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Category Places & Spaces

Mandating attractive urban design

The most recent installment of the American Enterprise Institute’s series Society and Culture Outlook features a piece about the role of urban design in how people use cities. The article “A plea for beauty: a manifesto for a new urbanism” by Roger Scruton is a deviation from AEI’s typically conservative view toward central planning. Scruton favors heavy-handed planning of the appearance of the built environment, essentially advocating for strict form-based zoning codes: Many suggestions have been made as to how an attraction to the center might be generated. Building downtown convention centers, expensive museums, and concert halls; offering tax credits for city-center businesses; creating enterprise zones; and removing some of the regulations that make living, moving, and trading downtown so difficult have all been tried, and none has worked. And the reason they do not work is because they are addressing symptoms instead of causes. People flee from city centers because they do not like city centers. And they do not like city centers because they are alienating, ugly, and without a human face. Or rather, they do not like city centers when they are alienating, ugly, and inhuman, the normal case in America. [. . .] The proof of this is easy to find in the old cities of Europe. People choose to live in the center of Paris, Rome, Prague, or London rather than the periphery. Others who do not live in those cities want to spend their vacations there to enjoy the culture, entertainment, and beauty of their surroundings. These are flourishing cities, in which people of every class and occupation live side by side in mutual dependency while maintaining the distance that is one of the great gifts of the urban way of life. And there is a simple explanation for this: People wish to live […]

Cities and the Market Process: Part 4

This series looks at some of the ways that people organize themselves to live alongside each other in cities. Part 1 looks at inherent problems with top-down planning, and this part will expand on this issue with the specific problems of pricing government-owned land. Prices are an emergent order that convey information beyond what is available to any individual. Entrepreneurs are incentivized by profits to provide consumers with the goods that they are looking for. The market is constantly moving toward equilibrium as consumer preferences change and entrepreneurial discovery takes place. With all of these moving parts, equilibrium prices will never be achieved, but we will always be moving toward equilibrium as entrepreneurs respond to profit and loss feedback. For me, the clearest description of this market process is Israel Kirzner’s Competition and Entrepreneurship.  The essay “I, Pencil” by Leonard E. Read provides a simple illustration of the dispersed knowledge that prices capture. He points out that there is not a single person on earth with the knowledge to construct a pencil, one of the simplest consumer goods available. Prices allow for this division of labor. While the land market is distinct from manufactured goods, prices play an equally important role in allocating land use. The knowledge of this highest value use is likewise disperse and tacit, so no one decision-maker has the necessary information to allocate land efficiently. The problem of government pricing is perhaps most severe in below market-rate or zero-price street parking, but it can also be seen in open space, where the value of the land that is dedicated to (often unused) public space is not considered. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs criticizes government-provided land use in the form of city sidewalks that are too narrow, parks that are too large or not visible […]

Market Urbanism Flickr Group

Small streets are all over urban planning blogs right now. Nathan Lewis at New World Economics is leading the way with beautiful images of really narrow streets along with Charlie Gardner at Old Urbanist, Small Streets, and Cap’n Transit. They have all compiled photographs of pedestrian-centric streets from all over the world with very inspiring results. Some of my favorite posts on small streets are here, here, here, and here. I’ve started a Flickr group with the hopes of providing another way for urbanists to share their own images of beautiful (or not beautiful) streets and talk about city design. I’ve started it off with some of my own photos with a couple of disclaimers. I know nothing about photography except that I’m not good at it, and I’ve never been to many of the cities known for really narrow streets. I hope to add some photos of nice small streets right here in the Mid-Atlantic sometime soon. I’m sure you all have many better pictures of really narrow streets and pedestrian environments, and I hope you’ll share some. I would suggest flagging your photos as Creative Commons which means that any bloggers would be free to use them with attribution, but if you’d prefer not to allow others to use them, feel free to add them to the group as copyright protected. To add photos to the group, you just have to create a Flickr account, upload photos, and then add away. You can also comment on any of the photos I’ve added or on the group’s discussion board.

The North Korean Origins Of Renzo Piano’s Shard Tower

Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks London’s Shard skyscraper (shameless article-I-wrote-about-London-skyscrapers plug) looks like Pyongyang’s Ryugyong Hotel. Koryo Tours, the only tour group that offers westerners package to North Korea, plays up the similarities on its blog: To the eyes of us all at Koryo Tours it looks like Renzo Piano has been copying Pyongyang… (Note the following is not 100% accurate – but close!…

Italy’s Austerity Plan Spurs Transport Deregulation

There’s been a lot of handwringing by American lefties over the austerity plans that Germany is asking indebted eurozone governments like Italy and Greece to implement in exchange for bailouts, but many aspects of the plans – especially labor market deregulation – are long overdue no matter which side if the aisle you sit on (in the US, at least). In searching for information on the deregulatory aspects of Prime Minister Mario Monti’s “Save Italy” austerity plan, I came upon this interesting bit on transport deregulation in Corriere della Sera. I’ve never actually studied or spoken Italian, but hopefully this is a workable translation, if a bit literal: The recipe that the Antitrust Authority has chosen for taxi liberalization will double the number of licenses, but with each driver receiving a second one as compensation….

Cutting Costs On California HSR Doesn’t Have To Add Delays

Scrapping viaducts like this would make California HSR cheaper, faster to build, and easier to maintain, without a loss in quality The recent peer review report recommending that California delay construction on the first segment of its high-speed rail project has caused a bit of consternation in the transit twittosphere. Blogger The Overhead Wire wrote, “Sorry, but defunding HSR won’t make local agencies $10b richer.” I replied, “But it might start a long-overdo convo on costs,” and he responded (and many agreed): “and then nothing will get done in my lifetime and costs won’t matter….

In Defense Of Land Reclamation: It Ain’t All Palm Islands!

Earlier today Urban Photo Blog tweeted earlier today a link to an article about Hong Kong’s latest land reclamation project, with an obviously sarcastic “because it worked so well in Dubai!” tacked on at the end. Not to pick on Urban Photo Blog – actually, his Twitter account is definitely one of the best I follow – but I think that some of boomtime Dubai’s real estate projects, among them the infamous Palm Islands, give land reclamation a bad rap. …

California HSR Review Panel Recommends Against $2.7 Billion Bond Issue

Enormous viaducts like this are one reason for the project's ballooning cost estimates Well, the other shoe has finally dropped: the California High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group is recommending that the state legislature not authorize the issue of $2.7 billion in bonds to begin paying for the state’s planned $98.5 billion high-speed rail line….

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