[William "Holly"] Whyte, in his films of New York City street life, identified the street corner as an important factor in urban dynamics. Here was a zone of serendipity where people encountered one another beneath the blinking walk man, where they paused to chat before parting, where they formed small convivial islands just as pedestrian flow was surging most strongly.

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]]> From Tom Vanderbilt’s Sidewalk Science; The peculiar habits of the pedestrian, explained:

[William “Holly”] Whyte, in his films of New York City street life, identified the street corner as an important factor in urban dynamics. Here was a zone of serendipity where people encountered one another beneath the blinking walk man, where they paused to chat before parting, where they formed small convivial islands just as pedestrian flow was surging most strongly. Even today, corners offer new uses; one often finds people talking there on their mobile devices, either held up by the signal or forgetting to move after the signal has changed. Either way, the corner is urban punctuation, a place to pause, essential to the whole civic grammar.

In part 2 of this excellent 4-part series in Slate, Vanderbilt (author of Traffic) talks to key researchers in the habits of pedestrians — particularly Jeff Zupan.

Much of the discussion is focused on sidewalk congestion — a problem that many cities wish they had! — and on the mechanics of the body, of the wind, and of the trend of pedestrians to “minimize their dissatisfaction” through creating new paths, taking escalators, jaywalking, and the like.

By the way, on the subject of corners: One of the reasons that Savannah’s streetscape is so vibrant is that it has such short blocks — as Jane Jacobs noted, this trait gives city dwellers and visitors constant options. And the design produces more corners, more places for unexpected and creative engagement with new streets and passersby.

Here’s a video embedded in part 2. It’s not labeled as clearly as I would like, but it appears to be a pedestrian simulation near a transit stop — the blue dots leaving the train come in floods that threaten to overwhelm the walkers headed into the station.

]]> 2663 http://www.billdawers.com/2012/01/15/the-end-of-the-exurbs/ Sun, 15 Jan 2012 15:20:21 +0000 http://www.billdawers.com/?p=1972 Read more →

]]> In the ongoing debates over development generally and housing specifically in the post-boom era, there’s considerable discussion and tension among planners and urbanists regarding the fate of the suburbs and the farther out exurbs (those outer rings of residential development beyond the existing suburbs).

I have long argued that increasing gas prices, the costs of road construction, the degradation of the environment and natural resources like water, and changing standards about what Americans want from their residential communities (alternate transportation, walkability, mixed-use, etc.) will doom many exurbs. And there was never a strong case to make that the suburbs would inevitably reach the exurbs, as many municipalities, planners, and developers have assumed.

A couple of reasons why that was a weak case: 1) any cities have lost population and can accommodate far more residents, easily, than they currently hold and 2) by mid-century the number of white Americans — the demographic group that has fueled exurban growth — will level off.

Let me emphasize that I’m not talking here about relatively close suburbs, which are near transit hubs and have easy access to a wide range of services. With a little more attention and a long-range plan, some of Savannah’s Southside neighborhoods could flourish as walkable, sustainable places to live with a much richer culture of place. (In the absence of a clear plan, attention, and money, I’m quite concerned about the Southside’s fate decades from now.)

Anyway, I just ran across a great piece going into much more detail about some of these issues, balanced by various counter-arguments, in the Philadelphia Inquirer from a week ago: Changing Skyline: Suburbia’s outer ring losing shine, some economists say by architecture critic Inga Saffron.

From the piece:

Is Oakcrest [a zombie subdivision on the fringe of the Philly suburbs where homes aren’t even selling for their replacement cost] a sign that the region’s suburban sprawl has finally reached its limit, or is it just a casualty of the housing bust?

Back then, experts maintained that the relentless march of suburbia would resume just as soon as the overstock of houses was exhausted. But five years after the market seized up, planners and economists aren’t so sure, and they’ve begun to ponder a previously unthinkable notion: The heyday of the suburbs may be over.

Not for every suburb, of course. The original, close-in, commuter suburbs, such as those on the Main Line, aren’t likely to lose their luster anytime soon. The next ring of suburbs can probably survive, too, if they make some structural adjustments, such as adding more townhouses and apartments. It’s low-density, fringe exurbs like Oakcrest, beyond the orbital pull of the big city, that may not have much of a future.

Saffron then cites Joel Kotkin’s counter-arguments and moves deeper into the issue.

The piece is highly recommended.

]]> 1972 http://www.billdawers.com/2012/01/03/museum-exhibit-highlights-200th-birthday-of-manhattans-street-grid/ Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:50:36 +0000 http://www.billdawers.com/?p=1916 Read more →

]]> Could Manhattan have ended up being laid out with something other than its simple grid, which gives the New York City borough its distinctiveness?

The answer is yes. Until the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 was implemented over a period of decades, Manhattan was destined to end up a patchwork of different sized lots and streets.

