Vauban, A Planner’s Dream

On a recent trip to Switzerland, I took an overnight trip to Freiburg, where I was able to spend a couple hours wandering around Vauban, a  one-square-mile eco-village built in 2006.  The city has been lauded as the best low-carbon living in Europe; cars are generally excluded from the development altogether (there are garages on the periphery); a tram runs through the middle of the development; and freestanding houses are forbidden.  One hundred of the homes in the development meet Passivhaus energy standards, and, as I walked around, I lost count of the number of green roofs and solar panels within minutes.  They’re everywhere.

Vauban is one square mile.  Houses are four or five stories tall.  The development is mixed-use, with a (delightful) cafe, a grocery store, some small-scale retail, and roughly a bazillion playgrounds, schools and other facilities for children and families (and for me.  Because I climbed all over the playgrounds, and it was awesome). In general, the design quality of all of the buildings is really high, and in proportion and design, it called to mind a very modern Back Bay.  The houses where of uniform proportion and design without being monotonous; the streets were narrow but not claustrophobic; and the whole place felt prosperous and well-heeled.  We wandered around for hours, commenting continuously about how everything should be designed like Vauban.

The development was originally Nazi army barracks that were occupied by the French.  Some of the buildings were turned into student housing for the University of Freiburg; some were retrofitted and turned into apartment buildings.  Many were leveled to make room for new housing and mixed-use buildings on the one-square mile site.  There were no streets in the barracks, so the site already had a human-scale development pattern that the urban planners maintained and improved upon.

The whole place felt pretty amazing.  Freiburg was recently named one of the best places to live in Germany, and we were there on a day that was pretty much perfect. There were children all over the place, and the development was quiet (no cars) but full of life.  The thing that struck me the most is how green it was.  There were green roofs, trees, shrubs, allotment gardens – it felt like a place that had been tended for generations rather than a place called forth from the minds of urban planners less than a decade ago.  I was also struck by how successful the car-free streets were.  The last car-free city I was in, Louvain La Neuve (in Belgium, in February) felt creepy and out of scale – a little like the empty cities in Inception.  Not so with the Vauban.

All rhapsodizing aside, though, I have a few major critiques of the development. The first is a question of density – 6500 people live in the square mile.  That’s not that many. Cambridge, MA has an average density of 7,350ish.  Cambridge, UK has 7600ish.  And Shorewood, WI – my hometown – has a population density of 8600ish.  You’d think that eliminating all those streets would give the developers plenty of space for more people than a streetcar suburb in the American Midwest, and that such density, in the absence of cars, would be desirable.  I found the number to be disappointing.

The other thing that I found really jarring was the tramline/Main Street down the middle of the development.  The tramline was built in concert with the development (good!) and the tracks are covered with grass, a design detail that I admired throughout Germany and Switzerland.  But the street was huge, treeless, and lacking in any activating features (most of the houses turned away from the street).  Furthermore, since most of the houses are carless, there was hardly any traffic on the massive central road.  The tramline/main street was as divisive as a river, and substantially less scenic.

Finally, while there was certainly plenty of mixed-use development, there didn’t seem to be any commercial center per se, or any Main Street (at least that I found).  We found a few businesses, and we stopped at the grocery store on the edge of the development and bought goo-gobs of Ritter Sport chocolate, but the cafe where we ate lunch was on an edge of development and was set far back from the walking path.  It had a lovely terrace and some pretty old trees, but very little adjacent commercial space.  It was the only commercial development that we saw on that side of the tramline/main street, and seemed like pretty slim pickings for 6500 people to share.

Despite my reservations, though, I would be thrilled to live in a place like that, and I fervently hope it inspires copycats (and that they read my blog and eliminate the enormous main street).

Economic Mobility –

How feasible is economic mobility, actually?  Can you move up the ladder?

This new study by Pew Charitable Trusts Economic Mobility Project examines this question, on a state-by-state basis.  The geographic pattern that emerges is pretty staggering.  Though most states do not differ in any statistically significant way, you may want to stay out of the south if you want to go from rags to riches.  Check out the interactive version of the below map at the economicmobility.org.

Urban America’s Renaissance?

Nothing makes a geographer more excited than the release of new census data.  If you’re a nerd like me, you’ve most likely read by now about the resurgence of urban america from the latest US Census:

The Census Bureau also recently reported that America’s urban population increased by 12.1 percent from 2000 to 2010, faster than the nation’s overall growth rate of 9.7 percent. The exurban tide may be receding.

Outer suburbs (or the exurbs) have ground to a standstill, with only 0.4% growth.(NY Times).  Cool.  Good stuff.

Of course, this has more to do with the mortgage crisis and financial woes of the US of A than any sort of dramatic shift in thinking.  In my opinion, those heralding this as some sort of end of an era/beginning of a new era of “smart growth” are deluding themselves.  I hope I’m wrong,  but I don’t see whats to start the exurban building once the economy picks back up.  Maybe this is a trigger that will start a shift.

