Duany: No mas

DPZ principal and New Urbanism founding father Andres Duany, reflecting on his experiences building the Katrina cottage on the Gulf Coast and modular housing, told the Congress for the New Urbanism gathering in Denver today that he had reluctantly come to a surprising conclusion -- that the design professions should give up on everything else on economical home design and concentrate efforts into designing a better mobile home. Trades contractors and government-imposed permitting and inspection requirements obliterate the savings achieved in low-cost housing construction, he said. The comments came as the New Urbanists wrestled with issues of infrastructure, going green, and financing of projects in these dark economic times. I presented the Lincoln Institute report, Smart Growth Policies, in the session "Selling the Green Urban Advantage," as an example of what can happen when the impact of sustainable development policies are measured (results are not the home run most would hope for), alongside Carol Coletta from CEOs for Cities, Robin Rather from Collective Strengths, and the intrepid Steve Filmanowicz from CNU. Another fine session looked at New Urbanism's focus on transit-oriented development and President Obama's high-speed rail initiative holds much promise with the group.
-- LEED-ND in the works. Standards for the green good-housekeeping seal of approval for entire neighborhoods and not just individual buildings are coming together, and several Denver-area projects, such as Stapleton and Bel-Mar, were put to the test. Interestingly, the Highlands Village neighborhood scored low on some measures because a street was deemed too wide and there was only one floor of street-fronting retail in one section.
-- Dark age ahead. Author James Howard Kunstler was in fine form with his analysis that the US financial system is broken "at every level," making it impossible to return to the oil-based arrangements to which we've grown accustomed. He argues that a much more locally based economy is on the horizon, with small cities depending on proximate farmland.
Blog posts and tweets are abundantly available via the conference Web site, www.CNU17.org, plus dispatches at The Huffington Post.

Expect more

Big-box retailers are an easy … target, when it comes to the window-dressing that’s often done on sustainability. “We’ve heard a lot of that … that word,” said our guide on a dazzling tour of Target’s corporate headquarters on Nicolett Mall in Minneapolis, where some 5,000 planners and others have descended for the annual American Planning Association. We were in the company’s 60-person architecture and engineering division, which if it stood alone would be the fourth largest such firm in Minnesota, after strolling through the Café Target and the art-adorned Great Hall, where pairs of employees talked earnestly on simple fabric furniture. What of the green innovations? The ubiquitous green roof, of course, skylights, recycling plastic hangers, tote bags to replace those bright white bullseye-dotted plastic bags, minimizing and decking parking, and plantings (Japanese maples, red of course, and “perennials with a neat appearance that align with Target’s brand image,” according to guidelines). Our guides were subdued about the greenest thing Target can do, which is to build or rehab in urban locations – the Minneapolis store is a nice example, with its slightly Dutch-feeling shopping-cart escalators, very well used when I was there. Depends on the cost of land, the market analysis, and whether it’s part of a development project, they said: “It has to be practical.” One factor is the delivery and handling of products in cities – from more compact loading docks to the need to move goods to multiple floors – which can raise labor costs. Over the nearly 200 projects in the works, most were conventional big buildings with big parking fields (though I did spot a nice roundabout drawn in to replace an intersection in one set of plans). The claim is that more building rehab is being done; no word on ending the practice of tear-downs after 10 years. Through a program of overhauling libraries and in other ways, Target proclaims interest in building communities. Truly harnessing its branding power could broadcast a message of green amid all that red.

Buckminster Rem

Rem Koolhaas was at Harvard tonight, and did not disappoint. He was the keynote for the Ecological Urbanism conference at the Graduate School of Design, a role he confided he first thought was some kind of "cruel joke." He suggested that green sensibilities began at least with Vitruvius, and continued with Ian McHarg and Buckminster Fuller, in a co-existence of culture and nature, and the ventilating walls and other features of "tropical architecture" he learned about as a young man. He was scornful of the "apocalypitc streak" of those predicting environmental calamity, citing the Club of Rome's "Limits of Growth." Showing a collage of contemporary skylines including Dubai, London and his own CCTV building in Beijing, he acknowledged that "that's out," in terms shortcomings in green performance. But he said "our responses are not that deep, equating responsibility with literal greening" -- green roofs, lining walls with grass -- and pilloried Renzo Piano's California Academy of Sciences building in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Piano's defense of the grassy-knolled creation was either "outrageously innocent or deeply calculation, and probably both," he said. In a house-of-mirrors moment came when he criticized Nicolai Ouroussoff's praise of the building. A more effective approach that goes beyond "good intentions and branding," he said, was the Nordzee wind power project in The Netherlands, in combination with the harnessing of tidal and solar power southward across Europe. That was the kind of marriage of "politics and engineering" that Buckminster Fuller was getting at some 40 years ago, Koolhaas said. Fair enough. I regard Koolhaas much the way that Jane Jacobs appreciated Louis Kahn or Mies van der Rohe; the Kunsthall and Seattle Library are certainly compelling. His take on the green mandate and architecture's response was nothing if not provocative.

