The malls of the future, today

I read Joel Garreau's Wired article Edgier Cities when it was new, twenty-five years ago, and it has stuck with me. I have long thought that he is a bit too optimistic about the prospects for the forms of suburban development he calls “edge cities”, but some of his guesses about the future are looking surprisingly prophetic.

Just so, in the near future, somebody realizes what a great space an old Kmart is - 80,000 square feet with 16-foot ceilings and killer HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning). Then he or she realizes you can get them for nothing from the Resolution Trust Corporation - and the first edge-city bohemian district is born.

First the artists break the space into lavish 5,000-square-foot sculptors studios. Then they punch skylights into the roof to let natural light into the interior. Then they do the sensible thing and start living there illegally.

They place sculptures and anything else they can think of on the roof, although the windmills quickly become cliché. When all the really great space in the Kmart is full, other people start filling the former drugstores and dry cleaners of the abandoned shopping center with funky bars, savory restaurants, computer-arts master printers, and the shady dens of CD-ROM pressers. The exteriors of the buildings are painted in intriguing ways.

Smells more than a little like Meow Wolf.

Thinking of this because of news about a computer game company buying a ghost mall rather than renting or buying or building an office building for their new corporate headquarters ....

Pop songs about urban planning

Urban planning is a sufficiently dry and obscure topic that you wouldn't think that it would be the subject of pop music. But you'd be wrong.

My favorite is the Pretenders' “Back to Ohio”.

Joni Mitchell's “Big Yellow Taxi” informs us that they've paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

The Talking Heads' “(Nothing But) Flowers”, which Kevin Smith used to introduce the world of New Jersey in Clerks II.

I'm writing this because I've now encountered yet another example: Arcade Fire's “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” from their album The Suburbs. The video features some landscapes of appropriately horrifying bleakness. (And one can see the ’burbs used as a dystopian setting in Spike Jonze's 30 minute film Scenes From The Suburbs inspired by the album.)

David Rovics' song “Parking Lots And Strip Malls” is in the club.

And Planetizen, incredibly, has a list of even more examples.

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Update: A friend points out that the Specials' “Ghost Town” also qualifies.

And XTC's “River of Orchids”:

And another friend points to John Mellencamp's “Pink Houses”.

Malvina Reynolds' “Little Boxes”:

Bicycle intersections

Even if you don't care about urban design, you may want to check out this gorgeously presented solution for intersections which support both cars and bicycles.

Protected Intersections For Bicyclists from Nick Falbo on Vimeo.

Though now it has me wondering about car/bicycle roundabouts, as I am a fan of roundabouts as an alternative to intersections with lights or stop signs. (Update: An experiment in the UK.)

And I want systems of cunning bollards and low barriers to help partition the space, as in Rio de Janeiro.

More at ProtectedIntersection.com.

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Update: This video got picked up in a collection of sexy bicycle-oriented urban design ideas at io9.

The San Francisco tech boom crisis

photo of MUNI bus vs Google bus by defabulous

There’s a lot of talk out there about the changes that the city of San Francisco is going through during the current tech boom. A lot of it is blather, as satirized in Joe Garofoli and Peter Hartlaub’s What Out Of Town Writers Need To Know About SF and A.I. Algorithm’s In a Constantly Changing San Francisco, Change is Constant.

Step 6: Get your adjectives straight. There are decisions to be made. What double-barreled description will you give the Mission? “Gritty and trendy”? “Seedy and hip”? “Vibrant and overpriced”? Is it populated by “Latinos and the technorati”?

These are the articles I regard as actually illuminating:

Google Invades (2013) by Rebecca Solnit is the article which gave us the Google Bus as symbol. I note that it has a much more ambivalent sense of those busses than later protestors have expressed.

Other days I think of them as the company buses by which the coal miners get deposited at the minehead, and the work schedule involved would make a pit owner feel at home. Silicon Valley has long been famous for its endless work hours, for sucking in the young for decades of sixty or seventy-hour weeks ….

Updated to add: I admire Solnit. Her book about how people respond to natural disasters, A Paradise Built In Hell, is an important work. Her touchstone memoir of mansplaining, Men Explain Things To Me, is well-circulated for good reason. She often writes beautifully about the reasons why I fell in love with San Francisco.

But I confess to growing frustration with her as a commentator on the turn San Francisco has taken. She responded to a critic of the Google Invades article the following year with Resisting Monoculture, which is instructive in many ways but rejects building housing as a way to address the city’s housing crisis.

The Brooklyn-based Adler’s proposals for “fixing” San Francisco are not apparently drawn from local knowledge—or reality. “To house more people, which is what San Francisco must do to accommodate the new tech workers and the lower-income immigrant families and artists who live there now, it must build upward.” He blames San Francisco for not being as dense as Manhattan, the densest major urban area in the country. San Francisco is actually pretty dense, more so than any other major city in the West and most cities in the US—and it’s already pretty fully developed: you can’t erase most of what’s there and start over. There’s no practical way to turn it into a land of mega-highrises anytime soon when the unparallelled transit, water, power, and other systems that run under Manhattan would also have to be developed to accommodate such a boom. Finally, a nanosecond of reflection might reveal that Manhattan is not exactly a Shangri-la of affordable housing. Most of the island is exorbitantly expensive.

