Tag Archives: urban planning

New Urbanism: Past, Present, and Future

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I basically agree with the principles of new urbanism (which were based on old urbanism). Communities where people can take most work, school, shopping, and entertainment trips by walking or biking are better for the planet and better for our physical and mental health. With good planning and design, there is plenty of room in the spaces we have already developed to accommodate whatever population growth we are expecting, without continuing to chew up land that could be left wild or used as farmland. The trick is to establish a virtuous cycle where gradually more people buy into the idea of life without private cars taking up half the space. And then some of that space saved has to be invested in good public infrastructure, access to recreation and nature to offset some of the negative effects of density. I think New Urban ideas have blunted suburban sprawl and car-dependency a little in the United States, but only a little unfortunately. There just aren’t that many walkable neighborhoods to choose from, and so people either aren’t familiar with them, and can’t imagine a non-car-dependent lifestyle, or else they assume people of average means can’t afford them, which is true in general of desirable things in short supply.

New Urbanism: Past, Present, and Future

The New Urbanism, initially conceived as an anti-sprawl reform movement, evolved into a new paradigm in urban design. Recently, however, some researchers have argued that the popular appeal of New Urbanism has eroded, the movement has lost its significance, and critical research on the broader theme has tapered off. In response, this article investigates whether the movement has lost its currency and explores the future of New Urbanism in the context of contemporary circumstances of development. The article begins with a brief description of the conceptualization of New Urbanism as an exception to the development trends of the time. Collaborative efforts of its protagonists that have contributed to the integration of New Urbanist concepts into other programs, policies, and development regulations are presented in the next section to describe its expansion, to clarify its mainstreaming, and to call attention to its broader impact. The concluding section presents contemporary circumstances of development and changes that are intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, including those related to the nation’s demographics, climate change, technological advances, rapid growth of the digital economy, and acceleration of e-commerce to explore the significance of New Urbanism for future development.

Urban Planning open access journal

top urban planning books of 2020

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Planetizen has an annual roundup of urban planning books. Certainly urban planners should care about urban planning, but urban planning is not just for urban planners. It touches on topics of interest to engineers, economists, social scientists (separate from economists? discuss amongst yourselves), and generally people who are concerned/interested in people or the environment. Because cities and their suburbs are the environment where the vast majority of people live.

Some animals and plants also live there, and this particular list is notable devoid of any books on parks, trees, urban ecology, or even environmental quality issues like air pollution or water pollution. It has a number of interesting books on housing. Some urban problems like transportation and land use and air quality have a range of solutions that experts loosely agree on, even if politicians and bureaucrats fail to implement them and special interests actively obstruct and spread disinformation about them. Adequate and affordable housing for everyone is the big urban problem that has never been solved and really has no clear cut consensus on what should be done. The basic puzzle is that as a particular city or neighborhood becomes a nice place to live, prices get bid up, and then over time only the relatively affluent can afford to live there. Once the snowball starts rolling, the people who live there will use their political power to try to limit increases in housing supply (for example, resisting greater heights or apartment buildings or smaller lot sizes). Government can try to intervene by allowing/requiring greater density, or it can go the other way and allow automobile-dependent low-density sprawl to develop. The latter chews up land that could be put to better use (or left wild), pollutes our air and water, cooks our planet, and contributes to everything from diabetes to mass pedestrian death to drunk driving. Governments should stop essentially paying people to live in the suburbs, and let people who make this choice experience the true cost to themselves and everyone else on the planet. But that’s just my view and lifestyle choice and I try to be tolerant of others, up to a point. And actually, I occasionally consider retreating to a quiet, cheap suburban life somewhere in the middle states from time to time. But if I did that I would be aware that it was cheap because the government was subsidizing me at others’ expense.

  • Brave New Home: Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing
  • Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America
  • Missing Middle Housing: Thinking Big and Building Small to Respond to Today’s Housing Crisis
  • Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (mortgages and lending, both on the public policy side and private sector side, are part of the puzzle)
  • The Affordable City: Strategies for Putting Housing Within Reach

There are a few books more about urban and regional planning proper:

  • City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present (sounds like a U.S.-centric version of Cities of Tomorrow, a classic and awesome introduction to urban planning history. Even the cover is similar to the version of that book that I have.)
  • The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs
  • Designing for the Mega-region: Meeting Urban Challenges at a New Scale (could we please have high speed rail to connect our mega-regions? Oh, I forgot, this is the United States and we just can’t have nice things.)

