Urban design and the changing economy

Its hard to get away from news about the economy, especially in the building industries. Unemployment rate at 11% for construction workers, several major Atlanta design firms instituting layoffs, the Architectural Billings Index at an all time low. These changes are expected to last into 2010 and to not directly follow the traditional V-shaped economic graph.

The reason the economists are having so much trouble predicting the length of the current downturn has to do with human behavior. Tax cuts, job development, infrastructure investment, and bank bail outs can all cause very different reactions amongst various segments of the population. Fascinating to me is that urban designers deal with this same uncertainty. Human activities, and their collective choices, are the basis for most design decisions in the urban realm. And in declining economic situations, people’s behavior changes.

• Where are the people going? As unemployment rises, fewer people have long commutes. And their destinations change.

• How do people get there? As incomes decrease, people look for ways to pinch pennies by taking public transportation, car pooling and combining trips.

• Is the destination setting conducive to people feeling positive? Urban designers have a stake in assuring that the workplace fits comfortably into its surroundings. As global and local economic structures change, our basic assumptions of the office typology might change as well.

Urban Design and People

‘For urban designers and community people, location and connectivity factors of how individuals make a living, along with the economic context and its trends are of great importance, from the regional or macro scale to the individual work place”

This quote is from my professor’s upcoming book, Urban Design and People. I was struck by its relevance not only for the current economic climate, but for the future of the urban design professional as well. This economic crisis is doing more than making it difficult to gain an initial job out of college, it’s changing very base patterns that my field follows.

Office environments are more flexible. Social and business networking increasingly takes place online. The need for centralized working locations is still important, but the demand for smaller public spaces where many people can work online, on a variety of different tasks for different companies in different industries, while still being around people, is growing. People look more towards part time and freelance opportunities while unemployment. These people need to network outside a traditional one company, one office environment.

Octane Coffee Bar

Working from home doesn’t hold much appeal to a social, energetic professional who was recently laid off. They want to get out, meet people, set up opportunities for casual networking while updating their resume, writing an article for a trade magazine, or engaging others for industry updates. Can urban design help them?

 

Notes on “A Better Way to Zone”.

For thesis, I’ve picked up Donald Elliott’s ‘A Better Way to Zone’. This has served as a useful counterpart to many of the overly saccharine articles I find praising form based codes. Elliot’s point is that many types of zoning codes (and there is a huge variety out there) are broken in very similar ways. They,

• Actually prevent many types of development that cities would like to approve

• Do not provide housing at prices that citizens can afford

• Adjust poorly to changed circumstances

• Encourage poor systems of city governance.

More specifically tied to my thesis, which is investigating the intrinsic flexibility of a traditional neighborhood, he calls out form based zoning as being overly tied to a snapshot of the present.

“Even if you manage to get a very good snapshot of the present, that picture is static. In contrast, real estate markets are dynamic.”

The value of a neighborhood is in its growth process and its ability to respond to changing demographics. At its best, zoning is reflective of community values. As the people within it change, the codes too should be flexible enough to change. However, Elliot recognizes the need for codes remain predictable enough to inspire confidence in potential developers and home buyers. What he’s questioning is whether the rules need to be static, in order to be predictable.

“We need to think in terms of zoning standards that change automatically, in predictable ways, as plans change and real estate markets evolve.”

On N. Golden Gate Ave. and Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake, over the course of ninety years, the neighborhood development around the growing Micheltorena Elementary School and the St. Francis Assisi Church (marked in blue) changed from primarily single family (light yellow), to one of mixed densities (orange and brown) and uses (red):

Neighborhood Block Evolution in Silver Lake

Another issue I’m looking into as a driver of zoning code evolution for neighborhoods is the issue of housing availability, choice and affordability. As we can see from the current economic downturn, housing attainability is a huge part of the US economy and future zoning codes should include better tools to address it. Elliot offers three suggestions for this:

• To look for greater land efficiency, so that more units can be built per acre of land and to better integrate those units into the urban fabric.

• To be to remove restrictions that limit creativity in the types of housing that are built.

• To create development approval systems that better integrate citywide needs for attainable housing into review of individual projects.

My thesis project uses the Silver Lake community as a case study which is helpful because it was built largely pre-zoning or the advent of the automobile, yet it has an excellent street grid and access. It also has a great variety in its community make-up, and even though prices remain high in this highly desirable Southern California neighborhood, there is a wide range of housing types and ownership situations and therefore, price points. The fact that this very desirable and well functioning neighborhood was built prior to existing, heavy handed zoning adds further fuel to the fire that developmental controls should be lifted to inspire creativity in lot arrangements, clustering densities and parking situations.

In the closing comments of his historical analysis section, Elliot writes,

“Life seldom turns out like the picture you envisioned, and that is true both for the city and for private developers. It is a mistake to think of zoning as a fixed model of uses and standards and forms. The only sure thing about zoning is that we need it to adapt well over time.”

