Cycling in New Belgrade

 

Another important linkage is bicycling and walking. Currently, walking captures 24% while bicycle captures only 1% of people traveling in urban areas of the city. Given the relative flat terrains outside the city centers, bicycle use should be encouraged. The Masterplan places importance for bicycle network expansion but provides few details. To use limited resources efficiently, investments in bicycle lanes can focus on linkages to transit stations and parking systems. Transit services can capture bicyclers who can ride 2-3 km to a transit station while walking may be limited to a 500m radius. Biking and walking should be well-integrated with public transport planning. Bicycle sharing should be explored to create a new IT venture as well as to increase its share as a mode of public transit. --World Bank Group, Towards a Transit Oriented Development Approach for Belgrade (2018)

As I mentioned in my last post, commuter cycling in Belgrade is difficult. In downtown there are wide sidewalks, sometimes with designated bike lanes...

Bike lane on sidewalk along Nemanjina (street)

...though here as everywhere in town space is negotiated on an ad hoc basis and all parts of the walk are used by everyone. In the surrounding neighborhoods, streets are simply too narrow and too full of cars to allow comfortable cycling. There it is only attempted by the most daring of souls. 

In the New Belgrade area west of the Sava River, however, streets are wide, and there is much open space for an extensive trail system.

Trail along Bulevar Mihajla Pupina

This facilitated a group ride on a lovely Sunday afternoon, arranged by our fearless leader. I Bike Belgrade, which operates out of this shop on the east side of the river...

...supplied bikes, helmets (optional), and three brilliant guides who provided all manner of assistance as well as some history lessons along the way. The cycling was easy, such interactions with traffic as we had were predominantly friendly, but other than the object lessons of New Belgrade for the young urbanist there weren't a lot of highlights west of the river.

We began our route out of downtown along the east bank of the Sava River.

We passed by the controversial Waterfront, where construction continues on what the city hopes will be an affluent development.

We found a small trailside bike shop!

...with a whimsical drinking fountain.

We crossed the Sava on ferry boats to the New Belgrade side.

New Belgrade was tentatively begun during the interwar monarchy, but it was the Communist government under Marshal Tito that went all in, draining the swampy area and building some rather severe-looking towers in the park recognizable to anyone familiar with American public housing of the period.

Near the Sava River

These towers in the park were surrounded, Le Corbusier-style, by vast swaths of green space.

Today over 200,000 of Belgrade's 1.3 million residents live in New Belgrade, making it the largest municipality in the city. Sloba, our lead tour guide, told us that the 1940s plans for New Belgrade included cultural centers that never got built. Towers are pretty terrible at providing "eyes on the street," but having public space nearby would provide reasons for people to encounter each other walking places. (We saw hardly anyone walking except around bus stops.) Now Sloba reports plans afoot for more residential development. A biologist by profession, he regrets the ensuing loss of green space. Either way, more residential development on top of a suburban street pattern means more of Belgrade will be car-dependent.

Developers will have to work around white elephants like the Gamex towers...

In Block 33. Down the street is a Mercedes-Benz dealer

...the Palace of Serbia built for the Yugoslav government back in the day...

Block 13

...and the former Phillips Exhibition Hall from the 1930s (later used as a prison camp for Jews and Roma during Nazi occupation).

Note the Renault dealership across the street

We did find some attractive places to cycle in Belgrade, principally the trails along the Sava. Within the downtown area commuter cycling seems do-able. Elsewhere design works against it, for a variety of reasons. I'd like to think that if car traffic were reduced, more streets beyond Knez Mihailova could be shifted to pedestrian/bike thoroughfares. But the old city lacks much of the grid pattern required to engineer this. So progress if it's possible at all will be bumpy.

MORE ON NEW BELGRADE AND THE WATERFRONT: Marco Roth and Katarina Dudas, "History of the Present Belgrade," Places Journal, October 2015

Separated bike lane in Novi Sad

Walking in Belgrade

 

Sign for our street

This May finds me unexpectedly in the city of Belgrade, the capital of the Republic of Serbia in central Europe. A May Term class at Coe College needed another faculty member. I leapt at the chance to explore a new city.  (New only to me, of course... the city has been occupied since pre-historic times.)

