Author Archives: David Bergman

Cities, Community and Sustainable Development

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The impetus for this post arises from a call for blog submittals on the topic of “Cities and Sustainability” for the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week Conference. Here I propose that community is a necessary part of sustainability.

While the environmental advantages of urban living remain unintuitive to some – a vestige of an earlier environmental movement belief in the virtues of living off the land — anyone who has looked into ecofootprints (or carbon or water footprints) knows that urban dwellers consume significantly less resources than do suburbanites or even most rural denizens. We travel shorter distances, more often by foot or mass transit than by car. Our homes are smaller and stacked, requiring less material to build and fill them with as well less energy to heat, cool and light them. The primary downside, perhaps, is the need to import most of the food supply. But this, too, may be a misplaced criticism since so much of the food supply is grown globally. If anything, then, the transportation and distribution of food is more efficient in cities than in spread out development. And for local, seasonal crops, we’re seeing a growing movement to urban gardens, which have the potential to provide a portion of food needs along with “reconnecting” urbanites to nature (addressing the Thoreaus amongst us).

So the rapid urbanization of the population is, in many ways, an environmentally positive – even necessary — event. Too often left out, however, is the question of what life in these cities is or will be like, and this has at least two significant implications for sustainable development.

Modern urbanization has taken several physical forms: horizontal expansion of low-rise districts, vertical densification where geography limits outward pushes, and ground-up creation of entire new high-rise cities. What most of these lack, due to the artificial influences of zoning, economics and modern architecture, are the street life and vitality of older cities. The tendency, even in the greenest buildings, is toward characterless and anonymous (or, alternatively, monumental) structures that pay little attention to the street or the community. A resulting combination of a lack of pride of place and, as I have written previously (1, 2), design that discourages neighborhood interaction, leads to a diminished sense of community. This loss of belonging to something larger than one’s self contributes to the perception that environmental issues, both local and global, are someone else’s problem.

This also has bearing on the potential for another positive environmental movement: the sharing economy. Sharing objects and services means less consumption has to take place, saving both resources and money. The good news is that urban living, by definition, has a good deal of sharing built into it: sharing of lobbies, floors and ceilings, of sidewalks, parks and transportation. But the possibilities are greater, ranging from tool libraries and community gardens to cars, communal cooking and guest facilities. These are often a part of what’s come to be called “intentional communities” such as cohousing where people band together to form communal groups. But urban areas in general have great potential for sharing, due in no small part to proximity and convenience – so long as a community exists that is conducive to sharing.

There is a reinforcing loop present in this. A strong community sets the stage for sharing, and sharing tends to strengthen the community.

We know that cities objectively represent a more viable path to sustainable development than either suburban sprawl or off–the-grid lifestyles. The much needed — and too often missing – part is attention to the quality of urban life, particularly as cities get denser. Density can be justified on both environmental and economic grounds, but true sustainability demands more. This is the premise behind what I call EcoOptimism: solutions that symbiotically address ecological and economic issues while also improving our lives. Urban living, if developed with people and community in mind, is perhaps our most fundamental EcoOptimistic path.

My 2013 Word of the Year

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transparency sm

When I posted around this time last year that the word of the year, at least according to me, was resilience, I wasn’t sure whether I’d make the word of the year a continuing event. I mean, who needs yet another commitment?

Nevertheless, I’m going to use my mini bully-free pulpit and anoint a 2013 word of the year. Here it comes.

Transparency

The word’s been tossed around a lot for a while now, most commonly in regard to government and making information and processes available. What makes it new and timely for us is its application to the businesses and manufacturers that make and sell the materials, chemicals and products that so heavily impact our lives.

For years, our ability to select products that are safe in terms of environmental and human health has been hobbled by businesses’ claims to proprietary information. Frequently, if you wanted to know, for example, what chemicals were used in a paint, that information was unavailable because it was considered a trade secret in the same way that the formula for Coca Cola is kept under lock and key.

We’re not about to learn exactly what’s in Coca Cola (or Pepsi, if you prefer). Nor are we going to find out the exact make up of every material and finish in our buildings. But the advent of two types of product information labels, Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) and Health Product Declarations (HPDs), may change the information and transparency landscape dramatically.

EPDs and their more recent complement, HPDs, are often compared to food nutrition labels. They aren’t the type of green labels we’re used to in that they don’t tell you whether the product meets a green standard such as Energy Star. Rather they tell you what’s in the product and how much of it there is. Equipped with this information, which has been verified by a third party, the idea is that you can come to your own conclusions.

First page of a fictional Health Product Declaration

First page of a fictional Health Product Declaration

Another newcomer in the product and material transparency movement is the Living Building Challenges’ Declare label. With the introduction of another transparency label, the risk arises that the number of labels could start to get confusing and off putting, as has happened with the world of green labels. It’s good news, therefore, that Declare and HPD have formed a partnership.

LBC Declare label

The transparency movement dovetails with another concept, one that I wish I could label the word (or phrase, to be more precise) of the year: the precautionary principle. I’ve discussed this concept previously. Basically, the precautionary principle states that an action or policy or, more relevantly here, a product or material must be proven safe before use or implementation. This principle applies elsewhere in the world, but not in the US.

