Tag Archives: urban planning

best “urban planning” books of 2023

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And the “best of” posts begin… I put urban planning in quotes because the field is broad and covers a lot of ground that may be of interest to engineers, natural and social scientists, economists, and many others. Here are a handful that caught my eye:

  • How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between. Interesting to me because, in general, neither the United States nor my specific state or city seems able to get big things done. I think this is largely a failure of imagination and priorities, but I also listened to this Freakonomics podcast recently on how construction productivity in the U.S. has just gone nowhere over the last 50 years while productivity in other sectors has grown by leaps and bounds. They rule out lack of capital investment and excessive monopoly power. Some evidence seems to point toward regulation (whether health, safety, and environmental protections are “excessive” is in the eyes of the beholder, but this also includes misguided/outdated local land use policies like minimum lot sizes and parking requirements), citizen input/resistance (but in my city, legitimate public input takes place alongside some shady politician/developer horse trading and the two can be hard to distinguish, and of course, existing homeowners have a rational but unhelpful interest in resisting new construction and new residents, and this can also be tinged with racial bias). Nobody thinks better construction management and risk management would be a bad thing, and this is an area I think computers and automation (call it artificial intelligence if you want) might make a difference. Make a digital model of exactly what is supposed to be built where and when, then monitor the hell out of it during the construction process to try to anticipate and correct deviations from the plan before they occur. There is always interest in prefabrication and making construction look a lot more like manufacturing, which it superficially resembles except for taking place in the real world of weather, traffic, surprise underground conditions etc. And then (not really covered in the podcast) there is the high-tech stuff like drones, robots, and advances in materials science. Being in the engineering industry myself, I know it is fiercely competitive and yet relatively risk adverse and slow to adopt new technology.
  • Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond. I’m not sure I want to be depressed enough to read this, but certainly an important topic. To solve poverty, you can give people money in the short term (which you have to take from other people/entities who have more than they need, although they won’t see it that way), and/or you have to give them education, skills, and job prospects in the longer term. That’s really the whole story – now go forth and prosper, everyone.
  • Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar. Well, before reading this everyone should read the classic The High Cost of Free Parking. But I have gotten jaded trying to change minds on this by providing accurate and rational information to the parking-entitled crowd, which is almost everyone.
  • Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of our Planet by Ben Goldfarb. “Road ecology” almost sounds like an oxymoron to me. Then again, it is really eye opening when you realize how much of the urban surface is made up of roads, streets, driveways, and parking lots. So if there really are ways to reduce the impact, it is worth thinking about.
  • Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City and The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown. Important topics, given that there is less and less land not altered by humans out there.
  • Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World: Learning to Thrive Without Growth. This covers population shrinkage in developed countries today, and possibility eventually in most countries. But developed countries will need to deal with increasing migration pressure in the medium term, so I am not sure how soon we will have the luxury of thinking about reducing our city sizes. Then again, maybe we should be letting some cities shrink while densifying others and making them as vibrant and human as possible.
  • The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. Okay yes, densify and improve the cities in good places.
  • A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? and The First City on Mars: An Urban Planner’s Guide to Settling the Red Planet. Fun to think about, because we need to have some imagination and practice thinking big even as we are solving all those tricky little problems close to home.

Americans may value walkable communities after all?

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The other day I lamented that the nation’s population and economic center of gravity seems to be moving toward less walkable and sustainable areas. So if people and companies are voting that way through their market transactions, what do we make of a survey where a majority of people self-report that they do in fact want to live in walkable communities, and real estate markets tend to reflect this. It’s a logic puzzle, but I’ll offer a few thoughts.

First of all, when people are polled on what they want in a house and a community, they also say they want ample free parking. It sounds great to have ample free parking AND walkability, but the laws of geometry simply don’t allow this. This is because most cars are sitting still most of the time, you need large amounts of parking to accommodate peak demand (for example, a mall during holiday shopping season), and cars need a lot of room to maneuver in addition to the space they take up when they are parked or trying to get from point A to point B. People do not understand this – when everybody has a car, the space required to accommodate the cars requires things to get too far apart to also have walkability. People walk less and less gets spent on walking infrastructure, and it becomes a vicious cycle.

Geometrically speaking, the only ways to solve this conundrum might be alternative vehicles such as bicycles and golf carts which don’t need so much room to maneuver and can be parked very efficiently. The problem is, these vehicles are not safe to be in around high-speed highway vehicles and trucks. So all these forms of transport really need their own lanes and signals to make it work. This is way too much change and perceived expense for America’s can’t-do urban planning crowd. And the public tends to turn on anything they see as infringing their freedom to drive fast and park anywhere they want for free. No matter what they say in a survey.

