The cosmopolitan ecologist

There has been this persistent myth floating around the Internet that Los Angeles is denser than New York (e.g., see the argument here and here). A variation on this myth has even worked its way into the Washington Post, which talked about dense Western sprawl (here). As someone who works on urbanization and the environment, I’ve known for a while that while these factoids are technically true, they don’t mean as much as the people using them think they mean. I finally got around to getting the appropriate data from the US Census for 2000, so I can show you all what I mean.

The simplest way one can measure density is this: one can take the number of housing units (for lots of theoretical reasons it’s more useful for planners to think about housing units rather than people… average household size in the US is around 2.6) in a region, and divide by the number of hectares in that region, and get a mean density in houses/hectare. Note that you have one number summarizing a whole region, which is just the mean density.  This is problematic because there is a lot of variation in density within a region, and it’s definitely not a Gaussian distribution of variation (more likely a log-normal or exponential shape), so the mean is a fairly bad summary metric. A better metric would be the median. The best thing to do is calculate the actual distribution of density within the region. The figure below is the answer to the thought experiment, if I skydived into the region and landed in a hectare at random, how many houses would be in that hectare?

http://robertmcdonald.info/blog/comparison_area.html

As you can see, 88% of the time in the LA region, you’d land in a hectare with 0 or 1 houses, whereas in New York the figure is 70%. Note, however, that there are more hectares of 1-3 houses, 3-5 houses, and 5-7 houses in New York than in LA. One important problem with measuring density this simple way (houses/area) is that it is extremely sensitive to the boundaries of the region used. Many of the articles online discussing the myth that LA is denser than New York have used political boundaries, which are often not representative of the true boundaries of the urban area. For my calculation, I used the Census Bureau’s Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical areas, so at least there is some consistency in how I define metropolitan area. I also excluded areas of water or area of completely undeveloped land (parks, etc.) from the calculation. Still, the point is that using slightly different definitions of the urban region, these density figures could change.

There is another way to define density, more meaningful for people thinking about mass transit and walkable neighborhoods. What if you were to look up a random address in the phone book (assume it’s a complete phone book, listing all addresses) and go to that address? How many housing units are in the same hectare as that address?

http://robertmcdonald.info/blog/comparison_houses.html

As you can see, the picture is very different. The “average” house in LA is in a neighborhood of 10-15 homes/ha; 20% of houses fall in this category. The “average” housing unit in NY is in a neighborhood with more than 80 homes/ha; 27% of homes fall in this category. This kind of statistic becomes extremely important when considering the feasibility of mass transit, which (for light rail) works well above 40 homes/ha. Only 8% of houses are in such a neighborhood in LA, versus 32.6% of houses for NY. Even better, this way of measuring density is relatively insensitive to changes in the boundaries of the urban region.

To return to the “myth” of LA being denser than NY, there is some truth to it. The newer (far) suburbs of New York are indeed less dense than those in LA. LA has fewer really low density suburbs, and fewer high density neighborhoods. NY has some really low density suburbs, and some really high density neighborhoods.

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This third map shows the price to rent 3 bedrooms. All of the caveats about the data source that I described in the first post in this series still apply. Anything that is gray are census districts that had very few available 3 Bedrooms, mainly areas controlled by universities and other institutions.

Click here for a high-resolution picture 

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This third map shows the price to rent 2 bedrooms. All of the caveats about the data source that I described in the first post in this series still apply. Anything that is gray are census districts that had very few available 2 Bedrooms, mainly areas controlled by universities and other institutions.

Click here for high-resolution 

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 This second map shows the price to rent a bedroom. All of the caveats about the data source that I described in the first post in this series still apply. Anything that is gray are census districts that had very few available 1 Bedrooms, mainly areas controlled by universities and other institutions. For college students, you can see that areas near Central Square and in Somerville are relatively cheap.

Click here for high resolution 

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Well, it's moving time again in Boston. All of the college students seem to be moving in on Labor Day, and they are all grumpy about the rent they are paying. For those who are new to Boston geography, I thought I would post information on the average rent in Boston and Cambridge, based on 2000 census data. This is of course a bit out of date- I'd add 10% to be current. There are also limitations with this data, as the Census bureau only has rent categories that go up to $1000 a month (which many apartments exceed in Boston, of course). But the maps are still useful to see what is expensive and what's really expensive- think of it as a relative map of price.

This first map shows the price to rent a studio. Anything that is gray are census districts that had very few available studios. For instance, large parts of Brookline don't have studios for rent, so if you're looking for one of these you are out of luck.

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    Sometime this year, humanity will become an urban species: for the first time ever, the majority of people will live in cities. By 2030, 1.7 billion new people will move into cities, and new urban neighborhoods will cover an area the size of California. Most of these settlements will be in the developing world, where new-found urban lifestyles and increased affluence could lead to dramatically increased energy use. This energy use, especially of oil and other fossil fuels, will have implications for the security of nations. Humanity is essentially buildings a city the size of Vancouver twice every week: how does the form of these new cities affect citizens all over the world?

