Ellen Dunham-Jones: Retrofitting suburbia
What About the Suburbs?
History is full of examples of shrinking cities — from collapsed empires to abandoned rural towns that failed to maintain adequate infrastructure, diversify their economy or adjust to changing demographics. The popular suburbs that ring Detroit’s hollowed center are but an extreme example of how our society relied on cheap oil to fuel leapfrog growth, instead of reinvesting in existing places. What’s perhaps more remarkable today are shrinking suburbs — and the specter of the end of cheap oil.
Courtesy of Toledo-Lucas County Public LibraryToledo, Ohio, circa 1949.
Vacancies have proliferated along aging commercial strip corridors and new “zombie” subdivisions at the foreclosure fringes. The oversupply of platted vacant lots in states like Arizona, Florida and Idaho that may never be developed prompts us to ask: Will planned shrinkage become the new normal? Planned growth — such as the resilient 1811 Commissioners Plan to grid Manhattan with walkable blocks — is a necessary strategy for rapidly urbanizing areas, but in the U.S. today we must move quickly to design plans to better utilize already urbanized land and reduce car-dependency.
Rising oil prices contributed to escalated foreclosure rates and the Great Recession. How will they affect American households over the long term? New research reveals that in 2008 a median income household living in a location-efficient neighborhood spent 12.6 percent of their income on transportation, versus 35.8 percent for those stuck far from jobs and transit. “Drive ‘til you qualify” affordability is no longer sustainable. Instead, we need to use cheap land for food and energy production, redirect growth inward, ease the production of affordable infill housing and retrofit our shrinking suburbs.
Failed commercial properties could be regreened into parks to help increase adjacent property values, like the former City Center mall in Columbus, Ohio, or into reconstructed wetlands to mitigate flooding and restore ecological habitat, as at Ames Lake in St. Paul, site of the former Phalen Shopping Center. Transit-served properties could be targeted for redevelopment into mixed-use, walkable nodes and corridors, as near Northgate Mall in Seattle and along Columbia Pike in northern Virginia. More modest revitalization can occur through the re-inhabitation of former strip malls with libraries, schools and other community-serving uses like the Jackson Medical Mall in Jackson, Miss.
Incentives for filling in and re-using urban land must be balanced with more robust disincentives to urbanize additional land at the fringes. First steps include revising local zoning and subdivision regulations and conducting greyfield audits of underused parking lots and vacant land. More systemic changes include a combination of large-scale land acquisition strategies, incentives like place-based underwriting protocols and targeted infrastructure spending, and regulatory changes like complete streets standards and eliminating Freddie, Fannie, FHA and HUD restrictions on mixed-use development.
In recognizing shrinkage as the new normal we not only prepare for the end of cheap oil by better managing our metropolitan fringes, but also boost opportunities for improved quality of life in existing communities and encourage the retrofitting of our most auto-dependent suburban properties into more healthy and sustaining places.
How to Fix That Ugly Strip
Which automobile-dependent landscapes in the U.S. are the most forsaken? Where would the pedestrian-oriented European strategies seem most out of place and yet potentially have the greatest impact on increasing affordability, health and livability while reducing greenhouse gases and re-using existing infrastructure? Commercial strip corridors.
Top of the list of unloved, underperforming and ubiquitous places, they were engineered for the single purpose of swiftly moving cars. But overzoned for commercial uses, they are now clogged with cars on both local and through trips. They provide access to cheaper land and “drive till you qualify” affordable housing – but then eat up the savings as transportation costs have risen to 20 to 40 percent of household budgets. They are aging with little prospect of funding for maintenance. And their high vacancy rates just add to the dispiritedness of a failed public realm.
Can they be retrofitted into attractive, transit boulevards lined with trees, sidewalks and affordable housing and anchored by mixed-use centers with a public life to be proud of? June Williamson and I are tracking over 35 North American corridors that are being redesigned not to make driving miserable, but to recognize the multiple social, environmental, economic and transportation purposes that great streets serve. Their integration was highlighted in the grassroots-led temporary re-striping of Ross Avenue as “Ross Ramblas” in Dallas this week at Build a Better Boulevard. Participants employed several techniques of Tactical Urbanism, including pop-up shops, chairbombing and dumpster pools.
More typical is the ongoing 10-year revitalization of a five-mile stretch of Columbia Pike in Arlington County, Va. It exemplifies the intelligent use of tight form-based codes to grow from one-story strip buildings in parking lots to mid-rise mixed-use buildings fronting tree-lined sidewalks at nodes on major intersections. The site-specific code quickly tapers heights where the new development faces the existing neighborhoods and new bike lanes on the less busy streets. This strategy retains the existing affordable housing in between the nodes while the tax revenue from the new density goes toward supporting a streetcar.
Cambie Corridor in Vancouver is employing similar techniques but has upped the ante with some stunning modern mixed-use buildings and a highly efficient district energy system that balances out daytime commercial energy demands with the residential night-time peak loads.
Aiding these efforts is the new street design manual for walkable urban thoroughfares. It is the first officially recommended practice that does not refer to sidewalks as “vehicle recovery zones”! El Paso recently adopted the manual to connect its implementation of Bus Rapid Transit with redevelopment of outdated properties along five major corridors. Imagine if all 50 DOTs followed suit and revised their Level of Service Standards accordingly! We might see more transformations of urban highways to boulevards and Complete Streets.
Funding remains an obstacle and demand for Sustainable Communities Partnershipfederal planning grants far outstrips supply. Can private real estate developers fund streetcars as they did early in the 20th century? Can the public again support public sector investments in infrastructure, as it did mid-century? How else can we provide an alternative to our broken system of “drive till you qualify” affordable housing, accommodate changing demographics and markets and make our least sustainable landscapes into places worth caring more about?
Ellen Dunham-Jones is a professor in the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. June Williamson is an associate professor at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York. They are co-authors of "Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs."
UPDATED JUNE 27, 2011, 4:58 PM
Car Clash: Europe vs. the U.S.
The notion that European cities are different from American cities because they discourage automobile use in certain places obscures larger similarities.
It is true, for example, that because of policies favoring pedestrian streets, fewer parking spaces, resident-only permit zones and a battery of other measures, it is much more difficult to drive through central Madrid than it used to be. These measures have widespread support within this immediate area because central Madrid, like many European cities, has experienced a dramatic surge of gentrification.
The core, with its very high land prices, is increasingly home to affluent residents, high-end businesses, government officials and tourists who are willing to walk, use taxis and transit and forgo the use of their cars for short daily trips because any inconvenience is vastly outweighed by the benefits of restricting noise and pollution along old, narrow streets and, not incidentally, stemming the tide of automobiles owned by working class suburbanites who must commute into the central city.
However, central Madrid occupies only a small and diminishing part of the urban area. As is the case with virtually all European cities, as population at the core has dropped, population in the periphery has boomed. Between the censuses of 1991 and 2001, for example, the population of the central city dropped over 2% while the five suburban rings increased by 19% to 90%. Along with that shift toward lower densities and single family houses went a dramatic increase in automobile ownership and use. Between 1995 and 2001 alone car ownership rose from 372 automobiles per 1,000 residents to 478. Because of the construction of a vast new system of subways and superhighways, however, average vehicle speeds actually increased.
Concentrating on pedestrian zones at the center and ignoring the new freeways at the periphery obscures one of the real differences between American cities and European cities: the Europeans' willingness to pay for new public infrastructure of all kinds. Whether it has spent too much is another issue.
Robert Bruegmann is a professor of art history, architecture and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of "Sprawl: A Compact History."
UPDATED JUNE 29, 2011, 10:52 AM
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment