Monthly Archives: March 2010

Infrastructural and industrial spaces

CC image from nathansnider

The Infrastructural City – Something I’m eagerly anticipating is a sort of on-line book club discussion of the infrastructural city, spearheaded by mammoth.

Over the course of the next several months, mammoth will be coordinating an online discussion of The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles (edited by Kazys Varnelis and published last year by Actar), as an experiment in the cooperative reading and discussion of a text.

As Varnelis explains in the introduction to The Infrastructural City, Los Angeles is perhaps the American city most fully indebted to infrastructure for its existence and survival:

“If the West was dominated by the theology of infrastructure, Los Angeles was its Rome. Cobbled together out of swamp, floodplain, desert, and mountains, short of water and painfully dependent on far-away resources to survive, Los Angeles is sited on inhospitable terrain, located where the continent runs out of land. No city should be here. Its ecological footprint greater than the expansive state it resides in, Los Angeles exists by the grace of infrastructure, a life-support system that has transformed this wasteland into the second largest metropolis in the country. Nor was this lost on Angelenos. They understood that their city’s growth depended on infrastructure and celebrated that fact. After all, what other city would name its most romantic road after a water-services engineer?”

Yet despite that history and the continued role of infrastructures such as the Alameda Trench and the Pacific Intertie in shaping the physical, social, and economic form of Los Angeles, the city has also developed an extraordinary resistance to the planning of new infrastructures. A myriad of factors, including ferocious NIMBYism and empty state coffers, make it increasingly difficult to implement new infrastructures or expand existing systems. Furthermore, the city’s infrastructures are increasingly inter-related and co-dependent, interwoven into what Varnelis terms networked ecologies — “hypercomplex systems produced by technology, laws, political pressures, disciplinary desires, environmental constraints and a myriad other pressures, tied together with feedback mechanisms.”

Free Association Design will also be participating, as will the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Speaking of CLUI – mammoth also points out CLUI’s spring newsletter, with some fascinating pieces on everything from ghost fleets and shipbreaking to urban oil extraction in Los Angeles.

Agglomerations – Paul Krugman has to give a talk in a couple weeks, and he found inspiration in northern New Jersey’s claim to be the embroidery capital of the world.

It’s an interesting history of individual initiative and cumulative causation — the same kind of story now being played out all across the world, especially in China. I still love economic geography.

Never Stop the Line – last weekend’s edition of This American Life featured the fascinating tale of NUMMI – a join GM-Toyota auto plant in Fremont, CA. Toyota showed GM all their secrets to making high quality cars – lessons that GM couldn’t easily translate to other plants.

A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: how it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn’t learn the lessons – until it was too late.

Given GM’s current status and Toyota’s recent recall issues (many of which are attributed to growing too fast to control quality), it’s a fascinating tale for anyone interested in American industry and manufacturing.

Parking, Census, & Maps

Some cool map-related items:

San Francisco’s Parking Census – with one of those ideas that’s so obvious that no one ever thought of it before, San Francisco has completed the first known census of all the publicly available parking spaces in an American city. The census found 441,541 spaces in the city, just 280,000 of which are on-street spaces – occupying an area comparable to the city’s Golden Gate Park.

The release of the public parking space census coincides with the redesign of the website for SFPark, an occupancy-based parking management trial funded with a $19.8 million federal congestion mitigation grant, which among many objectives, seeks to manage the supply of parking by adjusting the cost to match demand. To put that in laymen’s terms, if SFPark works well, there should be enough parking at the curb so that drivers don’t have to circle the block endlessly searching for that elusive space. By gradually adjusting the price of parking up or down in the pilot areas, the city expects to create roughly one or two free spaces per block face at any time, the original purpose of parking meters when they were introduced in the 1930s.

Jay Primus, who directs the SFPark trial for the MTA, said the parking census was the first step toward a better understanding of how parking works in San Francisco, filling a void where city planners could only make rough estimates previously. “If you can’t manage what you can’t count, doing a careful survey and documenting all publicly available parking was a critical first step for the MTA for how we manage parking more intelligently,” he said.

The importance of this data, especially to this level of detail, cannot be understated. Applying this type of information to performance pricing systems is just one potential application. The study’s accompanying PDF map shows just how detailed and granular the data is:

Each dot along the streets represents a meter, the larger circles within blocks represent off-street parking. Garages and non-metered street spaces with less than 25 spaces per block aren’t even shown.

The real Census also has some cool maps – the Census Bureau’s Take 10 map allows you to see real time (relatively speaking) response rates by census tract for DC:

Currently, DC’s response rate stands at 44%. Tract 4902, highlighted above, is only at 39%.

