Is a Floating "Wetropolis" the Answer for Rising Sea Levels?

You know things have gotten dead serious with respect to climate change when major world leaders are no longer talking about cutting emissions and instead talking about "geoengineering" or even simply throwing in the towel and evacuating their nations en-masse from rising sea levels.

Let's start with the first of our doomsday scenarios. Geoengineering is an emerging scientific field that aims to use frighteningly large-scale engineering projects to counter the effects of climate change. Part of the concession the field of geoengineering is making by default is that limiting our carbon emissions - or even eliminating them altogether and becoming carbon-neutral - is not enough to stop the most devastating impacts of climate such as:

• Global average temperature increase of between 1.8 and 4 degrees C (4-9 degrees F)
• Sea level rise of up to 1.5 feet by 2100
• More frequent severe storms (cough:Katrina:cough)
• Longer and more intense heat waves and droughts (Texas, are you listening?)
• More sporadic rainfall overall

All of these effects are now generally accepted among the scientific community as likely to occur if they are not already occurring. The very fact that we are talking about a "tropical Germany", submerged skyscrapers in New York City, and hundreds of summer heat-related deaths in Seattle by 2050 is evidence that climate change is spinning out of control faster than our ability to respond.

At least for now, the field of geoengineering is has little funding and is not understood to be a viable solution to the climate change mess. Proposals such as ocean iron fertilization to boost phytoplankton growth and soak up ocean carbon sound effective, but there is no way of knowing currently whether it is cost-effective. How much carbon would you have to displace to be able to justify the expense? Other ideas, such as space mirrors or cloud reflectivity enhancement are no more effective and could produce nasty unintended side effects. 

Ocean iron fertilization off the coast of Argentina

So clearly how we build our cities' infrastructure must drastically change even as we cut emissions well into the future. Here are some of the more outlandish ideas on the table for retrofitting our coastal cities to deal with rising sea levels and climate change: 

In San Francisco, Iwamoto Scott Architecture imagines so-called "fog flowers" that would be installed on Twin Peaks and other major hilltops to collect the condensation from incoming fog belts. This method of water collection would be very important, as water resources are expected to be very strained in the coming years.

Farther downhill, high-rise residential towers double as algae farms for biodiesel production.

"Fog Flowers" covering Ocean Beach in the Outer Sunset

Images courtesy of Inhabitat

Another alternative comes from the increasingly water-logged city of Bangkok. Already home to 12 million people in a marshy river delta that will face more flooding with rising sea levels, a plan from the designers S+PBA aims to embrace flooding as a constant resource in a more resilient "wetropolis".

The vegetation basis for the Wetropolis is a forest of indigenous mangroves, which the government is already trying to implement in Bangkok. The mangroves naturally filter water, and they also supply fresh oxygen and natural cooling. As the water is filtered, shrimp farming can flourish in a sustainable manner. The community will live above the water fields in a network of interconnected homes, walkways, and roads, with curvaceous lines that emulate the rippling water below.

Dubbed "A Post Diluvian Future", the "wetropolis" suspended above mangroves would allow Bangkok to live sustainably with natural flooding as a constant, rather than something to resist. The plan would also help detoxify the city's polluted water supply, a major protection against the more frequent droughts tropical climates are likely to face.

Now let's say you are a tiny, impoverished South Pacific island nation without the money for geo-engineering or fancy design remodels like these. What do you do then?

According to a recent story in The Guardian, the president 100,000 person nation of Kiribati, Anote Tong, recently announced that he had been looking at plans to evacuate the island chain onto structures resembling gigantic floating lilypads:

"The last time I saw the models, I was like 'wow it's like science fiction, almost like something in space. So modern, I don't know if our people could live on it. But what would you do for your grandchildren? If you're faced with the option of being submerged, with your family, would you jump on an oil rig like that? And [I] think the answer is 'yes'. We are running out of options, so we are considering all of them."

Whoa...can you imagine President Obama getting up on his podium and telling the citizens of New York or San Francisco, "you know, we really tried to do something about this global warming business, but you wouldn't listen, so we have no choice. All aboard the floating lilypad, everybody" ? Insanity would quickly ensue. The fact that the Kiribati president has made such statements and is still alive and still president is testament to how imperiled these and other island nations like the Maldives, Seychelles, and Tuvalu really are.

The structures are the brainchild of Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut. This "ecopolis" would not only be able to produce its own energy through solar, wind, tidal and biomass but would also process CO2 in the atmosphere and absorb it into its titanium dioxide skin.

The nation of Kiribati, just south of Hawaii, faces a bill of $900 million to shore up its infrastructure in the face of rising sea level projections for 2050. With most of the islands less than two meters above sea level and only a population of 100,000 how exactly are they supposed to pay for that?

Solutions like Callebaut's lilypad may look ridiculous and farfetched, but they are grounded in a tradition of artificial islands. For centuries, people have lived on floating islands of reedgrass in Lake Titicaca, Peru.

