Poison on Wheels & Freight Trains Runnin'

Next time you see someone online raving about the wonders of the car and pretending it has no drawbacks, send them this image and link:

(You can read the article about the NYC Health Department's study at Streetsblog.)

Outside of the major gridlock zones (i.e. Midtown), the map above represents an almost perfect trace of the interstate highway system in the New York City area. These ribbons of dense truck traffic are literally stifling people with their noxious fumes.

Think about that, and then watch my new favorite TV commercial.

This brings me back to America's plan for nationwide HSR, and begs me to ask yet again: why invest trillions to connect far-flung American cities with high-speed passenger rail for intercity travel?? Freight travels a much longer distance than we do on a regular basis: an article at "Car Free in Big D" (one of my favorite blogs on the web) mentions that the average meal travels 1500 miles to arrive on your plate. Why not dedicate some more effort to improving and expanding our rail freight system?

Even better, how about targeting long-distance trucking on corridors that have parallel rail lines? Shipping companies are saving a few bucks to ship with their own trucks instead of using one of the major rail lines - but this comes at a major environmental cost, safety cost, and health cost to everyone. Even worse, these trucks degrade our highway system at many many times the rate of a typical passenger car. At the very last, the companies that ship by truck should contribute to this maintenance nightmare.

Think about it -billions of dollars so that people can get from Minneapolis to Chicago in less time, or a fraction of that toward moving more freight by rail?

What the People Really Want

A common argument by anti-New Urbanists and Smart Growth opponents is that form-based codes dramatically limit the freedom of property owners. Stylistic cues, height limits, porch requirements and build-to lines are stifling, anti-democratic, and downright dictatorial rules, or so the argument goes.

My parents just bought a home in a cookie-cutter subdivision in Vero Beach, Florida. As in virtually every South Florida gated community and in many neighborhoods throughout the United States, their new home falls under the jurisdiction of a homeowner's association. The avowed "free marketeers" who think that any form of centralized planning is verboten often praise these associations. They are local, responsive, and practically self-limiting, and the stakeholders have far more say in decisions than they would at a city or county level.

So you can imagine my surprise when I opened my parents' homeowners covenants and found the following statement:

The Architectural Review Committee does not seek to restrict individual taste or preferences. In general, its aim is to avoid harsh contrasts in architectural themes and maintain harmony between all residences to preserve and enhance values of the Properties.

In tamden with this succinct statement is a two page list of "architectural standards" that constitute a simplistic form-based code: materials lists, front door type standards, color choices, minimum roof slope, etc. Despite the freedom to do whatever they want in their small corner of the world, these homeowners continue to embrace a restricted architectural palette.

But to me, the true marvel of this code is its source. The vision of a unified yet varied community of homes came not from an architect or planner or from some top-down master plan. It came from the local developer and builder who set up the rules, implemented them in the homes it built, and passed them on to the homeowner's association.

So what's the deal? If categorically non-urban sprawl builders are freely imposing Smart Code-like limitations on themselves, and if homeowner's associations are maintaining and even strengthening these rules, why aren't NU and Smart Growth more universally accepted? To put it another way, why do the histrionics of sprawl supporters trump the tacit support for Smart Growth-like ideals already in place?

Is it a matter of an ad campaign? Connections to news media? Grassroots coalition-building and community awareness events? How do we quash those who rail against creating human environments that everyone already understands and loves?

Great Animation

Go here: http://students.washington.edu/zvs/the-block/

This is a concrete way of showing anyone and everyone what traditional urbanists mean when they talk about how much our cities lost during the 20th Century.

An American Piazza?

The public space of a car-dominated culture.

This friendly car park is at Illinois & State in downtown Chicago, only three blocks from Michigan Avenue and four blocks north of the Loop. Surely an exorbitantly valuable piece of property, even in today's economy. Imagine turning this into some sort of urban plaza with low-rise mixed-use buildings and three levels of parking beneath. If only we cared as much about public space as we did about parking our cars.

