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Rem Koolhaas: Delirious Dubai?

"A city cannot be a work of art," Jane Jacobs once wrote.

It's one-square-mile of man-made island to be built on an artificial harbor in the Emirate of Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates, the cost of which, even before buildings, will be probably reach the tens of billions of dollars.

You can read about it on the website of Mr. Koolhaas's firm, The Office for Metropolitan Architecture, here. The idea is to mimic the density of Manhattan on an immense scale, combining mixed uses (what else?) in the context of his celebrated concept of a "generic city," which he has defined as "the city liberated from the captivity of the center, from the straightjacket of identity…it is the city without history."

So why can't a city be a work of art? Because a work of art is the creation of a single mind that abstracts from the complexities of life to achieve a particular end, however definite or ill-defined that may be. To the extent that the artist intends to create one thing and not something else (though she may change her mind often) she shapes parts of reality to realize her vision as effectively as she can — something the artist and the engineer have in common. A living city, on the other hand, is something that emerges over time from the mostly unplanned interactions of those who live in it, creating complex inter-relating patterns — social, infra-structural, and architectural — that defy deliberate construction.

"To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood," Jacobs continued, "as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life." Which is why (as I've said before) architects usually make bad urban planners.

Whether the result of private or public planning, or some private-public planning hybrid, construction on such a massive scale has serious, negative long-term consequences. First of all, even though Mr. Koolhaas's island district is designed to look heterogeneous and diverse, true architectural diversity is the result of buildings and public spaces being built in different eras, each with its own tastes, technology, and resources. A single mind can't design that kind of genuine diversity, any more than it can invent a living language. Visual homogeneity, no matter how cleverly done, is fundamentally bland and deadening at the street level.

Second, in addition to this deep and unavoidable visual homogeneity is an inherent temporal homogeneity. That is, since the structures will be built over a period of years rather than decades or centuries, they will mostly be of the same vintage. This will tend to make the district affordable when it's new only to the very rich and well-established, and it will all age together — good for married couples, but bad for long-term economic growth. Having some old and worn-out buildings sprinkled around offers cheap space for young entrepreneurs and artists with little money to experiment and exploit opportunities in a wealthy district with high concentrations of people. "New ideas need old buildings." They serve to significantly expand the diversity of tastes and knowledge that are necessary for the vitality of the city over time.
If ordinary mega-projects have trouble grappling these problems of homogeneity, giga-projects don't stand a chance.

I suppose if enough foreign wealth floods into this commercial and residential playground, it will achieve a sort of Disney World success. That's perhaps the best that deliberate planning at this scale can hope for, but it's as far from real urban success as Disney World is from Manhattan.

(For a contrary opinion, see the New York Times article by the architectural critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, who rarely seems to meet a mega-project, let alone giga-project, he didn't like.)

***
FYI, Dubai is also the site of the famous "palm islands."

And these aren't the only giga-projects in the works. They're also starting to sell man-made islands clustered in the shapes of the seven continents, modestly called "The World," which you can read about here.

Why all this massive construction? Turns out that only 6% of the GDP of the Emirate of Dubai now comes from oil revenues, which combined with its dwindling oil reserves has convinced Crown Prince Sheik Mohammed to turn his realm into a major business and recreation center. A Disney World on HGH.

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Rem Koolhaas had to wait 14 years after publishing his highly regarded book, "Delirious New York," before getting his first big commission in New York City, a luxury mid-rise on East 22nd Street. You can read about it here.

It's in that book, by the way, that he describes New York as a "culture of congestion." (So, if you didn't already, now you know.)

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Sat, 22 Mar 2008 at 2:32 AM  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)  |  TrackBack (0)

A Walker in the City, Just Not Where You'd Expect

Where do commuters walk to work the most?

New York? Celebration, FL? Portland, OR? Try Tempe, AZ — part of metro Phoenix, Exhibit A in the case against so-called urban sprawl.