Defining sprawl

When reading discussions about sprawl, one thing often becomes painfully clear – no one quite knows exactly how to define sprawl. Defining sprawl probably bears some similarities to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of obscene pornography – “I know it when I see it.” Indeed, when we’re talking about a qualitative measure of the built environment, it’s not particularly easy to come up with an authoritative definition.

First, I’d point out that when I talk about sprawl (as noted above), I’m talking about the built environment. Too often, discussions get framed in polar terms – urbanity vs. sprawl, inner cities vs. suburbs, etc. I don’t find any of these dichotomies are particularly useful in describing the built environment – not only do they not fit the complex patterns of development, but associations with inner cities or suburbs are too often charged with relatively unrelated social characteristics.

Sprawl is also not synonymous with suburbia, nor is it equal to a simple outward growth of an urban area. Sprawl has four key characteristics, each of which are inter-related:

Density – sprawling development is typically low density, but land use patterns often prevent the positive externalities of density from accruing.

Segregation of land use – separating land uses into different parcels is both a product of lower densities and auto-centric design…

Auto-centrism – what distinguishes sprawl from just suburban growth is the focus on the automobile as the only real means of transportation.

Outward growth – the connotation of sprawling out, away from the city is only one factor of urban sprawl. Sprawl often involves ‘leapfrog’ development away from the periphery.

Except for the outward growth, each of those points could be considered to be the opposite end of the spectrum for the 3D’s of Density, Diversity, and Design.

Cap’n Transit hits on some of these points – noting that all suburbs are not sprawl (and many of today’s urban core neighborhoods were once considered suburban development on the periphery):

Drum’s question actually shows that a lot of urban history is being forgotten. Most “urban cores” started out as bedroom communities. Greenwich Village, Brooklyn Heights, Long Island City and the Bronx were suburbs once. Hudson County, the part of New Jersey across the river from Manhattan, includes the four densest towns in the US, according to the 2000 census: Guttenberg, West New York, Union City and Hoboken. I’ve long thought that New York should just annex Hudson County as the fifth borough and be done with it.

If those are too “urban core” for you, consider these “streetcar suburbs” of Westchester County, all of whom have high-rise apartments walking distance from a commuter rail station, downtown shops and a supermarket: Scarsdale, where Garth Road is lined with seven- to ten-story luxury co-ops; Bronxville; the Fleetwood neighborhood of Mount Vernon; New Rochelle; Larchmont; and many more.

Oh, and for Jarrett, these Westchester suburbs all have twice-hourly trains to Grand Central Station six days a week, and hourly service on Sundays.

Most of these buildings were built years ago, between 1920 and 1960; for more recent dense suburb-building, see the claims for various DC suburbs. New Rochelle has also seen some recent high-rise transit-oriented development.

A sprawling synopsis

Image from Dean Terry on flickr

There’s been a great back and forth across the blogosphere in the past few days on sprawl, zoning, land use regulation, and market forces. A brief synopsis and chronology:

3/18, 8:47 am – Randal O’Toole – complete with terms like ‘poppycock’ that completely fit the mental image I have of him:

This is all balderdash and poppycock. People who believe it should get their noses out of Kunstler’s biased diatribes and look at some real data and see how zoning actually worked before it was hijacked by authoritarian urban planners. It doesn’t take much to show that areas without any zoning or regulation will — if developed today — end up as what planners call “sprawl.” Until recently, all that zoning has done has been to affirm the kind of development that people want.

3/18, 12:58 pm – Matt Yglesias -Yglesias argues that our sprawling environment isn’t a manifestation of market demand:

I’m not personally interested in debating the “smart growth” slogan. My point is that from a policy point of view excessive regulation of land use in already developed areas is bad for the economy and for the environment. And to be specific and clear about this, I don’t think the problem is “libertarian” hypocrites per se, the problem is specifically John Stossel and Randall O’Toole who are stridently opposed to anti-sprawl regulations but seem totally uninterested in sprawl-promoting ones.

3/18, 7:28 pm – Kevin Drum – we have exclusionary zoning regulations because people really, really want them.

I need to be clear here: I’m neither praising nor condemning this, just describing how things are. To get an idea of how strongly people feel about this, you really need to come live in a suburb for a while. But failing that, consider the balance of power here. Corporations would like to be able to build wherever and whatever they want. Wealthy land developers would like to be able to build wherever and whatever they want. And local governments hate single-family neighborhoods because they’re a net tax loss: they cost more in services than they return in property tax remittances. And yet, even with corporations, wealthy developers, and local governments all on one side, suburban zoning is ubiquitous. This is a triumvirate that, under normal circumstances, could get practically anything they wanted, but in this case it’s not even a close fight. Suburban residents have them completely overwhelmed.

