#NextUrbanism

Whatever...

One Size Fits One… (and it’s the worst one)

Transit, Urban Design, Urban Planning, walkability

The ubiquitous space, shape, but highly volatile speed of the car is much larger and faster than the universal space, shape, and speed of a human. Yet we continue, since post WW2, design and build everything and everywhere for space, shape, and volatile speed of the car. Streets widen, ground floors are parking lots, people are pushed towards the edges, and cars dominate our landscape. This is what ruins downtowns and isolates small towns. Cars are a suburban mobility tool.

That’s not say we need to ban cars. They do somethings great, such as get lumber, while not as good at others, such as exercising. The fact is that cars are best served for disparate suburban expanses. Walking, transit/buses, and bicycles work best in more urban areas. Cars work great in shorter-commutes and throughout suburbia. Trains, airplanes, and ships work best for long commutes.

The New Urbanism was new because it worked to humanize the car in cities, small towns, and new towns. We’re now moving into the Next Urbanism (and I write about this throughout this blog and speak about on podcasts, such as Kevin Klinkenberg’s Messy City). And as humans, we should be designing and building everything everywhere to accommodate for humans first, letting the right mobility serve us throughout the spectrum of urban to rural contexts.

Downtowns (regional centers) are marginalized by our 1.5 cars per person maxim (Spend 5-minutes walking around Downtown San Diego). Small towns are isolated by freeway by-passes, which need both regionally accessible cars and local people to be economically viable (think Ramona, Julian, and Jacumba, if in San Diego). The industrial era invention of cars and suburban sprawl go hand-in-hand, the built each other. Unfortunately, both cars and suburbs are inhumane and detrimental to our economy, environment, and cultural cohesion (See Sabre Springs).

The next urbanism means making downtowns less car-oriented, small-towns car-supported, and car-happy suburbia having sub-regional centers that are more urban/humane. This place, a small district in Tempe, AZ, Cul-de-Sac, is an example of the Next Urbanism… building more urban, sub-regional centers in the vast sprawl of suburbs surrounding downtown’s regional center. And, by the way, Opticos Design, Inc. is one our best architecture and coding companies.

The Mid-21st Century Economic Development Model

Economics, Innovation Districts, Urban Design, Urban Planning

My treasured colleague and mentor, Bill Fulton, is creating our brave new post-pandemic world’s econ dev model that is a dramatic shift in how we are socializing into the mid-21st century. You can find his writings about his approach on his Substack page. He’s clearly identified and defined the patterns within the urban core/center and general urban areas and I’ve merely added the rural component to complete the ‘transect’ of econ dev place types.

Our state-by-state policy shift towards mixed-use, walkable urbanism is finally complete. Every city across the nation has general or comprehensive plan policy that allows for urban infill development. But this process has taken 30 years and the promised transit to support this new urbanism hasn’t been funded, and now we are in a new socializing era. We didn’t plan for the unintended consequences of a global pandemic… that low-density, auto-oriented, suburban homes would become mixed-use, live-work buildings.

We didn’t plan for urban downtowns to have less work and less shopping after building more housing. We didn’t plan for the cultural backlash of electing a black President and burn down our federal government and defunded our education and the transit infrastructure rather than our police and military state. Oh well… “you get the government we deserve,” said, Andres Duany once.

So here we are again in need of reforming our new urbanist, after-suburban sprawl, 20th century urbanist policies and regulations to be to meet today’s social demands. This zoning reform transitions from noxious industries co-location needs to regulating obnoxious neighbors sharing amenitized downtowns and sub-regional urban centers.

The following are a regional and citywide policy and econ dev framework for lot and block scaled zoning/regulatory reform:

Regional and Sub-Regional Urban Hotel (Transect Zones T6, T5, and T4-Neighborhood Centers)
Offers amenitized live, work, and play facilities for hyper-locals (new infill housing), locals (suburban commuters), and visitors (hotel business/pleasure). Dollars are flowing in from these types of citizen consumers.

