Yesterday, arguing that Canada’s innovation and commercialization performance if dismal (citing last month’s Conference Board report), Pierre Rivard made a pitch to create a CleanTech district on Toronto’s Portlands. See Wikipedia’s entry for CleanTech for an overview, but essentially, CleanTech focuses on eco-efficient production techniques, renewable energy, green technology, and sustainable business.

I agree that Canada needs to do more to encourage entrepreneurialism and innovation — particularly in taking advantage of the opportunities that sustainable development affords us. Unfortunately, Rivard’s thinking reflects outdated mid-twentieth century thinking vis-a-vis segregation of land uses, rather than more current ideas of how to build cities and attract investment. I have been involved with three projects that each makes me skeptical of creating a special “CleanTech District” on Toronto’s waterfront.

In 2003, I taught an urban design studio at MIT that focused on the Toronto Portlands — precisely the area that Pierre is talking about. The problem with the Portlands is that it has been seen for, oh about 30 years, as a clean slate for the latest political pet project (Olympics, Expo, Studio/Media District, and now, apparently, a CleanTech district). The land is mostly publicly owned, but split across municipal, provincial and federal levels. So it’s a never-ending political football. Indeed, virtually nothing has happened in the four years since we did the studio. Given than Toronto is expected to receive about a million more people by 2031, it is clear that Toronto needs to build new neighborhoods. If we want to practice what we preach about sustainable development, we need to build more compactly with higher densities (high enough to support transit and street retail).

That doesn’t mean we need high-rises, though. Mid-rise housing built to the street with gardens in behind provides as much density as high-rises (because high-rises need to be set well back from the street). Believe it or not, a project with three 30-story towers set back from the street (covering 10% of the block) has the same density as 6-story buildings that are built to the street (with 50% private open space on the inside of the block). Both have a floor-area-ratio (FAR) of 3 (i.e. 3 times as much floor space as land area). So density doesn’t mean high-rises.

In our studio, we proposed several new mixed-use neighborhoods in the Portlands that would accommodate about 100,000 people, public spaces, schools, churches, etc and yes, jobs. That is, we should build city — that is, accommodate the full range of activities that makes cities. We explicitly rejected single-use districts that target one particular industry. I’m happy to have CleanTech in the Port, but the idea that it needs to be concentrated in one particular zone of one city is overly simplistic and would create a missed opportunity to build a real extension of the city.

I was also involved with a project with University of Cambridge (UK) that looked at the relationship between innovation and built form. Basically, the university wanted to know how it should grow, attract creative talent and turn those ideas into commercial products. They wanted to know what kind of built form would be best suited to accommodate that growth going forward. We looked at the Silicon Valley model (corporate office parks), but concluded that Silicon Valley was successful not because of the kind of physical environment, but rather in spite of it. We looked at more recent examples that suggested, to simplify things, that innovation didn’t happen in the cubicles, but rather over coffee in a cafe or other informal places. This led us to conclude that the built environment should be quite urban, with lots of informal places to meet, and be flexible enough to change over time. This suggested that the new creative economy would depend not on the 1980s corporate campus model but rather centrally located, vibrant urban environments.

Finally, I also taught a studio in which we worked with Electronic Arts (EA) — the gaming company; they had just chosen Montreal as the site of their new east coast corporate HQ precisely because it was such a nexus for creative talent. They argued that their workers — who were 28 years old on average — wanted to live and work in an urban setting. So came up with an urban design plan that integrated EA into a new urban landscape just south of the downtown and west of Old Montreal (where a lot of tech companies had located). Rather than a closed “campus”, EA would be very much a part of the urban streetscape. Again, it wasn’t a singular “tech” district, but one which had lots of cafes, restaurants, bars, bookstores, and housing.

The basic message is this: don’t sacrifice opportunities to make real city in an effort to attract one single use. These sterile single-use districts do not encourage innovation. On the contrary, mixed-use urban places with opportunities for informal conversation are more likely to attract creative talent and generate innovative ideas. So yes, let’s attract CleanTech to Toronto, but seek strategic sites throughout the city, rather than fall back to an outdated model of sterile single-use “districts”.

NDP Greener Homes Strategy Misses the Point
By Gregory D. Morrow

The NDP released Part 1 (“Greener Homes Strategy”) of its 5-part Green Agenda for Canada today. I applaud the NDP for making energy efficiency an issue at the Federal level. At this point, they are the only party seriously making noise on environmental issues in Ottawa, although that could change depending on the outcome of the Liberal leadership race. So far, the Conservatives have taken a page out of the Bush administration’s book — i.e. do nothing, and the Bloc Quebecois sold themselves out for a promise that Quebec would be taken care of “later”.

