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.

 

Programming a vertical city.

From “Re-inventing the Skyscraper”, diagrams on vertical theory:

Starting to think about the skyscraper in terms of ‘variable linkages’ instead of shelving is helping tremendously. Using Kevin Lynch’s traditional paths, edges, nodes, landmarks, and districts in terms of vertical inhabitation will be useful for the massing stage we’re now in.

	What works is the idea of pulling traditional, horizontal urbanism, vertical; with linked, open spaces.
What doesn’t is the author’s literal transition of a historic city grid into a theme’d skyscraper. Eeeee gad! Officially creepy.

• Programming the variety of a city block into the sky,
• The elevator as the equivalent of the metro system,
• Visual connections at multiple levels instead of a singular, observation deck,
• Spatial folding to enable local conditions,
• Vertical land use mapping, a high rise matrix,
• Transitional areas switching between modes of circulation as where the opportunities lie.

Very useful.

 

koolhaas’ version of Dubai

  . . . includes a perfectly square grid, surrounded by a moat (from the NY Times article).  Need I say more?  In its isolation, this ‘urban block’ (ha) will only attract the global elite.  But maybe this is Dubai’s fuction.  It hasn’t yet been defined, but even so, those that work in services still need somewhere to live.  And that type of social density is born over time, not created through a single, grandiose architectural vision.   However, that being said, his version might induce less whiplash than what is currently on slate for construction.  In response to his research on the ‘generic city’ (here’s a student thesis project on the topic), OMA’s plan makes a point to include both generic, similarly massed towers that are juxtaposed with moments of pure gluttony.

One thing I agree with for certain:

 ’We always have to keep up a high alertness around a problem until it becomes more clear.’

-Koolhaas in his office, 2006.
Rem Koolhaas, Al Manakh, the 2007 edition is described as the first comprehensive guide to architecture and urban design in the The Gulf.

From the developer’s webpage:

Waterfront will transform an unprecedented 1.4 billion square feet of empty desert and sea into an international community for an estimated population of 1.5 million people that is twice the size of Hong Kong Island. Waterfront is being developed on the last 15km of natural coastline in Dubai.  This mixed-use development of commercial, residential, resort and amenity areas offering 250 master-planned communities . . .  will help Dubai in setting the standards in property development.

Thats for sure.   Does anything about that insta-mega polis just absolutely terrify you? Or am I just the wimp . . . ?

 

Soja a deux.

In the mornings, while I eat my hot cinnamon oatmeal with sliced almonds and pears (way yum), I’ve been re-reading the Winter ‘07 Harvard Design magazine. I bought it last fall, and devoured it almost instantly, but am now going back at a less frenetic pace in an attempt to actually absorb some of the material. The ULI competition really did me in, I felt like I didn’t have almost any type of grasp on the current day, major tenants of urban design at all. Or at least in enough of a way so to be able to verbally present them to my highly ‘debate-centric’ group mates. So, to be able to take a few steps back and re-read articles that I found fascinating from the start has been highly informative.

For the past three days, I’ve been reading one article in particular that I really enjoyed. So I finally flipped back a few pages to the title only to find it had been written by Edward Soja. This is the second article of his that I’ve really been able to dig into. Titled “Designing the Postmetropolis”, some highlights:

To a significant extent, much of urban design as a distinctive subfield seems to me to be conceptually and analytically trapped in a static and stranded space, consisting of little more than pods of buildings hived together . . . Cut off this way, urban design has little else to draw upon other than the idiosyncratic creativity of the architect designer.

Design project (should be) put into context, linking project sites not just to their immediate surroundings but also to broader developments in the urban region, national politics and policy, and questions of distributional equity and social inclusion.

Even well into the 1980s, traditional theories and practices of urban development persisted, despite their growing disconnection to what was happening to cities worldwide. New terms multiplied to mourn the death of the city as we knew it: trans-urbanism, city lite, chaos city, post-urbanism.

Three interrelated processes are driving the transformation of the modern metropolis: 1) intensified globalization, 2) the formation of a new, information economy, and 3)the spread of communication technologies.

The transformation of the modern metropolis and the emergence of a new urbanism (without its capital letters) are nowhere more effectively demonstrated or more comprehensively studied than in the urbanized region of Los Angeles.

The next half of the article goes on to describe this thesis point. I’m guessing he’ll mention that LA is now the highest urbanized city in the US, beating out even areas of Manhattan, even though it began as the poster child of sprawl.  This fact has continued to amaze me from the first time I heard it from a particular professor’s rant last year.  I guess I had been zoning out, but when I heard him say that LA had eclipsed NYC on the density scale, I came back too.  But he moved forward with his argument, no giving any supporting details, so I figured I had mis-heard.  It wasn’t until months later that I heard the factoid repeated and I finally google’d it:

Robert Brugemann’s original publication.

LA Times  LA has always been dense.

Sprawl Brawl Critics square off over statistic that suggests LA is denser than NYC.
Liveable Places UCLA students clear up confusion that arises over various definitions of density.