urbanism

07 Oct 09

The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future - Future metro - io9

QUOTE
Adam Greenfield, a design director at Nokia, wrote one of the defining texts on the design and use of ubiquitous computing or 'ubicomp' called "Everyware" and is about to release a follow-up on urban environments and technology called "The city is here for you to use". In a recent talk he framed a number of ways in which the access to data about your surroundings that Hill describes will change our attitude towards the city. He posits that we will move from a city we browser and wander to a 'searchable, query-able' city that we can not only read, but write-to as a medium.

He states:

The bottom-line is a city that responds to the behaviour of its users in something close to real-time, and in turn begins to shape that behaviour.

Again, we're not so far away from what Archigram were examining in the 60's. Behaviour and information as the raw material to design cities with as much as steel, glass and concrete.
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cities archigram urbanism science_fiction ubiquity ubicom jjacobs

The city of the future increases its role as an actor in our lives, affecting our lives. This of course, is a recurrent theme in science-fiction and fantasy.
Back in our world, the exaggerated mega-city is going through a bit of bad patch. The bling'd up ultraskyscraping and bespoke island-terraforming of Dubai is on hold until capitalism reboots, and changes in political fortune have nixed the futuristic, ubicomp'd-up Arup-designed ecotopia of Dongtan in China.
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- We are now a predominantly urban species, with over 50% of humanity living in a city. The overwhelming majority of these are not old post-industrial world cities such as London or New York, but large chaotic sprawls of the industrialising world such as the "maximum cities" of Mumbai or Guangzhou. Here the infrastructures are layered, ad-hoc, adaptive and personal - people there really are walking architecture, as Archigram said.
  
  Hacking post-industrial cities is becoming a necessity also. The "shrinking cities" project is monitoring the trend in the west toward dwindling futures for cities such as Detroit and Liverpool.
- Jacobs claims that import replacement builds up local infrastructure, skills, and production. Jacobs also claims that the increased produce is exported to other cities, giving those other cities a new opportunity to engage in import replacement, thus producing a positive cycle of growth.

15 Sep 09

David Byrne’s Perfect City - WSJ.com

I love David Byrne's music, but in this essay for the Wall Street Journal I think he somewhat over-reaches himself. Why? The essay is muddled. He includes too many contradictory pronouncements. For example, that big and dense is good, but that you need the "village" thing for safety & security; or that LA isn't dense (I believe it is, actually); or that lack of density creates narcissistic attention-getting ploys; or that "human scale" needs to be achieved through some process of "compromise" (left undefined), and so on. Furthermore, his closing sentence really confuses me: "My perfect city isn't fixed, it doesn't actually exist, and I like it that way." He likes that it doesn't exist? What does that mean?

online.wsj.com/...3440104574403293064136098.html - Preview

wsj.com david_byrne cities urbanism jjacobs

31 Jul 09

Jane Jacobs vs. Robert Moses

A review of Anthony Flint's "How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City."
QUOTE
Now there's a book that shows how these mythic characters shaped each other's work and reputations - a volume that leaves me wishing there was some way today to combine the best traits of both.
(...)
Make no mistake, Jacobs is the hero of this yarn. But in the epilogue, Flint addresses our ever-changing urban dynamics, where Jacobs' quest for "thoughtful citizen involvement" has morphed into "all-powerful neighborhood residents, who seek conditions to stay exactly as they are and reward politicians who agree with them."

Which sounds a lot like San Francisco, Berkeley and every other city [Victoria!] where process is more important than results. All the protections we've put into place, such as environmental reports, become weapons that can be used to derail anything that anyone dislikes.
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www.sfgate.com/...article.cgi - Preview

jjacobs robert_moses urbanism cities urbanplanning politics

07 May 09

Ecological Urbanism (Events at GSD)

Description of "Ecological Urbanism," an exhibition at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, March 30 to May 17, 2009.

www.gsd.harvard.edu/...current.htm - Preview

ecological_urbanism urbanism gsd harvard exhibitions

09 Apr 09

affordable green housing (podcast.mov (video/quicktime Object))

Excellent short film about biophilia and how to make sure it's satisfied in urban environments, with specific reference to one project by developer Jonathan Rose (of Jonathan Rose Companies).