Nice Summation

This editorial in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (posted at Streetsblog) expresses in layman's terms why many us of traditional urbanists pine for European cities. If I had to pick one article about urbanism and New Urbanism to give to Joe American, this would probably be it.

Visions of a Division

I went with a friend to the Museum of the City of New York two weeks back. The museum is located in a beautiful building facing Central Park at 5th & 103rd. After enjoying an exhibit on Manhattan before 1609, we left the museum and walked one block over to Madison Avenue to look for a place to eat and to head for the subway at 96th & Park.

What met us as we walked south on Madison Avenue was a startling transition. No matter how many times I looked at a map of Manhattan in my life (there's even one on the wall across from my bed at home), it never once clicked in my mind that the Upper East Side and Harlem are right next to each other. That's right - the toniest neighborhood and the most notorious neighborhood sit side by side. I was curious. What divided these two distinct zones? Would there be some sort of 'ragged', blended edge, or would there be a clear marker?

The answer, as with any question of this type, is multi-layered. First and foremost, Harlem is characterized by the misled "slum clearance" movement of the 1960s, in which blocks of mixed-use walk-up buildings were replaced by midrise towers in parks. Anyone familiar with Le Corbusier understands this type of planning, but to see the contrast in street vitality and urban life is striking:
This first photo is taken facing north on Madison Avenue midblock between 98th and 99th, looking toward Harlem.

This second photo is taken in the exact same spot as the first photo, except facing southbound on Madison toward 98th and the Upper East Side.

Locator map. Without even drawing the Nolli, you can see from the air how slum clearance rewrote the face of Harlem while leaving the Upper East Side untouched.

Four factors contribute to the abrupt shift, and the same four factors have prevented any portion of Harlem from slowly becoming the Upper East Side, or vice versa:

1. The Corbusian "projects" - they exist only in Harlem. South of 96th Street, the street grid is virtually uninterrupted. The fabric was almost never violated and looks the same as it was originally platted. North of 96th, the opposite is true: it is rare to see even 6 to 8 blocks of historic fabric along any one avenue without it being interrupted by towers in a park.
2. Street grid interruptions - created by the towers in a park parks.
3. An elevated train line - south of 97th, the principal rail artery leading to Grand Central Terminal is underground. North of 97th, the rails are elevated, and to make matters worse, they are elevated on a stone-walled embankment instead of a permeable structure. If the towers in a park parks and the hospitals weren't bad enough for creating divisions, this effectively cuts the Harlem community into two isolated parts*.
4. Two large hospital complexes - Mount Sinai Medical Center (which is between 98th and 99th where I'm standing) and Metropolitan Hospital (which fills out two blocks further east) act as giant roadblocks and dividers. They create single-use blocks with monolithic, and frequently uninviting buildings, with hardly any street-level interest.
   

Area map. Pictures taken from yellow mark. Mount Sinai Medical Center is the left red complex and Metropolitan is the right. Cross streets in blue (with 97th in purple). Notice how few cross streets there are north of 97th. From 97th south, not a single cross street is interrupted.

What lessons can we learn from this? Firstly, and the most obvious, is don't do towers in a park. Secondly, don't interrupt the street grid, and thirdly, if you have to have an elevated train, make sure its structure is permeable.

But I think one issue that even good urban planners might miss in their grand schemes is the problem created by the hospital complexes. Urban, governmental, and education projects have increasingly become fortified entities through which people (and cars) cannot pass. These impenetrable islands drain life out of their immediate surroundings. And here, they have helped to bitterly and uncompromisingly divide two different neighborhoods. There is no chance for that nice-looking intact urban block north of Mount Sinai to become part of the Upper East Side. The hospital is a veritable barrier to the natural ebb and flow that might have occurred in this area.

