Town & country: the great inversion

     Just a couple of decades ago, it was taken for granted that inner cities were the preserve of immigrants and the poor, and suburbs were the chosen destination of those who could afford them. Today, a demographic inversion is taking place: Central cities increasingly are where the affluent want to live, while suburbs are becoming home to poorer people and those who come to America from other parts of the world. Highly educated members of the emerging Millennial generation are showing a decided preference for urban life, and are being joined in many places by a new class of affluent retirees.
      Alan Ehrenhalt, author of The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City, published this spring by Alfred A. Knopf, will deliver the second Lincoln Lecture in the spring series April 10 at Lincoln House. All in all, he says, our cities are becoming more like European cities and like those that have existed in the Western world for most of the last millennium. The flight of the wealthy to the suburbs in the last generation comes to look more like an aberration than like a sign of things to come. The commercial canyons of lower Manhattan are becoming residential neighborhoods, and mass transit has revitalized inner-city communities in Chicago and Brooklyn. Car-dominated Sunbelt cities like Phoenix and Charlotte have sought to build 21st century downtowns from scratch, while sprawling postwar suburbs are seeking to attract young people with their own form of urbanized experience.
    Alan Ehrenhalt served for 19 years as executive editor of Governing Magazine, and is currently executive editor of Stateline, a news service about state government that is part of the Pew Charitable Trusts. He has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review and op-ed page, the Washington Post Book World, the New Republic, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of The United States of Ambition (1991), The Lost City (1995), Democracy in the Mirror (1999), and was editor of the first four editions of Politics in America, a biennial reference book profiling all 535 members of Congress. In 2007, he received the Donald Stone award from the American Society for Public Administration, for contributions to the field of intergovernmental management.
   The lecture is free but registration is required.

Great Outdoors, continued

     At the beginning of the month, senior fellow Armando Carbonell participated in a White House conference on conservation that included remarks by President Obama and briefings by cabinet officers and senior administration officials on progress to date on the America's Great Outdoors initiative. Lincoln Institute board member Doug Wheeler also attended. The most highlighted initiative was the Crown of the Continent, flagship of the Institute's work on large landscape conservation with longstanding joint-venture partner, the University of Montana's Center for Natural Resource and Environmental Policy, a multi-year effort to bring conservation policy-makers and other stakeholders together to advance conservation planning and practice throughout a region that covers some 19 million acres in the state of Montana in the United States and in the Canadian Provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. The administration has proposed allocating $109 million for a Forest Service-Interior Collaborative Landscape component that aligns both agencies' land acquisition efforts to support community-driven conservation goals in the Crown of the Continent and Longleaf Pine in the Southeast. The federal investments in these large landscapes build on locally led conservation efforts, and will leverage significant private commitments to land and water conservation.

Planning the post-freeway city

Peter Park knows urban freeways. As planning director in Milwaukee, he helped engineer the dismantling of the Park East Expressway, now a model of downtown transformation that sparked revitalization and distributed traffic safely and efficiently. "It's un-American," he said, to put up with infrastructure -- highways blasted through cities -- that is clearly a "failed experiment" and devalues private property.
     Park, who most recently was planning director in Denver, delivered the inaugural lecture in the 2012 spring series March 20 to a standing-room only crowd. The establishment of the Eisenhower Interstate System beginning in 1956 was a remarkable mobilization of government and businesss, financed by the gas tax and complete with an expert marshalling of public support, aided by films by Henry Ford II and Walt Disney, promising freedom and prosperity. The interstate highway system wasn't really designed to go through downtowns, but cities with planners like Robert Moses lusted after federal funding as part of the urban renewal campaign in the 1950s and 60s.
     A new campaign to dismantle urban freeways and correct the errors of that era, Park said, should also be based on common values of prosperity, freedom, and a "renewed civic energy," bolstered by the success of the Embarcadero in San Franscisco -- a kind of right-sizing of infrastructure and urban design. America’s failing infrastructure needs to be addressed, he said. In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation’s infrastructure an overall grade of “D” and proposed that keeping America safe, prosperous, and competitive would require a 5-year expenditure of $2.2 trillion. But taxpayer dollars shouldn't flow to maintaining ineffective freeways or expanding them, he said. A removal campaign -- beginning with the top 10 Freeways without Futures,  identified by the Congress for the New Urbanism -- would strengthen cities and metropolitan regions.
     Peter J. Park is the 2012 Lincoln-Loeb Fellow. The lecture will be posted soon at the Lectures and Videos page at the Lincoln Institute website.

