City Comforts, the blog

Dark Age Ahead

Some among us eagerly await Jane Jacobs's provocatively titled new book, "Dark Age Ahead." Sounds pessimistic, though I would imagine in a tone very different from Kunstler's.

Yet, just a year ago, in an interview, there was this exchange:

Q. Do you see a more exciting time today, with these new technologies? Or have we become more cynical?

A. I think that the world is getting more exciting. I think the end of the Cold War, which made the whole world in many ways absurd…. Think of how many idiotic things were done, on both sides, everywhere, because of the exigencies of that cold war. It has been a great liberation to have that off us. But also, we are living, I am convinced, in one of the most intellectually exciting times the human race has ever gone through. We are emerging from this linear cause-and-effect way of seeing the world into a way that has really been led by the ecologists, into a Web world, beginning to understand relationships in quite a different way. And it is affecting everything. And no end of people have grasped this and are seeing the world differently and analyzing things differently and seeing possibilities differently--basically in a very hopeful way. And I think this is awfully exciting. People who are younger than I am, you are lucky. You can play a part in what I think can be an extremely hopeful stage.

For those in New York, Jacobs will be speaking--on the past, present, and future of skyscrapers!--at City College on May 6. It is the "First Annual Lewis Mumford Lecture." I wonder what Mumford would have made of that!

Salingaros on Tschumi

The mere term "architectural discourse" makes me nervous and raises my suspicions.

Foolish priorities...and obvious for decades

9/11 Files Show Warnings Were Urgent and Persistent

By late in the decade, the F.B.I. recognized the need to improve its intelligence collection and analysis, but the report said that Mr. Freeh had difficulty reconciling that with its continuing agenda, including the war on drugs. (italics added - DS)

I'd like to see the exact numbers on manpower, dollars, etc etc devoted to these two wars.

Just to make it crystal clear what I'm saying: the dollars and energy spent on putting pot-smoking teenagers in jail has been extremely foolish, especially if it has meant giving insufficient priority to dealing with terrorism.

Why such a short time frame?

Tappan Zee Bridge Awaits a Makeover, or a Successor

At the time of its construction, the bridge was expected to last about 50 years.

Is that an accurate statement?

In Seattle there is a lot of huffing-and-puffing about the "emergency" need to replace our "aging" -- built in the early 1950's! -- viaduct. Putting aside the merits of either situation, I am struck that there is no comment but just a mere wide acceptance that such huge, major works structures could have been built with such short expected lifetimes. Somehow I doubt it's even true; but if there is documentation that such short horizons were the norm, then that is truly an insight into and indictment of that era.

UPDATE: Just to put things in perspective, we routinely expect a wood-framed house of ordinary construction and with no special maintainence to physically last 200 years or more. The building systems of course will need rebuilding but the basic structure -- if water is kept away from it -- will be good for centuries. Why would anyone expect a professionally-maintained steel & concrete structure to last for less? It puzzles me.

Wal-Mart (and its brethren)...

...are a huge force in shaping the spatial form of the USA -- and soon-enough other places as well. So a blog which focuses on the Wal-Mart phenomenon -- Always Low Prices--Always. -- ipso facto also illuminates a big actor in urban form.

Sheri Olson misses a forest on Broadway

David invited me to guest-post this entry, and I appreciate it.

On Monday, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published this review by Sheri Olson, AIA, of the 700 Broadway development on Capitol Hill in Seattle. I read with interest, because the building she's talking about is literally right next door to my apartment, and when the built it, they took away our view, which was one of the best urban views in town. So I'd love to bash it along with her.

Pretty much every criticism she makes in the review is spot on. Mediocre materials. Clumsy. Goofy attempts to "answer" the neighboring Loveless Building. As Olson says, "Every move the architects make after this is an attempt to mitigate the problems of not approaching the building as a three-dimensional object." Frankly, that's the sort of problem I wish more architects had, but she's probably right.