While information transparency, as provided by EPDs and HPDs, doesn’t directly invoke the precautionary principle, it does enable wider availability of information such as Red Lists so that we can exercise our own precautions.

Can there be too much transparency? One potential issue is information overload. How many people really make use of nutrition labels on foods? Who has the time or the inclination? But it doesn’t matter that many folks won’t take the step of diving into these labels. The fact that they exist and are getting notice is proving to be an incentive for companies to pay attention, to open a window onto their products’ make up as well as altering those products and, in short, to  “come clean.”

 

Space Missions: the ultimate disposable packaging?

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I love the space program, having grown up steeped in it. (Those of you who know me, know it’s “in my blood.”) But it occurs to me on this anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission – and the Blue Marble photo*  that has been credited with increasing our environmental awareness of the Earth’s fragility and loneliness in space – that space missions are an unintentional analogue for our methods of manufacturing and consumption.

*OK, that was really Apollo 17, but Apollo 8 was the first time humans saw the Earth from a distance as an entire sphere. And the Apollo 17 photo’s anniversary was December 7. Image: NASA via Wikimedia

* The Blue Marble photo was taken during Apollo 17, but Apollo 8 was the first time humans saw the Earth from a distance as an entire sphere. And the Apollo 17 photo’s anniversary was December 7. Image: NASA via Wikimedia

If we focus on the Apollo lunar missions, they started with this:

Image credit: http://www.boeingblogs.com/randy/archives/2009/07/

Image credit: http://www.boeingblogs.com/randy/archives/2009/07/

Mere minutes after launch, the majority of the “stack,” as the Apollo capsule and lander sections combined with the Saturn 5 rocket were called, was ditched into the sea after the stages of the rocket had done their work — a lot like the packaging that many of our products arrive in: used briefly and thrown out after shipping is complete.

Saturn 5 First Stage separation. Image: Wikimedia.

The three stages of the Saturn 5 were jettisoned after each did its job in lifting the Apollo spacecraft into orbit. Image: Wikimedia

The Apollo components of the stack were encased in a protective housing for launch. Inside it were the Command Module, the Service Module and the Lunar Module. Think of it as that little packet of critical parts that comes inside the Ikea package.

Image: Wikipedia

The housing was left in Earth orbit and the modules rearranged for transit to the Moon.

Image credit: http://www.joecodegood.net/blogs/?p=49

Upon arriving in Lunar orbit, they separated again and the Lunar Module descended to the Moon. To return to the Command Module (which remained in orbit with one astronaut aboard), the Lunar Module Ascent Stage blasted off from its landing base Descent Stage. The base remained on the moon as, essentially, discarded waste. (I’m imagining a Moon alien with a tear running down one – his only? – eye.)

Lunar liftoff. Image credit: Wikimedia

Lunar liftoff. Image credit: Wikimedia

The Ascent Stage, meanwhile, was abandoned after the two astronauts transferred back to the Command Module. (Except in the case of Apollo 13, where it served as the survival craft.) Lunar Modules were then either sent into solar orbit or crashed into the Moon, and only the Command and Service Modules remained for the transit back to the Earth.

Finally, when the crew prepared to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere, the Service Module was jettisoned and all that remained and returned to the Earth was the tiny Command Module.

Base diagram credit: http://www.hq.nasa.gov

Base diagram credit: http://www.hq.nasa.gov

If you want to look at this in an even more extreme sense, you could think of the whole thing, from the Saturn 5 booster stages down to and including the Command Module, as packaging for the round trip of three people to the Moon and back. Almost makes you see that UPS package, the one that contained a single Christmas tree ornament within a gallon of foam peanuts in a shroud of cardboard bound together with plastic packing tape, as efficient.

The final frontier of garbage. A depiction of debris in low Earth orbit by NASA

The final frontier of garbage. A depiction by NASA of debris in low Earth orbit

More relevant to my somewhat dramatic point, though, is the comparison to our modern industrial manufacturing methods combined with our often non-essential consumption of short-lived products: the processes by which raw materials are crudely excavated out of the Earth, then subjected to “heating, beating and treating” involving energy and more materials to transform them into a product that may be used for only a brief period before being discarded itself.

The difference — because I don’t want to equate the Apollo program with a disposable razor blade — is that the space program yielded immense amounts of knowledge while embodying the optimistic nature of humanity. The products in our landfills and in the recesses of our closets and garages, and the industrial waste created along the way, do neither. They may seem optimistic in their moment of purchase – that brief sense of happiness and fulfillment we get from, say, that new cellphone, before it becomes old hat and we want a newer one – but they aren’t actually optimistic, let alone EcoOptimistic, in their legacy.

Before you can make a community resilient, you have to have a community

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FAB_1sm

The US federal government is broken and international agreements, it seems evident, are not about to happen any time soon. How then can global problems like climate change and pollution be tackled?

The ineffectuality of large-scale top-down governments, at least as they currently exist, leaves us with two possible, non-exclusive routes: a bottom-up popular approach and, perhaps counter intuitively, a corporate driven approach.

We see some evidence of the latter, albeit not nearly enough, in programs from Walmart and a few others to enforce environmental requirements on their supply chains, and in the growing endorsements by some energy and related companies of some form of a carbon fee. This business world trend, which is occurring in spite of the oversized voice of the US Chamber of Commerce, is a very positive sign in that it exposes the knee-jerk claims that a carbon tax would be a job and economy killer.

