Category: transit oriented development

Jerusalem stories: sustainability as detente?

On By Chuck WolfeIn housing, infrastructure, Israel, placemaking, politics, sustainability, top posts, transit oriented development, urban administration, urban views11 Comments

In Jerusalem, a municipal administration rides a pendulum between sustainability and geopolitics. Greenbelts, light rail, complete street-making and the storied demolition orders for Palestinian homes in a floodway: all live on a world stage.

Last week, addressing Pacific Northwest professionals visiting Jerusalem with Seattle-based i-SUSTAIN, Deputy Mayor Naomi Tsur prescribed the ultimate sustainable urbanism, drawing from a Hebrew phrase. Jerusalem must “emerge from its [many] walls”, old and new, she argued, and enhance the city’s diverse, public areas largely already shared by all. The Jerusalem of gathering spaces and neighborhoods is already present, she claimed, and should no longer grow out in rings of settlements, but preserve compact neighborhoods based on affinity, interlinked by public transit and defining connectors such as Jaffa Road and the Street of the Prophets.

The tools? Public process, for one, even in areas annexed after the 1967 six-day war, to help define a collective local voice.

Her systemic analysis of the city is familiar and compelling as she simultaneously seeks to avoid a Nicosia outcome (a reference to the divided Cyprus to the northwest). Arguably, she is peacemaking on a platform of the sustainable city.

For instance, Deputy Mayor Tsur thinks at night about the infrastructure lacking in East Jerusalem, and how the city should rise above the intractable and remedy untreated eastern watershed drainage which flows directly to the Dead Sea. It would be feasible, she says, to pump this sewage to the state of the art treatment plant which already treats the western watershed sewage, and create drinking water through sustainable technology.

Meanwhile, in the East Jerusalem village of Silwan, along the Kidron Valley, just below the City of David and Hezekiah’s water tunnel, resident Fakhri Abu Diab thinks at night about other things–what to tell his children about the potential fate of the family house which still “carries the smell of his mother”. As recently reported by the New York Times’ Ethan Bronner, the Abu Diab house was one of several which received a demolition order, because it was expanded without a permit, and is the potential location of an archaeological park at the base of excavations already mired in the complexities of political archeology–a search not only to document biblical events, but seen by detractors as a Jewish land-claim process in disguise.

In Abu Diab’s view, the post-1967 municipality has ignored him before, and he lacks confidence in the proposed relocation offer which is under negotiation for a move to higher ground.

Walls, sleepless nights, conflict, water, and a future for children. The human condition speaks loudly in this most urban of cities, as the debate over the future of Jerusalem brings a reality-television aura to local land use administration.

myurbanist will feature several pieces on Israel in upcoming entries.

See the refined and updated version of this post in Crosscut, here.

Detroit, laboratory for urbanists everywhere

On By Chuck WolfeIn housing, infill development, pedestrianism, placemaking, politics, sustainability, transit oriented development, urban administration2 Comments

An April 4 Detroit Free Press editorial issued a call to action: Start now to implement the “brimming with hope” principles that could reinvent Detroit by 2020.

When you assemble all the proposals, plans and dreams that have been advanced in recent months, the city of 2020 looks dramatically different than it looks today: smaller, smarter, greener, more mobile, with more job opportunities — and once again the pounding heart of a metropolitan region.

You see thousands of kids attending schools that work for them. You see people using light rail and boarding buses in a transit system that serves them. You see a gleaming, growing medical complex; banners being hoisted to the rafters of a new sports arena; and people tending little farms that nourish their neighborhoods in more ways than one. You see convention-goers strolling a crowded RiverWalk and bicyclists coasting the downhills of a new trail network.

The editorial is a challenge not just to Detroit, but to America, consistent with the dreams of the urbanist generation.

As we wrote in Crosscut last October:

[W]e can learn from Detroit and other places where our worst urban fears have been realized. There, consolidation is demanded from chaos, and visionaries have emerged from the ruins.