    One specter of the future can be seen in Bangalore, or to be more precise its busy Hosur Road. Cars ease into the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the street, which connects the town to its high-tech research park, Electronic City. The economic boom in Bangalore, combined with a desire to ape the dispersed landscape of Silicon Valley, has led to a dramatic increase in the kilometers each person drives a day. It’s a quite predictable response; traffic engineers can estimate the vehicle kilometers traveled if they know the average density of the city and the proportion of people who can afford to buy a car.

    Multiply such changes by the thousands of cities in the developing world, and you have the potential for millions of new cars a year. China alone may have 37 million additional automobiles on the road by 2020. This promises to put a strain on already tight global oil markets. Even under the somewhat optimistic scenarios of the International Energy Agency, over the long-term potential oil demand is likely to rise faster than oil supply, raising oil prices and increasing price volatility. The price consumers pay at the pump in, say, Los Angeles, will be affected by how cities like Bangalore grow. For those interested in studying oil security, oil demand will become as central as oil supply, placing urbanization on the top of their research agenda.

    Another specter of the future is found in the piazzas of Venice, which are flooding with greater and greater frequency. Each decade global sea level rises by about 2 centimeters, and this small increase, combined with geological subsidence, is slowly dooming the ancient squares. Under worse case scenarios, with the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, sea levels could ultimately rise by up to 6 meters. The cause of this sea level rise is global warming, the rise in average temperature caused by an increase in greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which trap outgoing heat from the Earth. A warmer climate will melt glaciers on land and expand the waters of the oceans, and will pose other serious problems for agriculture and human welfare.

    How bad global warming will be depends fundamentally on how much more greenhouse gases are emitted, and that depends in no small part on the form new cities take. Cities with adequate planning of public transit will use cars less, and have fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Modern insulation and building design can reduce heating and cooling costs substantially, ultimately reducing emissions from power plants. Most importantly, building more efficient neighborhoods in the developing world locks them in to a level of per-capita energy use that will persist for decades to come.

    A more rosy vision of the future can be seen in Curitiba, the capital of the Brazilian state of Paraná. Here a large network of cheap, efficient bus rapid transit shuttles workers from their homes, strategically located along the bus lines, to the downtown business district. The public transit system is used by 85% of residents, and the average personal automobile is driven 30% less than elsewhere in Brazil. The town is a testament to the fact that modest urban planning can achieve significant energy savings, even in a developing country context where public funds are often limited. Unfortunately, Curitiba is one of the few exceptions to the general rule that most new neighborhoods in the Global South are essentially unplanned. There are more than 1 billion people who live in slums, unregulated settlements whose residents often lack clean drinking water or toilets, and are too poor to consume much energy per-capita. As many developing countries experience some much needed economic growth, middle- and upper- class residents are often retreating to Western-style suburbs, which are low-density and car-dependent.

    How the thousands of cities in developing nations grow thus will affect everyone on Earth, for better or worse. Many of the steps toward more sustainable urban development will necessarily be taken by municipal and state governments. Foremost among these steps is the reform of urban governance, bringing development for the poor within the law’s oversight, for it is simply untenable to plan for sustainability when most neighborhoods are unplanned. Paradoxically, this may involve easing restrictions on urban land conversion in some cities, acknowledging that substantial growth will occur, but making sure it meets minimal health and environmental standards.

    There is also a small but crucial role the developed world can play in this search for urban sustainability. Technology and knowledge transfer is obviously a part of this role, as already codified in international policy instruments like the Kyoto Protocol and the Commission on Sustainable Development. However, what is needed is not necessarily the invention of new technologies– enough is already known to perhaps double the energy efficiency of neighborhoods in the developing world– nor some small programs to facilitate “transfer”. The main obstacle to the implementation of proven technologies is the chronic fiscal shortfall of cities in the Global South, who are never able to afford to make infrastructure investments they know they should make. The developed nations can help fill some of this gap between actual and needed funding, through programs structured like the Clean Development Mechanism. Properly conceived, this is not charity by the developed world, but a prudent investment in their own security.

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I returned from visiting my wife at Stanford, and as I stepped off the plane it was raining in East Boston. This made me indescribably happy. After several weeks in the unchanging, beautiful Palo Alto summer- always sunny and 80F- I was frankly bored. Granted, seeing the oleander in bloom, smelling the hibiscus (my only memory from my natal state, Hawaii), hearing the hummingbirds buzzing around my head, I was happy. And I got a lot of thinking done, as I walked down long streets designed for cars. But perhaps because I didn’t have any job to stress me out, the days slipped by one by one, pleasantly. Even the fruit in the farmer’s market was ridiculously ripe, bursting with flavor. It was paradise. It was monotonous. In a way, isn’t this the dream of suburbia, a life smooth and cool?

