President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, Jan. 27, 2010. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.

“…we can put Americans to work today building the infrastructure of tomorrow. From the first railroads to the interstate highway system, our nation has always been built to compete. There’s no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains…” -President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, January 27, 2010.

It is a watershed moment when any President spares precious moments from a State of the Union address to utter such words. In 2007 candidate Obama had me at hello. Now the bar is higher, now he has me at hello, I want to build the Infrastructure of Tomorrow.

Yet as these pages have attempted to articulate, it is hard to bridge the gap between the President’s aspirations and the next sentence from his address: “Tomorrow, I’ll visit Tampa, Florida, where workers will soon break ground on a new high-speed railroad funded by the Recovery Act.” In referring to the $1.25 billion funding for the proposed 168mph train between Tampa and Orlando, one local politician told The New York Times “It’s the biggest thing since Walt Disney World for the I-4 Corridor.”

“We didn’t pick this based on politics. I mean this sincerely,” The Vice President stated unconvincingly at a Florida rally the next day. “We’re picking the places that make the most sense, have the highest density, are ready to go.” Yes, he was speaking of Tampa and Orlando, those high density places. Clearly in this instance, Tomorrowland took priority over Tomorrow.

Tampa, Florida. Photo by Flickr user J. Stephen Conn.

But perhaps it’s time to take a pause from the criticism.

Many progressive readers, in digesting my last entry here on Urban Omnibus, were upset by my intense criticism of the President’s health care initiative. To be sure, most agreed with the emphasis on infrastructure – they just want both. The money for both, they argued, could come from higher taxes or fewer wars. Some were shocked to read that I believe the “AFPAK” situation to be a true existential threat, and therefore support the President’s troop deployment.

But perhaps none of these arguments are pertinent. Perhaps what is pertinent is that we have a President who uses the word “infrastructure” in his State of the Union address. That we have a Vice President who uses the word “density.” (I think Dick Cheney used this word only in relation to his former boss.) Perhaps in the ever-maddening world of Washington D.C. – the clearinghouse for the representatives of exurban America – such baby steps are as good as it gets.

Yet it is still confounding that the best we can get is $8 billion towards high-speed rail when we need at least $150 billion for all of the major corridors including California, Chicago-St. Paul, Char-Lanta, the Northeast, and yes, Florida. It is confounding when the Vice President states that the $1.25 billion investment in the Tampa-Orlando corridor will generate more than 23,000 jobs over four years, and that by extension one hundred times that investment nationwide might create 2,300,000 jobs. Now that would be stimulus.

But perhaps we should take solace in the fact that the President refers to the $8 billion as a “down payment.” Perhaps he knows that a true victory would be to leverage California’s state bond issue to bring true high-speed rail — as defined by international standards rather than by Amtrak — to the West Coast cities. Perhaps in the subtle use of the words “down payment,” in a Presidency in which every word matters, Obama is signaling that he will get to it all someday, if he can just win Florida in 2012.

Yet to state that “there’s no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains,” is, with all due respect, disingenuous. Of course there are reasons. Those societies revel in their urban density, and they have the ability to allocate resources efficiently toward that end. China may soon overtake America in automobile production, but it also just unveiled the world’s fastest passenger train. At a top speed of 217mph, the Harmony Train if operating here would propel us from New York to Charlotte in approximately three hours, eliminating an enormous amount of the nation’s regional air traffic.

Folks, when you read this stuff, doesn’t it just scare the bejesus out of you?

Harmony Express, China. Photo: AFP

Recently I attended a terrific conference on vertical density in Hong Kong. Representatives from Hong Kong, Shanghai and New York were in attendance. An urban planning scholar explained that the construction underway in Shanghai for their rapid transit system will lead to 196km of new subway lines by 2020. By comparison, I sheepishly explained the joys of helping to extend the #7 line here in New York, which as a 2km extension now under construction is one of the first meaningful expansions of our century-old system in decades.

Of course critics will reply that China is authoritarian, and that it is an emerging economy going through a transformation mirroring our own industrial revolution. One conference attendee replied that “mature” economies don’t build infrastructure the way China or India must. Yet in his address the President rightly raised Europe as well as China. If one compares New York’s recent attempts to rebuild Penn Station versus London’s St. Pancras or Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof, if one looks at the expansion of rail lines in eastern London versus New York’s struggles to get a new Trans-Hudson tunnel built, one realizes that excuses of being too mature or too democratic to build infrastructure are simplistic expressions of complacency.

