed a person for a year.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/agriculture/3487668/South-Korean-company-takes-over-part-of-Madagascar-to-grow-biofuels.html

Intelligence Agencies Assess Nuclear Technology

2008-11-21T10:12:00.000-08:00

The National Intelligence Council, representing all sixteen American agencies, has just released the global forecast that it prepares every four years. One of its conclusions, according to the New York Times, was:

"The chance of the use of nuclear weapons, while remaining 'very low' would rise in the next two decades as nuclear technology spreads."

That is just an assessement of the threat that more nations will produce nuclear weapons, as Iran may be trying to do, and will actually use them.

If you add the threat that terrorists will sabotage the storage or transportation of nuclear material or will steal nuclear wastes and use them to make dirty bombs, and if you project all these threats to the end of the century instead of just twenty years, you have a very good argument against nuclear power.

The Grapes of Wrath - Updated

2008-11-11T10:47:00.000-08:00

From an article in today's New York Times about the suffering caused by the current recession:

"... a data security specialist, moved into Mountain House last year, buying a foreclosed property on Prosperity Street for $380,000. But the decline in values has been so fierce that he too is underwater. He has cut his DVD buying from 50 a month to perhaps one, and is waiting until the Christmas sales to buy a high-definition television. He does not indulge much anymore in his hobbies of scuba diving and flying."

I don't know how anyone can endure such hardship.

Robert Solow On The No Growth Economy

2008-10-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

Prof. Robert Solow, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his theory of economic growth, says that that capitalism can function in a slow-growth or no-growth economy, and that he does not know whether economic growth can continue, given current ecological constraints.

He is quoted in the current Harper's magazine:

As Solow said to me, “There is no reason at all why capitalism could not survive without slow or even no growth. I think it’s perfectly possible that economic growth cannot go on at its current rate forever.” This does not mean that productivity will cease to increase our quality of life; it means that people might find it increasingly costly to turn productivity into the kinds of things they are now accustomed to buying with their earnings. “It is possible,” says Solow, “that the United States and Europe will find that, as the decades go by, either continued growth will be too destructive to the environment and they are too dependent on scarce natural resources, or that they would rather use increasing productivity in the form of leisure. . . . There is nothing intrinsic in the system that says it cannot exist happily in a stationary state.”

This is important, because those of us who call for shorter work hours and slower growth often hear the objection that growth is essential to capitalism. In fact, most classical economists believed that capitalism was leading to a "stationary state." Only Marxists claimed that the end of growth would mean the end of capitalism, and they believed this as the result of ideology, not as the result of analysis.

Now that we are facing ecological constraints, such as resource limitations and global warming, mainstream economists like Solow are beginning to say once again that capitalism can survive without growth, as the classical economists did.

Solow is quoted in the the excellent article "Fear of fallowing: the specter of a no-growth world" by Steven Stoll. I recommend reading the article, which is at:
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/03/0081958

(PS: Despite the confused triple negative at the beginning of the quotation, Solow clearly means that capitalism could survive with slow growth or no growth.)

The Affluent Society Fifty Years Later

2008-09-15T17:21:00.000-07:00

John Kenneth Galbraith's best-selling book The Affluent Society was published fifty years ago, in 1958.

Looking back at that book today, it is striking how prosperous Americans considered themselves at the time: we believed that we had to encourage more consumption just to keep up with our vast and growing productive capacity. And it is even more striking that Americans today have lost much of that general feeling of affluence, though the average American is about twice as wealthy now as in 1958.

Here are a few quotations from the book, which give a sense of the spirit of that time:

"... the experience of nations with well-being is exceedingly brief. Nearly all throughout all history have been very poor. The exception, almost insignificant in the whole span of human existence, has been the last few generations in the comparatively small corner of the world populated by Europeans. Here, and especially in the United States, there has been great and quite unprecedented affluence."

"So great has been the change that many of the desires of the individual are no longer even evident to him. They become so only after they are elaborated, and nurtured by advertising and salesmanship, and these, in turn, have become among our most important and talented professions. Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted."

"As a society becomes increasingly affluent, wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied. This may operate passively. Increases in consumption, the counterpart of increases in production, act by suggestion or emulation to create wants. Or producers may proceed actively to create wants through advertising and salesmanship. Wants thus come to depend on output. In technical terms, it can no longer be assumed that welfare is greater at an all-round higher level of production than at a lower one. It may be the same. The higher level of production has, merely, a higher level of want creation ...."

"Production induces more wants and the need for more production. So far, in a major tour de force, the implications have been ignored. But this obviously is a perilous solution. It cannot long survive discussion. Among the many models of the good society, no one has urged the squirrel wheel."

Here is an example of the spirit of that time: in the 1950s, it was widely believed that we had to produce oversized cars with useless tail-fins and we had to convince consumers to buy them, purely to absorb consumers' excess purchasing power, to keep the economy growing. Now that we are twice as wealthy, why have we lost this sense that our economy is so abundant that we have to make an effort to consume enough to keep up with its productive capacity?

In part, I think, it is because luxuries of fifty years ago have become necessities today.

In 1958, most Americans could remember living in neighborhoods where you walked to the store, and it seemed like an unprecedented luxury to live in a suburb where you drive every time you go shopping and where you cruise back and forth on the strip instead of walking up and down Main Street. Less than one family in five had two cars, and to be a two-car family was considered a sign of remarkable affluence.

Today, most Americans have never lived in a neighborhood where you can walk, and many can hardly even imagine that it is possible to get anywhere or do anything without a car. It is not a luxury to have two family cars: we have more cars than registered drivers, because in most American neighborhoods, it is almost a necessity for each adult to have a car. And it is an expensive necessity.

In part, also, I think it is because we are now faced with environmental problems that no one imagined in 1958.

Fifty years ago, no one had heard of global warming. We did not face the rising energy prices that we face today, as growing world demand presses against the limits of supply. In 1958, everyone assumed that the future would be even more affluent than the present, but now it seems possible that our children and grandchildren will have a less livable world and harder lives than we had.

As we have seen, Galbraith wrote that we may not be better off at a higher level of production, because we may be consuming to fill wants that are created by economic growth, and not actually improving our well-being:

"In technical terms, it can no longer be assumed that welfare is greater at an all-round higher level of production than at a lower one. It may be the same. The higher level of production has, merely, a higher level of want creation ...."

But Galbraith was not thinking about environmental costs when he wrote this. If we factor in environmental costs, it seems plausible that, after we are economically comfortable, we actually become worse off at a higher level of production.

Car-Free Housing In Berkeley

2008-09-11T15:45:00.000-07:00

One of the apartment buildings on Telegraph Ave., near campus, is advertising that it is easy to live there because it is car-free. There is no parking available, and you don't need a car when you live in this location. Notice that their sign says: "No car. No worries."

Stepping back a bit, we can see that building engages the sidewalk in a way that is welcoming to pedestrians. The sidewalk is too narrow, because the street was widened and made one-way in the early 1960s to accommodate more traffic. But we can imagine that this was a very pleasant place to walk early in the century, when the street was two-way and the sidewalk was wider and had trees at the curb.

Just two doors down from this building is student housing built a couple of decades ago. Because it has parking, it turns its back on the sidewalk. This is obviously not a pleasant place to walk, with the blank wall of the parking level right next to you.

It would make sense for the city to give developers the option of building housing without parking, because:

Some people find it more convenient to live without a car in this sort of location.
Housing without parking makes for more pedestrian-friendly streets.
Housing would be more affordable without parking.
Cars account for about half of the city's greenhouse gas emissions, and the city supposedly is working to fight global warming.

The city could protect nearby residents from spill-over parking by making people who live in car-free housing ineligible to buy on-street parking permits.

Needless to say, it is actually illegal under the zoning laws to build new housing in Berkeley without parking.

Update:
As of November 12, 2011, the new Southside Plan will allow car-free housing in most of the southside. It is still illegal to build car-free housing in downtown Berkeley.

Obama Calls For A Paradigm Shift In Economics

2008-08-25T13:09:00.000-07:00

From an article by Tim Leonhardt in the New York Times Magazine:

After I returned to my seat, the press aide walked back to tell me that Obama had more to say.