Adaption to climate change: the US & Australia

Although advocacy continues to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions through mitigation, much of the action worldwide is all about adaptation, or  managing the risk of climate impacts that cannot be avoided. And two places that have started to take serious steps to prepare for these impacts -- flooding, sea level rise, storm surges, wildfires, drought -- are the United States and Australia.
     The two countries, both large, sprawling, and showing a predilection for coastal development, have much in common when it comes to climate change. First, they are among the highest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters per capita in the developed world, with Australia usually heading the list and the United States close behind. Second, both countries are exposed to significant climate-related risk relative to sea level rise and storm surge, drought and water shortage, floods, wildfires, and heat waves.
    A new book just published by the Lincoln Institute lays out nine case studies of adaptation responses  from New York City, the Southeastern Atlantic Coast States, New Orleans, Los Angeles–San Diego, and San Francisco; and in Australia from Melbourne, Sydney, South East Queensland, and Perth. Examples of the initiatives include reconfiguring ecosystems and banning development in the wake of devastating fires in Melbourne, creating one super-agency to manage water supplies in Los Angeles and San Diego, and the concept of “strategic retreat” of infrastructure, housing, and other assets vulnerable to storm surge and flooding in New York and Connecticut.
        “We are humbly aware that this is only an initial response to a challenge with a magnitude of potential impacts never before experienced in human history, a challenge that will test our ability to work together at every scale,” said Lincoln Institute senior fellow Armando Carbonell, who co-edited Resilient Coastal City Regions: Planning for Climate Change in the United States and Australia with Edward J. Blakely from the University of Sydney, and former recovery czar in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.
        The focus is on coastal regions in the United States and Australia, but the aim of the volume is to suggest adaptation and mitigation initiatives applicable throughout the world, he said -- anyplace that has seen severe climate impacts already, such as extreme temperature and precipitation events. A recent story in the New York Times surveyed how some 3.7 million Americans along the coastline are threatened by sea level rise.
     The Lincoln Institute initially became involved in the issue of climate change through work with planning directors in the 30 largest cities of the United States. Beginning in 2006 these city planners started raising the issue of how to respond to their mayors’ questions about global warming. Many of the mayors were already signing the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, launched by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels in 2005 as the Kyoto Protocol was going into effect. 
     The pivotal environmental issue of our time has been crowded off the world stage as governments across the globe struggle for economic stability in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008. But in spite of mixed prospects for action at the international and national levels, state and local governments have shown a surprising ability to respond to climate change. Resilience and adaptation are rapidly becoming a major emphasis in these jurisdictions, warranting greater attention on best practices.
     To avoid catastrophic results, however, it remains necessary to significantly reduce GHG emissions, Carbonell and Blakely conclude. While there are encouraging developments at the national level in Australia, recent analysis suggests that the time for action is critically short.

Crowdsourcing planning

     The 21st century has brought all kinds of challenges for cities, but along with that has come technological advances -- in particular new ways of bringing citizens together to plan for the future. Harnessing the power and the wisdom of interested citizens, as well as experts, was a big part of last month's TED conference in Long Beach and and the TED Prize 2012, The City 2.0, a kind of global Wikipedia connecting citizens, political leaders, urban experts, companies, and organizations, to reshape cities around the world. The idea was to create a clearinghouse for tools and methodologies, best practices, resources, innovations and experimentations.
      To get the City 2.0 website up and running, TED called on The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and its Technology for Engagement Initiative, IBM’s Smart Cities initiative, Razorfish, and Autodesk. TED's Chris Anderson and TED Prize Director Amy Novogratz called for the further donation of ideas, drawing suggestions from Disney Imagineering, Architects for Humanity, Living Homes, and Intuit. The Lincoln Institute was also in discussions with the TED Prize team, and plans to make its own contribution: a new network promoting open-source and open-access scenario planning software, described in a Policy Focus Report, Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools, that will be released at the American Planning Association National Planning Conference April 13-17 in Los Angeles.
     The TED Prize has for the last five years been awarded to individuals, ranging from Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson to create the Encylopedia of Life to the street artist JR and his initiative to encourage portraits of people plastered on walls and buildings. This year marks the first time the prize has gone to a broader concept.
     Just before the announcement of the prize, one of the more enlightening moments at the conference that shed some light on crowdsourcing was a request for online guesses of the weight of an ox that was brought onstage. There were about 500 responses; some were as low as 800 pounds, some as high as 8,000 pounds. The average was 1,793 pounds -- and the beast’s weight was 1,795.
     Metropolitan Institute director Kevin DeSouza has a great essay exploring the uses of crowdsourcing in planning at Planetizen. Expanded coverage of the TED Prize and TED 2012 can be viewed at The Atlantic Monthly's The Atlantic Cities.