Floating villages of Lake Titicaca...yes, that really is the name of the lake :)

The sad truth is that unless we really start getting our act together on climate change, we too may have to look at these pretty fucking outlandish floating scenarios with a more serious eye.

Los Angeles Busts Out a New Chapter in Planning

California has been on my mind for quite some time now. Not only have I been envisioning what my future residence in California will look like, but I've also been scouring the Interwebs for the "next big thing" in the state's urban planning world. I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that I won't be able to make a living as a city planner, in any capacity, with only a Bachelor's degree. This, sadly, has been a delusion that I've had to get over rather quickly since graduating from UW. But let's sit back for a second and get a bird's eye view of reality. I figure that if I'm going to make a go at city planning as a career, then I sure as hell better have my finger on concrete projects I could work on when I'm finished with grad school. As they say, if you can dream it, you can do it!

The big picture is that out of California's diverse urban landscapes, the city of Los Angeles holds the most potential as a hotbed of innovative urban planning ideas and projects to engage with. Part of this is just due to the sheer size of LA as America's second biggest city, with nearly 13 million people in the metro area. There are world-class urban planning programs at both UCLA and USC that are of great interest to me. But more importantly, there is an abundance of urban planning projects ripe for the taking mostly because LA's urban planning processes and history have been so thoroughly, utterly fucked up.

The common maxim is that “if aliens were looking down on Los Angeles, they would come to the conclusion that the dominant life-form is the automobile”. Another suggests that even talking about LA as a coherent city is itself specious, that Los Angeles is a series of "72 suburbs searching for a city." How did things get to hell in a handbasket so fast? Why is LA so universally regarded as an urban planning catastrophe?

First, LA was dealt a bad hand simply by experiencing nearly all of its growth as a major city in the immediate post-WWII era. This was a time when the Interstate Highways Commission was pumping billions into brand new freeways. Simultaneously, the Los Angeles Railway, the city's former system of streetcars once among America's most extensive, was being bought out by General Motors and replaced with stinky, polluting diesel bus lines that - surprise! - no one wanted to take. The "locus" of downtown Los Angeles was beginning to become blighted long before the city entered its greatest period of urbanization from the 1960's onward. The dominant entertainment industry, where most of the city's jobs are, was decentralized and favored large studio warehouses in outlying areas, not the kind of centralized factories that solidified the urban centers of most American cities that came of age pre-WWII. These factors encouraged sprawling development patterns for both residential areas and employment centers. And LA's heavenly climate doesn't exactly discourage a car-oriented lifestyle with big, suburban lawns and white picket fences, now does it?

Of course, the suburban dream didn't quite work out as planned for LA. It goes without saying, of course, that LA has America's worst traffic, bar none. The city also has some of the worst social inequality in the US, the infamous Watts and Rodney King riots are only symbolic of this disturbing trend.

However, all is not lost! There are a whole host of new developments pointing toward a sustainable future for LA. Here's a recap of some of the most exciting ones:


1. TRANSIT

LA is already ranked the 3rd best city for transit, according to US News & World Report. Even though most of the native Angelenos I know would never dream of taking public transportation, this isn't to say that there isn't public transit available. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has already pledged to accelerate the city's investment in transit, especially rail rapid transit, by building at least $13.7 billion in subways, light rail, and commuter rail in a 10-year time frame, rather than the 30-year plan originally outlined. The expansion of the Expo subway line to Culver City and eventually Santa Monica, two hubs of the perpetually traffic-choked and densely-populated West Side, is the plan's centerpiece.

Additional lines are planned for Westwood/UCLA (Purple Line), the San Fernando Valley (Orange Line), Pasadena to Pomona (Foothill extension), Santa Ana commuter rail, and LAX (Crenshaw corridor). This would be the first time in LA history that the city had three rail projects under construction at the same time.

 Villaraigosa's proposal is probably the most ambitious one for rail/subway transit in the US today. When California voters passed Measure R in November 2008, they agreed to a half-percent increase in sales tax to fund $27 billion in transit in thirty years. So how will LA accelerate these projects when Measure R is only supposed to generate about $3 billion in ten years? Ask the feds for money, and then pay it back when Measure R's funding kicks in completely by the end of the 30-year window. If  this deal is packaged the right way, the federal government could get a significant benefit by lending LA this unprecedented sum of money. Not only will the local economy get a boost (leading to increased federal payroll and gas taxes from the thousands of construction jobs that will be created), but the federal government will also play a hand in solidifying LA's future as a progressive, transit-based city of innovation. Loans to fund this new infrastructure could lure hundreds of thousands of jobs and new residents to the city, whose growth would pay back the loans. China's Special Economic Zones of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and others have been given a similar treatment over the years, with great success.