To be in Hong Kong illustrates this vividly. I hadn’t visited in over a decade, and in that time more density has been built, a few more skyscrapers dot the stunning skyline, but the advances one really notices are on the ground. The new airport. The 20-minute train from the airport to downtown. The gleaming subways that glide under Victoria Harbor from Kowloon to Central. The stunning new bridges and tunnels. The lush country parks.

Returning to the chaos of JFK, opting for the creaky cab over the Mickey-monorail to Jamaica, rumbling over the BQE, one is forced to ponder the distance between now and the President’s tomorrow.

Political arguments aside, the most popular concept generated from my last piece was “ASIA” (The American Smart Infrastructure Act), a proposed Federal bill that could – through the promotion of density and infrastructure – act as a silver bullet by simultaneously addressing climate change, our dependence on foreign oil, and health care costs.  In essence, it is proposed legislation to get us to the Infrastructure of Tomorrow for all of our truly dense places. Given the current political climate, this silver bullet could happen.

Consider that with the Brown victory in Massachusetts, the Commonwealth that voted for Reagan in 1984 and has had multiple Republican governors since has largely sealed the fate of large-scale health care reform. (Side question: Shouldn’t Rahm, for all of our sakes, spend much more time with his family?)

Consider that improvements in the economy are yielding little new employment, causing economists to worry about the fading impact of last year’s stimulus bill.

Consider that with the private sector still ducking for cover, the Federal government remains the spender of last resort, remains the only entity able to infuse much-needed liquidity.

And consider that with a President who understands that he has only made a down payment on the Infrastructure of Tomorrow, he and we have an opportunity to double down on density.

The President has an opportunity to use repaid bank bailout funds and yes, taxation on outsized bonuses, to pave a path towards a second stimulus package, a package that combines a jobs bill, a Cap and Trade bill, and a Federal transportation bill. This White House is too smart to put the word “infrastructure” in the limelight without knowing that it polls well. Americans know our physical environment is crumbling. Americans are traveling more. From “Weeds” to “The Wire,” they know in their hearts we have a predicament. To be sure, the deficit will be the issue. For good or bad, the deficit is an abstraction that to date has never won or lost an election. But more importantly, the right investments can be argued as a means to reduce the deficit.

So three cheers for Tampa. It is a start. Tampa and Orlando could be much denser, much more transit rich, and much more sustainable, but they are cities after all. And as we build them, perhaps we can make a bigger bet and double down on density nationwide. Perhaps the odds are with us. Perhaps we can build A Country of Cities.


This is the third in a series of opinion pieces in which Vishaan Chakrabarti casts key current events as rallying cries in his evolving argument for urban density, for a Country of Cities. As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Vishaan Chakrabarti, AIA, is the Marc Holliday Professor of Real Estate and the Director of the Real Estate Development program in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. He is also the founding principal of Vishaan Chakrabarti Design Collaborative (VCDC, llc), an urban design, planning, and strategic advisory firm based in Manhattan. Formerly an Executive Vice President of Related Companies, Chakrabarti ran the design and planning operations for the firm’s extensive development portfolio. Through VCDC, Chakrabarti continues to advance the Moynihan Station project, as well as consult on the urban design effort for the Hudson Rail Yards. Read more…

Also last week, Nancy Levinson, editor of the journal Places, did just that: she summarizes some recent provocative positions on American infrastructure in order to challenge designers to do nothing less than reimagine the relationship between individual initiative and political community. This week, we’ve reposted her essay in hope that it starts a new kind of conversation about what public, and public works, really means. -C.S.

Left: Rural Electrification Administration, poster design by Lester Beall, 1934. Right: Wind Farm, China, 2009.

Today Americans may be divided, but they share the knowledge that something is deeply wrong. Two-thirds of the housing in Phoenix is in foreclosure. . . Unemployment rates in exurban California and Las Vegas are several points higher than in denser areas . . . because most exurbs have no industry other than real estate itself. . . . Among the leading killers in America are cardiovascular disease and adult onset diabetes, [lifestyle-related illnesses] which used to rank much further down. Our young men and women are dying in the mountains of Afghanistan, struggling against an enemy funded by an Arabian peninsula we have enriched because of a profligate lifestyle we have endorsed. – Vishaan Chakrabarti, “Being Dense about Denmark,” Urban Omnibus, December 16, 2009

Americans would like things to be better . . . Everyone would like their child to have improved life chances at birth. . . They would appreciate full medical coverage at lower cost, longer life expectancy, better public services, and less crime. . .  In the US today, we have a discredited state and inadequate public resources. – Tony Judt, “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy,” New York Review of Books, December 17, 2009

Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, July 8, 1938

And yet it seems increasingly — depressingly — clear that the Great Recession is not (yet) sparking a new New Deal, a contemporary WPA. The New Deal was a big-scale, legacy-building, vision-to-burn public sector response to national crisis. But in 2010, unlike in the ’30s, we confront our crisis in a social-political climate that’s to a large degree contemptuous of public sector solutions, and more, hostile to the very idea of the public.

