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Planning Naked | June 2016

Planning Naked | June 2016
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

Your (hopefully) hilarious guide to everything about the latest issue of APA’s Planning Magazine.

 

The Rise of the Aqua Planner. “Water Everywhere” in From the Desk of APA’s Executive Director section by James M. Drinan (pp. 3) discusses the intense focus on water issues during sessions of the recent APA National Conference. While the subject of water management and resources is, of course, important, especially in light of rapid urbanization and population growth around the world, I can’t figure out if the APA was being intentionally ironic, cleverly subversive, or just plain clueless by setting this conversation in Phoenix, Arizona. A city on the edge of an arid desert that gets a lot of its water from the Colorado River and probably should not exist at all based the precepts of generic function. It suspiciously sounds like APA is more interested in creating another specialized planning silo – the Aqua Planner.

June. 2016. A date. Which will live. In infamy. APA is finally forced to publish the obituary of Robert Moses’ ideas in “Farewell, Robert Moses Parkway North” by Tara Nurin (pp. 6). More like ‘good riddance’ since the real infamy is it took a quarter of a century for this project to get off the ground.

The Advance of Shared Space. “Chicago Neighborhood Puts Pedestrians First” by Allen Zeyher (pp. 7) details the shared space conversion of a three-block stretch of Argyle Street in Chicago. Pedestrians First? Isn’t that slogan some sort of right-wing synthesis of vehophobia (“fear of driving”) and xenophobia (“fear of outsiders”)? Brad McCauley at Site Design Group, Ltd. offers the absolutely priceless quote of the article: “in pedestrian-heavy corridors, it’s a no-brainer to reclaim space that was formerly given over to cars,” which implicitly confirms our suspicion that the overwhelming majority of urban planners do not possess a brain. Perhaps a trip to Emerald City to see the Wizard is in order?

States lead. Federal hampers. Oh wait, State hampers, too. At first glance, there is more evidence in the News Brief section (pp. 7) that there isn’t any problem the Federal government won’t try to regulate its way out of (e.g. more EPA requirements) whereas it is the States that are really leading (e.g. Colorado Supreme Courts overturns local fracking ban)… except for the last news item about the Texas Department of Transportation adding ‘informal’ lanes by using inside shoulders during rush hour for motorists to double average speeds and produce “smooth sailing.” That’s called medicating the symptoms, not curing the disease. At least, TexDOT have their ‘evidence’ for another costly lane widening project. Let’s be honest, motorists were probably already using the inside shoulders and TexDOT merely acknowledged the fait accompli.

Speaking of fait accompli. “Tactical Urbanism Goes Mainstream” by Jake Blumgart in the News and Legal Lessons section (pp. 8) seems to stamp tactical urbanism with APA’s approval because the brand has now been proven capable of securing money for things that don’t, in fact, have anything to do with tactical urbanism. The Philadelphia example cited in the article is for pool amenity improvements, not tactical urbanism. The $184,080 granted in Detroit isn’t for tactical urbanism, it’s nominally ‘planning for tactical urbanism’ but the first project discussed is – yes, you guessed it – pool amenity improvements. It’s disturbing how concepts get twisted to mean almost anything you want when the money gets involved in the United States.

Real Reporting. In “Scalia’s Land-Use Legacy,” William Fulton briefly reviews the legacy of the recently deceased Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia on land use law for the Legal Lessons section (pp. 9). It is a well-written, objective piece about, primarily, the Nollan and Lucas decisions. Fulton discusses their legal importance and Scalia’s intellectual role in crafting the majority decisions. The article is informative while blessedly free of ‘hidden’ agendas or positions. Ah, real reporting!

Tsk-tsk. Aaaaaarrrrrrrggggggghhhhhh. “Mixed Income, Mixed Results” by Craig Guillot (pp. 10-17) discusses the combination, for good or ill, of market rate and targeted affordable housing in developments. Housing policies in the United States from the Federal level to State and local government has been completely ass-backwards ever since the 1949 Housing Act and APA has been – and continues to be – complicit in perpetuating this ass-backwardness. All of the evidence you need is this quote, “Brennan says funding has been a barrier,” which again boils everything down to ‘give us more money.’ Giullot’s article therefore ably covers all of the problems this ass-backwards approach entails and reaps without ever addressing the core problem that everyone is basically talking out of their ass when it comes to housing. The short answer is found in the scale of developments, build-out times, land appreciation, and recognizing that a city does not ever, ever, ever remain statically frozen in time or character. The purposeful convolution of this issue is frustrating beyond belief and a direct consequence of early 20th century Euclidean zoning and suburban land tenure theories. But, by all means, continue to fiddle with market and affordable housing percentages and waste the next 50 years as well.

