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’ve been reading the blog Market Urbanism quite a lot recently. Writing recently about “the problem with “public” transportation” (and after noting the frequent use of ‘public transit’ where the broader ‘mass transit’ would be more appropriate), they argue:

…although the [New York] Subway was heavily subsidized by the government, the truth is that it was a very expensive and ineffective replacement for elevated trains, which are just as fast as subways, and far cheaper to build. The els were quite profitable and transit companies were eager to build them, but the NIMBY interests didn’t like the noise they made and the city resented the limited role that it had in the lines. In fact, it was the city holding out for a subway and the massive spending binge it took to finally build it that contributed to mass transit’s insolvency – a trend which continues unabated today. If the city hadn’t insisted on the unsustainable luxury of forcing all rapid transit underground (a theme I hope to explore more deeply in the future), then Second Avenue, and a whole bunch of other streets, would have gotten rapid transit a century ago. (And I won’t even get into the fact that much of the NYC “Subway” is actually repurposed old private elevated lines.)

There is a lot to agree with in that graf, but the conclusion of the post, which is literally “public transportation sucks”, lacks nuance (hah) — as does the implied conclusion that private development will always lead to a better solution than public. For example, it would be interesting to see property values plotted along aboveground and underground train lines in NYC and Chicago. It’s easy to call underground mass transit an unsustainable luxury, but would that assessment be altered by an offset resulting from increased property tax income derived from higher property values along underground lines? More generally, I’m not convinced that the formulation ‘cheaper and easier equals more attractive to private companies equals better solution’ is universally true, though this will probably be the case in many scenarios, due to the high opportunity cost of not building additional lines paid when cities choose to focus limited funds on less noxious but more expensive underground lines. In an excellent later post, Market Urbanism makes a case that the opportunity cost of not embracing private elevated lines was actually tremendous for America:

Though everyone loved the subway (well, sort of), burying rapid transit is much more expensive than building it above streets and alleyways, so few cities ever mustered up the funds to build subways. (This cannot be emphasized enough: Elevated lines were(/are?) cheap and profitable enough to be built by relatively apolitical private enterprise, whereas subways were not.) From this lack of els came horrible street crowding and congestion as people piled into overburdened at-grade streetcar lines. From this congestion came height limits, and from these height limits came sprawl, and from sprawl came the automobile and parking lots, and by the Great Depression, development pretty much ended.

The complicated nature of this set of cost/benefit trade-offs between public and private infrastructures is why we’ve argued in the past that, when discussing the creation and operation of infrastructure, using ‘development for constituents’ vs ‘development for markets’ is a better way to frame this debate.  This framing provides a window into some of the key results of the two methodologies, such as (respectively) geographically comprehensive coverage vs redundancy at high-impact nodes, or pricing to increase use vs pricing to increase profitability and financial sustainability. Infrastructural development is always in response to some sort of demand, and the type of demand (or mix of demands) has a significant impact on the nature of that development.

I would love to study the differing characteristics of constituent-driven and market-driven infrastructural development, as I suspect that the resulting infrastructures lead to dramatically different generative effects on the development of urban systems. How do patterns of infrastructural development differ depending on the type of demand which instigated their creation – and how do these effects remain embedded in the city as it develops among its infrastructures?

[For more beautiful early maps of NYC transit, like the combination plan / section drawing of the Interborough Rapid Transit lane from 1904 above, visit this incredible online archive: http://www.nycsubway.org/maps/historical.html]

Whereas most city officials and past DOT commissioners would have insisted on capital funds for something like, say, a bike lane, Sadik-Khan teases them out on the cheap. When you use capital funds for a project, you need approval from a few different places, and it takes months, sometimes years. So she takes a bunch of guys already painting double lines and gets them to dot a bike lane with the extra paint. Where she wants a plaza to swallow a car lane, she convinces abutting stores and the local business-improvement chapter to pay for the cleaning and to take the chairs and tables in every evening and set them out every morning. She tells them that shutting down the street will actually help their business, the way it did in Times Square. She shows them the numbers and where once they may have been against her, suddenly they are footing her bill. She doesn’t even need to check in with Bloomberg. Like a high school a cappella group trying to get to Ibiza for spring break, Sadik-Khan finds money between seat cushions. She uses her guile and glamour to get what she needs, craftily but lawfully.

More downright rebelliously, she sometimes circumvents the community by experimenting with test swatches called pilots, like little harbingers of the future. With a pilot change, you don’t necessarily need community permission, since the idea is that you may end up just taking it down. For example, with the DUMBO parklet, a past commissioner might have educated the residents first, tried to get them to buy into the plan. But it takes months to convince a neighborhood to agree to a change. Instead, she just painted. She did the same thing in the Meatpacking District, when she drummed up a plaza next to the Apple store, and again on Willoughby Street in Brooklyn. She’s figured out a quiet way to get her way without getting the pesky public in her face.

Part of this is psychological warfare. Moses once said, “Once you sink that first stake, they’ll never make you pull it up.” Sadik-Khan has co-opted those words. Under her rule, bike lanes materialize overnight. Sidewalks become pop-up cafés and flowers bloom inside repurposed pots in quick and cowering deference. New Yorkers aren’t used to this kind of change. So there they sit at their new café and they sip their Darjeeling, looking rather stunned or drugged and if not pleased, then at the very least seated.