www-tc.pbs.org/...able_green_housing_podcast.mov - Preview

biophilia cities urbanism green_strategies

10 Mar 09

Green Cities, Brown Suburbs by Edward L. Glaeser, City Journal Winter 2009

Ed Glaeser makes the point that cities are much greener than non-urban areas, all things considered. Your country or suburb carbon footprint is huge compared to your urban carbon footprint.

www.city-journal.org/...19_1_green-cities.html - Preview

edward_glaeser city_journal urbanism green_strategies suburbs cities

if you want to be good to the environment, stay away from it. Move to high-rise apartments surrounded by plenty of concrete. Americans who settle in leafy, low-density suburbs will leave a significantly deeper carbon footprint, it turns out, than Americans who live cheek by jowl in urban towers.
second paradox follows from the first. When environmentalists resist new construction in their dense but environmentally friendly cities, they inadvertently ensure that it will take place somewhere else—somewhere with higher carbon emissions. Much local environmentalism, in short, is bad for the environment.
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- Matthew Kahn, a professor of economics at UCLA, and I have quantified the first paradox.
- we’re trying to determine where future home construction would do the least environmental damage.
  - - that's key. - on 2009-03-10
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- In almost every metropolitan area, carbon emissions are significantly lower for people who live in central cities than for people who live in suburbs.
- New York City has the largest gap in emissions between central city and suburbs of any metropolitan area in the country—unsurprisingly, since New York’s central city is the epitome of dense urban living. Our estimate is that an average New York City resident emits 4,462 pounds less of transportation-related carbon dioxide than an average New York suburbanite. The reductions in carbon emissions from home heating and electricity are comparably large, thanks to New York’s famously tiny apartments. Manhattan is one of the greenest places in America.
- These four cities notwithstanding, the data suggest a strong general pattern: households in dense urban areas have significantly lower carbon emissions than households in the suburbs. The lifestyle that Thoreau preferred, living surrounded by green space, tends to be far less kind to the planet and far likelier to raise global temperatures, just as Thoreau himself did that afternoon in 1844.
- There is a large and growing literature, ranging from complete skepticism to ultra-alarmism, devoted to the question of just how much environmental damage is associated with carbon emissions. The widely cited Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change claims that each ton of carbon dioxide emissions causes $85 worth of damage to the planet. More commonly accepted estimates are considerably lower; one meta-study suggests an average cost of about $15 per ton of carbon dioxide. The right number probably lies somewhere between $15 and $85.
- Even if, like many economists, you think that the Stern Review overstates the true damage per ton and you chop its proposed cost in half, then the average new home in Memphis still does about $620 worth of environmental harm per year more than an average new home in San Francisco, since San Francisco homes are associated with 14.65 fewer tons of carbon dioxide each year. Once you crunch the numbers, that makes the lifetime environmental cost of building in Memphis, rather than San Francisco, $12,400 per home—a big number relative to Memphis’s average housing price of $90,000.
- Before even considering carbon taxes, the country should rethink its land-use policies, which currently push people toward high-emissions areas and away from green ones.
- The chart shows a strong negative correlation between restrictiveness and carbon dioxide emissions.
- But California’s abundant restrictions on new construction don’t do much to deter building across America as a whole. No matter what the Bay Area does, plenty of new households will come into being, and they will need new homes. By restricting local development, California regulators just make sure that construction occurs someplace else. That someplace else tends to be a lot less environmentally friendly than the California coast, blessed as it is with a superbly temperate climate. The net result of this process: land-use restrictions in California increase carbon emissions and raise the risks of global warming.
- The great irony, of course, is that land-use regulations are so often justified by environmental arguments.
- So California environmentalists have things exactly backward. If climate change is the major environmental challenge that we face, the state should actively encourage new construction, rather than push it toward other areas. True, increasing development in California might increase per-household carbon emissions within the state if the new development, following the current model, took place on the extreme edges of urban areas. A better path would be to ease restrictions in the urban cores of San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego. More building there would reduce average commute lengths and improve per-capita emissions. Higher densities could also justify more investment in new, low-emissions energy plants.
- Similarly, limiting the height or growth of New York City skyscrapers incurs environmental costs. Building more apartments in Gotham will not only make the city more affordable; it will also reduce global warming.
- Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.
  - Best ending sentence, ever. - on 2009-03-10
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23 Jan 09

"Where Do Cities Come From?" (Richard Florida - Creative Class)

Florida points to an article that smacks down cities (it claims that historically they've been "death traps") and asks for reader feedback. I left a long comment.