I found myself missing weather. On our weekend trips up to San Francisco, I loved the cold fog rolling into Sunset, positively sublime, if I can use that discredited word from the 19th century Romantics. I even loved the crazy bums in the streets, the craziest in the United States. At least their were little moments, like when a homeless man came in this restaurant and screamed for no reason, that no one controlled or could have predicted.

This line of thinking is, course, clearly bobo (bohemian bourgeois), for I’ve never lived in a truly bad neighborhood. Maybe one can only fear the suburb when one can afford to live there, and indeed know all the responsibilities of raising a family might push you that way. People want predictability, until they get it.

I chatted with a friend of a friend while sitting in a fantastic coffeeshop, Ritual. She makes her living designing spaces in Second Life. I always wonder whether these online virtual spaces will be more like Palo Alto- predictable and pleasant- or full of the electronic equivalent of the homeless man screaming. Online, people can choose between designing a paradise, or something just a bit more quirky and gritty and unstable. Who knows which will in the end predominate?

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I have often defended in this blog zoning and land-use regulations. They have brought many benefits to American cities, and so I felt the need to fight against the growing neo-conservative attempt to define any regulation as a taking. I believe the right to use one’s property is constrained by traditional common law, limited to what does not harm others and contributes to the common good, as defined by the people’s elected representatives.

Despite that general philosophic position, I have come to realize that in many ways zoning policy in United States cities has ominous implications for the environment. For example, I’ve been to dozens of cities that have made substantial investments in mass transit. Yet around the transit stations are hundreds of single-family detached houses, which persist because the municipality does not want to loosen or remove the restriction on density. Despite all the good done by Euclidean zoning system back in the industrial period, it has become today one of the biggest causes of sprawl. Ecologists need to argue that most density restrictions should be eased, and that society should let the free market build more densely in already developed parcels if there’s a market for it.

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I’ve been thinking a lot recently about different ways that the United States might reduce our dependence on oil. One significant component of our oil usage (although by no means the biggest) is passenger airplane transport, primarily between big cities. This is an issue worldwide, but is particularly acute in the US, where there is so little public transit available to move around the country. In part, this is because it’s such a big country. However, we also haven’t invested in other technologies like high-speed rail that can be effective over shorter distances. If we assume a speed of 125 miles per hour for high-speed rail (typical of first generation TGV, off-the-shelf type of technology), with 20 minutes to load and 20 minutes to unload the train, and we compare that to a typical plane (around 600 miles per hour, plus 1 hour to load and 1 hour to unload the plane), we can see that high-speed train is quicker than planes for distances of less than 210 miles. This differential goes up even further if one considers that most airports in the US are around an hour drive from the city center. Thus, if one was considering city-center to city-center travel, high-speed trains are faster for distances of less than 520 miles.

Setting a limit on high-speed train connections at around 300 miles, we might consider the 50 biggest metropolitan statistical areas of the US, and ask which ones might be linked by high-speed train. Here are the 15 most important, as ranked by total population (city1 + city2) served:

1.    New York City    Philadelphia        24.5 million people
2.    New York City    Hartford        19.9 million people
3.     Los Angeles        Riverside        16.8 million people
4.    Los Angeles        Las Vegas        14.6 million people
5.    Chicago        Saint Louis        12.2 million people
6.    Dallas            Houston        11.1 million people
7.    Chicago        Indianapolis        11.0 million people
8.    Milwaukee        Chicago        10.9 million people
9.    Baltimore        Philadelphia          8.5 million people
10.    Washington        Baltimore          7.9 million people
11.    Orlando        Miami              7.3 million people
12.    Dallas            Austin              7.3 million people
13.    OK City        Dallas              6.9 million people
14.    Riverside        San Diego          6.8 million people
15.    Atlanta            Charlotte          6.4 million people

Obviously, some of these cities already have regular train service between them, but none of them have anything approaching high-speed service. The one exception is the Acela Express, which can occasionally get up to 125 miles per hour. However, it still takes 6.5 hours to get from Boston to Washington, DC, which means (with stops) that the train is only averaging around 60 mph. The primary problem seems to be that Acela Express makes too many stops: it could stop as many as 13 times between Boston and Washington (a function perhaps of the need of Amtrak to satisfy Congressmen from many states). The desire of Amtrak to use existing track means that it’s often too curvy to reach top speeds.