Even if the population as a whole is beginning to understand walkability as a concept, government leaders, religious leaders, hospital CEOs and school superintendents might still be under the impression that a hermetically sealed place is best. Going forward, we'll have to look for good examples of permeable or semi-permeable institutions. We need to show how "liner retail" can be applied to places like hospitals, as both good for the city and as a moneymaker for the hospital. Most of all, we must be ready to fight what is now a prevailing mentality about how places like these "should" be designed.

*Note: In case you're wondering, the change in the train line from tunnel to elevated is not a deliberate backhand to Harlem's collective face. North of 96th Street, Manhattan's topography quickly drops off into what was formerly a tidal swamp and creek. This area was filled in as the city grew northward to create more developable area, so it is considerably lower than areas directly to the south. Hence the change - Park Avenue falls while the rails stay at relatively the same elevation and become an elevated line.

Awesome Website

If you've got some time to kill online and you're a city buff, a history buff, a subway/train buff, an architecture buff, or you just like New York, go to Forgotten NY: www.forgotten-ny.com.

Be forewarned: it is entirely possible to spend several hours here, sifting through thousands of photos, articles, neighborhoods, and streets of the Big Apple.

Wasilla and Werdau

I saw two different photos of important government buildings in the past 24 hours. First, the City Hall in Wasilla, AK (Kunstler's "Eyesore of the Month" last month):

(from http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore_200907.html)

Contrast that beauty to today's featured image on Wikipedia, the town hall in Werdau, Germany:

The State of Architecture Elitism in 2009

The NY Times architecture critic released a story on the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington, Texas. Nicolai Ouroussoff is your typical high-brow avant-garde architect who pooh-poohs any attempt at traditional design, but I was happy to see his criticism of the location of the new stadium in the middle of Dallas-Fort Worth's endless urban sprawl. He pines for an earlier proposal that had the stadium located in a "more contained urban setting." This location would have spurred the revitalization of older historic landmarks in need of new life.

I give Nicolai kudos for actually caring about the city, and I think it shows how far the mindset of the architecture establishment has changed in the past few decades. Even the pure-bred modernists, the ones who give absolutely no creedence to using a brick or a cornice anywhere on a building, no longer dream about skyscrapers in the park or a fractured urban fabric.

I decided a long time ago that strict traditional architectural style was the least important feature of New Urbanism, and that if we could arrive at a human-scaled, traditional city and fabric, the architectural details could be in any style and work as long as they kept to the idea of a form-based code. When I visited Stapleton and Belmar in Denver, I was pleased to see that the designers had been more daring in their style, allowing large openings and new materials, including metal balconies, columns, etc. The places both worked because the architecture was consistent (in Stapleton, consistent by neighborhood) among the buildings as, reflecting a respect for placemaking and consistency of form.

For me the most unfortunate part of Nicolai's article comes at the end, where he makes a remark about the jumbovision screens that loom over the field. Noting that the screens are so huge that they have already gotten in the way of a punter's kick, he states "It’s a nice irony that for all the space, there may not be enough room at Cowboys Stadium to play a game." This remark signifies a major problem with (Post)Modernist thinking (as opposed to its style). If a building is anything, it absolutely must be useful. We can argue venustas and perhaps firmitas (maybe temporary buildings are more practical?), but if a building doesn't even make the cut of utilitas on day one of its life, we have a real problem. And rather than decry an astonishing functional fault in the building, Nicolai makes light of it, like a playful little architectural joke. I just finished reading From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe, and while it is over-the-top in its romance novel-y journalistic flair, it points to the notion of 'irony in architectre' as one of many scholastic constructs that have made the profession so out-of-touch with reality. Twenty-eight years after writing, Wolfe would be sad to see that our avant-garde still thinks this way and is still trying to impose its will on the public.

Water, Water Everywhere...