Belgrade is a city of 1.2 million people, with a metropolitan area population reaching 1.7 million (Source). (Do the others live in Serb-urbia? Sorry, it was a long flight.) Its city population is about the same as Dallas, Texas, but the capital city has a population density of 8390 per square mile compared to Dallas's 3841. Dallas's metro area is much larger, too, of course.

Our class is staying in a small hotel in the Vracar neighborhood south of downtown.

Vojvode Dragomira (street)

Vracar remains Belgrade's most densely-populated district, though it has lost over a third of its population since it peaked at 88,000 in the 1961 census. As you can see from the picture of our block (above), streets are mostly narrow, and both residences and businesses are built close to the street. A lot of residences, though, have walls or wall-like facilities along the street, creating a tube-like effect for walkers, except that every once in awhile a break in the wall will reveal a garden or some other intriguing view. 

On Vukice Mitrovic (street)

Sidewalks are narrow, sometimes as narrow as two feet wide, with the occasional obstacle.

Along Vukice Metrovic

(Do graffiti count as human activity contributing to an interesting walk? Or does it make it feel less safe? What if one struggles with the Cyrillic alphabet?)

Cara Nicolaja II (main thoroughfare)

Walking around this old city scores high on Duany et al's qualities of meaningful and interesting, with mixed results on safe and comfortable. In a dense urban area, there are plenty of everyday-life destinations. Cuburski Park, a large multi-function facility, is very close by.

Cuburski Park

On the other side of the park is this shady bunch of shops.

There are shops of all kinds close by--Belgrade apparently never went in for Euclidean zoning...

Maksima Gorkog (main thoroughfare)

...with an unusual frequency of drug stores, as well as gambling facilities.

One of many "slot clubs" along Cara Nicolaja II

A mere kilometer from our hotel up Maksima Gorkog, past the intersection with Petrogradska--Do you get the impression there are some cultural ties to Russia?--is the huge open air market Kaliniceva Pijaca...

...which offered very fresh fruit including strawberries to die for, flowers, clothes, and one bin of LPs and 45s.

Farther north are the long pedestrian-only street Knez Mihailovich...

...of which more later, and beyond that a park containing the historic Kalmegdan Fortress, parts of which date to Roman times...

...and which overlooks the junction of the Danube and Sava Rivers.

Cycling is rare on the narrow busy streets in our part of the city. I had just decided it was non-existent when I saw a cyclist.

Maksima Gorkog intersection with Cara Nikolaja II

Then I saw a few more. They tended to be of the most committed variety, the ones who are determined to cycle in any conditions. Downtown the sidewalks are wider and cyclists tended to stay there.

Bike lane downtown

 I also saw some scooters downtown, though again not many.

We'll continue walking around Belgrade during our stay here. My first impression is that there are a lot of reasons to walk, and a lot of interesting sights along the way as well as a lot of other people walking. Pedestrian infrastructure is not always the best, and crossing the busier streets can be a challenge. On the whole I feel welcome here--Belgrade is the sort of place that won't judge you if you won't judge it.

Traffic mirror at intersection of Vojvode Dragomira and Vukice Micovic

Wayfinding and useful information sign

Fancy "beg button"

Abortion and our common life

This week's leak of a draft opinion by U.S. Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito strongly signals the end of the era defined by Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), in which access to abortion was a constitutionally protected right of private individuals. Roe has seemed on the edge of repeal for decades, only to escape in some improbable way or other. Now, the melodrama seems about to end, with no Dudley Do-Right coming to save Little Nell (or choose your own metaphor).

For all its improvisational origins, Roe has held up very well. The number of abortions in the United States has fallen precipitously over the last thirty years, while large majorities of the public support putting such complex choices in the hands of the ones most directly affected--even though they may not approve of the choices that get made.

While admiring the clarity with which both pro-lifers and pro-choicers see the abortion issue, I continue to find compelling arguments on both sides. It is too easy to simplify the relationship between a woman and the fetus she carries, and neither "Her body-her choice" nor "It's a child not a choice" gets the complexity. Any notion of a common life, which is what we're advertising here on Holy Mountain, requires including both the woman and the unborn child in our circle of care.

You know the arguments, so we don't need to repeat them here. This is not to pass judgment on them, or to question the sincerity of those who hold them. 