Finally, the book that caught my eye most is specifically about pedestrian deaths (Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America), and if you didn’t already notice this is an issue near and dear to my heart. Pedestrian deaths, and motor vehicle-related deaths more broadly, are going to cause coronavirus-level death and carnage each and every year into the foreseeable future, long after the coronavirus shock is in the rear-view mirror. Solutions are known, and would have all kinds of virtuous spillover effects on our urban areas. And yet we fail to understand or act, decade after decade after decade.

Wouldn’t it be fun to just disappear to a mountaintop hermit cabin for a week and read a stack of books on a topic? Well, my idea of fun is not everybody’s idea of fun. Also, I’m not Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, and can’t just leave my family or my day job for a week.

coronavirus changes to keep

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This article in Axios lists some changes brought about by the coronavirus that we might want to keep after the coronavirus.

  • not just remote work, but remote hiring and onboarding – There are now people working at the local branch of my company who I have never met in person. Conversely, it seems no more weird to work online with people anywhere in the world* who I have never met in person, than it does to work with someone local who I have never met in person. This gets us closer to the economists’ dream of a truly mobile workforce that could iron out some inequities. (* Time zones still exist, and I can tell you from working with U.S. staff while I was living in Asia, working in the middle of the night still sucks. I worked with someone in South America last year though who was only one time zone away from mine, and that worked out great. India – I love you guys but the time zone thing is just too brutal…)
  • new movies streamed – well, okay, if you’re a big movie buff… but I do see the distinction between movies and TV shows with a series of hour-long episodes slowly dissolving, and the shows tend to be higher quality. I suspect 2-hour movies that take a year or more to produce and then release may be on their way out.
  • more seamless delivery of everything – yes, but we still need street and parking design in our cities to catch up
  • telehealth and teletherapy – yes, this seems good. I’d like to see home visits make a comeback basic routine health care – no real sign of that yet, although my life insurance company did recently send a nurse to my house to check my weight and blood pressure, stick me with a needle and collect a cup of my pee. So it can be done. Here’s an idea – let’s do vaccination this way.
  • Maybe some states are realizing the internet needs to be treated like a public utility going forward. We’ll see….
  • better remote education tech – this article mentions smaller class sizes and better parent-teacher-school communication. I agree – some of what the remote model lacks could be offset by more one-on-one and small-group attention where it will do the most good.

I’d like to add timed tickets to this list. I’ve seen a few museums, parks, etc. do this in the past, but it has become much more prevalent to buy a ticket that gets you in within a certain window during the day, and this has a huge crowd control benefit. Things are just much more enjoyable when they are less crowded. I also like restaurants and stores that let you check in online, then text you when your table or customer service person is ready for you. Let’s get rid of standing in line forever!

metropolitan planning organizations

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If you live in a decent sized metropolitan area, your metropolitan planning organization forces local officials and other stakeholders to get together across political jurisdictions and make decisions about how to prioritize transportation projects in the context of a long term plan. The results then get sent up to the state, which uses it to allocate funding.

The article has a number of criticisms. MPOs have tended to favor highways over other forms of transportation, and these have often disrupted disadvantaged communities. They have tended to favor suburban areas. They have tended to favor new construction over maintenance of what is already constructed.

I have always thought MPOs are good even if they are imperfect because (1) they force stakeholders to work together at the right geographic and economic scale for infrastructure planning, (2) they force some kind of long term plan to be put down on paper, (3) they force the prioritization of site-level projects to be justified in the context of that long term plan, and (4) they bring in state and federal money to get projects in the ground based on the priorities of local actors that have “skin in the game”. In the absence of this process, either political jurisdictions would plan in isolation, or more efficient but less democratic structures would be created that largely cut out elected officials, voters and taxpayers. Engineers and officials not trained in planning would tend to jump right to analysis of site-level projects without a real plan. State and federal funding either would not happen at all or would be based on political lobbying. Corruption would likely be more common. And systems that are less in public view would tend to be neglected until major, obvious failures occur that affect peoples’ lives.

What I just described covers the state of water infrastructure in the U.S. pretty well. I think we should expand MPOs to cover other kinds of infrastructure rather than just transportation. MPOs are one of the reasons that politicians and the public think infrastructure=transportation and transportation=infrastructure. They do some rational planning and economic analysis at roughly the rate geographic scale and time period, then feed that into a messy political process to rank site-specific, short-term projects, then direct taxpayer money to projects that are likely to benefit the citizenry, while sharing the wealth at least a little bit. Unless you want to go authoritarian, it’s a reasonable approach to get infrastructure done in a democracy. I think it’s better and more equitable than the ratepayer-funded utility model followed in the water, energy, and communication industries.

