April 2009 Archives

Transportation drives development. At times the discussions revolve around how land use affects transportation, but the transportation decisions were made first. This is why private land developers once created their own streetcar lines, to entice people to visit and buy homes in their subdivisions which now make up the inner ring neighborhoods of many cities. The best examples are close-in, compact and convenient, usually very walkable to enable easy access to the streetcar, with a tight street grid of small blocks. Many of the great Chicago neighborhoods were streetcar suburbs, with the streetcar lines and ensuing development radiating away from the lakefront downtown core. Hyde Park in Austin shows the classic short-block form, is very popular and walkable, and has one of the lowest crime rates in the city to boot, disproving the "defensible space" theory of cul-de-sacs (for more quantifiable evidence see this 10mb thesis). Seattle has many great, compact and walkable neighborhoods which were once connected to downtown by streetcars.

The short block street grid of Hyde Park, a streetcar suburb in Austin

Some cities never gave up their streetcars, Toronto, for instance. The TTC Red Rockets are a familiar fact of life, as is the necessity of vehicles stopping to let passengers board and deboard the center aligned streetcars. That sort of civility can be relearned even when the city habit has been long broken, even in an auto-centric, big-oil loving city like Dallas. When they brought back the McKinney Avenue trolley, people had to learn how to stop for the trolley car, how to watch for it as it moves on tracks from center to side alignment, and to accept a few inconvenient stops and slow-downs. They seem to manage fine, although it helps that the enthusiastic volunteer motormen get out to make sure the traffic stops and will let drivers know if they have transgressed.

   

The previously private relationship between transportation and land development changed with the creation of the interstate highway system, when road building became the responsibility of the taxpayers via the government, and we all unwillingly or unwittingly subsidized auto-centric sprawling development. Now there is renewed interest in reestablishing streetcars in city streets, under a different sort of transportation funding and development model. Streetcars often represent shared public and private costs, a sort of mix of the purely private early streetcars and the typical public mass transit project. The capital financing for the initial outlay of street infrastructure, railstock, and operating agency often relies on a public or local improvement district, essentially a local tax district. Businesses, residents and property owners along the route, who are presumed to benefit from it, pay into the district fund. The PID along McKinney Avenue in Dallas provided a very good return in investment to the businesses and property owners along the route, which generated immense redevelopment and rise of property values, and therefore tax rates.

Streetcars on fixed rails are the type of investment that spurs development, and routes are planned accordingly through areas where the greatest redevelopment is desired, such as the South Lake Union streetcar (no, I won't use the original acronym here, you already know it). Seattle is planning other streetcar routes which are not fully decided yet. One is planned through my neighborhood on 1st Avenue, although the Belltown business owners have been vehemently against it. I don't know how to argue against the costs they bear, as I don't think I could run a business myself, but I think their greater fear has been loss of street parking. The good news for those of us who want a streetcar is that property owners along the whole route, from Seattle Center to Pioneer Square, get to vote on whether or not to approve the taxing district, which improves chances of it passing. The streetcar will have six minute headways, on a center alignment, with two or three stops in Belltown, fewer than the bus stops but encouraging more walking - along businesses frontages, of course. The buses will move to 2nd Avenue.

Cross posted to Great City

While the digital city building continues, it's good to take a break and get to the real bricks and mortar city - bricks, in particular. There are still bricks under many Seattle streets, fire-hardened road bricks that last forever and are sometimes briefly uncovered during road resurfacing projects. They are abraded by the asphalt removal machines, and fragmented by every utility project that trenches through and is filled with concrete afterwards, leaving a patchwork of brick and other paving surfaces. The brick is a wonderful material from a slower time, and is still the pavement on Pike Place and the Pike and First intersection, making a washboard sound when vehicles drive over them, letting drivers know that this place is not the typical engineered-for-autos route and encouraging them to slow down. It's a sad sight when progress finally catches up to the old brick and it is torn out entirely for a new concrete roadway, which handles heavy bus traffic and weathering better than pothole-prone asphalt.

     

Sometimes the brick wins out. During a resurfacing project on McKinney Avenue in Dallas, Texas, not only were the remnant areas of the old bricks uncovered, but also the original streetcar rails down the center of the street. This led to bringing back the old streetcar line with vintage cars, redesigning the street as the slow-paced streetcar commuter corridor it once was, and revitalizing the ailing neighborhoods that were once the premiere streetcar suburbs for the city. The street was resurfaced with new brick, and the remaining old bricks were used for crosswalks, intersections, transit stops and sidewalk accents. It was quite an amazing and effective transformation.

Many people seem to be very attracted to the idea of living, at least for brief interludes, in virtual environments, as evidenced by commentary and excitement around the upcoming 3D movie "Avatar" by James Cameron. Perhaps it is a harmless, fascinating experience, like having a particularly vivid dream which you wake from, but have persistent memories of. My fear is that this will be the next expectation for modeling of what will become real places that we live in and walk through in our physical bodies, or even that people will lose interest in walking through real places in their physical bodies. Perhaps that is just my particular Luddite phobia, that the people-filled environments I walk in daily will become depopulated. It's probably a ridiculous fear; virtual environments like Sim City and Second Life have been around for a while now and people don't spend all their time there - do they?