Private Buildings and Spaces Functions
– Retail – Dining and Entertainment, and Shopping
– Daily Needs Services – Gym, spa, sundries, bodega, rentals
– Office Facilities
– Hotels (Long-Stay)
Conferencing Facilities
– Hotels (Short-Stay)
Pools, spas, gyms
– Homes – mix of uses (working and living)
– Paseos – Access between spaces and buildings
– Belvederes – Roof decks and garden terraces
– Parking Areas – Access to spaces and buildings

Public Buildings and Spaces Functions
– Conference Center
– Plazas/Squares – Destination civic space, active and contemplative
– Civic Services – Library, Post Office, City Hall, Pool

NGO Buildings and Spaces Functions
– Chamber of Commerce / Meeting Rooms and Facilities

Suburban Workshop (T4 General, and T3)
Offers live, work, and large-scale play facilities without amenities in existing suburban communities. These are static places with low-growth, and little change the appearance of the pods of housing or commercial or industrial. Auto-oriented but adding work from home and people wanting to walk around for exercise, post-pandemic.

Private Buildings and Spaces Functions
– Single-family Detached Homes
– Accessory Dwelling Units
– Yards

Public Buildings and Spaces Functions
– Ballfields

Regional Rural Substructure (T2)
A zoning conflict we’re addressing today are the regional infrastructure and utility issues bumping against either the suburbs or smaller, historic towns. Agriculture being the original regional utility/commerce.

Private Buildings and Spaces Functions
– Energy – Solar, wind, electrical (Efficiency Issues)
– Substations, powerlines (Wildfire Issues)
– Data Center Districts (The Next Big Deal to Deal with)
– Agriculture lands, Farmsteads, and Farm Worker Housing (Resort Districts)

Public Buildings and Spaces Functions
– Freeways, Highways, Corridors
– Federal and State Parks

Preserved and Pristine Nature is T1

Seville

Controlled Complexity is the Spice of Life

philosophy, Urban Design

This headline/article was in today’s The Overhead Wire, “Complex urban streets encourage safer driving.” Yeah, when you take the complex river and stuff the water flow into a culvert it reduces the complexity and the energy is drained quicker… adding complexity keeps the energy stored in the system/network/place. This is stated in the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, as analysed by James Howard Kunstler in his fourth non-fiction book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century,

“... ordered flows drain entropy at a faster rate than complex disordered flows. Hence, the creation of ever more efficient ordered flows in American society, the removal of constraints, has accelerated the winding down of American potential, which is exactly why a Wal-Mart economy will bring us to grief more rapidly than a national agglomeration of diverse independent small-town economies. Efficiency is the straightest path to hell. (p.191)”

Yes, the more complex a river, a street, an economy, and our lives are, then the more energy we have within them to savor, enjoy, and experience them. It’s when we’re shopping in a Wal*Mart, walking along a box culvert creek, driving on a freeway, and being isolated do we more quickly entropy and lose our energy. Now, that doesn’t mean we thrive in chaos and disorder, we need both. But not just one or the other. In places of great chaos, more order achieves thermodynamic balance. In other places of great order, more chaos helps it achieve its equilibrium. This achieving equilibrium, between complexity and simplicity / chaos and order, is the basis of my economic, environmental, and social equity philosophy.

Existing Context

A City Hall Worthy of San Diego

Public Space, San Diego, Urban Design

Let’s Rethink City Hall… and put it back on our waterfront! Let’s show our civic pride in reconnecting the city to our great bay! And all of these IQHQ buildings are empty anyway. We can trade Papa Doug Manchester 101 Ash for the Broadway & Harbor block, and build a great and beloved grand City Hall. City can lease the existing buildings for administration/staff offices and everyone, from citizens to staffers, will feel good about going to the bayfront to govern our great city.

San Diego has a history of moving (after burning it down down) city hall, starting in Old Town (burned), then to Market & 5th, Waterfront, and C Street (should be burned), which has never been a beloved place anyway. It too was just a development scheme by C. Arnholt Smith… let’s make it work for us this time.

Our important civic buildings should be located on our best sites, and Broadway & Harbor is that. Use the C Street land sale $$ to build a new Chamber/Hall on our best site. And let’s be proud of how we govern our great city on the bay.

We’ve Lost that Loving Feeling.

Urban Design, Urban Planning

From Rick Cole’s article in Southern Urbanism: “In this sense, the enemy is… placeless sprawl. These are locations that have no distinct character, no history, and no beauty, that typically fulfill just a single function. We park there, we work there, we reside there, we shop there, we drive through there. But beyond those necessary functions, the bleak landscapes of sprawl lack a shared and diverse public realm. Without such a public realm, community dissolves into private space. Shared space gives room for different people engaged in varied activities. That is the physical manifestation of community—and the physical setting for community, too. Community can happen in a park, in and around a neighborhood store, on a crowded sidewalk, or in any other public gathering space. The ties of community can be tight—among neighbors at a farmers’ market, for example. They can also be loose—such as among strangers at a transit stop. Whatever those ties look like, a robust public realm is vital to generating a shared sense of community.