Here's a list of the top cities with "The highest percentage of residents who get to work on foot":

Tempe, AZ
New Haven, CT
Bloomington, IN
Cambridge, MA
Biloxi, MS
Portsmouth, NH
Cincinnati, O
Stillwater, OK
Vermillion, SD
Burlington, VT
Laramie, WY

(Source: Annual survey with the American Podiatric Medical Association)

You can read the MSNBC article here, where there are other lists, including "City known for most desirable destinations" (San Francisco) and a link to the Prevention (I suppose the magazine) Web site, where you can look up your own city to see how it rates.

I grew up a few miles from Tempe, which is home to Arizona State University. Students working at, say, the TGI Friday's near campus, or faculty living close to their offices, probably explain much here. Indeed, nearly all of the other locations are also college towns, including the other top four as well as Cincinnati (U. of Cincinnati), Stillwater (Oklahoma State U.), Vermillion (U. of South Dakoto), Burlington (U. of Vermont), and Laramie (U. of Wyoming). The exceptions are Portsmouth, where I couldn't find any major university (please correct me if I'm wrong), and Biloxi, which does however have an Air Force base, where I would expect there are many who work on or near the premises.

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Wed, 19 Mar 2008 at 2:16 AM  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)  |  TrackBack (0)

Community Boards Face Incentive and Knowledge Problems

How effectively can a community board convey the actual land-use preferences of the community it's supposed to represent?

This is the deeper question underlying the debate on Sheldon Solow's $4 billion proposal to develop the site of the old Con Ed power station — on the East River just below the United Nations — reported in Peter Kiefer's article in the Sun. (There was also a lively discussion in the comment section of the related editorial here.)

FYI, there are 59 community boards, created under the City Charter, each with 50 voting members appointed by the president of the borough in which the particular CB lies. According to the official website:

Boards have an important advisory role in dealing with land use and zoning matters, the City budget, municipal service delivery, and many other matters relating to their communities' welfare… Community Boards must be consulted on placement of most municipal facilities in the community and on other land use issues.

Now I've blogged about work that Peter Gordon and I have done on the concept of devolving most political power down to the level of the neighborhood. (Once again, you can read that study here.) I think an aspect of that work having to do with "government-initiated citizen participation" (or GICP) approaches is relevant here.

Unlike CBs, truly private neighborhood associations (PNAs) — apologies for all the acronyms! — are profit-seeking entities, similar to many of the new private housing developments in the West, that approach the efficiency characteristics of any other business in a market economy in that the prices for land-use and services they provide tend to reflect the underlying tastes, technology, and resources of buyers and sellers.

In this context, the first problem with GICP is that it treats land-use decisions as a zero-sum game. In a market exchange prices to help agents decide whether a trade will make it better off, so each side is potentially better off (or else the trade won't happen). But in a GICP what the developer gains, the community loses, and vice versa. Where there are no market prices, it's usually not clear what the relevant trade-offs are — e.g., is a traffic easement more valuable than additional rental space? (In the present case, Solow's company seems to have been quite accommodating. Here's a Sun article that cites some of his concessions.) If either side wins one concession, the economic cost of demanding even more is usually very small. In the market, with the help of money prices you stop making demands when the additional cost would be greater than the added benefit. In a GICP process, when to stop is a political, not economic, matter, so that efficient land use is highly problematic. In economic parlance, rent-seeking trumps profit-seeking.

A second problem is that the voting members of a CB are appointed, not elected. Representation is thus at best indirect and, because voting members are not drawn randomly from the local community, there is a bias in favor of selecting the more politically connected and against the ordinary land-user.

Third, there are unavoidable knowledge problems. Gordon and I cite Mark Pennington's work (see especially his article, "Citizen Participation, the Knowledge Problem and Urban Land Use Planning" — it's the fifth article down.) Here's our summary of his findings:

A democratic process…that tries to get input from as many people and groups as possible must first collect opinions from all these groups [and these] are often contradictory. Then, the decision-making body must condense this large body of often contradictory information into a single policy platform, which will secure majority support. While compromise of this sort is the essence of political solutions, it simply compounds the difficulty of getting at local knowledge relevant to achieving efficient land uses that enhance entrepreneurial success.

