Urban Planning Blog

Presenting five designs for sustainable and urban farm towers that might revolutionize agriculture.

19 cities in the world with 20 million people in the 21st century. Read more on the mega trend of our century. The world is urbanizing rapidly whether you like it or not.

Compact housing taken to the limits. More here. This is recycling at its best; using old containers to build housing.

Barak Obama has been asked the other version of the question far too many times. To understand why racial differentiation in social research might get difficult as years go by, read the following anecdote by Robert Putnam that he mentions in his latest study, E Pluribus Unum Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century (2007):

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Robyn at Cities of Theory asks a pertinent and oft-raised question - “are we training people for a profession crying out for candidates but with candidates not fitting the requirements and unable to get a job?”

Ten areas that offer both affordable housing and rapidly rising home values in some of the country’s largest cities. Also, check out the list of biggest Metro areas with the lowest rent. All four Texas metros make the cut.

The ‘white flight’ to the suburbs was followed by other citizens who well, were not so white. When the Fair Housing Act criminalizing racial discrimination in housing came into effect followed by the gradual decline of exclusionary zoning practices like redlining, etc, communities hunkered down further by creating the ‘gated community’. Justified in the name of keeping out crime and other evil social conditions [although not always true], the gated community was the ultimate in creating a Truman’s Show world provided you had the money and of course, the right ‘attributes’. The homeowners association probably the strongest private body that can at times be so un-American played the role of the gatekeeper and of course, law-enforcer and isolator if you ever managed to crash the gates.

In a increasingly globalized world and with the leveling of the playing field that Friedmann mistook for the flatness of the world, gated communities are making a foray in Indian cities. Expats are returning home and wish to duplicate the good life of their U.S. experiences. The market obliges and provides them with their own haven. Welcome to Palm Meadows:

It is a gated community of about 600 single family homes, with 10 or more security guards manning the gates at any given time. Some houses are big and some are small, but most houses have at least three bedrooms each. Residents of Palm Meadows are a mix of original owners, returning Indians and expats [source: Blogpourri].

Heck, even the name is U.S.-centric and trust me, I have never seen a meadow of palms. But leaving that aside, it does appear to provide all you could wish for to eke out a luxurious living. Of course, considering the clients and homeowners are considered to be rich and ‘earning in dollars’, prices are steep and as Sujatha mentions, collusion among the real estate agents have hiked up the rents further. Of course, some of that wealth trickles down to the domestic help. In India, it is quite common to have domestic help, even the middle-class families have them. The only difference is in the price.

Of course, you can enjoy all you want while you are inside Palm Meadows but once you cross the gates, not even God can help you navigate through that dreaded Bangalore traffic.

Living in cities is once again a viable option as trends of suburbanization are seen to be reversing at least in some urban areas. The inner city was long neglected and seen as a haven from poverty and crime. This was much in part to the dilapidated structures and abandoned property that resulted due to the changing economy from manufacturing to services. Industries no longer needed central city locations or simply found cheaper land outside the city due to advances in telecommunications and transportation. So they left lock stock and barrel leaving behind either contaminated lands or simply abandoned structures that the vandals took over.

Of course, the people that worked in those establishments didn’t follow the path of the retreating industries either because it wasn’t feasible or affordable to but largely because the industries no longer needed them. They found themselves to be out of a job and the poverty status wasn’t too far behind. Crime and poverty are often unwilling partners in these neglected parts and soon everyone else including the government writes them off and let them remain in these godforsaken parts of inner cities.

But things don’t remain the same as economy changes and so does attitudes and perceptions of people. It once again became hip to live in cities. At first, certain sections of the seemingly middle-class started moving back in the city. They spruced up their neighborhood a little, tried fitting in with the neighbors and soon got their friends interested in moving next door to them. The neighborhood, as they say, started gentrifying. Homes that once housed low income residents slowly began to be occupied by higher income people who moved to the city owing to low rents or property prices long suppressed either by crime, dilapidation, or simply due to the fact of being where it was.

People who moved in didn’t just move in but they fixed up their houses, cleaned the yards, and even got the government to cleanup the nearby brownfields. It doesn’t take long for the laws of economics and real estate to notice such changes. Prices start rising and so do the property prices. Unfortunately, the ones that had always lived there enduring years of poverty, crime, dilapidation suddenly find their homes to expensive to live in as the state comes calling for the increased property taxes. If you can’t afford your property taxes, why don’t you sell your homes to those nice people who would love to fix it up, says the state (or the market). Economically it makes sense but do they really want to leave? Probably they have lived there all their life, went to school there and built their childhood memories in the neighborhood. But the calling of the market is strong enough to stifle such sentiments.

