A Further Thought

That the Olympics is ultimately deleterious to their host cities is a counter-intuitive but well-established argument. The idea is that after the crowds leave, there is a big Olympic village and big Olympic stadia and none of them are seeing substantial use. Moreover, the costs to build the village and venues leave the city in a great deal of debt. According to the linked article, Montreal ran up so much debt that it took 29 years to pay it off. I was living on the South Side of Chicago when Chicago proposed its bid for the 2016 Olympics. Though many Chicagoans were excited, some South Siders were angry that their open spaces would be turned into stadia and even that rising property values would force out current residents. You can read about the kerfuffle here.
This post argues, with no evidence, that the World Cup does the opposite. The argument rests on the dilute nature of the World Cup: the entire nation participates, not just one city. This helps financially, since costs are absorbed nationally, or over many cities and not just one. More importantly, I suspect, all the host cities gain improvements, but none of the problem of too many buildings concentrated in one area.
This is just a hunch and I'm probably not going to research it more thoroughly. However, what little research I have done contradicts my thesis while not addressing the dilute city argument. From the above NYT article:

"Studies of the 2006 World Cup in Germany showed that the country experienced little in the way of improvements in income or employment figures, just as most economists would have expected. However, surveys noted a noticeable improvement in residents’ self-reported levels of happiness following the event. The World Cup didn’t make the Germans rich, but it appeared to make them happy."

Johannesburg and the World Cup

In honor of the World Cup, I've been meaning for a while to write a post on Johannesburg and the effect the World Cup will have on it. Johannesburg is one of six cities profiled in Endless City (the others are Berlin, London, Mexico City, New York City, and Shanghai) and of those, it is far and away the most messed up. Johannesburg seems like Detroit only much worse. North and northwest of the city is a prosperous ring of closely guarded homes; in the middle there is violent crime, apartheid-level conditions and a hollowed-out downtown. In the southwest is Soweto, a historically black township with slum-like conditions and more violent crime. The original idea of this post was that the World Cup would benefit the prosperous parts of the city while neglecting the latter two. Or that, like most Olympics, the Cup would prove more of a detriment than anything else. Happily, this seems not to be the case: while benefits seem mixed, the World Cup in Johannesburg seems to be benefiting Soweto more than anyone else.
Two Cautions: Soweto contains roughly 800,000 people. It is a third of the city of Johannesburg's population, and roughly the size of Austin. What goes for part of it does not necessarily go for all of it. This WSJ article, while mostly about the ANC, also discusses economic disparity in Soweto. Also, there was a certain level of improvement in Soweto prior to the World Cup - malls, upper class development. electrification and paving of roads. However, it seems that more benefits have accrued through World Cup preparations.
Notably, Soccer City, the premier stadium for the Cup, is located in the middle of Soweto. The stadium has provided jobs, tourism, and prestige. Infrastructure improvements to beautify the area and reduce crime are also beneficial. But the real benefit, I think, is the new Nasrec train station, designed to accommodate up to 20,000 riders per hour. The station is also safer and prettier than what was there before.
Endless City emphasized the transportation deficits in Johannesburg, noting that a third of all trips are made on foot. This is a serious problem, since limited transit also limits economic opportunity. And if it is true that there is a strong correlation between public transportation and economic justice, then the much improved train station should yield dividends even after the tournament ends, and the crowds go away.

Endless City

The Endless City is an immense, 6 pound tome produced from the Urban Age Project run by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society. Combining urban the proceedings from international mayoral conferences and years of research, travel and investigation, it profiles six world cities - New York, London, Berlin, Shanghai, Johannesberg and Mexico City - as well as other global urban issues going into the 21st century. It is awesome, and I'm going to be spending much of the summer reading and discussing it. But tonight, I just want to throw this quote up, from the last paragraph of the introduction:

"... [B]eneath the skin of at least these six world cities lie deep connections between social cohesion and built form, between sustainibility and density, between public transportation and social justice, between public space and tolerance, and between good governance and good cities that matter to the way urban citizens live their lives. Perhaps moreso than ever before, the shape of cities, how much land they occupy, how much energy they consume, how their transport infrastructure is organized and where people are housed - in remote, segregated environments behind walls or in integrated neighborhoods close to jobs, facilities, and transport - all effect the environmental, economic, and social sustainability of global society. One of the overriding realizations of the urban age is that cities are not just concentrations of problems - which they are - but that they are also where problems can be solved."