“Two things,” he said .... “One, just because I think it really captures where I was going with the whole issue of balancing market sensibilities with moral sentiment. One of my favorite quotes is — you know that famous Robert F. Kennedy quote about the measure of our G.D.P.?”

I didn’t, I said.

“Well, I’ll send it to you, because it’s one of the most beautiful of his speeches,” Obama said.

In it, Kennedy argues that a country’s health can’t be measured simply by its economic output. That output, he said, “counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them” but not “the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.”

The second point Obama wanted to make was about sustainability. The current concerns about the state of the planet, he said, required something of a paradigm shift for economics. If we don’t make serious changes soon, probably in the next 10 or 15 years, we may find that it’s too late.

from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/magazine/24Obamanomics-t.html?pagewanted=8&em

The Kennedy quote is available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77IdKFqXbUY

Thom Mayne's Federal Building In San Francisco

2008-08-24T19:23:00.000-07:00

All the talk is about the "strikingly original" architecture, but the most striking thing about this building is the bleakness of its public space, shown in these pictures.

Whenever there is a breeze, this corner is filled with a whirlwind of dust, newspapers, and plastic bags. This is one case where a video would be better than photos, because the photos don't show how the dust and trash is raised and blown around.

There was a light breeze when I was there, and I shudder to imagine what it is like on a windier day.

Update: July 2011:

An article in the San Francisco Chronicle reports that:

Neighbors of the eye-catching federal building at Seventh and Mission streets say its public plaza has become a lawless haven for the South of Market homeless, rather than the pleasant open space its builders intended. ...

When the super-green federal building opened in 2007, Thom Mayne, the architect, hoped the plaza could become a hub for the improving the neighborhood, "offering much-needed open space and services to the local community," promotional materials said at the time.

But visions of farmers' markets have turned into something else, especially on three-day weekends when the building is shuttered for more than 72 hours, neighbors say.

"What you see there all day, 24/7, is people drinking, you see people urinating on the walls, you see everything,"

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/24/MNND1KBBC6.DTL

Why am I not surprised? When you design this sort of bleak space, which no one would want to use, the only people who are attracted to it are those who have no better choice. It is no more surprising to find homeless people here than to find them camping under a freeway overpass.

The only thing that is surprising is that anyone ever took seriously the architects claim that this space would become a hub for improving the neighborhood.

Driving To The 99 Cent Store

2008-07-27T17:29:00.001-07:00

The price of gas is so high that some people can only afford to shop at the 99 cent store, but it is worth it all to be able to live in a beautiful urban landscape like this.

Another Reason To Vote For Obama

2008-07-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

From David Brooks' column in today's New York Times, explaining why he admires McCain's conservative approach:

"The high point of his campaign, so far, has been his energy policy, which is comprehensive and bold, but does not try to turn us into a nation of bicyclists. It does not view America’s energy-intense economy as a sign of sinfulness."

Is it genuinely conservative to support freeways and nuclear power? Aren't they a greater threat to our heritage than bicycles?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/opinion/18brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

Nicolai Ouroussoff And Buckminster Fuller

2008-07-04T14:07:00.000-07:00

New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff reviews a Buckminister Fuller exhibit today, and he unintentionally reveals the truth about his own esthetic bias. Here is a brief quotation:

"Cold war culture has been back in style for a while now, at least in architecture circles. ... So 'Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe,' ... is likely to stir waves of nostalgia. For people of my generation ... his architecture embodies the values of an era when it was still possible to believe that society was gliding steadily toward a better future. If parents sometimes drank too much, got divorced and neglected their children, these were only potholes on the superhighway to utopia."

Ouroussoff routinely criticises traditional architecture for its nostalgia, but here he admits that his own avant-gardist modernism is itself nostalgic. It is an attempt to go back to the naive faith in technology that inspired mid-century modernism.

Yet Ouroussoff also admits that no one has this naive faith in technology any longer. In fact, this faith in technology is not relevant to the great problems of our time, such as global warming, which requires that we put political limits on destructive technologies.

Ouroussoff doesn't realize it, but this 'fifties faith is why Buckminister Fuller projected real optimism about the future, while today's loss of faith is why current avant-gardist architecture is made up of empty gestures, which show off the architect's technological virtuosity but have no larger cultural meaning.

Nicolai Ouroussoff's review of the Buckminister Fuller exhibit is available at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/arts/design/04full.html?ref=arts

Pei, Picasso and Anonymous

2008-06-25T11:18:00.000-07:00

This picture makes the obvious point that modern architecture and urban design tend to be anti-human.

The building is part of the Silver Towers project by I.M. Pei.

The statue is the Bust of Sylvette by Picasso.

The "Keep Off Grass" sign is either by an anonymous groundskeeper or by an anonymous conceptual artist making a satirical comment about the project.

The Gospel of Consumption

2008-06-09T13:43:00.000-07:00

There is an excellent article in Orion magazine named "The Gospel of Consumption." Here are a few quotations:

"[By the end of the 1920s,] industrialists were worried. ... the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them."

"In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation’s Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called 'need saturation.' Davis noted that 'the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year' and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear."

"By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called 'the gospel of consumption' - the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: 'By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.' ... 'Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.'”

"Our modern predicament is a case in point. By 2005 per capita household spending (in inflation-adjusted dollars) was twelve times what it had been in 1929 .... We are quite literally working ourselves into a frenzy just so we can consume all that our machines can produce. Yet we could work and spend a lot less and still live quite comfortably."

I recommend that you read the entire article, which is at
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962/

Lower Speeds Save Lives

2008-06-01T18:22:00.000-07:00

Here are the figures on the percent of pedestrians who will survive if they are hit by cars travelling at different speeds:

20 mph: 95 percent survive.

30 mph: 45 percent survive.

40 mph: 5 percent survive.

Source: British Parliamentary Advisory Council on Transport Safety, Taking Action On Speeding (1996).

The number of lives saved is actually greater than these figures indicate, because slower speeds reduce the number of accidents as well as reducing the chance of death when there is an accident.

Herman Daly On Counterproductivity

2008-05-13T13:34:00.000-07:00

"Once we have gone beyond the optimum, and marginal costs exceed marginal benefits, growth will make us worse off. Will we then cease growing? On the contrary, our experience of diminished well-being will be blamed on the traditional heavy hand of product scarcity, and the only way the orthodox paradigm knows to deal with increased scarcity is to advocate increased growth - this will make us even less well off and will lead to the advocacy of still more growth! Sometimes I suspect that we are already on this 'other side of the looking glass,' where images are inverted and the faster we run, the 'behinder' we get."
- Herman Daly, Steady State Economics (San Francisco, Freeman, 1977) p. 101.

Over thirty years ago, Daly already suspected that we had reached the point where growth was diminishing our well being. Today, it should be clear that we have reached this point.

(Incidentally, Daly's analysis of counterproductivity is a bit different than my analysis in The End of Economic Growth. Daly points out that, as output increases, marginal utility declines and marginal total cost increases. I say that, as output increases, marginal utility declines and marginal external cost remains roughly the same. Both analyses are valid, but I prefer to talk about marginal external cost, because it lets me focus on the cost of environmental problems, while Daly focuses on the total cost of production plus environmental problems.)

NY Times Calls For Radical Change

2008-03-28T10:16:00.000-07:00

The official proposals to deal with global warming all rely on technological fixes, but there seems to be widespread realization that this is not enough and that we will also need to change our way of life. Witness the editorial in today's NY Times that says:

"There is nothing to be done about a collapsing polar ice sheet except to witness it. It may be too late to stop the warming decay at the boundaries of Antarctic ice, yet there is everything to be done. Humans can radically change the way they live and do business, knowing that it is the one chance to find a possible limit to radical change in the natural world around us."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/opinion/28fri3.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

Frightening Facts About Climate Change

2008-03-07T11:09:00.000-08:00

Here are some frightening facts culled from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report by Joseph Romm, editor of the Climate Progress blog:

To stabilize CO2 levels at 450 ppm, cumulative emissions during this century should be reduced to about 490 billion tons of carbon (GtC). This would lead to average global temperatures 3.6 degrees farenheit than they are now.