Nevertheless, I am given considerable pause by the political expression of the pro-life position. While I know quite a few individuals outside of government who articulate some version of what Joseph Cardinal Bernardin called the "seamless garment of life," in the halls of government the opponents of abortion are also advocating:

• immediate end to all public health efforts to control the coronavirus
  
• cutting social services for poor families with children
• shifting education money away from public schools
• reducing regulation of the environment, sometimes to the extent of denying the existence of environmental issues like climate change 
• oil drilling in environmentally-sensitive areas
  
• ending restrictions on gun purchases and possession
• harsh treatment of refugees and other immigrants from Latin America, sometimes as using them in political stunts
• English-only laws
  
• stigmatizing and punitive actions towards transgender youth 
• the right to refuse service to gays and Lesbians, while stigmatizing their allies as "groomers"
• hostility towards any effort to prevent police killing people of color
  
• exhibitionist prayer (evangelical Christian only, of course) by public high school coaches at the 50-yard-line
  
• repeal of the Affordable Care Act in favor of--well, it's never clear exactly, but something like commodified health care where those who can afford care get care
• more money for roads, less for public transit and bicycle infrastructure
• tax cuts for upper incomes with less enforcement
• making it more difficult to form labor unions
  
• making voting more difficult, along with the most cockamamie theories of how the 2020 presidential election was stolen
  

Throw in the brazen manipulation of the judicial confirmation process in 2016, and the theme running through this list is not "life," certainly not "common life." If anything it's an ad hoc mixture of libertarianism for people with socio-economic power, with strong opposition to anything that smacks of difference. And that's the world into which all those babies are going to be born?

That's why I'm going to miss Roe. Repeal is less about affirming life than it is about crushing the other. There needs to be more thought than you got in this space about how abortion, and rules about it, fit into our common life. But for sure Alito's decision ain't it.

SEE ALSO:

Lyz Lenz, "This Was Always the Plan," Men Yell at Me, 3 May 2022

Molly Monk, "The History of Catholic Teaching on Abortion Isn't as Clear-Cut as You Think," The Outline, 16 January 2020

Young people of today, embrace walkable urbanism!

 

An invitation to speak to Coe's Topics in Environmental Studies class gave me a chance to explain walkable urbanism to a group of informed college students. As Jeff Speck argues in his essay, "The Wrong Color Green," walkable urban design is a more effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions than switching to electric cars and LEED-certified buildings without lifestyle changes--what he calls "Gizmo Green" (Speck 2012: 51-63). Speck's book also pointed me to this Center for Neighborhood Technology site showing--more or less--that transportation emissions in metropolitan areas come from car-dependent suburbia.

So how do we get people out of their cars and on their feet (or bicycles)? Speck and his co-authors had already described the prerequisites for most people: meaningful destinations, safe streets, comfortable streets, and interesting neighborhoods (Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck 2010: 64-83).

The meaningful walk

Most people do not walk for the fun of it: "The first rule is that pedestrian life cannot exist in the absence of worthwhile destinations that are easily accessible on foot" (Duany et al. 2010: 64). The Mound View neighborhood northeast of Coe's campus has a grocery store, two parks, and several pubs all within an easy distance from most people's homes. When we lived in Mound View, we made regular summer strolls to this Dairy Queen:

Downtown Cedar Rapids is evolving into a walkable place, albeit with less in the way of life's necessities like groceries. (The pub pictured has closed, but there are plenty to take its place.)

The proximity of this grocery store to the Wellington Heights neighborhood means that a lot of people walk to it, in spite of the perilous crossing at 1st Avenue:

 

Walkable areas mix residential and commercial uses--take that, Euclidean zoning!--and are best based on a critical mass of locally-owned businesses. For some starter tips, check out the work of Stacy Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

The safe walk

Most people will not walk where they do not feel safe. People feel safe from cars when streets are narrow and/or there is a buffer between cars and pedestrians. People feel safe from cars when buildings are designed to facilitate "eyes on the street" (a phrase made famous by Jane Jacobs) i.e. windows not walls. In downtown Fairfield, people crossing the main street from the park to the shops have a short hop where they and the crossing area are both clearly visible. 

