Today, John and I are at AIA Seattle’s conference, “Design for Livability: Sustainable Cities”. They’ve got several speakers this morning, starting with a group of presentations about “ecodistricts” – ecologically-minded plans for building communities. So far, the examples given are whole neighborhoods built, essentially, from scratch.
I want to say, first, that I’m biased against this sort of thing. Not against planning for sustainability in communities, but against doing it all at once. We need old buildings, so that rents become low enough to support nonprofits and startups, new ideas in general that can’t generate new construction rents. We need to accept that a single plan, no matter how inclusive, can’t meet everyone’s needs – as Jane Jacobs said, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” We need a mixture of architectural styles and building ages so that entire neighborhoods don’t go out of vogue at once, so they have a mix of income levels and a mix of uses.
The two examples being discussed this morning so far are the South Waterfront development in Portland and the Olympic Village development in Vancouver, BC. In both of these examples, building essentially all at once probably couldn’t have been avoided. Olympic Village is being built on an ex-industrial site – it will be used temporarily by the Olympics as a weird, enclosed, secured compound, but afterward will be largely used as market rate, mixed use buildings, with a bit of subsidized housing. South Waterfront is similar – abandoned industrial land being built on all at once, spearheaded by Oregon Health and Science University’s expansion.
Most of the presentation time is being devoted to particular eco-features in each design, how they conserve water and energy, as well as a bit about transportation access. We’ll see if I can get some of the slides to update later.
I believe we’re moving on to a project in an existing urban area, so let’s start here and I’ll update more soon.
Not too mention that chances of building an entire neighborhood are few and far between without massive displacement.
I’ve been to South Waterfront and I’m not sure I would call it a neighborhood. Its got a nice little boardwalk area with some interesting retail but it feels incredibly mundane and, frankly, boring.
I think planners tend to love the idea of creating from scratch but in reality, creating livability/walkability/sustainablity in cities should focus on lots and lots of small projects over a very long period of time. I know many would say that we don’t have this kind of time but I think without doing it this way you risk failing on a much larger scale.
I agree. We need small changes, not big ones. Tweaks, single building additions, not whole new developments all at once.
I don’t think making these changes slowly is really that necessary, though – you can build and widen a hell of a lot of sidewalks in a very short time. You can build a lot of light rail. You can close streets to traffic, you can put in bike lanes.
Hell, a lot of the work here is just stopping highway growth.
New mega-eco-whatever-developments have an uncanny ability to be stale and soulless, and despite themselves they end up looking like downtown Bellevue or Lakewood Colorado’s hideous BelMar. Ben, you’re spot on to argue for mixed-age neighborhood buildings. It’s no wonder why, in my opinion, the best parts of downtown Seattle are where over the course of a few blocks Pioneer Sq. morphs into the Financial District.
I like the area around the retail core and the market too. Though the best parts about both are the older buildings and pedestrian activity.
Thank you!
And except for that block of 1st with parking garage on both sides. The whole city would be better if that wasn’t there.
Certainly, I think what you get at is key. We need to prioritize investments in pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users when it comes to our public investments, but at the same time we can do all this and decrease VMT without any changes to our building stock. Not that it would be ideal, but I guess my point is that I find it problematic when mega-project New Urbanist developments are seen as the answer for creating better urban environments. Its much more about how we engage with the urban space than its actual physical form that makes a great city.