This dilemma is brilliantly analyzed by the historian Tony Judt in “What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy,” published recently in the New York Review of Books. Here I can only suggest the scope of Judt’s long and incisive essay, which goes far toward explaining the current dissonance — the fact that we want things to be better, yet fail to support the actions that would make them better. [1]

Rural Electrification Administration, silkscreen by Lester Bell, 1937. Right: Solarpark in Rodenas, North Friesland, Germany, circa 2009 [via the Guardian]

How have we gotten to this contradictory moment? Judt illuminates decades of political and economic debate between the Chicago School free marketers, on one side, and the social-democratic adherents of John Maynard Keynes, on the other, in order to trace “the history of a prejudice, the universal contemporary resort to ‘economism,’ or the invocation of economics in all discussions of public affairs.” He goes on: “For the last thirty years, in much of the English-speaking world (though less so in continental Europe and elsewhere), when asking ourselves whether we support a proposal or initiative, we have not asked, is it good or bad? Instead we inquire: Is it efficient? Is it productive? Would it benefit gross domestic product? Will it contribute to growth? This propensity to avoid moral considerations, to restrict ourselves to issues of profit and loss — economic questions in the narrowest sense — is not an instinctive human condition. It is an acquired taste.” [2]

What has been central to the triumph of economism, in Judt’s persuasive argument, is the galloping pace of privatization. Again in the past thirty years, he writes, “A cult of privatization has mesmerized Western (and many non-Western) governments. . . . What we have been watching these past decades is the steady shifting of public responsibility onto the private sector to no discernible collective advantage. . . . Most of the things that governments have seen fit to pass into the private sector were operating at a loss: whether they were railway companies, coal mines, postal services, or energy utilities, they cost more to provide and maintain than they could ever hope to attract in revenue.”

They cost more to provide and maintain than they could ever hope to attract in revenue. To Judt’s list one can readily add the kind of long-range reinvestment in infrastructure that Chakrabarti envisions, or the innovative projects inspired by WPA 2.0. Or the proposals being generated by MOMA’s Rising Currents, in which teams of designers address the likelihood of rising sea levels around New York City; or Growing Water, from UrbanLab, which proposes a network of eco-boulevards for Chicago; or Moving Cooler, a new report sponsored by the NRDC, which explores transportation strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions . . . this is a list that could go on and on, for we’re fortunate to live in an era of remarkable creativity across the design professions.

Left: Proposed High Speed Rail, California [via Livable Streets]. Right: Eurostar High Speed Rail, St. Pancras Station, London, 2007 [photographer: Oxyman, via Wikimedia Commons]

But the implementation of this creativity will require what seems to have gone missing in American life, which is a sense of the collective, the conviction that not everything that’s worth paying for will pay for itself. Three decades on, the cult of privatization has blurred for us crucial distinctions between what’s optimally public and properly private, between the different strengths and capacities of each sector. [3] How might we revive these distinctions in order to tackle the profound problems we face — to move from the rhetoric of good intentions, and the sophisticated depiction of innovative design, to actual programs and policies and constructed works (which inevitably will be partial and imperfect)? Tony Judt put it this way: “We have to begin with the state: as the incarnation of collective interests, collective purposes, and collective goods. If we cannot learn to ‘think the state’ once again, we shall not get very far.”

To think the state: this is a discussion we designers need to delve into, for the most exciting and transformative work being proposed today —  diversifying our transportation networks, greening the power grid, creating low-carbon neighborhoods, reducing pollution and promoting conservation — is of a scale and complexity that demands sustained public commitment and powerful legislative vision, not only to construct but to operate. Without the state, such work will not get very far. [4]

So what exactly do we do? The urge is to end on the upbeat — a call to action. And yet at this point the essential dilemma is so fundamental. It’s got less to do with anything as easily identifiable as (say) partisan politics or economic interests than with what underlies our political and economic culture — what George Orwell would have called our “mental atmosphere,” in which the balance, or imbalance, between private and public has become so naturalized as to seem inevitable, and we’ve forgotten that government is ourselves. ”Why is it,” Tony Judt asks, ”that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?”

There’s the challenge. To imagine a different sort of society, a different set of arrangements, with a reinvigorated public, and a new era of great public works.

Notes

1. The essay was adapted from an October 2009 talk at New York University, where Judt is director of the Remarque Institute and a University Professor. You can watch a video of the event here.