Creating public desire for environmentalism

But I want to concentrate here on the other option, creating public demand for environmental thinking and responsibility, because this is potentially the most likely route to both engaging public support and, by extension, electing governments that respond to that demand.

“Resilient communities” has become a major theme in environmentalism. The basic concept is to create ways by which communities can prepare for and respond to disasters, natural or otherwise, with less reliance on others, including national governments. It’s a fine goal (though it won’t and isn’t intended to obviate the need for wider scale programs). But the concept ignores a first step that is both necessary and desirable: before you can make a community resilient, you have to have a community.

I started writing about this topic in the post Community and Sustainability. My basic premise is that neighborhoods that don’t have a sense of community, almost by definition, are not conducive to fostering individuals’ interest in topics or problems with impact beyond their own self-interest.

Living (or working) on a block or in a neighborhood where anonymity is the rule discourages any sense of ownership, of belonging to something larger than just you. Simultaneously, this means you have less incentive to participate and less sense of responsibility to a community. This can contribute to any number of “quality of life” problems like noise and littering. If you don’t know your neighbors, you’re less likely to care.

A starting point is asking why, in so many places, it seems we don’t have strong communities. Though it may be partially a product of nostalgia, we commonly hear that communities used to be more important and more central to people’s lives. Reasons for this abound, ranging from the trend away from extended families living in proximity, to fewer stay at home moms (as was the social and economic norm back then), the loss of local coffee shops and watering holes and, of course, the advent of the Internet. The common factor in all of these is that there are fewer places and occasions for in-person interaction: fewer places to meet your neighbors, fewer chances for unplanned exchanges.

LES streets

I’ve been pondering this while looking at current and proposed developments here in NYC and elsewhere, and comparing them to urban streets like my own. New urban apartment buildings and their streets bear little resemblance to the low-rise walk ups on my block. Aesthetics aside, there is a huge difference between a block-long building containing a hundred or so apartments entered via a single massive lobby, and a series of varied buildings with each with a dozen or two units, with entrances (perhaps on those quintessential gathering spots called stoops) every 25 feet or so. Add to that the difference between streets lined with a combination of generic large chain stores with ubiquitous bank branches versus smaller local businesses run and staffed by people in the community.

Rediscovering urbanism and suburbanism

As I’ve been emphasizing in several recent posts here, particularly Towers in the Block and the series on density, we need a re-envisioning of design, both urban and suburban, with an eye toward community and livability. We need to reinvestigate the older ways of fostering community and devise new interpretations that take into account increasing density, new construction methods and economic realities, and new social patterns.

Without this, we run the risk of continuing and expanding the anonymity and attendant self-focus of modern urban and suburban life styles, resulting in a population closeted in their homes and, when they emerge, being further isolated in their cars or their headphones. That self-focus, it can be argued, is the root of many of our political problems as well as our inability to deal with environmental issues, and is at least in part an outgrowth, a fault, of the physical structure of our non-communities.

 

Laissez-faire: the environmental version

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I tend to write a lot about messaging and sound bites [here and here, for two], sometimes with the simple sounding proposal that the environmental movement needs better and catchier phrases. (For instance, something less dull and abstract than “the environmental movement.”) So a sentence in a current post in one of my most favorite and least catchily-named blogs, The Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, caught my eye: “Laissez-faire takes on a new meaning — it is the ecosystem, not the economy that must be “left alone” to manage itself and evolve by its own rules.”

What a neat twist on the religious-like belief in conventional laissez-faire, the doctrine that the so-called free market, if “left alone” – which is a near literal translation of the term — will provide the best outcomes.

A reasonable response to that orthodoxy is: the best outcomes for whom? Herman Daly, the renowned economist and author of that post, similarly turns the laissez-faire idea on its head by suggesting that it’s the environment, not the market, which should be left alone.

A closer translation of laissez-faire is “let do.” And that interpretation, I think, is even more suitable as an approach to the environment because, from our human point of view, it is what the environment does that is critical to our existence. Interfering in the environment’s ability, honed over millennia, to do things like purify water and air, and maintain the exquisitely balanced temperature of the troposphere, is in the interest of neither us humans nor that free market that supposedly makes our lives better.

So how can we co-opt the phrase or come up with our own (preferably in the authoritative tones of a foreign language)? Any of you French-speakers out there have suggestions? At the risk of trivializing another powerful slogan, and since I’m bound by my fluency only in English, my dangerously off-the-cuff first thought is “let my environment do.”

OK, I withdraw that suggestion. Contain your sighs of relief. But I stand by the idea, or rather Herman Daly’s idea.

Towers in the Block

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A street in the Lower East Side. Photo by author.

A street in the Lower East Side. Photo by author.

My longtime neighborhood, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, represents for me some of the best qualities of urban living. Among its defining characteristics:

A Walk Score of 96 (out of 100, meaning I can happily exist without that American appendage, the automobile),

Density high enough to enable a richness of community and cultural vitality but not so high as to lose a sense of local identity,

Ethnic and economic diversity due to preservation of many of the low-rise century-old buildings, Street vitality and community arising from the varied possibilities for human interaction, and

A structural resistance to chain and big box stores due, again, to the existing building stock.

