Replacing shopping

Thinking about great places I have been, many of them revolve around historical significance. In fact, sometimes reclaimed and repurposed buildings make a great basis for placemaking. Of course, many times these repurposed buildings can utterly fail too. Either way, historical value can be a draw. But I digress.

Lots of the great places I can think of in the US center on nightlife and shopping. Even a lot of malls I have been too have many of the elements of great places. But what about areas without the economic firepower to support numerous restaurants and specialty stores? And what about the inner ring with its emptying strip centers with acres of parking? With much retail gone to the big boxes or malls, how can these areas create enough social energy to pass the tipping point and make a great place? I believe the key is giving people a reason to mix and mingle in close proximity without spending a lot of money. Take a big corner strip mall and replace a square of the parking with grass, a fountain, stalls to sell produce, ice cream, coffee, a place for live music (but no band shell, please -- they look so dead when empty). Maybe replace part of the strip with a library extension or city hall? This would bring a stream of people to the area all week long. Oh, and a few port-a-potties would be nice too.

What else is cheap and relies on other people to increase the value?

The future of housing?

From the website here, you can see that Urban Re:vision - Dallas has facilitated the redevelopment of a city block near Dallas' city hall. The site claims:

"Soon, a single block will be transformed into a place that creates economies,supports community, facilitates relationships and generates resources."

The idea here is to come up with a model that could be a prototype for residential neighborhoods in the climate/energy era we seem to be entering. There seems to be a widespread belief that when energy gets expensive, we will all have to live in high density urban areas in buildings covered with PVs and wind turbines with gardens on the roof where we can all grow our own food. The planners seem to have written off moderate to low density suburban living.

I think this is a mistake.

Why?

1. The only reason this type of density makes sense is if transportation costs get really, really high. I have faith that electric powered transportation (cars, buses, light rail, etc. powered via nuclear power) will be able to keep transportation costs below what it was in the streetcar era. This means that we will be able to maintain densities below what we experienced in the 1900-1910 period. And even then, residential housing was not as dense as these competition entries.

2. I am going to go out on a limb here and assert that these buildings are a lot more energy intensive in constrution (steel and concrete, and elevators) than a stick-built or even adobe-like two story building. I think it can be argued that the Jones/Emmons 1961 Case Study House #24 idea is much closer to the future of residential housing than anything I see at Re:vision - Dallas.

I cannot find a good pic of the plan online, but basically, Jones/Emmons carved a 48'x60' hole out of a pile of dirt and filled it in with 4 bedrooms, 3 baths, 2 living areas, three garden areas (all 48'x12') and a swiming pool. At 1736 SF, the house isn't at all cramped. With the main living area and bedrooms opening up to the gardens, the rooms would feel larger than they are. The house would also be energy efficient and by using 60'x80' lots, a neighborhood would be much more dense (9 =units per acre) than most of what we see today.

3. Are we really going to get away from the huge economies of scale that agribusiness creates for us and grow our own food in community rooftop gardens? Even if we need to build greenhouses in cities to lower the cost of transporting food to people, won't we want to lower the cost dramatically by letting professionals grow the food for us? This one is beyond me.

4. There doesn't seem to be any sense of place being created in any of these entries. Ok, I guess this is a little off-message, but after my previous posts on placemaking, I have to address this. From what I can tell, most of these entries turn their backs to the street (or rise above it) and then try to create a communal space within the housing development. Have we learned anything from 60 years of public housing? People use streets to get from place to place. The street is where a place can gain social energy from people that live elsewhere. The internal park-like or street-like areas in these plans will mainly be accessible to people who live here. Without reaching a critical mass, these places will mostly be dead space. My grandparents used to live in a gated park-like area development containing about a dozen condo towers each with 120 units. Even with all those people living in such high density, the outdoor spaces were empty most of the time. I am guessing Jane Jacobs would not be a fan of any of these entries.

And finally, one thing is certain. We have no idea what effects policies to control climate change will have on the cost of resources or what new technologies will be developed in response to those changes. What I do know is that trying to keep the cost of energy low and then requireing people to use less of it by having experts design "better" places is a terrible idea. The lowest cost way to handle this transition is to tax activities that cause the planet to heat up and then let people find the lowest cost way to avoid the taxes.

I bet what we would see in that case is a moderate increase in density of economic activity concentrated around our existing edge cities and central cities and a shift towards more mixed use land use to reduce travel costs.