["Bundled, Buried, and Behind Closed Doors", a documentary short by Ben Mendelsohn and Alex Chohlas-Wood, looks at one of our favorite things -- the physical infrastructure of the internet -- and, in particular, the telco hotel at 60 Hudson Street. It's particularly fascinating to see how 60 Hudson Street exhibits the "tendency of communications infrastructure to retrofit pre-existing networks to suit the needs of new technologies": the building became a modern internet hub primarily because it was already a hub in earlier communications networks, permeated by pneumatic tubes, telegraph cables, and telephone lines, and thus easily suited to the running of fiber-optic cables. (This is important because it demonstrates the relative fixity of infrastructural geographies -- like the pattern of the cities they are embedded in, the positions of infrastructures tend to endure even as the infrastructures themselves decay and are replaced.)]

Here’s the key graph that De Chant writes about:

And here’s why I think De Chant is drawing faulty conclusions:

A. “VMT only really declines substantially at the highest housing density—over 5,000 units per square mile, or about the same as Chicago.”

There is no reason that the graph should stop at 5,000 units per square mile.  New York City — not ultra-dense Manhattan, but the city as a whole — is nearly double that¹.  (It seems really odd to me to not include a datapoint for New York City on a chart about American urban density.)   Major European cities (Paris, Athens, Barcelona, etc.) are twice that again.  And global megacities (Cairo, Manila, many cities in countries like India and Indonesia, etc.) are even denser, three to even four times the density of New York City.  Even if you throw out those cities as unacceptably dense (though I wouldn’t, at least without defining unacceptably), it’s hard to argue that Paris or Barcelona aren’t pretty desirable places to live.  You can make the argument that such density is so unrealistic that it shouldn’t be a goal for American urbanists, but if you’re trying to quantify the value of various kinds of density, it’s bizarre to not even talk about the options.

B. “To halve VMT of the highest mileage households, you would need to increase housing density in those areas by 20- to 100- fold.”

In other words, to reduce the VMT of households in rural West Virginia, you would need to increase density in those areas to Chicago levels.  But no urbanist I’m familiar with is talking about turning West Virginia into Chicago.  Urbanists are interested in things like densifying inner-ring suburbs, or removing restrictions on new construction in already-dense areas.  In the context of the chart, moving people from the fourth column to the fifth, or from the fifth off the chart.  Yes, those are still difficult things to do, but they’re not absurd like the 20-to-100-fold increase De Chant describes.

C. The most important (and most wrong) argument in the piece is this: “Density is responsible for a fraction of annual VMT”.

This is literally not what the chart shows.  The chart indicates — predictably — that moving from a typical built-up suburb (density of 1000-3000 hh/sq.mi.) to the only portion of the chart that actually qualifies as significant density (>5000 hh/sq.mi.) nearly halves VMT.  If the chart were extended to the right to show further densities — New York City’s, European, global — then I predict (I am going out on a limb here) that it would continue to decline.  Signficantly.  (I feel pretty safe in further assuming that the decline would not be linear, but increase rapidly as you reach densities at which car travel becomes less and less practical.)

SF.Streetsblog posted a short item from Peter Calthorpe early this year which discussed the extremity of variance in VMT between neighborhoods in the San Francisco region.  I’ll quote a piece of it:

“…a typical household in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco has an average VMT of 7,300 miles a year. This neighborhood averages only three stories but is dense by suburban standards; has a rich mix of shops, restaurants, and services within walking distance; and is a short transit ride from downtown…

The Rockridge neighborhood in Oakland was created as a streetcar suburb back in the prewar days of the Key Route Trolley system, which connected most of the Bay Area until 1948. It is filled largely with bungalow and small-lot single-family homes but has small apartment buildings at corners and a wonderful mixed-use main street along with a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train station at its center. The average household there drives about 12,200 miles a year… Out in San Ramon, a low-density East Bay suburb without good transit connections, development patterns fit the standard sprawl paradigm, with isolated single family subdivisions, strip commercial arterials, malls, and office parks. VMT for the average home there is around 30,000 miles a year…

So there is a four-to-one range in travel behavior over three neighborhoods in one region.”

While the plural of anecdote is not necessarily data, I see nothing in the chart De Chant posted which would indicate that Calthorpe’s examples are outliers.

D. All that said, here’s what I can agree with De Chant on — increasing fuel economy is an extremely important project and densification is a slow, long-term project.  (mammoth has always argued for the importance of appreciating the slowness of change in urban systems.)  But bad interpretations of poorly-framed charts are only going to make the latter more difficult, and that’s why De Chant’s post is particularly unfortunate.

[If you've been reading mammoth for a while, you'll probably think this is kind of an odd post, given our frequent arguments for the importance of understanding, working with, and valuing the American suburb.  We like to hold these things in tension -- esteem for the virtue of dense, urban living and an appreciation of both the many reasons that Americans have traditionally valued suburban living and the strange vitality of the suburbs as the United States' most iconic urban form.]

[Photographs from Christoph Engel's series "Exterieur", which explores the sort of cryptoforested terrain vague which the urban field manual might excel in operating in.]

Issue 14 of the Magazine On New Urbanisms, “Editing Urbanism”, is out.  Brian Davis, Brett Milligan, and I co-wrote a piece in that issue, “Urban Field Manuals”, which argues that the humble maintenance manual — a document which is, in an architectural context, typically slapped together at the end of a project in an inevitably futile attempt to arrest the effects of material degradation on the completed architectural object as long as possible — might be hybridized with the similarly prosaic field guide to produce a new kind of architectural document (the field manual), describing procedures and possibilities rather than prescribing forms:

In considering novel urbanisms, it is important not only to investigate new urban processes and kinds of organization, but also to re-evaluate the methodologies by which we intervene in urban systems and spaces.  The traditional tools of the urbanist are the capital project and the contract document; the capital project originates with a major initial capital investment by a party other than the designer (usually either a public agency or a private investor), while contract documents are used to define the terms of production and maintenance of a capital project. Neither of these tools are obsolete in a condition of “editing urbanism”. However, we propose that another, often-ignored tool may be of greater use: the maintenance manual.

