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.
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The future of automobility | Nov 7th at 5:19pm
Moderator Charles Waldheim wonders about the future of automobility, and how we will design our city after the car is gone. I must confess that I thought this was the single biggest question of this conference, the issue that defines the nature of urban development in our culture.
Surprisingly, the question has rarely come up so far in the sessions that I have attended. Perhaps it is because not many of the architects at this conference actually believe that we are going to have to live without automobility.
Stephen Kierans suggests that we are not going to get rid of cars, they may be different but without them we will not be able to get to any of the places that we built that depend on them.
Lance Hosey suggests that we think about cars because they are destroying our atmosphere but we can’t forget that we should think about how cars are destroying our cities. He actually thinks that it is crazy to that people hold up the Prius as an example of how technology will save us, when in fact the Smart Car gets better mileage with less input, less technology. It is just smaller. We don’t necessarily need fancy new technologies, just better and smarter distribution of resources. But he still thinks we are going to have cars.
Jason Bregman looks forward to the day that we have all those little cars as storage units that can become part of the national energy grid, we don’t have to get rid of cars, we just have to make them part of the system.
I frankly am a bit shocked. I would have thought that the single biggest factor affecting urban design in the age after oil is the virtual elimination of private cars, replaced by denser, walkable cities, transit and bicycles. I am a bit surprised. Are you?
Lance Hosey on automobility
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“Now what about the social?” | Nov 7th at 5:17pm
It’s clear by mid-afternoon that the trajectory of the day will bring us from crisis to urban understanding—if not all the way to solution.
At lunch, Peter Head presented Arup’s invigorating vision of happy eco cities circa 2050—all the way through to suburban garages turned to vegetable stalls and big city buildings bragging about their energy conservation on electronic billboards. (The one downer was the news that Dongtan, Arup’s prized Shanghai eco-city project, is on temporary hold. “I think these projects will move forward, but I suspect they’ll not move forward as fast as we expected,” as Head put it.)
The post-lunch plenary was about understanding more than action. (Or, as Richard Saul Wurman put it, “What you heard before was action. Mine is non-action.”) For Wurman, that takes the form of 19-20-21—19 cities of more than 20 million people in the 21st century—his multi-platform project asking “the same questions of cities, so we can display the answers similarly.” “How can we fix what we don’t fully understand?” For James Higgins, a GIS specialist from ESRI, it’s the mapping tools that are the key piece of the process. “We build software that allows you to abstract the world to make decisions,” he explained. But this challenge is a powerful acknowledgment of the complex, polyvalent nature of the city—and the need to understand it before we can change it. For example, Higgins was recently in Doha, Qatar—a new city that, despite its newness, has no single, same-scale map of its wastewater, roads and electricity infrastructures, Higgins said. So forget (for the next 42 years) Arup’s eco-city; this is about a basic understanding of what’s there at all, before the infrastructural change can come.
So here’s where it ends up for me: the presentations have more in common than not. We agree more than we disagree; there is a remarkable overlap of interests, attitudes, technologies. Presentation after presentation, speaker after speaker, the same diagrams are clicking by on the big screens, the same calls for integrated flows, for common solutions for China and London, of hope for an Obama energy policy. And so at the afternoon breakout session on “Local Urban Design,” Martin Haas, a partner at Behnisch Architects, took the stage, thought for a moment about the previous presentations (flows, common solutions in China, London and San Francisco…) and said, with precision: “Ok. All the technical elements of sustainability are in place. We can implement them. Now what about the social?” -
Design After the Mindframe of Oil | Nov 7th at 4:32pm
Peak oil is the idea that we have passed the point of maximum extraction of oil from the world. Some say this day is coming soon. Others say it has already come. Both agree that oil will not be around forever. The point of this symposium is to figure out a way for cities to react as it runs out. But the problem is not the time frame, its the mindframe.
This is an interesting way to digest the oil issue, and it was mentioned briefly during a presentation by architect Lance Hosey. He is Director at McDonough Partners, a firm well known for its environmental design innovations, and his point is that lifestyles and habits are probably the greater hurdle over which we all must leap to kick the oil habit. Oil running out might help get the shift moving, but at its core, this shift is a personal one—meaning it has to be a shift within people.
