Are livable cities just a dream?

This paper strikes me as very, very odd. The evils he is talking about have nothing to do with urbanity and everything to do with oil, car and development industry-driven sprawl, crappy design and products in general, and capitalists taking advantage of public concern about the environment to build shitty densified complexes.

It is almost contrarian - if people all live in lower density forms they will have to drive everywhere, infrastructure (sewers, electricity, roads etc) will be much more massive - so they will pollute more.

I read a paper a couple of days ago about the remarkable progress the Socialist/Green mayoralty of Paris has made in terms of air quality and quality of life there by promoting public transport - including some new tram lines - and cycling and discouraging overuse of the car.

I've often suffered from the pollution when in Paris so that is good news. Of course the city's high density (as an old city, but with a lot of 19th and early 20th-century intervention) is a help in that. But it is pleasant news, because French and other Latin/Southern Europeans don't have the reputation of being as concerned about the environment as the more northerly Europeans.

quote:

---

Originally posted by M. Spector:
[b][url=http://www.ualberta.ca/PARKLAND/research/perspectives/ThompsonUrbanSpraw... sprawl: bad for your health, the planet and your pocketbook[/url][/b]

---

quote:

---

Rising fuel prices will create pain for Alberta suburbanites. The suburbs are an artifact of the age of cheap and abundant oil. But as CIBC economist Jeff Rubin reported in April of this year, we are leaving that age and entering an "age of scarcity."

---

I'm still not convinced that concentrating large numbers of people in cities is good for the environment let alone natural. What does David Suzuki say about it?

Canadian William Khrem had something interesting to say about concentrating people in large cities. Who really benefits? [url=http://www.comer.org/July03/lien.htm]Tracking the Social Lien Through the Economy[/url]

Yes, but Dr, that's just "One of the reasons consumerist "solutions" to climate change and peak oil are doomed to failure."

It is time to end the growth model.

How demolishing freeways is reviving American cities

Quote:

Next American City: One of your most well-known achievements as mayor of Milwaukee was demolishing the Park East Freeway. Next American City just held a panel discussion about urban highway removal, where we heard many of the same, understandable fears that people have about traffic, funding, economics, etc. As local leaders around the country are now seriously considering highway removal in some form or another, how do you suggest convincing concerned residents that such a move is right for them and their city?

John Norquist: Well, you have to change the discussion from pure traffic count comparison to traffic distribution. A robust street grid, with lots of connections, will distribute traffic much better than a few large freeways.

For example, when the Embarcadero Freeway, a double-deck freeway, was torn down, a majority of the trips—according to a study by the city of San Francisco—got shorter and faster because of the increased connectivity. With the freeway, there were a lot of trips where you overshot your destination and had to come back. It also attracted trips that didn’t add any value to the neighborhood: People going from Oakland to Marin County were cutting through San Francisco. When the freeway was torn down and replaced by a boulevard, it suddenly didn’t look so attractive to go that way, and [drivers] found a different way to get to Marin Country or, in some cases, didn’t make the trip.

NAC: What about funding? Your tenure as mayor has been described as fiscally conservative, which makes you something of an anomaly among urbanism fans and advocates. What do you think is the best way to fund large-scale projects like urban highway removal?

JN: Well, they’re smaller-scale than rebuilding the highway. Particularly if it’s an elevated freeway, it’s going to cost a lot of money to rebuild. A lot of freeways are headed beyond their design life, so they have to be rebuilt. You can’t just resurface them again. It’s cheaper to just tear it down and replace it with a surface street, so you win the cost argument by comparing it with rebuilding the freeway. 

As far as other funds that are available, you can try for some of the TIGER grants, and things like that, that might facilitate some of these things. New Orleans, New Haven—there’s a number of places that have either gotten TIGER II money or are applying for it. But I think the biggest single way to finance these things is to compare them with rebuilding the existing structure. In the case of Milwaukee, it cost about a third as much to tear it down as it would’ve been to rebuild it.

NAC: What are some of the highway removal projects around the country—not including Milwaukee—that you consider particularly admirable, and maybe worth copying?

JN: Well, there are a lot of them that aren’t completed. But the ones that are, they’re all admirable. New York’s West Side Highway was closed in 1975. It fell down once in ’73, and they repaired it, and it fell down again in ’75. At the end of its 40-year design life, it fell down right on schedule. And it was just really expensive, and politically unpopular, to rebuild it. A lot of the politicians wanted to rebuild it, but as soon as they figured out which way the wind was blowing, they changed their minds. Probably the most important conversion on the West Side Highway was [former U.S. Sen.] Pat Moynihan. Not only did he come out against rebuilding the freeway and against the Westway—which would have been a tunnel—but he became the leader in the Senate on transportation, and was really the father of the ISTEA program.

