Out of the mouths of babes

Source: Wikimedia commons

For a second year, my Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan and I took the urbanist message to America's youth, specifically sixth graders from Roosevelt and Wilson Middle Schools in Cedar Rapids participating in the Kids on Course program at Coe College. Last time we asked them about changes they'd like to see in the Mound View neighborhood--I'm not sure we knew then that none of them lives near the Mound View neighborhood--resulting in a gaudy but nonetheless energetic list of walkable potential attractions.

This year we asked them about mobility, specifically how confident these 12-year-olds feel navigating the city on their own, and what changes to street design might encourage them. (Ben introduced us to Streetmix, an intriguing website on which you can design your own street features. They drew their own ideal streets, which were adorable and which I would be able to share with you except that I didn't think to collect them. They did tend to feature protected bike lanes, whether because we unconsciously suggested them or not.

What we did collect were surveys we used to start them thinking about the subject. We had five students, which perhaps reflects that the compelling nature of urban design has not yet caught fire among our city's 12-year-olds. Three were from Wilson, two from Roosevelt. There were four boys and one girl, all white except for one boy who came to the U.S. from Congo. Your humble blogger can tell you that, at 12, he took the design of his town for granted, just the way it was, and assumes that these young people have, too--that is, until they landed in a classroom with certain troublemakers who attempted to teach them to think critically about their streets!

(Source: Roosevelt school website)

Roosevelt (above, recently renamed Roosevelt Creative Corridor Business Academy) and Wilson were built in the 1920s and serve the near west side of the city. Their attendance areas are fairly compact for Cedar Rapids middle schools, and are a mix of older neighborhoods with grid street patterns and some newer subdivisions with cul-de-sacs. We didn't ask about students' neighborhoods or specific distance from school.

(1) How do you usually travel to school? Bus-1 Car-2 Walk-1 Car or Walk-1

(2) Do you ride a bicycle for fun? To get places? Both? Fun-2 Both-1 Yes-1 Not really-1

(3) Can/do you walk or ride your bike to school? Why or why not?
Walk, because my mom don't want my bike stolen or broken!
I can walk to school but not ride my bike there because it is [too hilly?]
I walk
No, because it's to far and my parents wont let me
No, I live far from Wilson

(4) Can/do you walk or ride your bike to your friend's house?
Yes, I walk because we live 3 houses down from each other
Yes, both
I walk
I can if I know where they live
No

(5) Could you run an errand to the store for your family, if they asked?
Yes-2
No-2 [One added: "I cant run a errand to a store because they are too far away"]
I don't know

(6) Would you ride the city bus by yourself?
Yes-2 [One added: "it sounds like fun"]
No-2
I do not no

(7) Is there a place you like to go in town where you have to rely on others to take you?
Lindale Mall
Practice, restaurant, shop
No or "not relly"-3

(8) If your town could change one thing to make it easier for you to get around on your own, what should it be?
More rules
A train
Yes
Nothing
I do not no

What do we learn from this tiny lot of surveys, other than spelling may be a lost art and/or that I am either easily amused or patronizing? First of all, none of the children shared our experience of independent movement at that age. Ben (in the 1990s, in Albuquerque, New Mexico) and I (in the 1970s, in Wheaton, Illinois) both remember spending our summers riding our bikes all over the place. They do not do this. Secondly, though this was probably the first time they thought much about city design, they are very aware of this limitation.

Nearly two decades ago, Andres Duany and his co-authors described how suburban design negatively impacts children:

Dependent always on some adult to drive them around, children and adolescents are unable to practice at becoming adults. They cannot run so simple a household errand as picking up a carton of milk. They cannot bicycle to the toy store and spend their money on their own. They cannot drop in on their mother at work. Most cannot walk to school. Even pickup baseball games are a thing of the past, with parents now required to arrange car-pooling with near-military precision, to transport the children at the appointed times. Children are frozen in a form of infancy, utterly dependent on others, bereft of the ability to introduce variety into their own lives, robbed of the opportunity to make choices and exercise judgment. (Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream [New York: North Point Press, 10th anniversary edition, 2010], 116-117)

There is also the question of enabling routine activity to improve physical fitness.

