Helping economies in transition

     The Lincoln Institute's Valuation and Taxation Department conducted a week-long course in Slovenia last month, "Market Value-Based Taxation of Real Property: Lessons from International Experience," for public officials from Eastern European countries. An international faculty of experts from Estonia, Poland and Northern Ireland joined Institute fellows Joan Youngman, Jane Malme, and Sally Powers to explore the benefits and challenges of market value-based property taxes and to consider strategies for their successful implementation. Course participants included public officials from six countries, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Kosovo, Serbia, and Slovenia. The course, which addresses the fiscal, legal, poitical, social and administrative issues facing countries in economic transition that are considering or have introduced value-based taxation, was held at the Center of Excellence in Finance in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The center was established in 2001 to provide training, research, and assistance to regional officials dealing with public financial management and central banking, and to allow them to work with international experts in these fields.

The contested city

The annual Journalists Forum on Land and the Built Environment concluded last weekend, wrapping up two days with some fifty writers, architecture critics, and editors. The theme of the forum, co-sponsored by the Lincoln Institute, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, and Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, was The Contested City. Highlights:
Clash at town hall. Paul Farmer, president of the American Planning Association, Samuel R. Staley from the DeVoe Moore Center at Florida State University, and Lincoln Institute senior fellow Armando Carbonell explored what was driving the attacks on local planning and sustainability by Tea Party activists, moderated by Kate Zernike, reporter for The New York Times and author of "Boiling Mad:Inside Tea Party America." The panel agreed planners need to do a better job communicating, though building consensus is increasingly challening.
     The role of the arts. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett from the University of Southern California, and author of The Warhol Economy, showed how the fashion industry and the arts are powerful drivers of urban economies. Roger Cummings, a graffiti artist from JuxtapositionArts in Minneapolis, explored the sometimes controversial role of the public artist, from chalk drawings to “yarn bombing,” in the life of the city.
     Pension reform. Rhode Island state treasurer Gina M. Raimondo recounted the Ocean State’s initiative to overhaul the pension system, which, like in virtually every state, was on its way to bankrupting state and local government. Rhode Island faced a $7 billion unfunded liability, and 30 cents of every tax dollar going to generous pensions to retired public employees.
     Occupying public space. Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times, led a panel on protest, free speech, and public space in the city, with the GSD’s Jerold S. Kayden, author of Privately Owned Public Space, and Daniel D'Oca from Interboro Partners.
     The just city. Toni L. Griffin, director of the J. Max Bond Center at the Spitzer School of Architecture, The City College of New York, mapped patterns of segregation and inequity …
     The City 2.0. Using technology to foster public participation in planning, and to make urban life easier and more efficient, was the topic of the presentation by Frank Hebbert from Open Plans. Hebbert is a co-author of Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools. Also in attendance was Dan Mitchell from the TED Prize, which this year established The City 2.0, an online clearinghouse for shaping the 21st century city.
     Leading the contested city. Former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley said the key ingredients for a successful city included education, a good business climate, infrastructure, and sustainability.
     Temporary urbanism and city parks. Rahul Mehrotra, chairman of the Department of Urban Planning and Urban Design at the GSD, and an expert on Mumbai, shared his ideas about the “kinetic city” and new ways of thinking about the formal and informal city in the megacities of the developing world. Peter Harnik from the Trust for Public Land and author of Urban Green, caleld for a "funding quilt" to support great city parks, which he said "beat a yard by a mile." 
     Redistricting the contested city. Michael P. McDonald from George Mason University and the Brookings Institution showed how community input through tools such as the Public Mapping Project can counter intensifying gerrymandering. Kelli Lundgren, RepresentMe Utah recounted the citizens effort there to make the Salt Lake City area more of a coherent “doughnut” rather than “pizza slices.”
     Priming the pump. Joan Youngman, Daphne Kenyon, and Adam Langley from the Lincoln Institute shared research for the forthcoming Policy Focus Report Rethinking Property Tax Incentives for Business, suggesting there was little transparency in the popular practice of offering property tax incentives to businesses making location decisions – and little evidence of benefits in terms of jobs and economic development.
     All things digital. Kara Swisher from All Things D and the Wall Street Journal brought the gathering up to date on the continuing digital transformation in the media industry, suggesting that print was inexorably on the way out, and that most media consumption will be on mobile devices and tablets.
     Robert Hammond, co-founder of Friends of the High Line, was the dinner speaker at the Nieman Foundation’s Lippmann House, and told the story of one of the most successful park projects in recent memory – the transformation of an elevated freight rail line that was set for demolition. A key question was whether any city can have its own High Line, and how to pay for it, including the potential for value capture.
     Participants Roger Showley from the San Diego Union-Tribune, Garth Stapley from McClatchy Newspapers, and Josh Stephens from California Planning and Development Report, writing in Planetizen, all filed dispatches exploring the themes further.