The grid is being honored right now at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) with the exhibit The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, which the museum describes this way:

The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011 celebrates the 200th anniversary of the Commissioners†Plan of 1811, the foundational document that established Manhattanâ€s famous street grid. Featuring an original hand-drawn map of New York’s planned streets and avenues prepared by the Commission in 1811, as well as other rare historic maps, photographs and prints of the evolution of the city’s streets, and original manuscripts and publications that document the cityâ€s physical growth, the exhibition examines the gridâ€s initial design, implementation, and evolution. The Greatest Grid traces the enduring influence of the 1811 plan as the grid has become a defining feature of the city, shaping its institutions and public life.

The NYT has a great piece today by Michael Kimmelman, “The Grid at 200: Lines That Shaped Manhattan”.

Savannah, whose downtown grid was more than 70 years old by the time Manhattan got serious about extending its, gets a mention:

First, Manhattan had to be surveyed, a task that took years. Property lines had to be redrawn, government mobilized for decades on end to enforce, open, grade and pave streets. Some 60 years passed before the grid arrived at 155th Street. Streets were still “rough and ragged” tracks for a long while, as one diarist observed in 1867, describing a recently opened stretch around 40th Street and Madison Avenue as a mess of “mud holes, goats, pigs and geese.”

Even so, the grid gave the island a kind of monumentality and order.

Was it monotonous? Yes. Frederick Law Olmsted was among those who thought so. Other city plans are certainly more sophisticated (Paris) or elegant (Barcelona) or stately (Savannah, Ga.).

But New Yorkâ€s grid had its virtues. For one thing, it proved flexible enough to adapt when the cityâ€s orientation did shift north-south, flexible enough to accommodate Olmstedâ€s Central Park, the genius of which lies in the contrast between its own irregularity and the regularity of the grid.

Kimmelman also notes other ways in which the grid has proven adaptable, beyond the financial boon created by development largely due in part to the grid itself:

Money and aesthetics arenâ€t antithetical, and the grid has proved itself oddly beautiful.

Iâ€m referring not just to the sociability it promotes, which Jane Jacobs identified, or to the density it allows, which Rem Koolhaas celebrates, or even to the ecological efficiency it sustains, which now makes New York, on a per-capita basis, a very green place. Iâ€m also referring to a kind of awareness it encourages.

Itâ€s true that Manhattan lacks the elegant squares, axial boulevards and civic monuments around which other cities designed their public spaces. But it has evolved a public realm of streets and sidewalks that creates urban theater on the grandest level. No two blocks are ever precisely the same because the grid indulges variety, building to building, street to street.

The piece also notes what should be one of the most obvious factors: “The grid also makes a complex place instantly navigable. [. . .] The city, like its grid, exists to be adopted and made oneâ€s own.”

It’s a great piece, and obviously of particular interest to those of us interested in the future of urban spaces and of urbanism generally.

]]> 1916 http://www.billdawers.com/2011/12/20/peter-kageyama-for-the-love-of-cities-and-the-small-things-that-increase-civic-engagement/ Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:46:28 +0000 http://www.billdawers.com/?p=1800 Read more →

]]> In my City Talk column today, I talk about how inordinately happy I was to be able to buy beer last Sunday — even though I didn’t actually buy beer and will hardly ever take advantage of the newly legalized Sunday package sales.

In my column I call the legalization a “small gift” and note the work of Peter Kageyama, author of For the Love of Cities.

Kageyama uses the term “love notes”, which I tried to incorporate into my 450 words but seemed to need a little too much explanation.

I’ve been perusing Kageyama’s book since meeting (re-meeting actually; we had chatted when Charles Landry spoke here years ago) him earlier this fall. You can find a lot more about him, his work, and For the Love of Cities on his website.

From Kageyama’s website:

A 2009 Gallup study that looked at the levels of emotional engagement people have with their communities, found that just 24% of people were “engaged” with their community. Gallup also found a significant relationship between how passionate and loyal people are to their communities and local economic growth. The most “attached” communities had the highest local GDP growth. Despite this, it feels as though our places and our leadership have forgotten how to connect with us emotionally and our cities have suffered because of it.

This mutual love affair between people and their place is one of the most powerful influences in our lives, yet we rarely think of it in terms of a relationship. If cities begin thinking of themselves as engaged in a relationship with their citizens, and if we as citizens begin to consider our emotional connections with our places, we open up new possibilities in community, social and economic development by including the most powerful of motivators—the human heart—in our toolkit of city-making.

Here’s 18 minutes of Kageyama at TEDx Iowa City. It’s well worth a watch. It’s filled with examples, narratives, and visuals about the small things — like the zombie walk in Pittsburgh that is my featured image with this post on the homepage — that increase civic engagement. The video is highly recommended:

]]> 1800 http://www.billdawers.com/2011/09/25/a-few-more-thoughts-on-third-places/ Mon, 26 Sep 2011 02:14:10 +0000 http://www.billdawers.com/?p=1325 Read more →

]]> In my City Talk column today — When third place isn’t so bad — I talk again about Ray Oldenburg’s theory of third places:

In his book The Great Good Place, Oldenburg demonstrates why these gathering places are essential to community and public life. He argues that bars, coffee shops, general stores, and other “third places” (in contrast to the first and second places of home and work), are central to local democracy and community vitality.

