My opinions on our Post-Covid future…

Public Space, Uncategorized, Urban Design, Urban Planning

I 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:

1. End of Class A office park pods (retrofitted w/urban amenities);
2. More outdoor dining/entertainment (pop up container parks)
3. More online shopping & music concerts/events;
4. More bike/walkable streets;
5. 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.

Conservation of Culture Conversation

Public Space, San Diego, Urban Design

In the past, our culture (music, socializing, celebrations, food, worshipping) had secure foundations in public buildings, streets, squares and plazas (church, concert hall, theater, pub, halls, and markets), and in the private home.

Our parents added television, cars, the highway, and suburbia to these public and private places (drive-in theaters, drive-thru diners, freeway overpass protests, tv movies, tv evangelist, tv news, home theaters, homes cafes, home entertainment, backyard pools), shifting our culture towards a more private life.

Today, we are adding smart phone technology to these public and private spaces while shifting away from insular private suburban culture and towards a more balanced public and private life. These smart phones are our 21^st century version of urban renewal, allowing us to re-inhabit and re-animate public buildings, streets, squares, and plazas cheaper, faster, and with more friends and family.

Within a century, everything has changed with how we share music, socialize, celebrate, eat, worship, and share our selfies with smartphone technology in our daily lives/culture. And, with this pandemic… it’s dramatically changing again. See you on the other side!

In reference to Roger Scruton’s article, https://www.futuresymphony.org/why-musicians-need-philosophy/

Innovation Districts… in San Diego?

Innovation Districts, San Diego, Urban Design, Urban Planning

Innovation Districts are a contemporary economic development model focused on geographic areas where medical institutions (Med), research universities (Ed), and technology industry companies (Ted) are purposely clustered and connected with entrepreneurs, start-ups, accelerators, and incubators. These new era economic generators are a market shift from previously isolated suburban research parks towards mixed-use, walkable, amenity-rich places. These Med-Ed-Ted hubs, innovation districts, are useful tools to provide a competitive advantage for large swaths of a city over a single, isolated, private development project.

A question is when is an Innovation Districts more of a big picture policy/vision organizing and fundraising tool or a more refined geographical place defined by its regulatory structure?

THE IDEA DISTRICT – East Village, San Diego

In downtown San Diego, California, Local developers, David Malmuth and Peter Garcia of IDEA1, have identified and marketed their project in East Village as an Innovation District as an ‘education corridor’ from Balboa Park to Petco Park. These types of districts are well documented by urban scholar Bruce Katz here in 2016 and 2019. And a great model of success is found in San Francisco’s Mission Bay, one of the 20 or so of successful innovation districts across the nation.

Innovation District success is found, as Mr. Katz has written, “… in their complexity and integration of what was previously separated and ‘siloed’— people, quality of place, and innovation.” One of San Francisco’s Mission Bay accomplishments is found in its governance, which is evolving from the alignment of strategies and tenants to more sophisticated interventions around place-making. Another of its successes is found in attracting anchor companies, such as Dropbox in Mission Bay, as well as Quicken Loans in Detroit, Comcast in Philadelphia, and Amazon in Seattle’s South Lake Union.

Important urban design elements listed by Mr. Katz include providing a platform for various activities. This means its jobs and work, R&D and education, the arts and transportation. This variety provides the necessary critical mass to support each other. Scientist and creatives, teachers and residents, artists and employees, entrepreneurs and students. The scale and intensity cultivate an ‘eco-system’ that grows innovation and creativity that competes from the local to national scales. These plug into the existing economic infrastructure and governance, which infuse it with civic champions, business entrepreneurs, and leadership. And, finally, Mr. Katz says these big moves led to many small wonders that creates interest and complexity to what is replacing the conventional Class A Business Park model.

While the education anchors (City College and UCSD International Studies) are found in San Diego’s East Village today, it lacks a few of the key ingredients listed above to form a successful Innovation District. Importantly, an important portion of downtown’s governance is transitioning from Civic San Diego to the City of San Diego Development Services Department (DSD) with Civic San Diego still retaining some its economic development functions, such as Tax Credits, but losing its planning, permitting, and parking district oversight.

