Urbanist Goodreads: What Else is Going Down Besides All This S**t?

 

Chuck Marohn isn't freaking out. Maybe I shouldn't either?
(Source: strongtowns.org)

NOTE: In the innocent days of the last decade, my Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan did a series of what he called Urbanist Goodreads, annotated bibliographies of writing on a particular topic. I dabbled in the format myself to analyze the impact of COVID on the future of cities; here's an example from June 2020. Now, with a runaway U.S. executive breaking the government for the purpose of retribution (Donald Trump) and/or amassing money and power (Elon Musk) and/or an ideological vision (the Project 2025 crew), and states like Iowa micromanaging localities whenever they feel like it, what is left for urbanism to think about? Quite a bit, it appears.

"Growth Ponzi Scheme Leaves Virginia Town with $34 Million Dilemma," Strong Towns, 6 February 2025

[Strong Towns grew out of planner-engineer Chuck Marohn's doubts about the rationality of some of the projects he was being hired to do. His doubts became a blog and podcast, which became an organization, which has become a movement with chapters ("local conversations") all over the world. Marohn spoke in Iowa City in July 2015.]

Strong Towns takes us this week to Purcellville, Virginia, a small town near the border with West Virginia, but not terribly far from Washington, D.C. The story reflects a theme that has been prominent throughout Strong Towns' decade-plus existence: a town can't afford to maintain infrastructure it had built when it was hopeful about growth. "I'm just saying the funds were there when the town was growing like crazy," says Liz Krens, the town's Director of Finance. Like a Greek tragedy, none of their current choices--borrow $34 million? defer maintenance?--is good. Maybe a federal grant would solve their problems, but counting on that is not responsible.

This week's Strong Towns posts also address the limitations of traffic cameras and a local group in Maine that resisted the state's plan to widen a highway through their town.

Robert Steuteville, "Hurricane-Ravaged City Bounces Back with New Main Street," Public Square: A CNU Journal, 4 February 2025

[Public Square is the online journal of the Congress for the New Urbanism, which has been promoting a return to compact, mixed-use development since they gathered in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1993. Their most recent conference was last May in Cincinnati. CNU's membership includes planners, architects, and local officials; I am none of these, but they let me in anyway.]

The lead story this week celebrates the recovery of Panama City, Florida, which won a Charter Award at the 2020 conference, following Hurricane Michael in 2018. The award-winning plan is now being enacted, centered on a restored Harrison Street, which has again become the heart of the city. With better design, street trees and slower vehicle traffic, along with a new central plaza, the core of the city has been restored to life. “There’s a growing collection of wedding photos on the circle on Harrison Avenue,” crowed lead designer Victor Dover. “No one was getting a wedding photo on the main street before.” Note that implementation was expedited by federal COVID relief funds. 

Other current Public Square stories include an urban boulevard replacing a freeway in Toledo, proposed mall redevelopment in Michigan, and a foundation specializing in wildfire recovery, as well as a post arguing for attention to housing supply and affordability in "15-minute city" projects.

Addison del Maestro, "I'm an Antisocial Urbanist Living in the Suburbs, Ask Me Anything," The Deleted Scenes, 4 February 2025

[Addison del Maestro writes about design and a whole bunch of other stuff from his base in suburban Virginia. He's Catholic by faith and conservative by politics, which makes for unique takes on urbanist issues.]

This reflective post starts with the irony that del Maestro identifies as an urbanist while living in a suburban community. "I’m not quite sure," he confesses, "how these abstract ideas I hold about housing and community and not putting up walls around places and not being exclusionary intersect with living in an actual place with actual characteristics with actual people who were “buying” those characteristics when they bought homes here." It's gotten to the point where he feels like arguing with visitors who admire his neighborhood! I can relate, doing my urbanist writing in a large-lot neighborhood with no commercial establishments for blocks. How much change can he (or I) advocate when most of our neighbors presumably prefer the current characteristics?

This week, del Maestro's wide-ranging blog also covers reuse of old buildings, eccentric product design, and materialism, as well as his own set of goodreads.

In 2018 I would take the Silver Line to McLean
for 1 Million Cups Fairfax

Ryan Jones, "Commuter Rail to Loudoun: The Next Chapter," Greater Greater Washington, 7 February 2025

[Greater Greater Washington is a website with an urbanist mission: "racial, economic, and environmental justice in land use, transportation, and housing." They focus on the D.C. area (which extends to Baltimore and sometimes Richmond). I've been personally very attached to Washington since my semester there seven years ago.]

Jones tells the story of founding a group to promote extension of metro Washington commuter rail service westward into the Virginia suburbs (maybe as far as Purcellville!). He discusses budgeting, positive effect on road traffic, and advantages over building out the Silver (Metro) Line. Their next steps is to speak to town councils in the region. "By building a consensus town by town, we hope to gain momentum to get an official feasibility study commissioned by Loudoun and Fairfax counties in partnership with state and regional agencies..."

Besides opinion posts, Greater Greater Washington also includes their "Breakfast Links" collection of local goodreads, urbanist news from other parts of the country (including a bicycling promotion program in Denver) and opportunities to get involved around the DC area.

Pete Saunders, "Why Call It 'The Rust Belt?'" The Corner Side Yard, 2 February 2025

[Pete Saunders is from Detroit, and now lives in Chicago. He is an important Midwestern voice in a movement that can overfocus on the fast-growing towns on the coasts. His attention to black and working class experiences of cities make his voice especially valuable.]

This piece is less about policy than about nomenclature. Sanders embraces rather than resents the term Rust Belt for what was once the industrial Midwest (think Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland and all those little cities in eastern Ohio, maybe Pittsburgh). It can symbolize what it could be, "a term roughly synonymous with the legend of the phoenix, the mythological bird that rises from the ashes of its deceased predecessor." Like London, which emptied out after the Romans left in the fifth century but in time became one of the leading cities of the world, the Rust Belt (or Lower Lakes, if you prefer) can rise from its knees and become something else entirely.

Stacy Mitchell's book

And there's more! 

• Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance was quoted extensively in a Washington Post article on the reslient role of small businesses in the American economy, despite apathy (at best) from national elected officials. (Did you know local restaurants now last slightly longer than the average small business start?) 
• The Active Towns podcast, hosted by John Simmerman, presents a video on a "bike bus" in Montclair Township, New Jersey. 
• Happy Cities reports on a survey in Seattle finding "a remarkable relationship between street edges, building facades and pro-social behavior," suggesting a role for city design in human sociability.  
• Kristen Jeffers's latest salutes Rev. Andrew Wilkes, a pastor in Brooklyn who shows the influence of faith on urban issues like gentrification.  
• Planetizen reports the California High-Speed Rail Authority anticipates running trains between coastal cities and the Central Valley in five to eight years.

So there ya have it--urbanists are thinking about urban stuff: infrastructure and how to pay for it, rebuilding downtown, small business, public transit, cycling, trains, and shaping values which I guess includes branding. None of them even referenced national political dysfunction.

Friends, it does my soul good to think about all these people thinking about how to improve their places. It takes considerable nimbleness to negotiate around personal differences, not to mention state and national interference. I hope that what doesn't kill us will in time make us strong. But I'm still concerned that conditions for building prosperous, resilient and inclusive communities are becoming harder each day. Keep the faith, I guess.

Book review: The 15-Minute City

 

Carlos Moreno, The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet (Wiley, 2024), xxii +276pp.

"The 15-minute City" has become a widely popular concept and widely used phrase, especially after it was adopted by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo to guide that global city's ongoing development. The phrase sprung from the mind of Carlos Moreno, a native of Colombia who is now professor of systems technology at the Sorbonne, when he was attempting to humanize his approach to technology-based city design.

Although I was a pioneer in the emerging field of "smart cities," I saw technology as a powerful lever but no longer as an end in itself. My definitive break with technology-centered approaches came in 2010, when I decided to turn to urban service design as an essential methodology for transforming our cities.... 

[Drawing on the work of Jane Jacobs] My approach has refocused on the design of urban services that meet the needs and aspirations of citizens, putting people at the heart of the debate and integrating fundamental thinking on the geography of time, rhythms, quality of life, and chronotopia--a spatio-temporal concept in which the intersection of place and time creates unique and dynamic experiences in a given environment. [Moreno 2024: 89]

The idea that resulted was that of a city "in which the essential needs of residents are accessible on foot or by bicycle within a short perimeter in high-density areas," or a somewhat larger perimeter in less densely populated areas (p, 14). By reducing the need to commute long distances in cars, the approach is intended to reduce human stress on the natural environment like climate change, but also to reduce the difficulty and time people spend getting places, and to improve individual quality of life and social connection. 

The first third of the book seats the idea in the history of western cities, as a response to the disruptive impacts of cars, Euclidean zoning, and most recently the coronavirus pandemic. These disruptions are familiar to anyone who studies cities, but the story does bear retelling. After 75 years of sprawl we find that "Proximity plays an essential role in lifestyle change and city transformation. The concept of the '15-minute city' and '30-minute territory' is at the heart of this new urban lifestyle..." (p. 13, italics mine). 

It sounds like urbanism! Moreno's multi-faceted approach is indeed similar to that of Jeff Speck, Charles Montgomery, and Jan Gehl (who wrote the forward to The 15-Minute City), as well as not-yet-famous me. Moreno's main contribution is the convenient metric, though at his Congress for the New Urbanism address last month he warned against overfocusing on the number 15.

Carlos Moreno at CNU, May 2024

As we approach mid-book, then, we're set up for a series of examples where the 15-minute city concept has been translated into policy. And we kind of get that. Beginning with Paris (chs 10-11), we go to Milan (ch 12), and then to Detroit (ch 13) and Cleveland (ch 14) in the US, then to Buenos Aires (ch 15), already an admirable array of cities in different situations and parts of the world. The array seems to be the entire story, though, because while we would like to know how cities overcame obstacles to achieve good outcomes (or in the case of Cleveland, which has just begun under Mayor Justin Bibb, what it plans to achieve), we pretty much just get long descriptions of issues and short lists of achievements: Buenos Aires replaced some of its excess of roadways with plantings (Calles Verdes, pp. 186-188); Sousse, Tunisia, adopted a comprehensive plan that included considerations of times and distances travelled, with positive results on a variety of measures (pp. 195-200); Melbourne plans to redevelop a failed mall site (pp. 208-209). Pleszbew, Poland, has built "buffer car parks linked to train and bus services" (p. 221), but I don't know what those are if they're somehow different from regular station parking lots.

When I think of my own town, I think of all the aspects of the problem I wish this book had addressed: How do you assess the problems and potential of your city? How do you overcome inevitable public and interest-group opposition? What are the obstacles to successful formulation and implementation of 15-minute-city-inspired policy? (Speck's book in particular does a much better job of this.) Once the policy is in place, what are some useful measures of success? What are some ways cities have responded to complex or changing facts on the ground? (I think of the presentation on the complicated history of  Barcelona's superblocks I heard this spring.) Some of these are considered in chapters 10 and 11 on Paris, but even then only to a small degree. I'd have preferred four meaningfully detailed cases to a dozen quickies.

At CNU last month, Moreno seemed baffled by the political outrage his viral phrase has inspired. (The first video that came up on an Internet search described 15-minute cities as "the new reservations.") A second edition of this book might address this opposition in a practical way. By "practical" I don't think you're going to convince auto manufacturers and oil companies to be cool, and there's really nothing to be done about the cultural attachment to a car-dependent lifestyle, which is intimately connected to climate denial. But as anyone knows who's engaged even a little with city development, people are more afraid than hopeful about any change that will affect them. Moreno can go on about "happy proximity," but many of us outside of big cities aren't used to any kind of proximity. In Iowa, I'm lucky if someone agrees to share a lap lane at the YMCA pool. One street south of mine, people got everyone to sign a petition against a sidewalk on the south side of the street, including 35 homes on the north side that already had a sidewalk. A new chapter that holds people's hands and assures them everything will not only be okay, but joyously so, and coaches advocates on how to talk to the anxious masses, would be a good addition.

Linin' up at Dunkin', November 2021:
How many of these drivers want to live in a 15-minute city?

