Urban Planning | selophane.blog

Architect as … cultural healer

There’s been a lot of media attention on New Orleans and the removal of statues honoring the confederacy and notable confederates. This article from CNN talks a bit about it. It’s amazing that removal of a single statue can have such a strong personal impact on me when I’m so far away.

View of New Orleans from the Marigny Docks

I applaud the city of New Orleans for taking a proactive step to try to heal the scars of slavery and all of the horrors that came after the “peculiar institution” came to an end, if only in name. As a Jew, to get close to the feelings that African Americans feel, I have to imagine living and operating daily in a world with statues to nazis. And the thing is, the nazi’s only directly terrorized and killed a single generation (and all their future generations that were snuffed out before they started). Imagine if the Nazi’s had ruled for 400 years and what kind of cultural baggage we would have.

The closest parallel to the confederate monuments I have personally and locally is Ronald Reagan National Airport here in Northern Virginia. I refuse to call it by its current name: I call it “National.” I do this not because of his politics or economic policy, but because his administration looked the other way while an entire generation of my gay forefathers died in a plague. They refused to act because HIV and AIDS were happening to ‘those people’ and it was ‘icky.’ This was negligent, but it wasn’t willful. They didn’t give gay people (and transfusion cases, the African American community, drug users, and others) HIV, but they didn’t do anything to stop it. And for that I can’t bring myself to say the official name of “National Airport.” I imagine if it had been intentional and gone on for hundreds of years and maybe I can start to understand what the African American community feels about confederate statues and memorials.

For that reason I feel like this is literally the least that should be done. I’m not saying we should erase the confederacy from the history of the south, but we should be looking to how Germany teaches its history. We need to remember that ‘nice people’ do horrible things to other people when profit can be made, whether it’s the south and slavery (and the rest of the triangle trade) or the whole country’s treatment of the Native American nations. That’s said, remembering history does not mean honoring those who perpetuated the horror. It’s not disrespectful to the dead, who were literally traitors to the union, it’s doing something to set right the scales of history. They had over a hundred and fifty years of being honored and remembered. It’s time to start setting things right.

So, set that all of that to the side. In another part of my brain I’m sad. It’s just another reminder that my city is not the city I left; that time moves on and things are constantly changing. Will I miss it being “Lee Circle?” Yes, I will. But that’s ok. Being an adult is being ok with things changing, especially if it’s for the right reason.

View of Gibson Hall of Tulane University from Audubon Park

A third side of this came up just this week while I was writing this response. It has been suggested that my Alma Matter, Tulane University, change its name as a part of these changes. As you learn on any tour of the school, the University, which was originally the publicly funded Louisiana College of Medicine, became a private school and was renamed in honor of Paul Tulane after he made a sizeable endowment to the school in 1882. What you don’t typically learn on any tour of the school is that Paul Tulane was also the largest donor to the Confederacy in New Orleans. This raises some deep questions about the suitability of the name.

Should his funding of the confederacy be honored? No, it should be condemned. Should his endowing a school with enough funding to be self sufficient and become a seat of higher learning be honored? Yes, it should be celebrated. I feel like the answer to this comes down to intent. The issue is clear cut for me on Confederate memorials because the intent of the memorial is to honor the leader of the confederacy, but its murkier on the name of Tulane University. The intent of the school’s name is to honor the endowment by Paul Tulane, not his actions which helped prop up the confederacy. Nevertheless, he did do that and there is an unavoidable link there. Furthermore, his endowment was made after about 17 years after the end of the civil war, and might be seen as a way of making amends for his support of the Confederacy. Then there are the logistical issues, if the school were to change names, how would that even work? Would they need to send new diploma’s and transcripts to all alumni? And how would that affect their overall brand? Maybe the university should resurrect the Newcomb name and change from Tulane University to Newcomb University?

Personally, I think a name change is not warranted, since the name is meant to honor the endowment not Paul Tulane’s role in supporting the confederacy. That said, I think the university needs to use this as a teachable moment and show that even those who do great deeds in service of the common good can also do great harm. At the very least they should start making it common knowledge that University’s namesake was also a supporter of the Confederacy and a complicated man.