2. In the design world there is no more insidious instance of this acquired taste than the so-called Bilbao Effect, which seems to underscore the value of high architecture to urban redevelopment yet actually diminishes that value by narrowing it to “issues of profit and loss.” And of course this can boomerang if the redevelopment flops and the would-be Bilbao fails to produce the Effect.

3. It was in his First Inaugural Address — on January 20, 1981 — that Ronald Reagan declared: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

4. Judt offers as an example the railway system: “Imagine, if you will, a railway station. A real railway station, not New York’s Pennsylvania Station: a failed 1960s-era shopping mall stacked above a coal cellar. I mean something like Waterloo Station in London, the Gare de l’Est in Paris, Mumbai’s dramatic Victoria Terminus, or Berlin’s magnificent new Hauptbahnhof. In these remarkable cathedrals of modern life, the private sector functions perfectly well in its place: there is no reason, after all, why newsstands or coffee bars should be run by the state. Anyone who can recall the desiccated, plastic-wrapped sandwiches of British Railway’s cafés will concede that competition in this arena is to be encouraged.

“But you cannot run trains competitively. Railways — like agriculture or the mails — are at one and the same time an economic activity and an essential public good. Moreover, you cannot render a railway system more efficient by placing two trains on a track and waiting to see which performs better: railways are a natural monopoly. . . .”

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

“The Public Works” originally appeared on Places on January 21, 2010 — be sure to read the thoughtful comment thread. Nancy Levinson is editor of Places. She brings to the role a range of experience in design and practice, most recently as the founding director of the Phoenix Urban Research Laboratory and a professor of practice at the School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture at Arizona State University. She received a B.A. from Yale University and Master of Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Left: Copenhagen, photo courtesy of BBC World Service. Right: New York City, photo by Flickr user Susan NYC.

Some years ago I was invited to lecture to a group of architects and urbanists in Denmark. The hospitality was outstanding, the setting modern yet warm, and the economy secure due to substantial offshore oil and gas reserves that allow the small, homogenous nation to be happily socialist. The majority of the country is middle class. My host explained to me that the big cultural taboo in Danish society was ambition – he admired people he knew who wanted to excel, and had therefore left for the UK or US, to seek something beyond the mean.

I thought myself lucky to have experienced this charming but – no offense – remote place, and relegated my admiration to a renewed love of egg chairs, sidewalk pavers, and wooden toys.

Who knew that years later Copenhagen would become the arbiter of our own success?

In New York last year, Copenhagen somehow became the paragon of urban design, the place against which our polyglot metropolis should be measured. It was the talk of the urban design town: The Danes are great! People use bikes! There are beautiful waterfronts! There are lots of clean blonde people! Who wouldn’t want New York to look like Copenhagen? The fact that the two cities have virtually nothing in common in terms of population, economy, morphology, history, or ambition – yes that dirty word, ambition – seemed not to matter.

All of Denmark has roughly five million people, ninety percent of whom are of Danish descent. New York City has roughly eight million people, all of whom are, in some sense or another, striving immigrants. What were New York’s urbanists thinking?

Left: Copenhagen, photo by Flickr user rutlo. Right: New York City, photo by Flickr user Martin Haesemeyer.

Then there was the President’s ill-advised trip to Copenhagen a few months ago to lobby for the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid. It was well known beforehand that the IOC had issues with the USOC, and that the Rio bid, with the first games to be held in South America, held all the allure. The vote wasn’t even close. What was Rahm thinking?

And now there is the tepid announcement that rather than assert true leadership at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, the White House, along with China and India, will set arbitrary targets that put no real pressure on we-the-people to change our profligate consumption. What was the President thinking?

He was thinking about health care. And who can blame him? Like Copenhagen, who doesn’t love health care?

After all, this is the Administration’s Social Security moment. It is their Medicare moment. But one cringes to think that it is not their Kennedy moment, it is not their Eisenhower moment – it is their Lyndon B. Johnson moment.

With 30,000 troops deploying against a true existential threat, crushing double-digit unemployment, a national debt running amok, and a global climate crisis running unabated, what is our primary focus? A new, unaffordable entitlement, an entitlement that once passed will join Social Security and Medicare as a third “third rail” in American politics. Just as wealthy elderly citizens refuse to pay taxes on social security benefits, just as no one wants to hear about extending the retirement age, just as people want an MRI for a hangnail – just as none of us want to hear that when it comes to health care, we are the problem we seek – we are about to adopt a mammoth new program that once passed, will be beyond our capacity to make rational.

Which is not to say that nearly 50 million uninsured Americans is acceptable, to the contrary, it is a national sin. But the question is whether we will insure those Americans on the backs of our children, or whether we will actually take action to lower costs in order to spread coverage.

