The New Urban/Rural Relationship

Have a look at this scene. Where would you guess it is? Click on the square at the upper right corner for a larger view.

Now go see it on Google Maps. and zoom out and out and out. Surprised?

Welcome to the new reality. It's time to start over.

Tags: Urban Planning Urban Design downtown

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Is Manhattan, New York, or Greater New York Sustainable?

Based on a book review of Green Metropolis by David Owen and an earlier New Yorker article by the same author, there is still a great deal of confusion about the effect of localized density on energy use. Everyone should live in Manhattan says the author, who apparently lives in Manhattan. New Yorkers use the least energy of anyone. Did you notice the old switcheroo? Manhattan and New York briefly became synonymous.

Let's sort out the fact from the fiction. The book claims that living in highrises in Manhattan makes you use less heat, because of shared walls. Is that true? No. Heating and cooling highrises in fact uses a lot more energy per square metre and per person than heating and cooling any other sort of building including single family homes, and the total energy requirement is also greater. The average household in Manhattan is much smaller than the average household elsewhere, so Manhattan apartments tend to be a lot smaller than houses elsewhere. To its credit, Manhattan has a wonderfully efficient community heating system where steam produced in part as a byproduct of electricity generation is piped to buildings to be used for heat.

The book's specious argument about elevators is a bit silly. They say it take less energy to move people horizontally than vertically. Per metre when doing it mechanically, perhaps. But when you want to move people 15 metres away vertically you build an elevator. To do this horizontally you expend no energy at all, you expect them to walk, and more often than not you will not provide them with a lit, heated, cooled, maintained, stainless steel construction within concrete. Unless they take the subway, which probably requires even less energy.

New Yorkers in general use a lot of public transit. This proves in part that people are more likely to take a subway when there is a subway than when there is none. New York is different from most other cities in the US. In research I did a few years back when I tried to see the relation between density, household type and transit use, New York City was off the charts for just about everything. Everyone there takes the subway whether they are in high or low density. You have to remember that Manhattan is only a small part of New York City. Most of the city is not highrises, a lot of the area of New York City is made up of medium density single family houses. I lived in one in Queens and commuted to Manhattan every day. People in medium density in New York take the subway practically as much as people who live in Manhattan highrises. You have to be careful in your assumptions. A large proportion of Manhattan is not highrises and outside Manhattan the vast majority of residential buildings are ground-oriented. But New York has great public transit even in densities where other cities would not have a subway, so lower-density New Yorkers use it.

To me, it is the transit use by lower-density family-oriented areas outside Manhattan that is the great success of New York City. The two populations are very different. Take a typical apartment dweller in a highrise in Manhattan and move him to a lower-density area still in roughly the same size apartment. Is he driving more? Probably not very much. Now take a family of four or five in Queens and move them to lower density. How much will they drive then? A whole lot more. The lower-density area they have moved to will probably not be walkable at all and with 2 jobs and a few kids, that family has very high transportation needs.

It happens that in New York City, the highest population density areas are made up of highrises. But that is not the case in other cities. So, for instance, while Manhattan with its highrises has a population density of 27,000 people/km2, the Eixample area of Barcelona has a density of over 35,000 people/km2, and it does it almost entirely with attractive 5-6 storey buildings (see picture). Many areas of San Francisco do the same thing. Plateau Mont-Royal in Montreal is over 12,000 people/km2 with mostly 2-storey and some 3-4 storey buildings. You really don't need highrises to get population density. What you do need is units that appeal to households with children; that way you get a lot more people for the same number of units.

New York and other cities with dense cores and a high gradient between high-density centres and lower-density rings have polarized their population between the small households who are in the high density and the larger households who go further and further away. Having a Manhattan means that you will also have an extended metropolitan area of commuters spread across several states. When you count the total area and the total population density of this tentacled monster, the Greater New York area, which is a direct result of Manhattan's land use, doesn't look so good. This is a general rule in North America. The denser the core the greater the sprawl, and it gets worse every year. New York's population has not been growing, but its area has. Within New York City, population suddenly stopped growing in 1961 when zoning was changed to allow high density just about everywhere. Then earlier this decade in the "downzoning uprising", with Green Party people behind the movement, zoning was changed downward and lo and behold the population and population density started growing again for the first time in over 40 years.