Here's what she doesn't say, however. This is a letter-perfect Three Rules building. It occupies the entire site. The sidewalk wall is totally permeable, and at least one of the retail clients (Essential Bakery) is going to let you look in at people enjoying pastries along nearly the entire west side of the building. They demolished the old sidewalk and are nearly finished constructing a new, nicely detailed, much wider sidewalk. It terminates, finally, the urban vista looking north up Broadway. 100% of the parking is underground.

Maybe Olson thinks these sorts of things are so obvious, everybody does them right andthey don't need to be mentioned. She would be wrong. Recently I walked by the Welch Plaza development at 23rd and Jackson, which was supposed to be something of a New Urbanist project. Ha. There's a big blank wall, tallerthan me, along most of the facade on 23rd. There are all kinds of stupidand unurban things 700 Broadway could have done, and it didn't do any ofthem. Its worst sin is that it's not much of a looker. What was sheexpecting -- another Anhalt or Loveless? That was never going to happen.

Yes, I think they could have done better, maybe something along the lines of the Press at Pine and Belmont, but I'm really glad they didn't do better by Sheri Olson's standards: she loved the new UW law school building, which is an unbelievable piece of junk. A few weeks ago on campus, I approached Gates Hall from the south on one of the newly paved paths through the quad, and when I reached the door, it was not only locked, but there was no handle--it was an exit-only door. I think I ended up having to climb some stairs and walk around the perimeter to get into the building. This was an incredibly missed opportunity: Gates Hall could have defined space to the south and created a nice new outdoor hangout, or it could have opened up the campus to the west. Instead they build a giant brick pudding lump with puke-green glass, and Sheri Olson ate it up.

"The project is built and life goes on but the possibilities for the small pleasures that better design offers, from the delight of enjoying a latte at a sidewalk cafe in the Loveless Building or coming home to an Anhalt apartment, are gone. It's squandered opportunities like this that erodeeveryday life," Olson writes. I'll try to remember that over my croissant and macchiato at the new Essential Bakery.

Clarification

A few posts ago I made reference to "Let the neighbors decide!" Not.

"...the idea that anyone still believes that it's fine for "neighborhoods to decide." Why not simply say "let business decide."?

I was not clear. My intention was to poke a little fun. The idea that we should simply get rid of city-wide rules and "let the neighborhood decide" strikes me as just about as misguided as "let business decide."

Both business owners and neighbors (not "neighborhoods) have, of course, a moral and legal right to set forth their views and to argue for them via all political and legal means.

What I meant to express is the view that "let the neighborhood decide" allows the triumph of concerns not very different in nature (i.e. narrow, sectarian & selfish) as does "let business decide." And that's a bad idea in my book.

More Oil

Imports of Crude Oil by Country of Origin 2002

Petroleum Imports 2002

Top Producers and Exporters

Best of all:

Top consumers

This site is a trove of information.

Yes. No buts.

Modern Art Notes suggests:

Because we're such a helpful bunch here at Modern Art Notes, here are some ideas for future Getty shows:

Transportation of Genius: The history of human transportation, featuring wheels, carts, horses, bicycles, cars, planes and those little semi-subways that take you one of the hills that forms the Sepulveda Pass.

Food of Genius: The history of food, featuring rice, pizza, pasta, gyros, subs, roasts, vegetables, grits, and the utility of mini-BBQ stands in the midst of Richard Meier-designed complexes.

Gardens of Genius: The history of planted areas, including the Hanging Gardens of Mesopotamia, the Business of Tulips, agricultural planting, and whether or not a garden can be elevated to art if it is designed by a well-known artist.

The only thing that City Comforts would add is Parking Garages of Genius which would be a regrettably small show. Of course that is the point. When will some of those swanky starchitects do something practical like a parking garage. If I had the moolah, that's what I'd hire Gehry to do: a parking garage.

Philip Langdon writes:

(I've posted on this bogus issue of new urbanism being crimogenic and my conclusion then as it is now is that the question is bunkogenic. My friend Phil Langdon speaks far more authoritatively. D.S.)