Digitizing 100 years of land values

     Here's a quiz: how many recognize something called Olcott's Blue Books? Gabriel Ahlfeldt from the London School of Economics certainly does. He's been working on a unique dataset of historical land values derived from Olcott’s Blue Books, which were published annually between 1900 and 1990, and represented in map form a range of spatial information about the city of Chicago and its suburbs, including data on land values, land use, building heights, public transportation, and schools. Since the books were published annually for nearly a century, the information makes it possible to observe land values and urban development over a long period of time. The purpose of this project is to digitize and process the Blue Books data, making it available for statistical analysis of long run adjustments in land values. The data extraction process involves using geographic information system (GIS) software to create a rectangular grid following Chicago’s street pattern and produce a unique spatiotemporal dataset. 
     Ahlfeldt, a lecturer in Urban Economics and Land Development at LSE, and also an affiliate of the Spatial Economics Research Centre (SERC) and the Centre for Metropolitan Studies, Berlin, will deliver the final Lincoln Lecture of the spring series, One Hundred Years of Land Values, May 2 at Lincoln House. His research concentrates on the effect of large transport projects and architectural developments on local house prices, local political preferences and urban structure, as well as the way in which various agglomeration forces shape the spatial concentration of economic activity. His work has been published in leading field journals, including  Regional Science and Urban Economics, Real Estate Economics, Urban Studies, the Annals of Regional Science, the Journal of Regional Science, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, as well as general interest economics journals such as  Economics Letters, Journal of Economics and Statistics, and German Economic Review. Prior to joining the faculty at LSE, he earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Hamburg and worked as a research assistant for the Free University of Berlin.
     The lecture is free but registration is required.

Scenario planning: This year's model

     At the American Planning Association National Planning Conference in LA the past few days, planners, elected officials and many others have been wrestling with the right language to resonate with the public, invoking terms such as "resilience" and "strength," and "prosperity." At the foundation of this discussion is the task of identifying what America's top concerns actually are as they look at the future of their communities.
    The team that put together Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools believes they have something to offer, to foster better public participation in planning. Right now, there are several mostly proprietary scenario planning tools for visioning exercises, and they can be complex. A better and ultimately open-source ecosystem of tools could result in what Ken Synder from Placematters called "durable buy-in." Standardizing data inputs, customizing tools for particular regions, and making the process more transparent can help build trust in the planning process. Ultimately, it's also suppose to make it fun.  "We're probably not too far from having people look at scenarios on their phones," said Frank Hebbert from OpenPlans.
    Team members led by Jim Holway, director of Western Lands and Communities at the Sonoran Institute, encouarged planners to visit www.scenarioplanningtools.org, which is envisioned as a "switchboard" and clearinghouse where a community of planners and software developers will work on improving scenario planning tools and exchanging best practices on their use.

Bracing for the future

     New York is raising subway grates so they don't act as giant drains in floods, while Connecticut is thinning trees and contemplating micro-grids in the wake of a hurricane and Halloween winter storm.  The Bay Area is making cost projections for levees and a flood-absorbing peripheral canal, which all must be designed with the next big earthquake in mind.
     It was hard not feel at least a little bit of a sense of impending doom at the first sponsored session at the American Planning Association's  National Planning Conference, with senior fellow Armando Carbonell, David M. Kooris from the Regional Plan Association, and San Francisco-based consultant Laurie A. Johnson -- all contributors to Resilient Coastal City Regions: Planning for Climate Change in the United States and Australia. Sea level rise, drought, fires, storm surge, and volatile weather promise drastic changes for coastal regions, where much of urban humanity lives.
     While preparation is on the minds of many non-governmental and civic organizations, many are "overwhelmed by the scale of the problem," said Kooris. Planning -- and paying for -- climate adaptation infrastructure also requires appropriately regional governance structures to make big decisions, and regional collaboration continues to be a challenge, Johnson said.
     Perhaps no surprise then, that when talking about adapting to climate change impacts, the discussion turns to creating "floodable development zones" and the ultimate buzzword for the next 50 years: strategic retreat.