The avatars are becoming more appealing, too. These bionic penguins are very cute and seemingly lifelike. I can imagine people wanting to use these as avatars, although that is not what they were developed for.

The previous post had to do with unintended consequences of form-based designs that are then realized in actual built form. Another consequence is that, even with a compelling image, vision, or story, a design won't get built at all, because certain realities were not addressed. That may be the situation with this project, which I got to know of in the early stages when an architect at the firm I was working for was involved (I think the client took it to another, bigger-name firm later). The architect, who was a fellow alumnus of the same school of architecture I graduated from, was having great fun with the project, modeling lyrical elliptical and cylindrical forms that echoed the oil tanks which were part of the site's previous use. Our team of landscape architects was also having a great time with it, designing wonderful sustainable shoreline landscapes for local and general public access. It was a designers dream site, a point of land poking out in the water, with great views of Puget Sound and a deepwater dock. The architect was grumbling, however, having a premonition that the planners and other civic servants responsible would be unlikely to grant permits for this large waterfront development, no matter how wonderfully envisioned.

At this point, someone remembered that, as a certified planner, I was technically one of "those people" and might have some insight into how the other side thinks and what arguments would be made against the project. I pointed out the location and access issues - the site is at the foot of a bluff and can only be reached by a single narrow road deep within single-family neighborhoods, whose residents would not appreciate the thousands of new residents who would have to drive through to so much as get a gallon of milk. Unless the new residents could work and shop where they live, or new convenient water or rail access was provided, there would be problems, which turned out to be the local belief as well.

When I provided this unwelcome input, the architect just grimaced, as there was no answer that could be supplied through building or site design and he knew his form play would come to an end. It was a good opportunity while it lasted, though.

I enjoy building virtual cities, as in digital modeling, even though it is very labor intensive and time-consuming, so much so that I haven't been home much lately, and should be modeling at this moment rather than writing. However, one must write when the bug bites, as one cannot live by modeling alone, although it is part of what I do to pay the bills. Building cities satisfies that architectural love of the play of forms, which some believe is what inspired whatever god to creation. It is also the basis for the affliction of "designeritis" which so many in our profession are inflicted with, that ingrained godlike sense that what we create must be, has to be, for the best because it seems so right and self-evident to our own sensibilities.

As an urban designer and planner with an architectural background, I am considered (when I am considered to have a place in the profession at all) to be a "bridge" between the differing fields of practice. In actuality designers in each field - landscape architecture, architecture, and increasingly engineers and others - consider urban planning and design to be fully within their own realm of practice and specialized capabilities. Many are quite capable of multiple points of view and an interdisciplinary approach, and I offer my poor contributions wherever such are accepted. There are, unfortunately, occasional outbreaks of Designeritis, during which any attempt to generate a dialogue of other viewpoints with the afflicted party is futile. The bug has bitten and inflicted the Designer with a unique Vision which must be realized in form.

Great Visions are compelling and have a way of becoming actualized in the real world, with widely varying levels of success. As I am modeling a virtual city, first building the existing conditions, then the infill of improvements and developments over time, I find it important to keep it tied to quantifiable, verifiable realities of urban development and placemaking, even in the simple blocky massing stages. What the clients are usually expecting is something different, a "Visualization". As our digital environments, in which so many spend so much time or at least have become quite familiar with, become more photographically realistic, there is an accompanying trend of rising expectation of photorealism to the point of virtual reality in the depiction of architectural and urban designs, even in conceptual stages

Vision, in the sense of sight, is very powerful, perhaps the most powerful of the senses, but is still only one of the ways in which we interact with and experience our "real" environments. This emphasis on photorealism is in some ways a return to the school of architecture as high art, a painterly aesthetic. That aesthetic is important, as are the Vitruvian delights - but the design of human environments must be more than a visual or artistic aesthetic. The form-based school of design requires an evidence-based counterbalance which is too often either lacking or under-valued as something that can be applied at a later stage. The initial pressure and efforts are for "pretty pictures" to sell an idea to the public or to market it to investors.

For some years there was school of thought in the design world that followed literary and linguistic theories, known as Deconstruction. Rem Koolhaas, who was a journalist before he was an architect, was one of the best known proponents. What it boiled down to is the notion that whoever tells the best, most compelling story, wins. The story becomes the truth, the reality, by virtue of the power of the telling. A powerful story or vision can become reality - but what then? What genie do we let out of the bottle? Sometimes getting what we wished for, what we so effectively visualized or imagined, has unintended consequences. That's why I would really like the opportunity to do more research for evidence-based design and put a soul into the pretty shell of the simulacrum.

These images are student exercises and not client project models.