Today’s urban maintenance manual is typically a dull and even banal document; whether it is produced by an architectural team for a built project or a planning department for a zoning code, it is typically explicitly aimed at preserving the status quo within the urban environment.

Its form, however, offers the opportunity for new kinds of urban engagement. Rather than prescribing set geometries for an urban territory or drawing up master plans for the delineation of new neighborhoods — as is done in traditional urban practice — the maintenance manual can be used to describe procedures and reactions to be performed in response to shifting urban conditions. In this sense, the maintenance manual offers urban editors a dual opportunity to increase focus on adaptable, opportunistic strategies, and to expand agency in shaping the city from the typically limited set of actors (such as professional designers, developers, and local politicians) to anyone who can read, interpret, and apply the instructions found within a manual.  It provides a format for instructions to edit the city, block-by-block, landscape-by-landscape.

The full piece — which illustrates the potential of this approach by developing the outline of such a kind of document through cataloging a succession of contemporary urban projects, ranging from Santiago Cirugeda’s Recetas Urbanas to the work of Grassroots Mapping to the recent output of the New York City government, aligning them with a series of working modes we call “the bureaucratic retrofit”, “the subversive”, “the diagnostic”, “the jerry-rig”, “the readymade”, and “the mycorrhizal”  – can be found in MONU 14, which is available here.

[Brett has a post up at Free Association Design which, among other things, goes into further detail on those working modes.]

We usually analyze Development at the national level. Why not other levels? At the other extreme, here is a short and surprising illustrated history of one city block [...]

Its history had been a series of unexpected events involving many actors, from Nicholas Bayard to the yellow fever mosquito to Anthony Arnoux to James Bogardus to Jane Jacobs to George Maciunas, few or none of whom could have anticipated the outcomes of their actions. Like many other examples, Soho illustrates that a lot of economic development is a surprise.

I’d be interested to hear your ideas on other types of tools should be used to tackle [urban problems] other than the local and national political ones.

This question is a very interesting one, and though I suspect there’s a lot more to a good answer than the brief things I noted in my reply, I don’t think we’ve collated our thoughts on tools in one place before (and I doubt there’s anyone out there subscribed to our comments feed, which means that most of our readers probably won’t see this unless I pull it up), so I’ll paste part of my brief reply here:

Here are three that immediately come to mind:

1. Infrastructure: We spent the summer reading a book, The Infrastructural City, which (among other things) lays out much of what is interesting, significant, and difficult about infrastructure as a tool for organizing or intervening in the city. I’d recommend in particular the posts “jam, hack” (which also discusses some of the same things I’m going to mention under the third tool here) and “starting from zero”.

We happen to be writing a short post at the moment on exactly how and why infrastructure is an appropriate tool for designers to use to engage, shape, and organize cities; I can’t promise a particular date when we’ll finish it, but it is coming.

2. Technological innovation: MIT’s CityCar, for instance; Stephen and I wrote about it and its significance in our “best architecture of the decade”. You’ll have to scroll down to locate the entry for CityCar. We also mentioned it in the post “jam, hack” linked above, saying:

“Instead of designing a new form for cities, and then producing buildings which fit that form, the Smart Cities group has designed both a technology — the CityCar — and a series of ways in which that technology would interact with the city (as a battery in a smart grid, as a part of an even more advanced traffic control system that would adjust congestion pricing in real time to efficiently distribute traffic over time and space), confident that doing so will enable ways of life [see point 3] that will generate positive changes in the city.”

3. Practices: One place where I significantly differ from a New Urbanist in how I understand urbanism is that I would argue that practices — including what Louis Wirth called “ways of life” — are generally more significant than physical form in determining the shape (used figuratively, not literally to mean “physical shape”) of a city. (Though there is, of course, feedback between the two.) Suburban practices will tend to dominate an urban form, for instance, rendering it functionally suburban. This is what has happened with the Kentlands. Or urban practices can exist and even thrive in forms that New Urbanists would consider sub-optimal. Greenwich Village might be considered the most pure example of New Urbanist form in New York City, but it’s hardly the locus of the city’s creative culture.

What does it look like to use practices as a tool for altering urbanism, then? Well, one thing that happens is that you have to look at the practice of urban design disciplines — in our case, specifically architecture and landscape architecture — in very different ways, because the traditional models for those disciplines are explicitly focused on building objects, not curating, encouraging, and seeding practices. We’ve got a whole category on the site devoted to alternate modes of practice, “the expanded field”. Another thing that happens is that you become very interested in the idea of participation — of opening the city up as something which its users can participate in the construction of. Adam Greenfield has done tons of interesting thinking about this (specifically in relationship to technology and media), much of which is recorded at his blog, Speedbird (here’s a good starting point for Speedbird). Efforts like Broken City Lab or Actions are also quite participatory and focused on practices.

The iPhone, by the way, is a fascinating instance of overlap between practice and technology, as we note both here and here.

In an excerpt on Slate from his latest book (Makeshift Metropolis), Witold Rybczynski asks the question: what kind of cities do we want?

Judging from the direction that American urbanism has taken during the second half of the 20^th century, one answer is unequivocal—Americans want to live in cities that are spread out. Decentralization and dispersal, the results of a demand for private property, privacy, and detached family homes, have been facilitated by a succession of transportation and communication technologies: first, the railroad and the streetcar; later, the automobile and the airplane; lastly, the telephone, television, and the Internet. In addition, regional shopping malls, FedEx, UPS, the Home Shopping Network, and Amazon.com have helped people to spread out. Even environmental technologies—small sewage treatment facilities and micro power plants—have allowed people to live in more dispersed communities than in the past.

Framed in this manner, Rybczynski’s question and this part of his answer (which is more complex than can be deduced from this brief excerpt) together indicate something important that has been missing from the latest series of shots fired by various New Urbanists at landscape urbanism (those shots and related posts have been handily collected by Jason King over at Landscape+Urbanism here, here, and here).  One of the primary roots of the disagreement between the two schools of thought is that New Urbanists tend to see dysfunction in the contemporary American city (roughly, sprawling suburbanization) as primarily political in origin.  This is why (true) narratives about the role of mid-century auto manufacturers in sabotaging street car lines or the illegality of building traditional urban forms under contemporary zoning codes are so central to the New Urbanist complaint.  (This is also, coincidentally, why New Urbanism has little to offer towards ameliorating one of the most massive global urban challenges, the question of how to deal with the sprawling and impoverished informal developments that one in six humans already live in — political actors may have a great deal of responsibility for those conditions, but it is extremely hard to see how political reorganization (of the sort that New Urbanists champion in the United States) is likely to successfully respond.)