Shown below is a map of the US, with links shown between major metropolitan statistical areas that are within about 250 miles of one another. While building high-speed train lines may seem expensive ($10 million per mile of track would be pretty normal), it is actually a fairly modest investment compared with other government expenditures. Assuming around (new interstates in urban areas can cost around $6 million per mile). The total network I show in the map is around 5,400 miles, which would be about $54 billion. This may seem like a lot, but it’s one-tenth of what has been spent in the Iraq War to date. Food for thought…

Click here for image

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I write these words from the math library of Jussieu, on the left bank of the Seine. It is a clean, well-lighted place, with cheerful hardwood veneer tables and daylight streaming in the skylight. Nevertheless, it’s not the kind of place whose grandeur inspires, like the older style reading rooms that Mario Vargas Llosa eulogized. The ceilings are oppressively low, perhaps to save on the cost of construction, and a sunken courtyard has been thoroughly colonized by ragweed and autumn olive, growing disorderly in a heap. The library epitomizes the whole campus: space-age but somehow decrepit and a bit unfriendly. A friend who attended Jussieu told me it was designed after the tumultuous events of 1968, when students occupied most university campuses in France [I have since heard from someone else that Jussieu was almost certainly built a few years earlier than the events of 1968]. With this eventuality in mind, the architect allowed for numerous entrances to each building, and broad unenclosed courtyards, to reduce the possibility of an effective blockade. Perhaps because of this, the campus lacks a clear visual focus (excepting for the surrounding Latin Quarter, which is gorgeous), with no central entrance or portico providing a memorable vista.

It occurs to me that U.S. universities haven’t taken this step, and in fact are returning to more traditional-looking architecture after some experimentation in the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps in part this is because the political activity and organization is so much lower among U.S. students. In a sense, American universities have sanitized their students rather than their architecture. This programme has been so successful, thanks not just to the universities but also to the broader American distrust of political organization, that the fervor of the anti-Vietnam war era is totally gone, replaced with an emphasis on achieving a profitable career. In the current context, constructing new buildings in a classical style serves to retain and strengthen the university’s brand. This is the true goal of many (but not all) American university administrators: to be able to say not just that a student received an education, but that they received our brand of education.

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I've recently been playing with ways to quantify where Americans work and where they live. In particular, where are there more people than jobs, and where are there more jobs than people? One way to look at this is by taking the US Census data on the journey to and from work, and calculating the ratio of jobs in a county to workers in a county (for the east coast, where counties are small). In the figure below, red counties have a ratio above 1 (more jobs than workers), while green counties have a ratio below 1 (less jobs than workers).

Click here for a high resolution image 

The counties that have the highest ratios are not necessarily the ones you might expect most: Tunica County, MS (3.92); Norton, VI (3.64); Williamsburg, VI (3.2). For reference, Manhattan has a ratio of 2.73. On the flip side, the communities that have the lowest ratios are mostly counties on the outskirts of sprawly cities like Atlanta: Long, GA (0.19); Echols, GA (0.21); Crawford, GA (0.25).

 Another interesting question that can be asked from this data is, how many workers from a given county work overseas? The figure below expresses this as the number of workers out of a 1000 that work overseas.

Click here for a higher-resolution picture 

Cities tend to be higher, with places like New York City have 2.7 overseas workers. So do upscale vacation places, such as Martha's Vineyard (2.1). However, the areas with the highest proportion of overseas workers, by far, are military bases (Onslow county, where Camp Lejune is, has 19.4) and counties along the gulf coast (perhaps the oil industry?). Interestingly, much of the country has essentially no workers working overseas.

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History, the many stories from the past that created the world we live in today, is both a blessing and a curse. Americans have relatively little history- our country is a baby compared to many other nations- and relatively little sense of history- Gore Vidal once called America the United States of Amnesia for just this reason. On a personal level, Americans act as if history doesn’t matter much, thinking nothing of moving from our natal city to one far away from our family and friends. Indeed, we cherish the idea of a fresh start: we admire a man more if he’s torn up roots in one spot and made a living for himself somewhere else. Despite a famous statement by F. Scott Fitzgerald to the contrary, America is all about second acts (and third and fourth…). I suppose growing up in America I have absorbed all this in my psyche; I know live far from home, in a city that is relatively clean of personal history or familial contacts, and I kind of like it that way, just for its newness.

More and more, though, I’ve realized how atypical this relation with history is, compared with that of many other peoples. A recent acquaintance of mine, for example, takes pride and obvious joy in living only a few blocks away from where he grew up in Spain, within walking distance of his family. And there simply are many more centuries of history in every city in Europe, which is one of the things that make these cities so appealing to Americans. Paris, for example, has at least 10 centuries of history in its walls. It’s enchanting for me as a write, for when I visit I can ponder all sort of historical coincidences and ironies. It’s also a bit like visiting a historical theme park: “oh look, that’s the café where Voltaire often dined.” It’s a lot of fun for me, but strangely claustrophobic; there’s too much history, nothing seems new, just bits of recycled history. It’s perhaps the grand challenge to Henry Ford’s famous quote, “History is more or less bunk.”

