Cindy Wu with SF Board of Supervisors President David Chiu (left) and Chinatown CDC Executive Director Norman Fong. Photo: CCDC

As a commissioner, Wu will vote on planning decisions that shape the city’s streets, from streetscape redesigns to enforcing regulations on car parking in new developments (which affects how much residents and employees drive) to crafting design requirements aimed at minimizing the damage of driveways to the pedestrian environment.

Wu told Streetsblog that she hopes to encourage the Planning Commission’s progressive shift towards a broader consideration of how projects affect walking, bicycling and transit. ”I think the Planning Commission has integrated transportation more into their thinking and opening the categories to be considered,” said Wu.

Wu replaces Christina Olague, the former commission president who was recently appointed as supervisor of District 5.

At her appointment hearing, colleagues roundly praised Wu for her strong educational and professional background, and her fresh perspective as the youngest person on the commission (Wu is 30). Planning Commissioner Kathrin Moore took time out of a hearing to voice her support for her appointment: “She engages, she listens — an extremely important attribute in the position of a commissioner, and she operates within the public discussion,” Moore told the supervisors.

“I’m interested in continuing to work in breaking down barriers that prevent people from participating in land use decisions,” said Wu. “That might literally be language, but that might also be the translation of planning language into everyday activities that people can understand. I think that the way you go to the grocery store, or the way you take your kids to school, all of those things are affected by land use decisions and planning code.”

Wu, a graduate of U.C. Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has recently worked on projects like Chinatown’s plan to redesign Broadway as a friendlier street for pedestrians. In her more than four years at CCDC, she has also done community outreach on the Central Subway, which CCDC supports. (Supervisors did ask her to address her potential conflicts of interest at the hearing.) Wu also sits on the board of directors for the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), which is launching an effort to re-envision Stockton Street.

“Cindy is a great choice for the Planning Commission,” said SPUR Executive Director Gabriel Metcalf. “She is going to bring a combination of sophistication about the big planning issues and grounding in a community.”

Two major upcoming decisions at the commission concern the California Pacific Medical Center project and a luxury condo development at 8 Washington Street, which would include 420 parking spaces for just 165 residences near the Ferry Building. Though Wu declined to comment specifically on that project, she said she thinks ”transit-first is an important policy for the city, and we want to continue to pursue that, but I do think there’s a balance, always — and I think we struggle with this in Chinatown — it’s finding the right balance between all the modes. It’s not to say it should be 100 percent transit, or 100 percent vehicle or pedestrian, but just making sure that all the uses of a neighborhood are able to continue and function.”

Wu would also influence San Francisco’s involvement in the Bay Area’s ongoing Sustainable Communities Strategy (a.k.a. Plan Bay Area), an effort aimed at focusing population growth near transit. When asked for her thoughts on the local effects of shouldering much of that growth in San Francisco, Wu told the committee that densifying existing neighborhoods needs to be done carefully to ensure that the new housing is accessible for people of all incomes and to prevent negatively affecting existing residents.

“If we’re going to be building along transportation corridors, we really need to think about whether or not that housing is [subsidized to be] affordable or market-rate, and whether or not there’s a role for preservation of existing housing,” said Wu.

Wu joins her first hearing today, and the Planning Commission meets every Thursday. To see what’s on the agenda, check the SF Planning Department’s website.

Sibelius Park, a housing complex in Copenhagen, has cooperated with the Danish Crime Prevention Council to carefully define private, semiprivate, semipublic and public territories in the complex. Subsequent studies have shown that there is less crime and greater security than in other similar developments. Photos: Jan Gehl

Editor’s note: Streetsblog San Francisco is thrilled to launch a three-part series today by renowned Danish architect and livable streets luminary Jan Gehl. The pieces are excerpts are from his book, “Cities for People” published by Island Press. Donate to Streetsblog SF and you’ll qualify to win a copy of the book, courtesy of Island Press. Visit the Island Press website to find many more great titles by the nation’s leading publisher of books on environmental issues.

Feeling safe is crucial if we hope to have people embrace city space. In general, life and people themselves make the city more inviting and safe in terms of both experienced and perceived security.

In this section we deal with the safe city issue with the goal of ensuring good cities by inviting walking, biking and staying. Our discussion will focus on two important sectors where targeted efforts can satisfy the requirement for safety in city space: traffic safety and crime prevention.

Throughout the entire period of car encroachment, cities have tried to remove bicycle traffic from their streets. The risk of accident to pedestrians and bicyclists has been great throughout the rise in car traffic, and the fear of accident even greater.

Many European countries and North America experienced the car invasion early on and have watched city quality deteriorate year by year. There have been numerous counter reactions and an incipient development of new traffic planning principles in response. In other countries whose economies have developed more slowly and modestly, cars have only begun to invade cities more recently. In every case the result is a dramatic worsening of conditions for pedestrians and bicycle traffic.

The concept of shared or complete streets suggests equality between traffic groups, which is a utopian ide- al. Integrating various types of traffic is not satisfactory until pedestrians are given a clear priority (shared space in Haren, the Netherlands, and a pedestrian priority street in Copenhagen, Denmark).

In cities where the car invasion began early and has lasted decades, we can now see a strong reaction against the myopic focus on cars that has dealt such harsh blows to city life and bicycle traffic.

In many countries, especially in Europe, traffic planning in the 21st century has changed dramatically compared to the traffic planning of twenty or thirty years ago. The importance of promoting pedestrian and bicycle traffic has gradually been acknowledged while better understanding of the nature and causes of traffic accidents has produced a considerably wider variety of planning tools.

When the first pedestrian streets were introduced in Europe in the 1960s, there were really only two street models: those for vehicular traffic and those for pedestrians. Numerous types of streets and traffic solutions have since been developed so that today’s traffic planners have quite a wide range of streets to choose from: vehicular traffic-only streets, boulevards, 30 km/h (19 mph) traffic, pedestrian priority, 15 km/h (9 mph) areas, pedestrian-streetcar, pedestrian-bicycle and pedestrian only. The experience gained in the intervening years has also made it possible to reduce the number of traffic accidents and make walking or biking considerably safer and more comfortable.

In choosing street types and traffic solutions, it is important to start with the human dimension. People must be able to move comfortably and safely in cities on foot or by bicycle, and when traffic solutions are adopted special consideration must be given to children, the young, the elderly and people with disabilities. Quality for people and pedestrian safety must be key concerns.

A number of recent urban planning ideologies deriving from accident statistics contend that the risk of accident can be reduced by physically mixing types of traffic in the same street under the heading of “shared space.”

The underlying idea of these so-called shared streets is that they will give trucks, cars, motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians of all ages the opportunity to travel quietly, side by side and with good eye contact. Serious accidents will rarely occur under such conditions, or so it is thought, because pedestrians and bicyclists need to be extra vigilant at all times.

Obviously, if people are sufficiently frightened and keep a close watch on traffic, nothing untoward will happen. However, the price is high in terms of dignity and quality. Children cannot be allowed free rein, and older people and others with reduced mobility may be forced to drop walking altogether. In any discussion about people and traffic safety the risk of accident must be weighed against quality for pedestrians and bicyclists. Much of modern traffic planning continues to pay far too little attention to the quality of city life.

Mixing types of traffic is certainly possible, but not on the equal terms implied by the shared street concept. As the British “home zones,” Dutch “woonerfs,” and Scandinavian “sivegader” have demonstrated for years, pedestrians can thrive with other forms of traffic as long as it is crystal clear that all movement is based on the premises of pedestrians. Mixed–traffic solutions must prioritize either pedestrians or provide appropriate traffic segregation.

Copenhagen-style bicycle lanes take advantage of parked cars to protect bicyclists.

The principle of having bicyclists bike outside a lane of parked cars does not solve many safety and security problems. It does help to protect the parked cars, however!

There is every reason to applaud the many new types of streets and policies that ensure safety for pedestrians and bicyclists while allowing service vehicles to make door-to-door deliveries.

From project to project, planners must consider which types of streets and degree of traffic integration would be a good solution. The actual and perceived safety of pedestrians must always be the determining factor. It is not a natural law that motorized traffic should be allowed access everywhere. It is generally  accepted that cars are not welcome in parks, libraries, community centers and houses. The advantages to not having car traffic everywhere are obvious, so even though there are compelling arguments for allowing car traffic all the way to the front door, in many situations there are equally good arguments for establishing car-free areas surrounding the residences.

For centuries traffic in Venice has functioned on the principle that the transition from rapid to slow traffic does not take place at the front door but at the city limit. The Venice principle is hard to beat when prioritizing city quality. As mentioned above, a number of options have been developed for coexistence between pedestrian and motorized traffic. While these options open new doors, they also create more problems.

A pedestrian in Venice can be forgiven for thinking that many of the recent traffic solutions represent various forms of compromise com- pared to the vision of a true city for people. Or put in another way, in Venice it is easy to surmise that “there is only one thing better than slow cars — and that is no cars.” But as also mentioned, it is important to be pragmatic and flexible. There are many good new compromises, but they must be assessed and carefully selected.

In Venice the shift from rapid to slow traffic occurs at the city limits rather than at the front door. This is an interesting and inspiring for the contemporary vision of creating lively, safe, sustainable and healthy cities.

Already in the first chapter of her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs discusses the importance of safety in the streets. She describes the crime-preventive effect of life in the street, of mixing functions in buildings and of residents’ care for common space. Her expressions “street watchers” and “eyes on the street” have since become integral to city planning terminology.

Being able to walk safely in city space is a prerequisite for creating inviting well-functioning cities for people. Experienced as well as perceived safety is crucial for life in the city.

The safety discussion has a general and a more detailed dimension. The general focus is maintaining and supporting the vision of an open society in which people from all socioeconomic groups can move about side by side in the common room of the city as they go about their daily business. Within this general framework, safety can also be promoted through careful consideration for the design of the many detailed solutions in the city.

Juxtaposed with the idealistic visions of safe open cities is the reality of many urban societies. Social and economic inequality is the backdrop for high crime rates and the fully or semiprivate attempts to protect property and private life.

A profusion of bars, fences, signs and cameras signals the insecurity and fear that have crept into communities around the world.

Barbed wire and iron bars fortify houses, security patrols cruise residential areas, security guards stand in front of shops and banks, signs threaten “armed response” outside houses in exclusive quarters, gated communities abound: all of these are examples of people’s attempts to protect themselves against invasion and trespass of private property. The examples also illustrate a general retreat to the private sphere by some population groups.

It is important to point out that simple individual urban crime-prevention solutions are not of much help, where the invasive sense of insecurity is often deeply rooted in social conditions. On the other hand, many urban communities are less gridlocked, including hard-hit city districts. In these areas there is every reason to make a solid effort to avoid the retreat of the population behind bars and barbed wire.

Other parts of the world do have cities and societies in which cultural tradition, family networks and social structure keep crime low despite economic inequalities.

To conclude, in almost all situations there are good arguments for working carefully to reinforce real and perceived safety, a prerequisite for using common city space.

If we shift the focus from defending the private sphere to a general discussion about feeling safe while walking in public space, we will find a clear-cut connection between the goal to strengthen city life and the desire for safety.

If we reinforce city life so that more people walk and spend time in common spaces, in almost every situation both real and perceived safety will increase. The presence of others indicates that a place is acceptly good and safe. There are “eyes in the street” and often “eyes on the street” as well because it has become meaningful and interesting for people in nearby buildings to follow what is going on in the street. When people make their daily rounds in city space, both the space and the people who use them becomes more meaningful and thus more important to keep an eye on and watch out for. A lively city becomes a valued city and thus also a safer city.

Life in the street has an impact on safety, but life along the street also plays a significant role. Urban areas with mixed functions provide more activities in and near buildings around the clock. Housing in particular signifies good connections to the city’s important common space and a marked reinforcement of the real and perceived safety in the evening and at night. So even if the street is deserted, lights from windows in residential areas send a comforting signal that people are nearby.

Approximately 7,000 residents live in Copenhagen’s city center. On an ordinary weekday evening in the winter season a person walking through the city can enjoy the lights from about 7,000 windows.

The light from buildings along city streets can make a significant contribution to the feeling of security when darkness falls. Above: Bakery in Amman, Jordan.

The Apple Store in Sydney, Australia.

The proximity to housing and residents plays a key role in the feeling of safety. It is common practice for city planners to mix functions and housing as a crime prevention strategy and thus increase the feeling of safety along the most important streets used by pedestrians and bicyclists. The strategy works well in Copenhagen, where the city center has buildings between five and six stories high, and there is good visual contact between residences and street space. The strategy does not work as well in Sydney. Although the Australian metropolis has 15,000 people living in its heart, the residences are generally from 10 to 50 stories above street level, no one who lives high up can see what is happening down on the street.

Tall buildings can also land softly and elegantly along streets and soften the transition between out and in (Lloyd´s of London. Architects: Richard Rogers Partnership, 1978 - 86).

Ground floor building design has a disproportionately large impact on the life and appeal of city space. Ground floors are what we see when we walk past buildings. It is also from the lower floors that people inside can follow what is going on outside, and vice versa.  If ground floors are friendly, soft and — in particular — populated, pedestrians are surrounded by human activity. Even at night when little is happening  in cafés and front yards, furniture, flowers, parked bicycles and forgotten toys are a comforting witness of life and proximity to other people. Light streaming from the windows of shops, offices and dwellings at night helps increase the feeling of safety in the street.

Soft edges signal to people that a city is welcoming. In contrast, in streets with retail, where solid metal shutters close off shops outside opening hours a sense of rejection and insecurity  is produced.  The streets are dark and deserted in the evening, and there is not much reason to be there on weekends and holidays either. Given the general desire for safe cities and inviting ground floors, preferred façade options have open metal grills and other types of transparency to protect goods but allow light to stream onto the street, and they also give nocturnal pedestrians the pleasure of window shopping.

Life in the street and on the street, mixed functions along the street and friendly edge zones are key qualities for good cities — also in terms of safety and protection. The polar opposite is the perfect recipe for an insecure urban environment: lifeless streets, mono-functional buildings devoid of activity for most of the day, closed, lifeless and dark façades. To this list we can add insufficient lighting, deserted paths and pedestrian tunnels, dark nooks and crannies, and too many bushes.

In the face of this rather depressing scenario it is important to remember that almost any enticement to invite people to walk, bicycle and stay in city space will also contribute to a greater sense of security.

A soft edge and clear distinctions be- tween public, semiprivate and private territories provide good opportunities to signal where you live and decorate it with your favorite flowers (Almere, the Netherlands).

Another contribution to our sense of security is a good city layout that makes it is easy for us to find our way around. It is a mark of good urban quality when we can directly find the destination we’re looking for without hesitation and detours. Clear structure and organization do not require large dimensions and broad straight roads from point to point. It is fine for the streets to be winding and the street network varied. What is important is that the individual links in the network have clear visual characteristics, that space has a distinctive character and that important streets can be distinguished from less important ones. Signs and directions and good lighting at night are crucial elements of the relationship between city structure, sense of locality and feeling of security when walking in the city.

In the chapter on human senses, it was mentioned how different distances are used for various types of communication between people, and how these distances are continuously used to reinforce the character and intensity of contacts. Interacting with others and protecting our private sphere are two sides of the same coin. Just as close contact necessitates precisely defined territories, a clear articulation of private and public territories on the larger arena is an important prerequisite for social opportunities and a sense of security.

