Urbanffffinds 027

Apologies for the lack of Urbanffffinds last week. This week, please accept this double-shot of urban imagery goodness as a peace offering. And some more happy news: part-time employment has been secured, and regular posting will resume at Where, starting with almost three weeks of great arch&urb stuff in a hearty linkdump, tomorrow morning.

It Takes a Video Game to Save a Village

Most cities have a love-hate relationship with tourists -- civic officials love them, and residents hate them. Tourism generates billions of dollars in revenue for cities across the globe each year. The number of traffic accidents caused by tourists not watching where they're walking? So far, no reliable estimates have been made.

Still, tourism is a vital part of any urban economy. Even moreso, it can be a powerful factor for a neighborhood that is trying to lift itself up. Tourism As Economic Strategy is a well-worn path. But with all of the emerging technologies related to the web and wireless communication, it seems like the old urban tourism formula (cleaned up historic buildings + quirky neighborhood attraction + Starbucks and/or Cold Stone Creamery and corresponding independent cafe/gelato bar = success!) is due for an overhaul.

Let's start by thinking small, with the traditional Japanese village. Japan's demographic woes have been well-reported over the past few years; indeed, as young residents of this highly urbanized island nation put off having families and move to the cities in droves to pursue fast-paced careers, the raw population number isn't the only thing being affected. Culturally, Japan is seeing the evaporation of its small villages, and the slow death of ancient rural and cultural traditions.

Enter: mixed-reality gaming. An explanation, c/o Very Spatial: "One of the areas of convergence for location-based applications and gaming is the idea of mixed reality, where places in the game correspond to real-world locations, and actions in one lead to events or consequences in the other." A recent Nintendo DS game, Treasure Quest: Enoshima, follows this very blueprint, using a small island north of -- surprise! -- Tokyo as the setting for a handheld video game. Players have to visit and explore the actual island to play the game. The DS unit acts as the mixer, blending the fictional and real worlds, literally with the push of a button.

The problem with Treasure Quest, though, is that it's over. The software could be downloaded off of the internet, and the game only ran until February 19th. Makes sense, considering that Nintendo doesn't own the island, and thus can't stake any real claim to it. But what if they could? What if, as a way to draw in tourists, a rural village somewhere in Japan agreed to sell off a large number of its abandoned buildings to Nintendo in an agreement to become the permanent setting for a mixed-reality video game?

It sounds crass at first, but with the right amount of finesse, it just might be a win-win economic development strategy. For instance, to prepare the town for guests (players), Nintendo would agree to upgrade local utilities. It would also take on the responsibility for upkeep of public areas. Streetscaping, garbage collection, and parks maintenance would be taken care of by the entertainment giant. Villagers would enjoy a higher quality of life at a lower rate of taxation (though I'm assuming the American system there since I know very little about the governance of rural Japanese villages). In return, residents would agree to coexist peacefully with players. A particularly savvy game designer would craft the game as a cultural experience, creating some sort of mystery or adventure plot that made use of the area's native traditions.

The argument could be made that Nintendo (or whatever company helmed the project) was being given too much power over a municipal entity; it could also be said that cultural traditions were being bastardized and pillaged in the name of commerce and fleeting entertainment. But when the options for the village are Sink or Swim, the picture becomes less black and white. After all, don't most -- if not all -- preservation efforts (architectural or cultural), on some level, tokenize the very things that they aim to preserve?

So assume that Nintendo creates a mixed-reality game around a rural Japanese town, and it becomes a wild success. Players start booking rooms at a nearby hotel months in advance for their chance to play. The villagers find new opportunities to pass along their cultural history and traditions. Nintendo makes a buttload of cash. Everyone's happy. A small town in rural Portugal hears of the success and decides to give it a try. Sony's European headquarters gets a call from the mayor...