LA's ambitious plan to building 30 years of public transit in only 10 years

2. BIKES

The Los Angeles City Council in March approved a plan calling for 1,680 miles of interconnected bikeways. This is a huge event equivalent to building 50 miles of bike lanes per year for thirty years! And it will go a long ways to encourage would-be cyclists previously terrified (with good reason!) by the city's traffic-choked and unfriendly streets, to take to the streets safely.

Map of LA's new system of 1,680 miles of bike lanes and boulevards planned by 2038

This heavy dose of bike infrastructure is also being funded by Measure R, 10% of which was dedicated to bicycle transportation. Here is a link to the full bike plan and more details from GOOD magazine:

The plan promises several changes for L.A. bikers: the Citywide Bikeway System will introduce three new interconnected bike path networks—Backbone (long crosstown routes on busy streets), Neighborhood (short connectors through small streets) and Green (along recreation areas)—throughout the city, a new pledge for Bicycle Friendly Streets will make streets more pleasant for riders and walkers, and a series of education programs and safety policies will help cars and cyclists co-exist. 

Of course, the LA Citywide Bikeway System is still in its conceptual phase and will require a great deal of commitment from the city to actually become a reality. Even so, the plan makes clear and definite the policy choices that Measure R will be allocated into, so even producing this long-range plan is a huge step forward for LA.

So what kinds of infrastructure could the bike plan lead to?

The plan will begin with bike accommodations we regularly see here in Seattle, like "sharrows" and dedicated bike lanes. Later on, bigger projects will include "bike boulevards" and traffic-separated bike lanes that until now have been almost exclusively the domain of cities like Portland, OR and Amsterdam, which I covered here.

Rendering of a "bike boulevard" planned for downtown Los Angeles

Some of the first traffic-separated bike lanes in Southern CA just opened in Long Beach a few weeks ago, and they provide a glimpse (hopefully) of what is to come to the rest of the metro area.

Bike lanes in Long Beach, CA

3. PEDESTRIAN IMPROVEMENTS

Figueroa Street, which runs through downtown and connects with the USC campus, is one of the streets identified as a Backbone corridor, which means its bike and pedestrian improvements will be given highest priority. In all, the street is nearly 30 miles long and is without doubt one of LA's longest and least pedestrian-friendly streets. Copenhagen-based Gehl Architects, of Cities for People fame, are already working on providing bike lanes, improved sidewalks, mixed-use development that embraces street level uses, and what to do with the nearly 545 acres of parking lots within a half-mile of the Figueroa Corridor. More info from GOOD:

The proposals for Figueroa Street are divided into "good," "better," and "best." The entire street would be configured to the "good" specs, with the protected bike lane, more trees, new paving, and general improvements to the pedestrian experience with crosswalk striping and mid-block crossings. The "better" and "best" schemes would be seen at more high-traffic intersections, like near Staples Center and USC's Galen Center.

Vision of a future Figueroa Street landscape. Doesn't it remind you just a bit of Las Ramblas?

An even more groundbreaking proposal comes from three architecture students at Cal Poly: why not ban cars from downtown LA entirely? A baffling 36% of the space of downtown LA is used for parking lots and garages for in-coming commuters. What if that were replaced by more housing, parks, plazas, transit, and all the other things we actually love about cities? Have a look at the slick video they produced for more info:


Downtown Los Angeles from tam thien tran on Vimeo.



Finally, I leave you with an inspirational passage from Tim Halbur of GOOD magazine:

I live in a beautiful old apartment in an historically preserved neighborhood filled with trees. Most mornings, I walk three blocks to the nearest rapid-transit stop and take a 10-minute ride past a major art museum, a couple of beautiful art deco theaters, and several busy shopping and office districts. On alternate days, I bike the four miles, stopping at any one of the many sidewalk cafes along the route before settling into my desk on the fifth floor of a 10-story office tower. 

Would you believe I live in Los Angeles? 

Most people picture sprawling suburbs with deteriorating lawns, framed by minimarts and overshadowed by the Hollywood sign. The corner minimarts are there, but they border old neighborhoods thick with duplexes and other lowrise multi-family dwellings, the kind of dense living quarters that are all the rage among urban planners. In fact, Los Angeles has more people living closer together than Portland, Oregon, the current poster child of urbanism. And depending on where you draw the lines, L.A. is denser even than New York City.

But where Los Angeles differs from those urban cities is that it is really, really big. While the County of New York is less than 23 square miles, Los Angeles County stretches across 4,083 square miles, larger than all of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. And while walkable neighborhoods like mine flourish in many cities across the county, the last 70-odd years of history have decimated the relationships between them. When talking about cities like Cleveland or Pittsburgh, city planners and architects refer to the dead or under-used areas as “broken teeth.” Well, Los Angeles might as well be a washed-up prizefighter, because there are a lot of gaping holes between those pearly whites. 

But all is not lost. Before we revert to old stereotypes about Los Angeles as a Blade Runner-esque dystopia, I’m here to report the good news: The City of Angels is turning away from that imagined future and heading toward a much brighter past.