Of the grid and ghostowns

     Earlier this month a panel of experts assembled by the Forum for Urban Design and the Lincoln Institute reflected on the exhibit Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream at the Museum of Modern Art, where teams of architects, economists, and artists re-imagined five areas devastated by the 2008 housing crisis. The hotspots in New Jersey, Florida, Illinois, southern California and Oregon are all primarily suburban environments, though not as far-flung as the zombie subdivisions of the Southeast and Intermountain West, and surely not as stark as the ghost towns of China. 
     Ellen Dunham-Jones, author of Reinventing Suburbia, Joseph B. Rose from the Georgetown Cos., Phoenix attorneyGrady Gammage Jr., and national homebuilder Ara K. Hovnanian all agreed that the proposals, which ranged from cascading green buildings to the retrofit of an abandoned factory, were what curator Barry Bergdoff called a "provocation." But the panelists also agreed that reinventing housing and changing development patterns will involve an understanding of market demographics, complex attitudes toward density, and nuts-and-bolts fixes like reforming restrictive zoning.
         The task at hand is retrofitting -- going back to landscapes that have turned out wrong. That was in stark contrast to another outstanding exhibit in New York right now -- The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan for Manhattan 1811 - 2011, at the Museum of the City of New York. The exhibit chronicles the way New York planned for growth, from lower Manhattan to 155th Street, above which was thought to be too hilly and rocky and wild for development. The planners confronted a number of decisions about the length of street blocks, the size of periodic parks and squares, and even informal settlement, with shantytowns along what is now Fifth Avenue -- but mostly they had to make the fundamental calculation, based on a certain minimum density, population growth and a fledgling real estate market, of how much the city would grow. It brought to mind the work of Solly Angel, who in the seminal report  Making Room for a Planet of Cities points out that there will be a doubling of urban population and a tripling of land area over the next 30 years in cities primarily in the developing world. To accommodate millions of people who will continue to stream in from the countryside, Angel recommends planning for ample urban land, infrastructure needs on a decades-long time horizon, and a framework of arterial streets one square kilometer in size.
     An expanded consideration of these themes -- "Foreclosed" as an example of reaching too far and perhaps not planning adequately, "The Greatest Grid" a tribute to a more orderly, and ultimately wildly successful, urban growth -- can be viewed at The Atlantic Cities.

Shifting suburbia

There were inklings that conventional suburban development may not be sustainable or have positive outcomes, for many years. At the Lincoln Institute, we ran a workshop called "Redesigning the Edgeless City," aimed at retrofitting, in a targeted way, the landscape of strip malls and far-flung subdivisions. These days that effort, sometimes referred to as "sprawl repair." has taken on a new urgency, after the housing bust of 2008 -- a seminal event that left wide swaths of the country veritable wastelands, dotted with zombie subdivisions, vast developments that have platted and laid out with cul de sacs and streetlamps, but with virtually no chance of ever getting built out. At the same time, industrial areas and legacy cities have been similarly struggling.
     It was a natural partnership, then, with the Forum for Urban Design and the Museum of Modern Art, to put on Shifting Suburbia, a symposium set for March 8 in New York at MoMA, in association with the museum's exhibit Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. Curator Barry Bergdoll will moderate a discussion with Ara K. Hovnanian of Hovnanian Homes, Joseph B. Rose of the Georgetown Companies, and Ellen Dunham Jones of the Georgia Institute of Technology. The event is at MoMA's Bartos Forum on 3/8 at 6:30 p.m.
     The exhibit, which details the work of design teams made up of architects, economists, and artists, charged with remaking five struggling areas all around the country, has prompted an interesting dialogue, including commentary from Blair Kamin at the Chicago Tribune, Diana Lind at The Next American City, and Bryan Bell at Metropolis. Jeanne Gang and Greg Lindsay had this op-ed essay in The New York Times, Designing a Fix for Housing. The proposals are meant to be provocative more than specifically policy-oriented, though it's heartwarming that anything at MoMA would refer to zoning and Brownfields. The intent of the forum is to take the discussion of post-2008 to the next level.