Phil writes::

There was quite a bit of discussion a few months ago when a crime analysis from England by Peter Knowles was distributed on a listserv by Randal O'Toole, chief organizer of the "Preserving the American Dream" conferences. New Urbanists noted that the place Knowles studied in England was not in fact new urbanist. Knowles didn't seem to understand the principles of new urbanism, and seemed to think that New Urbanists want to keep cars out of communities, which is not the case. Now another supposed expert from Britain, Stephen Town, is about to appear seemingly out of nowhere to appear at Randal O'Toole's "Preserving the American Dream" conference to discuss New Urbanism and crime. Town says that a new urbanist development in Hulme, England, suffers from crime because it has alleys.

It's peculiar that O'Toole keeps going to England...

It's all about oil?

U.S. Oil Imports - Top 10 Countries of Origin

Inspiration via Live from the Third Rail

I can understand why libertarians would get upset; real liberals should be as well.

And I am simply thankful that the founding fathers of my state -- Washington -- made it very difficult for government to use its powers of eminent domain to force one property owner to sell so that a City can then resell to another private enterprise under the guise of "public welfare." It is truly a grievous and unfair use of governmental powers but here it is in Charleston where

...urban renewal commissioners on Monday voted to forcibly buy East End property needed for a grocery store from a landowner who has said the commissioners "should be ashamed" of their offer.

I think that they should be ashamed as well to believe that being able to sit behind a public dais gives them some extra wisdom about which private business should have the benefit of a particular location.

He's got it right. (partly)

Jim Kunstler actually gets it right in Conflicted and confounded -- (though sad-to-say it is in his still grossly-named if definitely much better-designed blog; on that last point I have always been amazed that a guy so sensitive to design could have such a totally ugly web site.) Anyway, he writes well here:

The strange assumption gathering behind the 9/11 Commission is that the government ought to be omniscient and omnipotent. And, oddly, those who seem most disappointed with the government's failure to know absolutely everything about everybody, and to control what they do, are the very faction who would most object to a government that actually tried to do so -- namely, Democratic progressives. This is one of many palpable ironies in our conflicted national mood these days.

(Of course then Jim loses it in when he tries to link our problems to diversity. It is precisely our tolerance, diversity and openness to new ideas which is the strength of the West and precisely why the bad guys hate and fear us. Why is that so many middle-aged middle-class white guys are still whining about diversity? I've noticed a fair bit of it recently and it amuses me. But I do know what Jim means, in a sense; but I attribute it to something besides diversity. I was talking to a fellow a few nights ago -- a middle-aged middle-class white guy it so happens -- and for the life-of-me he came up with a sentence about Osama bin Ladin which had the cant-phrase "self-expression" in it. I was appalled -- he seemed to believe that the problem is that terrorists don't have enough legitimate peaceful means of self-expression. I really couldn't believe what I was hearing. So I do agree that there is a lot of naivete about in the liberal circles I inhabit; but to pin the problem on diversity rather than mere stupidity seems like ignoring Occam's razor.)

Anyway, I am sympathetic to Bush on this one. Yes he should have done more; he should have been smarter; he should have done this or that. But it's inconceivable to me that our psychic outlook in August 2001 would have allowed, say, the 'rules of engagement' (that means, basically, when you can shoot) for an on-board air marshall to have said "Go ahead and shoot to kill, thus endangering the lives of the 300 people on your flight, when and if you think in your sole discretion that the hijackers mean to fly your plane into the ground."

It flies past any plausibility that security services would have been allowed to train their officers to take that sort of action, at least before 9-11 offered us a glimpse into the abyss of such a possibilty. If Bush was asleep, then most of us were at least dozing.

"Let the neighbors decide!" Not.