While a very real shift with intended and unintended consequences, this change appears to be an opportunity to better align the city’s planning/permitting of private property with its traffic, transportation and parks duties. Historically, these services have been ‘siloed’ and this shift might be an opportunity to better align the implementation of the Downtown Mobility Plan with new projects being entitled in East Village to craft a distinctive Innovation District to strategically attract anchor company tenants.

The City of San Diego’s Economic Development Department, and local Non-Government Organizations, the Economic Development Corporation (EDC) and Downtown Partnership, provide incentive programs for new businesses to locate downtown. And, this may be an opportune time to advocate for a dedicated Innovative District with additional incentives and municipal services available to private development, possibly via a Joint Power Authority consisting of a combination of City of San Diego Economic Development Department (Christina Bibler), EDC (Mark Cafferty), Civic San Diego (Andrew Phillips), SD City College (Ricky Shabazz), UC San Diego (Mary Walshok), and California State University (Adam Day) agencies, or some other enabling tool post-redevelopment to purposely provide a competitive advantage for East Village over San Diego’s rival innovation hubs across the US West and beyond.

Why Design (still) Matters!

San Diego, Urban Design

I have running dialog (troll) with a pessimistic friend about the value of our jobs and which of us is cumbersome to this world (yes, I’m listening to Rock Hits ’96 on iTunes… it’s Friday afternoon). And, I had been on the losing end of the troll on the value of urban design in the midst of our coastal cities long-standing housing crisis. His contemporary point is that designing for highest and best use raises existing land values and because everything is already too expensive good design is framed today as an agent of gentrification, and something to avoid.

Times have changed. My past assumptions are regularly challenged in this early 21-century new socio-political context. And, in my circle (social class) of friends and colleagues, I see increasing anxiety as we feel left behind economically and ‘good design’ is only valued by the wealthy to create investor opportunities. See, I was losing!

Searching, I found this terrific article on What makes a beautiful place, by Tristan Cleveland, a researcher at Happy City. And his point on the value of beauty beautifully translated to my points on the value of urban design, which I’ve restated from Mr. Cleveland’s brilliant prose with the following turn:

At the human scale: Design makes a difference in our lives by helping us feel safe and comfortable while walking and socializing in our neighborhoods, which helps us feel happier and experience a deeper sense of belonging to places and people.

And,

At the city scale: Design makes a difference in enabling cities to more easily attract and retain residents and businesses with inviting public streets, civic spaces, and interesting places. Well-designed places are a practical and essential way to bring vitality and dignity to city living.

I think I’m winning… what do you think?

A Better Transit Network in San Diego

Climate Action Plan, San Diego, Transit, Urban Design

(Original Post: https://sandiego.urbdezine.com/2019/01/26/walkable-transit-san-diego/)

At last week’s State of the City address, San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer enthusiastically stated, “I want to radically overhaul the system itself. The bureaucracy has been set up to empower anti-housing forces that delay or deny projects at every tum… We need to build more housing near employment centers and transit.”

This is a rejection of our long-standing, auto-oriented, one-size-fits-all approach to city making. Fortunately, in 2008, our City of Villages plan began to shift the standards of new construction of private development from single-family, single-use land use outcomes towards more mixed-use buildings and blocks filled with offices, shops, affordable housing, and market-rate homes. This proclamation officially transitions San Diego from focusing on suburban outcomes, as we have for the past 60+ years, to building within our urban neighborhoods.

Now it’s time to do the same for our transit services.

With the Mayor’s emphasis on using transit to connect our employment centers to new housing construction, it is time to shift our transit modes from its one-size-fits-all, over-reliance on Light Rail Transit (LRT – The Trolley) to a mix of transit modes. The problem today is that our Trolley acts like Commuter Rail by linking downtown to Santee and the border, as well as acting like a Streetcar by linking downtown’s Little Italy to Gaslamp. No matter where it is in the city, the trolley stops every 15 minutes at over 56 stations. Plus, it is limited in its ability to climb hillsides to access and serve the neighborhoods and districts located on our mesas.