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As an ecologist and urbanist, I’m a big fan of public transit. Boston, my current home, is well endowed in that regard, and certainly has more miles of rails than most cities its size. I’ve been frustrated though how all the discussion about expanding the rail network in Boston is either about minor issues (like whether or not to build a tunnel to connect the two ends of the Silver line), or hopelessly quixotic (like how best to build a ring subway, which may be badly needed but would take billions to build).

I thought that I would put my $0.02 into the discussion, and point out some ways to expand the Boston rail network on the cheap. I do this humbly, for I’m not a mass transit engineer and I’m confident that everything I write has been considered by MBTA planners at some point. I hope to just point out some cheap ways to significantly increase service.

Below is a map of the current Boston subway and commuter rail system (click for a bigger picture). The white shaded areas are areas within 1km of a stop, about the maximum distance that people are willing to walk to a stop. The background image is population density, taken from the 2000 census. Population densities above 1,500 people per square kilometer are useful target areas for rail- any stops in areas of lower density are unlikely to be used much.

Click here for a high resolution picture 

Now, certain areas stand out as not having access to a stop, yet being very close to an existing commuter rail line. If you feel like there’s already too many stops on some of the commuter lines, I’d argue it’s worthwhile to close one of the little-used stops in the far suburbs, and open some closer to the city that will be used more:

1. Between Hyde Park and Roslindale- a new stop on the Attleboro line would solve this problem.
2. Western Brighton and eastern Newton- new stops on Framingham line would solve the problem.
3. Union Square, Somerville- I know there’s talk of someday running the Green Line up this direction, but why not just add a stop off of the Fitchburg line.
4. Winter Hill, Somerville- Why not add a stop on the Lowell line near Broadway Street?
5. Tufts University, Medford- Add stop on Lowell line.
6. Hendersonville area of Everett: Add a stop on the Rockport line
7. Revere/Chelsea- Add a stop near where Rockport line crosses Chelsea River.

Also, at least two existing rail lines seem like fairly cheap ways to add to the rail network in the city:

1. Use the Saugus Industrial Track, which is already owned by the MBTA. This was originally planned to be part of the Orange line- see http://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/FutureT/Orange.html. It could be cheaply made into either a spur of the Orange line or a commuter line spur. Stops would serve Malden, Saugus, western Lynn. The line could terminate at Lynn Central Square.
2. Buy the Watertown Industrial Track from the B&M. As far as I can see, this line is little used by industry. It could be a spur of the Red Line, or a commuter line spur. Stops would serve the Mt. Auburn area of Cambridge, the Watertown Mall, Watertown center. The line could terminate at the current Waltham commuter rail station.

Here’s a map of what the new stops and lines that I propose could do to fill in the gaps in the Boston area rail network. I think all of these projects could be done relatively cheaply, especially relative to the $14 billion or so spent on the Big Dig!

Click here for a high resolution picture

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There has been much buzz in the media this past week about the relatively sharp spike in oil prices. I’ve been frustrated by how the majority of coverage has focused on the (very real) possibility of oil company manipulation, as if we’re searching for a convenient villain in the process. The Bush Administration’s policy response to the price spike has been storyline #2, even though truthfully there’s little a president can do to affect oil prices over the short-term. Sadly, there’s been little coverage of how U.S. oil prices compare to the other G7 counties (they are much lower), except for a brief fact check I saw on CNN International (and even that focused on other countries’ high taxes, without explaining the good policy reasons for them). Even worse, there’s been no coverage of the likely long-term trend in oil prices over the next decade or two. Global supply will remain relatively constant, or at best slightly increase; this is not because of technological limitations like a lack of refinery capacity, but simply because there’s a finite supply of the stuff and what’s left is harder to extract. Global demand, on the other hand, will continue to grow rapidly, as nations like China and India industrialize.

The clear implication is that oil prices will continue to rise over the long-term. In this context, the current U.S. government policy of seeking to maintain steady, low prices seems quixotic. It would be far more honest if the U.S. committed itself to expecting steady 5% annual increases in oil prices. The U.S. economy could absorb that sort of gradual annual increase in prices, as we all slowly adapted, whereas a rapid huge price spike could be very damaging.

Yet the press mentions none of these weighty issues. This seems to be a general problem: the media focus on particulars, not on the underlying trend. Global warming is another great example. There is much discussion of whether this or that hurricane was caused by global warming, an attribution that’s almost scientifically impossible to make. In contrast, the long-term, gradual trends (e.g., glacial melt and sea level rise) that keeps us scientists literally up at night, get little press (Andy Revkin being a notable exception).

Maybe this is just human psychology. We focus on what is nearby in space and time, and forget what is distant. It may also be the failure of environmental scientists like myself to find a good, compelling narrative. It’s just challenging with such a grand process: we’re recreating Noah’s flood by burning fossilized sunlight! Perhaps the best summary was what was once said by Herbert Stein, a conservative economist who served under Nixon and Ford: “What can’t go on forever, won’t.”

