Tag Archives: mammoth

Hacking the city

Times Square

Mammoth’s excellent series of posts covering any and all topics on The Infrastructural City recently touched on chapter 5 – Blocking All Lanes, the first of the book’s section on the fabric of this city of networked infrastructure.  Mammoth notes a couple of big themes from the chapter, each with profound implications for how cities are built and how they evolve.

The interesting fact that arises from the complexity of these co-evolved systems (and, as noted in Varnelis’s introduction to The Infrastructural City, from the primacy of individual property rights in L.A.’s political culture) is that, “as the possibilities for adding new highways — or even lanes — dwindle in many cities, most new progress is made at the level of code”.  This shift which the authors identify is a part of a systemic shift in the methodology of urbanism, from plan to hack, that we’ve been fascinated with for some time now.  In a mature infrastructural ecology, like Los Angeles, the city has developed such a persistent and ossified physical form that, barring a radical shift in the city’s political culture, designing infrastructure becomes more a task of re-configuration and re-use than a task of construction.

The idea is simple – big moves, such as new highways, new subways, and other massive infrastructure investments are much harder in a developed city than in a greenfield site.  I’d also argue that such challenges are not solely physical or political, but also financial (see previous discussions of the limitations of nostalgia for private-sector transit funding).

Mammoth continues:

Initially, this may seem an extraordinarily frustrating condition for urbanists, who have of late been so interested in the possibility that the design of infrastructures might offer an alternative instrument for shaping cities, combining the intentionality and vision of the plan with the vibrancy and resilience characteristic of emergent growth.  Infrastructures, we’ve noticed, can be a stable element which mold and manipulate the various flowing processes of urbanization which produce cities: economic exchange, human migration, traffic patterns, informational flows, property values, hydrologies, waste streams, commutes, even wildlife ecologies.  Historically, governments and private developers have sought to harness this potential, whether by profiting from the sale of land along a new infrastructure or by supplementing existing infrastructure to reinforce growth and density in a locale (the initial growth of Los Angeles along privately-owned streetcar lines being one of the classic examples of the former sort of infrastructural generation).  But if, as the authors of “Blocking All Lanes” suggest (and, I think it is fair to say, The Infrastructural City suggests as a whole), opportunities to plan and design new infrastructural frameworks are likely to be extremely rare in mature infrastructural ecologies, should urbanists abandon their interest in infrastructure as an instrument for shaping the city?

There’s no doubt about urbanists and their interests in large scale infrastructural investments (see the various transit fantasy maps at Greater Greater Washington –  spilling out to reader submissions, for example – and even my own contribution here).  Many of these ideas are financial non-starters, but the overall ideal is not something to be completely dropped.  Instead, the focus should be on encouraging those infrastructures to evolve within this urban context, while also continuing to use the useful parts of the old infrastructure plans and ideas of capturing increased land value, etc.  Mammoth seems to agree:

I don’t think so […]

First, the rarity and scarcity of those opportunities does not mean that they should not be seized when they are realistically presented.  And when opportunities for the construction of new infrastructures within a mature city do occur, they are likely to appear in hack-like guises: concretely, like Atlanta’s Beltline, which utilizes a defunct rail right-of-way as the foundation for a new commuter rail line1, or Orange County’s Groundwater Replenishment System, which redirects the flow of cleaned wastewater in Orange County from ocean to aquifer; speculatively, like Velo-City’s Toronto bicycle metro (which, as it happens, has a less-speculative southern Californian counterpart, the Backbone Bikeway Network).  Go over, go under, re-deploy, tag along, piggyback.

…

[T]he key realization is that successful shifts in urban form will only happen when they are paired with successful alterations of the infrastructures, systems, and flows that generate those forms.  Attempts to construct a new vision for the city that fail to grapple with the underlying systems that, like traffic, constitute and produce the city will ultimately either be ineffective or collapse catastrophically.

Instead of using the hack to replace the era of infrastructure, hacking instead is the method to implement these infrastructural changes.  In the comments, faslanyc likens the hack (as opposed to the plan) to the tactic (as opposed to the strategy) – tactical urbanism:

by the way, i like your reading of this chapter and think that it is basically what the nyc dot is doing with a lot of their bike lane/pedestrian plaza initiatives. A while ago I likened it to tactics and strategies, certainly they are not mutually exclusive, though in practice they aren’t usually working in concert.

Reconfiguring extant street space for new and re-prioritized uses is a good example, with bike lanes and NYC’s ‘temporary’ pedestrian plazas representing the lower end of the spectrum in terms of investment.  I’d argue that streetcars in DC (when compared against the costs for new Metro lines) represent another level of investment.  Even large scale investments, such as the Federal stimulus money for High Speed Rail involves a hack approach – key investments in grade separation, signaling, and other small moves to offer incremental improvements rather than wholesale development of TGV-style trains from the onset.  Federal grant programs such as TIGER tend to focus on these kinds of investments, as well.