An Urban Plan for a New New Orleans

I submitted the op-ed below to the editorial desk of the New Orleans Times Picayune two weeks ago. I have not received any response to my inquiries, so I assume that they are not interested; if that changes I may have to remove this post. In any case, I would like to present my solution for a sustainable redevelopment of New Orleans:

An urban plan for a new New Orleans.

Although New Orleans avoided Gustav’s wrath, we need to learn as much as we did the hard way from Katrina. Instead of rebuilding the city and the levees as they were, we need to make it so that New Orleans will never worry about a hurricane again.

New Orleans has had a past fraught with disasters: twice fires wiped out the bulk of the French and Spanish colonial city and there have been numerous floods and levee breaks which have altered the city’s shape. Over the last century we believed that we had bent nature to our will by controlling the course of the Mississippi River and preventing the annual flood. At the same time developers drained the surrounding swamps to make new low-lying easily flooded subdivisions. The damage caused by Katrina showed this control to be fleeting.

The rebuilding after Katrina was done with the wrong methodology: we treated the symptoms, not the problems. What we needed to do was create a plan to address the environment, the economy and the unique identity of New Orleans, and we still can. The levee system by itself is not sufficient; overtopping and crevasses are always a possibility. The city needs a two tiered approach to safety, one which selectively prevents and allows controlled flooding in to create a city that can function with six feet of water in the streets of evangeline. New Orleans is also facing a similar struggle with its economy; it relies on the tourism industry and the port to survive. With the current downturn in the national economy there is less money to be spent which will eventually hinder both the shipment of goods and services and the attraction of money to the tourist trade. The city needs a new sustainable identity.

To save the Crescent City we need to recreate it as a new Creole city by blending the local culture with building concepts from around the world. The Dutch city of Amsterdam and an area of Peru called Belén both have novel strategies to handle flooding; one is a city that walls off the water and the other is a community that floats atop it. The older urban areas of New Orleans should learn from Amsterdam and create more raised levees and canals to bring high water from the river and the lake to designated overflows, much like the Bonnet Carré Spillway. These areas, the former swamps and low lying neighborhoods devastated by Katrina, could be built anew using updated concepts based on the Peruvian strategy; buildings and public plazas that lay on the ground during parts of the year, but float on the surface of the water during flood periods. These buildings would be anchored in place but allowed to move vertically to adjust to rising and falling water levels. This strategy could serve as a water recharge basin and allow all rain water to be pumped from the low lying city streets into the new controlled flood plains where it can be treated and released down river or into the lake. This constant movement of water will work like a bayou and prevent mosquito borne diseases. These levees and canals will create a more efficient mass transit systems with in the city with boat traffic running atop the water and an enclosed rail system below.

New Orleans should look beyond structures and embrace a new urban identity. By improving upon the model of Greensburg, Kansas – creating all platinum LEED buildings and aiming for carbon neutrality – New Orleans could brand itself as the heart of the Green movement. Most of its power needs could be met through hydro electric, solar and other non-polluting forms of energy production. Water that is collected in the recharge flood plains should be used for plant irrigation, cleaning the streets after parades and other non-potable water needs. Tax breaks and incentives should be offered to companies that achieve carbon neutrality, manufacture alternative energy products and research new environmentally friendly technologies. By encouraging organizations like the USGBC and Green Globes to make New Orleans their headquarters, the Big Easy could be the leader at the heart of the green movement. These new businesses would supply New Orleanians with jobs and the city with a consistent source of revenue that would enable a more locally funded rebuilding process. In addition, the greening of New Orleans will help the tourist industry by making it a destination for cultural and environmental tourism. The city may have missed the tech boom of the late twentieth century, but it could easily embrace the twenty-first as a model green city.

This redevelopment plan is a bold stroke and some may argue that it is unrealistic; but wasn’t draining almost 100 square miles of swamp for more dry real estate just as bold? It is my belief that without daring aspirations the Crescent City will always be teetering on the edge of destruction. Yet, by allowing controlled flooding and by bringing in the industry of the twenty-first century, Creole culture and adaption can once again save New Orleans.