Thinking about Cedar Rapids also illuminates why Moreno does not want to fixate on a number. There's more, as he would be the first to tell you, to purposeful walking and biking than measuring radii. According to Google maps, a 15-minute walk is about 0.7 miles. I live reasonably close-in, but all that's within that radius is an elementary school, a credit union, two dentists, a grocery store that's closing in a week, several churches, and two fabulous parks (Bever Park and Brucemore National Historic Site). 

Getting on a bicycle means 15 minutes is roughly equivalent to 3.0 miles, which expands my reach to all of downtown, Kingston Village, New Bohemia and Czech Village. Besides all the bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and museums--and hair salons, which New Bohemia has in spades--I am within three miles of the middle school and high school my boys attended, two Hy-Vee Grocery Stores, Bruegger's Bagels, CVS, Walgreen's, two hospitals, Coe College, Mount Mercy University, Cedar Lake (destination attraction in process), and the 16th Street Dairy Queen. When the casino comes, as currently seems inevitable, it will be within three miles as well. But in our town of "happy motoring" (phrase lifted from James Howard Kunstler), not every three mile bike trip is an advisable one. Some of those places require the non-driver to ford huge parking lots, and I won't be riding on Mount Vernon Road any time soon!

Mt. Vernon Road SE, fall 2024: getting in this zone requires a car

So, three cheers for the concept, although I won't be living in a 15-minute city any time, and one and a half cheers for the book.

Book review: City Limits

 

Megan Kimble, City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways (Crown, 2024)

I can't believe there was a day when people were like, you know what we should do? Tear down all the businesses and houses around our downtown. That seems smart. Let's do that.

--BETH OSBORNE, Transportation for America (Kimble 2024: 202)

This is an even better book than I expected. At its heart it is the story of grass-roots movements in three Texas cities--Austin, Dallas, and Houston--in opposition to Texas Department of Transportation plans to widen interstate highways through the centers of their towns. Those stories are well-told, including accounts of public hearings and interviews with participants on all sides. Results of their efforts were mixed, but demonstrated the importance of community input.

Megan Kimble (from her website)

Besides that, City Limits has two features that make it valuable to those of us who don't live in Texas. (Remarkably, I have not been to any of the three cities!) The first is to describe early in Part I the context in which the current controversies exist, that being the story of the Interstate Highway System. President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously championed that system, but explicitly as an inter-city road network. Apparently without his knowledge, the program aggressively included highways built through cities as well, including all three of the Texas cities discussed (see pp. 27-34). 

The intra-city highways typically obliterated many blocks of existing black neighborhoods and lowered the quality of what remained. This experience was seen with I-90/94 in Chicago, I-94 in Minneapolis-St. Paul, and probably your town as well. 

"Before" picture from Dan Ryan Expressway hologram
(my photo at National Museum of American History)

(In Cedar Rapids, without a substantial black population, I-380 plowed through a working-class white neighborhood, and its huge right of way remains an obstacle to development on the west side of the river.) She also discusses highway removals in San Francisco and Rochester, with possibly more to come.

The second feature of the book that is relevant to readers in and out of Texas is hearing directly from those affected by intracity highway construction and expansion; these conversations make up much of Part II. We meet Lockridge Wilson, whose Dallas neighborhood was cleaved by I-45, which he now uses to get to work; Elizabeth Wattley, who managed restoration of Dallas's historic Forest Theater before she found it in the path of I-45 expansion; Elda and Jesus Reyes of Houston, who rally their mostly Spanish-speaking neighborhood to defend their homes against I-45 expansion; Angel and Michael Leverett, who live in the Austin suburb of Kyle, reliant on I-35 while choosing employment that will somewhat minimize their commutes; and dozens more. Their stories add dimension to the policy problem, and though neither you nor I are likely to meet any of these people, there are stories just like theirs in the places where we live.

Berm view: 3rd St SW, looking up at I-380

Kimble concludes the book on a hopeful note, but there really are no clear signs of what the future will bring for intracity highways. We need to stop doing what we've gotten used to doing, as well as undoing some of the damage where we can. Their social and environmental costs are hard to ignore, and their financial costs are prodigious, though maybe not as visible as other areas of government budgets. ("I don't think federal taxpayers should be subsidizing the costs of [mass-transit] systems," Baruch Feigenbaum of the Reason Foundation tells a congressional hearing (p. 99), conveniently overlooking that highway infrastructure too is "subsidized.") Land costs, too: outside of the city, but the junction of Interstates 80 and 380 was recently redone to correct a serious problem with the original design, and the footprint of the new interchange is at least as large as the entire downtown area of Cedar Rapids including Kingston Village. (I have it 1.35 square km for the interchange... 

...1.3 square km for downtown-plus-Kingston including the river.)

However, the obstacles to change are huge. It seems expressways are one policy where powerful economic interests are at one with the cultural interests of the Republican party base. This is particularly true in Texas, where private motor vehicles are as sacred as teaching Christianity in public schools, opposition to abortion, closing the border, and free access to heavy weapons (see page 12 of the Texas Republicans' new party platform; for perspective on that platform, see Tumulty 2024.) Neither Texas Governor Greg Abbott nor Transportation chair J. Bruce Bugg have a background in transportation, but they know what they like, and it involves adding lanes (p. 9).  Heck, even in New York, there are limits to how much the interests of local residents can match up with those of commuters.

1960s highway protests in Washington, ultimately successful
(my photo at Anacostia Museum)

A recent Supreme Court ruling penned by Justice Samuel Alito (cf. Howe 2024), though it dealt with congressional districting, raises a lot of doubts about whether disparate racial impacts can stop highway expansion as they were in Houston, without an explicit statement from planners that the highway was intended to harm blacks. The costs we've sunk into building expressways also inhibit change: in the long run, public transit is more scalable and less harmful, but at present adding highway capacity is easier.

We've been making a mess of things for 75 years, and now we've built our cities and our lives around coping with it. The way forward is far from simple or clear, but Megan Kimble has given us a good introduction to the issues involved.

SEE ALSO: Dan Allison, "Lawsuits Against YOLO 80," Getting Around Sacramento, 4 June 2024

Joe Cortright, Driven Apart: How Sprawl is Lengthening Our Commutes and Why Misleading Mobility Measures are Making Things Worse (City Observatory, 2010)

Freeways Without Futures 2023 (Congress for the New Urbanism)

Can there be too much of a good thing?

