Category Archives: Land use

Yet Another Mongolian Crossroads

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Peter Galuszka| 9 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

(Third in a series)

ULAN BAATOUR, Mongolia — Flying into this capital city nestled among treeless, light brown mountains brought back memories of a grimy, industrial Soviet city from 30 years ago. Along the tarmac are rows of cannibalized Antonov 2 biplanes used as crop dusters after World War II along with ubiquitous MI-8 helicopter workhorses.

The airport parking lot is also a blast from the past. As we struggle with our bags, Mongolian cab drivers scream at us for our business. My Russian-born wife springs into action. By turns playing one cabbie against the other and tough bargaining, besides touching off at least one fist-fight, she gets our fare down from 50,000 tegreg ($30)  to 15,000 tegreg (about $12)  in exactly 14 minutes — a masterful performance.

Downtown is a mix of Soviet and new destiny. The sidewalks are cracked lumps of ankle-twisting concrete. Local pedestrians will shove you out of the way. Mongolian drivers are hyper-aggressive, challenging other drivers to showdowns that can be measured in millimeters. Yet against the gels, yurts and Stalinesque buildings are scores of construction gantries providing testimony to Mongolia’s newest crossroads.

Freed abruptly from its decades’ long role as the Soviet Union’s 16th republica, Mongolia is struggling to position itself between a still-ambitious Russia and a fast-growing China’s with a ravenous appetite for raw materials. Mongolia needs foreign investment badly but has to shake off its bad reputation for lawlessness, corruption and a poor to non-existent infrastructure. As an attraction it has huge reserves of copper, gold and coal.

The best-known Mongolian, of course, is Genghis Khan, who conquered most of the Eurasian landmass in the 12th century. On the bright side, he brought a sense of law and order to his new empire, introducing such inventions as the diplomatic passport. But G.K. & Sons were among history’s most vicious killers. Their 12th century body county, taken together and adjusted for world population, would be about double that of all the people Hitler, Stalin and Mao slaughtered in the mid 20th century.

Mongolia has long been feared and abused by both China and Russia. It became a country in 1924 after the Manchus fell apart, but the Soviets were quick to force their influence. To make the point with his typical subtlety, Josef Stalin included Mongolia in his 1937  purges by accusing Mongolian Communist leader Gendel of collaborating with  Chinese nationalists and the Japanese.

The result was the arrest of 56,000 and the execution of 20,000 to 30,000 Mongolians, about 40 percent of the population. The horrible event is marked at the Victims of Political Persecution Memorial Museum tucked away in a hard-to-find part of downtown that is being torn up for new skyscrapers to house foreign consulting, banking, mining and construction firms.

The museum is not for the squeamish. One exhibit shows the skulls (see
photo)  of some of those executed. They were lined up precisely so one bullet would shatter the skulls of three or four victims. This particular batch of skulls shown in the photo was found in a mass grave in a remote part of Mongolian discovered in 2003.

Not everything in Ulan Baatour is horrible.  Nearby is a museum of Buddhism with wildly creative art and there are plenty of monks around. Historically, Ulan Baatour (or “U.B.” in local parlance) rivals Tibet as a Buddhist religious hot spot.

Meanwhile, Mongolians are trying to take corrective steps for a better future. At a conference on foreign investment that I attended, Bayaratsetsev Jigmiddash, a legal advisor to the Mongolian government, says that progressives are working on as many as seven separate laws to upgrade the country’s courts and judiciary systems. Key reforms include creating a conflict of interest code for judges to follow and to require them to list their assets and bank statements, she says.

There’s more to be done on the infrastructure front. Despite its strategic location between two rich countries, Mongolia is stuck with ancient Soviet-style railroads and equipment. General Electric is said to be interested in building new locomotives capable of withstanding minus 50 degree temperatures and sandstorms. Likewise, the highway system is primitive or just doesn’t exist where needed. Many major highways have no repair shops or gas stations. About 40 percent of the truck fleet is obsolete.

It’s a classic chicken-or-egg problem. Foreigners won’t invest without rule of law. Without investment, there won’t be rule of law. As one wag suggested, one place to start educating Mongolians about what being modern means is on the highways where no one seems to understand what a rule or a law is or how to brake for pedestrians.

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Posted in Agriculture & forestry, Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Demographics, Economic development, Economy, Energy, Federal, Infrastructure, Labor & workforce, Land use, Transportation

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The Old Boy’s Still Around

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Peter Galuszka| 5 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

(first of a series)

BEIJING, China — Red and gold emblems flap around Tiananmen Square in celebration of 62 years of the People’s Republic of China. This holiday, the sprawling square area is thronged with Chinese families of all ages on this warm and sunny fall afternoon.

I am here on a book research trip that will take me into three Asian nations. Of the three, China holds the spotlight as the coming thing. It’s been the coming thing since the 1980s when Deng Xiaoping turned more than three decades of Maoist central planning on its head and started market reforms. A combination of  pent-up entrepreneurial zeal that’s part of the Chinese DNA and a huge, young population soon sparked double-digit GDP growth rates that started to slow from 11.9 percent in 2010 to 9.7 percent only this year.

The results are stunning. The capital boasts of new buildings, clean streets, an efficient subway system, and luxury stores and restaurants. Growth is concentrated in coastal areas, such as Guangzhou and Shanghai where I stopped first to pick up my wife who is spending the year teaching there. Conventional wisdom has it that with its wealth and growth levels, China is fast eclipsing the United States as the world’s leading power — a view that my otherwise pleasant French Canadian seat mate mentioned as many as five times on the flight over from the states.

Shanghai is likewise a shiny jewel of Chinese modernity, shinier even than Beijing. Its riverfront skyscrapers soar high. Everywhere, gigantic flat screen televisions and LED lights flash out new light architecture. One example of this almost obscene longing for western-style commercialism is Wu Jiao Chang, a square that just got a new subway stop last year. At least four huge, multi-level shopping malls surround the square. Its focal point is a passenger rail line running through the center that has cladding shaped like a giant dirigible covered by thousands of tiny, color-coordinated flashing LED lights.

“People in Shanghai don’t seem to want anything more than eat, shop and have their hair done,” my wife says. Her words echo those of French philosopher Jean Paul-Sartre who once said: “Hell is all the people at a Shanghai department store at the same time.”

The mass-overconsumption so complained about on this blog is in full throttle in China’s big cities. Does it mean true modernity and western values? Not at all.

For an example, let’s go back to Beijing. We stayed at a no-star Chinese hotel near the massive airport because we had an earlier morning flight and couldn’t handle morning traffic. It wasn’t anything we couldn’t handle after years in the former Soviet Union, but it was tucked away in what you might think of as the real China. Garbage lay on the steps of the little eateries and hair dressers in a little strip mall that seemed destined soon for bulldozers. I needed the Internet to get in touch with Expedia.

I ended up in an “Internet cafe” up the dirty stairs of a building. The room was filled with 60 or more terminals with young Chinese playing Net games at some. But you don’t just sit down and boot up. You have to go to the bar where a man examines your passport and writes down all pertinent information for the police. The Net is tightly restricted since the Communist government fears the kind of Twitter-based backlash that this year brought down regimes in Egypt and Tunisia and probably Libya.

I sat down at an ancient Acer desktop with a keyboard that has been through several iterations of rebuilding. The keys are alternately black and red. It’s slow and pokey. A scary thought goes through my head: Do I want to put my Expedia personal data on this? Hell no.

I remember a Wall Street Journal story from earlier this year reporting that Chinese governments officials allegedly hacked hundreds of Google email accounts. The hacking was tracked to the People Liberation Army’s technical reconnaissance bureaus in the city of Jinan. This Big Brother approach is reminder of just how much China hasn’t changed, despite the glittering lights.

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Posted in Demographics, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Labor & workforce, Land use, The Economy, Transportation, Uncategorized

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Making the GOP Case for a Gas Tax Increase

Posted on October 10, 2011 by James A. Bacon| 16 Comments

Michael S. Bronzini

by James A. Bacon

For years, Republican politicians in Virginia have held firm in their opposition to higher taxes, even if those taxes, like the levy on  motor fuels, can be construed as user fees. But the ground seems to be shifting.  A study published September and underwritten by former Gov. Jim Gilmore’s Free Congress Foundation stops just short of endorsing an increase in taxes/user fees to upgrade the nation’s surface transportation system. This comes at a time that the McDonnell administration says it is “considering seeking additional revenue sources” to maintain state roads and highways.”

In his paper, “Surface Transportation: The Case for Growth,” Michael S. Bronzini, an engineering professor at George Mason University, argues that investments in surface transportation promote economic output and productivity, that public investment has been lagging needs for several decades, and that the private sector is unable on its own to meet the need for regionally and nationally interconnected networks of transportation services.

“While some gains can be made through better use of existing revenue, rehabilitating the existing system and investing in our future will require spending that is tens of $billions per year above recent levels,” Bronzini writes. “It may be time to recognize that investing in surface transportation is one of the most productive uses of tax revenue, hence citizens should expect their legislators to accord this high priority.”

Bronzini cites a number of sources to make the case that investments in roads, highways, transit, railroads and maritime systems have a “provable link” to economic development. Most notably, transportation infrastructure lowers production costs, permitting more output and a higher GDP than otherwise would occur.  Investment in non-local roads between 1950 and 1980 yielded annual cost savings to industry of 24 cents for each dollar of investment. The rates of return were significantly higher than returns to private capital and the long-term interest rate.

(Bronzini cites a Rand Corporation study in support of this argument, but he mentions only in passing Rand’s conclusion that the returns have been declining steadily over time and have reached a point by 1980 at which point it is was debatable whether additional investment in road and highway represented a net social gain or loss.)

Bronzini points to a February study by Stephen S. Fuller, also of George Mason, that calculated the economic impact of constructing 16 proposed mega projects as public-private partnerships backed by tolls. The projects, ranging from the Third Crossing in Hampton Roads to the Coalfields Expressway, would cost a total of $30 billion but create a $4 billion gain to State Domestic Product, including 57,000 jobs and $2.9 billion in personal earnings. Two years’ of added economic growth attributable to the mega projects would equal the state’s financial contribution.

