Urban Planning Blog

Quick calculations showed that, given construction costs in the 1990s, profits made from the market-rate sale of 560 apartments would finance 1,000 free homes for slum-dwellers. So, to give away 160,000 homes, developers would have to sell almost 90,000 full-price homes. In total, they would have to build 250,000 each year.

In an insightful article, Dilip D’Souza, writing for the Outlook section in the Washington Post explains the futility of the current slum redevelopment schemes in Mumbai.

I will always welcome the transfer of public property into private hands, and even the most left-liberal activist will agree that it is more preferable to hand over property rights to the “little guy” transparently than to big evil builders after intense backroom dealings.

Gaurav Sabnis, an Indian blogger takes the argument further and advocates transferring property rights to slum dwellers thus giving them a better say in negotiations with the builders.

My uncle, a builder and developer in the Mumbai suburbs runs his construction business through the model that Dilip suggests i.e. by redeveloping properties which have surplus FSI (Floor Space Index) and effectively giving free homes to the original residents while making the profit off the additional housing units that he sells at market rate. More on the impact of that strategy for the housing condition in Mumbai later.

[via the ever-so-excellent Jessica Hagy's Indexed.]

Almost two years after Hurricane Katrina exposed the brittleness of New Orleans, New York Times reports that even after spending more than a billion dollars the city is still at risk. I had written earlier on how New Orleans might be the city that never should have been and if taken at face value, I can be acussed of undermining human tenacity and resilience. But at the core of the matter is our struggle with nature. To put it bluntly, we can never win. No matter how hard we try or how long we hold her off, nature will always win. Rivers that change their flow or sea levels that rise will not consider the fate of those millions living on its banks or the coastline.

Christopher Hallowell’s Holding Back the Sea documents man’s futile attempts in controlling nature. Hurricane Katrina not only exposed our societal inadequacies but also laid bare some of our massive engineering feats. No offense to the Army Corps of Engineers, but they will always be fighting a losing battle and can only hold the fort so long. Even if it was technically possible to hold off the inevitable for a longer time, I doubt we have the financial prowess to do it anymore. Other more urgent and important priorities have crept up the national agenda. At some point in time, we have to reevaluate our presence in the volatile Mississippi basin. Perhaps nature doesn’t want us there at all. We can claim that we have been there for over a hundred year but nature has been there much longer, right?

This involves painting streets with a high-visiblity mural that creates a public square for residents to gather and one which gently encourages drivers to slow down when approaching these spaces.

Building demolitions in urban areas as part of redevelopment have always been messy affairs although well planned (and executed) implosions can be quite dramatic. However, just as that credit card company[I forget which] commercial shows that buildings aren’t built top down, buildings similarly cannot be demolished bottom up. Or can they?

This amazing feat of dismantling an existing building from ground up is being done in the heart of London. Why from ground up instead of the traditional way? Because when the P&O building was constructed in 1965, each floor was hung from a huge beam at the top of the tower and supported by the central core [source]. Thus the building is being dismantled a floor at a time from the bottom while exposing the central core. After all floors have been removed, the central core will be demolished the old fashioned way.

Anyway, until the building is entirely dismantled, it certainly looks cool and literally stands like a piece of art in central London. Too bad it won’t last long.

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

Disasters have caused tremendous loss of life and property around the world especially in the United States. This trend has seemingly increased in the 1990s. The conflict between natural disaster occurrences and choices of places where people want to live has often proven to be the cause of these losses. The government, at the federal level and state& local level has consequently increased their role in disaster recovery. Although traditional responses to disaster have entailed reactive measures like preparedness, response and recovery, more attention is being paid in recent times to proactive responses of hazard mitigation. Simply defined, hazard mitigation is advance action taken to reduce or eliminate the long term risk to human life.

The governmental intervention especially by the federal government has involved drafting and implementing legislation starting from the first disaster relief act in 1950 to the more recent Stafford Act in 1988. Since then, other piecemeal plans and proactive measures like NAPA’s report, Coping with Catastrophe (1993), NFIR Act (1994), and Office of Technological Assessment’s report recommending an action-oriented approach instead of an information provision approach has signaled changing trends in disaster management. Agenda 21, an action agenda adopted at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Summit focused on reducing natural hazards and encouraged proactive measures for disaster management. Uses of new concepts like ecological footprints as a way to understand the implications of consumption and development patterns helped to identify the regional trends in population toward disaster vulnerability.

