Category: infill development

talking urbanism amid a shortfall of snow

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, everyday urbanism, infill development, infrastructure, placemaking3 Comments

While the Colorado Rockies saw long-awaited snow this weekend, depths remain historically low.  Signs caution of “early season” conditions (more typical of November),  yet the economic impact is still unclear—resort revenues benefitted from robust holiday traffic through New Year’s Day.

This background—a low snowpack and its potential impact on the economic base of resort towns—provides an ironic gloss to my annual presentation at a national continuing legal education conference in Aspen.

Hence, an unoriginal, yet salient question: What of cities and towns built on climate-dependent activities, and the consequences of over-dependence on consistent weather?

After all, enthusiastic, robust tenets of urbanism usually rely on similarly strong, underlying economies.

The presentation is embedded below, and addresses—in summary form—several urbanist ideals, as well as the interplay of market preferences and public policy initiatives in two key areas: redevelopment in concert with new transit infrastructure, and reuse of formerly contaminated properties within urban cores.

Understanding the Domain of the Urbanist Lawyer

Posts from 2009, 2010 and 201l comment on earlier January visits and presentations in Colorado..

Image and presentation composed by the author.

a tall building bible for urbanists

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, everyday urbanism, housing, infill development, infrastructure, placemaking14 Comments

Recent reports and coverage show that the skyscraper is very much alive in the post-9/11 world, despite recession and lowrise alternatives to modern urban development.   Hence the timely release of consulting engineer Kate Ascher’s new book, The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper (Penguin Press, 2011), a remarkably plain-language reexamination of tall buildings in a sustainability-conscious age.

Ascher previously profiled the built environment, on a broader, more horizontal basis.  In The Works, in 2005, she examined New York City infrastructure in layperson’s terms, with similar, graphically rich precision.

Now, with the assumption that skyscrapers are both urban building blocks and small cities in themselves, she provides a necessary primer on the hows and whys of contained vertical settlement amid an otherwise horizontal landscape.

A telling hint from the outset:  The table of contents is a “directory” and the chapters display in reverse order, as if building floors, ascending, in elevator fashion, from introduction, through elements of constructability, function, maintenance, sustainability—and topping off with a look to the future.

The book is a remarkable confluence of coffee table display, children’s book fascination, and quick study fact-finding.

According to a reviewer, Ascher followed inspiration from David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work.  The Macaulay-like show and tell style predominates—but for grownups—as Dave Banks notes in Wired.

Full of color diagrams, perspectives and narrative detail, factoids abound.  Topics range from superstructure to building elements (e.g. glass, skin and steel), and include corollary systems (e.g. elevators, air conditioning, safety, fire prevention and energy conservation).

Among the learning: Ascher expects that Dubai’s Burj Khalifa will remain the world’s tallest building for a decade or more.  Yet, the last chapter predicts more of the same “supertall” examples, such as China’s pending, 121-story Shanghai Tower.

After summarizing approaches to reduced environmental footprint and diverse tower shapes, a last section, entitled “How Will We Live?”, entices the urbanist with predictions of the further evolution of mixed-use skyscrapers.

Consider, for instance, the 750,000 inhabitants of the visioned Shimizu Pyramid, a mega-structure standing over piers in Tokyo Bay, with miles of interconnected tunnels below.

While not entirely devoid of context and backdrop, Ascher’s vertical approach in her 2011 effort is more building-specific than citywide.  She glosses over history, regulation and interdisciplinary perspective in favor of design, construction and long-term site maintenance.

One compelling diagram illustrates the basics of floor-area ratio through a comparison of a 1.3 million square foot mixed-use skyscraper versus the same land use spread over a suburban setting.  I would have enjoyed more of such contrasts—about urban form as a whole—and the interrelationship of buildings, streets, blocks and transportation.

But, in fairness, this broader view is not Ascher’s premise, and my preference actually contrasts with Ascher’s core purpose of educating readers, through robust illustration, about the basic wonders and challenges of building tall.

While some other reviewers are in a quandary about the book’s intended audience, I have little doubt that Ascher has created a laudable, one-stop summary that goes beyond lists and photographs of tall buildings. and gives the rich grounding in vertical basics that all students of cities both need and deserve.