One could imagine a very different first year for the Obama Administration. After the $700 billion TARP bailout, in which banks were said to be too big to fail, we could have been told that the nation and world were, in fact, too big to fail. Once Citibank was pulled from the precipice, they could have said “OK folks, you’re next.”

Imagine that it is early in 2009. In that gray light of late winter, four terrifying, push-me-pull-you facts are clear to our leaders:

1. Massive unemployment looms due to a sharp contraction in private sector spending, leaving the Federal government as the spender of last resort.

2. Spiraling health care costs are threatening the deficit and the dollar, so there is limited spending the Federal government can or should do.

3. Afghanistan and a nuclear-armed Pakistan are destabilizing, the petro-dictators who finance jihad are laughing, and the cost of war in blood and treasure are rising.

4. Polar bears are perfecting the doggy paddle.

At that point imagine the road not taken. Imagine the Administration avoided the naiveté that said “America, if we pass health care reform, we’ll lower costs and fix the deficit” – a premise that never contemplated republican cries of death panels for granny and democratic cries about any measure that reduced benefits for anyone – a premise that from its inception failed the sniff test of cost control.

Perhaps we might hear our leaders promote time- tested ideas of density and mass transportation, of cities using far less energy per capita.Imagine they instead said “America, we have a silver bullet. We are going to rebuild this country. We are going to build a new national landscape, and in the process we are going to create jobs, build an innovation economy, rein in health care costs, lower our dependence on foreign oil, and lead the planet to sustainability. We are going to do this with one fell swoop, with one big idea, called the American Smart Infrastructure Act. (ASIA).”

Imagine that in early 2009, they decided to accelerate and combine the Federal Transportation bill (currently decelerated because of health care), and Cap and Trade legislation into one consolidated bill, ASIA, which took as its premise the following:

1. We will build and rebuild infrastructure that lowers greenhouse gas emissions and encourages urban density, emphasizing high-speed rail, transmission grids from alternative energy sources, national internet broadband, and critical roadway maintenance. We will deemphasize all infrastructure that exacerbates emissions, particularly roadway and airport expansion projects. The government will fund approximately $350 billion (about half of TARP) over three years, solving the nation’s mobility needs while lowering automobile use and censuring the energy devoured by McMansions. To expedite infrastructure construction and lower costs, NEPA will be streamlined and project labor agreements will be negotiated with unions. Millions will be employed, pouring liquidity into Main Street.

2. Health care costs, which are mainly tied to chronic disease stemming from obesity, will lessen as people drive less. As people urbanize in response to new infrastructure and the tax reform described below, rates of diabetes and chronic heart disease will plummet. (A 2003 study from the American Journal of Health Promotion and the American Journal of Public Health studied over 200,000 individuals in 448 counties. The findings were conclusive: Those who live in the most sprawling counties are far more likely to be obese. The exception is poor inner-city residents, whose issues tend to be linked to the dearth of healthy food choices.)

3. To pay for ASIA, we will recoup the $7.8 billion lost annually to traffic congestion, and we will charge people for the costs of their pollution, particularly coal emissions, creating a market for cap and trade exchange; we will pass a national $1 per gallon gas tax; and we will phase out the Federal tax deduction for mortgages, dismantling the false promise of the “ownership society” by putting renters, who are primarily city dwellers, on equal footing and on the forefront of a more agile, mobile labor force.

I know what you’re thinking: A new national gas tax? Eliminating mortgage deductions? The US government promoting urbanity?

Chakrabarti’s cheese has slipped off his cracker.

But consider the enormous political capital Obama has expended on health care – political capital that he could have instead expended on this silver bullet. Consider further that issues of energy independence, infrastructure, and climate change poll strongly among both independents and Obama’s base. Consider that as gas prices spiked two summers ago, mass transit use rose substantially nationwide. Consider that many municipalities have passed local tax increases to create transit infrastructure, and that California passed a state bond issue to support high speed rail. And consider that in the wake of the passing of such an infrastructure bill, the restoration of America’s economy could be so profound that by Obama’s second term, meaningful health care reform could be passed with a far more supportive public at his back.

Photo by Flickr user Scorpions and Centaurs.

Today Americans may be divided, but they share the knowledge that something is deeply wrong. Two thirds of the housing in Phoenix is in foreclosure, in contrast to one fifth of the housing nationwide. Unemployment rates in exurban California and Las Vegas are several points higher than denser areas, with the exception of aging industrial cities like Detroit, because most exurbs have no industry other than real estate itself. Among the leading killers in America are cardiovascular disease and adult onset diabetes, which used to rank much further down. Our young men and women are dying in the mountains of Afghanistan, struggling against an enemy funded by an Arabian peninsula we have enriched because of a profligate lifestyle we have endorsed. And to paraphrase Al Gore recently on SNL, “There are guys in flip flops outside the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center.”