With its one-size-fits-all use, our Trolley does not really perform to its fullest LRT function, nor is it capable of being a true Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) or Streetcar. LRT is a fixed-rail system intended to serve city-to-city, such as connecting Chula Vista to La Mesa to Santee. BRT is intended to serve community-to-community, such as North Park to City Heights to Rolando. And, Streetcars are intended to serve neighborhood center to neighborhood center within each community, such as from North Park’s 30^th street from Adams Avenue to Upas.

Our city’s new Rapid Bus service is essentially an Express Bus, or BRT-Lite, that flows with traffic, stopping at streetlights, and merging with all traffic on the freeways with 15-minute waits between buses. We do have a short segment of BRT, but it is located on a half-mile stretch on Park Boulevard in Hillcrest. And, we have one historic Streetcar circling a downtown loop on our LRT tracks. These limited modes are our best opportunity to quickly expand access to our city with cheaper and lighter forms of transit.

We need a mixed-modal, walkable to/from transit network to compete with the auto-oriented infrastructure we’ve built over the past 60+ years. It is easier to drive a car around than to take transit because we purposely designed and invested to do. San Diego needs to add BRT on major corridors and local neighborhood Streetcars to connect our mix of surface street buses and fixed rail trolley network.

Since 2013, San Diego has been a member city of the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), who state in their Transit Street Design Guide (Island Press, 2016, page 178) “Cities with both buses and a dedicated right-of-way rail system (LRT) have historically structured the former (bus) as a feeder service to the latter (LRT). Bus Rapid Transit can be used to upgrade new parts of the network into trunklines… Streetcars and Buses can also form a multi-hub network.” Just last month the City of San Diego’s Development Services Department stated that it, “is allowing the incorporation of NACTO design concepts as presented in the Urban Street Design Guide (Island Press, 2013),” to plan and design projects. These new rules will permit more dedicated BRT and Streetcar lines throughout the city.

The hierarchy of San Diego’s full-range of public transit service modes are as follows:

Heavy Rail (Amtrak) – Connects San Diego to Los Angeles and the nation a few times a day;
Commuter Rail (Coaster) – Connects three coastal cities at peak hour times;
Light Rail (Trolley + Sprinter) – Connects Santee, San Ysidro to San Diego (with a new line up to University City next year) and Oceanside, San Marcos to Escondido with frequent stops every half-mile or more. Our bus networks feeds into our main LRT lines;
Bus Rapid Transit – Easily retrofitted into our wide streets with dedicated bus lanes, separated from traffic, and given priority at intersections to be competitive timewise with local car trips. These connect our canyons (Mission Valley) to our mesas (Clairemont Mesa and Rolando);
Express Bus (Rapid & Breeze) – These run faster schedule by not making as many stops as than normal bus services between the same two commuter or destination points on quicker routes;
Local Bus – The bulk of our transit service with stops every quarter-mile throughout the city;
Streetcars – Modern and historic cars that run on rails that usually flows with traffic on main streets and connects neighborhood to neighborhood;
Shuttles (Paratransit, Flex & Lift) – Connects people with daily service and those of us with physical, cognitive, and visual disabilities throughout the city.

The hierarchy of San Diego’s full-range of private mobility modes are as follows:

Shuttles (Airport Shuttles, Van Share) – Connects people with daily service and those of us with physical, cognitive, and visual disabilities throughout the city.
Bicycles & Jitney facilities – Connects people up to three to five miles comfortably at a slower speed;
Pedestrians & scooter facilities – Connect us up to a quarter to half mile distance at a walkable pace.

To support our Mayor’s vision for San Diego, we need to build a more sustainable transit network that focuses on connecting job centers to neighborhood centers with BRT and interconnecting Streetcar lines. Our zoning requires our new housing to be constructed as mixed-use and accessible by pedestrians. The new BRT study investment our City Councilmembers, Georgette Gomez and Chris Ward, announced this week is the right start to building the right mix of transit types to connect new housing with job centers.