Barcelona (from Wikimedia Commons)

I've never been to Barcelona--in fact, I've never been to Spain--but Barcelona, like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Paris, has emerged as a bucket list destination for urbanists. Not only does it have the massive but neighborly Sagrada Familia, an eye-popping Gothic Quarter, and at least 23 other wonders plugged by Earth Trekker, but in the mid-2010s a new city administration undertook an ambitious Urban Mobility Plan based on superblocks.

Superblocks were intended to improve quality of residential life and decrease the environmental impact of motor vehicles by routing vehicles to the exterior of neighborhoods. (See Kohlstedt 2017 for description and diagrams.) The idea was to take maybe nine square blocks, and restrict through traffic from the interior of that area, allowing more pedestrian and commercial activity on narrower park-like streets. 

Earlier superblocks had been effective but tended to produce rapid gentrification; the more aggressive approach taken by the new administration in 2015 seemed more haphazard and produced more pushback (Roberts 2019). The administration of Mayor Ada Colau recalibrated, incorporating more amenities as well as more consultation with the neighborhoods. Subsequent projects incorporated "everything we learned," Port of Barcelona President Lluis Salvado told Vox, so that in what "should have been a more hostile area... the implementation process was almost unanimously accepted" (Roberts again).

Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal

But all is not now blissful in Barcelona, reported Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal at this month's Midwest Political Science Association meeting in Chicago. Viladecans-Marsal is an economist at the University of Barcelona, among other appointments, and has been cited on City Observatory for a co-authored 2022 paper on induced traffic demand. Presenting a work in progress entitled "The Electoral Effects of Banning Cars from the Streets: Evidence from Barcelona's Superblocks," co-authored with Cèlia Estruch, Albert Solé-Ollé & Filippo Tassinari, she said the superblocks continued to show immediate local positive effects, but that the vehicle traffic they displaced were creating more problems around streets designated for through traffic. The experiences of people living along the throughways were so negative that it tipped the political balance of the city: Mayor Colau's party lost their Council majority, and the new Council announced a plan to undo the superblocks.

Viewed from the perspective of people on the throughways, the superblocks of Barcelona sound less idyllic and a lot more like... Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A lot of our houses in Cedar Rapids are built along streets with very low traffic, albeit without the public amenities, shops, and active use of the space that appeared in Barcelona. Our vehicles, doubtless like those in your town, are funneled onto arterials, which function a lot like the throughways around the Barcelona superblocks i.e. they're noisy, unpleasant, and periodically congested. The mess created by this approach to traffic engineering is carefully detailed by Chuck Marohn in chapter 6 of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer (Wiley, 2021).

Inclined as I am to despair anyway, it is easy to conclude that in our complicated world with all of its sunk costs and vested interests, we just can't have nice things. The whole MPSA panel on "International Governing Institutions," on which Viladecans-Marsal appeared, was full of fuel for such despair. Connor O'Dwyer of University of Florida and Vaclav Orcigr of Charles University reported on a well-funded Spatial Plan in the Czech Republic creating fertile ground for state exploitation, while Yooil Bae of Dong-A University reported on the Republic of Korea's failed attempt to restore a region's flagging fortunes by merging three cities into a megacity. Even where injustice and unproductivity are widely-acknowledged, as in the cases of interstate highways plowed through urban neighborhoods (Reimagining the Civic Commons 2024), the people who remain after the sacking now rely on the highway to get places.

Perhaps the lesson of the superblocks is not to proceed too quickly, that great big "game-changing" projects are likely to be rife with unintended consequences. Even when undoing massive auto-centric sacking of our cities, the best approach is to be slow and cautious, and to have a backup plan when things don't go as planned. (If I sound like a charter member of Strong Towns, it's because I am.) Incrementalism can be hard to stick to, though, when--as in Barcelona--the problems you're addressing are widespread, or when markets can move so much faster than your cautious self. 

Closing disclaimer: Residents of Barcelona will argue they are not in Spain, or if they are it's only under duress. I feel a song coming on...

I've never been to Catalonia/But if I go perhaps I'll see ya...

Pity Hoyt Axton's not still around to finish this.

Review essay: Urbanism for all?

 

Alex Krieger, City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present (Belknap/Harvard, 2019).

Stacy Mitchell, Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (Beacon, 2006).

A few years ago, I began a talk on urbanism by reading from the excellent novel The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker (Harper, 2013). The author describes in detail the golem's first encounter of late 19th century New York City, full of energy and community and poverty and garbage. I told the group that urbanism was more or less an effort to recapture the energy and community Wecker describes without the yucky stuff.

It seems urbanism is not the first movement in American history to try to pull this off. Most of Alex Krieger's prodigious book is a chronicle of hope, as a succession of dreamers takes advantage of the vast American continent, as well as ever-improving technology, to leave whatever mess they were in to seek economic and social opportunity (chs 1, 9, 12, 16, 18), contact with nature (chs 2, 6, 7, 13), better communities (chs 4, 5, 14, 15), or just some fresh air. These (predominantly white) Americans had big ideas of how they could somewhere produce a mode of living that provided the best of both worlds--be those individualism/community, culture/nature, stimulation/security, e.g.--without the yucky parts of existing arrangements. Existing cities were typically perceived as anti-nature, rushed, stressful, crowded, dirty, noisy, corrupt, and full of disease and poverty and crime. Also difference (ch. 3). 

Las Vegas's wide streets are for people who are going places

So successive generations of dreamers struck out for a new start, either individually or in like-minded communities. Krieger covers a bunch of urban design trends over the centuries, as well as profiles of indicator cities like Washington (ch. 10), Chicago (ch. 11), and Las Vegas (ch.16). He is gentle and sympathetic in his portrayals, dismissing reflexive snobbery (of the "what they wanted was stupid" variety) and cynicism ("it was stupid to want/hope for that"). He pays some but not a whole lot of attention to the continental vastness being dependent on ignoring the presence of Native Americans, or to the nonwhite minorities and poor whites who suffered the impacts of whatever actions were taken towards the next utopia.