Human society is subtly organized around various social structures that define and reinforce the individual’s sense of affiliation and security. A university student is part of a structure with faculties, departments, classes and study groups that provide a framework. Workplaces have divisions, departments and teams. Cities have quarters, neighborhoods, housing complexes and single dwellings. Coupled with well-known designations and signals, these structures in themselves help reinforce a sense of affiliation within the larger entity and security for the individual group, household or person.

Also on a small scale — particularly in connection with individual dwellings — clarifying territories and affiliations is crucial for contact with others and for protecting the private sphere. Whereas efforts are made to graduate and soften transitions between private and public areas by building semiprivate and semipublic transition zones, the likelihood of contact from zone to zone increases, and residents gain the opportunity to regulate contacts and protect private life. A well-proportioned transition zone can keep events at a comfortable arm’s length.

In the previous section soft edges and their importance for life in the city are discussed. It is emphasized that edge zones, porches and front yards can make a decisive contribution to vitalizing life in public space. These transition zones between the private and public sphere must be carefully articulated in order to clearly distinguish between what is private and what is public.

Changes in pavement, landscaping, furniture, hedges, gates and canopies can mark where public space ends and fully or semiprivate transition zones begin. Height differences, steps and staircases can also mark the transition zone, providing critical prerequisite for the important function of soft edges as the link between inside and out, between private and public. Only when territories are clearly marked can the private sphere afford the degree of protection that people need to make contact with others and contribute to life in the city.

Pedestrian and bicycle traffic save a lot of space in the city. Bicycle paths have room for five times more traffic than car lanes. The sidewalk has room for 20 times more travellers than car lanes.

Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography

San Franciscans are dreaming big as Market Street’s transformation approaches in 2015, when the city’s most important street is scheduled to be redesigned and repaved. City planners are engaging with citizens to answer a century-old question: How can we make Market Street the glorious thoroughfare that it needs to be?

Better Market Street, a collaborative project of five city agencies, has held public meetings and webinars the past two weeks to field input from people who walk, bike, ride transit, and even drive along the street. The effort is being informed by a large swath of research brought to the table by city staffers, which is now available on the Better Market Street website.

“Market Street is San Francisco’s civic backbone, connecting water to hills, businesses to neighborhoods, cultural centers to recreational opportunities,” the site’s about page states. “The movement of people and goods, from the very earliest times, has dominated its design and use. But Market Street needs to be more than a transportation route. It needs to be the city’s most vibrant public space and many San Franciscans feel it falls far short of this ideal.”

Block-by-block, hour-by-hour data documenting the urban environment were collected by researchers to help inform input from attendees at recent workshops. Researchers note everything from fluctuations in pedestrian and bicycle traffic along the street, to the conditions plaguing its extremely high volume of transit trips, to the placement of trees and how the usage of plazas is impacted by the sun and wind. Comparisons and best practices from major streets abroad help put it all in perspective.

Pedestrian activity on Market Street is most highly concentrated in the retail districts during the weekend. Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography

“The BMS Project is expected, at a minimum, to result in a major revitalization effort, with plans for a number of strategic and significant public space improvements,” the project materials explain. “These improvements will be supported by sustainable urban design and mobility principles that facilitate promenading opportunities and an enlivened sidewalk life; reliable and efficient transit service; and a safe, comfortable and appealing bicycle facility along its entire length.”

The project is an effort led by the Department of Public Works along with the SF Municipal Transportation Agency, the Planning Department, and the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, among others.

One of its highest priorities is to make Lower Market more inviting to people who will want to spend more time along all of the street throughout the entire day.

Walking is already the predominant use of the street, making up nearly half of all trips, according to the research. But pedestrian volumes were found to vary drastically throughout different areas, different times of day, and for different seasons. While the mornings and afternoons see commuters fill sidewalks in the Financial District and weekend shoppers swarm the retail district, they stay relatively empty west of Seventh Street.

That low level of activity can inhibit a sense of “urbanity” and contribute to a feeling of insecurity, researchers found. Most people who do walk or linger on Market are just passing through or waiting for a bus.

The public spaces along Market lack certain features needed to promote healthy pedestrian activity, and “gathering spaces and edges that activate the street” such as cafes, public seating, and storefronts within a comfortable distance of pedestrians, are key to reaching that goal, say researchers.

In many of the open space destinations along Market, lingering is limited to weekends and events, according to the research, and Market Street is the city’s regularly chosen stage for civic parades and celebrations. But on most days, many of its public plazas suffer from design flaws such as a “lack of differentiation from the street” and “visual and physical barriers to the majority of the occupiable space”.

Much of the pedestrian activity that does happen seems to be connected with transit use. Of all transit boardings in San Francisco, Market Street hosts nearly a quarter, carrying one-third of all Muni lines and most BART lines for a total of 250,000 daily boardings. On the surface of the street, buses and streetcars pass at an average of every 40 seconds at peak times, yet they travel “relatively slowly” at 4 to 8 mph despite the traffic lights being timed for an optimal 11 mph.

The thoroughfare has seen a sharp growth in bike usage over the past few years, notes the research, with bikes outnumbering cars three to one at rush hour. But project members say they would like to see that ridership grow beyond the predominantly male, commute-based traffic.

The growth seems to have partly resulted from a “safety in numbers” snowball effect, although separated green bike lanes west of Eighth Street seem to help. But hazards like neglected pavement, turning motor traffic and incomplete bike lanes are well-documented deterrents, and a continuous separated bikeway was a markedly high priority in workshop attendee responses.

"Half of those riding along Market Street do so because other people on bikes use the same route." Photo: Bryan Goebel

The disproportionate impact of private autos on all uses of Market Street has been a concern shared by many, but the data makes a strong case for doing away with cars on Lower Market altogether.

Up to 85 percent of the car traffic at intersections is crossing Market Street, rather than traveling along it, according to the research. The majority of the relatively few cars that do use Market are traveling only two blocks ”circling around looking for parking.” Meanwhile, the 30,000 spots provided to store automobiles in garages and parking lots within one-quarter of a mile of the street sit underused: city-owned garages average 45 to 73 percent of their capacity.

Going car-free could be crucial in designing a truly unique grand boulevard for the city that invites people from all over to experience it every day.

The Better Market Street Project is accepting community input via a survey on its website. Two more workshops are expected to be held in September and November 2011.

Project timeline. Click to enlarge.

Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography

City planners often get very little public recognition for the work they do, and can sometimes take the heat on a project if it doesn’t prove politically popular. In the case of San Francisco’s revolutionary Pavement to Parks program, the early resistance to reclaiming public space from cars to create convivial spaces for people has gradually subsided and parklets are now in heavy demand. None of it would have been possible without the hard work and determination of Andres Power, an urban designer for the San Francisco Planning Department.

As the manager of the P2P program, Power has spent tireless hours managing the city’s initial plaza and parklet projects and moving them through the vast city bureaucracy. He deals regularly with merchants, neighbors and community groups. He’s worn a hardhat on many a Saturday and is the guy who gets called at midnight if something goes wrong.  Power’s unwavering dedication, even in the face of fierce opposition, has made him one of the unsung heroes of San Francisco’s livable streets movement.

Along with some of his colleagues at the Planning Department, Power is working from within to change the dysfunctional and old-school culture of city government with an eye to then transform our streets. The Pavement to Parks program is now catching the attention of cities all over the U.S. Last week, San Francisco issued a new request for parklet proposals, which means they’ll be spreading to even more neighborhoods.

Power was born in San Francisco and grew up in the East Bay city of Albany. I sat down with him recently to find out more about his interest in urban planning, and his involvement in the Pavement to Parks program.

Bryan Goebel: What sparked your interest in city planning?

Andres Power: I’ve always loved cities. Being in a place that’s dynamic and changing and exciting has always been something that has intrigued me. I’ve tried to think back and to figure out what my motivators were and I think I just landed in the right place, to be honest. I had some great professors in undergrad at Brown University that really were forward and progressive thinking and inspired me. Then, after undergraduate, I went and worked in New York at the Department of Housing and Preservation doing economic development for the city and it was just an amazing place to be. It was so crazy and frantic, such a huge and complicated bureaucracy, but still, individual people could make amazing changes.

Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography

BG: So this was in your early 20s? You must have graduated from college early then?

AP: I graduated from Brown when I was 20. I was young for my age because I skipped a grade early on. So yes, I graduated early and worked for New York for, I guess, three and a half years. It was a really fun place to be, and I moved my way up through the system there and I was actually working in the Section Eight program. It was tangential to my interest but it was a fascinating work with a lot of smart people and it just really cemented my love for cities. It was so satisfying knowing that as a bureaucrat, I could make positive change for people.

BG:  Yeah, and I imagine living in New York deepened and inspired your interest in urban planning.

AP: Absolutely. There’s no question about it. At that time it was right after 911, so it was early 2002. The offices were four blocks from the World Trade Center so it was an interesting place to be, for sure, and the focus was really on emergency management type stuff, at first, and then things calmed down, and it was much more about starting to think about the future, and looking at the long-terms goals of the city. The notion of working for an entity that is thinking about what the future’s going to be in 20-25 years, and doing things in the short-term, to move us in that direction is incredibly satisfying. That’s what I do here now. It’s really about seeing what we want this city to look like, how we want it to function, how we want it to be for the next generation and working on the immediate steps to make improvements that move us in that direction.

BG: So you spent three and a half years in New York City, and then went to grad school at MIT for two years?

AP: Two years, yes.  MIT was an interesting place for sure. The urban studies program was somewhat isolated from the rest of the university but was still a crazy place. The buildings were all connected underground by these tunnels and there’d gatherings sometimes on the weekend in the tunnels where people would all dress up in Star Trek attire. So, a lot of the stereotypes that you would think of for MIT, definitely a lot of that happened there. It’s also a great place to be. People were really smart, really motivated and undoubtedly the program really cemented the notion that this is really what it was that intrigued me.

BG: So after MIT what happened?

AP: Getting a job anywhere in government takes a lot of time so the beginning of my last semester, in January or so, there was a posting for jobs here in San Francisco. I applied and actually got called back sooner than I’d anticipated, came out here over spring break, had an interview, had a second interview and was hired as an entry level urban designer for the San Francisco Planning Department.

BG: What exactly were you hired to do?

AP: The first thing I did was to come up with a streetscape plan for San Jose Avenue. It was a good first stab at doing this type of work and getting to learn the dynamics and the politics here. I remember going out with then Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval in his personal car. He took me down and showed me what he thought needed improvement. It was great, understanding the craziness and how the system in the city works, and how the public realm is managed by so many different agencies and entities. It was an eye-opening experience. Then from there I started doing a lot of graphics type stuff and early plan development for the Rincon Hill streetscape plan and the Better Streets Plan.

Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography

BG: So how did Pavements to Parks get started? It all pretty much began with the 17th Street plaza, right?

AP: Yes. I’d been working with Adam Varat on content development for the Better Streets Plan for a couple of years at that point, and in that plan there was a lot of discussion about temporary uses of the right of way. What that meant wasn’t fully fleshed out but the idea was to be playful with the public realm and to think about uses that perhaps changed over time. Being creative in how we use a parking lane, for example, was particularly exciting to me. Then, New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn came and met with the different department directors and basically challenged the city to do something. She came and presented the work that she was doing to DPW Director Ed Reiskin, my director, John Rahim, and [SFMTA Chief] Nat Ford and the representatives of the Mayor’s Office and said, ‘This is what we’re doing in New York,’ which was a challenge to do something similar over here.

So, in response to that challenge, all the different departments submitted a list of possible projects based on culling the archives of community plans and public efforts. So that project, the Castro 17th project, was one that had been advanced by a couple of agencies. With DPW and MTA we moved it forward. This was around the same time that the Upper Market Streetscape Plan was being worked on and it talked a lot about making improvements to that intersection. So, it just sort of all came together, and [City Design Group Manager] David Alumbaugh felt very strongly that we should start off with something bold, making the subsequent projects easier by comparison. It was a smart move to make. As small as it is, the Plaza location was as complicated as one can be, with the streetcar going right through and cars coming from just about every direction. But we knew that the users were there, and that the community was generally on board with it. At the same time Public Architecture came to the city and was offering its services to help with a public space project.

“I think in my mind the most beneficial change is really pushing the city family to be okay with experimentation.”

Change is always hard. Beyond the actual projects that the Pavement to Parks program has installed, I think in my mind the most beneficial change is really pushing the city family to be okay with experimentation. At Castro, how a trial plaza could come together was incredibly challenging for the bureaucracy to wrap its collective head around. So the proposal languished. Getting approvals was incredibly difficult. But finally, with some colleagues we thought, ‘we’re just going to get this done, this is ridiculous,’ and we got it done. Once the project was installed some department heads came together with the Mayor’s Office to talk about what we learned and what the next steps were. Basically, what came out of that meeting was that we needed someone who would be empowered to just make things happen and someone who ultimately would be responsible for delivering the projects. So, they put me in charge and that’s how the program came to be.

Power with architect Jane Martin constructing the Guerrero Park plaza. Photo: Jamison Wieser

BG: What do you see as some of your biggest challenges now?

AP: Amongst the city family, I think generally speaking that there is alignment with what it is that we’re doing, but not everyone necessarily agrees 100 percent, or is as gung-ho about this work as I am. It’s incredibly difficult to get people to just say, ‘this is how we’re going to make it happen.’ The culture has been changing and it’s gotten much better, at least in a relative sense over the last number of years, but the culture’s always been, ‘no, you can’t do it and this is why.’ It’s never been, ‘This is what you want to do, let’s figure out how we’re going to make it happen.’ And as for design, it’s always been the common denominator that gets implemented. Everyone has to weigh in. Muni weighs in, the traffic engineer weighs in, the utilities weight in, the street sweeper weighs in. Then once you’ve resolved all of their individual concerns, you have your end product. That’s how things have been done historically, but at the end of the day that end product doesn’t necessarily advance the city’s collective goals. The most challenging piece is getting the projects through a system that is not geared to making these kinds of things happen in an easy way.

BG: What about the occasional opposition that arises from merchants, or neighbors, like what happened in Noe Valley?

AP: Not every project is going to work and I think it’s great, ultimately, that people speak up for what they believe. I may not necessarily agree with that position, and I may know their arguments are technically incorrect, but at the same time, I think it’s perfectly legitimate for people to not want something and I think that’s just part of the way things are in a heterogeneous community. Generally speaking, most people want urban public spaces, most people want open space, most people want amenities, most people want bicycle infrastructure, most people want storm water improvements. So, it’s not convincing people of the merits of that per se. A lot of it has to do with disagreements between one neighbor and another so these kinds of projects can become the polarizing element for that. I have no problem with this reality, and it’s why cities ultimately are fun places to work in. It’s not like working in the suburbs where you have a much more homogenous perspective on things.

“The culture’s always been, ‘no, you can’t do it and this is why.’ It’s never been, ‘This is what you want to do, let’s figure out how we’re going to make it happen.’ “

BG: I was walking on Dolores Street recently and had an encounter with a woman who was walking her dog and was just furious the city had removed a parking space in front of her house to install a crosswalk. There’s a ‘war on drivers,’ she exclaimed.  In your role as a planner, and this is a difficult question, but how do we win the hearts and minds of people like that who don’t feel like they want to give up any space for cars?

