Eric Miller on 07.31.10 @ 12:58 PM PST [link]  

If the blog has seemed a little quiet lately, it's because we have been preparing a new format for New Colonist: starting tomorrow, we will be presenting a monthly front page with two to four new articles, fresh each month!

The blog will also continue, and the blog address and RSS feed will not change, so your old links will not need to be updated. However, clicking on newcolonist.com will then take you to the new monthly homepage--which will include a digest of latest blog postings as well.

We will be revamping our archives page layout later on, and are also considering adding an events calendar open to readers and businesses.

So take a look at us tomorrow morning; we're sure you'll like what you see!

Richard Risemberg on 07.31.10 @ 06:22 AM PST [link]  

In a publication released last month, urbanist Jan Gehl and Walter Hook, Executive Director of the Institute of Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), together set out ten keys to building successful cities. "Our Cities Ourselves: 10 Principles for Transport in Urban Life" shows how cities from New York to Nairobi can meet the challenges of rapid population growth and climate change while improving their competitiveness.

In a concise, vibrant and accessible format, the booklet promises to be a "must read" for all those involved in city design and urban planning, and forms the backbone of the ITDP exhibition "Our Cities Ourselves," which opens on June 24 at New York's Center for Architecture, before traveling to China, Brazil, Mexico and beyond.

"Cities of the twenty-first century should be lively cities, safe cities, sustainable cities and healthy cities," says Jan Gehl. "All of these qualities can be achieved if we embrace these ten principles, which means putting people first."

Cities face massive population growth, particularly in the developing world. By 2030, 60 percent of the world's population, or 5 billion people, will live in cities. The transportation sector currently accounts for around a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, a growing proportion derived largely from cars and trucks.

Without a significant move away from car-dependent suburbanization to pedestrian-friendly and public transit-oriented urban planning, cities will face growing difficulties financing the necessary infrastructure. As a result of inaction, preventing the two-degree rise in global warming that threatens cataclysmic climate change will be nearly impossible.

"When I was growing up, we used to think that in the future we would all be traveling around on monorails, or in flying cars. In cities with 25 million people, this sort of thing just isn't workable," says Walter Hook, Executive Director of ITDP. "Now, our dreams are full of elegant pedestrian promenades along waterfronts alive with fountains and children playing, of great bike paths connecting to public squares alive with cafes, musicians, and performance art."

Some cities are waking up to this reality, and changing direction. "Our Cities Ourselves: 10 Principles for Transport in Urban Life" showcases examples of cities reaping the benefits of integrating urban planning and design that gives priority to pedestrians and transit. It is designed as a guide to cities and countries wishing to make their cities more competitive and livable, while helping to solve the problem of climate change.

"We are thrilled to launch the 'Our Cities Ourselves' global program at the Center, but also to see this important booklet arrive. The principles outlined--and beautifully so--offer a promising future for New York and other growing cities," says Rick Bell, FAIA, Executive Director of the Center for Architecture and the American Institute of Architects' New York Chapter. "I think I speak for the architects of New York when I say we look forward to realizing these principles in our designs."

What are the ten principles of sustainable transport?

• Walk the walk: Create great pedestrian environments.


• Powered by people: Create a great environment for bicycles and other non-motorized vehicles.


• Get on the bus: Provide great, cost-effective public transport.


• Cruise control: Provide access for clean passenger vehicles at safe speeds and in significantly reduced numbers.


• Deliver the goods: Service the city in the cleanest and safest manner.


• Mix it up: Mix people and activities, buildings and spaces.


• Fill it in: Build dense, people and transit oriented urban districts that are desirable.


• Get real: Preserve and enhance the local, natural, cultural, social and historical assets.


• Connect the blocks: Make walking trips more direct, interesting and productive with small-size, permeable buildings and blocks.


• Make it last: Build for the long term. Sustainable cities bridge generations. They are memorable, malleable, built from quality materials, and well maintained.

Eric Miller on 07.21.10 @ 12:49 PM PST [link]  

A new study from Next 10 identifies commercial buildings as a stealth energy drain and huge untapped resource that could provide significant savings for California businesses and state government, reduce the need to build new power plants, and cut global warming pollution while generating jobs and economic growth.

