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In the past, I've written about "Life Without Cars." This time, I think
we will have a little change of tone: "Life After Cars." People get the
tremblies at the idea of "without." But, we seem to sense that the
Automobile Age is passing. Nobody likes it. It's time for something
new. But, we haven't come up with a clear alternative yet.
December
28, 2014: Life Without Cars 2014
December 8, 2013: Life Without Cars: 2013 Edition
December
27, 2012: Life Without Cars: 2012 Edition
December
25, 2011: Life Without Cars: 2011 Edition
December
19, 2010: Life Without Cars: 2010 Edition
December
13, 2009: Life Without Cars: 2009 Edition
December
21, 2008: Life Without Cars
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Here for the Traditional City/Heroic Materialism Archive
I make two propositions:
1) That most people living in cities
should not own a car, or use one regularly. This
means that transportation is accomplished on foot, or by train,
bicycle, bus, or taxi, in roughly that descending order of preference.
This is already common in many large cities worldwide, in both the
developed and developing worlds. Walking is the primary mode of
transportation. For most people, it is all they need for their most
common trips to work, shopping, school, or to the local train station.
When a train, bicycle or bus is used, it is to travel from one
walking-centric place to another walking-centric place.
We've been fooling around with cars for a hundred years, without one
single example of success. Yet, we have a profusion of great urban
places for people walking. It is not hard at all. Humans have a long
history of accomplishments in this realm.
December
27, 2009: What a Real Train System Looks Like
August
1, 2010: The Problem With Bicycles
2) That cities should be designed to
be beautiful, pleasant, convenient, comfortable and affordable, for
people who do not own cars. Obviously, once you accept the
first premise, the second naturally follows. I should mention that
"people" doesn't just mean childless people mostly between the ages of
16 and 35. It includes babies, small children, elderly, mothers,
fathers and
families, and also young women, who have a lower tolerance for ugliness
than men. But, Americans especially have a lot of difficulty here. The
American experience, from 1789 onwards, tends to divide into two things:
Low-density automobile-dependent
suburbs (and previously, small towns centered on farming); or
19th Century Hypertrophic Cities (New York, Chicago, Cleveland,
Buffalo, etc. etc.) that were not beautiful, not pleasant (especially
in the days of coal soot and bad sanitation), not comfortable and,
especially today, not affordable.
When you put it into words like that, it probably seems impossibly
Utopian. But, actually humans have a long history of success in doing
exactly this. For example:
Kyoto, Japan.
Quebec City, Canada
 
Cordoba, Spain
Warsaw, Poland
By "cars" I mean personal automobiles. We can still have motor
vehicles, since nobody wants to go back to oxcarts. These are trucks,
buses, vans and taxis -- essentially, commercial vehicles. You can rent
a car, or perhaps use some future self-driving taxi. The self-driving
taxi promises to allow "Life Without Parking" and also "Life Without
Owning a Car," both of which hold considerable promise, especially
given how much land area is taken by parking and related Green Space
buffers. Obviously, the self-driving car is an easier bolt-on to the
U.S.'s present automobile-dependent land-use patterns. However, I don't
think this holds as much promise as the city based on trains. We would
end up with much the same dysfunction -- anyway, much the same traffic.
Try to imagine if New York, London or Paris tried to replace its train
and subway system with self-driving cars. I've never seen any solution
better than a well-developed train network, such as is common in
Germany, China or Japan; and indeed, it is hard to even think of a
problem that one might aspire to remedy.
Things have moved on a lot since I first started on this topic around
2007. The ideas that were radically new at that time (although embodied
in centuries of human experience in building cities) have become more
broadly embraced, to the point that enough people share them -- there
is enough consensus -- that we have begun to see some real-life
implementation. People have come to recognize that many cities today
are grotesquely inhumane. This is true of what I call Suburban Hell,
but also of the 20th Century Hypertrophic City (which is basically the
automobile suburbs with highrise architecture), and also of the 19th
Century Hypertrophic City, typified by New York or Chicago. With that
in mind, I want to comment a bit on where we stand today.
The goal is to make Places for People. Obviously, if you do not make a
Place for People, then you are making ... something else ... which is
probably not going to be as good. You are probably not even realizing
that you are not making Places for People, but the consequences will be
just as bad nevertheless. So, make Places for People.
I propose that Places for People take on three basic forms:
1) Streets
2) Parks and Squares
3) Private space, including commercial and residential buildings
(building footprint, indoor space), and also small outside areas
associated with these, such as gardens, backyards, courtyards, patios,
sports fields, etc.
