Strolling along the Ringstrasse, Viena

 

Many of you will recognize the allusion to "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera but here Michael Mehaffy and I are talking about the heavy burden of sprawl and what to do about it. Check out the links to the CNU Sprawl Retrofit Initiative! 

Even when a topic has been extensively analyzed and evaluated, it is always tempting to add one’s own perspective. The High Line in New York is such a topic. Praised by design critics and most of the media, the High Line has not been favored by many of my New Urbanist friends, which made my inclination to comment on it even stronger. Having visited the High Line for the first time last weekend, I couldn’t resist, and so yielded to the temptation, as Oscar Wilde once wisely recommended. 

Influenced by enthusiastic media and not-so-enthusiastic friends' opinions, I expected an over-designed, sleek installation, wasteful and extravagant in use of materials and display of high-tech tricks. What I found was a useful and well-designed piece of civic infrastructure, perfectly located and executed, while celebrating the city, its exuberance and its contrasts. 

Rushing through a busy, Halloween-ready Chelsea Market and the bustling streets around it, my friend and I entered the park at 16th Street. It was an instantaneous relief to find ourselves high up on the High Line, taking in the city’s view with a breath of fresh air (or the illusion of it). The height (even at 30 feet) changes the perception of the city; at street level one looks first at the closest details – the sidewalk, the storefronts, the people – while up there the attention is instantaneously drawn to the expanse of the horizon and the river beyond. 

At first glance the park is unassuming, even modest: subdued grayish colors, informal layout, grasses and young trees waiving in the breeze. It even looks unfinished in some places, matching this part of the city and its rough patches: parking lots, crumbling structures next to busy construction sites, directly adjacent to brand new, glitzy buildings – proof of the real estate rebirth credited often to the High Line. 

Why does the High Line work so well?

First, the park is the right scale: using the dimensions of the elevated railroad, in some places meandering under buildings, it has the proportions of an intimate, comfortable street. The occasional expansions along the railroad trajectory create nodes of different activities and alleviate overcrowding. 

The High Line is a great connector for an assembly of distinct neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan: the meatpacking district, Chelsea, The West Side Yard. Eventually it will reach the riverfront and join the existing pedestrian and bicycling route that runs through the Hudson River Greenway. The High Line makes all these areas psychologically and physically accessible through a unified walking promenade. 

The park has successfully created possibilities for different experiences: quiet walking, city viewing, bird watching, coffee drinking, and just relaxing. A linear park can provide such multi-functionality better than a square or more enclosed urban space. My friend who has been living in Manhattan for more than a decade suggested that some of the famous and beloved NY squares suffer from  "over programming." There is always something going on: markets, festivals, bazaars, skating, etc. Such a comment may be against the common wisdom that “the more you have to do in a public space, the better,” but it struck me as aligned with Frederick Law Olmsted’s assertion in his report on Prospect Park that “a sense of enlarged freedom is to all, at all times, the most certain and the most valuable gratification afforded by a park” (as quoted by W. Rybszynski in “A Clearance in the Distance”). The High Line achieves a good balance between expanse of space and entertainment. It offers locations for various activities without eliminating the possibility for quiet roaming and contemplation. 

The juxtaposition of nature and urbanity is always effective, and the landscape of the High Line successfully achieves a contrast to the manmade world below and around. Delicate birches, savannah grasses, and aromatic herbs, native and exotic plants – the overall assembly is delightful and unforced. Though these plants haven't yet withstood the test of time, they look refreshing compared to the barren streets below. 

Considering the high cost of its construction (more than $150 million), can the High Line serve as a prototype for adaptive reuse of old infrastructure in other places? Of course it could, but only in highly urban conditions. It cannot be a universal model – not because it is expensive or “high” design, but because its success requires a vibrant urban environment. The High Line is a catalyst for the city, but it works so well because of the city around it. Nevertheless, it has inspired cities like Chicago and St. Louis to start similar projects of infrastructure reclamation. Philadelphia is planning to transform the Reading Viaduct into a similar, but supposedly less costly promenade.