To stabilize CO2 levels at 1000 ppm, cumulative emissions should to about 1100 GtC. This would lead to average global temperatures 18 to 25 degrees farenheit than they are now - and up to 50% more than that in the continental United States.

Current emissions are 8 billion tons per year, and they are expected to increase to 11 tons per year by 2020. Even with a significant government effort that keeps emissions from growing much higher than the level in 2020, we will reach 1100 GtC.

Currently, summer temperatures in the US typically go up to 100 degrees. Imagine the effect on humans, biodiversity, and crops if summer temperatures typically went up to 130 degrees.

And this is not the worst case. It assumes government action to keep emissions from growing significantly after 2020. If the climate deniers prevent us from acting, CO2 levels will be much, much higher.

Even more frightening, these temperature predictions are based on current models of how natural feedback increases warming (for example, as melting arctic ice reflects less sun, increasing warming). Yet warming has been happening more rapidly than the current models predict, indicating that natural feedback probably increases warming more rapidly than they predict.

The good news is that the European Union is supporting a plan that would cut emissions rapidly enough to hold temperature change down to 3.6 degrees farenheit. The bad news is that the rest of the world does not seem willing to accept these limits. They seem to be willing to sacrifice the well-being of our children and of all future generations for a few more decades of economic growth, until climate change causes the world economy to crash.

See Joseph Romm's blog post at the bottom of the page at:
http://climateprogress.org/2008/03/05/

The First Carbon Tax Shift

2008-02-22T13:51:00.000-08:00

British Columbia has introduced North America's first carbon tax shift.

Initially, it will tax carbon dioxide emissions at $10 per ton, and the tax will rise to $30 a ton over the next five years. There will be matching income tax cuts, so this is not actually an added tax but a tax shift that is revenue neutral.

This is a good start, but it is not large enough to meet goals for reducing CO2 emissions. I have estimated that a tax that begins at $20 per ton and increases by 10% a year would be enough to reduce emissions by 80% before 2050, which is needed to avoid the worst effects of global warming.

For more information on the benefits of a carbon tax shift, see
http://www.preservenet.com/studies/CarbonTaxShift.html

We Need More Infrastructure

2008-02-08T10:27:00.001-08:00

This picture of new freeway lanes being added to San Antonio's I-410 proves what many politicians are saying: America's biggest problem is that we have not spent enough money on infrastructure.

Mass-Produced Food

2008-01-16T16:24:00.001-08:00

The New York Times quote of the day for today, from an article saying that the FHA has found that meat from cloned animals is safe to sell to consumers:

"When you buy a box of Cheerios in New York and one in Champaign, Illinois, you know they are going to be the same. By shortening the genetic pool using clones, you can do a similar thing [for meat]."

It is worth it all to have mass-produced food that is exactly the same everywhere - even if it has all the nutritional value mass-produced out of it, like Cheerios. With that identical meat, people all over the world can eat identical McDonald's hamburgers.

What Is Missing In "Green Levittown"?

2007-12-19T16:21:00.000-08:00

The New York Times reports (with a straight face) that Levittown, NY, the archetypal post-war suburb, is now aiming to become "the nation’s first 'green' suburb."

To do this, the city is partnering with home improvement companies to help homeowners make their houses more energy efficient, add solar heating, and buy products that reduce home energy consumption.

What is missing from these plans to make Levittown a "green suburb" that is a model for the nation?

If you can't guess, take a look at the intersection of Levittown's two main shopping streets:

Maybe they're planning to paint all the asphalt green.

Luis Rayo and Gary Becker On Evolutionary Psychology, Large Houses, and Happiness

2007-12-19T13:44:00.001-08:00

Two university of Chicago economists, Luis Rayo and Nobel-laureate Gary Becker, have theorized that evolutionary psychology makes us want larger houses, even though larger houses do not make us happier.

These economists argue that, 50,000 years ago, our ancestors were more likely to survive if they were unsatisfied with the amount the amount of food they had and pushed on to find more, even if they already had enough. So, they conclude, we are likely to be dissatisfied with the size of our houses and want bigger ones, even if our houses are already big enough. But both steps of this argument are dubious.

Hunters and gatherers can store only a small amount of food. Since they are nomadic, what they can store is limited to the amount they can carry. And 50,000 years ago, they did not have domestic animals to help them with the carrying.

If they keep hunting and gathering after they have enough food, the extra food they get will go to waste, and they will just have wasted time that they might have used for other activities that could have made them more successful in evolutionary terms.

One example of these other activities is making alliances with other people, which could help them gain dominance in the group. Frans de Waal has shown that these sorts of alliances are critical to chimpanzee society. They absorb a huge amount of chimpanzees' emotional energy because of the evolutionary advantage that they offer: the dominant chimps are more likely to reproduce and are more likely to get food for themselves and their children in times of scarcity.

Among early homo sapiens, forming alliances could take even more time, because they were able to speak. In fact, this is probably one reason that speech evolved. Anyone who put his energy into gathering food when times were good, rather than into forming alliances, would be less likely to be in the dominant group that gets food when times are bad.

There some is empirical evidence undermining Luis Rayo and Gary Becker's point. Most famously, Marshall Sahlins found that the !Kung hunter-gatherers worked only about 20 hours a week to get food.

Sahlins said that this was all the time that it took to get all the food they wanted. Some of his critics claimed that, if they hunted and gathered longer hours than this, the calories in the extra food they would get would be less than the calories they would burn to get the food, so they were really not as well-off as Sahlins said. If the critics are right, there is a disadvantage to working longer hours, and if Sahlins is right, there is no advantage to working longer hours while there could be an advantage to use those hours doing something else (such as forming alliances).

Findings about contemporary hunter-gatherers can't give us precise information about how hunter-gatherers behaved 50,000 years ago, because their environments are different, but it is clear that there is no advantage to nomadic hunter-gathers producing much more food than they need, so Luis Rayo and Gary Becker are wrong about their evolutionary psychology.

Rayo and Becker are even more obviously wrong in the second step of their argument, when they claim that this psychology would cause people today to buy larger houses. Nomadic hunter-gatherers built temporary shelters, so evolutionary psychology certainly did not program them to want big houses.

It is plausible that hunter-gatherers would want to accumulate small objects that are easy to carry around to demonstrate their status, such as attractive shells that take a long time to gather or small works of art that take a long time to carve. In fact, it is plausible that these status symbols would help people form alliances and would provide evolutionary benefits. If so, then evolutionary psychology would push us to want to accumulate jewelry, art works, and the like - not to want big houses.

However, Luis Rayo and Gary Becker are right about their most important point: they say that, if evolutionary psychology makes us want status symbols, it doesn't follow that we should spend our lives pursuing status symbols. Because they involve constant desire for more and constant dissatisfaction, Rayo and Becker say, bigger houses don't make us happy, and we would do better to do things that bring more lasting happiness. As an example, they mention exercising, which makes us feel better over the long run.

It is very important that these economists recognize that we are not completely controlled by our evolutionary psychology, because this is a common error among social theorists who abuse evolutionary psychology.

For example, evolutionary psychology makes us want to overeat, because 50,000 years ago, people who overate and gained weight when there was enough food were more likely to survive when there was not enough food. Despite this psychology, we recognize that overeating is harmful, and we know that we should try to maintain a healthy weight.

Likewise, if evolutionary psychology has programmed us to want status symbols - whether jewelry or large houses - we should be able to see that this urge is self-defeating and that we are better off turning to activities that give us more lasting happiness, as Luis Rayo and Gary Becker point out.

Choice Of Technology - A Small Example

2007-12-07T10:09:00.000-08:00

Today's New York Times has an article about plans to provide internet service on airplane flights that mentions choice of technology in passing:

While the technology could allow travelers to make phone calls over the Internet, most carriers say they currently have no such plans. Many travelers find the prospect of phone calls much less palatable than having a seatmate quietly browsing e-mail. Onboard phone calls are “one of those ‘just because you can doesn’t mean you should’ types of technologies,” Mr. Harteveldt said. “The last thing you want is to be in a crowded tube at 35,000 feet for two or three hours with some guy going on and on about his trip to Vegas.”