In making the case  for higher levels of government investment (he can’t bring himself to say higher taxes), Bronzini argues that real (inflation-adjusted) highway spending per mile has fallen by 50% since the federal Highway Trust Fund was established in the late 1950s, that the number of miles traveled by automobiles and trucks has roughly doubled, and that half the lane-miles on federally funded roads are in various stages of decrepitude. “An ever-expanding backlog of investment needs is the price of our failure to maintain funding levels — and the cost of these investments grows as we delay.”

Bronzini discusses the motor fuels tax, which can be construed as a “user fee” on the grounds that “the more you drive, the more you pay.” Increasing the tax is one way to deal with the funding shortfall, he suggests.  An increase in the fuel tax of 10 cents per gallon would amount to $5 per month per vehicle, or $9 per month per households. He warns, however, that the motor fuels tax are not a stable, long-term funding source as cars get more miles to the gallon, and that an alternative such as a Vehicle Miles Traveled fee may have to be considered.

Two things are missing from Bronzini’s analysis. First is the recognition that not all projects are created equal. Some provide a better return on investment than others. He avoids drawing the obvious conclusion that there needs to be a mechanism for separating economically viable projects from the boondoggles Secondly, he shuns any discussion of human settlement patterns. The economic payback of transportation improvements is inseparably tied to the balance, or lack of it, of land uses served by the improvements as well as the density and connectivity of development. A case can be made that the motor fuels tax should be raised to a level that can pay for properly maintaining existing infrastructure. But at present, no sound methodology exists for determining where funds for new construction can be most effectively deployed. Until we develop that methodology, the discussion of how much money we need to raise in taxes and user fees is getting the carriage before the horse.

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More Bad News — and Bad Advice — from the 2011 Urban Mobility Report

Posted on October 3, 2011 by James A. Bacon| 23 Comments

by James A. Bacon

The recession may have provided a temporary respite in traffic congestion — people tend to drive less when they’re not working, and trucks move less freight — but the picture will worsen rapidly when economic recovery takes hold. So say the authors of the 2011 Urban Mobility Report published by the Texas Transportation Institute.

The national picture will play out in Virginia’s three metropolitan areas included in the study. The congestion relief provided by the recession for the Washington, Hampton Roads and Richmond regions has largely evaporated already. The picture is especially bleak for Richmond, once one of the least congested of the nation’s largest metro areas, whose ranking in the national congestion standings continues to rise.

The Urban Mobility Report is simultaneously a highly useful exercise in documenting the cost of traffic congestion in the United States and a disturbing part of the problem. On the one hand, the range of data it collects is the most extensive and authoritative anywhere and, for all of its limitations, it remains the best gauge we have for measuring congestion and its costs. On the other hand, the authors persist in the belief that a Texas-styled approach of building more roads will get us out of the mess we have created.

To be sure, the authors advocate a “balanced” approach that includes investing in mass transit, traffic management strategies such as signal coordination and rapid crash removal, and demand management strategies like telecommuting and flexible work hours. And they add, “Land use and development patterns can play a positive role, as well.” But the report perpetuates the belief that regions can build their way out of their congestion woes. “If you invest in roads and transit, you get better service and access to more jobs,” says co-author Tim Lomax. “Generally speaking, mobility investments in congested areas have a high return rate.”

Lomax offers no evidence to justify that last statement. The truth is, many projects are driven by political considerations in the total absence of Return on Investment analysis. Moreover, the complex interplay between transportation and human settlement patterns means that the rate of return is exceedingly difficult to ascertain even if some one tried to perform an analysis. Yes, Virgina does need to invest more in transportation. The trick is figuring out which investments to make. Dumping billions of dollars into “doing something” on the grounds that it’s better than doing nothing could, in fact, be worse than doing nothing if we put money into the wrong projects.

With those caveats, let’s look at the picture in Virginia’s largest metro regions…

Washington metro area: 68% of the region’s arterial and interstate lane-miles and 84% of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) are congested during periods of peak travel. (“Rush hour” lasts seven hours each day.) The cumulative delay per person is 74 hours yearly and the cost per commuter in time and fuel is $1,495.

Virginia Beach metro area: 44% of the region’s arterial and interstate lane-miles and 50% of VMT are congested during periods of peak travel. (Rush hour lasts four hours each day.) The cumulative delay per person is 34 hours yearly and the cost per commuter in time and fuel is $654.

Richmond metro area: 36% of the region’s arterial and interstate lane-miles and 33% of VMT are congested during periods of peak travel. (Rush hour lasts 2.5 hours each day.) The cumulative delay per person is 20 hours yearly and the cost per commuter in time and fuel is $375.

To me, the big story is the continually worsening situation in the Richmond region. No one needs to tell Northern Virginians and Hampton Roadsters that they have huge traffic problems but, except in spot locations, congestion has yet to become a major concern of Richmonders. Accordingly, Richmond political and civic leaders perpetuate dysfunctional human settlement patterns. But congestion is steadily worsening and will become a major problem in the foreseeable future. In 2005, Richmond was ranked 88th among 101 metro areas by the cost of congestion per commuter. In 2010, it ranked 68th. The number of congested lane-miles has increased from 30% five years ago to 36% in 2010. The percentage of vehicle miles driven increased from 28% to 33%.

And why is that? The Richmond region is sprawling faster than almost any other region in Virginia, opening up more land for development, building at lower densities and perpetuating the pod form of development with disconnected and segregated cul de sacs, office parks and shopping centers. While our civic leaders focus on panaceas like high-speed passenger links to Raleigh and Washington, they remain blissfully unaware as builders and developers, working within the parameters set by government, pour billions of dollars into outmoded human settlement patterns. Will we be the last region in America to wake up and see how we are suffocating our future?

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Deal or No Deal?

Posted on August 23, 2011 by James A. Bacon| 1 Comment

U.S. 29 north of Charlottesville. Photo credit: The Hook

Lisa Provence with The Hook in Charlottesville has done some nice follow-up reporting to my inquiries into what strings the Virginia Department of Transportation is attaching to its funding of the U.S. 29 Bypass. She quotes Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton as confirming what he had told me, that he sees the project as a “test bed” for the state’s access management policies on corridors of statewide significance such as U.S. 29.

“This is all new,” Provence quotes Connaughton as saying. “We’ve never done this before. How do we put teeth into the designation?” Options include limiting curb cuts and traffic lights, better light synchronization, and parallel/service roads.

The reporter also quotes Albemarle Supervisor Ann Mallek as saying she was so focused during the Bypass debate on ensuring the funding for long-desired U.S. 29 corridor projects like the Best Buy ramp, the Hillsdale extension and the Berkmar extension that it took a while to realize that the secretary had attached conditions limiting direct commercial and residential access to U.S. 29. “We need to make sure we understand what this means and the people who supported the bypass understand what it means,” she told Provence.

Once again, Albemarle-Charlottesville Metropolitan Organization chairman and Albemarle Supervisor Rodney Thomas insisted that there was no “deal” or understanding, as I had suggested in my reporting there was. Regarding the access management restrictions, he told Provence, “I look forward to cooperating.” But he then partially backtracked by noting that he has some concerns about restricting driveways on future developments. “I don’t want to see people who own property have their rights taken away.”

It’s not clear from those statements that Thomas understands Connaughton’s expectations regarding the access controls. The secretary says he wants to get serious about limiting encroachments on the state highway because, “We want to make sure we aren’t back here again.”

Whether or not Thomas believes there was a “deal” or or an understanding regarding access management, Connaughton is talking as if there was. And he holds all the cards.  He’s gotten the approval for the U.S. 29 Bypass that he sought, and he doesn’t have to release funds for the related projects unless he’s satisfied with the Charlottesville-Albemarle region’s efforts to clean up the corridor. The secretary has explained what he expects three times — once in writing and twice to reporters. It’s possible that Thomas and others just aren’t getting the message.

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Posted in 2011, Land use, Transportation, Uncategorized

Gentlemen’s Agreement

Posted on August 10, 2011 by James A. Bacon| 12 Comments

Rodney Thomas. Photo credit: Charlottesville Tomorrow

Albemarle County and VDOT have reached an informal agreement on how to approach access management on U.S 29 north of Charlottesville.

by James A. Bacon

In a side deal forged to grease the skids for  construction of the $200 million Charlottesville Bypass, the chairman of the regional Metropolitan Planning Organization and member of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors has agreed to limit private property owners from opening new access points to U.S. 29  north of Charlottesville.

The specifics of the handshake deal had not been spelled out until today during a meeting between Rodney S. Thomas and Gregory Whirley, commissioner of the Virginia Department of Transportation. In exchange for Albemarle’s approval of the Charlottesville Bypass, the McDonnell administration has committed to fund or assist four smaller projects on the region’s list of priorities. But that help is contingent upon the county’s commitment to the state’s “access management” strategy for U.S. 29.

In addition to limiting new access to the highway, the County also may buy up “a few driveways” from private property owners, Thomas says, and it will “consider” deleting some median-strip crossovers.

The informal understanding worked out between Thomas and Whirley brought clarity to a side deal that had been worked out between Thomas and Whirley’s boss, Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton in negotiations to gain funding and approval for the Charlottesville Bypass.

Roughly two months ago, Thomas and fellow Albemarle supervisor Duane Snow met with Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton to discuss funding of priority transportation improvements to Charlottesville and Albemarle County. The supervisors were committed to a handful of modest projects, including four in the U.S. 29 corridor and the replacement of the aging Belmont Bridge in Charlottesville. Connaughton floated the idea of funding the Charlottesville Bypass, a mega-project long considered to be unfundable. The supervisors said they would love it as long as the Bypass wasn’t being funded at the expense of the smaller projects. Connaughton gave them the assurances they were looking for.