Here’s Your Consolidation Prize. “Separated City” by Lee R. Epstein (pp. 18-23) about Capetown in South Africa is actually a really interesting, informative article. Epstein seems to skip over the fact (or maybe, I missed it) that cities like Capetown actually represent traditional urban patterns in most of the world where lower income people live at the edges (e.g. suburbs) and higher income people live in the center. In contrast, the American urban model became inverted due to suburbanization during the post-war period. However, what’s really suspicious is how this story on Capetown immediately follows Guillot’s article about mixed income neighborhood planning efforts in US cities. Am I being paranoid that this article represents a consolidation prize to make American urban planners feel better about themselves (“See, it could be worse. Just look at Capetown, South Africa”)? Maybe, maybe not.

My God! Real Science in Planning Magazine! The use of biometrics to track human eye movement in the built environment is not new (perhaps it’s new to the APA and/or Americans). It’s been around for a while now – being worked on at University College London using virtual reality 20 years ago – in one form or another. It’s a fascinating area of research about the built environment but we need to be careful to fully appreciate the implications and not assume it’s an issue of quantity [“No wonder visitors from around the world like walking through Venice or Copenhagen — there’s so much (our emphasis) there to stimulate our sensory system, no matter one’s native language, culture, or personal history”]. There is a LOT of meat in this subject, too much to go into here but you can look at some of the work of Dr. Ruth Conroy Dalton at the Northumbria University and Dr. Beatrix Emo, Cahir of Cognitive Science at ETH Zurich. The key takeaway from the article for architects and planners right now is this quote: “I realized how people are really attracted to people.”

My God! Housing Sanity in Planning Magazine! Finally, someone articulates a reasonable perspective about the issues of housing in the Viewpoint section, “The New Home Ownership Reality” by Professor Anthony Nelson (pp. 48) of the University of Arizona. Professor Nelson does not implicitly tackle the house size part of the equation (e.g. tiny houses/small house movement) but any discussion about affordability has to begin with rental housing and ownership of affordably sized homes. Professor Nelson’s Viewpoint article is a good place to start.

Planning Naked is an article with observations and comments about a recent issue of Planning: The Magazine of the American Planning Association.

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Architecture, Education, Essay, Philosophy, Photography, Professional, Urban Planning

PHOTO ESSAY | Downtown Springfield IL

God bless, historic downtown Springfield, Illinois… they are trying, they really are. Unfortunately, for every smart decision to promote vibrant urbanism, you can find another decision (or indecision) holding things back. The most important and destructive is the continual adherence to a one-way traffic system that has only one purpose: moving vehicles as quickly as possible through downtown. It is especially mind-boggling considering the large numbers of people (including school groups) visiting the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Historic downtown Springfield is vibrant urbanism waiting to happen, trapped in its cage so automobiles can pass through quickly while only paying the minimal, necessary attention to pedestrians.

Historic Union Station and Union Station Plaza in downtown Springfield, Illinois (Photograph: Mark David Major).
Historic Union Square (to left) and Museum Parking Garage (to right) along East Madison Street in downtown Springfield, Illinois (Photograph: Mark David Major).

Another questionable design choice: locating a ‘dead’ facade parking garage across the street from beautiful, historic Union Station (now an accessory structure to the Lincoln Museum), thus creating an urban void absent of any active frontages. The parking garage was obviously built for the convenience of people visiting the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum located one block away but does nothing for the street life along this one-way, ‘rat run’ segment of East Madison Street. The street trees seem like an apologetic, after-the-fact attempt to hide this failure of urban design and planning from citizens and visitors alike.

Historic Union Station and Union Station Plaza from the corner of Sixth Street and East Jefferson Street in downtown Springfield (Photograph: Mark David Major).

