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.
-
The Governance Crisis | Nov 8th at 9:55am
Clive Doucet gave a riveting presentation about his city of Ottawa. What struck me most about what he had to say was that there is a crisis of governance—in his country and others. I keep thinking back to what Judith Rodin said yesterday about “bold ideas.” In 2006, during a transit strike during the most brutal December weather, anyone who wanted to enter Manhattan during peak hours had to carpool—4 to a car—and streets shared the road (not the bike lane) with bicyclists. It was the boldest, eco-friendly approach to NYC’s congestion that I’ve seen. Granted it lasted for just a few days, but I have always wondered why NYC doesn’t institute some kind of similar program year-round.
As Andy Altman from Philadelphia sat up there on the panel, I wanted to ask him if he thought Philly was ready for an equally bold approach to radically changing the way people get around the city. But the panel ended too soon.
-
Hey, Good Lookin’ | Nov 8th at 9:46am
It’s almost a given that everything we build from now on is going to need to be energy efficient. As the problems of climate change and limited energy resources become more evident, building with energy in mind is increasingly accepted by the design community. There’s ideological buy-in, and the costs of designing and building for energy efficiency are starting to slide. But even the greenest building can’t be completely green when the lights stay on all night.
What is the role of interior design in achieving energy efficiency? That’s a question that’s surfaced a number of times during the symposium. The answer isn’t exactly clear, but what is clear is that aesthetic concerns can have a negative effect on energy efficiency.
In one of the opening addresses, climatologist Robert Socolow briefly wondered about how interior design—with its emphasis on lighting and creating atmosphere—counteracts energy initiatives in green buildings. Extensive lighting, in particular, is one of the most evident conflicts in these so-called “green buildings”.
The real question for the future of green buildings and cities is, as architect Lance Hosey asks, “Can we be as smart about how things look as we are about how they work?”
-
The Need for Research | Nov 8th at 8:07am
In an op-ed on Monday, New York Times columnist David Brooks predicted an Obama win and he speculated on the biggest challenge for his administration and our country: scarcity.
“In the next few years, the nation’s wealth will either stagnate or shrink. The fiscal squeeze will grow severe. There will be fiercer struggles over scarce resources, starker divisions along factional lines. The challenge for the next president will be to cushion the pain of the current recession while at the same time trying to build a solid fiscal foundation so the country can thrive at some point in the future. We’re probably entering a period, in other words, in which smart young liberals meet a stone-cold scarcity that they do not seem to recognize or have a plan for.”
The last thing anyone wants to hear right now is an idea about how to spend more federal dollars. It’s probably the fastest way to end a conversation with your elected official. But somehow we need to bridge the divide between the mounting problems and the need for solutions. We need a plan and that plan must include research.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to hear Barry Katz of IDEO talk about new product design. IDEO is a rare example of a company embracing an inclusive and smart approach to research. “It is an integrated approach,” Katz said. “It’s not just engineering [a product], it’s anthropology, history, design.” IDEO brings different disciplines together to circle around a problem and to find a research-driven solution. Katz himself is an historian, a title you don’t often find in a design firm.
Having a research-driven answer is something that the built environment sorely lacks. We rate buildings before they are up and running, we award designs before they are constructed, we have no effective way to measure building efficiencies after they are built. We cannot accurately frame the answers in many cases because we cannot honestly analyze and assess the problems.
An idea that has been circulating is the creation of a National Academy of the Built Environment, similar to the National Academy of Sciences, to do the kind of research and development that can make real inroads. The trick, of course, is getting the kind of political will needed to invest in research during a serious recession. How can you make the ROI argument? How can you convince others that an investment in the built environment and in cities is the smartest way to resolve our coming global crises?
The new Obama administration is going to come calling. They are going to look to urban designers for solutions about infrastructure and energy needs. If there is not a clear and articulate response, the window of opportunity will pass. Start to form your response now.
-
Rybczynski: “This green thing.” | Nov 7th at 11:54pm
The evening plenary, Getting the Message Out: Urban Design and 21st Century Media, was of obvious interest to me as a journalist—which also meant I walked in with my biases. (Joke.) I’ve been having a conversation in my head with Witold Rybczynski ever since reading his wonderful book, City Life, a decade ago. But if one of the things I’ve been tossing around over the course of today is how relevant the old (local) way of thinking about cities is to the new set of (global) problems, then I’m obligated to call out Rybczynski on a few things.
He showed his hand with his first words, when he referred to the topic of the day as “this green thing”—a phraseology that seemed the urban design equivalent of McCain’s “that one.” I was struck by his skepticism about the situation—not that the planet is warming, but rather that cities are inextricably linked with its future—and therefore the realm of architecture and urbanism critics. This doesn’t seem to me a matter of journalistic restraint, but rather a seismic shift in our beat—in what we cover when we cover cities. At one point, Inga Saffron, architecture critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer and moderator of the panel, asked Rybczynski if he believed critics will one day feel obliged to consider a building’s green credentials in its evaluation. “I think it is quite possible, and I think we’re probably getting there,” he responded, a bit unconvincingly.