Peter Gordon has the idea that if you let neighborhoods decide, everything will be just fine:

....San Francisco politicians now want to keep chain stores with eleven or more stores from setting up shop in any of selected SF neighborhoods. They argue that they are doing what they can to protect the cities prized neighborhoods.

What is wrong with this picture? Why not let the neighborhoods decide? Let them secede and hammer out their own rules. Top-down one-size-fits-all has never quite worked. Besides big-city politics is less likely to cater for local tastes and more likely to be hijacked in the name of various agendas that have little bearing on neighborhood life.

I won't examine the merits of the specific San Francisco proposal. It sounds a bit goofy at first; and if you actually read the flimsy article -- Neighborhood Pride Prompts Effort to Limit Chain Stores -- you will get only the vaguest picture of what the ordinance actually requires. But enough does seep through to suggest that the ordinance might indeed be reasonable -- merely a design-review system to make a chain drop enough of its "trade dress" to make every Main Street look different. At least I think that's the theory, as essentially harmless as it may be mis-guided.

I am more fascinated by the idea that anyone still believes that it's fine for "neighbrohoods to decide." Why not simply say "let business decide."?

Neighborhood NIMBYs can be just as narrow-minded as their business opponents and with whom are joined at the hip by a singular though opposing devotion to respective factional interests. Neighborhoods are made of neighbors, not altruists; proximity produces interest, not wisdom.

Moreover, we do let neighborhoods decide; it's called voting for city councils and mayors.

Further, if you really did balkanize a city into neighborhoods with separate zoning powers, you would no longer have much growth anywhere at all. Now that may be fine, in fact, if you like the idea of freezing things as they.

But it's pretty funny when hard-core pro-market academics who usually sneer at liberal do-good environmentalism and its urban no-growth progeny turn around and urge on us a neighborhood-based decision-making system which would give us yet more liberal do-good neighborhood protectionism.

"Precautionary Principle"

Sounds to me like everyone -- including maybe even President George W. Bush -- could get behind this principle:

"Where threats of serious or irreversible harm to people or nature exist, anticipatory action will be taken to prevent damages to human and environmental health, even when full scientific certainty about cause and effect is not available, with the intent of safeguarding the quality of life for current and future generations."

Pretty dramatic, eh? That very language is "[a]mong the various Comprehensive Plan amendments being considered by the [Seattle] City Council for adoption in 2004." And even more dramatic (and surprising to me) is that the Precautionary Principle

"was set forth in the Rio Declaration of the 1992 United Nations Conference on the Environment and was signed and ratified by the United States among other nations. It states:"In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost effective measures to prevent environmental degradation."

My own immediate observation is that the City of Seattle's language has significantly removed any economic testing of the "Principle" by removing the "cost-effective" verbiage. Taking the language at its face-value and very seriously indeed, such a Principle could be used to overturn all constitutional protections in the sake of "precaution." It's a Principle which could be used to justify doing pretty-much anything one wants to do.

Also particularly missing is any respect for "property." The Principle calls for protection of "people" and of "nature" but neglects to mention "property." Is that a mere oversight?

I understand where proponents might be coming from. I am well-aware of the problem of global climate change and the scientific ambiguities and I am concerned. See my post from last August 2003: What is the small-c 'conservative' thing to do?

But language such as that contained in the "Precautionary Principle" is so broad and sweeping and unhindered that it might be used by, say, a President who wanted to launch a preventive strike against, say, a ruthless dictator who was draining vast marshes in order to punish the people who lived amongst them. But that couldn't happen, could it?

I am all for "caution" but "pre-caution" sounds to me like a wild card which might be used by people of meager principle.

UPDATE: As a practical and specific matter, when it comes to global climate change, I am probably in line with doing 'cost-effective' things to attempt to deal with the matter; whether the cause is a product of industrialization or natural is somewhat a separate issue; in any case there is a problem. But the language of the Principle -- when I see it in black & white on my screen -- is a bit troubling as a general social policy.

Of course it was partly about oil...but which part?