A very important article about more industrial abuses shows us, again, that we are ruining our environment at an even faster rate than we can imagine - and this time it's water, our lifeblood. Just another victim of the pollution caused by the very unnatural, toxic and lethal ways we make things today... and the industries that shirk their legal and moral responsibilities all in the name of making a few bucks.

Getting the Most Bang for Your Billion Bucks

The third and final entry in a group of posts about high-speed rail.

The vision for American HSR is a bold one, and like any bold move we must be sure that it is a wise one before we thrust ourselves into it. As urbanists we are all for increasing modes, uses, flexibility, efficiency, and sustainability - so is HSR the best use for our money?

LEED is a Work in Progress

A good New York Times article today discussing some of the kinks in LEED, specifically how some LEED certified buildings perform with regard to energy and water usage ("life cycle costs" in LEED terms). Newer versions of LEED seem to be taking this into account by requiring higher minimum numbers of energy credits so that "gas guzzler" buildings can't qualify by getting all their credits in sitework and materials and ignoring energy completely.

The USGBC plans to continue raising the bar, and the article cites that it is considering moving more toward the Energy Star model, in which buildings only get kudos for energy usage for the year or period in which the award is given.

The bar for LEED will also inevitably get higher and higher as we move forward. A presenter at CNU 17 described an aggressive track for increased standards that many are pushing the USGBC to implement. With this model, the standards for LEED Gold today will ultimately become the standards for simple LEED certification over the next decade. Concurrently, net zero energy usage for buildings would become a requirement to attain a higher-tier award like gold or platinum, and ultimately would be demanded of any LEED certified building.

The time is now to start pushing designers and builders with more stringent requirements. The fifth paragraph of the NYT article from before describes how "builders covet LEED certification" as a major marketing tool and a way to obtain tax credits. LEED has become so recognized by the general public that developers are now pursuing certification to attract clients. This is great - we want sustainability to be "in", the norm, the next cool thing, but as long as it's the right kind of sustainability. The USGBC needs to tweak the standards higher and higher starting now and over the next few years now that it has the collective attention of the nation. If this does not happen now or soon, LEED risks being lost forever in the growing greenwashing market.

High Speed Rail: A "Case Study"

This is the second part of a group of posts on high speed rail (HSR) in America.

I recently completed a four-week grand tour of the East Coast of the United States - well let's be honest, four weeks of couch surfing with family and friends. At different points on the trip, I tried to imagine making the journey without a car, either by plane or by train... and each time I realized that it would be nearly impossible.

I'll chronicle one leg of the trip, a long jaunt I made from Hilton Head Island, SC to Lewes, DE, 655 miles total:

The Question of High Speed Rail: Concerns

The first of several parts of a series of posts on high-speed rail in the United States.

High speed rail (HSR) is the most important component of Obama's recovery package. Folks all over the country have been crowding town hall style meetings with signs, chanting "No we won't!" at their senators as security tries to escort them out of the room...

Awesome Project

Every now and then you found a project that really makes you smile and have hope for the future of urbanism.

This Sacramento Railyards project looks absolutely awesome. It has everything an urbanist could want to start: abandoned but very usable historic buildings, a brownfield/infill site, adjacency to downtown, and an economy ready to grow again (how many LEED credits do we have already?) Even better, Sacramento is building a new transit hub just across the tracks from this project.

But what really made me like the project was its plan:

This plan is smart, compact, and easy to understand - because it is a grid that actually cites the exact urban fabric (even the scale!) of downtown. Unlike many newer projects with all sorts of funky twists in the roads, odd-shaped plazas, and streets that never run for more than a few blocks, this plan is actually good. It doesn't try to be anything more than a warped grid, and that is certainly commendable. It even includes a "Regent Street"-type avenue with a gentle curve that, if done right architecturally, could become something really special.

Bravo to this one.