 

Photo courtesy of Ben Kaplan

Streets through Cedar Rapids's Wellington Heights neighborhood were widened and made one-way in the 1960s to facilitate the speedy movement of cars. Thankfully, the streets were redesigned in 2019--though still wide--slowing the cars, and making the neighborhood more walkable and neighborly.

The very suburban area around Westdale doesn't feel safe to walk. Cars are fast and loud, and there are many places where they turn onto and off of the main drags. Streets are difficult and dangerous to cross.

Edgewood Road, pictured above, is a classic stroad. Pete Saunders is hopeful stroad design can be repaired, improving housing supply as well as walkability: This kind of suburban infill could relieve pressure on hot urban neighborhoods, thus reducing the displacement of poorer families. If developers include affordable housing in the mix, it could bring more people closer to the jobs in suburban office parks that are currently out of reach for many city residents. Maybe, but it's expensive, unlike toning up a core neighborhood where the grid pattern already exists.

Jeff Speck has specific design recommendations for safe walking (2012, ch. 5). Slip lanes are not safe... period!

 

The comfortable walk

Flat, simple, continuous front walls, narrow streets, and rows of street trees create a "degree of architectural enclosure--the amount that it makes its inhabitants feel held within a space.... Whatever the cause, people are attracted to places with well-defined edges and limited openings, while they tend to flee places that lack clear definition or boundaries" (Duany et al. 2010: 74-75). The comfortable feeling of 8th Street SE, even though this section is largely comprised of parking lots, comes almost entirely from the strategically-placed trees.

Waterloo artist Michael Broshar brilliantly captures how the design of this Chicago street feels both comfortable and interesting:

The same feeling comes from Gustave Caillebotte's beloved "Paris Street-Rainy Day," even though Caillebotte intended it to depict alienation.

This intersection on the north end of campus does not feel comfortable or safe, which has hampered development in that neighborhood.

The interesting walk

"For people to walk," write Duany and colleagues, "a neighborhood has to be interesting: not terribly so, but enough to convey some notion of human activity" (2010: 80). I love discovering little side-yard gardens, like this one in Oak Hill-Jackson:

16th Avenue SW, the historic commercial street of Czech Village, features shops built to the sidewalk, generous windows, and occasional benches:

 

 

A mural brightens an alley in Iowa City. They had to get an exemption for the sign, too.

 

 

Another downtown mural doesn't quite do the trick. The tunnel creates a wall effect in spite of the whimsical colors, and doesn't feel safe.

 

 

What is not interesting? Garages. And parking lots. The Med Quarter is full of parking lots that create distance between destinations (anti-meaningful), do not show signs of human activity (anti-interesting), and when in active use are trickier to cross than even busy streets (anti-safe).

The most effective way to keeping the planet habitable is to get people out of cars and onto streets. For most people, that requires re-thinking how we design streets, neighborhoods, and towns.

SEE ALSO:

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (North Point, 10^th anniversary ed., 2010)

Diana Ionescu, "Cleveland Mayor Wants a 15-Minute City," Planetizen, 18 April 2022 

Charles Marohn, "To Fully Observe, We Need to Walk," Strong Towns, 25 April 2022

Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (North Point, 2012)

Post No. 450: Nine years in

I began writing Holy Mountain nine years ago this month. That spring I was on a sabbatical leave from Coe College, gorging myself on literature about the phenomenon of place.  I needed somewhere to park my ideas, to help me process all the stuff I was reading.

At the same time I was encountering for the first time the school of urban design known as new urbanism. Writers such as Jane Jacobs, James Howard Kunstler, Chuck Marohn and other seemed to be on to something, to have found both explanation and antidote for a world gone mad. I listened to podcasts, read books and blog posts, and walked the familiar streets of my town while seeing them through new eyes. Things were awry, for sure, and had been going awry since the end of World War II, but there were ways to start making them right. A housing crisis, rising gasoline prices, falling crime rates, and some popular TV shows were causing young people to consider the attractions of urban life. America, particularly young America, seemed to be discovering the keys to a better, communitarian, inclusive, environmentally- and fiscally-sound future at the same time I was.

In those heady days, I teamed up with a friend and former student, Ben Kaplan, to start a local discussion group which came eventually to be known as Corridor Urbanism (not coincidentally the title of Ben's blog). I got in on the ground floor of Strong Towns' blog roll, which enabled me to exchange ideas with a number of virtual members. Corridor Urbanism hosted Chuck Marohn in 2015, and in 2017 ginned up a grand day in the Mound View neighborhood. Every time I turned around there were new concepts, new insights, new possibilities.