Happy to see this perspective more widely shared:

...the flipside of acknowledging that America should be trying to reduce its dependence on oil is to acknowledge that America is, in fact, dependent on oil. That means we need to take steps to ensure that oil can be acquired and, ideally, that the people reaping financial gain from the sale of oil are not implacably opposed to America's interests and values.

In the run-up to Iraq, I remember people confiding in me, as if it should be some great secret, that "it was all about oil."

I was doubly nonplussed because
1. I saw little wrong (in principle and in conjunction with measures to conserve) with the industrialized world assuring itself of a stable source of supply
and
2. I could never figure out how the Iraq war actually helped assure that supply.

Still can't. To this day I am confused about why we are there. GW rolled the dice on his Presidency (plus a lot more) and no explanation I have heard (of Left or Right or Center) is intellectually satisfying. (Just to note: "Why" is a different question than "Might the war have long-term positive impacts?")

It takes a wall to make a building

Architects and Glass. Some seem to overdo it.

Stability of Gaze

From a typically illuminating piece by Camille Paglia:

"The visual environment for the young, in short, has become confused, fragmented, and unstable. Students now understand moving but not still images. The long, dreamy, contemplative takes of classic Hollywood studio movies or postwar European art films are long gone. Today's rapid-fire editing descends from Jean-Luc Godard, with his hand-held camera, and more directly from Godard's Anglo-American acolyte, Richard Lester, whose two Beatles movies have heavily influenced commercials, music videos, and independent films. Education must slow the images down, to provide a clear space for the eye. The relationship of eye movements to cognitive development has been studied since the 1890s, the groundwork for which was laid by investigation into physiological optics by Hermann von Helmholtz and Ernst Mach in the 1860s. Visual tracking and stability of gaze are major milestones in early infancy. The eyes are neurologically tied to the entire vestibular system: the conch-like inner ear facilitates hand-eye coordination and gives us direction and balance in the physical world. By processing depth cues, our eyes orient us in space and create and confirm our sense of individual agency. Those in whom eye movements and vestibular equilibrium are disrupted, I contend, cannot sense context and thus become passive to the world, which they do not see as an arena for action. Hence this perceptual problem may well have unwelcome political consequences."

What she does not mention is that another culprit in destroying our "stability of gaze" has undoubtedly been the automobile.

Again, I don't mean to be anti-car, any more than I am anti-TV or anti-rock music. But Paglia's point is sound: Educators need to redouble their efforts to "stabilize the gaze" of the young. Until such time as that, the constituency for New Urbanism and other arts of the stable gaze may grow not as much as some of us would hope.

CC '67 -- One of the great classes

But not everyone agrees: Boomers and the '70s.

It's hard to imagine how else it could have evolved

When Francis Morrone's guest-post More on BoBo Paradise arrived I remember thinking -- hmm...interesting...That phrase "... Americans' sense of entitlement to cheap gas has a hell of a lot to do with why we are in a war on terror to begin with" caught my attention. And since reading it yesterday I have have pondered the connection(s) between an auto-oriented society and terrorism.

You can look at it from several perspectives. The going-forward one is easy. Oil is a strategic weapon -- and it works both ways. We are definitely in a war and against an enemy unlike any we have seen. The enemy happens to have emerged in parts of the world under which there are large pools of easily-accessible oil, a resource which provide the predominant source of foreign income for most of the societies which sit atop them. Putting aside any moral claims to the oil, it seems to me that fighting must involve the oil weapon. Over the next 50 years, they fully need our dollars as much as we need their oil. The ability to consume more -- or less oil -- is a strategic weapon as it allows us to influence -- not the terrorists of course -- but the societies around them. WW2 was won not only because of the gallantry of the Allies but because the steel mills of Pittsburgh were at a safe remove from the battle. We can diminish our strategic dependence on oil-producing nations by buying less oil from them. Of course there is a price to pay as such "energy independence" will weaken those societies -- they have nothing else to sell us -- and plunge them further into economic chaos, this weakening the already-weak modernizing elements. In the long term view, the huge transfers of wealth from the First World to the oiul producers have been a form of economic aid, though of course usually squandered and plundered by the ruling elites.