Of course not everything is perfect. As glorious as it may seem, the panorama is interrupted in numerous places by unexplainable piles of glass and steel (the largest one and most difficult to explain is by Frank Gehry, the IAC building). In addition, the Standard Hotel is an outright disappointment. My friend insisted that it was an old building from the ‘60s that had been renovated. Unfortunately it is almost brand new and actually praised as a masterpiece. It reminded me of a hotel I lived next to for more than two decades in Sofia, Bulgaria. It really was built in the ‘60s, a slab-like building whose blandness and curtain wall were very similar to the Standard. Oh well – it is a small world, after all, and there is a lot of repetition, especially within the repertoire of the international style. I hope Mr. Ouroussoff, who praises the Standard as “serious architecture,” will forgive me, but I will join Mr. Kunstler, who put the Standard in his Eyesore of the Month collection.

It feels absurd to talk sprawl when you are on the High Line, but as pre-occupied with sprawl as I have been for many years, I could not help but think of all that infrastructure – highways, arterials, collectors, cloverleaves, mega parking lots – that serves sprawling suburbia and how it will be maintained and updated in the coming age of the non-exuberant economy. How will we handle the suburban infrastructure when it crumbles and stops working? And who will pay for the transformation or replacement – or just the maintenance – of this profligate infrastructure? In a recent study, Strong Towns compared sprawl to a Ponzi scheme, which happens when “revenue from new growth is used to pay off liabilities from past growth.” This is not a bright future ahead. 

A simple comparison between walkable, diverse places and sprawl makes it obvious that there will be much more demolition and even abandonment of infrastructure in sprawl where there is so much waste of space and resources. 

Some of us imagine that sprawl can be redeemed. As early as 1977 Leon Krier suggested the retrofit of a multi-layered highway interchange in Athens, Piraeus into an elevated park or “wooded archipelago” leaving traffic and noise below, while opening views to the Acropolis. History has shown the death and rebirth of countless human settlements: layers upon layers of civilization happening at the same location. But are we going to succeed in recycling sprawl, rebuilding it, repairing it, making it a place beloved, spirit-lifting, and magical? 

Or does magic happen only in New York?

As a quintessential element of sprawl, the cul-de-sac has become a predictable target for critique and attack. Loved by suburbanites for its presumed safety, privacy, and even exclusivity, the cul-de-sac has been blamed, deservingly, for many of the ills of sprawl: disconnected street networks, over-loading of suburban thoroughfares, lack of walkable block structure, residual open space, only a single building type and only a single use, to name a few. Prevalent within single-family subdivisions, of which we have hundreds of thousands in the US, the cul-de-sac has become in the past 60 years one of the most widely spread planning patterns around the world.  

Of all the types of sprawl patterns, residential subdivisions (where cul-de-sacs proliferate) are the most difficult to change, for many reasons. One is that they consist of multiple properties. Another is that the single-family houses are usually the biggest investment of the homeowners, who might be afraid of any change. NIMBYism (ironically itself the result of sprawl) is another obstacle. Homeowners associations and their restrictions are often the most powerful impediments to sprawl repair.  

How can cul-de-sacs be redeemed? Can they be transformed into something more useful than dead-end patches of asphalt? Can we “occupy” them in more meaningful ways? It is realistic to assume that even if we had the most assertive intentions to transform cul-de-sacs into benevolent urban patterns we would not be able to change all of them any time soon. There are simply too many, with people living around them, most of whom will be resistant to change. 

There are strategies, however, that can improve cul-de-sacs through slow, incremental interventions, upgrading the quality of life in and around their single-family subdivisions. The process can be called Micro Sprawl Repair. It may include connecting the cul-de-sacs through pedestrian and bike lanes in places where it is possible to attain easements. In some rare cases it may even be feasible to puncture streets through cul-de-sacs, stitching together the suburban fabric. (These straightforward techniques are explained in the Sprawl Repair Manual.) 

But the most innovative (and transformative) intervention is to create new centers of activity. Single-family subdivisions are not complete, self-sustaining entities: they lack the most elementary daily services such as corner stores, drycleaners and places for gathering and socializing. The idea is to insert a Complete-the-Neighborhood Module, a “package” of buildings and uses that will rebalance the sprawling residential enclaves by adding some of the missing elements. An expandable, flexible grouping of structures can be made to fit within and between existing houses or replace abandoned or outdated housing stock to provide much-needed amenities. 