-Spencer Lepler is a graduate of the Tulane School of Architecture (’05) with a Master of Architecture and a certificate in Preservation Studies. He lives in Northern Virginia and is working towards his architectural license. His blog can be read at http://www.selophane.com/blog

The Metro, The Metro, The Metro’s on Fire!

So this past week there were a number of fires and closings of stations within the DC Metro system. While the fires and the maintenance issues that caused them (and many more during the previous years) are one issue, the greater issue at hand is that these incidents completely incapacitated the Red and Orange lines. On a system with three major corridors downtown serviced by 5 lines, the loss of two (one of which runs alone on its corridor) is tantamount to a 50% loss of service. This is unacceptable in the 21st century, and especially in the Nation’s Capitol, where a 30 mile commute can take 2 hours by car.

On Sunday, The Washington Post ran an article identifying the double track system as the achilles heel in the Washington Metro. I have to agree with them. One of the greatest strengths of the NYC subway is that it can divert around stations and segments of tracks which are under repair or out of service. With the current system if a single track is out of service all trains must share a single track to bypass the problem. If both tracks are incapacitated by jumper or a fire than the whole system shuts down.

The problem with this article is that it gives no suggestions on how to improve the system besides creating a dedicated source of funding. In addition, while I am a proponent of increasing the capacity and coverage of the Metro system I worry that continued expansion without a remedy of the double track system will just lead to a rail analogous of the beltway and poor road planning in the area. It would be my suggestion that in addition to building the Dulles extension and a ring line, extra tracks should be added to all of the current lines. In an effort not to disturb stations, the two additional lines should function as bypass lanes for future express trains – they could be tunneled below the existing stations. While this seems outlandish, they are already talking about tunneling to put a line in Georgetown.

Urban Parkland

So I’ve been digging through the archive of articles that I have meant to write about, but have not had the chance and came across this article from boston.com which discusses Green Roofs, specifically the the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) in Washington DC, and discusses their popularity in Europe and compares them to standard roofs.

Green roofs are one of the areas where building design in the US lags behind the rest of the developed world. In Europe, green roofs are more ingrained in the culture, for lack of space and in the northern climates, as a pre-modern cultural adaption. It has only been recently that this urban parkland has been identified as a environmental boon, and not just a social one. In the US contractors balk at putting dirt, substrate, plants and a drainage method on a roof, complaining that ti will be too costly, need more structural reinforcement that the design calls for, and pose greater chances for leaks. Yet rooftop gardens have been a fixture in NY for years and not just in skyscrapers.

But green roofs should not just be urban elements. The suburban strip mall is perfect for green roofs or PV panels. The large expanses of asphalt and the traditional tar flat roofs can create suburban heat islands to rival their urban counterparts. Plus, it would be a good marketing ploy. Imagine if Target decided that to show its environmental awareness they would plant a green roof on every store, and whatever rainwater seeps through the soil, will be collected in a brown water storage system and used to flush toilets and urinals. Not only would they reap the benefits of lower heating/cooling loads and less municipal water use, but they would also bring in many customers looking for an “environmentally friendly” shopping experience.

Organic Planning?

Recently I have made a number of posts regarding green buildings and the paradigm shift which will be necessary if we are even going to have a truly green architecture (see posts here and here). I bring this up again because i recently read two different articles online from two different architectural professionals from two different cultures, Martha Schwartz – a Boston & London based landscape architect and Harald Bodenschatz – a professor of Sociology and Planning in at the Technical University of Berlin and they both discuss similar goals for a more environmentally friendly development. Schwartz focuses on the urban landscape and its development (or lack thereof) currently as opposed to in a truly green environment, and Bodenscahtz focuses on the development of inner cities and suburbia as sustainable growth tactics and in such a way to help the European city thrive.

While neither of these articles explicitly states my previously argued hypothesis (that in order to be a truly sustainably designed society we need to increase our population densities and thus maximize our transportation schemes), both provide intellectual support to my arguments. Without a new 21st century version of urban renewal – one which is culturally, environmentally and economically sensitive – we will never be able to sustain our growth and development. This collapse in infrastructure is one of the issues facing us today, and it is potentially more threatening than global warming, rising oceans, and food shortages. With more people in the suburbs there are more cars on the road, the more cars the more wear on the roads. The more cars, the higher the demand for and thus the higher the price of gasoline, and the higher the demand for gas the less money available for other “necessities.” Greatly improved mass transit systems could alleviate the strain on our fuel supply and roads, while slightly increased mass transit systems but planned suburban clumping and urban densification could easily have the same impact.

