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| Coping with People |
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| Posted on Apr 25th, 2005 at 5:07 pm by Jonathan |
Recently there's been a lot of irksome talk amongst certain people of my dorm that is deceptively high-minded in its 'we have to act like a community' doublespeak. Doublespeak? Yes, considering that those who shout the loudest about making concessions and accomodations are also the least capable of living in a dorm-like environment and coping with, well, other people. One of the things that one has to learn when they're in close contact with a great many people is that a lot of them probably don't agree with them, and that they're not going to change their minds or stop functioning just to make said individual feel comfortable. The point to dorm-living, and the very trick to life, is learning to deal with that in a way that allows both to function. Essentially, it's called 'picking your battles,' the root of which is ignoring people. This is the heart of city living, where you turn a blind eye to your neighbor because you have your own life to live, (Suburbanites aren't necessarily more moral in this - they've turned a blind eye by moving away) and I believe that it's a lesson that the college dormitory is quite well adept at teaching. But that, I don't think, is the single problem of the characters that are causing all the fuss. What makes this issue the most annoying is the fact that the language they use - that of progressiveness - in a singularly hypocritical way. I've sat in 'community meetings' here to listen to people complain, in all seriousness, "Why can't open-minded people be tolerant of those who simply cannot tolerate X, because if they can't they're not really open-minded." Wrapping oneself in a blanket of smug pretentiousness masked as liberal ideology. It makes me think of stories about the leaders of hippie communes being authoritarian control-freaks, or the Apple Corporation being the spokesperson for free thinkers while their OS and hardware are proprietary information, or the Black Panthers versus the Cultural Nationalists. With that in mind I wonder whether those people can and will learn the lesson of coping, and if they can't, whether or not we can yank them from positions of liberal authority, like the Republicans are trying to do with the Christian Right. I'm sure more can be said of this, but right now to me such talk from these people is ultimately poisonous. |
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| New Urbanism |
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| Posted on Apr 22nd, 2005 at 1:27 pm by Jonathan |
I happened to visit the New Urbanist development of Cornell in the town of Markham, a northwestern suburb of Toronto, Canada. Toured through the area by the planning/architectural team that conceived and hatched this town in the mid 90s, I have a great deal of problems with it as a whole. - It focuses too much on the image of the city, without giving the services of one. The planning team told us students that they had planned for transit corridors of busses that would bring the locals a couple of kilometers away to the local commuter rail depot or the Markham town center. (I asked why they didn't just fill in the areas around the town center or the rail depot, and they didn't really give me an answer) They built 1,300 homes thus far, with 2,000 more by the end of this year, but they hadn't actually run a bus through these planned corridors. This flies in the face of what several planners, including the Toronto city planners, say about transit planning: People will develop the habit of driving if given no other choice, and will probably keep that habit even if you put in transit after the fact. It's better to run at a loss for a couple of years because it will at least allow people to develop the habit of riding mass transit, which is good for traffic and congestion in the long run. After all, if you're building dense, then that's really the only viable solution. Speaking of which, it's not dense enough. The town sort of holds Lewis Mumford's ideal of how dense towns should be: Just dense enough at the densest point to give the sense or image of rowhouses, but far enough apart that they're really just duplexes and freestanding homes, and without the nasty business of walkability. The greatest complaint critics have about Mumford is that his plan is unsustainable: It's not dense enough to support community centers or a neighborhood feel, nor dense enough to support local businesses. I'd prefer a goal towards what Christopher Alexander or Jane Jacobs would have liked: 4 to 6 story apartments with an emphasis on street-level stores, where the lowest density would actually be 15-25 foot rowhouses. That would be able to support itself far better. As it stands, this New Urbanist town will never really be a town in its own right, but simply a bedroom community in the Greater Toronto Area. The planning team had built a street of shops, as it were, with condominiums on top, to give the sense of a downtown focal point. This center was supposed to have a coffee shop, a dry cleaner's, a convenience store, a hairdresser's, etc etc etc. They had planned it out to the letter. None of the businesses, aside from the coffee shop or the convenience store had survived the first year. Now, to have a dry cleaner's go under is quite of a shock, considering how little overhead they really have once they get going. I wonder what kind of rent they were charging. So I asked one of the team, and he said that they were going market value. So? the place is in the middle of nowhere. Of all the places for cheap leases, I'd have thought this would be high on the list. Apparently the fact that the planning team had built it all at the same time and to specific guidelines (down to every detail, which was obvious because the whole place felt like one of those social-engineering jobs planners of the 70s loved to do) had shot up the land value of what was once farmland to a disturbingly high amount and made the whole area a developer land-grab. I asked him why they couldn't have, instead of a convenience store, a full-fledged