It is precisely this shared sense of community that is breaking down all across North America. Sprawling suburbs and walled-off, self-contained urban “projects” deprive us of a place for community to grow. Evolving technologies accelerate our detachment from real life, happening in real places. Human beings crave belonging, so in the absence of a shared community, we gravitate toward self-selected faux-communities that more resemble tribes. Unlike citizens of a true community, these factions have no commitment to their neighbors or loyalty to the places they happen to occupy. When we are rigidly separated by income, race, and lifestyles, the fragile shared bonds of a democratic society inevitably fray into “us” versus “them.”

And from Jeff Wood’s Overhead Wire: “Of course most stores can’t compete with Amazon or Walmart he said, but what they can do is create a better shopping experience and pleasant environment people want to visit. This redevelopment can’t be just another (strip center, suburban mall, or) office park, it should be a destination in its own right if it is to succeed.”

Places we love and want to spend time are valuable for many reasons… economically, socially, and environmentally, because we care for and maintain those spaces, and fill them with people and trees rather than laying down asphalt and putting up a butler building on that next offramp further outside of town. Therefore, better places are more sustainable than crappy suburban ones.

Walkability Doesn’t End at the Front Door…

Urban Design, walkability

In the city making profession, we use the quarter-mile, or 5-minute walk, as a standard measurement of distance for planning neighborhoods and cities. It is a traditional baseline for a ‘comfortable’ walk before people will choose another mode of transportation1. A half-mile walk, or 10-minute walk, is another standard used to measure walking distance to comfortably access transit facilities.

These distances were first codified in the 1929 regional plan for New York and its 5-minute walking radius diagram by Clarence Perry (top image below). In San Diego 60-years later, Peter Calthorpe’s original Transit-Oriented Development to plan around our Light Rail Stations popularized the walking distance measurement in planning documents throughout the nation2 (bottom image below). And today, walkscore, is used to measure quality-of-life in neighborhoods and cities throughout the world.

An average person has a stride length of approximately 2.1 to 2.5 feet. That means that it takes over 500 steps to walk a horizontal distance of a quarter-mile, or for 5-minutes. Health experts recommend 7,000 – 10,000 steps per day to maintain an average adult level of fitness. And with 2,000 steps being about one-mile, or a 20-minute walk, 10,000 steps is about 5-miles or a little over one and half hours of walking per day.

Those who walk to access daily needs most often are also those who don’t usually drive, children and the elderly. The 5-minute walk to/from a place in the neighborhood is a comfortable walk somewhere for an elderly person pushing a baby stroller, about 1,000 steps. Or for average adults, its a quick visit to the corner market for a daily need or having lunch/dinner with friends nearby without driving and taking up more space for you, your home, plus your car at every shop, office, or home you visit in your own neighborhood. Notice this time and ease of walking only works in neighborhoods with a traditional urban pattern and most definitely not in drive-thru suburbia. In short, it’s a more socially equitable way for more people to access their own neighborhood and their daily needs beyond their home.

Unfortunately, this is where most of our city’s policies, guidelines, regulations, and cultural expectations for walking end. Even our first round of Active Transportation Plans across the nation, see the County of San Diego’s ATP I worked on here, stop at the front door of every building (except New York City’s very good Active Transportation Guidelines that incorporate the placement of a building’s stairs).

It is well-document that walking and bicycling are healthier for us as individuals. It is also well documented that reducing the amount of vehicle trips, miles, and idling time and replacing them with walking, biking, and transportation trips reduces the amount of greenhouse gasses (GhG) emitted into our atmosphere. The burning of oil and gas in vehicle engines is by far the largest contributor to global climate change, accounting for about 30 per cent of our GhG emissions3.

Buildings account for another 30 percent of total U.S. GhG emissions. This is mostly due to their extreme electricity use, for heating/cooling air conditioning and elevators. The taller the building, the more GhG emissions. (LEED serves the purposes of measuring these emissions, but it stops measuring at the the building’s exit door. LEED ND bridges this divide, but it too is an individual certification lacking authority.)

