City Comforts, the blog

Break-up superblock, provide space for micro-retail

DanB makes some good points about the proposed Goodwill at Dearborn Street Development. He's right that it looks like a superblock development, which is unfortunate and bad. But I wonder if we have to ban large-plate retail (e.f. Safeway, Circuit City etc). Why not simply require a big box to be "wrapped" with small retail (maybe 30' deep*) at the street-grade to give opportunity for small and micro retail?

*I blogged about the issue of depth here: How deep should a retail space be?

A new focus for this blog: megaprojects

You may have noticed that I have started to pay attention to real estate megaprojects and how to civilize them. (I won't be focusing on the even more numerous utility and transport megaprojects such as dams, power plants & grids, marine and air ports, highways, tunnels etc. etc.)

Here's why.

I had the opportunity recently to spend a few fascinating days in the Middle East. I was invited to give a talk at the Jeddah Economic Forum 2008 on the subject of "megaprojects." Never having thought very much about megaprojects the prospect took me slightly aback. (If you know City Comforts then you know that it is about anything but praying to large-scale.) But as I got into writing the talk (which I will post here soon) and then visiting the Middle East I realized several things which had never occurred to me.

1. There are an incredible number of real estate megaprojects in design or under construction across the globe, often in some relationship with a utility or transport megaproject. That's the big story.

2. We don't have many megaprojects, if any, in the USA (military operations aside) which is why I hadn't thought much about them. The Middle East and East Asia, mostly China, seem to have them in abundance. Let's put it another way. If we have megaprojects in the USA, then they have hyperprojects elsewhere. There is not one single proposal (much less under anything construction) for a brand new city in the USA. In the Middle East and China there are several hundred such projects (the most numerous in China, of course, but seemingly the most glamorous ones in the Arab world.)

3. These megaprojects are going to get built. I come from a 1960s tradition of "small is beautiful." And that may well be true. But mega has its political and econoomic charms. Many magaprojects, whether I particularly like them or not, are being built and will continue to be built for several interrelated reasons:

• Capital is available to build magaprojects — vast capital, on a scale unimaginable to most of us and is concentrated in the hands of a very few decision-makers. That's the basic reason: megaprojects per se are created by capital-push, not market-demand.

• These decision-makers are often or even usually political figures in their nations and they need to put that capital to work to keep their people content — which usually means jobs — and it is easier to do ten megaprojects than a thousand merely large ones. The leader who can keep people employed and well-fed remains on top of the greasy pole. That is known in Chicago and DC and it is known in Riyadh and Peking.
• Most of these men (and they are mostly men) are  decision-makers in nations in which there is a tradition, being diplomatic, of centralized power. There are no NIMBYs to slow dow the process because, well, there is no political process as we in the the USA or Western Europe know it. These projects in most cases are born in a top-down world with which Robert Moses would be familiar, the only American developer who ever worked close to the scale of what I believe is happening overseas.
• The politics of mega-projects are interesting. It's my surmise that — taking the Middle East as an example — there is a window of opportunity to build these huge projects of perhaps another 30-50 years. By mid-century or so — assuming we haven't destroyed ourselves — the populations in what are now top-down authoritarian regimes will have developed their own NIMBYism. For example, Saudi Arabia is building a new city which is suppose to have 1 million residents — and it is being built about 1.5 hours drive from Jeddah, the business capital of Saudi Arabia with its own population of 2 million. That couldn't happen in the USA. No way could you assemble the political will to establish a new city of a million people 90 or so miles from an existing city of that size. If nothing else, the business-people of the existing city would simply put up too much of a fuss and resist diversion of such massive capital investment to a piece of raw land; they'd want it for their city. Saudi Arabia does not appear to have such issues — yet. So there is a political window of opportunity to build brand new cities from scratch which will only last a few generations, with any luck.

•••

One question: is it megaproject? or mega-project?

Interesting irony.

Southern California has nice weaather.

....LA would be a great place to walk or ride a bike to work all year 'round. But it's our bad weather belt that has the walkable cities, and our sunny and temperate all the time region that barely has sidewalks.

Blame history i.e. America was settled from east to west.

By the same token you shouldn't "colorize" a house by Frank Lloyd Wright

I was thinking about Witold Rybczinski's point (here) on architects' claims to have "built" and therefore presumably to have some future "moral rights" to prevent changes by future owners and it struck me that maybe there is a parallel with colorization in movies:

The case against colorization is most often couched in moral terms. According to this reasoning, colorization violates the moral right of the film director to create a work of art that has a final, permanent form and that will not be subject to alteration years later by unauthorized parties.

I think there is a parallel. If there is some reason to prohibit or at least inhibit colorization of movies then why let a current owner change the color of a house by certified artist-architects? See earlier post about the general issue here.

Of course I think prohibitions against colorization are absurd if for no other reason than we can simultaneously have both original black & white and also colorized versions. plural. And it's inaccurate to assume the director alone as the sole intellectual force to create a film and thus to determine if colorization can be done. But if one believe that such "moral rights" laws are appropriate for films then why not buildings?

 

Cooler heads prevail in San Francisco

Paint chain store cleared to open.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors gave approval Tuesday for an ICI Paints chain store to open at the intersection of Cesar Chavez Street and South Van Ness Avenue. The paint store's application for a permit to open at that location, which owners sought after closing a store on Market Street, had been denied by the city's Planning Commission. The supervisors' vote overturned that decision.

But it is incredible that such a decision even gad to get to the Board of Supervisors In fact it's absurd from the facts as I know them that the matter had to even go to the Planning Commission.

An example of an easy transformation

Backing for a Behemoth in New York City. But it flies under the radar because it is only $1 billion on 14 acres with 3.3 million square feet. So why would I mention it here? Because of the fascinating and novel solution found by the architect to "[m]aking sure those lease revenues offset the project’s huge cost." The story continues:

If stores had simply been clustered at the ground floor of stand-alone towers, as they are in many developments, the site would have yielded just 250,000 square feet — about one-quarter the amount he ended up including.

The ingenious solution? (so the article seems to suggest):

...increase the project’s retail square footage by creating its distinctive full-block pedestal-style base.

(click to enlarge)

Putting snarky humor aside, what is significant here? They've transformed a horrible Corbusian isolated-towers plan to a basic urban layout reflecting the three rules which meets the street with ground-floor retail.

Obviously there are many other aspects of this project which demand attention. The project is roughly 25% retail. (Retail = 800,000 SF. Total project is 3.3 million with 1,100 apartments.) There is no way that 1,100 for-sale apartments can support 800,000 SF retail so the retail must perforce be relatively larger stores (maybe even big box?) to draw from other parts of Queens. So there is a question of compatibility of large-scale destination tenants with residential living.

And the driver was certainly not an attempt to make a better urban project but simply to make enough (or more) money for an adequate return to the developer. But the interesting point is how dramatically and simply a terrible project can be converted into what has the potential to become a good one.

•••

More on the project: Developer of $1B Sky View Parc condo is bullish on Flushing.

Bullish, eh? So what else is new?

Truly stunning paint photoshopjob

 

But is it for real? Or photoshopped? And where is it? I want to go.  

Via Where: Urbanffffinds

Update: Alas, more than a little disappointing, it's a photoshop job of Manarola:

Cinque Terre.

S.F. grows ever more weird

S.F. grows ever more hostile to chain stores.

ICI Paints operated a store on Market Street for 65 years but needed to relocate after its lease expired last year. The company wanted to move into the shuttered Hollywood Video, whose parent company had gone bankrupt and left longtime landlord Ken Allen without a tenant.

But as part of their review, planning commissioners concluded that the property could be used for something more beneficial to the community - possibly new housing and some non-chain stores, although no developer had proposed such an alternative. (italics added(

The Commission has over reached, certainly by measure of wisdom and perhaps by law. The neighbors seem to be split, according to the City's Planners, who in fact actually favored the lease. Yet the Commissioners thought they had greater wisdom.

I had no idea that San Francisco had such an authoritarian element. Gives me the creeps to even think about such a government though I could easily see Seattle doing the same.

•••

Via Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space

Hard to know if it's serious

What's clear is that we need far more than more malls. From a 2005 article in the NYT:

The Mall That Would Save America

Robert Congel, a commercial real-estate developer who lives in upstate New York, has a plan to ''change the world.'' Convinced that it will ''produce more benefit for humanity than any one thing that private enterprise has ever done,'' he is raising $20 billion to make it happen...

What Congel has in mind is an outsize and extremely unusual mega-mall. Destiny U.S.A., the retail-and-entertainment complex he is building in upstate New York, aspires to be not only the biggest man-made structure on the planet but also the most environmentally friendly. Equal parts Disney World, Las Vegas, Bell Laboratories and Mall of America -- with a splash of Walden Pond -- the ''retail city'' will include the usual shops and restaurants as well as an extensive research facility for testing advanced technologies and a 200-acre recreational biosphere complete with springlike temperatures and an artificial river for kayaking.

Someone ought to mention to the architect that isolated goof-itecture amidst a huge parking lot doesn't spell sustainable:

But some reporters take it seriously:

Mega-mall in upstate New York could give birth to a clean-energy awakening

But it sure looks like it will fall-apart:

Destiny USA Breaks Ground in Syracuse.

Two Steps Forward: Destiny USA's High-Wire Act.

Yet another new city in Dubai

"twice the size of Hong Kong Island with housing for 1.5 million people."

We've all been witness to the exploding nature of development in Dubai, but one project is taking the scale of building to another level altogether. On the emirate's last remaining few kilometres of undeveloped coastline an entire city is rising from the ground.

At the moment, Dubai Waterfront is nothing more than endless miles of deserted beachfront dotted with a few lone cranes. But wait ten years and this patch of sand will be transformed into a living, breathing city twice the size of Hong Kong Island with housing for 1.5 million people.

There is some  preposterous about the ambition but then you go see it and they are actually doing it. What Americans may not understand is that there is a vast world — hundreds of millions of middle-class people — for whom Dubai is nearby, Moslem, relatively honest and even progressive by the standards of that part of the world. So yes, it's not such a bizarre idea that a city-sate with a native population of 250,000 — think Tacoma or Ica, Peru before its emergency — could build a city for another 1.5 million people. What I don't quite yet get is whether the expectation is that these new residents will be part-timer residents simply looking for a safe haven (though I can't quite see how the Gulf is all that safe in global terms) or will be full-time. If the latter, doesn't that present a long-term threat to the hegemony of native Dubaians, much more so the Emir?

 

Pretty accurate summary

The Viaduct Conspiracy

Local urban designer (sic) David Sucher, who has been relentlessly predicting a retrofit for years, recently reiterated his view here, but what caught my attention was his assertion that the government has been intentionally misleading the public — our local version of the Iraq War, as he put it.

Yup, that is more or less how I see it, though I'd prefer to phrase it this way: It's not that they lied to the public but simply that they didn't tell the whole truth and biased the public conversation. The parallels to the Iraq war are disturbing as our local compliant press merely repeated government assertions with no independent review.

With both situations you have an initial problem — gruesome dictator and weakened viaduct — and the government uses that real problem for much larger and unconnected ends. In fact arguments can be made that the ends sought were ok if not even noble (widespread democracy in the Middle East and a beautiful front door to Puget Sound). But nobility of ends is not enough. An astute and wise politician will lead the people with plain talk so that the decision is theirs and they will stick by it. In both cases we have a failed policy with a public that wants to withdraw, the worst possible conclusion.

What amazes me is how the same Seattleites who were so correctly skeptical of George Bush's Iraq plans were simultaneously so willing to believe anything that aste and local government told them about the Viaduct. I can't figure that one out except to explain it by residual party loyalty. (Local politics in Washington State is dominated by Democrats.)

As Glenn Greenwald puts it here:

One of the biggest mistakes we can make is to assume competence and benign intent on the part of political officials when deciding how much power to give them. We ought to assume the worst about them — about their abilities, integrity and motives — and only then, based on those suppositions, should we decide how much power, and what specific powers, we’re willing to vest in them.

Concerning Clinton and the gas tax

Seems like most of the elite (except those angling for a job in her administration) think that Clinton is wrong, wrong, wrong on the gas tax.

I had been sitting on the fence about the election. While I do favor Obama I wouldn't have been concerned at all if Clinton were to be elected.

I feel differently today. Either she is a fool or she is venal; and either way she should not be President.

To clarify: I think that Clinton is wrong on the merits; it's absurd on policy and economic impact grounds to lower that tax. But reasonable people can disagree about many things and so it is not bizarre that Clinton should have another perspective on the gas tax. But her anti-intellectual stance — forget those wonky economists! — shows a woman who will stoop as low as possible to get to the White House and appeal to the Rush Limbaugh crowd — I don't nothing and I am proud of it!

What a contrast! Really hard to imagine such a dramatic transition

"Huacachina: Ensconced in the center of hundreds of miles of Peruvian desert..."

Think of it in context of The Transect.

Via Pro Traveller

See also: Last gasp for the Lourdes of the Americas

Update:  And in fact that little oasis "ensconced in the center of hundreds of miles of Peruvian desert" is also part of the city of Ica, which before the terrible earthquake of 2007 had 200,000 residents. So much for truth in photography. And thank goodness for Google Earth

 

"Air conditioned" bike path in Qatar

It's not a mega-project but a way to humanize them.

What struck me about Dubai when I was there was how ideal it would be for cycling, at least some part of the year, because it is basically dead-flat. Plus they could really use an alternative way of getting around because of the horrible auto traffic. The problem? The heat (and humidity) of course. The obvious solution is shaded bike paths, some combination of trees and awnings. And if you combine shade, I wondered when I was there, with 'misting' — think the produce section of the supermarket — maybe you'd get a system to extend the biking season. My thinking went farther into "Dubai Style" bike clothing: have a competition among the best clothing designers in the world to develop bike clothing specifically for non-racers optimized for a very hot climate. This research into "hot weather cycling" could be useful to other and poorer nations so the Sheik would be helping not just Dubai but helping sustainability all over the world.

And it would be great for tourism. My one big and major complain about Dubai is that it is totally oriented to the auto. Dubai makes no provision for the pedestrian which is unfortunate. Why would I go back to Dubai, if it wasn't on business? I mean I liked the place but I found it somewhat stultifying to spend my time indoors most of the time i.e. in hotel, shopping mall and auto. (Actually I went on some tours out in the desert and that was great but you get the idea: Dubai has to offer a lot more than shopping and gaping at the super-wealthy) If Dubai wants to promote tourism — at least certain kind of repeat tourism — it needs to provide low-key things to do and I think that getting around on bikes could be a central part of it. That's beyond all the health benefits etc etc which apply as much to residents of Dubai as tourists.

The good news is that Dubai is developing a bike plan. Knowing a little bit about how the Sheik of Dubai gets things done, it will probably be the "best bike path system in the world." I hope he takes such priode in it.

Anyway, someone has taken my dream and is turning it into reality: Cooled Cycling Infrastructure.,  Mist-Cooled Bike Paths Being Built in Qatar. And here's a video featuring the path's articluate and well-reasoned designer: Qatar’s cooled cycle-path.

I'd embed the video directly in this post but I haven't figured out how to do that yet so here's an artist's rendition:

 

Would break-up have been better for Microsoft? Still be better?

Did monopoly damage Microsoft? Would the shareholders and employees of Microsoft be better off if the company had been broken up and the shelter of living under a monopoly tent been taken away?  A Step Back for Microsoft. No, I don't think so. I think Balmer made a sound decision. Who wants Yahoo?

Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, walked away from a Yahoo deal on Saturday still looking for an answer to his company’s fundamental problem: its time-tested recipe for success isn’t working against Google, the leader in the current wave of Internet computing.

With a bid for Yahoo, Microsoft was trying to buy its way out of the problem. It was a controversial step and a gamble, but at least it was a big move. Now, there is no clear prospect of a quick fix for Microsoft, as the center of gravity in computing continues to move away from the personal computer, Microsoft’s stronghold, and to the Internet.

Microsoft remains a powerful company, and highly profitable, but its stock price has stagnated amid doubts about future growth. Years of antitrust scrutiny have tempered its competitive behavior in new markets. (italics added) 

Let's think about it another way: Years of living off monopoly profits have tempered its competitive behavior in new markets. That's what its shabby share price suggests to me. M'soft is a massive company. Revenues went from $44 billion in 2006 to $5i billion in 2007. But...But... They are not, as I see it, technological leaders. They didn't have to lead because they had the shelter of a de facto monopoly.

So there's another question: maybe it's smarter for M'soft to spend some of it's huge cash hoard rebuilding its operating system from the ground-up. Apple did so five (?) year ago and it saved the company. Obviously M'soft now is not even close to Apple's situation then. But M'soft may yet have to compete with the Mac OS. Maybe that is part of Steve Balmer's calculus. You can't buy cool. Google and Apple now have the cool factor and M'soft might be smarter to split itself up into more manageable companies, rebuild Windows (you wouldn't change the name of course) and let a thousand points light up a thousand flowers blooming i.e. get young, fresh blood with style to shake up the vast M'soft bureaucracies.

Question of the day: Would M'soft (in aggregate) go up in value if it was voluntarily split up? (I have no doubt that that question is being throughly analyzed this very evening.) Such re-creation of M'soft into 5-6 separate companies (each huge in its own right) might be the real resume-builder for Balmer.

McGill University Health Centre Glen Campus Superhospital

OK. We have some big projects in North America -- maybe not Dubai-big but still sizable. McGill University seems to be the central organizing force for a super hospital complex. (In fact it is McGill which refers to it as a "super-hospital.")

The $1.5-billion MUHC complex will bring together research and services currently spread across five McGill hospitals and institutes, a Shriner’s children’s facility and allied services to foster “excellence in patient care, research, education and technology assessment”. The hospital strives to be a “humancentred” environment, with a medical “mall-style” construction and many private rooms for patients. It will have over 8000 employees on site daily. In addition to the 280,000 m2 hospital complex, at least 1.6 million m2 of office space will be needed offsite for laboratories and spin-off research companies. Initial public consultations have been held, site decontamination is nearly complete, architects and engineers have been contracted, and transit plans are being finalized. Impacts are already occurring in the surrounding areas as traffic routes are reconfigured, residents mobilize and real estate changes hands. The hospital is slated to open in 2011. Residents understandably seek to maximize the positive aspects of this project. Some, though, fear negative effects on their quality of life: traffic and emergency vehicles will be ever-present, off-site medical offices will transform the character of neighbouring streets, and employees will outbid local residents for housing; jobs and business opportunities may not go to local workers, especially less educated residents in the Sud-Ouest and CDN/NDG boroughs.

Sounds like they are talking about 20 million square feet of hospital and related offices (if I have done my arithmetic correctly.) So that's indeed a big project and it's both noteworthy and praiseworthy that McGill is concerned about community impact. Here's the question as they ask it:

The central question is: under what conditions, and through what mechanisms, can urban mega-projects contribute to the building of stable, inclusive and healthy neighbourhoods?

Nicely phrased. I'd like to hear other megaproject developers asking such a broad question because the answer is not always "simply by getting it built."

Some minor puzzles me after browsing through their Making Megaprojects Work for Communities website:
• Why do they phrase their work in terms of a "research project?"
• Why are there no site plans and architectural renderings on their web pages?
• Why no mention of the size of the site?

The site is outlined in white, fyi.

They seem to have designs which are well-advanced. Or maybe not? The precise state of their planning is not clear. I doubt that they are in preliminary design, at any rate as as the hospital is supposed to open in 2011 and this is already mid-2008. So maybe the bad news is that they already have a site plan and they are just now (better late than never) starting to realize its enormous impacts on the surrounding neighborhoods?

To my mind, the way you handle the physical design of a project like this one is pretty straightforward and what you do NOT do is build it as an isolated campus. You don't protect the neighborhood (or the institution itself) by separating them from each other with beautiful stone walls and acres of lawn. You integrate them. etc etc. As to the social impacts — gentrification, displacement etc etc — that's a far more complex issue. But is it truly research? More later as I learn about the project.

The Construction Site Called Saudi Arabia

Once I started looking for stories on megaprojects I saw nothing but stories on megaprojects. Here's one from the NYT which mentions one of the most ambitious —  King Abdullah Economic City — and reflects the broadly-held perception that urban livability as we strive for it here in the USA may not yet be high on the priority list:

One of the most noticeable illustrations of the industrialization push is a plan championed by King Abdullah, the 83-year-old Saudi monarch, to build six new cities throughout the country — including the King Abdullah Economic City on the western coast....The intent is to create industrial centers that double as housing and commercial hubs for the country’s young and growing population...Drawings of these new towns depict a cross of the futuristic “Blade Runner” and traditional Arabic design.

I see the Blade Runner element but not the traditional Arabic design. Also note that the PR about megaprojects usually show a bird's eye view and rarely a view from the street, which may reflect the amount of attention paid to the street-level experience:

I very rarely read Thomas Friedman anymore, except today.

And this column really rang a bell and urge you to read it because I feel the same way when I saw Dubai:  Who Will Tell the People?.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.

•••

Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

That shouldn't suggest that I think Dubai is fantastic and wonderful and without flaws. By no means. But there is a problem in the USA  and I am not sure if we are aware of it much les have any idea what to do. I guess we will see this next election though I don't think that even Obama really has the nerve to tell Americans the truth about our not-inevitable decline. Certainly no local/state politicians in my area seem even dimly aware.

"Big Ideas" seduce and can lead astray

A view of the city puts it well:

Raleigh hosted a "Big Ideas" workshop last week, a brainstorm which produced the predictable golf-ball-sized hail of notions about monorails, artificial rivers, and "filling in the skyline" with lots more tall buildings.

Big ideas are seductive, and they lend themselves well to slush funds and grandstanding.  Naturally, politicians love 'em. But (by and large) they're not what makes cities livable.

Rather, city comforts -- also known as "quality of life" -- are all about small ideas: little details, multiplied many times.  It's a place to sit in just the right spot, or a colorful new coat of paint on an ordinary building; places for kids to play safely and close to home (above); a crosswalk just where it's needed.

By the same token, a little detail gotten wrong can destroy city comfort:  a roaring exhaust fan at street level, or a bus stop without a rain shelter.

Solidarity with the Palestinians, eh?

In light of my post Two percent control sixty percent, consider this story from today's  issue of Abu Dhabi's The National:

US urges Arab states to give more to Palestinians

The United States has called on Arab nations to provide aid they have pledged to the Palestinian Authority but have yet to deliver...

...According to US figures, foreign donors have promised US$1.55 billion (Dh5.69bn) in budget support to the Palestinian Authority for 2008, including $717.1 million from Arab League members and $834.9m from other countries.

Of these promises, the Arab League members have actually delivered, all of which came from three countries: Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Algeria.

Other international donors, in contrast, have disbursed $502.1m, the US figures showed, with the largest sums from the European Union, the United States, Britain, Norway, France and Britain.

It's widely claimed that Islamic governments are devoted to the Palestinian cause to divert popular attention from their own terrible conditions. Does such flimsy follow-through on financial commitments by Arab League members substantiate such a claim? Donating $153.2m isn't much considering the price of oil and the needs of the Palestinians.

Two percent control sixty percent

Do you remember the refrains about first world profligacy? Here's one version:  World's wealthiest 16%  uses 80% of natural resources. 

Sixteen percent of the world's population is consuming some 80 percent of its natural resources. That's the estimated toll the wealthiest populations on the globe -- the United States, Europe and Japan -- are taking from the earth's natural bounty to sustain their way of life.

That's from 1999 but I imagine it's similar today and usually offered on (depending on one's politics) either a moralistic or strategic basis.

So what do you think about this striking fact?  Two percent of world population controls 60% of world oil reserves.

With prices expected to stay high despite the world economic slowdown, the oil of the countries inside the Red Line has never been so valuable.Their proven reserves of oil and gas are the equivalent of more than 1.2 trillion barrels of oil. It is worth, at present prices, more than $100 trillion, nearly twice the value of the world's economy in 2008. And it is owned by countries with little more than two per cent of the world's population.

(Of course that statistic doesn't include Iran which would change it somewhat.)

Cause for concern no matter where you stand politically to have so few people claim sovereignty over a resource which is "theirs" only by luck. Especially when that 2% don't have the capability to defend that oil and the only thing which prevents invasion is the US security umbrella (now stretched thin), international opinion about invasions  (how many divisions does international opinion have? could the Kuwait 1991 coalition happen again?) and the Israel-Palestine war, (which will eventually, one hopes, peter out.)

Sorry, James Kunstler

And I don't mean that in a particularly triumphalist way. But anyone who was hoping/predicting that rising oil prices would mean the end of suburbia and the end of civilization as we know it might want to read this article: As Gas Costs Soar, Buyers Flock to Small Cars.

While the demand for driving a certain amount of miles each year  may be somewhat inelastic because of our huge private & public fixed investment in suburban property, the means by which those miles are driven seems to be quite responsive over even the fairly short run.

Will $120/barrel oil force change? Of course. And over a host of human activities, including the suburbs. The cost of building and servicing the suburbs will go up; I am not sure how much smaller you can make a redi-mix concrete truck or a grocery store delivery semi. So the far distant suburbs will be losers and in some cases become wretched slums. But so far as the sort wholesale collapse Kunstler sees, I don't think so. As I heard thirty years ago during the first oil shock of 1973, "the Pinto saved the suburbs."

We still have the Viaduct to kick around and distract us

Some comments on a blog here.

@1: David, we've heard you say many times that you believe the viaduct will be retrofitted. But what do you believe OUGHT to be done with the viaduct?

Posted by Henry Miller Lite | April 30, 2008 9:57 PM

———

#12, Henry Miller Lite.

Short answer:

Ideally, I too would like to see the Viaduct disappear. But I think we are stuck with it. There is no practical alternative. And that's not such a bad thing.

— Repair the damn thing, save the money and use imagination to make it a plus for the downtown rather than a negative. (Yes it is possible and people who can't see it should reconsider. There are many ideas of what one could do. I've written about some of them on my blog. My favorite one is to copy what they did in Paris to an old viaduct. What's tragic about the media -- I am looking at you, _Stranger_ — is that it has played along with WSDOT's basic assumptions and not challenged the government "experts" -- sound familiar? think Iraq.)

— A surface boulevard is a fetching idea, except that I think it would create far more of a barrier than does the current Viaduct.

— A high bridge along the lines of the Millau in France would be great but there is neither the imagination nor the governmental skill/vision.

What is going to happen is just what Mr. X says is happening: REPAIR. Government plays along with the surface/transit fantasy and then when it is obvious that there is NO regional consensus, it throws up its hands and says "Well we have to do something! So let's just repair!"

•••

But yours is a very good question, and I am glad that you see the difference between what I (or anyone) would personally prefer and what the political dynamics will give us. You ask a very layered question. Some of my response:

Priorities.
First of all, I put the issue of the Viaduct in the context of all the possible "good things" which we could do with $3 billion in the city of Seattle. (And remember that the initial budget for this "emergency" were up in the $10-12 billion range, so the issue was even more extreme 5-6 years ago.) Putting it in the context of city-wide possibilities, improving 1.5 miles in one neighborhood just doesn't make sense. Is tearing down the Viaduct a "good idea?" In the best of all possible worlds, of course it is. But when consider the costs versus the benefits to the daily lives of 600 thousand people, it's not even on the table.

Governmental ability
There is no way that state/local government is capable of the enormous transformation required by the liberal herd fantasy (i.e. the "surface/transit" option). In order to replace the Viaduct you'd need to re-route traffic which bring on its own law-suits. Then you have to increase the size of the bus fleet. Etc Etc Etc. Taking out an artery like the Viaduct and expecting the traffic to just filter away is not an experiment which local politicians will take when they realize that they are betting there own careers on the opinions of traffic engineers and Stranger reporters. It's a huge disruption and we are not capable of doing a project of such scale with grace. This is not Dubai and we have SEPA. To give you an idea of the fantasy world in which tear-it-down people live, they rejected what was their only chance: "Repair & Prepare."

Truth in government
We have been lied to. There is no emergency. The Viaduct needs repairs but those repairs have been blown up as an excuse for an expensive project which would not pay for itself under norla cost/benefit criteria. The Viaduct is our local Iraq war. A bad situation -- a dictator in Iraq and a road needing repair -- is used as an excuse for a wild-ass, poorly-conceived and pointless adventure. So that's probably more background than anything else but the context of this project is governmental dishonesty.

Posted by David Sucher | April 30, 2008 11:10 PM

Concerning "fit"

As with clothing on a person, the fit of building is particular to its site. Along with parking impacts, "fitting-in" is one of the most contentious issues with infill i.e. what does it mean? Does it mean copying the neighbors? (And that's assuming that the existing context offers any remote reason to copy.) How far do you have to go? How far can you go? Libeskind finally got his permit but the neighbors were sure not happy about this proposed addition to the Victoria & Albert Museum, which though it may surprise you, I think could have been made to work nicely and to "fit in" in the largest sense of complementing & complimenting its neighbors:

There is a role for spice, the exception to the rule, the raisin in the oatmeal. But iconic buildings (or attempts at them) can be easily be overdone — you just don't want too many raisins in the oatmeal, just Goldilocks amount, or else the exception will devour the rule. And it's also a bit embarrassing to hear someone say that they want to build or esign an "iconic" building. What lack of insight into what makes an icon. Icons are recognized, nor designed.

•••

Sandy Ikeda discussed "fit" here. Karen wondered about it here. Now Jon Swerens likes to how the issue is handled in San Jose, California, where while it's not quite my "Let 'er rip," official policy is that cloning is not essential to fitting-in. The key element (as I read it) is simply similar site plan:

New construction may do so by drawing upon some basic building features — such as the way in which a building is located on its site, the manner in which it relates to the street and its basic mass, form and materials — rather than applying detailing which may or may not have been historically appropriate.

Read it:  Traditional neighborhoods and modern architecture.

Listening to Sam Zell

He was on a panel at  Milken Institute Global Conference, reports Felix Salmon, and it looks like Sam may have drunk the new urbanist kool-aid:

Zell then got into an interesting conversation with Bobby Turner, of Canyon Capital Advisors, about demographics and urbanization. Turner, channeling the likes of Ryan Avent and Richard Florida, said that consumer preferences are going to move away from the suburban lifestyle as transportation costs soar.

Zell agreed, pointing to enormous growth of housing in what he called "24/7 cities", putting a lot of that growth down to the societal deferral of marriage.

But as cities become ever more expensive and the suburbs become ever cheaper, he was asked, won't corporations move out to the suburbs? No. Motorola rented 200,000 square feet of office space in downtown Chicago last year, he said, even as they have over half a million vacant square feet not far away in McHenry county. If the employees are moving to the cities, then the companies are going to have to follow suit.