Douglas Kelbaugh

Three Paradigms: New Urbanism, Everyday Urbanism, Post Urbanism—An Excerpt From The Essential COMMON PLACE:

Although New Urbanism has enjoyed meteoric success in the American media, it is far from the centerline of either the academic or the real estate development world. However, it is fast becoming the norm for greenfield development in North America. Nonetheless, conventional suburban development continues to envelop the American metropolis. And conventional urban development is fast changing our downtowns into giant entertainment/tourist/convention/ sports/office centers. These radical changes are happening piecemeal, without much input from urban designers and planners in general, much less from New Urbanists. New Urbanism enjoys little and often begrudging respect in academia, especially in most schools of architecture, where poststructuralist and avant-garde theory continue to dominate. In addition to the conventional un-self-conscious urbanism that is willy-nilly changing the face of American downtowns and suburbs, there are at least three self-conscious schools of urbanism: New Urbanism, Everyday Urbanism, and what I call Post Urbanism. They run parallel to contemporary architectural paradigms, although there would be additional schools of thought defined by tectonics, environmentalism, regionalism, historicism, and so on. There are other urbanisms and architectures, such as environmentally inspired ones (which here, is subsumed under New Urbanism), but these three cover most of the cutting edge of theoretical and professional activity in these two fields. All three are inevitable and necessary developments in and of the contemporary human condition. A brief synoptic view of the three paradigms follows. New Urbanism is utopian (or at least idealist and reformist), inspirational in style, and structuralist in conception. It is utopian because it aspires to a social ethic that builds new or repairs old communities in ways that equitably mix people of different income, ethnicity, race, and age, and because it promotes a civic ideal that coherently mixes land of different uses and buildings of different architectural types. It is inspirational because it sponsors public architecture and public space that attempts to make citizens feel they are part, even proud, of both a culture that is more significant than their individual, private worlds and a natural ecology that is connected in eternal loops, cycles, and chains of life. New Urbanism also eschews the physical fragmentation and the functional compartmentalization of modern life and tries “to make a link between knowledge and feeling, between what people believe and do in public and what obsesses them in private” (Zeldin, 1994). It is structuralist (or at least determinist) in the sense that it maintains that there is a direct, structural relationship between social behavior and physical form. It is normative in that it posits that good design can have a measurably positive effect on sense of place and community, which it holds, are essential to a healthy, sustainable society. The physical model is a compact, walkable city with a hierarchy of private and public architecture and spaces that are conducive to face-to-face social interaction, including background housing and gardens as well as foreground civic and institutional buildings, squares, and parks. Everyday Urbanism is nonutopian or atopian, conversational, and nonstructuralist. It is nonutopian because it celebrates and builds on everyday, ordinary life and reality, with little pretense about the possibility of a perfectible, tidy or ideal built environment. Indeed, as John Kaliski, Margaret Crawford, and others in Everyday Urbanism (1999) point out, the city and its designers must be open to and incorporate “the

