On the Street: The DNA of place and the ROI of movement

The corporate culture of our government has been a carte blanche to keep doing what we’ve been doing. This culture implies that what we’ve been doing works.

In business, last year’s income statement is a major driver in this year’s action plan. If a product or service was profitable, then it’s nurtured and grown this year. If a deliverable creates a loss, then change is made as quickly as possible.

Because governments are focused on GDP and jobs instead of ROI, the reasons behind decisions often get muddy. Return on Investment (ROI) is quite simple. It’s just the gain from investment less the cost of investment all divided by the cost of investment. How many times over your money will be returned to you.

And yet our governments aren’t geared to think this way unless it has to do with a change from business as usual.

Politics & Public Process: The Half-Life of Anger

Maybe it’s like the argument that given enough time, a chimp with a keyboard would eventually hammer out Hamlet, but I’m thinking the messy GOP presidential campaign is inching its way towards clarity.

Not that the process will produce outcomes extreme partisans will like. Disappointment is often the byproduct of a clarifying experience, especially if success is measured by outcomes perfectly in sync with the purest of visions. In that sense, the Republican ordeal might have something to teach us about public processes in the communities and regions in which we work.

Rolling with Ever-Changing Gas Prices: Lessons from my dumb luck

The Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Op-Ed pages took on the subject of gas prices this week, devoting a good fifty column inches to a discussion that could otherwise be summarized like this:

The price of gas might increase by anywhere from a few pennies to a dollar this year. It might also go down, but then it will go up again. And, amidst the fluctuations, expect the ongoing trend of slowly increasing average costs to continue. So we’re right to be concerned.

Playing Tea Party: Planning and Agenda 21

2011 is over, but not forgotten. Indeed, in the planning world, it will be remembered as the year when many planners across the country began fielding smart growth policy objections from Tea Party supporters and those concerned about the U.N’s Agenda 21. No shortage of articles and blog posts, written in tones that drip with frustration yet offer few solutions, have documented the trend.

These concerns are no small issue. Rather, they’re a formidable distraction capable of sinking years of work and wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars. In an era of diminishing resources, they’re something most communities simply can’t afford.

The Next Urbanism

‘Tis the season to rejoice and enjoy the brotherhood of all mankind, as well as that of our in-laws…

As we ease into 2012, I am officially announcing a New Urbanism victory across North America, as we recently witnessed the end of building suburbia and its physically isolated, segregated lifestyle. Proof? Just this week, the award-winning New Urban News, a publication dedicated to all things New Urbanism, officially changed their title to “Better! Cities and Towns.”

Retail: When it bends the rules and breaks the law.

Getting ready for a TEDx talk in a few weeks, I’ve once again been noticing how the places that I love the most usually break the law. The contemporary development codes and bylaws, that is, which are geared to the car, not to the pedestrian and cyclist.

Then last week’s urban retail SmartCode tweetchat with Bob Gibbs sparked a debate about the rules of thumb that govern the success or failure of the most risky development of all: retail. And when those rules might be bent by certain special circumstances.

Ready to geek out with me for a moment?

Getting Beyond ‘Mad as Hell’: Here’s hoping for a civic afterlife

On December 14, Time magazine announced its 2011 “Person of the Year.” And as it’s occasionally done in the past (Remember the choice of “You” in 2006?), the mag opted for a broad zeitgeist capture as opposed to settling on just one person. This time around it’s The Protester.

“Is there a global tipping point for frustration? Everywhere, it seems, people said they’d had enough,” Rick Stengel wrote in Time’s intro to the 2011 “Person of the Year” section.

Ta-may-toe, Ta-mah-toe: Lessons in complexity from a fruit

Want to know where we go wrong solving single-mindedly for parking, affordability, sustainability, accessibility and all the other stuff on urban planning’s high-priority list?

Consider the tomato.  More specifically the winter tomato, as designed and manufactured in Florida.

In Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, food writer Barry Estabrook shows how things go haywire when you’re determined to dumb down complexity. As Estabrook describes it, Florida tomato growers have one big advantage, a winter growing season, and one big marketing concept: A tomato defined by factory-perfect roundness and redness.

Resiliency: It’s who ya know.

If there’s one thing the 20th century gave us, it’s the luxury of not needing each other. It so defines our culture that it’s physically embodied in our sprawling, disconnected landscapes.