This is why it is this bill, this silver bullet, that demands the fierce urgency of now.

And so, to the state of Denmark, we can imagine our young and noble President traveling not as Hamlet, wrestling the dagger of the trillion dollar health care bill he sees before him, but as Henry V at Agincourt, proclaiming “from this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be remember’d…”

Perhaps we can imagine the President being remembered in Copenhagen for something other than vague emissions targets and a sense that fluorescent light bulbs will save us from this morass. Perhaps we can imagine that beyond all the fancy talk of pollution sequestration and carbon offsets, we might hear our leaders worldwide promote time-tested ideas of density and mass transportation, of cities using far less energy per capita before a dollar is even spent on green technology.

Perhaps we can imagine the next UN climate change forum not taking place in quaint Copenhagen, but in exploding Shanghai or emerging Mumbai, where a real discussion could ensue about the terrifying, impending embrace by China and India’s two billion people of America’s most lethal export: the suburb.

And perhaps we can imagine ASIA in the US – perhaps we can imagine a new policy that generates a new landscape for a new millennium – one in which anonymous sprawl gives way to a green, healthy, prosperous urbanity.

Perhaps we can imagine a Country of Cities.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.


Vishaan Chakrabarti, AIA, is the Marc Holliday Professor of Real Estate and the Director of the Real Estate Development program in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. He is also the founding principal of Vishaan Chakrabarti Design Collaborative (VCDC, llc), an urban design, planning, and strategic advisory firm based in Manhattan. Formerly an Executive Vice President of Related Companies, Chakrabarti ran the design and planning operations for the firm’s extensive development portfolio. Through VCDC, Chakrabarti continues to advance the Moynihan Station project, as well as consult on the urban design effort for the Hudson Rail Yards. Read more…

It’s been a busy week packing, moving and unpacking. And as much as we’ll miss our special Brooklyn canal and the weird infrastructural happenings of Midtown East, we’re settling into Soho and are certain to find some local obsessions at the intersection of design and the built environment to cover in this neck of the woods.

If JFK airport had a writer-in-residence, what would she write about? Poetic treatises on the ebb and flow within the top international gateway to the USA? The ghosts of art exhibit debacles past? The difficulty and expense of getting to Manhattan, despite the Airtrain? The new FAA rules for Hudson flyovers? Well, in case the Port Authority (which controls JFK, LGA and Newark airports, along with Stewart and Teterboro) decides to try a writer on for size, they’ll soon have a precedent from across the pond. Heathrow Airport has contracted Alain de Botton, author of the Architecture of Happiness, to render his observations of the world’s busiest airport in prose.

Another of our principal obsessions is, of course, urban exploration. So if thinking about airports depresses you and you’d rather buy into the whole “staycation” trend this Labor day weekend, join the folks of Hey! I’m Walking Here! for a 20-mile trek through the landscape of that other island. Hopefully, this will whet your appetite for a meet-up we got planned along the Staten Island Railway later this month. Stay tuned.

Speaking of rail systems in both the city’s past and future, the proposal for light rail between Red Hook and Downtown Brooklyn is gaining ground, and if the project ever happens, it may just find a way to resurrect Red Hook’s trolley tracks.

That sounds stimulus-worthy but far from shovel-ready. But even if longer-term projects were being funded by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, cities are still getting the short end of the stick. Streetsblog has a nice write-up of Vice President Biden’s admission that stimulus aid to cities is imperfect:

Congress’ decision to route stimulus money through governors has sparked open confrontations between urban mayors and governors over how to distribute funds to the most needy areas. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was particularly direct in urging that the stimulus provide direct aid to cities, bypassing the politicization that often dominates decision-making in state capitals.

Politicization, is that what we’re calling it these days? We’re about ready for some interesting primaries in local races in a couple weeks, from city council to the heated contest to be elected what may be the last public advocate.

While pondering that, check out some raw footage, posted today by the Daily News, of the tearing down of the old Yankee stadium’s facade.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Wait, the site in the image above couldn’t be in Manhattan, could it? It is, in fact. It’s one of the many overlooked spots of our dense urban island in which a recalcitrant nature has overcome vestiges of a forgotten built environment. For his Nowhere in Manhattan project, photographer Michael Jensen has found and framed such places and aspires to display the images on a billboard near you. Anyone out there got the hookup at Clear Channel?

