Spending More

Emily Badger, writing for The Atlantic Cities, on the relative amount of money spent by customers using different transportation modes:

But for all of the other business types examined [excluding supermarkets], bikers actually out-consumed drivers over the course of a month. True, they often spent less per visit. But cyclists and pedestrians in particular made more frequent trips (by their own estimation) to these restaurants, bars and convenience stores, and those receipts added up. This finding is logical: It’s a lot easier to make an impulse pizza stop if you’re passing by an aromatic restaurant on foot or bike instead of in a passing car at 35 miles an hour. Such frequent visits are part of the walkable culture. Compare European communities – where it’s common to hit the bakery, butcher and fish market on the way home from work – to U.S. communities where the weekly drive to Walmart’s supermarket requires an hour of dedicated planning.

Walking and/or riding a bike creates a feeling of engagement with the neighborhood that driving typically does not. The slower pace allows for unplanned stops at interesting businesses while also giving smaller, unknown businesses enough time to make a good impression. Catering to people who choose to walk or bike, at least as much as to those who drive, can only be good for business.

Staying Put

Speaking of families opting to stay downtown, Ryan Briggs has a piece for Next American City on how Philadelphia and Baltimore downtowns are continuing to grow on the strength of families opting to stay put:

While urban revitalization is often stereotyped as dominated by young professionals and retirees, Census data found that the Greater Center City area had an even balance of all age groups. Data from the year 2000 indicated an average household size of 1.7 people in the eight ZIP codes. That figure had ticked up to 1.75 by 2010 — a trend CCD attributed to couples opting to raise children in the city.

It’s possible for cities to create vibrant, thriving downtown communities that include families and children.

Retaining Millenials

Haya El Nasser, writing for USA Today, reports on how cities are trying to retain millenials as they move on to marriage and kids:

The hot pursuit of young professionals has been at the core of American cities’ urban revival for more than a decade. It worked. They came, they played, they stayed.

An urban renaissance unfolded as the number of people living in America’s downtowns soared, construction of condos and loft apartments boomed and once-derelict neighborhoods thrived. In many of the largest cities in the most-populous metropolitan areas, downtown populations grew at double-digit rates from 2000 to 2010, according to the Census.

Now, cities face a new demographic reality: The young and single are aging and having children. If the pattern of the past 50 years holds, they might soon set their sights on suburbia.

The problem isn’t that suburbia is inherently better for raising kids. The problem is that for many decades most of the development of family-centered infrastructure - the good schools, the parks, the grocery stores, the child care centers, the livable houses - has all been in the suburbs. If cities want to retain families, they need to provide the services and amenities that familes want and need. Cities are just as well equipped as the suburbs (probably even better) to provide for their citizens. It’s just a matter of priorities.

The Absurd Future

Over at Curbed, Amy Schellenbaum has a collection of absurd futuristic designs:

Lately it seems that every other day one ambitious architecture firm or another churns out crazy renderings they insist are what’s next for urban development. From the absurdly utopian to just plain strange—super-galactic restaurants, giant phalluses, and all—the world’s future cities sure do look like rather awesome places to hang out.

These don’t look like the kinds of places I would like to hang out. In fact, most of them seem strangely alien - impersonal and inhuman. I wonder what motivates these designs. They aren’t real. Most of them aren’t even achievable. They are pointless exercises in how “futuristic” an architect can dream. Hopefully it isn’t a future any of us have to see.

Fun with Foldify

This app provides one of the few remaining reasons to have a printer. It looks like fun.

Via Daring Fireball

The Amazing Neighborhoods of Washington D.C.

Speaking of Robert Kwolek, he has a five part series of Case Studies on Washington D.C. neighborhoods that feature some exceptional pictures of truly beautiful examples of walkable urbanism. If you want to be inspired, check out these posts:

Logan Circle

Capitol Hill

Dupont Circle

Georgetown

Conclusion featuring other Washington D.C. neighborhoods

Of those neighborhoods, I’ve only had the opportunity to spend much time in Georgetown - and that was just a rainy morning with some friends. I came away very impressed and wished I had more time to explore. Seeing Robert’s posts just made we want to go back!

