High quality service provision is an economic development tool
“The most important economic development tool in a municipal government’s toolbox is to do what you’re supposed to do: provide public services and do it well.” - Dr. John Matthews, in class tonight.
Forget tax incentives and selling your city’s soul for a Mercedes plant; firms are increasingly attracted by good roads, good police, good schools, good sewerage, and good anything else that makes for a well-run city.
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Event: “Berlin-New York Dialogues: Building in Context”
An exhibition called “Berlin-New York Dialogues: Building in Context” opened last week at New York’s Center for Architecture and will run through January 26 before traveling to Berlin in March.
Rather than focus narrowly on noteworthy buildings, the exhibition and related panel discussions explore issues like how Berlin is reasserting its role in European cultural and intellectual life and how New York is trying to maintain its reputation as a creative center, even as artists are priced out of neighborhoods they helped to rejuvenate.
“We didn’t really try to have one-on-one comparisons,” said Kristien Ring, the director of the German Center for Architecture in Berlin. “We tried to pick themes where one can delve into a dialogue.”
For example both cities seem to have rediscovered the potential of their waterfronts in recent years, with an array of commercial buildings and residential lofts rising near the Spree River in Berlin and architects drafting plans to enhance the East River esplanade in Manhattan.
Medellín is the new Bogota
It seems that common sense solutions are usually completely ignored by governments in Latin American cities, and it is refreshing to see that this isn´t the case with Medellín. The government is rebuilding its city for the inhabitants: they have discovered that when people have public spaces they can enjoy and where they can relax, breathe in clean air, and stretch their legs, they work harder, better, and are generally happier. The poorer inhabitants of the city don’t have time or money to take vacations to the rural areas; they don’t have the means to visit beaches and certainly don’t have membership to country clubs…so the city decided to give them spaces where they could take their families, where they could lay on the grass, sit on a bench and kick back on a Sunday.
Today’s Where blog post on Medellín reminds me of similar successes enjoyed by Bogota a few years back (and still enjoyed, as far as I know):
“Every Sunday, we close 120 kilometers of main arteries to motor vehicles for seven hours,” [former Bogota mayor] Penalosa explained. “A million and a half people of all ages and conditions come out to ride bicycles, jog, see others, to appropriate their city. During Christmas, we close those streets one night and more than 3 million people come out just to see the Christmas lights, to be with the others as a community.”
The two Cairos
In a pattern that is repeated in megacities–and not so megacities–everywhere, Cairo’s rich are opting “for the private gated enclaves, while the poor live in illegally built suburbs reclaimed from the surrounding countryside.”
What are the growth patterns within the city?
“It is only a slight exaggeration to say that informality is the defining characteristic of the modern Egyptian built landscape,” says David Sims, an American housing expert who worked extensively in Egypt. He cites studies which found that the population of the informal areas of Cairo has been growing at more than three times the rate of the formal districts of the city. The city is now ringed by vast areas of informal housing. These are overcrowded forests of unrendered blocks crammed so close together that their balconies almost touch above streets that are too narrow for cars to pass.
Experts estimate that well over half of Cairo’s 16m people live in unplanned districts that have sprouted in breach of laws banning construction on farm land.
Anti-pigeon movement takes flight, wants bread
Cities in Europe are discussing methods for reducing their pigeon populations.
Scientists, city officials and animal welfare activists met in the western German city of Essen on Tuesday for Germany’s first Town Pigeon Conference to discuss how to deal with the growing pigeon population which is expected to rise by around 50 million to up to 400 million worldwide in the next 10 years as a result of growing urbanization.
There are around one million of them in New York, and Venice has the highest pigeon density with an estimated three birds per human inhabitant. In most big European towns, there is around one pigeon for every 20 citizens.
What are the risks?
[T]he birds can and do spread diseases, allergies and parasites to humans. Haag-Wackernagel says many everyday illnesses including allergies can be attributed to human proximity to the birds which carry salmonella, lung illnesses, fleas, ticks and a host of other ailments — something to think about when surrounded by flapping pigeons in town squares or outdoor cafes.
How do we get rid of them?
“Killing makes no sense at all,” says Haag-Wackernagel. “The birds have an enormous reproduction capacity and they’ll just come back. There is a linear relationship between the bird population and the amount of food available.” A pair of pigeons can produce up to 12 fledglings per year.
“The best way to reduce the population is not to feed them. People say it’s cruel to deprive them of food but in the wild the sudden absence of food is a completely natural occurrence and animals adapt to it.”
Photograph by Pensiero.
Tensions between mass transit and mixed-use
…there is a contradiction in the planning approaches of many jurisdictions that are developing mass transit, in that promotion of mixed-use urban areas actually weakens the strong nodes that are the lifeblood of mass transit.