Federal acts like the Stafford Act which is increasingly used to combat disaster recovery outlined the “provision of orderly and continuing federal assistance to state and local government to alleviate suffering and damage caused by disasters.” But recent trends have moved away from federal responsibility to holding individuals and local governments responsible for increasing susceptibility toward natural disaster. State and local governments are now required to evaluate the nature and extent of vulnerability to effects of natural hazards and accordingly develop systematic hazard mitigation plans. There also has been a significant shift in implementing ‘softer’ approaches such as watershed management, land use planning, using flood insurance and storm insurance as disincentives, and increasing awareness regarding relocating from vulnerable areas as opposed to traditional ‘hard’ structural solutions like levee construction.

The government has realized the importance of moving people out of harm’s way rather than continually fund reconstruction and recovery post-disaster. The federal government also makes federal assistance subject to condition before disaster strikes and adjusts share of federal assistance in order to get state and local governments more involved in disaster mitigation. This is supported by upping the level of public education and awareness of locating in high-risk velocity zones and inventorying and disclosing all properties within the flood hazard zones.

Another school of thought talks on the use of sustainable communities to fight a more sustained battle against disaster recovery. Emphasis on high density development and efficient use of space and land outside the high-risk areas that are susceptible to disasters like flooding, earthquake, and hurricanes is the hallmark of sustainable-oriented mitigation. Sustainable communities effectively balance risk against other preferable social and economical goals. It promotes a closer connection and understanding of the natural environment instead of the traditional school of thought of dominating nature.

Sustainable communities better understand the interconnectedness of social, economic, and environmental goals. Of course, this requires a new ethical posturing that errs on the side of caution and helps us refrain from actions that may have serious or long-lasting effects on our survival. Understanding that sustainable community planning is largely participatory and community based helps delegate more responsibility to the individual to prevent loss from disaster. However, it may also entail clarifying and reestablishing the ethical content of private property ownership and use to see and purse a larger public good.

References:

Tags: disaster+mitigation, sustainability, sustainable+communities, prevention, disaster+recovery, redevelopment, prevention, Stafford+Act

I had the opportunity to take a quick visitor tour through the School of Nursing at the UT Health Science Center, thanks to my fiancee who studies in the adjacent building. This building is counted as one of the top green projects for 2006. I could tell you more but I’ll point you in her direction as she has some interesting links for you. I took few pictures and am sharing a couple:

more »

A gallery of derelict London cinemas accompanied with a brief background of each [via].

Technorati Tags: revitalization, cinema, theaters, redevelopment, abandoned, derelict

The stark reminder of Hurrican Katrina - the battered dome roof of the Superdome (largest free-standing dome upstaging the Pantheon) was finally fixed today:

The job required 120 roofers working round the clock since March 1 to finish. When it was done, workers had replaced 10,463 pieces of galvanized metal decking and sprayed 500,000 gallons of polyurethane foam sealant to the 9.7-acre surface.

Five other projects also are on track: replacement of 14,000 seats in the club, plaza and terrace levels that were damaged during the storm; installation of a new epoxy flooring system in the ramps and concourses; remodeling of the 38 permanent concession stands; installation of a new technology infrastructure; and the new video board-scoreboard-LED ribbon board system.

“We’re confident the building is going to be ready for football by Sept. 25, but the project is far from over,” Thornton said. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

I would ask a different question. Is it ready for the hurricane season?

People ask me why is sprawl harmful to the environment. Among other reasons, my first response is that why build on greenfields when you have so many abandoned sites waiting to be developed back to their glory days. As technology developed and industrialization changed dramatically, erstwhile bustling industrial sites fell into decay. Many of those sites still exist and can be a delight to a photographer albeit in a graphic sense.

Feast your eyes on several such abandoned sites. Never was desolation and abandonment pictured so beautifully. All that is left to be done is to clean up the sites and redevelop them to satiate our need for more urban development. Of course, green spaces sprinkled liberally would do just as well.

We finally heard back from the EPA’s P3 [People, Prosperity, and Planet] Request for Proposals and sadly, they rejected our grant application. The reason - too ambitious and infeasible for the allocated grant money. Well, they are right. We had submitted a proposal suggesting developing a sustainable model to rebuild Southern Louisiana by seeking to analyze risk perceptions and economic necessities of residents that force them to make unsustainable choices.

