Liveblog
Correspondents Lloyd Alter (TreeHugger and Planet Green), Ryan Avent (Grist), Nate Berg (Planetizen), Andrew Blum (Metropolis and Wired), Randy Crane (UCLA School of Public Affairs) and Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson (New York Times Magazine, Architect, and Metropolis) bring you updates from the Re-imagining Cities: Urban Design After Oil symposium.
Symposium presented by the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design and the Penn Institute for Urban Research, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation.
-
Extra! Extra! Urban Design Revolution in Philadelphia! | Nov 9th at 9:25am
Fifty years ago the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored a small conference on urban design at the University of Pennsylvania sparked a revolution in urban planning and changed the face of our cities. Yet somehow I doubt that newsboys were screaming that post headline from street-corners the next day. It took time for the lessons of the conference to be digested, disseminated and for a young woman who certainly wasn’t the star of that conference to put it all together over the next few years, with a little more oomph from the Rockefeller foundation. It then took more time, and a couple of editions, for the ideas that grew out of that conference to take hold.
When I practiced architecture I thought it was a slow-moving profession, but compared to planning and urban design, it is positively giddy. So I should not be surprised or disappointed that the participants were not drawing new urban design solutions on the walls of Houston Hall; it seemed most of were here to learn about the problems rather than talk about the solutions. Many presentations focused on the issue of climate change, which really is less about “design after oil” than it is “design after coal”, and where, as Alex Steffen pointed out, we know what to do: more insulation, conservation, alternate energy sources and efficiency. As Andy Revkin pointed out on the media panel Saturday night, climate change is a hard thing to get newspapers and readers worked up about; it is still seen as our kids’ problem, important but not really immediate. If it isn’t happening tomorrow, it ain’t news.
There was less discussion about the impact of peak oil, which from a planning and urban design perspective, will have a more immediate impact. On the Revkin Scale, it’s news. Only 20% of carbon emissions come from oil, but almost 100% our cars run on it, so a world after oil is a world after cars as we know them. This is why I thought that the preoccupation with carbon dioxide and climate change was a misdirection; what we have is a planning and design issue, that we have planned our nation around cheap individual transportation. The main impact of peak oil is not that we will run out of the stuff, but that it will get more and more expensive as the supply dwindles. Now that the election is over (for some reason oil prices always drop before an election when there is a Republican president) and the economy recovers a bit, (or probably as soon as the winter heating season starts, there are still lots of Americans who heat with oil) that oil price will start rising again.
That will affect planning and urban design in real, not academic time. When gas hit four bucks a gallon the value of suburban real estate took a severe hit. Sales of sophisticated personal alternate power sourced vehicles, called bicycles, soared. Business owners started questioning why they pay for office space when they can have people work from home. Trains still didn’t run on time but they suddenly were filled. Everything we wanted people to do to mitigate climate change, they were suddenly doing out of economic self interest, more rapidly than the transport infrastructure, the real estate market or even the bike repair shops could cope with. One only has to imagine what will happen when gas hits ten dollars a gallon in 2010 or twenty in 2020. When I came to this conference, that is exactly what I thought we would be doing.
My hope is that somewhere in that conference, among the presenters, observers or students, there is another young woman or man putting these thoughts together like Jane Jacobs did fifty years ago. I hope she writes more quickly and that the professions are quicker on the uptake. Frankly, I hope she blogs, it’s faster and we don’t have a lot of time. We have a little economic time-out right now to put our thoughts together, to consider what we have to do to respond to the problem of Re-imagining Cities: Urban Design After the Age of Oil.
-
What’s in a Manifesto? | Nov 8th at 1:38pm
Time for some disclosure, I think. My background is in economics, not urban planning. As such, I’ve enjoyed learning about the cutting edge, green strategies emanating from the academy and design professionals. It all strikes me as wonderfully idealistic and aesthetically pleasing—not something I frequently have occasion to say of economics.
But that economic background is useful in these matters, because it is, at base, the study of human behavior given scarcity, and that is actually what all of these discussions are about. Why do people behave as they do, and how can we get them to change? Given limited quantities of time, money, and political capital, where are our efforts best expended?
I appreciate the idea of an ecological approach to city planning, which permeated today’s working group discussion, of just what should go in our manifesto. It’s very appealing—a holistic system that wastes little or nothing, and which constantly replenishes itself. Certainly, if this can be made to work over the long-term, our impact on the environment will be sharply reduced and the sustainability of our cities guaranteed. Those are worthy goals.