Ten years later, mixed-reality gaming has become an economic silver bullet. Hundreds of villages in countries around the world have mixed their realities with fantastical virtual counterparts. The trend goes big-time when the city of Detroit sells a square mile of its infamous "urban prairie" to the Walt Disney Co., which painstakingly re-creates the neighborhood circa 1930 to stage a depression-era mob mixed-reality urban epic. The arts & crafts bungalows are the hotel. Visitors live in the game. A month later, Blizzard Entertainment announces a joint deal with CCTV and the city of Shanghai to buy up hundreds of defunct surveillance cameras and create the world's largest multi-player mixed-reality on-and-offline mega-game. The setting? Pudong.

Of course, it must be asked: when is the reality in question no longer considered to be mixed? When does "mixed" become simply "augmented?"

(Photo from Flickr user Mathias M. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
Mixed Reality Gaming In Japan (Very Spatial)

Urbanffffinds 014

Why Do We Build Cities?

Against all odds, more than half of the citizens of New Orleans returned to their broken city after Hurricane Katrina to try to repair their homes and their communities. The process has been notoriously difficult, as the media continues to report, yet New Orleansians press on, living in FEMA trailers or under tarp roofs and trying to make sense of the legal nightmare of applying for aid.

Meanwhile, down in Pisco, those who lost their homes in the recent earthquake are starting to rebuild their adobe houses without any kind of supervision or safety regulations, Peruvian officials worry. At least part of the motivation is economic, as one can only build on the land that one owns or can lay claim to. These people need shelter, and they're addressing that need. But with the government promising aid and training for people rebuilding their homes, there is the suggestion that there is some other motivation, something below the surface, that is causing people to rebuild so quickly.

In fact, the rebuilding processes in both New Orleans and Pisco raise some interesting questions about the nature of urbanism. Why do these people rebuild instead of moving elsewhere? And if a city must be rebuilt, why start over in the same place? Why not build a new city in a place less prone to, say, flooding or earthquakes? What's the reasoning behind trying to rebuild a city that has been knocked down?

There is a social aspect to urbanism that underscores all of the other motivations for urban development. People, as has been well-documented by sociologists, generally like to be around other people (at least in close proximity, even if there is no direct interaction). Still, we generally think of cities merely as concentrations of power (both economic and militaristic) instead of what they are, literally: concentrations of people.

If our settlements can be leveled by natural forces regardless of size, and if their economic structures can be so easily toppled, why don't we all live in small towns or villages? They'd probably be easier to rebuild. They wouldn't be such a hassle to manage. In fact, one could make a convincing argument that a society made up of small towns, even operating with current technology, would be more sustainable than one composed of large cites.

So why the heck do we build cities, anyway?

A few weeks back, a research consortium with participants from Harvard and Cambridge Universities (among others) shared some interesting new findings from the excavation site at Tell Brak -- findings that seem to tell us a lot about the origins of urbanism. The researchers have found, by analyzing fragments of pottery scattered around what was essentially a core city, that the urban area around Tell Brak was developed in an organic way that suggests an entirely different reason for the founding of mankind's earliest cities.

Traditionally, the founding of these early cities has been attributed to various kings and religious authorities. In an article about the new findings, Scientific American quotes researcher Jason Ur: "Kings were quick to take credit for founding cities...We're taking royal inscriptions at their word, which could be a bad thing to do."

The informal growth of Tell Brak seems to suggest that, at their very beginnings, cities were founded because they provided a strong social network. This undoubtedly created economic and military power as early cities grew, but the original impetus was simply for people to gather in one place in order to improve their lives in some way (the researchers acknowledge that individual motivations were likely diverse). So Tell Brak illustrates at least one compelling argument for why we build large, impressive urban centers: we just like to be around each other.

In wrecked cities like New Orleans and Pisco, the large majority of citizens don't return because they look forward to the immense challenges of cleaning up environmentally devastated lots, tearing down the shards of their old homes, and rebuilding from scratch. They return because they are looking to rebuild the social places that existed before their city was ruined. They rebuild for the same reason that anyone builds in the first place.