"Up to 80 percent of the energy used by commercial buildings is going up in smoke," said F. Noel Perry, founder of Next 10. "As our state struggles to emerge from recession, relatively low-tech energy efficiency fixes could save California businesses and the state government significant money and help to generate jobs."

Untapped Potential of Commercial Buildings: Energy Use and Emissions, produced by Collaborative Economics for Next 10, examines the untapped energy efficiency potential held by existing and new commercial buildings in California, analyzes obstacles to achieving widespread adoption of building efficiencies and explores approaches to removing these barriers.

Highlights of the study include:

• Electricity consumed by commercial office buildings represents 37 percent of California's total electricity consumption. Based on the U.S. average, energy efficiency improvements could cut that usage by 80 percent.


• Only 60 percent of all new commercial building construction meets California energy efficiency standards. With a minimal two percent increase in construction costs, new buildings can be designed to use one-third to one-half less energy than they use today.


• Only three percent of all buildings are newly constructed or renovated every year.



• California has no energy efficiency standards for existing building stock, which could yield substantial savings in energy.


• Energy efficient buildings retain higher real estate value, commanding higher rents (6-7 percent) and maintaining higher occupancy rates than less efficient buildings.


• Simple energy efficiency improvements to existing buildings, such as insulating window films, yield three dollars in savings on average for every dollar invested.


• In existing buildings, split incentives, elevated hurdle rates, upfront capital costs, and an information gap diminish large-scale adoption of energy retrofits.


• In new commercial construction, a lack of incentives for developers and ineffective installation and inspection methods are barriers to energy efficiency efforts.


• Much can be achieved through actions taken at the federal, state and local levels that raise efficiency standards, align incentives, and support the broad-based application of high-efficiency products and practices.

See the study

Eric Miller on 07.15.10 @ 07:47 AM PST [link]  

Is there room in the American psyche for a rational parking policy?

A few years ago, suggesting that not providing unlimited free parking for as many cars as physically possible in a development would have been seen as a heresy meriting the social equivalent of burning at the stake.

But nowadays, thanks to the analytical work of Donald Shoup and others, we see how parking is a major contributor to the drain that unquestioned support of private driving imposes on the public purse (not to mention the health of both individuals and communities) both directly and by encouraging the extremely expensive and highly-socialized habit of driving everywhere for everything.

But since in America all values are reduced to dollars, let's talk about costs...or rather, let's listen to my colleague Josef Bray-Ali, do so:

Until recently, I worked in real estate development, doing everything from property acquisition and permit filing to management and sales.

One of the biggest hurdles our small company always faced was paying for the construction of mandated, and usually unnecessary, automobile parking.

Car parking requirements forced us to shrink everything--the ground-floor commercial was squeezed into a 400-square-foot space; the building had to have an extra story just so we could stuff a bunch of cars underneath. The cost on paper shot up, meaning that our four one-bedroom apartments turned into four studio condominiums--and once you subdivide a property into condos, you have to go through a whole bunch of planning hoops, bumping up costs even more.

This easy $200,000 construction project turned into a super-risky $1.2 million, four-story fiasco.

Bray-Ali goes on to itemize the burdens that mandating excess parking lays onto both private businesses and communities, and points out that instead of a minimum parking requirement, there should be a maximum parking cap--and that parking space should be shifted to more efficient modes, such as bicycles.

Not as wacky as it seems, once you manage to dissociate driving from the delusion of social status associated with cars: studies show that cyclists cost far less to accommodate with roads and parking yet generally spend more per capita than customers who have arrived by car--and of course you can accommodate twelve cyclists in a space that typically parks one driver's car.

In other words, accommodating cyclists is good for business.

It's also almost impossible under present development rules that mandate building only for cars.

Continues Bray-Ali:

In 2009, I stumbled upon LAMC Sections 12.21-A.4(c) and 12.21-A.16. These sections allow for something quite unique--they authorize a building owner to swap out some of the required car parking spaces for covered bicycle parking.

You can fit 12 bikes in one car parking space--12 customers where only one fit before! (In city after city, when you build it, they do come.) So, swapping car for bike parking could drastically reduce the footprint of a project; small projects like the one we gave up on in (bike-friendly) Eagle Rock would blossom.

But, there are catches....

Read Bray-Ali's entire article in the Los Angeles Business Journal: Putting Parking in Its Place.