And the mechanism whereby excellent new housing will be built here for lower-income families? I think it’s called socialism. I’m for it, but it’s not on the horizon, and it’s not what a corporate boom is bringing, especially not one headed by libertarians with little sympathy for the poor.

Returning to the subject in 2024 with In The Shadow Of Silicon Valley, Solnit calls shenanigans on pop narratives of “crime” in San Francisco, but is so eager to place every real ill San Francisco at the feet of the “tech” industry that the only things she has to say about housing names “tech” as the singular cause destructive both through its presence …

Levels of violent crime are actually lower in San Francisco than in many American cities. Theft is a bigger problem, but like homelessness it has been exacerbated by the tech boom, which brought an influx of well-paid workers and a steep rise in housing prices over the past three decades

… and through its absence.

San Francisco is said to be in a ‘doom loop’ because so much office space and so many shops have been abandoned since the pandemic. Tech layoffs drove some of the shutdown, but the industry also enabled a mass white-collar withdrawal from the workplace – employees working from home, sometimes leaving the region to work remotely. More than the shrinkage of the population and the emptying out of downtown, the new mood of the city seems to be influenced by a kind of shrinking from human contact.

I share Solnit’s love for the lost Arcadia of San Francisco and her critique of the worst of the “tech” industry, but leaving things there is irresponsible.

Big Tech Isn’t the Problem With Homelessness. It’s All of Us is a very good overview of the policy failures which produce the bizarre situation in the Bay Area.

The city is turning into a Brechtian horror show where young men wearing Airpods and backpacks emblazoned with the names of gig-economy apps weave e-scooters among people passed out in their own filth.

That’s not even the most frustrating part. This is: Everyone who works on homelessness agrees on the way to fix the problem. Build more homes. Not coincidentally, more places for people to live would help alleviate all sorts of other problems, from climate change to income inequality. But the kinds of housing California needs are not the kinds that get built. The reasons amount to an obstacle course built from policy mistakes, economic vicissitudes, and prejudice. “This is not something like pancreatic cancer, where thousands of scientists are striving to find a solution for a really difficult problem that we literally don’t know what to do about,” says Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine at UCSF who studies homelessness. “We actually know what to do. We just lack the will.”

How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained) by the reliably illuminating Kim-Mai Cutler is smart about policy and history. Follow her if you are interested in this topic.

San Francisco’s orientation towards growth control has 50 years of history behind it and more than 80 percent of the city’s housing stock is either owner-occupied or rent controlled. The city’s height limits, its rent control and its formidable permitting process are all products of tenant, environmental and preservationist movements that have arisen and fallen over decades.

A tale of two cities: how San Francisco’s tech boom is widening the gap between rich and poor by Laurie Penny does a good job of getting the flavor of the current state of the City right.

There are two things every child knows about bubbles: they are beautiful, and they burst. Time and again, I am told that San Francisco is “a bubble” — referring both to the gorgeous, insular never-neverland where workers in the city’s tech and associated industries live and play and to the localised economic boom that has fuelled the fat years.

Living in a Fool’s Paradise by Mark Hogan provides a look at the complex history and policy failures throughout the Bay Area which have produced the current situation.

Caution is warranted when considering construction projects in such a beautiful place. But the current state of permitting regulations for building and the glacial pace of infrastructure projects in San Francisco benefit very few people and risk turning it into a caricature of its former self for tourists and residents rich enough to live in a fantasy, not a living city. If there was ever a time when San Francisco needed to embrace a dynamic, expansive policy for building housing, offices and transportation, it is now.

Demolishing the California Dream: How San Francisco Planned Its Own Housing Crisis by Hunter Oatman-Stanford takes a very deep dive into the full history of zoning and housing policy in San Francisco.

In July of 1978, the San Francisco Chronicle also reported that even Rai Okamoto, director of the planning department, had reservations about downzoning the city, echoing fears that it would raise housing costs and force middle-income residents out of San Francisco.

It’s clear that many San Franciscans were well aware this rezoning would lead the city toward a housing crisis. The planning commissioners, however, were not moved. Their testimony throughout the hearings made it clear they valued maintaining the city’s predominately suburban layout over affordability. In response to a homeowner who was unhappy that his property would be downzoned to allow fewer units, commissioner Sue Bierman gave a quintessential anti-growth response—countering that San Franciscans were concerned about parking, traffic, and sunlight reaching their backyards, embracing a shift toward zoning that would preserve “more comfortable neighborhoods.” Instead of listening to those folks worried about becoming homeless, the commissioners focused on the single-family homeowners worried about shadows on their yards and parking for their cars.

What’s the Matter With San Francisco? by Eve Bachrach and Jon Christensen is smart about the mechanics of housing and income inequality. (The lead article of a whole collection of good stuff at Boom Magazine.)

