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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Exhibition Complements the Conference | Nov 7th at 1:46pm
The exhibition not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. It is powered by a temporary solar photovoltaic system, and its display lighting was designed from simple, basic materials like cheap Luxo knockoffs, track lighting and traffic cones. All printed materials are non-toxic and recycled.
congratulations to Maritza Mercado, and Jamie Montgomery and Amy Montgomery.
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The Importance of City Management | Nov 7th at 1:46pm
In a mid-morning discussion about three global cities (Philadelphia, New York, Durban), the idea came up that city management is more important than city design. This isn’t something you’d expect to hear from a group of urban designers, but the message is important. Unless there is a framework for redefining city form, any significant progress is unlikely to happen.
PlaNYC, New York City’s sustainability plan, is one example. With a clear and segmented shopping list of goals and programs, PlaNYC takes a very exacted approach to defining how the city should go about becoming sustainable. Rohit Aggarwala is director of the Mayor’s Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability in the City of New York, and is in charge of undertaking the programs outlined in PlaNYC—127 separate initiatives. This plan is obviously geared towards an end-goal of a more sustainable city. But in discussing its implementation, Aggarwala says the piecemeal nature of the plan and its 127 initiatives is what makes it so effective.
Other cities seem to agree, and are looking to New York’s plan as a model. Mark Alan Hughes, Director of Sustainability for the City of Philadelphia, He says these environmental and urban issues are too often treated like puzzles. For cities to make action on these issues, the place to start is in turning those puzzles into decisions. Sounds pretty easy, huh? In reality, things may not be as simple to solve, but Hughes says this framework process is where that can happen. Better management of city programs, then, can lead to the implementation of more intelligent city design.
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Lunch Speaker: Can an Ideal World be a Real World? | Nov 7th at 1:34pm
The distinguished UK Engineer Peter Head gave a fluid, elegant, wide-ranging talk on what the post-oil city might look like. Following a review of how we got here, he promoted higher densities and “eco” city strategies, and argued that China is among the most active in this regard, with pronouncements from its president and its support of such demonstration city-scale projects as Dongtan, near Shanghai. Brazil’s Curitiba and Colombia’s Bogota were also used as examples (mainly, I suppose, for their visionary mayors Lerner and Penalosa and their BRTs).Detailed and attractively rendered guidelines for urban design were flashed on the screen (probably available from www.arup.com), with particular emphasis on literally greening cities and suburbs with more vegetation on roofs and sides and roads (professional gardening is a growth industry in these scenarios). Transport alternatives fell into 3 categories: high speed rail, zero emission mass transit, and consolidated centers for freight delivery. His presentation included animated films showing how this might look and feel in downtowns and suburbs. One central theme was that this can be somewhat if not entirely self-financed, in that cheap-oil behaviors are now clearly economically inefficient. Accessing that surplus by reducing waste is at least possible, if it won’t happen as a matter of course.
The presentation was beautiful and the speaker articulate and extremely well informed. As a result, I am inclined to gloss over the many, many loose ends. Let’s just call it aspirational and leave it at that for the moment. Time to go to the next talk.
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The Aesthetics Issue | Nov 7th at 1:19pm
During a workshop on local urban design, K.T. Ravindran from the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi raised an interesting point. We had just seen presentations filled with futuristic-looking renderings of things like buildings with heliostats, and Ravindran responded, “In times of stress and change, it can be hard to absorb new forms.”
Robert Socolow addressed this same conundrum in his presentation at dinner last night. The state of New Jersey recently approved plans to construct a massive offshore wind farm in the Southern part of the state, but the news was dominated, Socolow noted, by the site of wind turbines on the seascape. The picture that ran with the story in The New York Times emphasized local fears that turbines would be an unsightly mar on the pristine seascape (never mind the existing scar of belching power plants on our landscape - we’ve apparently become blind to that):
Kenneth McCown, an architect and landscape architect based in Arizona, said that he has learned to tread carefully when presenting new ideas to communities. He intentionally downplays innovations and works to relate new forms to past precedents. In one instance, McCown referenced historical images of a town’s agricultural past to sell the idea of reintroducing urban farms to the cityscape.“People connect to an uncertain future when they can relate it to the past,” he said.
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Simple Solutions for Complex Problems | Nov 7th at 1:09pm
Himanshu Parikh thinks that it is dumb to pay more money to get energy efficient buildings. He thinks we should be paying far less.
He is particularly appalled by the first LEED Platinum building in the Middle East, covered in glass. Instead, he proposes simple technologies, noting all the ways that simpler is the better way:
simpler the faster
simpler the cheaper
simpler the easier to build
simpler the more equitable.
simpler the more beautiful.It takes a smart architect to build a dumb building. Instead, LEED and other systems don’t don’t encourage simplicity, natural ventilation, traditional ways of building as we did before electricity. They build smart buildings with elaborate controls that need lots of smart people to maintain.
