Koan of the Day

The output quality of a given social science is inversely proportional to its perceived hardness.

Land use is the derivative of the transportation system

Something I've been mulling over:

Land use is the derivative of the transportation system. What I mean by this is that the nature of the land use system is wholly dependent on the local dominant transportation system. Hence a rail-oriented transportation system sees incredible centralization, pedestrian- and bike-oriented ones a dense spread, and automobile-oriented ones...sprawl.

Perhaps "derivative" isn't the right word in a technical sense, but it certainly sounds sexier than "dependent variable". And we want mantra here. We need mantra, because we need to focus on the problem at its core, because the reality is--there's a reason why planners are so often hamstrung, and it's because they're fighting a system dictated by the engineers. So while Euclidean planning standards don't help--parking requirements especially--the place to focus action would be with the engineers, to make it possible to engineer real streets, real platforms for value creation, again.

Repeat after me: Land use is the derivative of the transportation system. Land use is the derivative of the transportation system. Land use is the derivative of the transportation system.

Tepid Urbanism At New Norris Apartments

*Author's note: I originally used the phrases "battery cages of poverty" to describe towers-in-a-park and "barracks and battery cages" to describe public housing's urban renewal-era efforts, producing towers-in-parks and garden apartments, when writing this post.

Wrapping up major construction, and soon to be rented, are the LEED certified Norris Apartments, a low-slung townhouse-and-apartment public housing complex replacing a dreary tower-in-a-park that loomed over the northeast corner of Temple University for the longest time. (See Naked Philly’s report HERE and Plan Philly’s HERE.)

On the outside, this ambitious project, designed by Blackney Hayes, is akin to other ... Continue reading at Hidden City Philadelphia.

Embrace and Enliven

Credit drexelmasterplan. The dream--and the reality.

The announcement last month of Drexel University’s draft master plan (by the Boston firm Goody Clancy) was a purposely subdued event, a presentation only to interested parties, with documents only later released publicly on the master plan blog.

What a treasure trove of documents they are! Three PowerPoints–a vision, a strategy, and implementation–show ... Continue reading at Hidden City Philadelphia.

Quick Note on the History of Urban Planning

Nostalgia* has been behind almost every movement in urban planning.

1. City Beautiful. Nostalgia for the imperial center, as established in Mesopotamian, Greek, and Roman precedent, and retranslated in the Baroque period.
2. Decongestion (for lack of a better word). Nostalgia for the idealized medieval free city. We can see this in Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow and especially in Lewis Mumford's The Culture of Cities.
3. New Urbanism. Nostalgia for the settlement pattern nebulously called "Small Town America". Resultant reduplication of features common to this settlement pattern, with the sole exception of abandonment of the strong grid. Outgrowth of urban theory of Andrés Duany and James Howard Kunstler; informed greatly by Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language.
4. Landscape Urbanism. Nostalgia for Modernism, primarily as an interbellum movement. Led by Charles Waldheim and James Corner. Nostalgia for Frederick Law Olmsted and Le Corbusier.
5. Traditional Urbanism. (Why is it even on here? Because it's the most cogent response to New Urbanism there is, despite its lack of attention in intellectual circles.) Nostalgia for castle towns (for lack of a better term). Nostalgia for density. Articulated best by Charles Gardner and Nathan Lewis. Informed by Jane Jacobs. Desire to harness urban forces operative in e.g. informal settlements.

There are only three major urban theorists who I can think of who are members of no movement--two of whom are Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander--and it's precisely their work that has stayed most relevant through the years. This is frankly because both of their work starts by correctly identifying the problem of the city (a precious rarity in urban theory) and works from there. The third theorist is, of course, Le Corbusier, whose ideas (the Radiant City) have been, by and large, discredited.
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* By nostalgia I mean the idea of a historical urban form as the ideal urban form. There's nothing wrong with that--humanity has experimented with a variety of urbanisms throughout its history, and relatively few have failed. Charlie Gardner pointed out that he's trying not to romanticize, and a laissez-faire approach to urbanism should theoretically lead to a variety of urbanisms; one of my larger points, both in agreement and in contrast with him, is that there are a variety of good urbanisms. Of the schools I pointed out, traditional urbanism comes closest to reflecting this--possibly due to its youth.