Unfortunately, the NDP plan isn’t very well thought out — and I say that as a progressive architect, urban designer, and urban planner who is very interested in promoting such a “Green Agenda for Canada”. Here is what the NDP proposes:

- Development of an advanced energy efficiency program to help make Canadian homes the most efficient in the world;
- Amendment of the National Building Code to legislate lower energy use in new homes;
- Making mandatory, in order to qualify for the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s Mortgage Insurance Program, proof of compliance with the new National Building Code’s energy efficiency provisions for new homes AND Establishing or enhancing other programs to assist Canadians in retrofitting older homes so as to meet the new energy standards;
- Requiring that all appliances and lighting sold in Canada meet the Energy Star standards; and
- Re-instatement of the EnerGuide program abolished by the Conservatives.

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Very sad news today. Jane Jacobs has died at 89, apparently due to a stroke. The world has lost one of its greatest citizens. The American-born activist, writer, and urban expert has lived in Canada (Toronto) since 1968.

Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) is one of the seminal texts of the twentieth-century.

Edit: Christopher Hume did a nice piece in the Star today.

Globe and Mail
Toronto Star
Wikipedia

Project for Public Places
CBC
CBC Archives
New York Times

Kunstler Interview

Rational Reasons
Treehugger
Metropolis 347

(more to come)

I typically don’t post my academic work here, since scholarly work is not as accessible as op-eds. That being said, this piece might interest some people — it’s about the relationship between politics, ideology and design. Architects should be warned that I take a critical position on current practice.

How Technology Swallowed The Fish:
Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim And The Ideology Of Skin-Deep Architecture
By Gregory D. Morrow

You know that Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim has entered into the lexicon of pop culture when silver-haired, cigar-smoking, mildly obese old men in central Kansas debate the merits of having a “Bilbao Effect” for their own declining town.[1] Hate it or love it, the Bilbao Guggenheim has been labeled as: a) as Paul Goldberger has suggested, “a metaphor for Basque culture and the relationship it aspires to have with the world: a thing apart, yet entirely willing to make a connection on its own terms,”[2] or b) another example of American cultural imperialism. The position to which you ascribe — masking imperialism or mirroring culture — to some degree depends on the ideological frame through which you see the world. If you ascribe to Clifford Geertz’s theory of ideology, architectural production merely reflects culture, lending support to Goldberger’s thesis.[3] If you ascribe to Karl Marx’s theory, ideology distorts reality, thus architecture would be seen as masking the reality of cultural imperialism.[4] In what follows, I will argue that Bilbao is neither American cultural imperialism, nor a metaphor for Basque nationalism, but rather reflects the current state of urban redevelopment and architectural practices.

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I’m looking for popular news media stories about politics and design or the politics of design for a seminar that I am doing on Politics, Ideology and Design. Left to my own devices I will use either a recent article about Gehryland, USA (Christopher Hawthorne, Metropolis Magazine, April 2006) or the $195-million scribble and other tales of seduction from our romance with celebrity architects (Mark Kingwell, Toronto Life, June 2004).

I’d welcome any suggestions (i.e. links) that any of you out there have. I need this principally by Monday, but I’m always looking for similar articles.

The Injustice of Eminent Domain in Hollywood

By Gregory D. Morrow

This one is personal. The block across the street from my building in Hollywood — the famous corner of Hollywood and Vine — is being taken from its owners by eminent domain in order to construct a $325-million mega-development (developed by Legacy Partners), including a fancy W Hotel, luxury condos, apartments, retail and parking. This is yet another example of eminent domain abuse, legitimized by last summer’s Kelo v. New London ruling. I sometimes think I am the only planner who thinks eminent domain is bad. I can’t tell you how many planners justify its use, even when the resultant development is a) entirely private and b) would make millions without using eminent domain. As I said here many times, eminent domain is simply about facilitating land assembly for developers. But, in order to justify it, cities must label an area “blight”.

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Plantizen — the planning & development network — made a list of its top 10 planning issues for 2005. Here’s what I think about them:

1. Kelo v. New London and Eminent Domain
Terrible, as I noted previously. Eminent Domain hurts the little guy 9 times out of 10. Its purpose is to facilitate land assembly for large-scale developers (non- and for-profit). The premise is that wholesale change is better than smaller, incremental change. The history of mega-development — even in the name of the public good — has been dreadful.