The posted example, developed with Chris Ritter and watercolored by Eusebio Azcue at DPZ, shows the incremental replacement of three houses with new structures.

First, the house on the left is replaced by a flex building – a recycling/learning center that can include a workshop and market where people can build or repair and then sell such things as furniture, appliances, and electronics. A recycling drop-off station and compactors for plastic and aluminum are in the back; a greenhouse is attached on one side, with a compost drop-off spot behind it. 

The house on the right is replaced by a cooking school and a small restaurant that can be used as a banquet room by the residents and seniors. A dry cleaner, hairdresser or a small daycare can occupy the middle portion that joins the two structures. The new buildings face the street and form an attached plaza that can later be replicated on the other side of the entrance street. The plaza can be used for outdoor eating and games for the elderly. The parking is hidden behind but conveniently accessible from two sides, and a path connects it to the cul-de-sac. 

The next step is the replacement of the third house by six live-work units with an average footprint of 1,000 square feet or less. They represent valuable real estate that could pay for the acquisition of the houses and the construction of the additional amenities. Senior housing is an alternative to the live-work units that could allow retired residents to remain in the neighborhood.

Postscript: The time of reckoning for sprawl has arrived. Millions will be stuck in declining impoverished suburbs. Economic factors will make it difficult for some of the younger residents moving out and will prevent the seniors from getting rid of large homes and mortgages when they wish to retire. This will create an urgent need to change the current arrangement to bring more flexibility, adaptability, and enterprise to cul-de-sacs.

The truth is that some subdivisions with fossilized governing documents will be frozen by inaction and will be left to wither and, instead of serving the growing needs of the population, will succumb to decay and irrelevance. Others will gather the collective strength needed to face reality and make changes that will benefit not only everyone around the cul-de-sac, but also the wider community.

 

 

Inspired by the recent popular discontent expressed so colorfully on Wall Street, I offer this proposal: Occupy Sprawl!

People are not happy with the economy, with politics, with the government. Consider the physical surrounding of the protesters: the streets and squares in lower Manhattan where there are plenty of places to gather. Good urbanism provides good spaces for assembling and protesting. Our sprawling suburbs are devoid of such places. Where can people get together to show frustration (or to celebrate)? Are people happy with their physical environment in sprawl? Why not revolt against the system of sprawl, which is responsible for some of the most serious environmental, economic, social and health problems in recent history? Sprawl has been central to our economic troubles: the mortgage meltdown, dependence on cars and oil, pollution and waste of resources to mention just a few. Sprawl has even been blamed for the death of the American dream itself.

How about taking on sprawl in the passionate way the protesters are taking on Wall Street? The metaphor of occupation can serve us well in the quest to reform sprawl because we will need a dramatic overhaul – of the physical pattern, of the law, of the financing mechanism that created, supported and encouraged sprawl for decades. The whole system must be shaken from its foundations, in the same way the occupiers demand systemic changes on Wall Street.
There is so much to occupy in sprawl! People should reclaim the empty, unproductive, wasteful spaces: over-scaled parking lots, empty big boxes, dead malls, vast front lawns, foreclosed McMansions, massive cul-de-sacs, underperforming golf courses, etc. Suburban strip corridors can become main streets and boulevards, malls can incubate much-needed town centers, deserted McMansions can house students and seniors, and parking lots can be transformed into productive community gardens.

There is a direct connection between Wall Street and the future redevelopment of sprawl. A few years ago Christopher Leinberger identified 19 real estate categories or standard product types preferred by Wall Street and showed the need to provide new alternatives that are walkable, diverse, more resilient. The redeveloped sprawl types will be the new products in the Wall Street toolbox.

Leinberger put it succinctly and unambiguously: “We can stay outside the world of Wall Street-dominated real estate finance, discuss, and (occasionally) design and build precious, expensive alternatives. Or we can work hard to develop new product types that the mainstream can understand, accept, and prosper by developing and owning.”

The good news is that things are already moving. The New Urbanists have been building numerous projects redeveloping sprawl, piling up experience and success. Sprawl is under attack from many sides ­ from the grassroots as well as from the private and the public sectors. The market is shifting towards more intelligent, human-scale urban patterns and Wall Street is paying attention. Adam Ducker of RCLCO pointed out in his CNU presentation on the economic context of sprawl repair, that walkscore is becoming a Wall Street underwriting tool.