3/19, 11:18 am – Ryan Avent – zoning is about exclusion and control – it is a manifestation of NIMBY attitudes and not one of popularity:

So people build where it’s easiest and cheapest to build, which is on the urban fringe. And walkability is difficult to build on the urban fringe because transportation will be overwhelmingly auto-oriented (the fringe being distant from employment and retail centers and unserved by transit). So you get acres of tract housing, which subsequently become filled with people, who then do what homeowners everywhere in the country do, which is try to exclude new people from moving in to their neighborhood. And development then moves further outward.

But the notion that suburban sprawl wins out simply because it is so popular is belied by housing cost data. People live where they can afford to live, and if they can’t afford to live in a walkable area, then they’ll opt to live in sprawl rather than go homeless. And once there they’ll act to defend their investment by fighting development projects that may have unpredictable impacts on the value of nearby single-family homes.

3/19, 2:28 pm – Matt Yglesias – exclusion is a general phenomenon (see NIMBYism), not just suited for suburbia and sprawling places.

It’s true that the problem of overly restrictive land-use rules is in large part a problem of voter-preference. But it’s not a problem of voter-preference for sprawl per se. It’s a general problem of homeowner eagerness to exclude outsiders. It’s politically difficult to build dense infill development in Washington, DC and that’s not because DC residents want to live in sprawling areas or because DC residents approve of sprawl as a phenomenon. It’s a mixture of selfishness, misunderstanding, and poor institutional design. As Ben Adler reminds us, surveys indicate that about a third of Americans would like to live in walkable urban areas but less than 10 percent of the country’s dwelling units are in areas that fit the bill. That’s why houses in walkable central cities (Manhattan) and walkable suburbs (near Metro in Arlington Country, VA for example) are so expensive.

3/19, 2:45 pm – Kevin Drum – No, people like sprawl. Honestly.

Sure, exclusion is part of the dynamic here, but by far the bigger part of it is that lots and lots of people actively like living in non-dense developments. Seriously: they really do. It’s not a trick. So they vote with their feet and move to the suburbs and then vote with their ballots to keep big-city living at bay. Given an ideal world, of course, they’d love to have a nice 3,000 square foot house with a big yard right in the middle of Manhattan, but one way or another, they want that house.

3/19, 7:07 pm – Ryan Avent – Price data shows a clear preference to walkable, urban places. Moreover, the density that creates that value also raises productivity – urban walkability is expensive for a reason, the positive externalities of urban lifestyles compound on one another. Suburban residents, however, fight added density and walkability because they never see the benefits of those positive feedback loops:

Say New York started selectively zoning parts of Manhattan for single-family home only use. The first few folks to buy would have a glorious time of things. But as additional people moved in, density would fall. Declining density would ultimately reduce the walkability of Manhattan, but perhaps more importantly, it would lead to a deterioration of the positive externalities associated with the high level of density. Density raises productivity and wages (see this, or this). And because of this benefit and positive spillovers associated with density, we find increasing returns to scale in cities. In many cases, the addition of another person to a dense area increases the return to others of locating in that area. And things work in the opposite direction as populations decline. The fact that residents of dense cities don’t internalize these benefits is one of the reasons they fight new development.

Low density suburban development eats up a lot of land while contributing relatively little to the positive urban externalities associated with density. And meanwhile, the combination of auto-centricity of suburbs with the inability of governments to correctly price congestion externalities means that suburbanites end up limiting urban growth in an economically unfortunate manner by reducing potential wages and raising the real cost of commuting into (and therefore within) the city. One reason sprawl is attractive is that the people living in it aren’t facing the true cost of their decision to live in sprawl (and this is without ever bringing carbon into the mix).

All in all, some very interesting points on sprawl, economics, design, land use, and so on. I wanted to aggregate these posts here as a baseline for more discussion – because this post is already long enough. I didn’t even get a chance to touch on the discussions of High Speed Rail and sprawl – with posts from the CA HSR blog, as well as the Transport Politic.

Water Conservation

Via Matt Yglesias, a great chart from the recent Gold Medal hockey game between Canada and the US in Vancouver. When 2/3rds of the entire country is watching, you know it’s a big deal.

This chart looks at the water consumption in Edmonton, Alberta over the course of the game – comparing it to the day before, an average weekend day.

You can see the tension building with higher peaks after each period. Now you can see why one of the major milestones for any new sports stadium is flushing all of the toilets and urinals at the same time.