It’s not clear to me why we’re not there already—if not for sanctimonious reasons, then for journalistic ones. Those of us who write about architecture and cities are sitting on the story of the century. Buildings and cities are relevant in new ways. They have political and scientific consequences that capital-A architecture—and its critics—are only slowly coming to terms with.
Not that these are easy stories to tell. On the same panel, New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin explained the challenge of covering something happening so slowly and amorphously. “Global science is all someday somewhere. Newspapers are about today,” he said. “These issues are the antithesis of the stuff we’ve been calling news for the last 150 years.”
-
The Sustainability of Green Journalism | Nov 7th at 9:13pm
The closing plenary session for day 1 of this conference had a full roster of interesting, articulate people, mostly writers focused on communication about urban design and/or climate change. It was soothing to imagine that many such newspapers, magazines, and other outlets had the budget and sensibility to have folks like these on their staffs.Which I gather that is not the case, which raises the issue not only of how journalists can communicate with their readers and their editors, but whether they even have the time to pay any real attention at all to substantive issues of urban development. Most particularly when the issue is nuanced in its explanation, and murky in its implications for policy and implementation. Like, say, oh I don’t know, this one.
My favorite personal example is when I got a call from the LATimes last November, which I picked up running late to a meeting because I thought it concerned that meeting. I explained I would have to call back. “That’s ok, I really just have a quick question.” Ok, shoot. “What should we do about the nightmare that we call traffic in Los Angeles?” Um, that’s going to take more time than I have right now. “Ok, I’ll make it really quick. The mayor and governor announced a $100 million dollar program today to synchronize traffic signals in Los Angeles. Do you think that will solve the nightmare we call traffic in Los Angeles?” Um, no. (And that was my quote in the next day’s paper.)
I am quite glad to see print and electronic media with seasoned, informed “urban policy” reporters and analysts, but I worry this is far from representative. And I don’t know who to blame. Certainly the LATimes reporter was a real pro. It’s not his attention span, I would venture to guess, so much as his deadline schedule.
And we expect the press to educate us—and our constituents in elected office, the professions and the neighborhood—about how to design cities to mitigate and adapt to climate change?
One argument is that we need to make this issue more pressing for editors, publishers and readers alike. Without crying wolf or losing credibility some other way.
-
The water cooler buzz | Nov 7th at 7:08pm
Some of the best conversations happen over the break table. Juggling coffee, cookies, pamphlets, and bags, we gather to dissect what we just heard. I had a fast-paced conversation with a young landscape architect who has studied design after peak oil for four years. His concern about this conference is our seeming inability to get really honest about the hard truths. Elizabeth Kolbert opened the day outlining the stark realities about the rate of climate change, and several earlier posts on this site speak more to that. This designer felt that the subsequent sessions have not addressed those needs. He worries that we’re being too hopeful on some level. “Most people are talking about how to be a bit more sustainable,” he said, but we are not really contending with these harder truths. And if this group can’t have a come to Jesus moment, who can?
This is a challenging proposition. The human mind doesn’t like to wrap itself around dire predictions. We need some level of hope and a belief that we can remedy this individually and collectively. So how do we sound the alarm effectively? How do we learn to present the staggering truths to move toward the kind of real change that can offset these terrifying numbers?
-
Witold Rybcznski is the King of the Green One-liners | Nov 7th at 6:42pm
“A degree of skepticism is part of the territory. It is a questioning of many of the solutions proposed. If grass on the roof ok, why is grass on the front lawn so bad.?”
“We give prizes to buildings that don’t exist, that is like giving an Oscar to a movie that hasn’t been made.”
“Suddenly everyone is green, it is like the green fairy came in the night and touched us all.”
-
Getting the Message Out | Nov 7th at 5:47pm
Here’s a preview of the situation: design journalists attend conferences like this one all year long. They know how bad things are: how the world is in peril. They know how brilliant some of the architects, planners, designers and engineers are — and how hard it is for them to get the attention of the regular folks who don’t get this kind of information every day.
The question remains: how come the media haven’t turned the rest of the world into converts for change? Given the amount of information they put out there, how come they haven’t developed a voice that transmits the inconvenient truths with the urgency they require? Or maybe they do. And we just don’t listen.
I’ve been thinking lately that what will cause change is not the media but community organizations. Maybe the media just needs to report the news and not act as advocates. Thoughts?
-
Green Cities at Work: Sustainability plans in NYC and Philadelphia | Nov 7th at 5:46pm
New York City was represented in a conference panel on “City Urban Design” by Rohit Aggarwal, discussing the preparation and implementation of that city’s PlanYC, its sustainability plan containing some 127 initiatives. That was certainly interesting and I would get him for a longer period of time to discuss all this for hours if possible. But rather than list these in boring detail, he also made two other very interesting and somewhat unique points for this conference.One, the average carbon footprint of a NYC resident is 29% that of the national average. This is similar to (and perhaps drawn from) the recent work of Ed Glaeser and UCLA’s Matt Kahn concluding that denser and warmer environments generate less CO2—that is, two key drivers were gasoline and heating oil. This rightly implies, according to Aggarwal and me, that one approach to climate change is simply to move more people to NYC. And by extension, other really big cities. That is, urbanization has eco-friendly implications.