The city isn’t complaining. It can finally look at the neighborhood without feeling sorry for its residents; after all they seem to have gotten a new lease of life. And of course, there is that little matter of increased tax revenue through property taxes for the city coffers. Everyone loves the new folk and like what they are doing to the neighborhood. Soon there is a Starbucks to cater to the new clientele and a wine bar is opening shortly. You hear faint music and laughter on Friday nights.

Where are the erstwhile residents, you ask? Who knows. Probably in some old-age home living their last days in peace or some other ignored neighborhood that hasn’t yet been gentrified. You never know they just might have to move once again when it is the turn of that neighborhood to be gentrified. The gentrified neighborhood sports a new look but where are the people that made it a neighborhood in the first place? Should we care about the place or the people?

Technorati Tags: gentrification, redevelopment, planning, neighborhood, community, revitalization

Note: Since this blog was lying ignored and hosted only the occasional paid reviews, I guess I could share writings that I did or am doing in my academic pursuits. For the next few weeks, I’ll share my writings on planning epistemologies and theories that I did for a directed readings course. Please feel free to comment on any points that you agree or don’t agree with. Here is the first one:

The theory of construction of scientific knowledge has been examined traditionally through positivist lenses. The empirical background of scientific knowledge is based in quantitative analyses and evidentiary based studies that rely on human observations to prove or disprove theories or statement of facts. Developed by Auguste Comete, the logical positivist influence molded much of scientific knowledge right until the early twentieth century and was bereft of normative aspects of associated disciplines of science. The natural sciences wielded much influence over the methodological supremacy of knowledge construction. Positivism focused on the measurable aspects of science and relied on the cumulative or progressive nature of building theories as a measure of constructing scientific knowledge. The core belief was constituted by the verifiability of facts by empirical observation of reality.

Initiated by Hume and furthered by Karl Popper, the standards for scientific knowledge veered from verifiability to falsifiability. This departure from having to prove facts to having to withstand disproving facts was initiated by the problem of induction. Scientific knowledge until then was based on inductive methods that relied on observations. The inherent logic of induction was cyclical and observation of a single anomaly rendered the entire approach invalid. Thus, logically speaking, no amount of positive outcomes or verifiable observations can confirm a scientific theory especially when a single counter observation can disprove the theory thus constructed.

According to Popper, scientific knowledge is inherently conjectural and hypothetical that can only be subjected to rigorous scientific tests [in reference to their implications] but can never be accepted as disprovable fact. Thus, Popper used the test of falsifiability as a measure for setting scientific standards. He used this test as a ‘criteria of demarcation’ between scientific knowledge and metaphysical hypothesis. According to Popper, any theory or statement that aspires to be scientific shall also incorporate disproving statements along with proof statement within its construction i.e. their formulation shall be such that “to verify them and to falsify them must both be logically possible.”

The method of observation was also discounted as being fallible to our sensory limitations and prejudiced perceptions of the subject matter. Objective examination of scientific knowledge termed as critical rationalism called for the distinguishing system to be different from the one that represents our world of experience. Subjective experiences and “feelings of conviction” should be clearly differentiated from the logical relations of the scientific statements. Thus, the focus was shifted from inductive reasoning to deductive analysis. The deductive method of testing is not intended to establish or justify the statements that are being tested thus it does not suffer from the infinite regress problem that plagues induction. The standard for scientific knowledge, according to Popper, was not in the actual implementation of testing of any scientific fact but rather in the capability of being tested thus.

On a related note, although Popper’s departure from empiricism to falsification and critical rationalism was noteworthy, subsequent contributions by Lakatos and Thomas Kuhn greatly clarified the methods by which standards for scientific knowledge are set. Using the criticism of Duhem-Quine thesis that it doesn’t help to discard the set of theories when in fact only one element of the theoretical package has been falsified, Lakatos clarified Popper’s ‘naïve falsification’.

The Lakatosian standard for scientific knowledge emphasized that research programs rather than universal statements are falsified. The body of statements that envelope a core truth-statement are subjected to tests of falsification before the core is tested. Only when the supporting research programs fail to live up to the tests, is the core universal statement challenged and subsequently changed if falsified. Thomas Kuhn relied on the use of paradigms to explain the progress of scientific standards rather than a falsificationist methodology that he said was not typical of the scientific community.

This was a brief summary of the epistemological approaches of scientific knowledge and establishment of standards that constituted science. I shall now explore the suitability of such standards for planning and policy inquiry.

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Suburbanization - and even ever greater sprawl - must be accepted as the future. Attempts to stomp out or control outward movement, as Portland tried, have not only failed but have driven settlement even further out beyond the areas of control.