That alone begs a classic, chicken-n-egg question: Did the leisurely lure of the suburbs kill our sense of community? Were our social ties unwittingly severed by the meandering disconnection of subdivisions and strip malls or was sprawl just a symptom of something larger? After all, for all their rewards, meaningful relationships take a lot of work. Perhaps, once the modern world elevated our prospects for personal independence, we cut those ties ourselves, willingly, lest our happy motoring be weighted down with excess baggage.

Sprawl: form following function.

Do We (Still) Need Vancouver?

A few years ago Urban Guru Leon Krier asked this question — “Do we still need Vancouver?” — at CNU XVII Denver. In response, the Next Generation of New Urbanists invited then-new Vancouver planning director Brent Toderian to speak in favor of Vancouver, which is easy to do. For, since the fall of Hong Kong, Vancouver has been reinvented to become one of the world’s most livable cities, and a model for urbanization.

Collaboration’s Failing so it’s Back to Hypocrisy

It’s a sad day when you have to start rooting for liars and hypocrites.

That thought occurred to me when I read the news of Congress’s likely axing of the budget for the Sustainable Communities Initiative. That’s the two-year-old program that attempted to pull together goals of three federal agencies — the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Transportation, and the Environmental Protection Agency — to encourage out-of-the-silos thinking by local and regional planners. Grants under the program required getting lots of folks who don’t normally talk to one another collaborating to integrate policies and programs covering infrastructure, environmental protection, economic development, public health, housing, transportation and transit, and land use.

Poggibonsi and other Tuscan Lessons

With all the angst over Italy this week, I’m in the mood to count some blessings. To elaborate on some assets. To look at the local marketplace. And to debunk a couple of frequent idealist notions about European urbanism often heard from North Americans.

Last month, I was traveling in the Tuscan countryside, which is the most beautiful land I’ve ever seen. Staying in a vineyard outside of Poggibonsi, waking up to the resident rooster, and walking medieval streets was cleansing for the mind and spirit. Even the parking lots are frequently overseen by amazing art, like this copy of Michelangelo’s David on the hill overlooking Florence.

Backyard Chickens: WWI-Era Solution to Almost Everything

Over the course of the past six or eight decades, certain things have come to define, in part, our modern existence: Making a living out of your home has been increasingly restricted, especially in predominantly residential areas; the production of goods has fallen to fewer and larger hands; and we’re now seeing the rise of what some call the helpless generation, with their legion of helicopter parents herding them about.

My Right Turn at the Intersection of Good Ideas

When things get tough, people start digging in ideologically, increasingly viewing the world through the lens of their own experiences to fortify their already entrenched positions.

Yes, experience counts for a lot and, chances are, they do hold some piece of the larger solution. But as we’ve learned time and time again, things are never that simple. There are no magic bullets.

Answers typically turn up where perspectives intersect.

‘Show Me the Money!’ New bumper sticker for the New Normal?

There hasn’t been a New Urbanist Council gathering for a while. Which is why a lot of pent-up anxiety — and hope — found release in Council sessions in Montgomery, Alabama, October 14-16.

These regionally organized Councils are intended to grapple with topics that should be on the table for annual Congress for the New Urbanism meetings but require give-and-take from a smaller group to better focus issues. So some 50 or so folks came to Montgomery to critique recent ideas and projects and to wrestle with propositions to position New Urbanism for the New Normal.

Resources + Connections = Jobs

Jobs come up in every community-building conversation these days. It’s making me go back to the start, to think it through. What created jobs in the first place?

Division of Labor. Access to natural resources. Human settlement patterns: cross roads, rivers, oceans, eventually railroads and highways.

In the last few decades, many cities have been racing to the economic bottom trying to incentivize jobs. It’s led to jobs being all about giving away resources, and not so much about the value of connections.

100,000: What’s in a number?

Sometime today or over the next few, Placeshakers and Newsmakers will cross a notable (for us) threshold: 100,000 reads. Not that 100,000 is altogether different from 90,000 or 80,000 but it does make for a nice round opportunity to reflect on what we’ve been doing here and how its evolution has surprised us.

As many readers know, Placeshakers is the online soapbox of PlaceMakers, a town planning and community development firm. By our own admission, a company blog is nothing particularly special — in fact, they’re often painfully tiresome — and that’s why we’ve taken great care to avoid the sin of talking all about ourselves and, instead, talk about what really matters: the big picture issues and ground-level challenges facing those who care as much about shaping community as we do.

Can Preservationists Let Love Rule?

Call me naive.

When I was first exposed to the New Urbanism in the 1990s, it was as a 9 to 5 ad-man with an appreciation for music and art. Killing time one day in my dentist’s waiting room, I stumbled upon “Bye-Bye Suburban Dream,” the cover story of the latest Newsweek magazine.

