Uncategorized
Streets are Mixed Use too…
UncategorizedStreets have a mix of uses. Streets needs to be viewed in terms of a series of layered uses and speeds and be designed appropriately in relationship to the buildings that front onto the streets. The following are a list of uses per layer from building edge to centerline:
1) Ground floor Layer – The building fronting onto the street. Hold long-term Commercial, Residential, and Civic uses.
2) Encroachment Layer – Holds signs, less than public seating, dining, displays, deliveries, doorway zones. Holds more longer-term Commercial, Residential and Civic uses.
3) The Sidewalk Layer – <5 mph pedestrian travel lane with walkway, ADA access, on a clear path.
4) Furnishing Layer – Street Tree planters, more public seating, street lights, signage, parking meters, newspaper stands. Holds longer-term Commerce uses.
5) Parking Layer – Public parking stalls (angled/parallel/perpendicular/reverse angle), painted stripes, handicap stalls, transit stops, loading/commercial zones, drop off/delivery, and short/long-term car storage. Holds more shorter-term Commercial, Industrial, and Residence uses.
6) Cycle Layer – <10 mph zone between stopped parking cars and transit/travel lanes for various cycles ridden by various aged people.
7) Transit Layer – <25 mph zone between pulling in/out of Parking Layer and into the Driving travel through lane(s).
8) Driving Travel Layer – <25 mph zone (because any more than that kills most people)
All of these layers are mostly interchangeable and not every element is on every street. The big idea here is to introduce to the Furnishing and Parking Layers permanent Parklets, and movable/temporary Tiny Mobile Units in place of private car storage. These facilities can be rented and used for metered time periods as shops, hotel, and short-term residences. This is a shorter than permanent building Live-Work mix of uses that sit in the public right-of-way and reclaim the street from primarily auto flow use to a more livable and complex area that prioritizes the speed and scale of people. The image is an unfinished draft.
A forthcoming Mixed-Use Street PROPENSITY Map will illustrate where the more to less mix of uses on the streets are located. Think of it like a land use plan map for our streets. And, finally, for cities and places with overly scaled streetscapes, this is a way to reclaim public space for private commerce and housing (some public). A link to the ratio of public to private space discussion is here. What do you think?
Reforming Government to End Systematic Racism
Uncategorized, Urban PlanningAn answer to our demands to end systematic racism will be found in reforming our role and structure of governance. Rick Cole, former Santa Monica City Manager, made some solid points about how our government system of today is a turn of the 20th century Progressive Era construct, a response to industrialization, in an era of racism. Racism was prevalent throughout that political movement comprising mostly white, small-town, Progressive voters grabbed the reins of power from business elites, government anti-trust policies shifting power from the elite robber barons.
As Thomas Leonard writes in, Illiberal Reformers, Princeton University Press, 2016, “The industrial revolution and the rise of big business after 1870 dramatically increased American living standards, but the era was plagued by recurring financial crises, violent labor conflicts, and two deep economic contractions. In response, progressive economists sought to regulate the American economy through a new administrative state based on scientific management principles. They established economics as an academic discipline, while promoting and helping build regulatory and independent institutions such as the Federal Reserve (1913), the Federal Trade Commission (1914), and the International Trade Commission (1916).
Unfortunately, their policies were based on social Darwinism and eugenics and excluded groups deemed inferior — including women, Southern- and Eastern-European immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and blacks.”
Red Lining and resulting zoning were born from that era, which I have spent a career focusing on reforming. However, I only just now realized that this advocacy for zoning reform was a very limited view and that I should be advocating for government reform in the same way.
Here are Rick’s comments: https://planningreport.com/2020/04/19/rick-coles-resignation-santa-monica-city-manager-canary-coal-mine-cities….
My opinions on our Post-Covid future…
Public Space, Uncategorized, Urban Design, Urban PlanningI got a blog, I’m an urban designer, and I got opinions… so let’s do this!
This epic pandemic moment will resonate in two scales. First, at the global scale:
- Easily identified our global economy as being very fragile and forgetting the trickling down part…
- Every nation now has the experience to work collectively to… limit Greenhouse Gas emissions. We can all stop driving and we will survive. When our Climate Change Pearl Harbor or asteroid moment occurs, we’ll have practice in how to collectively work on surviving it. This is the hope we were looking for.