Thomas and Snow then wrung an endorsement of the Bypass from the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, reversing its previous opposition. Connaughton next won approval from the Commonwealth Transportation Board, finding the funds from pots of money that did not diminish the Six Year Improvement Plan in which the smaller projects were listed. Indeed, he found money for one of those projects, the widening of a stretch of U.S. 29. Finally, Thomas and Snow, who both sit on the Charlottesville-Albemarle County Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), reversed that organization’s previous opposition to the Bypass. No more approvals were needed.

While the Bypass project was a “go,” it was not clear to the public what was included in the side deal. In a letter to the MPO board, Connaughton specified the recommendations he would make to the CTB to advance or accelerate the remaining priority projects. (See “Promises, Promises” for details.) Overlooked in the MPO board discussion of the deal and in subsequent press coverage was the fact that Connaughton had attached what he later described as a “quid pro quo” — the region had to get serious about keeping U.S. 29, a Corridor of Statewide Significance, free from curb cuts, traffic lights and other access points that slowed traffic on the highway. (See “Connaughton to Charlottesville: Implement a Plan to Prevent More U.S. 29 Congestion,” for details.)

But Connaughton’s letter did not spell out local obligations with any specificity. And when I talked to Thomas yesterday,  he didn’t have the details either. But he said he would know more after his meeting today.

What emerged from Thomas’ discussion with Whirley could better be described as an informal understanding than a formal agreement. Albemarle, whose previous zoning and design decisions bred the traffic congestion plaguing U.S. 29 today, must restrict future access of developers and property owners to the highway. The county also may have to conduct some remediation, but there is no hard-and-fast agreement. “A few driveways, with some negotiation, may have to be closed up,” Thomas said. The county also will have to “consider deleting some crossovers.” (Crossovers are where intersections cut through the highway median strip.)

“There is no specific proposal or plan. We don’t have to sign anything,” Thomas said. “It would be nice if we could cooperate with VDOT to improve traffic situations rather than make problems for them.”

Likewise, Connaughton’s commitment to advance Albemarle’s transportation priorities is an informal one. Thomas says he believes the transportation secretary will deliver. “I trust Sean Connaughton.”

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This article was reported and written thanks to a sponsorship by the Piedmont Environmental Council.

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LANDSCAPE URBANISM, NEW URBANISM OR THE THIRD WAY

Posted on February 17, 2011 by James A. Bacon| 34 Comments

THE SEARCH FOR A COMPREHENSIVE SETTLEMENT PATTERN CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK THAT PROVIDES A BASIS FOR RATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE DECISIONS

The vast majority agree that there is a desperate need to build and rebuild infrastructure to support functional and sustainable human settlement patterns in the United States.

The unsustainable trajectory of Business-As-Usual has put citizens, their Organizations and their civilization on the roadway to dysfunction and collapse.

The current settlement pattern is not working. Therefore, building more ‘INFRASTRUCTURE’ to support the dysfunctional settlement ‘STRUCTURE’ would be suicidal.

In spite of the widely acknowledged need for infrastructure investment, there are not even funds available to keep the existing infrastructure repaired. There are many reasons why there is not a critical mass of citizen support for infrastructure investment. However, a prime reason is that citizens have seen trillions of dollars poured down the ‘more of the same’ rat hole for three decades with no relief in sight.

As documented in THE SHAPE OF THE FUTURE transport is the canary in the minefield of settlement pattern dysfunction. ‘Traffic congestion’ is the bellwether and traffic congestion gets worse every year regardless of how much money federal and state DOTs pour into asphalt to support Autonomobiles. There are science-based physical and economic reasons for this reality. See THE PROBLEM WITH CARS – PART THREE of TRILO-G and the resources cited in the prior sections of this Perspective.

In this context, where do citizens and their leaders look for guidance to evolve new strategies and functional settlement patterns that can be supported by intelligent infrastructure investments?

Over 95 percent of the US Households are Urban Households so it is reasonable to ask: What are the parameters of the Urban template that can achieve a sustainable future for human civilization?

There are two competing philosophies / paradigms that are being intensely debated at this time:

● New Urbanism (and the related consumption-centric Smart Growth Ideal), and

● Landscape Urbanism (which some link with the econ-centric Green Infrastructure Ideal)

There IS a third paradigm about which few yet understand.

The question is should the Urban template be:

A. Landscape Urbanism?

B. New Urbanism?

C. Or, a Third Way based on the New Urban Region Conceptual Framework and economic / social / physical reality?

This section of the INFRASTRUCTURE Perspective addresses this question.

[NB: This is the fourth, and next-to-final BaconsRebellion Blog post by EMR on the topic of INFRASTRUCTURE. This Perspective is a rough second draft and informed comments are always welcome. The Vocabulary used in this Perspective – including the phrases ‘Landscape Urbanism,’ ‘New Urbanism’ and ‘New Urban Region Conceptual Framework’ have been carefully defined by their proponents. While THE LITMUS TEST has not yet been published, if the reader is NOT conversant with the Vocabulary used and what these words and phrases mean, they would be well advised to not bother posting random thoughts in an attempt to contradict or discredit the Perspective when, by definition, the commentors do not know what they are talking about. For words that may appear to have irregular Capitalization, see the GLOSSARY that accompanies this Blog and which is accessible from the RESOURCES page at www.emrisse.com As has been often noted on this Blog, ‘New Urban Region,’ ‘Urban Support Region,’ ‘SubRegion,’ ‘MegaRegion’ and the components of the New Urban Region Conceptual Framework are not terms currently used by advocates of New Urbanism or Landscape Urbanism.]

THE SPOILS OF WAR

The conflict between Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism is a HOT topic among some with professional interest in human settlement patterns. This conflict has the potential to impact the provision of infrastructure to support function and sustainable settlement patterns.

The question arises:

Which of these ‘Urbanisms’ makes the most sense upon which to base decisions related to the infrastructure needed to support functional and sustainable human settlement patterns – especially Urban settlement patterns which must support 95 percent of the US Households?

It turns out the answer is NEITHER.

Some may be unfamiliar with, or confused about, the two hot topic Urbanisms – ‘New’ and ‘Landscape’ – and how they differ. New Urbanism is the more broadly articulated Urbanism. See Peter Katz’s 1994 book The New Urbanism and other resources cited below. Landscape Urbanism Reader assembled by Charles Waldheim in 2006 is credited with being the founding document of Landscape Urbanism.

For a summary of the conflict between the two Urbanisms – described by Planetizen as “… the war for the future of our built environment” – see the recent summary by Leon Neyfakh in The Boston Globe at

http://www.boston.com/yourtown/cambridge/articles/2011/01/30/green_building/

[NB: If you are required to sign in at the Globe web site to view the article (the sign in requirement seems to be random) and you do not want to do that, you can find a frustrating 8 mini-page version of the material by Googleing “Leon Neyfakh Green Building.”]

Neyfakh presents an Enterprise Media ‘he said, he said’ overview of the ‘war’ between the two Urbanisms.

EMR would advise not trusting the details too far. For example, Neyfakh says Landscape Urbanism ‘started’ at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1980s. It is clear that the origins of these ideas at Penn go back to at least the 60s and the work of Ian McHarg. Discussion of the topic prompted EMR to review his 1969 copy of McHarg’s well regarded Design With Nature.

This book contains many of the insights that distinguish Landscape Urbanism as articulated by Waldheim via Neyfakh. McHarg’s book also exhibits several of the key shortcomings that afflict Landscape Urbanism and prevent it from being an overarching Conceptual Framework that could guide the evolution of human settlement patterns.

It appears that one can trust the general outlines of the “war” as depicted by Neyfakh but be careful of the details.

FIRST, IS THIS A WAR WORTH FIGHTING?

If you believe writers like Neyfakh, the WAR between Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism is VERY serious business. (As noted below, there ARE INDEED significant implications.)

However, there are threshold questions:

Is this conflict any more than an Ivy League squabble with Princeton / Yale (Duany and Plater-Zyberk) on one side and Harvard / Penn (McHarg and Waldheim) on the other?

And:

Are these two ‘Urbanisms’ just separate refutations of the culture of Starchitects who suffer from ego-centric edifice complexes? Are the acolytes of these two Urbanisms simply design students and practitioners that in an earlier day found solace and refuge in Chris Alexander’s ‘timeless way of building’?

It is very clear that both Landscape Urbanists and New Urbanists HATE ‘modern’ architecture and egocentric Starchitects. That is UNLESS these Starchitects are card carrying supporters of one of the Urbanism. It is also clear that both Urbanisms have champions who are striving for Starchitect status.

Back to the question of war worthiness:

The important reality is that if either of these flavors of Urbanism ‘wins’ it will have a controlling impact on the type, location and cost of the infrastructure to support humans Urban activity.

With the advent of Peak Resources to support the contemporary brand of high-technology civilization, humans cannot afford to toss another generation of resources down the rat hole of dysfunction settlement patterns.

So the answer is yes, who wins this war IS important.

As outlined below, it is in citizen’s and their Organization’s best interest that neither New Urbanism or Landscape Urbanism ‘win’ but that selected core values of each emerge in an overarching Third Way strategy.

The conflict opens the door, not for a ‘compromise’ but for an overarching, comprehensive Conceptual Framework.

This brief Perspective is not intended to provide the details on any particular position but rather to suggest that there exists a clearly articulated exit strategy from the current dysfunctional trajectory.

WHO IS ON FIRST?

At the present, New Urbanism has a big head start but Landscape Urbanism is said to be catching up.

On what basis is New Urbanism ahead of Landscape Urbanism?

Well, for starters: Market, Allies and Agencies.

Market. New Urbanism has proven market acceptance at the Unit, Dooryard, Cluster and Neighborhood scales even after the 2006 built-environment downturn.

While the call for ‘a new urbanism’ came from Grady Clay in the July 1959 issue of Horizon, there were few examples beyond the Unit, Dooryard and Cluster scales until Seaside, FL, was launched in 1981. This Village scale vacation / leisure Urban enclave on the Gulf of Mexico has become the poster child of New Urbanism.

There is a poster child project for Landscape Urbanism as well. It is a Planned New Community of about 60,000 citizens. It was started in the early-70s and is nearing ‘completion’ but apparently most of the advocates of Landscape Urbanism do not yet understand that fact – or perhaps they do not want to confront the conclusions that can be drawn from this Community which is the subject of a section later in this Perspective.