Your Vote Counts

Dwell Magazine solicited submissions for a design contest called "Re-Burbia", for innovative solutions for sprawl remedy. They picked twenty finalists, one of which was submitted by a CNU regular, Galina Tahchieva of DPZ, who has been working on "sprawl repair standards" for the SmartCode for several years. You can go here to see the finalists, or go directly to Galina's project. If you like it, I highly recommend that you vote for her to win (allegedly you just click the pink arrow and it records your vote). It would be great for something like this to get the recognition of Dwell and the attention of the more "avant garde" designers:As usual, there are some truly bizarre and also a few awful solutions in the running. My favorite is the first on the list, Airbia, the "suburban airship" - seriously? They tried to use dirigibles in the '30s as a new form of transportation and it failed miserably. How does this help anything?

Interesting Article

The graphic below, from this article on Streetsblog, shows what Manhattan would look like if the 388,000+ people who commute in daily were to start driving to work and their cars had be accomodated on the island:

A rather jarring view - even moreso when you realize that this is what a lot of American city centers actually look like:

That's Fort Worth (top) and Jacksonville (bottom), just two examples. Freeways, surface parking, bloated streets and eroded urban fabric - but we can still save them!!

Signs of a Systemic Problem

Three articles I've seen in the past 24 hours about alarming trends prove once again that there is a systemic problem with the way we live and the way we treat the world around us:

• There is a growing patch of garbage in the Pacific, now about the size of Texas (ironic? see below). It is composed of slowly-degrading plastic, most of it smaller than can be seen from the surface, but large enough to be choking the ecosystem there.
• Immigrant groups that move to the U.S. see large spikes in cancer incidence. Researchers are seeing it in Hispanics now and saw it in Asians a few decades ago. Maybe something to do with our sedentary lifestyle and the massive amounts of processed foods we eat? I can't posit these things scientifically, but the article makes reference to them.
• Thanks to my good friend Mike B. for sending me this third article, in which it appears that recycling isn't "Texas" enough for Houston.

Maybe Wall-E was the most prescient movie ever made?

An Old City with a New Good Idea

With all the talk of "freeway teardowns" going on in the CNU, I can't believe I missed out on Providence's big project, relocating an interstate along a shorter, waterfront route that will open up several new blocks in the city for infill redevelopment:

While we normally try to see waterfronts today as assets that should NOT have freeways along them, Providence's harbor is still home to refinery tanks, warehouses, docks, and other industrial uses. Moving I-195 nearer to the shore does "seal the deal" for an industrial waterfront, but it opens up an outstanding opportunity to heal Providence's downtown area. The scar of the elevated freeway can be healed with blocks upon blocks of infill, public spaces, new streets, etc. Maybe we should all move to Providence in a few years to get in on the action.

Sprawl in the Round

Viera, Florida: my new favorite picture of sprawl. Looks like someone was trying to create figural public space? Too bad it's actually three rows of parking... a true homage to the car's triumph over man.

Should we charge for trash?

The garbage problem in the U.S. is a big issue - of course, not an issue like the economy or war or crime, but just another one of the lifestyle issues we could easily and quickly confront.
As I took the trash out today, I realized that maybe throwing things out is just a bit too easy for us. We do pay for it in our taxes, but once that tax bill goes out the door, we have a years' worth of throwing out as much household waste as we please, literally (it's unlimited in the Town of Brookhaven as long as the bags don't weigh over 50 pounds each).

Meanwhile, on the recycling side, the Town has an every-other-week schedule that alternates between cans/bottles and paper, and a laundry list of "acceptables" and "not acceptables". You can't put any old plastic in your "CURBY" can - and you can't mix your newspaper with your mixed paper. Turning CURBY into a cartoon character may have seemed like a smart move by the Town, but he sure is discriminating when it comes to your recyclables.

Part of the answer to the problem lies in single-stream recycling. While it has its cons (one of which is the potential downgrading of paper due to contamination by the other recyclables), single-stream recycling does exactly what our culture demands: ease of use. No thought is involved - almost everything except for food can be stuck in the bin, and the garbage men will collect it later.

