Recycling the Suburbs—Followup Notes

Alison Arief has now posted a followup note on the suburbs in her By Design blog. Based partly on comments from readers, it is enlightening not only for Arief's analysis and resource recommendations, but for what it reveals about the attitudes of urban dwellers toward suburbanites and vice-versa.

Since the suburbs as they now stand are becoming less viable every day, it is up to all of us to find humane, sustainable ways to retrofit them. Arief's followup note shows how difficult this may be. Teamwork begins with the sense of being on the same side. With respect to making the suburbs more sustainable, there are a lot of good ideas out there. And there are a lot of unhelpful attitudes. Let's hope this can change, and quickly.

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Recycling the Suburbs

The American suburb—fuel-intensive, automobile-based, and without walkable neighborhoods—is coming to the end of its useful life. Rising fuel costs and the collapse of the mortgage market mean that some planned developments will not proceed, some developments that have begun will never be finished, and many suburban residents will have to move to smaller and less expensive houses.

Those who, like James Howard Kunstler. dislike the suburbs, expect and hope that they will collapse of their own weight. Others, including this blog, have tried to find ways to make existing suburbs more sustainable by measures like connecting them with public transit and revising zoning codes.

One of the most interesting recent discussions of the design problems posed by the decline of the suburbs is a recent posting in Alison Arief's By Design blog. Although the article reaches no conclusions—Arief admits that she has no perfect solution—it outlines the difficulty of finding creative approaches to recycling the suburbs even while it hopes they will be found.

Well worth reading.

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A Follow-Up Note

Just over two years ago, I posted a three-part series on a proposal to build a ten-story parking lot (instead of the originally proposed condominium) in the heart of Philadelphia's downtown. The series can be found at "Design for What," Part I; Part II; and Part III.

In the intervening two years, the developer has found enough tenants to justify building the full condominium, and the building's exterior is nearly complete. While this outcome does little to address other issues discussed in the post, such as creating jobs in the city and the proliferation of parking lots, it is at least better than a parking garage, however "beautiful" (the developer's term when making the proposal).

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Alison Arieff on Water Management

Alison Arieff's latest By Design column gives a good summary of possible solutions to the problem of water. Well worth reading.

What to Do with a Big Box Store

If you set out to deliberately build an unsustainable retailing structure, you could hardly do worse than the big box store. Unattractive, surrounded by acres of parking lots, and closed off from the outside world, the big box store comes close to violating every rule of sustainable and beautiful building. It is a sad legacy of the move to the suburbs.

It becomes even worse when it fails. Stores close, developers abandon it and move on, and it becomes a ghost. (See the three-part series in this blog on Dead Spaces: Part I; Part 2; Part 3.) The ghosts of big box stores complicate water runoff, contribute to climate change even when no one uses the parking lot, and are even more ugly than their live big box cousins.

In the long run, the big box store will almost certainly succumb to rising fuel prices and environmental constraints. The major question is what to do with the buildings and parking lots that remain when a big box store is abandoned. Tearing it down is one possibility, but this is both unimaginative and (because of the building materials used in most big box structures) hazardous to the environment.

Now the Washington Post has assembled a team of artists, architects, engineers, and developers to come up with creative suggestions for recycling these dead spaces. The article by Joel Garreau, repays study. The Post's team has some imaginative suggestions, with artists' renderings that bring them to life.

One doesn't have to agree with all the suggestions to see that this is a good start toward resolving an issue that we face even as I write and will face more urgently in the future.

Empty Houses and Toxic Loans

Amid all the commentary on the housing bubble and the banking crisis of 2008, few have asked what kind of houses and communities the real estate boom was helping to create. This is not surprising; the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the threat to the U.S. and world financial system, and the Bush Administration's bailout plan have pushed all such questions into the background.

It is important, however, that we ask them. The consequences of our current crisis will include not just financial disruption, but bricks and mortar—houses and subdivisions built on the assumption that the market would take care of community planning with little oversight from the communities where the homes were being built. The result, in far too many places, was suburban design on steroids. The new "financial instruments" that have now proven so badly flawed financed bigger houses in neighborhoods where two or three cars became a necessity because the nearest stores and services were ten or twenty miles from home.