Longtime San Francisco residents who fought for so long worry that the city they love is disappearing. They’re too late. That city is gone and they, in some ways, have aided its demise. Cities are like living organisms, not flies trapped in amber. Protestors long fought the “Manhattanization” of San Francisco—not wanting to see their mostly low-rise city dominated by high rises and dark urban canyons. Instead they’re getting the other kind of Manhattanization—a playground for the rich with little room for the artists and regular folk who held down the fort for so long.

Why housing costs keep rising in San Francisco from transit planner Michael Rhodes describes a few economic fundamentals that should be obvious.

• The number of employed residents in San Francisco has grown at almost twice the rate as the number of additional homes since 1990, exacerbating our housing shortage.
• As a result, the cost of renting in San Francisco has doubled since 1995, when a two-bedroom apartment cost $1,700 a month. In the 54 years since 1960, San Francisco has added about as many housing units as we used to add every 15 years, even as the city and region have seen steady job growth.
• Our current housing building boom is the result of a long backlog during the recession, and won’t be enough to catch up to demand unless it is sustained for a long period of time.
• Housing costs will only continue to rise unless we support adding new homes in San Francisco and other transit-oriented areas of the Bay Area. By building near transit, we can accommodate this growth while preserving and enhancing our region’s quality of life.

What's the Matter With San Francisco? from Gabriel Metcalfe at Citylab describes a little history of the politics of San Francisco housing policy.

It’s our own version of What’s the Matter With Kansas?—the 2005 book in which Thomas Frank tries to explain how working-class Americans came to vote for right wing politicians against their own economic self-interest. In San Francisco’s case, many tenants came to vote against new development in an attempt to show their disdain for monied interests. The problem is that this stance happens to result in very expensive rents in the long run.

As the city got more and more expensive, progressive housing policy shifted gradually to a sad, rearguard movement to protect the people already here from being displaced. No longer would San Francisco even try to remain open as a refuge for immigrants and radicals from around the world. The San Francisco Left could never come to terms with its central contradiction of being against the creation of more “places” that would give new people the chance to live in the city. Once San Francisco was no longer open to freaks and dissidents, immigrants and refugees, because it was deemed to be “full,” it could no longer fulfill its progressive values, could no longer do anything for the people who weren’t already here.

Airbnb, Proposition F And The Shared Hypocrisy Of Bay Area Housing from Kim-Mai Cutler at TechCrunch is a discussion of a particular San Francisco ballot measure which provides a lot of great background on the weird politics of housing in San Francisco and the Bay Area at large.

Why Are People Blocking Housing Development?

It varies by jurisdiction. In most of the 101 cities around the Bay Area, tenants are just outnumbered by homeowners, who don’t have a strong reason to add more homes because they’ve already got theirs. In many Californian cities like Palo Alto, there’s almost nothing you can do because you may never mathematically have the votes.

But in San Francisco, it’s different. This is a majority tenant city.

....

Tech founders, are, of course, frustrated. They’d like to hire thousands of engineers over the next several years, but the competition for housing is driving up rents and salary costs higher and higher.

And again, the city can’t coerce land owners into selling their property to non-profit developers. So unless the moratorium is permanent, land owners might sit it out until the end because they don’t want to sell at a discount.

Blame Zoning, Not Tech, for San Francisco’s Housing Crisis from Kriston Capps at Citylab makes some smart observations about NIMBYism and gentrification.

As Rick Jacobus explains for Shelterforce, building new housing units anywhere—whether they’re set-aside affordable units or penthouse condos—goes in the win column from a regional perspective. But when new units mean penthouse condos in a low-end neighborhood, the region may prosper at the potential expense of the neighborhood.

What happened in South of Market and parts of Brooklyn and what people fear in the Mission (and the rest of Brooklyn!) is that high-rise luxury housing was dropped into otherwise distressed neighborhoods. These luxury projects dramatically changed the perception of these neighborhoods—they sent a clear signal to the market that these places were safe—both in the sense that they were safe for wealthier residents to live in and in the sense that they were safe for more investment in residential development. However much these projects decreased rents regionally by increasing supply, they had a larger impact of increasing rents in the immediately surrounding neighborhoods by increasing demand.

Yet this signaling happens with or without the luxury condos. Prohibit new building in the high end, developers turn to the low end. Decline to build new luxury condos, buyers will turn to the existing housing stock. It is, as Jacobus describes, “the new planning dilemma: where to put the rich?”

The new wealthy are ruining everything because the old wealthy decided not to let them live anywhere near them.

Carpetbaggers is a comment on the effect the two tech booms I have seen have had on San Francisco. Forgive me linking a post of my own: as a pre-Boom San Franciscan and a tech professional, I literally embody the split.

The San Francisco I loved was raffish and queer and weird, and it attracted people like me who didn't quite fit anywhere else. But ’99ers weren't moving to San Francisco because it was San Francisco. They were moving here to get rich. And they resented that San Francisco was weird; they wanted it to be like anyplace else and they did their level best to make it that way.

Don’t Say This To A NIMBY is a little example of the weird psychology of longtime residents who want to personalize the causes of change.