As to New Urbanist projects:

Who would NOT rather vacation in Seaside, FL and live in Celebration, FL or Kentlands, MD as opposed to vacationing in Panama City, FL and living in Kissimmee, FL or Glen Burnie, MD?

The Creative Class, that is who.

The citizens who are drawn to New Urbanist projects are the citizens with the skills and ambition to get jobs even in a ‘bad economy.’ Consider at a map of New Urbanist projects. It is a location-sort of attractive places for the Creative Class to seek Jobs / Housing / Services / Recreation / Amenity – The Research Triangle, Austin, Silicone Valley and in other desirable locations in the Boston, Washington-Baltimore, et. al New Urban Regions. Peter Katz’s book The New Urbanism noted earlier provides a mid-90s tour of projects and New Urban News provides regular updates and summaries in its newsletter and now on line at www.newurbannetwork.com

Allies. As for allies, the New Urbanists are cohabiting with the Smart Growth and the Smarter Growth cohorts who are the champions of comfortable, ‘settled’ places and Transit Oriented Development. As anyone at the Urban Land Institute will tell you, THAT IS WHERE THE ACTION IS, down at the Light Rail Station.

New Urbanists have also formed alliances with the “Conservation NGOs and their Enterprise Partners” – the Institutions and Enterprises with owners, leaders and members that argue that ‘growth’ will raise all boats.

It is clear that the ideals of New Urbanism have influenced plans and programs even for places and projects that have NOTHING to do with the ‘real’ New Urbanism – or with functional human settlement pattern. Tysons Corner, VA and the National Capital SubRegion METRO Silver Line is a good example. See columns “All Aboard” Column # 96 and “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Lies” Column # 131 and the resources cited in these columns. The columns are accessible from the RESOURCES Page at www.emrisse.com

Agencies. Look no farther than the amount of Agency money funneled to New Urbanist projects by HUD and EPA at the federal level and by states and municipalities as well. Without a backfire to rob fuel from New Urbanism’s momentum, the recent past is prologue to what would happen with infrastructure resources if New Urbanism ‘wins.’

In spite of this, as quoted by Neyfakh, Andrus Duany (the leader of New Urbanism) said after projecting a lecture by Charles Waldheim (the leader of Landscape Urbanism) for a summit of New Urbanists:

“OK, but is there one kid in that room who isn’t a convert?”

Duany is referring to the underlying appeal of Waldheim’s abstract ecological based argument.

Landscape Urbanism’s hook is ecology, science, climate change and – surprisingly – the endorsement of some important parameters of Business-As-Usual such as continued dominance of Large, Private Vehicles to provide mobility and Access. Landscape Urbanism may be the backfire needed to turn New Urbanism from dysfunction to function – and visa versa.

HEAD TO HEAD: APPLES AND KUMQUATS

In a side by side comparison, there are profound differences between the two Urbanisms but each has a core strength.

First the strengths:

For New Urbanism the strength is that at the Unit, Dooryard, Cluster and Neighborhood scale New Urbanists champion and deliver places that citizen love to live, work and play. You can take that to the bank.

For Landscape Urbanism it is that they claim an ecological (existing landscape) base for their ideas. This attracts those concerned about survival of the ecosystem upon which all life, including human life depends. You can take that to the global bank.

Now the weaknesses:

The New Urbanists

As readers of THE SHAPE OF THE FUTURE, TRILO-G and the resources accessible at www.emrisse.com know, EMR has long supported many of the objectives of New Urbanism and many projects designed and implemented by New Urbanists.

But there are reservations as documented in the Section titled “The New Urbanism: Light at the End of a Tunnel, or Just Another Train?” in Chapter 18 (“Sources of Inspiration– Planned New Communities, The New Urbanism and other Prospects for Guidance on the Future”) in THE SHAPE OF THE FUTURE. While some of the shortcomings listed in this 2000 book have been addressed and the market for New Urbanist projects has grown, other concerns remain.

Among those that remain the two big ones are:

● Lack of a robust and consistent Vocabulary, and

● Absence of the comprehensive, overarching Conceptual Framework for human settlement pattern.

One aspect of the Vocabulary issue is addressed in the following section and the lack of an overarching Conceptual Framework in the section that follows.

An issue that helps cloud the two overarching issues is a reverence for – bordering on an obsession – the grid. This topic is discussed in the chapter of THE SHAPE OF THE FUTURE noted above.

The long and short of it is that a grid is not a viable settlement pattern beyond the scale of the Cluster and then only when the Cluster has landscape / natural feature Boundaries.

The grid is not an armature for organic settlement patterns because it fails to provide a tangible boundaries between components of human settlement. It is no more ‘real’ than the ‘transect’ which is used as a lame substitute for a comprehensive Conceptual Framework.

There are locations in every New Urban Region that match the illustration of the ‘stations of the transect’ but no New Urban Region that is composed of sequential segments of these stations.

New Urbanism does not recognize that human settlement pattern are organic systems and does not follow the ‘timeless way of building’ beyond the Unit, Dooryard and Cluster scales and perhaps Neighborhoods in some cases. That cannot be done without a robust Vocabulary to articulate a comprehensive Conceptual Framework

It is not that the advocates of New Urbanism have not thought about the issue of larger (and smaller) scales and the role of New Urbanism in the forces that shape the human settlement pattern, they have. Perhaps the problem is that too many New Urbanists have thought too much about these issues and have reached no consensus beyond the simplistic Transect and a non-specific Vocabulary. See New Urbanism and American Planning: The Conflict of Cultures, Emily Talen (2005), New Urbanism and Beyond, Tigran Hass, Editor (2008) and The Language of Towns and Cities, Dhiru Thadani (2010)

The Landscape Urbanists

While there is an assumption’ that Landscape Urbanism is based on ecological principles that is not clear from Landscape Urbanism Reader. ‘Abstract academic principles’ might come closer to the mark. Landscape Urbanism could vastly improve its level of acceptance by embracing more of McHarg’s emotional attachment to the environment and downplay most of the hyper-intellectual (pseudo-intellectual?) abstractionism.

In spite of stated reverence for the ‘organic’ and ‘ecological’ systems, Landscape Urbanists do not understand that human settlement patterns ARE an organic system

Further, they are TOTALLY obliviousness to scale and amount of land needed for functional human settlement patterns.

In other words, while repulsed by what Urbanization has done to ‘The Landscape’ – as McHarg was about what happened outside Glasgow after World War II – Landscape Urbanists have no clue of functional patterns of human settlement OR the amount of land needed for functional human settlement patterns.

Those who read section on ‘Green Infrastructure’ in INFRASTRUCTURE MANIA – the first chapter of this Perspective –will know where this critique is going.

As documented by the work of SYNERGY, there is already FAR too much land devote to Urban development and that does not include the vast amount of land speculatively held for FUTURE urban development.

This is a tragic flaw because Landscape Urbanist assume that the future will see far more land converted from NonUrban to Urban land uses and thus the need to use the natural configuration (‘landscape’) or not yet Urbanized land as the armature for future Urban land uses.

This may be a blind spot inherited from McHarg. His work identified far more land suitable for future Urban development than was (or is) needed. This work has encouraged speculation and scatteration. The root cause may be in the gross exaggerations of the extent of metropolitan ‘growth’ that resulted from extrapolating the trajectories from the 1950 to 1960 census.

If Loren Eiseley is right that humans are a planetary disease (McHarg used Eiseley’s analogy over and over in his lectures) then it would seem wise to fit humans into the LEAST CONSUMPTIVE, functional configurations possible. Do not spread out the disease.

As suggested below, that turns out good idea. More compact Urban fabric DOES NOT mean ‘Manhattan Urban’ for most Urban citizens, but rather ‘Georgetown Urban’ and ‘Louisburg Square Urban’ – Urbane. What do you know!! That is just what New Urbanist do well.

To compound the problem, Landscape Urbanists try to curry favor of Enterprises (and supposedly citizens) by genuflexing to ‘what citizens want’ in order to sell their abstractions. “Consumers want cars? We will give them cars.” However, in the process they cause them to drive even farther as documented in the section below devoted to The Woodlands.

WHY VOCABULARY (AND A COMPREHENSIVE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK) IS SO IMPORTANT.

Vocabulary is the focus of PRIMER (forthcoming). This Perspective examines the failure to communicate useful information about human settlement patterns and focuses on strategies to avoid Core Confusing Words. This section addresses the topic of Vocabulary only to the extent necessary to explore the key shortcomings of New Urbanism (and Landscape Urbanism) highlighted in the last section.

First, the problem is NOT that Vocabulary has not been considered by New Urbanists. Dhiru Thadani’s 2010 book The Language of Towns and Cities runs to 781 pages with 2,500 color images. The problem is New Urbanists have no comprehensive Conceptual Framework to apply a Vocabulary. As will be made clear in PRIMER, the first step is to just avoid Core Confusing Words.

Vincent Scully (“one of the United States’ most brilliant architectural historians”), a long time professor at Yale and mentor to many New Urbanists is the author of American Architecture and Urbanism published in 1969. That is the same year McHarg’s Design With Nature was published. In the Afterword of Peter Katz’s 1994 book The New Urbanism, Scully suggests that perhaps New Urbanism should be called “the New SubUrbanism” citing the work of John Nolan in the 1920s. Nolan’s projects in Florida are in many respects, identical at the Unit, Dooryard and Cluster scales to contemporary New Urbanist.

When Scully was writing his book on Urbanism, the word ‘Urban’ implied ‘highrise’ buildings and ‘modern’ architectural design. There is a place for nodes of high density Neighborhoods and Villages but it turns out the majority of citizens do not find higher intensity settlement patterns such as mid-Town Manhattan as attractive a place to work – and especially to live, work and seek Services – as ‘The Village – be that Greenwich or Greater Warrenton. There may always be a place for highrise components in the Zentra of the Cores of New Urban Regions but it is not for everyone, in fact these patterns and densities are not attractive to the great majority.