As always, kind of hard to tame the beast. Another beast many New Yorkers would love to tame is the mass transit system. Last week, Mayor Bloomberg pledged reform and improvements, just as reports this week find many transit agencies slow to spend stimulus funding.

If it were up to you, what small or large changes – in the routes, timing, infrastructure, wayfinding, information display, aesthetic experience – would you make to the way you get to work and around the city? This is one of the questions we’ve been kicking around with our cityscapes buddies at WNYC Culture, so drop us a line or leave us a comment below with your thoughts and stay tuned for more discussion on this theme next month.

For starters, we can think of one simple change that would make deciding whether to wait for the bus or not a whole lot easier. Tell us the ETA of the next bus! And, guess what: miracle of miracles on 34th street.

Remember way back in 2007 and then again in 2008, when our friends at the Forum for Urban Design partnered with everyone’s favorite Storefront and others to prove that bike-sharing was not only fit for Parisians? Yet another way that use-on-demand systems can make our cities more efficient, convenient and fun. New York Bike Share may not yet have become a permanent reality for New Yorkers, but other American cities have taken the plunge, notably… Denver. Denver? Yes, Denver. Check out the video below from GOOD’s excellent green tech series:

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

At the Federal level, one has to wonder if there is an Asphalt Lobby, because if there is, they must be partying like it’s 2008. The stimulus bill passed earlier in the year feeds rather than fixes our ill-conceived land use patterns, resulting in new “infrastructure” that runs the risk of being little more than a grab bag of roadway construction. The bill’s criteria mandate that projects, in order to qualify for federal funding, must be “shovel ready,” must be compliant with the existing regulatory regime including NEPA, and must be complete in two years after commencement. The much touted $8 billion of stimulus funds for high speed rail is negligible in terms of what is needed. Common estimates for high speed rail in the northeast corridor run $25-$30 billion. This sounds high until one considers that one third of the nation’s air traffic goes through New York, sitting on tarmacs behind turboprops unconscionably flying from Newark to Philadelphia. Nationwide, the needs are probably around $150 billion. This also sounds high, until you consider the checks we write to bail out banks, fund failing auto makers, and care for the human ailments – spanning from asthma to obesity – that result from urban sprawl.

And now we hear that the much more critical legislative vehicle for funding infrastructure, the “ISTEA” reauthorization scheduled for passage in 2010, has been delayed by the Administration. They have instead funded a stop gap measure for the next eighteen months, thereby allowing themselves room to maneuver on health care and cap-and-trade, particularly as a Congressional election year approaches. To be sure, these are worthwhile initiatives, but one wonders whether infrastructure will once again be postponed for future generations, forever misconceived as something that adds to rather than reduces Federal deficits.

Little of vision can come of this approach – no true high speed rail, no new power generation, no densification of our sprawling, anonymous national landscape.

And the most shocking part is that we’re being told that it’s OK.

We are being told, in the end, that sprawl is just fine, that if we just weatherize our McMansions, drive hybrid Yukons, and change to fluorescent lightbulbs, our gluttonous use of land is legitimate. It is from Silicon Valley, where sprawl is high art, that progressives fuel the mentality that technology will save us from ourselves. (As an aside, one only need to look at the viral spread of this approach to the physical landscape of the Indian IT sector, where smart minds, office parks, and malls prevail.)

This tacit sanction of sprawl is of course politically deft. “Regionalists” have smartly framed the issue as planning for a United States now defined by a series of large regions in which some seventy percent of the populous reside. By uncritically granting legitimacy to the exurbs and suburbs, a true confrontation around land use policy can thus be avoided, as can concepts like urbanity, undeveloped nature, and loss of elections.

We would be wise to remember that the suburbs were a Federal creation – built out of a fear of race, as well as a nuclear arms race. White flight was synthetic, fueled by a set of policies intended to encourage the use of cars and discourage the use of cities.

Imagine instead that we had a market-based approach to the use of land, in which people pay for what economists call the negative externalities of their own behavior. This would mean no more subsidized highways, no more mortgage deductions, and no more free rides at the gas pump. People would have to pay for the congestion, the pollution, and the health care problems that they themselves create. In such a scenario, the suburbs would likely shrink, and the exurbs would likely atrophy altogether.

Imagine what would result. Imagine dense green urbanity, surrounded by nothing but nature. Imagine lanes of interstates reused for high speed rail. Imagine a healthy population that walks and bikes throughout their neighborhoods, and rides transit to their jobs. Imagine New Jersey as a nature preserve. Imagine being number one for takeoff.