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Sun, 16 Mar 2008 at 6:55 PM  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)  |  TrackBack (0)

A moratorium on eminent domain? An eminent idea!

Mayor Bloomberg and a host of New York mega-developers, including Bruce Ratner, may be squirming a bit as David Paterson becomes governor on Monday. As a member of the state legislature, Paterson called for a state-wide moratorium on what he described as a "gold rush" of the use of eminent domain across the state. You can read the Sun article here.

(For the time being, the slumping economy seems itself to be imposing its own kind of moratorium on large-scale public and private construction, as I wrote here.)

Such a moratorium would at least temporarily stop local projects that rely on the takings power of the state, including the Columbia University expansion in Harlem, Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, and Willets Point in Queens. In the last case, for instance, we're not talking about a lone hold-out blocking the construction of a public utility, but virtually an entire business community digging in its heels against a Mayor who wants to uproot it to impose his own vision of "economic development." (See my earlier blog on the taking of Willets Point.)

The Mayor has reportedly said: "You would never build any big thing any place in any big city in this country if you didn't have the power of eminent domain." That's a half-truth. The whole truth is that without the backing of the government's power to take private property, private developers would have to pay the actual rather than the so-called "fair" market value for the scarce urban space they want to build on. In a free market that would almost certainly mean fewer mega-projects, but it wouldn't bring them to an end — just the economically unjustified ones.

So, a moratorium on eminent domain would be good. Making it permanent would be even better.

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Sun, 16 Mar 2008 at 6:51 PM  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)  |  TrackBack (0)

Can helping artists stay put spur development?

One typical pattern of economic development, in New York and other cities, is when artists move into a run-down district that has lots of cheap space and turn the place hip. Hipness then attracts galleries, funky performance spaces, and quirky shops, eventually luring in high-income users — residential and commercial — who increase the demand for space but over time price out the artists who started the whole thing. It's a version of what Jane Jacobs calls the "self-destruction of diversity" — in which expensive, standard uses crowd out small, innovatative ones — which we've seen in Greenwich Village, Soho, and now Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

(So strong is the idea that artists can jump-start revitalization that city governments everywhere have invested large sums in grand arts centers, when subsidizing the artists themselves might be a more successful strategy.)

"The Lords of Dumbo Make Room for the Arts, at Least for the Moment," in yesterday's New York Times, suggests a different model: Doing what you can to keep artists in the neighborhood.

Some 1,000 artists and arts organizations are now working in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn, courtesy of the developers David Walentas and his son, Jed, partners in Two Trees Management. Operating on the principle that cultural ferment makes a neighborhood hot, Two Trees has offered creative people rents that they cannot refuse.

While some object to "using" artists to speed development — which goes to show that you can always find someone who will complain about anything — others see this as the boon to artists that it is.

But it's not going to last forever:

The Two Trees developers, who own about three million square feet of property in Dumbo, tell their tenants that they will try to find other places for them in the area if their spaces are sold or developed. But they make no guarantees…The developers are up front with the tenants about the short-term nature of their leases.

If New York is pricing itself out of the "creativity industry" in favor of Lille, France, or elsewhere, I'm not sure there's anything that can or even should be done, in the private or public sector, to stop it. No city can sustain a golden age indefinitely, and trying to do so usually produces more fossils than Fosses. So while this may not be a solution for those who see losing artists as a long-term problem, it's a fresh approach with little downside that I can see.

***

My last post discussed the scaling back of mega-projects.

Here's more in the New York Times on the mess that has been made of the good idea of relocating part of Penn Station to the Farley Post Office. What began as a $3-billion plan — to move Amtrak across Eighth Avenue to the west —ballooned in nine years into a $14-billion mega-project involving tearing down and re-building Madison Square Garden, adding 1 million square feet of retail space, and erecting two Empire-State-Building-sized structures on the site.