In the above photograph, you can see how much street width is dedicated to moving cars through the one-way street system in downtown Springfield and the amount of pavement pedestrians have to overcome to cross a street even though there is plenty of room for landscaped medians, enhanced pedestrian crosswalks, and on-street parking with a 20-25 mph speed limit to efficiently move (instead of stop-and-start) the traffic… perhaps, even the elimination of some stop lights using the design principles of shared space.

Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (foreground) and Museum (background) at East Jefferson Street (center) and Sixth Street in downtown Springfield, Illinois (Photograph: Mark David Major).

The HOK design of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is O.K. (not great, not awful, hardly objectionable) though the 2nd floor structural crossover of East Jefferson Street wouldn’t be necessary at all with traffic calming, generally in historic downtown Springfield and, specifically, on this segment of East Jefferson Street so people could pass freely from one ground level entrance to the other using the street without having to wait for the crosswalk lights to change.

View east along East Adams Street from Sixth Street in downtown Springfield, Illinois. The high-rise Modernist building in the background was originally constructed in 1973 as Forum 30 but is now the Wyndham Springfield City Centre Hotel (Photograph: Mark David Major).
View south down Sixth Street from the pedestrianized segment of East Adams Street in front of the Old State Capitol in downtown Springfield, Illinois. The historic Lincoln-Herndon Law Office building is located to the right (Photograph: Mark David Major).
View northwest across Old State Capitol grounds from the pedestrianized segment of East Adams Street with the historic Myers Brothers Building in the background in downtown Springfield, Illinois (Photograph: Mark David Major).
View east down the pedestrianized segment of East Adams Street with Old State Capitol to the left in downtown Springfield, Illinois (Photograph: Mark David Major).
View west down East Adams Street from the the pedestrianized segment of that street and 5th Street in downtown Springfield, Illinois (Photograph: Mark David Major).
View east down the pedestrianized segment of East Adams Street with historic shop frontages located to the right including the Feed Store and the National Museum of the Korean War in downtown Springfield, Illinois (Photograph: Mark David Major).
View south down Sixth Street from East Adams Street showing the retention of historic buildings (including Lincoln-Herndon Law Office to the right) and the flow of vehicles down this one-way traffic corridor. Off-street parking is allowed along this segment of Sixth Street in downtown Springfield, Illinois (Photograph: Mark David Major).
View west down the pedestrianized segment of East Adams Street with historic shop frontages located to the left such as the Feed Store and the National Museum of the Korean War and the Old State Capitol to the right in downtown Springfield, Illinois (Photograph: Mark David Major).
Historic Lincoln-Herndon Law Office building at the corner of Sixth Street and East Adams Street in downtown Springfield, Illinois (Photograph: Mark David Major).
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Architecture, Essay, Mark David Major, Photography

PHOTO ESSAY | William Morgan Houses | Atlantic Beach, FL

William Morgan was an American Modernist architect based in Jacksonville, Florida, who passed away earlier this year (December 14, 1930 – January 18, 2016). Three of his designs are included on the Florida Association of the American Institute of Architects list of Florida’s Top 100 Buildings including The Williamson House in Ponte Vedra Beach, Morgan’s Residence in Atlantic Beach, and Dickinson Hall at the University of Florida. Morgan grew up in Jacksonville and graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University before serving in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War. After the war, he returned to Harvard to study architecture. He studied in Italy on a Fulbright Scholarship and then returned to Jacksonville to open his architecture practice in 1961 (Source: Wikipedia; Photograph: Florida Times-Union).

Street-side view of the William Morgan House in Atlantic Beach, FL (Photograph: Mark David Major).

The William Morgan House located at 1945 Beach Avenue in a Atlantic Beach, Florida was commissioned 1971. The 1,800 square foot house is made of timber construction. Two triangular masses meet to form A-frame styled house, which sits partially atop a sand dune with the lower level resting on beach. There is a symmetrical exterior with stepped balconies, rough-sawn interior and exterior cedar siding with central-entrance stairway (Source: North Carolina Modernist Houses). Morgan’s use of the A-frame in the design to accommodate parking in street-side carports is remarkably similar to the prototypical design of the Southern California ‘dingbat’ houses of the 1950s/1960s.