Love vs Hope

Leon Krier, Public Space, San Diego, Urban Design, Urban Planning

In the middle of reading Dan Solomon’s new book, Love versus Hope, and think he’s beautifully addressing the issues of how to build a more socially inclusive city.

He posits that cities based on Love are a ‘continuous city’ that is manifested in terms of timeless traditions as well as buildings conjoined to form streets/squares. This traditional city has a far better track record at building cities than those based on Hope, which he calls the ‘ruptured city’ that is designed for revolution derived from naive modernist optimism that has destroyed urbanism/cities to implement their hopeful vision of the future that is greener, safer, accessible, whatever.

That said, the ‘walled city’ is a continuous city in an exaggerated/extreme form that moves away from being socially inclusive and just and towards being based on fear to some extent. This leads to a vision of Yoda whispering about how fear leads to anger, and anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.

This also leads us to Leon Krier’s Albert Speer conundrum… for it is possible to be insanely scared and criminal towards others while designing great cities/buildings and being very civil to your own tribe? These are questions about the ambiguity of humankind. And of our ethical responsibilities to build cities civilization (towards a less suffering society).

San Diego was mostly built in the ruptured city model. We are moving towards a more continuous city. And as a major border city, today I am proud of San Diego’s leadership because we haven’t succumbed to the fear and loathing espoused by our immoral federal leadership intended to anger us this holiday weekend. Thank you San Diego Mayor, City Council, State Assemblyman Gloria, State Senator Atkins, Congressman Peters and Congresswoman Davis, for endeavoring to keep us from being an even more walled off city as we close 2018.

How do You See the City?

Urban Design, Urban Planning

I see every city for how it was built when it got rich. Economies move around, cities rise, fall, and some rise again, reinvent themselves, die off, or sit stagnate waiting for its revival. But, at some point every major city got really rich, and that’s when its public streets, parks, buildings, and private buildings set the bar/tone for the next century or so.

Photo by Ross Richardson on Pexels.com

For example, in San Diego, it got rich in the early 1950’s, when its population double as military R&D rose/located near its military installations. High wages, lots of jobs, and land for suburban growth with great state/fed spending on highways and our pending car culture. Spending its money during our mid-century modernist era has formed/shaped the context for the city of today and beyond.

It was a trip to Buffalo, and seeing its turn of the century opulence, that showed me how to ‘see’ a city. Every great American architect of that time, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, Frederick Law Olmsted, were building in Buffalo at that time and it generated two Presidents. This view translates to seeing our old European cities, such as Venice and its well-preserved mid-millennium opulence still valuable today, as well as in seeing our Asian cities, such as ShenZhen and its booming wealth (with every architect in the world, Steven Holl, BIG, and Gensler working there), and so on…

Vancouver got rich as Hong Kong shifted hands from English to Chinese rule 20+ years ago. That era’s neo-conservative ‘free market’ architectural expression of almost urban, but not quite, townhouse wrap of a small footprint, single-core tower was urbanism-lite at time when suburbia ruled our west coast north American landscape. And, it was the right architectural form for transitioning from suburbia back to urbanism… but, its already dated and in transition again, and towards a more urban pattern.

Photo by Arnie Chou on Pexels.com

This new era is beholden to the ‘got really rich’ era in Vancouver and will still be subservient to that context, which wasn’t true 20+ years earlier when that great flush of wealth easily overwhelmed its past and context. Meaning, the wealth generated today in Vancouver is simply the by-product of yesterday’s economic boom. Same with Venice and its tourist value today for preserving its past opulence.

We’re watching the political anxiety in the face of this urban shift playing out across the world as the last throes of that 80/90s neocon intellectual culture are desperately holding on to the last of their structured power. Those neocons who are voraciously holding onto power today also hold the counterculture of the 1960s in great disdain as their political radicalism and animus against authority, custom, and tradition is rising and an obvious threat to the old leaders. I believe this disdain is one of the reasons for the angry, resentful, punitive political furry expressed in Washington, DC and beyond… because the neo-counterculture is being repeated by today’s younger generation but this time with their own value system/context.