AP: It’s not an easy answer. If we knew the answer to that, then we’d be golden. I think there’s a couple of things at play. In large part our work is about education and we’re not always good at that. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the best. I think generally the city family’s not very good at it, but really what we ought to be doing, as people who are paid to be thinking about the future, is tailoring our messaging in an understandable way and to be able to explain why it is we’re doing the things that we’re doing. So, I think a lot of it is education. Some people may just fundamentally disagree with your position and that’s okay. But many people, when you have an informed and rational discussion about the merits of an effort, can ultimately become your best supporters. But specifically when trade offs involve a car, I think unfortunately people can become very passionate about it.

BG: Emotions can get in the way.

AP: It’s very emotional, yes, and so to a certain extent you have to do your very best to educate, and to be that facilitator and explain what it is that you’re doing, and why you’re doing it, and what the benefits are for each person because ultimately it’s not just about taking away something from one person, and giving it to another. It’s about advancing our collective benefit. I think any type of change can be difficult for people, but at the same time, I do believe that delivering good projects and being able to show, for example, the lady with her dog, that benefit to her as she’s trying to cross the street. There really is an immediate benefit to her. She’s probably much less likely to get hit by a speeding car. Her dog is less likely to get run over because of that improvement that was made.  So, it wasn’t just about taking a parking space away, it was about making her condition better. I think the city is not the best at making this understood, although we’re constantly working to improve our communication.

Enjoying a light moment in the Castro plaza while shooting a Streetfilm. From left, Power, City Design Group Manager David Alumbaugh and filmmaker Paul Jaffe. Photo: Bryan Goebel

BG: Where do you see the Pavements to Parks program going?

AP: That’s a good question. The Pavements to Parks program has been really focused as of late on getting the parklets up and running. I think we’ve done that. I think we’ve created a model that is sustainable for the long term. We’ve done a lot of work, with great help from the Department of Public Works, the MTA and the SF Great Streets Project, to come up with the mechanisms to evaluate these projects and facilitate them because at the end of the day we want to be encouraging this. We want the city structure to be set up in such a way that it’s incentivizing and not making it difficult to make public improvements.  So, with that under our belt, to a certain extent the question now becomes, what’s next? Are there going to be more plazas? Are we going to be doing some other design typology perhaps that we haven’t even thought about yet? I think the answer to that ought to be yes. Aside from the physical projects that Pavement to Parks has produced, which I think are great things, one of the amazing contributions it’s provided is showing that experimentation is a good thing, and how it can produce good stuff. The vehicle of Pavement to Parks, this interagency cooperation, can apply to anything. Theoretically, it could apply to innovative treatments of a bike lane, or whatever it is we want to try. The structure of Pavement to Parks is such that the actual physical improvement can be anything, but the process to get it on the ground is really about what Pavements to Parks provides, and it’s an expedited process. I think it’s a great example of what happens when people come together saying, ‘We want to get this done, how are we going to make it happen,’ as opposed to figuring out a way why you can’t.

I think the streets of our city ought to be designed for the kind of use that provides the most benefit to the most people, both at the local level, and ultimately on a global level because what is sustainable in the long term is a city that encourages and gives priority to people who want to walk and who want to move around in a way that doesn’t produce an externality on somebody else. Unfortunately, for the last 50 years, it’s been the opposite. We have been prioritizing the mode of transport that provides the most externalities on people, and so I think a long-term vision for the city is one in which the fabric really is about the best common good. I think for me what that means is a place where driving is a last option. I think we’ve got a long way to go to get there, while, at the same time, I do feel like there will always be the need for a vehicle. I have to remember to say that because I do believe it. I think whether it’s a solar powered car or whatever it is, ultimately there is a need for transport of kids and goods but as a primary transportation mode, I think that there isn’t room for that in the city.

BG: What advice would you have for other cities looking to do parklets and plazas and repurpose space for people?

AP: Start with the location, either for a plaza or a parklet, that you know will be successful. One that has a strong on the ground partner who is vested in helping ensure that the space is successful. This is absolutely key as the success of the first installation sets the groundwork for many more. Also, don’t expect to create a program first. Start with a great project that people will be excited about and the the program will follow. Get authority from the very top – you’ll need it – so that you can push through the inevitable red tape. Also, have an answer to the inevitable questions that will come up. “Putting a parklet in will make the cross section of the street too narrow for a fire truck.” Remind the reviewer that a parklet is no wider than a parked car.  If it’s okay that a car is parked there, why can’t people sit there too. Celebrate the first project. From there, the next installations become easier.

Image © Peter Calthorpe & Marianna Leuschel

Editor’s note: This concludes our 5-part series of excerpts from Peter Calthorpe’s book, “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change.”  Thanks to Island Press, a few lucky Streetsblog readers will be selected to receive a free copy of the book. To enter the contest, fill out this form. We’ll choose the winners tomorrow.

The most important community-scale system dependent on urbanism is transit. It has long been known that density and transit ridership are linked, but it goes much deeper than that. The key to viable transit systems is not just density but walkability and mixed use—true urban places. If people cannot walk the quarter mile to or from a station, chances are they will not use the transit. Conversely, if they can easily run errands and coordinate trips on the way to or from a station, they are more likely to use transit. European data show that the percentage of walk or bike trips always exceeds that of transit trips—often by more than two to one.²⁷ In fact, walking by itself constitutes 30 percent of all trips in Great Britain (versus 9 percent transit), and in Sweden walk/bike trips are 34 percent of the total (versus 11 percent transit). ²⁸ Transit supports and extends the pedestrian environment; transit is pedestrian dependent, not the other way around. The primary alternative to the car and all of its environmental costs is the pedestrian environment and the walkable urbanism that supports transit.

A good transit system has many layers, from local buses to bus rapid transit and streetcars, from light rail to subways and commuter trains. They all feed into and reinforce one another, and they all depend on walkable urbanism at the origin and destination. The quality of the interface from walking to transit, and from one form of transit to the other, is central to displacing car trips and is the greenest technology that urbanism provides.

The relationship among transit, urbanism, travel behavior, and carbon emissions is complex but can be summarized with one key quantifiable metric, vehicle miles traveled (VMT)—effectively, the amount we drive. VMT is determined by the number and distance of trips we take, and our “mode split”—the percentage of trips taken by various transportation modes such as walk, bike, car, carpool, or transit. Each household, depending on its location, income, and size, has an average VMT per year, which when combined with various auto technologies will generate its travel carbon footprint.

Many factors affect VMT, and there are many complex models that simulate the travel behavior behind it. For example, the modal split among auto, walk/bike, and transit is affected by location and level of transit service as well as how pedestrian friendly the streets are; the average length of each type of trip is affected by land use patterns and how closely destinations are located; the number of trips per day is affected by household size; and auto ownership rate is affected by household income and size. The most significant variables in all this are the walking and transit opportunities of urbanism, a compact development form, and land use patterns that bring destinations closer together.

The power of place over travel behavior is demonstrated by mapping VMT per household across a region. While averages always lead us to stereotypes, different environments across any region reveal dramatically different travel behaviors. For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area, a typical household in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco has an average VMT of 7,300 miles a year. This neighborhood averages only three stories but is dense by suburban standards; has a rich mix of shops, restaurants, and services within walking distance; and is a short transit ride from downtown. Its walk score (an algorithm that awards points based on the distance to the closest amenity in several categories) is 98 out of 100—as good as it gets.

The Rockridge neighborhood in Oakland was created as a streetcar suburb back in the prewar days of the Key Route Trolley system, which connected most of the Bay Area until 1948. It is filled largely with bungalow and small-lot single-family homes but has small apartment buildings at corners and a wonderful mixed-use main street along with a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train station at its center. The average household there drives about 12,200 miles a year and has a walk score of 74. Out in San Ramon, a low-density East Bay suburb without good transit connections, development patterns fit the standard sprawl paradigm, with isolated single family subdivisions, strip commercial arterials, malls, and office parks. VMT for the average home there is around 30,000 miles a year, and the walk score is 46.²⁹

So there is a four-to-one range in travel behavior over three neighborhoods in one region. They differ in density, mix of uses, walkability, proximity to job centers, and level of transit service. The density in Russian Hill is 62 units per acre, but home values are $555 per square foot. In Rockridge, the density averages 15 units per acre and values are $420 per square foot. Finally, in San Ramon, considered a very high end suburban community, the average density is 3.4 units per acre and the value averages just $320 per square foot.³⁰ The market itself is telling us that walkable places have value and, as a bonus, can reduce our carbon emissions and oil dependence. So desirable is the walkable neighborhood that a 2009 study found that in cities like San Francisco and Chicago, moving from a household with a city’s median walkability to one at the 75th percentile would increase the unit’s value by over $30,000.³¹ The challenge, of course, is to create walkable places as authentic and beautiful as Russian Hill and Rockridge that are affordable.

The point is that all of these community-scale systems—whether power, water, waste, or transit—need urbanism to be effective. Urbanism is essential for the viability of community cogeneration systems and the savings they provide in energy consumption. Denser, mixed-use development can provide the open space, community parks, and riparian setbacks needed by ecological water and waste recycling systems. And, of course, transit depends on urbanism for its fundamental viability.

These community-scale systems built around urbanism are not intended to replace the emissions reductions of efficient industrial processes, renewables in our utility portfolios, or better fuel standards for our cars. It is just that those supply-side strategies alone will not take us far enough quickly enough—and they come at a large cost premium. The combination of transit-served urbanism and green technology at the community scale is essential to complete the picture.

All of this discussion boils down to some simple choices in community building. One alternative simply extends our current land use patterns, architectural types, everyday aesthetics, and civic habits. As one example of this, imagine a room with a low-hung ceiling, sealed windows, and fluorescent lights; within a building with a mirror glass skin, set behind a parking lot off a six-lane arterial; in a zone of commercial development making up part of a suburb of subdivisions, shopping centers, and office parks connected by a freeway to a metropolis of decaying inner-city neighborhoods, struggling first-ring suburbs, exclusive suburban enclaves, failing school systems, and underfunded civic programs. This would seem like a biased contrivance if it were not so commonplace.

The other choice involves a quality of place making we seem to have lost touch with. It could be described as a room with high ceilings filled with natural light and breezes; in a building wrapping a courtyard and lining a street; in a neighborhood with tree-lined avenues, village greens, and local shops; making up a part of a city filled with streetcars, public squares, parks, and cultural districts; providing the focus of a metropolis with a constellation of many varied towns and cities connected by transit, growing economic networks, cultural institutions, and social opportunity. This also may seem like a biased contrivance, but it has been realized in some significant U.S. metro areas.

In both models, each layer is interdependent and connected by deep-rooted economic, policy, and social systems. Each is a complex that cannot easily exist piece by piece but nests layer by layer into a self-reinforcing “whole system.” Certainly, the future will be a mix of these two extremes, but the question is: in what proportions?

Just how much change in land use, technology, and place making we can tolerate is the topic of the next chapter. A look back over the past fifty years of development and urban form reveals just how dramatic the shifts can be—and what trends will direct future growth. The question then becomes how to shape a vision for our future and what will be the best balance of design standards, policies, technologies,
and economies to bring it about.

From Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, Chapter 1, by Peter Calthorpe. Copyright @ 2011 Peter Calthorpe. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Notes:

27. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), “Safety of Vulnerable Road Users” (Paris: OECD, 1998), 47.
28. OECD, “Safety of Vulnerable Road Users.”
29. John Holtzclaw, Mary Jean Burer, and David B. Goldstein, “Location Efficiency as the Missing Piece of the Energy Puzzle: How Smart Growth Can Unlock Trillion Dollar Consumer Cost Savings” (Asilomar, CA: Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, 2004); Front Seat, “Walk
Score: Helping Homebuyers, Renters, and Real Estate Agents Find Houses and Apartments in Great Neighborhoods,” http://www.walkscore.com/ (accessed February 10, 2010).
30. Prices per square foot are calculated using the online real estate services of Trulia.com using quarterly real estate statistics from 2009. Densities are calculated as a net of residential parcels using data from city and neighborhood boundaries established by the corresponding municipality.
31. Joe Cortright, “Walking the Walk: How Walkability Raises Home Values in U.S. Cities” (Chicago, IL: CEOs for Cities: 2009), table 8

Tassafaronga Village in Oakland features buildings "designed to the highest level of green standard...incorporating a wide range of complementary green strategies including solar power for on-site generation of electricity and hot water." Image: Brian Rose from David Baker + Partners Architects

Editor’s note: This week, we continue our 5-part series of excerpts from Peter Calthorpe’s book, “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change.” This is installment number four. Thanks to Island Press, a few lucky Streetsblog readers will be selected to receive a free copy of the book. To enter the contest, fill out this form.

I was part of the passive solar architectural movement in the 1970s. Its core idea was to provide energy for buildings in the most direct, elegant way. We had disdain for complicated “active solar” systems, with their complex engineering, maintenance, and costs. The passive way was first to reduce the demands by building tight, well insulated structures, flooded with natural light, and then to let the sun’s radiation or the cool night air work with the buildings’ form to provide thermal comfort. The same approach needs to be taken in relation to the climate change challenge: we need to find the simple, elegant solutions that are based on conservation before we introduce complex technology, even if it is green.

We need to focus, ironically, on ends, not means. For example, in passive solar buildings, focusing on the end goal (thermal comfort) rather than the means (heating air) changed the design approach dramatically. It turns out that human comfort has more to do with surrounding surface temperatures than with air temperature in a building, so massive walls that absorb and store the sun’s gentle heat also provide a more comfortable environment without all the hot air. Or, if lighting is the goal, electricity and bulbs are just one potential means; a building that welcomes daylight is the simple, elegant solution—even better than a complex system of wind farms generating green electrons for efficient fixtures. Likewise, the goal of transportation is access, not movement or mobility per se; movement is a means, not the end. So, bringing destinations closer together is a simpler, more elegant solution than assembling a new fleet of electric cars and the acres of solar collectors needed to power them. Call it “passive urbanism.”

Once demands are reduced by passive urbanism, the next step is to add technology. Green urbanism is what you get when you combine the best of traditional urbanism with renewable energy sources, advanced conservation techniques, new green technologies, and integrated services and utilities. All the inherent benefits of urbanism can be amplified by a new generation of ecological design, smart grids, climate-responsive buildings, low-carbon or electric cars, and next generation transit systems.

These technologies function in differing ways at differing scales. There are three scales of such green technology: building, community, and utility. Building-scale technologies are ecumenical; they can be applied in any form of development, traditional urban or auto-oriented sprawl. Obviously, better building insulation, weatherization, and efficient appliances can be used in single-family subdivisions as well as in urban townhomes. So, too, can solar domestic hot water systems or photovoltaic cells. Efficient lightbulbs make sense in any location, as do efficient appliances. While bigger, less efficient buildings will cost more to green, such retrofits and new building standards are the starting point for any sustainable future—but not the final solution.

At the other end of the spectrum are the centralized utility-scale systems. Shifting to massive renewable sources in remote locations will carry the burden of building equally massive distribution facilities. Such a “smart grid,” while essential to moving large quantities of power to our cities from distant natural resource areas (wind, sun, geothermal), has a high capital cost and reduces efficiency because of transmission line losses. These expenses are in addition to costs that are already consistently higher than those of conservation. Also, large-scale solar and wind operations can create big environmental footprints, as large tracts of virgin land are developed.