Words for any urban planner to live by.

Edge City and Suburban Nation

So I happened to be at the Border in the Domain today, and I read Suburban Nation for a bit. It's a polemic, published 2000, against the suburbs and all the evils the suburbs have wrought. Like Jane Jacobs (to whose book this has been compared) the authors bemoan a lack of diversity in suburban zones, claiming this detracts from diversity. As Jacobs attacked single-use housing projects and business-only downtown buildings, so Duany et al attack the single use suburban division of housing subdivision, bigbox shopping mall, and office park. A particularly damning graphic shows a "bubble map," an entire suburb divided lazily into six zoning sections. As a whole it is a well-written and cogent critique, if not as thorough or insightful as The Death and Birth of Great American Cities.
My problem is this: suburban sprawl is depicted entirely as a result of social trends, decrees from on high, and the bad choices of urban planners themselves. The FHA and interstate highways take the rap for cities spreading out, and the aforementioned zoning codes are blamed for making suburban life itself nightmarish. But the people who choose to live there are never brought up. They are portrayed as the passive victims of a badly designed system, who are powerless to change it. But we know from Edge City that this isn't true. Garreau stresses again and again that Edge City is the result of choices Americans made. Suburbia may be nightmarish, but people embrace that nightmare. People like driving just to get groceries, or circling for the best place to park at the mall. Sometimes malls are better than downtowns and big box stores better than Main Street. I myself was reading their book in an Edge City mall (mixed use, yes, but I only use the shopping part) in a big box book store. The point is that planners can plan better, make useful open space instead of water easements, make many, narrow streets, etc. but we can't make people walk and not drive, or play outside, or live in dense housing. More fundamentally, as long as Americans will move beyond the edge of the current city just to get a house or a bigger house, there will always be sprawl.
Jane Jacobs says in the preface to her book that she likes walking cities more than driving cities, and her book is less useful if you prefer the latter: Duany et al need a similar caveat.

Coming back

So, in the past two weeks, I participated in the world's largest scavenger hunt, took the GRE, and got some sort of horrible plague, the combination of which has detracted somewhat from my ability and volition to write. The Scavenger Hunt, incidentally, is run by the University of Chicago and is amazing. This year's list had 286 items, including makeshift elephant polo (teams built a litter that looked like an elephant; 4 people supported it, while a rider hit balls with a polo stick) and a miniature steam engine. My favorite item was the Job globe, a snowglobe that, when shaken, causes disasters of biblical proportions.

To cities: I don't really have any really solid topic to write about tonight. The biggest news is the new Brookings report: "State of Metropolitan America." There is so much data here, it's hard to comprehend. It focuses on, and classifies cities accordingly, on education, diversity, and population growth, but also has reams of data on topics like commute times, age demographics, and family and household breakdowns. It's huge and intimidating, and I will almost certainly revisit it.

Some other things:

The Lost Books of the Odyssey is a sort of magical realist elaboration on the Odyssey where the author crafts 44 episodes that imagine the main characters in different circumstances with different emotions. BLDBLOG has a post on a chapter where Agamemnon creates a vast fortress on the plains of Troy dug into the sands of Troy. The post discusses the feasibility of such a palace, and other details of the architecture of sand, (which is really, really pretty.)

But later in that chapter, Agamemnon tasks Odysseus with a book comprising all the knowledge in the world. Part of the book describes the “hidden language of cities”

“A lexicon of the hidden language of cities, in which buildings are nouns, the inhabitants verbs, and empty spaces adjectives in an endlessly changing narrative.”

This is a fantastic image of the vitality of urban life, conjuring the idea of a city map as a conversation, or hundreds of conversations. I tried to do more with the idea, but the only significant insight I had was that such a description of cities reminds urban planners that we can only put the skeleton of a sentence in place; we can't force the actions around it.