The book, published last year, also has an associated blog with it.

Another review, with a more critical opinion.

 

Aging infrastructure in first ring suburbs.

Infrastructure is kind of a hot topic right now.  The American Society of Civil Engineers released its 2009 Report Card for Infrastructure, giving the nation a cumulative grade of “D”.   Obama has been pushing for infrastructure improvements as a way to improve the economy while any mayor with a half baked, “shovel ready” project salivates at the thought of freely flowing federal funds.  One of the questions asked at the monthly CQRGC Healthy Places meeting was about suburban vs urban infrastructure investment. Specifically, they were interested in the investment split between the first ring suburb of Gwinnett County and the urban core of Fulton County. The speaker, Paul Moore from Glatting Jackson, answered the question with an example that I had particular experience with – the Parisian suburb riots of 2005-06.

During my last year of undergraduate Architecture at Georgia Tech, I studied abroad for 10 months in Paris. I lived in the northern portion of the 18th arrondisement, which is better known for the artist’s district Montmartre and the graceful cathedral of Sacre Coeur. For me, it was also nervously close to ‘les banlieues’, or suburbs of Paris. Despite their proximity to downtown, the neighborhoods are separated from historic Paris by a literal ring of disinvested rail tracks that remain under utilized in order to remain available for military use in case of the city’s attack. And while I can’t vouch for the relevance of this motive, I can say that the elevated rail line does a great job at separating the ‘haves’ from the ‘have nots’ in the city.

Peaceful Protests.

In fact, the phrase ‘les banlieues’ is now recognized as a euphemism in the French press to describe low income housing projects that the government practically forced immigrant communities into during the 1970s and 80s. Petty crime has also increased in France, with much of it blamed on juvenile delinquency fostered within the banlieues, as a result the ensuing areas are perceived as being unsafe places to live. During the early 1990s, tougher law enforcement and immigration control measures were enacted, and partly as a reaction to those increased penalties without a perceived increased in assistance, the area imploded with riots in the Fall of 2005.

Now, some might say that Buford Highway would never come to such extremes, but a quick pass at the area:

• Its aging infrastructure that was never built to be adaptable, a key tenant for sustainability. Atlanta had similar growth issues during the 1950s.

• However, at that point, Atlanta had the tax revenues to support re-investment. Currently, Gwinnett County is experiencing decreasing  tax revenues each year.

• The changing demographic of the Buford Highway strip, is startling similar to the immigrant based Paris suburbs.

With the current mortgage crisis, economic downtown, and rising prices, its not out of reach to think that we might have similar problems in our own back yard. As these first ring suburbs age, and traditional disenfranchised communities growing larger, this purely infrastructural issue can spill over and really start affecting communities.

 

In the beginning, we knew it was coming.

The CQRGC Healthy Places January monthly meeting’s topic was the Connect Atlanta plan, the city’s new comprehensive transportation plan. The presentation was enlightening in multiple ways, but one notable piece of information eschewed my perception of a piece of Atlanta’s transportation development history. When the Connect Atlanta plan came out, many people I knew lauded it as Atlanta’s first transportation plan, and while this is true in many ways, Atlanta has had several transportation planning initiatives already. What really got me, was that planners recognized the inefficiencies of the freeway system early on and called out the necessity of a balanced transportation plan. And this was before construction even started on the 1950s freeway system!

Jammed.

The speaker, Paul Moore from Gladding Jackson pulled a 1958 graph of Atlanta city transit ridership statistics. The early planner’s mindsets were eye opening. I have continually heard in my education that this city was ‘designed’ to grow entirely around the highways with no alternative methods of transportation.

As it turns out, during the initial studies, planners recognized that the coming freeways could only support Atlanta’s growth if, if and only if, transit ridership remained at the same rates. In 1958, this was at 50%!! Yes you read that right, 50%. Incredible. Still, the pre 1950’s graph pointed out quite clearly that the city had three options:

• It could, in a best case scenario, increase transit ridership from current levels.
• It could, in what they projected to be the most likely scenario, keep transit ridership levels at the same rate.
• Or, in a worse case scenario, transit ridership could decrease 20%.

Unfortunately, we all know how that one turned out. Atlanta city transit ridership decreased an astounding 43%, down to 7% of total trips taken by the year 2007. Wow.

Now, if the 1950s planners had only had the foresight to create policies that would keep transit ridership at similar or increasing levels, rather than relying on chance to keep them there, we’d be in a different place than we are today. But what would those have been? I don’t think anyone could have foreseen the rise of the 2^nd and 3^rd ring suburbs and subsequential growth of perimeter job centers at that early stage of planning, but the simple act of keeping the downtown street car networks would have been a good start.

I wonder, what are we doing today that will seem so short sighted in the future?