So even though I'm not chomping at the bit to move to LA just yet - San Fran wins in so many areas it's not even funny :) -  it's good to know that even the most recalcitrant, stubbornly car-oriented cities can still be reborn into somewhere we would actually want to live!

Bike-Only Boulevards: This Would Be Portland's Idea...

In Seattle, late February marks the unofficial start of biking season, because let's be honest, everyone except the most hardcore bike commuters and Critical Mass-types among us has pretty much had their bike sadly rusting away in storage since late October.

So in honor of this, I dusted off my 15-year-old Trek hybrid bike, which had been sitting in my apartment's front doorway almost unused since I moved here in...gulp....September! I'm a terrible cyclist - terrible, terrible, terrible. Bicycling used to be a big part of my life, the one type of exercise I never wanted to quit, the way I discovered new neighborhoods anywhere I went. Hell, a 60-mile ride around Lake Washington was a "training ride" at one point for me not so long ago. I promise to redeem myself this year by doing two things:

1) Train for and do STP, the annual 10,000 rider-strong race from Seattle to Portland. I did STP two years and absolutely loved it!!! There's free food and drinks every 20 miles (a drop in the bucket compared to the 200 miles between the two cities), and my favorite part about it - getting tranced out on my iPod the whole f*cking way there. Wouldn't do it any other way :-)

2) I will devote more space on Green My Fleet to bike-related issues, like bike infrastructure, bike sharing, upcoming rides and events, and bicycle cultures from around the world.

Riding through one of my favorite cities in the entire world - Valencia, Spain

In deference to ultimatum #2, I found a pretty interesting trend that's emerging among the more left-leaning green circles of - where else ?- Portland, Oregon: bike-only boulevards. What's that, you ask? A street where only bikes are allowed - in America??? Impossible. It has to be the psychotic dream of some deranged  hipster twat with chronic anomie and gauged ears! (see below in case you missed the latest episode of Portlandia):



You'd be wrong in thinking that bike-only boulevards are doomed to be an idea of the loony fringe, however. Portland happens to the be the US city with the largest bicycle mode share of 7% (planner-speak for the proportionate ways we get from point A to point B), but it pales compared to bike-friendly cities internationally. European cities take the cake on bicycle population - some 30-35% of all trips are made by bike in most Dutch cities, as well as many cities in France, Germany, and Scandinavia. That most US cities, including Seattle (2% bike mode share), fall way behind Portland is an indictment of our unsustainable transportation system in general.

Portland achieved the success it did by allocating more bike infrastructure - bike lanes, sharrows, bike racks on buses and light rail trains - than any other American city for many years. Portland pioneered the neighborhood bicycle boulevard and the traffic-separated bicycle track that were a first in the US, though hardly elsewhere. A large portion of Portland's large biking population is due not only to its relatively flat geography and outdoorsy culture, but also its 15 neighborhood bicycle boulevards, where traffic is calmed to the point where cyclists almost begin to take precedence over cars.

Recently installed traffic-separated bike track on Manhattan's 9th Avenue, photo courtesy of Seth Holladay of http://www.nycbikemaps.com

Recently, though, Portland's bicycle hegemony may be slipping. Portland was bested by Minneapolis as the most bike-friendly city in America by Bicycle Magazine this past spring. New York City has laid 250 miles of bike lanes in the past three years alone under the partnership between Mayor Michael Bloomberg and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. Meanwhile, bike-sharing systems are sprouting up like weeds across the US, from Washington DC to Denver, San Francisco, and Miami, and Portland is nowhere to be found on this important trend.

Bike-only boulevards represent one of the great bits of uncharted territory for bike infrastructure that Portland and other cities are now looking to tap into. How exactly do you make the transition to a street completely dedicated to bikes? This is something no city in the US can match, and only the densest parts of Amsterdam have any experience with. One of the most important ways to encourage more people to hop on their bikes is to eliminate the threat of riding in traffic, a danger that deters an estimated 60% of "would-be cyclists", that is, people who say they would like to ride their bikes as their primary mode of transport but choose not to.

So by this measure, all of the previous bike infrastructure we've ever experimented with doesn't even come close to meeting people's needs. Bike lanes are often narrow, rarely continuous, and provide zero safety if cars are speeding just inches away from you at 40 miles an hour or more. Most streets lack the space for a dedicated bicycle track, so this option does little for us. Bike paths built on railroad spurs, like Seattle's Burke Gilman, are fun recreational spaces but impractical as commuting paths because they are difficult to integrate with the street network and can only be built where there was once a railroad. Sharrows don't even pretend to give you any space as a cyclist - rather than allocating any street width for bikes, they just paint a bicycle on the asphalt to "warn cars" that bikes might be nearby. Big help that is...