And finally, I found some more new buildings that look like the buildings I described earlier. I didn't take pictures, but there are two new apartment buildings by UT and a new place at 12th and Lamar that look substantially like the triangle, the domain et al. Disturbing indeed.

I intend a series of short posts over the next few days to let my thoughts catch up with my output. Regular posting, hopefully, resumes next week.

Jane Jacobs was right

The van in Times Square was initially pointed out by two street vendors. This, Slate.com argues, vindicates Jacob's assertion that street traffic keeps streets safe by keeping extra eyes on the situation.

Short, late, not particularly insightful, post tonight. I'm in Michigan; I saw Obama speak at the University of Michigan commencement. Which was awesome, but the whole trip has involved a great deal of sleep deprivation and so I've read little and have little to say. Alas.

But I've been reading a book about ancient cities, "From Mycenae to Constantinople". It's a welcome change of pace from Edge City. Edge City, like its subject, is sprawling and thinly populated, but From Mycenae ... is written in a dense academic style. And I majored in Classics in college, so dense academic books about the ancients kind of feel like home. On the other hand, the conjunction of what appear to be my two main interests, cities and Classics never really overlapped. This is my first direct study, as opposed to allusion and asides in other classes.

Anyway, I haven't extracted a whole lot to

put here, cause I was reading it on three hours of sleep, and the book is not much concerned with city life as such. That is, there is little direct discussion of things like infrastructure, traffic, economic development and daily life, in part because those things are so hard to establish, and in part because it's not the author's main goal. But there is a tie in to Edge City in the case of Rome.

The best way to avoid Edge City is to have marauding bands of Gauls running around your countryside. As late as the 3rd century AD (when the army could no longer keep the barbarians at

the frontiers) Rome could be encircled with a 19km wall. A similar wall for Los Angeles would be 300km or so, relying on the coast to cover the other half. Additionally, Rome had great mixed use: shops, industry and housing was all intermixed in tight-knit districts. Indeed, such was the diffusion of uses that there is an entire page where the author wonders what the point of the forum, in the empire, was. (In the Republic, political discourse and argument was conducted there, but that was unnecessary in the autocratic Empire.) Official government business was done in the vast complexes of the Emperors which were elsewhere in the city. This is mixed use too, since the emperor and presumably his bureaucrats also lived there. Additionally, Most fora had basilicae where legal business was done, but the Imperial fora did not have one. And commercial activity was spread out. He concludes that it is wrong to view the forum as 'utilitarian' and that it was mostly just a large embellishment to make the city look good. As an urban form I'm not sure there's an equivalent in a modern American city; a compact city with no substantial downtown. Any thoughts?

(Image Source: Romeartlover.it)