Many of these houses are now in foreclosure, unsaleable, or abandoned. Most, because of the housing bubble, were priced far beyond the means of ordinary families. In 2003, the New York Times reported that the rise in housing prices had affected mainly communities that were already affluent. By 2008, houses everywhere had been affected to some extent. The market did a good job of making money for developers and hedge fund managers; it did a poor job of providing affordable, sustainable houses in liveable neighborhoods.

What we forgot in the early years of the 21st Century is that, as Adam Smith argued, markets alone do not create a viable society or the good life. Smith, who in his time was known as much for his moral philosophy as for his economics, relied on our moral sentiments to restrain market excesses and protect the common good.

It is impossible to know whether there will eventually be buyers for the houses now in foreclosure, or how long they will sit empty in virtually abandoned neighborhoods. As fuel prices rise and access to public transit becomes an asset, the automobile-centered suburb and the McMansion will surely become less viable. If we are wise, we will learn from this episode and begin once more to invest in real neighborhoods and sustainable housing.

Offsetting Without Tears

Carbon offsetting, in which individuals, households and corporations "offset the carbon emissions [their] lifestyle generates by funding projects that reduce carbon emissions" (Consumer Reports, March 2008), have become increasingly popular lately. Offsetting seems to offer an accessible way to reduce emissions beyond what is possible by individual conservation alone. In principle, it is a helpful idea. In practice, there are traps for the unwary.

The system seems easy and painless. A family or corporation calculates its carbon footprint (the emissions it generates annually). This is theoretically easy to do using one of the many online carbon footprint calculators. Most calculators—which are in effect fundraising devices—assign a dollar amount per ton to carbon emissions. The user donates this amount to the organization which provided the calculator, and the money goes to projects that are supposed to lower the worlds's overall emissions, usually low-emissions power projects, conservation projects, or reforestation projects.

The difficulties with this approach, although they do not necessarily invalidate the idea of offsetting, should lead us to approach it with care:

• Calculating a family or corporate carbon footprint is not a simple matter, and the online calculators are not as easy or helpful as they seem. I tried four of them and got family footprints ranging from 16.0 tons (of carbon) per year to 32 tons. This in turn led to suggested offsetting donations ranging from $236.00 to $640.00.
  
• Every calculator that I tested needed data that was difficult (or in some cases nearly impossible) to get. This shows that the calculators are serious—providing data on energy use requires a lot of record-keeping and research—but it can be frustrating for the user, especially when:
• Online carbon footprint calculators ask different questions, which means they are using different metrics and algorhythms for their calculations. Thus it is not surprising that they get different results.
• Carbon offsets and providers are currently unregulated in the United States. Consumers should be sure that an offset provider will actually deliver on its promises.
  
• Although contributions to (or investments in) sustainable power and conservation are likely to be useful, experts differ about whether reforestation is likely to have much of an impact. An organization like The Nature Conservancy, which emphasizes reforestation and land management, may have less impact on carbon emissions than a group which invests in sustainable power. (The Nature Conservancy's calculator, however, is the most thorough and easy to use of the ones I tested, which is why it appears in the column on the right of this essay.)
  
• Some, like the environmentalist George Monbiot, argue that carbon offsetting can provide a kind of "license to pollute," allowing families and corporations to think they are saving the planet without changing their own habits—or in some cases, polluting more and rationalizing their bad habits with offsetting. This argument, while perhaps unfair, stands as a reminder that there is no solution to climate change that avoids changes in individual and corporate behavior.

Despite the difficulties, carbon offsetting has in fact raised capital for low-emissions energy and conservation projects—and reforestation, whether or not it sequesters carbon as its advocates claim, is desirable in itself for many reasons. The problem with offsetting is not the concept itself. It is finding the best way to implement it.

Here is one approach that seems reasonable for a small household. First, calculate the household carbon footprint using a good online calculator. The suggested donation will vary with the organization providing the calculator, and in any case, one household may be able to give less, another more. The simplest way to proceed is to use the suggested donation as guideline. One can only do what is within one's power to do.

The keys to this approach are

• Offset some of your household's normal usage. Offsetting is of little or no use if it becomes a rationalization for increased emissions.
• Do not simply donate to the organization that offers the calculator. If you already know and trust the organization, a donation may be the wisest use of your money. If not, without regulation and established quality standards it can be very difficult to judge. A good alternative is to:
  
• Donate to a good local project that needs financial support to succeed, or invest directly in an alternative energy project or company that needs capital.
  