So I’ve been following with great interest the influx around us of high-rises in the past decade, a movement that will reach a crescendo with the proposal to finally build out a long contemplated – and long fought – massive redevelopment in the center of the LES.

For most of the previous 50 years or so, since the last of the post-Robert Moses urban renewal projects were completed, the LES retained most of its low-rise urban fabric of tenement buildings with mom-and-pop stores at the street level. True, the neighborhood was hit hard by the one-two punch of NYC’s fiscal crisis of the 70s followed by the epidemic of crack in the 80s. Though not as severe as the South Bronx, there were plenty of abandoned, sometimes burned out buildings interspersed with garbage strewn vacant lots. Both of the LES buildings I’ve lived in during my 31 years here had been empty and scheduled for demolition until early gentrifiers like me came in and gut renovated them.

The newer buildings, the mid-20th century urban renewal projects, generally adhered to the much maligned and discredited “tower in the park” approach to urban design in which high-rise apartment buildings were set back from the street and surrounded by open space. While there are some successful versions of this, such as Stuyvesant Town, the majority of them became characterless semi-isolated towers embedded in sometimes unsafe public space. The worst of them, like the infamous Pruitt Igoe project in St. Louis, had to be demolished because they were so dangerous. And from an urban vitality point of view, this concept of urban design abandoned the street, eliminating the activity, safety and community that looked messy and outdated to planners but, we discovered, are the backbone of urban neighborhoods.

Lower East Side "towers in the park." image credit Wikimedia Commons

Lower East Side “towers in the park.” image credit Wikimedia Commons

The more recent influx of development has taken the forms of both conventional towers fronting on the major streets (Houston and Delancey streets, and the Bowery, for the most part) and mid-block “sliver towers.”  The latter have been very controversial for their practice of buying up the “air rights” of surrounding older buildings and transferring the square footage to the mid-block site, thus allowing these new buildings to be far higher than the zoning would have permitted. More on that in a moment.

Amidst this, the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA), one of the largest development sites remaining in Manhattan, is finally moving ahead. Following an RFP this spring, the NYC Economic Development Corporation awarded the entire project to a developer team (the EDC could have chosen to award any of the nine sites to individual developers, which might have resulted in a less monolithic look) and the proposed design was revealed a few days ago.

SPURA (Seward Park Urban Renewal Area) site. Image source NYC EDC

SPURA (Seward Park Urban Renewal Area) site. Image source NYC EDC

In some Op-Ed pieces (here is one of them) I wrote during the RFP period, I expressed concern about the urban aspects of the project’s criteria as developed by the EDC. While the local community board did heroic work in demanding affordable housing and limiting big box stores, my fear was that the design proposals would follow the common contemporary formula: whole block buildings with uniform street walls and slightly set back anonymous looking glass towers.

(This was in addition to my other objection – the EDC’s insistence on providing an additional 500 parking spaces beyond the maximum allowed by the zoning. This approach reflects a long-standing and outdated car-oriented policy of theirs. One result of it is the empty and soon to be demolished brand new parking garage at the new Yankee Stadium.)

The primary architect of the SPURA proposal is the hot firm SHoP. Their work is often fresh and interesting, as evidenced by local designs such as the Barclays Center. (Interestingly, that project could be seen as the opposite of SPURA in that the controversy there mostly revolved around demolition of existing housing and the dramatically increased density of the not-yet-built buildings that will adjoin the arena. Back here, most of the sites have been long vacant since the existing housing was torn down 50 years ago, and the open parking lots have been what I’ve termed the “black hole” of the Lower East Side. Since those sites are empty, no one is objecting to building there. The questions centered on how it would relate to the surrounding area and how it could improve the community.)

Renderings of SHoP Architect's SPURA proposed design. Images source.

Renderings of SHoP Architect’s SPURA proposed design. Images source.

SPURA2

SHoP’s renderings, while not as bland as the other nearest redevelopment project, Avalon Bowery, still succumbs to the whole-block building syndrome which, in spite of amenities like roof gardens, results in unrelenting forms that are devoid of relationship to their surroundings.

Bowery Avalon. photo David Bergman

Bowery Avalon. Photo by author.

Which begs the question: what’s the alternative? Many would say (as in fact I have in other situations) that the approach should be to take the best of adjoining neighborhood – presuming there are positive aspects to the neighborhood – and improve upon them. This would have the effect of strengthening local roots rather than inserting a wholly new and out of character “intervention,” as this is sometimes called in archispeak.

The problem with this approach, of course, is money. Urban land is valuable and construction is expensive, so developers insist on density. On the community side, limiting the amount of housing inexorably pushes up prices, often forcing existing residents to leave.

So, as desirable as it may be from a contextual point of view, low density development is not realistic in urban cores. Is there a way to accommodate the economics without forsaking community character? There is and, though it may evoke outcries at first, it’s not far different from the sliver tower concept.

I first contemplated this conundrum – how to increase density without losing the appeal of older urban streets – in a design competition back in 1985 for urban infill housing in Harlem, “Reweaving the Urban Fabric: Approaches to Infill Housing.” My entry proposed filling in the vacant lots with new buildings similar in scale to the existing walk-ups, and then adding what in essence was a new layer of shallow towers above. The concept was that the lower level buildings would be primarily for families and the upper levels would focus on smaller apartments for singles, couple and seniors. Multigenerational buildings were not yet a topic, but it was implicit in the idea.

