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?

 

planner vs. architect

In this month’s Planning magazine (the magazine of the American Planning Association – and my last copy, since I refused to pay SPA dues for monthly pizza luncheons this year) the executive director wrote his traditional editor’s introduction. However, instead of talking up the latest and greatest TDRs or sustainable zoning codes, he took his precious page to bash architects who attempt act as planners, and in bold no less! Sure, traditionally there hasn’t been a great track record (Plan Voisin anyone?), but shouldn’t architects today be trained in all matters sustainable and have been introduced to the idea of context through their studios?? Apparently not.

The director goes on to explain that the systems of human settlement, from neighborhoods to cities to regions (there goes that idea of scales again) are far different from building systems. And he’s right. But where does that leave me? Little miss dual degree.

“We need to respect the core competencies of allied professions, just as we expect them to respect ours.”

Sounds like he’s drawing the proverbial line in the sand. But aren’t the planning, architecture, engineering, landscape professions becoming more interwoven these days? Aren’t we currently aiming for a hybrid system where careers, ideas, people, jobs, methodologies, technologies, and information overlap? Or by combining ‘core competencies’ are we merely diluting each of the respective profession’s level of expertise . . .

 

soja’s got it down

Ha. So the very next article in my new book, called “Restructuring the Industrial Capitalist City”, was written by an LA architect who also teaches regional planning at UCLA, Edward Soja. Pictured, is him at the TransUrbanism symposium hosted by V2|Organization.

The best paragraph:

You describe in many ways the core architectural view when you said that a city consists of streets, roads, and a built environment located within a vaguely defined ‘urban cloud’. In this vision, the city becomes a collection of separate cells with built environments compacted together to form an urban mas. This view is radically different for the larger scale spatial vision of a city as an expansive system of . . . not just people living in the built environment but in constructed geographies characterized by different patterns of unemployment, income, education levels, ethnic cultures, housing and job densities, etc. All these things are often pushed aside in the obsession – sorry, the passionate concern – architects have for design.

Because architects fix their attention to these cells, or clusters of buildings and their typologies, they reduce everything to design and put blinkers on their ability to think regionally about cities. They miss the power of these multiple scales.

Fun stuff.