I learned just how much one really can recycle when I stayed with my aunt for a few days. She has somehow completely reversed the proportion of garbage to recycling that most of us use. Her main garbage pail is essentially a tiny wastebasket under her sink, right next to a giant bin for all the recycling - and it really makes sense. Each time you go to empty your wastebasket, check out how much of it is miscellaneous papers, junk mail, plastic wrappings, styrofoam, etc., and then how much is food and other non-recyclable things... you'll see that upwards of 75% is probably recyclable, yet we all just throw it into the landfill. My aunt somehow changed her mindset and sees all of these items as recyclable.

Changing to single-stream across the nation may be part of the solution, and I hope that more cities and counties move in that direction. In an ideal situation, our responsibilities as stewards of the environment would be enough to motivate us all. This is the real world, however, and in this world, the only thing that really talks is money.

As it stands now, I can do everything I can to eliminate general waste, or I can just throw absolutely everything out for regular trash collection (it's unlimited!) - either way, my household pays the same exact assessment, based on our home's value. While there's a feel-good incentive to recycling, there's absolutely no personal economic incentive to Joe the Trash-Thrower-Outer - he's not the one who lives near the dump, and he'll have moved south to Florida by the time the town has to deal with landfill capacity issues on the taxpayer's dime.

So I end with a question - does a system where one pays by volume for landfill trash, but pays nothing for single-stream recycling make sense? I could imagine a system where the household assessment remains in place, but the city/county charges say $2 per 32 gal. bag of regular trash to your account, and bills you quarterly. There would be accounting issues to be sure, but I think they could be worked through rationally. All in all, I think the only way to actually kick Americans into gear and curb their wasteful habits is money.

Sea Cliff, NY: Treasure Trove of Urbanism

As a lifelong Long Islander and an urban explorer by nature, it is rare for me to discover a place I have never seen before here on the Island. It is a thousand times rarer for me to be absolutely stunned by something here, but when I visited Sea Cliff for the first time, I was floored.

I spent about two hours on a perfect Friday summer evening driving and walking around, photographing, and taking measurements in Sea Cliff because I was so intrigued by it. For those unfamiliar with the area, Sea Cliff is located less than twenty miles northeast of Midtown Manhattan on Long Island's "Gold Coast":

Tucked into a natural harbor off of the Long Island Sound, and perched atop a 120' precipice that gives it its name, Sea Cliff has always been a fairly sleepy place despite a nearby commuter rail link to New York with trips under one hour. Luckily for us today, Sea Cliff managed to survive the modernizations of the 20th Century with its amazing historic urbanism and architecture completely intact.

What struck me first as I wound around the serpentine roads leading into Sea Cliff along the harbor was Sea Cliff's tiny scale - for the first time on Long Island, and perhaps for only the second or third time ever in the United States, I felt like I was entering a piece of Europe. Like Boston's North End and Lower Manhattan, Sea Cliff operates an what in today's terms is a tiny scale - the main street of the town, Sea Cliff Avenue, measures between 44' and 48' wide from street wall to street wall:

The actual roadway at Sea Cliff is only 32' wide for two parking lanes and two driving lanes, and it is flanked by 4-8' sidewalks. This is extremely narrow even by historical standards - similarly aged towns on Long Island and in the Northeast have main streets with somewhat wider roadways as well as more generous sidewalks, generally totaling about 55-60' in sum. Compare this to 19th Century Midwestern railroad towns that might have main streets with 80-90' ROWs, and modern day arterials that are far, far wider.

Yet despite its limitations (see the cars in the picture above that actually don't fit in the 6.5-7' parking lane), Sea Cliff actually works. There was not a lot of traffic, but it did move through the town, albeit slowly when two cars had to pass. I wouldn't advocate a 32' wide four lane road today, but Sea Cliff Avenue shows that "too small" can actually be functional, and reminds us that every extra few feet we add greatly diminishes the intimacy of place a street can evoke.