It's a study in just how volatile public-private partnerships can be, not in the sense the article tries to spin it — that of private benefits dominating the public good — but in what happens when political power becomes a tool of greedy private and political entrepreneurs. Cost explosions like this aren't because of jumps in input prices or bureaucratic miscalculations (as in my post on "Our costs runneth over"). Instead, it's what happens when entrepreneurs from the hard-budget-constraint private sector are set loose in the soft-budget-constraint world of public-private partnerships.

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Sat, 8 Mar 2008 at 1:16 AM  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)  |  TrackBack (0)

Following Up on My Last Post and Responding to a Critic

After yesterday's posting on how some local mega-projects are scaling back, Peter Kiefer of The Sun had an article today on the same subject (with much more extensive reportage), "Unease erodes ambition on real estate." In addition to the projects I mentioned, Mr. Kiefer covers the Fulton Street Transit Center (which I blogged earlier), delays in the redevelopment of Penn/Moynihan Station, and Brookfield Properties dropping out of the race for construction of Hudson Yards on the Far West Side (see my very first entry of this blog back in December) — a pity, since theirs was my favorite among the five proposals.

Quoting the article:

A professor of urban policy and planning at New York University, Mitchell Moss, said the current situation is the result of a glut of projects that have been pushed through without enough reflection by elected officials.

Also, one correction and one clarification on that post. The correct name of the blog I cited is "Atlantic Yards Report," not "Atlantic Report." And I should have made it clearer that the Crain's New York Business article I also cited actually drew very heavily from that blog.

***

A blogger, Ryan Avent, rants about my original discussion on population density in LA versus New York. Suffice to say, he should read the follow-up posting on density, in which Wendell Cox explains that his data come directly from the Census Bureau.

But Mr. Avent goes on to question my economics creds and my familiarity with the concept of "externality" as it relates to NYC transit:

There are plenty of relevant ones here to choose from — carbon emissions, congestion, the spillover effects of density in NYC that help make the city an economic juggernaut — all of which indicate that the state should, in fact, be subsidizing transit.

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Tue, 4 Mar 2008 at 12:21 AM  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)  |  TrackBack (0)

With Recession in the Wind, Local Mega-Projects Scale Back and Slow Down

It was only a couple of months ago that the prospects for growth in Downtown Brooklyn were so rosy. There were estimates of more than 14,000 new residential units to be built in the next few years, the tempestuous but on-going plans for Atlantic Yards, and a lively revamped Metrotech district were just a few of promising developments. Things have changed.

Recent postings in the blog "Atlantic Reports" have noticed an apparent scaling back in the description of the Atlantic Yards development — the proposed future home of the Brooklyn Nets and an enormous Frank Geary-designed mixed-use complex. Crain's New York Business also reported

a previously undisclosed transcript of an Forest City meeting with investors in early October at the New York Times Building. During the meeting, Forest City executives said the Brooklyn project would span "21 acres in downtown Brooklyn, with 6.5 million square feet of residential and commercial development." That's smaller than the 8-million-square-foot, 22-acre project publicly outlined by the company.

During the meeting, Forest City also referred to the Frank Gehry-designed Miss Brooklyn tower as having 528,000 square foot of zoning rights. Earlier, it had been pegged at over 900,000 square feet. Forest City has nixed plans to include condominiums, instead offering additional office space, which is now seen as more profitable. A company spokesman says the smaller square footage reflects the concession announced last fall to reduce Miss Brooklyn's height to 511 feet, one fewer than the borough's tallest building, One Hanson Place.

 Among other disclosures, Forest City executives said it will take up to five years to rebuild the Metropolitan Transportation Authority rail yard, instead of the three-and-a-half year estimate in an initial environmental review. The developer is even reducing the number of planned hospitality suites (from 170 to 130) it will rent out in the Nets' new 18,000-seat arena.

Feel a chill?

***

A related article in the same issue of the Brooklyn Paper reports that federal funding for so-called below-market or below-cost residential units is drying up. It would take $7 billion of federal money to build all of the projects currently proposed in the state of New York, but only $1.33 billion was granted (in bonds) in 2007, with no change expected in 2008. Apparently, if the funding for these units doesn't come through, none of the 2,250 units will get built, and Mr. Ratner will have to pay a $500,000 penalty for going back on his promise. Evidently, the rest of the multi-billion dollar mega-project will go on as planned without further consequences.