Edge City

Edge City by Joel Garreau
Edge City describes, as optimistically as possible, rising areas of suburbia. It's a hard sell: the dominant images of suburbia in my mind are 1) Saturday afternoon gridlock on I-35 caused by, as far as I can tell, a big strip of box stores; 2) The giant and
horrifying I-35, Texas 45 superloop (below); and 3) huge tracts of identical KB homes, expanding ever deeper into the Texas Hill Country. Suburbs, in my imagination, are horrible, lifeless places with no culture and no identity. But Joel Garreau will try to convince us anyway. He has some valid points, but not enough to redeem suburbia.
The most useful contribution is the distinction between what Garreau calls an Edge City and mere suburbia. Suburbia is more like a bedroom community, he says; Edge City actually keeps people in it in the day. He has a useful taxonomy based on the amount of office and retail space and whether the place has more jobs than bedrooms. Essentially, he is describing the difference between Round Rock and Kyle.
Garreau's case that 'Edge City' (there are individual Edge Cities, but the collective phenomenon is Edge City) is essentially that, given a set of assumptions about Americans, Edge Cities are better than the alternatives. Americans will always prefer cars, always prefer houses, and always be willing to sacrifice identity for convenience. He describes a family who left jobs and an apartment in downtown Boston to live in a community of densely-packed, identical, yardless townhouses by a highway twice as far from downtown Boston as Walden Pond is. That was a convoluted sentence, but the Garreau's point is that if Americans will make those choices, Edge City will help. Notably, Edge City actually reduces commutes because office space is outside downtown. Edge City helps connect man with nature, he writes, because deer play in office parks in the middle of New Jersey. Malls like the Galleria in Houston are as impressive as cultural icons as many to be found in downtowns.
These are positive things, I suppose. But Reluctant Metropolis describes Angelenos willing to get up at 4 am to beat traffic in their 60 mile commutes. and in the paragraph about nature, he also lists 11 species sprawl is endangering in New Jersey alone. And everyone he interviews still goes to the actual city for culture and entertainment.
But its all ok, he says, because new city forms always look bad and chaotic, but then transform into something better. Chicago, New York, and London and Venice were all horrifying at some point. But they refined themselves year by year becoming better and better. What looks attractive about those cities now is the end result of a maturing process. Accordingly, Edge Cities will also refine and become more attractive as years go by. Except they won't. Because people will keep moving out. In a chapter on Dallas, Garreau takes to task the planners and architects who focus on “problematic downtowns” while ignoring Edge City. They can't change human nature, he argues, and so should focus on molding suburbia as best as possible. But as Downtown Inc. shows, the efforts to restore downtown are part of what makes the city form constantly improve. If you keep moving out, those refinements never happen.
Edge City is still a worthwhile book, even if it's 20 years out of date. (e.g. The facsimile machine will change the world in unfathomable ways!) But the economics are solid, and probably function similarly today. And it's a good ethnography of suburbanites. And I'll definitely be returning to some of the issues it raises. But its core thesis, that Edge City is ultimately positive, rings hollow to me.

All the Same!

Midtown West Commons

(Courtesy of Trammell Crow Co.)

The Triangle:













Allaustin.com
The Domain:














(from glidingresidential.com)

5350 Burnet:













(Courtesy of Ardent Residential)

Post South Lamar:










(Courtesy of Ardent Residential)
Post West Austin:










(Courtesy of Ardent Residential)

These are six recent mixed use development projects in Austin all built (or being built) within a range of five years. The Triangle was finished in 2007, and the Domain will be finished in 2011, I think. They are spread throughout the city, but they are all new, upper class, and they look the same. Not exactly the same but they have a common central element: Each building has boxy, rectangular prisms of alternating neutral shades. All of them, except the Triangle, project their windows in an angular fashion.

I have only vague guesses as to how this came about, whether by accident or by design. There may be a grander Urban Design strategy afoot, trying to establish, perhaps, an “Austin Architecture” but that seems unlikely. Or possibly, there is a general country or region wide trend towards such architecture. If there is, I will feel quite foolish, but I assume there is not. So I started looking at the developers, which offered some clues. Let's start with Ardent Residential.

Ardent Residential is an Austin based company, responsible for the Four Seasons condos, and three of the above projects: the Post West Austin, the Post South Lamar, and 5350 Burnet. For those three, but not the Four Seasons, Ardent Residential employed LRK. So it makes sense that these three buildings all look similar, but did they influence the rest? The two posts and 5350 Burnet were built, chronologically, in the middle of these projects. So let's look at the Triangle.

The Triangle was developed in 2008 by Cencor Urban, a company that developed three other pieces of property in the Austin area. But those projects, such as Mueller Regional Retail and another retail parcel out by Lakeline mall, are both purely retail, and do not look like the mixed use buildings.

Likewise, Trammell Crow, who built Midtown Commons, also built The Shore (at Red River south of Cesar Chavez) and is working on the Austin Water Treatment plant. Neither of these buildings look like multicolored boxes placed side by side, so I'm not sure if the design of Midwest Commons intentionally looked like the others.

I think I'm going to write a separate post about the Domain in the next few weeks, whereat I may revisit this topic if I have any new insights, but otherwise it seems that the multicolored box formulation only affects mixed use developments outside downtown.

The upshot of all of this is mostly just that it's interesting and I'm not sure how it happened. All the buildings, taken individually, look good. If they propagate further, I might get grumpy, but as of now the phenomenon is just interesting.