Today’s YIMBY movement advocates strongly for tall, dense, buildings as housing scarcity for individuals has been deemed a more important problem than reducing GhG. This is due to the fallacy that higher-density can only be achieved by higher/taller buildings. That said, YIMBY’s also advocate for urbanism, and the value of walkable, bikable, and transit accessible places. Walkability doesn’t end at the front door of the building.

What does a walkable place mean? It means that you are able to comfortably walk across, horizontally, your neighborhood streets and blocks. The buildings that front onto the streets are connected, compact, and offer a mix of things to do. Then it means that when you walk back home from the corner store, and enter the front door, you are able to walk up, vertically, to your home/flat/unit. This leads to asking what is the value of walkable places?

LEON KRIER WAS RIGHT (As Always…)

It takes almost 33% more effort to climb a flight of stairs, about 15 steps. So walking one floor of stairs is about the same as taking 45 steps on level ground. Walking up a 5-story building, approximately 75 vertical steps, is equal in effort to walking up five flights of stairs, or the same as 225 horizontal steps. Walk up and down a 5-story building, 500 steps, takes the same amount of energy as walking 5-minutes at grade.

Based on the walking classifications from the Compendium of Physical Activity, a 170-pound person would burn approximately 80 calories walking one mile at a slow pace (2.0 mph), so a quarter-mile walk, 500 steps, equals 20 calories burned. This study found that walking up and down five flights of stairs daily is enough to increase heart protection and reduce disease (see here too). 

Traditional, mid-rise buildings are between 4 to 6-stories tall. This height is based on traditional construction technology using locally sourced materials of wood and/or masonry and has been used throughout the world for centuries. It also based on how far people are willing and able to walk, vertically before they choose an elevator and hermetically seal themselves off from the weather in glass and air conditioning (GhG generator). And just as importantly, as demonstrated above, this distance is equal to about how far people are willing walk horizontally before they choose a vehicle (GhG generator).

It was Luxembourg’s Leon Krier whose transformative traditional architecture and urbanism polemic in the 1970’s and 80’s shaped America’s New Urbanism of the 90’s and 00’s. His radical at-the-time advocacy led to the traditional mixed-use, walkable, transit-supported urbanism being the standard practice of today. His work can be found across the Google, and here during in our Covid Conversations.

DO THE MATH!

Walkability is both healthier for the individual and our collective climate. It’s just math! A traditional walkup building set in a traditional neighborhood pattern is able to reduce GhG emissions by +60%. And an inactive lifestyle contributes to 1 in 10 premature deaths. About 110,000 deaths annually could be preventable if US adults increased moderate-to-vigorous physical activity by even 10 minutes per day. Unfortunately, the YIMBYs, NIMBYs, and self-referential modern designers still advocate for an unsustainable, drivable, man-as-a-machine lifestyle that’ll leads us to a WALL-E world…

“The Moose out front should of told you, folks (to think less about consumerism and instead focus on protecting our humanity)!”

(The park is our planet as predicted in WALL-E, and the moose in front of Walley World is Leon Krier)

Housing for 1 Million New New Yorkers

Social Justice, Transit, Urban Design, Urban Planning

Last week, Vishaan Chakrabarti, founder of PAU, unveiled his firm’s housing analysis via The New York Times. The PAU founder says there is space for up to 520,245 homes in the city on roughly 1,700 acres of unused land. Most of it would be enacted above existing single-story commercial spaces.”

The article I read about the proposal, here, said they used, “available data on vacant lots, flood-prone areas, and the location of subway stations and other mass transit options.”

Uhm, well, okay… As stated in my previous two posts, that after 30+ years of illustrating the benefits of mixed-use, walkable, infill, transit-supported design, planning, architecture, and building, why are we still trying to sell the obvious? The NYT article references how infill is still controversial… based on Boomer NIMBY-ism. Or the lack of political courage to do what is right over the long-term.

Today it is an incredibly hard lift to get short-term politicians to address long-term issues against perceived short-term public interests, such as homeless on the streets (regional issue), interest rate fluctuations (national issue), and gas prices (international issues).

California’s housing crisis became a political crisis due to the technological advancement of social media to organize and coordinate a series of disparate Bay Area groups into one large YIMBY movement.  ‘Yes in My Backyard,’ led by Sonja Trauss, shifted San Francisco’s political approach to its acute housing and homelessness crisis to make these issues the city’s number one issues, beyond potholes and loss of parking spaces. The political structure of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, and San Diego followed in suit.