This actually happened and is paraphrased to the best of my memory.

Me: Thanks for creating this Facebook group about Palo Alto’s history. Since I’ve only lived here a couple of years, I feel I have a lot to catch up on. How long have you lived here?

Admin: I’ve lived here since the Seventies and it’s crazy now. Did you see this rental ad for a van? Someone actually lives in a van! What if they need a bathroom?

Me: I dunno, bedpan and use the shower at the gym? You’re right that it’s crazy. I blame voters who block development. If it wasn’t for that housing shortage, people could live in proper apartments instead of spilling out into vans, illegally-converted garages, and cardboard boxes.

Admin: It’s those tech workers, is what it is. They raise rents and make mortgages unaffordable for anyone but themselves. Thank goodness we bought our house back when this area was quiet.

Me: Did you grow up here?

Admin: No, we moved here when my husband was hired by IBM.

Me: Oh, so he’s a tech worker like my husband. The only difference is you came here forty years earlier so you lucked into an affordable market while we pay top dollar for a clapboard apartment. You’re just like us!

Admin: *kicks me out of group, blocks me on Facebook*

Me: Whoops.

Unpacking SF’s Moderate / Progressive Divide provides a good description of how housing, tech, politics politics, and cultural politics come together.

There is one policy area where the moderate/progressive divide seems to have sharpened in recent years. Nearly every academic and political insider contacted for this article highlighted housing and land use as the biggest cleavage between the two camps.

“That is the seminal issue in San Francisco that divides all politicians,” says Agnos. “It’s not the environment. It’s not healthcare. It’s not homelessness. It’s not voting rights. It’s not any of the traditional issues that we see in this country that define progressives or moderates. It is land use.”

“The moderates will look to the market more for solutions,” Agnos adds, “whereas the progressives will look to government more for solutions,” emphasizing that it’s not zero sum.

[⋯]

Housing is also where the mutual “strange bedfellows” critique emerges, making it harder to map each sides’ voting bloc. By opposing policies that would allow new housing to be built throughout the city, progressives are accused of allying with wealthy homeowners who don’t want their pristine neighborhoods to change. In their quest to make housing more abundant and, hopefully, more affordable, moderates are accused of running interference for billionaire developers and supporting gentrification.

Nobody says hi in San Francisco by Noah Smith from 2020 calls San Francisco “a great city in decline”.

I wonder — are poor transit and low density an effect of San Francisco’s culture of alienation, or a cause?

In NYC, the high and mighty of the finance and law and publishing industries ride the same subways as checkout clerks and hairdressers. The city is so dense that poor neighborhoods are shoved right up against rich ones; everyone walks past everyone on the street. There is certainly class separation and racial division in New York, but there is an inherent camaraderie to the city itself, a shared feeling that everyone is in the belly of the same vast urban beast. NYC is bigger than any of its industries, bigger than any of its neighborhoods. Its richest and most famous residents are supplicants to its glory, not the conveyers thereof.

Maybe if SF had dense housing and good trains, San Franciscans would be forced, if not to be interested in each other, than at least to recognize each other’s existence. But it’s a chicken-and-egg problem (or as econ dorks like to call it, an inefficient equilibrium). It might be that SF can’t have a sense of civic unity until it has functional urbanism, but can’t build functional urbanism without a sense of civic unity.

Cities

I love this poster from Walkable And Livable Cities Institute. It's not hard to see which place I'd rather live in.

Reminds me of an old favorite urban design propaganda image.

Walking

Kaid Benfield at the National Resources Defense Council describes the nightmarish hostility of our built environment in an essay on the disturbing and sometimes tragic challenge of walking in America.

What you don’t see are any but the crudest accommodations for walking. This particular part of Woodbridge is a place for being either indoors or in a motor vehicle. If you were, say, an employee at the Pep Boys auto parts store, didn’t have a car on a given day, and wanted to grab a sandwich for lunch at Wendy’s right across the street, you’d have to walk nearly a mile, round trip, to cross the road with the benefit of a traffic signal. Even then, half your trip would have no sidewalk.

What many people with limited time would understandably do in that situation, instead, is attempt to cross the road using the shortest and most direct route between Pep Boys and Wendy’s, and hope their instincts and powers of observation would enable them to do so without getting hit. Some people do exactly that, without consequence.

But other pedestrians aren’t so lucky.

It's a nightmare, which is why in a previous post I said:

I do indulge in one very big luxury, which is not living in the great American suburban wasteland. This not only makes my housing breathtakingly expensive, it also nickels-and-dimes me with every carrot and bar of soap. Suburban living is actually more resource-intensive than urban living, but we've made it cheaper through a whole range of public policies. It is decidedly weird that a smaller living space, relying on public transit, and encountering hungry, miserable people asking for spare change every day is an expensive luxury.

Likewise, how bizarre is it that living without owning a car is an expensive luxury?

The city of the future of the past

The UC Berkeley Library maintains a little online museum about San Francisco bay area bridges full of renderings of the bridges before they were built and photographs of them under construction.