The problem with this primarily political conception is that the contemporary city has been produced not just by political forces, but also by the social desires and technological changes that Rybczynski so succinctly describes.  Attempting to impose a New Urbanism through political means — however wisely planned — on the complex matrix of technological, economic, and social forces that produce cities is asking for that urbanism to be fractured by pressure from below.

I make this point in more detail here and here. Conveniently, the comments of my interlocutor in both cases — Sandy Sorlien, the principal of SmartCode Local and a New Urbanist of some note — indicate that New Urbanists tend to be as focused on political causes as I have argued.

These days, the need for new buildings or entire city quarters is decreasing or even ceasing to exist altogether – at least in the Western world – due to the demographic changes and financially difficult times. Ever since, architects and urban designers, who were trained by schools that focused their education first of all on the past and mainly taught urban and architectural restoration, preservation, renovation, redevelopment, or adaptive reuse of old structures might be best prepared for a future, in which cities will be edited rather than extended or even newly designed.

In such a future, which has become reality in most Western cities of this day and age, architects and urban planners will become urban editors. But it will probably become reality, too, in emerging and developing economies such as China, Brasil, or India in the far future, where historical city parts are currently being bulldozered out of existence by uncontrolled developments. Urban editors will be released from the modernistic burden to constantly replace the old world with a new one. But they will be involved in processes of selecting, correcting, condensating, organizing, or modifying the existing urban material. The process of urban editing will originate from an idea for the existing urban structures itself and will continue in a relationship between the users and producers of the city and the urban editors. Urban editing, therefore, will be also a practice that includes creative skills, human relations, and a precise set of methods.

But the question is: what kind of methods will the urban editors use? What will be their exact tasks? What will the process of urban editing look like exactly? With what kind of urban challenges will urban editors be confronted and how will they solve them? How will they judge how to deal with the existing structures, and with preserved and protected parts of the city? Will it be the job of the urban editors to define the value of existing urban structures? Which structures will they keep an which will they destroy? How will they deal with urban nostalgia towards history, and how with memory? What will be their criteria for action, their values, their moral issues? Will urban editors perhaps only occupy an advanced version of an already existing profession: the interior architect, re-designing, re-programming and renovating the interiors of the existing urban fabric according to the changing needs? Or will urban editors be merely the mediators between the old and the new in general?

While I’m not sure that I would say there was any point in anything like recent history where designing cities was not primarily about editing existing fabric (regardless of how many utopian fantasies architects and planners have produced), this theme resonates strongly with mammoth‘s avowed belief in the importance of designing for the city we have, and so strikes me as descriptive accurate.  (For that matter, there is also a bit of resonance between it and the current barrage of vitriol that various New Urbanists have launched in the general direction of landscape urbanism, as questions of “urban nostalgia” and who holds responsibility for negative aspects of the legacy of modernist planning are central to those arguments.)

Abstracts are due by December 31.

[An aerial shot of the Alameda Corridor amidst warehouses and distribution centers, from Lane Barden's photo-essay "The Trench", which follows "Distribution" in the text]

We’ve now reached the next-to-last chapter of The Infrastructural City, Deborah Richmond’s “Consumers Gone Wild: Distribution”.  Richmond begins the chapter with a description of the “super-distribution centers” which dot the I-5 corridor between Los Angeles and San Francisco.  When goods arrive at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach — and vast quantities of goods arrive at those ports, which together “receive more than three times the cargo volume of the next largest American port, the port of New York and New Jersey” — they are often quickly shipped north up the Alameda Corridor:

“Running adjacent to Alameda Boulevard, the $2 billion, 23-mile-long open trench of the Alameda Corridor conveys trains from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to rail yards near the city’s downtown and on to points beyond in Kern County and the Inland Empire.  Allowing double-height, stacked trains to pass while eliminating traffic conflicts at over 200 intersections between the ports and downtown, the corridor mitigates many drayage problems such as unfortunate collisions between passenger vehicles and trains full of televisions, blouses, and microcomputers… Roughly 60% of the goods coming through the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are distributed to the Southern California region, while only one-third make their way onto local railroads (most notably via the Alameda Corridor) for distribution to the Midwest, South, and East Coast.

It is this character as a throughput city that has ultimately marked the landscape of Los Angeles more than water, more than cars, and more than movies.  The transfer of shipping containers from ships to trains, trucks, container transfer buildings, retail outlets, and even homes, has been supported by a particularly voracious and narcissistic consumer whose ideal home is the city of Los Angeles itself, but whose influence radiates outward along truck routes and rail lines to the rest of the country.”

Unlike many of the previous chapters in the book, such as “Owens Lake” or “Gravel”, which were more strictly constructed as guidebooks to the infrastructural conditions of Los Angeles, “Distribution” continues to flit back and forth in this manner between descriptions of the spatial constructs of distribution¹ and diatribes against the consumerist society that produces such spatial constructs.  Those diatribes do over-reach in places — as in the case of the above claim that distribution has been the most significant marker on the landscape of Los Angeles, which seems an unnecessary claim in a text that serves as a single, long argument for the diversity of the infrastructural forces shaping Los Angeles.  However, they are also often relatively cogent, as when Richmond argues that “the movement of consumer goods through the city” produces competition between humans and their future possessions, both “for open space on roads” (where relatively tiny passenger vehicles must navigate between “heaving eighteen-wheelers”) and in the genericization of the public realm (into a “transitory space of blind facades and low, blank walls”) in favor of private “control spaces of consumer constructs”.