But our immediate task is more specific. How can we build our cities in the next two decades, to minimize growth in carbon emissions and minimize the detrimental impact of high resource prices on the citizens of the world? As desirable as ecological city building may be, it will not be the solution to this crisis, because there is no time. People are stubborn creatures. Political institutions are, if possible, yet more stubborn (being made up of people). Planners must act to cajole both households and leaders into accepting changes that constitute, on the surface at least, a painful alteration of lifestyle. Forget, for the moment, total recycling of waste. How do we get people to want to walk from one place to another? Forget, for the moment, the encasement of buildings in energy-producing algae tubes. How do we attract young families back into cities from the suburbs, reducing their carbon footprints in the process?
And we can’t begin from the position that the rules around us will change so that we can make it easier to be green. We have to start from the position that the rules around us will not change, and so how can we produce change despite that hardship?
The most important thing to realize is that global climate change and environmental challenges are more important to this group of urban planners than to most other professions, and certainly than to the population as a whole. Given that, it is basically certain that the demand for good environmental design will lag supply. And the supply of good government policy will lag demand for policy improvements among the planning profession. Those are the constraints, and they’re pretty significant. We have to sell the people something they’re not sure they need, and it seems unlikely that merely telling them they need it is going to change their minds. Planners have to convince them they want it, through the power of their design.
That’s doable. So long as we recognize that that’s the challenge, it can be met.
-
What is it you don’t understand about the title “Urban design after oil?” | Nov 8th at 1:04pm
It was the closing breakout session, trying to create manifesto for educating the next generation of urban designers. I attended the group discussing the fundamentals that urban design students need to know. There were many of them, from philosophy to to technology through ecology. But I was dismayed at how little attention was actually being paid to the issue of urban design after oil.
William Rees of the University of British Columbia got it, and tried to get some focus on the issue of the end of oil. A few others got it, and stressed the need for urgency and action. But most were less concerned about mitigation or adaptation than they were about more traditional planning issues. Some thought that the answer was more testing and monitoring of what they do to analyze what works and what doesn’t, on the assumption that we actually have the time to plan, build, occupy long enough to monitor. One even suggested that there is too much to learn in too little time during an urban design education to think about these things.
Fritz Steiner of the University of Texas suggests that universities last a long time but they take a long time to turn around; it can take years for them to adapt to change. Also, urban designers have a lot more on their plate than just oil and climate change, and a lot less power to change things than they should, given the importance of their role.
But until there is a fundamental awareness of the depth of our problems there isn’t going to be much of a change in the fundamentals of urban design education.
-
The Education of Integration | Nov 8th at 11:20am
The three fields of urban design, urban planning and architecture are semi-amorphous. They overlap a great deal and aim towards many of the same goals. But by looking at the skill sets of most practitioners, you wouldn’t even realize that overlap exists. There is a striking lack of understanding between these silos of thought and practice—a problem that starts in the classroom.
The mid-morning discussion on education emphasized the need for better integration of these fields. They are in a constant state of interaction, but often the professionals within each of thee fields are not. This segregated existence is caused by segregated education, according to the panel of esteemed educators. Each is calling for the borders of these fields to blend, to create a more complete education of urban design.
“Many schools of arhitecture neglect the context, neglect urban design,” said Taner Oc, Director of the Institute of Urban Planning at the University of Nottingham. “It should be at the core of architectural education.”
Doug Kelbaugh, former dean at the University of Michigan’s architecture and planning school, agrees on the need, but underlines the difficulties
“Design education in general needs revamping,” Kelbaugh said. “The challenge is to bring great urbanism and great architecture together.”
This need is especially relevant today. More and more architects are undertaking huge projects across the globe that call on them to act as both architects and master planners. But an architect is not a master planner. Not those who were educated in the past, anyway.
And really, that’s true of the present. I remember being an undergrad studying urban planning not long ago and I would walk from one end of campus to the other to get from the planning school to the architecture school. But I wasn’t trying to get to class or hear a lecture. i was going there to meet friends. In my own education, the two realms of planning and architecture had virtually no interaction at the academic level.
The challenge is to bridge the gap. This doesn’t necessarily mean that planners should be designing trusses or that architects should be drafting housing policies. But they should at least be able to understand the importance of each, and understand how the micro and the macro of the other fields are inseparable. The change all starts with education, and educators who understand how these fields have failed to fully integrate in the past.
-
The Aging City | Nov 8th at 11:04am
During the talk titled An Agenda for Urban Design Education, I was pleasantly surprised when Taner Oc of the University of Nottingham brought up the needs of aging citizens in cities. In Nottingham, they now have more residents over the age of 65 than under the age of 16—a trend, he says, that is prevalent in many European cities. In the U.S., there are 76 million baby boomers and one of them turns 50 every seven seconds. By 2026, the population of Americans over 65 will have doubled to 71.5 million.