Social justice is today’s environmental movement of the 60s/70s, and economics in the 80s-00s. The third element of sustainability, we are learning how to build a more accessible and socially equitable city, which is why bicycles, walkability, shared mobility, complete streets, and transit-orientation are the focus of city making today. This housing crisis is a linchpin of the equity issue and I believe social equity/justice is a political crisis leaders must address. State laws are providing political cover for elected officials to pass new rules necessary to build more housing.

Lessons learned from SF’s YIMBYs to create a political crisis that makes change are:

– Organize various groups into one single-purpose, general issue group (with a catchy name)

    – Use new technology (social media expanded during their rise)

      – Put a charismatic leader with excellent public-speaking skills in front of the organization.

      – Provide political cover for our risk-adverse Mayor(s) to approve controversial housing projects.

      – Find and maintain the support of philanthropist.

      – Find and support like-minded candidates running for office on this project.

      – Sponsored policies dedicated to housing.

      – Educate citizens via various media to show how plans can turn into better projects. Provide reasonable tradeoff scenarios to educate everyday citizens. 

      To make this more citizen specific, this aligns with 5 Reasons People Accept Change (borrowed from reasons why people buy retail products):

      – Solves my pain – Homelessness is San Diego’s greatest pain.

      – This connects me to community – Everybody loves San Diego.

      – This makes my life easier – Able to conveniently access and enjoy beautiful spaces and places

      – This feels luxurious – San Diego is as beautiful as any place in the world, accessible to everyone.

      – This will make me more money – Our city can attract the World who’ll spend their money here.

      The following are ways to shift our cultural expectations necessary to change status quo, which takes time:

      Forces Within your Society: Homelessness is first. And then there are local advocacy groups or local connector/influencer people to collaborate with and an opportunity for coalition and capital building.

      Forces Between Societies: Regarding housing, State Law is the agent of change.

      Changes in our Natural Environment: Increased housing creates the need for high-quality amenity spaces. And climate change with longer, hotter, drier summers and wildfires are the low hanging fruit and take change out of our hands.

      Invention/Stimulus Diffusion: The new-new is faster smartphone technology, which is changing how we get around our cities with shared mobility and on-demand. Millennial culture ideas are making changes via smartphone technology inventions.

      Agents of Change. The best singular agents of change, are people who are culturally allowed to propose, advocate for, and succeed in making change are the following:

      Students/Faculty: Schools are teaching the future and past, but not status quo.

      Attorneys: Their job is manipulating the law and regulations.

      Designers/Artists: All projects are new and therefore represent change.

      Wealthy: Philanthropists are champions.

      Advocacy Groups: But they lack any authority.

      Long-Term Politicians: We have few in San Diego.

      Not Agents of Change. The least acceptable, singular agents of change, people not in the cultural expectations position to propose such and will eventually be your foil are:

      Chamber business interest/developers: Constituency groups that are risk adverse to change.

      Government Departments/Staff: They’re trying to equitable to all citizens, as change = winners/losers, and they’re not paid to make change.

      Churches / Religions: Maintain status quo.

      Community/Preservation Groups: Maintain status quo.

      Impoverished: Don’t experiment on the poor, they don’t have the resources to sustain failure.

      Short-Term Politicians: Our city council, Mayor, and County Supervisors.

      Politicians need that city-wide vision/principles/image to assist them in navigating the dichotomy of individual/small group fears versus larger city/common interests that this singular new project brings the city. And infill that builds mixed-use, walkable, transit-supported urbanism is our best sustainability tool.

      The State of Land Policy in America

      Uncategorized

      Recently, the Lincoln Institute asked readers to submit their best definitions of land policy. Being late, I offer the following that builds upon their submissions for your consideration:

      Land policy is the rules and regulations that govern the use, ownership, and management of urban and rural lands. It involves both rational and emotional decisions about how the federal, state, and local authorities determine land uses, who are allowed to access to it, and what activities are permitted on it. These policies trend with our collective social consciousness between individual property rights and common public good at both national and local levels.

      Land policy has both formal and informal outputs. Formal outputs are often plans, regulations, and programs. Informal outputs are often socially accepted patterns that shape our underlying cultural behaviors and social expectations. However, as stated in my previous blog, the federal, state, local land use policies are as misaligned as our current social and cultural malaise.