[Wal-Mart distribution center in Porterville, CA, via Google Maps]

Perhaps the most interesting discussion in the chapter is the discussion of warehouses and “big box” stores, which, like the recent research on Wal-Mart presented at Places by architect Jesse LeCavalier, notes that these typologies are a peculiarly contemporary iteration of “architecture without architects”, guided not by vernacular building practices, but by spreadsheets and the demands of logistics:

“As William Mitchell observed, there exists in addition to all manner of “retail fronts,” a corresponding “architectural back” consisting of the supply chain infrastructure that allows goods to arrive on demand at specific, physical locations around the world.  This architectural back has surpassed in cost and architectural importance any notion of a “front” for big box buildings.  It is evident that more money is spent on the building envelope in terms of dock doors, special materials handling equipment, and site access to the rear of these buildings than is spent on the architecturally mediocre storefronts and office lobbies tacked onto the front of such buildings.  One has only to pass along the loading-dock side of a warehouse or retail building to observe the subtle details that connect buildings to the supply chain.  Attached by a weather-sealed gasket to the roll-up doors of the building, shipping containers come to rest.”

This also serves the reinforce one of the themes of Kazys Varnelis’s chapter, “Invisible City”: the importance of the architecture of the big box building as a cultural or formal performance pales in comparison to the importance of the building as a conduit for flows of materials and goods.  These flows, and the logics of distribution and logistics that order them, are the “command line” of the infrastructural city.  If architecture has something to say to the big box, it must be spoken in that language, as Richmond notes in reflecting on the (perhaps now thankfully dying?) trend towards architectural re-use of empty shipping containers:

“As a matter for architects to consider, the container itself is hardly interesting as an object retro-fitted for human habitation; rather, it is the extent to which more and more building types are being formatted with the specific aim of integrating fixed sites into the intermodal supply chain, or the extent to which buildings are already intermodal containers that pique our interest.”

As in the case of the container, the former tactic — considering the big-box as an object — is unfortunately the more common community tactic for dealing with typologies related to distribution.  As laudable as the desire to reformat the big-box for urban locations is, reformatting alone may very well be futile, so long as it is practiced without interacting with the “capitalist dependency on efficiency and geo-economics” (Lateral, from their “Flatspace” project) so ably described by LeCavalier.  (See, for instance, the way in which Vermont’s attempts to keep out Wal-Mart on the grounds of local preservation were circumvented and rendered irrelevant.)   In that same piece, LeCavalier notes that focusing on new forms for the big box building or the strip mall without interacting with the logics of distribution and logistics that produced the original forms may not only be insufficient, but also missing more powerful opportunities:

The unintended result [of a community demanding purely formal modifications to new "urban" Wal-Marts] is a tacit endorsement of Walmart’s larger operations. But if communities and critics focused less on what the stores look like and more on what they do — less on form and more on performance — it’s possible that genuinely new formats might emerge, formats that would optimize urban settings in their handling of public space, infrastructure access, program mix, and so on.

If you’ve been following the Infrastructural City discussion and actually wading all the way through our extended ramblings, you’ve probably reached the end of this post and thought to yourself “well, that was mercifully brief”.  You’re right, but you’re also wrong, because we’ll be back later in the week (well, probably this week) with posts on recent proposals for the architecture of distribution and a brief bit of commentary on the phenomenal flatness of Terminal Island.

[Traffic cameras in Los Angeles, photographed by flickr user Puck90]

“Blocking All Lanes”, Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, and Steve Rowell’s contribution to The Infrastructral City, opens by questioning the various meanings of “traffic”:

“If Los Angeles evokes sunshine, flashy cars, and movie stars, it also instantly brings to mind traffic.  But the word “traffic” is always a little slippery, one of those words that escapes us when we try to pin it down.  For engineers and the dictionary alike, “traffic” refers to the movement of vehicles along a roadway.  For the rest of us, however, traffic has come to mean the exact opposite: that phenomenon of vehicles crowding a roadway until everything slows down to a frustrating crawl…

…We are traffic… Of course, we don’t talk that way: we say that we are “in traffic”, but we never admit to being traffic… our need to remove our own culpability from congestion, our need to speak of being “stuck in a jam”, is an expression of our profound ambivalence to driving.  The automobile, the capitalist vehicle par excellence, promises freedom while the often-frustrating experience of driving leaves us feeling quite out of control.  We hold onto the idea that although we might be stuck now, there is a way out.  But what if our agency were underpinned by an organizing, computational mechanism?  We stop.  We go.  We turn.  We yield.  What if these were not simply rules to follow (code as law), but instructions to follow (code as program)…”

After detouring through a (rather fascinating) history of the evolution of traffic control (a history which reminded me of a recent tweet from the excellent Lost Angeles: “at the turn of the century, speed limits for the new cars were 8 mph in residential districts and 6 mph in business districts”), the authors turn to a discussion of the contemporary means of traffic control in Los Angeles, which they split into two categories, physical systems and virtual data.  The former are described thusly:

“…over 50,000 buried loop detectors — the insulated wire loops that passively detect subtle magnetic field changes from vehicles — combine with over 700 weatherproofed video cameras, some of which are remotely controlled to pan and zoom, to monitor and control traffic flow.  Loops automatically trigger software in switching boxes linked to intersection signals, but also send data to TMCs that allow traffic engineers to monitor flow patterns and adjust timings remotely.  A simple click of  mouse button [in the control centers "ATSAC" (Automated Traffic Control and Surveillance) and "TMC" (CALTRANS's Traffic Management Center)] can start or stop the flow of movement on the grid.”

Of course, as that description makes clear, the virtual and physical aspects of the modern traffic control apparatus are materially inseparable, as the data has neither host nor eyes without its physical appendages and the physical appendages are dead and useless unless the streams of information they host flows and is interpreted.  If there is a real distinction to be drawn between the physical and the virtual aspects of traffic control, it is, as the authors note, that the physical appendages are persistent and static, moving only when maintenance workers crack open their housings, while the data the system hosts is “ephemeral and dynamic”.