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Okay, so many friends have asked me to dig up this information that I thought I'd post it. Below are pictures of data from the 2000 census on median rent and median house price of different neighborhoods in Boston. I make no promises about the quality of the data, but for those new to the area it'll give you a sense of what's pricey and what's not.

Rents: Note that the picture below shows median rent, which doesn't account for how big the apartments are. Areas with less than 5% of people renting are shown in gray- there are essentially no rentals in these neighborhoods. Town outlines are shown in black, and major roads are displayed for reference as well. Click the picture for a larger image.

Median cost of a Housing unit: Note that the picture below shows median unit cost, which doesn't account for how big the houses/apartments are. Areas with few owner occupied units are shown in gray- these are either institutional areas with little housing, or areas that are almost exclusively rental. Town outlines are shown in black, and major roads are displayed for reference as well. Click the picture for a larger image.

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James Howard Kunstler’s classic work, The Geography of Nowhere: the Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, remains central to many urban planners and urban ecologists thoughts on U.S. cities. As this particular urban ecologist prepares to teach next semester at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, I’ve been meditating on Kunstler’s work. His central argument is indubitably correct: the rise of the automobile, combined with extensive government investment in road infrastructure and the persistent American ideal of agrarian purity, led to massive growth in suburbs, which were simply unpleasant places to live in many senses.

Kunstler commits one great sin during his presentation, a sin all authors must constantly flirt with to some extent: simplification. He shows only the negative aspects of dispersed-style development, and doesn’t adequately discuss the many negative aspect of live in an industrialized city. An economist would argue, correctly I think, that people would only have moved to the suburbs if they felt that on average it was a good move for them and their families. A full understanding of suburbanization requires an understanding of these drivers of migration.

Kunstler’s solution to the banality of current development in the U.S. rests on a firm faith in the power of urban planning to restore some sanity to American growth. I whole-heartedly agree that this is an important goal, and one that the brave practitioners of New Urbanism may hopefully bring into fruition. However, his solution also strikes me as symptomatic of a disease that urban planners and landscape architects are often afflicted with: the belief that bad urban planning, and the bad ideas behind it, is the root of bad development patterns in the U.S. The reality is that most new development occurs without any direct input from an urban planner or landscape architect, in patterns that result from a combination of economic drivers and relatively diffuse laws. Changing these diffuse laws, as Kunstler advocates, is surely important, but at least as much attention must be focused on making the economic drivers reflect the full cost of ecological and sociological externalities.

This brings me to the other think about the book that makes me uneasy: I have the sense that Kunstler envisions the end of the automobile era as a reversion to previous transportation technologies. We must acknowledge that there has been a consistent trend toward transportation systems that increase mobility and decrease the per-mile cost of transit. This trend will likely continue into the future, regardless of how the oil economy ends up crashing in the short to medium term. It is a simple fact that development patterns are shaped in fundamental ways by the dominant transportation system, and so new development will by necessity look different than in the past. There is no going back to the city of the 19th century, no matter how much New Urbanist planning we do. There are of course principles from older form of development that we should preserve, but we must not slip into nostalgia. The new developments of the 21st century can be more sustainable and humane than those of the 20th century, but they will above all be new, in style and form.

Posted by ecologist at 09:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

MIT’s new Stata Center lurches impressively over Vassar Street, a mélange of surfaces and cylinders intersecting at odd angles. Designed by Frank Gehry, it’s seen as the pinnacle of hip, postmodern architecture in Boston (which ain’t saying much), and supposedly is surprisingly functional inside despite its odd form. I therefore feel decidedly square saying it but I must: I think it’s rather ugly. More than anything, its ornamentation seems ostentatious to me, arbitrary, like a sculpture pretending to be a building. Part of me still believes in that mantra of modernist architecture, form follows function. Politically and spiritually, this at least seems like an honest goal, far more than mere irony and whimsy.

See the rest at Urban Cartography...

Posted by ecologist at 09:19 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

One of things that ecologists and conservations spend a lot of time worrying about is the process of “parcelization”, which is rampant worldwide. Parcelization is just an infelicitous term used to describe the process by which one parcel of land is split into many smaller pieces of land. It is seen as the first step in a sequence (or spiral) of events that inevitably reduce the ecosystem services that land provides to humanity. First, after some triggering event a large parcel is subdivided legally into a set of smaller parcels, whose boundaries are set by the landowner and the relevant town or county planning commission (in some states, like Massachusetts, landowners have free reign when it comes to how to subdivide their land). The triggering event is often the death of the previous landowner, which usually brings the land into the hand of his descendants, who are often interested in maximizing the sale value of the property by subdivision. Second, these smaller parcels are generally sold to a developer, who builds a set of houses that often perforate intact habitat. What’s worse, from an ecologist’s perspective, is that these small parcels are usually too small to be managed in an ecologically beneficial way- it is impossible to manage for forest resources in a sustainable way on a parcel below a certain size, just as it is impossible to use controlled burns to minimize the risk of catastrophic fire, just as it is difficult to provide habitat to many wide-ranging species. Third, landscapes almost never go back toward a more intact state, but instead the process of parcelization continues further.