Despite Cedar Rapids's efforts to improve the walkability of downtown and the core neighborhoods, more consideration of the development pattern of the town as a whole is needed to equitably address the "8-80" crowd, i.e. children and the elderly. Note that the students' comments reflected concern primarily with distance to places, and secondarily to secure storage, moreso than street infrastructure. Where do we build schools? Housing developments? Shopping areas?

Finally, who knows why Ben and I are so nerdy about urban development? But surely one factor for both of us was that we learned from a young age that our mobility was not dependent on driving or being driven in cars. Though both of us are now auto-owners, we continue to use a variety of transportation modes to get around our city, and look for ways that our city can better accommodate everyone.

Today's independent walkers and bike riders will be better prepared for the needs of the 21st century.

SEE ALSO: Spencer Gardner, "Strength Test #6: Can Children Safely Walk or Bike in Your Town?" Strong Towns, 5 April 2017

ON THIS BLOG:
"Talking About Walking," 4 November 2013
"What is a Stroad?" 3 April 2014

My letter to the first-years

This fall I'm teaching a course in Coe's first-year program called The Future of the City. I don't know the students' backgrounds, of course, so we'll start with the basics: Suburban Nation and a very good reader on "Urban Society" compiled by Annual Editions. If I can get them into some of the excellent urbanist blogs out there over the course of the semester, I'll consider it a success. If they join Strong Towns, I'll consider it a triumph.

The program jump-starts with some summer reading. This year, for the first time, faculty were given a list of four books from which to choose; I chose Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehesi Coates as the most relevant to the topic of urbanism. Little did I know how timely it would prove to be.

Last week we faculty got our provisional class rosters. I have 14 students so far, with one or two last-minute types expected later. Now I know their names and home states (6 IA-2 IL-AZ-CA-FL-MO-TX-WI), but not much else. We were asked to write a letter to the class. Given last week's tragedies, my letter was less chatty than usual. This is what I wrote:

July 11, 2016

Welcome to Coe! And welcome to the first-year seminar class, The Future of the City. Thank you for making it one of your top four choices. I came to the study of cities out of my study of American politics, as well as an interest in places, which was the subject of my previous FYS. Cities of all sizes are some of the most interesting and challenging places on Earth!

This week we’ve seen one version of the future of the city: police shootings on back-to-back days in Baton Rouge and suburban St. Paul, followed by a sniper attack on police in Dallas that left five dead and seven injured. That version sees each of us in more-or-less constant battle threatened by whoever we encounter particularly if they seem dangerously different. This version features a lot of conflict, leading inevitably to violence. People protect themselves as well as they can, and hope for the best.

There’s also been another version of the future of the city on display, albeit hasn’t gotten as much attention. This one also features a lot of conflict, but it’s conflict tempered by recognition of each other’s common humanity. That enables a conversation about seeking solutions, working towards common goals like peace and prosperity, and how we’re going to live together in the space we share. That too was on display in Dallas, at the protest rally that the sniper attacked, where blacks and whites, civilians and police talked across their differences and helped each other to safety.

I bring to the study of cities a few assumptions, all of which I freely admit are arguable: the nature of the global economy makes individual economic opportunity more challenging even as we need it to sustain our communities; environmental realities increasingly limit our ability to access and use resources (like any source of energy); government finances at all levels are so constrained that suburban development can’t continue to be built and maintained on the scale of the last two generations; but diversity in its many dimensions can be a source of strength if we as a species can learn to embrace it. The bottom line assumption is that Americans are probably going to live more compactly in the next 75 years than they have in the last 75, partly out of choice, but partly out of necessity.