The Environmental Paradox of the City, Landscape, Urbanism, and New Urbanism

“The City Council, as you can well imagine, swallowed this line whole. Who wouldn’t? Landscape is good; building is landscape; therefore building is good. One hears this three-car train of logic constantly in architectural discourse today...Nothing sells like landscape. It’s our sex” (Heymann, 2011). “If you love nature, live in the city” (Glaeser, 2011). As the first quote above suggests, the proponents of Landscape Urbanism have been winning design competitions and commissions, as well as gaining professional and academic acclaim. Closely associated with hallowed ecological values, it has been given a wide berth in the media and public process. However, it has received limited analysis and criticism in the professional and academic worlds. New Urbanism, on the other hand, is an older and more organized movement whose agenda has been repeatedly dissected and critiqued. A critical comparison of the two is illuminating and timely in an era of increasing ecological degradation and climate disruption, as well as of rapid urbanization. Before comparing the two, the environmental merits and demerits of urbanism in general will be discussed. 1. The Environmental Paradox of Urbanism It’s obvious that cities consume enormous amounts of resources and produce prodigious amounts of pollution and waste – far more per acre than suburban sprawl. Yet, cities are surprisingly greener than their more verdant suburbs. This paradox can be explained in a number of ways for different audiences: For the average citizen: The average urbanite’s carbon and other eco-footprints are smaller than the average suburbanite’s. Leafy suburbs may look greener, but on a per capita basis they produce more pollution and waste than cities, and consume more energy, water and natural resources. For the economist: Measuring carbon and other footprints on a per capita basis is the equitable way to measure environmental costs and level the playing field in a world of wildly uneven wealth (For instance, a large LEED Gold house isn’t very sustainable if only two people live there.). Cities are also more efficient in terms of land consumption, infrastructure, and the mechanical heating and cooling of buildings, as well as transportation. Placing people in the denominator of the metric is the key that unlocks this paradox, however narrowly or widely it is applied. For the climate scientist, the environmental paradox is more complex: On top of producing a higher amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) per acre, the city also tends to warm the local climate. Its extensive dark rooftops and pavements absorb solar radiation and release heat into the atmosphere. There are fewer trees than in Consilience Kelbaugh: Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism suburbia to provide shade and evaporative cooling; there is more waste heat, i.e., hot gases spewing from tailpipes and chimneys that heat the air. This “anthropogenic heat” raises the temperature of the climate in the city higher than in its suburbs and countryside, producing the “Urban Heat Island Effect” (UHIE or UHI). GHGs produced in the city contribute to global Climate Change (CC) as opposed to local warming. However, the city’s GHG production is smaller per capita than its suburbs, paradoxically making urbanization an environmentally beneficial trend. For the local government official: Urbanism is a powerful and under-utilized strategy to mitigate global CC. And because mitigation strategies for global CC are complementary to UHI mitigation strategies, the more immediate impacts of local climate change can be used in already-hot cities to motivate people to simultaneously address both problems. Urban deforestation is a major contributor to local warming. For instance, metro Atlanta lost almost half its trees in the last quarter century; replanting these trees would cut its UHI in half, dropping average summer temperature about 3 degrees F and shaving up to 12 degrees F off the daily highs (Stone, 2012). Last, for the urban planner it would be no surprise that residents in a dense city have less impact on global climate change than automobile-dependent sprawl. What might surprise her is that a city of the same statistical density that does not have a wide mix of uses, a well-connected road grid, walkable streets, and good transit produces a per capita impact on CC much like suburbia. Figure 1: Cities like Dubai with a superhighway supergrid can be “highrise sprawl,” a compromise that provides neither the space and privacy of suburbia nor the walkable and transit benefits of urbanity. This relentless overlay of the Emirate-wide grid of Consilience Kelbaugh: Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism superhighways encourages making every trip by car. It is indifferent to natural topography and ecology, while encouraging the continuous, undifferentiated sprawl and monoculture of Modernist development. In short, the ecological footprint and environmental impacts of cities are larger per acre but smaller per capita than suburban sprawl; and the footprint with a mixed use network of small blocks is even smaller than fragmented cities with cul-de-sacs, superblocks and limited access highways. 2. Three Relevant Benefits of Urbanization A. The environmental paradox is central to this comparative study, as well as a very relevant benefit to a rapidly urbanizing planet. The phenomenon is supported by current scientific research at the Santa Fe Institute. (West, 2011) Its work, which is based on big data, indicates that the metabolism of cities increases in a sub-linear manner — that is, due to the inherent efficiencies, their metabolic rate grows at a slower rate than their increase in size. Similar to Kleiber’s Law for animal metabolism, doubling the size of a city with a commensurate increase in density has been shown to increase energy consumption by about 70%—not 100% as might be expected. Bigger cities are more efficient at using and conserving energy—like the elephant, which has a slower heartbeat and metabolism than the beaver, whose heart in turn beats slower than a hummingbird. The increasing energy efficiency arises from higher rates of walking, biking and transit ridership, as well as fewer and shorter automobile trips. Larger buildings are typically more efficient per square foot to mechanically heat and cool (although more difficult to naturally light and ventilate). To solarize, whiten, or vegetate their roofs and walls costs less per occupant to build and operate, as does urban infrastructure—from streets, bridges, tunnels, utilities and transit, to sanitary and solid waste systems. The metabolic benefits are less in new or expanding cities, where the energy and material flows resulting from construction are much higher than in mature cities. As aggressive interventions in the landscape, cities could be called ecological sacrifice zones. This may be inflammatory terminology, but even the greenest of cities inflict local environmental wounds that nature must heal; they leave scar tissue that must be compensated or justified with other trade-offs and benefits that outweigh the ecological costs. This compromise is illustrated in countless cities, vividly so in cities like Venice, Italy and Charleston, South Carolina. These virtuoso examples of compact, traditional urbanism were built on landfill in sensitive environments, ones where development would be highly regulated if not prohibited today. Consilience Kelbaugh: Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism Figure 3: This map of metro Chicago’s GHG production illustrates the environmental paradox of cities. While vehicular travel in the center city produces more emissions per acre, it produces less per person. The paradox would be even greater if the per-capita heating and cooling of buildings were also included, not to mention water consumption as well as the capital and maintenance costs of infrastructure (Center for Neighborhood Technology). Any visitor to or resident of these cities can attest to the many ways that the merits of these and other cities compensate for their intrusion into local ecological systems. This is not to say that new cities should be built in sensitive areas. We should select development sites as mindful of ecological constraints as possible, while also recognizing that humans need and want to be in proximate contact with “nature.” On the other, hand physical distance is no guarantee of protection; indeed, humans can disrupt ecologies without living in or near them. Cities are better understood in a broader meta-ecological way, and seen not as metaphors for ecological systems but as actual ecological systems. They can be as or more negentropic than forests and estuaries. And as seats of human ecology – from Muppets to Mozart to metaphysics – their culture can be profound, even operatic in their complexity and intelligence. Consilience Kelbaugh: Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism Figure 4: Charleston as built (left), and as a hypothetical non-urban/anti-urban configuration that contemporary regulations might require it to be built today (right). Cities unavoidably entail environmental trade-offs and sacrifices, but the myriad benefits of good cities seem well worth the deficits. (DPZ) Although not central to this study, the following two important benefits of cities are also relevant: B. Cities are on average more productive and creative per capita than suburban and rural communities. Kleiber’s Law is inverted – doubling the density increases creativity roughly 2.8 times, as measured in metrics like patents and publications per capita. (West, 2011) Per-capita productivity and income also enjoy a better-than-linear rise. Jacobs (1961) has written about this phenomenon, as have Florida (2004) and Glaeser (2011). C. Cities sponsor a positive social paradox: they can maintain socio-cultural diversity within a large population while simultaneously providing a sense of identity for neighborhoods, social groups and individuals. They can promote tolerance and a