[Inductive loops in Los Angeles pavement; photograph via CLUI]

The final portion of the chapter discusses “incidents”, which are described as the re-introduction of the corporeal and embodied into the virtual system of traffic control – the smooth flow that the virtual seeks to enable is interrupted, human errors literally pile up on freeways and in the streets.  This feedback between traffic control system and human agents, though, is not at all one way.  Traffic (remember, “we are traffic”) and traffic control systems are functionally cybernetic: the driver’s foot on the gas pedal moves up and down in rhythm with the dictates of a city-spanning central nervous system, communicating as surely with the driver through the code of yellow, red, and green as the brain does with the arm.  The traffic control system is extraordinarily complex, existing as networked ecologies do, at a multiplicity of scales. At some scales, it is easily experienced directly — the traffic light — while others can only be experienced through mediating systems or summaries, such as the traffic diagrams the authors have drawn.  An inductive loop, for instance, can be understood both as a series of strangely beautiful markings in hot-poured asphalt (above) and as a single neuron in a massively complex system.  Stepping back further, that massively complex system only functions a part of the irreducibly complex urban whole: without pit mines to produce aggregate, there would be no roads for traffic to fill; or, without the individual people who commute on the roads, there would be no need to coordinate signal timings.

The interesting fact that arises from the complexity of these co-evolved systems (and, as noted in Varnelis’s introduction to The Infrastructural City, from the primacy of individual property rights in L.A.’s political culture) is that, “as the possibilities for adding new highways — or even lanes — dwindle in many cities, most new progress is made at the level of code”.  This shift which the authors identify is a part of a systemic shift in the methodology of urbanism, from plan to hack, that we’ve been fascinated with for some time now.  In a mature infrastructural ecology, like Los Angeles, the city has developed such a persistent and ossified physical form that, barring a radical shift in the city’s political culture, designing infrastructure becomes more a task of re-configuration and re-use than a task of construction.

[The interior of ATSAC, via Swindle Magazine's feature on ATSAC]

Initially, this may seem an extraordinarily frustrating condition for urbanists, who have of late been so interested in the possibility that the design of infrastructures might offer an alternative instrument for shaping cities, combining the intentionality and vision of the plan with the vibrancy and resilience characteristic of emergent growth.  Infrastructures, we’ve noticed, can be a stable element which mold and manipulate the various flowing processes of urbanization which produce cities: economic exchange, human migration, traffic patterns, informational flows, property values, hydrologies, waste streams, commutes, even wildlife ecologies.  Historically, governments and private developers have sought to harness this potential, whether by profiting from the sale of land along a new infrastructure or by supplementing existing infrastructure to reinforce growth and density in a locale (the initial growth of Los Angeles along privately-owned streetcar lines being one of the classic examples of the former sort of infrastructural generation).  But if, as the authors of “Blocking All Lanes” suggest (and, I think it is fair to say, The Infrastructural City suggests as a whole), opportunities to plan and design new infrastructural frameworks are likely to be extremely rare in mature infrastructural ecologies, should urbanists abandon their interest in infrastructure as an instrument for shaping the city?

[Signal vaults in a traffic island, via CLUI]

I don’t think so, for two primary reasons.

First, the rarity and scarcity of those opportunities does not mean that they should not be seized when they are realistically presented.  And when opportunities for the construction of new infrastructures within a mature city do occur, they are likely to appear in hack-like guises: concretely, like Atlanta’s Beltline, which utilizes a defunct rail right-of-way as the foundation for a new commuter rail line¹, or Orange County’s Groundwater Replenishment System, which redirects the flow of cleaned wastewater in Orange County from ocean to aquifer; speculatively, like Velo-City‘s Toronto bicycle metro (which, as it happens, has a less-speculative southern Californian counterpart, the Backbone Bikeway Network).  Go over, go under, re-deploy, tag along, piggyback.

Second, there are fantastic opportunities created by thinking about the architectural act as a hack rather than an object (whether or not the hack produces an object).  These opportunities were one of the primary themes of our post on “the best architecture of the decade”, which included both examples of hacks that lack a traditional architectural object — the iPhone, Kiva — and architectural projects executed as hacks — Quinta Monroy, Parque Biblioteca Espana.  Perhaps most relevant of the hacks cataloged there, given that the topic at hand is automobile traffic, is the MIT Smart Cities group’s CityCar, which utterly inverts the architectural methodology of the plan.  Instead of designing a new form for cities, and then producing buildings which fit that form, the Smart Cities group has designed both a technology — the CityCar — and a series of ways in which that technology would interact with the city (as a battery in a smart grid, as a part of an even more advanced traffic control system that would adjust congestion pricing in real time to efficiently distribute traffic over time and space), confident that doing so will enable ways of life that will generate positive changes in the city.  Notably, all these cases are new ways of utilizing existing infrastructures (the iPhone, Kiva, CityCar) or of thinking about architecture as an infrastructure (Quinta Monroy, Parque Biblioteca Espana).  Infrastructure is not made obsolete by avoiding object fixation.  Rather, it becomes increasingly important, as a material instantiation of non-corporeal forces and thus the potential physical locus of hacks.

In both cases — whether the hack is understood as a way of implementing a new infrastructure or as a new kind of architectural act — the key realization is that successful shifts in urban form will only happen when they are paired with successful alterations of the infrastructures, systems, and flows that generate those forms.  Attempts to construct a new vision for the city that fail to grapple with the underlying systems that, like traffic, constitute and produce the city will ultimately either be ineffective or collapse catastrophically.

For additional reading on the physical infrastructure of traffic control, I recommend CLUI’s online exhibition, Loop Feedback Loop.

[Aggregate operation in the Reliance pit mine, Irwindale, California; photograph by Steve Rowell, via CLUI]

The fourth chapter of The Infrastructural City, “Margins in our Midst: Gravel”, is written by Matthew Coolidge, founder and director of mammoth‘s favorite Los Angeles-based landscape research organization, the Center for Land Use Interpretation.  In “Margins”, Coolidge describes the curious situation of Irwindale, a suburb of Los Angeles, playing on the use of the term “margin” to refer both to the edge condition of the city — Irwindale “lies at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains”, which delineate the northern limits of greater Los Angeles — and to the rock aggregate mined in Irwindale.

