Paris, 1928

Last year in a post entitled Barcelona, 1908 I shared an video shot from the front of a streetcar navigating the avenues of the title city a little over a century ago. As you'll remember (if you don't, feel free to go back and take a look), I commented on the complexity of the methods of mobility that took up street-space in relative harmony. From pedestrians, to bicyclists, to carriages, to even a few early automobiles, the streets were a genuine mix of modes of transportation. Now I bring you back to an early 20th Century European city, but this time it's Paris, 1928.



The differences are immediately apparent. There are many more automobiles, and pedestrians largely keep to the sidewalks instead of weaving in front of the streetcar-mounted camera as they did in Barcelona. It's interesting to see the changes and the prevalence of the automobile only twenty years after the first clip.

In 1928 Paris you will notice a city struggling with the pressures of this increase in automobile traffic. Street activity, largely unregulated and unsupervised before, now necessitates direction from officers who stand down oncoming vehicles. At the 1:18 mark, the camera captures the somewhat organized chaos of the bustling intersection where one car drifts into the flow of oncoming traffic. But no one really has right of way anyway and there aren't even lanes, so who is at fault here? Here's a frightening thought -- think of being on the road with that many new drivers, operating largely unfamiliar technology in a space with little oversight. No wonder the pedestrians stick to the sidewalks except to cross...

My takeaway from this video (in reference to the first) is the pace at which automobiles infiltrated the centers of these old cities that for centuries had operated largely on foot traffic as the primary mode of transportation. More autos traveling at higher speeds on cramped streets relegated pedestrians to the sidewalk where they understandably felt more safe. This separation transformed the function of these streets, and had serious implications for them as public spaces. This compartmentalization of uses is the challenge the shared space movement, and to a certain extent the complete streets initiative, attempt to correct through redesign and reprogramming of streets, thereby changing public perception of streets as car-only zones to ones accepting and emboldening of more diverse modes of transportation.

Sometimes we must look back in order to move forward.

We Need Our Oil... (Part 2)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I said I wouldn't say much about the Gulf oil spill last time, but I found some interesting posts which complement the point I was making last week about how deeply embedded fossil fuels are in American culture, and how design can dictate our mobility choices.

The first is an article by Jonathan Hiskes of Grist entitled, "Can we just drive less after the Gulf spill? If only it were so easy..." Hiskes comments on interviews of gas-station customers conducted by NPR reporter Brian Mann. Mann concludes that despite the fact that many customers have been very concerned about the spill, "they also don't see a real connection between the spill in the Gulf and the decisions they're making about the cars and trucks they drive, and the number of times they fill up the tank in the week." Hiskes is quick to point out what I was getting at last week, which is sometimes (oftentimes?) Americans lack viable alternatives to automobile transportation, especially in a place like semi-rural upstate New York where these customers were interviewed. None of what they're saying suggests they don't understand the connection between their consumption of oil and the disaster in the Gulf, he says, "They're saying they lack good alternatives to driving. That's the real problem: Our cities and towns (and lives) are built around the assumption that we'll be driving our own cars and trucks to get where we need to go."

Don't believe that urban design and car use go hand-in-hand? Check out the following graphic:



Also linked from Hiskes' piece, this graph from Left for LeDroit depicts the relationship between pre-autocentric design in the Washington DC area and the ability of residents in these places to forgo car ownership. As you can clearly see, in the neighborhoods established before the rise of car culture it is possible to get around without an automobile. Hiskes concludes:

Conversely, people aren't going to walk or bike when amenities are too far away. They're not going to ride mass transit where it doesn't exist. They're not going to buy electric cars when they're not affordable, and when we don't have a network of charging stations. The way to help people drive less is to give them alternatives.

So if it is impossible to avoid car travel in some areas of the country, what else can people do in these places to stick it to BP? Boycotting BP is unfortunately not as straightforward as simply not fueling at their stations. Quite seriously, they have their hands in everything. As Ronald White of the LA Times reports, "Few foreign companies have ever become as deeply rooted in the U.S. economy as BP." Chris MacDonald of The Business Ethics Blog has even called a BP boycott "futile and unethical."

So even though tempers are hot right now and we want some sense of immediate retribution, we must shift our attention to longer-term strategies like investment in renewable energy technologies and related infrastructure, as well as legislation to promote this shift and hold the oil companies responsible for their actions. A little good urban design never hurt anyone either, but again this is obviously a long-term strategy. It took a decades for the oil companies to obtain the power they now have, and it will take a sustained, concentrated effort if we are ever to defeat the monster that we helped create.

We're Stickin' with LA, and Cars Still Don't Rule the Road

Two weeks ago I posted a video by Ross Ching depicting the streets of Los Angeles devoid of automobile traffic, which created an equally eerie and visionary display of what life would be like without our primary form of transportation.