On the flip side, it is not entirely lost. We can always choose to divide up our proposal and resubmit to other funding organizations or just modify this and send it off to a larger funding organization. In lieu of Katrina hurricane, we found our proposal quite timely and had managed to keep the scope of the project broad enough to warrant adequate examination of the research issues involved. Restricting ourselves to a particular region of Louisiana or just to media-popular New Orleans would have led us to ignore correlational factors that influence every move in the southern state.

Climate change data has shown how everything is interrelated and a little bit of tweaking elsewhere can have larger implications often unintended elsewhere. Developing a sustainable model for Louisiana (and New Orleans) cannot be a piecemeal project but has to encapsulate the larger region. This may not have been possible within the parameters of the P3 Project but hopefully, the EPA takes this issue seriously enough to allot more funds for such a study.

New Orleans brings to mind several images dominated of course by the debauchery-riddled and flamboyant Mardi Gras. But death, destruction, despair, and desolate landscapes are far from your mind. The city stands on a rich cultural heritage and although (ecologically) as I argue, the city should not exist; it not only does but also prospers and throbs with urban vibrancy. However behind the glitz and glamour of the chic French Quarter with its colonial architectural trimmings lived one of America’s poorest cities. Crime was rampant and racial divisions were never more pronounced. I had stopped over for a night while traveling to Texas last year just before Katrina hit so it was an immensely sad experience to see a city shaken at its very foundations. We talked to a local architect who had nothing but frustration and disgust writ all over his countenance over the rest of the country’s apathy. And rightly so too. People seemed to have forgotten that this is just the beginning and the worst might be lurking behind the next hurricane.

The basin of the world’s third largest river (after Nile and Amazon), New Orleans and much of Louisiana stands on unstable ground that constantly changes its geographic form every thousand years. The mouth of the Mississippi has moved left and right since forever and it continually seeks to do so. But it finds itself restricted and controlled by the sub-standard levee system (the Dutch do it better). New Orleans is famously known to exist below sea level and if you look at the cross-section of the city, you will see a great depression in a bowl-like fashion protected by feeble contraptions erected by man. In spite of many warnings by scientists and climatologists, stubbornness of American people (in the region) often mistaken as resilience failed to inspire any preventive action. The result – Hurricane Katrina literally exposed the dangers of human impact on marshlands by destroying nearly 80% of the city. Levees snapped like twigs and all talk of their engineering prowess was muted.

We walked through the Ninth Ward and even after six months we could see destruction and wrecked home as far as our eyes could see. It is almost that this part of town has been declared a ghost town and no cares to rebuild. The catch however might be that probably the best option is not to rebuild. Easier said than done; this area was inhabited by mostly low-income people because no one else wanted to live on ‘that’ side of the town. The low-income people also happen to be mostly African-American so the issue of not rebuilding slowly transcends from that of rational thinking to resolving issues of social and racial equity. Can we genuinely deny these people from coming back? If we can stop them from living in this vulnerable location, where do we put them? Of course, New Orleans needs people who can work low-end jobs at the bars, restaurants, grocery stores and those people cannot live in flood-safe areas occupied by the middle- and upper-class residents. So technically, the low-income people have a choice of living in flood-prone areas that are cheap to build in but face risks of destruction almost every year or not living in New Orleans at all. So will New Orleans exist as an urban space without its share of poor people that are needed (relative and in an economic sense) in a society? Probably not; no matter how much the upper class of New Orleans citizenry secretly wishes. Hence my conclusion that New Orleans may or must not exist in its current urban form; it should either drastically evolve to live sustainably and densely so as to reduce its ecological footprint in a worsening ecosystem or in a worst-case scenario, count its losses, cherish its history, pack up and move on.

Cities have died before either gradually due to economic or social decline or suddenly due to natural cataclysmic changes. Our capacity to absorb havoc wrecked by nature might have increased and it might take one heck of a natural disaster to wipe off a city especially in a developed nation. As I mentioned, the next hurricane season is expected to be worse and so will be subsequent seasons; natural processes or global warming – the consequences are similar. If at all we choose to rebuild, the way we do it will be paramount in testing the hypothesis that man learns from history. Sadly, I think that we often prove that hypothesis wrong.