[Pit mines in southwest Irwindale, via Bing Maps]

The rather wonderful reality, perhaps often obscured by the seeming banality of concrete and asphalt, is that both the buildings of Los Angeles and the spaces between them — streets, courtyards, sidewalks, driveways — are constructed from tiny shards of the surrounding mountain ranges, ossified with cement and petroleum.  Though concrete and asphalt often seem like infinitely available materials — only becoming visible once they are whole and ready for use in the beds of asphalt pavers and concrete mixers — they are, in fact, associated with specific landscapes of extraction, much like any other product of contemporary society.  For the greater Los Angeles region, Irwindale is the locus of that extraction, a small city pitted by seventeen major aggregate quarries, “so full of holes that more of the land in the city is a pit than not”:

“Of the seventeen major pits in the Irwindale area only four are being mined at the moment.  Many of the others are idle, having already been mined to their permitted depth of 200 feet, and having met their limitations in size by running up to the edges of adjacent properties and roadways.  In many cases the material extends to a thousand feet deep and the quarries are trying to get permits to go deeper.  [One of the main pit operators,] Vulcan, estimates that if they could go another 150 feet, their Irwindale pits would have another thirty years of life.  The city, on the other hand, having literally lost so much of its taxable surface area, is interested in bringing the inactive pits back up to grade, so they can develop the land in a more economically productive way.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the spatial dominance of these landscapes of extraction within Irwindale, the un-mined zones of the city are also dominated by “marginal” uses, as Coolidge relates: the Irwindale Speedway, constructed on a “giant slab of asphalt” capping a former pit mine, hosts races, notably including the “D1 Grand Prix”, the nation’s premier “drifting” race, and itself an activity that lies at the margins of automotive racing; landfills, primarily holding construction waste; the Miller brewery; and, of course, Irwindale Avenue, a typical southern Californian main drag, “lined with fast food restaurants”, “muffler shops and storefronts”.  The most fascinating of these additional margins is the network of dams that Coolidge describes, acting first as flood-and-aggregate control, but also as a sort of slow, passive mining system:

“Beyond the pits, one of the key landscape features in the region is the Santa Fe Dam, an arc of piled rock nearly five miles long.  Built by the Army Corps, it has never really had to be used for its designed purpose–yet.  It was made to defend the land downstream from catastrophic floods and debris flows.  These are occasional storm events, which have been very destructive to some parts of the city, where unconsolidated rock from the mountains is mobilized by prolonged rain, and tumbles down the canyons and river valleys like a slow motion avalanche of coarse rock, gravel, and mud, destroying everything in its path.  There are hundreds of check dams higher up in the mountains now, and these catch the majority of the flows before they reach the valley (the dam basins themselves are periodically emptied by the aggregate industry).

Structures like the Santa Fe Dam, the Sepulveda Dam, the Hansen Dam, and the Whittier Narrows Dam are last line of defense, built downslope to hold back a major flow that makes it out of the mountains, like a geologic shock absorber.  Behind these dams are undevelopable areas that need to stay empty to contain the material from this potential unscheduled aggregate delivery.  The permitted use of the land here is ephemeral: oddly disorganized wildlife areas and recreation zones.”

[The Santa Fe Dam, via Bing Maps]

It is important to note, at this point, that describing these landscapes and uses as “marginal” is not intended to be normative, but rather descriptive: while in this case the marginal landscapes of Irwindale do happen to sit at physical margin of Los Angeles, it is their position on the psychological margin of Los Angeles which we find more interesting, and more important to the study (and design) of the infrastructural city, generally.

Architects and landscape architects are, historically, most interested in — and most often employed to work on — the prominent, “significant”, symbolic cores of cities.  Think, for instance, of the disproportionate effort expended by the ASLA on advocating for the allocation of funds to renovation of the National Mall, and of the buildings on the AIA’s latest list of honor awards.  Or: how many architecture schools send students into historic cities to sketch monuments and courthouses, and how many send their students to the edge of suburbia to sketch muffler shops and fast food restaurants?

[Pit mine in Irwindale, via Bing Maps]

It is hard, of course, to blame a profession for wanting to highlight its most prominent products (and, correspondingly, entirely natural for societies to focus their creative energies on places of commonly-held symbolic worth), but the degree to which we exclusively define our professions in relationship to those prominent products has the effect of excluding us from conversations about the ordinary.  This becomes particularly problematic when we realize that — as studies such as Coolidge’s “Margins” indicate — ordinary and marginal places actually compose the bulk of the territory of the infrastructural city.

[The Miller Plant, via Bing Maps]

Perhaps this is part of the reason that utopian visions of the city — including, we think, even many visions which would not necessarily claim that descriptor for themselves, such as New Urbanism — tend not to have any place for marginal terrain.  That might even suggest an interesting way in which to arrive at a negative definition of a utopia: a harmfully-drawn utopia is a vision of the city which excludes marginal places.  That definition is obviously simplistic, if only because utopias are not easily or properly divided into “negative” (harmful) and “positive” (useful) categories, but it does serve to extend mammoth‘s consistent argument that it is vital to work with the city we have, to not make plans which wish away the parts of the city that we find undesirable or uninteresting, if only because, as Coolidge notes, the margins are literally the foundations of the city.

For instance, there’s the distaste for youth culture:

“There’s this generation who grew up in the suburbs, for whom the suburbs have no magic. The mall has no magic. They’re the ones that have discovered the city. Problem is, they’re also destroying the city. The teenagers and young people in Miami come in from the suburbs to the few town centers we have, and they come in like locusts. They make traffic congestion all night; they come in and take up the parking. They ruin the retail and they ruin the restaurants, because they have different habits then older folks. I have seen it. They’re basically eating up the first-rate urbanism. They have this techno music, and the food cheapens, and they run in packs, great social packs, and they take over a place and ruin it and go somewhere else.”

The clinging to the more destructive tenets of the magical thinking that characterized the real-estate-boom economy (renting is improper use of cities; buying is proper):

“…These people would normally be buying real estate by now. And we designed for them. We kept saying, “Aha, these kids, between 24 and 35, will be buying real estate.” Guess what? They aren’t. Because they can’t afford it. But they’re still using the cities–they’re renting and so forth. The Gen-Xers also discovered the cities; they’re buying in a proper way. The Millennials are the ones we’re talking about. And they love cities desperately. And they’re loving them to death.”