Lifestyle changes take a while. We are starting to see some movement along these lines, though, and this movement is surprisingly not solely a result of rising oil prices. Vehicle miles traveled (VMT) actually started to dip before oil prices began to rise in late 2007. That drop continued as oil prices continued to rise above three, four or even five dollars. These prices are falling again, and though there are fears that John and Jane Gastank will now revert to their guzzling ways, many expect the downward trend of VMT to continue.
People seem to have remembered that they like places where they can walk. They’ve also become more sensitive to environmental problems and the behaviors that cause them. These are the sorts of mindframe shifts that are going to be necessary if our culture is going to be able to react to a world in which oil is no longer the rule.
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The Smartest Guys in the Room | Nov 7th at 3:53pm
Watching Alex Steffen and Richard Saul Wurman perform is an experience. They are both accomplished, talented raconteurs and they know it.
Alex Steffen doesn’t talk about carbon anymore. He doesn’t bother telling a roomful of architects and planners about density or insulation. He has gone beyond that and expects that we all have as well.
After we have insulated all of our houses and rebuilt our cities, we are going to have to start thinking about the hard stuff.
About how we make things so that we can take them apart. About green chemistry. How we are going to have the kind of transparency that lets us know if we are buying blood diamonds or rainforest wood. About how we have think about our patterns of consumption, shared goods and lasting quality.
And, we have to learn what makes us happy.
Alex’s curiosity and intelligence are reflected in Worldchanging, which continues to be the smartest and most sophisticated discussion of the issues that face us.
Richard Saul Wurman describes himself as a stupid man. “I am not very smart, and my ignorance is terrific. I embrace my stupidity. I am also very curious. I have written 81 books that are the journey of the tango between my curiosity and my stupidity.”
That is why he is doing something as stupid as the 19.20.21 project, ” a multi-year multimedia initiative to collect, organize and better understand population’s effect regarding urban and business planning”
Both are visionaries who are looking far beyond the obvious. Alex Steffen sees the big picture and can riff about anything affecting our planet. Richard Saul Wurman? He is already on another planet.
I feel sorry for James Higgins, who had to follow these acts.
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Greening Los Angeles and Shanghai: How and Would it Matter? | Nov 7th at 3:37pm
LA’s own distinguished Tridib Banerjee (I forget where he works) is speaking in the afternoon “Regional Urban Design” break out group about alternative futures for his city. Starting with a early 20th century plan by FL Olmsted, which was park-heavy and livability-friendly but never implemented, he’s going through other scenarios. For example, what if each city had to provide for its own “fair share” of the region’s growth and, critically, the new development was limited to only 2% of its land? That is the premise of the region’s metropolitan planning organization’s (SCAG) current “2%” plan. One version of a solution to this puzzle is much higher densities along the major transportation corridors. Is this post-oil? He’s not sure; but maybe.
On to India and Tata motors. India is motorizing rapidly, if not at Chinese rates, still at a pace that is crowding roads and parking spaces. Tata expects to sell 250k Nanos annually in India. Opposition to this trend is reminiscent of objections to working class families suburbanizing in the US in the post-WWII period. Another tradeoff that seems easy on an abstract level, less so at a human scale.
Another speaker is Lin Wang, a Harvard Loeb fellow this year but normally the head of Urban Design and Historic Preservation in Shanghai (a quite challenging job I’m sure, as they are bulldozing seemingly with abandon). She starts with a great photo of the Shanghai skyline revealing maybe a couple of hundred skyscrapers in a few square miles, with the smaller ones probably hidden. She is emphasizing how populations and densities have risen. 8,000 skyscrapers currently. A shift from a 40% urbanization rate to 90% now. Roughly 20 million population now. Photos of Pudong in 1996, 2003, 2005 and now, all quite different. (The highest building, “the bottle opener,” is just completed.) No photo from 20 years ago because there was nothing much there. What, she asks, when they all have cars? Can you imagine? Then, she says, to some groans from the audience, it’s not realistic to think we can stop it, so what to do?