Book cover reproduction courtesy of Penguin Press. Building image composed by the author.

reconsidering shapes of avoidance on the landscape

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, everyday urbanism, infill development, placemaking, sustainability, urban abstractions1 Comment

Last year, I asked what elements of today’s urban landscape occur in spite of urban land use policy and regulation, and form “shapes of avoidance”. I provided a historical example, and suggested modern counterparts. That was before Occupy Wall Street and its progeny.

Nate Berg’s November 22 article in The Atlantic Cities posed compelling questions about how today’s public spaces can accommodate the Occupy Movement.

Berg asked whether the Movement “may be a mechanism to change the way we think about what we as a public want and need from our public spaces”.

In visiting the public spaces used by Occupy Seattle and Occupy DC in the past weeks, I saw a potentially new form of public space, institutionalized, not by top-down authority, but in spite of it.

Accordingly, Berg’s question recalled my thoughts from November, 2010, slightly amended from the original, below.

______

The form of urban settlements and appearance of constituent structures reflect underlying culture and regulation.

In times of change, buildings, landscapes and objects transform to show the impact of new or modified policies or regulations. And the resulting shapes of compliance—such as the patterns of height, bulk and density dictated by a new downtown zoning code—can potentially reinvent the urban landscape.

But the urban landscape can also be dramatically altered by “shapes of avoidance”.

Consider, in the context of everyday urbanism, those shapes and patterns dictated by focused avoidance of regulation.

Here, I am discussing not just spontaneous parklets and sidewalk tables of guerrilla urbanism” or “pop-up” cities, but widespread examples of urban forms that result when policy or regulation is creatively defied.

Call it the urban landscape’s manifestation of French-American microbiologist René Dubos‘ classic discourses on remarkable and unpredictable human adaptation to environmental change, Man Adapting and So Human an Animal.

A compelling example is the alteration of a southern Italian landscape in the 15th to 17th centuries premised on the avoidance of taxes or fees—the apparent explanation for the unique shape of trulli houses in Puglia, Italy—and the resulting appearance of the Itria Valley and the town of Alberobello.

As the story goes, local inhabitants built the conical houses—that don’t look like houses—without mortar. This method allowed easy destruction, so the Counts of Conversano could avoid property tax payments to the King of Naples on permanent structures (such as residences).

What are today’s trulli?

Are they merely a list of unenforced zoning violations (e.g. unpermitted home occupations, illegal accessory dwellings, unsanctioned tent cities, vehicles on lawns) or perpetual temporary uses?

Given the breadth of land use regulation today, could spontaneous, repetitive trulli-like “shapes of avoidance” define a sustainable urban landscape more interesting than planned examples?

Or are the most visible “shapes of avoidance” now limited to freedom of expression in the ballot box and on urban walls?

After all, some might argue that graffiti and the recent electoral landscape are the trulli of our times.

All images composed by the author.

This article was republished in similar form in the Fall 2011 issue of ARCADE, Architecture and Design in the Northwest.

finding the best ways to portray city life

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infill development, infrastructure, pedestrianism, placemaking12 Comments

Media attention to urban life continues, day by day, but to my mind, characteristic rankings, photographs and metrics often need greater historical context, and more robust, real-life punctuation.

While Tahrir Square and the Occupy Movement parlay the daily urban tensions of democracy and authority, cities remain focal points of celebration, as demonstrated in Robert Kunzig’s latest city-as-solution retrospective and accompanying imagery in the December 2011 National Geographic.

Kunzig’s article is, in fact, closer to the holistic focus called for above. By using Ebenezer Howard’s “large and lingering impact” as a foil, Kunzig contrasts the zeal of economist Edward Glaeser, the perspectives of David Owen, as well as a mini-history of sprawl and South Korean density. His approach recalls journalist-turned-urban authority Grady Clay’s treatment of Howard’s Garden City ideals (and largely misplaced American implementation) in a famous 1959 Horizon Magazine article, “Metropolis Regained”.