Richard Risemberg on 07.15.10 @ 07:24 AM PST [link]  

A short trip up to Oklahoma and beyond brought a look at two sites idyllic in the proliferation of America's auto culture. The first is a Meadow Gold sign in Tulsa. The sign had been both a Tulsa and Route 66 icon since the 1930’s. Neglected and dark since the 1970s, the sign was slated to be torn down in 2004 by a car dealership. The owner agreed to donate the sign to the Tulsa Foundation for Architecture if it could remove and store the two 20-foot-by-40-foot panels. The Meadow Gold sign's new address isn't far away: the owner of an adjacent building donated land to the city of Tulsa for the sign's new home base. It was rededicated in 2009.

The second is the only realized skyscraper by Frank Lloyd Wright. More like a tall building, it is of course an urban form, and Wright was known to dislike the urban form. "To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor," he said. Well, this building is not in what most would call a city, it's in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. The Price Tower was commissioned by Harold C. Price, for use as a corporate headquarters for his Bartlesville company. Wright nicknamed the Price Tower "the tree that escaped the crowded forest."

Strangely this Walt Whitman quote adorns the lobby.

Toward All
I raise high the perpendicular hand-I make the signal
To remain after me in sight forever
For all the haunts and homes of men

Where the city of the faithfullest friends stands
Where thrift is in its place but prudence is in its place
Where behavior is the finest of the fine arts
Where outside authority enters always after the
precendence of inside authority
Where the city that has produced the greatest man stands
There the greatest city stands

Bartlesville seems to have its charms, but following the poem, just perhaps that's possible its not here.

Eric Miller on 07.11.10 @ 04:59 AM PST [link]  

Eric Miller on 07.07.10 @ 02:53 PM PST [link]  

Jane Jacobs is one of those few people who seem to hold up well with audiences on opposite sides of the political spectrum. On the right, libertarians like her opposition to government planning and clearance. On the left she relates in her looking out for the people and places that make a city unique.

This quality is in part what allowed a somewhat diverse group of authors to contribute to the book What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs. The book is the joint work of the Center for the Living City and New Village Press.

Conytibutor Janine M. Benyus is a natural sciences writer. Hillary Brown is a practicing architect. Sanford Ikeda is an associate professor of economics at Purchase College SUNY in New York. Ray Suarez is a Washington-based correspondent for PBS Newshour. You get the idea. The messages of Jane Jacobs have in someway resonated with each of the books contributors.

The results are apparent. Today we think of cities differently. We understand the importance of mixed-uses and pedestrian traffic. Few would argue these points. So what more can there be to say about Jane Jacobs?

A recent New Republic article compared Jacobs with her nemesis Robert Moses and explored whose ideas may have won in the end. I'd venture that while many of Jacobs ideas about the importance of street life have won out, it's hardly an urban development that happens organically. The importance of buildings of varying ages and condition is largely still lost on us. When planners and government entities are involved (and they hardly ever are not) too often cities today are still remade Robert Moses style, from the top down, and sometimes even with a meat axe.

With that in mind, the book is an important one because while the ideas of Jane Jacobs have appeal for many people, in the end they are largely discarded in the interest of practicality and control. But as Sanford Ikeda reminds us in What We See, the city has no purpose or end in itself. Great cities enable the better part of its inhabitants to be free to pursue their own diverse interests with the maximum likelihood of success.

As a nation, we are rediscovering cities. And so we must continue to rediscover and advance the observations of Jane Jacobs. The best cities and the best neighborhoods are the ones with the widest variety of interests and the most diverse stakeholders. Anytime we use top-down planning to remake a place, the diversity of interests decreases. The ideas of Jane Jacobs will have won out only when this is understood.

What we see can help us learn to look, and understand.

Eric Miller on 07.07.10 @ 12:56 PM PST [link]  

by Nathan Zoob

Carnegie Mellon student Dawn Weleski does her best to act surprised when Sheela Ramesh, a young Indian-American woman in bright blue scrubs, breaks the quiet of the Wood Street T station by launching into a musical theater-style song, accompanied by a three-piece string and brass band.

Up and down the platform startled commuters put down their crossword puzzles and take off their headphones to pay attention. An elderly gentleman strains to hear the music from across the tracks; near the bandstand a young man in a red leather jacket flips open his camera phone.

Read More

Eric Miller on 07.06.10 @ 01:14 PM PST [link]