Ms. Wang presents the “urban strategy,” starting with the 1966 urban plan. Which I though meant in the year 1966 but it turns out “1” refers to the central city, “9” to the 9 new cities, or subcenters—such as Pudong—where the district administration centers are (some of these new cities have a population of 1 million), “60” to new towns, and “6” to the number of central villages (population around 2 thousand, organized around farming villages in the county), an effort to modernize rural villages.
The strategy is thus a hierarchy of places, and then roadways. 15 minutes to the expressway system, 30 minutes from new towns to the expressways, and so on. The subway system is being rapidly expanded from 19 lines of 1000 kilometers to 32 and 1500 by 2010, with 120 stations under construction.
Finally, 2318 buildings are considered historic, in 41 historic districts of 44 square kilometers. Roads will not be widened in these areas, and parking will not be added. Additional landscaping is also in store for some areas of the Bund, now under construction.
The discussant is William Rees, a population ecologist—perhaps best known for his promotion of the ecological footprint framework—from U.British Columbia. He says he’s scared of what’s happening in Shanghai, etc. In comparing these places, he focuses on two numerical indicators: material/resource flows, and relative rates of consumption.
Rees rejects Banerjee’s distinction between LA as a single big city or a network of cities, as being immaterial to the broader ecological impact issue. His presentation is “getting serious about urban sustainability.” The framing premise if that cities face any number of grim threats, quoting Martin Oppenheimer “Today’s city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.” Second, “the anomalous, unsustainable oil-based expansion of the human enterprise.” Text of next slide: “Result: A World of Overshoot”. Followed by, “As presently conceived and designed, cities are not complete (human) ecosystems” with subtitle “Enclosed in a bell-jar, any city would simultaneously starve and suffocate.” His point, cities should be defined to include the necessary ecosystem. Next slide, “In biophysical terms, cities are parasitic ...” The next slides clarify that what he means is that cities acquire resources, then dissipate them. So the big problem is waste management. Thankfully, his first concrete examples are not US cities.
His answer: We must give up on material wealth. Question: Can we do this? Second question, if not, what does that mean? Here’s the US example—US cities must reduce their ecological footprint by 80%. But note: this is not anti-city, only a critique of “how we do them.” Such as think of them as bio-productive regions. A number of more political recommendations follow. More independent and self-contained, in a manner that makes them more accountable for the consequences of their resource use.
My quick take: There is a muddled mix here of positive and normative; of the facts and what to do with them. The factual part is the strongest by a long shot. These are, in many respects, straightforward accounting models of resource, energy and waste flows (admittedly, with lots of uncertainty as we project into the future). The normative is the weaker, without a doubt, which is almost always the case—but worth hearing through to be sure. Still, might be clearer if we labeled assertions about facts differently than assertions about right and wrong.
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Problems With Scale | Nov 7th at 3:31pm
For cities to operate well, city functions need to operate at the same scale. Mismatching scales create broad problems for the “system” of a city, and especially for those trying to manage the city form.
James Higgins, a regional manager at the mapping software firm ESRI cites the example of Doha, Qatar. This is a middle-eastern city that is undergoing a huge wave of growth. He showed a picture of downtown Doha, with dozens of high-rises under construction. The problem is that the infrastructure for each of these buildings was constructed at different scales. It all uses the same physical space, but the way it was constructed and the ministries involved in approving it and collecting information about it is disjointed. Without a united way of controlling this data and construction, the city has been left with a jumble of fully constructed infrastructure within its skeleton that can’t interact at a managerial-level.
Uniform scales would clearly play an important role in some of the physical aspects of cities. But how do you get there? That’s a question Richard Saul Wurman hopes to answer. The geographer, author and founder of the TED conference is working on 192021 aimed at creating unified scales to map and record data about cities. None of the major cities of the world records the same data about itself in the same way, making comparisons difficult. This is an especially big problem, considering the common theme running through this conference that the cities of the world have to work with each other to address the urban implications of climate change (and the climate change implications of urban development).
But, as Wurman stresses, the problem of incomparable data is just a symptom of a sickness that is in essence caused by the problem of scale mismatch. These cities aren’t mapped to the same scale. Without this relation, information about cities can’t accurately compare.