FYI.

***

While all this has been going on, we learn that the Toll Brothers, a well-known suburban developer, is planning a 447-unit, mixed-use development along the banks of the still-dirty-but-not-as-disgusting-as-it-
was-not-too-long-ago Gowanus Canal. In addition to getting the zoning changes and the obligatory environmental-impact study (in this case it's unclear if we're talking about the construction's impact on the environment or the fetid canal's impact on the construction), the Toll Brothers hope to make the project more attractive to the locals by promising — guess what? — below-market housing.

Gee, don't they read the papers?

***
And on the other side of the East River (that would be Manhattan) we learn the fate of the ambitious plans to use state-owned property north of the Jacob K. Javits Center on the Far West Side. Read about it here. According Governor Spitzer himself, "The Javits Center expansion is done," as cost estimates doubled from $1.6 to $3.2 billion. Escalating construction costs were blamed. Uh, by 100% in a few months? (See my earlier post, "Our costs runneth over," on why these things happen.) They must be using my former apartment contractor.

Again, it wasn't too long ago — about a year — when we read in the New York Times that the Governor wanted to "redraw the current plans favored by the city and expand the center to the north and south. His proposal would make the Javits Center even larger."

***

The upside? Turning down the flow of what Jane Jacobs aptly called "cataclysmic money" — mega-spending that overwhelms the fine structure of a community, creates visual architectural homogeneity, constructs high-cost buildings of the same vintage, and erodes local social capital — may in the long run be a good thing.

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Sun, 2 Mar 2008 at 1:54 AM  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)  |  TrackBack (0)

The city of perfect love and trust

I found this passage in Mark Helprin's "A Soldier of the Great War," about an old man recounting his youth, very moving — and true. It mentions Rome, but it could about be any great city.

Though he knew it was not true, he felt that in Rome someone would be waiting for him. Perhaps it was because the magic of cities is that they provide the illusion of love and family even for those with neither. Lights, the business of the streets, the very buildings close together, the interminable variety and depth, serve to draw lonely people in, and no matter what they know, they still feel in their heart of hearts that someone is waiting to embrace them in perfect love and trust.

And having glimpsed the familiar stranger who awaits them there, the one they hope in time to become (though she's never quite what they think she is), they leap to embrace her, which is the perfection of love.

Life is the business of cities.

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Fri, 29 Feb 2008 at 12:53 PM  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)  |  TrackBack (0)

Wendell Cox Responds to My Post on Density

In an earlier post, "Is LA really denser than NYC?" I wrote that I was puzzled with Wendell Cox's data showing that Los Angeles is denser than New York. He left a comment that, with his permission, I reproduce below:

The data Dr. Ikeda questions is not mine, it is that of the United States Bureau of the Census. In 2000, the last data available, the Los Angeles urbanized area (urban footprint) had a population density of 7,068 per square mile. The New York urbanized area had a population density of 5,309 per square mile. Even San Jose, with nothing that resembles even the density of central Los Angeles (much less New York) has an urbanized area density of 5,914, well above that of New York. Any arguments with this data should be taken up with the Bureau of the Census (which has developed this data since 1950), not me.

All urbanized areas must be contained within a metropolitan area (MSA), thus the urbanized area definition will ALWAYS have a greater population density than the MSA. I have no problem with the Jane Jacobs definition of a city (in the generic term, not as a municipal corporation), that a city is "a settlement that consistently generates its economic growth from its own local economy." This is true of urbanized areas (as I report Census data) and true of metropolitan areas. I suspect Bureau of the Census demographers would have no difficulty with that definition for either term.

All of this can be verified by visiting www.census.gov, the Bureau of the Census website. http://www.demographia.com/db-ua2000pop.htm

I was wrong. My problem was I could not derive the density figures I found on his website directly from Census data, and because I believed his concept of a city is fundamentally different from mine and Jacobs's (which I'm pleased to learn it isn't), I assumed that he used his own method of calculating density. I know now that I should have looked at urbanized-area and not MSA tables. I thank him for taking the trouble — in addition the above comment there were several email exchanges and a telephone conversation — to clear up my misunderstanding.