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cities richard_florida industrial_revolution urbanism comments

19 Jan 09

"'Actions' anthology a handbook for urban revolutionaries" by Christopher Hume (TheStar.com)

Discussion of Montreal's Canadian Centre for Architecture's publication "Actions: What You Can Do With The City" (Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi): 98 examples of "techniques, events, ideas and strategies aimed at making cities more sustainable, humane, efficient, livable and, not least, fun." I was especially intrigued by what Hume describes as "Actions"' subtext, *waste* - see article.
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"Our whole economy has become a waste economy," writes Zardini quoting Hannah Arendt, "in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end."
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thestar christopher_hume waste cities urbanism

"Between the utopian fantasy of starting over and the impossible dream of continuing in the direction that we are headed," writes architect/activist Fritz Haeg, "there lies a middle ground in which we come to terms with the urban decisions that have already been made and repurpose aspects of our existing built environment in strategic ways. ... No matter what has been handed to us, each of us should be given licence to be an active part in the creation of the cities that we share."
- Well said, and interesting to think about in relation to someone like J.H. Kunstler, who thinks there's a tabula rasa coming up. - on 2009-01-19
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If Actions has a subtext, however, it's that of waste. Many projects included are based on reclaiming the vast quantities of food we throw away – a quarter of all food produced in North America ends in a trash bin, much perfectly edible.
"Our whole economy has become a waste economy," writes Zardini quoting Hannah Arendt, "in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end."
Arendt's words, written half a century ago, have never been so pertinent.
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- At the same time, Action recognizes that livability can be a strictly local issue.
  - V. true. - on 2009-01-19
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14 Jan 09

Creative Class » Blog Archive » Design and the Crisis - Creative Class

Left a comment on this entry by Richard Florida. His post was actually about design, and how it could change under economic pressure. But then someone left a comment about how bad urban 'density' is and that it benefits only developers and tax-hungry governments. Well, I couldn't let nonsense like that stand, so I posted a comment in defense of urban density. File it under "really, some people...!"

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urbanism density comments design

01 Jan 09

The economic impact of high density development and tall buildings in central business districts: British Property Federation

A 9/10/08 pointer to a 44-pg PDF, "The economic impact of high density development and tall buildings in central business districts: British Property Federation." From the description:
QUOTE
There is increasing recognition of the need to increase the density of commercial development, especially in the centres of our towns and cities. The sustainability benefits of high density are relatively well known. For example, less urban sprawl means less need to use greenfield sites, more use of public transport and, with mixed use developments, a reduced need to travel.

However, there is also an economic case for increased commercial density, as specified in Policy Planning Statement (PPS) 6 and the State of the English Cities. In current debates about increasing commercial density in London – including through tall buildings – this economic element has been little mentioned, and is perhaps little understood.

This research has sought to explain and estimate the economic costs and benefits of high density commercial development in central business districts. The aim is to provide a more rounded picture of the economic impact of high density development and to strengthen the assessment of such development.
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central_business_districts cities urbanism economic_development tall_buildings high_rise density

There is increasing recognition of the need to increase the density of commercial development, especially in the centres of our towns and cities. The sustainability benefits of high density are relatively well known. For example, less urban sprawl means less need to use greenfield sites, more use of public transport and, with mixed use developments, a reduced need to travel.

However, there is also an economic case for increased commercial density, as specified in Policy Planning Statement (PPS) 6 and the State of the English Cities. In current debates about increasing commercial density in London – including through tall buildings – this economic element has been little mentioned, and is perhaps little understood.

This research has sought to explain and estimate the economic costs and benefits of high density commercial development in central business districts. The aim is to provide a more rounded picture of the economic impact of high density development and to strengthen the assessment of such development.