October
10,
2009: Place and Non-Place
First, these areas are Places. They have a name, which typically
includes some recognition of their identifiable form. They have a
purpose, and that purpose includes the enjoyment of the space by
People. For example, a residence might have a Yard or a Garden, with an
identifiable purpose such as recreation, beauty or growing vegetables,
and a form which is expertly designed for that task.
I think there are some real attempts today to break out of the bad
habits of yesteryear, and to make something that is better. Sometimes
this is successful; and when it is successful, I find that it is
because the result mimics existing and proven Traditional City forms.
If is not successful, I find that the failure can be described using
the tools above. There is some kind of vaguely vegetated outdoor space
that is not identifiably a Park, Garden, Sports Field or the like; some
kind of street-like form that is not identifiably a Street, but perhaps
is a mushy combination of Street and Square; some kind of open paved
area that is not identifiably a Square. Without a name or identifiable
form, they typically do not have an identifiable purpose. Children play
in parks. But, if some place is not identifiably a Park, should you
play there? Probably not.
October 11, 2015: Parks and Squares 4: Smaller Squares
August
16, 2015: Parks and Squares 3: Squares
August
2, 2015: Parks and Squares 2: Smaller and Closer
July
26, 2015: Parks and Squares
April 12, 2015: Narrow Streets for People 4: Organizing the Street
March
22, 2015: Narrow Streets for People 3: A Shopping Center Example
March 15, 2015: Narrow Streets for People 2: Subtleties of Street Width
March 8, 2015: Narrow Streets for People
For example, here is a promising development in Boulder, Colorado. It
includes this Narrow Street for People-like space:
Looks pretty interesting.
But, the project also includes this funny space:
Is this a park?
It could be a park. It vaguely resembles a park. It is not identifiably
something other than a park. But, I would say that it is NOT a park --
meaning that not even the designers had the idea that they were making
a "park," or identified this space with a name that includes the word
"park", or that I would call it a "park" or can identify it
conclusively as a "park" -- and it would not be used as a park.
Probably, like many such confused, low-value and semi-useless spaces
today, it would become a favorite destination for skateboarders. If it
is a "park," then it could certainly be a much better one. Even in this
rendering, it seems to be abandoned by the cyber-people, who apparently
would rather stroll, chat and ride their bikes on the sidewalk.
Designers: back to work! This time, Make A Park. Make it the best park
you can.
Here is a project in West Hollywood, CA. This section (which appears to
be a few stories off the ground) is called "Havenhurst Park." I would
say it is identifiably a park. It could be better -- and will be, when
the trees get a chance to mature -- but I give it a thumbs-up.
I find that Streets can be segregated into three types: the Narrow
Street for People, the Arterial, and the Grand Boulevard. They have
different purposes, and thus different forms. Perhaps the most
difficult idea is that perhaps 80% of all the streets in a city, by
length, can or should be Narrow Streets for People. The idea of an
"alley" here or there, perhaps under 5% of total street length, that is
a sort of pleasant commerical place, is not too challenging for most
people. But, 80% of all streets? Actually, this is not only quite
common worldwide, but works well for vehicles as well. Despite the
Narrow Street for People being the most common street form, typically
no building is more than a quarter-mile (1300 feet) or so from an
Arterial. Obviously, it is not so easy to change existing street
patterns. But, often developers are working with a blank slate, either
a greenfield development or some sort of urban redevelopment, and they
have to define street forms, parks and squares anyway, so they might as
well do a good job of it rather than a bad one. Also, there are a lot
of opportunities to create "streets" in private spaces such as shopping
centers, resorts or townhouse developments, which are not necessarily
municipal rights-of-way.
Failure to make attractive Street forms typically involves the
confusion and admixture of these categories. For example, the Narrow
Street for People can become quite problematic when it is too wide, as
is common when people are influenced by "Main Street USA" ideas based
on the Arterial form. It becomes a forbidding blank barren space, even
at widths of forty feet or so, and which practically begs to be broken
up with planters, benches and other whatnot. It is better simply to
make the street narrower, perhaps twenty feet; or, perhaps, to create a
Square. The Arterial, on the other hand, can benefit from being wider,
and adding things such as trees or dedicated bicycle lanes, which can
easily take the width up to eighty feet or more. While the Narrow
Street for People form is best when there is no street segregation --
it is one flat plane from side to side -- the Arterial form should be
segregated into a central lane dedicated to vehicular use, and
sidewalks for pedestrians, and perhaps even more segregation for
dedicated bicycle or BRT lanes. There should also be some kind of
buffer between the two, and a row of trees has been one of the most
successful solutions. The Grand Boulevard can be very large, and
designed for high-speed crosstown traffic; but there shouldn't be very
many Grand Boulevards. The typical U.S. 19th century hypertrophic city
has basically one street form -- the Arterial -- as even the Grand
Boulevard is commonly replaced by an intracity freeway.
target="_blank"
April 13, 2014: Arterial Streets and Grand Boulevards
Example of "laneway" street form, City of Toronto municipal planning
department. (Includes a bicycle and truck making a delivery.)