There's already a great deal of evidence in support of bike-only boulevards. The city of Bogota, Colombia, regularly sees almost two million people use its 100-mile plus system of bicycle boulevards that are closed on Sundays as part of its Ciclovia (Spanish for "bike-highway"). Los Angeles copied the event with its own CicLAvia series and likewise saw a huge increase in people out on their bikes. Why? Because the bike-only boulevards remove car traffic and finally make people feel safe being on their bikes.

As cities grapple with how to become more sustainable, we're set with some very big goals to achieve. San Francisco aims to have 20% of its residents moving by bike in just ten years, by 2020. Portland is aiming even higher, 25% bicyclists by the same year. It might just take something otherwise considered radical to hit targets like these. The San Francisco Bike Coalition is lobbying the city's Board of Supervisors to install 27 miles of bike-only boulevards that connect the most important commercial and transit hubs. I can only suspect a proposal like this would cost far less than what the city has spent so far on who knows how many bike lanes.

The bike-only boulevard trend is even spreading to cities as ass-backwards as Seattle. A "neighborhood greenway", borrowing Portland's granola terminology, is planned for the NE 45th St. corridor in Wallingford.

Will these bike-only boulevards work as truly functional transit arteries, and not just a fun Sunday recreational pastime? If the two boulevards installed in London recently are any indication, we needn't worry about that. Bicycle traffic went up 70% in less than a year since installation, which speaks volumes about the difference good infrastructure makes in our transportation choices.

In case you needed any more motivation to be on the look out for bike superhighways, check out this statistic:

According to a report from the Political Economy Research Institute, a think tank based out of the federal Department of Transportation, construction on bike and pedestrian infrastructure creates TWICE the number of jobs per dollar spent than road construction. Take that, Tea Party assholes!

So...What Do You Do Exactly?

Every so often, I find an article that hits the nail on the head for exactly what I wish I could say, if only so eloquently. When I was in school at UW and told people that I studied urban planning (don't even get me started with Geography!), I was met with blank stares and mild eye-rolling 90% of the time. You wanna do what now? The other 10% probably has some idea of the profession and assumes you are either a) an architecture school reject or b) a lost hippie who wants to create urban farms to feed organic food to the homeless - don't worry, some of us still do!

Really urban planning is much more simple than that. I want to be able to take people's vague ideas of what a "sustainable" future is supposed to look like and put them into practice. Are you happy with your current lifestyle? Do you worry about pollution and its effect on your health? Do you hate your morning commute and wish there was an alternative to sitting in your car wasting fuel while you idle? Do you wonder why you can't walk to your corner store the way your parents could? Ever wonder how your city will restructure itself due to the recession? Where its jobs will come from? Well, that's where urban planners come in. Because I'm terrible at explaining things like this, I'll leave it to a PhD student at UMaryland whose full article is below:

It happened again, as it invariably does every holiday season. In the midst of spiced eggnog and office holiday parties or visiting with family and friends, I get asked a simple question: “What do you do?” I politely say, “I study urban planning.” And then there’s the inevitable silence as I wait for the quizzical follow-up – “What’s that?” – and another brooding year of Christmas heartache. However, this year something changed. After I uttered my usual phrase, “I study urban planning,” my speech was met with a “Wow, that’s really cool,” and “Ah, that’s interesting, I have a friend who is studying that,” or my personal favorite: “I wish I had gone into planning rather than settle for law school.”  Yes, the field of urban planning was met with unbridled enthusiasm as I made the rounds this holiday season. A Christmas (or Hanukkah) miracle? I think not.

The plain truth is that urban planning is hot. If we take a look at the numbers, according to the Department of Labor, the urban and regional planning field is expected to grow by nineteen percent, from 38,400 jobs in 2008 to 45,700 jobs by 2018. Moreover, quite apparent is that a burgeoning global population has created the need for additional infrastructure including transportation systems, affordable housing, and schools while simultaneously existing infrastructure needs repair and restoration. It is no wonder that U.S. News and World Report included urban planning as one of the fifty best careers for 2011. But this is really just the beginning. 

In his notable work, Planning in the Face of Power, John Forester describes planning or designing as “a deeply social process of making sense together.” Planners, to appropriate the sociologist’s C. Wright Mills language, translate personal troubles into public issues.  Moreover, they help individuals and communities communicate and develop visions for the future based upon shared interests, values, and norms. In a time and place where the prospect of the future seems uncertain, unsettling and even frightening at times, the expertise that planners bring is needed more than ever. In this context, a perfect storm of factors is contributing to an auspicious growth for the field. 