What are the real needs for large utility-scale renewable energy sources? It depends on the type of communities we plan and how we build them. If we add the travel demand of an average single-family home in the United States to the energy needed to heat, cool, and power the home, the total is just under 400 million Btu (British thermal units) per year (this includes the source energy typically left out of these calculations: the embodied energy of cars, the energy to produce the gasoline, and the wasted energy to produce the home’s electricity). Assume for argument that weatherization and greening this home can reduce building energy consumption by 30 percent and that the family buys new cars with 50 percent better mileage. The result is a 32 percent overall energy reduction—not bad for “green sprawl.” In contrast, a typical townhome located in a walkable neighborhood (not necessarily downtown but near transit) without any solar panels or hybrid cars consumes 38 percent less energy than such a suburban single-family home. Traditional urbanism, even without green technology, is better than green sprawl.

Now add more building conservation measures, green technology, and better transit systems to the townhouse, and you get close to the results we will need in 2050. If you move to a green townhome in a transit village, you will be consuming 58 percent less energy than on a large lot in the suburbs. If you move to a green condo in the city, you will be saving 73 percent when compared to the average single-family home in a distant suburb.

The implications of this for our power grid are massive. If more families lived this way—say just a quarter moved from single-family lots to green townhomes—the generating capacity required for buildings in the nation would be reduced by over 25,000 megawatts per year, eliminating the need for 50 new 500-megawatt plants.²² At $1.3 million per megawatt of installed capacity, that is more than $32 billion of avoided capital cost for new power plants per year.²³ The reduced fuel costs and environmental impacts are additional benefits.

The same is true for auto use. For example, satisfying California’s need for more driving in a “Trend” future would result in around 183 billion additional auto miles per year in 2050 when compared to the more urban alternative. Some believe that if we shifted to electric cars running on green electrons, the carbon problem could be solved. However, producing that many green electrons has a hidden hurdle: it would take 50,000 acres of high-efficiency solar thermal plants, 130,000 acres of photovoltaic panels, or 860,000 acres of wind farms (nearly thirty times the land area of San Francisco) to power such a transportation system.²⁴ This would present a giant environmental footprint no matter where it was placed. Ironically, the biggest barrier to such a green, if not urban, solution may be environmentalists themselves, protesting lost desert landscapes or resisting impacts on bird populations by wind turbines (or
even objecting to seeing the turbines on the horizon).

At the middle of the three scales, urbanism offers a better framework for more distributed community-scale energy systems. In fact, there are important community scale systems that can function only within an urban framework. One of the most significant of these technologies is the decentralized cogeneration electric power plant (called combined heat and power, or CHP). Such small-scale power plants can be coupled with district heating and cooling systems to capture and use the generator’s waste heat in local buildings and industry. Currently, for every watt of energy delivered to a home, two thirds is lost as waste heat up the smokestack and in transmission lines.²⁵ Local cogeneration plants coupled with district heating and cooling systems can largely eliminate these inefficiencies. The waste heat is captured and reused, while the transmission losses are greatly reduced. Because of this, it is estimated that cogeneration systems operate at around 90 percent efficiencies whereas standard power plants average only 40 percent.

Married to urban environments, cogeneration offers a cheap, time-tested alternative—one that has been employed by college campuses and European new towns for decades. There, small power plants are placed close to dense neighborhoods and commercial centers, distributing waste heat underground to each building for hot water, cooling, and heating. These plants can burn almost any form of renewable biomass, eliminating the energy-intensive process of converting valuable crops into biofuels or finding mechanisms to transform grass to gas. More interesting are a new generation of “waste to energy” technologies that not only produce green electricity and heat but also avoid the massive landfills and trucking costs of typical garbage systems.

Typically, cogeneration systems are found in commercial applications where waste heat is used in an industrial process and the power generation balances with the electrical demand. It is estimated that in the industrial sector alone, “the potential for CHP generation is equivalent to the output of 40 percent of the coal fired generating plants in the US.” ²⁶ Utilizing similar systems in urban districts would add dramatically to this potential.

Sacramento built such a system in its downtown in the 1970s that burned “gasified” dead wood created by a Sierra Mountain beetle infestation—a net zero carbon system because it used only biomass. In addition, it had twice the efficiency of a remote plant because its waste heat was used to run heaters and chillers for all the state office buildings in the district. But to be effective, such systems are dependent on urban densities and a balanced mix of uses. Sprawl is not a candidate for district heating and cooling systems, as the costs of moving the waste heat to scattered buildings are too high. However, mixed-use urban neighborhoods could top off their energy needs with cogeneration in ways that greatly reduce costs and environmental impacts—easily creating zero net energy communities.

Water and waste systems also benefit from a community-scale approach. Sewer systems can take effluent and biologically recycle it into potable or irrigation water, usable biomass, and methane for cooking. Water demands can be offset by such graywater recycling systems, drought-tolerant landscaping, and indigenous plantings. Stormwater detention and treatment can be decentralized to community-scaled parks and integrated as landscape features. Rather than channelizing streams and rivers, setbacks can allow habitat to coexist with flood protection and trails. As with energy systems, community-scaled water and waste systems can be ecologically integrated in ways that save costs, save carbon, and enhance livability.

From Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, Chapter 1, by Peter Calthorpe. Copyright @ 2011 Peter Calthorpe. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Notes:

22. Assuming advanced natural gas combined cycle plant technology.
23. National Energy Technology Laboratory, “Cost and Performance Baselines for Fossil Energy Plants” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2007).
24. Calculations based on average capacity factors for each technology, and land use requirements based on case studies of representative electricity-generation facilities.
25. Energy Information Administration, “Annual Energy Review 2008” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2009).
26. Al Gore, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2009), 254.

Image © Peter Calthorpe & Marianna Leuschel

Editor’s note: This week, we continue our 5-part series of excerpts from Peter Calthorpe’s book, “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change.” This is installment number three. Thanks to Island Press, a few lucky Streetsblog readers will be selected to receive a free copy of the book. To enter the contest, fill out this form.

For many people, urban is a bad word that implies crime, congestion, poverty, and crowding. For them, it represents an environment that moves people away from a healthy connection with nature and the land. Its stereotype is the American ghetto, a crime-ridden concrete jungle that simultaneously destroys land, community, and human potential. The reaction to this stereotype has been a middle-class retreat into the closeted world of single-family lots and gated subdivisions in the suburbs. As a result, much of the last half century’s planning has been directed toward depopulating cities, whether through the satellite towns of Europe or the suburbs of America.

But, for many others, the word urban represents economic opportunity, culture, vitality, innovation, and community. This positive reading is now manifest in the revitalized centers of many of our historic cities. In these core areas, the public domain—with its parks, walkable streets, commercial centers, arts, and institutions—is once again becoming rich and vibrant, valued and desirable. There is new life in many city centers and their public places, from cafés and plazas to urban parks and museums—ultimately drawing people back to the city.

In fact, since 2000, many of our major cities have increased their share of new home construction while their region’s suburbs have declined. For example, in 2008, Portland issued 38 percent of all the building permits within its region, compared to an average of 9 percent in the early 1990s; Denver accounted for 32 percent, up from 5 percent; and Sacramento accounted for 27 percent, up from 9 percent. There is an even stronger trend toward urban redevelopment in the largest metropolitan regions. New York City accounted for 63 percent of the building permits issued within its region. By comparison, the city averaged about 15 percent of regional building permits during the early 1990s. Similarly, Chicago now accounts for 45 percent of the building permits within its region, up from just 7 percent in the early 1990s.¹³ This represents a dramatic turnaround as cities regain their roles as centers of innovation, social mobility, artistic creativity, and economic opportunity.

Urbanism of this caliber is desirable but, unfortunately, too often limited and very expensive. A home in the metropolitan center is, in some places, the most valuable in the region—an economic signal of just how desirable good urban places can be. In such cities as New York, Portland, Seattle, or Washington, DC, urban residences command a premium of 40 to 200 percent per square foot over their suburban alternative. ¹⁴ Meanwhile, in our ghettos and first-ring suburbs, the working poor—and now even the middle class—are suffering and struggling. Urbanism is again proving its value; but if in limited supply, it soon can become too valuable.

At the same time, the bread-and-butter subdivisions at the metropolitan fringe experienced the greatest fall in value during the 2008 housing bust.¹⁵ Their physical environments along with their economic opportunities, cost of transportation, and social structures are becoming more and more stressed. Many economic and social factors are at work in this equation, but certainly a better form of urbanism is one necessary component of the renewal we need. But first, a clear definition of urbanism is needed.

Much confusion surrounds the differences between suburbs, sprawl, and what I mean by urbanism. Suburbs are not always sprawl and can be urban in many ways. Sprawl is a specific land use pattern of single-use zones, typically made up of subdivisions, office parks, and shopping centers strung together by arterials and highways. It is a landscape based on the automobile. We all know it when we see it; nevertheless, much of the debate about sprawl and urbanism is rife with misrepresentations.

For example, sprawl is typically described as discontinuous developments that wastefully hopscotches across the landscape. But healthy forms of suburban growth can also be discontinuous, as villages and towns with greenbelt separations demonstrate. Suburbs are criticized for their low densities, as if we should abolish single family homes and yards, but many great urban places integrate a full range of densities, from large-lot mansions and single-family homes to bungalows and townhomes. The classic streetcar suburbs of the turn of the twentieth century were not sprawl— they were walkable, diverse in use, transit oriented, and compact—but they were relatively low density and outside the city center, in a word “suburban.” Conversely, urban renewal programs transformed decaying urban districts into denser versions of suburban sprawl, substituting superblocks and arterials for walkable streets and single-income projects for complex, mixed-use neighborhoods.

It is the quality of the place that is most significant in sprawl: its relentless parking lots and oversized roads, uniform tracks of houses, isolated office parks, strip commercial areas, and, above all, its near total dependence on the car. To be against sprawl is not to be against suburbs or small towns. All suburbs are not sprawl, and unfortunately, not all sprawl is suburban.

Traditional urbanism has three essential qualities: (1) a diverse population and range of activities, (2) a rich array of public spaces and institutions, and (3) human scale in its buildings, streets, and neighborhoods. Most of our built environment, from city to suburb, manifested these traits prior to World War II. Now, most suburbs succeed in contradicting each trait; public space is withering for lack of investment, people and activities are segregated by simplistic zoning, and human scale is sacrificed to a ubiquitous accommodation of the car.

None of these urban design principles are new. Jane Jacobs postulated a similar definition of urbanism in her landmark 1961 work The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The difference here is that urban issues are also being considered in the context of climate change and environmental protection. In fact, one can arrive at the same design conclusions from the criteria of conservation, environmental quality, and energy efficiency that Jacobs located largely by social and cultural needs. By investigating the technologies and formal systems scaled for limited resources, climate change concerns add a new and critical element to Jacobs’ rationale. If traditional urbanism and sustainable development can truly reduce our dependence on foreign oil, limit pollution and greenhouse gases, and create socially robust places, they not only will become desirable but will be inevitable.

To Jacobs’ three traditional urban values of civic space, human scale, and diversity, the current environmental imperative adds two more: conservation and regionalism. Although the traditional city was by necessity energy and resource efficient, it commonly showed a destructive disregard for nature and habitat that would be inappropriate today. Bays were filled, wetlands drained, streams and rivers diverted,
and key habitat destroyed. A green form of urbanism should protect those critical environmental assets while reducing overall resource demands.

Indeed, the simple attributes of urbanism are typically a more cost efficient environmental strategy than many renewable technologies. For example, in many climates, a party wall is more cost effective than a solar collector in reducing a home’s heating needs. Well-placed windows and high ceilings offer better lighting than efficient fluorescents in the office. A walk or a bike ride is certainly less expensive and less carbon intensive than a hybrid car even at 50 MPG. A convenient transit line is a better investment than a “smart” highway system. A small cogenerating electrical plant that reuses its waste heat locally could save more carbon per dollar invested than a distant wind farm. A combination of urbanism and green technology will be necessary, but the efficiency of urbanism should precede the costs of alternate technologies. As Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute famously advocates, a “nega-watt” of conservation is always more cost effective than a watt of new energy, renewable or not. Urban living in its many forms turns out to be the best type of conservation.

In addition, the idea of “conservation” in urban design applies to more than energy, carbon, and the environment; it also implies preserving and repairing culture and history as well as ecosystems and resources. Conserving historic buildings, institutions, neighborhoods, and cultures is as essential to a vital, living urbanism as is preserving its ecological foundations.

Regionalism sets city and community into the contemporary reality of our expanding metropolis. At this point in history, most of our key economic, social, and environmental networks extend well beyond individual neighborhoods, jurisdictions, or even cities. Our cultural identity, open space resources, transportation networks, social links, and economic opportunities all function at a regional scale—as do many of our most challenging problems, including crime, pollution, and congestion. Major public facilities, such as sports venues, universities, airports, and cultural institutions, shape the social geography of our regions as well as extend our local lives.

We all now lead regional lives, and our metropolitan form and governance need to reflect that new reality. In fact, urbanism can thrive only within the construct of a healthy regional structure. The tradition of urbanism must be extended to an interconnected and interdependent regional network of places, creating polycentric regions rather than a metropolis dominated by the old city/suburb schism.

This last point is critical to understanding urbanism and the climate change challenge. City life is not the only environmental option; a regional solution can offer a range of lifestyles and community types without compromising our ecology. A well designed region, when combined with aggressive conservation strategies, extensive transit systems, and new green technologies, can offer many types of sustainable lifestyles. New York City may have among the smallest carbon footprint per capita, but to solve the climate change crisis we do not all have to live in the city.¹⁶

Identifying an appropriate balance among technology, urban design, and regional systems in confronting climate change is now the critical challenge. As a greater percentage of the world’s population increases its wealth, the definition of prosperity will become critical. If progress translates into the old American suburban lifestyle, we are all in trouble. If China and India adopt our development patterns—auto-oriented,
low-density lifestyles or even a high-rise, high-density version of the same—we will truly need breakthrough technologies to accommodate the demands. If they develop an enlightened and indigenous form of urbanism, we all will have the opportunity to address climate change in a less heroic and more cost effective way.

In fact, many developing countries are fast approaching a tipping point of urbanism. As auto ownership grows, the infrastructure to support it expands. Slowly at first, then in a landslide, the logic of surface parking lots, low-density development, freeways, and malls becomes irresistible. As cars make remote destinations viable, the historic logic of density and urbanism erodes and the economics of single-use, lowdensity suburbs grows. The built environment shifts to focus on auto mobility in ways that are hard to reverse—and with this shift urban culture dies. Traditional landscapes and neighborhoods are demolished at astonishing rates to make way for what is now seen as modern. Certainly, we cannot romanticize or literally replicate the complex historic urban fabric of, say, the Hutong in Beijing, but we can learn from it.

At the center of energy and carbon problems in the United States (and in many developing countries in the not-too-distant future) is transportation. It represents almost a third of current U.S. GHG emissions and is the fastest-growing segment.¹⁷As industry becomes more efficient and jobs continue to shift toward an information economy, transportation becomes a more dominant issue.