This post has been updated and appears in the April 10, 2010 seattlepi.com, here.

from ancient Rome to “sidewalk Saturdays” in America?

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, infill development, pedestrianism, placemaking, politics, transit oriented development, urban views5 Comments
Via Dolorosa, Jerusalem, in modern commercial context

The contextual evolution of Roman military crossroads often shows commercial street life as the latest overlay on the ancient castrum, its roads (decumanus and cardo) and intersections. Over time, a place of armies becomes a sociocultural place anew.

For instance, in Jerusalem, the legendary path to the cross coincides with the Roman decumanus. In Split, Croatia, the crossing of the decumanus and cardo in the old urban center shows remnants of the temples of the Dalmatian summer palace of the Emperor Diocletian.

In several entries, myurbanist has challenged American placemaking advocates to consider pragmatic approaches when borrowing from qualities of foreign urban spaces, recalling their evolution over thousands of years under different sociocultural circumstances. Likewise, the blog Emergent Urbanism recently cautioned to be mindful of the “patterns of place”.

In American efforts to move from the food court back to the street, we should consider first our own cultural context, and without political will, the tendency of traditional street use permitting and related, safety-based regulatory regimes to discourage more expansive public use of rights-of-way for nontraditional street and sidewalk use.

Certainly, policymakers, the development community and community leaders are gaining momentum through focus upon sidewalk dining ordinances, complete streets programming, and compact and walkable transit oriented developments. But in a time of recession and financial constraint, reinvention will not appear overnight, and allegiance to traditional regulatory schemes dies hard at the interface of public and private property lines.

Outdoor cafe reuse of Diocletian's Palace, Split, Croatia
American food court
American sidewalk expansion

In the short term, in the spirit of the “quick win” discussed before in the context of achievable placemaking in urban alleys, why not innovate even more?

Here’s another “quick win” idea, convertible to existing neighborhoods, large and small. Every Saturday morning, suspend the rules:

Create Sidewalk Saturdays.

How about a municipal ordinance offering temporary, no-fee public sidewalk use every Saturday morning for two hours, with removable tables, for small restaurants and coffee houses that can do so while allowing a walkable passage between storefront and street? How about such businesses offering noticeably reduced coffee, espresso drink and chocolate drink prices during these two hours for those who bring their own cups?

Would such an experiment work universally? Could it be done while meeting the needs of fire codes and related public safety and often complex insurance requirements? Would businesses uniformly reduce prices to further the American return to the livable street? Would we walk, bike, or take transit to sit streetside?

Can we achieve the evolution of the castrum in America? Whether we could implement a “quick win” like Sidewalk Saturdays would forecast success in implementing the “look and feel” from afar.

old planning principles are new again

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, housing, infill development, pedestrianism, placemaking, transit oriented development6 Comments

If you’ve never seen them, old ideas feel new.

At the dawn of the American community planning movement, the founding generation of American planners attempted to optimize the configuration of new neighborhoods with careful attention to integration of land use, building type and street position, with an eye beyond property lines.

In “The Road to Good Houses”, Survey Graphic, v. 54, May 21, 1925, planning pioneer and landscape architect Henry Wright urged comprehensive siting beyond lots with an eye to light, air and view; provision of public institutions, recreation facilities and local commercial and convenience facilities “in the right places for community uses”; the location of industry to facilitate efficient transportation of goods and people; provision of parking and waste disposal with little disruption; an emphasis on the interplay of public and private lands, with attention to the grouping of buildings and collective service provision; and the allowance in housing for a variety of income groups and family sizes.

Here he compared the ordinary with the ideal:

walk, bike, ride: neighborhood evolving

On By Chuck WolfeIn pedestrianism, placemaking, transit oriented development3 Comments

One historical premise for American community planning in the first part of the twentieth century was the idea of “propinquity associations”–participation of neighbors in clubs and activities based on neighborhood proximity. As we rediscover the premise for the compact community, propinquity is often based on the alternate forms of transportation which bring neighbors to and from their homes.

Here, Seattle’s Madrona neighborhood shows the allure of a cycling association after dark.