I talked about third places in relation to The Sentient Bean at the southern edge of Forsyth Park. The Bean’s 10th anniversary celebration is Friday evening, September 30th.

I also mentioned Oldenburg in a recent post here that includes a link to a guest column I wrote for The Inkwell, the student newspaper at Armstrong Atlantic Satate University.

In my life, the closest rival as a third place is the bar at American Legion Post #135, which is right around the corner from and the landlord of The Sentient Bean.

I have heard from a couple of readers who live in neighborhoods lacking such third places. I hope it’s something we’ll focus on as we continue to rethink how we live and where we live.

]]> 1325 http://www.billdawers.com/2011/09/05/restoring-the-oglethorpe-plan-as-much-as-possible-the-arguments-arent-just-historical/ http://www.billdawers.com/2011/09/05/restoring-the-oglethorpe-plan-as-much-as-possible-the-arguments-arent-just-historical/#comments Mon, 05 Sep 2011 19:20:14 +0000 http://www.billdawers.com/?p=1217 Read more →

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Sometimes in arguing for the full restoration of the Oglethorpe Plan, Savannah preservationists get accused of various forms of nostalgia — of arguing for preservation for the sake of preservation, of ignoring contemporary needs.

But those accusations show a fundamental lack of understanding about the grid system established by General Oglethorpe when he founded the colony of Georgia in 1733. The Oglethorpe Plan has proved amazingly resilient and has adapted itself stunningly well to the age of the automobile. In fact, the areas of downtown Savannah that see the worst traffic are those that have been most disrupted.

The other day, while perusing the draft of the Unified Zoning Ordinance (UZO), I ran across a couple of graphics that perfectly display the key principles of the Oglethorpe Plan. The one below shows how the streets are interconnected around each square. Historically, the squares played a variety of civic roles. The trust lots on the east and west sides of the squares were traditionally set aside for civic purposes, primarily houses of worship, but as the decades passed an increasing number of those lots were set aside for residential uses. Long before the advent of cars, the lanes provided parking and created housing for a variety of “lower income” residents, from slaves and domestic servants to laborers and today’s college age renters. The east-west connecting streets held a variety of housing types, while the north-south connecting streets developed in mixed use ways. The north-south service streets also developed a mix of uses, but those have proven least adaptable to cars: since so many of those streets were designed in the 20th century in ways to foster high auto speeds and poor conditions for pedestrians, property values have fallen and uses have dwindled.

Savannah is thought of as an incredibly green, beautiful, and pedestrian-friendly downtown, but look at how many streets there are. How can a city with such frequent streets work as well as Savannah does?

The frequent streets themselves are part of the magic. The many choices for drivers have the effect of quickly siphoning congestion away and dispersing traffic. As Jane Jacobs noted, those frequent streets are a characteristic of vibrant cities, providing both motorists and pedestrians with sometimes- exciting choices.

The original plan permitted a mix of commercial  and residential uses as well as a diversity of housing types and styles — and the same is true today.

But over the years, some of the original plan was chipped away, as you can see in the following map pulled from the UZO draft. Most of the changes were on the west side of the grid. There were three main culprits: the I-16 overpass, the Civic Center, and the Chatham County Courthouse. Along the way, two squares pretty much disappeared: Liberty (#9 below) and Elbert (#22).

These changes have been terrible for traffic flow. Instead of the grid dispersing traffic on the west side of downtown, we see bottlenecks as drivers are denied the historical choices. In addition to the closing of some streets, we saw the unnecessary addition of one-way traffic on Montgomery from Liberty to Broughton.

Pedestrians, too, were denied choices, and the changing traffic patterns had nightmarish results for MLK, the former West Broad Street, which would have faced tough times if the only obstacle were the razing of the old Union Station.

I routinely hear Savannahians downplay the upsides of removing the I-16 flyover — some even seem disdainful of the idea. But it’s a straightforward way to move toward a variety of goals:

• allowing traffic to disperse more quickly in the southwest quadrant of the Historic District
• adding acres of valuable street-front property to the tax rolls
• permitting pedestrians and cyclists to move easily across streets that are now forbidding

I hope that the I-16 flyover removal will spur other changes that lead to the reconstruction of the Oglethorpe Plan. Once the flyover is down, Montgomery Street can be two-way for its entire length. Even if we never manage to build a new arena or leave a large building in the place of the existing one, it would be possible to open up Jefferson Street from Liberty to Oglethorpe. Even if the Courthouse stays in place, maybe one day we’ll switch out that horrid parking garage on Broughton for one that allows street frontage commercial uses on Broughton Street and opens up Broughton Lane.

All of these changes would encourage pedestrianism, give more choices to drivers and improve traffic flow, and give more inherent value to the land on neighboring blocks.

Along the way, we could restore part of Elbert and Liberty Squares in ways that effectively slow traffic and create more opportunities for the public green spaces that Savannah is so famous for.

Restoring the Oglethorpe Plan isn’t just nostalgic; it could be one key to a thriving downtown into the next century and beyond.

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