They just like to be around each other.

(Photo from Flickr user mateollosa.)


Links:

Pay Heed to New Orleans' Plight (Associated Press)

Citizens in Pisco, Peru Informally Build Adobe Houses after Earthquake (LivinginPeru.com)

Ancient Squatters May Have Been the World's First Suburbanites (Scientific American)

Researchers rewrite origins of the urban sprawl (University of Cambridge)

The Witold Rybczynski Interview

Last week, I posted a review of Witold Rybczynski's new book, Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville. After talking to a rep at Scribner (who had sent me the book back in June) I got in touch with the author, who agreed to do a Q&A about the book. The following took place over a series of emails this past weekend.


======================================


Where: Thanks again for agreeing to do this Q&A for Where. So to start out, in my review of Last Harvest I took issue with your statement that "For the first time in history urbanization does not mean concentration" on the grounds that it undermines the difference between urban and suburban environments. What's your take on that terminological disagreement?

Witold Rybczynski: Urbanization traditionally brought with it a whole set of particular advantages. By living together in dense concentrations, city dwelllers had access to a set of services, amenities, institutions, and goods that were distinct from what was available to those living in non-urbanized areas, i.e. the countryside. It seems to me that today technology has, for the first time, vastly diminished the advantages of concentration. Of course, mid-town Manhattan still offers unparalleled advantages, but the way of life in an average American city is no longer as vastly different from the way of life in suburban and rural areas as it once was. People may still choose to live in one place or another, but unlike in the past, concentration no longer offers decisive advantages in education, communications, employment opportunities, availability of goods, culture, and so on. It is not I who have undermined the difference, but society.


W: But does the decentralization of most cities really diminish the difference between urban and suburban neighborhoods? I would argue that it makes the contrast between the two stronger, more readily apparent. Decentralization has not cheapened urban environments...as the recent "revitalization" of many cities has shown, suburbanization has led to an increased appreciation of the distinct advantages that urban places offer. I guess, at this point, it would be good to have you explain what "urban" signifies to you.

WR: Think of the difference between "town" and "country" one hundred years ago. It was absolute and affected what you ate, how you lived, the amenities to which you had access, and much more. I would argue that today the differences between amenities, resources, etc. available to someone living in an exurb outside Denver or Pittsburgh, and living in downtown Denver or Pittsburgh, while they have not disappeared, are slight. The fact that information, medical care, education, entertainment, and so on have dispersed is significant. I am not aruing that there are no differences at all, but rather that they have, for most people, diminished to the point of being trivial. Nor is the balance weighted to the city, as it once was. Suburban Philadelphians, for example, have more choice in department stores or food stores, than those living in Center City. On the other hand, we all have equal access to Netflix and Amazon.

At this point in our history, urban means all of us who live in metropolitan areas, downtown, city neighborhoods, suburbs, and fringe areas.

I think that the "urban" that you describe, and which is what is described in the so-called "renaissance" refers to those who live in downtowns, who are generally either young professionals or retired people, and a small number of empty nesters. This is probably not more than 5 percent of the total city population.

Center City Philly has about 70,000 residents (very large for a US downtown), while the city has 1.5 million, so 5% is conservative, for most cities.


W: In a recent interview with Business Week, you were asked whether New Urbanism and Neotraditional Developments like New Daleville were in the vein of Jane Jacobs' brand of urbanism and you confirmed that you did, indeed, believe them to be very similar. I agree to an extent -- they do aim to achieve many of the same things Jacobs championed. But Jane focused heavily on density as a critical aspect of successful urbanism (and, from what I remember, did not think much of New Urbanist development), so how do you reconcile the extremely low (by compairison to her professed ideal) densities of these developments with the fact that they claim to aim for a rather Jacobsian ideal?