Audacious stimulus

As the stimulus package moves through the Senate this week, urbanists are tracking the jockeying on transportation and public works infrastructure. How much of the spending will be for new highway and bridge construction, and how much for transit, "fix it first" roadway and bridge repair, and other aspects of green infrastructure? And how will the money be spent -- by state departments of transportation as they see fit, or with some green-oriented strings attached? The House version of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Economic Recovery Bill called for roughly $30 billion for highways and $10 billion for transit and inter-city rail. In December, Lincoln Institute senior fellow Armando Carbonell urged achieving multiple goals – including energy-efficiency and targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions -- and using a new framework of megaregions for making the investments, in this op-ed essay appearing in The Boston Globe. He was also a signatory in the "Call to New Administration: Only One Chance to Do this Right, Invest Wisely," a blueprint to guide these dramatic new investments, composed after a coalition of leading civic, business, environmental, and transportation leaders came together at Pocantico, N.Y. The blueprint, posted at The New York Times Economix blog and available at the America 2050 Web site, calls for an emphasis on repair and maintenance, projects that foster energy independence, compact communities, and emissions reductions; a phasing-in of spending to allow for strategic planning; workforce training; and a new system of oversight to ensure the projects have desired outcomes. Thus far, the legislation has few of these characteristics. Good reading on the infrastructure aspect of the stimulus can be found by Michael Grunwald in Time magazine, Nicole Gelinas in City Journal, Libby Tucker in the New York Times Green Inc. blog, David Leonhardt in the New York Times, and among many opinion essays, this one by Congress for the New Urbanism president John Norquist on Planetizen. The Los Angeles Times has a good summary of this extraordinary, evolving package, and a good place to keep up with highway vs. transit news is at the Transportation for America blog.

Best and worst of times

On our block here in Boston, the men threw all our carefully separated recycling into the garbage truck today, including all the cardboard boxes from Christmas that we spent time breaking down and stacking into paper bags. When I asked how this could happen in such a green city as Boston, the crew said their instructions came from City Hall, because there was no recycling truck available. It was a fitting end to 2008, which was a jumble of good intentions and harsh realities. I finished my book on the clash of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, to be published by Random House in the summer of 2009, bought a hybrid Toyota Highlander, spent a wonderful two weeks in Peru, Vermont, my son started a new school; soaring gas prices seemed to make more Americans aware of how dependent we are on our cars, particularly in our dispersed suburban areas, and the country elected a president who valued cities, embraced smart growth, and seemed to understand transit. But then of course the economy tanked, the stock market had its worst year since 1931, decimating 401(k)s and endowments; gas prices dropped to $1.50 a gallon, and the Obama administration looks like it's succumbing to business as usual for state DOTs and the highway lobby in the planned investments in infrastructure in the economic stimulus package. John Massengale has a nice post on this last most troubling subject. In the closing days of the year, our nanny quit abruptly and moved to Maine. But, onward: this morning we met someone new. Tomorrow we start the two-week jump-start for the South Beach diet, and we'll get the ship righted once again. Happy new year.

Riding the rails

I want to love the Acela. But it just keeps confounding me. Earlier in the fall, I booked a seat from Boston all the way to Washington. I viewed it as an experiment: yes, it takes more time than flying, but you can get work done, and six hours is worth it for the reduced energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. I stacked appointments behind my scheduled arrival at Union Station. Somewhere in Connecticut we came to a dead stop; a drawbridge ahead failed to close properly. OK, I thought, a little mishap, but maybe we’ll make up the time. Not only was that not the case -- when we finally pulled into New York an hour late, we were told we would remain in Penn Station for an hour. I asked a conductor and she said something about "missing our slot." The afternoon's appointments were obliterated. On a more recent trip – ironically to a conference, Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design after the Age of Oil, on the way to New York we were told we would be late because conditions were “slippery” and slowing things down. Doesn't it rain in France and Japan? Don’t high-speed trains work there in all kinds of weather? Finally, after meeting with my editors at Random House, I went to Penn Station to catch a 7 a.m. Acela for the short trip to Philadelphia. Train canceled. No explanation. Finally, a barely audible announcement: there was an equipment shortage. The Carolina was scheduled to depart at 7:05, and Acela ticket-holders herded toward that platform -- only to get attitude about honoring the more expensive Acela ticket on the less expensive service. Several other people were delayed getting to the conference -- the same gathering Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Ian McHarg and others attended 50 years ago. One prominent topic was of course infrastructure, and the Northeast corridor service is the model for the rest of the nation -- but it needs to work. The original, perfectly reasonable goal was a three-hour trip from Boston to New York. The train can't seem to make three and a half hours. As a reporter for The Boston Globe I covered the various reasons why there were so many problems with the Acela, but I still don't understand them or why they can't be addressed. The staff seems to have a blasé attitude about being on time and going fast. The traveling public needs to go fast, and we need reliable service, for short-haul regional trips by rail to catch on. As reauthorization of the federal transportation bill approaches, and after voter approval of a $10 billion bond issue for new high-speed rail service in California, policymakers will be asking the question: how does it actually work? By the way, former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis will be at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Nov. 19 at noon to talk about the future of rail in the U.S., as a more transit-friendly administration prepares to move into office.

Jane Jacobs and Barack Obama

At this event on the campaign trail, the Democratic nominee took a question from a gentleman who talked about cities and then handed over a copy of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library hardcover edition). Obama called it a great book and seemed to indicate he'd read it; he promises a coherent policy for cities and metropolitan areas if he's elected.