But looking backwards, the connection between our auto-oriented/oil-dependent society and terrorism is not so clear. There were narrow-minded and anti-Western religious sects in Saudi Arabia, for instance, before there really even was an industrial revolution and they joined with the Saud family to keep the population in the 12th century, much as the current generation of anti-modern terrorists desire to do. Oil has given them a weapon and perhaps a focus but I can't really see how our use of oil has created them. It gives us a legitimate reason to be involved in the politics of countries which produce oil and it therefore makes us more visble to the crazies and hence puts us in their gun sights. Because the USA is an example of the success which can arise from the human energies unleashed by an entrprenurial multi-cultural diverse pluralistic but Judeo-Christian society, we are a particularly tempting target for terrorists whose fervor arises very much out of their own Islamic religion. Terrorists attack us not because of oil per se but because we are modern and successful in ways that they fear; and we are very visble and their own nations have squandered much of their oil wealth. Oil both makes us visble and vulnerable but my take is that historically it is not our oil-buying but our success as free societies which provoke terror's bile.

Bottom line: our use of oil makes us visble, vulnerable and concerned about a secure source of oil but the terrorists hate us because we have a (largely) free, pluralistic society in which women, Jews etc etc can vote etc etc.

•••

I had yet another stream of thought. Imagine of that President Eisenhower, a strategic thinker of some ability, had heard the warning of impending natural resource shortages which arose as early as the late 1940s -- see for example, William Vogt's Road to Survival and then the work of Resources for the Future starting in the 1950s -- and had steered the nation to a smaller population, less use of cars, more oil independence etc etc. Yes I know that it is a preposterous thought. But what would have been the result? One result might have been that the developed countries would have drawn back into themselves and traded less with nations rich largely in natural resources and that the people of the oil producing nations might very well be living in even greater poverty and more benighted circumstances that they are today for the west might have done the wise thing and become "sustainable" before the Third World could even remotely emerge from its local economies. Would that have been a better world? A good subject for a graduate school seminar in "Alternative Futures."

More on BoBo Paradise

As David Sucher points out below, David Brooks, in The New York Times, writes of our "Sprawling, Supersize Utopia." (Requires registration.) Here's Brooks:

"We're living in the age of the great dispersal. Americans continue to move from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and West. But the truly historic migration is from the inner suburbs to the outer suburbs, to the suburbs of suburbia....These new spaces are huge and hugely attractive to millions of people. Mesa, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix, now has a larger population than Minneapolis, St. Louis or Cincinnati. It's as if Zeus came down and started plopping vast developments in the middle of farmland and the desert overnight. Boom! A master planned community. Boom! A big-box mall. Boom! A rec center and 4,000 soccer fields. The food courts come and the people follow."

This comes on the heels of a controversy that raged recently at andrewsullivan.com (you'll have to scroll down a bit). Sullivan had noted, in passing, that he has never learned how to drive a car. Living as he does in Adams-Morgan, in northwest Washington, D.C., he has no need to drive a car. Between his bicycle and the Metro, he gets around the metropolis just fine. But people wrote to tell him what a oddball he is for not driving. And when he suggested that Americans pay too little, not too much, for gasoline, that gasoline should be heavily taxed to fund the war on terror, and to help Americans feel a palpable sense of sacrifice during the war, the letter-writers opened up on Sullivan. They accused him of, among other things, being un-American and unpatriotic.

Brooks, like Sullivan's letter-writing critics, claims that the drive-in Utopia is some fulfillment of the American destiny.

