While the War of Terror remains the mainstay of this blog's focus, there are other trends changing our world that are worthy of coverage. One of the least-discussed and most important is the way North America's thinking about cities and their design is slowly changing, thanks to movements like "New Urbanism" [great Flash Presentation | more resources].
New Urbanism and related ideas matter for all kinds of reasons, from public health & security angles to minimizing social pathologies to creating an opportunity economy. Blogger Michael Totten offers some before-and-after pictures of Portland (but see the comments section). My take: don't be thrown off by attempts to roll New Urbanism's core concepts in with a lot of other liberal baggage under the moniker "smart growth". These ideas aren't just for leftists.
The Reason Public Policy Institute had an interesting Sept. 2001 report called "Older Suburbs: Crabgrass Slum or New Urban Frontier?", which I'm sure got absolutely no attention. One of its appendices in particular tickled my funnybone, and provoked a few hmmms:
"The decline of the older suburbs in the 1970s and 1980s drove growth out to the urban periphery, even further away from established major metropolitan markets. Smaller-scale, science-based cities emerged in such places as Austin, Salt Lake City, and Raleigh-Durham… Communities such as these cannot be described as either "suburbs" in the conventional sense or even as "edge cities" attached to the periphery of a major city. They neither depend upon the core city for employment, like many older suburbs, nor seek to duplicate the traditional functions of the urban core, as is the case of featureless, ill-defined conventional "overgrown" suburbs that have emerged as exurban business hubs. Instead, these communities can best be described as "nerdistans" - new urban regions built on their attractiveness to the rising technological elite… More than anything, successful nerdistans seek to eliminate all the kinds of distractions -crime, traffic, commercial blight - that have commonly been endemic to cities and, later, midopolitan areas as well. Although nerdistans often lack the social diversity and cultural richness traditionally associated with more urban areas, these are features that many engineers and scientists seem more than willing to dispense with in order to escape social and other pathologies."New Urbanism. Midopolises. Nerdistans. Each represents a somewhat different approach to the problems of modern urban life, with the Midopolis concept and criteria for success serving as a kind of conceptual bridge merging aspects of the other 2. Nor are these concepts mutually exclusive. Austin may be classified as a Nerdistan, but its status as a government & university town has also folded a very vibrant artistic & cultural scene onto the classic template. New Urbanist efforts at the neighbourhood, district, or regional level could add even more, enhancing the Austin experience in the near term and preventing breakneck growth from compromising it in the longer term. Many of our complaints about urban life stem from poor policies, and poor behaviours too. Too often, issues of poor design and neglect of centuries-old lessons lie at the heart of both. Good cities are like good software: architecture & design matter. Even so, it took 50 years of hard experience to pinpoint some of the issues involved. We won't dig ourselves out in a year or two. If we can change the criteria for design and discussion of our cityscapes, however, we can gradually change our experience of living in them. Right, Left or Center, that's a responsibility we can all stand behind.
Portland, Oregon is not a great example of 'new-urbanism.' It is the result of years of no growth development policies. Take at look at home prices in Portland - crazy money for crummy houses. Affordable housing? Not in Portland. That is why the growth in metro Portland is across the river in Washington.
I like the town, have many relatives there, but you would have to pay me ALOT of money to work there. Tiny, older housing stock, declining public services (wait until they have to actually treat their water supply), and a lack of a well-balanced economic base are issues that cause me concern.
Also, I hardly think Austin qualifies as a "nerdistan". For only a few years in the late 1990's, a rational, "do something" mayor rode herd on the typical Austin city council... NIMBY, anti-growth masquerading as green and progressive. There was a flurry of new downtown development, cut short by the end of the tech boom.
Most of the tech-related development and housing has occured on the western and northern sides of Austin, and particularly in Round Rock (Dell Corp's home). Downtown Austin has its cultural scene, gov't, and the University. But drive I-35 or MoPac during the peak traffic times, try to walk ANYWHERE outside the pre-automobile urban core, and you'll see that Austin has as much New Urbanism as I have admiration for Saddam Hussein.
MG
PS: I like visiting downtown Portland, but don't know enough to say whether I would like living there. Even a senior member of "1000 Friends of Oregon" acknoweledged to me that a lot of spillover is occuring in SW Washington.
I also live in Portland, on the east side; I work downtown. Mr. Totten's anti-car bias is clear and poisons his work; his pictures almost all come from four very small areas within 2 miles of downtown. He doesn't show the many neighborhoods that work with cars all over the city, like the Hawthorne district, Hollywood, Multnomah Village; the infill in these areas is also built to look like local housing stock, but with a much wider range of styles, just like the existing houses. (My house was built in 1911 in what was then a middle class streetcar suburb; I am a native Oregonian.)
All those pictures he shows don't illustrate the real problem: a lot of the culture in Portland is still "we roll up the sidewalks at 6:00 on weekdays and all day Sunday."
The price problem is real, but not entirely attributable to the urban growth boundary; partly it's because in the early 1990s we passed the initiative that rolled back property tax assessed values and limited their growth as well as growth in the property tax rate. My house has more than quadrupled in value in only 13 years, but the tax assessed value is only about half the market value.
The problem with shifting Portland metro area growth to southwest Washington is roads: there are only two freeway bridges from those bedroom communities accross the Columbia River into Oregon. People who have moved here from places where a half hour commute is impossibly short don't mind, but most locals would be horrified, and it is routine for evening rush hour traffic to be backed up from the border to downtown Portland on both freeways at the same time.
"Even a senior member of "1000 Friends of Oregon" acknoweledged to me that a lot of spillover is occuring in SW Washington."
I would contend that it is the presence of Clark County that makes "Portland" possible. I lived in the Portland metro area for 20 years (I now live on an island in Puget Sound). Portland is a theme park for the new urbanism, but like all theme parks requires a large "offstage" area that contains all the less desirable bits.
Control new building, let the land prices rise high enough and lots of your problems commute home every night across the Interstate bridge.
How in the world can anyone tease out an anti-car bias from Totten's slide show? (Unless that's what they want to see.)
Ahh, my beloved Portland.
$154/sq ft is a normal average for housing in the westside suburbs. Traffic capacity is strangled to "discourage" cars, but without any alternative. (if you don't thing smart growth is anti-car, you're deluding yourself) http://www.ti.org/vaupdates.html New building consists entirely of Three-story "townhouses" that are about 12' wide on each floor, no lot, and no parking on the street.
"Smart Growth" is the apex of stupidity in planning.
The UGB (Urban growth boundary) is killing the economy. But it's completely in line with a "no growth" philosophy that's been the hallmark of Oregon's personality since the 1960s. Leave your money and go back home is Oregon's motto, and smart growth is the tool to ensure no growth whatsoever.
There was nothing the gov't could do during the economic boom of the 1990s, so it just sucked up whatever excess it could. Now it's retrenching and keeping the economy in the tank so we can keep Oregon to ourselves.
I can afford it, lucky me. For everyone else, there's the Couv (Vancouver, Washington)(and the I-5 commute).
Perfect analogy Beryl
Midland, Tx is the perfect nerdistan