To be fair, the concept of mixed-use areas is intended to support short walking trips rather than public transport; but the application of mixed uses, increased densities, parking requirements and public transport are not always thought through in a coherent way at the metropolitan scale.
This presents a serious risk to the attainment of green transport. The greater risk, though, may be the inability of metropolitan authorities to exercise adequate control over all the factors that need to be brought together for a green transport strategy. Even in the context of strong policy, planning is often fragmented and stymied by political interference, uncooperative developers and unreliable funding.
This tension is not clearly evident in Atlanta but, then again, the city’s largest mixed-use development doesn’t seem to encourage any form of transportation that isn’t via automobile.
Beautiful solutions
“When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
(via Monoscope)
Designing away climate change and fat people.
Britain’s health secretary, Alan Johnson, proposes the “10 eco towns already being planned by the government should now be built and designed to confront the UK’s obesity crisis.”
“We have to look at ways of improving the built environment, doing more to help people make physical activity a normal part of everyday life.”
Mr Johnson is leading a cross-government drive to put the eco towns concept at the cutting edge of the fight against obesity. Each new town is planned to house as many as 20,000 people. He has also been looking at tackling some of the least healthy cities in the north or London boroughs to see if progress can be made in redesigning existing towns.
Obesity is estimated to cost the UK £1bn a year and is projected to rise to £45bn by 2050.
Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh
Le Corbusier said of the city, “Chandigarh is planned to human scale. It puts us in touch with the infinite cosmos and nature. It provides us with places and buildings for all human activities by which the citizens can live a full and harmonious life. Here the radiance of nature and heart are within our reach.” In the middle of the last century, Le Corbusier’s lofty plans for urban design were (nearly) realized in Chandigarh, India [map, wiki, flickr, official].
Photograph by d ha rm e sh.
Busting superblocks.
The Built Environment Blog busts superblocks. The post does a good job of placing into historical context one controversy among many surrounding the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn.
A handy list of Atlanta’s recent plans and studies
The city of Atlanta offers a handy (and fairly comprehensive) list of its recent plans and studies.
Sprawl in Melbourne
Melbourne is sprawling faster than its Melbourne 2030 comprehensive plan allows.
The Department of Planning and Community Development yesterday released the first part of its review of Melbourne 2030.
The review, completed using the figures from the 2006 census and other sources, argued that 48.3 per cent of new housing built in Melbourne was on “greenfield” sites — new subdivisions typically on the city fringes. Its target had been 42.5 per cent by 2005 and 31 per cent by 2030.
Länsisatama redevelopment project to transform Helsinki harbor
In an earlier entry, I mentioned a Chinese blog post I found yesterday morning. I posted the English translation and asked for more information. Within minutes, Esa helped me find everything I’d need. The Chinese post mentioned a development project in Helsinki that involved input from local schoolchildren. It turns out the project has actually enlisted the help of many other groups of Finnish citizens in the redevelopment of Länsisatama [map, site, flickr].
The Länsisatama redevelopment project will transform one of Helsinki’s container harbors into “into a waterfront city quarter with an estimated population of 22,000.” The place has potential, according to this “possible future view.”
Disparities in subprime lending patterns
The New York Times: “Home buyers in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods in New York City were more likely to get their mortgages last year from a subprime lender than home buyers in white neighborhoods with similar income levels.” The Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy found that the “10 neighborhoods with the highest rates of mortgages from subprime lenders had black and Hispanic majorities, and the 10 areas with the lowest rates were mainly non-Hispanic white.” I’m glad the paper focuses on the “reverse redlining” aspect of the findings:
[H]ousing and civil rights advocates said the findings highlight lending patterns that have long troubled them.
They say minority communities whose financing needs were starved decades ago because of redlining — banks’ refusal to offer loans or other services in minority areas — are now singled out for high-cost, high-risk mortgages in a kind of reverse redlining.
Any loan that carried an interest rate more than 3 percentage points above the prevailing rate for long-term Treasury bonds was considered a subprime mortgage. In 2006, Treasury rates ranged from 4.5 to 5.3 percent. Prime mortgage interest rates averaged 6.1 to 6.8 percent, according to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation.
Subprime loans are typically made to borrowers with credit histories that the mortgage industry considers less than prime. They can carry higher interest rates than traditional loans or adjustable rates that can make the mortgage difficult to repay once the interest rate resets. They can also carry higher fees and prepayment penalties and thus are at a high risk for foreclosure.
Bricoleurbanism and Black Rock City
Bricoleurbanism’s post on Black Rock City is as good an urban design blog post as I’ve read in a while.