Beach-side view – second from right – of the William Morgan House in Atlantic Beach, FL (Photograph: Mark David Major).
Nighttime beach-side view of the William Morgan House in Atlantic Beach, FL (Photograph: William Morgan).

William Morgan’s Dune House is a small earth-sheltered home in Atlantic Beach, Florida, which is actually a duplex of two near-identical homes of 750 square feet in size. As Morgan lived next door, he did not want the new house to block his view of the ocean so he preferred to keep the landscape natural. Morgan’s solution was to bury the house in an existing sand dune, which was  constructed in 1975 for use as vacation rentals. It is barely visible from the street above. From the ocean side, it appears somewhat frog-like with two large rounded openings framing the twin patios. The mass of sand over and around the homes moderates the inside temperatures year-round so very little heating or cooling is needed (Source: Small House Bliss).

Street-side entry to William Morgan’s Dune House in Atlantic Beach, FL (Photograph: Mark David Major).
Beach-side view of William Morgan’s Dune House in Atlantic Beach, FL (Photograph: Small House Bliss).
Interior view of living area in William Morgan’s Dune House in Atlantic Beach, FL (Photograph: Small House Bliss).
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Architecture, Books, Education, Housing, Professional, Review, Urban Patterns, Urban Planning

FROM THE VAULT | Bourgeois Utopias | Robert Fishman

FROM THE VAULT | Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia by Robert Fishman
Review by Dr.  Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

I’ve been an admirer of historian Robert Fishman ever since reading Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 1982) in the early 90s but especially after hearing him speak at CNU20 in West Palm Beach, FL in 2012. Given this, I was a naturally excited to read this book when I came across it many years after its publication. However, I have to begrudgingly admit I was mostly underwhelmed by Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (Basic Books, 1987). Partially, this is a matter of timing. When Fishman wrote and published this book in the late 1980s, it seemed like the cumulative apex of suburban expansion and urban decline in the United States. In hindsight, Fishman’s history of suburbia come across as a dated, unconditional surrender to what must have seemed to many people at the time as the inevitable (despite the ‘fall’ mentioned in book’s title). Of course, we now realize there was still a significant part of the story waiting to play out over the subsequent three decades (see New Urbanism/Smart Growth, collapse of the mortgage bond market, and 2008 Financial Crisis).

However, it is not all a matter of timing. Fishman is so determined to fit his subject into the thematic structure began in Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century that he tends to cast aside any evidence contrary to his central thesis, especially when it comes to the American experience of suburbia. For example, you will not find the phrases ‘exclusionary zoning’ or ‘restrictive covenants’ anywhere in Bourgeois Utopias, which seems like an odd oversight for a purported history of suburbia. Fishman also oddly ignores ample evidence in the historical record (as well as John Reps’ seminal histories The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States and Cities of the American West: A History of Frontier Urban Planning) that there were, in fact, only a few examples of the modern American suburb type (Llewellyn Park, New Jersey and Frederick Law Olmsted’s Riverside, Illinois being the most obvious 19th century forerunners) before World War II because the regular grid dominated in American land speculation activities until the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.

Riverside, Illinois (Photo: Wikipedia).

This creates a problem because Fishman has to, more or less, cast aside the narrow, formal definition of suburbia he adopts at the start of the book when discussing early suburbs in London and Manchester, England  for a much looser definition (basically, any single family home with front yard setbacks) when approaching the American experience, especially in Los Angeles. In fact, Fishman’s entire chapter on Los Angeles reads as a regurgitation of Reyner Banham’s arguments in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) so both have the same flaws in underestimating the power of the urban grid. It is also another case in bad timing since Mike Davis’ City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles was published only a few years later in 1990. Davis’ book has its own flaws but it is an invaluable resource for understanding the historical development of urban form in Los Angeles including the role of water pilfering in that city as well as the insidious role of the automobile industry in the Red Car’s demise.