• In addition to making an offsetting donation, look for additional ways to reduce your household's carbon footprint.
  

Our family's particular project is the Friends Center's green retrofit in Philadelphia. In the United States, buildings are the third largest source of greenhouse gases after the industrial and transport sectors (EPA figures), which makes green building projects particularly suitable for offsets. The Friends Center was originally a more or less typical energy-intensive 1970s building. It differs from most buildings of its era only in having windows that open, thanks to pressure on the architects from the organizations which built it. Remaking it will save a great deal on carbon emissions even though it is a small building. Supporting a project like this will not, by itself, save the planet. But it is a start.

Allison Arieff on Housing and Community

Allison Arieff's latest posting in her blog for the New York Times ("Is Your House Making You Look Fat?") is a sharply-written essay on how to design houses for lower environmental impact, greater sense of community, and better health for those who live in them.

Well worth reading.

Dead Space—Third of Three Parts

In the 1950s, at the start of the large-scale migration to the suburbs, few thought of problems like the environment and water runoff. Now they have become crucial, both for the present and for the future. How should we plan and build for the future? And how can we reclaim the acres of dead space that surround us?

Planning for the future is easier to envision. We have to change, and in at least these specific ways:

• We need to end the practice of building single stores or malls in the center of large surface parking lots. The era of the standalone shopping mall or big box store is coming to an end, whether we like it or not. In a world with limited space and resources, acres of surface parking—one of the characteristics of standalone shopping—will no longer be possible. Nor will they be desirable.
• We need to connect shopping, work, and living space. Stores and work within walking distance or an easy transit ride of where people live were once the norm. Suburban-style shopping is a historical aberration, brought on by zoning codes that separate living from shopping and working, and by our reliance on cheap fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are no longer cheap, either for consumers or for the environment. And the drive from home to school to store to work to mall and back and around has become increasingly burdensome as traffic has increased. The old-style zoning codes have failed. They need to change so that we can once again walk to work and to the shops.
  
• We need to revise building codes to require new homes, stores, and offices to be as sustainable as possible. In the long run, green buildings are cheaper to operate than traditional ones, and they are often more pleasant places to live and work.
• Planners and the community—not developers alone—must take responsibility for what happens to a neighborhood in the long term. If a mall or housing tract project fails now, responsibility for converting the land to new uses rests with those who own the land. Failure to reuse the land, however, has consequences for the whole community. Ownership of land may be private, but the fate of the land is a legitimate public concern that planners and the community (which should be part of the planning process) must consider when approving development projects.
• We need to start building in ways that deliberately allow for the needs of wildlife, and that allow more wild species to continue on the land. Preserving wild (or nearly wild) space is vital both for the environment and for the spirit. (Thanks to Marshall Massey for his suggestion in a comment.)
  

Following these four principles will not end problems with land use, but taken together they provide a more creative approach than the kind of development we now see in our suburbs.

As to the future of our current dead spaces, green rehabilitations like the Forensic Science Center in Philadelphia give some guidance. Sadly, many shopping malls and big box stores are not very good buildings and may not be salvageable. Nearly all of them, however, are located on tracts of land that would provide good mixed-use development. The shopping mall and the big box store provide an abundance of products; mixed-use development can provide an abundance of life. In the long run, we must move away from the mall and the big box and back toward communities and real neighborhoods.

Dead Space—Second of Three Parts

For years, the forensics laboratory in Philadelphia was a cramped space in the basement of police headquarters. Now it is located in an award-winning green building that may point toward a future for the abandoned shopping mall and its acres of parking.

The Forensics Science Center began as an abandoned public school building—a solid 1929 structure surrounded by a large parking lot. The building had "good bones," in the words of the lead architect on the project. (A complete list of project participants is available on the American Institute of Architects web site.) The completed building provides a cheerful working environment, uses natural light and climate control in very creative ways, and manages the problem of chemical waste—which is both severe and inevitable in a forensics laboratory—with minimum damage to the environment.

It also reclaims much of the parking lot for natural water runoff.

Traditional parking lots, which are impermeable, interfere with normal water runoff. The old school building parking lot posed a particular challenge because it is close to the Delaware River and had been a major source of water pollution in the neighborhood. Despite the need for parking for police vehicles, the architects managed to cut runoff substantially:

The previously impervious site now includes large areas of vegetated swales and buffer vegetation, improving water catchment by roughly 33%, while still meeting the Center’s demanding parking and servicing requirements. Linear vegetated swales paralleling the parking rows filter stormwater and allow it to evaporate or infiltrate the ground before it enters storm drains. Site plantings are drought-resistant, requiring less watering and maintenance than conventional landscaping. (From the AIA web site.)