Competition Entry by David Bergman Architect for "Reweaving the Urban Fabric: Approaches to Infill Housing," 1985.

Competition Entry by David Bergman Architect for “Reweaving the Urban Fabric: Approaches to Infill Housing,” 1985.

Interestingly, the day after the SPURA design was released, I received a copy of the Yale School of Architecture’s annual publication Retrospecta in which the previous year’s student work is shown and discussed. One of the studios was taught by Gregg Pasquarelli, a partner in SHoP. The studio assignment was called “Bob and Jane Are Dead: Re-examining the Superblock.”  Bob refers to Robert Moses and Jane, as you might surmise, is Jane Jacobs, the two figures advocating opposite poles of 20th century urbanism. The first project immediately caught my eye. Titled “The Shroud and the Cloud,” the cloud represents the towers favored by Moses and the shroud is the contextual approach of Jacobs. The two students claim that either alone creates “architectural monotony.”

And so they set out to combine them in a “best of both worlds” approach that, strikes me as quite similar in concept to my proposal from almost 30 years ago: a street level urbanism Jane Jacobs might approve of with inventive and exciting new urban forms rising above it.

Yale School of Architecture student design "The Shroud and the Cloud," by Benjamin Sachs and Dinah Zhang.

Yale School of Architecture student design “The Shroud and the Cloud,” by Benjamin Sachs and Dinah Zhang.

shroud cloud 3Db

Which brings me back to sliver towers. They are generally attacked as uncontextual and unwanted intrusions, and both criticisms are usually accurate. But disallowing new construction and not providing needed new housing is not realistic. Except perhaps in the most significant of historic districts, it simply isn’t feasible to preserve neighborhoods in landmark stasis. Nor is it desirable. Cities cannot be stuck in their pasts as people, cultures and economies evolve. Even Paris, often cited as either the quintessential example of the ideal low-rise city or, conversely, as a tourist destination disguised as a city, is allowing high-rises.

A "sliver tower" under construction in the Lower East Side. Photo by author.

A “sliver tower” under construction in the Lower East Side. Photo by author.

So if new construction and increased density is inevitable, how can it be accomplished without sacrificing communities? And let’s go one better. How can it be designed to improve communities? We have a model at hand, and it involves using the often criticized “transfer of development rights” process to preserve the strong urban fabrics while allowing encouraging positive growth.

A friend of ours was approached a few years ago to sell his air rights to a developer putting together a mid-block high-rise a few doors away from his building. He held out as a matter of principal while his neighbors sold, and at the time we complimented him roundly. Now I’m not so sure I agree.

Yes, the building that resulted is architecturally heavy and, far from adding to the neighborhood, has become a nuisance in that it is a hotel with no connections to the community and its second floor rooftop parties can be hideously noisy. Indeed, a slightly earlier nearby high-rise hotel has exactly the same issues. (Who’d have thought we’d see glass tower high-end hotels in the Lower East Side?) But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Mid-block high-rise hotel in the Lower East Side

Mid-block high-rise hotel in the Lower East Side. Photo by author.

What we can have, I’m suggesting, is what I term “towers in the block.” Much as the Yale students recently proposed, and as I proposed much earlier, we can modify the towers in the park idea to correct its faults and simultaneously incorporate the wisdom of contemporary post-Jacobs urbanism.

But how does this work in the (increasingly rare) case of whole-block construction? SHoP’s renderings for SPURA are basically towers in the block. But, glass tower esthetics aside, by proposing block long buildings, they fail to create a good base over which to put the towers. The street is, to use Pasquarelli’s students’ words, architecturally monotonous. Its nod to contemporary urbanism, beyond some gestures to amenities, is present only in the setbacks on the plinths. Look at any new building like this, whether nearby in the LES, uptown on Broadway on the Upper West Side, in downtown Brooklyn, or any number of other cities, and the street level is devoid of local character and mindless of community.

This is, I want to stress, at least in part an architectural problem. Though zoning may mandate ground-level commercial spaces and setbacks (and hopefully may start to regulate the proliferation of chain stores and big box retail), in the end zoning is not the same as design, and it is designers who have the potential – and the responsibility – to provide the architectural bones in which street vitality and community can grow.

Architects need to study (and force their clients to look at) the banality of most new urban buildings, the unfriendly and unrelenting monotony of their creations. The towers in the block concept provides two related models for moving beyond this, one for blocks with existing strong urban fabric and one for larger scale blank slate sites. The latter needs to be informed by, without directly copying, the former.  For the latter to work, it needs to look beyond the expedience of large scale uniformity and the architectural hubris of the megablock. It’s not that Bob and Jane are dead. The lessons of both are very much alive and need to be combined.

 

If Overpopulation Isn’t the Problem, What’s the Question?

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Overpopulation in the future? (image from Star Trek)

Overpopulation in the future? (Image from Star Trek)

In a commercial for Doritos some years back, the consumption-encouraging slogan was “Eat all you want; we’ll make more.”* That guilt free line, with some minor alteration up front, could also be the subtitle for Erle C. Ellis’s New York Times Op-Ed “Overpopulation Is Not the Problem.” Basically he says we can have as many people on the planet as we want because we’ll always find ways to make more food.