Let’s be straight: Urban planning is and traditionally has been a relatively obscure field in a relatively obscure set of disciplines known as the social sciences (we like to talk things out). In her article “Planning Theory’s Emerging Paradigm: Communicative Action and Interactive Practice,” Judith Innes writes, “There are probably 1,500 people today who hold a planning Ph.D. The proportion of educators with a Ph.D. in planning is steadily increasing.” This was in 1995. Today, my educated guess is there are in the range of 2,500-3,000 people with planning Ph.D.’s and they are in more places than walking the corridors of the Ivory Tower both here and abroad. You can find them in think tanks, NGOs, law firms, and public policy organizations. In terms of academia, one only need take a glance at the Job Bank on the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) website to see the plethora of faculty jobs available. Indeed, the L. Douglas Wilder School at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) alone has announced it will be filling ten or more tenure-track or tenured positions in the coming two years. Ten positions! That’s larger than the entirety of many planning departments, and along with a number of new positions, the field is seeing whole programs commence and become newly accredited including those at Boise State University and the University of Louisville, among others. To put this in perspective for those new to the field, the annual planning conference for academics draws between 400-500 individuals yearly. The field is not large; we aren’t talking a department of history, economics, or political science here. We are talking about a field where there are at present fifty-four openings for urban planning faculty (I counted). 

Why all the activity?  A constellation of factors are at play, including:

• The first full generation of trained planners are on the eve of retirement

• The growing relevance and significance of planning, both locally and globally from Dubai to Detroit reflected by the ascent of wealth and the capacity to build mega-project (e.g. as in Dubai), but also the ascent of poverty resultant from failed public policy, markets, and structural economic forces (e.g. Detroit)

• The growing visibility of planning through media (including this magazine) and the blogosphere thereby precipitating more interest from the general public

As both supply and demand factors continue to incentivize the field, the explicit notion that both individuals and communities are looking for answers and find themselves increasingly reflected in the language of planning, whether tacitly or knowingly, begs the question: What does this emergence mean for how we train planners for the future? It is a question that generations of planners have considered, including Paul Davidoff and Judith Innes. 

Davidoff, regarded as the founder of advocacy planning, described in his 1965 article Advocacy and Pluralism in Planningthe need to broaden the scope of a planners’ education. He wished to widen the focus of planning to include all areas of concern within government. He speaks to the primary role the planner has as a coordinator and suggests that two years of graduate study may be insufficient to broadly train planners for this difficult job. Judith Innes, writing in the mid-1990s, notes the importance of allowing students to take over their own learning processes. She references an anecdote in a teaching workshop she attended which imbued her with a Deweyian lesson, “that learning by doing has far more power than simply learning by reading or listening and that social learning – learning as part of a group effort – has important advantages over the solitary investigation of the lonely researcher.” More recently, Leonie Sandercock contends the need for “therapeutic” processes to transform urban spaces from places of fear (racial, socio-economic, etc) to places of cohabitation and coexistence. Such processes could be structured in helping residents organize meetings in moving from fixed positions to shared interests. These three scholars are but three voices over planning’s lifespan that add to the discourse on planning pedagogy. The ascent of issues such as all things sustainability-related, social justice, and international development planning only contribute to the dialogue on what a planner should be learning.   

Peter Bosselmann, a professor of urban design in architecture, city and regional planning, and landscape architecture at the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that among his students,

“

There’s an interest in international work right now, which probably has to do with the economy . . . Geographically, China is very important, as is India, and we assume that soon the urbanization of Africa will start becoming of interest. [Topic-wise], the environment is becoming stronger and stronger, especially the forces of nature and how they’re acting on cities, such as the rising of water tables.”

What so many of us love about planning is that it is dynamic. And urgently so. From the growing wealth gaps in the United States and globally, to environmental issues, individuals come to planning because they wish to effect change. We can only hope that as the institution of planning moves into the next decade, planners will be more cogent of their past, their context, and their responsibilities to their craft in embracing this dynamism. No Christmas (or Hanukkah) miracle required. 

Via: Planetizen

Taxis of the Future Soon to Hit New York Streets

The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission has announced the three finalists for the vehicle they will choose to replace New York's aging taxi fleet. The winning cab will replace a large chunk of over 13,000 cabs that traverse the city. Whichever design is chosen will have a major impact on which green fleet technologies get adopted - New York has the largest taxi market in the US - and which don't.

These are the criteria that will determine the winning bid:

• Meets highest safety standards
• Superior passenger experience
• Superior driver comfort and amenities
• Appropriate purchase price and ongoing maintenance and repair costs
• Smaller environmental footprint (lower emissions and improved fuel economy)
• Smaller physical footprint (with more usable interior room)
• Compliance with appropriate Americans with Disabilities Act requirements
• Iconic design that will identify the new taxi with New York City

It will be especially interesting to see how the winning cab stacks up, in terms of fuel efficiency, with the city's current crop of hybrid-electric cabs, or Chicago's CNG (compressed natural gas) cabs that I wrote about here. This is to say nothing of San Francisco's Japanese-made all-electric cabs that received a huge federal grant earlier this year. 