Most parking lots are soul-destroying wastelands. The Forensic Science Building's parking lot, with its swaths of green and well-designed plantings, is not.

We can draw a number of lessons from the Forensic Science Building and its parking lot.

• Many buildings, even long-abandoned ones, can be rehabilitated with smaller carbon footprints. The initial cost is high, but as green rehabilitation becomes standard, it will drop. And by using less fuel, projects like the Forensic Science Building eventually pay for themselves.
• Parking lots can be less destructive if carefully planned. More important, they can be smaller, and the building less dependent on the private car, if we also learn another lesson of the Forensic Science project:
• Any green rehabilitation must include good connections to mass transit. Most of the employees at the Forensic Science Building take public transit to work because existing connections to the neighborhood were good. At any time, the majority of the vehicles in the parking lot are police cars and vans transporting evidence, not private cars used by the employees.
• Well-designed green buildings are pleasant places to work. The combination of large windows (for natural light) and airy rooms makes forensic work, which is often very distressing, easier to bear. Sickness and absenteeism dropped sharply after the laboratory moved to its new quarters.

The Forensic Science project and other green rehabilitation projects provide hope for the future of the dead space that is everywhere in our suburbs and increasingly in our cities. Much of it can be rescued. The question is whether it will be.

Dead Space—First of Three Parts

Few places in this world are more sad than a derelict shopping mall. Built to face inward, its outer walls are dead space, often with no windows. Acres of empty parking lot surround it. On a windy day, old paper—flyers advertising sales in the stores, chewing gum wrappers, torn up shopping bags—whirl and flutter like the ghosts of some nightmare past. The doors are locked, usually chained, and any windows that were in the outer walls are boarded up and blank. One or two signs, sometimes with letters missing, mark the now-departed stores that were there. And all is silence.

More and more, in many places in the United States, we are seeing these dead hulks, as developers buy up green land, pave it, build a new mall, and then move on when business disappears or when the next mall down the road attracts all of the old mall's customers. The results are ugly and disheartening, and their larger implications hardly bear thinking about.

Each mall includes the inevitable parking lot, so enormous that finding one's car after shopping is often a major undertaking that wastes half an hour or more. Each parking lot, in its turn, replaced acres of grass, trees, or farmland. Even when it was successful, the mall contributed to problems with water runoff and pollution. Once it has become derelict, it still does—and it is often unclear who, if anyone, is responsible for cleaning up the mess and repairing the damage. Worse, the odds are that the mall has become derelict because another and almost certainly larger mall has superseded it. Thus to the problems created by the mall that is now derelict, we have added the problems created by the new mall that is (for the moment) successful. Both are, in ecological terms, dead space that is helping to destroy our planet.

The results of this kind of development can be dramatic. Forty years ago, Bucks County, just outside of Philadelphia, was the central character in a bucolic diary, Area Code 215: A Private Line in Bucks County, by Walter Teller. The book is a kind of modern Walden, with reflections on nature, farming, gardening, canals, and the neighbors. It is a comforting book to read. People go about their business; each day brings rain, sun, snow, clouds, and all shades of weather. There is no flooding or natural disaster in this book because in those days Bucks County was a kind and gentle environment.

The Bucks County that Teller describes has been gone for at least twenty years, victim of tract house development and mall-style retailing. Much of the farmland is gone and paved over. There are few derelict shopping malls, because Bucks County is prosperous. But there is plenty of dead space—and with it, flooding and natural disasters where before there were none. Some riverside communities now flood annually, although each year the residents hope that this flood will be the last.

It will not. There is too much paving and too little soil to absorb the rain. And in the long run, the busy malls that are the source of most of the problem may become less busy and be succeeded by bigger, gaudier ones. It is a cycle which, if we do not find a way to stop it, means nothing but trouble in the future.

Insoluble Problems, Soluble Opportunities

In one episode of Yes, Prime Minister, the British political satire, the Prime Minister tells his cabinet that "every problem is also an opportunity." His Cabinet Secretary, a high-ranking civil servant, then observes that the cabinet must beware of creating "insoluble opportunities."