This is a very small example of choice of technology, but it represents an important principle that was generally overlooked during the twentieth century. For example, imagine if we had applied the same sort of reasoning to America's post-war binge of urban freeway construction:

Urban freeways are one of those ‘just because you can doesn’t mean you should’ types of technologies. The last thing you want is to slice up neighborhoods with high speed roads, so people can no longer walk to services and are forced to drive.

For more examples of choice of technology, see http://www.preservenet.com/studies/ChoiceOfTech.html.

Work Time And Human Nature

2007-12-01T18:44:00.002-08:00

Cynics and economists often say that our calls for shorter work time and simpler living are contrary to human nature. People are endlessly acquisitive, and they would rather have more money than more time.

They have observed human nature only in modern societies, and they would have a less narrow view if they also looked at people in primitive societies (who presumably are closer to human nature than moderns). During the nineteenth century, European colonialists often claimed that the people they hired would work only long enough to buy necessities and then would stop.

Here is a bit of evidence about human nature from Marx:

"The Times of November 1857 contains an utterly delightful cry of outrage on the part of a West-Indian plantation owner. This advocate analyses with great moral indignation—as a plea for the re-introduction of Negro slavery—how the Quashees (the free blacks of Jamaica) content themselves with producing only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption, and, alongside this 'use value', regard loafing (indulgence and idleness) as the real luxury good."

Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook III, referring to The Times, London, Saturday, 21 November 1857, 'Negroes and the Slave Trade," Letter To the Editor.

Nicolai Ouroussoff Reviews Jean Nouvel's Tower

2007-11-16T10:55:00.000-08:00

As one more proof that avant-gardist architecture is intellectually bankrupt, consider Jean Nouvel's tower, proposed for a site next to the New York's Museum of Modern Art, and Nicolai Ouroussoff's review of it in the New York Times.

Jean Nouvel's design looks like a Dr. Seuss parody of a highrise. It is the usual boring glass and steel tower, but the cross-bracing is in random locations, and the facade is set back in random ways, making the building look like it is wavering and just barely managing to remain standing.

Of course, Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff is terribly impressed with this design, but (unfortunately for his credibility) his review may be the worst-written article that has ever appeared in that newspaper.

It begins with a title that is a grand cliche: "A Tower Will Reach for the Stars." Most writers would be ashamed to use a title that is so hackneyed.

Its text begins with this point: "If New Yorkers once saw their skyline as the great citadel of capitalism, who could blame them? We had the best toys of all" - as if that were a compliment to the design. I don't think that the people who designed the Empire State and Chrysler building thought of them as toys - but it is a good description of this Dr. Seuss building.

Then he continues by misrepresenting John Ruskin: "It brings to mind John Ruskin’s praise for the irrationality of Gothic architecture: 'It not only dared, but delighted in, the infringement of every servile principle.'" Ruskin actually was talking about the freedom of the individual craftsmen who built the Gothic cathedrals, which obviously has nothing to do with this building.

So, this is the sort of architecture admired by a critic who writes in cliches, who thinks of buildings as amusing toys, and who either misrepresents or misunderstands the history of architectural criticism.

Jean Nouvel's tower will be almost as tall as the Chrysler Building, making it one of the most prominent buildings in New York's skyline. It will mark a significant change in New York's architecture - from the stylishness of the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building and Rockefeller Center, to the boring boxy highrises of the 1960s and 1970s, to the goofy architecture of today.

And the New York Times has just the right critic to herald that goofy architecture: Nicolai Ouroussoff.

See this review at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/arts/design/15arch.html?em&ex=1195362000&en=b32f27112f1750da&ei=5087%0A

The Typical American Today

2007-11-08T17:41:00.000-08:00

A story on the front page of today's NY Times includes a description of someone who might be a candidate to represent the typical American consumer today.

When you read the quote from the article below, ask yourself whether this is the sort of person who made America great or the sort of person who symbolizes America's decline. The Times apparently thinks that he helps to make the nation great, since it says that his being forced to cut back on his consumerism is "an ominous portent for the national economy." But I suspect that the Americans of 50 or 100 years ago would have considered his consumerism to be a symptom of a drastic decline in the national character.

RENO, Nev., Nov. 5 - As his wedding day approached last spring, Marshall Whittey found that his money could not keep pace with the grandiosity of his plans. But rather than scale back, he chose instead, like millions of homeowners across the country, to borrow against the soaring value of his home.

He and his bride, Holly Whittey, exchanged vows on the grounds of a sumptuous private estate in the Napa Valley. They spent their honeymoon at a resort in Tahiti.

But now, in an ominous portent for the national economy, Mr. Whittey has grown tight with his money. His home is worth far less than it was a year ago, and his equity has evaporated. And like many other involuntary adopters of a newly economical lifestyle, he can borrow no more.

"It used to be that if I wanted it, I'd just go and buy it and finance it," Mr. Whittey, 33, said. "I'm feeling the crunch, and my spending is down significantly."
...
A sales manager at a flooring and tile company, he [Whittey, who lives in Reno] exudes the unflappable air of someone raised amid the easy money of the casino world.

Until recently, he and his wife regularly embarked on shopping sprees of $1,000 and up. He bought a 21-foot boat and two flat-screen televisions for their home. He sold his old truck and bought a new one, he said, "just 'cause I didn't like the color."

Mr. Whittey could live in such fashion because his company was making good money and his house was appreciating. But today, the value of his own home, which reached $500,000, has fallen and a separate investment property he bought seems likely to fetch far less than the $580,000 he owes the bank. His commissions have diminished, so his income is down.

His neighbor recently fell behind on house payments, prompting the bank to foreclose. Anxiety reigns.

Take a look at the picture of this guy in the Times article at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/business/08borrow.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.
At 33, he seems to be on the borderline between overweight and obese, and he is photographed sitting on his couch in front of his oversized flat tv screen.

Admit It - You Really Hate Modern Art

2007-10-19T09:41:00.000-07:00

"Admit It - You Really Hate Modern Art" is an excellent essay by someone who writes under the pen name of Spengler. Here is some quotations:

"The most striking difference between the two founding fathers of modernism is this: the price of Kandinsky's smallest work probably exceeds the aggregate royalties paid for the performances of Schoenberg's music."

"Why is it that the audience for modern art is quite happy to take in the ideological message of modernism while strolling through an art gallery, but loath to hear the same message in the concert hall?"

"When you view an abstract expressionist canvas, time is in your control. You may spend as much or as little time as you like, click your tongue, attempt to say something sensible and, if you are sufficiently pretentious, quote something from the Wikipedia write-up on the artist that you consulted before arriving at the gallery. When you listen to atonal music, for example Schoenberg, you are stuck in your seat for a quarter of an hour that feels like many hours in a dentist's chair. You cannot escape."

For the entire essay, see
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IA30Aa03.html

London's "Interesting" Skyline

2007-09-11T14:57:00.000-07:00

Modernists commonly claim that a skyline with high-rises is more "interesting" than a "monotonous" traditional skyline - thinking of the skyline as a sort of abstract sculpture, to be viewed from a distance.

London provides a good test of this idea. After the great fire of 1666 destroyed most of central London, Christopher Wren designed a new St. Paul's Cathedral and fifty-one parish churches, giving London one of the world's great traditional skylines. During the mid-twentieth century, this skyline was marred by boxy high-rise office buildings. Toward the end of the twentieth century, London deliberately decided to make its skyline more "interesting" by building distinctive high-rises taller than these boxy high-rises.

These new high-rises generally have nick-names based on their distinctive shapes: one that has already been built is called "the gherkin," and other that are coming are called "the cheese-grater" and "the walkie-talkie."

How well does this "interesting" skyline work?

Here is a picture of London by Canelleto, done in the eighteenth century, when Wren's skyline was still intact. The skyline is dominated by St. Paul's and is punctuated by church spires that rise above the mid-rise fabric buildings.

Here is large detail from a rendering by Will Fox of London as it will look in 2012, after the high-rises that have already been approved are complete.

Which is more "interesting" and more appealing, Wren's skyline or the high-rise skyline?

Even more important, we should remember that people don't just look at the skyline in the distance. They also live among these buildings.