10% drop in vehicle miles traveled predicted long-term

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KPMG says some of the sharp reduction in vehicle miles traveled during the coronavirus crisis is likely to be permanent, with people getting used to working from home and shopping online. The numbers they came up with are a 9-10% reduction in vehicle miles traveled (this factors in both a decrease in personal vehicles and an increase in delivery vehicles, if I understand the article) and a drop in car ownership from 1.97 to 1.87 per household.

Google’s pedestrian foot traffic data

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The Philadelphia Inquirer has an article showing foot traffic at various locations around the city during the coronavirus shut down compared to average. As might be expected, foot traffic is down pretty much everywhere except grocery stores, where it is up slightly. This matches my personal observations. It doesn’t match the media accounts of crazy lines at grocery stores and big box stores in the suburbs. Maybe this is because in a dense walkable city, we have many small stores instead of a few large stores, and people tend to spread out their shopping over the entire day and week and to buy just a bag or two at a time that they can carry home. There are odd, sporadic shortages, but I have not observed any extreme shortages of basic goods.

The data supposedly come from Google. I tried to find out more about how, where and when Google is collecting this data, and came up short after 15 minutes or so of looking.

Now, I admit that clearly dense cities with a lot of social interaction have their down side right now. The big dense cities are also where the most international arrivals happen, and this factor along with density might be why they are the worst places to be right now. Hopefully they also have the largest medical facilities with the most experienced medical staff, but whatever we have is clearly not going to be enough to help everyone who needs help in the next month or so.

solving the delivery problem

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Wired has an article on solutions to the “last mile” delivery problem. A couple interesting stats are that 5% of deliveries don’t reach their destination on the first try (that sounds pretty good to me) and that this costs retailers about $18 each time. Most of the proposed solutions just have to do with better data on locations and delivery preferences.

This article repeats the claim that deliveries increase traffic congestion, although it admits this is “difficult to measure”. I am still a bit skeptical of this. I am willing to follow the evidence wherever it leaves, but logically I feel like these claims leave out all the trips individuals are not taking to the store. If a delivery truck brings 100 packages to 100 homes, that could mean 100 car trips that were not taken. And that was just one truck, although it is kind of a big obvious smelly one and it might be blocking the street, a crosswalk, or a fire hydrant for a few minutes. Those trucks might also be competing for city and suburban streets at times when people are coming and going from work trips, which could increase peak traffic congestion.

minimum parking requirements – just get rid of them!

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This Vice article makes a pretty strong case that minimum parking requirements should just be gotten rid of. There are so many complicated problems cities are grappling with. This one isn’t all that complicated. Seriously, just get rid of them. This isn’t banning parking, it is just letting the market decide. Free parking is not free, it is expensive and the cost is shared between car owners and non-car owners, but car owners have come to feel entitled to these subsidies and take them for granted. If you want to pay for a car and pay for parking, go ahead and do so. If you don’t, you can spend your money on other things.

best urban planning books of 2019

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Planetizen blog puts this out every year. Here are a few that caught my eye:

  • Better Buses, Better Cities. I ride buses a lot. I wouldn’t mind knowing more about best practices in running a bus authority. I would miss them if they went away in my city, but I also know they could be a lot better. I’m talking to you, Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority.
  • Cities, the First 6,000 Years. It sounds like this book goes into ancient cities and how they functioned on the ground.
  • Choked: Life and Death in the Age of Air Pollution. Because it’s possible that if we tackled only one environmental issue in cities, this should be it. Solving air pollution would be a huge gain for public health in itself and would force us to make progress on a lot of other problems.
  • Soft City: Building Density for Everyday Life. Because the pictures look really cool, and coming back from a European city and telling your friends in words how much better it is than our cities just doesn’t cut it. They just need to go there. But a book with really cool cartoons of European cities might be an affordable start.
  • Vancouverism. It’s about Vancouver. Actually, I don’t know that I am likely to read this. But I have heard good things, have never been, and would like to go. I’ve also heard that housing prices are a problem there. But I’m going to state the inconvenient truth: most U.S. cities are not that great. Cities that are great are in very short supply, and thus the wealthy bid up prices there until only they are able to live there. So let’s build more cities that are at least good.