It is a wonderful exchange, and it tells us a lot about ourselves and the debate over climate change. Mainstream commentators no longer doubt the reality of climate change, but they see only problems in trying to cope with it. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions, it is argued, would do enormous economic damage, especially cutbacks at the levels recommended by scientists and the United Nations in its latest report. It is fraught with problems, so we cannot do it—or at least not at the recommended levels.

But, as the Prime Minister observed, every problem is an opportunity. Not every problem has a solution, but every problem gives us a chance to think anew about how we work, play, travel, and live our lives. And we may never cut back our emissions as much as we would like, but the effort to do so—to rethink our approaches—can lead us toward a better world even if we are not entirely successful.

Consider the problem of buildings. Buildings are one of the major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. They are also one of the areas where change means opportunity, not privation. Retrofitting old buildings for more sustainability; designing new ones with smaller carbon footprints; even simple actions like installing insulation in old houses—all of these measures involve investment, money, and jobs. They are not insoluble problems, but soluble opportunities.

The central problem with buildings is not the technology. Architects already know how to build more sustainable buildings and refit old ones, and over time they will find better ways to do so. The central problem is with ourselves, and the saga of the Comcast Tower in Philadelphia is a good example.

The Comcast Tower was designed to be the world's tallest green building. Among its features was exclusive use of waterless urinals, a new technology that is known to save tens of thousands of gallons of water over time. The Philadelphia Plumber's Union, which has a great deal of political clout, objected. The objections delayed construction on the building and threatened to undercut its green certification. The problem, according to the plumbers, was that waterless urinals would result in less work for members of the union. They were a problem—not an opportunity.

The plumbers were trapped in old thinking. It is perfectly true that installing waterless urinals takes less time (and is therefore less lucrative) than installing conventional ones. But waterless technology is the future; conventional plumbing is the past. The Plumber's Union failed to see the opportunity to master a new technology which, in the long run, would preserve its members' jobs as new buildings adopted the new urinals and older ones converted to them. If Plumber's Union members would not install the technology of the future, someone else would. Failure to adapt, as in most situations, would mean failure to thrive.

A more sustainable society need not be a society in economic collapse. It could be a better place to live than our current world. But we will not see this, let alone achieve it, if, like the Plumber's Union, we fail to see that every problem is also an opportunity.

Design for What? Third of Three Parts

A ten-story parking garage at 15th and Chestnut Streets in Center City (downtown) Philadelphia, as proposed by one condominium developer, is quite rightly controversial. Opponents argue that it would add more traffic to an already-congested corner and encourage people to drive to and around Center City, which in turn would generate more greenhouse gases and increase fuel consumption. On the other hand, supporters of the project argue, the city needs more parking to attract visitors from the suburbs who will not take public transit or walk long distances to get to events on the Avenue of the Arts (Broad Street), which is just around the corner from the proposed garage, or to Center City restaurants and other attractions. And the city needs the suburban visitors.

This is not an easy balance to strike. The city does need the visitors. But the city also needs to survive and thrive in an era when travel by private car will become more expensive and difficult than it is today—and when climate change will almost certainly force us to restrict our use of private cars. Market pressures and legal requirements make the situation even more problematic. In the short term, plenty of parking is a marketing plus; in the long term, easy access to public transit may be a selling point. And in the short term, city ordnances require off-street parking for large residential building projects. (The parking garage project began as a condominium project that could not generate funding—hence the inclusion of off-street parking in the original plan.)

Whatever city ordnances and market pressures may dictate, however, lack of parking is not the problem that the "more-parking-is-better" mantra makes it appear to be. A quick search of Center City using Google Maps shows that there are already at least 531 parking facilities in Center City. Some of them, including the parking lot that is currently at 15th and Chestnut, are surface facilities that eat up space and destroy the cityscape. Most are multi-story buildings, some with retail on the ground floor, others with nothing at street level but a blank wall. At 15th and Spruce Streets, just three blocks south of the proposed garage, there is an extraordinary structure half a city block square that consists of a large tavern with ten stories of parking on top—making it possible to drink and drive in one convenient stop.