Bar Crawl

Two things I like – beer and maps. Maps about booze are even better.

Having grown up in the Midwest – born and raised in Minnesota, with lots of family in Wisconsin, as well as living in Madison and Ann Arbor, it’s no surprise to me that people there like to drink. It’s a part of the culture. Now, we have some maps to prove it.

The blog floating sheep has some great maps of America’s beer belt. First, the total number of bars in various locations across the US, based on Google maps’ directory.

Next, a point of reference – a map showing the relative popularity of bars to grocery stores – red indicates more bars than grocery stores:

Finally, putting Wisconsin’s culture on display, a map of how many Google Maps entries there are for bars, normalizing the data to show the relative popularity of them.

Unsurprisingly, we see all sorts of concentrations of bars that correlate with population density – namely, cities. Wisconsin, however, is punching well above its weight. That well-worn drinking culture shines through. Southern cities, conversely, seem a little thing based on their populations – perhaps a holdover from dry counties and other temperance movements?

Either way, it’s a cool set of maps.

Historic DC Maps

In the same vein as UCLA’s Hypercities maps I’ve discussed previously, I recently ran across some more historical maps from Shannon over at We Love DC. The maps themselves are ok, not nearly as detailed or interesting as the Hypercities maps, taking the historic maps and re-projecting them onto an interactive Google maps interface.

More interesting to me, however, is an older post of Shannon’s that directs you to David Rumsey’s historical map archive, as well as a world-wide index – which includes (unlike the Hypercities site) two DC maps – from 1851 and 1861.

The index page shows you the wide variety of locations covered:

The interface is similar to the hypercities one, allowing you to toggle on a historical map that has been manipulated to match the projection of the underlying Google interface. This allows you to navigate around the environment.

First, the base layer, a current aerial of DC:

Here’s the 1851 map of DC:

And the 1861 map:

You can adjust the opacity to directly compare the current conditions to the map – some interesting details concern the shoreline of the Anacostia, the existence of Hains Point, as well as the evolution of the city’s built environment:

The detail in the 1861 map is fantastic. Extremely detailed, right down to the figure ground of individual buildings – as well as demonstrating how much of L’Enfant’s plan had been built out on the eve of the Civil War.

On the edges of the L’Enfant city, the map shows how historic roads have shaped the current city, such as Columbia Road meeting Connecticut:

Also, the property boundaries outside of the L’Enfant plan influenced the street patterns of later developments. Note how the slightly off-kilter grid of LeDroit Park corresponds to the landholdings of one C. Miller:

Very cool stuff.

Street spaces over 100 years

For a nice Saturday morning post, David over at Greater Greater Washington points to a great video from San Francisco, circa 1905. The video is shot from a cable car traveling down Market Street, San Francisco’s great axial street. The clock tower of the Ferry Building terminates the view, all while pedestrians, horses, cars, streetcars, and just about every other mode of transport share in the controlled chaos of a street where all modes share space.

Our streets weren’t always so compartmentalized, with segregated spaces for cars, pedestrians, bikes, and so on. David gives a hat tip to the Ludwig von Mises Institute for the video, where the free-market libertarians posting the comments attribute the resulting order to the power of markets to organize themselves.

Several, however, note the limitations of such an example as a case for removing all traffic restrictions and separations – changes in technology, mass, speed, and so on – as well as the fact that managed and planned order can indeed be more efficient than this type of organic order. Another notes that some of the chaos may not have been completely authentic:

I saw this video before, with a commentator talking alongside it. The car that crosses the tracks and is barely missed by the streetcar is actually part of the filming team, asked to do that to keep things interesting. If you pay attention, you see him cutting accross [sic] many times, actually crisscrossing in front of the streetcar.

Yet another commenter points to an almost exact re-creation of the same video from 2005, this time making use of travel along the F-Market streetcar line.

The arrangement of street space, obviously, has changed. So has San Francisco’s urban fabric, now complete with skyscrapers. The older video just predates the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire, a major factor in re-shaping San Francisco’s urban form. The comparison between the two is stark, both for the things that have changed, as well as for the things that have not.

Back at GGW, commenter Lance throws a few barbs about overhead wires obstructing vistas. It’s worth noting that DC’s current streetcar plan does not have any long stretches of track along the main vista avenues, such as Pennsylvania Ave. Under the idea of a hybrid solution and careful routing, we might not even need wires to cross those main vistas, yet alone run along them. It’s also worth noting that San Francisco’s wires in the 2005 video are not just for streetcars, but also electric trolley buses – a few of them are seen in the video itself. Since trolley buses do not run on steel rails, they require two wires to act as a ground.

City Block

a work in progress…