It seems obvious that the more we spread out, the more we must drive. But the numbers are still startling. From 1980 to 2005, average miles driven per person increased by 50 percent in the United States, a change that can be linked to the nearly 20 percent increase in land consumed per person over roughly the same period.¹⁸ By comparison, Portland, Oregon, with its regional focus on transit and walkable neighborhoods, has seen a reduction in vehicle miles traveled per capita since the mid-1990s.19 At the same time that it reduced auto dependence, the Portland region has preserved valuable farmlands and provided a widening range of housing options. Short of such regional efforts, even a doubling of auto efficiency will not keep up with the typical growth in sprawl-induced travel. We cannot solve the carbon emission problem without changing our travel behavior, and to do that an alternative to our auto-dominated communities is essential.

The good news is that truly great urban places also happen to be the most environmentally benign form of human settlement and are at the heart of a green future. Cities and urban places produce the smallest carbon footprint on a per capita basis.²⁰ New Yorkers, for example, emit just a third of the GHG of the average American.²¹ In addition, it is generally accepted that population growth in developing countries drops as a rural population urbanizes. Urbanism therefore leads to fewer people consuming fewer resources and emitting less GHG at a global scale. Urbanism is a climate change antibiotic and our most affordable solution to foreign oil dependence. Urbanism is, in fact, our single most potent weapon against climate change, rising energy costs, and environmental degradation.

Yet our towns, cities, and regions cannot be shaped around a single issue like climate change or peak oil, no matter how critical they may be. Urban design is part art, social science, political theory, engineering, geography, and economics. I believe it is necessarily all of the above—urban design cannot and should not be reduced to any single metric. In the end, great urban places are qualitative; they are ultimately defined by the coherence of their public places, the diversity of their population, and the opportunity they create for our collective aspirations. We will never treasure our cities and towns just because they are low carbon, energy efficient, or even economically abundant; we will treasure them only when we come to love them as places—as vessels of our cultural identities, stages for our social interaction, and landscapes for our personal narratives. But that does not mean that they should not also play a critical role in the climate change challenge.

From Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, Chapter 1, by Peter Calthorpe. Copyright @ 2011 Peter Calthorpe. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Notes:

13. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “Residential Construction Trends in America’s Metropolitan Regions” (Washington, DC: EPA, 2010).
14. Christopher B. Leinberger, “The Next Slum?” Atlantic, March 2008.
15. Natural Resources Defense Council, “Reducing Foreclosures and Environmental Impacts through Location-efficient Neighborhood Design” (New York: Natural Resources Defense Council, 2010).
16. Andrea Sarzynski, Marilyn A. Brown, and Frank Southworth, “Shrinking the Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America” (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2008).
17. Author’s analysis of data from World Resources Institute, “US GHG Emissions Flow Chart.” (accessed April 1, 2010).
18. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, “National Transportation Statistics 2009” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, 2009), table 1-32; Natural Resources Conservation Service, “National Resources Inventory 2003 Annual NRI,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/
technical/NRI/ (accessed February 12, 2010).
19. Metro Regional Government, “1990–2008 Daily Vehicle Miles Traveled, Portland and the U.S. National Average,” Metro Regional Government. (accessed March 1, 2010).
20. The Center for Neighborhood Technology has done extensive research revealing that urban dwellers commute shorter distances and rely on public transit more often. Their per capita emissions, as well as spending on transportation, are consistently lower than those of the average American.
21. Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, “Inventory of New York City Greenhouse Gas Emissions” (New York: Mayor’s Office of Operations, 2007), 6.
22. Assuming advanced natural gas combined cycle plant technology.

A future San Jose Diridon Station with high-speed rail. Image: CHSRA

Editor’s note: This week and next, we’re presenting a 5-part series of excerpts from Peter Calthorpe’s book, “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change.” This is installment number two. Thanks to Island Press, a few lucky Streetsblog readers will be selected to receive a free copy of the book. To enter the contest, fill out this form.

California’s effort to implement its new greenhouse gas reduction laws has provided a comprehensive look at urbanism and its potential in relation to a range of conservation and clean energy policies. The Vision California study, developed for the California High Speed Rail Authority and the California Strategic Growth Council, measured the results of several statewide land use futures coupled with conservation policies through the year 2050.⁵ The results make concrete the choices before us, the feedback loops, and the scale of both benefits and costs.

California is projected to grow by 7 million new households and 20 million people, to a population of nearly 60 million, by 2050.⁶ It is currently the eighth-largest economy in the world and therefore provides an important model of what is possible. The study compared a “Trend” future dominated by the state’s now typical low-density suburban growth and conservative conservation policies to a “Green Urban” alternative. This Green Urban alternative assumed that 35 percent of growth would be urban infill; 55 percent would be formed from a more compact, mixed-use, and walkable form of suburban expansion; and only 10 percent would be standard low-density development. In addition, the Green Urban alternative would push the auto fleet to an average 55 miles per gallon (MPG), its fuel would contain one third less carbon, and all new buildings would be 80 percent more efficient than today’s norm. It does not represent a green utopia, but it is heading in that direction. The results of this comparison highlight just how much is at stake and what the costs will be.

Remarkably, the quantity of land needed to accommodate the next two generations was reduced 67 percent by the Green Urban scenario, from more than 5,600 square miles in the Trend future to only 1,850 square miles. By comparison, the state’s current developed area is 5,300 square miles.⁷ This difference would save vast areas (up to 900 square miles) of farmland in the Central Valley along with key open space and habitat in the coastal regions of the state. The more compact future means smaller yards to irrigate and fewer parking lots to landscape, saving an average of 3.4 million acre-feet of water per year—enough to fill the San Francisco Bay annually or to irrigate 5 million acres of farmland.⁸ Less developed land also translates to fewer miles of infrastructure to build and maintain. The annual savings would be around $194 billion for the state, or $24,300 for each new household—not including the costs of ongoing maintenance. In addition, the Trend future would cost more in police and fire services as coverage areas increase.

If we are to arrest climate change at about 2° Celsius, developed countries must reduce carbon 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050. Meanwhile, in the U.S. alone, population is projected to increase 140 million by 2050. That means that by 2050, per capita emissions must be reduced to just 2.7 metric tons per capita. To achieve this each person in 2050 must on average emit only 12 percent of their current rate. Image © Peter Calthorpe & Marianna Leuschel

Surprisingly, such a future would not dramatically change the range of housing choices available in the state. In fact, some would argue that the outcome would be more market responsive, providing a long overdue adjustment of housing types and prices. Specifically, while large single-family lots would decline from 40 percent of the total today to 30 percent in 2050, small-lot homes and bungalows would increase slightly and townhomes would double to 15 percent. Multifamily flats, condos, and apartments would actually end up the same, at around a third of the market. Overall, detached single-family homes would drop from 62 percent of all homes today to just over half. Many would conclude that this would be a reasonable shift, one ultimately making the housing stock more diverse and affordable—not, as some would argue, the end of the American dream.

In the Green Urban future, auto dependence drops dramatically—in fact, average vehicle miles traveled throughout the state would be reduced 34 percent, to 18,000 miles per household, from a Trend projection of 27,200. Closer destinations, better transit service, and more walkable neighborhoods all contribute to this significant shift. We would all still have cars, but they would be more efficient and we would use them less. The implication of this reduction in auto use is far-reaching. In terms of congestion, it is the equivalent of taking over 15 million cars off the road.⁹ There would be fewer roads and parking lots built, less land covered with impervious surface, and less runoff water to be cleaned and stored. The list of collateral benefits is long. In fact, the need for new freeways, highways, and arterials is reduced by 23,000 lane-miles, a saving of around $450 billion for the state.

Less driving means fewer accidents, in this scenario potentially saving around 3,100 lives and $5 billion in associated costs per year.¹⁰ Less driving means less air pollution and less respiratory disease.¹¹ More walking means healthier bodies and less obesity, affecting diabetes rates and all of its associated health costs.¹²

Most significantly, the Green Urban scenario reduces carbon emissions and comes very close to achieving the 12% Solution in the transportation sector of the economy. When the savings in vehicle miles traveled are combined with low-carbon/high-MPG cars, emissions for transportation drop from more than 260 million metric tons (MMT) to just 29. Moreover, we would consume 352 billion fewer gallons of fuel over the next forty years, for a saving of over $2.1 trillion. These numbers are almost too big to imagine, but by way of comparison, the proposed high-speed rail system running from San Diego to San Francisco is projected to cost $42 billion, less than one-fifth the value of the potential annual gas savings. Put simply, at a projected $8 per gallon in 2050, these gas savings represent around $6,100 in savings per household.

There is more. The efficient and compact buildings of urban development use less energy, produce fewer greenhouse gases, and cost less to operate. The carbon reduction in the building sector is projected to be over 62 percent less, not enough to achieve its share of the 12% Solution but a significant and necessary step. In total, the average household in the Green Urban future would save around $1,000 a year in utility payments. When this figure is combined with reduced auto ownership, maintenance, insurance, and gas costs, California households would save close to $11,000 a year in current dollars. With an interest rate of 5 percent in 2050, this could pay a mortgage of $200,000.

What is not to like in such a Green Urban future? For some, exactly the thing that makes most of these savings possible: a more urban life.

From Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, Chapter 1, by Peter Calthorpe. Copyright @ 2011 Peter Calthorpe. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Notes:

5. Information about the assumptions, methodology, and results of the Vision California study and modeling tools can be found here.
6. California Department of Finance, “Population Projections by Race,” State of California. (accessed February 12, 2010).
7. Natural Resources Conservation Service, “National Resources Inventory 2003 Annual NRI,” U.S. Department of Agriculture. (accessed February 12, 2010).
8. San Francisco Bay estimate based on William Emerson Ritter and Charles Atwood Kofoid, eds., University of California Publications in Zoology, vol. 14 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1918), 22; agricultural data from Economic Research Service, “Western Irrigated Agriculture,” U.S. Department of Agriculture. (accessed April 1, 2010).
9. Research and Innovative Technology Administration, “Table 5-3: Highway Vehicle-Miles Traveled (VMT),” Bureau of Transportation Statistics. (accessed February 12, 2010).
10. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, “National Transportation Statistics 2009” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, 2009), table 2-1. The fatality rate per mile traveled is assumed to hold consistent from 2009 until 2050. Hospital costs data from National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration, “The Economic Impact of Motor Vehicle Crashes 2000” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, 2002), 60.
11. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “National Air Quality: Status and Trends through 2007” (Research Triangle Park, NC: EPA, 2008).
12. David R. Bassett Jr. et al., “Walking, Cycling, and Obesity Rates in Europe, North America, and Australia,” Journal of Physical Activity and Health 5 (2008): 795–814.

Image © Peter Calthorpe & Marianna Leuschel

Editor’s note: Today we are very pleased to begin a five-part series of excerpts from Peter Calthorpe’s book, “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change.” Keep reading this week and next to learn how you can win a copy of the book from Island Press.

I take as a given that climate change is an imminent threat and potentially catastrophic—the science is now clear that we are day by day contributing to our own demise. In addition, I believe that an increase in fuel costs due to declining oil reserves is also inevitable. The combination of these two global threats presents an economic and environmental challenge of unparalleled proportions—and, lacking a response, the potential for dire consequences. These challenges will in turn bring into urgent focus the way our buildings, towns, cities, and regions shape our lives and our environmental footprint. Beyond a transition to clean energy sources, I believe that urbanism—compact, diverse, and walkable communities—will play a central role in addressing these twin threats. In fact, responding to climate change and our coming energy challenge without a more sustainable form of urbanism will be impossible.

Many deny either the timing or the reality of these challenges. They argue that global demand for oil will not outstrip production and that climate change is overstated, nonexistent, or somehow not related to our actions. Setting aside such debates, my book, “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change,” accepts the premise that both climate change and peak oil are pressing realities that need aggressive solutions.

Responding to climate change and our coming energy challenge without a more sustainable form of urbanism will be impossible.

The two challenges are deeply linked. The science tells us that if we are to arrest climate change, our goal for carbon emissions should be just 20 percent of our 1990 level by 2050. That, combined with a projected U.S. population increase of 130 million people,¹ means each person in 2050 would need to be emitting on average just 12 percent of his or her current greenhouse gases (GHG)—what I will call here the “12% Solution.”² If we can achieve the 12% Solution to offset climate change, we will simultaneously reduce our fossil-fuel dependence and demonstrate a sustainable model of prosperity. Such a low-carbon future will inherently reduce oil demands at rates that will allow a smoother transition to alternative fuels—and the next economy.

In addition to these twin environmental challenges, the United States has two other systemic forces to reckon with in the next generation: an aging population and a more diverse middle class with less wealth. We are now a country in which a third of the population are baby boomers or older and less than a quarter are traditional families with kids. And for the past decade, median income has actually fallen; in fact, “the typical American household saw its inflation-adjusted income decline by more than $2,000 between 1999 and 2008.”³ So, at the same time that we must respond to climate change and rising energy costs, we must also adjust our housing stock to fit a changing demographic and find a more frugal form of prosperity.

Such a transformation will require deep change, not just in energy sources, technology, and conservation measures but also in urban design, culture, and lifestyles. More than just deploying green technologies and adjusting our thermostats, it will involve rethinking the way we live and the underlying form of our communities. The good news is that our environmental, social, and economic challenges have a shared solution in urbanism. Shaping regions that reduce oil dependence simultaneously reduces carbon emissions, costs less for the average household, and creates healthy, integrated places for our seniors: one solution for multiple challenges.

The urban solution involves both technology and design. For example, we will need to dramatically reduce the number of miles we drive as well as develop less carbon intensive vehicles. It will mean living and working in buildings that demand significantly less energy as well as powering them with renewable sources. It will involve the kinds of food we eat, the kinds of homes we build, the ways we travel, and the kinds of communities we inhabit. It will certainly involve giving up the idea of any single “silver bullet” solution (whether solar or nuclear, conservation or carbon capture, adaptation or mitigation) and understanding that such a transformation will involve all of the above—and, perhaps most important, that they are all interdependent.

In fact, the viability of new technologies and clean energy sources will depend on the success of our conservation efforts at the regional, community, and building scales, which in turn will be determined by our basic lifestyles and the urban forms that support our changing demographics. The key will be designing the right mix of strategies, a “whole systems” rather than a “checklist” approach to climate change, energy, and economics.

There are three interdependent approaches to these nested challenges: lifestyle, conservation, and clean energy. Lifestyle involves how we live—the way we get around, the size of our homes, the foods we eat, and the quantity of goods we consume. These depend in turn on the type of communities we build and the culture we inhabit—degrees of urbanism. Conservation revolves around technical efficiencies—in our buildings, cars, appliances, utilities, and industrial systems—as well as preserving the natural resources that support us all, our global forests, ocean ecologies, and farmlands. These conservation measures are simple, they save money, and they are possible now. The third fix, clean energy, is what we have been most focused on: new technologies for solar, wind, wave, geothermal, biomass, and even a new generation of nuclear power or fusion. These energy sources are sexy, they are relatively expensive, and they will be available sometime soon. All three approaches will be essential, but here I focus on the first two—lifestyle and conservation—because they are, in the end, our most cost effective and easily available tools.

Perhaps just as important as greenhouse gas reductions and oil savings is the fact that urbanism generates a fortuitous web of co-benefits—it is our most potent weapon against climate change because it does so much more.