Sounds like music to the ears of an EcoOptimist, or at least an optimist: evidence that centuries of fears of overpopulation have been wrong and the idea of a “carrying capacity” is irrelevant. Problem is it’s neither correct nor an example of EcoOptimism.

In a previous post, I refuted an EcoPessimist. Now I need to refute a false optimist.

Since the end of the 18th century, when Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population, there’s been controversy regarding the concept of “carrying capacity,” or the maximum population that an ecosystem (or the planet as a whole) can support indefinitely. Carrying capacity can refer to any species, but what we’re usually talking about is humanity – how many people the planet can support.

Malthus and his followers concluded that, largely because the Earth is a finite system, there are only so many people who can be fed by its resources. The 1972 book The Limits to Growth expanded upon this and predicted, as population and consumption grew, we’d run out of other necessary resources as well as food.

When the estimated dates passed without the shortages and human calamities the authors described, opponents claimed that it proved the concepts of finite resources and carrying capacity were wrong. Economists had an economic explanation – that scarcity would drive up prices which would, in turn, create demand for more expensive or alternative sources. This is, in fact, what is happening with fossil fuels; “unconventional” fuels like tar sands used to be too expensive but now are becoming viable as cheaper sources of oil run out. The problematic assumption here is that there will always be interchangeable alternatives. Some resources are simply not replaceable. Try living without oxygen or water.

Other opponents had a different take. Scientific and technological advances, they said (and still say), will continue to bring us new solutions which will allow us to increase efficiency as well as find alternatives. Natural resources may be finite, but that doesn’t matter because our intelligence will always yield new ways around those limits.

This in short is Ellis’ thesis. “There really is no such thing as a human carrying capacity,” he writes.

The idea that humans must live within the natural environmental limits of our planet denies the realities of our entire history, and most likely the future…. We transform ecosystems to sustain ourselves. This is what we do and have always done. Our planet’s human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of our social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental limits.

This inherently optimistic and appealing view has, though, a couple of fatal flaws. It is based on a “don’t worry, be happy” attitude that technology will always come to the rescue. While it’s true that human history has largely been one of advances leading to immense growths of population (as well as living standards), it’s a huge leap to assume that, unlike natural resources, our potential to think our way out of problems is limitless. Yes, technology has in the past changed the planet’s carrying capacity for humans (provided, that is, we ignore the long and continuing history of famines and overcrowding). Banking our future on this, however, is a form of blind faith.

But let’s take that leap and suppose that technology will always come to the rescue and provide ways to ever increase the amount of food we can eke out of the planet. Food is not the only limit on human population growth. The technologies that comprise modern industrial food production, and that have allowed us (or perhaps encouraged us) to increase the human population from 1 billion to 7 billion in little more than 2 ½ centuries, demand vast amounts of not just land, but other finite resources, most notably fossil fuels for energy, fertilizers and pesticides, along with fresh water. (Let’s leave the highly debated question of whether organic agriculture can feed us to another post.) Sure we’ve figured out how to make land more productive, but it’s involved adding a lot of additional energy and resources. Plus there are the crucial issues of pollution from the runoff of those fertilizers and pesticides, and soil degradation from intense monocropping.

And then there’s the not-so-small point that Ellis’ entire outlook concerns only human carrying capacity, not the ability of any of the other billions of species on the planet to survive. This isn’t just an altruistic concern; many of those species are essential to the functioning of ecosystems – the same ecosystems that enable human survival. Even in this newly-crowned Anthropocene Age, it’s not just about us. We may have the unique ability to alter the planet, to “transform ecosystems to sustain ourselves,” but that doesn’t mean we have either the right to do so for our sole benefit or the intelligence to do so with enough foresight.

Ellis’s rationale is both hubristic and dangerous. He’s betting that an historic pattern will continue, without acknowledging that the game has changed so the pattern no longer applies. A strong competing view says that the Industrial Revolution and the agricultural revolution that resulted from it were a once-in-a-species-lifetime event, enabled by a world that had a combination of relatively few people and plentiful, easily accessible resources. Neither of those conditions exists anymore and the latter will not happen again in any conceivable human future.

It’s not that we, the anthros of the Antropocene, are powerless. We have the ability to alter both the planet’s path and our own. On that, we agree. Is he advocating, though, that we should continue increasing the human population because, well, we’ll always have the ability to innovate and “make more” so it’ll all work out?

That’s an incredibly huge gamble and, furthermore, begs the question: why should we take it? Even if he’s correct in his wildly unsubstantiated claim that “There is no need to use any more land to sustain humanity — increasing land productivity using existing technologies can boost global supplies and even leave more land for nature,” why would we want to continue to increase the population? What’s the upside? Wouldn’t it be much wiser and more beneficial to not go down that questionable road and, instead, apply our unique innovating abilities to ensuring that future generations can not only exist, but be better off?

Overpopulation may not be the problem, but it certainly is a part of the problem. The famous (in some circles, anyway) equation I=P*A*T states that environmental impact is a function of the population times the amount and types of things people consume. What we have now is a rapidly growing population with a rapidly growing per capita consumption rate. Whether or not the planet’s ecosystems can sustain the exponentially increasing levels of environmental impact we are inflicting on it – and I can’t believe Ellis would say they can – diminishing that impact has to be a good thing. Maybe, maybe we can manage to figure out ways to feed everyone, but what about all the additional demands that accompany a larger and more affluent species.