I have been an avid proponent of ’smart’ growth and continue to believe in the ‘evils’ of suburbia but Joel Kotkin makes a reasonable argument for accepting suburbia and in fact for making it better. Yup! if you can’t beat it, join it.

The Economist reports that “Nevada has the fastest-growing elderly population of any state. The number of Americans over 65 rose by 16.8% between 1990 and 2004, slightly slower than the growth of the population as a whole. In Nevada it rose by 100.5% and in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, it rose by 122%.”

This certainly gives a new twist to their tourism slogan - what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Jokes aside, the casino business is proving to provide decent and non-strenuous [physically] jobs as compared to driving the toy train in the hot summer sun at Disneyland. Las Vegas apart from being the fastest growing city is also attracting a wide demographic of people other than elderly folk and this certainly gives a filip to housing demand. As the housing bubble in neighboring California continues to grow, senior citizens with a fixed income prefer the equally warm climate of Vegas to settle down.

And what’s more? With a great air link, the children have no excuse not to visit.

Technorati Tags: Las Vegas, senior citizens, elderly, housing, Nevada, city, growth

A street plan of Opolis, an imaginary city, has been laid out on the floor of the Flux main space. Individual city blocks have been claimed by individual artists. They have designed the buildings and environments that fill the city blocks (apartment buildings, libraries, factories, parks, junkyards, skyscrapers, bars, office buildings, theaters, etc), and have invented characters to populate these environments. The artists have created the work in such a way that as the viewer walks around the block, the buildings (or images in or on the buildings) function as comic strip panels that resolve into a story.

Opolis: A Comix Flucture is trying out the age-old idea of placing the viewer in a Lilliputian city, letting him walk the streets, touch the buildings and basically get a sense of the place that you wouldn’t by staring continuously at a plan drawing for a few hours. The man on the street has always related better to real stories and images than abstract conceptions that architects often resort to. Winning awards is one thing but building an experience-rich place requires taking all those inane and otherwise-mundane stories and weaving them into a conceptual storyline. An interesting experiment, I might say.

The legacy of Jane Jacobs and importance of her work is often doubted by market-based economists. Although I too [for most part] support the market mechanism, I also believe that at certain points, there are other arguments for promoting a cause other than brute efficiency. Jane Jacobs’s seminal work, The Life and Death of Great American Cities addressed the haughty approach practiced back then by evangelist planners who had lost touch with ground realities. Of course, everything fell in place and people were better off but the places that emerged lacked character. People were better off economically but definitely desired more than just a reliable and efficient way to obtain utilities and places to shop. California may be one of the most expensive places in the country yet people choose to live there due to intangible factors like great climate and quality of life that may be difficult to transfer elsewhere. Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolutions considers Jacobs “tiny-teeny bit overrated”. He says,

It is fine to juxtapose the old Greenwich Village against the gargantuan planning of the corrupt Robert Moses. Few other social scientists of her time grasped the idea of spontaneous order. But what to do if a city grows from one million to ten million people, as has happened many times in the Third World?

To be sure, favelas and shanties work far better than their reputations. Drug gangs aside, they embody many of the best qualities of Jacob’s analysis, or for that matter Hayek’s. But surely it is a problem when there is no piped water or reliable electricity. How can you get those services into new areas without some serious planning? You can call for private sector involvement but it is planning nonetheless and it probably will involve some use of eminent domain. Or how about new roads?

I believe he straddles an important middle-ground that has plagued much of planning literature. Planning, everyone agrees is important and necessary but they differ on how much planning or control is required. Libertarians argue that the market should be allowed to let a city organically grow according to the economic needs of the people. But then, we have a resulting city like Houston that you definitely wouldn’t pride living in. Complete top-down approach, like that empowered Le Corbusier gave rise to Chandigarh which I believe, failed to connect with the people and still remains a mystery even to the people who live there. Jacobs may have leaned a wee bit too much toward the left but her opposition to Moses, who built much of New York’s infrastructure, was well-intentioned. Moses’ creations may have helped New York be the city that is today but at the same time, social injustices cannot be overlooked in the name of progress. Equal representation to all sections of the society must remain planning’s overarching objective.

Times are much different from when Moses and Jacobs practices their professions and it may not be possible to adhere to simply one process of planning. Globalization and urban agglomeration has made Jacobs’ idyllic sense of a community redundant whereas the global melting pot of cultures and ethnicities in any metropolis worth its salt has refocused attention on social justice.

Is it time to develop a new theory for planning that focuses on changing times, social and economic, as well as keep an eye on sustainability? Or does one already exist that needs a little tweaking?