So what do we do? I don’t have all the answers, or even very many of them, but am fascinated and perplexed by the questions, and I hope that they will intrigue you as well. I’ve chosen a couple of texts that cover a lot of the basic issues, and which should get some good conversations started, not to mention inspire your own explorations through paper-writing and giving presentations. [I don’t know what your high school experiences have been, but college in general relies more heavily on reading and discussion of text than on memorizing the truth. Back in the day I was very good at memorizing the truth, so I had some adjustments to make when I got to college… maybe you will, too. Anyway don’t expect me to do all the talking.]

Which leads me to the summer reading: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehesi Coates (Speigel & Grau, 2015). You should buy the book, or borrow it from your local public library, and read it before you get to campus. It’s short but tough and timely, an unflinching look at contemporary America written by a black father of a teenage son (who also happens to be a columnist for The Atlantic Monthly). For some of us, Coates’s arguments will be alien; for others they might be screamingly obvious. Read it—but don’t, in spite of its brevity, try to read it in one or two sittings--and see what you think. We’ll spend the first couple class sessions talking about some of the themes he raises. He doesn’t bear as directly on cities as what we’ll read later, but he raises some important issues. You don’t have to agree with everything he says, but it’s important to listen (visually?) and respond.

Another short-but-powerful book I read this summer is Tribe by Sebastian Junger (Twelve, 2016). Junger looks at the way we design, build and live in our places from the perspective of troops returning from a war zone. He notes that American veterans are diagnosed with PTSD at far higher rates than our allies, and wonders if our historic emphasis on individualism affects the design of our places such that it leads naturally to isolation rather than the close connection we might experience in a military unit in danger.

I’ve read other books, too… But you want to know about college!! So here’s some college stuff, starting with your other courses. We will choose those once you’re on campus, and by “we” I mean mostly you with some help from me. In addition to being the instructor for your FYS, I will also serve as your academic advisor during your first year at Coe. We will meet individually during orientation to make out a schedule for your other courses for the Fall term. The choices will be yours, but I will make sure that we put together a solid program for your first semester. 

We’re going to be spending a lot of time together this fall. In addition to having seminar four times a week, our class will participate in cultural activities throughout the semester, starting during orientation. To help first years acclimate to their college experience, every FYS is assigned a College Adjustment Peer (CAP) who will assist you as you make your way through the labyrinth of college life. Our CAP is Hanna Koster, a junior Physics major. She was a CAP leader for a different class last fall and is looking forward to meeting all of us. We also have the services of two consultants from the Coe Writing Center, Marissa Bouska and Allison Bryan.

Speaking of writing, you should have received a link to a questionnaire from the Writing Across the Curriculum program about your experience as a writer. Please respond! It will help them shape their programming for the coming year.

So, again, welcome to Coe and to the class on The Future of the City! Enjoy the rest of your summer, and I’ll see you in six short weeks. In the meantime, if you have any questions, I’ll be here all summer so send them my way!

Bruce F. Nesmith

Joan and Abbot Lipsky Professor of Political Science

New York City, 1979 (Source: Flicker. Used without permission.)

Gleanings from the New Urbanism

The New Urbanism is a movement in city design that seeks to enhance the livability of cities while keeping an eye on issues of sustainability. I first encountered the term when the town of Seaside, Florida (designed by the team of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk) got a lot of attention. Seaside is a development that is redolent of traditional small towns. Columbia, Maryland, is another example. My first impression was that this movement is well-intentioned, lovably idealistic, and relevant to no one except mobile idealistic rich people.

Swiped from seasidefl.com

Since then I've read a good bit about the New Urbanism, particularly this semester with my sense-of-place research. I am happy to report that it is much more than a passing fancy; it is a way of thinking that is broadly applicable, even to well-established localities. The following is a synthesis, drawing heavily on the books referenced at the end of the post.

The core problem that the New Urbanism addresses is sprawl, from which numerous other evils spring. Sprawl occurs when a metropolitan area develops over a large area, relying on low-density housing developments, located far from places to work, connected by vast networks of highways. Atlanta, Houston and Los Angeles are probably the most famous loci of sprawl, but it's plenty visible in older cities like Chicago, and certainly has occurred albeit on a smaller scale in Cedar Rapids.