By far, the best and most compelling part of Bourgeois Utopias is Fishman’s research on early suburbs in England during 18th and 19th century and Olmsted’s mid-19th century plan for Riverside, Illinois (basically, pages 1-148). Indeed, any reader should be able to sense the author’s greater interest in these pre-20th century examples compared to the amalgamated cancer of 20th century suburbanization in the United States, when it seems as if Fishman is trying to ‘run out the clock’ on the book. In fact, if Fishman wasn’t so determined to ambitiously fit this topic into the ‘utopia’ theme, he might have been better served to limit his historical research to these pre-20th century examples. Fishman astutely identifies the changing nature of family related to longer life expectancy during the 18th and 19th century in England as the social origins for suburbia. Fishman briefly mentions life expectancy (which seems far more important than the words given in this book) before devoting most of his time to the evolution of familial relations in the workplace and/or home. Fishman also makes an important, useful distinction between the productive and consumptive suburb that has broader implications than spelled out in the book. It is fascinating research, which alone makes the book worth the effort. In the end, though, there are some good parts (Anglo examples) and some head-scratching parts (American examples) in Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia so the book deserves, at best, only a 3-star rating.

Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia
by Robert Fishman
Basic Books, 1987
Paperback, 272 pages, English
ISBN-10: 0465007473
ISBN-13: 978-0465007479

You can purchase Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia from Amazon here.

From the Vault is a series from the Outlaw Urbanist in which we review art, architectural and urban design texts, with an emphasis on the obscure and forgotten, found in second-hand bookstores.

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Architecture, Education, Essay, Housing, Mark David Major, Photography, Professional

PHOTO ESSAY | Dana-Thomas House | Frank Lloyd Wright

Dana-Thomas House located on East Lawrence Avenue in Springfield, Illinois is one of the earliest examples of the Modernist Prairie Style of architecture designed by its leading advocate, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, circa 1902-04. The State of Illinois bought the house in 1981 and it became a historic site under the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, which led a restoration effort in 1987-1990 to refit the house to its appearance in 1910. It is believed to contain one of the most intact Frank Lloyd Wright architectural interiors in the United States (Source: Wikipedia).

There is an interesting, contradictory dynamic at work in the scale of the house in the horizontal and vertical dimension. Simply put, this house has a gigantic footprint! The house is 12,600 square feet, with thirty-five rooms and sixteen major spaces (Source: Illinois Historic Preservation Agency). This square footage is so far over-the-top that the top “is a dot to you” and me. This is the equivalent of five houses for the average American homeowner today! The horizontal emphasis in the designed elevations of the house (especially adjacent to busiest, public streets) allows this house to somewhat sit comfortably in the Springfield neighborhood in the vertical dimension of the elevation of the houses. However, the footprint of the house is equal to the size of four lots either immediately across the street or adjacent to the house. I suppose it is a testament to horizontal emphasis in Wright’s elevation designs that the house fooled me into thinking it was (only) around 6,000 square feet; itself, a extremely large house (and perhaps the footprint of only the first floor without the accessory structure/courtyard to the rear is around this number). The more you move around the house, the more conscious you become of how out-of-scale the Dana-Thomas House is to the surrounding urban context in the horizontal dimension of the plan.

First floor plan for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Dana Thomas House in Springfield, Illinois, USA (Source: Wikipedia).
Dana-Thomas House in Springfield, Illinois from 4th Street (Photograph: Mark David Major).
Dana-Thomas House in Springfield, Illinois from sideyard (Photograph: Mark David Major).
Dana-Thomas House in Springfield, Illinois from interior courtyard (Photograph: Mark David Major).
Dana-Thomas House in Springfield, Illinois from interior courtyard (Photograph: Mark David Major).
Dana-Thomas House in Springfield, Illinois from interior courtyard (Photograph: Mark David Major).
Dana-Thomas House in Springfield, Illinois from interior courtyard (Photograph: Mark David Major).
Dana-Thomas House in Springfield, Illinois from East Lawrence Avenue looking toward 4th Street (Photograph: Mark David Major).
Detail of Dana-Thomas House in Springfield, Illinois side entrance from East Lawrence Avenue (Photograph: Mark David Major).
Dana-Thomas House in Springfield, Illinois from corner of 4th Street and East Lawrence Avenue at side elevation of the house (Photograph: Mark David Major).
Dana-Thomas House in Springfield, Illinois from corner of 4th Street and East Lawrence Avenue at front elevation of the house (Photograph: Mark David Major).
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