Anyway, the result of the West Side Highway coming down was [that] it really helped the rebirth of the real estate market in Chelsea, Tribeca, Battery Park City. In Portland, the riverfront section of the expressway was removed and there was a huge property value increase. People could see the [Willamette] River, and without the freeway in the way that made a huge difference. And then in Seoul, South Korea is the most spectacular one of all: They took out a freeway with over 150,000 cars a day and replaced it with two moving lanes on each side of a river, which they restored. And it works just fine because they have a really rich street grid in Seoul.

There are a whole bunch of projects pending where there’s some real good opportunity to have more success in tearing down freeways. Basically, freeways don’t belong in densely populated cities. They create more problems than they solve. They’re very expensive, so almost nobody’s building new ones. That tells you that they’re sort of doomed: When you’re not doing new ones, you’re going to eventually have to remove the old ones.

Trains and goods trams would be much less polluting than truck transport, but of course another aspect of environmentally-friendly goods distribution would be more local production. I once found organic carrots from California at a Loblaws - in July.

The Ford Brothers are an example of "barbarism" (as the contrary of ecosocialism) but almost in caricature.

Will Self: Walking is political

Quote:

That our mode of being in the industrialised – and now post-industrial – built environment is in some sense profoundly awry is by no means a new observation. Writing in the 1840s, Friedrich Engels notes the "brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest", which "becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together in a limited space". What he characterised as the fundamental principle of society everywhere, was nonetheless "nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious, as just here in the crowding of the great city".

But writing 20 years earlier, Thomas de Quincey had already perceived in the great moiling of London's thoroughfares a fundamental alteration in the nature of human connectivity. As a teenage runaway he was, by his own account, saved from starvation on the streets by a young girl, Ann, with whom he spent some weeks. On their parting he arranged to try to meet with her on the corner of Titchfield Street at a given hour in the evening. If either of them failed to make this rendezvous they were to try again the following evening – but she didn't come after many nights, and although he searched for her throughout the city, De Quincey was never to find her again. He says: "This, amongst such troubles as most men meet in life, has been my heaviest affliction. If she lived, doubtless we must have been sometimes in search of each other at the very same moment through the mighty labyrinths of London."

Quote:

Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust, her magisterial history of walking, writes of her own experiences of danger during nighttime promenades in San Francisco: "I was advised to stay indoors at night, to wear baggy clothes, to cover or cut my hair, to try to look like a man, to move someplace more expensive, to take taxis, to buy a car, to move in groups, to get a man to escort me – all modern versions of Greek walls and Assyrian veils." And so she realises that "many women had been so successfully socialised to know their place that they had chosen more conservative, gregarious lives without realising why. The very desire to walk alone had been extinguished in them …" She later observes that "Black men nowadays are seen as working-class women were a century ago: as a criminal category when in public."

Quote:

So far as they are concerned, the journeys to work, to shop, to be entertained, to liaise with their social circle are all the utilisation of the built environment – such unpremeditated and willed walking as there is remains within these contexts, the most egregious example being the shopping mall itself. Yet a little over a century ago, 90% of Londoners' journeys under six miles were still made on foot – many of these would have been commutes, but even a walk to work involves a physical possession of the built environment and the exercise of orienting skills.

Year on year, the number of journeys taken on foot declines – indeed, on current projections walking will have died out altogether as a means of transport by the middle of this century. No longer subjected to the measure of man – or woman – or her oversight, the city has already acquired distorted lineaments: vastly extended thoroughfares are lined by cul-de-sacs, while the architecture defined by Rem Koolhaas as "junkspace" presumes that only a corridor can be a viable destination – especially if it has a cash machine. Suburbia, and the inter-zone between the city proper and its rural hinterland, is the tangible form of this disregard, being a collection of locations that no longer convey any sense of place.

I know Mary's blog well! In my blogger days we corresponded once or twice. Love her writing. Thanks for the refresher, lagatta (and I echo Michelle's delight in seeing you back, if only infrequently. I wish we could fix that bug for you...)

Michelle wrote:

 

I have no desire to get a car because they're too expensive, they're a pain in the ass to find parking for, and they wreck the environment.  But if you work or live anywhere other than downtown in the city, the incentive to buy a car goes way, way up because of the terrible transit and sprawl.  No wonder there is such a divide between downtowners and the inner suburbs.  Getting an e-bike has been a godsend.