Contemporary Urban citizens make use of a wide range of patterns and densities, but highrise / Manhattan is not often the optimum economic, social and physical choice for the vast majority.

The Cost of Service Curve (The Second Natural Law of Human Settlement) articulated in THE SHAPE OF THE FUTURE documents that, it is a VERY GOOD THING that only a small percent of the population of any New Urban Region find the most desirable place to live, work and play to be in a very high intensity setting.

Scully puts his finger on why ‘suburban’ is a Core Confusing Word, why Vocabulary is so important and why Quantification is essential to establish Balance and Critical Mass at all scales of the organic components of human settlement pattern.

There is a vast difference between an Urban environments at the Dooryard, Cluster, Neighborhood and Village scales which make up Alpha Communities at 25 persons per acre – and ones that comprise Communities at 250 persons per acre. In the context of this Perspective, there is a VAST difference in the infrastructure needed to achieve Balance and Critical Mass at those two scales.

While there are Neighborhoods and Villages at 250 persons per acre in the Zentrum of large New Urban Regions, most of the Core of those New Urban Regions – where 70 to 85 percent of the citizens of the New Urban Region live, work and play – are FAR lower. Outside R=3 to R=6 from the Centroid, most Beta Communities are only about 5 persons per acre. These topics are explored in both THE SHAPE OF THE FUTURE and in TRILO-G, and the Vocabulary used in this paragraph is explained in detail in the PowerPoint “New Urban Region Conceptual Framework” found in Chapter 49 of TRILO-G.

As noted in THE SHAPE OF THE FUTURE Planned New Comminutes built during the 60s, 70s and 80s have densities of 10 person per acre at the Alpha Community Scale. It turns out that 10 persons per acre at the Alpha Community scale WAS the lower bound of sweet spot on the Cost of Services Curve for Autonomobile served settlement patterns based on the land actually developed between 1970 and 2000.

Ten persons per acre at the Alpha Community scale was a convenient benchmark for the MINIMUM density for functional settlement patterns WHEN ENERGY WAS CHEAP.

With decline in the dominance of the Autonomobile, and growing reliance on pedestrian movement, small vehicles and shared vehicles to achieve Mobility and Access, the Sweet Spot will move up to from 15 to 25 persons per acre at the Alpha Community scale. But it will not migrate to 250 persons per acres. See review of David Oven’s Green Metropolis in Chapter 50 of TRILO-G.

Most or the economies of scale and support for pedestrian movement, the use of small vehicles and the use shared vehicles to achieve Mobility and Access can be achieved at 15 to 25 persons per acre at the Alpha Community scale. In other words ‘MANHATTAN’ is a the reddest of red herrings.

LOST IN SCALE

Not every New Urbanist is lost in scale, but as a class New Urbanists – and their Smart / Smarter Growth compatriots ARE lost in scale.

The vast majority are obsessed with Neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are FINE. They are WONDERFUL. (‘Neighborhoods’ are the scale that New Urbanists get the many commissions to design and land use control permission to build. See THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM, below.)

But Neighborhoods are NOT the only scale / level of ORGANIC COMPONENTS of human settlement pattern.

The Cluster scale components are important and in fact many of the New Urbanist projects that actually get built are CLUSTER SCALE. The Dooryard scale is also critical. In other words,
Neighborhoods are NOT just collections of Units in a gridded street configuration. In fact over application of grids means that the Cluster and Dooryard components are hard to identify – where does one end and other start?

As important as the Dooryard, the Cluster and the Neighborhood are, it is the larger scale components that are the most important. For example the Village is the native scale of a station area for a single line, ‘heavy rail’ shared vehicle system. (A station area serving a multi-line station of several closely associated stations would be of Community scale.)

Beyond the Village scale, the Community scale components are obviously critical: The terms Community College, Community Hospital, Community Theater and many others are Community ******* for a reason.

But then, the New Urban Region is important too. The New Urban Region is the basic building block of contemporary Urban civilization as documented in THE SHAPE OF THE FUTURE.

In addition there are important roles for SubRegions and MegaRegions in functional and sustainable human settlement patterns.

While the Neighborhood is important, what is more important is to understand the organic structure and the scalar components of functional human settlement patterns.

This reality of organic components of human settlement patterns is lost on many New Urbanists. While some New Urbanists leaders such as Peter Calthorpe have been involved with notable ‘regional’ plans – that is not their forte and they focus on the scales of settlement pattern components with which they are comfortable. For example, Calthorpe has written books with titles such as The Next American Metropolis (1993) and The Region City (2001) but the process relied on in these books exhibits prominent use of municipal and state borders rather that natural features.

The ‘regional’ conceptualizations of New Urbanists provide little evidence of specific overarching, regional-wide strategies. There is no defined role for the Countryside, no component composition within the Urbanside and almost never a Clear Edge between Urbanside and Countryside. (See PowerPoint “New Urban Region Conceptual Framework” in Chapter 49 of TRILO-G.)

More on the topic of regional reality, Regional Metrics and New Urban Regions below but first, what about Landscape Urbanists?

LANDSCAPE URBANISTS

Landscape Urbanists are not REALLY “urbanists” much less Urbanists.

One gets the impression that the founders of Landscape Urbanism heard half the world’s population was now Urban and that large Urban areas in some parts of the planet were becoming more populous at an alarming rate and figured that they needed to have ‘urban’ in their name to be relevant.

The credo of Landscape Urbanism as spelled out in a dramatic double truck dark image in big white letters in Landscape Urbanism Reader is:

Landscape urbanism describes a disciplinary realignment currently underway in which landscape replaces architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism. For many, across a range of disciplines, landscape has become both the lens through which the contemporary city is represented and the medium through which it is constructed.

The first sentence completely ignores pattern and density of sustainable Urban fabric.

In the second sentence by use of the word ‘city’ (without Capitalization) telegraphs that fact that, like New Urbanist, Landscape Urbanist are lost in scale AND they are lost in time. As documented in THE SHAPE FO THE FUTURE, a valid use of the word ‘city’ (Uncapitalized) to describe Urban fabric became meaningless in the US not long after the end of the Civil War and specifically during The Long Depression from 1870s to the 1890s.

Most importantly, the credo reflects a failure to understand that in the First World (now known as ‘more developed nation-states’) and especially in the US more urban citizens does NOT mean that more urban land is needed or that the area of Urban activity needs to or should expand.

In fact, and this is critical from an infrastructure perspective, the amount of land devoted to Urban land use must shrink to achieve a sustainable, functional settlement pattern for the 95 percent of the Households that are Urban.

See above re the density of at Alpha Community scale and the following section on Regional issues. As an aside, Landscape Urbanism would not be much help in the Third World (now known as ‘less developed nation-states’) where the issue of Urban area expansion is critical because of the failure to understand the function and components of Urban fabric.

If Landscape Urbanism Reader is the bible of Landscape Urbanism as Neyfakh suggests, they have a long ways to go before they can compete with New Urbanism.

Those who have been tenure track professors in an earnest and technologically competent university program of architecture, urban design, landscape architecture and planning – and especially those who have served on administrative committees – can understand how Landscape Urbanism could be a hot topic in dean selection, chairperson selection and tenure decisions, but as a popular movement? Never happen in its current state.

One can see citizens waving a book on New Urbanism at a public hearing or being passionate about the results of the latest charrette. But waving Landscape Urbanism Reader with its black and white horror show images? The only color in the entire book is the astroturf that adorns the cover.

If boarding passenger grabbed this book in an airport bookshop so they would have something to read on the flight and thumbed through the photographs they would be sure they had stumbled onto a mother lode of Landscape pornography. Landscape Urbanism might be written off as just a joke except that many seem to be concerned about its impact. Here is a plausible scenario:

Landscape urbanism has been created by intelligent, sensitive scholars who ended up in landscape architecture because they were attracted to the idea of creating landscapes as places for warm fuzzy animals to live in peace and harmony.

Upon getting into the classroom these sensitive students were intimidated by Starchitects and frightened out of their wits by ugly aerial photographs of what industrialization / urbanization (small ‘u’) has done to the landscape. Hoping to avoid being tossed out into the cruel world they stayed in school, got a PhD and now have to find SOMETHING to do with their time. Every academic department on every campus has professors who are variations on this scenario.

There is an especially frightening picture of Single Household Detached (REALLY DETACHED FROM REALITY) Urban Dwellings along the south side of Phoenix South Mountain Park in Landscape Urbanism Reader. The editor was so impressed with the graphic that it is reproduced in two locations in the book. However, it is not clear from the text if Landscape Urbanists consider this is a good example or a bad example. (It could be a strategy to avoid steep slopes for ecological rather than economic reasons or the protect the habitat of kangaroo crickets for example, who knows?)

Clearly it is a dysfunctional settlement pattern for Urban Households. If the full location-variable costs were fairly allocated these Units would have never been built.

Just to make sure it was not a visual joke, Google Earth was consulted. This settlement pattern does exists on the ground just as it is pictured. It is North of Pecos Road and West of I-10 in the southern part of the Valley of the Sun (Phoenix) New Urban Region. The camera angle was selected to make the picture look as unworldly as possible.

There is a significant problem understanding and interpreting what can be seen from an airplane window. Images in books such The American Aesthetic (1969) by Starchitect Nat Owings helped launch the ecological movement. But it is hard to translate from gross images to intelligent action without an overarching Conceptual Framework for human settlement patters and an appreciation of scale.

Based on the bible of Landscape Urbanism, the ‘movement’ could be could be an intellectual joke but for the fact that citizens nation-state-wide NEED Landscape Urbanism to become mainstream so that the it is a real competitor for New Urbanism if there is to be a Transformation to a d functional human settlement pattern for Urban Households.

That could happen if there is:

● A broader understanding of the natural system heritage inherent in the work of Ian McHarg,

● An intelligent Quantification of the land area actually needed to support the existing and potential Urban population,

● A better grasp of functional and sustainable patterns and densities to achieve Balance at the Alpha Community scale and below,

● An understanding of the existence, role and function of New Urban Regions – or some other science-based, comprehensive Conceptual Framework for human settlement, and

● A Balance between the settlement pattern and the infrastructure to support that settlement pattern that reflects the limited role that Large, Private Vehicles can play in proving Mobility and Access.