Here is a picture that shows that St. Paul's works as part of a nearby skyline as well as it works as part of the distant skyline.

And here is a picture that shows that the gherkin does not work at all as part of a nearby skyline: it looms above the other buildings.

Finally, here is a picture that shows that St. Paul's works as you approach it. All those people sitting on the steps prove that this building provides a good place for people to be.

And here is a picture of the gherkin as you approach it. No one would want to sit here.

It is a sad commentary on the intellectual climate of our time that Norman Foster has become a famous architect by designing this sort of sterile, dehumanized environment.

Of course, high-rises are not always as bad as this: New York's Empire State Building works well for pedestrians on the sidewalk in front of it. But all high-rises loom above their surroundings, dwarfing the people who are near them and making the city a less human-scale place to be.

The modernists' talk about "interesting" high-rise skylines is wrong for two reasons:

First, a city should be designed as a comfortable place for people to live, not as an interesting abstract sculpture to be viewed from a distance. Because high-rises are out of human scale, they make their nearby surroundings less comfortable for the people there.

Second, high-rises do not work even as an abstract sculpture viewed from a distance. Because each high-rise is designed by a different architect aiming to make his own distinctive statement, they clash esthetically and do not form a coherent whole.

The way to get an esthetically coherent skyline, given the reality of how individual buildings are designed, is to limit the height of fabric buildings and to allow important public buildings to rise above the fabric, as they did when Wren rebuilt London.

The rendering of London in 2012 by Will Fox is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of the file under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it, and that you distribute it only under a license identical to this one. For the complete image and more details about the license, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:London_skyline_2012_panorama.jpg.

A Car-Free Town In Michigan

2007-09-09T17:45:00.000-07:00

I didn't know that Mackinac Island, MI, is car-free until I read about it in last Friday's New York Times. They only allow bicycles and horses, not even motorized service vehicles!

Here is a picture of Mackinac's Main Street that I found on Flickr.

And here is what a couple of people who live there say about it:

" Steve: As most people know, vehicles are not permitted on Mackinac Island, something that makes it very special. I’m a fifth-generation Mackinac Island summer visitor, and I never get over the wonder of it. When I was a boy, after spending a summer here, I’d go home and it actually seemed weird to see cars and trucks. It still feels that way. During the summer, you see thousands of bikes. People nod as they bike past one another and say hello. And people of every age ride.

Anne: There are over one hundred miles of trails. Some are for mountain biking, others are paved. Still others are rustic for the more hale and hardy riders. We ride for recreation as well as for completely utilitarian reasons. Our house is just over three miles outside of town so we have to hook up a cart to get all our groceries to bring them back here. Our bikes have big baskets, too. This lifestyle is not for the lazy. It’s a seven-mile round trip just to get milk.

Steve: On the other hand, there’s nothing like going to a function or a party and then biking home in the dark. The moon is overhead, and as you glide along, the water is so blue, it doesn’t seem real. You sail along, slipping under the bridge and then, once home, hop off the bike, your feet finally on the ground. It’s simply unforgettable."

http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/09/07/travel/escapes/07live.html

So why don't we have car-free neighborhoods in American cities (with motorized service vehicles, of course, instead of horses)? Then people could have this sort of experience year-round

Consumption and Global Warming

2007-08-29T11:13:00.000-07:00

A couple of recent news articles talk about the need to address consumption in order to control global warming.

John Dingell (D. Mich) says that he plans to introduce comprehensive climate change legislation this fall that includes an end to tax deductions for McMansions; any house over 3000 square feet would not get a tax deduction for mortgage interest. Dingell explained:

"In order to address the issue of climate change, we must address the issue of consumption. We do that by making consumption more expensive.'"
http://www.sfchroniclemarketplace.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/26/REI8RLUB6.DTL

In an unrelated article, Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, is quoted as saying:

"We try to be strategic about doing the things where each unit of effort has the most impact. We'll encourage companies to make more efficient S.U.V.'s, and we'll encourage consumers to buy them, "but we do not find lecturing people about personal consumption choices to be effective."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/business/media/29adco.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The Sierra Club seems to be behind the curve on the issue of consumption, but I think that both Dingell and Pope would be more successful politically if they framed the issue in terms of giving people more choices, rather than in terms of taxing or lecturing people who consume too much.

As an example of the right way to frame the issue, there is a group dedicated to promoting alternative transportation in the San Francisco Bay Area that always talks about promoting "transportation choices." The way our cities are currently built, most people have no choice but to drive every time they leave their homes. Instead, we need to build neighborhoods that give people the choice of walking or using public transportation as well as driving.

The most important way to deal with consumption is to offer choice of work hours. Most Americans today have no choice but to work full-time jobs. We should give them the option of down-shifting economically by reducing their work hours and their earnings. This option is the first step toward building a movement to simpler living, and offering it as a choice would obviously be more successful politically than taxing consumption or lecturing people about consumption. I don't see how anyone could object to having this choice.

For more information about choice of work hours, see the white paper Work Time and Global Warming.
http://www.preservenet.com/studies/WorkTimeGlobalWarming.html

Chesterton On Progressives And Conservatives

2007-08-04T21:52:00.000-07:00

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types--the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine."

G.K. Chesterton, from a newspaper column of 1924 - and very appropriate in an age when English conservatives were beginning to support capitalism, exactly the innovation that English conservatives had opposed and Whigs had supported a century earlier.

Genetic Engineering Goats Plus Humans

2007-07-30T15:50:00.000-07:00

In response to an article in today's New York Times, I sent this letter to the editor:

Editor:

One proposed genetically engineered product awaiting federal rules is anti-bacterial goat milk, made by splicing the human gene that creates the anti-bacterial protein found in human tears and milk into a goat. ("Without US Rules, Biotech Food Lacks Investors," July 30)

But if we overuse this anti-bacterial protein by putting it in milk, bacteria will evolve a resistance to it, just as our general overuse of antibiotics has caused drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis and E coli to evolve. As a result, humans will permanently be more vulnerable to infection.

This is a particularly dangerous example of the short-sightedness that is typical of the biotech industry. One of the most popular genetically engineered crops, Roundup Ready soybeans, have led to such massive use of the herbicide Roundup that weeds have evolved that are resistant to it.

And consider the ethical issues involved in using human genes in farm animals. This milk would not sell very well if it had to be labeled honestly: "produced by animals that are genetically part goat and part human."

Charles Siegel

Extreme Sprawl

2007-07-20T14:25:00.000-07:00

Robert Steuteville has an excellent opinion piece in the current New Urban Newspointing out just how extreme suburban sprawl is in the United States:

"The suburbs of Phoenix and Atlanta have 1,600 to 1,700 people per square mile, according to the book Boomburbs by Robert Lang and Jennifer LeFurgy. .... US urbanized areas now consist overwhelmingly of sprawl, which contributes to a low average density of 2,670 per square mile - less than two units per acre. This US suburban development pattern is the main reason why we use twice as much energy per capita as European countries that enjoy the same standard of living as ours. Energy use is the driver of greenhouse gases, which is why the US is the cause of a disproportionate share of global warming."

Imagine how different the country would be if we had built streetcar suburbs instead of all this sprawl. The average density of all our urbanized areas is 2,670 people per square mile, which is very slightly over 4 people per acre. By contrast, streetcar suburbs typically average 10 people per acre, and if we averaged in cities, the overall densities of our urbanized areas would be over 12 people per acre even if almost everyone lived in suburbs.

Urban areas would take up only about one-third of the land they do now. People would still have their own houses, but they would also have farmland or parkland nearby, instead of drowning in an endless sea of suburbs. We would consume much less gasoline than we do now, reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and our dependence on imported oil. The financial savings would let Americans work shorter hours and have more time for theirfamilies and their own interests.

We would get all these benefits by living in streetcar suburbs rather than sprawl - on top of the fact that streetcar suburbs are more livable than sprawl.

Steuteville's opinion piece is at http://www.newurbannews.com/CommentaryJulAug07.html.