2. Hurricane Katrina
An important planning issue that has everyone in planning scrambling to get down to New Orleans to help. Perhaps I am cynical but where the hell were the social justice advocates before the hurricane? That it took a massive crisis to mobilize the planning profession seems to me to run counter to what planning is. Isn’t planning supposed to pro-active, not reactive? It should serve as a reminder to everyone of the importance of planning — that is, thinking into the future to head off potential disasters. Unfortunately, given the scale of disaster, those groups with a ready-made toolkit just waiting to be implemented will be the winners. And make no mistake — it is the New Urbanists who came to New Orleans ready to deploy. Somehow that troubles me…

3. America’s Failing Infrastructure
Nothing new here. As local budgets get squeezed further and further, the regular investments necessary to maintain infrastructure are not made — everything from bridges, roads, hospitals, schools, you name it. That’s one of the things government is supposed to do — figure out ways to make regular investments in critical public assets (either by direct support or user-pay). Donors don’t give money to fix potholes, so the problem usually isn’t with new ribbon-cutting initiatives, but rather with the everyday maintainence.

4. The McMansion Backlash
Well, there’s a backlash in certain circles, but to your average hard-working family, it is a symbol of pride and achievement to finally move into one of those hideously designed mega-houses in the suburbs. Certainly, it’s not my goal. But, until we find a way to even out land values across a metropolitan region, people will always be trading off location for space. It’s a values question — how much space do you really need? To me, I find it difficult to imagine a family of four requiring more than about 2,000 square feet + garage. Do the math: living room (250 s.f.), dining room (200 s.f.), kitchen (200 s.f.), den/family room (250 s.f.), master bedroom (200 s.f.), master bath (120 s.f.), walk-in-closet (60 s.f.), bedroom 2 (180 s.f.), bedroom 3 (180 s.f.), bath 2 (120 s.f.), laundry (60 s.f.), entry/powder (80 s.f. ), circulation (100 s.f.) = 2,000 s.f.

5. “Condofication”
Here, we are referring to the conversion of rental units into condos, often forcing people to relocate. To me, converting to condo ownership from rental isn’t the problem. The problem is when there aren’t enough condos on the market and prices are therefore exorbitant. We need to find a way to facilitate the construction of more housing units, rental and condo, period. Affordability problems are typically a problem of cities blocking what the market would otherwise be happy to provide. This is a morals question — current zoning prioritizes R1 (single family) above all else. Too much city land is zoned R1 and not multi-family. More multi-family housing (rental or condo) and the overall cost goes down.

6. Google Democratizes Mapping
I must say I love Google maps and Google Earth. The applications are vast. The Toronto Star, for example, uses Google to map the locations of homocides in the city, with pop-ups about each of the victims and, if known, the circumstances of their death. This is a powerful tool, and an honorable way of recognizing, in this case, the lives lost. Environmental groups can also use it to plot the location of the most polluting sites. There are thousands of applications – Google should be applauded for making this tool available to the public.

7. Wi-Fi Networks and Economic Development
This one bugs me. Sure, I would like to have wi-fi everywhere I go. But, it’s hardly a public good. Of all the basic things that governments still aren’t going well — like providing good schools, encouraging affordable housing, providing public security, etc — they feel it is important to spend millions on setting up a wireless network across the city (or downtown core). What a waste of taxpayer money. There are plenty of private companies that are all too willing to provide such a service for those of use lucky enough to have wireless devices. The fact is, this benefits only a small segment of the population. Government action should be to provide services that benefit the most number of people — things that are neither practical nor affordable if done privately. When we’ve created a more just society, then we can start worrying about making our toys work better.

8. The New Suburbanism and Creative Class Debates
This one boils down to the age-old battle of downtown vs. suburbs. But the debate is actually quite dumb. Richard Florida’s Creative Class is provocative and there is something to the idea that young professionals want to live in funky places. Likewise, one cannot debate the importance of suburbs in urban politics, as Joel Kotkin suggests. But, this isn’t a polar argument. The fact is, suburbs by necessity will be more dense (starting from the inner ring out). Urban areas will also by necessity become more dense. The issue isn’t suburbs vs. downtown, it’s the conflicts in both places over the need for higher density environments.

9. “Peak Oil” and Planning For Alternative Energy
This is also a debate for the ages. There’s no doubt that the cost of oil has entered into a new era — the days of $25/barrel are over for the foreseeable future. However, the forecasts that I have seen show the price of oil dropping over the coming years — still above $50, but not rising. At these price levels, areas like Alberta’s oil sands become feasible to develop. Which, in turn, will likely cause the price of oil to drop. So, yes, sustainability is vital — and we should be working towards that goal regardless, but until the Saudis issue a press release saying, “sorry we’re empty”, it is very likely that oil will continue to dominate. Cities (nations, even) would be smart, however, to think of the big picture, though. More sustainable environments is not just about a potential oil crisis. It’s about pollution and smog. It’s about wasted productivity (to this point, we’ve been lucky to have land to expand so that commute times remain the same, but the scarcity of land is quickly becoming a problem). It’s about the destruction of local food supply. It’s about parents not being home for their kids. It’s about kids playing video games and getting fat. It’s about a lot of things. We shouldn’t be fooled to think that the only reason why we should be more sustainable cities is because of oil.