The millennials are choosing to spend their money in cities that are getting rich right now. These are San Jose, Oklahoma City, and in rebound cities, such as Austin, Seattle, and maybe Detroit (an anomaly in this group of relatively ‘new’ towns as it got very rich in the 1940s and may keep its Art-Deco patterns) will be reshaped with their values. I’m looking forward to ‘seeing’ how these cities express themselves as they grow rich over the next decade (with Vancouver’s ubiquitous point towers with a townhouse wrap in mind).

“Do the Math!” How to Deal with Hot Housing Markets

San Diego, Urban Design, Urban Planning

This innocuous quote from a recent Texas Monthly Magazine article (here) shows how easily it is to misunderstand the forces that shape a hot-hot housing market cities:

“”The problem, of course, is that this idealized urban lifestyle is out of reach for most. The culprits? “Student loan debt, wage stagnation, rising rents, insurance costs, and the lingering aftermath of the Great Recession, which many millennials ran right into at a key career stage,” – Jason Dorsey, President of the Center for Generational Kinetics, an Austin-based research and marketing strategy firm that tracks social trends among millennials and Generation Z.

Ok, so rents don’t rise when wages stagnate. This is because “the rent” is determined by:

Wages x Employment ÷ No. of Units Available = Market Rate Rents*

OK, so while this *equation is simple… the basic point is that the rents are rising in hot housing market cities because our growing upper class wages are booming while the number of units available are limited. Higher wages x higher employment in cities that constrain new development makes for hot markets and high rents.

With wages somewhat stagnating for the shrinking middle class, we understand that rich/middle/poor people want to live in nice /fun/safe places. And, everyone is willing pay more/compete for access to the ‘good life’ in a city that has great amenities, such as arts, parks, rivers (think Austin and Denver), nice weather, beaches, bays (think San Diego), and most importantly lots and lots of jobs with some or all of this stuff (think Bay Area, Seattle, and Los Angeles).

This competition is seen in San Diego, as our rent has historically been high for my entire life, with very little fluctuation in either good times or bad. A recent Federal Reserve paper stated the reason for this is attributed to rental rates being determined more by the level of amenities our neighborhood’s provide than merely by supply of housing.

This factor still fits with the simple equation above as those cities with the good life are too few and far between and those nice places are unwilling to build enough housing to meet market demand… as people continue to look for places to spend their valuable time and money. With that, one neighborhood will be expensive for a variety of reasons, and a similar neighborhood only a few miles away will be stagnant or declining, while still having the same physical access to beaches and bays… just not the economic access.

What Mr Dorsey fails to understand about Austin is that those few units available in the urban fun/nice hipster areas are being rented by those few Sci/Bio/IT-tech engineers who are in high demand and making significantly higher wages (+$200k/yr) than the regular blue and white collar workers ($60k/yr). This drives up the rent in those few high-demand neighborhoods. Austin, and all cities, needs more housing/jobs with nice stuff in more neighborhoods rather than having big money fight for those few amenity-filled neighborhoods scattered throughout most cities.

And with that I feel myself sliding into the displacement/social justice trap. As displacement is the nasty common side effect of gentrification (value increases). So, I’ll put this out there again for your consideration:

The most appropriate urban design response to social justice is to build towards social/enviro/economic (jobs/housing) stability. To be clear, I am not advocating for displacement, but I am advocating for some gentrification in economically static neighborhoods (such as more schools, parks, and market-rate development opportunities) and some economic stagnation (such as subsidized housing and rent control) in hot markets.

This brilliant study shows that all of San Francisco is an expensive because it is affluent with a growing population and no land easily available for development. And, building more housing would reduce rents as it adds supply to the inherent demand. But, if they built enough new housing to reduce prices it would significantly change the character of the city and its quality-of-life… so, urban design will make a huge difference in how San Francisco builds its future! Go Sonja Truss!