There’s also a Friedman-esque longing for an authoritarian government that would cut through all the democratic whinging and get things built the right way:

“But I think the most interesting experiment of all is Singapore. Singapore had nothing going for it. No raw materials. And you got a kind of top-down government that was almost completely enlightened, putting education first and so forth, and you have this city that is extremely livable.

While democracy does most things well, I think we need to confront the fact that it does not make the best cities. And that the cities that were great were rather top-down. You know–Paris and Rome, the grid of Manhattan. What would those have been like if there hadn’t been some top-down stuff? Every landowner would have done a separate little pod subdivision. That’s one of the things that’s naive about Americans–extremely naive, I find, as an outsider having lived in places that are possibly less democratic, like Spain. This idea that you have an individual right to do whatever you want with your land is very democratic, but the result is pretty questionable.”

And, perhaps most troubling, apparent approval indicated for an instance of literally keeping the rural poor out of cities (within the context of praise of the preservation of Havana):

I think it’s more than just capital. There are two kinds of destruction: there’s the loss of the city, the high rises, which is what happened in Mexico City and Buenos Aires and Bogota. But then there’s the other destruction, which is the migration of the rural people to the city. And that was controlled in Cuba. They just said, “You don’t have your card, you don’t have your permit, you are not coming in.”

Interestingly, it’s exactly this tendency — the desire to preserve the city as an aesthetic and social experience for the privileged (you’ll note that earlier in the interview Duany describes New Urbanism as originating in aesthetic concerns) by maintaining controls on the movements of the poor — which, in another of the Atlantic‘s articles in this special report, Benjamin Schwarz finds and criticizes in the writings of post-Jacobsian urbanists:

“Confronted with this unstoppable process [of globalization-induced gentrification], Zukin proposes waving a magic political wand by calling for an assortment of mandates and controls to ensure that certain ethnic groups and social classes and the practitioners of certain livelihoods that contribute to the “authenticity” of the city be able to live there. Surely this is taking the fetishization of vibrant Jacobsian urbanity too far. It’s entirely reasonable—in fact, humane—to argue that the state must ensure decent living conditions for its citizens (and God knows we are terribly far from that situation). But it’s a wholly different proposition to argue that, in the name of what Sorkin calls “the protection of … the local” and to forestall “a landscape of homogeneity,” the state should create the conditions necessary for favored groups—be they designers, craftspeople, small-batch distillers, researchers, the proprietors of mom-and-pop stores—to live in expensive and fashionable neighborhoods or boroughs. That effort would ultimately be an aesthetic endeavor to ensure that the affluent, well-educated denizens of said neighborhoods be provided with the stage props and scenery necessary for what Jacobs and her heirs define as an enriching urban experience.”

1. We were as interested in articulating a series of comments on the relationship between designers and suburbia as we were in producing an architectural proposal (which isn’t to say that we were disinterested in producing a proposal, and it’s entirely valid to judge the clarity, value, etc. of the proposal on architectural grounds alone).

2. We (architects, landscape architects, etc.) are not doing ourselves (or suburbia, or humanity, or the remainder of the world) any favors by pursuing an excessively antagonistic stance towards suburbia.

Exhibit A for “excessive antagonism”: “Let Them Burn”, one of the “notable entries” on the Reburbia site, which (really) proposes burning down the suburbs and dancing on the ashes.

As Nam mentions in the comments on Stephen’s post, the re-burbia competition’s phrasing and framing seems to imply a buy-in to the “the burbs are totally wasteland mentality”, which is as unfortunate as it is inaccurate (though, being familiar with some of the jurors from their other work, I’m sure that that mentality was not exclusive or controlling in the judging).

3. (We Don’t Have to Make Every Suburb a City)

(a) We aren’t going to be able to fix the suburbs by making them exactly like cities. While I love cities (and live in one, and couldn’t be happier with the kind of transportation flexibility offered by living two blocks from a Metro stop), I’m not the sort of person who needs to buy into a new vision for the suburbs in order for that vision to be realized. The sort of person we need to convince lives in the suburbs and loves the suburbs. This person isn’t a reluctant suburbanite, priced out of urban living by restrictive zoning or pushed out by crumbling school systems. Schemes that concentrate the suburbs along (mass) transportation arterials, imitate Le Corbusian glass-towers-in-a-park, or model new developments after historical town planning may appeal to the latter, but not the former (note in particular the comments on “Urban Sprawl Repair Kit”, which I suspect provide a typical window into the average suburbanite’s reaction). A new vision for the suburbs ought to begin with understanding what characteristics of the suburbs make them appealing to the suburbanite and then find ways to solve problems while retaining or even expanding upon those characteristics.

(b) Exhibit A for “making the suburbs like cities”: “Arterials for Living” (another notable entry), which is, at least architecturally, a likeable enough proposal (I’d rather live there than in, say, Chino Hills), but which exposes (unintentionally, I think) a bit of the dark and arrogant underbelly of the typical urbanist’s distaste for the suburbs when it slyly suggests “relocating” suburbanites to newly-built dense housing along boulevards and “razing” their existing housing.  While its possible that this would be a peacable and pleasant process, its much more likely that this sort of intensive dislocation would follow the pattern of most forced relocations and quickly devolve into a nightmarish scenario (the Suburban Resistance Army, et cetera).

(c) When we talk about adjusting transportation options, or zoning regulations, or whatever else we do to promote urban living, we’re not really talking about wiping out the suburbs.  We’re playing with percentages; and if we take as a given that the suburbs will continue to exist, we have to talk about how we can solve suburban problems without falling back onto urban solutions.

4. While I’d like to think that our entry at least outlined one sort of strategy for solving a problem (lack of density, for instance) while retaining and magnifying one of the characteristics that make the suburbs attractive (the availability of land), there are certainly many other strategies that might share this approach.  In fact, one of the entries published on the re-burbia site, “ParkUrbia”, shares this sort of approach.  The title of Philippe Barriere Collective‘s entry may give me another opportunity to complain about the excessive use of prefixes and suffixes in naming architectural projects, but I think ParkUrbia might be the smartest entry to the competition (at least, of the published entrants) — I can’t figure out how it didn’t merit a place among the finalists and am disappointed to not have the opportunity to vote for it.