Article: Un velo a day keeps the traffic away.

A Bike Station in Paris

[image via anArchitecture via AP]

Horns honking, cabbies swearing, streets filled with a slow moving mass of metal particles, pedestrians choking on exhaust fumes: Traffic. Nothing says Urban center like a heaping helping of fossil fuel consumption, or does it? Paris and Vienna have both rolled out free short term bicycle rentals (albeit at different scales) as a social experiment and attempt to reduce reliance on automobiles and ease traffic within the urban centers of these two European Cities (read about it here).

This is something that could work in the Old Growth Cities along the eastern seaboard of the US, as long as it is kept free for short term rides and deployed in massive numbers (like Paris). If you coupled this with a good commuter rail system this could make up for a non-extensive subway system: it would be a method of getting people from the rail terminus to their destinations. I can see this working like the zip car phenomenon, but in reverse. Instead of renting one on those rare occasions where you need to drive out of town, people could rent bikes daily (if there was enough of a supply) to go to and from work and the store. Of course this would not help commuters from the suburbs, but since it could alleviate casual car use amongst residents it would reduce some of the daily traffic. I could imagine NY, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC all benefitting greatly from this kind of program.

Article: New Urbanism, is it old hat?

Whether you know it by name or not, most of America has at one time or another come into contact with New Urbanism. This anti-modernist anti-sprawl post-modern offshoot which has been with us for almost 30 years, since the development of Seaside, Florida in 1980 held a conference in Old Town Alexandria, VA. If you understood the nature of New Urbanism, the fact that their conference was being held in one of the oldest downtowns in virginia is quite the irony.

New Urbanism stands for the creation of artificial suburban (and sometimes urban) downtowns and mixed use communities, something, which like the path to hell, is paved with good intentions. The problem I have always had with the New Urbanist movement is its non-organic nature. Communities get branded before they are built; house styles and strict zoning rules are pre-planned and approved by designers preventing any straying from the ideal image from entering the perfect new (sub)urban town. They also stand in direct opposition to Modernism; instead of drawing on both the strengths and weaknesses of modernism, they look to its failures and piece together historical pastiche architecture in an attempt to meet the needs of the present. Which is ironic, considering that modernism’s creed was to disregard all architecture that came before it to re-discover the natural forms of building.

On the other hand, I have great respect for what the movement did. It changed the discourse of suburbia and the planned town. No longer was planning a black and white contrast between Levittowns and Unité d’Habitations, but instead planned communities could approach multiple scales and occur both in and outside of cities. In addition it brought a focus back to mixing uses, developing ground floor commercial corridors with residents above and providing mass transit systems.

In recent years, New Urbanism has seen a wax and wane with the tides of fashion. More and more developers are using the New Urbanist Town Center model, but not applying the actual design philosophy to it. While at the same time the newest move by New Urbanists is to co-opt the language of Green Building, because by nature the New Urbanist system is very green friendly (if you disregard that most New Urbanist construction is on Greenfield/virgin sites). In my opinion this is a smart move; New Urbanism is appealing to local planning commissions and if it also helps bring about environmentally friendly design and planning that would be a boon for American Suburbia.

Article: New York as the City of Lights

If you can’t be London, why not be Paris? At least that’s what NYC seems to think according to an article in New York Magazine. The article discusses that with the failure of the congestion surcharge, New York City officials are looking towards the changes that Paris has made since the turn of the century (from 20th to 21st) to be a more resident/pedestrian friendly place; specifically Paris-Plage, bike sharing and the new bus lanes and routes. It appears that NY may be looking at making some streets pedestrian only during the summer, and adding more bike routes.

