Monthly Archives: April 2011

How Jane Jacobs killed city planning

deathlifegreatuscities

I ran across this excellent piece from Thomas Campanella in Design Observer, discussing the deadly impact of Jane Jacobs on the planning profession.  Campanella is a professor of planning at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of City and Regional Planning.  I share it because I’ve encountered many of the same issues in my relatively brief time in the profession.  An excerpt:

And all along I kept wondering: Why did this have to come out of a coffee shop and a classroom? Where were the planners? Why didn’t the town or county planning office act on this opportunity? A moment ago I argued that the public lacks the knowledge and expertise to make informed decisions about planning. If that’s the case, what does it say about our profession when a group of citizens — most with no training in architecture, planning or design — comes up with a very good idea that the planners should have had? When I asked about this, the response was: “We’re too busy planning to come up with big plans.” Too busy planning. Too busy slogging through the bureaucratic maze, issuing permits and enforcing zoning codes, hosting community get-togethers, making sure developers get their submittals in on time and pay their fees. This is what passes for planning today. We have become a caretaker profession — reactive rather than proactive, corrective instead of preemptive, rule bound and hamstrung and anything but visionary. If we lived in Nirvana, this would be fine. But we don’t. We are entering the uncharted waters of global urbanization on a scale never seen. And we are not in the wheelhouse, let alone steering the ship. We may not even be on board.

Lots of interesting stuff to chew on in the piece. I will say that vision isn’t in short supply amongst individual planners – from directors down to new staff – but articulating that vision within planning’s narrowed authority can be difficult.

Anyone in the field (or observing it from afar) should give it a read.  I’m curious to hear what others think.

Tiny Jackson Hole

A Tiny Day in the Jackson Hole Backcountry – by Tristan Greszko.

I had posted this in my Google Reader feed last week, but I feel it’s deserving of a post.  Skiing is a hobby of mine.  Though I love living in DC, it doesn’t offer the same kinds of winter recreation opportunities, nor do the adjacent parks and wilderness areas have the same scale and feeling as the American West.

I ran across this ski video initially expecting more of the same from the ski movie genre – movies that exist to show the skills of the athletes and how they push the envelope of what’s skiable. This is something different – a short film that truly encapsulates the experience of spending a day in the Jackson Hole backcountry.  More than anything else, the use of tilt-shift photography and miniature faking gives the mountain a sense of scale that no film I’ve seen has successfully recreated.  The sense of being alone along a ridge, a small person amidst a huge landscape is one of my favorite feelings about skiing.  The fact that this film is set in Jackson – my favorite place to ski by far, a place I’ve visited many times over the years – only makes it that much more enjoyable.

As the artist’s (Tristan Greszko) instructions read, let the movie load in HD, put it on full screen and sit back for the ride.  It’s almost like you were there for the tram ride to the summit.  As it is, I’m just glad I was able to make a trip to Wyoming earlier this season to take part in the record 557 inches of snow.

The most segregated cities in America

Salon.com has an interesting slideshow of the 10 most segregated cities in America.  The data comes from the 2010 Census, and the methodology to determine the level of segregation is based on differences between census tracts:

We may think of segregation as a matter of ancient Southern history: lunch counter sit-ins, bus boycotts and Ku Klux Klan terrorism. But as the census numbers remind us, Northern cities have long had higher rates of segregation than in the South, where strict Jim Crow laws kept blacks closer to whites, but separate from them. Where you live has a big impact on the education you receive, the safety on your streets, and the social networks you can leverage.

The following is a list of the nation’s most segregated metropolitan areas of over 500,000 people. The rankings are based on a dissimilarity index, a measure used by social scientists to gauge residential segregation. It reflects the number of people from one race — in this case black or white — who would have to move for races to be evenly distributed across a certain area. A score of 1 indicates perfect integration while 100 signals complete segregation. The rankings were compiled by John Paul DeWitt of CensusScope.org and the University of Michigan’s Social Science Data Analysis Network.

Each of the 10 most segregated cities includes a narrative for the city.  Several include observations on transportation and the linkages between land use and infrastructure.

# 10. Los Angeles

LA 10

The L.A. riots of 1992, like the 1965 Watts riot, were sparked by police brutality, a steady concern in besieged neighborhoods like South Central. Nearly 20 years later, the jobless ghettos of black and Latino Los Angeles remain. Greater Los Angeles has been so big for so long — legion nodes connected by extensive highways — that it’s hard to say exactly what its borders are. Safe in their cars and behind their gates, most white people have gone back to not paying attention.

In short, transportation matters. Diversity without intermingling can be isolating.

# 2. New York
NY 02

Ingrid Gould Ellen, an urban planning and public policy professor at New York University, says that New York City is somewhat more integrated than the data would suggest, because it is far denser than most cities. Since census tracts are made up by population, tracts in New York tend to be very small.

“What happens is that we’re not making apples to apples comparisons. The neighborhoods in Atlanta and Houston are 10 times the size of neighborhoods in New York City physically,” she says. “The census tracts are so much smaller, so you’re likely to cross over a number of census tracts every day.”

The daily commute of the average New Yorker also lessens racial isolation. Thanks to the dominance of public transit, intra-city travel tends to be a diverse experience.

New York, despite segregation, benefits from both density and transit.

# 1. Milwaukee

Milwaukee 01_2

Nationwide, blacks have been concentrated in the inner city, far away from where new jobs are created. Yet the case of Milwaukee is extreme: 90 percent of the metro area’s black population lives in the city. Making matters worse, suburban whites are notably hostile to building any form of public transit to connect city people to suburban jobs, further exacerbating segregation’s ill effects.

If you’re wondering if this can somehow, some way, be blamed on union-busting Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, the answer is yes. Walker took the lead in a campaign against public transit to connect the suburbs to the city during his time as county executive. He thought the funds would be better spent on highways.

“There is virulent opposition in these exurban counties to any kind of regional transit system, particularly a regional rail system. There have been proposals over the years, but they’re always DOA,” says Levine. “Governor Walker’s big issue as state representative and county executive was ‘Over my dead body light rail,’ and he fought with Milwaukee’s mayor over funds for regional rail. He very much represents that suburban and exurban base.”

That map graphic says it all.

Density, productivity, and housing prices

Ryan Avent recently spoke at the Kauffman Foundation‘s conference for economic bloggers. His short presentation touches on a number of economic issues as they relate to urban economies and their role in our national economy.

The presentation tackles Tyler Cowen’s Great Stagnation thesis.  Avent specifically looks at the benefits of density on productivity and innovation, and how the dispersal of the American population has had a disparate impact on American productivity.

The implications for cities are clear – the dense areas (owing to the benefits of agglomeration and economies of scale) are extremely productive, but they’ve not been the areas seeing growth in recent decades.  Instead, the less-dense places in the sun belt have grown.  Avent attributes this to the sun belt’s ability to expand supply and keep housing costs low (citing Ed Glaeser).  The implication is that the low cost of living is attracting people to areas that are less productive than the dense but hard-to-expand coastal cities.