The Environmental Paradox of Cities: Gridded in Manhattan vs. Gridless in Dubai

On the occasion of the Manhattan grid’s bicentennial, this essay looks at New York City and Dubai through the lens of sustainability and their patterns of land use and street layout. It demonstrates that the virtues of the grid are based on the environmental paradox of cities: when humans inhabit dense urban space, they decrease their impact on the global environment faster than they increase their impact on the local environment; in other words, their ecological footprints per capita are smaller than in both low-density sprawl and cities of similar density with coarser, less permeable networks. Dubai, a modernist city of superhighways, superblocks and superhighrises, rapidly developed a disconnected pattern of homogenous enclaves that has served to limit physical accessibility, especially on public transit and foot, as well as to undermine the inherent vibrancy and sustainability of the compact, complex, connected, and complete urbanism of

Lean Urbanism Is About Making Small Possible

This chapter argues against approaching urbanism as a production and storage problem, and for focusing on the potentials of informal urbanization. The informal economy is not just a coping strategy in the Global South, but it is permeating the creative and culinary sectors in Western cities. This chapter demonstrates how Lean Urbanism can disrupt the sclerosis of conventional planning, help people with fewer means contribute to their communities, and make nicer places. Lean Urbanism relaxes codes and challenges conventional development processes in Pink Zones, designated urban districts that relax the ‘red tape’ of zoning and building codes. The chapter concludes with an example of an open-source toolkit that underlies Lean Urbanism and focuses on energy-efficient buildings.