That is why Independence Hall in Philadelphia has high double hung windows; air and natural light penetrate deeply. Yet as one commenter noted, looking around the room in Houston Hall, there were venetian blinds blocking the windows and lights turned on, there was air conditioning running and windows closed. The room worked perfectly well a hundred years ago without these technologies and it could be doing it right now.
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“We’ve bumped up against the limits of their 20th century thinking.” | Nov 7th at 12:54pm
After the morning plenary, Dr. Judith Rodin spent a few minutes answering questions from a small group of journalists, where she told this story: Soon after becoming university president here at Penn, in 1994, she heard a visiting lecturer talk about this new idea of “globalization.” Then, it was something of significant concern not for America but for the rest of the world—a world soon to be awash in blue jeans and American movies. Her story was meant to illustrate the urgency and potency of Rockefeller’s overarching strategy of “Smart Globalization,” which weaves healthcare with climate change, agricultural technologies with urban planning (and this conference). But, coming off the morning plenary, it caught me at a weak moment, given the—to put it frankly—desperation of David Orr, Adil Najam, and Elizabeth Kolbert. (It’s terrifying to hear of ten-year mitigation plans launched five years ago.)
The scope of interconnectedness this presents is overwhelming—not least to the ways in which we talk about, and build, the city. It only emphasizes again the uncomfortable inadequacy of the past century’s urban planning toolbox. (Rodin, this morning: “Today we’ve bumped up against the limits of their 20th century thinking.”)
So if two hours ago I asked what we talk about when we talk about cities, the answer (so far) is: we talk about the world. Not merely to identify the specter of climate change, but to begin to recognize cities as global organisms. (And that is a shockingly different singular image than the Jacobsean one that dominates today.) In a room dominated by designers, planners, and urban thinkers, Najam asked,“We’re going to spend the day as people who think about cities thinking about climate. But how do people who think about climate think about cities?”
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Systems Thinking | Nov 7th at 12:46pm
I just came from my second workshop of the morning, a session on local urban design, and I am seeing several themes rising to the surface at the conference. One theme that keeps bubbling up is the idea of systems thinking and scale. How do we begin to redefine our approach to existing systems in an age of peak oil? How can we create new design hierarchies, new measurements of building performance, new financial and cultural models that embrace our challenges and foster an ethos of responsibility?
Alex Washburn, Chief Urban Designer for the city of New York, put it this way: “Cities are a confluence of politics, finances, and design and design is often the weakest. The window of opportunity for design opens and closes quickly, so when that window opens, we need to be prepared to rush in.”
And HOW we rush in as design professionals is key. It is imperative to recognize the advocacy role that designers can play in the other two legs of Washburn’s three-legged stool: politics and financing. He pointed out that we have just federalized two U.S. mortgage banks and that we are embarking on legislature for major infrastructure renewal in the U.S. We have an opportunity to restructure our mortgage system so that it supports local efficiency and favors mortgages that rebuild existing structures and encourage walkable communities (an idea that David Orr shared in his opening remarks earlier this morning). Washburn served under Patrick Moynihan in the Senate for a time, and he recounted how many times plans for major systems were decided in a room void of an architect or a designer. “I would challenge every designer to take a sabbatical in government and be a part of the decisions as they hang in the balance.”
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The Burden of the Design Profession | Nov 7th at 12:22pm
Gita Goven, Jonathan Marvel, and Jose Picciotto all gave presentations on the work that their design firms create. Apparently buildings account for almost HALF of carbon emissions — and so it’s amazing to realize what a burden designers have to help correct the problems cities are facing. Goven, Marvel, and PIcciotto are all doing amazing work — green fantasylands in Brooklyn, efficient buildings in Mexico, and affordable housing in South Africa — but are they the exceptions or the rule? The design profession seems fully aware of climate change and yet so many of the other people responsible for buildings and zoning (ie the political realm) must be fairly oblivious. How else to explain why sprawl persists? Or why buildings are still being built that have no natural ventilation? Just two examples.
All this has made me wonder if maybe we don’t actually believe — as a larger society — that sprawl is bad or that air conditioners are part of the problem.
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Looking at the Big Picture | Nov 7th at 11:48am
I’m currently enjoying a session on regional urban planning featuring Dinesh Mohan, who is a professor in the Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. Mohan has made a number of excellent points concerning the structure of cities in shaping vehicle speeds and willingness to walk and use transit, and the extent to which those variables influence both carbon output and public safety. These are issues that Jane Jacobs popularized—that if we don’t make city structures inviting to people, to do all the things they do, then they’ll stay away, leaving the streets for automobiles with all of the associated safety and environmental issues.