- There are always people on the wrong side of history. The anti-vaccine groups, hate groups, and libertarians are not helping us collectively survive and thrive as citizens.
- Today’s cities exist because of jobs. With the local economies collapsing, big cities will continue to provide the most available jobs to any region, and will continue to grow as long-standing local economic jobs in small towns will be late to the economic recovery cycle. We must prepare for continued big city housing crisis.
Second, at the local scale:
- We are sheltering-in-our neighborhoods (place). We are seeing our local streets, right-of-ways, and parks as the health, welfare, and safety valves they actually are. Mindful of San Francisco’s parks post-1906 earthquake and fire, where people lived until they were able to rebuilt their homes.
2. Pre-Covid trends will be accelerated:
-
- End of Class A office park pods (retrofitted w/urban amenities);
- More outdoor dining/entertainment (pop up container parks)
- More online shopping & music concerts/events;
- More bike/walkable streets;
- More parks for our health, welfare, and safety (See point #1).
3. (Stolen from Bill Fulton) New Office Space as a place more specifically for meetings, sales, showroom, model building, virtual touring (gaming), lectures, parties, and fun and less as a dedicated production work space, allowing for more of that to happen at home. This more mixed-use flexible workspace will help retention of parents who are raising young children, and people who love working from home. It’s a retention program.
4. The neighborhood is the Rosetta stone of understanding how to build cities, which are very complex. And, at this moment, we are collectively learning more and more about our neighborhoods because we are driving less and walking more which is a good thing.
Plus, we’re learning how to respond to a global scale crisis, which is another good thing when the comet (climate change) hits.
More later.
Embrace the Scooter
Climate Action Plan, San Diego, UncategorizedThe city’s public officials are obsessed with changing how we get around the city. But instead of just talking about expanding our mobility options, the scooter companies have come in and actually provided a change.
I have seen the future of downtown transportation, and it is fun!
The electric scooters from Bird and Lime are the greatest mode of travel in San Diego since my grandma rode through Balboa Park in a convertible or cruised Broadway in a hot rod.
The value of scootering is three-fold. First, getting around the city faster, easier and cheaper than in the old expensive convertible or gas-guzzling sports car is a big deal.
I work on the eastern edge of East Village, and my wife works on the western side of Broadway near the waterfront. If we want to meet for lunch, it’s a 25-minute walk, leaving little time to eat and walk back. Driving is faster, thanks to downtown’s one-way streets, which were designed for my grandmother’s hot-rod. But that still means a 10-minute drive for me, after which I pay up to $10 per hour for parking in a lot a few blocks away from my wife’s office, or peck around hoping to find street parking for $2 per hour. It’s a chore.
Instead, we can use our smartphones to find a scooter, walk one block to pick it up, and ride less than four minutes to drop it off at our destination. It costs $2 tops.
The city’s public officials are obsessed with changing how we get around the city. San Diego has adopted a Climate Action Plan that promises half of us who live near transit will get to work without a car by 2035. But instead of just talking about expanding our mobility options, the scooter companies have come in and actually provided a change.
I keep my helmet in my office. I ride on the street most of the time. But honestly, it’s not as safe to scooter on the street as it should be for three important reasons. The condition of the pavement is abysmal. Holes and cracks are treacherous no matter how you’re getting around.
Second, downtown’s long, straight, one-way streets facilitate high-speed traffic. Cars bunch up at each signal and roar to 35 miles per hour before stopping at the next light six blocks away. Once that first bunch of crowded, angry, honking cars pass by, scootering is a lovely experience on the street; our volume of traffic is usually low compared with the capacity our street network is built to handle.
And third, there is very little quality pedestrian, bicycle or scooter-oriented infrastructure built in downtown San Diego.
What these scooters are showing us is the fallacy that cars provide “independence.” Scooters will change how we get around downtown San Diego for many years to come.
There is a caveat: These scooters are not as appropriate for more urban cities like San Francisco, Chicago and New York. Those cities have tremendous transit service and wide, clear sidewalks, and are filled with lots of people, cars, trucks and commerce. San Diego’s downtown sits more comfortably in the Phoenix, Austin, Dallas, Houston and Denver scale of intensity and transit availability. We actually need these machines to bridge those gaps between Little Italy, Gaslamp, Ballpark and City College, as we continue to urbanize.