WR: Jacobs definitely espoused density + a mixture of uses. In “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” she wrote almost exclusively about Greenwich Vilage, which is an extreme example of both. I don’t think you have to interpret Jacobs literally to be influenced by her, and like almost all town planners post-DLGAC, the New Urbanism movement has found inspiration in her writing. It is true, as Robert A. M. Stern pointed out in his recent adress to the CNU convention in Philadelphia a few months ago, that the accomplishments of New Urbanism have had more to do with suburbs than with city centers so they have usually been built at lower densities. That has partly to do with the market in the 1980s, when New Urbanism started. Today, a few developers have figured out how to do high-density, mixed-use and we are seeing more new construction along those lines (Atlantic Yards, for example).

Incidentally, all ideas in urbanism that start out as ideologies (Charles Mulford Robinson’s city beautiful, Howard’s garden city, Jacobs, McHarg, DPZ) get severely compromised by the time they have gone through the sausage machine of the market. In the 1960s, did Jacobs imagine that her Village would become an expensive enclave? I doubt it.


W: The Village is certainly not what it was in the 1960s, but that has a great deal to do with people rejecting the aesthetics and isolation of the suburbs. The prices of places with a strong sense of place are rising specifically because of characterless development, which is what New Urbanism aims to change. It makes sense, then, that most of the successful NU developments would be outside of the urban core, but the one thing that the oft-cited examples (Seaside, Newpoint) share is a great attention to detail. After observing the development of New Daleville and comparing the outcome with other NU developments you've seen, how important do you think this attention to details is to successful New Urbanism?

WR: Attention to exterior detail in neotraditional developments is important. Partly it has to do with establishing a sense of place, partly with the houses being close to the street, hence more visible. I think that equally important is a marketing issue. Neotraditional development is not cheap to implement, since there is landscaping, street details, money spent on the public realm, usually a more expensive permitting process. The builder finds himself in the position of selling a house on a small lot for the same price as a house on a large lot. To offset the competitive disadvantage, builders have found that spending more on design and details of construction makes the house more attractive to buyers. The details at New Daleville included metal porch roofs, porch columns, solid front doors, often with side-lights, shutters, decorative moldings. The overall effect is to make the house appear more solid. The discovery that people will accept higher density in return for a sense of place and good design was one of the key discoveries of Seaside.

Incidentally, prices in places with a strong sense of place are not always higher. There are plent of attractive old villages that are languishing. Location is still an important factor. The first generation of neotraditional developments were in booming real estate markets—that helped a lot. At New Daleville, prices were initially set high (in the hope that people would pay more for detail), but as the market slow-down set in, prices were lowered significantly. This has had a positive effect on sales, and New Daleville now has the lowest prices in the area. But profits are lower than they were initially.


W: Speaking of money, much of the hesitation of the residents of Londonderry toward New Daleville seemed to have come from the fear of how increased density would affect land values in the area. How have things played out in the months since you finished Last Harvest?

WR: I think the general resistance to development from communities arises from the fact that new residents will mean more traffic on the roads, more children in the schools (hence higher schol taxes), and of course, development means the loss of views of open landscape, which is what originally drew people to the rural location. This is quite irrespective of density, except that lower density means less of all the above, so if development must take place, folks would prefer that density be as low as possible.

The other issue is that everyone wants their neighbor’s house to be more expensive than their own—not cheaper. So people are very resistant to having new housing that will cost less than what is already there. That is why it is so difficult to build affordble housing—nobody wants it in their neighborhood. By the way, New Daleville consists only of detached single-family houses. When I asked the developer, Joe Duckworth, about this, he said that he could have included town houses, but that would have made getting approval even more difficult, so he didn’t risk it.In Last Harvest I describe a town meeting at which Joe mentions that the future houses at New Daleville will cost about $200,000, which satisfied the neighbors. In fact, the New Daleville houses started at $340,000 when the sales office opened, although prices have now dropped to about $270,000. This is still more than the price of existring houses, so it is unlikely that New Daleville will negatively impact surrounding land values.