I still remember the feeling I had as I read it. Unbelievable, I thought. This is a movement creating places where people, community, beauty and culture are once again prioritized. Where the interconnected everyday experiences that color our lives are valued. Where commerce and art can both thrive.

Pruitt-Igoe: More ego or opportunity for vocational penance?

The restoration of degraded, traumatized, and distressed communities has been a high priority for the Obama Administration. The EPA, HUD and DOT are all allocating revitalization funds for places as large as Detroit and Cleveland, and as small as Ranson, West Virginia.

That’s the kind of solid support needed at the big picture level, where communities can be considered — and treated — as the living organisms they are. But what about revitalization at a smaller scale? Because that’s when it stops being about the relative health of the collective and gets down to the level of individual lives.

Real people.

Special Districts Getting All Mixed Up

Recently there’ve been rumblings of a very interesting trend among cities that have adopted form-based codes to guide the character of their neighbourhoods. That is, once a city begins to think urbanistically, they start to solve some really hard problems. And those problems lately have been to do with industrial uses, and how to reconnect industry to the walkable portions of the city.

Over the last month, I’ve lost count of how many emails and phone calls I’ve gotten asking for exemplary plans under form-based codes that incorporate industrial uses. I got one while I was writing this, in fact. Heavy industry is one primary thing zoning initially sought to separate. I am reminded of one of my favorite T.S. Eliot excerpts, from Little Gidding:

“We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time.”

Not that anyone’s adding back in noxious uses to the ‘hood, but it is a very interesting turn of events.

After the Flood: Hard choices for communities and citizens

Virginia Republican Eric Cantor, majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, caught a lot of grief for suggesting there should be budget cuts elsewhere to offset the extra federal dollars that FEMA needed to do its job as tornadoes, floods and winds assaulted the eastern U.S. But at least he was being consistent as a deficit hawk and fearless — if naive — in the face of some ugly truths.

The ugliest of them: We want a bunch of stuff we’re not willing to pay for. And because democracy allows us to vote our delusions, we don’t plan to stop wanting or to start paying anytime soon.

Popsicles and the Importance of Simplicity

Back in June, I wrote a piece about how, compared to sprawl, smart growth produces places better suited to raising children. The overall takeaway was simple: When kids are able to navigate the world around them, manage conflicts, make decisions, screw up and recover, they’re better off for it. And place is a big contributor to that. Attracting families to life in the city can be a difficult endeavor. But given the stakes, it’s a critical one.

Over the course of the post, I touched on a lot of different things. Vancouver, and the challenges they faced with their own smart growth efforts. Buying happiness, helicopter parenting and fragile, teacup children. The value of independence, and the need to align political and market forces to make things happen. And, oh yeah. Popsicles.

Which idea do you think actually went somewhere?

Extreme Makeover: Zoning Edition

Want to get some sleep tonight? How about snuggling up with your local Development Code? Read any section, such as Sign Violations and Enforcement Procedures, and I’m willing to bet you’ll be out before you get past the Statement of Purpose.

That’s a problem, because such volumes don’t exist to cure insomnia. They exist to engage us in the collaborative project of creating our shared surroundings. That means something and, while I understand that Comprehensive Plans, Zoning, and Subdivision Ordinances, by virtue of their lofty stature, might make for poor everyday reading, we all suffer when they end up so… tedious.

“Our life is frittered away by detail … simplify, simplify.” – Thoreau

City Neighborhoods: Livin’ large

Empirical observation is a key to unlocking secrets of great urban design. As Jane Jacobs wrote in Death and Life, “The way to get at what goes on in the seemingly mysterious and perverse behavior of cities is, I think, to look closely, and with as little previous expectation as possible, at the most ordinary scenes and events, and attempt to see what they mean and whether any threads or principle emerge among them.” In my case, proof is in the pudding.

The most notable observation I’ve had since I sold my sports car in January, leaving me walking or biking ’round the neighborhood every day, pretty much everywhere, is that I haven’t lost a pound.

Entice, Don’t Coerce: The pleasures of green by design

Living in a century home with passive air and choosing cycling as my primary mode of transportation during this unusually warm summer may sound like hardcore Greenie behavior, but it’s been particularly satisfying.

This enjoyment of a modernized take on methods that have worked for generations has made me pick up Steve Mouzon’s Original Green book again, where he notes:

Delight is often a side effect of buildings that operate naturally for most of the year.