It might be hard to believe, but the typical residential street in the town is even narrower. I loved this because even in a town where the main drag is 32' wide, the residential streets were still hierarchically smaller, in this case about 16-18' of pavement. They had no sidewalks, but didn't really need them since they felt comfortably sized for walking, almost as though they were pedestrian lanes down which cars occasionally traveled and parked. I documented 12th Avenue, one block south of Sea Cliff Avenue:









*A caveat to both street sections: all of the streets in the downtown area of Sea Cliff are very variegated in plan, with buildings at all different setbacks, alternations between attached and detached buildings and even building types, etc. The street sections try to give a representative view of the street's most typical character.

The architecture of Sea Cliff complements its amazing and unique urbanism. There is an excellent mix of well-executed buildings in several styles popular in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, including Queen Anne, Italianate, Tudor, and more. I'll close with a selection of some of the many amazing buildings I saw, without doing the justice to the countless others that fill every street in the historic town.









The fire station (left), my favorite building and a simply awesome example of half-timbering in brick, was finished in 1931. The town library (right) must have formerly been a church, and sits a few steps above Sea Cliff Avenue, with its own wooded plaza out front.









Some of the mixed use buildings downtown. The left building is an example of the beautiful polychromy throughout the town. The right building shows the adaptation of detached housing into mixed use streetfronts, with a single (or sometimes double) story extension filling up the former yard to meet the street wall formed by its neighbors. This happens frequently in small towns throughout Long Island. I also loved that the storefront was nothing other than an architect's office!









More polychromy (left), not in the best shape but still stunning. Finally, a typical local house (right), featuring a tower, which are quite common in Sea Cliff due to its excellent vantage point. There are excellent views across the harbor to Port Washington, and also across the Long Island Sound to New Rochelle, which is developing quite a skyline these days.

The Suburban Lawn: A Single-Use Paradigm

As a recent graduate, forced into early retirement by the job market, I find myself once again doing a job that I loathed from about fifth grade until I started at Notre Dame: mowing my family's oversized front lawn. My father is looking down on me now, chuckling to himself that the job he assigned to me 13 years ago is still mine - and we even have the same walk-behind lawn mower.

When I was just 10 years old, I swore each and every Saturday morning that I would never, ever have a lawn when I grew up - it wasn't worth the wasted time to me as a kid. Today, at 22, I realized that I still would never, ever have a lawn, but I realized that a $210,000 education had given me an ideological reason for my gripe: lawns are single-use constructs, and if I have learned anything at all about good architecture and urbanism, that is a big no-no.

The lawn perfectly encapsulates the conflict of what we are trying to achieve by building sprawling suburbs. When we "drive till we qualify" and plop ourselves on a half-acre in a brand-new exurb subdivision, we are signing up for what looks like a match made in Heaven: a new home close enough to all the conveniences, yet also right out there in Nature, with lots of open space and room to breathe. Similarly, with a personal lawn, we want Nature at our doorsteps, literally, yet we want it just so:

"Your first impression … and it stays with you … is one of quiet, spacious beauty. The gently curving streets with modern lighting are uncluttered by cars … Everywhere you look, your eyes rest on the loveliness of well-kept lawns, majestic shade trees, fruit trees and flowering shrubs."
- 1950s ad for Levittown, PA, from http://web1.fandm.edu/levittown/one/f.html

The essential problem with suburbia, one that the public at large is finally beginning to realize, is that you can't actually have it both ways. You don't get to live out in the "quiet, spacious" country, yet also live amidst manicured surroundings with easy access to culture, commerce, and education. In a case of 'something's gotta give', both sides end up giving, and suburbanites are left with neither the pleasantries of true country living nor the perks of living in the big city.