Ultimately, our big west coast cities currently flourishing on the tech industry (ironically born in San Jose suburban garages) will continue to be successful into the future as our nation’s constricting economy pushes well-educated, financed people into these nice cities. And, they’ll continue to spill out excess jobs into neighboring cities, towns, and transform conventional suburban tracks (which are still being built, btw) into more urban places (despite their fighting this urban shift). Again, urban design is necessary to move our cities into the future.

By the way… Seattle and Denver have stabilized rents by building more housing. And, a few years ago Denver changed their conventional zoning to a form-based code in anticipation of their 21st century development needs. Need I mention the value of urban design again?

Congress for the New Urbanism 26 – Savannah (and Magical Mystery Tour)

Urban Design, Urban Planning

From May 11 – 19^th, I had the opportunity to speak at the 26^th annual Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) in Savannah, Georgia. My 18th CNU (in a row), these are always valuable to me on a professional and personal level. This was a memorable experience spending time walking around Savannah’s squares and waterfront as well as touring mid-America before arriving on the eastern seaboard. The most memorable part of the week was actually a blur. My trip began with a frantic four-day bus tour from Memphis to Savannah. We visited and compared the ‘new towns’ Harbortown (MS), Providence (AL), Gorhams Bluff (AL), Serenbe (GA), Glenwood Park (GA), Nexton (SC), I’on (SC), and Habersham(SC), with the downtowns and Innovation Districts of Memphis, Chattanooga, Huntsville, Atlanta, Greenville, Charleston, Savannah.

Gorham’s Bluff, Alabama

The most instructional places were in cities that imported the ‘new town’ housing types into its existing/older neighborhood pattern, which made for some real hits and misses. One of the biggest hits was the Southside neighborhood in Chattanooga. An old grid of vacant buildings and a tight network of street with mature street trees had been revitalizing over the past 5-years using traditional ‘new town’ housing’s front porch, stoops, and forecourts, which fit comfortably. Vacant manufacturing buildings were expertly adapted into mixed-use and live-work units all sparked with the building of new school, Battle Academy. The neighborhood is anchored by the now revitalized Chattanooga Choo-Choo historic rail station with a market hall that has great restaurants, bars, shops, and hotel.

Southside Neighborhood, Chattanooga, TN

The second half the week spent at the Congress speaking on how-to design for a specific community character in neighborhoods and small towns, and my vertical ‘transect’ idea for big city downtowns. Thanks to Kevin Klinkenberg and Eric Brown‘s hard work on the local host committee, more than 1,600 advocates for urbanism gathered to hear Jan Gehl, Andres Duany, and Peter Calthorpe speak on their latest work and perspectives. Based out of Washington, DC, CNU is an international nonprofit organization with over 3,000 members from major urban centers to historic small towns. And through 27 years of advocacy, CNU has changed the national conversation from a debate over sprawl to a discussion on how to reinvest in our cities and towns as Americans both young and old are demanding walkable lifestyles, the market for unique and green places is growing in every region.

Savannah is always an illuminating experience for a west coast urban designer. The city was originally designed to be a utopian community with its ubiquitous squares the by-product of lofty thinking. Places like this inspire me to aspire towards designing towards utopia for my local projects… if just to get one really nice park or plaza.

Savannah, GA

As for the tour, in greater detail, I have to express my heartfelt gratitude to Nathan Norris, Laura Clemens, and Kate Duro (City Building Exchange Express) for hosting a memorable road trip. Jack Kerouac would of been burned out by this adventure. Plus, having the people we had to explain and tour us through each place was invaluable. Absolutely worth every dime as the tremendous effort to coordinate was obvious in the results, which is that I am still learning from it this week.

Below is my roman a’ clef notes version of the tour is as follows:

On our first night, Elvis and I walked through downtown Memphis with our feet 10-feet off of Beale under WC Handy’s watchful, all-knowing gaze. We knew that he knew that we knew. So, we went on tour the next morning.