I've also joined AutoShare, and as a member, I can take a car when I need it for any trips out of the city, or for times when I have to lug a lot of stuff somewhere in the city.  It's a way of having a car when I really need it and paying only for the time I use.  I think that contributes to better liveability too - sharing a car with others means you don't drive as much, and you find alternative forms of transport as a regular thing.

Where I live (North Etobicoke in Toronto) Transit sucks though its stable and regular just over-used and not good for general life(just getting to/from school or work).

Just going shopping for groceries can be hard unless you are lucky enough to live near a mall or grocery store and can walk. I see lots of people forced to use taxis for their shopping especially since you cannot do enough shopping using transit to be able to carry it all on the bus.

If I lived downtown I wouldnt use a car (and I have friends that do exactly that) but here in the suburbs? Just about everyone who can, does.

Urban trees reveal income inequality

Quote:

Wealthy cities seem to have it all. Expansive, well-manicured parks. Fine dining. Renowned orchestras and theaters. More trees. Wait, trees? I’m afraid so.

Research published a few years ago shows a tight relationship between per capita income and forest cover. The study’s authors tallied total forest cover for 210 cities over 100,000 people in the contiguous United States using the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s natural resource inventory and satellite imagery. They also gathered economic data, including income, land prices, and disposable income.

They found that for every 1 percent increase in per capita income, demand for forest cover increased by 1.76 percent. But when income dropped by the same amount, demand decreased by 1.26 percent. That’s a pretty tight correlation. The researchers reason that wealthier cities can afford more trees, both on private and public property. The well-to-do can afford larger lots, which in turn can support more trees. On the public side, cities with larger tax bases can afford to plant and maintain more trees. Given the recent problems New York City has had with its aging trees dropping limbs on unsuspecting passers-by—and the lawsuits that result—it’s no surprise that poorer cities would keep lean tree inventories.

The tree thing is flagrant if you look along avenue Bernard just south of where I live - as soon as one reaches the wealthy arrondissement (formerly an independent enclave city) of Outremont, one sees a green forest, or even in wintertime, a hell of a lot more branches above the street. As if by magic, the snow and ice are always cleared there too.

The same, of course, can be observed upon entering Westmount.

Indeed, it doesn't apply so much to rich suburbs and exburbs. Think they don't give a shit about what is outside their huge ugly houses.

La rue Bellechasse has NO sidewalk trees, or houses with trees in the tiny front yard (few houses have such tiny yards on that street, in the blocks between St-Laurent (its end at the west) and St-Denis. I walked along this to verify the dearth of trees.

Oh, I certainly agree, and my arrondissement (Rosemont - Petite-Patrie) is doing a lot to encourage greening, as is the Plateau Mont-Royal arrondissement just to our south.

I believe you live in Vancouver though? Lovely place, but as you know too well, becoming prohibitively expensive. I guess all of us have urban problems to deal with...

lagatta wrote:

Oh, I certainly agree, and my arrondissement (Rosemont - Petite-Patrie) is doing a lot to encourage greening, as is the Plateau Mont-Royal arrondissement just to our south.

I believe you live in Vancouver though? Lovely place, but as you know too well, becoming prohibitively expensive. I guess all of us have urban problems to deal with...

Close, I live in Burnaby. It is still expensive but it also has older walk up apartment flats that have "reasonable" rents.  Those housing stocks might be why we have more refugees in Burnaby than in most neighbouring cities.  That and maybe the parks and services. 

Burnaby was originally developed the same way it is being developed now and that is in conjunction with transit.  The original Interurban line ran from Vancouver to New Westminster near the turn of the last century and around the stops the various town centers grew up.  Now our city counsel pushes high rise development within walking distance of sky train stations. No large car dependent projects are being built in this city.

Part of the parkland has been amassed by selling density bonuses. Instead of say 15 stories they will allow an additional few stories but only in exchange for amenities.  That means paying for public spaces that become city owned and swapping unused land in the city owned by the same developer that is suitable for  future park.

Saskatoon is almost unique because the public owns the land along both sides of the river in the older parts of town. That would be because of the vision of the original communal settlers who also planted the tree cover that makes the city such a livable place. Although the original inhabitants of Nutana would be gob smacked to realize that their community has become the entertainment centre of the city where there are the most places to buy liquor than pretty much any other area.  A little bit of irony.