Linear cities might theoretically work. This seems very science-fiction, but you could maybe have a nice skinny walkable city with a sea of parking lots on one side of it, so everybody is within easy walking distance of everything they need including their car. But in this case, the only reason to own a car would be to go on an inter-city trip, and rail or buses would make more sense. If anyone knows of a previously undeveloped continent where this can be tried, let me know.

Gentrification, perceived and/or actual, is another issue. What I see in Philadelphia is that clean, safe, walkable, green neighborhoods with good schools are in very short supply. Prices get bid up for things that are in short supply, so wealthier people live in these areas. Wealthier people are also more vocal about demanding infrastructure and services from their government. So they demand, and they get. Meanwhile, less well-to-do neighborhoods notice all this, and they complain. The government can’t or won’t spend the money to provide excellent services and infrastructure to all neighborhoods, so a very convenient and cheap solution is to provide them to nobody. The only beneficiaries are slum lords and owners of nuisance businesses like junkyards and building material warehouses in the middle of residential neighborhoods (yes, I have somewhere very specific in mind when I bring this up), some of whom are politicians or in bed with politicians. This is all a downward spiral.

land value tax plan

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Detroit is considering a land value tax.

The proposal, dubbed the Land Value Tax Plan, would increase taxes on land while reducing taxes on homes and structures by an expected 30%, or roughly $38 million total. This would apply to every neighborhood in Michigan’s largest city, requires no application and never expires.

If approved by the Michigan Legislature, and later by Detroit voters, Duggan said, the plan would provide relief to homeowners who have been struggling under the burden of high taxes, encourage further neighborhood growth and hold land speculators accountable.

Detroit Free Press

It makes a lot of sense to me. The cynic in me has to ask, how much are the politicians that would have to vote for this in on the land speculation game? Here in Philadelphia they certainly are. But I’m not one to name names…ah hell, COUNCILMAN KENYATTA JOHNSON I’M TALKING TO YOU.

parking cash out

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I like this idea. It’s the kind of idea cowardly city councils across the USA can get behind because it costs them zero dollars. Just require employers providing “free” or discounted parking to their employees to let their employees opt out and receive the cash value instead. This makes more sense to me than free bus service, which is often not configured well for our urban areas (i.e., our urban areas are not configured right for transportation, but we don’t think of it this way, do we?).

“Conservatives” will support this because it is a free market solution, right? Don’t force people to pay extra taxes and fees to support other peoples’ subsidized parking. Let the market set the price of driving, parking, and all other modes of transportation. No, I’m not this naive. Conservatives generally support the status quo, even if it is demonstrably, logically and indisputably anti-free-market.

Top Urban Planning Books of 2022

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Planetizen has a list of top urban planning (and related fields) books from 2022, or to be more accurate, fall 2021 through fall 2022. Lots of fields are related to urban planning, like engineering, architecture, parks and recreation, housing, transportation, infrastructure, utilities, ecology, economics, and public health to name just a handful.

First, they have an interesting list that they call “The Canon”:

  • To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Reform by Ebenezer Howard
  • The Death and the [sic] Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs [yes, they got the title wrong – ouch!]
  • Design With Nature by Ian McHarg
  • The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup
  • The Urban General Plan, by T.J. Kent, Jr.
  • Local Planning: Contemporary Principles and Practices, edited by Gary Hack et al.

Anyway, here are a few from the new list that caught my eye:

I have reached middle age as defined by having a reading list of more books than I can read in my remaining lifespan (a long list for what I hope will still be a long life). So I am not sure how many of these I will get too. But knowing they are out there is useful in case I need to brush up on a particular topic at some point.

what we think about paying for transportation

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Is this hypocrisy or ignorance?

Bettina Jarasch, a Green party politician who also serves as the city’s deputy mayor, suggested the implementation of the measure after the apparent success of a recent summer scheme that saw Germans charged only €9 per month for public transport in order to help curb the impact of inflation during the summer months.

According to a report by Bild, Jarasch believes that a mandatory charge of between €15 and €20 ($16-$21) for public transport will further to bump revenue for public transport services while keeping prices low for individual users.

“I’m increasingly thinking about a solidarity levy of 15 to 20 euros a month for all Berliners,” the politician remarked, while also noting that the reduction in the price of public transport has seen a significant uptick in usage across the country.

Breitbart

Meanwhile, here in the USA, we are all forced to pay a fortune for driving and parking infrastructure, whether we use it or not. We accept this partly because it has been the status quo for so long we don’t remember anything different, and partly because of the endless propaganda hurled at us by the auto-highway-oil industrial complex.