If parking is not the problem in Center City, what is? The simplest answer is also the truest: jobs. The population of Center City is growing; the economic base is not. And a parking garage at 15th and Chestnut Streets will not reverse this trend. Even with retail stores on the ground floor, it will house fewer jobs than the building that occupied this space before a major fire destroyed it in the 1980s. The good of the city would be better served by commercial development on this site—ideally, retail on the ground floor, with no more than 10-12 stories of offices above it to fit in with the rest of the Chestnut Street corridor. The problem is attracting the jobs.

Philadelphia, it must be said, provides a difficult environment for business because of its eccentric tax structure and bewildering bureaucracy. In the long run, however, merely ending these barriers will do less for the city than a good development plan that balances commercial, residential, and transportation projects to maintain a vibrant, walkable center that people can reach without resorting to their cars.

Philadelphia is not the only city that needs planning like this. In the future that is coming, public transit will become more important. Walkable business districts will become vital. And living closer together in viable neighborhoods will be a necessity. We could choose not to move in these directions: to build more and more parking lots and big-box stores, let our public transit fall to pieces, and ravage our cities in the name of storing millions of private cars. If we do, the odds are against our having a long-term future at all. But we will have plenty of parking.

Design for What? Second of Three Parts

The problem with designing a building is that it is a lasting monument. If it is beautiful, works with its surroundings, and moves us toward a better future, we will enjoy it for a long time, and it will help us to live better. If it is mediocre, ignores or destroys its surroundings, and lessens the prospect of a better future, we may tolerate it, but we will not love it—and in the end, when it has outlived its usefulness, we will have the problem of what to do with it.

All over the United States there are buildings like the big box store in the photo, the shopping mall outside of town that has effectively destroyed the central business district, and the office park that might once have been located in the city center. All are surrounded by acres of parking lots which damage water runoff, speed climate change (both by encouraging more cars and more driving, and by paving over farmland and green areas), and create traffic congestion. But in the suburbs, where most big boxes and office parks are located, parking, however ugly and destructive, has up to now been a sine qua non—an absolute necessity because shoppers and workers must drive their cars to reach the big box that is their destination. They have no alternative.

Older cities like Philadelphia provide alternatives to the private car. Public transit in Philadelphia is inadequately funded, does not run frequently enough, and follows routes that are often based on a city that once was, not the city that exists—but it is there, and it is quite possible to live in the city without a car at all. The difficulty for city planners is that the city needs to attract suburbanites for shopping, events, and jobs if it is to thrive. And suburbanites are not only in the habit of driving everywhere, they actually fear the city (any city, not just Philadelphia) at night. Or at least they fear the process of getting to and from downtown, or find it inconvenient,

In fact, it is inconvenient to drive from the suburbs to downtown, not because of parking but because of traffic. The local news in every city in the United States, not just Philadelphia, has regular reports on traffic jams—a daily crisis that everyone regards as normal even though it plainly is not. Hearing these reports, I regularly wonder why people subject themselves to the torture of driving to the city. The train is leisurely, comfortable, and quiet. It seems expensive, but compared with driving it is not. But there are few trains, they run at awkward times, and they stop running too early. Hence the choice of the slow, unpleasant, noisy, expensive drive to town.

Which brings us back to the proposed parking garage at one of the busiest intersections in downtown Philadelphia. From an environmental and social point of view, a ten-story parking garage like the one proposed is hard to justify. Less diplomatically, it is a disaster. It uses precious city space that could house offices or residents to house cars. It encourages driving to the city, and its location will inevitably increase traffic congestion.

That is the case against the proposal. The case for it is that the city "needs more parking" if it is to attract business from the suburbs. The real question, however, is whether, in the long run, the city will need more parking or better and more efficient access to its events and services. More and more parking seems important for the next five or ten years. But during those years, the price of fuel will go up, the supply will almost certainly go down, and the need to discourage driving (because of climate change) will become even more apparent than it is now. In the long run, the suburbs themselves will have to change or face ruin as the sheer cost of living in them and supplying them grows beyond what those who live there can sustain.

Given a long term in which suburbs become less viable (unless they also change), should city planners approve parking whose importance will probably diminish after five or ten years? And in any case, is a parking garage on one of the most important parcels of city land a good choice? More on this in the third posting of this series.

Design for What? First of Three Parts

One of my favorite blogs is Skyline Online, by the Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic, Inga Saffron. Saffron's postings and the discussions that follow range from the aesthetics of new buildings to Philadelphia city planning to climate change and back—a stimulating and worthwhile experience for anyone concerned about these issues.