Deaths From Global Warming

2007-06-28T16:26:00.000-07:00

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, representing a consensus of the world's scientists, drought will kill hundreds of millions of people and will displace 1 to 2 billion people during this century, unless we act dramatically to slow global warming.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently pointed out that the genocide in Darfur is caused partly by global warming. Before the drought in east Africa, black farmers welcomed Arab herdsmen to their lands, where they grazed their herds and shared the wells. Fighting broke out between these two groups only when there was not enough food and water for all.

There are two articles in today's New York Times about the same subject.

The first says a new UN report has found that tens of millions of people have already left their lands to flee drought caused by global warming, and 50 million people are at risk of displacement in the next 10 years.

The second, a column by Nicholas Kristof named "Our Gas Guzzlers, Their Lives," talks about the shrunken lakes that he saw in Africa and says that crop yields in some countries could be cut in half by 2020 because of drought caused by global warming.

To put the predicted hundreds of millions of deaths in perspective, consider that Hitler killed 6 million people in the holocaust. Imagine this holocaust every year, year after year, for 50 to 100 years - that is what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that we are causing.

It is by far the greatest suffering that has ever happened in human history -- but despite record gas prices, Americans are expected to flock to the roads for the usual Fourth of July pleasure driving.

England Moves Toward Toll-Everywhere Congestion Pricing

2007-05-28T12:10:00.000-07:00

Pay-as-you-drive trial rules laid down
May 22, 2007 Guardian

The government is pushing ahead with its controversial road pricing plans with the publication today of proposals to introduce pay-as-you-drive trials. A draft bill lays down the ground rules for local authorities wishing to introduce pilot schemes.

The Tories today branded the bill a "Trojan horse" for a national scheme, in which the movement of cars would be tracked by satellite or roadside gantries and motorists would be charged about £1.30 a mile on the busiest roads.

"It's now clear that Gordon Brown is as committed to the government's road pricing plans as Tony Blair has been, despite the petition signed by 1.8 million people and official forecasts that such as scheme could cost up to £60b," said the shadow transport secretary, Chris Grayling. "Local road pricing schemes are fine but only if they are originated locally and agreed locally. It is just plain wrong for ministers to interfere in the way that they are."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/transport/Story/0,,2085559,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

Work Time And Global Warming

2007-05-09T11:35:00.000-07:00

As a first step to getting Berkeley to recognize the importance of work time in its Measure G process to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, I wrote an Op-Ed about work time and global warming that is in the current Berkeley Daily Planet. You can read it at:
http://www.berkeleydaily.org/article.cfm?issue=05-08-07&storyID=27017.

It is based on my white paper Work Time and Global Warming, which is at:
http://www.preservenet.com/studies/WorkTimeGlobalWarming.html

A Carbon Tax Shift

2007-05-01T10:27:00.000-07:00

The conventional wisdom is that a tax on CO2 emissions would be the most efficient way to control global warming but is not politically possible, so cap-and-trade is our only alternative.

But a carbon tax could be politically possible if it were presented as a tax shift designed to lower other taxes, such as the income tax.

There is currently one carbon tax bill in congress, introduced by Rep. Pete Stark, which would tax CO2 at $10 a ton the first year and would raise the tax by $10 a ton each year until CO2 emissions are reduced to 80% less than their 1990 level.

There is very little support for this sort of open-ended tax increase, but we could easily make it a tax shift rather than a tax increase by adding this provision: each year, the Internal Revenue Service would calculate the total revenues from the carbon tax, divide it by the number of taxpayers, and give each taxpayers a refundable tax credit that would return all the money collected by the carbon tax.

There are tremendous advantages to this sort of tax shift:

Income tax has no benefit except raising revenue. A carbon tax has the same benefit of raising revenue, and it has the additional benefit of dealing with our most pressing environmental problem. A carbon tax gives much more benefit than an income tax of the same amount.

A carbon tax could apply to imports, while cap and trade would only apply to domestic products. For example, products imported from China would have to declare how much CO2 is generated in producing them and transporting them to an American port, and they would pay the carbon tax on this amount. This would help convince the China to start building cleaner power plants rather than relying on coal. It would also favor locally produced goods over imported goods, because they are transported shorter distances. Reducing transportation distances is an important element in controlling global warming, and in a global economy, a carbon tax deals with it much more effectively than one nation's cap and trade. (For this reason, the tax should be levied on the carbon content of products, rather than being levied when the fuel is taken out of the ground, as in Stark's bill.)

A carbon tax is progressive. For example, someone who owns a 10,000 square foot house is likely to use much more energy heating and cooling it that someone who lives in a small apartment. As a general rule, a carbon tax would generally take more revenue from people who consume more, and it would return this revenue in a tax credit that is given equally to everyone.

A carbon tax shift can involve a higher tax than a plain carbon tax. For example, Pete Stark's tax of $10 per ton comes out to about 10 cents per gallon of gasoline. It would take 30 years for it to double the current price of gasoline, which would decrease driving by about 30% - and it would take a long time to influence behavior across the entire economy. This is about the largest tax increase we can demand, but we can have a much larger carbon tax if we are give that money back to every American in the form of a tax credit that they can use to pay the higher cost of gasoline. I think a reasonable amount would be $30 or $40 per ton, which would double the cost of gasoline in 10 year or less, changing people's behavior soon enough to have an important effect on global warming.

Let's move beyond the conventional wisdom by emphasizing that this is a tax shift rather than an added tax. For example, we should say that, with this sort of a plan, the majority of Americans would not pay any income tax: only the very rich would still have to pay income tax, and most Americans would get a check back from the IRS instead of paying income taxes.

Congestion Pricing In Rome

2007-04-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

I have read lots of news about congestion pricing in London and Stockholm. I had not heard that there is also congestion pricing in Rome, until I saw it mentioned in an article by Andrea Broaddus, an American studying planning in Europe. In response to my question, Andrea wrote:

" Rome has a cordon scheme restricting access to the city center during peak hours, with revenues invested in transit. A CIVITAS-funded project, it is described on their website, http://www.civitas-initiative.org/measure_sheet.phtml?lan=en&id=38. Or you can find a nice comparative study by our very own FHWA on European demand management strategies, including a case study on Rome which describes their road and parking pricing schemes, http://international.fhwa.dot.gov/traveldemand/t1_p08.htm."

Andrea blogs at www.urbanwunder.blogspot.com.

Our Teenage Governor

2007-04-13T16:24:00.000-07:00

Arnold Schwarzenegger has been "pimping his ride" - showing off Hummers that he has souped up to increase their power and also has converted to hydrogen or bio-fuels.

This is consistent with the policies he has backed as governor. He has supported more freeway building and pulled funding from public transportation, and at the same time, he has claimed to be an environmentalist and has supported goals for reducing CO2 emissions.

What sort of a model is he for the people of the state?

Most of us can remember that, when we were teenagers, there were a few kids in the neighborhood who lived for their cars - which they wanted to have a more powerful engine and a bigger sound system than anyone else's. Teenage boys tend to like the rush of testosterone that they get when they accellerate, and a few were addicted to this cheap thrill.

Most of us have moved beyond this as we have grown up. We have realized that there are more important satisfactions in life, such as raising a family and contributing to our communities. But our Governor seems to be as addicted as he was when he was a teenager.

By promoting automobile use, he shows his ignorance of the history of American city planning. Americans drive twice as much now as in the 1960s, and we are no better off because we spend all this extra time on the freeway. Most city planners support pedestrian- and transit-oriented development that would reduce automobile dependency, but Schwarzenegger supports only one approach to city planning: more freeways.

By promoting automobile use, he also shows that he has an adolescent idea of the good life. If they had the choice, most Americans would prefer to reduce their car expenses so they could have more time to spend with their families; this is an adult's idea of a good life. By contrast, Schwarzenegger is a model for people who are willing to go into debt to buy a bigger, more powerful car than they can afford, thinking that this will somehow impress everyone; this is a teenager's idea of the good life.

By promoting automobile use, he also shows that he has not done the basic math about what is needed to slow global warming. There is a place for hydrogen and biofuels used in moderation. But if we use too much hydrogen, the leaks will damage the ozone layer, and there is not enough farmland in the world to grow biofuels to power a Hummer for everyone. Hollywood stars specializing in selling fantasies to the public, and this is a prime example.