Here are the finalists:

Turkish automaker Karsan's entry, the only cab that is wheelchair-accessible

Ford Transit Connect Taxi

Nissan's finalist


Via: Planetizen

"Ugly Tourism" Takes Off - Welcome to Cleveland, Bitch :)

As if by some stroke of God, one day I'm writing about the schadenfreude of looking at Detroit's "feral neighborhoods" and how the city could be cashing in on a micro-niche of "ugly tourism." Today we are serendipitously greeted with this perspective on Detroit's slightly less corroded neighbor to the east, Cleveland.

Like Detroit, Cleveland has been shedding jobs and residents for decades, and there is little hope for its long-term economic future. But why be such a debbie downer about it? The upsides of economic decline are cheap (cheap!) housing, affordable bars and restaurants, and an unpretentious, no-frills attitude towards life. Why stress out about which college you'll go to when there are no jobs for college grads in your city anyway? Poverty is simple and low-maintenance, argues Mike Polk in the video below:



"Come and look at both of our buildings"
"Watch poor people all wait for buses"
"Here's the place where there used to be industry"

Can you make a rap like this about your city?

Come on, Tacoma, you know you want to :)

Via: GOOD magazine

The Feral Houses of Detroit - Part Deux

Last week we covered one of the more spectacular and haunting side effects of the dramatic decline of Detroit - the rise of "feral houses" and even "feral neighborhoods" that are so thoroughly abandoned they revert to a natural state.

Part of the City of Detroit's economic rescue plan involves essentially withdrawing from nearly one-quarter of the city's land area and letting it become wild. Cut off your nose to spite your face. For those living in Detroit, this must be a stunning reality that not only has the city been in sharp decline since the 1960s, it is completely evacuating large sections of once elegant neighborhoods just to remain financially solvent. Once among the richest of American cities, it now seems more like an internationally famous ghost town. Our version of Somalia, if you will.

A note for the Detroit Chamber of Commerce: "ugly tourism" is all the rage right now in Europe. Like "slum tours" through the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or "grief tourism" to the killing fields of Cambodia and Auschwitz, Detroit needs to take advantage of its clear monopoly on decay and the powerful story of its riches-to-rags downfall. Might I suggest a marketing slogan to tempt the more thrill-seeking among us? "Zombieland Detroit: And You Thought it Was Just a Movie"

This series from the Guardian has excellent photos of the interiors of some of Detroit's most tragically derelict buildings. The incredible thing about many of these shots is that so many of the buildings appear to have been abandoned so suddenly and without planning, with knicknacks and personal belonging still left untouched decades later. In many ways it's eerily reminiscent of post-Katrina, except this disaster was entirely man-made. All photographs by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

East Methodist Church

Detroit’s Vanity Ballroom with its unsalvaged art deco chandeliers. Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey once played here.

The biology classroom at George W Ferris School in the Detroit suburb of Highland Park

Dentist's station, Broderick Tower

Light court - Farwell Building

Michigan Central Station

Michigan Theater - now a parking lot?

Former police station, Highland Park

The ballroom of the 15-floor art-deco Lee Plaza Hotel, an apartment building with hotel services built in 1929 and derelict since the early 1990s

The ruined Spanish-Gothic interior of the United Artists Theater in Detroit. The cinema was built in 1928 by C Howard Crane, and finally closed in 1974

Waiting Hall, Michigan Central Station

Livingstone House, designed in French Renaissance style in 1893, demolished after this picture was taken.

Via: Planetizen

Crazy and Outrageous Buildings of 2010

2010 has thrown up some buildings and developments that are out-of-this world, spectacular, outrageous, and even absurd. All despite the worst recession in thirty years. Here's a look at some of the best, courtesy of GOOD magazine.

The tallest freestanding structure on the planet, the Burj Khalifa, will open in Dubai in January, standing 2,717 feet above the desert. Designed by Adrian Smith, the tower is the centerpiece of a $20 billion development named Downtown Dubai, but it opens at an ominous time. The tower itself, known as the Burj Dubai, is re-named after Sheikh Khalifa al-Nahyan, the President of the United Arab Emirates, who gives it the economic bailout necessary to complete it. Dubai is plagued with financial problems, and in October, only 825 of the 900 apartments are rented, overlooking a city where cranes hang motionless across the sky.

Meanwhile, a few months later in China, the new tallest tower in the world officially opens in Guangzhou, Guangdong. Designed by Information Based Architecture with Arup, the Canton Tower twists up 1,968.5 feet (beating out Toronto's CN Tower) into a hyperboloid (or double-ellipse) structure. An observation deck is planned for its rooftop. Meanwhile, Nanjing Greenland Financial Center and the International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong are also completed this year, meaning China secures the titles of the second and third tallest buildings in the world.

After years of speculation about the future of the Santiago Calatrava-designed Chicago Spire, which would rise 2,000 feet over Chicago's waterfront, a foreclosure suit threatens to end construction for good. If ever completed, it would be the tallest building in the United States, topping the neighboring Willis—formerly Sears—Tower in Chicago. But since 2008, the construction site (literally a huge hole in the ground) has been abandoned, symbolic of the nation's waning power in the skyscraper race.