This is interesting enough, but most fascinating is the Unbuilt Projects section, detailing bridges that were never built, including Frank Lloyd Wright's famous SF-Oakland span ... and some plans I'd never heard of to use systems of dams to turn most of the bay into freshwater lakes, waterways, and habitable land. Such plans would never pass environmental impact review today — and that's probably for the best.

And that makes me think of Jake Coolige's marvelous BART map for the completed BART system as it was imagined in the 1950s, ringing the Bay. The science-fictional-looking people who launched BART in the '70s seem like they might have been capable of building such a thing.

I marvel at the ambition of an earlier time, an ambition which we seem to have lost.

The political consequences of suburban public space

Via Digby, in a long and fascinating article that details the unfolding dystopian nightmare of Florida under Republican dominance, a little observation jumped out at me:

I don’t want to downplay the noble efforts of the Floridian Occupiers (yes, they exist) but the state’s overwhelmingly suburban geography, its lack of density and dearth of prominent public space, prevents the sort of spectacular urban reclamation that made Occupy so compelling.

This is something that I've been thinking about for a long time, but it occurs to me only now that migration back to urban cores of educated White cultural liberals over the last couple of decades is part of the formula that gives rise to the Occupy movement as a revival of street protest.

Infrastructure matters

It turns out that Haiti's airport is a limiting factor in getting aid to the Haitians.

Col. Buck Elton, who was given the mission to open up airfield and assist with airlifts, says they have controlled 600+ takeoffs and landings in an airstrip that normally sees three takeoffs and landings a day.

Because the air traffic control tower has collapsed, all of this is being done by radio, on the ground - in a place that only has one runway/taxiway for planes, set directly in the middle of the airport and thus making it difficult for other planes to take off and arrive.

Whoa. If I ever find myself in the company of Col. Elton, I'm buying that man a drink.

A Short History of America

Via James Howard Kunstler I am informed that Robert Crumb's immortal comic A Short History of America has a sequel.

Slums

Christopher B. Leinberger, writing in The Atlantic, writes about the coming decline of suburbs and observes how physically unprepared the 'burbs are to evolve into something more appropriate for the world of expensive oil we're soon to be living in.

Suburbia’s many small parcels of land, held by different owners with different motivations, make the purchase of whole neighborhoods almost unheard-of. Condemnation of single-family housing for “higher and better use” is politically difficult, and in most states it has become almost legally impossible in recent years. In any case, the infrastructure supporting large-lot suburban residential areas—roads, sewer and water lines—cannot support the dense development that urbanization would require, and is not easy to upgrade. Once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild.

The experience of cities during the 1950s through the ’80s suggests that the fate of many single-family homes on the metropolitan fringes will be resale, at rock-bottom prices, to lower-income families—and in all likelihood, eventual conversion to apartments.

This future is not likely to wear well on suburban housing. Many of the inner-city neighborhoods that began their decline in the 1960s consisted of sturdily built, turn-of-the-century row houses, tough enough to withstand being broken up into apartments, and requiring relatively little upkeep. By comparison, modern suburban houses, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built. Hollow doors and wallboard are less durable than solid-oak doors and lath-and-plaster walls. The plywood floors that lurk under wood veneers or carpeting tend to break up and warp as the glue that holds the wood together dries out; asphalt-shingle roofs typically need replacing after 10 years. Many recently built houses take what structural integrity they have from drywall—their thin wooden frames are too flimsy to hold the houses up.

As the residents of inner-city neighborhoods did before them, suburban homeowners will surely try to prevent the division of neighborhood houses into rental units, which would herald the arrival of the poor. And many will likely succeed, for a time. But eventually, the owners of these fringe houses will have to sell to someone ...

James Howard Kunstler, as I mentioned a while back, calls this problem Peak Suburbia, and with the lending crisis growing ever worse, it's clear that this watershed has definitely arrived.

Peak

Having warned us about Peak Oil, James Howard Kunstler now also declares Peak Suburbia.

It is not an accident that the housing bubble coincided with the phenomenon of Peak Oil. First of all, the housing bubble should more properly be called the suburban bubble, because most of the activity came in the form of “greenfield“ housing subdivisions, and included all the additional crap-o-la accessories required by them—strip malls, power centers, Outback steak houses, car washes, et cetera. The suburban expansion has been based entirely on cheap-and-abundant supplies of oil. Similarly, it was not an accident that the suburban project faltered briefly in the 1970s, when America's oil production entered its long decline, OPEC seized the moment, and oil prices shot up. Notice that the final suburban blowout occurred after 1990, when the North Sea and Prudhoe Bay oil strikes came into full production, disabling OPEC, and a world oil glut finally drove prices as low as ten dollars a barrel in 1999. That ushered in the climactic phase of suburbia, as represented by things like the standard 4000-square-foot Toll Brother's McMansion and the heyday of the super-gigantic SUV to go with it.

The American public has no idea how over all that is.

This is, of course, a wrenching catastrophe on many levels, but I'm in a good mood, so I'm choosing to look on the bright side of how I hate suburbs and will be happy to see them go.