Meanwhile, we have a double standard for transit for some reason where we expect it to be paid for 100% by user fees. Then we disincentivize people from actually using it by providing heavily subsidized car infrastructure.

There may be a few corporate executives and marketing types that understand the hypocrisy of this arrangement, but overall I’m going to go with ignorance.

VMT, traffic, and density

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This post provides evidence that increasing density (households per acre) does indeed reduce vehicle miles traveled per household. The thing is that what people experience is not vehicle miles per household, it is “traffic” and the inconvenience of parking. So even if driving per person or household decreases, the inconvenience of daily life will still increase until you get to a point where cars are unnecessary for most daily work, school, shopping, and leisure trips. I picture a curve where convenience decreases with density up to a certain point, and then increases again. People who have experienced only the decreasing side of the curve have trouble understanding what it would be like to get over the hump and up the other side. And this plays right into the hands of the highway-oil-auto industrial complex.

housing policy overview

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A blogger on Planetizen has a good overview of what many professional planners and economists believe would make a real dent in the U.S. housing problem.

We support reforms to allow developers to build more affordable housing types (e.g., multiplexes, townhouses, and mid-rise multifamily) with unbundled parking (parking rented separately from housing, so car-free households are no longer forced to pay for costly parking spaces they don’t need) in walkable urban neighborhoods, including large-scale upzoning, eliminating parking minimums, reducing development fees and approval requirements for moderate-priced infill, plus subsidizing housing for families with special needs.

Most planners also support innovative home ownership models, such as housing cooperatives and co-housing, modest inclusivity requirements (not so high that they reduce housing production), subsidies for households with special needs such as disabilities and very low incomes, and, sometimes, special regulations such as rent controls to limit rent increases.

Planetizen

This sounds about right to me. There are a couple reasons it is hard to do in today’s U.S. The most obvious is the massive political corruption driven by the construction/road/auto/oil-industrial complex. It is hard for politicians, especially local ones, to resist these forces. The second is the consumer preference for auto-dependent suburban development. I would not take this choice away from anyone. I would just stop subsidizing it and make it no longer the only viable choice for most Americans. Many people would like to try out a walkable urban neighborhood, but assume that there is not one available that they could afford. And they would largely be right. There are just not enough of them, and even in the ones we have the public infrastructure (protected bike lanes, frequent/clean/reliable public transportation, parks and trees) lags far behind what the leading cities in Europe and even parts of South America are providing. (Asia is hopeless though.)

The final issue is that you just can’t combine widespread car ownership and use with a walkable urban neighborhood. You have to get the number of cars down, then use all that space you saved for more housing, open space, and other amenities. And obviously, you have to make sure people can still get around.

So the answer is pretty clear – remove density limits (upzone in the parlance) and parking requirements (actually these last two sound a lot like a “free market” to me), then offset some of the disadvantages of urban density with excellent public infrastructure and parks. You may still need some subsidies and non-profit options to help the poor, but ideally that needs to be done at least at the metropolitan area scale if not state/federal scale. It’s a fairly simple formula but a long game and a politically difficult one.

what would a forward-looking infrastructure plan look like?

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The U.S. has neglected its infrastructure for decades and is falling apart. Unemployment and inequality are high, and people are hurting. Real interest rates are negative, there is virtually no risk of inflation, and the U.S. dollar remains strong and stable for the near future. Warm up the printing presses and helicopters! Don’t take it from me, take it from Larry Summers, who is normally in the headlines for cautioning against this sort of thing:

we propose a crude way to take account of this by excluding a specific set of programs and investments from the constraints of pay-as-you-go when strong evidence from academic research implies they would plausibly pay for themselves in present value. This includes well-designed investments in areas like children, education, and research. Infrastructure would ideally be paid for with Pigouvian revenue measures that improve infrastructure utilization, but it too could get an exception to the pay-as-you-go principle.

a paper by Larry Summers and another guy you haven’t heard of

Under these conditions, just directing the fire hose of federal money at infrastructure projects, any infrastructure projects, can’t hurt. It might be good to do that rather than spend too much time coming up with a plan to do it the best possible way. And yet, it could be done better. We could take the time to plan when we are not in a crisis, and then be ready to turn on the taps when a crisis hits (or just crack the taps open to a slow drip when a minor challenge hits and we need to nudge the country back on course.)