Some people live in cities by choice, Oc says, but “quite a few of them are there because they are trapped there.” Seniors are increasingly among that latter category. Many would love to age in place gracefully, but they cannot successfully access the city or even their own homes, in many cases, due to poor design consideration. In the U.S., our design answer for the aging is frequently the exurban Continued Care Retirement Community. The building type is fueled, literally, by a car-culture carrying its elders out to pasture. Oc put forth the idea of “greening the gray city” and reminded us to remember the needs of all when crafting a vision for the future city.
-
Smokin’ | Nov 8th at 10:51am
During several of my conversations over the last two days, the metaphor of smoking has been brought up. One conference attendee raised it in the context of design research. The ban on smoking came only after years of intensive research proved that cigarettes were dangerous, she noted, and after political advocacy pushed the non-smoking agenda. We knew that smoking was bad for us, we got it on some level, but it took decades to tip the scales. Today, she argues, we need to apply that same rigor to researching design problems and to making the connection between the built environment and public health.
This morning Clive Doucet, Councilor from the City of Ottawa, Canada gave an impassioned talk about the need for more walkable communities. He told stories about the vibrancy and health of the streetcar neighborhood where he grew up and still lives, and he contrasted that experience to the newer, Big Box sprawl developments of today. “The shopping centers we’re building now are called Power Centers and you could land a B52 in them,” he said. “They make our old malls look like community centers.”
This development is driven, of cource, by an artery of highways, what Doucet calls the “trillion dollar heart of our carbon problem.” The streetcars are long gone, but the sprawl continues. “I don’t believe it’s really understood even by the talented people today how grave the impact of the decline of the streetcar was for cities,” he added.
After the talk, I spoke briefly with Stephen Goldsmith, a former Harvard Loeb fellow and an extremely articulate thinker on cities. In his wonderful way of synthesizing problems, he connected our car culture to—you guessed it—smoking. “Cars are the new cigarette. We have to teach people that cars are cancerous.”
-
Apocalypse Now! (and what that means for urban design students) | Nov 8th at 10:46am
The 2nd Saturday morning session is “An Agenda for Urban Design Education,” with speakers who had to have one to get their jobs. Luminary deans and chairs, with diverse backgrounds and constituencies, crowded the speakers’ table and delivered dense, compact, mixed topic talks of 10 minutes or so each. You could do far worse that to find the recorded versions of these, once they are available, and listen in.
Sudeshna Chatterjee discussed the great challenges of rethinking how to build cities in a dramatically changing north-south world, where her students want more examples in the literature from the global south. Doug Kelbaugh wants the design professions to study together in an interdisciplinary studio setting before settling on whether they want an MUD, MArch, MUP, etc. And those studios should depart from the traditional practice of an isolated building in a greenfield to study infill in mixed-profession settings. He concluding with the bold statement that the new urbanism is often bad architecture while the starchitecture culture is often terrible urbanism, so his dream is that education should combine the best of the two. Unclear was whether he pursued this agenda in his many years as dean of the architecture and planning school at Michigan, or if he plans to do so in his new capacity as the director of urban design in the Dubai-based firm Limitless.
The other speakers revisited these and related aspects of curriculum and professional evolution. As architects, the language tended toward literary and image-laden, and a bit light on either the details or prospects for actual change.
My take? Parsing the substance and consequences of these quick-take big-picture agendas is tricky, and probably unfair. Several mentioned how traditional urban design education doesn’t fit modern times so well as the world it was designed for, and by, not least with the impending prospects—if not doom—of a warming planet. There was wide agreement that urban designers would benefit from greater attention to sustainability considerations, working and learning with other disciplines, and keeping their eye on the ball. Where the ball is getting hot. Getting from here to there is the obvious question.
In that spirit, the rest of the day is devoted to getting more concrete about all this. Let’s hope those steps address the literal as well as the figurative.
-
International Perspective on a Common International Problem | Nov 8th at 10:30am
We’re back in action on Saturday morning, much earlier than this blogger typically engages with urban ideas on a weekend, but it’s great to be involved nonetheless. The first panel covers programs being implemented in Shanghai, Ottowa, and Curitiba (Brazil). The difference in scale is amusing. Jiang Wu describes China’s plan to surround the 10 million person central city of Shanghai with 9 new edge cities of up to 800,000 people each. They intend to ply Shanghai with 1000 kilometers of Metrorail by 2020. The American planners swoon. I swoon. That’s a lot of rail.