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Example of "Civic Street" (Arterial) street form, City of Toronto
municipal planning department.
The Traditional City form, with buildings rarely taller than six
stories, is easily capable of densities of 55,000 (the City of Paris)
or even 100,000 people per square mile. "Sububrbs" of single-family
detached residential buildings in Japan, typically of three stories or
less, commonly achieve densities of 30,000 people per square mile,
which is nearly as high as Brooklyn (37,000/sqmi). So, there is really
not much need to use highrise architecture. Instead of "building out"
(expanding further into greenfield) or "building up"(highrise), quite a
lot can be accomplished by densifying with buildings of six stories or
less. If the City of Oakland, CA, the eastern suburb of San Francisco
(7,400/sqmi), had the density of the City of Paris (55,000), it could
be home to 3.1 million people, instead of 419,000. That is just the
City of Oakland, not the entire East Bay. It is 3.5 times the
population of the City of San Francisco (864,000), and a pretty large
part of the entire San Francisco metro area most broadly defined, with
a population of 8.7 million. And not a single highrise. There is never
really any great shortage of land, and housing prices, ex-land, are
basically a function of construction costs. Construction costs for
high-quality masonry or steelframe construction are about $200/sf, so
you can do the math -- a 1000sf apartment would cost about $250,000 to
build (including common areas like hallways), for construction alone.
Any "shortages of affordable housing," in any metro area, are largely a
fuction of artificial land scarcity (developable land is being kept off
the market somehow) and also barriers to construction (via zoning or
any number of other local regulations and legal hurdles). We can see
this in Tokyo, for example, which has always had high land costs, but
where "affordable" market-rate housing is highly abundant. The "free
market" should have no problem creating low-cost solutions for housing
at a market rate, just as it provides low-cost solutions for virtually
every other thing under the sun -- and in many cities, especially in
Asia where people haven't yet tied themselves up in knots, it does.
target="_blank"
September
26, 2016: The $50,000 San Francisco Home
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July
31,
2011:
How
To Make a Pile of Dough With the Traditional City 5: The New New
Suburbanism
target="_blank"
July
17,
2011:
How
To
Make
A
Pile
of
Dough
With the Traditional City 4: More SFDR/SFAR Solutions
target="_blank"
June
12,
2011:
How
to
Make
a
Pile
of
Dough...the
Traditional City 3: Single Family Detached in the Traditional City Style
Paris of the present ... potential Oakland of the future.
< target="_blank"div>
This section of Beirut, Lebanon, was destroyed in war and rebuilt after
1990.
Realistically, a city is a big thing, and it will take many decades to
change its form. But, we have done this in the past: cities were not
always automobile suburbs. Cities are always changing form. The only
difference is to change it for the better; that new construction be an
improvement. The amount of money, or percentage of GDP, spent each year
on
construction is not likely to change very much. So, we don't have to
spend any additional money. The amount already being spent -- which, in
the U.S., is trillions of dollars -- is already enough. We just have to
spend the same money, and get something better.
May
23, 2010: Transitioning to the Traditional City
June
6, 2010: Transitioning to the Traditional City 2: Pooh-poohing the
Naysayers
August 22, 2010: How to Make a Pile of Dough with the Traditional City
Since both developers
and municipal planners/government agencies both want to make something
better while spending the same amount of money (in principle), the only
real obstacle is figuring out what that "something better" is. In other
words, the ability to imagine a successful solution. If even 5% of a
city's surface area was in the form of the Traditional City, that would
radically change its character. For example, we imagined what it could
be like if the City of Oakland were remade in the Traditional City form
of the City of Paris. Nice idea, right? Now, what if just 5% of Oakland
were in the form of Paris? That would be 5% of 55.8 square miles of
land, or 2.79 square miles -- 1,786 acres. That would be perceived as a
huge area. 153,000 people could live there, at the average density of
55,000/sqmi in Paris. Some of Paris' residential arrondisements have
population densities in excess of 100,000 per square mile. So, if this
5% of Oakland was built out as a residential area in that pattern,
279,000 people could live there. So you see, we don't really have to
change everything, all at once. Just 5% would be huge. Just 2% would be
major.