Having lived in Paris for a summer, I believe that parts of New York City that the are the most talked about – lower manhattan and midtown – are already as Paris-like as they can get; It is the outer boroughs that need to be brought up to speed. The reason for this is mass transit. The Métro is extensive within Paris much as it is in Manhattan (though the Métro does seem to run more trains it closes at 2am). This allows rapid movement within the city for pedestrians, sometimes it can be faster than driving. In addition, nothing short of a massive double parking towing campaign paired with making all avenues and certain cross town streets (like each decade 30th, 40th, 50th, etc) no parking will clear the congestion from midtown. Also, Paris is much smaller than most people realize. The entirety of Paris is the same square footage as Manhattan. Once you add in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, NYC is easily 6 times as large by land area. This difference in scale can be held responsible for a great deal of the traffic. People who live in the boroughs still commute to Manhattan; many by car. This daily vehicular movement by residents is just not present in Paris. Yes there are commuters from the Banlieu’s, but with the expense cost of driving over there the numbers are just not comparable.

I personally feel that NY would do better to look to Tokyo and other cities plagued by high density urban sprawl such as LA and Mexico City, not just for ideas on what to perfect, but also to identify what to avoid.

Article: Reinventing the Cul-de-Sac

A proposed revision to suburbia using tessellating multi-family houses

[Image from Treehugger via tessellar]

The other day I was discussing the mortgage crisis and mentioned that I believe that we should be moving towards a more dense mass transit rich residential development model. Treehugger recently posted about a possible reinvetion of the the Cul-de-sac. This interesting article revisions suburbia as a series of duplexes, triplexes, quadruplexes, and sextuplexes which could be tessellated to efficiently fill space and allow for a maximum of residents on their own quiet cul-de-sacs.

While this is a great idea for land use and would provide increased environmental efficiency I fear that this would never happen in the US. Most people move to low rise suburbia to escape sharing walls and floors with their neighbors and while this adds to environmental efficiency by providing increased insulation it means less perceived privacy. I say perceived because the advancements in sound abatement technology which have occurred in the past few years have made it such that modern condos and duplexes are for all intents and purposes soundproof. In addition, this proposal while making efficient use of land, it would be a nightmare for traffic and road navigation. I have had a first hand experience with this, where I live none of the subdivisions connect, so all traffic must use main arteries. There are no secondary routes – and this system would just increase that problem.

Article: Real Estate Road Trips Scout Troubled Market

The Decadence of the American Housing Market

So I don’t know how I missed this, but apparently on Monday, March 31st The Washington Post ran an article about the new phenomenon of Foreclosure Tours in the DC/NOVA metro area (Click here for the article). This strikes a sore spot with me, it makes me think of the Katrina tours that sprung up in New Orleans once tourists started to return to the city. Now I know this is a different sort of animal; the article describes these tours as “foreclosure seminars on wheels” and they are intended to help fill in neighborhoods instead of to educate. Yet in the end, I wonder, aren’t they both ways of profitting off of the pain and suffering of others?

Now I know that this in and of itself is not really architecture or design related, but I feel as if the whole foreclosure mess stems from the modern architecture and urban development of the US. For the past century we have been spreading farther and farther from urban centers and the average american living space has ballooned, this has not only affected us mentally and physically, but it is also affecting us environmentally and monetarily. As we move farther from the cities we need to travel farther to reach our employment, have less mass transit available to us, and the larger properties get the more spread out they must be. Where a 1/4 acre of land was plenty large for each Levit house (and considered private in comparison to inner city living), a modern McMansion would hardly fit within the property lines and required setbacks of the same lot. Daily travel becomes more expensive — monetarily and environmentally — especially with a lack of decent regional rail systems. Add all of this into a market in the past few years where 0% ARM’s were a common thing and a mind set which said that ownership is always better than rental, and its easy to see how we got in this situation.

The thing that interests me is that no one is suggesting that as a solution to the housing crisis we start building rail lines or beefing up mass transit systems and encouraging urban and suburban densification. Condo and apartment living provides many environmental and economical advantages to single family home ownership — heating and cooling loads are lower and more averaged, water usage is decreased because there is less lawn/planting per person, and there is less land being used for housing which allows for more land being used for other needs. While I may have some design and business issues with the new urbanist town centers and mixed use developments I do believe that they are a long term plan for dealing with housing.