Well, we have one consolation. It is bad enough that he is our governor. It would be even worse if he lived in our neighborhood and kept us awake late at night by racing his souped-up engine, like a obnoxious teenager.

(P.S. I have bicycled as my main form of transportation all my adult life. I think that Arnold is probably scared to bicycle on city streets because he is just a girlie-man.)

Shorter Work Week Or Choice Of Work Hours

2007-03-18T17:14:00.000-07:00

I support choice of work hours rather than a shorter standard work week for several reasons:

On social grounds: The standard work week is a relic of a time when families generally were supported by one bread winner, but families are much more diverse today. There is no reason for a father supporting a wife and three children to work the same number of hours as a childless couple with two incomes.

On political grounds: Changing the standard work week creates political problems, because labor wants shorter hours without less pay, which businesss resists. Allowing choice of work hours avoids this problem and focuses the political debate on the real issue, that people should have the option of downshifting economically and consuming less. A shorter standard work week does not seem to be a real political possibility in the United States (though it may be in other countries): I can imagine businesses running a series of ads showing workers who say they need the longer work hours to survive and they don't want big government to deny them that opportunity. Choice of work hours, without forcing anyone to work shorter hours and to downshift, may be a real possibility in the United States.

On economic grounds: Choice of work hours allows people to maximize their own well-being by choosing between more consumption and more free time. This is similar to the economic choice between any two commodities. It is a very basic point of economic theory that, if you require people to consume a given amount, you reduce overall well-being. If we required everyone to buy a given amount of roast beef, we would reduce the well being of people who don't like roast beef; likewise, if we require everyone to work a given number of hours, we reduce the well being of people who want to consume less overall than the average person.

On economic grounds again: Choice of work hours is a more realistic alternative economically, because it does not reduce a country's competitiveness. One of Sarkozy's points is that the French don't work hard enough to be competitive, and one of his goals is apparently to roll back France's 35 hour week. A shorter standard work week at the same pay reduces international competitiveness, but the option of working shorter hours at the same hourly pay does not. I have not heard any calls to roll back the laws in Netherlands and Germany that give workers the option of working shorter hours.

On political and social ground again: As a reaction to global warming, there could be a strong voluntary simplicity movement during the 21st century. Many people could decide to work less and consume less to save the world's environment. But people can make this decision only if they have choice of work hours. A voluntary simplicity movement has to be based on this voluntary choice.

Removing Freeways - Restoring Cities

2007-03-01T14:12:00.000-08:00

We recently created a web site with the histories of all the freeway removals that have occurred in the United States, "Removing Freeways - Restoring Cities," which is available at: http://www.preservenet.com/freeways.

It tells the stories of how the following freeways were removed:

Portland, OR: Harbor Drive

San Francisco, CA: Embarcadero Freeway

San Francisco, CA: Central Freeway

Milwaukee, WI: Park East Freeway

New York, NY: West Side Highway

Niagara Falls, NY: Robert Moses Parkway

It also includes two essays:

From Induced Demand to Reduced Demand by me

Tear It Down! by John Norquist, president and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism

Richard Branson and Global Warming

2007-02-11T16:43:00.000-08:00

Sir Richard Branson, owner of Virgin Airlines, has offered a $25 million prize to anyone who devises a technology for removing carbon dioxide from the air. Branson's new venture, Virgin Galactic, is planning to offer space flights to tourists beginning in 2009, at a cost of about $200,000 per flight.

I have two questions for Branson. How much carbon dioxide will be emitted by each of these space flights? Is it worth doing this much damage to the environment to give a brief thrill to a few tourists?

People have questioned Branson's sincerity by pointing out how much carbon dioxide Virgin Airlines emits, and he answers that people would simply take other flights if he closed his business. But that excuse does not apply to Virgin Galactic, since Branson is the only one planning to offer space flights to tourists.

By planning tourist space flights and offering this award, Branson is implying that we can continue to emit carbon dioxide as if there were no tomorrow, because scientists will invent a way to solve the problem of global warming. It is obviously dangerous and irresponsible to imply that people should not make a personal effort to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions.

The newspaper articles that described this prize showed Branson playfully tossing a globe up in the air. Maybe this is meant to symbolize the space tourists who will be amusing themselves by playing with the earth.

A Statue Of Robert Moses

2007-02-05T18:36:00.000-08:00

I have found the perfect place for a statue of Robert Moses, to commemorate the changes he brought to New York.

There is a circle at the west corner of Prospect Park where Ocean Parkway used to begin. It is hard to imagine what this corner was like when it was first built, but it must have been a high point in the history of New York's urban design. Frederick Law Olmstead considered Prospect Park his greatest creation; the boulevards radiating from the corners of the park were the key to Olmstead's planning vision for Brooklyn; and Ocean Parkway was the most completely realized of these boulevards.

Robert Moses destroyed the stretch of Ocean Parkway nearest to Prospect Park in order to build a sunken freeway there, the Prospect Expressway. The boulevard that tied together the neighborhood was replaced by a freeway that sliced up the neighborhood. Shortly after Moses did this, the rest of Ocean Parkway was declared a landmark, so no one could do the same sort of damage to the rest of this boulevard.

This circle must have been a popular place for pedestrians when it was first built. The intact parts of Ocean Parkway are still full of people sitting and strolling, and this circle must have been even more lively, because it connected Ocean Parkway with Prospect Park.

Today, it is an empty circle full of weeds with a freeway passing by it. This circle is an ideal place for a statue of Robert Moses, with a plaque describing how he changed this neighborhood.

Because there are no pedestrians here, the statue is bound to be vandalized and covered with graffiti, exactly what Robert Moses deserves for vandalizing this neighborhood.

But if the damage that Robert Moses did to this neighborhood is ever undone - if the freeway is removed and the boulevard is restored - then the crowds of people on the boulevard will deter the graffiti artists. If Moses' act of vandalism is ever undone, then his statue will no longer be vandalized.

Costs and Benefits of Economic Growth

2007-01-22T18:26:00.000-08:00

The benefits of continuing economic growth for the average American are things such as bigger houses, more cars, and more driving.

Some of the costs of growth are highlighted in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, just released in draft form. It predicts that devastating storms will become much more frequent, deserts will spread, coral reefs will die as oceans become acidic, and deadly heatwaves will become common. Hundreds of millions of people will flee their homelands to escape drought or flooding.

This study is a conservative estimate of the damage that global warming will cause, because it was produced by thousands of climate experts, and it only includes points that they all considered indisputable.

Isn't it obvious that the benefits of growth to people in affluent countries such as the United States are now much less than the costs of growth? By consuming luxuries - for example, by driving every time you leave the house - you are depriving your grandchildren's generation of necessities.

It is time for us to take seriously that old saying: live simply so that others simply may live.

Shorter Work Hours Mean Less Greenhouse Gas Emissions

2006-12-26T17:20:00.000-08:00

A new study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research finds that:

If Americans worked as few hours as western Europeans, it would lower our energy consumption by 20%. This alone would mean that the United States would have produced 3% less greenhouse gas emissions in 2002 than in 1990, almost bringing us to the Kyoto goal for cutting emissions.

If Europeans worked as many hours as Americans, it would raise their energy consumption by 25%, making it virtually impossible for them to reach their Kyoto goal.

If the developing nations imitate the American model (all else being equal), world emissions of CO2 in 2050 would be 14Gt, raising world temperatures by 4.5 degrees. But if the developing nations imitate the European model, world emissions of CO2 in 2050 would be 10Gt, raising world temperatures by 2.5 degrees - a very substantial difference.

It should always have been clear that we can reduce our environmental impact by shortening work hours - producing and consuming less. It is good to have a study that quantifies it.

This study is available at
http://www.cepr.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=726&Itemid=8

Save Classical St. Petersburg

2006-12-17T16:24:00.000-08:00

I have written an article and helped put a petition on the web to save St. Petersburg, Russia, from Gazprom's plan to build a high-rise, avant-gardist headquarters building there. Here is the text of an email that I am sending to encourage people to sign the petition. You can copy this text and email it to anyone you think would be interested:

Please sign our petition to save classical St. Petersburg, at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/petersburg/. Please forward this email as widely as possible.