Memphis, TN – HarborTown – Expertly assembled as a rough diamond found in the middle of the Mississippi. A great way to start a tour that would alternated between many older ‘new’ towns and several downtown infill projects. It set the tone perfectly as a stable, understandable, competently delivered new town in a place that was genuinely new. Drove away fearing what Jesus said about building on sand.

Memphis, TN – Uptown Infill – Tried to take a picture of Elvis’ high school but my thumb got in the way. Seeing Harbortown housing placed in a mindless grid showed how mindless the grid can be.

Memphis, TN – CrossTown/Midtown – Had never seen such a thing. Cutting the atriums was brilliant and I still cannot fully conceptualize what a Vertical T6 Village in the midst of historic T4/T3 General sub-urban housing means… Amazing adaptive reuse and couldn’t conceive of seeing another on in my life (only to march across Atlanta later on the tour and be completely dumbfounded again).

The Memphis Surprise…

Memphis, TN – The Edge / Medical District – All I could think of was how to bottle up and sell Tommy Pacello’s can-do spirit. Inspiring, and a dynamo that any city would be fortunate to have. Speaking of big personalities, Elvis appreciated being back in Sun Studios again after a long layoff.

Huntsville, AL – Downtown Huntsville – Its downtown director, Carl Perkins, is having fun, you can really see it. However, that spring at the foot of the downtown hillside thoroughly impressed this SoCal desert tortoise most. Again, never seen anything like that before.

Downtown Huntsville, AL

Huntsville, AL – Village of Providence – Expertly executed. A lot of housing taming a former arterial. Solid. And, I appreciated Laura’s passionate perspective on its harm to downtown, but see these old New Towns as successful Trojan Horses as what happened out in the woods wouldn’t of been allowed to happen in broad daylight at that time. We were decidedly a Suburban Nation with everyone defining themselves by their own Pink Cadillac.

The Village of Providence, AL

Pisgah, AL – Gorham’s Bluff – A great lunch with a tremendous view!
Chattanooga, TN – Waterfront – Put on my blue suede shoes and took a long, hot walk.
Chattanooga, TN – Innovation District – Great mix of new mid-rise, missing-middle infill housing and shops.

Chattanooga, TN – Southside – Again, TND quality housing + missing middle townhouses and live work quarters, set in a mindless grid. But, with the compactness lacking in Uptown Memphis it felt more livable. Appreciated listening to Bob McNutt, Director of Real Estate, describe this place and the Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise nonprofit housing organization dedicated to Building a Better Chattanooga.
Chattahoochee Hills, GA – Serenbe – The Smartest Sprawl I’ve ever seen… Stunning details, smartly promoting compact growth in one spot in the city, but have no idea what this will be in 100 years.

Serenbe, GA

Atlanta, GA – Glenwood Park – Expert infill. Also stunning details but accessible to anyone wanting to live in a great neighborhood is a big city.
Atlanta, GA – Krog City Market*/Inman Park/Beltline***/Ponce City Market – The Sears monolith as a retail/parking catalyst was amazing too. Great deal to learn from in this urban context. The rails-to-trails parkway works amazing well to provide amenity to high density. The parks, market halls, different housing types, adaptive reuse, it was all so beautiful… until I started to sweat. Back on the bus, quick!

Ponces Market, Atlanta, GA

Greenville, SC – Downtown Greenville – Surprise as a form of delight… A nice Main Street, with Americana confederate forces giving off bad vibes on one end and a river park on the other end mindful of the Beltline… Amazing! Again, great density with great amenity. The last leg of Main Street over the riverpark was more worth the drive through Columbia, SC.