***

Having said that, though, I'm very pleased to be wrong. That the LA urbanized area is actually denser than the NY urbanized area is a challenge for interventionist urbanists, such as advocates of smart-growth and the New Urbanism. They demonize Los Angeles and Phoenix and hype New York and Portland, largely because of the high densities of the latter. Well, the Census data Dr. Cox presents shows they're wrong. Phoenix has a density of 1,404 per square mile and Portland 1,289, and this is after decades of very interventionist anti-sprawl, pro-density policies in Portand and relative laissez-faire (until recently) in Phoenix.

At the same time, as I've mentioned in previous posts, I do part company with many free-market urbanists (FMU) who don't see density as especially important for economic growth, as Jacobs does (and I do). The census data appear to support the idea that, while the trend in urban development has been away from the downtown-centric model and more toward the suburbs and so-called edge-cities, density is still highly relevant. As Joel Garreau wrote in his book about the edge-city phenomenon: "Density is back!"

It's unhelpful for the FMU to diss density, when what they really oppose are government interventions (e.g., greenbelts and similar restrictive land-use restrictions) that try to promote higher population densities and combat so-called "sprawl." I too am highly suspicious of using intervention to impose — to borrow a phrase from a recent NY Times editorial — "a comprehensive vision for urban America." Just please don't throw the density baby out with the interventionist bathwater!

Anyway, to answer that post: Yes, LA really is denser than NYC!

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Sat, 23 Feb 2008 at 11:21 PM  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)  |  TrackBack (0)

Taking From Peterboro To Pay St. Paul

"For more than a generation, presidential aspirants have mostly resisted acknowledging the importance of the cities' well being," says a recent New York Times editorial, "In search of a real urban policy" (February 19, 2008). It cites a Brookings Institution study calling for more state and federal spending in metro areas. Here is a related paper.

The editorial goes on to say that in this election year, "Voters deserve to hear a lot more from the presidential candidates — in position papers, public speeches and debates — about how they intend to help the cities," by spending on areas like schools, infrastructure, and the environment. Neither of the leading Democratic candidates "so far, are offering anything like a comprehensive vision for urban America." This is important because "the largest 100 cities and their surrounding communities are home to 65 percent of the nation's population and account for about 75 percent of the country's gross domestic product." Cities are rich, the country (as we used to call "rural areas") is poor.

Okay, it makes political (but not economic) sense for state and federal governments to redistribute wealth from cities to the country. But who would pay for the urban programs the Times wants? Certainly not the poor country, of course, but rich cities. Let cities subsidize one another! Tax Peter in New York City, then return some but not all of it to him. Use the rest to pay Paul in Detroit, presumably without paying less to Mary in the corn belt. (It's gotten so bad for NYC, currently an $11-billion loser in the redistribution game, that there's talk of secession again. See my earlier post on this topic.) But more inter-city redistribution, like all such schemes, is a bad idea whether NYC wins or loses, as political decrees made at higher levels of bureaucracy further displace market decisions. The solution is not political wealth redistribution but entrepreneurial wealth creation – locally.

And if collective planning is necessary, it's best done locally as well. The Times asserts, "There can be no substitute for national leadership." But there is. It's called local governance. Indeed, the editorial cites Mayor Bloomberg's efforts on behalf of NYC and proclaims, "Without much spending, he is changing things for the better." While I don't agree with all of the Mayor's policies, I do think it's reasonable to expect municipal governments to improve their communities without much spending.

The "comprehensive vision for urban America" we need isn't the top-down kind the Times is calling for. It's the kind that comes from the ground up. If voters viewed the entire urban landscape with common sense they would see inter-city redistribution for the shell-game that it is. Rather than expand it, they should put an end to it.

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Fri, 22 Feb 2008 at 4:23 PM  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)  |  TrackBack (0)

Culture of Congestion Archive