Here's my take: You don't have to be anti-car, or anti-suburbia, to believe that Americans' sense of entitlement to cheap gas has a hell of a lot to do with why we are in a war on terror to begin with. Brooks's beloved exurbia helps directly fund the Saudi madrassas that are a breeding ground of suicide terrorists. And so on. And so as America wages war against Islamism, the nation bitches and moans when the price of gasoline goes up a few cents (while, I might add, still being significantly lower than in most other developed countries). Yet the place that bore the real brunt of Islamist rage was not exurbia, but New York City.

Yes, we non-driving New Yorkers took it on the chin for our exurban brethren. (Not to mention that New York's annual massive net outflow of federal tax funds is what builds exurbia's roads to begin with. I'm sure Brooks would find a very clever way of saying that that's just what God intends.)

It would be nice if exurbia said thank you. But I'd be happy if they'd just shut up about the price of gas.

Nice to read some good news.

California Voters Reject Wal-Mart Initiative

Voters in Inglewood, a racially diverse working-class suburb of Los Angeles, have soundly rejected a ballot initiative to permit construction of a 60-acre Wal-Mart shopping complex exempt from virtually all state and local regulation.

Wal-Mart's defeat at the polls on Tuesday may portend difficult battles ahead for the retailing giant as it moves forward with plans to build 40 of its supercenters in California, combining Wal-Mart's usual assortment of goods with large grocery departments on as much as 200,000 square feet of floor space. The Los Angeles City Council is preparing an ordinance that would in essence outlaw construction of such retail behemoths within the city limits and several other California cities, including San Diego, are considering similar measures.

The Inglewood vote against the Wal-Mart, by a 60 percent to 40 percent margin, was a victory for a coalition of unions, churches and community groups who said the shopping development would have driven local retailers out of business and gutted the city's legal, environmental and planning powers.

Anyway, what is "BoBo Paradise"?

Massengale on Kunstler on David "BoBo" Brooks

James Howard Kunstler on Brooks's preview of his upcoming book in the New York Times magazine:

The New York Times and Brooks's self-satisfied readers are going to discover soon what a catastrophe this way of life really is, and they will be shocked to discover that they were not rushing wide-eyed to embrace the future but rather sleepwalking into it.

I thought Brooks's essay on the BoBo was very good. It surprises me he likes the scene below, which doesn't seem like BoBo Paradise.

Jim Kunstler's diatribes about running out of oil fascinate me. I would be the first to agree that our national policy about oil is a bit short-sighted but has Jim never heard of markets? And of the ability of people though markets to find substitutes for particular goods as those goods become more expensive? "Running out of oil" is more likely to find us sliding down a slope rather than hurtling off a cliff. In the extreme short run, sharp run-ups in oil prices are indeed de-stabilizing. But the extreme short run does not last very long; the folks who have oil are very dependent on us to buy it -- many of them have nothing else to sell; and because we are so wasteful, there is an awful lot of slack in our system. The good news/bad news is that we will have suburbia to kick around even when/if gas is $5 gallon.

I have to admit that I somewhat side with Kunstler in his assessment of Brook's NYTimes piece i.e. it's not a particularly incisive article. It tries to gussy-up some really simple human motivations -- a house and yard of one's own -- with a lot of airy-fairy language. People who live in the suburbs are not manifesting philosophical gobbledygook:

Born in abundance, inspired by opportunity, nurtured in imagination, spiritualized by a sense of God's blessing and call and realized in ordinary life day by day, this Paradise Spell is the controlling ideology of national life.

(-- nor are they by any means all "immoral" yuppies, btw.)

They are simply fairly ordinary people trying to live decently and within their income. You get more house for the money and more sense of personal autonomy in the suburbs than you do in an inner-ring gentrified city neighborhood, much less a Manhattan-style high-rise. That's why suburbs are so popular. Forget Emerson and James Fenimore Cooper. Everyone would live in a brownstone on East 64th Street if they could afford it.

UPDATE: Crooked Timber pretty-much agrees with me: The unbearable liteness of David Brooks .

How can Russell be so kind...

to Muschamp?

