Category: Planetizen

Shrinking cities, ‘shovel-ready’ and more

That great Web site, Planetizen.com, and writers Nate Berg and Tim Halbur offer their take on the biggest planning issues of 2009. Top o the list, you’ll not be surprised to see, is the Great Recession.

Next is “Shrinking Cities,” followed by “The ‘Shovel-Ready’ Conundrum,” and “High-Speed Rail.”
Except for the high-speed rail, this region experienced all those travails.

The Planetizen recession article has a link with this woeful headline: “Architect Tops List of Hardest-Hit Jobs.” Carpenters came in at No. 2. I think the devastation in the architure profession may be one of the great underreported stories of 2009.

The section on Shrinking Cities ends with a link to an LA Times report that a large commercial farm is buying abandoned land in Detroit with hopes of establishing a large-scale commercial enterprise. Here’s another link, to a Fortune magazine piece on the same topic. It may sound crazy, but if so, a lot of respected planners are crazy. The Fortune piece notes: “After studying the city’s options at the request of civic leaders, the American Institute of Architects came to this conclusion in a recent report: ‘Detroit is particularly well-suited to become a pioneer in urban agriculture at a commercial scale.’ ”

The high-speed rail section includes this paragraph, quoting the always quotable author and dystopian James Howard Kunstler: “James Howard Kunstler, who famously said that America has ‘a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of,’ commented that high-speed rail is overspec’d and unnecessary. In 2009, Kunstler wrote that ‘Californians (and the U.S. public in general) would benefit tremendously from normal rail service on a par with the standards of 1927, when speeds of 100 miles-per-hour were common and the trains ran absolutely on time (and frequently, too) without computers (imagine that!)’

There are a wealth of links. Happy reading.

Corbu? Or You?

Yesterday I posed the question of who should be on the list of worst urbanists – spinning off Planetizen.com’s entertaining Top 100 Urbanists list.

The easy, cliched choice would be Le Corbusier, the brilliant but destructive architect whose vision for the city of the future was one of tall towers surrounded by large lawns and big highways. In other words, this guy invented Charlotte’s suburban office park development Ballantyne, as well as this nation’s many failed public housing towers. But Corbu was avant-garde and influential, and many others took up his theories. This was especially true in the U.S., where they dovetailed nicely with the auto and petroleum industries’ push to get everyone into automobiles and driving a lot.


But thinking of Le Corbusier made me think of General Motors and its famous Futurama display at the 1939-40 New York Worlds Fair, depicted at right. Surely the automobile and petroleum industries – with their powerful influence on Congress and highway funding and with GM’s purchase of many urban streetcar systems in order to dismantle them – did more to shape the nation’s cities for the worse than any one architect could.

But then, of course, it’s worth remembering that while Le Corbusier did influence huge numbers of architects in this country, Walter Gropius and his colleague Sigfried Giedion (who wrote “Space Time and Architecture”) probably influenced more, during Gropius’ many years at the Harvard School of Design. So maybe Gropius and Giedion should be on the list.
But again, wait. Architects challenge us to think. They may be wrong but who, really, decides what gets built? It’s government that makes the rules that shape our cities. What about Herbert Hoover, who before he became president was Commerce Secretary and commissioned the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act, which to this day underpins most land use ordinances in America and whose very foundation rests upon the theory that separating uses is the way to a safe and healthy city or town. As Jane Jacobs later showed us, it really isn’t.

The federal government funded the interstate highway system, envisioned as a way to connect cities. But when it entered the city it caused open, ugly wounds to the urban fabric that continues to damage cities to this day.

It was the federal government whose rules for backing mortgage loans created the redlining that cut off access to credit for anyone who A) was black, or B) lived anywhere near black people, or C) was one of a variety of so-called undesirable ethnics, such as Mexican or Bohemian or D) lived anywhere near any of those so-called undesirable ethnics.

It was the federal government, again through its financing rules, that encouraged the sprawling, low-density suburban subdivision design that vanquished more urban dwelling forms.

Consider: The government is by the people, for the people and of the people. It’s all of us. So maybe that worst urban thinker arrow should spin around and start pointing at all of us?

“Green” conventions? And other news

Should Charlotte’s convention center start trying to capture the “green convention” business? Successful event planner Mary Tribble, who’s back from a national conference on the subject, said Tuesday she believes more national conventions will aim their business at cities and facilities that can market themselves as “green.” The Charlotte Convention Center is not LEED-certified, of course. [LEED = Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.] Nor will the new NASCAR Hall of Fame be. (See my May 23 posting, below.)

Tribble says she and Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority honcho Tim Newman are forming a task force to see what can be done in Charlotte.

— In Wake County, even conservative tax-watchdoggers are pushing FOR a land transfer tax to generate money to build schools. Click here for the N&O’s story.

Excerpt: Even former county commissioner Phil Jeffreys, speaking as a member of the fiscally conservative Wake County Taxpayers Association, was on board for a transfer tax. “We need to make sure we go to the legislature and really push on real estate transfer fees,” said Jeffreys, who was voted off the board in the last election after voting “no” on many spending proposals.

— In fast-growing Chatham County, county commissioners on Monday enacted a moratorium on residential development. Click here for the story.

— Courtesy of one of my favorite planning info sources, Planetizen.com, here’s a link to a Wall Street Journal article about the trauma subprime loans are causing in many minority neighborhoods, including a long-established middle-class area of Detroit. According to the article, so many homeowners are facing foreclosure now that it may well erase any gains in homeownership the nation has seen. (And don’t forget the Observer’s coverage, complete with online map of local foreclosures. Here’s a link.)

–And finally, also from Planetizen, here’s a piece in which the author takes aim at Reason magazine’s assumptions about mass transit versus road-building.