The intersection of lifestyle and conservation is urbanism. Consider that in the United States industry represents 29 percent of our GHG emissions; agriculture and other non-energy-related activities, just 9 percent; and freight and planes, another 9 percent. This 47 percent total represents the GHG emissions of the products we buy, the food we eat, the embodied energy of all our possessions, and all the shipping involved in getting them to us. The remaining 53 percent depends on the nature of our buildings and personal transportation system—the realm of urbanism.⁴As a result, urbanism, along with a simple combination of transit and more efficient buildings and cars, can deliver much of our needed GHG reductions.

Perhaps just as important as greenhouse gas reductions and oil savings is the fact that urbanism generates a fortuitous web of co-benefits—it is our most potent weapon against climate change because it does so much more. Urbanism’s compact forms lead to less land consumed and more farmland, parks, habitat, and open space preserved. A smaller urban footprint results in less development costs and fewer miles of roads, utilities, and services to build and maintain, which then leads to fewer impervious surfaces, less polluted storm runoff, and more water directed back into aquifers.

More compact development leads to lower housing costs as lower land and infrastructure costs affect sales prices and taxes. Urban development means a different mix of housing types—fewer large single-family lots; more bungalows and townhomes—but in the end provides more housing choices for a more diverse population. It means less private space but more shared community places—more efficient and less expensive overall. Urbanism is more suited to an aging population, for whom driving and yard maintenance are a growing burden, and for working families seeking lower utility bills and less time spent commuting.

Urbanism leads to fewer miles driven, which then leads to less gas consumed and less dependence on foreign oil supplies, less air pollution, less carbon emissions. Fewer miles also leads to less congestion, lower emissions, lower road construction and maintenance costs, and fewer auto accidents. This then leads to lower health costs because of fewer accidents and cleaner air, which is reinforced by more walking, bicycling, and exercising, which in turn contributes to lower obesity rates. And more walking leads to more people on the streets, safer neighborhoods, and perhaps stronger communities.

The feedback loops go on. More urban development means more compact buildings— less energy needed to heat and cool, lower utility bills, less irrigation water, and, once again, less carbon in the atmosphere. This then leads to lower demands on electric utilities and fewer new power plants, which again results in less carbon and fewer costs. As Bucky Fuller exhorted us, urbanism is inherently “doing more with less.” Or, as Mies van der Rohe famously asserted, “Less is more.”

But for the past fifty years, our economy and society have been operating on the premise that “more is more” and “bigger is better”: bigger homes, bigger yards, bigger cars with bigger engines, bigger budgets, bigger institutions, and, finally, bigger energy sources. In contrast, urbanism naturally tends toward a “small is beautiful” philosophy. This then involves trade-offs: less private space but perhaps a richer public realm; less private security but perhaps a safer community; less auto mobility but more convenient transit. Compact development does mean smaller yards, fewer cars, and less private space for some. On the other hand, it can dramatically reduce everyday costs and leave more time for family and community. The question is not which is right and which is wrong or that it must be all one way or the other—urbanism works best with blends. The question is how such trade-offs fit with our emerging demographics, our desires, our needs, our economic means—and perhaps our sense of what a good life really is.

From Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, Chapter 1, by Peter Calthorpe. Copyright © 2011 Peter Calthorpe. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Notes:

1. U.S. Census Bureau Population Division, “2008 National Population Projections: Summary Table 1,” U.S. Census Bureau. (accessed February 10, 2010).
2. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990–2007” (Washington, DC: EPA, 2009), ES-17.
3. The State of Metropolitan America, Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. (accessed June 22, 2010).
4. Author’s analysis of data from the World Resources Institute, “US GHG Emissions Flow Chart.” (accessed April 1, 2010).

Shaun
Donovan, Ray LaHood, Lisa Jackson: Together forever? The Livable
Communities Act would codify the partnership between HUD, US DOT, and
the EPA. Photo: EPA

The administration has been taking steps since last March to coordinate between the Department of Transportation, HUD, and the EPA. This bill, carried in the Senate by Connecticut’s Chris Dodd, would formalize those partnerships and authorize substantially more funding to work with. 

Most of the action would flow through HUD. This year the agency is funding $150 million in grants
supporting regional efforts to improve access to transit and promote
walkable development. The Livable Communities Act promises to scale up
that program significantly, creating a new office within HUD, called the
Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, that will distribute
about $4 billion through competitive grants.

The initial round of grants would fund comprehensive plans — local
initiatives to shape growth by coordinating housing, transportation,
and economic development policies. Most of the funding — $3.75 billion
– would be distributed over three years to implement projects
identified in such plans.

While some Senators from rural states had expressed skepticism
about the benefits of the bill for their constituents, yesterday’s vote
split strictly along party lines, with Democrats Jon Tester of Montana
and Tim Johnson of South Dakota both voting in favor.

To make the case for the bill to his rural and Republican counterparts, Dodd singled out Envision Utah,
a campaign that has built public support for smart growth policies in
one of the country’s reddest states. Not a single GOP Senator voted for
the bill, however, even Utah’s Bob Bennett, who told UPI, "I think the overall philosophy is wise, but I will be voting against it."

Some of the strongest backing for the bill has come from AARP,
which sent a letter to committee members on Monday pointing out that the
country’s aging population will be poorly served if development
patterns don’t evolve to make driving less necessary. "Nine out of ten
of our members tell us they want to stay in their own
homes as they age — most are living in suburban or rural areas and
don’t have access to public transportation," said Debra Alvarez, senior
legislative representative for AARP. "There’s a lot of things that can
be done in small towns: co-locating
things like post offices, grocery stores, pharmacies, and putting
housing there too."

Advocates for transportation reform are now looking at the path
forward for the bill. "We applaud the Committee for taking this major
step forward on behalf of communities both small and large, and for
American families looking for affordable homes in healthy neighborhoods
with reliable transportation options," said Transportation for America
director James Corless in a statement. "We urge the full Senate to
follow their lead and give final passage."

Dodd has vowed to shepherd the Livable Communities Act through to become law
before he retires in January. With Congress about to adjourn until
September 13, he’ll face a tight time frame. In addition to awaiting a
vote in the full Senate, the bill has yet to clear a committee vote in the House, where Colorado representative Ed Perlmutter is the sponsor.

A reconfigured Phelan Bus Loop. Graphic: SF Planning Department

In a statement, the FTA said the project "paves the way for landscaped open space, new retail space, and new affordable housing, all next to public transportation, and within walking distance of both a major transit hub and San Francisco City College, one of the nation’s largest educational institutions."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also issued a statement praising the project and the federal funding. "Today's announcement highlights San Francisco's continued leadership in the realm of livable communities and transit-oriented development. It will increase public transportation options, while reducing congestion and our dependence on foreign oil."

John Katz, the project manager for the SFMTA, said it will probably take several months before the funding is in hand, but the reconfiguration would be the first major public project under the Balboa plan, and under a best case scenario, would be on target to begin construction a year from now.

"It's great news for the community in San Francisco. This is a project that has been worked on, at least in concept, for the last 7 or 8 years and it looks like it's going to become a reality now," said Katz. "This project is really a catalyst for a lot of long-needed community improvements." 

The current Phelan Loop on Ocean Avenue near Phelan and Lee used to be a turnaround for the K light-rail line before it was transferred to the Balboa Park station in 1973. It currently serves two major bus lines: the 49-Van Ness-Mission and the 8X-Bay Shore Express. But it occupies a lot of "wasted" space, according to Katz, that under the new configuration will allow a mixed-use affordable housing and retail development as well as a public plaza similar to Hayes Green and better transit connections, including a new BART entrance on the west side of Balboa Park station. The goal of the Balboa plan is to embolden the connection between transit and land use in the area. 

"What this does is make Muni whole again," said Katz. "It gives us back the same functionality we had before, but it sort of gets the buses off of fronting Ocean Avenue and gets them behind the fire station, and provides all this additional space to do all these other community-driven goals."

The Balboa plan is an ambitious blueprint for the area. Planners have envisioned a full deck over I-280 that would reconnect neighborhoods while dramatically improving pedestrian, bicycle and housing amenities.

The redeveloped Phelan Loop, according to the Planning Department, will simultaneously function "as a new front door on Ocean Avenue for City College and as a gateway to the commercial district."

Editor's note: This is the first of a three-part series on the past, present and future of traffic engineering in San Francisco. 

Jack Lucero Fleck remembers his teenage years as a sputnik, the kind of kid who was as "nutty as a slide rule," loved math and science, and knew he was headed in that direction. It was the summer of 1965, and living in Peoria, Illinois, the same town where US DOT Secretary Ray LaHood grew up, Fleck couldn't quite peg what he wanted to do in life. And then there were the Watts riots.

"I got kind of interested in, 'well, what caused that? Why were people burning down their neighborhood?'," Fleck, 62, explained during a recent interview. "I decided I would go into civil engineering because I liked to do math and science and engineering and I would combine it with city planning to make cities better places to live, so people wouldn't want to burn them down."

For the last 25 years, Fleck, who retired yesterday from his job as San Francisco's top traffic engineer, has had a hand in almost every major transportation project in San Francisco, from the demolition and boulevard replacement of the Embarcadero and Central Freeways, to helping in the design of the T-Third line and Central Subway, to crafting a controversial proposal to remove the bike lane at Market and Octavia Streets.

He has sometimes been the bane of transit advocates for defending post-World War II traffic engineering orthodoxy favoring one-way street networks, such as those that roar through neighborhoods like the Tenderloin and SoMa. While some advocates have been working to dismantle some of the one-way arterials, Fleck, who became lead traffic engineer in 2004, is a firm believer in them. Still, those advocates and transportation professionals who have worked with Fleck (none we contacted would go on the record with their criticisms) say he has been a true professional and easy to work with.

"His views are very progressive and he's very environmentally conscious," said Bond Yee, the interim Director of Sustainable Streets at the SFMTA who has been at the agency four years longer than Fleck. "He epitomizes what the new generation of transportation professionals is becoming. He's a little bit ahead of his time."

Fleck had a lot to talk about during our 90 minute interview last week. Some answers are revealing and offer insight into his thinking as a traffic engineer who has been entrenched in the design of our city streets for more than two decades.

Fleck in his office at the SFMTA.

Fleck said he learned the word livability from Don Appleyard while he was studying City Planning as a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley and it struck him "that that's what I wanted to do, make cities 'livable,' and I don't know that it was really a word that was used a lot until recently, but it does make sense."

Fleck's first job out of school was working on the Berkeley traffic diverters, and he got a stern lesson that traffic engineering doesn't always have to do with left or right politics.

"Some of the NIMBY types are pretty conservative, but then some of my friends on the left would surprise me that they would be pretty hostile to the diverters, you know? That they were people who were with the anti-war movement or whatever and they were just inflamed, 'oh the idea of those things in my way.' So I kind of realized that traffic is a funny issue, it's not exactly left and right and people get very emotional about it."

Fleck recalls, for example, the battle over tearing down the Embarcadero freeway after the 1989 earthquake, when lefty Terrence Hallinan (who went on to become the long-time district attorney before Kamala Harris), was among the supervisors who voted 6-5 to rebuild it. He was working for the Department of Public Works at the time.

"These freeways were taking land off the tax rolls. They weren't really making the city a better place or anything. So, it was great to see it go," said Fleck, who was engaged in a debate at the time about whether the traffic from the demolished freeway would live up to predictions of gridlock on city streets.

"The fact that all that traffic didn't go away, actually, helped us win the argument to say that they didn't need the freeway because the city streets were handling it all."

"Going back to my Berkeley experience I do feel there are arterials that need to carry more traffic and then there are residential areas that you want to protect. So I don't really support the idea that the traffic should just be tossed out there widespread."

Fleck cites the demolition of both the Embarcadero and Central freeways as projects he was involved in that were some of his greatest accomplishments, but building the staff at the SFMTA, and changing the culture of the agency, is something he's most proud of.

"I think we've really looked at people who have backgrounds in both engineering and planning because they have that diverse sort of broader viewpoint," said Fleck." I think that we have people who really get it in terms of the Transit First policy and pedestrians and all the things we are trying to do here. I think in terms of a lasting legacy I would feel that that's more significant than anything."

"From the 50s, to now, almost 60 years, it's incredible to think back. There's only been five traffic engineers. And Jack's number five," said Yee, who was the longest serving traffic engineer before Fleck from 1990 to 2004.

Among the Transit First accomplishments Fleck listed in a slide presentation (PDF) at a recent SPUR luncheon are the city's 40 miles of bike lanes (bikes and pedestrians were added to the policy in 2000), 13 miles of transit lanes, transit signal priority at more than 100 intersections, pedestrian countdown signals at 800 intersections and a 30 percent reduction in injury collisions over the past 30 years. He also used this graph to point out that traffic fatalities have been on a steady decline.

"I kind of feel like this is in response to people who feel like traffic control devices actually are unsafe or less safe. I really don't subscribe to that. I think there is an argument to be made on big wide open intersections with low volume that it works pretty well without stop signs or anything because people have lots of visibility, and especially if you put traffic signals in, those can work."

Fleck attributes the decline to the three e's: engineering, education and enforcement, but thinks it's also the signals, the mast arms, the countdowns "and all those things that improve safety."

Fleck spent the first two days of his last week at the SFMTA attending the Western Institute of Transportation Engineers conference in San Francisco, where he made this presentation (PDF) with Yee titled, "What It Will Take to Stop Global Warming: The Case for Electric Cars." While he acknowledges that there is a danger electric cars could perpetuate sprawl and generate more auto-oriented development, Fleck sees them as key to fighting global warming.

"It's not the ultimate total, everything solution, but I think given the danger of global warming, and being underwater, it kind of makes everything else moot. We can fight about all of the other things that we want to do, but if we are under water it's not going to matter."

Fleck plans to continue working on global warming solutions, and hopes to improve his neighborhood in Oakland by encouraging "the political forces there to get solar panels on people's roofs and plug-in facilities in their driveways so people can have electric cars, and they won't be generating all this C02."

About leaving the SFMTA and the challenges ahead, Fleck was optimistic.

"I think we are in good hands. I really feel great about the staff and I feel like the organizational structure right now is very good," said Fleck. "I like the idea of introducing the word 'sustainability' into our name. I think traffic engineering has traditionally been safe and efficient movement of people and goods, which I support, but adding the word sustainable will also be a plus as we think to future generations and make sure that whatever we do now isn't damaging."

The BP oil spill goes on. And on. We watch the oil on live web cam pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. And we watch. Political rage is muted, practical responses even more distant. What to do? How do we “take action” on something like this? How can individuals meaningfully respond to this catastrophe? Stop driving? Boycott one brand of gas? Stop buying things made of plastic? Let’s not flatter ourselves. A few folks I know are planning to go to a local ARCO gas station (owned by BP) to protest, which will surely be a big moment for the minimum wage employee in the cash booth, and probably an irritant to the half dozen or more motorists waiting to fill their cars.

The numbing impotence we feel is painfully calibrated to our inability to affect what’s happening. Consumer choices we might make will have zero impact on this disaster, and can’t shape the larger dynamics of a globe-spanning, multinational oil industry either. Just listen to Democracy Now on Friday morning to hear how Chevron has destroyed thousands of square miles of the Nigerian delta in its incessant exploitation of the oil there, or how the Ecuadoran Amazon too is covered in vast lakes of spilled oil.