This is really clever.

The Small Streets Blog, a publication I found linked from Slate, has a very cool visualization of historic villages superimposed on parking lots.  Its eye-opening, and a great way to think about how much space is actually dedicated to cars.  The first shows the park-and-ride lot of Greenbelt, MD (given that the lot feeds public transportation, choosing it is a little bit of a cheap shot), with a Swedish village plopped on top.

Image courtesy Small Streets Blog

People are really terrible at understanding scale, and anything like this that helps you see how space can be redeployed is a really good thing.  We need to splash this stuff all over the internet.

King’s Cross = Awesome

I was in London last week, and I got to see the new King’s Cross station just a few days after opening.  I’d seen renderings, and this was a rare occasion when the real thing was everything promise by the drawing and more.  While its not The Platonic Public Space, its an enormous improvement on what was there before, and I think it really makes a huge difference to the area.

King’s Cross and environs is currently undergoing a huge, decade-long revamp, and this development is on the vanguard of completed projects.  I was traveling through King’s Cross a lot in the fall, so I can say with authority that this new public space – including a new retail gallery, a ticket office, a huge covered corridor and Underground connection – is a fantastic addition to the area.

Furthermore, I was there just a few days after the official opening, and there was still a large-scale public information campaign to retrain the public how to use the station.  On the one hand, I think traffic patterns should be clear if the space is well-designed.  On the other hand, thousands of people have used the station the way it was for the past however many years, and I did actually profit from a woman wearing a sandwich board (in the same finger-pointing shape as above) directing me from the Tube to the station.  The public information campaign has been really well executed.

I should also say that, while I am certainly a nerd for stopping to take pictures, I was hardly the only one doing it.  The space isn’t perfect, but the effect is really impressive.  It actually stopped me in my tracks as I rounded the corner from platform 9.

The National Planning Policy Framework

Wordle courtesy vsnw.co.uk.

The new UK national planning document, the National Planning Policy Framework, was officially released today.  I haven’t had a chance to see how many changes were made from the draft version (which has been kicking around for months); the blogosphere was fairly quiet about it today (although the internet has had plenty to say about the NPPF over the last year or so).  The best resource so far is this article from the Telegraph.

The idea behind the document is that it replaces thousands of pages of documents generated over the course of decades with a single go-to policy “in favor of sustainable development.”  The NPPF has cheerleaders and detractors.  As I read it, the central tenets of the document aren’t fundamentally bad, but (as one might expect, when 50 pages distills 1000s), its capable of being interpreted about a bazillion ways: sustainable is never defined, for example.  What constitutes sustainability? I could give you my definition, but somehow I doubt it corresponds to what the conservative politicians had in mind when they drafted it. It is also hazy on things like density, urbanity, provision of affordable housing, and conservation of green belts around towns, among other things.  These aren’t niggling details.  They are critically important to envisioning the future of England as dictated by the NPPF.

If I were to provide the glossary for the document, I think it might be pretty strong.  But since no one’s asked me to yet, I think the definitions will be hashed out over time.  It will be sloppy and yield some unfortunate planning results.  But the planning system as it has historically existed isn’t streamlined or efficient, and leaves much to professional judgment.  Basically I think the former planning system was the lesser of two evils.

Those of you outside the UK are probably unaware, but whether good or bad, its a huge shift in the way the country approached planning and could have real implications for the way England builds in the coming decades.

I’d Live There

On a early spring run a few weeks ago, I took a turn down a street I’d been near many times, but never been down. Secluded down a ravine, with easy access to the Don Valley Recreation Trail, these modern houses caught my eye.  Not my usual style of architecture, but they were so appealing in the warm spring air.

 

***This is part of a weekly Friday posting of places we’d love to live, eat, and play***

Matthew Yglesias: Professional Smartypants

Matthew Yglesias is a former blogging wunderkind (that was, like, five years ago.  Now he’s just a blogger for Slate, albeit a really good one) who has just released an e-book entitled “The Rent is Too Damn High,” a reference to a New York political party of the same name.  In an interview with the New York Time’s Economix blog, Yglesias sums up the thesis of his new book. Predictably enough, the thrust of his argument is that the rent is too high: a lack of density in city centers has led to suburban sprawl and its attendant ills, including large-scale migration to the SunBelt.  Following in the well-trod footsteps of urbanists before him (most famously, Corbusier; most recently, Edward Glaeser), he argues for more density, which will allow for more green space.