03 Dec 08

Is Urban Loneliness a Myth? by Jennifer Senior -- New York Magazine

Another fascinating New York Magazine article, showing that 1 out 2 apartments in Manhattan are occupied by singles ...and that their occupants are not lonely or alienated.
QUOTE
Manhattan is the capital of people living by themselves. But are New Yorkers lonelier? Far from it, say a new breed of loneliness researchers, who argue that urban alienation is largely a myth.
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nymag.com/52450 - Preview

urbanism manhattan nyc myths loneliness demographics nymag

01 Dec 08

A city that thinks like the web, slides + audio « commonspace

Must-see/ must-listen presentation at the City of Toronto 2.0 Web Summit, by Mark Surman on getting cities to think like the web: open, transparent, shared data, mashable, hackable, improve-able.
QUOTE:
three simple challenges to City Hall. They went something like this:

1. Open our data. transit. library catalogues. community centre schedules. maps. 311. expose it all so the people of Toronto can use it to make a better city. do it now.
2. Crowdsource info gathering that helps the city. somebody would have FixMyStreet.to up and running in a week if the Mayor promised to listen. encourage it.
3. Ask for help creating a city that thinks like the web. copy Washington, DC’s contest strategy. launch it at BarCamp.
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mark_surman web_2.0 commonspace cities open_source mozilla urbanism toronto

22 Nov 08

Building an Obama urban agenda - PD Opinion - cleveland.com

Cleveland Plain Dealer blog entry about Carol Coletta's visit to Cleveland to speak at the annual meeting of University Circle, Inc.

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cleveland.com carol_coletta ceos_for_cities cities urbanism

she thinks Barack Obama will be good for urban America.

"I think he has an urban sensitivity -- an urban sensitivity based on working to make things happen in some of the most devastated neighborhoods in Chicago," said Coletta. "He knows what works. He understands the scams. He's no bleeding heart."
Coletta said she's hoping for three pillars to an Obama urban agenda:
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- Infrastructure. A hot item because it can be the centerpiece of a stimulus package, Coletta hopes the emphasis of any spending on roads, bridges and sewers would be "fix it first." That is, repair what already exists in cities rather than build new or wider expressways out of town. "We need to extract value out of what we've already invested in," said Coletta.
- Transportation policy. Coletta hopes Washington will emphasize mass transit, encourage wiser land use and stop urban sprawl. And with her, it's not simply about the environment. Density, Coletta says, drives productivity. That's because modern knowledge economies thrive when creative people, the types who tend to congregate in cities, effortlessly interact and share ideas. "You need to think about how to enable those happy accidents," she said.
- Education. There's no better predictor of a city's or a region's economic performance than its level of educational attainment, in particular its percentage of college graduates. That's a lesson Cleveland has learned the hard way. Obama, during his campaign, called for a $4,000 college tuition tax credit. That would help open college doors to thousands of extra students, and cities would disproportionately benefit. "If you're trying to encourage economic development," said Coletta, "that's the lowest hanging fruit."
- Coletta says it's important that when urban leaders nudge the White House, they go with solutions in hand -- not with hands out.

09 Aug 08

The end of suburban sprawl

Well, well ...an opinion piece in the Ottawa Citizen (republished across the CanWest newspaper empire, therefore also in Victoria's Times-Colonist), unsigned, that lays out the tenets of anti-sprawl and pro-urbanist thinking succinctly and favorably. (Except that while the title calls it "suburban sprawl," the author calls it "urban sprawl" in the first paragraph. Odd.)

Of interest for a Canadian perspective is that the article hints at the realities of infrastructure funding in Canada.

www.canada.com/...story.html - Preview

sprawl ottawa urbanism cities commentary

Some years ago it started to become clear the post-Second World War race to suburbia was damaging North American cities. The result was long anti-social commutes (anti-social because we live in our cars) and outrageously expensive infrastructure -- funded by taxpayers -- to extend services to these outlying neighbourhoods.
Ottawa residents know well the negative effects of sprawl. It's hard to create a sense of civic identity when a city is made up of disparate communities separated by vast tracts of land. And yes, the economic inefficiencies of this kind of arrangement are legendary.
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- City of Ottawa planners, like planners across North America, have come to recognize the cost of uncontrollable sprawl, which is why they would like most new development in Ottawa to occur inside what is called the urban boundary.
- Some developers, however, are outraged. The efforts of city planners to increase density inside the boundary is being dismissed as "naive."
- In fact, it's the naive ones who somehow believe sprawl is sustainable. Right now, for example, Ottawa is trying to build a light-rail system, but sprawl -- as expressed in low-density living -- makes that project more difficult and expensive.
  - - exactly right! - on 2008-08-09
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- As the price of fuel increases, and people become more sensitive generally to their carbon footprints, anyone who's going to argue against the benefits of intensification could find himself in a very lonely position indeed.