The deeper questions about technology and science are far from our daily lives. The world we live in is embedded in complex networks of technological dependencies, which none of us have chosen freely. Nor do any of us have any way to participate directly in deciding what technologies we will use, how they will be deployed, what kind of social controls will be exerted over private interests who organize and run them for their own gain, etc. (supposedly the federal government regulates them in the public interest, but that is clearly false as shown YET AGAIN by this disaster). The basic direction of science is considered a product of objective research and development, when it has always been skewed to serve the interests of those who already have economic and political power. Public, democratic direction for science and technology is not only non-existent, we really don’t even discuss it as a possibility!

British Petroleum should be given the death penalty. Oh wait! They don’t have death penalties for corporations. In fact, though they apparently have all the rights of individuals with respect to “free speech” (which they are free to buy at any price they wish), they cannot be held accountable as individuals for overtly criminal behavior. And even if they were, their bottom-line obsessing, litigation-phobic approach to the worst oil spill in history is just an example of normal corporate behavior in 2010. Their efforts to control press access and spin the story to their advantage have been consistent since the original accident, insisting on journalists being embedded on BP boats or planes so they can control what is seen and reported.

Penalizing corporate executives that get “caught” only legitimizes the rest of the criminal class in their everyday destruction of the planet. Maybe BP executives will be held criminally responsible (probably not), but the entity whose logic controls the behavior of anyone who is its executive is virtually immune. Unlike its political competitors in human form, the corporation is also apparently immortal.

The abject obeisance of the Obama government during the first 30 days of the oil geyser is a shame. Government ignorance and inaction, following the routine corruption that granted safety and environmental waivers to BP for this drilling project, should rock its legitimacy as much as Chernobyl did the Soviet government’s in 1986. I hope that blind faith in technology would also suffer a severe blow. Assurances about safe technology, proper safe guards, etc. are made about all our energy sources, from undersea oil drilling to nuclear power to the fictional “clean coal.” (Just last Tuesday I was speaking at a class at UC Santa Cruz where a couple of earnest students tried to argue that nuclear power was the solution to global warming!) This oil geyser resembles nothing so much as an uncontrollable nuclear meltdown. But rather than radiating thousands of square miles of countryside as happened in the Ukraine in 1986, this is filling the Gulf of Mexico with billions of gallons of crude oil. The sea is already dying, which is beginning to cascade into seaside communities and economies. The death of the Gulf will have unknown further effects on weather, ocean ecology, bird migration, and much more, and that’s before the massive underwater oil plume reaches the gulf stream in the Atlantic and does even more damage. It’s an insane, unwanted experiment in a foreseeable and preventable ecological catastrophe of unprecedented scope and severity.

Turns out that BP is closer to us, in a bigger way, than a lot of folks realize. Only a couple of years ago BP and the University of California at Berkeley signed a $500 million deal that will build a new biofuels research institute at the school, to be managed by BP and it is to BP that all patent discoveries will go. Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu was the UC official who made the deal. Now his deputy energy secretary is the former chief scientist for BP! Maybe folks who want to protest this disaster should explore an alliance with the dynamic student movement that has already been in motion since last fall. Protest and obstruction do have their place.

Nature in the City's new proposal for a 10-mile "wild" corridor.

But other things are afoot in San Francisco too of a more affirmative nature. A couple of weeks ago the Public Utilities Committee of the Board of Supervisors held a well-attended public hearing regarding new ways of working with local water supplies from ground water and storm water to rain catchment and graywater. On Wednesday night Nature in the City presented their new campaign for a Bioregional Park (PDF) in the heart of San Francisco, a long-term feature of which is a 10-mile corridor that sweeps from the Presidio in the north down the spine of the City’s major peaks and then angling east across McLaren Park to Bayview Hill and Candlestick Point.  A natural corridor that knits together as many existing open spaces and parks as possible, planted with native plants to restore basic habitat for local critters, bugs and plants, would also help them to migrate through the urban environment. Bikeways, hiking paths, even daylighted creeks could be part of this.

And the SF Bike Coalition just announced their new campaign Connecting the City—San Francisco's Crosstown Bikeways for All (which is not as ambitious—after all these years—as a modest little flyer I put out in 1987 calling for a City of Panhandles). So far it’s a campaign to raise money, but it demonstrates a willingness to finally push for a more serious challenge to the dominance of private cars over our public streets. It’s a campaign that dovetails nicely with the notion of a wild corridor, new ways to think about watersheds and underground creeks, and more. It’s welcome development for the bigger agenda of altering how we live.

Ultimately these small choices are the only way we CAN start to lay a new foundation, technologically and socially, for a real transformation of life that will preclude disasters of the magnitude in the Gulf. A materially comfortable life for all should be the goal of a creative and energetic campaign of social and technological re-invention so that we radically reduce our use of energy, water, and other materials.

Combining the various incipient insurgencies for other uses of public streets, maybe we can start by getting some accurate numbers. What percentage of the land area of San Francisco is covered in public streets? What percentage of that street area is dedicated to cars as opposed to bicycles, pedestrians, or even transit lines (obviously buses use the same streets as cars, but not nearly as many streets as cars; nor do they generally park curbside)? What percentage is open space, parklands, sidewalk gardens, etc.? What are the largest contiguous zones of open lands not built on in some fashion?

I propose that once we get the numbers, which we can only guess at now, it will be possible to raise the demand for a specific percentage of city streets being permanently turned over to new uses, including daylighting subterranean waterways, building city-spanning parkways for crosstown bicycling, walking, and for the critters, scurrying and slithering. What do you think? Five percent of the streets converted to new auto-free uses? 10 percent? 25 percent? How far can we go?

Our era is characterized by a profound impotence in the face of national and global breakdowns. We don’t have a political vision, let alone a movement of movements, ready for prime time. We have to build the capacity to reinvent life one block, one neighborhood, one city at a time. The good news is that thousands of your friends and neighbors are already involved in just these efforts. Paul Hawken in his book “Blessed Unrest” identifies 30 million grassroots environmental organizations around the world! He calls them the immune system for Earth. Let’s hope the immune system will behave like our own bodily immune systems, and start killing the threats to our global health, the corporations that left unchecked will certainly kill us and everything else on the planet.

A "transit village" in the San
Francisco area, cited by the Ford Foundation as an example of projects
eligible for its new grants. (Photo: Bay Area MTC)

The foundation’s president, Luis Ubiñas, revealed the move in a
speech to local community leaders gathered at the White House to discuss
the future of the nation’s once auto-dominant cities.

Ubiñas cited several examples of existing transit and urban
development projects that would be good candidates for the foundation’s
five-year grant program. The Bay Area’s residential-commercial "transit
villages," Detroit’s public-private M1
light rail plan, and New Orleans’ push
to rebuild its Claiborne Avenue corridor topped the list.

“When we look at metro regions and see pockets of serious
unemployment
but also pockets of employment opportunity, and disjointed transit
systems that
fail to connect people to the services they need and the jobs they seek,
it’s clear that a different approach is needed,” Pablo J. Farías, a vice
president at the foundation, said in a statement on the grants.

The foundation was established
in 1936 with an initial gift from Edsel Ford, son of the automaker
Henry Ford, and managed by members of the Ford family for several
decades after its founding.

(Editor's note: This is Part 3 in a 3-part series on the Bay Area watershed. In Part 1, we examined a radical new daylighting proposal in Berkeley; and in Part 2, we looked at the changes that SF streets may face under a bold plan by the Public Utilities Commission.)

Phalen Creek in St. Paul, MN

Early daylighting projects like the Napa River, Strawberry Creek, and Codornices Creek formed the basis for a worldwide shift in the possibilities presented by urban watersheds. Now, a series of best-practices has begun to emerge from the ever-growing number of daylighted streams around the world, which could inform the proposed transformations of creeks here in San Francisco.

The SF Public Utilities Commission is now studying the feasibility of daylighting Yosemite Creek, Islais Creek, and Stanley Creek. While their research is underway, Streetsblog decided to take a closer look at successful urban water projects around the world from which planners might draw inspiration.

Emerging Best-Practices

The Las Vegas Wash

At one time, the standard treatment was to place streams into culverts underground; now, aquatic restoration is viewed as a top priority. The EPA's "Principles for the Ecological Restoration of Aquatic Resources" describes federal priorities for restoring wetlands. The EPA calls for an increase in wetland area of of 100,000 acres per year, and provides municipalities with 17 guidelines, including "Address ongoing causes of degradation," "Design for self-sufficiency," "Use natural fixes," and "Focus on feasibility."

On a local level, some cities have made a similar effort to document the correct treatment of wetlands. The Seattle Public Utilities Commission provides citizens with a handbook for caring for natural drainage systems, making it easy for property owners to manage the Natural Drainage Systems near their homes.

"The science is pretty well-established at this point," said Mark Frey, a biologist working for the Presidio. Streetsblog spoke to him this week about the park's high-profile efforts to restore areas such as El Polin Spring, Thompson Reach, and the lesser-known Dragonfly Creek. As biologists continue to monitor and study urban waterways, there's a growing confidence in our ability to manage those projects.

Turning Sewers into Show-Stoppers

Some daylighting projects encounter success beyond what their designers could have hoped for.

Cheonggyechun in South Korea is the latest to dazzle observers. A prominent city feature for hundreds of years, it had become an open sewer by the mid-20th century and was buried. But this decade, a $384 million project cleaned the river, removed vehicular traffic, and established habitats along its shores. The revitalized waterway has become a destination not only for humans (90,000 visitors per day), but for fish species (which increased from 4 to 25), bird species (from 6 to 36), and insect species (from 15 to 192).

El Polin flows from a historic weir in the Presidio

Elsewhere in the park, the grasslands above El Polin Loop are being cleaned and replanted. A tributary that currently "short-circuits" the land in a plastic pipe will eventually flow freely through the trees. Dragonfly Creek, flowing near the Pet Cemetery beneath Doyle Drive, will see extensive rehabilitation as part of Caltrans' reconstruction of the highway.

The Presidio's location within San Francisco provides a unique opportunity for collaboration. "As an agency, we don't work with the city," the Presidio's Mark Frey told Streetsblog, "But as individuals, we visit the parks," including Glen Canyon Park and the wetland work at Lake Merced. When it came time to re-plant the native Islay Cherry in the Presidio, biologists ventured over to Bayview Hill to harvest seeds.

Providence's Waterfire

A decade of planning, fundraising, and construction began in the 1980s. By the time it was completed in 1996, the area was unrecognizable: railroad tracks and automobile thoroughfares were gone, replaced by a massive riverwalk. Now, rather than parking lots, the area features gondola rides and a late-night bonfire art installation on the river that has drawn millions.

Riverwalks have proven to be popular amenities in cities across the country, although few have required a daylighting project as extensive as Providence's. The Reno Riverwalk features kayaking on the Truckee River, and hosts an annual festival. In San Antonio, a $384.5 million project will revitalize 13 miles of river. And 1,900 feet of the Sawmill River in Yonkers, buried for 100 years, could be daylighted soon as part of the city's $1.5 billion revitalization project.

Blending in to the Landscape

Elsewhere, urban creek projects have sought a lower profile. They don't have to be the landscaping centerpiece of a city to make an important contribution.

Los Angeles has the lowest per-capita park space of any US city -- only 4% of the land is park. (San Francisco is more than twice that, at 9%.) In the middle of the city, plans are underway to restore Compton Creek, turning it from a polluted flood-control channel into a natural habitat. Despite several setbacks, watershed research continues.

A proposal for Vancouver's Still Creek

Seattle has also caught the daylighting bug, with several significant projects. Over six hundred feet of Ravenna Creek were daylighted in 1996 at a cost of under $2 million, restoring land that had been filled in during highway construction.

A decade later, Seattle's Madrona Creek was revitalized for $805,000 with bridges, ponds, cascades, and weirs, as well as human amenities like observation decks and trails. It's since become a habitat for the endangered chinook salmon.

Seattle's Thornton Creek

Seattle's Thornton Creek was perhaps the most difficult undertaking, requiring that environmentalists take the city to court. Seattle had initially claimed that the creek simply didn't exist; but in 2004, the city reversed course, with a plan to restore the creek. Credit for the Thorton Creek daylighting goes to persistent neighbors who fought for years on the water's behalf; one community leader recalls gatherings at which cardboard models of the proposed landscaping was built on a kitchen table, with children fabricating trees for the makeshift diorama.

At the time, the site was a paved-over lot, slated to become a shopping mall and parking garage. Thanks to activists -- and $6.85 million in funding -- it is now a transit-oriented mixed-use development, featuring a bioswale capable of treating stormwater through natural processes before releasing it downstream.

A Model for San Francisco

The Nedelbach in Zurich

Elsewhere in the city, the Wolfgrimbach incorporates runoff from local homes and the Frisenbergbach is used by residents for swimming. Since daylighting began in 1988, streams have been incorporated into children's playgrounds, along city streets, and though residential developments.

Although Zurich provides inspiration for San Francisco's future, it's far from the only source. From Napa to South Korea to Providence, imaginative new ideas have turned urban creeks from an unhygienic nuisance into a critical component of cities' watershed and of sustainable development. All that's required to imagine similar transformations here in SF is a willingness to acknowledge a landscape that predates our arrival -- a landscape that has owned the hills and valleys of our city for thousands of years.

One of the proposed designs for Center Street in Berkeley, by Ecocity Builders

(Editor's note: This is Part 1 in a 3-part series on the Bay Area watershed)

The proposal to convert Center Street in Berkeley from an asphalt thoroughfare to a park-like promenade -- revealing a long-hidden underground creek -- is the latest twist in the interesting and often-controversial story of the Bay Area's heavily-modified waterways.

The Center Street project is a striking reversal of a century-old trend towards burying Berkeley's creeks below ground. It's also an example of the relatively new practice of "daylighting" forgotten waterways, a trend said to have been unintentionally sparked forty years ago in nearby Napa.

"In the 70s, there was the redevelopment," Barry Martin, Napa's Public Information Officer explained to Streetsblog. "and a number of buildings were taken down. The creek ran underneath some structures, so as they were designing this urban renewal project, [daylighting] was part of that."

"I don't think there was any environmental thinking going on at that time," he added.

The Napa River

Uncovering the waterway didn't fix Napa's watershed problems, either.

Forty years after its restoration began, Napa still struggles with the health of the Napa River: Frequent flooding plagued the city during the past decades, and engineers are only now getting the water flow under control, in part thanks to tactics similar to those employed by the settlers of 200 years ago.

In the 1800s, residents recognized that the east side of the river's oxbow was too wet to use in winter, and set aside the land as a summer fairground. An amphitheater now sits on the land, but there's more to the park than meets the eye: It serves as a buffer during floods, redirecting overflow away from more vulnerable areas.

"You might go 4 years and never see a drop of water," Martin explained, "but when it's needed, it'll provide the capacity and move the water downstream into the wetland areas."

He added, "The Army Corps of Engineers uses us as an example of a new way of thinking about flood control."

And whether or not Napa's example meets the definitions currently used for daylighting, the re-engineering of the Napa River changed the way people thought about urban waterways in the Bay Area. 

Berkeley's History of Daylighting

Historically, Berkeley's land has been comprised largely of sediment pushed up along the Hayward Fault. Gradually, as many as a dozen streams carved their way from the Berkeley Hills into marshes along the bay.

In the late 1800s, after years of dumping sewage into those streams, Berkeley had a sanitation problem: Not only did the streams stink, they bred disease. And beyond the difficulties of sanitation, the water posed an obstacle to development, since developers couldn't build on a marsh.