Community and sanity

Via Rivet Pep Squad: Robert Wright writing for Time magazine in 1995 describes the problems of suburbanization in The Evolution of Despair, which was a response to the Unabomber, his manifesto ... and evolutionary psychology.

nostalgia for the suburban nuclear family of the 1950s—which often accompanies current enthusiasm for “family values”—is ironic. The insular coziness of Ozzie and Harriet's home is less like our natural habitat than, say, the more diffuse social integration of Andy Griffith's Mayberry. Andy's son Opie is motherless, but he has a dutiful great- aunt to watch over him—and, anyway, can barely sit on the front porch without seeing a family friend.

To be sure, keeping nuclear families intact has virtues that are underscored by evolutionary psychology .... But to worship the suburban household of the 1950s is to miss much of the trouble with contemporary life.

Though people talk about “urbanization” as the process that ushered in modern ills, many urban neighborhoods at mid-century were in fact fairly communal; it's hard to walk into a Brooklyn brownstone day after day without bumping into neighbors. It was suburbanization that brought the combination of transience and residential isolation that leaves many people feeling a bit alone in their own neighborhoods. (These days, thanks to electric garage-door openers, you can drive straight into your house, never risking contact with a neighbor.)

The suburbs have been particularly hard on women with young children. In the typical hunter-gatherer village, mothers can reconcile a homelife with a work life fairly gracefully, and in a richly social context. When they gather food, their children stay either with them or with aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins or lifelong friends. When they're back at the village, child care is a mostly public task—extensively social, even communal. The anthropologist Marjorie Shostak wrote of life in an African hunter-gatherer village, “The isolated mother burdened with bored small children is not a scene that has parallels in !Kung daily life.”

Evolutionary psychology thus helps explain why modern feminism got its start after the suburbanization of the 1950s. The landmark 1963 book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan grew out of her 1959 conversation with a suburban mother who spoke with “quiet desperation” about the anger and despair that Friedan came to call “the problem with no name” and a doctor dubbed “the housewife's syndrome.”

It is only natural that modern mothers rearing children at home are more prone to depression than working mothers, and that they should rebel.
....
Suburbs are largely products of the automobile. (In the forthcoming book The Lost City, Alan Ehrenhalt notes the irony of Henry Ford, in his 60s, building a replica of his hometown—gravel roads, gas lamps—to recapture the “saner and sweeter idea of life” he had helped destroy.) And in a thousand little ways—from the telephone to the refrigerator to ready-made microwavable meals—technology has eroded the bonds of neighborly interdependence. Among the Aranda Aborigines of Australia, the anthropologist George Peter Murdock noted early this century, it was common for a woman to breast-feed her neighbor's child while the neighbor gathered food. Today in America it's no longer common for a neighbor to borrow a cup of sugar.

I'm not entirely comfortable with Wright's beating the drum of evolutionary psychology as hard as he does—everyone seems to be able to justify their own view of society by some kind of “evolutionary psychology” reasoning—but his fundamental point about the problems of the suburbs is right on. And this plugs into something I've said before about the relationship between the mechanics of our society and the human experience we have within it.

One of the things that we American lefties find frustrating about all of this “family values” blather in the social/political sphere is the assumption by social conservatives that the solution to the problems facing the American nuclear family is ultimately for people to just try harder. Lefties argue that rather, we just don't support families as well as we did in the old days, economically, logistically, and socially.

We have to start digging our way out of the suburbs right away.

Red transit

Via Ken MacLeod, I learn that the Scottish Socialist Party makes a surprisingly entertaining and sensible argument supporting universal free public transit.

It's enough to make me a Scottish socialist.

Apartment

Over at Wired News, iMomus has been thinking about the advantages of living in a very, very small apartment in Tokyo.

Who needs a big fridge when you have a 24-hour convenience store right outside your building? Who needs a big bathroom when there's a well-equipped sento (a spa-like public bathhouse) nearby? Who needs a garage when Tokyo's public transport is so great? Even a big bedroom becomes unnecessary when you can book a love hotel—equipped with a Jacuzzi, vibrating bed and a karaoke machine—by the hour. When your city has great amenities, when its public zones are safe and inviting, you don't need a lot of space at home.

Pretty much the opposite of the the “American Dream,” that.

He also offers a list of strategies for releasing your attachment to your living space. It brings back unhappy memories of Wired magazine back in the old days—dig these too-clever neologisms.

• Hikki
• The Guest
• The Dole
• Writer Nomad
• Smart Homeless
• Squatters and Eel Houses
• Hay Balers and Self Builders
• Cockpit Living

But—again like Wired in the old days—there is some provocative utopian thinking lurking in there.

Detroit is the future

Via Bruce Sterling I learn of a post on Detroitblog about the “wilderness” reclaiming unwanted parts of the city.

A lot of America is going to start to look like this in another couple of decades. James Howard Kunstler is a critic of how we build cities now, and forsees a coming end to America's endless fields of suburbs, office parks, and strip malls.