09 Jul 08

Looming Debate, by Veronique Vienne (Metropolis Magazine)

Interesting article (with some inaccuracies, too), focused chiefly on Bertrand Delanoe, the "Situationist"-inspired left-leaning, assassination attempt survivor and openly gay mayor of Paris, who gets blind-sided by Nikolas Sarkozy, the pro-business president of France, who wants Paris to be a bit more get-go-ish. Delanoe is on the side of the human-scale advocates who want to preserve its "charms," whereas Sarkozy doesn't mind a tall building or two. The article is interesting because it's one of the clearest outlines I've seen so far on making political linkages between certain attitudes toward modernization and height in Paris, vs preservation (and rejuvenation) of what that city's status quo as well as historical "essence" (at least mid-19th century onward) is.

www.metropolismag.com/...story.php - Preview

paris metropolis_magazine high_rise urbanism urbanplanning bertrand_delanoe

One of Delanoë’s priorities has been to blur the line separating affluent Parisians from their often less privileged neighbors. In the last decades, Paris has steadily lost its working-class residents, who migrate to poorer bedroom communities beyond the city limits—a trend Delanoë wants to stop.
- Well, good luck. You can "want" to stop something like that, but that won't make the inner Paris more affordable or make land values drop. - on 2008-07-09
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Whether it will work remains to be seen, but this solution is a typical Delanoë move. The former head of a PR agency, the mayor likes projects that “speak”—those that tell a good story and make his political intentions clear.
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- “He is clever, even mischievous. In this town, it’s the only way to be innovative while respecting the fetters of tradition.”
- promote small punctual interventions that improve the quality of life of Parisians. He is less supportive of projects that flaunt the vitality of corporations and financial institutions eager to pitch towering office buildings inside Paris
- For tall structures to be erected, Delanoë would have to change existing regulations that cap the height of buildings at 82 feet in the center of Paris
- Delanoë would rather spend taxpayers’ money improving the urban experience than sweetening deals to attract big investment.
  - again, it's a question of affordability, non? If you can afford to do that as a city, great. if you're not Paris, maybe you can't afford it, though... - on 2008-07-09
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- He knows that living well is the most effective business incentive and the reason everyone wants to come to Paris.
  - Isn't that sort of like making a place into a resort community for the well-off? Isn't that what's happening (or in danger of happening) with Vancouver, and even with Victoria? - on 2008-07-09
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- The capital can no longer afford to be a museum of its glorious past. It needs to jump over the beltway, reach out to the suburbs, and become the center of the metropolis that encircles it.
- But under the pretext of helping him achieve this goal, Delanoë’s political opponents are launching a campaign, spearheaded by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, to create a new administrative chain of command to supervise the economic development of a new urban entity that would incorporate the capital and its suburbs, an area whose outer boundaries are still to be determined but that has already been named Grand Paris. In the wrong hands, this proposal might be used to undermine Delanoë’s authority. And, indeed, recently reelected by a landslide vote that reaffirmed the left-leaning preferences of the historically defiant Parisians, the mayor has many enemies in the pro-business Sarkozy government.
  - - sounds familiar... - on 2008-07-09
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- The question of Paris and its suburbs is linked to that of building heights because it is at the frontier between these two worlds that city planners propose to challenge the traditional size limits and build skyscrapers.
- Tall buildings are anathema here for many reasons. The City of Light is built atop a city of shadows. Paris is laid over a subterranean limestone quarry, its huge system of ancient tunnels weakening the ground. Its low-rise skyline is the product of geological circumstances. But there is another reality—a political one—that has shaped the way the city looks: Parisians don’t like authority. They’re an unruly bunch, known to tear down or burn symbols of oppression. In fact, the architectural form that is most typically Parisian is not the mansard roofline or the Haussmann facade but the barricade. A low structure, usually made of a pile of cobblestones and pieces of trash from construction sites, it has been the type of edifice local residents choose most often to express their political views. Tall buildings in Paris? You must be kidding! To Parisians it would be an open invitation to dissent.
  