So Berkeley built underground passages for the water, carrying it from its tributaries in the hills to outlets near the waterfront. During this time, many of Berkeley's streams -- a million years in the making -- were hidden from public view. Placed out of sight in the early 1900s, they were largely out of mind.

Advocates like Steve Donnelly like to point to Strawberry Creek as one of Berkeley's earliest daylighting experiments. Completed in 1984 at a cost of about $50,000, a 200-foot section of the creek was removed from a culvert beneath an empty lot and transformed into the centerpiece of the park. (The park cost an additional $530,000 on top of the creek construction.)

A class trip to Codornices Creek

The impact of that transformation has been significant. According to a study by the Rocky Mountain Institute, nearly 30 years after the daylighting, property values in the area around Strawberry Creek Park have increased, crime has decreased, and an empty warehouse has been converted to offices and a bakery.

Strawberry's success was followed in 1993 with the daylighting of Codornices Creek. This time, the city daylighted 400 feet of the creek between 8th and 9th Streets on the border of Berkeley and Albany, at a cost of $33,000. Nearly four hundred volunteers helped to restore the original meander of the water -- an important factor in regulating speed and controlling floods -- and the area saw a gradual increase in the population of species like crayfish, damselflies, garter snakes, mallards, egrets, and gophers.

"A 'sink' is where more animals die than are produced," explained Susan Schwartz, President of Friends of the Five Creeks, which protects and restores East Bay watersheds. Daylighting projects aren't necessarily sinks, she explained, but the possibility exists that a project undertaken for ecological reasons might wind up taking an unexpected toll on the environment.

Center Street Daylighting Could Be Berkeley's Crown Jewel

One of the champions of the Codornices Creek daylighting in 1993 was Bay Area urban planner Richard Register. He's also one of the primary supporters of the most recent push to transform Berkeley's Center Street.

The plan, which was recently endorsed by the Berkeley City Council, would create one of the most visible daylighting projects in the country on what is now a rather plain two-way street. Starting at the Berkeley BART station and stretching up to the UC Berkeley campus, Center Street would be transformed from its present-day asphalt into a pedestrian destination. And it would continue the work that began in the 80s: the body of water beneath Center Street is none other than Strawberry Creek, a section just upstream from the city's first major daylighting project.

"I think it's absolutely fantastic that Richard Register has fought for this," Susan Schwartz told Streetsblog, though she added that because the Center Street proposal is such a tiny, pedestrian-focused section of the creek, "it's not going to make any significant difference to the watershed." As such, Friends of the Five Creeks has not taken a position on the project.

Kristen Quay, Restoration Coordinator at the Urban Creeks Council, agreed that the Center Street proposal is more of a human amenity than a comprehensive daylighting. "The constraints are pretty extreme," she told Streetsblog. "The vehicular access and the location of the site make it not as, well, creek-like."

Creek daylighting can be controversial, unpredictable, and potentially dangerous. For example, in areas near the bay that were formerly industrial, additional groundwater could potentially stir up toxic pollutants.

But when done carefully, daylighting can bring multiple ecological benefits to a neighborhood. Historically, straight, deep culverts are particularly prone to flooding during storms; they're prone to earthquake damage and in combined sewage systems like San Francisco's, they place additional strain on water treatment plants.

In contrast, daylighting can increase habitat for wildlife, ease monitoring and treatment of water quality, and contribute to human recreation, education, and opportunities for sustainable development.

"Stream restoration is neighborhood restoration," explains Ann Riley of the Waterways Restoration Institute in "Urban Stream Restoration."

Significant portions of Strawberry Creek remain enclosed within culverts.

Probably not.

In the hundred or so years that the creek has been hidden below ground, there's been a lot of development up on the surface. Many private homes sit atop the underground culvert. Obtaining that land would be a nearly impossible.

Sometimes, a daylighting project will be fortunate enough to come along at just the right time and in just the right place. In 1992, Thousand Oaks Elementary School began to seriously consider daylighting Blackberry Creek. At the time, Blackberry ran directly underneath the school property and was prone to frequent floods. Once the plan to daylight was approved, it cost $144,000 to remove a dilapidated playground and restore 200 feet of creek to the surface. Now fifteen years later, it's a treasured feature of the school.

The Blackberry Creek project required years of work, fund-raising, and political campaigning. A similar project along Schoolhouse Creek was a massive undertaking. Future projects will be even more challenging.

The Future of Daylighting in the Bay Area and Beyond

Property acquisition aside, there are numerous other obstacles to daylighting. Determining the historic meander of the stream may be impossible; fully-restored creeks require significant space along their banks for sloping and vegetation; water can attract less-desirable animals such as wild rats and mosquitoes; and there are inevitable conflicts over public access to the water.

But for all of those challenges, a little bit of daylighting can go a long way. "The thing about riparian corridors," the Urban Creek Council's Kristen Quay said, "is they provide an inordinate amount of benefits to wildlife. Providing any habitat at all is worth a lot, it's certainly worth the average cost of these projects. Our more mobile species like birds and insects -- especially bees -- can reach these projects very easily and take advantage of their benefits."

Although each project is radically different, dozens of cities all around the world have managed to successfully rethink their treatment of creeks, streams, and lakes.

In future installments in this series, we'll be taking a closer look at those cities' plans. They include replacing the widest bridge in the U.S. with a river of floating bonfires, the creation of a kayaking facility in the middle of downtown Reno, and the possibility of unearthing buried streams in San Francisco.

People's Park in Berkeley

Let's hope that doesn't take another million years.

San Franciscans, like residents of most big cities, are in a continuous process of reshaping public spaces. There are pilot programs for new ways to use Market Street, for pocket parks in areas covered with underutilized asphalt, for Sunday Streets closures, for opening sidewalks to “green sewers,” and even some tentative efforts to launch more public art and/or urban agriculture in empty lots. All of these experiments are welcome departures from the long-simmering biases favoring the total unquestioned domination of private automobiles over public space.

Behind most of the experiments are deeper ideas of an improved life, what some people are quick to dismiss as “utopian.” The anti-utopians apparently consider change impractical or threatening, or have accepted the close-minded meme of the past few decades that any kind of “social engineering,” or public planning to improve human interaction, is inherently totalitarian. This mentality is rooted in a presumption that the way things are is always good enough, or that even if they aren’t, humans are so inherently corrupt or power-mad that any effort to improve things can only make it worse. The dark chapters of mid-20th century totalitarianism (now being regularly conflated to the present by Murdoch’s pompous blowhards) are somehow supposed to be examples of why trying to make life better is impossible. The American Way of Life, with all its poverty, racism, militaristic imperialism, shallow materialism, et al, is somehow the best we can hope for, and anyone who doesn’t accept that at face value is at best a dupe of some future dictator.

For those of us concerned with transit planning, or urban planning more broadly, this politico-cultural baggage comes with the territory. It shapes the discussion before it starts, and so a lot of folks have learned to think small, so as not to fan the flames of fear.

Paul and Percival Goodman series of plans for cities presented in their 1947 book "Communitas" propose a libertarian-yet-socialistic urbanism, focused on both efficiency and individual choice. "The Community with the Elimination of the Difference Between Production and Consumption" presents a hexagon-shaped plan with multi-use residential, commercial, public and industrial sector in the city center, surrounded by a ring of "diversified farms." From "49 Cities" exhibit at SPUR.

The center of this city is highly dense and irregular. The proximity of the urban core to the farms and countryside allows for easy access from one to the other, and the farms are valued for their educational and aesthetic value in addition to their productive use.

Curiously, SPUR is hosting an exhibit right now called “49 Cities” in which a variety of utopian urban plans are revisited, from the works of Le Corbusier to Owenite cooperative colonies, to Levittown and Brasilia, and even a Buckminster Fuller plan to put a giant Dome over midtown Manhattan. One curiosity of the exhibit is its organization of a “Fear Timeline” which plots various utopian urban visions over a four-century long timeline. Clustered largely in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most of the visions were concocted to address the dominant “fears” of their era, whether it be military invasion by a foreign army, securing internal security against uprising masses, ensuring access to water or food, controlling disease, etc.

Given the overarching theme of utopia, I expected the exhibit to be more inspiring than it is. The authors of this study have chosen to flatten out the particularities of human culture, political movements, passion and visionary excitement, to instead present the studies as composites of specific statistical comparisons. The end result is a series of odd two-dimensional diagrams (like the one above) which allow plans from across time and space to be compared on total land areas, total housing, distribution of land-uses, population, green spaces in its variations, water use, etc.

Almost as an antidote to this numbing exhibit, Matt Hern came to town recently and gave a few talks. I caught him at the Studio for Urban Projects, an exciting new venue in the Mission on 17th Street near Guerrero. Hern is from Vancouver and has a new book out called Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future. I haven’t had a chance to read it all yet, but his presentation was quite a refreshing alternative to the kind of dry, bureaucratic approaches to which most urban planners tend to succumb. Hern is a fully accredited Urban Studies Ph.D., but standing in front of us in a white t-shirt and jeans, his head shaved, talking about planting community gardens in his East Vancouver neighborhood, and defending the right of the local junkies to hang out in the neighborhood park, he came across as the neighbor you wish you had. (He has small children too, and still says he’d rather have the drug dealing going on in the open in the middle of the park than being busted and pushed into the alleys and doorways of the surrounding neighborhood. That way he can see it and work around it.)

His book refers back to Vancouver, but it’s written from a number of other locales around the world. He has chapters from Thessaloniki, Greece, Istanbul, Turkey, New York City, Diyarbakir, Kurdistan, Portland, Oregon, and others. He explained to us that however you think about your own city, once you go elsewhere, it always develops in interesting ways. The comparisons one can make when far from home are often surprising. Suddenly you notice a sensible bus shelter, or an open streetside marketplace, and realize that an analogous locale in your home city could learn a lot from this new perspective.

Hern is concerned with gentrification, like most of us that live in cities that are rapidly evicting long-time populations of poor and working class people. San Francisco is a quintessential example of this process. Here in the Mission where I live, the process of turning into a mini-Greenwich Village proceeds unabated. You wouldn’t know there’s an economic crisis going on here by glancing in to the many new, crowded, upscale restaurants.

As Hern says:

The market puts us in Faustian bargain: almost any attempts to beautify, improve, develop, or embolden a community inevitably means it will price its most vulnerable/valuable citizens out and undermine all that good work. Capitalism values selfishness and self-interest above all. Progressive planning and social policy try to mitigate this, but are always behind the curve and at a pronounced disadvantage… Cities CAN do something other than smooth the way for capital and/or clean up its messes. It is possible to articulate and develop genuinely democratic and inclusive strategies that are not self-defeating, that don’t reduce “community” to a commodity. There have to be ways to imagine sustainable community development that doesn’t price people out. I think we can carve huge areas out of this economy for non-market life.

I agree. The specific remedy for the housing crisis that is pricing ever more people out of life in San Francisco is the limited equity co-op based on a land trust. We have functioning co-ops here in town, the most forward looking being the San Francisco Community Land Trust. They’ve already managed to acquire one building on Columbus in North Beach where the former elderly Chinese tenants are now owners, paying only slightly more than they used to pay in rent. Removing properties from the market in perpetuity should be the goal of an aggressive social capital fund under democratic public control -- not to make a revolution, but to start the process of wresting our lives from the vicissitudes of raw capitalism when it comes to home, community, and shelter.

Housing is only a small but important part of this larger agenda of radical change. To make San Francisco a city that connects with the needs of its residents requires a very different political structure and very different forms of power to emerge, ones that will allow for a wholly new kind of public planning to take place. The kind of transition to a low-energy, low-water, high quality-of-life future that we must begin to make will depend on a great deal of mutual aid and solidarity. Instead of building infrastructure that could facilitate a more robust common life, this city’s mayors have consistently put the interests of wealthy property owners and large corporations ahead of its working and middle class residents. The quasi-progressive majority on the Board of Supervisors since 2000 has done little to reverse this deep bias in city politics.

Utopian thinking is the only realistic way forward at this point. Leaving our fate in the hands of PG&E, Bechtel, Chevron, and the rest of that lot is to ensure our inability to face a future fraught with radical change.

Matt Hern sums it up nicely:

An ecological and an ethical city is one and the same thing—we can’t have a “green” city without reimagining our social institutions. And that can’t be made to happen by relying on politicians or planners or developers. They can’t lead, they have to get out of the way and allow the neighborhoods, communities, public spaces, and common spaces that make a great city to become the ongoing expression of a constant series of choices made by everyday citizens.

Fighting for our common spaces, our right to what we already DO have, is underway. This Saturday, March 27, from 10-5 all over town, take to the sidewalks. Sidewalks are for people! Use them! Many of us will gather at Castro and Market at 4 pm to dramatize our opposition to a mayor and police chief (and their political supporters) bent on destroying the fabric of San Francisco. Check it out online at www.standagainstsitlie.org.

(Chart: The Avenue)

Writing on The New Republic’s Avenue blog, Puentes notes
that the nation’s top 100 metro areas — which collectively generate
three-quarters of U.S. GDP, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors
– got more than 70 percent of the total TIGER funding.

Meanwhile,
the stimulus law’s $48 billion in formula-based transportation spending
continues to give disproportionately short shrift to major cities.

Puentes
found that as of the end of 2009, the top 100 U.S. metro areas had
received about 59 percent of total infrastructure stimulus spending.
That number masks a greater urban-rural imbalance in highway stimulus
money, just 50 percent of which went to America’s biggest — and often,
most economically productive — cities. (See the chart above for more
details.)

A July analysis
by Streetsblog Capitol Hill reached a similar conclusion, focusing on
the top 20 U.S. cities and finding them getting 28 percent of the $787
billion stimulus law’s highway money, compared with 61 percent of its
transit funding.

So what can be done to help give major
cities a share of infrastructure recovery aid that’s commensurate with
the scale of their economic needs? For Puentes, the answer is simple:
Use TIGER as a model:

As Washington considers the additional steps
needs to retain and create jobs, the TIGER’s recognition of the
economic primacy of U.S. metropolitan area should be illustrative.

Chris Leinberger at last year’s Walk21 conference. (Photo: M. Katz)

The
concept is often referred to by the wonkish term "value capture,"
evaluated by the University of Minnesota in a groundbreaking study last fall. But Leinberger, an active player
on land-use issues who founded the group Locus to help make urban
planners part of the federal transportation debate, kept his case
simple and accessible.

Many developers are willing to "share part of our financial
upside" to ensure continued local investment in transit and mixed-use
development, Leinberger said. "We in the private sector need to be at
the table because, a) we need these systems, and b) we have the
financial means to pay for it."

Leinberger’s approach, which
attracted vocal interest today from House transportation committee
chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN), would not solve the problem of uneven
federal support for roads — which are funded through an 80-20 split
between Washington and local governments — and transit, which tends to
receive a lower 50-50 federal match.

"If we need to lower the
federal match, that’s fine," Leinberger said, as long as private-sector
buy-in could be counted as part of a locality’s contribution to transit.

Yet
despite value capture’s increasing presence in transportation financing
debates, it has a long way to go before members of Congress could
consider enshrining it in legislation. Increased property taxes are one
established method of requiring land owners to contribute to transit
construction, but cities such as Portland have attempted a largely
opposite approach by offering property-tax exemptions to developers who build up in walkable areas.