If we extrapolate from history as Ellis claims we can, it’s obvious that the demand for “stuff,” whether it be basic food and housing or designer jeans and the latest electronic gizmo, is increasing at least as fast as the number of people demanding that stuff. How that can possibly be construed as anything sustainable or “not the problem” is incomprehensible. The two-fold solution involves reducing both consumption and population growth, resulting in a wholly desirable scenario that, as EcoOptimism espouses, leaves us all better off and happier.

As with the Doritos line, Ellis says we’ll just “make more.”  He’s almost certainly wrong — we can’t continue infinitely to make more, no matter how imaginative and innovative we are – but moreover, making more is the wrong response. It’s not the route to “creating a planet that future generations will be proud of.” We need to make better – better things, better food, better education, leading to better people — not more.

* Fact checking this slogan, it appears that it may have been “crunch all you want”, not “eat,” but hordes of people including me remember it as “Go ahead. Eat all you want. We’ll make more.”

Density Part 3: Kenneth Jackson’s “Future” of New York

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[This post is part of a continuing series within EcoOptimism analyzing the pros and cons and different types of urban density, beginning with the post Height vs Delight and continuing with Density: It’s Not the Sky that’s the Limit.]

The urban historian Kenneth T. Jackson is a towering figure among New Yorkologists, so it seems appropriate that he’d be a supporter of towers themselves. In an Op-Ed this Sunday in The New York Times, he takes to task the opposition to the proposed upzoning of East Midtown in Manhattan.

Illustration from the Municipal Art Society in its response to the rezoning showing “how the height of the new buildings the City is hoping to see realized around Grand Central Terminal will impact the area.”

Illustration from the Municipal Art Society in its response to the rezoning showing “how the height of the new buildings the City is hoping to see realized around Grand Central Terminal will impact the area.”

Historic preservation, he says, has gone too far. “Its goal seems to be to preserve anything that will maintain the streetscape, whether or not the individual structures have significance….Presumably, its leaders would be happy to stop any change at all between 59th Street and 125th Street.”

New and taller construction is necessary, in his vision of NYC’s future, in order to maintain the city’s pre-eminence. Buried in this belief are two huge and, I believe, mistaken assumptions. The first is the basic premise that NYC must be pre-eminent.  While it sounds irreverent and disloyal to say otherwise, the fact is that NYC is but one of many major 21st century urban centers. We are no longer in a world dominated by New York, London and Paris, and haven’t been for a while. (Though midtown Manhattan is still the largest central business district in the world, at least according to Wikipedia.) True, NYC is still seen as the financial capital of the world, but in many ways this is vestigial in a digital and globalized scenario and, furthermore, it’s highly questionable whether it’s in the city’s best interests to remain focused and therefore dependent on a single “industry.” Many have argued for the economic diversification of the city, with an eye to the income and job generators of the future: creating more baskets for the eggs, etc. Potential growth sectors that have been discussed, in addition to silicon alley, include sustainable design and related industries, distributed manufacturing (MakerBot originated in Brooklyn), biotech, urban agriculture and, of course, the arts.

The second assumption Jackson makes is that the solution to securing the city’s future is in the clouds. Unfortunately, he doesn’t mean the digital cloud, in which information is dispersed, but the physical clouds encountered at skyscraper heights, in which people are concentrated. Jackson laments “Of the 100 tallest buildings in the world now under construction, only three are in New York and only one is in East Midtown.”

But why are height and the city’s ranking in numbers of tallest buildings the determinant of growth and importance? The essential defining property of a city is density: a concentration of people that enables commerce, community and exchanges of ideas.  But like most things, there is a point at which density (of people, buildings and traffic, not to mention bank branches, Duane Reades and Starbucks) reaches diminishing returns and begins to undermine the attributes that constitute the vitality of a city.

Jackson claims that density in Manhattan has decreased from a population of 2.3 million in 1910 to 1.6 million today. But that’s a very misleading way to define density. It excludes the additional 1.6 million people who commute to work in the city every day, as well as the number of tourists. And the East Midtown upzoning plan is not designed to increase residential space; it’s for commercial towers. This will effectively worsen a basic problem of Manhattan and many cities in general: the separation of working and living areas. This results in what are perhaps the two greatest problems of modern cities:  expense of living and transportation congestion. According to an NYU Wagner Rudin Center report, “Manhattan is the top work destination in the country for ‘extreme commuting,’ work trips that are more than 90 minutes long each way.” And as many of us are all too aware, NYC is the most expensive place to live in the US, all of which would lead to the conclusion that the city needs more living space, not office towers.

Regarding transportation, Jackson blithely puts aside another extreme: the crowding on the existing east side transportation infrastructure, claiming the MTA “could handle more, not fewer, riders” based on the statistic that ridership has fallen since 1947. Try telling that to any rush hour rider. In a breath, he ignores the fact that there were two more train lines on the east side then (before the Second and Third Avenue Els were demolished) and merely says that the long-awaited and far from finished Second Avenue subway will relieve some of the congestion on the crammed Lexington line.