Starchitects Don't Know Best

Robert Kwolek, writing for his blog reCities, dissects the cult of the starchitect:

So I propose we stop promoting the BIG’s of the world (referring to both Bjarke Ingels Group and Koolhaas’ “Bigness” theories), and return architectural discourse to something of a grassroots level. We need to stop asking architect/businessmen what they foresee for the built environment, and instead start empathizing with our fellow citizens, and ask them how they would like to see their towns and cities develop. From studies we already know it veers more toward traditional walkable neighborhoods, not a megalopolis. And why not, when traditional city designs are the result of thousands of years of evolution and adapted to human needs. We want beautiful, walkable, place-specific neighborhoods, but we won’t get that if we continue to hire a select group of architects to design all over the world. When mayors, planning officials, and developers turn to starchitects to develop buildings and master plans for their cities, it’s nothing more than totalitarianism which ignores the dreams of the people. Left to many architects, we’d still be in the throes of urban renewal and building towers in the park à la Le Corbusier.

As I’ve mentioned previously, starchitects are focused solely on purity of design vision. This is a focus on the design not the people the design serves. I agree wholeheartedly with Robert - we need to get back to the humanity of design. We need to build places for people. We need citizen buildings that contribute to a better place just as we need engaged citizens who contribute to a better society.

Walking Home Cold

Lenore Skenazy, writing for Free-Range Kids, relays the story of how a Michigan mom got in hot water for expecting her kids to walk home from the library. From the original report, written by Joni Hubred-Golden for the Farmington-Farmington Hills Patch:

A Farmington Hills Police officer picked up two children, ages 12 and 15, from the Farmington Community Library Main Library at 6:18 p.m. Saturday, after their mother told them she would not come to get them.

[…]

While the children walked to the library, neither was wearing a jacket, and library staff would not let them walk home. The report noted temperatures had fallen below freezing.

The report indicated the officer told the mother when she picked up the children that a report would be filed.

Neither story mentions either how cold it was or how far the walk would have been. However comments from readers of both stories indicates that temperatures for the day ranged in the low to mid 30s on that particular day - cold, but not overly so. And with a temperature swing of just a few degrees, these kids had already walked the exact same walk in virtually the same weather to get to the library.

The whole story seems rather outrageous, particularly that the police would feel the need to file a report. The comments on both stories are great though!

Embarrassing Addresses

Curbed has a fun list of the most embarrassing addresses in America. It’s good for a laugh or at least an amused smirk. If you are ever naming streets, I’d suggest staying away from any of these.

The Peak

Chuck Marohn, writing for Strong Towns, has a thought provoking post today about the disappearance of the merchant class in which he makes this insightful observation:

I have sometimes been accused of being too nostalgic for the pre-Depression America. While I acknowledge that the good old days weren’t always good, there are some reasons why people’s perceptions of prosperity – when it comes to their place – centers around 1960. For much of America, this was the peak.

This was the point in time where our cities had the best of both worlds. The traditional neighborhoods still existed in a mature state. The momentum for growth and development that is inherent with the traditional design (a resilient high upside, low downside configuration) remained intact. We had not yet begun to dismantle our places in service of the automobile and so we still had the agglomeration of humanity consolidated in and around neighborhood centers.

In 1960 we also had the automobile and all of its upside, but without the inevitable downside that would, in later decades, become accepted as normal. One could now travel between cities on open roads at any time of the day, no longer beholden to railroad routes or schedules (although those still existed for people and freight). The first generation of auto-oriented development was in its infancy, the financial sweet spot in the Ponzi scheme where the growth is producing new revenue for the city but the taxpayer’s long term costs wait – uncalculated and unaccounted for – hidden in the future. There is little wonder why, in Rocky Ford and tens of thousands of other cities across the county, we felt like we could have it all.

While his lament of the missing merchant class is well worth a read, I found this section about the peak of prosperity intriguing. 1960 is about 20 years after what I have typically considered the last of universally good urban development. The early post-war years were extremely detrimental towards the practice of walkable, compact development as there was an increasing focus on building out the infrastructure and development of early suburban sprawl. However, from a broader perspective, 1960 as the peak makes sense. At that point, there had been relatively few years of sprawling development, very little destruction of the traditional compact urban fabric, and the costs of the first lifecycle had yet to appear. The so-called “Urban Renewal” of the 1960’s had yet to destroy vast swathes of compact, walkable districts in favor of towers and parking lots. The exceptional highway expansion of the past 60 years had just begun and, for the most part, had yet to destroy neighborhoods and segment cities. The smog creating, maddening traffic issues of trying to push ever increasing numbers of people through congested corridors had yet to become a problem. As Chuck puts it, it was the best of both worlds and the worst of neither.