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Can We Get There From Here? | Nov 7th at 3:27pm
There has been no shortage of big ideas at the conference, so far. At our lunch session Peter Head, an expert on eco-city design, presented slides showing magnificent vistas of green cities—literally green—with buildings sheathed entirely in food crops and energy producing algae systems, tree canopies covering streets without cars, and suburbs emptied of asphalt. Much of it, said Head, was or would soon be commercially viable. And indeed, very little of the actual technology presented was unknown to us. The problem, or at least the missing link, is execution.
Head highlighted China’s commitment to eco-city construction. Building wisely is entirely in China’s interest, given the resource demands of its growing economy. China also has plenty of opportunities to try out new ideas. In a country where millions of migrants from the countryside flock to mega-cities every year, experimenting with an 80,000 person town or two, dedicated entirely to renewable technologies, is no big deal. In America, by contrast, the challenges are different. Our cities are older, and mostly built-out. Any significant change in such cities will require an overhaul in places where navigation of building codes to erect a conventional building is difficult enough. Whether in New York City, where tower battles occasionally turn epic, or in a typical suburb, where homeowners are likely to fight tooth and nail over the design of a mail-box or the shade of paint employed by a neighbor, the probable resistance to a wholesale rethink of our building techniques is daunting.
The same problem reared its head in the afternoon plenary, where TED founder Richard Saul Wurman entertained us with a series of amusing stories. Wurman is an idea man, an individual with a knack for seeing solutions where others didn’t realize there were problems. During his talk, he let them rip. “Why do cities build schools?” He asked. “They should just require any new building to add two floors for classrooms at the top. Then the city never has to pay for class space, and students have the whole city as a schoolyard.” (This is paraphrasing; my note-taking skills aren’t that impressive.) “I mean, come on,” he said, “it doesn’t take a committee.”
But it does take a committee! Our institutions are sometimes of very high quality and sometimes not, but none of them are built for rapid, revolutionary change.
And this is a significant problem. Throughout the talks today, the ability of our planners and our innovators has become clear. The ideas are there and often brilliant; the technologies are there and often far more advanced than we imagine. If only our political leaders would place these people in charge, we would see monumental changes in no time at all.
But our political leaders are not going to do this. As such, we need to make sure that we focus on political innovations as much as technological innovations. We need to wow political groups with the do-ability of our ideas, as much or more so than their cleverness.
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Form, Function or What? | Nov 7th at 3:13pm
The plenary afternoon session, titled “Post-carbon thinking,” had themes of action, information and using data, in that order. AID.Steffens’ talk was one of the clearest use of ppt slides in recent memory, each slide composed of a handwritten drawing in its center and some handwritten bullet points on a white page. Mostly white space. Your eye was drawn to the drawing and the one or two sentence fragments. Simple, clean, unambiguous, unconfusing. Each was on the screen for a couple of minutes, long enough to read and mostly absorb the point. Then on to the next. The presentation was mainly the associated verbage, with this trim, focused illustration to maintain one’s attention. Content? Something about living post-carbon. Radical transparency. The political economy didn’t fit the presentation style quite as well as the initial action proposals. I am stealing the slide style though, next time I only want one idea per slide.
“Time and distance change. It was insane!” This was a 50+ year old complaint recalled for us by the “information architect” Richard Saul Wurman about a road atlas he wanted to use when driving across the country. Not only were the states in alphabetical order, geography be damned, fitting each page on a single page or two meant the scales were different. He subsequently turned his take on the conventional way information is too often organized into a useful (and hence lucrative) series of products over the decades that organized data “less stupidly.” His current project is 19.20.21 (he claims the starting number 19 is simply a marketing device. Marketing is emerging as a keen angle on the topic of information, no less for urban design & climate change), referring to 19 cities of over 20 million in the 21st century, is a compilation of mapped info at the same scale for this cities.
In these slides, form mostly trumped function. The flash animation was sharp and the type small but certainly quite pretty. The project’s 2 minute promotional video (with its emo/nu jazz soundtrack) would be a great way to introduce world cities to my freshman lecture class, but it is Wurman’s argument for how to see things that was the most distinctive part of the conference so far. Another quote: “We can’t be smug about our facts.” Meaning we think we know but in many cases the “facts” are just place holders until we know better, which will almost certainly happen before we know it. The other side of this observation is that the most obvious is often overlooked, a perspective behind many of his projects.