I’ve realized recently, however, that there’s an ideological split between this way of talking about land and the old progressive ideal of land ownership. Thomas Jefferson and others propounded agrarianism, the desirability of every citizen having a small farm that provides a measure of self-sufficiency and economic stability. When freed slaves were promised the proverbial (and apocryphal) “40 acres and a mule”, the motivation was similar, to strengthen U.S. democracy by having all citizens having some basic landholdings. In most developed countries today, agrarianism seems irrelevant to the mostly industrial and postindustrial world we live in, but the ideal lives on in a sense in the quest of the U.S. to make sure home ownership is available to a broad spectrum of Americans. In developing countries, of course, land reform remains a contentious topic, and one that I believe must be addressed in countries where old colonial systems of concentrated land ownership persist.

Given this progressive pedigree of the ideal of an equitable distribution of land, ecologists and conservationists must be careful with how they talk about parcelization. We must state honestly what needs are driving increasing numbers of Americans to leave dense urban regions for less dense suburban or exurban regions:
1. Many people are simply moving away from cities in a quest to find an affordable way to own a house.
2. They are seeking access to recreational amenities, like a walk in the woods or the babble of a brook, that are often absent from urban settings.
3. They are fleeing negative aspects of urban like, like higher crime and bad public schools, by going out to the suburbs or exurbs.
Our goal as conservationists must be offer political alternative that satisfy these needs with a minimum of parcelization. These must be offered to the body politic not as solutions to the “evils of parcelization”, which will be inevitably portrayed as elitist, but as ways to more fully satisfy the needs of Americans while preserving the environment. After all, Thomas Jefferson did not present agrarianism primarily because of some mystical quality of the soil (although there’s a bit of that in his writings), but because ownership of small farms led to political opportunity and democratic power. In today’s world, owning a house on a 40 acre ranchette doesn’t bring any more political power to the owner than owning a smaller house on a ½ acre lot.

I can think of two ways that conservationists can begin to address the problem of parcelization. First, we need to make urban areas more livable places. If home ownership can be made more practical to urban dwellers, crime can be reduced, and schools can be improved that much of the things pushing young parents out of the city would cease. There is much work on this front by people pushing affordable housing agendas, etc., which is wonderful. Second, in more rural locations, we need to offer more viable legal means for a set of people to share ownership in a property without legally subdividing the land. For example, states could change their subdivision laws so that instead of having an absolute minimum lot size, an increased number of (small) lots could be created if they were clustered on one edge of a parcel. The remainder of the parcel would go under a conservation easement, and be open for recreational use by all members of the community.

Posted by ecologist at 09:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Rip Van Winkle took his famous nap on the outskirts of Palenville in the Catskill Mountains. In Washington Irving's original story, Rip slept for only 20 years, managing to miss the entire American Revolution in the process. Let us imagine that Rip, being incredibly long-lived due to his many hours of restorative sleep, is still wandering around the Hudson Valley. How different it must look to him! The New York City megalopolis alone now holds more Americans than the Empire State and all of New England did in 1900. Rip has just been the witness to one of the most dramatic transformations of the last century, the shift from a rural to urban existence for the vast majority of Americans. In 1900, 60% of the U.S. population was rural. Today, less than 25% of the population is. It was a transformation that changed the very character of life for Americans, and drove a series of political and cultural changes that continue today.

I've heard that Rip Van Winkle has grown tired again. This time, however, in his quest to find a quiet place to rest his head, he's ventured to a calm spot along the China coast. What can Rip expect to see when he awakens, another 50 or 100 years hence?

See the rest on my post at Z Net:

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=56&ItemID=9355

Posted by ecologist at 09:13 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The riots in France continued last night, albeit at lower intensity than the night before. They appear to be spreading, metastasizing beyond Paris to dozens of French cities, and now have sparked a few events outside France. There have been millions of bytes of text written about the riots already, by many people far more knowledgeable about the situation in France than I. If I can offer anything new to the discussion, it’s just to point out the similarities between the French riots and the riots by African-Americans in the late 1960s in the United States...

see more at Urban Cartography

Posted by ecologist at 09:01 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve just returned from traveling in Morocco the past couple weeks, and while my mind is full of lots of vivid images of the places, my thoughts keep turning again and again to … architecture.

The rest of this article is posted on Urban Cartography.