Eventually, Krieger's tone turns critical. Late in this exhaustive history of American approaches to place design comes this hint at the author's overall message: When Thomas More coined the term Utopia, the U came from the Greek words for "good" and "no" (p. 336). By chapter 18, on the back-to-the-city movement of "yuccies" and younger retired people in the early 21st century, he is scoring what the utopians have produced: swaths of environmental destruction, isolation or displacement of less powerful poor and nonwhite groups, and hoarding of goods and opportunities. He cities a number of critics of gentrification, including Joel Kotkin and Peter Moskowitz, contrasting their findings with a 1931 quote from James Truslow Adams, who defined the American Dream as a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position (The Epic of America, pp.214-215, quoted on p. 344). Boy, is this ever not happening. (See Piketty 2014, Reeves 2017).

Finally, in chapter 19 ("Postscript"), he turns cautiously hopeful again. We can and must do better, as we've already striven to do, though not by leaving places and people behind to build a new city on a new hill. Rather, we must our places and their people get better. Like Richard Florida in The New Urban Crisis (Basic, 2017), he has a to-do list: 

1. sharing access to the abundance of America
2. minimizing inequality, especially by careful public policy investment choices
3. stewardship of the environment, especially by curbing excessive consumption
4. responsibility to a broad idea of common purpose/good

Now, that's my kind of urban idealism! It stands in contrast to displacement-by-gentrification, or to urban renewal (ch. 14).

Stacy Mitchell's occasionally anachronistic but still powerful argument describes another American would-be utopia: the massive "big-box" stores operated across America by massive chains like Home Depot, Target, and the empire that is Wal-Mart. (Frequent mentions of Borders, Blockbuster, and K-Mart are jarring, but the arguments remain current in the age of Amazon.) The chains' promised paradise is one of large quantities of low-cost consumer goods, which would be nirvana to people who identify primarily as consumers. Local governments are attracted to the promise of single-shot job creation. In chapter 2, she tackles "the jobs mirage," including a study by Kenneth Stone of Iowa State University that found Wal-Mart's first ten years in Iowa (1983-1993, at the end of which there were 45 superstores) corresponded with statewide losses of "555 grocery stores, 591 hardware and building-supply dealers, 161 variety stores, 88 department stores, 291 apparel stores, 153 shoe stores, 116 drugstores, 111 jewelry stores, and 94 lawn and garden stores," and all their jobs with them. The low costs that attract consumers (ch. 5) are illusory, too, based on loss leaders and temporary cuts to drive out competition. These putative consumer paradises come at costs to local tax bases, domestic manufacturing, local and global wages, the landscape, the environment, and so on.

Mitchell is one of America's foremost advocates for locally-owned small businesses. Happily she concludes on hopeful notes: how communities have (sometimes) successfully fought back against chains, and how small businesses have banded together to make themselves stronger. Her evidence is thorough, yet her writing remains passionate, which is a difficult combination for any writer. Any observation of the American landscape, however, will show the lessons of all the research she details have been imperfectly learned.

 

Marion, IA, Black Friday 2019

 

What we learned about us in the pandemic

Will more Americans vacation outdoors after the pandemic?

In the halcyon days that were the middle of the last decade, my Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan did a series of what he called Urbanist Goodreads... annotated bibliographies of writing on a particular topic. I am shamelessly stealing this format as a way of starting to sort through the vast array of writing on how the pandemic will affect the future of cities. Today's topic: the future of social life.

People relate to each other in all sorts of ways, of course, but social life is shaped by technology as well as law. The third places of yore whose loss Ray Oldenburg lamented (The Great Good Place [Paragon House, 1989]) were done in by interstate highways, single-use zoning, and big houses with prodigious home entertainment systems, among other things, even before the advent of social media. The sudden shutdown of regular life in March made people aware of patterns in their lives they might previously have taken for granted. If you're not commuting, going to sports events or performing arts events, going to church, hanging out in bars and coffeehouses, or attending meetings, you might suddenly feel the loss of a valued activity at the same time you feel liberated from other things.

In Iowa, we seem to be over the pandemic, even though the pandemic is not yet through with us. Liz Martin of the Gazette took a picture of a packed Lake MacBride beach last week. Precautions, schmecautions--wherever I go I'm in a minority wearing a mask, if not indeed the only one. But we have had two and a half months of restrictions, though nothing on the scale of the Northeastern U.S. I have missed coffeehouses. Though I can take out coffee, or make my own, there's nothing like sitting with a book or a friend while staff and customers do their things around you. I miss the performing arts, though--surprisingly for a lifelong Cubs fan--not sports so much. (The Cubs are on the downswing, though. Maybe I'd feel differently if I rooted for the White Sox or Cardinals.) I don't miss multiple nights out at meetings where people wanted me to do stuff. 

I think I've learned I should be frequenting more coffeehouses and performing arts events, and spending less time at sports arenas and meetings. Hey, we all need to contribute to the commonweal, but as Oscar Wilde said about socialism, "The trouble is it takes up all your free evenings." I've enjoyed my suddenly free evenings, and maybe I can defend some more of them once the lid comes off.

What will people rush back to after the pandemic? (Bars and beaches are definitely on Iowa's collective list.) What will they leave alone? How will new public health regulations or city design affect our choices?

Laura Bliss and Jessica Lee Martin, "Your Maps of Life Under Lockdown," City Lab, 15 April 2020

A huge collection of reader maps of their lives in the shadow of the pandemic. Readers report and depict greater awareness of nature, micro-level details of a built landscape constrained by lockdowns, and... better relations with neighbors. I hope they don't lose these when normal life returns.

Michael Wilson, "These Are the Things That New Yorkers Achingly Miss," New York Times, 9 May 2020

Various responses to this question add up to a city. Some major landmarks are included, as well as personal activities like working out at a gym or yoga studio, but there are also the signs of other, often unknown people that have been so abruptly removed: on the street, on the subway, on the ferry, at the hair salon, in line at the food cart. It is from these interactions that a city is built, and in time will be rebuilt.