And extra bonus points for this anecdote about the endurance of cities, and the importance of engaging the city we have:

“Broadway,” she says, “was simply a powerful farmer’s precolonial footpath, and the great thing it did was create these wonderful squares.” But now she doesn’t need it anymore. So she restored the grid by doing the math. There were seventy pedestrians for every ten cars in Times Square, but cars were louder and more catered to, so, “you know, the balance was in the wrong direction.” She turned it into a village green, where tourists have room to rubberneck on the sidewalks while busy New Yorkers can zoom out of their way across the plaza. That’s a pretty monstrous change, and it happened over a long weekend.

The full profile, which is well worth reading, is here.

[mammoth has mentioned Janette Sadik-Khan before in the context of Bus Rapid Transit here -- also be sure to visit this comment by FASLANYC in that same post for a series of links to things he has written about Sadik Khan.]

[Flushing Airport, one of New York City's "places humans let be", via Google Maps]

Robert Sullivan’s recent article on the renaissance of urban ecology in New York City, The Concrete Jungle, is so outstanding that I’ve been sitting on it for two weeks, paralyzed by the plethora of great quotes I could pull from it.  In the end, I’ve narrowed down to three quotes, each of which emphasizes a different way in which our understandings of the composition, importance, and functions of urban natures are changing:

1. On the diversity of urban forests “Recently, however, scientists have come to suspect that urban forests have thrived not despite their urban environment but because of it. “The old idea was that urban areas are not ecologically interesting or don’t have ecological processes, and that’s false,” says Richard Pouyat, who studies urban forests for the U.S. Forest Service. “The difference is, it’s been altered.” And altering the natural landscape isn’t always a bad thing.

Take fires. Alley Pond experienced many car fires over the years, and this is now understood to have played an important role in the forest’s ecological health. In some parts of Alley Pond Park, as well as in forests in the Bronx and Staten Island, open forest canopies encouraged sensitive species like upland sandpipers or a threatened suite of plants like purple and green milkweeds. In a 1996 article in Restoration & Management Notes, Marc Matsil and Mike Feller, an early NRG naturalist, called arsonists “New York City’s incidental restorationists.”

Urban forests are healthier than their suburban peers in other ways, too. The flora scene is more diverse. Much of the soil found in places like Alley Pond Park is pristine compared to suburban areas. Perhaps more interesting, from the point of view of the larger urban ecosystem, our forests have evolved to become more productive. According to a study comparing oak-tree stands in rural Connecticut with ones in New York City, city forests carry more of the metals associated with air pollution into the soil.”

2. On the tension between process and aesthetics in ecological restoration “Understanding nature as infrastructure means thinking about it less as a painting to restore and more as a process to encourage. River-cleanup parties, those classic old-school conservation outings, may help in attracting humans to a restoration site, but they don’t necessarily do much for nature. “It’s fine if they realize that they are doing it for people and not for wildlife,” says Pehek, the NRG ecologist. “[But] roof material and plywood, for instance, is great for snakes.””

3. On future forests “In the city’s forests, Parks employees might take a more laissez-faire approach to invasive species. Some are targeted for removal, including the Norway maple, once the darling of Parks tree-planters throughout the East Coast but now known to release chemicals that discourage undergrowth. But mostly, urban foresters are comfortable with the idea that the species makeup of nature will change based on external events and that tomorrow’s forests won’t be the same as yesterday’s. They talk about encouraging the trajectory of the forest. The imminent arrival of the Emerald ash borer, an exotic beetle, may mean the destruction of thousands of ash trees in the next few years, but it also will bring about the beginning of something else.

This is a culture shift, and it has already happened in Europe, where biologists tracked plant and forest succession at bombed-out sites after the war. There, what Americans consider invasive species are tolerated as plants that thrive in the warmer, more acidic ecology of the city. “They just consider it nature, and this whole question of ‘natural or not natural’ is just a moot point,” says Peter Del Tredici, a senior scientist at the Harvard arboretum who teaches urban ecology at the Graduate School of Design.”

Read the full article for much more — from crypto-forestry and the previously mentioned future forests, to how Robert Moses became an accidental inspiration for urban restoration ecology, why urban ecologists are shifting from the documentation of remnant and accidental ecosystems to the active curation of new urban ecologies, or why it is important to think of urban nature and rural nature as components of a single system, intricately linked by webs of feedback loops.

Fast Company author Cliff Kuang writes about New York City’s adoption of rapid-bus transit solutions developed in Brazil and Columbia:

Urban planners, rejoice! Today, the New York City Department of Transit announced a radical new plan for improving the city’s bus lines: A fully dedicated express-lane for buses, running crosstown on 34th Street. It’s expected to improve bus speeds by 35%, on a route where buses are stationary a whopping 40% of the time. And it marks another huge, bold idea from Janette Sadik-Khan, the DOT commissioner who’s overseen a slew of projects, ranging from the new sidewalk saffolding to a pedestrianized Times Square.

The system has several novel improvements over standard bus lines which work in conjunction with the dedicated express lane, as described in Fast Company’s reporting.

[via @thewhereblog]