10. The High Cost of Free Parking
Don Shoup is bang-on. Los Angeles is the worst offender. In Boston, parking is so scarce, it becomes very expensive. So, if given the choice between driving downtown and taking the T (subway), you take the T. A couple hours parking in downtown Boston can cost you $15-20. The equivalent in L.A. costs $2-5. Most places give two hours of free parking. Hell, even valet parking — something reserved for the uber-wealthy in Boston — is only a couple bucks more in Los Angeles. So, of course people drive in Los Angeles. The fact is, we have been subsidizing car use for decades. It is time that parking and those that drive pay its true cost. That means more expensive parking and freeway tools. You use it, you pay for it.

Big story in the Star today about the progress of the Don West Lands revival. Be sure to check out the full plan on the Waterfront Revitalization Corp’s website. It is a huge PDF (19mb), but it’s worth the wait. I can’t speak to whether the public process was good or not, but Joe Berridge of Urban Strategies and his team deserve a big round of applause for their work.

Being an urban designer myself, I can tell you that it is not easy to build into a plan the level of complexity and diversity that exists in real cities. On that count, the plan is a welcome precedent for other urban designers. Instead of treating the 79-acre site as a single monolithic neighbourhood, they recognized that real neighbourhoods are much smaller. The plan identifies 4 such neighbourhoods.

Also a welcome addition is the density. So often ‘density’ is a bad word in public planning meetings, with people equating density with highrise. The fact is, more often than not, you achieve higher density with mid-rise perimeter blocks than tall towers set back from the street.

With an expected 11,000 people to call the 4 neighbourhoods home, the area will have a density of 139 people/acre (and with 2 people per unit on average, that equates to 70 units/acre, which is about right for an urban neighbourhood).

Importantly, there is a recognition that it will take 15 years to build it out. All too often people want instant change — usually a recipe for disaster. The area is designated to have 25% affordable housing, although it remains to be seen how they actually achieve that. Parking is dealt with in the interior of blocks, and using parking structures. The streets are too wide, which usually happens these days. There is provision for a trolley along Cherry St. And there’s a big park that doubles as a flood plain for the Don River Delta.

The challenge, as always, will be to allow the area to grow with diversity and yet within some basic design guidelines. All too often zoning has the effect of killing diversity, as do too many guidelines. It will be interesting to see it unfold. But as a starting point, the plan is encouraging.

If the price of oil went up to $100 per barrel, how well would your city cope? SustainLane put together a list of the top 10 U.S. cities best prepared for such an oil crisis. They use a variety of criteria — congestion, transit, food supply, sprawl, etc. The top 10 are:

1. New York
2. Boston
3. San Francisco
4. Chicago
5. Philadelphia
6. Portland
7. Honolulu
8. Seattle
9. Baltimore
10. Oakland

No Canadian cities ranked, but you can bet the top 3, in order would be:
1. Montreal
2. Toronto
3. Vancouver

While you are at SustainLane, be sure to also check out their city sustainability rankings:

Zoning + NIMBY = Lack of Housing = Expensive Cities
By Gregory D. Morrow

It is bad enough that we zone the earth into areas that some higher authority (no, not God, but rather the equally omnipotent Urban Planner) has deemed “compatible” or not. [Needless to say, I am not a fan of zoning]. But the situation becomes entirely untenable when powerful neighborhood groups use such zoning to block the provision of housing — not just affordable housing, but all housing, resulting in the infamous NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard). The result, as witnessed in cities where most people want to live, is that housing demand far outstrips housing supply, making housing costs astronomical. High housing costs hurts everyone. High housing prices means higher rents. It means that extended families must share small houses (this is a particular problem in East L.A., for example). It means that even middle-income earners cannot afford to live in the city — forcing them to live further from the city and increasing their commute time (that’s not to say that many people don’t want to live in the suburbs — of course they do — only that many who live in the suburbs do so because housing prices are lower).