THE REGION

As pointed out in THE SHAPE OF THE FUTURE, the ‘region’ and specifically the New Urban Region is the basic building block of contemporary civilization

Three regional plans impacted the evolution of the New Urban Region Conceptual Framework and the evolution of Regional Metrics.

One. A 1968 plan for a SubRegion in the Mohawk Valley that created functional settlement patterns by taking the existing Urban enclaves that supported agricultural and industrial activities and adding to those enclaves the elements of Jobs / Housing / Services / Recreation / Amenity that would result in Balance and Critical Mass at the Village, Community, SubRegional and Regional scales.

Two. The land use control system that now covers the 5,000,000 acre Adirondack Park in New York State. This system allocates the scope / scale of land use controls to the appropriate SubRegion, Community and Village scale component of Urban settlement within Clear Edges and protects the Countryside.

(Note: These first two plans provide the Urban fabric specifics and implementation details for the 1926 plan for the State of New York by Henry Wright and others.)

Three. The ‘Wedges and Corridors’ Plan(s) for the National Capital SubRegion developed between 1958 and 1965. The genius of the Wedges and Corridors plans is not the Wedges and Corridors but that the Corridors (Linear SubRegions) are composed of Communities. AND more important, the Communities are composed of Villages, AND still more important, the Villages are composed of Neighborhoods.

(Note: It was not until Burke Centre (planned and built between 1972 to 1982) that the importance of the fact that the Neighborhoods are composed of Clusters became clear. It was a decade later at Fairfax Center (North Lake Cluster of Fair Lakes Neighborhood) that the importance of the fact that Clusters are composed of Dooryards became clear.)

Some of the highlights of the New Urban Region Conceptual Framework are:

● Functional and sustainable Urban fabric is composed of multiple scaled components as is every organic system

● Function and sustainable Urban fabric requires appropriate Balance and Critical Mass at all scales for the Unit and Dooryard to the New Urban Region and MegaRegion.

● Neighborhoods are not just ‘arrangements’ of Units.

(For a graphic exploration of The New Urban Region Conceptual Framework, see the PowerPoint of that title in Chapter 49 of TRILO-G.)

The abstract concept of “region”, ‘regionalism’ and Regional Metrics is hard for citizens to get excited about until they realize that their economic, social and physical well being depends on functional and sustainable New Urban Regions. There will not be support for Fundamental Transformation of human settlement patterns until there is Fundamental Transformation of governance structure.

A ROOT CAUSE OF THE WAR BETWEEN LANDSCAPE URBANISM AND NEW URBANISM – WHO PAYS THE BILLS.

As point out in THE SHAPE OF THE FUTURE when it comes to dysfunctional human settlement patterns, there are no villains. One reason that New Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism have not found common ground is who pays the bills.

McHarg sagely points out in Design With Nature, – at the start of two separate chapters for emphasis:

Professional practitioners in architecture, landscape architecture and planning must focus on the contexts that clients bring to them.

As Andrus Duany told EMR in a private conversation when questioned about specifics of a canned helping of New Urbanist Rhetoric that Duany had just presented to a gathering of municipal officials, citizens and project promoters in a jurisdiction where Duany had never (and still has not) designed a project:

“All that is to first get the commission and then to get the zoning. THEN you do the best you can with the opportunity presented.”

This has caused New Urbanist to scatter cute New Urban Dooryards, Clusters and Neighborhoods in inappropriate places. This is the most widely noted ‘problem’ with New Urbanism.

On the other hand as McHarg also points out those in academia have no opportunity to test their ideas in the marketplace. McHarg suggests that because he had a foot in each camp and so was able to consider a wide range of real world challenges that clients were willing to pay for AND when there was no client turn them into student projects.

The shortcomings in McHarg’s work – e.g. failure to understand the amount of land needed for functional human settlements at a Regional scale for example – show up in the student work and are apparent in the work of Landscape Urbanists.

THERE IS A LANDSCAPE URBANISM PROVING GROUNDS

Neyfakn makes the point in his review of the war – and he apparently is reflecting the view of Waldheim here – is that there is no large scale application to test Landscape Urbanism as there with New Urbanism – Seaside, Celebration, Kentlands and a thousand other, mostly smaller projects at the Dooryard- Cluster- and Neighborhood- scales. This is not correct.

There IS an application of how Landscape Urbanism would work at the Alpha Community scale (and by extension at SubRegional and New Urban Region scales) with McHarg’s fingerprints all over it.

The Woodlands TX was conceived in the mid-60s by the humanist, visionary and Texas oil man – not an often encountered combination – George Mitchell. Mitchell personally hired both Ian McHarg (Partner at Wallace, McHarg, Roberts and Todd) and Richard P. Browne (Partner at Richard P. Browne Associates – Engineers, Architects, Planners and Landscape Architects, later RBA) to design The Woodlands, a Planned New Community on about 20,000 acres of pumped out and logged over oil fields along I-45 north of Houston. By the time the planning for The Woodlands was designed, nature had largely erased past damage and the tract really is an attractive “woodland.”

Mitchell’s goal for The Woodlands was to meet the economic and social goals for a Balanced Planned New Community that were articulated by Jim Rouse (Columbia, MD) and Bob Simon (Reston, VA) AND to go far beyond them in ecological sensitivity. Although ecology was an important element in the plans for both of these Planned New Communities and there are thousands of acres of OpenSpace in both, The Woodlands present significant ecological challenges.

(For a summary of EMR’s relationship with Richard P. Browne Associates (RBA) and to Columbia, MD, Reston, VA, Burke Centre, VA, Fairfax Center, VA, The Woodlands, TX, and Peachtree City, GA and other Planned New Communities, see the BIO / CV page at www.emrisse.com .)

Unlike Columbia and Reston which are located in ‘the uplands,’ The Woodlands is in ‘the lowlands’ and not far from the extensive Gulf flood zones. Much of The Woodlands site was and is subject to flooding.

The eco-plumbing planned by McHarg and designed and implemented by Browne and others over the past 40 years ‘works.’

The Woodlands has turned out to be a magnificent place to live, to work and to seek Services. It is the perfect place for a Households with 2.5 kids, 2 dogs and Suburban (the state car of Texas) and a Corvette, Eldorado or Land Rover. There are great Recreation facilities and fabulous Amenity IF the Household one has a lot of money and two or more Large, Private Vehicles.

In most of the Census Tracts that make up The Woodlands over 60 percent of Households have incomes over $100,000, some tracks have over a third of the Households with incomes of over $200,000. Several census tracks have over 25 percent of citizens with masters degree or more.

And the downside?

The space to drive and park Autonomobiles AND the space required for the Green Infrastructure make for long drives within the Community.

In other words the attractive use of landscaping – the wildflowers are magnificent – and hiding the Urban fabric behind generous OpenSpace buffers is attractive but when the Urban fabric is further disaggregated by the Green Infrastructure the result is not functional, unless one can afford Large, Private Vehicles, extensive use of school buses, etc. The magnificent pathway system is used for recreation, not a substitute for reliance on Large, Private Vehicles.
See THE PROBLEM WITH CARS – PART THREE of TRILO-G.

AN ALTERNATIVE TO MORE WAR

Landscape Urbanists claim to have a reverence to organic systems but do not understand that human settlement patterns, especially Urban fabric IS AN ORGANIC SYSTEM and that there must be an overarching and comprehensive Conceptual Framework for understanding human settlement patterns.

New Urbanist build great components of human settlement at the Cluster and Neighborhood scales but have no overarching Conceptual Framework and no robust Vocabulary with which to articulate that Framework.

The path forward requires both sensitive design reflecting human needs at the Cluster and Neighborhood scale AND understanding of the ecological context at all scales.

One way to achieve that goal is The Third Way outlined in HANDBOOK: Three Step Process to Create Balanced Communities and Sustainable New Urban Regions – PART TWELVE of TRILO-G.

EMR

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Posted in Land use

INFRASTRUCTURE PART TWO POINT ONE

Posted on February 5, 2011 by James A. Bacon| 47 Comments

OH BOY!

Mr. Bacon came forward with his 10 percent concern about the SYNERGY take on INFRASTRUCTURE and it is a WINNER!!

EMR agrees with almost 100 percent of Bacon’s 10 percent reservation.

What is even better, his ‘reservation’ is a big fat pitch right over the heart of the plate.

More on that in a moment, but first:

WHAT MR. BACON SAID:

“OK, I’m back for a second try… As usual, I agree with 90% of what EMR says here. There *is* a housing and affordability crisis, there *is* a mobility and access crisis, dysfunctional human settlement patterns *are* at the root of both, and the key to reforming human settlement patterns *is* (a) governance reform, (b) devising rules by which people pay the location-variable costs of where they live, work and play, and (c) (my emphasis) dismantling the zoning/regulatory policies virtually mandate the scattered, disconnected, low-density pattern of land use that plague us today.

“Also, let me say that I enjoyed EMR’s perspective on the tradeoffs between affordability, fuel mileage and safety in autonomobiles — a fresh analysis I had not seen anywhere before.

“That said, it is inevitable in a conversation to focus on areas of disagreement. While I agree with EMR that the economics of building a transportation system around autonomobiles has reached a dead end, I can’t say I’m enthralled with the alternatives.

[Mr. Bacon said: I CAN'T SAY I'M ENTHRALLED WITH THE ALTERNATIVES!!

BACON IS RIGHT...

IF HE MEANS THE ALTERNATIVES MOST OTHERS HAVE PUT ON THE TABLE.

But so far in these three perspectives on infrastructure, EMR has only talked about WHAT DOES NOT WORK and why citizens and their Agencies, Enterprises and Institutions must understand what makes Urban settlements functional BEFORE they build INFRA to support their STRUCTURE.]