The Life and Death of a Masterpiece

Via one of the very interesting Project for Public Spaces Listserves we are informed by Reed Dillingham as follows:

Don't know if any or all of you saw the latest issue of Landscape Architecture....Was an interesting article about a "park" (really corporate plaza) built 16 years ago in Tampa....Fascinating review of all the mistakes that cities and designers make about parks. Almost nothing to applaud but a good cautionary tale. Amazing that cities and designers are still creating so many of these bad public investments! Go to The Life and Death of a Masterpiece. Quite amazing that they call it a "masterpiece"!

Neighborhood impacts & congestion pricing

Peter Gordon misses a subtlety about the dynamics of congestion pricing and HOT lanes etc etc when he offers:

City-center pricing as in London is not useful in the U.S. where few go to the traditional centers. Rather, HOT-lanes are the way to go. The next logical step is to have them over an entire metro area's highway system, not simply on an isolated link here and there. The results would be dramatic and eye-opening, just as in London.

Putting aside the curious statement about "few" going to traditional city centers, placing charges on an "entire metro area's highway system" would have the immediate impact of diverting an enormous numbers of short trips to local streets.

I agree that charging for only a few corridors makes little sense; the next logical step is charging for the entire major highway grid. But charging for the limited-access system is also not enough. Remember the "squeeze the toothpaste tube" image? Logically and practically, one has to charge for the use of all urban streets or else you'll be managing the freeways but increasing traffic on neighborhood arterials, feeders etc and that is not an idea on which I'd suggest anyone run for office.

Finally...

some common sense:

Under the proposal, the state would issue licenses for civil unions, with identical rights and benefits, for both heterosexual and homosexual couples, while churches, synagogues, and other religious institutions would perform marriage ceremonies. Clergy members could officiate at the marriage of any couple they choose. That system would let religious groups that object to gay marriage refuse to perform the ceremony.

Government should not be in the business of sanctifying anything...that's one of the reasons to have separation of church and state in the first place.

Read it and weep, for America

If You Have To Ask, You Can’t Afford It

Read it and weep, for Iraq

Jacques Verges will not defend Saddam Hussein — but he is already attacking America

Where are the adults?

Her blueprints are the future

"I was greatly influenced by early Russian abstract artists, mainly El Lissitzky and [Kasimir] Malevich. I wanted to apply similar artistry to my architecture..."

Maybe the problem is poor career-counseling?

Shortcuts sometimes lead to brambles

"Transferable development rights" are an appealing way to give cities greater say in curbing sprawl

Gov. James E. McGreevey on Monday signed a law authorizing the state's towns and cities to trade development rights between environmentally sensitive regions and those open to growth. The transfer development rights bill brought to a close a two-year legislative effort and was a focus of McGreevey's anti-sprawl initiative, which also focused on curbing building along waterways.

The land-use scheme allows communities to essentially trade building credits within "no-growth" zones and shunt it into "import zones."

They sound great at first. But transferable development rights (TDRs) are actually a gimmicky "something-for-nothing" tool. The only way to preserve land is to purchase development rights. Techniques like TDR throw the underlying zoning base out of kilter -- after all, if there are TDRs floating out there, what is the "real" zoning of your property? TDRs also require a far more complex and burdensome adminstrative structure which benefit only planners and lawyers and the few developers able to thread the needle.

Nice try but no cigar.

I wonder why.

Costco drops Aurora warehouse plan

....withdrawn its application with the city of Seattle to develop a three-story warehouse at North 125th Street and Aurora Avenue North. The company had planned to build a warehouse on top of two stories of parking at 12220 Aurora Ave. N. and had completed two public design-review meetings with the city's Department of Planning and Development.

Costco builds multistory warehouses in high-density areas where it cannot acquire the 15 acres needed for a typical warehouse and parking lot. The North Seattle property where the Costco warehouse was planned consists of about 7 acres.

I'll be following this story as I would have shopped at this very store and I was curious to see how well Costco -- which I admire greatly in many respects -- would have done it.