The combination of Zoning + NIMBYism is a disaster that the planning profession has neither the will nor the means to fight. That is understandable since planners are ambivalent over communities organizing against planning initiatives. You see, planners see community organizing as good (when the community is poor and they are fighting initiatives that are seen as an affront to equity or environmental justice, such as an incinerator or even gentrification). But planners also see community organizing as bad (when the community is rich and they are fighting socially progressive initiatives such as affordable housing). The current planning paradigm is a combination of advocacy planning (fighting for social justice) and a will for good luck (hoping that the poor little guys win more often than the rich big guys).

The problem is that planners, for the most part, have actually convinced themselves that zoning benefits the poor little guy — that is, it is a public tool used to mitigate the evils of the greedy developer. And yet, anyone who has even remotely been associated with the planning process knows full well that the sheer complexity of navigating zoning undoubtedly benefits those with deep pockets and plenty of time. Invariably, that is not the little guy, but rather well financed developers. In fact, the overlapping layers of controls are so complex that the City of Los Angeles had to recently publish a 300-page manual for its own employees (importantly, a simple guide for developers was not seen as a priority — talk about the Weberian bureaucracy ensuring its own survival!). In fact, the sheer complexity and time required to get zoning and public approvals (entitlements) shapes the kinds of development we get. Since entitlements account for such a high proportion of a project cost (through direct costs, but mostly because of the time required), small developers doing urban infill projects often cannot make their projects pencil out, or certainly cannot bid as high for the land. What is left, then, are large-scale projects where developers have assembled entire blocks or many blocks (sometime made even more perverse by the use of eminent domain to take land from owners who don’t want to sell). Are we supposed to believe that a system that favors large-scale, wholesale re-development over small-scale, incremental development is a system that favors the little guy? Planners need to wake up to the fact that zoning is a tool that benefits the wealthy, encourages large-scale re-development, and is impossibly impenetrable to poor neighborhoods that have neither the time nor money to use it effectively. A history of zoning practices — while initially motivated perhaps by a genuine concern for the proximity of industry to workers housing — reveals a history of racial, ethnic and class segregation (implicitly and explicitly promoted by the state).

What’s most distressing about the current state of affairs is that community opposition of the “good” variety (i.e. in poor communities) and the “bad” variety (i.e. in rich communities) both organize to block the development of multi-family housing. The perception is that multi-family housing is a drag on property values. This is pure myth, and stems largely from an Anglo, Protestant culture where the single family house is the only legitimate form of “home” (the language used in some community meetings is verbatim what was used a century ago by urban reformers). More to the point, researchers at MIT have shown this there is no effect of multi-family housing on property values. For developers, that comes as no surprise because they know that property values are largely a result, ironically, of the allowable zoning envelope for a piece of land and the relationship between the supply of a given product (say, housing) in a given market and the demand for it. If the zoning envelope is increased from a floor-area-ratio (FAR) of 2 (i.e. you are allowed to build 2 times the lot area), to an FAR of 3, then the value of the property goes up. That is because property values, from a developer’s perspective, are a function of the future cash flows that can be generated by the land. A bigger envelope means more units, which means more profit.

That’s where the public sector and community organizers enter the picture. Since developers and their greed for profit are the enemy (so the story goes), the good community and those caretakers of the public good (planners) must fight against such housing development. The result is either the complete opposition to a project, or a dramatic scaling back of the number of units, typically arguing on the grounds of inane parking requirements or traffic counts, without recognizing the potential benefits (more shops and restaurants and amenities due to a higher concentration of people in a given market — of course, once again, traffic and parking dominate in those debates as well). Partly this fight is motivated by the aforementioned fear of multi-family housing, and partly it is motivated by the view that developers are the only ones who benefit from their project. Yet, the more housing units that are built, then the same number of buyers (or renters) now have more units from which to choose. This means that housing costs tend to fall — a basic supply/demand argument. This is precisely what happened in Toronto in the past few years, where the city allowed a plethora of condos to be built. In fact, they over-built the market — too bad for developers, but good news for people, since housing is vastly more affordable in Toronto than, say, Los Angeles.

The point here is to recognize that zoning coupled with NIMBYism results in multi-family housing being blocked. This increases the cost of housing for everyone, most especially the poor. The question isn’t whether this situation exists, but what planners are going to do about it? Are we going to sit back and convince ourselves that zoning actually benefits the poor? Are we going to aid communities in blocking (for-profit) housing development? We need more housing, period.

In a democratic society, we cannot station troops at the borders of our cities and turn back people who want to relocate. A city like Los Angeles is growing. The choice isn’t whether it grows or not, it is whether we stick our heads in the ground or not. The choice is whether to accommodate that growth or plead ignorance, thereby not providing housing for our new citizens, driving up the costs for everyone. NIMBYism is not the answer. Zoning is not the answer. But the combination of the two is absolutely lethal.