  
  
  But Lion, like so many French architects, would like to see Paris compete in terms of contemporary architecture with cities like Barcelona, Berlin, and London. He says he enjoys working with clients in cities that are much more dynamic, much more creative—and much more polluted—than Paris, adding, “Yet at the same time, I can’t wait to fly back home where I can walk wherever I want and breathe freely. It’s not just the nice streets and the clean air I crave; it’s the democracy.” As annoying as it is, a convoluted “democratic” process safeguards the public good in Paris, he says. Indeed, in an unprecedented move, Delanoë has imposed on private developers the same time-consuming competition-and-jury review procedure foisted on public projects. “Things are so stagnant in this administratively driven city,” Lion says about this design-by-committee method, “but even I’m grateful for all the resistance. In Paris I feel there is hope for the human race. But they do get on my nerves!”
- “We want folks to apprehend Paris in another mode, in a less goal-oriented fashion,” Girard says, referring to the Situationist doctrine of the 1960s, a left-wing movement that advocated deliberate “disorientation” as a cure for conspicuous-consumption boredom.
- a generation influenced by the ideology of that time. His vision of Paris stems from a culture of dissent that condemned the constant hype required to sell consumer goods and products.
- “We’re here to do a city, not a collection of objects. A collection of objects never amounts to a city. Look at New York. There’s an array of amazing buildings there, but look at the poor quality of the public space! In contrast, compare this with the quality of the streetscape in Paris.”
- This antispectacular stance is a Delanoë trademark.
- The elegant translucent canopy that will spread its wings over Les Halles’s commercial center is indeed an unobtrusive structure, not the grand architectural gesture likely to appeal to Parisians who would like to see the city demonstrate the vitality of its financial community with truly dramatic buildings.
- Dominique Alba, director of the Paris Arsenal museum and the authority on contemporary architecture, bristles every time someone calls her hometown a museum city. “The architectural heritage of Paris is so rich, it swallows the most novel urban forms,” she explains. “There are plenty of exciting new buildings around, but they do not stick out.”
- Mercifully few and far between inside Paris, the tall apartment buildings and office towers that “stick out” were built in the 1970s in accordance with poorly understood Le Corbusier design principles.

03 Jun 08

Generative methods in urban design: a progress assessment, by Michael W. Mehaffy - Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability

Have only skimmed this so far, but worth going over in detail. Mehaffy focuses on Christopher Alexander's 1987 work, A New Theory of Urban Design, which was inspired by Jane Jacobs's 1961 work, The Life and Death of Great American Cities. Some of Alexander's ideas have been incorporated by the New Urbanists, and Mehaffy's article traces their "setbacks and shortcomings, and significant opportunities still remaining."

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urbanism placemaking christopher_alexander jjacobs urbanplanning

18 May 08

"Pay your voluntary carbon taxes: Move into the fashionable high-rise city," by John Barber (globeandmail)

Barber's article links the ideas expressed around the demise of suburbs due to rising fuel costs, the benefits of densifying the cities (by building up, not out), and discussions around carbon taxes. "Meanwhile, the free market is applying its own time-tested solution to the problem of overconsumption, with salutary political as well as social consequences. Hillary Clinton never stooped lower than when she promised a summer "gas-tax holiday," joining John McCain in the promise. Barack Obama never looked better than when he condemned it." One answer? Live downtown, preferably on a public tranist line.

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globeandmail toronto carbon_tax urbanism cities condos

excise taxes on gasoline and the municipal grants pegged to them are levied on volume, not price. The less gasoline people buy for private automobiles, therefore, the lower the value of federal grants for public transit. If those grants were pegged to sales rather than excise taxes, they would be the next thing to a perfect carbon tax.

Meanwhile, the free market is applying its own time-tested solution to the problem of overconsumption, with salutary political as well as social consequences. Hillary Clinton never stooped lower than when she promised a summer "gas-tax holiday," joining John McCain in the promise. Barack Obama never looked better than when he condemned it.
left-wing doppelgangers predict that high gas prices will bring about "the end of suburbia," destroying uncountable billions of dollars in real-estate value and devastating the sprawlscape like a nuclear weapon. Neither view accounts for the capacity of people to adapt. Most Europeans pay more than $2 a litre to fill up. They pay more in gas taxes than Canadians pay for gas. Both here and there, the price of fuel accounts for about one-fifth of the total cost of owning and operating a vehicle, behind depreciation. People will cope with high gas prices by moving to smaller cars. It happened before, it's no big deal.

The big deal is what's happening to the skyline of our own city, its dramatic growth the purest expression of a post-carbon age.
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- Fifteen years ago, all new housing in Toronto had to have a front door. The high-rise market was dead, the 905 was booming and surface parking lots pocked the face of the central city. But things have changed - and once again prices reveal all. A beautiful house in central Mississauga with parking for four cars costs less than $200 a square foot. A slice of a midtown Toronto "filing cabinet," as Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion calls high-rise condominiums, costs well more than $400 a foot.
  