local grocery. Christopher Alexander says that a corner grocery only needs 1,000 people in five minutes' walking distance, and here we have 3,900. He said that the grocery couldn't support itself with 1,300 homes within walking distance unless it was one of those swanky, gourmet places you'd see in New York. Now, I grew up in Washington Heights, where every corner bodega (and there were four per block - at least! - and mixed in with carnicerias and the like) had at least simple sundries and perishables, like milk, cereal, canned and fresh fruit and vegetables... but apparently in this town they could only make by selling candy and beer, candy and beer. Which, of course, coupled with the coffee shop means that nobody goes to this 'downtown.' - Conversely, it focuses too much on the ills of the suburbs, without relieving them. First of all, because it is planned like one grand social-engineering job, it is monocultural and expensive. The starting cost is $200,000 (a lot for an area in the middle of nowhere with no jobs), and the only rental units in the whole development are what the planning team called "carriage homes" or "coach homes": Apartments built on top of detached two-car garages. What's more, the owner of the house (and thus the garage) can't sell the second car space, but must provide a third in order to rent out the carriage home. Now, the planners had a rule that all garages were behing the homes and facing alleyways, which means that the main entrance of the carriage homes were to, well, alleys of parked cars and garages. Compared with the rest of the town, the stigma against living in one of those places was so bad, to my eye, that I didn't expect them to actually attract much of anyone, except possibly for a few domestic servants. Which brings me up to my second point: Because it is, indeed, a social-engineered job, the whole area is monocultural. Since the costs of the place run much to the same spread, the only people they've attracted to move there were White yuppie starter-families in the electronics industry. As they had not provided any local services in the area, all of them drove. It was basically like any other suburban subdivision. Hell, the neighborhood itself had limited accesses. It was planned for 10,000 homes with possibly 7 or 8 entrances and exits, which is decidedly few for the grid pattern they had within the development. And to make it look more suburban, they had all the tricks of suburban development: Houses whose front facades looked like they were each villages unto themselves, slowly curving streets, two parking spaces (or even three!) for every home built... In fact, looking back on it, they should really call the whole thing 'New Suburbanism' because that's what it is. It lacks enough things that make city neighborhoods - diversity, density, local services - that it feels like it is merely a way to 'patch up' suburban development. It is basically suburban development where homes take quarter- or eighth-acre lots instead of half- or whole-acre lots, fronted to the streets, with condos on top of the strip malls. The developers love it because they're artificially increasing land value and get more money per acre they buy, but all it does from a planning standpoint is incur the worst of the city and the suburbs: Uptown Land values and thus high mortgages and rent, without any of the city's cultural or commercial amenities. Those yuppies who move to these towns instead of city neighborhoods will soon find out just what it is that's missing. |
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| Toronto, Ontario |
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| Posted on Apr 18th, 2005 at 7:10 pm by Jonathan |
Toronto's like a large bunch of popcorn condos and airport hotels plunked down into Jersey City. Not only that, but if New Jersey's stuck in a timewarp of 1986, Toronto's stuck in a timewarp of 1947. There are some major power and telephone poles here, which coupled with the large collection of streetcars (They have streetcars! How incredibly quaint!) means that there is a considerable amount of street furniture. The subways (all two and a half lines) all have these retro-looking trains of corrugated steel exteriors and upholstered interiors, and the stations are all in that particular shade of teal that I was certain died in the 1950s. On top of that they have, according to the planning wonks of the city, the largest collection of municipal bike racks in any major city. Which reminds me of the other analogy swirling in my head: Toronto's like NYC if the Soviets took control. People are polite. Freakishly so. There's none of that "fuckyouIneedtobesomewhere20minutesago" hustle and bustle, though there is the population diversity. There's none of that "I'm walkin' heah!" attitude, even with all the anti-car legislature. Hell, people are curiously fearful of jaywalking. I shudder to think of what the transit police are like here. There's none of that bombastic flair for "look at me and be awed, you insignificant cog!" architecture. Hell, this place is definitely not aesthetically-pleasing, by any stretch of the imagination. They have that Soviet-style concrete slab architecture down to a T. The streets aren't intimidating at night, but the 'East Village' area of Queens Street West and Kensington Market feel more touristy than artistic. The streetcars run efficiently and better than busses, but they feel quaint and the whole transit system feels like it works only because people want it to. It's the site of a lot of urban planning initiatives that I agree upon, but I'm underwhelmed. It's the current haunts of Jane Jacobs, but the planners don't agree with her philosophy. The whole place is slightly less than the population of Chicago, but doesn't get busier than Astoria, Queens. It's like NYC, but without the pride and badge of honor for surviving the 'naked city' dynamic. Maybe because it's Canadian that I don't really feel the edge of city living. I dunno. I don't like it. It's nice enough but doesn't leave an impression, like the distinctive styles of Boston or Philadelphia. Myself, I'm stickin' to the Big Smoke. =p |
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