I haven’t read the book, although I’d like to.  I’ve only read the interview.  That said, here are some preliminary thoughts:

I’m curious to hear how Yglesias addresses  historic preservation: he says in the article that many of America’s best-loved neighborhoods couldn’t be built today because of zoning. This is true, but doesn’t necessarily square with his argument for greater density in urban areas.  The best-loved urban areas in world are already pretty…well…urban.  If you’re talking about densifying suburbs, going from 1 or 2 units per acre to 8 or 9 or – gasp! – even more, I’m all for it.  But if you look at cities like Shanghai, you see an argument against rampant densification.  Traditional neighborhoods have been obliterated and replaced with dense but soul-less architecture.  There is more green space, but less community.  The same argument could be made for many cities: Cambridge, MA’s triple-decker architecture is not as dense as it could be, but it is iconic.  Ditto New Orleans, Charleston, SC, Seattle’s Capitol Hill, Boston’s Back Bay/South End/Beacon Hill, and many others.

Like Corbusier, Yglesias makes the argument that greater density allows for larger green spaces, which is undeniably true.  Corbu’s green spaces were soul-less and boring, which is why they were (thankfully) never built.  I would guess, because Yglesias is a guy with lots of common sense, that he is proposing something more akin to a greenbelt or a nature reserve than large swaths of lawn punctuated by apartment blocks.  But while I am, on balance, pro-green space, I am also pro-access to green space.  What is the best way to reconcile the preservation of wild lands with granting access to those who live in the city?  I should note that this is already an issue – while working at a nature reserve, I had a child ask me “are there animals in the woods?”  When told “yes,” she started shrieking. Full-on, no holds barred.  It was distressing.

Finally, Yglesias talks about the fear that many municipalities have of density.  I certainly saw this when I lived in rural Pennsylvania: there is a widespread failure to recognize that you need density somewhere in order to maintain a bucolic feel elsewhere.  Attempts to allow a low level of development in order to “preserve rural character” are often doomed to fail.  I’m curious to read about how he proposes to solve it.  Most small towns are unwilling to partner with other municipalities in their region.  While there have been some very successful metro partnerships (Portland & Toronto spring to mind), cooperation has been the exception.

Ball’s in your court, Yglesias!

 

On Transit: A comparison by Miles of Track

Back in December I started a series comparing North American Transit sytems, first by Fare Prices, then by Hours of Operation.  The third installment in the series has been sitting in a folder of drafts since then, half finished.

Miles of route is one of the hardest things to compare among transit systems because each transit system is so different. With subway, light rail, street car, and bus rapid transit (BRT) all being used to different extents in different cities, it’s hard to know what to include.  I’ve done my best here, with the information I could find from transit sources on the web.

For the purpose of the below chart, I included only rail-based transit, and excluded any commuter-rail line (such as GO Transit in Toronto or MBTA commuter rail in Boston).  This isn’t to say that this type of rail isn’t of supreme importance in the greater urban public transit picture, but only that perhaps it is best left to a second comparison.  It is for this reason that I did not include Philadelphia in the below chart.  As discussed previously, Philadelphia’s transit system is so complex in terms of types of routes and types of transit it was difficult to sort out what to include.

Well, New York really trumps any other North American system in terms of total amount of track, with Chicago and Washington basically tying for second.  Toronto comes in 4th, largely due to my inclusion of streetcar lines in the analysis.  If I were to eliminate streetcar lines, the miles of track would drop to 43 putting it below Boston.  Take that as you will, keeping in mind the fact that some Streetcars have designated tracks and some don’t.

What is not quantified here is the effectiveness of each line.  Which systems are built smartly?  Which serve the population most effectively and which encourage the most transit use?  Is it best to build outwards to serve a larger geographic area, or to build densely to serve the most densely populated areas?

These are all things I will explore in my final installment of this series.

**This is the third post in a series of posts on North American Public Transit systems**

The Castle

The first time I went to Metro Rock Climbing Wall in Everett, Mass, the driver assured me (repeatedly!) that he wasn’t trying to kill me and dispose of my body.  Metro is sandwiched between a limousine and town car warehouse and  some sort of cement storage yard down – take a left at the peanut butter factory down a rutted gravel road, take another left past an overgrown wire gate, and you’re there!

Because of the physical requirements of rock gyms, they’re often located in unappealing places – in industrial estates on the edge of town or far outside the city center.  Or, alternatively, they’re located someplace wonderful but the facility is dinky, expensive, or both.

The Castle Rock Gym in London is expensive but hardly dinky; in fact, I think its the best climbing gym I’ve ever been to.  But what I love the most about the facility (versus any other climbing wall) is that its actually located in a castle – or, more specifically, a former pumping station built in 1860 to look like a castle.  Elsewhere in England, churches have been repurposed as climbing gyms, and of course Europe in general has been enthusiastically re-using buildings for hundreds of years (I got really excited about a grocery store in Ghent for that very reason).

The Castle also has a garden and solar panels, and has set a goal of becoming completely carbon-neutral by 2014 (or something…check their website for more info).  They’ve taken an out-of-date piece of infrastructure and turned it into a vibrant and profitable business.

Does anyone else have a favorite adaptive-reuse story? Or am I just a big ol’ nerd?