Two years ago, while granting Clay its Athena Award, the Congress for the New Urbanism brought renewed attention to Clay’s article—as early documentation of back to the city principles.

Clay’s 1959 conclusion still holds:

All these ideas of the New Urbanists spring from their conviction that the city can be saved, but not by denying its nature. The city, they believe, generates innumerable devices for ameliorating the human lot, and we would do well to study these—even where at first glance they look disorderly and disreputable—before abandoning them. Cities have been around too long for our generation to desert them so precipitously. As that admirable humanist Leon Battista Alberti put it in his Deiciarchia, “The necessary things are those without which you cannot well pursue life. And as we see, man, from his emergence into this light to his last end, has always found it necessary to turn to others for help. But then cities were created for no other reason than for men to live together in comfort and contentment.”

Kudos to Kunzig for his artful use of Howard’s life-long quest for a livable urbanism; especially in the context of my memories of Clay’s writings.

But the Kunzig article invites more.

Like Clay’s observations in his later writings (e.g., the “Vantages” chapter in Close Up: How to Read the American City), in the last few months, I have pondered how best to further communicate urban preferences amid a changing landscape. As shown by both Kunzig and Clay, history can supplement two forms of documentation: straightforward photography with authentic, and ordinary personal experience.

To put this into practice, why not develop a simple test to measure a city (over and above complex rankings or metrics) that takes advantage of history, imagery and experience, including daily life? I offer, in short form, an emphasis on a creative reference, an icon and the hope to stay, as follows, and invite others to offer their own criteria.

The value of a creative reference. The founding story of a city is often an influential basis for prominence and evolution. The most famous founding stories derive from creation myths, such as that of Rome. Romulus and Remus, fathered by Mars, the God of War, abandoned at birth on the Tiber River by a threatened king, rescued by a wolf, and raised by shepherds—Romulus becomes ruler after prevailing in the “duel of the titans”.

In my measure, good lore is essential to a successful city.

The helpful role of a visible icon. Among the most photographed and touted elements of a city is a central place or object that can become a focal point for distinction and pride. Once religious or military in nature, modern cities display several exemplary civic monuments or places for ready reference of implied success.

Perhaps the most famous is the Eiffel Tower, which acts as a symbol of Paris in the opening photograph, above.

Most particularly, a compilation of completed statements about “why I hope to stay” can offer qualitative input on livability. For example: “I hope to keep living here because I feel like I can walk safely to where I need to go.”

These answers would not be uniform—some may champion transit, bicycles, parks and open space, good schools or night life—but the “why” question probes at the “comfort and contentment” referenced by Clay in “Metropolis Regained”, or Kunzig’s conclusion.

After saying goodbye to his interviewee, British planning academic Peter Hall, Kunzig explains:

With that he disappeared into the Underground for his ride home, leaving me on the crowded sidewalk with a great gift: a few hours to kill in London. Even Ebenezer Howard would have understood the feeling, at least as a young man. When he returned after a few years in the U.S.—he’d flopped as a homesteading farmer in Nebraska—he was jazzed by his native city. Just riding an omnibus, he later wrote, gave him a pleasantly visceral jolt: “A strange ecstatic feeling at such times often possessed me … The crowded streets—the signs of wealth and prosperity—the bustle—the very confusion and disorder appealed to me, and I was filled with delight.”

The key point: Kunzig, in National Geographic shows how as popular writing on urban topics matures, we move closer to meaningful issue statements about urban life. A narrative once the province of “specialists”, such as Clay, is now mainstream.

But with just a few more questions and answers of the sort proposed here, removed observation is more likely to result in practical understanding of urban solutions and success.

All images composed by the author. Click on each image for more detail.

resetting urban land use: what’s next?

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, everyday urbanism, housing, infill development, pedestrianism, sustainabilityLeave a comment

Whether centered on “reset” or “recession”, there is no shortage of provocative summaries about the game-changing new economy. As a legal practitioner who also writes about cities, I find the most value in comprehensive efforts gleaned from on-the-ground intelligence of urban trends—those parlayed by clients on a daily basis.

Today’s post continues as an exclusive entry on The Atlantic Cities. For the remainder, click here.

Photograph composed by the author.