Tag Archives: urbanism

Who are the ‘urbanists,’ anyway?

CC image from STREETART PHOTAGRAPHIE

Aaron Renn has a provacative post, asking if “urbanism is the new trickle-down economics.” He writes:

Have urbanists used this as a call to arms to put all of their energy into helping those left behind in the knowledge/creative class economy? No. Instead, urban advocates have gone the other direction, locking onto this in a reductionist way to develop a set of policies I call “Starbucks urbanism.” That is, the focus is on an exclusively high end, sanitized version of city life that caters to the needs of the elite with the claim that this will somehow “revitalize” the city if they are attracted there.

First, who are these urbanists? And why are they acting as one ideologically coherent bloc?

What does the word ‘urbanist’ mean, anyway? Merriam-Webster simply calls it “a specialist in urban planning,” but I would broaden the term to simply be people who are interested in cities. Given the diversity of opinions within that population, Renn’s broad brush misses the mark.

Then there’s the ideology. There’s an irony in Renn criticizing the role of urbanism-as-trickle-down and the reductionisim of urban policy, mirroring trickle-down’s reductionism of economic policy. Renn takes no care to distinguish the diversity of opinions on all things urban, instead lumping all urbanists under this label. He doesn’t lump all economists together as if were in favor of trickle-down policies.

This isn’t the the only example; there are plenty of cases where New Urbanism is falsely equated with urbanism (as in – an interest in cities) – and even more that innaccurately describe what New Urbanism is (the N and U are capitalized for a reason). San Francisco’s SPUR publishes a magazine entitled The Urbanist. There is also the distinction on the market orientation of urbanists (‘demand-side urbanists’ – as phrased by David Schliecher and Witold Rybczynski) and a whole host of other factions with interests in the city.

This isn’t to say there isn’t a truth to Renn’s point about ‘Starbucks urbanism’, but the broad brush weakens the argument. Any way you slice it, urbanists are a pretty diverse group. Often argumentative, too.

Some for you, some for Mies – a defense of DC’s MLK Library

IMG_2103(Mies’ Chicago Federal Plaza, with Alexander Calder’s Flamingo sculpture.  A note about the lack of people in the plaza – this photo was taken with a temperature of about -5 degrees and a wind chill well below that.  Author’s photo)

Today, Lydia DePillis has a guest post from Kriston Capps offering a well-put defense of DC’s oft-maligned MLK Library, the sole work of Mies van der Rhoe in the city.  DePillis recently wrote about DCPL’s building boom and the modern taste it has.  Capps defends Mies’ design and chalks up the library’s deficiencies to poor maintenance of the building, but also falling victim to the larger social ills that often make the location undesirable.

But more than a renovation, even, the MLK Library needs city serves downtown to step up. It will never be an inviting place like Shaw or Tenleytown until the city does something to serve D.C.’s homeless population downtown. The library serves as a de facto shelter and has since before Armstrong v. District of Columbia Public Library. Mayor Williams was kidding himself to say that it was a lack of WiFi, and not an abundance of homeless men, keeping families away.

Design matters – but it can only do so much.

The MLK Library has always reminded me of the uniquely frustrating promise of the District. Here is the start of this soaring Mies skyscraper that stops before it starts, well short of the Seagram Building in New York or 860–880 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. We get a Mies, but a Mies cut off at its knees. It’s a perfect architectural metaphor for the almost-urbanism that characterizes life in Washington.

Mies isn’t all skyscrapers, of course.  I’ve visited other low-slung libraries of his (on Chicago’s IIT campus) that work well.  I’d also argue that Mies’ other works do work well in “almost-urbanism” of places like Detroit’s Lafayette Park, or when given sufficient space to contrast against the predominant urban fabric as the Seagram Building or Chicago’s Federal Plaza do.  The MLK Library instead conforms to the city’s plan and fabric, with only the slight jog in G Street NW as it skirts the Portrait Gallery offering a chance to see the building from a distance.

It’s certainly not Mies’ best work, but the library isn’t the negative many make it out to be.  With some thoughtful renovations to care for the original design, it has potential to be a great public space once again – insofar as design alone can tackle the human challenges of the library’s primary users.

Economists for cities, density

CC image from urbanfeel on flickr

CC image from urbanfeel on flickr

Ed Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard, chimes in on cities, density, and their economic value on the Economix blog:

But now humanity is marked more by concentration than by spread. In 2007, one-half of the world’s population became officially urban. One-third of Americans inhabit just 16 large metropolitan areas, which collectively use only a tiny fraction of the country’s land mass…

Understanding the appeal of proximity — the economic advantages of agglomeration — helps make sense of the past and future of cities.   If people still clustered together primarily to reduce the costs of moving manufactured goods, then cities would become increasingly irrelevant as transportation costs continue to decline.

If cities serve, as I believe, primarily, to connect people and enable them to learn from one another, than an increasingly information-intensive economy will only make urban density more valuable.

Glaeser highlights several conclusions – including a key one that density increases productivity. Ryan Avent has harped on this before.  Any way you slice it, the end idea is that cities are the intellectual and economic hubs of our country.

Improvements in transportation and communication costs made it cost-effective to manufacture in low-cost areas, which led to the decline of older industrial cities like Detroit. But those same changes also increased the returns to innovation, and the free flow of ideas in cities make them natural hubs of innovation. Since the death of distance increased the scope for new innovation, idea-intensive innovating cities were helped by the same forces that hurt goods-producing cities.

Humanity is a social species and our greatest gift is our ability to learn from one another. Cities thrive by enabling that learning, and they have become only more important as knowledge has become more valuable. Understanding what makes cities work is more important than ever.

In order to avoid alienating groups on political grounds, it’s worth noting that we’re talking about cities, broadly defined.   Just as the focus on urban, walkable places is an urban design distinction rather than a political one, the benefits of urban agglomerations are regional.  Design matters, of course – I’d be curious to see if an economist could measure if economic benefits of agglomeration can be attributed to any other characteristics other than density.