Whether in Manhattan or in Portland, you can't just look at localized density and think you're making progress. When you change the distribution of the demographics you don't improve energy use as a whole. If you build up a small area you could get very good stats in that one area, as people who are already prone to taking transit move there and continue taking transit. But what happens to the other demographics who get displaced? What about the ones that don't want to live within a few blocks of a high-density hub and who see the area becoming less family-friendly. You may have just moved them away from a transit route to an area where their energy use will skyrocket.

It's a complex topic and the easy answers, like why can't everyone do what I do, simply don't work. It's a shame that people spend their time promoting simplistic solutions and attacking the simplistic solutions of other, rather than simply pricing carbon and letting our economic system minimize total emissions using the price signal.

Tags: Urban Planning Zoning New York GHG Sprawl

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Criticizing Me Is Unconstitutional, Says Architect

Knowing the Guardian newspaper, it's not very surprising that they would jump on a story where an architect is angry at Prince Charles, but they have been at it now for over two months. Two months ago, Charles had a discussion with fellow royals from the Qatari royal family who own some land in a prime location in London, near one of Sir Christopher Wren's achitectural masterpieces. Unsurprisingly, his opinion, as always, was that in architectural heritage areas a more traditional style is appropriate. They decided he was right, and withdrew the design, much to the fury of architect Richard Rogers, who went to the newspapers demanding that the Prince be forbidden from speaking to other landowners.

In a small sample of this week's set of attacks. the Guardian again attacks Charles, this time for having spoken to another developer who wanted to build a different modernist building near a different one of Sir Christopher Wren's achitectural masterpieces. Again, they call upon constitutional arguments to silence him. Whereas the constitution guarantees the right of free expression for most people, arguably it limits this right for a few members of the royal family, and the Guardian is quite keen to use it to muzzle opposing points of view.

In this and previous cases (usually modernist high-rises adjacent to Wren buildings) Charles has never made use of his constitutional role, that is to say has not tried to intervene with the national government or its ministers. Charles himself is a landowner and property developer, and has dealt with a large number of architects. He does not dabble, he "puts his money where his mouth is" and develops properties that he owns using traditional architectural styles. These properties are quite profitable, as it turns out.

The Guardian criticizes him because Charles is in a position to wield his influence on a lot of land owned in part by the royal family. They are attacking him for his role as a landowner and developer who has undue influence on development of his own land. How socialist of them. I don't see them going after other developers for occasionally commenting in private to other developers. In this area, the prince has no actual influence. There is no penalty for ignoring him, in fact in latest case that the Guardian uncovered, the developer did exactly that and the architectural monstrosity was built.

On balance, the influence of Prince Charles has been positive. Precisely because he is not starstruck by the knighted and decorated superstars of the architectural upper class, he speaks his mind openly about those things he cares about and yet seems to studiously avoid using his constitutional role. What he uses is his occasional invitations to speak on the subject, his own land, and the charitable foundations that he has started and staffed with experts. He started talking about sustainability before it was mainstream. He looked for ways to improve density and walkability within a traditional context when everyone else thought this was old hat and before it became the rage. On the few occasions when he has come out against specific projects, they were truly dreadful and badly located. He used to do it publicly and was criticized for it. He now does it privately, and is criticized for it, or in public when he is invited to do so, and is criticized for that too. I think that starchitects just don't like to have their work questioned. And they particularly don't like losing business to upstart traditionalist architects that they have spent their student years and career belittling.

Tags: Urban Planning Urban Design Modernism Architecture

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Will High Speed Rail Reduce GHGs?

In a controversial short column in the New York Times, economist Edward Glaeser argues that high-speed rail has little environmental effect.

The article examines a very small set of factors for the benefits. For instance, it assumes that rail would attract air passengers but not automobile passengers. It uses a straw man argument by saying that high-speed rail would stop in small towns and turn them into exurbs whose residents would then emit more GHGs from driving. Or that trains would be stopped for long periods at the border. Like airplanes, right? He mixes data and arguments from effects of intercity and intracity rail service. He picks numbers out of the air for assumptions. He assumes that the benefit of population living within a city rather than in sprawl consists of less electricity because their house will be smaller and less gas because of a shorter commute. Part of the article argues the negative impact of people moving to be near train stations because of evidence that they do, and part argues the negative impact of people NOT moving to be near train stations because of evidence that they don't. The confused arguments about whether people will live in cities or suburbs and drive more or less are irrelevant since according to his calculations, whatever US city you live in, the value of the environmental benefit adds up to $100-200 per person, while the cost is higher. In his world anything that reduces sprawl has negative benefit, unless the cost of the measure is negative to compensate.