Scenario planning tools in bloom

   If scenario planning software was arrayed on a shelf, for many planners it could be a dizzying experience, figuring out which visioning tools were right for their challenge. Some have become somewhat famous, of course, such as software by Fregonese Associates for Envision Utah and Superstition Vistas, or Community Viz  developed by Placeways LLC. But there are different shapes and sizes, and the advances in technology and innovation makes it hard to keep up.
     A team convened by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Sonoran Institute tried to address that problem, hoping to make scenario planning tools openly accessible on a common platform -- and ultimately open-source as well, to take advantage of ideas and innovations in technology in the future. Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools, a report and online initiative, based in beta version at the website www.ScenarioPlanningTools.org, was released today at the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference in Los Angeles.
    More reflections on the topic of "visioning" tools and public participation can be found at Planetizen.
    Scenario planning tools use the best in available technology to help citizens visualize different futures for their cities and regions, typically by taking inputs such as density, mixed-use development, and transportation nodes, together with population estimates, to show different outcomes. The Lincoln Institute team sought to create a clearinghouse for planners to sort through these tools and determine how best to use them, beginning with the establishment of a community of planners and software developers exchanging information and ideas at the new website. ScenarioPlanningTools.org is a mechanism for interested parties to contribute and collaborate in the rapidly changing world of planning tools, with the goal of making them easier to understand and more transparent in their applications.
    The use of scenario planning tools is expected to rise. Scenario planning is legislatively required in greenhouse gas emissions reduction planning in Oregon and California, and is also mandated as part of US Department of Housing and Urban Development sustainability grants.
     Decisions about the future are increasingly controversial due to competing economic interests, different cultural values, and divergent views about property rights and the role of government, said Jim Holway, lead author of the report and director of Western Lands and Communities at the Sonoran Institute. To ensure community support for decisions about development and other land-related policies -- and public investments -- broader and more effective civic engagement is needed, he said. The traditional predict-and-plan paradigm is inadequate to address all of these challenges.
     The initiative underscores three major concepts for planners to engage in better scenario planning and tool-building -- collaboration, capacity building, and creation of an open environment for engagement. Collaborative problem solving recognizes that interrelated issues cannot be resolved by one organization alone. Capacity building is needed to enable individuals and organizations to apply scenario planning methods and tools effectively to their specific planning concerns. An open environment for information sharing and education will help accelerate the use and improvement of scenario planning tools in multiple settings.
      The other team members include a number of leaders in the burgeoning field of visioning and visualization, and public participation: C.J. Gabbe, an urban planner with Fregonese Associates, Inc., in Portland, Oregon.; Frank Hebbert, director of civic works at OpenPlans in New York City; Jason Lally, director of the Decision Lab at PlaceMatters, a nonprofit organization based in Denver; Robert Matthews, project director for the Decision Commons initiative in Seattle, a joint project of the University of Washington’s Runstad Center for Real Estate Studies and the Quality Growth Alliance; and Ray Quay, research professional at the Decision Center for a Desert City, a National Science Foundation–funded Decision Making Under Uncertainty Center within the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University.
     Computer-based planning tools have been around for many decades, noted Gregory K. Ingram, president of the Lincoln Institute The difference today is both in an explosion of availability of key data and advances in presentation, starting with geographical information systems (GIS). Programmers are making the formats more and more user-friendly.
     Armando Carbonell, senior fellow and chairman of the Department of Planning and Urban Form at the Lincoln Institute, said the goal of the initiative was to take many different scenario planning tools and make them available and easy to use, for planners everywhere.
     Many team members will be at APA in LA. Jim Holway, Frank Hebbert, Jason Lally, and Robert Matthews will appear on the panel, Advancing Scenario Planning Tools, with Ted Cochin, Office of Policy, Economics, and Innovation, at the US Environmental Protection Agency, at 2:30 on Monday April 16 at the conference.

At APA in LA

     Next week we're headed to California to consider some of the most critical issues facing planners -- adapting to the impacts of climate change, harnessing technology for scenario planning, and promoting civic engagement amid furious political and cultural crosscurrents -- at the American Planning Association National Planning Conference in Los Angeles April 13-17, 2012.
     A Policy Focus Report, Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools, and a major initiative to facilitate online access to visualizing tools for planners, will be announced at the conference, where the Lincoln Institute is a longstanding partner. The team that authored the report, which includes C.J. Gabbe from Fregonese Associates, Jason Lally from PlaceMatters and Frank Hebbert from OpenPlans, will share the ways that planning software can be made more ubiquitous, openly available, and open-source.
     Our latest book, Resilient Coastal City Regions: Planning for Climate Change in the United States and Australia,will also be available and will be part of the APA’s ongoing examination of “delta urbanism.” The book, co-edited by Armando Carbonell, senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, and Edward Blakely, the former recovery czar for post-Katrina New Orleans, surveys efforts to prepare for the impacts of climate change, from sea level rise to drought and fires.
     Two panel sessions are planned to assess the public perception of planning, amid challenges by Tea Party activists at the local level over various sustainability and smart growth initiatives. That topic was a major theme in the convening of the planning directors from the nation’s 30 largest cities in the fall of 2011 by the Lincoln Institute, APA, and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.
     We're also having a celebration of the release of Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools, by James Holway, C.J. Gabbe, Frank Hebbert, Jason Lally, Robert Matthews, and Ray Quay, and the book Resilient Coastal City Regions: Planning for Climate Change in the United States and Australia, co-edited by Edward J. Blakely and Armando Carbonell, during the APA Exhibitor Open House at the convention center, Booth 413, from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m.
     A detailed listing of sessions can be found here.