Posted by ecologist at 08:54 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

For the moment, I'm staying in Montreal, and have amused myself by going on strolls through her streets whenever I can escape my meeting. Today I decided to head east on Rue Catherine, hoping to find a good cafe in the Quartier Latin. Instead, I ended up walking through several blocks worth of sex shops and peep shows, which seem to be metastasizing up and down Rue Catherine. Two things about this puzzled me. First, where do the students at QUAM go to hang out and get a coffee? Second, how in the world do everyday people, from little children to gray-haired ladies, walk so nonchalently down the street? In the United States, even being seen on such a street would be scandalous, but here it's all rather routine.

I've seen this latter phenomenon before, on my way up to Montmatre and Sacre Coeur, still my favorite spot in Paris. The most convenient metro stop lets one at at Pigalle, which dwarfs Rue Catherine in size. Oddly though, the same attitude of banal normality is also present, with plenty of T-shirt stands and nice bistros. There's something different culturally between these places and U.S. cities, which must explain the difference. One possibility is that French (and thus Quebec) culture tends to be less prudish about sex. Somehow, I don't think this is it though. There also seems to be some general acceptance  in France of the ability of fairly discordant images and cultures to pass on the street, without really affecting each other. In urban planning, this has translated to neighborhoods with a huge variety of commercial businesses. When adult stores occur, they are usually mixed in with other businesses. The U.S., on the other hand, has chosen to limit such stores to a few select locations, making those zones of the city too seedy and dangerous for any other stores to relocate to.

Posted by ecologist at 08:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There’s been much grumbling recently about the Supreme Court decision in the case of Kelo versus New London, from both sides of the political spectrum. Libertarians worry about the increase in state power, and dream about the horrible abuses of eminent domain that a crooked government might invent. Progressives, because of our natural distrust of large corporations, are afraid this law will simply be used to enhance corporate power over society. It is indeed an odd state of affairs to have both groups mad about the same decision. Progressives, I argue, might take this as a sign that they should reevaluate their interpretation of the case.

Let’s remember the facts of the case: The elected representatives of the people of New London decided it would be in the best of the citizens of New London to redevelop a portion of the city. They hoped to buy out the current residents using the power of eminent domain, paying fair market value for the houses, and begin a development project that would include both public and private organizations. The Supreme Court simply ruled that the mere fact that there was a private component to the development could not prevent the city from using its power of eminent domain.

It’s important for progressives to realize that this legal challenge was part of a much larger attack by business interests on the entire legal basis for land-use regulation. This court case was merely a convenient step in that larger journey, as far as these interests are concerned. These forces are trying to define all regulation as a “taking,” which would require compensation by the government. If this general principle were to ever gain legal standing, which is a distinct possibility now that President Bush can appoint a few new justices, the environmental and social consequences would be horrendous. We progressives should thus be glad that the Supreme Court has turned back this challenge to common sense, and that elected representatives remain free to carry out the greater good, consistent with the Constitution and common law. We should also take it as a lesson that not everything that is good for a corporation is bad for the broader progressive agenda.

Posted by ecologist at 08:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Hi all,

I have a post this week over at another site, that begins:

When I walk around my adopted city of Boston, I continually find myself getting lost. Even having lived in the city for more than a year, I still find myself needing to whip out a map just to navigate cross-town in my car...

Continued at Urban Cartography

Posted by ecologist at 08:41 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I once heard Joseph Chamie, Director of the United Nations Population Division, joke that most people consider the work of demographers dull, while the demographers feel like they are recording the most dramatic event in human history: the demographic transition and the concurrent urbanization of humanity. And the more I think about this statement, as an ecologist, the more I must concur. Most of the major changes in global ecosystems, for good (e.g., regrowth of forest in the northern hemisphere) or ill (e.g., fragmentation of natural habitat), are due in one way or another to this massive shift of people from rural to urban areas.
In developed nations, perhaps because of this environmentalist perspective, urbanization is a bad word; when I mention it in conversations people usually talk about population growth or urban sprawl. These are indeed negative consequences: rapid growth in an urban area poses a severe challenge for transportation and urban planning systems, often resulting in ever increasing gridlock on urban roads. Moreover, rapid growth makes it extremely hard to maintain healthy air, water, and forests.

However, there’s an irony for those of us in the developed work, which mostly live in urban areas, attacking urbanization as something bad. First and foremost, urban life offers opportunities, both cultural and economic, that are simply not available in rural areas. In this sense, urbanization is a natural process most economies go through as the mature. Beyond this, there are numerous positive effects of urbanization. From an environmental perspective, resource use is often more efficient, per-capita, in cities than in rural areas. From a governance perspective, an urban middle-class is often one of the prerequisites for the formation of a democracy. Maybe instead of cursing urbanization, for the challenges it poses, we should all bless it, for the opportunities it represents.

There’s another, deeper irony here in the 21st century. The very concept of a dense urban area, with sidewalks and apartments and a core downtown area, is being reconsidered. Each transportation revolution, from trolleys to interstate highways, has incr