      The study of land policy was founded during the early 20th century’s Progressive Era in response to economically and environmental instability generated by industrialization’s overwhelming amount of poverty and pollution. The rising tide of the new industrial age/era wealth was expected to lift all ships, but apparently only the steel hulled ones stayed afloat. As JP Morgan, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt’s robber baron class drove our lassiez-faire economic policies towards violent race and class warfare during in the Reconstruction Era that led to the reactionary, government led Progressive Era.

      Land policies led to the establishment of local zoning controls in the 1930s/40’s. Then in the 50s/60s it was focused on urban renewal, and then environmental conservation in 60s/70s. In the 80s/90s it concentrated on redevelopment and economics. In our 21st century, it is focused on housing and social equity as our economy has again dramatically shifted, from industry to knowledge-based products.

      And so here we are again today, wrestling with lassiez-faire Republicans supported by capitalist oligarchs’ whose exploitative practices influence our highest levels of government policies and manipulate our media markets. They form monopolies to raise prices, pay subsistence wages, and exert control over natural and public resources to amass extraordinary wealth. And our current Democratic-led social justice and equity era is echoing the Progressive Era’s renegotiation of social norms in the face of violent white, Christian nationalism… Ugh.

      The GOP-led oligarchy system is being confused for authoritarianism. They’re not taking control; they’re abandoning the role of the government owning and managing the public good in trade for individual wealth creation. This is the state of Land Policy today…. the waiving of housing regulations while blocking the reformation of public housing to promote a supplyside, trickle-down response to chronic coastal city housing shortages. The focus on enabling regulatory-free development in transit areas policies without investing in transit supported infrastructure. And in economically static rust belt cities, nonprofits are expected to fill the void and role of both private development and public investments… Gah!

      We’re experiencing a new land policy era in real time. North American cities continue to transition towards more human-scale urban development patterns in our post-industrial society, and even more rapidly post-pandemic. And our land policy should be leading cities and neighborhoods towards economic, environmental, and social equilibrium and away from the predominantly individual interests over our collective needs… C’mon.

      “Are we there yet?” No… But we’re close.

      Economics

      I shared this very good 2013 documentary with a potential client in Fresno, California. And he asked after watching it if I thought Fresno was better off today from the ideas and potential presented a decade ago? I know Fresno is better off today than it was 10+ years ago because of its public and private investments highlighted in the movie. And it was a real change to restart the building of urbanism in a decades long suburban culture.

      Usually, this is when I self-righteously plow into the value of the New Urbanism and how 30 years ago we restarted and sustained this urban living revolution (with help from the sitcom, Friends). But it’s been 30 years, a full generation. And we should be fully building mixed-use, walkable, transit-supported urbanism at an industrial scale/speed by now, if measure by how long it took for the idea of suburbia to become reality. For example, Corbusier published the City of To-Morrow And Its Planning in 1929 and auto-oriented sprawl was in full bloom by 1959.

      Calthorpe, Duany, and Katz all published their groundbreaking books on the New Urbanism in the early 1990s and here we are in 2023. Why aren’t we there yet? We’re most certainly moving in that direction, but too slowly.

      That said, every city’s revitalization efforts suffered setbacks from the dramatic changes to how we work and commute due to the Covid shutdown. In California, we’re not building offices, retail is dead, and housing is king, because we’re building so little of it and we’re now working and shopping from home. I think that our Covid reset has to be overcome by all American cities, especially Fresno.

      The overall development and construction industry in California appears to be in a static point between the pendulum swings of change, from suburban to urban building. And no major city in California is building enough housing to meet its market demands beyond the few thousand or so built a year on the fringes in master planned communities by the few big home building firms leftover from the 80s.

      We have zero national or regional building/construction companies that build urban infill housing types at an industrial scale. We depend on 1,000 small-scale builders in every city to build enough housing to meet market demands, who are all learning and starting from scratch at the same time. Few are trained, prepared, or knows how to build urban infill housing at the scale of 2-3,000 homes annually.  Few city are able to build enough infill housing yet because:

      – The Federal Government neither insures/subsidizes its loans/mortgages nor invests in our transit facilities.
      – The State neither invests in transit services nor modifies building codes.
      – The City neither invests in job training/education nor reforms its entitlement codes (they waive them).