Similarly, the manicured private lawn is another failure to link the true nature of the country with that of the city. A lawn is inherently unnatural, for Nature does not produce anything single-use on its own. Indeed, our lawns are constantly trying to go back to a natural state, with weeds and dandelions cropping up as soon as the first rains come. But because we want the lawn just so, we spend weekends toiling to keep it unnaturally single-use. And unlike a farm field, which is also single-use and somewhat unnatural, the lawn provides absolutely, positively no benefit to us other than aesthetics and the occasional football game or family gathering. For that, we are willing to invest countless dollars and hours, use harmful chemicals, and consume what would likely be replaced by a thriving ecosystem. What's worst, we claim to have a piece of Nature in our yards, when in fact the entire thing could not be further from a legitimate ecosystem.

The irony of it all is that cities typically feature great and expansive urban parks that allow for exactly what uses we do get out of our lawns: picnics, strolls, games for all ages. Since these parks are communal, they can offer us far more amenities than individual lawns, and the grass that we must maintain there gets a constant stream of use instead of the occasional pickup game. We can argue whether the cost to maintain the manicured communal park lawn, both economic and environmental, is indeed worth it, but such cost is surely not worth it for each and every household in the U.S.

Surely in today's world of "green" thinking, where a magic convergence of concerns for economy, energy, climate, and environment are moving common sentiment away from large-lot sprawl, we can put some serious thought into foregoing the green parcel that made William Levitt fawn. There are tons of more sustainable options like rain gardens, native plantings, permeable courtyards, and the simplest, a much smaller patch of green for each home. Let's hope for a better understanding of the diversity that characterizes good ecosystems as much as it does good urbanism.

Isn't This Era Over?

I visited a developer's website today looking for information on a new local PRC (Planned Retirement Community). The following image is from their featured project, a 55+ community on Long Island (company's name removed):



When is this era going to be over? I see about a thousand things wrong with this picture, and I'll detail the most egregious:

• Isolationism, in this case for retirees. The project is geographically isolated from anything besides other homes, and some light industrial uses. It has no amenities whatsoever within comfortable walking distance, despite the website's bragging about how close residents are to "one of the most picturesque waterside villages on Long Island".
• Density, in an awful way. The project places 174 units on 28 acres, or 6.2 DUs per acre gross, far denser than the typical for Long Island. The project replaced a single light industrial business and some virgin forest. This places approximately 300+ residents about 1.7 miles from a downtown and 2 miles from any supermarkets. At least most of them are no longer commuting, as job centers are much, much further away.
• Deceiving arguments to dupe locals. In a 2002 article about the zoning charge from industrial to residential, the developer argued that "the development would reduce commercial traffic" as homes instead of as the larger industry that could have replaced the smaller one on site. Great argument - instead of the 50-100 workers commuting to and from work generated by the would-be new industry, we have 174 units with upwards of 300 cars leaving all day long to: go to work, go to the supermarket, go to the doctor, go to the drug store, go out to dinner, go to a movie, go to a play, go to the beach, etc., etc., etc.... but I bet that's still less than the one industrial business would have produced.
• Concern for the pedestrian falls short. Even though there are "public spaces" and walks for residents around the lakes, there are absolutely no sidewalks along the "streets", which are really parking lots. Good thing nothing is nearby - even if it was, you'd have to hike across the asphalt.
• Cookie-cutter architecture. All white, three unit types, all buildings almost the same size... does it get worse than this?
• Blatant Photoshopping!!! You'll have to take my word since I do not want to reveal the location, but the subdivision entrance road does not disappear into green as shown - the two lane local road leading to the neighborhood is only about 100' southeast of the lower lake, and should run diagonally across the lower right corner of the picture (the lower right homes in the picture back up to a small buffer along the road)

Oy ve - I feel sorry for the isolated seniors who bought into this at the height of the market - what's going to happen if, God forbid, they can no longer drive?

Baptism of a New Blog

Welcome to my blog, started July 19, 2009. Please share your thoughts, comments, criticisms, and ideas!