2017: Imagine Mound View, 1600 block of F Avenue NE

I'm still blogging nine years later, and Corridor Urbanism has survived the pandemic shutdowns and is now in its eighth year. In fact, we meet next Wednesday 4/20 at Thew Brewing in Cedar Rapids, and Wednesday 5/18 probably in Marion. Come join us! We are persisting!! Our city has converted one-way streets back to two-way, and added considerable amounts of sidewalks and bike infrastructure. New housing concepts are emerging, at least in the core neighborhoods on the west side of the river.

Nevertheless, something is missing from the early days: A sense that the way forward was simple, and if we explained it enough it could be achieved? That the arc of the design universe was bending towards urbanism? That these ideas, which seemed away around the bitter dualities of national politics, have been incorporated into the conservative movement's pantheon of demons? Or merely the excitement of novelty is no longer with us?

I wrote 14 posts that first month, and 77 posts in what was left of the year 2013. I haven't approached that since. I seem to have less to say. Maybe I can find a book in the piles of words that I've written? Or maybe it's time to stop writing and get involved? 

Kharkiv before Putin moved in (from travelafterkids.blogspot.com. Used without permission.)

It was empowering in 2013 to think that we had found a way to build communities on a local level, while ignoring the political theater of national politics. That was before Donald Trump took political theater way past the threshhold of pain, and begat Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and their painful ilk. But are our local conversations about missing-middle housing, roundabouts, or scooters any better? I see my state being run on the politics of bilious cultural rage, my metropolitan area focused on building and widening highways, and a promising urban district devolving into a clot of greasy burgers, hair salons, and condos that cost more than my house. My favorite coffeehouse across the street from my office closed in March 2020. Meanwhile, teaching has its benefits, but I mostly seem to be annoying students who would rather be doing something else.

The core ideas remain. We are better in every way when we live in genuine community. There is value in difference, and virtue in welcoming the stranger. Natural and financial systems work according to their own rules, so we had best learn to live with them. And maybe my thinking gets sharper when I realize how non-obvious is the road ahead.

Most read pieces, 2013-2022:

(1) A Silent But Needful Protest, 1 November 2016: "At Coe College, where I teach, nearly 100 members of the community responded yesterday to a call by the student organization Multicultural Fusion to stand in silent protest during the noon hour." 

(2) Snout Houses? In Oak Hill Jackson?? 16 October 2016: "Oak Hill Jackson is a historic neighborhood located south of downtown Cedar Rapids."

(3) Crime and Our Common Life, 1 August 2016: "Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump is asserting a dark, dystopian portrayal of America in 2016 as overwhelmed by predatory criminals and terrorists, in spite of data that show the national violent crime rate has steadily fallen for 25 years."

(4) Let's Hear It for Cedar Rapids, 5 September 2016: "A great city has places to go and ways to get there, and Cedar Rapids celebrated both this Labor Day weekend." 

(5) Gentrification: What Do We Know, 26 July 2016: "A number of forces--economic, ecological, health and fashion trends--are driving middle-class Americans back to the central cities many of their own ancestors abandoned decades ago." 

Least read pieces, 2013-2022:

(1) I Think This House Will Be OK, 18 March 2021: "It's not often my neighborhood makes the news, but last week the Board of Adjustment was called in to grant a zoning waiver to a house on my very block."

(2) Dear America Brings Light in the Heat, 8 July 2021: "The U.S.-Mexico border right now is a mess, which is not new."

(3) Theater Review: "Respect," 15 June 2014: "Cedar Rapids's marvelous arts venue, CSPS, hosted the premiere Saturday night of the University of Iowa's Summer Rep production of "Respect: A Musical Journey of Women"."

(4) Rollin' Recmobile Brings the Fun, 28 June 2021: "Cedar Rapids Parks and Recreation's Rollin' Recmobile started its week of fun this morning at Redmond Park in the Wellington Heights neighborhood."

(5) Nothing Says Community Like..., 13 January 2014: "...a great big pile of Christmas trees!"

Stronger in community:
Volunteer at the 2022 Maple Syrup Festival