      All of these things were being done in the 1950/60’s as the Feds/State/Cities were in alignment to build suburban development at a massive scale. Feds changed its lending practices to subsidize single-family home mortgages. Fed and States built freeways and highways and their interchanges. States and cities built schools and colleges to educate ourselves. Cities created zoning to segregate work from home and enable master planned suburban development. America was a brave, new modern world post WW2. We were flush with cash and power and the world had changed dramatically by the mid-1940s.

      Today, we’ve shoveled all of our post WW2 wealth over to the Saudi’s for cheap oil to fuel our autopian suburban landscape. And were breaking ourselves financially to maintain the out-of-date and cheap suburban infrastructure, which is a losing financial scheme. This is all explained much better by Chuck Marohn and Joe Minicozzi.

      In short, we’re still not set up for building infill urbanism. And at this moment, California’s new urban infill development shift is being led by the State’s housing requirements and affordable housing incentives forcing city’s to waive their zoning (as opposed to reforming it). The Feds have started changing its policies too. But, these are just two of the six points the feds/state/cities need to be in alignment with in order to build infill housing at an industrial scale.

      It’ll take time to get all three aligned, and we’ll get there as we’re well past the suburban experiment… which proved to be the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of civilization (stolen from James Howard Kunstler). Ultimately, when you tug on downtown Fresno you’ll find that it’s connected to the world (stolen from John Muir).

      San Diego/Tijuana is a World Design Capital

      San Diego, Urban Design

      This is an excellent article about the need for design innovation in SoCal, and very apropos to San Diego. In short, the author explores ideas about the need to ween ourselves off of our car culture and recommends Building Expositions: “Design thinking is applied to urban design through rapid urban prototyping, and as such through the primary tried and proven vehicle of international building exhibitions, which have had a successful track record for more than a century.”

      San Diego/Tijuana has a history of important building innovations, starting with San Diego’s two early 20th century world expositions. First with the invention of Spanish Revival in 1915 by Bertrand Goodhue, and then with suburban sprawl in 1935 by the Federal Housing Authority. The suburban auto-oriented pattern of building was first exhibited in ’35’s FHA suburban model homes by Neurta and Eckbo, and it changed the world.

      In the 1950s, San Diego also invented Climate Change (Scripps GhG/carbon measurements by Roger Revelle and Charles Keeling), which dramatically changed our world too. We invented the modern LRT system, Transit-Oriented Development (Peter Calthorpe/Mike Stepner), modern ranchette house (Cliff May), modernist tilt-up construction (Irving Gill), Salk Institute (Lou Kahn), downtown urban malls (Jon Jerde/Frank Wolden), and we have UCSD’s Teddy Cruz’s study on cross-border construction techniques found nowhere else. Our latest UCSD/Tijuana Migrant Shelter (Teddy Cruz/Fonna Forman) and Cross-Border Terminal (Ricardo Legorreta/Blackson – yeah, I did the Site Plan) are important innovations too. Our bordering cities have a successful history of building innovation that needs to be celebrated.

      This is the value of next year’s WDC2024. The World Design Capital is a legacy thread that builds upon our history of innovation and has the potential to reshape our future.

      Buildings are spaces and places we inhabit as humans. Virtual Realities, Artificial Intelligence, and Autonomous Vehicles are appropriately named… they’re fake, false, impersonal, and limited. Salk/UCSD’s CAVE has faded after so much bluster in 2007, but is an early 3D/VR innovation, and something to be proud of. We need to build them to test our 21st century spaces and places, and share the risk/financing/rewards. For example, a heavy timber building was quietly built and successfully earthquake tested recently at UCSD. We need to test/build modular as well as Doug Austin’s concrete prefab patent idea. We need a place to share this knowledge and get onto our less suburban, auto-oriented future our climate and society demand.

      UCSD is leading our region in design thinking, and its Park/Market facility is our region’s design creativity Hub. It’s the center of our WDC2024. We’re fortunate to have both coincide today.

      When debating NIMBYs, I like to say that a community’s “character” is found in its memory (history) and expectation (vision). This idea of an International (USA/MEX) Building Expo center is a great idea and we have a history of success with it. Now we are able to ideate a new vision for our region during WDC2024 and beyond. It’s a character defining moment!

      And I wish to carry this idea through the WDC year as one of its on-going legacy goals. #LFGSD!