But more voices and hands are needed for this Herculean effort. The resources are here and plentiful; just help yourself. Use the strategies from Retrofitting Suburbia, the toolkit of the Sprawl Repair Manual, the maneuvers of the Tactical Urbanists, the interventions of Incremental Sprawl Repair and Planned Densification, the common sense of the Original Green, the sustainability of Rainwater-In-Context and Light Imprint, the techniques for re-zoning sprawl of CATS and get support from the many minds of the CNU Sprawl Retrofit Initiative.

Get out and Occupy Sprawl!

Scale is fundamental to urban design. If you get it right, and achieve a well-proportioned space between buildings, you have a sound basis to build upon. Even if the architecture is far from perfect, the public realm you create can be decent and comfortable. If you get the scale wrong and your master plan is built, even the most lustrous architecture won’t remediate the failure of space-making; people might still use it for utilitarian reasons (think the parking lot of a Wal-Mart), but will not enjoy it. 

Getting the urban scale right has been the mantra of planners and architects for ages. But have we been practicing what we have been preaching? In reality, we have been putting up for too long with the worst offender to human scale, sprawl. This pathological growth pattern has created environments of magnified dimensions that overwhelm the physical size of the human body. Massive thoroughfares, perfect for fast-moving cars but not for pedestrians, have destroyed our neighborhoods; mind-boggling multi-level interchanges have eroded our urban cores; single-use mega structures of enormous size and their even more enormous parking lots, have obliterated the walkable scale of traditional towns. This type of planning has resulted not only in the largest waste of real estate, infrastructure and natural resources in human history, but has seriously impeded some elemental human necessities – the need to walk based on the physiology of our two-legged bodies, and the need for spatial enclosure based on the physiology of our human eyes as well as our psychology. It is simple: we enjoy walking and we enjoy well-defined spaces, while sprawl has deprived us of both. 

It is ironic that the demise of human scale in urban planning started with Le Corbusier, who taught us in his Modulor that human dimensions should become the universal criteria for any type of design – from the height of the kitchen counter to the size and shape of an airplane. However, he accomplished something very different in his city-building practice – he introduced gigantism in urban planning based on the necessity to accommodate the movement and speed of cars. Chandigarh, his only built plan, is the implementation of the modernist urban utopia, “a painting on a clean canvas,” per Edmund A. Bacon, where both separation of functions and division of vehicular and pedestrian traffic were instituted. The mega-grid created a strong, memorable diagram; the sculptural quality of Le Corbusier’s civic architecture delivered the grandeur of the image. However, Chandigarh’s scale is car-oriented; its street network is a highway system, with buildings pulled away from the streets, not shaping the streets into spatial enclosures. 

The Athens Charter of CIAM (mostly written by Le Corbusier) explicitly calls for the use of human scale in all urban planning matters (Conclusion 76 “ The dimensions of all elements within the urban system can only be governed by human proportions”), but in Chandigarh Le Corbusier did not apply this requirement literally. He carried through the monumental scale of the overall urban diagram, but failed to achieve the smaller, human scale. 

Today most of our cities and suburbs repeat the mistake of Chandigarh, ignoring the ways people have been living and socializing for thousands of years in pedestrian-scaled, compact, and diverse environments. These places are sick with a virus that could be called “mega-scale” or as Jan Gehl defines it, “The Brasilia syndrome”. 

In Brazil’s capital there is a centerpiece called “The Square of the Three Powers,” designed by a follower of Le Corbusier, Lucio Costa, with buildings by Oscar Niemeyer. The ensemble is an astounding accomplishment of civic pride and symbolism, similar to the grand metrics of Chandigarh. As a main square of the capital of Brazil, its oversized dimensions are suitable. But seeing the pair of gigantic “Candangos,” or “The Warriors,” a metal sculpture at the square, symbolizing the people who built the place, I couldn’t help thinking about scale. I could barely touch the knee of one of the giants. It seemed that the square, as many other places in recent urban history, were created for these metal “avatars.” Towering four-fold over a normal person, they were the only ones who looked comfortable in this vast space. The square and the sculptures are appropriate for their location and function, but they remind us that in urban design large scale should be reserved for the civic and the monumental, while human scale should prevail over most of the urban fabric. We need to reclaim smallness, by “shrinking” the scale to fit our species’ size. 