There’s a more convincing argument for upgrading midtown’s office spaces. A study by the eco-consulting group Terrapin Bright Green concluded that the bulk of the mid-century office buildings in midtown are outmoded in terms of both space and energy efficiency and, more significantly, cannot be viably upgraded. The singularly most devastating finding, from the point of view of either environmentalists or historic preservationists, is that these buildings would need new skins – the old curtain walls are energy sieves – but the structures of the buildings cannot support the weight of better insulated facades. That’s in addition to the fact that their low ceilings with many interior columns are not “Class A” spaces, the most desired type. (At least, that is, for conventional financial institutions with trading floors and old-school work cubicles. The newer growth sectors have more varied needs.)

The city’s thinking is that replacing these buildings is not economically viable for developers given the existing zoning limitations. Given the coziness between developers and the Bloomberg administration, one has to take with this a grain of salt.

Like the city (and most economists and politicians), Jackson seems to wholeheartedly swallow the “growth is good” Kool-Aid. We have to be very careful how we define growth. Growth is not the same as betterment, and the opposite of growth is not stagnancy. Jackson writes:

Is New York still the wonder city, the place that celebrates the future, the city that once defined modernism? Or should it follow the paths of Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston and Savannah in emphasizing its human scale, its gracious streets and its fine, historic houses?

The answer for a metropolis competing on a global scale must be no, because a vital city is a growing city, and a growing city is a changing city.

Leaving aside the question of what’s wrong with the human scale and gracious streets (btw, I’d substitute “livable” for “gracious”) of Boston or Philadelphia – or, for that matter, Paris — Jackson has reduced this critical issue to a false dilemma. The choice is not solely between economic vitality and quaint neighborhoods. Nor is it between unbridled development and historic preservation. For cities to succeed economically, environmentally and socially, we have to look at a wider, more holistic picture than simply the one that gives us the tallest buildings and the most claims to the “greatest city.” We have to include affordability, reducing inequity, increasing livability and, yes, a sense of history. These are not the constraints Jackson seems to regard them as. They are the sources of our future “growth” and our flourishing as individuals, as communities and as a world.

 

Nature Bats Last and Owns the Stadium

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Map by “Shannon1,” via Wikimedia

Map by “Shannon1,” via Wikimedia

What goes around comes around?

It was one of the defining battles of the early environmental movement: would a dam be built across the Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park in the early 20th century in order to provide water for post-earthquake San Francisco? Sierra Club founder John Muir, appealing to President (and outdoorsman) Theodore Roosevelt, advocated that the valley should be preserved in its natural condition. In Roosevelt’s other ear, conservationist and founder of the National Forest Service Gifford Pinchot supported “wise use” of resources “for the greatest good for the greatest number in the long run.”

Muir, on the other hand, wrote “”It is impossible to overestimate the value of wild mountains and mountain temples as places for people to grow in, recreation grounds for soul and body. They are the greatest of our natural resources, God’s best gifts. . . .”

In this schism between environmentalists, Pinchot won and the dam was built. To this day, preservationists want the dam removed. The real loser, they would argue, was nature.

The Hetch Hetchy Valley before and after the dam. Images via Wikimedia.

The Hetch Hetchy Valley before and after the dam. Images via Wikimedia.

Well, 100 years later maybe it’s time for payback. A huge fire is currently out of control in Yosemite, and California has declared a state of emergency not just for the immediate area, but for San Francisco, 140 miles away. The reason? The city’s electric and water supplies may be in jeopardy. 85% of the city’s water comes from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, which may get contaminated with smoke and ash, and, furthermore, there are major electrical transmission lines in the, um, line of fire.

I haven’t read whether the cause of the fire has been determined, if it was natural or human, or whether forestry policies contributed to its spread.  But the potential irony is there. Muir and nature may have lost the initial battle, but the war – which is how some still see our relationship to nature – is far from over, and nature, provider of oxygen and water and a few other life essentials, holds a stronger hand than we do. One wonders how long that “long run” of Pinchot’s wise use is.

Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir at Yosemite

Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir at Yosemite

 

Almost Good Advice on Consumption

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This CNN article, headlined “Parents, you don’t need to buy more stuff,” seemed promising. Though it’s pretty basic and obvious to EcoOptimism readers, my first reaction was that it’s great to see this type of post-consumer attitude in the “lamestream” media. However, it didn’t end as smartly as I’d expected.

I’m contentedly “childfree,” so the examples mentioned in the article aren’t all that applicable to my relatively small ecofootprint urban lifestyle, but still the advice in the closing paragraph caught my eye: “Focus on buying better time instead of buying better stuff.”  That sounded right for a second until I realized they were a bit off the mark in advising against buying better stuff. What we’re really talking about is buying less stuff. Despite the expensive and less functional high chair example they dwell on, a general rule should be buy less stuff, but when you do buy, aim for durable, high quality (as well as ecologically and socially responsible) stuff.

So I’m all for the advice to “accept every hand-me-down you can find and let your toddler put a vegetable colander on his head rather than hitting the store for the latest Hot Wheels Monster Truck” — even though my favorite toys were my Matchbox (non-monster sized) trucks. But if that colander is getting handed down because the cheap material has broken, don’t replace it with another cheap one that will just break again.