Much of the suburban real estate produced by this process is destined to lose its supposed value, both in practical and monetary terms as energy scarcities get traction. So, on top of the sheer distortions and perversities of the glut in bad mortgage paper, America will be faced with the accelerating worthlessness of the collateral—the houses, Jiffy Lubes, and office parks—as gasoline prices go up, and long commutes become untenable, and jobs along with incomes are lost, and the cost of heating houses larger than 1500 square feet becomes an insuperable burden.

All this is to say that the suburban rings of our cities have poor prospects in the future. They therefore represent a massive tragic misinvestment, perhaps the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It is hard to say how this stuff might be reused or retrofitted, if at all, but some of it, perhaps a lot, may end up as a combined salvage yard and sheer ruin.

Since America's endless concrete wastelands start out with no charm or grandeur, I expect that they won't even be interesting as ruins.

Design

In a comment on an old post on Brazilian urban design, TheWayOfTheGun points us to a fascinating Wired article about traffic engineer Hans Monderman. His philosophy: remove signs and road markings and rely on the geometry of the roadway to calm traffic.

This is the hip new thing in traffic engineering, and apparently it works. Again, I've been reading City Comforts, and David Sucher advocates curvy roads and roundabouts, arguing that it's not slow driving speed that frustrates people, it's signs telling them to drive slower than the road is designed to accomodate — and then having to start and stop in the process. Steady driving at slower speeds is calming.

Monderman clearly has the knack for traffic design. The Wired article talks about an intersection he did.

We pass by the performing arts center, and suddenly, there it is: the Intersection. It's the confluence of two busy two-lane roads that handle 20,000 cars a day, plus thousands of bicyclists and pedestrians. Several years ago, Monderman ripped out all the traditional instruments used by traffic engineers to influence driver behavior—traffic lights, road markings, and some pedestrian crossings—and in their place created a roundabout, or traffic circle. The circle is remarkable for what it doesn't contain: signs or signals telling drivers how fast to go, who has the right-of-way, or how to behave. There are no lane markers or curbs separating street and sidewalk, so it's unclear exactly where the car zone ends and the pedestrian zone begins. To an approaching driver, the intersection is utterly ambiguous — and that's the point.

Monderman and I stand in silence by the side of the road a few minutes, watching the stream of motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians make their way through the circle, a giant concrete mixing bowl of transport. Somehow it all works. The drivers slow to gauge the intentions of crossing bicyclists and walkers. Negotiations over right-of-way are made through fleeting eye contact. Remarkably, traffic moves smoothly around the circle with hardly a brake screeching, horn honking, or obscene gesture. “I love it!” Monderman says at last. “Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each other. You can't expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design of the road.”

That elegance of subtly encouraging folks to do the right thing is a hallmark of good design in any field. And the knack for getting the sum of small details right to do that is the defining characteristic of a good designer.

I've talked about Maya Lin before, as an example of this principle. For the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, Lin was very insistent on using stone that could be polished to be reflective. She knew that for the memorial to work, you had to see your face reflected behind the names.

A good designer studies principles and successful examples, but that's not enough to make a good designer. It also requires that knack for cooking up the elements just right. This is one of the baffling things about both art and craft. It feels the same to create good art and bad art. The artist, or the craftsperson, is certain.

Monderman tucks his hands behind his back and begins to walk into the square —backward—straight into traffic, without being able to see oncoming vehicles. A stream of motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians ease around him, instinctively yielding to a man with the courage of his convictions.

Which is not to say that certainty is a sign that a designer is talented. But uncertainty is always a sign that a designer doesn't have the knack.

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Update: Another article on Monderman, and a little observation about intersections without stoplights:

The key thing is that basically everyone drives slowly and steadily rather than in a stop-and-go manner. Stop-and-go turns out to be less a way of increasing safety than a way of maximizing the value of vehicles with high top speeds (i.e., automobiles) rather than slower vehicles (bicycles, scooters, motorcycles). So filling your city with signalized intersections turns out to be a kind of backdoor subsidy to automobile ownership.

A Spiegel article about Monderman hits another point about the psychology of driving:

“The many rules strip us of the most important thing: the ability to be considerate. We're losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior,” says Dutch traffic guru Hans Monderman, one of the project's co-founders. “The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles.”

Monderman could be on to something. Germany has 648 valid traffic symbols. The inner cities are crowded with a colorful thicket of metal signs. Don't park over here, watch out for passing deer over there, make sure you don't skid. The forest of signs is growing ever denser. Some 20 million traffic signs have already been set up all over the country.

Psychologists have long revealed the senselessness of such exaggerated regulation. About 70 percent of traffic signs are ignored by drivers. What's more, the glut of prohibitions is tantamount to treating the driver like a child and it also foments resentment. He may stop in front of the crosswalk, but that only makes him feel justified in preventing pedestrians from crossing the street on every other occasion. Every traffic light baits him with the promise of making it over the crossing while the light is still yellow.

The result is that drivers find themselves enclosed by a corset of prescriptions, so that they develop a kind of tunnel vision: They're constantly in search of their own advantage, and their good manners go out the window.

