What a day! WaPo has six stories on the front page and five of them relate to human settlement patterns and/or to the topic of our current column on Jared Diamonds new book Collapse.
There was some interest noted in one of them (“The Los Angeles Story” about “density”) in the string following Jim Bacons post on the need for a Carbon Tax from yesterday. As we document in “The Shape of the Future,” almost every discussion of economic, social or physical consequence eventually gets to the issue of human settlement pattern.
The Los Angeles story demonstrates the wisdom of the adage “It is not how dense you make it, it is how you make it dense.”
Proximity is a fundamental parameter in the creation of functional urban form. Close proximity of a wide range of elements is a necessary, but not sufficient, parameter for sustainable human settlement patterns. In addition, there must be, among other things, functional dooryards, clusters and neighborhoods that are organized in relatively balanced villages and those villages configured in Balanced Communities that are arranged in such a way to create sustainable New Urban Regions and Urban Support Regions. There is a lot to learn from a careful reading of the story with the right contextual framework into which to fit the information.
Mobility is an example. Attempts to provide a “modern” alternative to the extensive system of “interurban” streetcars in The Los Angeles region just before, during and after WWII was founded on the tragically flawed idea that it is possible to build enough “freeways” so everyone could go wherever they wanted to go when ever they wanted to go there in private automobiles. (Some will recognize this as a variant of the Private Vehicle Mobility Myth. See “The Myths That Blind Us” 20 Oct 2003 and “Myth to Law” 29 Nov 2004 at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com
A unique combination of significant topographic constraints, early reliance on an extensive shared vehicle system, small municipalities with strong zoning powers, a region-wide lack of water and large manufacturing, fabricating and entertainment venues, among others, resulted in a relatively high density at the village and community scale and a large number of expensive houses in dangerous locations. See “Fire and Flood.” 3 Nov 2003 at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com
Over the past 20 years the region has slowly and painfully started to reintroduce shared vehicle alternatives for mobility. That accounts for the improvements in some measures of mobility and access that Jim noted. It is also true that, in line with the perspective of Tony Downs, congestion has forced changes in location decisions.
Actually the Los Angeles New Urban Region would work fairly well if citizens understood the importance of Balanced Communities and made more of their decisions based on an intelligent consideration of the real alternatives unvarnished by pandering politicians and philosophical nut cases. They would come to realize this in a hurry if the government subsidies were phased out and citizens and enterprises all paid the full cost of their location decisions. Many of the best “mixed use” and “new urbanist” projects in the Untied States can be found there along with some of the most successful Planned New Communities.
The WaPo version of “The LA Story” has special meaning to me because my grandfather, a builder and developer in California at the turn of the last century, gave up an option on most of Signal Hill just before oil was discovered in order to buy property in Richmond and Gridley. Readers will recognize these two places as California real estate hot spots.
Post Script: The contention that there is no evidence to tie mobility and access directly to human settlement pattern is so silly that is does not merit a response. This relationship is not clearly evident only to those who have a specific economic, social or physical objective that is rendered uneconomic, anti-social or physically impossible but admitting the existence of the relationship.
EMR
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