Relatedly, he then pointed out that in addition to the many explicit environmental strategies mentioned in this conference, anything that gets people into NYC-like places—such as, reducing crime rates, improving schools, and generally increasing the quality of city life—has positive climate change consequences. He advised thinking of these as environmental strategies, among their other merits, and particularly feasible ones at that.
Mark Alan Hughes, a former Princeton professor, is Philadelphia’s director of sustainability. He wisely put aside what that title means in theory to emphasize his function and evolving roles within the civic bureaucracy in practice, including his efforts to make sense of environmentally progressive steps for the rank and file civil servants. For example, he had a breakthrough one day when an audience member realized—on his own—that he could bolster a budget proposal for new windows at the firehouses by including estimates of their energy savings. Word got around to the other department heads immediately, in a way that Hughes could not have done on purpose.
One of his more interesting themes, among many, was the recognition that change among civil servants is not exactly chicken soup, not least since effective environmental strategies tend to span such departments and sectors. Functions, especially environmental functions, are not integrated at the municipal level—or state or federal, it stands to reason. Plus, business as usual is based on the cheap oil model. So monitoring lighting or heating or fuel use tends to be piecemeal, and changing that goes way beyond sending memos around. It requires, perhaps, fundamental governance and organizational reform. If you think that’s easy, go try it. Or just try to draft the memo.
Something that is easy—too easy—is for policy analysts to announce “solutions” to a given sustainability problem, and then leave it for an underfunded, politically vulnerable civic servant to implement. Sensitive to that, Hughes saw his job as “maturing” policy questions to the stage where people such as the mayor can make informed, credible decisions. Put another way, Hughes sees his job as making his advice both helpful in theory and in practice.
- Page 2 of 5 < 1 2 3 4 > Last »
How Do We Prioritize? | Nov 7th at 5:45pm
I had an opportunity to check out the exhibition space, which was very well put together. I particularly enjoyed a series of tables presenting big questions in urbanism and allowing participants to weigh in on the answers by placing a marble in a jar corresponding to their preferred answer. It was a nice idea, and the results intrigued me.
Forgiving the author his regrettable photography, I’ll ask you to have a look at the first image, asking which policy a participant might support the most. As you can (hopefully) see from the picture, the use of urban brownfields for agriculture is far more popular than the elimination of car lanes for bike lanes, which is itself more popular than the use of congestion pricing in a downtown area. Keep in mind that most of these votes were cast by urban planning professionals, attending a conference dedicated in no small part to the use of urban policy to reduce dependence on oil and to reduce carbon emissions.
In fact, ordering the policies by their effectiveness on those measures would likely generate the exact reverse ranking. It is quite true that agriculture involves intense use of carbon. On the other hand, the supply of good urban space is very limited. Using valuable urban land to support agriculture would result in the displacement of potential urban residents, who would be pushed into residence elsewhere—potentially in places less dense, and more carbon intensive. Potentially, in fact, into the city’s suburbs, where existing farmland might well be plowed up to make way for new homes. This isn’t a good trade-off in nearly all circumstances.
Congestion pricing, on the other hand, has been shown (in places like London, Stockholm, and Singapore) to reduce driving and increase transit use. By reducing traffic volume, it becomes easier to allocate street space to other modes, like bikes and surface transit. Best of all, pricing raises revenue, which can be used to invest in new transit, or retrofit inefficient buildings, or invest in renewable power generation, and so on. So why is that policy the least popular? It is, I suppose, the least sexy. It’s playing with prices rather than turning old industrial land into crops. The latter, no doubt, is more visually gratifying to those concerned about environmental activities. But we must always remember that the most important thing is the results.
Or consider this question, concerning where we ought to build to accommodate the rising urban population. As you can see, dense urban infill is vastly preferred to suburban infill or suburban greenfield development. Few people, myself included, would think that greenfield building is the best way to go. As desirable as dense urban infill is, however, we must keep the size of the challenge in perspective. I live in Washington, DC, a district 66 miles square that’s home to 600,000 people. Were we to double its carrying capacity, an additional 600,000 people could be housed. I would welcome this (and we may get there, with good planning).
In Washington’s inner suburbs (inside the famous Capital Beltway but outside the District), a little over 1 million people live on approximately 240 square miles. Doubling the carrying capacity of that area would increase the metropolis potential population by another million. What’s more, that additional density would help to make many parts of the suburbs that aren’t currently walkable, walkable.
And in Washington’s outer suburbs something like 3 million people live on thousands of square miles of land. By doubling the density of the population living on that land, we could accommodate an additional 3 million people, boosting the metropolis’ total population by 50%. And again, the higher density level would shift many parts of the outer suburbs to densities more conducive to walking and transit.
In other words, most people live in places that aren’t that dense. It may be simpler, institutionally, to add density in places that are already dense, but the return to adding people in suburbs is potentially much larger, especially if we can, in the process, improve land use. In a world where billions of people must ultimately be housed in metropolitan areas, we must work where the work delivers the highest returns.
