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Russia links

1. “Experts have proposed increasing road taxes for Moscow drivers six or seven-fold in an effort to alleviate the Russian capital’s notorious traffic congestion.” 2. Moscow Mayor Sobyanin wants to regulate taxis, of which over 80% (!) are current unlicensed. Racial undertones abound (“They should get them off the road, especially those who came from the mountains”), and you know a plan is probably not a good idea when even the monopolists (i.e., current licensed drivers) are skeptical. 3. Moscow drivers are planning a protest over the recent death of a student at the hands of one of the city’s notorious official cars that use flashing blue lights to routinely halt traffic throughout the congested capital. 4. Russian President Medvedev has signed a decree banning foreigners from owning land along most of Russia’s borders with Finland and Norway. It’s unclear how they’ll deal with land already owned by them. It’s unclear to me if the ban includes land extending into, say, the Russian city of Vyborg. 5. The Potemkin Village of Skolkovo. Is there any officially-designated Silicon Valley wannabe that hasn’t been an utter failure? More on Moscow’s unfortunate urbanism here.

Almost-Thanksgiving list

Unfortunately, none of these things are really things to be thankful for: 1. 81% of Americans disagree with Kelo v. City of New London in a 2009 survey, with the wording being quite generous to the pro-takings side. 2. Who possibly could have thought this was a good idea? It’s like they took every bad publicly-subsidized megaproject idea they could think of and rolled them into one. 3. NYU’s plan to build a forth tower in the middle of I. M. Pei’s three towers in Greenwich Village (discussed here by commenter Benjamin Hemric) has officially died, the death kneel coming from Pei himself. NYU’s plan B is to build the tower on a plot that they already own and can develop as-of-right. They’ll be tearing down a supermarket to build it, but who still eats food these days anyway? 4. “…there isn’t a single grocery chain store within [Detroit’s] city limits.” 5. Apparently the kiosk tear-downs in Moscow were a result of nothing more than Mayor Sobyanin’s verbal order, and the kiosks are being allowed to reopen until the city can formally close them. The unaccountable government-by-fiat of the USSR dies hard.

Sobyanin’s horrific plan for Moscow

It’s been a few months since longtime Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov was fired, so I figured it would be a good time to check in on the city. In spite of Moscow’s infamous traffic and “perversely-sloped” population density gradient, the former mayor’s plan to build 100 km of new metro tracks and over 350 km of new railroad tracks was rejected just a few weeks before his ouster as too expensive. So now that the new mayor, Segrey Sobyanin, has announced his plan to untangle Moscow’s Gordian knot of traffic, how does it measure up? Well, put quite simply, it’s probably the worst urban plan I’ve seen since Paul Rudolph’s plan for the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Increasing the amount of parking by building large lots on the outskirts of town seems to be the most prominent proposal. Like the author of this Bloomberg article which claims that parking spaces in the city “meet 30 percent of needed capacity,” Muscovites don’t seem to recognize that all cars obviously already have places to park, and that increasing the amount of parking is only going to increase the ease of owning a car, and hence the amount of people who choose to do so. Russian urban planners seem to be stuck in the 1950s, too – here is the president of the national planners’ guild claiming that Moscow needs to more than double the surface area it dedicates to roads. The plan also seems to operate under the assumption that public transportation is the problem – their promises to expand mass transit ring hollow when they’re also contemplating banning trolleybuses from the city center and banning the private fleets of jitneys, known as marshrutki, which provide higher quality and more expensive service than the city’s decrepit buses. Some of the elements of the […]

The economics of redevelopment and the shape of socialist cities

Earlier today I read an article by Daniel Garst about Bejing’s awkward population distribution that reminded me of a journal article about the general shape of socialist cities that I read a while back. Garst talks about Beijing being a “circus tent” when it comes to density, with population density increasing as you travel away from the city center, in contrast to the “pyramid” style of most cities, with high densities in the center and lower densities around the periphery (see chart for a visual representation). This immediately made me think of an article by Alain Bertraud and Bertrand Renaud called “Socialist Cities without Land Markets,” where they describe exactly this phenomenon, and explain it as a failure of administrative urban planning. Here’s an excerpt: As their economy and their population grow, cities expand through the progressive addition of concentric rings, similar to the growth of trees in successive seasons. New rings are added to the periphery as the city grows. With each ring, land use reflects the combined effects of demography, technology, and the economy at the time when the ring was developed. Wile this organic incremental growth is common to all cities, in a market city changing land prices exert their pressure simultaneously in all areas of the city, not just at the periphery. Land prices exert a powerful influence to recycle already developed land in the inner rings when the type and intensity of the existing use is too different from the land’s optimum economic use. Thus, changing land values bring a built-in urban dynamism as ceaseless variations in land prices put a constant pressure on the current uses of land and trigger changes to new activities and/or densities. Under the administrative-command economy, the absence of land prices eliminated the main incentive to redevelop built-up areas by […]

More links!

Why didn’t I catch onto this whole linking thing earlier? Are these link lists boring for you guys? 1. Human Transit has a great post on “density” and all the different ways to measure it, with a cool picture of sprawling apartment buildings that illustrates why transit use in the Las Vegas metro area is so low, despite the fact that it’s actually slightly denser than the Vancouver metro area (?!). 2. Rich old white Manhattanites against BRT lanes. 3. Privately-paid rent-a-cops gaining traction in Oakland. 4. Longtime Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov has been fired, which some hope will make things easier on property developers in one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets (“[Current] city policy practically rules out private land ownership and forces developers to lease plots under “investment contracts” that often give a share to the city”). Most, however, are girded for a multi-year transition while new palms are greased. 5. Damon Root at Reason magazine explains why Columbia’s Manhattanville eminent domain takings are illegal even post-Kelo.

Exporting (sub)urbanism: Kuala Lumpur and the communist world

by Stephen Smith Adam Martin at William Easterly’s development blog Aid Watch has a post up warning about the tendency among developing nations to adopt Western styles wholesale, even if such styles are not even efficient in their countries of origin. He posits this as a sort of developmental Whiggishness, and cites education policy and intellectual property law as possible examples of the trend. We here at Market Urbanism, by virtue of language and location, tend to focus on urbanism in North America and Europe, but I thought this would be a good opportunity to discuss the state of urbanism in developing countries. The starkest example of misplaced developmental Whiggishness in planning I can think of is the city of Kuala Lumpur. The city was practically brand new when it was made capital of the Federal Malay States in 1895, and as a British protectorate, the Crown sent New Zealand planner Charles Reade to the Malaysian capital in 1921 to head its planning department. Schooled in the methods of the nascent Garden City movement in the UK, Reade made a name for himself by spreading the sprawling, proto-suburban style throughout Australia and New Zealand before his posting in British Malaya. Under Reade’s aegis, Kuala Lumpur became a test case for the movement’s applicability outside of the industrialized West. Unlike in the West, where dense, built-up urban cores relegated Garden City developments to small new towns and the outskirts of large cities, Kuala Lumpur offered an opportunity to build a metropolis from scratch as a Garden City. Charles Reade eagerly set to work building sprawling, low-density housing estates alongside wide roads which anticipated widespread private vehicle ownership. Residential, commercial, and industrial areas were segregated and separated by grassy, undeveloped parkbelts, characteristic of the Garden City style. Following independence, a nationalist Malaysian […]

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