The new traffic model's advocates believe the only way out of this vicious circle is to give drivers more liberty and encourage them to take responsibility for themselves. They demand streets like those during the Middle Ages, when horse-drawn chariots, handcarts and people scurried about in a completely unregulated fashion. The new model's proponents envision today's drivers and pedestrians blending into a colorful and peaceful traffic stream.

It may sound like chaos, but it's only the lesson drawn from one of the insights of traffic psychology: Drivers will force the accelerator down ruthlessly only in situations where everything has been fully regulated. Where the situation is unclear, they're forced to drive more carefully and cautiously.

A giant passes

Jane Jacobs
1916-2006

Urbanist
Dilettante

We just lost Jane Jacobs. Ninety years old, and working on yet another book.

She didn't need to be. She secured her claim to greatness for having written The Death and Life of Great American Cities forty-five years ago. To my mind—and many others'—it's the most important book about urban design ever. And, dear to my heart, she was a great dilettante. She was smart about subjects that defy categorization and demand synthesis, and she got there by virtue of paying attention and doing her own homework, rather than by virtue of any formal qualifications.

I blogged a link to a terrific web post about her a while back. If you didn't check it out then, you missed out. Now might be a good time; you'll see why I mourn her passing.

Urban design in Rio de Janeiro

So a few months back, I spent a week in Brazil. Most folks come back from a trip abroad with pictures of themselves in front of sightseeing attractions. I come back with photos of urban design ... and they didn't even come out that well. But I was pretty excited by the sidewalks in the Leblon district of Rio, where I stayed — and I've been reading City Comforts this week, which is all about this stuff — so I'm posting about it anyway.

The most important thing about them is very difficult to photograph, because it lives the the succession of things that you see walking down the sidewalk. The buildings mostly have a gently partitioned relationship with the sidewalk: there are big shop windows, waist-high concrete fences topped with iron, rows of elegant little metal bollards, trees and bushes, and so forth. So even though the streets are narrow, they don't feel confining, and there's always something to look at.

The sidewalks are also done with this tile mosaic in black and white, made into constantly varying big geometric patterns: swoopy curves and broad stripes. It really livened up the sidewalk, ordinarily so bland, in a simple and tasteful way. It made me think of the city of Neverness, in David Zindell's elegantly written SF novels, which he describes as marked with coloured stripes that make it possible to navigate the twisty, nameless streets; I imagine one might have a city with mosaics like Rio's that obey some rule, such that it would be impossible to get lost because the sidewalks always tell you where you are.

The neighborhood also has slightly sunken bike paths in red brick. The paths weave in and out of normal sidewalk space, and the different colour of the ground keeps you conscious of when you should keep an eye out for cyclists --- and adds a little charm to the sidewalk.

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Notice, too, the little bollards in the centerline of the bike path. More gentle partitioning of the space.

Many of the intersections — especially the busy ones — had a very distinctive partition between the cars' street and the pedestrians' sidewalk. Though most of the streets had curbs, the corners had the sidewalk flush with the street, but there were rows of silver balls set into the ground, about a foot and a half high.

This was surprisingly effective in creating a psychological barrier between human and car space, and accomodated people on wheels better than the curb cuts that are common in the US. A beautiful, effective, and distinctive solution to creating that simple partition.

Update: LiveJournal based reader SterlingSF adds a comment ...

Amsterdam also makes use of the slightly separate bike path. It's a little scary when there's a lot of bike traffic becuase you can brush against the curb.

... and points out a cool collection of pictures of bike paths around the world.

Carfree

I recently discovered the Carfree Cities website, and feel a little bit foolish for having bought the Carfree Cities book, because I think the web actually tells the story better than the book. I suppose that I'm paying for the cost of the site, so that's not too bad.

J.H. Crawford is entirely serious in proposing that a city of a million people or more can function entirely without cars or trucks. My own image of utopian urbanism — setting aside my dreams of arcologies — has long excluded private cars but included taxis and trucks. Crawford has convinced me that these aren't necessary, that a truly carfree city is possible. After all, observes Crawford, Venice manages just fine without cars, and this helps to make it arguably the most pleasant city in the world.

Crawford's argument is, in fact, full of surprises. There's some crafty number-crunching that shows that in principle a city of a million inhabitants could be structured with 80% green space, four-story buildings, and a metro system that takes people from anywhere to anywhere in no more than 35 minutes, with no more than a 5 minute walk at either end. The metro system in Crawford's reference design is very cunning: there are only three lines, and everything is reachable with a single transfer.

Part of the trick is discussed in the book: most folks don't understand which parts of the public transit system to optimize. Where does the time go? Train accelleration is not so important, but designing the doors to start opening a moment before a train stops cumulatively shaves more significant time off of a long trip. There's a lot of good, deep thinking like this in Crawford's proposal.

The website also includes a fun pattern language of good stuff to have in a city, very much taking after Christopher Alexander. Crawford is a fan of a Mediterranean model: open courtyards in the centers of blocks, twisty little streets, arcades, little squares, and so forth.

Oh, and he wants to convert the interstate highways system into rail, too. My kind of guy.