Introduction:
This blog is an intellectual exercise. I've been reading extensively on cities and city planning, and I feel that writing about them with descriptions, and analysis will cement knowledge in my mind, and hone writing skills that have languished this past year since I finished my B.A. And, since I live in Austin, I'll try to apply the readings to the city. So, for the book I read on Los Angeles (below), I compare the two cities, and hopefully find more dissimilarities than similarities.
Posts will take one of two forms. Every Tuesday and Friday, a big post on the book I'm reading. And periodically, hopefully several times a week, they'll be posts on relevant issues to Austin. If, for instance, I had started this blog last week, there would be a post about the TODs along the Red Line.
I've been reading for a while, so here are summaries of the books I've already read.

The Life and Death of Great American Cities – Jane Jacobs
This is the seminal text of urban planning, and the title that drew me to the field. I ran across it in an article I read for my eminent domain work, which it condemns (as it were) in very harsh terms. Written in 1962, the book was a polemic against the urban planners of the day. Urban renewal plans of the 1950's and 1960's focused on tearing down blighted communities and replacing them with big single use buildings, like office buildings and housing projects. The projects were designed according to Le Courbusier's radiant city ideas: tall buildings surrounded by open grass and streets were supposed to make for an attractive city. Such ideas spawned projects like Cabrini Green and other slums; Jacobs rightfully attacked them for fostering crime and poverty.
She also attacked big office buildings downtown; since the workers they brought to town left as soon as 5 o'clock hit, she argued they added nothing to the value of downtown. Instead, she argued for diversity: downtown buildings with office, retail and housing space. (Which Austin is trying to create with the condos and the 2nd street shopping district, among other projects.)
Jane Jacobs lived in New York, and many of her insights, though substantiated by other examples, come from the positive experience of her neighborhood. This can be kind of irritating, but its the still the foundational book of planning, and it will come up many more times. Accordingly, I'm not going to elaborate with respect to Austin beyond the brief note on 2nd street and condos.

The Reluctant Metropolis – William Fulton
The mechanics of Los Angeles are somewhat terrifying. I've always wondered why a city of such size arose in a desert with no water and no harbor, and no discernable core. Los Angeles was engineered by a cabal of real estate planners. They tricked and bullied the rest of Southern California for water rights and then sold the city as rural and idyllic to attract people seeking lots of land and a nice climate. Los Angeles' economy was urban sprawl: the more people came, the farther away from the center they settled and homebuilding was the biggest industry. And LA county was big, and freeway money was plentiful, so this expansion never really stopped.
Unfortunately, all the suburbs incorporated as different towns, diffused power through the entire region, making the region almost entirely ungovernable. No good public transportation, no effective water sharing plan, no cultural center (the Walt Disney center was unfinished and millions of dollars over budget when the book was written – it was a prime example of the city's failures) and a host of other urban problems resulted. A collection of towns that saw themselves as independent led to a “reluctant metropolis” lacking identity and unity.
Austin, happily, has a core identity built around the Capital and the University of Texas. And the music scene establishes a cultural identity for the city in a way that Hollywood can't for Los Angeles. The book made me happy, because even though Austin continues to sprawl, it will never turn into L.A.

Mega Projects – Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff
This book was essentially Downtown Inc. about highways, airports and convention centers. It kept referencing Downtown Inc. and said essentially the same things, so I read Downtown Inc. instead.

Downtown Inc.
This is an awesome book. It was written in 1990 and concerns the struggle to renew downtowns eviscerated by suburban malls and failed urban renewal projects. The book focuses on four projects: Faneuil Hall in Boston, Horton Plaza in San Diego, Pike Place in Seattle, and Town Square in St. Paul. All of these successfully adopted the idea of a suburban shopping mall but made it work within a city's character to establish city landmarks that bring people back to downtown. It made me happy, because I like downtowns, and it illustrates what urban planning can accomplish with creativity and persistence. Downtown Inc. is the opposite of the book I'm currently reading, Edge City, and I'll discuss it at greater length next post when I discuss Edge City.