Over the ages our minds have evolved more than our bodies. Actually, according to Wikipedia, “the appearance of modern man about 100,000 years ago was marked by a decrease in body size at the same time as an increase in brain size.” Yes, since then we have grown in height compared to the medieval knights; however, the difference is measured in only a few inches that are far less significant than the oversized, car-oriented dimensions we have chosen for ourselves while building sprawl. Today we acknowledge the mistake and the challenge to correct it. Let’s hope our larger brains will help us return to the smaller scale. 

As of late, the mortgage interest deduction (MID), a tax break many Americans have become accustomed to, has become the focus of much debate and controversy. It first became the subject of heated discussion when President Obama’s debt commission suggested its reduction. They argued that in addition to reducing deficits, such reform could also help slow the growth of sprawl. The claim was that the deduction encourages people to buy larger homes on larger, exurban lots, and that reducing this subsidy would slow the growth of sprawl.

In a previous post, I argued that the MID is only one of many incentives that have made sprawl the predominant form of growth. What’s more, slowing growth does nothing with the huge surplus of sprawl that already exists. If the goal is to effectively deal with sprawl, we will be better served by encouraging its repair through regulatory and financial incentives. 

Now the MID debate has started anew as President Obama suggested funding portions of the Jobs Act through certain reductions of the MID. And yet again the result has been uproar from all directions. It is obvious that any proposal to reform this all-American “privilege” will be an uphill battle. 

Here is another proposal. We know that sprawl is a disaster of biblical proportions and that we will need to deal with it sooner or later. Why not modify the MID to encourage the repair and redevelopment of our sprawling communities? We need to create incentives for density and mixed uses. Sprawl happened not only because people wanted big houses and privacy, but also because the policies and incentives, such as the MID, were very attractive. 

The MID could be reduced for all properties except those in locations targeted for sprawl repair and redevelopment. This would create a strong incentive for people to buy and build in places that need infill and densification. If that action proved to be politically unfeasible, the MID could be increased for investments in sprawl repair sites, such as dead malls that could be transformed into mixed-use town centers and failing commercial strip corridors that could be made viable as transit-oriented boulevards.

The above strategy could be applied in combination with state and local policies such as legislation encouraging smart growth and reformed zoning codes, to deal with the enormous and complex phenomenon of sprawl. 

However, real leadership will be required to successfully pull off sprawl repair. Forward thinking and political courage will be needed to change the status quo. These leaders must understand that great place-making invigorates local economies. Recent studies show that dense cities create more jobs and expand markets. It is not a coincidence that these places are not only dense, but also demonstrate great urbanism, attracting the entrepreneurial and the talented. Incentivizing sprawl repair, transforming struggling or failing places into spots of great urbanity, would benefit larger regions and help the economic recovery.

It is disheartening to see that one of the most innovative companies in the world has wasted a great opportunity and is choosing for its new corporate campus the most conventional stereotype of suburban sprawl: a free-standing, single-use, mega-structure in the form of a glass doughnut. We are not talking about architecture here; no doubt the architecture could be spectacular. It will be Foster + Partners designing the building, so we can expect the architecture to be the state of the art. What is hugely disappointing and substandard for Apple is that their place-making concept is wrong. They will create a commuter-oriented environment using one type of building: an object, to which everybody commutes (yes, 2/3 not by car but still commuting). Some may find the spaceship beautiful, free-floating in green space. But that is not the point.

The point is that the Apple campus could have been a real place. Located amidst disconnected fabric of sprawling enclaves, it could have been a focal node in suburban Cupertino. Why not incorporate living, dining, entertainment, shopping, within the campus? This would have been a revolutionary idea, similar to the spectacular Apple products. How about a new elegant product for suburbia – a self-sustained, walkable, human-scale place? An opportunity was missed to correct past mistakes in the way the region grew, to infuse sprawling Cupertino with a piece of real urbanism.