Too many proposals about infrastructure just boil down to throwing money at pork barrel highway projects, or else a buzzword soup about things like sustainability and equity without specific proposals. Here is one new proposal from Rice University with some specifics. One thing they propose is that project proposals come from leaders at the metropolitan or regional scale rather than the federal government. I completely agree with this. They suggest focusing on transportation (including public transportation), public facilities (including health facilities and parks), water and wastewater, energy (including renewables), and communications (including broadband). They then get down to a laundry list of specific projects at the local scale that would benefit from funding. Pulling all of this together is a pretty good accomplishment.

These basic categories sound okay to me. I might leave “health facilities” out of it – the U.S. needs a comprehensive, universal health care system now and that is a big enough topic to deserve its own legislation and program. Education is similar. I might add housing. Housing is a huge topic and it is excluded from most definitions of public infrastructure, but it is so intertwined with infrastructure and land use that its problems almost need to be solved at the same time. I like that they included parks – I might broaden this to include other forms of green infrastructure like street trees. Maybe “green infrastructure” is a too buzzwordy term – nothing wrong with “parks and trees”, except maybe there is a gray area whether are talking about any type of park or recreation facility (an urban playground or basketball court?) or whether it has to be quasi-naturalistic. I think I would go with the broader definition. I might add “urban food infrastructure” to the list – this is somewhat nebulous, but again intertwined with the larger infrastructure system and land use issues. You don’t really want the ag industry lobbyists involved, hence the “urban” term.

A bunch of projects do not make a plan. A good plan needs to have a definition of the system that is being planned for, and measurable goals for the state or function of that system that is desired. Then any package of inter-related projects can be evaluated to see how well they meet the goals and at what cost. Then finally, a specific package of projects can be chosen and put in priority order, and funding and implementation details can be worked out. Lots of “plans” skip right to the last step I just mentioned, while others fail because the last two steps are not well enough thought out.

As far as goals, they should be set at the local level, but the basics are fairly obvious, I think:

  • Provide reliable and affordable water, energy, communication, food and waste disposal services for everyone. (This can get wonkier – you want to keep infrastructure in a state of good repair, set and meet level of service goals, and minimize the cost of each component over its life cycle by making smart maintain/repair/replace/upgrade decisions.)
  • Minimize the expense and time of moving people and goods where they need to go. (I think of this as infrastructure minimizing “friction” in the workings of the economy.)
  • Minimize the negative impacts and maximize the positive impacts of the infrastructure system on the environment and public health, or if we want to be more buzzwordy, maximize ecosystem services.
  • Make the transportation system as safe as possible for everyone. (You could roll this into either the transportation or health goals, but it is so near and dear to my heart I give it its own bullet. If we made this an explicit goal, we would not be designing our streets and highways the way we are today in the U.S. By the way, active commutes are very nice and a lot of people might like them if they had the option to give them a try.)
  • Housing – I don’t know enough to articulate this. Basically, everybody needs to be able to afford a decent roof over their heads.
  • Be prepared to react, manage, and recover from disasters and other disruptions that occur. The buzzword is resilience. (Climate change mostly fits under this goal. The words “climate change” are not a goal or a plan in and of themselves. Some bad things that happen are related to climate change, and some are just random bad luck, and some are mixes of the two. We need to be ready for all of them.)

A few more principles I think are important:

  • The federal government could fund this planning at the metro scale. The planning itself would create some government, professional, and academic jobs and build technical capacity. Something similar is already done for transportation so it could be expanded. The plan would need to be on the books, with a goal-based analysis justifying a prioritized list of specific projects selected, to be eligible for federal funding.
  • The funding should go from the federal government directly to metro areas, without passing through state politicians. Otherwise they will use the helicopters to scatter the money over rural areas where it will not do as much economic good or help as many people. States could be given a fair amount of money to plan and implement in areas unable or uninterested in doing it themselves.
  • The metro region needs to have skin in the game. The federal government should match local investments – it could match at a higher or lower rate depending on economic conditions, but something short of 100%.
  • Funding for maintenance needs to be included, and set aside in some sort of trust fund. This would need to include funding for existing infrastructure through the end of its service life, and then funding for new infrastructure to be maintained as it replaces the old. In fact, funding maintenance of existing infrastructure would be the single easiest way to benefit people and the economy right away without the considerable time and effort it takes to get new construction projects up and running. Maybe I’ll rethink my earlier proposal to leave out education, and include maintenance of public schools which would instantly improve the lives of millions of children, parents, teachers and staff. We could hit this hard and have a decent public school system in this country (again) by fall 2021.

So there’s my infrastructure plan. If you are a powerful politician reading this, please feel free to steal it and say you thought of it. My reward will be living in a decent, modern country with a growing economy and a pleasant environment.