“Yes, redesigning the urban space can make it possible for people to take more trips on foot and by bicycle (or, who knows, by Segway). That we should do. But let’s be realistic, bicycles will never be more than a niche mode of transportation, and walking is useful only for very short trips.

[The future of AFFORDABLE Mobility and Access requires that the vast majority of Urban trips be VERY SHORT TRIPS. In the most functional Urban places, they already are -- that is what makes them great places to live, work and seek Services.]

“My reservation about buses, light rail, heavy rail and high-speed intercity rail is that they all require massive subsidies.”

[Because of the current station area settlement patterns as demonstrated in the case of Tysons Corner. The Silver Line could pay for itself IF it was not a give away to adjacent land speculators. Right TMT?]

“ Creating more functional land use patterns undoubtedly would improve the dismal economics of buses and perhaps light rail, but there is no getting around the fact that the up-front capital costs of heavy rail are extremely high, that projects routinely experience massive cost overruns, and they will continue needing operating subsidies on an ongoing basis. Do we really want a transportation system with those characteristics as we hurtle towards Boomergeddon?

“Say what you will about roads and highways, it is possible to make them pay their own way through user fees (gas taxes, mileage taxes, tolls, whatever) in a way that is not possible with mass transit.”

[When roadways do pay their full cost, then roadways and the private vehicles to use them will be more expensive than most Households will be able to pay.]

“ Here in Virginia, Gov. McDonnell has veered away from the user-pays principle, trying to pay for road improvements by means of anything but user fees. But conceptually, switching to a user fee basis of paying for roads/highways is easy, even if the political will is lacking. The end result may be that roads will cost more than people would like, or roads will be more congested than they want, or more people will be driven to buses, vans, carpools, but the basic principle of people paying their location-variable costs would be maintained.

“By contrast, there is no way to get people to pay the location-variable costs of using heavy rail. The best you can hope for in places like Tysons Corner is to reduce the subsidies by introducing more functional human settlement patterns. (There may be niche cases where rail can be made profitable, but I doubt we can build an entire transportation system around them.)

[The Hong Kong heavy rail shared vehicle system is a money making proposition – at least it was when the Brits walked away, not telling what it is with Chinese accounting – but that does not solve the problem for most large Urban agglomerations.]

“Bottom line: I say we have to reform human settlement patterns, make people pay their location-variable costs, and then let the market decide. I am a transportation mode agnostic. I don’t see how subsidizing heavy rail is any more virtuous than subsidizing roads and highways. If I’m wrong about the economics of heavy rail, if someone can figure out how to make heavy rail pay (without offloading all the risk to the taxpayer), then I’m all for it. If I’m right, then I guess we’re stuck with cars and shared-vehicle systems (buses, vans, carpools) that can run on road/highway infrastructure as our alternatives.”

[As one can see there are some small quibbles but EMR is 99 percent on board. One other quibble below.]

BACON IS 99 PERCENT RIGHT ABOUT HIS 10 PERCENT RESERVATION

To be specific Bacon says “buses, light rail, heavy rail and high-speed intercity rail” are NOT THE ANSWER.

That does not mean that Large, Private Vehicles and roadways ARE the answer, only that there must be an alternative. A fair allocation of costs is a place to start as Bacon suggest, BUT…

The fact that there must be an alternative is EXACTLY what EMR demonstrates in WHAT COMES AFTER THE CAR (Forthcoming,)

The topic could be left there but will take it a step further:

The REASON that “buses, light rail, heavy rail and high-speed intercity rail” are NOT THE ANSWER is that each example of each mode has a native sweet spot on The Cost of Services Curve for STATION AREA land use patterns and densities.

The proof of this settlement pattern axiom can be found in moderate scale Urban agglomerations such as Goteborg, Sweden and Freiburg, Germany where light rail matches the settlement pattern for most of the Urban fabric. Goteborg is the best example because the Urban agglomeration has grown up around a light rail armature.

However, No large Urban agglomeration is uniform and so one size cannot fit all. And, none of the candidates that Bacon lists achieve optimum Mobility and Access at rational cost for the variety of settlement patterns at the Cluster, Neighborhood, Village and Community scales that are economically viable AND ecologically sustainable where the vast majority of Urban citizens can be happy and safe.

The Large Urban agglomeration with the best Mobility and Access FOR THE LARGEST PERCENTAGE OF THE POPULATION, especially those who cannot afford a LARGE, PRIVATE VEHICLE (Stockholm, London, Paris, Toronto, Vancouver, Berlin, Wien, and others) employ a variety of different shared vehicle systems. But none achieve optimum Mobility and Access at rational cost for the full spectrum of settlement pattern alternatives that are economically viable AND ecologically sustainable where the vast majority of Urban citizens can be happy and safe.

ONE OTHER QUIBBLE.

Jim too often jumps to the conclusion that something that will cost a lot for Agencies to provide (aka, massive subsidies) is bad per se.

Not so.

Urban civilization is VERY expensive. Humans have been living on natural capital – not just stored cheap energy but that is the big one.

If humans are to continue to enjoy civilization as it has evoked to date EVERYONE WILL HAVE TO PAY MUCH MORE:

HOUSEHOLDS,

AGENCIES,

ENTERPRISES,

INSTITUTIONS.

That does not take away form the fact that WHAT FOLLOWS THE AUTONOMOBILE will need to be flexible. The good thing is that on a seat-mile basis it will be far, far cheaper – but not free and not even cheap.

More in WHAT COMES AFTER THE CAR.

EMR

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OUT OF THE OILY SLIME — FOR A MOMENT

Posted on May 12, 2010 by James A. Bacon| 76 Comments

A RECENT JOINT FORUM BY FEDERAL AGENCIES AND SUBREGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS INDICATES THAT THE NATIONAL CAPITAL SUBREGION HAS WASTED THE LAST DECADE BY NOT IMPLEMENTING A BROAD CONSENSUS CONCERNING THE PATH TO A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE.

THE OILY SLIME IN THE GULF DOCUMENTS THAT THERE WAS NOT A DAY – MUCH LESS A DECADE – THAT CITIZENS AND THEIR ORGANIZATIONS COULD AFFORD TO SQUANDER ON THE PATH TO FUNCTIONAL AND SUSTAINABLE HUMAN SETTLEMENT PATTERNS.

WHILE AGENCIES, ENTERPRISES AND INSTITUTIONS ATTEMPT TO CONTAIN THE BP BLOW OUT, LET US TAKE A MOMENT TO CONSIDER HOW TO DISENGAGE THE HEALTH, SAFETY AND WELFARE OF CITIZENS IN THE WASHINGTON-BALTIMORE NEW URBAN REGION FROM LARGE, PRIVATE VEHICLES. DISENGAGEMENT WILL DEMONSTRATE HOW TO ADDRESS THE PROBLEM OF MASS CONSUMPTION OF PETROLEUM. IT WILL ALSO BE A MAJOR STEP TOWARD A SUSTAINABLE TRAJECTORY FOR URBAN CIVILIZATION.

On 3 May, for the first time in a long time, EMR rode METRO to the Wash COG headquarters near Union Station for a Joint Federal / SubRegional Forum. See End Note One. The forum was intended to showcase on the new Federal Agency (US DOT, US HUD and US EPA) emphasis on ‘sustainability.’ There was much good talk at the forum but not much to inspire confidence that the overarching unsustainable trajectory of society will change any time soon.

EMR was invited to the forum because he is an alumnus of the turn-of-the-century “Group of 40.” (Sounds ‘old school,’ right?) The Group of 40 was a broad based coalition from which The [Greater] Washington Smart Growth Alliance emerged. This Alliance is made up of Agency, Enterprise and Institution representatives and got off to a good start in the early 00s.

VOICES FROM THE PAST

In the post-forum communications that always spring up between old acquaintances after such an event there have been a number of useful observations and suggestions put on the table. Several of them will be addressed in this venue in the near future. Perhaps most often enunciated is the call to restate the consensus of the early 00s that has was over-washed by the feel good BOOM that ended in 2007.

One lightening rod at the 3 May forum was a statement by the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance (NVTA). The leader of NVTA called for those present to support Roadways to access ‘the places people want to live’ – aka, remote land in which sponsors of NVTA have speculative interests (aka, direct and indirect speculative ‘investments’).

For those who do not know, NVTA is an Institution sponsored by Roadway / Developer / Builder Enterprises. See End Note Two. (Full disclosure: Twenty plus years ago when building and improving SOME Roadways made economic, social and physical sense, EMR was the Chair of the NVTA Technical Committee and served on NVTA Board of Directors.)

The rational response to these statements of outrage about ‘places people want to live’ outside the logical location of the Clear Edge around the Core of the National Capital SubRegion is this:

The leader / spokesperson of NVTA had no choice.

What the spokesman says is what the owners and officers of the Enterprises who sponsor his Institution want to hear. It is also what they want Enterprise Media (aka, MainStream Media) repeat and citizens to believe for as long as possible. See THE ESTATES MATRIX – PART TWO of TRILO-G

THREE KEY REALITIES

The NVTA wish list for new Roadways and the cries of outrage about ‘places people want to live’ puts a spotlight on three key realities about the National Capital SubRegion:

1. If quantifyable location-variable costs were fairly and equitably allocated within a well-informed market context, then the places to which NVTA lobbies to have Agencies build Roadways would NOT be popular, feasible or even seriously considered by builders OR buyers.

Trust the market, but FIRST, the playing field must be leveled with valid data, analysis and quantification. A fair allocation of costs would eliminate hidden and misguided subsidies and unintended externalities.

2. The Region and its SubRegions must achieve Balance of Jobs / Housing / Services / Recreation / Amenity in each of the Beta Communities that make up the Washington-Baltimore New Urban Region and its SubRegions.

The FIRST STEP to achieve Alpha Community Balance is Affordable and Accessible Housing NEAR Jobs.

3. In 2002, Radial Analysis of the National Capital SubRegion ‘Activity Centers’ documented that Job locations were center weighted in the SubRegion. The vast majority of the Jobs were INSIDE the logical location of the Clear Edge around the Core of the SubRegion. Nothing has happened since 2002 to alter that reality.