How could this be achieved? The program housed in the corporate mega-structure could be distributed differently: the restaurant facilities, the café, the fitness center, the corporate auditorium, the research facilities could be pulled out of the internalized, air-conditioned mega-space and located along streets, squares and greens, making enjoyable, sociable, intimate environments and public spaces for employees and visitors and taking advantage of the gorgeous California weather. Why would they put 13,000 employees into a huge bubble? Instead of walling off the numerous amenities in a single building, as is typically done in a suburban office enclave, they could be incorporated into an urban fabric to create a lively urban node. Imagine the benefit to those 13,000 employees, and to the city of Cupertino, if those amenities were available in a nice, walkable environment.

The open space as a mega space is also ill conceived, as humans prefer the spectacle of a lively street instead of acres of open space. With security an important issue, the campus could be secured along the perimeter (as the current design suggests) and still be a decent, walkable human environment. The campus will amount to 2.8 million square feet of program – equaling 5% of the total office space in downtown San Francisco - a pretty substantial number that could be distributed into a pedestrian-friendly, human-scale urban fabric of small blocks that would be easy to build, easy to phase, and pleasant to walk around. This is how the human scale, user friendliness, elegance, and simplicity typical of Apple products could have been achieved. Great urbanism integrated with great architecture would have been a perfect fit for Apple’s ambition to create the creative 21-century workplace.

We have become accustomed to seeing the best from Apple. Not this time.

Galina Tachieva

Sent from my iPad.

PS: When I first saw the news of the Apple spaceship doughnut I thought it was one of The Onion's spoofs similar to the "Mac wheel". Turned out they are serious...

Sprawl Tongue Twister: Say That Three Times Fast

Galina Tachieva | January 6, 2011
The mortgage interest deduction (MID) has been the subject of much discussion after President Obama's debt commission suggested its reduction. It has been argued that in addition to reducing deficits, such reform could also help slow the growth of sprawl. The argument is that the deduction encourages people to buy larger homes on larger, exurban lots, and that reducing the subsidy will slow the growth of sprawl. That may be correct, but how important is it?

Sprawl has been malfunctioning for decades, and is one of the primary factors in the recent mortgage crisis, escalating transportation and infrastructure costs, deteriorating environment, and growing health problems. We certainly need to stop the growth of sprawl, but the MID is only one of many incentives that have made sprawl the predominant form of growth, and besides, slowing growth does nothing with the huge surplus of sprawl that already exists. If the goal is to effectively deal with sprawl, we will be better served by encouraging its repair.

The common perception of sprawl is the multitude of housing subdivisions built in the exurbs. That is correct, but sprawl is also composed of such elements as office parks and shopping malls, and these places are failing as fast as the subdivisions. The problem is that we have created a landscape dominated by segregated, single-use pods, where residences are separated from stores, which are separated from offices, etc., and cars are required to reach every destination.

The way to repair sprawl is to strategically redevelop certain portions of it - by making it walkable and by adding options for housing, working, shopping, and transportation. Failed office parks and shopping malls, for example, are prime candidates for sprawl repair because they are typically in good locations, under single ownership, and are substantial parcels (their parking lots represent possibly the largest depository of underutilized real estate in the country). These failed, sprawling behemoths have the potential to be transformed into complete, sustainable communities that provide most of the daily needs for the people who live and work there. Such places are in high demand, but there is unfortunately a whole host of obstacles to their creation - whether land-development regulations that don't allow them or difficulty in securing funding. The focus, therefore, should be on making sprawl repair possible and desirable.

That task is best addressed by local stakeholders. Citizens, elected leaders, and municipal staffs must decide these places are worth saving and do what is necessary to encourage their repair.

Local officials can change zoning ordinances to allow higher densities, mixed uses, and expedited permitting for sprawl repair projects. At the state level, legislation and policies can be created to enable this type of zoning and provide financial incentives. Rather than continuing to pour money into sprawling infrastructure projects that make the problems worse, states can direct funding to the transformation of failing sprawl into functioning, sustainable communities. Projects expected to benefit their larger regions should be eligible for such funding, as well as indirect incentives such as tax deferrals, the right to use tax money for improvements, and reduction of fees, among others.

These repaired, sustainable communities would serve as amenities for their inhabitants and their entire regions while also aiding the real estate markets and giving much-needed boosts to the local economies.

Sprawl is draining our resources, damaging our environment, and worsening our health. Reducing the MID might slow the growth of sprawl, but other regulatory and financial incentives would be much more effective for truly dealing with the larger problem of existing sprawl.