This is the first in a series of opinion pieces in which Vishaan Chakrabarti casts key current events as rallying cries in his evolving argument for urban density. As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Vishaan Chakrabarti, AIA, is an Executive Vice President of Related Companies, where he runs the design and planning operations for the firm’s extensive development portfolio. Chakrabarti also leads the design and planning efforts for the Hudson Rail Yards and Moynihan Station projects. Read more…

Recover What?
Columbia Architecture students Wayne Congar and Troy Therrien launched the Imagining Recovery competition to invite designers from across the world to envision, in a single image, the prospect of post-financial crisis America. In devising these experiential images, and the accompanying design strategies, designers are encouraged to propose responses to some of the following questions. What is it that we hope to recover? How can designers assert the importance of design in recovery (economic and otherwise)? How can designers act as visual interpreters between policy-makers and the general public? How can design support innovation in imagining the future?

The timeline of Imagining Recovery corresponds to the first hundred days of the Obama administration: the competition was announced days after President Obama signed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (otherwise known as the Stimulus Package) into law, and the final deadline for submissions was day 100. The competition offers a forward-looking, design-led alternative to the modes of analysis provided on the stimulus tracking website, recovery.gov: the maps, charts and graphics that aim to explain how stimulus dollars are being spent. It also seeks to recast the function and identity of the designer in the context of current global economic challenges: encouraging greater collaboration with policy-makers and “proposing a model wherein designers can actively participate in the initial imaginings of the policies they will be called upon to implement.”

To foster this new culture of collaboration, competition organizers set up a policy discussion forum, between days 45 and 55 of the presidency, which gave designers “the opportunity to participate in a global network of public policy students to unpack and discuss the issues of recovery, developing lines of communication and a common language.” A summary of the issues raised collectively in this forum constitutes the brief of the competition.

On Day 100, over 100 submissions poured in from 25 countries. The winners of this competition will be announced tonight at a party and public discussion with the competition jury at Studio-X. This week on Urban Omnibus, we hear Wayne and Troy discuss the ideas behind this competition in their own words and get a sneak preview of some of the competition entries.

Design Responses to the Stimulus
Wayne and Troy are part of a growing number of citizen-designers turning economic crisis, and the policy measures to combat it, into an opportunity to re-imagine the American landscape and the role of the designer within it. Part of the challenge exists in the language; “shovel-ready” projects are meant to prioritize short-term job gains and immediate capital influx over the benefits of a lengthy design process. So how do you help convince Americans that “shovel-ready” projects – dependent on the status quo by definition – might not yield the innovative investment that our built fabric needs? You’d better have some good ideas, which is exactly what the design professions are trained to think up.

As those shovels enter the ground, many of the responses from design communities have emphasized the need for transparency and accountability. Edward Tufte, statistician and information designer par excellence, has offered advice to the managers of Recovery.org on how to move beyond accountability towards the sharper challenge of legibility. Many other efforts are underway in small and large projects across the country, including our friends at WNYC, who are working with ProPublica on the excellent Shovelwatch. This model is interesting for a number of reasons, particularly for fusing the burgeoning field of non-profit, foundation-supported (professional) investigative journalism with public insight journalism. Listen to the Brian Lehrer show from Monday for an overview of the project. Another interactive project, Stimulus Watch, invites the public to report on, discuss and evaluate the list of “shovel-ready” projects assembled by the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Other open-source initiatives, such as the Sunlight Foundation‘s Sunlight Labs, rely on the collective intelligence of software and web developers to design mechanisms to make government more transparent and accountable. More locally, Council Member and Public Advocate candidate Bill De Blasio uses some similar language to describe SunlightNYC. The proposed new government website would “help the public easily track how City Hall allocates money provided to New York City by the stimulus package.”

And while we may sometimes like to pretend otherwise, branding is an important part of design. FDR used an eagle with an “NRA” for National Recovery Administration. This time around, we’ve got another icon for stimulus-driven projects that will make recovery visible and mark its legacy.

For its part, the architecture community has set up a series of online forums to address issues of concern relating to the economic situation. Many of these, such as Architectural Record’s Architect’s Survival Guide, deal primarily with keeping your job or finding a new one, Archinect‘s also includes discussion threads on the recession’s effect on the evolution of architectural practice. Taking a different approach to putting the expertise of out-of-work architects to good use, John Morefield has set up Architecture 5 Cents. You can read more about it on Flavorwire.

And there are many others. Leave us a comment below if your latest design project, school’s design studio or plan for the year-off you’re about to take offers a unique vantage point on the relationship between design and the attempts to stimulate, recover or reinvent the American economy.

- Cassim Shepard

Some further reading:

- David Brooks opines: This Old House (12/09/08)