W: It's sort of ironic that two of the three worries that you listed as being associated with higher density in the suburbs -- increased automobile traffic and loss of natural open space -- are two of the biggest concerns of urbanists regarding suburban and especially exurban development, yet the two sides view these problems from slightly different angles. All of it, as you note in your book, gets lumped together as "sprawl." This seems to support your claim that sprawl is actually a myth, a scapegoat for change.

WR: As I wrote in Last Harvest, sprawl is always perceived as somebody else's fault. I think there are serious issues to be addressed in a country with a growing population and technologies that permit decentralization--and plenty of space--but the concept of sprawl has not so far proved useful in resolving the issues. It seems destined to reinforce entrenched positions, rather than finding a solution. Which is a shame. We need another model, that permits discussion rather than merely argument.


W: Any ideas of what that might be?

WR: I don't. But I do hope that it will be based on something other than prejudice, misinformation, and self-interest. Actually, replacing one simplistic model by another would not achieve much. I'm hoping that readers of Last Harvest come away with an appreciation of the complexity of the community building process. That would be a start.


Links:
Witold Rybczynski talks to Diane Brady of Business Week

A True Alternative

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Newton's Law is one of the few scientific maxims that I can recite, verbatim, years after my last science class. It's concise, it's eloquent, and it applies to so much more than physical or chemical reactions in the way that Newton described. Urbanism is the perfect example, I think.

Which came first -- the town or the city? That's actually a pretty easy question to answer, but there has been a constant push-and-pull between rural and urban places over the course of human civilization. At different times, with different demographic groups, one or the other is en vogue. But not recently; of late, we have been plagued in our building and planning practices by an intense mediocrity, a society-wide indeciciveness. What we want, of course, is the best of both worlds: the convenience, community, and culture of the city, and the peace, privacy, and pastoral scenery of the small rural town. What we've wound up with is suburbia: the best of nothing.

I don't talk much about towns here; this is an urbanist blog, after all, and I am an avowed urbanist. However, I think that small towns play a very fundamental and almost completely overlooked role in the creation of successful cities. Towns are the yin to the city's yang; the genuine, 180-degree counterpoint to urbanism. Let's be honest: cities aren't for everyone. For cities to thrive, there is a need for an equally viable rural alternative. Perhaps the most insidious facet of the suburbs' assault on society is the way in which they supplanted the small town as the alternative to the city. Racial segregation, auto-oriented sprawl, pollution, social tension, congestion -- all of these are well-discussed, very popular arguments against suburbia. But more than anything, the suburbs have caused generations of people all over the world to grow up in places that are neither here nor there.

A new study out of Pennsylvania yesterday illuminates the slow but steady recovery of that state's rural areas over the past three decades. While a decrease in unemployment and an increase in income are both seen as good signs, the report emphasizes the need for a comprehensive economic plan for the state's rural areas, which hold 28% of its population. With the growth of the internet-based economy, more and more people are finding it possible to live and work wherever they choose. This puts rural areas like Pennsylvania's at a crucial point in their economic history. These areas must begin to reclaim their rightful spot as the true alternative to the bustle of city living.

From the Pennsylvania report: "[T]he state must move beyond antiquated smokestack chasing economic development policies and invest, on a regional basis, in key rural industries with potential for growth. In much of rural Pennsylvania, these assets include natural beauty and tourist destinations, town centers, a powerful sense of community, and, in some places, colleges and universities."

While I agree with this statement, I also think that it aims too low. The need for small towns and rural communities is not simply to draw tourists from sprawling metropolitan areas, but also to convince these visitors of their supremacy over the suburban environment as an alternative to urbanity. So yes, focus on the natural beauty, the town centers, the powerful sense of community. But don't pitch them as tokens. Pitch them as elements of a truly equal and opposite lifestyle.


Links:
Rural Pennsylvania at an Economic Crossroads Says New Keystone Research Center Report on Trends Over Last Four Decades

UrbanOhio.com (Photo credit)