A recent Skyline Online posting reported that a Philadelphia developer, unable to find enough potential tenants for a proposed condominium at 15th and Chestnut Streets, had now decided to build the project in two stages: a "beautiful" (the developer's word) ten-story parking garage in the next two years, and the rest of the condominium later.

Two-stage projects like this in Philadelphia—and presumably in most cities—tend to remain at Stage 1 indefinitely. In effect, the developer was proposing to build a permanent parking garage at one of the busiest intersections in downtown Philadelphia (Center City, in local terminology). The local planning commission, which seems to love parking above all else, was likely to approve the two-stage project, although the newly-appointed city planning commissioner later said that because planners had approved the garage only as part of the condominium project, approval would not necessarily be a foregone conclusion.

Comments on the posting range from those who saw the proposal as a disaster to those who argued that the building itself looked nice and that more parking was an unalloyed benefit because no one from the suburbs would come to Center City unless they could park. My own position was the former—in fact, I was the first to use the term "disaster."

The whole discussion raised a deeper question: What does it now mean to say that a building (or a city block, or a machine like an automobile, train, or bus) is well-designed? The parking garage makes a pretty picture in the architect's rendering, although whether it harmonizes well with the buildings near it is hard to tell. But its impact on the environment, both natural and man-made, is likely to be very unattractive indeed. Is a nice building that destroys the natural environment and causes more traffic congestion really well-designed?

That is a hard question, too hard for one short posting. The scientific consensus is that every additional mile we drive places greater and greater burden on the environment. This is true both of private cars and of buses without adequate pollution controls—but the private car is far less efficient at moving people than the bus. And both transport modes are less efficient, and therefore more of an environmental hazard, than rail.

Can a building that is beautiful (or at least not ugly) really be well-designed if it does not take into account its overall impact? And how do we balance the environmental destruction that one more parking garage will encourage with the potential loss of business from suburban dwellers who will not visit the city unless they can drive there and park?

It is not an easy balance to strike. I have no clear answer. But in the next two postings, I will try to weigh the factors and consider them in the larger context of the future of climate change and resource limitations which is moving toward us faster than we could have imagined even five years ago.

An Unforbidden City

Yesterday's posting described Orange County, China, a residential development that replicates an American suburb. In fairness to the Chinese, I should also point out that a team of environmental designers from Berkeley has recently proposed a far more sustainable form of development which, if adopted, bodes well for the future of China and could provide a model for other places. The full story is found in Unforbidden Cities, by Harrison Fraker, Jr.

The proposed community includes

• a stronger emphasis on public transit and non-polluting forms of transport like bicycles;
  
• community development centered around public transit stops; and
  
• most important and exciting, extensive use of renewable energy and recycling to make the community as self-sufficient and carbon-neutral as possible.

The central discovery in this project was the potential of "whole system design":

As the project progressed, the Berkeley team became more and more excited by the potential for the whole system design concept to be a real breakthrough, to be a reproducible model for sustainable development throughout China and the developing world. The buildings are platforms for producing energy from renewable sources such as wind and sun. Sewage is not treated and dumped, but processed into energy, fertilizer, and water for irrigation. The landscape is more than eye pleasing; it is a multi-functional contributor to the systems. There is little or no waste, and all energy is generated on site. Most importantly, the neighborhood becomes essentially a self-sufficient unit, a circular system. It does not require the construction of expensive new power plants, new sewage treatment and water supply outside the system.

This approach to community development, however, had its downside as well.

The new design requires a radical transformation in the development process. In addition to constructing housing units, the developer has to build a comprehensive, on-site utility system of energy production, water supply, and sewage treatment, which is beyond the developer's traditional scope of work. It requires getting approvals through government agencies that are narrowly proscribed and not accustomed to thinking across their jurisdictions. Most importantly, it requires design and construction professionals to share responsibility and to work collaboratively, to which they are unaccustomed. It requires paying 15 to 20 percent of the costs up front. Even though the life cycle costs are significantly less than the cost of constructing new centralized utilities, the question becomes: Who owns, operates, and maintains the system, and how are they compensated for the service? Some models exist for funding and operating on site systems, but none is as comprehensive and integrated as the one proposed.

Despite these potential problems, the Fraker team's approach offers an alternative for community design—not just in China and the developing world, but in the advanced economies. It will be interesting to see whether it is widely adopted in China.