Regardless of that, though, what interests me about ParkUrbia at the moment is how it approaches the suburbs: not with destructive intent, not with the desire to re-make them in the image of an entirely different settlement pattern, but grabbing one of the characteristics that people love about the suburbs — the feeling of being in a park — and multiplying it.  While one might contend that Barriere has gone too far, that the point of the suburb is that it pairs the illusion of the park with the advantages of the city and that Barriere’s scheme produces such an inherently low density as to ruin the ability of the suburb to function as an amalgamation of park and city, I’d argue that there’s no need to see Barriere’s scheme as an exclusive future for the suburbs when it might function quite well (and beautifully) as one of many adjustments, perhaps ranging from something like Paul Lukez’s work at the densest to ParkUrbia at the most spread-out.

5. Since our scheme is about twenty percent tongue-in-cheek, I enjoying seeing that a number of the other schemes were, too, even if I could find other things to dislike about them.  A few of them weren’t but probably should have been.

People love living in suburbs. Urbanites often imagine them to be sterile cultural wastelands, but the suburbs host vibrant and diverse communities. While not everyone who dwells in a suburb does so out of love, many do.

Yet there are serious problems with the suburbs. They are energy inefficient, lack public space, and are often hostile to pedestrians. The root of these problems is that suburbs use too much land. The typically suggested solution to this problem remodels the suburbs after the city: building more buildings on smaller lots.

But if we want to imagine a suburban future that solves the many issues created by problematic land-use patterns, we ought to envision one that appeals to dwellers who love the suburbs.

The amount of land offered to each inhabitant is also one of the most cherished characteristics of suburbs. Rather than force suburbanites to use less land, why not make more land in the suburbs?

This new land-surface can be programmed indirectly through the modification of its properties, such as slope, support, perforation, and thickness. These inform a range of possible uses for the surface without strictly defining them, leaving room for the surface to be appropriated according to cultural and market forces. Further, the surface becomes a point of agency for counteracting the above noted land-use issues. By making more land, we can add more of what people love about the suburbs while (ironically) ameliorating problems created by wasting land.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a lecture by Amale Andraos of workAC, hoping to hear more about their new book, 49 Cities.  It may be the single greatest collection of architectural ego ever assembled (yes, it’s on my to-buy list).  I was struck by how much control over the lives of the inhabitants the architects wanted to wield.  Each of the designs was intimately tied to an assumption about how people would live in the city.  In the Q&A I asked Ms. Andraos to talk a little bit more about the societal implications of the projects: briefly (because I was taking poor notes) her response was that yes virtually all of these cities had a grand utopian scheme encompassing the way of life of their dwellers; this is requisite and good.

Of course, the issue with this is that the way of life so integral to these cities doesn’t exist – it is a fabrication created by the designer, in the best cases before the architecture of the city, and in the worst cases, as a justification for their super-formal aspirations.  Absolutely, architects need to play the role of anthropologist, tailoring our solutions to the folks who will use them – but Big Bang Urbanists have it backwards.

To be clear, I adore good speculative architectural and urban projects. Nor am I afraid of scale (bonus quote from the workAC lecture: “Ecology is not about nature, it is about scale”), or even of a certain amount of societal intervention – this isn’t an argument that designers should cater to existing norms and preferences no matter how harmful.  I just don’t see much use in solipsistic projects culled from nothing other than the designers own conception of what the perfect city ought to look like, how the perfect city dwellers ought to live like.   We must begin with the city we have, engage it on its own terms.  Or, as Rob once said when talking about Landscape Urbanism, “I’ll go to my grave defending the value of speculative work, but I think that for landscape urbanism to be the revolutionary shift away from modernist urbanism it claims to be, it must find expression in the world of developers and Wal-Marts, as well.”  Indeed.  Because people often like where they live(!) already.  An incremental approach to urbanism, far from lacking ambition, looks opportunistically at our developed landscapes with open eyes.  Designing a Big Bang Utopia is the less ambitious approach, as it renders null the most difficult work of the urbanist – that of developing adaptive tactics which are responsive to preexisting conditions.

“The developed world’s version of ad-hoc urban growth – suburbia! – certainly doesn’t elicit the same marveling response that uncontrolled fringe settlements get from visitors to the developing world … I wonder, why don’t we look at our own cities with the same open eyes as we look at places like Mumbai or Medellín; searching not for failure and horror, but for potential? Is the unplanned city only valid if it’s dense and dirty? Why don’t we see our cities as legitimate landscapes from which we can build our future?”

I have a number of minor quibbles with Galloway’s article (for instance: I don’t think I’d agree that there is no ecological reason to promote density, though I would agree that the dry formula “density=good, sprawl=bad” is simplistic), but he does a commendable job of teasing out two important and contradictorary threads, which are that the informal city, whether in the developing or the developed world, is (a) pregnant with possibility and (b) problematic and in need of intervention.  Becker and I would, obviously, like to think that it is exactly those contradictorary threads we were addressing with our recent project/essay on fog farming in Luanda.

These contradictions also tie back into the observations Stephen made a couple weeks ago about the endurance of the city.  The permanence of infrastructures such as roads and property lines is the exactly the reason why tactical insertions aimed at altering the city through the modification of flows of capital, people, goods, services, water, etc. are the proper tools for the urbanist.  Observing the permanence of the city argues for flux-based interventions, not against them, as it is this permanence which renders the grand scheme inoperable and insufficiently pragmatic.  The significance of the recent projects in Medellin that Galloway takes note of is not that they fetishize the problems of the slums they are sited within (or refuse to confront them), but that they confront them without attempting to erase the existing condition of the city.   Improvement without demolition.  The master planner — whether a new urbanist, a landscape urbanist, or modernist — refuses to confront the exigencies of the city, both good and bad, preferring to imagine an idealized condition (which, when constructed, is much more likely to trend towards dystopia than utopia).  Learning to deal with the city we have, and, in particular, the informal city in guises suburban and slummed, is, as Galloway argues, an essential challenge.

[Galloway's article via Nam Henderson, in a post on JG Ballard and Mike Davis]