Give it time. Hopefully officials see the scooters as an opportunity to build the infrastructure needed to support such a fun way of getting around our extremely beautiful city.
[This was first published in Voice of San Diego on April 24th. I’d like to add that the ability to scooter around with your work clothes on it an advantage to using these versus bicycles for short, work-oriented trips. The fun, convenience, and cost combination makes scooters a viable mobility tool to cut emissions and auto trip to meet our Climate Action goals.]
An Ethical Approach to NIMBYism…
UncategorizedDue to today’s housing crisis, it seems west coast cities are taking on Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) opposition that has stymied new projects and developments via polarizing and protracted public processes. These ‘no-growth’ individuals group together out of an innate fear of change to stop planned development intended to benefit their larger community. In my hometown of San Diego, these polarizing projects range from bicycle lanes, stadiums, house rentals, and to building more homes to address our housing crisis. Their innate ‘fear of change’ response to anything new creates an ethical challenge for every major city trying to build housing or transit.
The ethics of good community planning serves the public’s interest today by balancing social equity with economics and environmental elements to maintain livable and sustainable neighborhoods.
Planning and urban design techniques assists cities and its citizens to navigate the dichotomy of individual/small group fears versus larger city interests. The goal of land use decisions is to ultimately build safer, stronger and more sustainable places. Planning has historically used comprehensive plans, policy documents, regulatory codes, master planning, community visioning and urban design plans to guide new development. Additionally, a new group of city-making tools are being used to create mixed-use walkable urban places across the nation. These tools include Transit-Oriented Developments, form-Based Codes, Complete Streets, Tactical Urbanism interventions, and New Urbanist place making principles. These are intended to make our cities more livable and connected for everyone.
These ‘making cities more livable’ techniques also include public-engagement tools to educate and foster collaboration and conversations with key stakeholders in local communities. Charrettes, workshops, town halls, and interactive webs sites are used to clearly articulate the issues that builds the political will necessary to allow new development or redevelopment to move forward. These public process tools are as important as these planning tools to address the ethical challenges of balancing individual wants with community needs.
Ethical Challenges
The ‘livability’ of a place, according to city planner and author Bruce Appleyard, a professor at San Diego State University, in a 2014 article in Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, is best understood as, “an individual’s ability to readily access opportunities to improve a citizen’s personal quality of life for living, working, playing, shopping, learning, worshiping, resting and moving within his or her city, town or neighborhood.”
We must plan for these collective opportunities in terms of scale, time and intensity. The ethical challenge city’s face is in balancing individual self-interests (NIMBYs) with the collective needs and interests of those many other individuals who inhabit any given community, such as artists, elderly, professionals and social clubs. The profession’s ethical principles, established by the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP), states, “The planning process must continuously pursue and faithfully serve the public interest.”
The best city-building example of balancing these challenges is revealed in planning for mobility, such as main streets, transit corridors and/or bicycle lanes, as an individual’s personal travel inherently touches the private lives of many others along that public path. To illustrate this balance, a municipality is typically concerned with the safety, air quality, noise pollution, congestion and economic viability of public thoroughfares, while private individuals tend to express concerns with safety, maintenance, time and accessibility.
The Pursuit Of Happiness
The definition of livability given above by Dr. Appleyard (i.e., people’s access to opportunities for the pursuit of improvements to their quality of life) is based on the pursuit-of-happiness clause in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. When coupled with AICP’s code of ethics, and we can begin to think of “planning for livability” as a tool to justify a basic American right that can be used. For example, when we build Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) and Complete Streets, we provide an accessible mobility option that serves the greater public.
A TOD development pattern is based on long-standing, traditional mixed-use, walkable villages and neighborhoods that have become cities over time. Mobility supports urbanism. The number and types of individual mobility options, from commuter rail, light-rail, streetcar and bus, to jitney, shared car, private car, bicycle and walking, determine the intensity of a given neighborhood or city and its ability to scale up or down over time. This tool is a collectively valued mobility-based approach to building more housing for individuals.
This applies to Complete Streets based on providing equitable access to public streets via walking, biking, riding transit, shared services, and driving a car. These improvements transform streets from auto-oriented facilities into public spaces that invite various users. The freedom to access a wide-variety of transportation modes supports access for the greatest number of people to the city.