Scottsdale AZ (Wikimedia creative commons)

Sprawl has happened because since the 1940s Americans have assumed there will be eternal flows of cheap oil. Lower up-front costs, along with promises of low crime and privacy, have made suburban living attractive, and developers and suburban government officials and the highway lobby have been very willing accomplices. But the whole process has been made possible by very bad policy decisions by the national government, which has subsidized the building of large homes through unlimited tax deductions for home mortgage interest, energetic highway construction and a transportation aid formula that pays states based on the raw amount of vehicle miles traveled. These policies may have made sense at some time, but they have long since become dysfunctional.

The evils of sprawl are, as I said, numerous: traffic congestion and air pollution, highway deaths and injuries, waste of taxpayer dollars, individual spending on transportation, and disinvestment in core cities. The last has meant poverty and marginalization for those unable to follow their better-off neighbors out of urban (and older suburban) ghettos. Society loses from the lack of public spaces or time to spend in them: people have less contact with people different from themselves, including those who live nearby, spending time isolated in their cars, or with similar and like-minded friends ("gated communities of the mind," in Douglas Calthorpe's phrase). Individual rationality is collective irrationality, and then the individuals find themselves on an accelerating hamster wheel with no way to get off.

Addressing these problems requires shifting our policy focus to metropolitan regions and individual neighborhoods. Metropolitan problems need to be handled by metropolitan governments with the ability to make decisions (highways, urban growth and urban service boundaries) in the best interests of the whole region, not just of individual municipalities. Zoning in particular needs to change, allowing for integrated planning, and ditching the current system which require physical separation of different uses and ridiculous amounts of parking while indifferent to how a place looks and operates.

Their most intriguing recommendations have to do with how neighborhoods should look. The "traditional neighborhood" idea common to New Urbanism thought consists of streets that are walkable and human scaled (narrow so they're safe for bicycles and pedestrians, architecturally pleasant), diverse in population, varied in uses, and shaped around public spaces ("centers") that are meaningful and memorable. These centers provide loci for the "everyday and sometimes random casual meetings that foster a sense of community" (Calthorpe and Fulton ch 2). Many places should be reachable in a five-minute walk. Walkable and bikeable streets should support an appropriately-scaled system of public transit (Calthorpe and Fulton ch 9).

Revitalized cities would be able to provide the advantages of "urbanism" without miserable areas of concentrated poverty. People who wanted different kinds of lifestyles would have different options, but without incentives to push ever-outward. More people could get to work, shop, recreation and back home with a reasonable amount of time and effort, without destroying the atmosphere and depleting resources. More contact between people might well bring a greater sense of common purpose and common destiny.

All the authors recognize that there are powerful forces arrayed against attainment of these goals. Wealthy interests are heavily invested in the current system, and individualism is everywhere rampant. Imagining trying to convince Naperville not to sprawl into Will County, or to do some infill, is enough to convince one of the hazards of this project. Then imagine trying to convince Naperville that its destiny is any way tied to that of 63rd Street in Chicago (other than keeping it as far away as possible). The authors are, thankfully, politically realistic, and offer some ideas about how to persuade. (Hester is particular puts a great deal of emphasis on inclusive participation, but they all do to some extent.) They remain convinced that we don't have the resources or the public funds to sustain sprawl, and that communities cannot flourish with so much of their population miserable and marginalized.

In future posts I hope to illustrate some of the specific aspects of the New Urbanism, as well as some of the challenges in making them come alive.

SOURCES

                Calthorpe, Peter, and Fulton, William. The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl. Washington: Island, 2001.

     Duany, Andres; Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth; and Speck, Jeff. Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: North Point, 2000.

         Hester, Randolph T. Design for Ecological Democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

    Kelbaugh, Douglas S. Repairing the American Metropolis: Common Place Revisited. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002.