St. Petersburg, Russia, has one of the world's greatest collections of neo-classical architecture and is a UNESCO world heritage site. Gazprom, Russia's largest energy company, is planning to build a modernist headquarters tower there that is taller than New York's Empire State building.

For the six entries that Gazprom considered, all in an avant-gardist style that is incompatible with the historical style of St. Petersburg, see http://www.gazprom-city.info/competition/projects

For more information, see http://www.intbau.org/news.htm#GAZPROM081206.

Sign our petition to save classical St. Petersburg, at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/petersburg/ and forward this email as widely as possible.

The government of St. Petersburg has been shaken by the opposition to this project, and if there is a widespread international outcry, we can stop this project.

Charles Siegel

City Of The Future - Or City Of The Trendy Present

2006-12-14T13:19:00.000-08:00

The History Channel is sponsoring a competition among teams in three cities "to produce a vision of their city 100 years from now that, like the engineering and architectural marvels of past civilizations, has the staying power to endure for centuries to come."

But as judge of the competition, they choose Daniel Libeskind, the ultimate trendy architect, whose designs will look as outdated in fifty years as Le Corbusier's visions of the city of the future look today. In fact, they will look more outdated, since Libeskind is more mannered than Le Corbusier.

If you want a design that endures, then design a city that is a good place to live today. No one has ever created a livable city or an enduring design by trying to design a city of the future.

Why High Rises Seem Faceless and Impersonal

2006-11-26T17:54:00.000-08:00

These pictures from Jan Gehl's Life Between Cities show why high-rise neighborhoods seem faceless and impersonal.

In a series of views, Gehl shows that people on the ground and in a building can see each other clearly looking down from the second floor and the fifth floor, that they can barely see each other looking down from the eight floor, and that they cannot see each other at all looking down from the sixteenth floor.

I would not make the fifth floor the cutoff height, as Gehl does, since I know places where there is a sense of connection with the street even when you are on the ninth floor. But when you get higher than that, people living in a high rise have no visual connection with the surrounding community; they just look out at a distant view (unless that view is blocked by another high rise).

When you walk through a traditional urban neighborhood, with buildings five or six stories high, you can see the faces of people looking out of their windows, and you can see personalizing details such as flowerpots in windows. When you walk through a high-rise neighborhood, you cannot see this sort of thing in most of the building's facade.

The high rises literally are faceless and impersonal. They have all the humanity of a piece of graph paper.

Sorry for the blurry picture, which was the best scan I could get. The text reads:
"Meaningful contact with ground level events is possible only from the first few floors in a multi-story building. Between the thrid and forth floor, a marked decrease in the ability to have contact with the ground level can be observed. Another threshold exists between the fifth and sixth floors. Anything and anyone above the fifth floor is definitely out of touch with ground level events."

Jan Gehl, Life Between Buildings: Using Public Spaces, translated by Jo Koch (New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987) p. 100.

Apart from what it says about high rises, this is generally considered the best book about how to create lively public places, and I strongly recommend it.

Arizona Votes to Make Itself Uninhabitable

2006-11-08T18:37:00.000-08:00

One of the most important issues in the recent election was the initiative measures that would require states to compensate land owners for the reduced value of their land if the land is downzoned to allow less development. These measures also put limits on eminent domain taking of land for non-public uses, and their publicity emphasized eminent domain and generally did not mention compensation for downzoning.

These laws would essentially make it impossible to downzone undeveloped land to stop sprawl. Because sprawl is a major cause of global warming, these laws would make it much more difficult to control global warming.

This initiative lost in California but won in Arizona.

Arizona is already the sprawl center of the world, and it looks like they plan to keep it up - until they make global warming so bad that the state becomes uninhabitable.

Manhattan Is Modern Again

2006-11-02T18:42:00.000-08:00

When the Museum of Modern Art reopened after being closed for remodeling, it used the slogan "Manhattan is Modern Again."

Modernist architecture is known for ignoring its context and killing adjacent streets, and MOMA certainly upholds that principle. On 54th St., it has a blank fence facing the sidewalk and a blank wall towering above it. This modernist building is a striking contrast with the welcoming nineteenth-century row houses on the other side of this street.

When you walk down this street, it is hard to understand why they expect us to be pleased that Manhattan is modern again.

Norman Foster's Upper East Side Radicalism

2006-10-25T11:48:00.000-07:00

Norman Foster has designed a 22-story elliptical, glass apartment building as a rooftop addition to the existing five-story limestone Parke-Bernet Gallery building on Madison Avenue between 76th and 77th streets, in a designated historic district.

In response to opposition from preservation groups throughout the city, Foster said that the project was consistent with the Upper East Side's "tradition of radicalism," exemplified by the designs of the Guggenheim and Whitney museums.

People from New York know that the Lower East Side has a tradition of political radicalism, but the Upper East Side does not have a tradition of radicalism at all.

The Upper East Side has a tradition of being very wealthy, which lets it play with artsy avant-gardist projects that have nothing to do with political radicalism, such as the Guggenheim and Whitney museum.

Maybe we could deflate its pretentions if we described this style as "Upper East Side radicalism."

The Perfect Location for Frank Gehry's Buildings

2006-10-19T18:34:00.000-07:00

From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

"The Philadelphia Museum of Art has selected Frank O. Gehry, the architect famous for rambunctious and sculptural buildings such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, to design a vast new underground gallery space, a project that will be virtually invisible from the street."

"Because Gehry will be working inside the museum's monumental stone base, he will not have an opportunity to append one of his signature swirling forms onto Philadelphia's beloved neo-classical temple. There will be no titanium-clad fins sprouting from the art museum's Kosota stone wings, no giant cylinders dancing down its famous staircase. Whatever theatrics Gehry can produce will have to be kept 30 feet below the museum's east plaza, deep inside its Fairmount hillside."

from http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/15792610.htm

High-Rises and Urban Design

2006-10-17T19:56:00.000-07:00

It is a basic principle of traditional urban design that symbolically important buildings should be taller than utilitarian fabric buildings. This is why the we are so attracted by medieval European cities where the cathedral rises above the skyline, and by Vermont towns where the church steeple rises above the skyline. These cities and towns seem coherent and meaningful because their skylines are dominated by the institution that gives meaning to the culture.

But you cannot follow this principle when the fabric buildings are high-rises. Even though the consistent 12 to 14-story apartment buildings on the main streets upper West Side of New York are generally very appealing, much more appealing than most high-rise neighborhoods, you can see that the skyline is incoherent when the apartment buildings surround a church.

Imagine, instead, that the apartment buildings were cut off at the sixth floor, as they are in traditional European cities - so their roofs are a bit lower that the peak of the church's pitched roof and much lower than its tower. Then we would have skyline that is symbolically meaningful - not a skyline of faceless boxes.

The Polluting Hydrogen Economy

2006-10-01T13:16:00.000-07:00

Hydrogen is touted as a clean future energy source: once our cars are powered by hydrogen, their only emissions will be water vapor.

In reality, there are two problems with the hydrogen economy.

First, hydrogen is not a source of energy, just a method of storing energy. To produce the hydrogen that powers the cars, you use electricity to convert water into free hydrogen and free oxygen. But if the electricity is generated using coal, then producing the hydrogen to fuel a car would create more carbon dioxide emissions than using gasoline to fuel that car.

Second, hydrogen itself can be polluting. A study done at the California Institute of Technology found that, if hydrogen replaced fossil fuels, 10 percent to 20 percent of the hydrogen would probably leak from pipelines, storage facilities, processing plants and fuel cells. Because it is so light, the leaked hydrogen would travel straight to the stratosphere, tripling the amount of hydrogen there. This hydrogen would oxidize, cooling the lower stratosphere and causing larger holes in the ozone layer, which has already been disturbed by pollutants such as CFCs.

This does not mean that we should avoid hydrogen entirely. It does mean that hydrogen is not the perfect technological fix that it is touted to be.

We need cleaner fuels. We also need to live more modestly and consume less fuel, if we do not want to disrupt the world's environment.

For more information about the Cal Tech study, see
http://www.wired.com/news/autotech/0,2554,59220,00.html