Sunday reading 9 August 2015

John Greenfield, “Burke: Don’t Bend Over Backwards to Facilitate Driving at the Lincoln Hub“, Streetsblog Chicago.

Sandy Smith, “Tracing the urban transport revolution“, Next City.

Over the last 30 to 40 years, a tectonic shift has occurred in the way Americans think about urban transportation networks, especially the streets and roads that are their backbone. After decades of designing streets as low-grade highways designed to move cars as quickly as practicable, officials in a growing list of cities across the U.S. have changed course…

[advocates] play the key role of raising public awareness of the issues and generating support for change. When groups with particular interests band together around larger goals, they become even more effective.

Nathan Lewis, “Parks and Squares“, New World Economics.

A large amount of surface area devoted to parks or squares sounds nice, but it means that there is less and less land that is used for building footprint and other urban uses — which is to say, all human activity that takes place outside of parks and squares, mostly living and working. A simple way to think of this is in terms of land value. How much is an acre of prime real estate, in Manhattan, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, London etc. worth to a property developer? This value is what we are giving up by having a park or square, instead of buildings.

Unfortunately, almost all of our urban areas in the United States, from low-density Suburban Hell to the highest-density highrise districts, tend to be rather harsh, ugly and unfriendly to people. By “people” I don’t mean only a male adult in a business suit, but also a mom pushing a stroller, or a four-year-old walking, or a seventy-year-old woman. This tends to exaggerate our desire for parks — somewhere that is comfortable for people, including all ages and genders. This desire is well-founded, but I would caution that it should not get so out of hand that we decide to devote an overly-large amount of surface area to parks. That would result in a very beautiful place where nobody could live, since there is no space to live on. (In practice, it would be expensive.)….

As we think about parks, we have to address the really poisonous notion of “green space” which has polluted City Design thinking over the past several decades. The term “green space” is rather fuzzy in general use. In practice, it can certainly include formal parks, but what it really tends to mean is some kind of surface area covered with vegetation that is not a park. If it was a park, then we would call it a “park” and not have a separate term, “green space.”

“Green space” is a new invention. The basic purpose and format of “green space” is to serve as a buffer between some sort of automobile infrastructure (Arterial street or parking lot) and some place where human activity takes place — like an office, residence, or, for that matter, a park. I’ve talked about “green space” extensively in the past. A park is not “green space.” It is a park.

Anne Gibson, “Sell golf courses for houses – economist“, NZ Herald. Generation Rent author Shamubeel Eaqub suggests Council should sell some golf courses to provide more residential housing. The same case can be made for council parking lots, excess road reserve, and defunct open spaces.

Asked for a more detailed explanation, he said he thought it was wrong to have so many hectares of land tied up in public ownership across the city when that very same city was suffering a desperate shortage of land for residential development.

That situation had resulted in rich people effectively getting a subsidy from the publicly owned organisation by locking that land away from development options, he indicated.

Keith N Hampton, “People are more likely to spend time together in public spaces than they were 30 years ago“, The LSE’s daily blog on American Politics and Policy.

Despite concerns that Americans are increasingly likely to live alone, that loneliness has increased, and that the mobile phone – by distracting us from those around us – has led to the loss of conversation, today public spaces are a more likely source for interacting than they were three decades ago. Observations of nearly 150,000 people captured on film in four public places in 1979-80, and from video taken of the same places 30 years later, show that we are less alone and more together in public.

Renate van der Zee, “How Groningen invented a cycling template for cities all over the world“, The Guardian. The story of how Groningnen became a cycling city with one courageous move- limiting car traffic through the city centre.

The history of Groningen as a bicycle city par excellence goes back to the 1970s, when a left-wing council wanted to make a change. In the 60s, the number of cars was growing rapidly and they were severely clogging up Dutch cities. The common response was to tear down old neighbourhoods and build motorways right through the centre of town. However, in Groningen, local politician Max van den Berg decided on a revolutionary policy. Van den Berg, who was 24 when he became responsible for the city’s traffic and urban development policy, dreamed of expelling cars from the centre and creating space for pedestrians and cyclists. In those days, it was totally unheard of.

The essence of Van den Berg’s traffic circulation plan, as it came to be called, was that the centre of Groningen would be divided in four sections. For motorists, it would become impossible to go from one section to the other: cars had to take the ring-road around the inner city, whereas cyclists could move freely about on new cycle paths constructed to accommodate them. Driving a car would become a time-consuming affair in the centre of Groningen. In the future, travelling by bike would be a much quicker option.

Change in street structure is identified as a key factor to the success of cycling in Cambridge as well.

Florian Idenburg, “One Santa Fe housing in Los Angeles by Michael Maltzan“, The Architectural Review.

San Francisco is a utopia gone wrong, while Los Angeles is a dystopia gone right.

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