I am struck, however, by one idea that Mohan has pressed. He suggests that underground transit does nothing to impede automobile flow, but merely increases supply. As such, driving is not much reduced by transit construction. He thinks, in fact, that rapid, high-capacity transit inside cities is not a good use of money.
I can’t agree with this, for several reasons. For one thing, increased transportation supply is desirable, for its own sake. Cities are economic engines that bring resources together to create wealth. This is a good thing, and fast, effective transit is an excellent means to keep economies healthy in a green fashion. But it’s also important to take a view of transit that considers a bigger picture. Improved transit systems reduce the relative cost of taking transit, compared to driving. This provides an incentive to shift land uses to take advantage of that improvement in relative costs—changes that can increase walking and biking. Where transit is used as a tool to alter the shape of cities, and this is increasingly a priority in many growing American cities, the economic and environmental return can be great. Denying people transit in big cities will lead them, by and large, to drive more. When congestion becomes an intolerable problem, those people may move closer to their jobs, but they may also move elsewhere, to a younger, more highway-rich city. Denying people good rapid transit is entirely counter-productive to the effort to build walkable blocks and reduce auto-dependency.
It’s also important to remember that transit is far less competitive than it should be, relative to driving, because of the favoritism we show to automobiles. We allow drivers to use roads at no cost in most cases, leading to congestion. We provide massive volumes of parking. We build at low densities that make walking problematic.
The city structures Mohan discusses are vital, and they are intimately connected to transit. Each helps shape the other, and neither should be viewed as a solution in and of itself.
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Is admitting you have a problem the first step toward recovery? Or just a confession? | Nov 7th at 11:37am
Full disclosure: I’m here under false pretenses. I’m no journalist. I am a teacher and ivory tower kind of guy, with an amateur, unsupervised blog on the side for venting excess research steam. That blog is about what we don’t know about how cities work, succeed and fail, followed by unprocessed (and un-reviewed) brainstorming about how we might know more. It is about clarifying the questions, first, and the credibility of our attacks on those questions, second.
For that purpose, big questions with weak literatures work best. Climate change and urban design will do nicely.
This is an interesting set of issues not least because in many minds the solutions are already fairly clear, so the issue then becomes how to get there. I am deeply curious how far beyond this conventionally primitive assessment this conference will take us.
What is the problem?
The opening session included a brief presentations from Gary Hack, the immediate past dean of Penn Design, and Judith Roden, president of the sponsoring Rockefeller Foundation and past president of Penn, who set the stage by reference both to the 1958 Penn/RF conference—given credit for various influential late 20th century urban design initiatives—and the oil and urban crises of the 70s, and so on. Both linked these continuing challenges and debates to the challenges of the new century, not least climate change.
The first panel aimed to clarify the extent and nature of climate challenges.
Kolbert reminded us of many of the central trends, and some implied policy directives. Najam further emphasized the distributional consequences of these issues, along several dimensions. There are lots and lots of constituencies with competing goals. There are winners and losers, and transition issues. That is, there are economic, political, and social tradeoffs. While Orr challenged politicians to do the right thing, and assessed the problem as the consequences of our behaviors partly explained by priorities and distorted incentives, Najam implicitly clarified the difficulty of this and what that suggests about the prospects for real change. (His slide presentation was distractingly animation-heavy though.)
Knee-Jerk, I mean Real Time Blog Reaction
What I am not hearing are serious proposals for institutional and political reform, or even discussions of the feasibility of such efforts. I suppose the function of this opening panel is to put the key concerns and questions on the table for discussion in the breakout sections.
But in the very brief audience Q&A, a question from William Rees nailed a similar point in saying something along the lines of: “I’m concerned that there seems to be a great gulf between the urgency of the problem and the solutions we appear to be willing to make.” The panel response hesitantly emphasized the sensitive psychology of this tradeoff, and the value of making small, significant progress/victories. And the lack of political will. Caution was expressed about “large solutions,” that seem to accomplish much with relatively little effort and broad-base buy-in.
In other words, good question.
As more context, a key problem with this literature is not that it reasonably paints a grim picture of the consequences of an oil-dependent world economy, but that it tends to oversimplify how then to proceed in practice or theory—with respect to either mitigation or adaptation. Stop sprawl. Get people out of the cars (especially the Chinese and Indians, and Los Angelenos). Move us into compact, mixed use communities. ASAP. But each of these represents huge, extremely problematic tradeoffs that must be productively negotiated with full attention to the competing constituencies at each step of the way. It would be great if that wasn’t so but as H.L. Mencken said, “For every complex problem, there is a simple solution. And it’s wrong.”
Let’s see how the breakout sessions draw this out, or cut it different ways.