Rebecca Renner, "Kids Are Having Pandemic Dreams Too," National Geographic, 11 May 2020

Children, like adults, are having lurid nightmares inspired by the pandemic and the resulting quarantine, which have brought "anxiety, loneliness, and lack of sleep." Will the nightmares, and the anxiety, persist? Psychologist Deirdre Bennett suggests some ways of inspiring "mastery" dreams of overcoming the dread.

Christian Cotroneo, "The Sharing Economy is Taking On a Whole New Meaning These Days," MNN, 1 May 2020

What do you do if you are out of something and a trip to the store is suddenly unappealing (or precluded by finances)? You borrow from neighbors, just like the old days, except there are now apps to help you make the connection. Of course, who knows where that toy or jar of peanut butter has been, but, Cotroneo figures, a book borrowed from a neighbor, rather than a public library, is probably a safer bet, having been passed around by fewer problematic hands. 

Sarah Lazarovic, "Circle Back to This Email," Minimum Viable Planet, 14 May 2020

Among other observations in this always pithy and uplifting weekly from Canada, she notes that the waste stream, already stressed by the loss of market for recycled materials, is getting swamped by excess packaging: COVID-19 fears mean everything now comes in a plastic bag inside a cardboard box inside a Hazmat suit. I suspect this feature will stick around for awhile, figuring that incentives to package goods "safely" will outweigh incentives not to stuff landfills.

Katherine Martinko, "What Will Post-Pandemic Travel Look Like?" Tree Hugger, 11 May 2020

The "urge to travel is hardwired into many humans," but the pandemic experience is likely to shift our modes and destinations outdoors and away from crowds. Expect more camping, canoe trips, skiing, fishing, and the like, along with usage of parks and wilderness areas. People are likely to shift from air to auto travel, and from hotels to home-sharing like Airbnb. She explains: While some people may be grossed out at the thought of staying in a private home where they don't know who's been there before... you're surrounded by fewer people than if you're in a hotel or resort, which means fewer germs. Speaking of hotels, another Tree Hugger post suggests they'll redesign to look and feel cleaner: less stuff in the rooms and more white (Alter 2020). 

Jeremy Smith, "Are Conservative Evangelicals Better Suited Than the Mainline to Withstand COVID-19?" Hacking Christianity, 26 May 2020

As many houses of worship, including mine, agonize over whether and when to return to in-person services, and some others push back against public health regulations, a United Methodist pastor asks which styles of worship are likely to endure in a post-pandemic world? Theater-style megachurches have the advantage of encouraging impersonality, albeit in crowds. Praise bands are safer to restart than traditional choirs or congregational hymn singing. But more conservative churches are playing a dangerous game restarting before it's safe: While mainline churches may have a problem with a difficulty to worship in the traditional ways, conservative evangelical churches will get their people killed [emphasis his], or at least lose credibility when they prioritize inflexible worship over sensible congregational care, informed by public health. [BN adds: A generation ago, I would have said that more evangelical and pentecostal churches would have the advantage of intensity i.e. a lot of traditional worshipers just won't return when services restart. I'm not sure that advantage is still true, however.]

I miss informal gathering at coffeehouses
(here, the Early Bird, which managed the best-timed
going-out-of-business ever in early March 2020)

The economy--macro and micro--after the pandemic

Still running: Iowa Running Co. in May 2020

In the halcyon days that were the middle of the last decade, my Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan did a series of what he called Urbanist Goodreads... annotated bibliographies of writing on a particular topic. I am shamelessly stealing this format as a way of starting to sort through the vast array of writing on how the pandemic will affect the future of cities. Today's topic: the future of the economy and work.

The economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic has been huge in the short-term, and may continue huge in the medium-term. The May 2020 report from the Congressional Budget Office forecasts an impact on real gross domestic product at the end of 2020 of negative 7.6 percent, which doesn't struggle back to zero until the end of 2030. GDP is a blunt measure of economic strength, but it certainly indicates tough times for many individuals; state governments have also seen substantial lost income and sales tax revenue (Dadayan 2020).

We began this decade with a bunch of economic questions, even in a long bull market: Can the American economy provide careers and opportunities for all our citizens? (After a ten year bull market, a quarter to a third of Americans were financially fragile, Watkins 2020.) Can governments at all levels find some degree of financial stability? Is ever-rising economic inequality a problem in itself, a symptom of a systemic flaw, or both? Now these are joined by others: Was there a better set of policy responses that could have forestalled some of this damage? (Backward-looking, I know, but possibly useful for next time?) Will there be jobs for everyone who needs one? Will some areas be disinvested as they were after the 1960s? Is there anything government can do at any levels to lessen pain and/or increase resilience? And how will the nature of work change?

"How Government Jobs Programs Could Boost Employment," Urban Institute, 6 May 2020

The liberal think tank calls for government job creation to accelerate the recovery, although "Many of these jobs will come back as people return to normal life" anyway. Government efforts could include public works jobs, improvements to the unemployment insurance program, and subsidies for private-sector employers, either generally or targeted at certain areas or sectors. The choice of futures seems to be a bleak 2021 with familiar-looking recovery thereafter, or intense government involvement with intriguing but unstated possibilities for the long-term future of work.

Kirston Capps, "The Rent is Getting Paid. How?" City Lab, 8 May 2020

May rent payments are by and large getting made, which is something of a miracle. The various shutdowns have thrown a lot of uncertainty at people's financial situations, particularly those with little savings and/or more vulnerable to job loss. The pandemic will seemingly last longer than the federal unemployment insurance and stimulus payments will. Renters' income is one link on a brittle chain that includes the businesses that would hire them and the landlords who depend on their payments for income and maintenance. The article quotes Rutgers University law professor Rachel D. Godsil: "Even [government relief] plans with the best of intentions only defer the problem." Are we heading for a rental housing crisis, then?

Texas, for example, had halted evictions (by judicial action) in March; that ban was lifted May 26, though some local protections remain (Garnham 2020). The article continues: "The number of people who could be impacted by lifting the eviction moratoriums is not known because there's no data available yet to understand who is covered by the patchwork of regulations in the state."