Jonas Rabinovitch discusses the operation of the famous bus-rapid transit system of Curitiba, meanwhile, and Clive Doucet offers his thoughts on the tragedy that was the elimination of urban streetcar networks across North America. The contrast is interesting. There is room—there must be room—for massive new infrastructure investments. On the other hand, it’s sometimes the case that the first best policy is not to mess with the stuff that works.
For my money, moderator Andrew Altman asks the key question—as folks familiar with the actual operations of cities, how do you get your people to accept the necessary changes, of design, density, and transportation mode? Doucet says, rather unsatisfactorily, that no one knows how to get these things implemented. If that’s the case, we need to be spending our time on that question and little else. The what doesn’t matter without the how.
Wu, for his part, suggests that stronger municipal governments in China simplify planning decisions. And no doubt they do. But the winning answer comes from Rabinovitch. You get people to act, he says, by giving them an economic incentive to act. Only later do they develop their environmental conscience. And he’s right. We have a design problem with our cities, but that design problem has its roots in an institutional problem—in the rules that we set that encourage bad planning and bad behavior. It’s critical that we recognize the structural roots of the crisis at hand and take the necessity of their alteration seriously.
-
Necessity Makes a Frog Jump | Nov 8th at 10:02am
The Saturday morning session concerned “City Management,” and featured planners and architects with extensive experience working in the municipal governments of Shanghai, Ottawa, and Curitiba. The Ottawa discussion emphasized nostalgia. Mr. Doucet’s neighborhood used to have streetcars, powered by the city’s river, and the neighborhoods were designed around this system—since replace by buses and of course cars. He wishes we could go back, and his political efforts are aimed that way.The Shanghai discussion, by the deputy director general of its planning bureau, again talked about its 1966 plan, with particular detail on the 3 new cities now in place or under construction of the planned 9. One is a port, one a university city, and one a residential area that will be generating a new economic base. In each case, the idea is to decentralize some administrative and economic functions. In Shanghai, another refreshing argument, which we only hope can be true, was that that planning process is more thoughtful and reflective, and less rushed, than the pace of construction and plan-making might make appear. The Curitiba discussion reviewed its familiar BRT, organized around desired growth corridors, as well as waste management issues.
These are pretty different places administratively, and we unfortunately did not hear much in the way of war stories about the “management” part of these planning processes, which might have clarified the nature of both management failures and achievements. Still, it was quite refreshing and reassuring to hear that Curitiba’s planners made many mistakes and experienced much trial and error (though without the details). One can imagine this might mean that Curitiba’s results, widely admired and emulated across the world, may well include as much of the process negotiations than the resulting infrastructure and urban design products. That is, Curitiba was partly an incremental process of discovery in a rather unique governance and administrative setting (the country was under military rule at the time, so the political accountability of these decisions was not exactly a democratic one), a point on which I’ve written briefly before (by way of comparison with Bogota).
At the same time, those efforts were “ground truthed” to a great extent. Plans and their built counterparts work best when responding to underlying fundamentals, rather than mere fancy. Mr. Rabinovitch illustrated this with the Brazilian expression, “Necessity makes the frog jump.” This was useful as for some reason I had been thinking they did it just for fun.
- Page 1 of 5 1 2 3 > Last »
Are we seriously facing up to the issue of a world without oil? | Nov 8th at 9:59am
Jiang Wu, Deputy director General of Shanghai Urban Planning Administration describes building new cities to service Volkswagen and General Motors. Millions of people in a new city living in new towers building new cars.
Then they built a new city around a new harbour to handle the new bigger ships to send more goods to the rest of the world. The entire system is based on energy, primarily coal and oil.
I’m scared.
Clive Doucet describes how postwar development was so different from prewar. His vision of the future is the vision of Ottawa of his past, where the cops take the bus, where there are local farmers markets, walk to the pub, walk to the store, where the first thing you do is use your feet, not your car. While his presentation was a typical politician’s “all about me” , he was the first speaker that actually nailed what might be the crux of the solution- to look back to how we built our cities before oil.
I am encouraged, but doubt that one can build versions of downtown Ottawa to accommodate a billion Chinese.
I think of my walk down Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street. It is narrow, designed before cars. The older buildings have tall windows that all open. Many of the stores are vacant, and many of their upper floors appear to be too. A few are being converted to loft apartments, but there is a lot of space here. There are stores that could be reopened, upper floors that could be converted, adapted and renovated; there are roofs that could be inhabited or covered with solar collectors. There are parking lots that could be farmed.
Or the residential areas like the one shown above. Narrow lots, big windows, natural air conditioning provided by big old trees.
There is a lot of excess capacity here and as the recession does its work there will be more. There is excess capacity all over America, but it isn’t on the table. I wish there had been more talk about it.