I recently read Fast Food Nation for a class on Sustainable Urbanism. Expectedly, the book was loaded with facts against mega corporations aiming for a quick buck while paying little attention to the overall impacts of their business. The author, Eric Schlosser came away as a convinced (and converted, I think) activist against the evils of the fast food companies. Any talk of rabid and profit-hungry corporations with scant regard for societal good cannot exclude Wal-mart. Countless campaigns against its labor exploitative policies and tendencies to big box American countryside and movie (Wal-mart: The High Cost of Low Price) with scathing allegations hasn’t won any friends for Wal-mart in recent times. The capitalistic spirit justifies its business-like methods but accusations of being heartless for its tireless workers and its surroundings is not completely off the mark. Wal-mart at its end is continuously trying to explore new markets and have been eyeing the lucrative and number-rich Indian market for quite some time now.

Recently during a trip to India, I drove by the now-vacant plot of land at the junction of Bandra-Kurla Complex and the Western Express Highway that housed the drive-in theater not long ago. I was informed that this site was earmarked for India’s first Wal-mart in partnership with Reliance Industries as the retail giant look set to enter Indian markets. Of course, the information wasn’t accurate and may have been a tad premature; I couldn’t help but imagine that this would indeed be the perfect site for an in-city Wal-mart. A huge parcel of land with ample space for parking, prime location, proximity to the Western Express highway to facilitate easier access for inbound trucks, location at the cusp of the city and the suburbs; the site had Wal-mart all over it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the information I received would prove to be correct in the near future. Of course, Wal-mart efficiency and its famed supply chain would be seriously hampered in an Indian context due to lack of supporting infrastructure.

India’s cabinet recently approved the entry of foreign retail outlets [source: Times of India] and eliminated the need for India-based franchisee partners. This is yet another step towards a completely globalized market in India. The humungous middle-class consumer market is pegged at $200 billion currently and is expected to grow to almost $500 billion in the next 5 to six years [source: CNN Money]. Although it is small compared to other growing overseas markets, it still offers enough incentive for retailers to move in and are held back only by regulation issues. However, Wal-mart and other big-box retailers are bound to face protests from the local businesses and urban planners. Ample proof of the Wal-mart effect seen all over America –unaesthetic stores, disregard to local urban fabric, conformity leading to monotony, environmental concerns, and lack of attention to regional geographic constraints. Consumer’s economic and rational behavior partly tries to justify shutting out local business but charges of despoiling the urbanscape refuse to go away. In the recent fascination for malls that appeal to the consumer from the inside but do nothing for the urban dweller on the outside (e.g. Centre One, Vashi), Wal-mart’s big blue box will definitely be something new in the first few years but repeat that thousand times over all around India; you will realize the bane of American urbanscape.

But fortunately, not all is lost. Andre Duany of the New Urbanism fame has something wonderful to offer in rebuilding the Wal-marts destroyed during Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi. Seventy percent of Pass Christian, a beautiful bedroom community was destroyed after Hurricane Katrina passed right over its skies [via Veritas et Venustas]. But this destruction has given Wal-mart an opportunity to rebuild keeping in mind the unique urban and cultural context of the southern town. The big-boxing of its retail outlets undoubtedly more efficient but has eroded support in the bucolic environs of Pass Christian mostly due to adverse impact on local businesses. But some businesses have managed to adapt in spite of the presence of Wal-mart and it shows a resurgent attitude amongst local businesses. But they wish Wal-mart mend its ways regards the way it chooses to construct its stores. During a design charette to rebuild Pass Christian, Duany proposed working with Wal-mart to modify its design to suit small town characteristics; instead of a “big-box” store, Wal-mart could build a series of stores that give the appearance of a small town (source: Sun Herald). Plans haven’t been finalized yet but this offers a great opportunity for Wal-mart to win back hearts at least in an urban design context.

Such an approach would also have tremendous implications for its move to India in the near future. Fascination with the big-boxes will wane over time but if Wal-mart choose to assimilate into urban fabric of any Indian city depending on the cultural and social context, it will definitely win brownie points for the mega corporation. Adorning the outsides with commercial logos (see any mall in India) appears cool now but trust me, design ultimately triumphs as people tire of seeing disjointed and non-contextual symbols everywhere they go. The ‘beauty’ of Times Square would be lost if it is replicated everywhere. Sense of a place is an important characteristic in finding your place in an ever-expanding city. Sometimes, making yourself inconspicuous is the solution to standing out from the rest of the crowd. After all, there is more to life than rising profit.

New Urbanism for New Orleans?