Large scale investments are still crucial to our urban systems, but as Mammoth notes, opportunities to capitalize on them will be both rare and scarce.

Adaptation in housing, organically

A few housing-related tidbits that I’ve accumulated over the past week.

Richard Layman laments the lack of quality development, noting the difficulties involved with larger scale infill projects, especially when compared against smaller scale renovation projects of single rowhouses or small apartment buildings.  The smaller scale renovations take on a more organic character, while the scale of the larger projects necessitates more centralized planning and development.

As for your point about “organic” development, in my experience, which I admit is relatively limited, my sense is organic (re)development that includes significant amounts of new construction is more about adaptive reuse of extant places, complemented by (hopefully high quality) infill.

Along similar lines, Rob Holmes over at mammoth points to a great discussion of housing in Haiti (Incremental House, Wired), with a particular focus on adaptation and organic elements.  This isn’t the first time mammoth has mentioned the idea of incremental housing development, which Rob touched on in his very interesting list of the best architecture of the decade (including more infrastructural/engineered spaces like the Large Hadron Collider).  Quinta Monroy, an incremental housing project in northern Chile, has a fascinating approach to both building shelter and also growing and adapting with the residents:

Quinta Monroy is a center-city neighborhood of Iquique, a city of about a quarter million lying in northern Chile between the Pacific Ocean and the Atacama Desert.  Elemental’s Quinta Monroy housing project settles a hundred families on a five thousand square meter site where they had persisted as squatters for three decades.  The residences designed by Elemental offer former squatters the rare opportunity to live in subsidized housing without being displaced from the land they had called their home, provides an appreciating asset which can improve their family finances, and serves as a flexible infrastructure for the self-constructed expansion of the homes.

Quinta Monroy

Elemental’s first decision was to retain the inner city site, a decision which was both expensive and spatially limiting: there is only enough space on the site to provide thirty individual homes or sixty-six row homes, so a different typology was required.  High rise apartments would provide the needed density, but not provide the opportunity for residents to expand their own homes, as only the top and ground floors would have any way to connect to additions.  Elemental thus settled on a typology of connected two-story blocks, snaking around four common courtyards, designed as a skeletal infrastructure which the families could expand over time:

We in Elemental have identified a set of design conditions through which a housing unit can increase its value over time; this without having to increase the amount of money of the current subsidy.

In first place, we had to achieve enough density, (but without overcrowding), in order to be able to pay for the site, which because of its location was very expensive. To keep the site, meant to maintain the network of opportunities that the city offered and therefore to strengthen the family economy; on the other hand, good location is the key to increase a property value.

Second, the provision a physical space for the “extensive family” to develop, has proved to be a key issue in the economical take off of a poor family. In between the private and public space, we introduced the collective space, conformed by around 20 families. The collective space (a common property with restricted access) is an intermediate level of association that allows surviving fragile social conditions.

Third, due to the fact that 50% of each unit’s volume, will eventually be self-built, the building had to be porous enough to allow each unit to expand within its structure. The initial building must therefore provide a supporting, (rather than a constraining) framework in order to avoid any negative effects of self-construction on the urban environment over time, but also to facilitate the expansion process.

Obviously, applying this idea to a western city (as opposed to a slum) raises a whole different set of issues, but it’s a particularly interesting idea when contrasted against the highly planned and professionally designed structures Richard Layman notes.  It provides a jumping point to look at the continuum between several of the elements that the Incremental House mentions in their self-description:

Much of the housing around the world occupies a space in between the planned/unplanned, formal/informal and the professional/non-professional, offering people a small space space to negotiate the tremendous shifts taking place in the urban landscape.

DC’s stability provides less of an opportunity to shift between those poles, but the idea is nevertheless interesting.  Rob Holmes expands on what this means:

Elemental, in other words, have exploited the values and aims of ownership culture (which mammoth has suggested understands the house to be first a machine for making money and only second to be a machine for living) not to support a broken system of real estate speculation and easy wealth, but to present architecture as a tool that can be provided to families.  While the project is embedded with some of the assumptions of the architects (such as that faith in the potential of ownership culture, for better or worse), this tool is primarily presented as a framework, a scaffolding upon which families are able to make their own architecture.

Framework is a good way to put it – much of the work in planning seeks to establish frameworks (legal, physical, financial) around which cities and grow, evolve, and adapt – Layman’s point shows there is more we can do on that front.