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Extra! Extra! Urban Design Revolution in Philadelphia! | Nov 9th at 9:25am

Posted by Lloyd Alter | 4

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.

Lloyd Alter has been an architect, developer, inventor, and builder of prefab housing. He now writes for TreeHugger and Planet Green, is an Associate Professor at Ryerson University teaching sustainable design, and has written for Azure and Ontario Nature magazines.