But it will be the sophisticated, slick, Apple-quality graphics (an Apple ad man is a project partner) that will catch the eye. We’ll have to wait to see how the content compares with the branding. I suppose a valid question is how the difference between brand and content might matter, and how the former strengthens (or weakens) the latter.
p.s. I ran into Wurman later and spontaneously gave him my card and volunteered to work pro-bono on his project. Was that wise?
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The Role of the University | Nov 7th at 2:57pm
One of the key goals of this conference is to draft a manifesto on where urban design education must go in the future. Tomorrow, we will sit down as a group and parse this question. I’m going to jump the gun here and suggest one of the answers. Universities need to be more than just good neighbors, they need to become advocates for and partners in creating a sustainable city. The university must become the idea lab, the researcher, and the generator for the local community.
You can see this already happening in several instances. David Orr talked this morning about the plans at Oberlin College to revitalize the surrounding neighborhood with renewable energy sources, living systems from John Todd, new cultural containers, and infrastructure. More than just opening up their campus to the city, they are extending the boundaries of their work into the community to change the landscape.
I just got out of a session on engineering and product design and Robert Harris of ENVIRON and a professor at Princeton talked about a nonprofit in Trenton called Isles. Founded in 1981 by a group of Princeton students, Isles works with local residents to foster community planning, financial self-reliance, education, real estate development, and environment and community health.
They are now developing a physical Center for Environmental and Energy Training, which will teach people how to do energy audits, weatherize homes, and install photovoltaic panels—the kind of Green Collar jobs that Van Jones espouses. Harris’ students are working with Isles to help renovate this mill building to LEED silver. It will house the nonprofit’s offices as well as the green collar job training center. “It will be an example to all of Trenton as to how the rehabilitation of such buildings has to occur,” Harris said. “We can’t bulldoze them under and fill up landfills.”
“My class is now working with the design team. It will be a teaching tool,” he added.
Universities are ideally positioned to play a role in providing research and design services, true, but more than that, students can be an excellent conduit for community buy in. I spoke with Ellen Dunham-Jones, Director of the Architecture Program at Georgia Tech, and she told me that students have a way of diffusing heated meetings where residents bump up against designers and planners. Student engagement actually mitigates angst. “They have no horse in the race,” she said, so people tend to listen to what they have to say.
I will also throw out another challenge to this group as they think about the new curriculum. Don’t forget public education. Anyone who has read the report Rising Above the Gathering Storm about the state of science, technology, engineering, and math education in the United States cannot help but be alarmed. We are spending more on tort litigation in this country than we are on scientific research. Our students are not prepared to address the emerging needs of our increasingly technical world and our curricula is not engaging them in real-world problem solving. How can we start to bring design education into the public school system in a real way?
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The Prius Effect | Nov 7th at 2:12pm
Alex Steffen, Executive Editor and co-founder of Worldchanging, is talking right now about ways individuals can mitigate their own consumption. He brings up an interesting and simple observation that several of the speakers have raised: few of us understand our own daily energy consumption. How many kilowatt hours do we use? How much are we paying per kWh? Steffen says:
“When we put the energy meter on the inside of the house, the household energy use goes down by 7%. Just by showing people their use of energy.”
David Orr took the idea of kWh transparency a step further. “We are not as rich as we said we were,” Orr noted about the recent economic collapse in the U.S. Orr advocates that we understand the true cost of things, like what we’re really paying per kWh. If you add in the governmental money that subsidizes mountaintop removal in West Virginia for coal mines, if you add in the the cost of the healthcare to cover cancer from living downwind of the power plant, the true cost per kWh is much, much higher.
Steffen just called this kind of transparency the Prius Effect—when drivers have their mileage meters inside and can understand how the fuel is spent, they become more thoughtful drivers. By revealing useage behind the scenes, we can help individuals see connections. We understand the price at the pump, it’s time to understand the cost at the thermostat as well.