Kim Hart, "Federal Coronavirus Relief for Cities is Still Uncertain," Axios, 14 May 2020

Cities and states face dramatic financial shortfalls in the wake of the coronavirus; the main driver is, depending on your perspective, either lost revenue and increased obligation in this calamity, or irresponsible spending and obligations taken on before the virus hit. This controversy is playing out at the federal level as politicians debate a massive aid package. In any case, the amount state and local governments need in the next two years in order to save their credit totals to hundreds of billions of dollars; without that money there will be immediate impacts on public employment as well as senior living, mass transit, and higher education services. 

The Wall Street Journal reports state and local governments cut 1 million positions in April 2020. A study by a Harvard economist estimates a $1.50-2.00 negative impact on the American economy for every dollar states and localities cut (Harrison 2020 [paywall] via Daily Deduction). Where does the money come from, if not from the national government? Tax increases large enough to make a difference seem unlikely (Zaretsky 2020).

Some towns will not survive as cutbacks are passed down the federal ladder, writes Chuck Marohn in "We're In the Endgame Now for Small Towns" (Strong Towns, 1 June 2020). Analyzing the budget of his hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota, Marohn finds locally-generated revenue accounts for slightly more than half of the town's 2020 expenditures; removing debt obligations from the table actually makes it less than half. "Brainerd is a ward of the state," he concludes, and worries what will happen when the state government retrenches in the wake of the pandemic and its attendant financial contraction. Smaller towns are in even more perilous shape; large cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul are in better condition but are also cautioned not to risk their prosperity. Writing from Wichita, Russell Arben Fox (2020) argues that the old way of approaching local budgets is more dangerous than ever now.

Lloyd Alter, "Will the Office Be Killed by the Coronavirus?" TreeHugger, 5 May 2020

Like many white collar workers, I've spent the last two months working from home, and it has its advantages and disadvantages. So does office work. Do I hanker to return to my college office? Well, I have been showing up there once a week; by prior arrangement, my colleagues are elsewhere. Alter provides the guidelines of one design firm, Bergmeyer of Boston, Massachusetts, which contain (by my count) 17 rules for the conscientious employee to follow in addition to doing their actual job. Alter suggests that in the shadow of the coronavirus there are even more disadvantages to office work and the advantages are hard to take advantage of. It will be interesting to see, he muses, how many people are really, really desperate to get out of the house and how many have decided they would rather keep working from home. But do employees really get to choose? [I hear that employees are now finding all those meetings were wastes of time. Well, guess what? We knew that already... but we weren't the ones calling the meetings!] Maybe it's different for designers, but a lot of our employers own our asses and will put them wherever they want them, particularly if the burden of keeping things sanitary can be put on the employee as well.

Indeed, says Washington Post columnist Helene Olen ("Telecommuting is Not the Future," Washington Post, 21 May 2020), employers in the long run "will likely remember that money spent on real estate is often money well spent" because of better collaboration and better control. Workers, too, might find working-at-work means better work-life separation and feeling more connected/included.

The coronavirus causes some second looks at the fashion for "open" offices, especially after nearly half of workers in a Seoul call center caught the virus in February, but probably will result in revision not abandonment, writes Sarah Holder ("Even the Pandemic Can't Kill the Open-Plan Office," City Lab, 14 May 2020). Expect more space between employees, fewer client drop-ins, smaller or virtual meetings, modular furniture and room dividers, and new air filtration systems, rather than a sudden outbreak of walls.

When I do return to teaching this fall, how will it work? Dr. Wendy Bashant, a former Coe colleague spending the year at Jiaotong University in China, reports on that institution's re-opening last week: hand-washing stations and hand sanitizer everywhere, check-in tents, temperature-taking security gates, students required to stay on campus, social distancing regulations with printed and verbal coaching... but mingling during breaks hard to manage. Can American students behave even that well? I'm thinking about:

• What am I supposed to do if a student in my class does not abide by social distancing practices?
• How are we going to manage access and egress to classrooms and buildings?
• Is Marketing going to put something stupid on my face shield?

These are surely "first world problems," in that I have the luxury to worry about stuff like this instead of how will I eat and where will I live? But few people are truly shielded from economic pain; it gets to us eventually, we're more connected than we think, and we're all better off when the system works for everyone. 

City design after the pandemic

Czech Village, May 2020: Where to pee in the post-pandemic world?

In the halcyon days that were the middle of the last decade, my Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan did a series of what he called Urbanist Goodreads... annotated bibliographies of writing on a particular topic. I am shamelessly stealing this format as a way of starting to sort through the vast array of writing on how the pandemic will affect the future of cities. Today's topic: city design.

The Urbanist movement in city design has had widespread influence in cities around the world. In my town, the core has eliminated one-way streets, sidewalks have been added to neighborhoods that had been without them for decades, there's a much more extensive network of bike lanes and trails, and two years ago we adopted a form-based zoning code for at least a small part of the city. (On the other hand, we still go in big for large-lot subdivisions, franchises, and shopping plazas on four-lane stroads.) Urbanism seeks, for a variety of reasons, to bring people into closer contact with each other.

All of a sudden, we are in a time when closer contact is the friend of the virus and the enemy of public health. How does that get figured into design? Can we still have street life and third places, or must we (for health or consumer demand reasons) spread out again? How can we have a functioning city while avoiding infections? The following pieces range from anticipating urbanist adaptations to the pandemic to deep levels of concern.

Adie Tomer and Lara Fishbane, "Big City Downtowns Are Booming, But Can Their Momentum Outlast the Coronavirus?" Brookings, 6 May 2020

Mainly an analysis of census data showing continued residential growth in downtown areas of large cities, defined as the central business district and surrounding neighborhoods, and whether this phenomenon can be extended to other neighborhoods in the city--for an extreme example, Chicago's downtown population has grown fivefold since 1980, but the county in which it's located has lost population since 2000--and/or to downtown areas of smaller cities. They conclude, though, by noting the need for cities everywhere to "assuage fears during the coronavirus crisis and build confidence that denser neighborhoods are not threatened by future pandemics." They think they can do this, as the cities' superior infrastructure and concentration of assets will continue to attract residents and businesses, and they have always shown resilience through past crises (citing Campanella and Vale 2020).