It officially opened in late 2009, but 2010 sees the completion of the final phase of CityCenter in Las Vegas, a spiky, fantastical, starchitect-studded collaboration featuring hundreds of A-listers like Daniel Libeskind and Cesar Pelli. The $8.5 billion project is the largest privately funded development in U.S. history, and one of the largest LEED-certified projects in the world. Yet reviews slam the development for its faux-urban nature, and suffering Vegas hotels blame its 6,000 new rooms for glutting the market. In November, Norman Foster’s troubled and still uncompleted tower, the Harmon, is slated for demolition. Um, what does that do to the LEED ratings of the other buildings?

At the Shanghai World Expo this year, plenty of architects had a chance to flex their muscles while designing the various national pavilions. While the U.S. architecture was a dismal failure, there were otherstandouts from countries like Denmark, who featured a working bike track, equipped with bikes, that wound through the Bjarke Ingels-designed sculpture. But nothing tops Thomas Heatherwick's Seed Cathedral for the United Kingdom, a stunning tribute to biodiversity. More than 60,000 fiberoptic rods showcase specimens from Kew Gardens' Millennium Seedbank, which will hold 25 percent of the world’s plant species by 2020. Which makes it even more fitting that it was nicknamed "The Dandelion."

In October, official renderings are revealed for Park51, an Islamic community center that plans to occupy the site of a former Burlington Coat Factory in Lower Manhattan. Instead of the design by SOMA Architects, the media focuses on the fact that it's three blocks away from where the 9/11 attacks took place, inaccurately dubbing it the “Ground Zero mosque” (even though it's not a mosque, and there are already other mosques in the area). Although there's no explicit commentary about what the design means, the exteriors seem to evoke an Islamic star pattern while flooding the interiors with daylight.

Also in October, a family of five finally moves into what's widely regarded to be the first billion-dollar house, a private, 27-story tower in Mumbai that's built for India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani. Designed by Perkins+Will, the "house" has a health club with a gym and dance studio, swimming pools, a 50-seat cinema, three helicopter pads, a garage for 160 vehicles on the ground floors, and 600 full-time staffers to maintain the house, which is widely regarded to be the most expensive permanent residence in the world.

In December, after perhaps the most ambitious World Cup proposal in history, the tiny Middle Eastern country of Qatar wins its bid to host the 2022 games. Its radical plan to host millions of soccer fans in 130-degree heat include building 12 stadiums that will later be disassembled into 22 new stadiums for neighboring countries, and mysterious solar-powered air conditioners that will keep even open-air stadiums cool. Well, at least they’ve got 12 years to figure it out.

Via: GOOD

40 Drunkest Cities in America

Are you hungover on New Years Day, 2011? Lord knows I am. It's the one day of the year where binge drinking is socially acceptable, at least according to the Good Book - but what do they know, really?

Whenever I've traveled and gone out in different cities, I've always wondered whether the city I'm in is particular drunker (or more full of drunks?) than any other.

In the Bay Area, for instance, drinking is the most popular local sport - friends from there can invariably drink me under the table. Levels of drunkenness regularly approached the worst of my Fratterdays.

When I lived in Spain, however, blacking out was deeply frowned upon by the local people. Having a drink or two with your lunch on a Tuesday, however, was completely normal. This, of course, does not include Cadiz Carnaval, where the whole city shuts down so entire families can get debauched together for a solid week.

Drinking in Israel was a big disappointment. Not only is it the custom to nurse a beer or two for your entire evening, there's also a slight possibility the club you're in will be blown up by Palestinian terrorists.

So....is your city among the drunkest in the US? The study linked below measured the percentage of adults who are "binge drinkers" (more than four drinks in two hours) and the percent suffering from alcoholic liver disease.

Let's have a look at the rankings:

1. Milwaukee, WI - colddddd
2. Fargo, ND - even colder!
3. San Francisco, CA - gays + sunshine = party people
4. Austin, TX - live music, go figure
5. Reno, NV - gambling :) sinners
6. Burlington, VT - do they drink a lot of maple syrup, or what?
7. Omaha, NE - BOW DOWN TO WASHINGTON, BITCHES!!! That should do something to their alcohol consumption, dontcha think?
8. Boston, MA - let's get drunk in hahvahd yahd
9. Anchorage, AK - is there a sarah palin shot up there?
10. San Diego, CA - German for "whale's vagina"

Rounding out the list:

21. Spokane, WA - I would drink myself to sleep, too, if I were from here

24. St. Louis, MO - How my Dad manages to not do so is nothing short of a miracle

29. Chicago, IL - you have to drink if you're gonna eat a Chicago dog, those things are huge!

30. Seattle, WA - Goooo 206!

32. Portland, OR - microbrews are yummy :)

Via: The Daily Beast