The comments are more illuminating than the article itself.

Tags: Transportation Transportation Planning Rail Sprawl Economics

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Suburban Retrofit

A sometimes hilarious and usually light-hearted approach to re-imagining the suburbs, Reburbia is a design competition intended to think outside the box about re-using McMansions, big box stores, parking lots and highways in a more environmentally responsible way.

Among to top 20 finalists, airship transit, a perpetual motion machine powered by the weight of parked cars, a ribbon of townhouses perched on top of streets like an elevated train with parkland on the roof, and various transformations of houses, malls, roads and pools into indoor farms or water treatment plants. All of them drawn with professional drafting and rendering.

Among the ones that were not finalists, replacing streets with luggage carousels, a combination landfill, cemetary, and golf course, huge public house burnings, and various houses on wheels, on stilts, stacked houses and flying houses.

Tags: Urban Planning Urban Design Sprawl

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Lateral Semantic Indexing

Like everyone else with a web site, I get articles from reputable sources that explain to me how to make web sites rank highly in the search engines. I find most of them hilarious because so many people make their living entirely from incorrect, misunderstood fourth-hand information about search engine algorithms, and then with a perfectly sincere approach sell you some incantations to protect your web site from the evil eye or put some sort of a spell on it that will fool the jaded Googlebot.

The latest hilarious advice based on a misunderstanding of real algorithms was telling me about "lateral semantic indexing" and telling me to use a lot plurals or related variations of keywords, the more the better. I don't know who first read an article about latent semantic indexing, got the first word wrong and then wrote an article about his misunderstanding of the concept. These people all steal from each other and we get a written form of what used to be called an oral tradition.

I won't give a lesson on the math of LSI, I am sure you can all look up reliable sources. If your eyes glaze over when you read about tf-idf or singular value decomposition, the math breaks down to this: if a page is written with perfectly normal prose using the same words and style that other people are using when discussing a particular topic, the search engine will rank it more highly than if you use an unnatural distribution of words, for instance by repeating the same word over and over again. The same way that you and I can tell a crazy person (or a politician with talking points) apart from a sane person.

It's true that a sane person will sometimes use a term in the plural, with the ratio of plural to singular varying depending on the subject and the exact meaning of the word. So for instance if you are using the term "right" in a document that is discussing the legal context, the plural form will probably come up often. If you're using it in a political sense, there will be no plural even though it's a noun, but words like "conservative" or "left" are likely to be there. So their advice about using other forms as often as possible is very likely to get the search engine to dismiss your text as psychotic ravings.

There is a bit of a problem when everyone starts using SEO techniques. The "average" principal word vectors calculated from the actual internet pages will start to be heavily weighted toward repetition of keywords. If the insane ravings that the SEO pseudo-experts recommend that you use start becoming the norm, then people who write normally will start to seem like the crazy persons from the point of view of search ranking algorithms.

Tags: Search LSI Search Engines Information Retrieval

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Resistance From Residents Near Carbon Capture Sites

Here is one of what I am sure is many groups that do not want a carbon sequestration site in their town. The citizens against CO₂ sequestration group is from the area around the proposed carbon sequestration project near Greenville, in Darke County Ohio. It seems that a lot of them are not too keen about the rest of the continent wanting to pump billions of tonnes of poisonous waste under their house.

This 93 million dollar project, mostly paid for by the US Department of Energy, is run by Battelle at the site of The Andersons Marathon Ethanol, LLC (TAME) plant near Greenville. They will inject over a million tonnes of CO₂ and then monitor it to see how much comes back up.

The biggest CCS sites in the world so far have been in the middle of the North Sea or the middle of the Sahara desert. Now we are starting to see them in populated areas, and despite the protestations that they are perfectly safe, that they never leak, and that they have plenty of experience in fixing those leaks that never happen, residents aren't satisfied. Since CCS is going to require a large number of different sites, there are going to be a lot of unhappy people.

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Environment Energy Carbon Capture CCS

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