The Greenville Surprize

Summerville, SC – Nexton – I completely agree with Rick Hall that the production builders are getting it! I liked it. Yes, parks and streets were oversized, but that’s the… Next Urbanism.
Mt Pleasant, SC – I’On – Honestly, looking forward to what Jason King of Dover Kohl has planned for its remodeled downtown plaza (no curbs, no lawn). The canals/quarry lakes were marvelous.
Charleston SC – Downtown Charleston – The real deal banana peel historical American city. Touring that very old family house with Cary Grant’s friend was a real highlight. Drinking a scotch, sitting in a smoking room, looking at firearms from every major American conflict while staring at oil paintings of beautiful family matriarchs with Elvis was a sublime American moment. Would love to have spent several days there. Then, Elvis left the building (bus). And I was wore out at this point.

Charleston, SC

Beaufort, SC – Habersham – The attached buildings were immaculate. The town center kept my attention and I appreciated spending time sitting with iced drinks at this point too.

Afterward: The place that has continued to resonate with me is Memphis. I feel like our American soul lives in there. I wanted to see the MLK Jr. Civil Rights Museum, Graceland, and Tupelo. The old, new, historic, future, and that wild Crosstown Commons still swirl in my mind. Savannah too. Beyond that, comparing infill with new towns directly, back-to-back was marvelous and illuminating (Ok, don’t tell, but Elvis was Trent Claughton, Carl Perkins was Chad Emerson, and I am the SoCal desert tortoise).

A Vertical Transect / Context Elevated

Urban Design

I’ve been fussing around with a context-sensitive/form-based code for more urban neighborhoods for several years now. I’ve worked on creating many codes for small towns (San Marcos, CA and TX), new towns (Whitehall in New Castle County, Delaware), sections of mid-sized cities (El Paso) across the county, and downtown San Diego. And, it’s here in San Diego that I see the need to craft a code for tall buildings that better reflects our 21st century context.

Over a century ago, Louis Sullivan, HH Richardson and others rebuilt Chicago after its fire using the new construction technology that steel brought to building. That combination of steel and fire led to the creation of the tower as a new building type. Being without precedent then, these neo-classical, romanesque, and gothic revivalist smartly relied upon the classical column structure to design towers with a base, shaft, and cornice.

Base/Base, Shaft/Middle, Top/Cornice.

Today this classical configuration still seen in the now ubiquitous Vancouver Point Tower Model.

The Vancouver Point Tower as Applied in San Diego. Image: Me

Today, after 100-plus years of building these classically arranged towers a vertical context exist. And, we’ve worked very hard since the 60’s modernist crescendo to get tower construction at the street level to be humane (see this old blog on the topic). I first got the idea from Jan Gehl’s book, Cities for People, and these great diagrams.

This new context is based on the following transect zones: Human connectivity is the primary objective in the street zone (floors 1 – 6), which transitions up to the facing blocks (floors 3 – 12), up again towards the surrounding city views levels (floors 9 – 20), and finally at the regional vistas (above 20 floors). These four context zones have differing design responses to consider as the now the building can reach down toward street rather than always soaring to the sky.

As applied to a Vancouver Point Tower in downtown San Diego. Image: Me

The following diagram was an initial study into how to use the SmartCode template to regulate more urban buildings where their fronts/back, below/above, and middle zones could be designed in context to cultivate urban living that is human oriented rather than mechanical elevator-oriented. What do you think?

Borrowing from the SmartCode, a Context-Sensitive Code for 3-Dimensional Urbanism

And, we are continuing to study this approach that lends itself to coding for a specific San Diego model and moves beyond the Vancouver point-tower lite urban model.

Precedent Images Attempting to Define a San Diego Architectural Vernacular for Towers

And, finally, just because I drew it… here’s another inspiration for getting towers’ grounded into its context, a metaphor if you will.

I drew it so I put in my blog… otherwise it’s not much to look at. Image: Me

I would appreciate any comments as this is an idea that’s still under construction. Cheers!

	Your City Psychologi… on That Feeling of being at …
	Your City Psychologi… on Objective Design Standards are…
	Your City Psychologi… on “Do the Math!” How…
	Your City Psychologi… on An Ethical Approach to NI…
	Ashlee D on City Planning’s Balancin…

Howard Blackson

21st Century Urbanism