Kim Hart, "Coronavirus Derails Plans for Smart City Projects," Axios Cities, 14 May 2020

Since it seems the coronavirus will be with us for awhile, might tech help us manage and sustain the social restart? Maybe not, because projects will cost money cities don't have, and because anything that smacks of monitoring people raises red flags. Sidewalk Labs scrapped a project in Toronto (Hart cites Daly 2020), and survey respondents show a marked ambivalence toward contract tracing if it involves using cellphone data (Hart cites Ipsos 2020). Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff argues the pandemic will create more need for smart cities, and his company is looking at other projects where they could work with local investors to implement some of the features proposed in Toronto (Kiger 2020).

Adie Tomer and Lara Fishbane, "Coronavirus Has Shown Us a World Without Traffic. Can We Sustain It?" Brookings, 1 May 2020

National and local data show that use of motor vehicles dropped dramatically during the various shutdowns around the country. (In the Cedar Rapids area, driving dropped by more than 2/3 between March 1 and April 24, but by one measure has bounced back since then.) Traffic as well as air cleared, particularly in areas with (a) early shutdowns, (b) high concentrations of information and management workers, and (c) Democratic-leaning politics. We can't survive long with the economy shut down, of course, but can we make some changes to preserve some of the benefits of low traffic? They suggest flexible work schedules and more telecommuting, replacing the excise tax on gasoline with fees for vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and redesigning streets to promote cycling, walking, and public transportation (plugging the advocacy group Smart Growth America). (See also CBC Radio 2020, which includes an interview with urbanist Brent Toderian.)

But there will be pushback, notes Ben German ("Coronavirus is Reshaping Urban Mobility," Axios, 21 May 2020). There's already evidence that driving levels are bouncing back from April's troughs in a big way, as work resumes and people are anxious about the cleanliness of public transportation. "Many transportation planners are concerned that the combination of reduced capacity, as well as fears of using transit in a pandemic world, will result in a shift towards personal vehicles," said Regina Clewlow, CEO of Populus, which provides transportation data analytics to local governments. It's up for grabs (citing Zipper 2020). [My take: Cities like New York, London, and Paris, as well as tech-heavy cities in the western U.S., have strong reasons to keep cars at bay; in other places I expect the car to regain dominance.] 

Another alternative to public transportation is cycling. Electric bicycles are selling fast as another, but, again, while a few large cities are converting significant road space to cycling, they are the exceptions (Ricker and Hawkins 2020).

Starr Herr-Cardillo, "How Designers are Remaking Spaces for Our New Socially Distanced Lives," WHYY, 9 May 2020

Architects are looking at retrofitting buildings to make them "COVID-19-ready," including long-term issues with schools and offices as well as immediate work on emergency sites like hospitals and food banks. The goal is to make public spaces "more flexible and adaptable," including more modular features.

Trish Riggs, "Confronting COVID-19: Renewing the Focus on Resilience and the Future of Cities," UrbanLand, 4 May 2020

Highlights from an Urban Land Institute webinar, "Resilience in the New Normal," featuring an investment manager, a green energy consultant, and developer and author Jonathan Rose. Toward the end of the event, Rose suggested that residences and workplaces would be relatively easy to adapt to public health and public confidence, but the stickler would be transportation: Ultimately, I could see this resulting in more use of autonomous vehicles--semiprivate or shared vehicles that come on demand and move along set courses. That would give people a sense of security and privacy with the efficiency of a mass transport system. Marc Wilsmann, the investment manager, predicted that "Once this is behind us," people will continue to value the advantages of dense urban areas. Panelists also discussed the likelihood of greater attention to air quality in buildings, spreading out workers within office by time as well as space, and--possibly counter-intuitively--continued efforts towards environmental sustainability. [Thanks to Grant Nordby for sending this article my way.]

 

AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse, New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times (Polity, 2017)

Written before the pandemic, but with additional resonance now, academic authors look at the challenges facing cities in Africa and Asia, focusing particularly on Kinshasa, Jakarta, and Cape Town. Their challenges are much the same as those facing Western cities, but with weaker institutions, greater extremes of wealth and poverty, and the likelihood of continued explosive population growth. Individuals, unofficial groups, and even governments are described as scrambling and improvising for whatever goods they can acquire in a shifting, dangerous environment. The authors decry top-down solutions, especially those imposed by outsiders ("capital"), and advocate inclusive policy making, multi-faceted solutions (i.e. don't focus on a single silo like housing) and "experimentation" in preference to "a clean slate." They eschew statistical data, perhaps understandably, but the prose is often difficult, particularly for an audience of practitioners. More narrative might have helped accessibility; having read Trevor Noah's Born a Crime (Spiegel and Grau, 2016) helped me.

John Surico, "Need More Outdoor Public Space? Maybe Cities Already Have It," City Lab, 6 May 2020

Where do you go to get some air when every place you go is crowded? This is particularly a problem in bigger cities. The writer suggests most of those cities have golf courses, cemeteries, parking lots, and school campuses that the public could be encouraged to use, and those that are already open could extend their hours later into the night. This seems like a short-term problem for the pandemic, but how short-term is the pandemic going to be? London's walking and cycling commissioner, Will Norman, is expecting multiples of current levels of both through the summer and maybe into the fall. Moreover, "We need to come out of this crisis in a radically different way." Can the public claim more open urban space, and keep it?

Other places might follow Miami's lead in turning golf courses into housing, or that of a Washington, D.C. area developer who has been making townhouses out of retail space (Bivins 2020).

Lloyd Alter, "Rethinking Public Washrooms After the Coronavirus," TreeHugger, 4 May 2020

Pictures of successful urbanism feature crowded outdoor cafes and places to walk dogs, but sooner or later one confronts the banal need to urinate or defecate, and where are the pictures of that? When I spent a sabbatical semester writing downtown a few years ago, I (eventually) found a total of three restrooms that weren't locked. What happens, Alter wonders, when some restroom owners go out of business, and others weary of the task of keeping their cleanliness at pandemic standards. He advocates a national program of self-cleaning restrooms: Montreal's self-cleaning public toilets cost a quarter of a million dollars each (citing CBC News 2018). On the other hand, cities are building highways that cost billions; there is always money for that. 

Can parking lots in the city be converted to more recreational uses?