< target="_blank"div>
Large section of Toronto suburbs, to be redeveloped including new
street pattern.
< target="_blank"br>
Here we have a proposal -- from the
Dallas Department of Transportation! -- to remove a major freeway
interchange and replace it (pink buildings) with something that looks
suspiciously like the courtyard architecture of ... Paris.
So you see, I am not just fantasizing. Major municipal goverments are
already planning to rebuild large sections of their cities in a better
form. So the only question is: how do we get a great result?
Narrow Street for People, about twenty feet wide and no central
roadway/sidewalk segregation. The basic building block of the
Traditional City form.
Boston, MA.
< target="_blank"div>
Melbourne, Australia.
Devon, England.
< target="_blank"br>
Portland, Maine.
Bilbao, Spain.
What if 80% of all the streets in your city looked like these examples?
We have begun to see a few examples of the successful combination of
Traditional City elements -- Narrow Streets for People, Parks and
Squares -- with highrise buildings. For many reasons, a highrise
solution might be best for a particular development, so the question
is: how to make it better? We used some basic Traditional City ideas to
make big improvements in the design of the Hudson Yards development in
western Manhattan, which includes 90-story buildings.
February
28, 2016: Let's Take A Look At Hudson Yards
I talked about combining highrise with Traditional City forms in this
series:
September 23, 2012: Corbusier Nouveau 3: Really Narrow Streets With
High-Rises target="_blank"
August 26, 2012: Corbusier Nouveau 2: More Place and Less Non-Place
August
19, 2012: Corbusier Nouveau
Here is a new highrise development in Gothenburg, Sweden. These four
pics are all from the same development.
< target="_blank"div>
This is pretty much your Paris-style Narrow Street for People with 4-6
story buildings ... and some towers off "in the back somewhere."
< target="_blank"br>
< target="_blank"br>
Higher up, a Patio -- an identifiable Place for People.
Whoa! This is a serious highrise! Soooo much different than the "tower
in a park" form that I call 20th Century Hypertrophism.
Here is a development in Qingdao, China.
Here again we have an identifiable
Narrow Street for People plus 4-6 story "Paris-style" Traditional City
format here. (The "street" is rather wide, however, and could be much
narrower as in the Gothenburg example.) And in the back somewhere --
big highrise towers, combined again with some sort of rooftop
patio/garden/park.
This highrise project in Brooklyn, New York includes parks and patios
for People. It would be better, I think, if there was a bump-out at
ground level (pedestal form) with more of a Traditional City height of
two to six stories.
Among all of the advantages of the Traditional City based on walking
and trains, is the fact that they are very environmentally friendly.
The environmental advantages that one can achieve from living in this
manner are so great, that it is almost a waste of time to consider
alternatives that don't include Traditional City living. You simply
aren't going to get there by sprinkling windmills, solar panels, goats
and tomato plants on the U.S. automobile suburb. Farmers should live on
farms; but most everyone else should live in cities, whether small
rural villages or giant metropolises.
May 8, 2014: Environmentalism is the Key to Growth target="_blank"
target="_blank"April
10, 2014: How to Make Billions While Making People Happy and Saving the
Planet target="_blank"
March 2, 2014: The Eco-Technic Civilization
April
4, 2010: The Problem With Little Teeny Farms 2: How Many Acres Can
Sustain a Family?
March
28, 2010: The Problem With Little Teeny Farms
March
14, 2010: The Traditional City: Bringing It All Together
May
3, 2009: A Bazillion Windmills
April
19, 2009: Let's Kick Around the "Sustainability" Types
In our Life After Cars, we will still have cars, but we won't need
them. Our cities will be designed for People, not Cars. All the
building blocks are at our hands and ready to use. We don't need any
new technology. If anything, yakking about Smart-This-Or-That is a
distraction from the real challenge of making a street and a park that
is a place you want to live. If you can imagine it, then soon hundreds
of billions of dollars will be directed towards its construction, for
the simple reason that it produces a better result than spending the
same hundreds of billions on something else -- the Suburban Hell, 19th
Century Hypertrophism and 20th century Hypertrophism forms that we all
hate.
This is already starting to happen.
< target="_blank"big>Click
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