The centrality of Job locations has not been impacted by:

– The residential settlement pattern impacts of the Wrong Size House / Wrong Location caused by the Housing Bubble from 2002 to 2006,

– The Over-Servicing of scattered residential land uses by Agencies, Enterprises and Institutions, and

– The derivative and speculation and fraud driven financial meltdown from 2007 to ? that has resulted in a distinct pattern of foreclosures and short sales in the outer Radial Band beyond the logical location of the Clear Edge around the Core of the National Capitol SubRegion.

On the question of Job locations in the future:

Newswire is published by “Planetizen” www.planetizen.com an omnivore ‘planning’ web site owned by Urban Insight. Urban Insight is a Los Angles based Enterprise that describes itself as a “web design, content management and Internet strategy” corporation. The 3 May issue of Newswire summarized a Harvard Business Review note of 28 April 2010:

“The Suburbanization of Business Headquarters May be Coming to an End.”

This brief article from Harvard Business Review suggests why major Enterprises are abandoning the “office campus.” The reasons run parallel to the notes that Groveton (an Enterprise insider and new BaconsRebellion Blogger) provided recently in his comments summarizing the parameters impacting the evolution of Balance in the Greater Fredericksburg SubRegion on this Blog.

Based on SYNERGY’s analysis of Loudoun and Prince William County “employment” patterns over the past 18 years, the trend toward ‘subUrban’ office campuses was ‘ending’ long ago. It does not take a rocket scientist to understand why AOL and WorldCom made bad location decisions or how these bad decisions impacted Enterprise performance.

THE IMPORTANCE OF ACTIVITY CENTERS

Those outside the National Capital SubRegion may not be familiar with the importance of the ‘Activity Centers’ noted in Key Reality #3 above.

There is a long story – too long for this item – about the rise, demise and apparent resurrection of Activity Centers in the Wash COG sphere of influence. EMR only has first hand experience concerning the rise and demise. Somehow the idea of Activity Centers has had a revival since 2003 as suggested by the report:

“Region Forward: A Comprehensive Guide to Regional [SubRegional] Planning and Measuring Progress in the 21st Century”

This document was approved by the Wash COG Board of Directors on 13 January 2010 and handed out at the 3 May forum.

EMR intends to find out more about the revival of interest in Activity Centers and the need for Quantification but in the meantime, why are ‘Activity Centers’ important?

With a robust Vocabulary, a comprehensive Conceptual Framework and science-based Quantification – via Regional Metrics or other reality-based conceptual frameworks – Activity Centers could put citizens on the path to functional and sustainable patterns and densities of human settlement in the Washington-Baltimore New Urban Region.

It was good news that the Activity Center concept is not dead. It is also good news that ideas presented in “Blueprint for a Better Region” are still on the table. Graphics from “Blueprint for a Better Region” showed up in the EPA PowerPoint presentation on Federal Agency initiatives at the forum on 3 May. See End Note Three

WASTED DECADE

While there were a number of useful exchanges at the Forum, from the perspective of one who helped forge the general consensus achieved by the Group of 40′s efforts and put content into the articulation of the Activity Centers, the 00s have been a lost decade.

The consensus that employment was center-weighted and the consensus on the need for the evolution of Balanced Urban enclaves focused on the existing employment and transport system inside the Clear Edge around the Core of the SubRegion has been honored in the breach.

One need go no further than pages 1 thru 6 of the Metro section of WaPo for 9 May 2010. NB: The Vocabulary to articulate the early 00s consensus has evolved since that time but the substance has not changed as conversations on 3 May confirmed.

It is in fact appalling that NVTA can STILL talk about ‘the places where people want to live’ – code for scattered Urban dwellings – in a public forum and have those who know better sit quietly.

The majority of the participants said in 2002, and many of those who returned for the reunion still agreed, on the basic parameters of a sustainable trajectory but Agency, Enterprise and Institution ACTION. They have been distracted by propaganda, Geographic Illiteracy and Autonomobility Myths. The 9 May WaPo articles and commentaries focus on the problems generated by relocation of military personal and the ‘demise’ of METRO but there are many other indicators of dysfunction.

BACK TO THAT OILY SLIME IN THE GULF.

That slimy goo and those dead birds and turtles should remind us that there must be renewed, concerted effort to evolve functional and sustainable settlement patterns that Do NOT depend on Large, Private vehicles for Mobility and Access. See End Note Four

Relying on Large, Private vehicles for Mobility and Access in the Cores of New Urban Regions results in dysfunctional settlement patterns. No one can disagree the Large, Private vehicles and the settlement patterns they generate create demand for VAST quantities of energy – especially petroleum.

The effort concerning Large, Private vehicles must be similar to the Hartwell consensus on the response to climate change which is, of course, closely related to that effort. See End Note Five

There can be no more lost decades or there will be a much, much more than that lost. As important as Bayou ecosystems and economic stability are, the consequence of continuing an unsustainable trajectory will be far worse.

EMR

END NOTES

1. Now that The Shape of the Future, 4th Printing and TRILO-G are wrapped up and the new website is evolving with professional guidance, EMR has started to step outside Greater Warrenton-Fauquier. This is the first of the items that will appear from time to time under the heading ‘Current Perspectives’ at www.emrisse.com

2. The key supporters are individuals who TMT and Groveton love to hate. TMT has alerted readers of BaconsRebellion Blog that these same Enterprise and Institutional players have formed ‘The 2030 Group’ which is attempting to build support for the same goals as NVTA under the guise of ‘regionalism.’ Much more on that effort soon.

3. Reminder to BaconsRebellion Blog denizens, Google the title “Blueprint for a Better Region” to access a streaming video of the “Blueprint…” PowerPoint.

4. See “THE PROBLEM WITH CARS.” As is the case with “Blueprint…” cited in End Note Three, THE ESTATES MATRIX (noted in the text above) as well as many of the components that have been revised and included in TRILO-G, can be accessed on the web. There is a very early version of THE PROBLEM WITH CARS are accessible on line by Googleing the title. The version of THE PROBLEM WITH CARS that makes up PART THREE of TRILO-G includes the complete argument for the abandonment of Autonomobiles as the primary strategy for Urban humans to achieve Mobility and Access in New Urban Regions.

5. BBC 11 May 2010.

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Want to Create Jobs? Think Big.

Posted on February 20, 2010 by James A. Bacon| 45 Comments

The Republicans in Virginia’s House of Delegates have passed a lot of bills to promote “jobs and opportunity” this year — at least 34 by my count, based on a compendium of bills approved by the House on the House Speaker’s website. The best that can be said is that, if enacted into law, most of them wouldn’t do too much damage. A number use the old ploy of exempting favored groups from assorted taxes, which is a bad thing because the state tax code has too many exemptions already, but for the most part they are inoffensive.

But it is difficult to imagine these narrow-bore bills having much impact on Virginia employment. In the long run, the best way to increase employment and economic opportunity are by making sure the commonwealth does a good job of performing core functions and services, keeping taxes low and getting the hell out of the way. If legislators really want to promote jobs and opportunities, here are some general strategies they should pursue that require no expansion in the scope of government.

Build knowledge clusters. Companies are more competitive, more likely to grow faster and more likely to spin off new enterprises when they belong to a strong knowledge cluster, usually focused on a specific industry. Most of the knowledge resides in the companies themselves, but some of it resides in academic institutions, research centers, not-for-profit organizations and the legal and financial professions. Knowledge concentrations lead to greater innovation and higher levels of productivity, and they attract outside capital investment. Government is not particularly adept at creating knowledge clusters, but it when such clusters already exist, government can act as a catalyst to get key players organized and acting in the common interest, and it can play an important role by supporting community college and higher ed programs to create a stream of graduates possessing skills relevant to the clusters.

In my day job, I have worked with the state of North Carolina, which has played a role in creating the North Carolina Aerospace Alliance, and with metro Atlanta, which, with the state of Georgia, is actively promoting a digital entertainment industry. Virginia has numerous knowledge clusters, too, but I don’t see the state doing anything substantive to promote any of them.

Reform human settlement patterns. You don’t have to buy into the “smart growth” vision to acknowledge the need to reform Virginia’s scattered, disconnected, low-density human settlement patterns. Just think resource scarcity. Our human settlement patterns have evolved during an age charactrerized by energy abundance and a profligate use of natural resources. While the Global Financial Crisis has temporarily obscured the fact by depressing energy and commodity prices, we are moving to a new plateau of higher energy and resource prices. (Don’t believe me? The 2.4 billion inhabitants of China and India do.) We need to evolve more compact, better connected communities that consume less energy and fewer raw materials. We don’t need to employ social engineering to reform human settlement patterns. We simply need to (a) devise funding mechanisms for transportation and public services that require households and enterprises to pay their location-variable costs, and (b) scrap the antiquated zoning codes that lock existing development patterns into place.

Want to promote job creation? More efficient human settlement patterns will provide cost savings for households, enterprises and municipal government.

Overhaul the health care system. Virginia Republicans rightfully regarded Obamacare as a monstrosity that would have increased the role of government and transferred wealth without addressing the underlying causes of escalating healthcare costs. Unfortunately, the Republican proposals, though relatively harmless, would have little effect. If they could just grit their teeth and admit it, Obamacare did contain a few good ideas, most particularly: measuring medical outcomes, disseminating best practices, and increasing transparency. There is nothing inherently “socialistic” or “big-governmentish” about these ideas.

There is no reason that Virginia needs to wait for the federal government to reform the state health care system. A good place to start would be to convene all major stakeholders — hospitals, doctors, health plans, employers, consumers — and expand upon the state’s existing but tepid data collection measures. Key goals would be to measure medical outcomes, allow health plans and providers to access the data to improve quality and reduce costs, and share the data with consumers so they could select providers on the basis of value (i.e. the best trade-off of price and quality). As measured by the Dartmouth Atlas, Virginia’s health care sector already delivers the best value anywhere on the East Coast. But there is huge room for improvement. We should aspire to be lead the country.

Want to create jobs? How about having a healthcare system that provides top quality care at half the cost of anywhere else in the country?

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