  Why? It's the subway, stupid. It's the power of proximity, the value of choice, the enduring appeal of urbanity. As reckoned by the free market, the price of gas remains a minor factor in the total cost of the suburban lifestyle. Many ordinary people in Toronto today, especially those of the new generation, are more than happy to pay their voluntary carbon taxes - simply by moving into the suddenly fashionable, high-rise city. So let the Ottawa gang play their "revenue-neutral" shell games. The real leaders are ordinary people responding to clear market signals, calmly building a new city for the new age.

28 Apr 08

New Urbanists Point the Way Forward by Catesby Leigh, City Journal 18 April 2008

"The New Urbanism and suburban sprawl have something in common: they’re uncool. New Urbanism is uncool because it is basically traditional; modernism is still the thing in architecture, notes Andrés Duany, the most influential New Urbanist."

For some reason, City Journal is impossible to annotate (neither highlights and consequently "stickies" work), which is too bad. Some good ideas in this article, but I can't mark it up.

www.city-journal.org/...bc0418cl.html - Preview

urbanism new_urbanism suburbia sprawl smartgrowth density modernism architecture style city_journal

A gifted crew of architects and planners, they have changed the conversation about urban planning in the United States. They reject conventional postwar developers’ essentially quantitative, two-dimensional, single-use-oriented blueprints for residential subdivisions and office parks in favor of a qualitative, three-dimensional, mixed-use approach to designing neighborhoods and towns that generally involves reliance on traditional architectural styles.
To make the most of these changing public preferences, the New Urbanists need to focus on a vision that supports the resurgence of an architectural culture—which is precisely what we haven’t got now.
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- Perhaps the New Urbanists should cherish their outsider status. A gifted crew of architects and planners, they have changed the conversation about urban planning in the United States. They reject conventional postwar developers’ essentially quantitative, two-dimensional, single-use-oriented blueprints for residential subdivisions and office parks in favor of a qualitative, three-dimensional, mixed-use approach to designing neighborhoods and towns that generally involves reliance on traditional architectural styles.

24 Apr 08

Chicago's Green Dividend

Short video clip produced by CEOs for Cities, which asks, "How much is it worth, to live two miles closer to work?" The answer(s) is (are) astonishing, when you take those 2 miles and make them cumulative, for the whole US. That said, imagine what it does mean, then, if we build cities that are walkable, that engage people in public transit, that shave those 2miles off people's commutes/ daily drives?

blip.tv/848670 - Preview

ceos_for_cities automobile cars driving video walkability urbanism

22 Apr 08

"Wal-Mart and the city an uneasy mix" by Christopher Hume (Toronto Star)

Another article by Hume on the Leslie Street Walmart ("SmartCentres" development). I really like what he writes about delivery/ delivery trucks.

www.thestar.com/416576 - Preview

thestar christopher_hume urbanism retail walmart deliveries

"Everything about an urban project is more difficult than a suburban one," laments SmartCentres' affable vice-president of development, Tom Smith. "It's easier to do 10 malls in the 905 than one in an urban centre."
One wonders how different the response would have been had SmartCentres announced that it intended to build the city's first no-parking mall. Sounds ridiculous, but maybe not, on second thought. Already there's a mall in San Francisco that has no parking. Why not Toronto?
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- Then there's that revolutionary concept known as the delivery truck. Remember that? There was a time when the big stores – Eaton's and Simpsons – all had their own fleets. In those days, few shoppers even considered schlepping home anything larger than a breadbasket. And let's not forget the IGA on Danforth at Pape, which to this day has no parking on its premises.
  Clearly, the time has come to bring back the delivery truck, and Eastern Ave. could be a perfect place to start. Of course, the Wal-Marts would have nothing to do with such a concept, but being Toronto's first green shopping centre, Wal-Mart wouldn't be wanted anyway.
  Shoppers would walk or cycle to the centre, make their purchases, then walk or cycle home. The goods would show up later. Now that's convenience.
  "We think delivery is a great idea," says Smith, who also points out that, "this is a huge evolution for us. None of us has a lot of urban experience."
  - - what a great idea! - on 2008-04-22
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