Complete Streets provide a city its biggest return on its social equity investment because it’s built with general funds, doesn’t require management partners, and connects to the widest range of citizens.
Think of the mobility options New York City offers since its transformation of Times Square. New York’s ‘livability’ success has led to social equity issues and a housing affordability crisis. Measuring this balance between individual specificity and collective inclusiveness is at the heart of planning. While the examples above focused on mobility, community planners – seen as stewards of shaping the places in which we live – also must focus attention on issues such as housing, jobs, parks and public services.
A city is always balancing the greater common good versus individual interests. We must be mindful that the purpose of planning and urban design is to guide this dialogue towards building more livable and sustainable places for everyone. The attainment of this goal is constantly shifting between social, economic, environmental, and local political pressures. Balancing these competing interests is our profession’s greatest challenge and purpose.
Design vs. Process?
How do we best balance these competing interests? I agree with famed New Urbanist Andrés Duany, who encourages giving equal value to both design principles and public process as keys to successfully navigating this balancing act. He says that relying only on design principles that have gone untested by local public participation is coercive and lacking authority. Meanwhile, relying solely on a public process without a basis in design principles lacks structure and a credible outcome. These are important because design principles guide individuals and groups toward decisions, and the process provides the structure through which these decisions and compromises can be made.
This balanced approach to planning and urban design is how cities can ethically weigh individual NIMBY reactions with the collective need of citizens to access the city in both mobility and housing terms.
The benefits created by focusing on the rights of all people when making city-wide decisions are found in increasing the opportunities for everyone to improve the quality of their lives. When planning for the livability of our city, we must balance its principles with its processes to justify new projects that meet these collective needs and interests. The intended outcome is to place cities in a better position to compete in the contemporary economy with socially equitable and environmentally responsive places.
Photo Credits:
Great streetscape NYC, Photo by Erik Heddema on Unsplash.com
Transit oriented development in San Francisco, Photo by Arushee Agrawal on Unsplash.com
Times Square before improvements, photo by Howard Blackson
Times Square NYC after improvements, Photo by David Alacaraz on Unsplash.com
“Quotes of the Day…”
San Diego, Social Media, Uncategorized, Urban Design“The true value of urbanism occurs when are able to interact with each other. These physical connections will redefine our ability to both endure and thrive into the 21st century.” – Howard M. Blackson III
“Segregation Sucks.” – Bruce Donnelly
Understanding How Homes Get Built – The 10-step series
Uncategorized
Stand in the Place Where You Live… Being Context-Sensitive
UncategorizedMy latest thoughts on Context-Sensitive Thoroughfare design…
Every city and town are formed by its neighborhoods, districts, corridors, and its downtown. Each of these place types range from a more urban extreme, such as downtown, towards its more suburban, rural, or natural boundaries. And, each of these include a broad spectrum of public and private functions and places.
Looking in more detail, each neighborhood has its own set of more urban centers, general areas, suburban, and rural edges. For example, in my San Diego neighborhood, our center is the 100% shopping corner with coffee shops, boutiques, bars, mixed-use buildings and bus stops. And, my neighborhood boundary is formed by canyons and Balboa Park. In between are a variety of housing types ranging from garden apartments, bungalow courts, and small lot homes nearer the center to large lot homes along the canyon edges.
Single-use districts are places of industry, education, and regional institutions. These include airports, hospitals, and military basis. I tend to put suburban sprawl in…
View original post 339 more words
“… what might have been.” A True Story (from NextCity.org).
UncategorizedIn my professional career, my time assisting the City of San Diego in experimenting with a Civic Innovation Lab was the most bittersweet. While its potential was incredible, having the results we did, after just six months of life, was incredible as well. Thanks to Amanda Kolson, who tells it well here: http://nextcity.org/features/view/teddy-cruz-fonna-forman-civic-innovation-san-diego-public-interest-design
And, a heartfelt thank you to our Planning Director, Bill Fulton, Interim Mayor Todd Gloria, Mario Lopez, former Mayor Filner, fellow Innovators David Saborio, Ilisa Goldman, Xavier Leonard, and our patron saints Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz! Hope you enjoy the story.
Howard Blackson 