This time, I've found something a little different. As you'll see in the following creative transformations of our beloved built environment, the cars remain but much of the infamous LA asphalt does not.

La Cienega Blvd and 3rd Street (Before)



(And after)

Who is the wizard behind this disappearing act? His name is David Yoon, a self proclaimed "urban planning geek" curious enough to investigate the question: Could the entire mood of a neighborhood depend on something as simple as street width?

Look at the following images and answer that yourself.

Rodeo Drive and Dayton Way (Before)

(And after)

Third Street Promenade (Before)



(And after)

One of the reasons these images are so powerful is because of the emotional response one has when looking at them. Wide streets are alienating physically and socially, not only limiting pedestrian mobility but also making it more difficult to meet with friends and even have basic interactions with other city goers. These images play with our impulses, as our reactions to the dichotomy displayed by them can be reasonably attributed to personal experiences we've had in similar spaces.

On his blog, Yoon describes how his work exposes the asphalt elephant in the room, so to speak, and how we got into this mess in the first place:

As a writer, street-narrowing to me represents an act of fictionalization, with fiction itself being an attempt to make sense of the randomness life flings our way. The grander absurdities of Los Angeles have already been well documented — its optimistically-named enclaves, phantom star maps — but its smaller, more micro-level oddities go mostly unnoticed: sunning at an outdoor cafe just steps from the edge of a six-lane, 50mph road; eyeing the 30-second countdown when crossing an intersection; bidding farewell to friends after dinner in dreary parking lots.

There's a yearning for a more human scale out there, and a growing realization that hey, this world wasn't created by some petulant, eight-armed Deus Urbanus but by people — ordinary people, struggling to make the best design decisions they could. Los Angeles, located at Manifest Destiny's terminus and born from a mad Levittown landgrab amid giddy postwar prosperity, was not designed badly per se; it was never really designed to begin with, at least not in a coherent fashion.

Yoon also hopes that his work will spark a debate about how we can further reimagine our cities and reinvent these broken and isolating design practices, hearkening back to a question I have asked myself many times before. If design dictates how we interact with the built environment, and the extensive infrastructure now in place has contributed to so many of the problems we face today (environmental degradation, social inequality, etc.) then what can we possibly do with all of that asphalt and concrete to improve the situation? Unfortunately we can't just slice out the middle of every major boulevard and reassemble the remaining pieces as Yoon has done. There may be some ways to adapt what exists to achieve different outcomes, but that discussion must be reserved for another day. For now, let's consider Yoon's work as a vivid look into what's possible through responsible urban design, and the reactions we have to it as the proof that design matters to each and every one of us.

For a full map of all of his LA transformations (as well as images and the significance of each one), click here.

How Can We Improve the Connectivity (and Vibrancy) of Our Neighborhoods?

In a recent article on Grist.org, one of my favorite staff writers, David Roberts, conducts a step-by-step critique of his home turf, the Bitter Lake neighborhood in Seattle (Walk Score 71). By exposing the limitations of the current orientation of city streets and lack of adequate access to public spaces, Roberts identifies the reasons why he and his wife don't feel comfortable letting their children walk to the local park and why they have never met their neighbors who live less than a stone's throw away.

Roberts then embarks on a multi-stage redesign of his neighborhood (complete with maps and colored lines denoting areas of interest, see his initial one on the left) and offers some well-though-out and reasonable changes to the current urban fabric.

By engaging in this exercise, Roberts offers an answer to a question that has largely dominated my pursuit of sustainable urbanism in the last year: What can we possibly do to the miles and miles of unproductive infrastructure already in place?

Roberts concludes his post by addressing this very issue. He writes: "One of the biggest challenges in years ahead, as we attempt to densify and green our communities, will be retrofitting existing neighborhoods to increase walkability, sociability, sustainability, and safety. It's worth a minute of anyone's time to ponder how they could make their own surroundings more amenable to spontaneous, non-commercial, human-scale social interaction."

To see the rest of his neighborhood diagrams and a more detailed analysis of the proposed design elements, read his full post here.

Follow Up: Times Square and the Cheonggyecheon River

Last July I profiled efforts by city officials to deconstruct automobile-centric urban design and reclaim these spaces for pedestrian use. Two of these projects, the conversion of Times Square to the world's most famous patio (complete with lawn furniture) and the daylighting of the Cheonggyecheon River in Seoul, South Korea, are supreme representations of the power of place.

The first video below describes pedestrian reactions to the transformation of Times Square, as well as the motivations on the part of NYC transportation officials and Mayor Bloomberg to make the drastic change. It also includes striking before and after shots of the automobile-dominated streets in 2005 and the pedestrian-only block it became last summer:



In this second video, urban designers comment on what the daylighting of Cheonggyecheon means for the people of Seoul, and how the creation of public space reshuffles the urban transportation hierarchy and forms the "glue that keeps the city together":