In 2008, with more than half of the world population found in cities, the earth becomes officially urban. With this change, we recognize intensified levels of environmental urgency coupled with a demand for new technologies to drive business and housing development forward in an improved way. A missing element appears to be a debate on how to create a mass transportation foundation for these improvments. Transit systems support high-density urban development; they contribute to the elimination of social and spatial disadvantages, and serve to coordinate and clarify development policy, especially during periods of rapid growth. Mass transit helps to focus two prime areas of urban integration business and housing. This "focus" is vital to making an urbanized earth a viable solution to the global challenge. Below, three ideas about "promises" are used to begin this exploration. One involves urban density, another suggests a design approach to equity and social justice and the third offers advanced forms of multi-sector knowledge capital. It is thought in this exploration that whether facilitated or forced, it may be possible to survive a mass reduction in globally dangerous consumption, it will be absolutely impossible to eliminate the human desire for trade. The demand to change what is traded may be the core economic issue, but the need to do so is ultimately a commuity design problem.
The Promise of Density
Urban business sectors benefit from increasing levels trade when stimulated by ease of movement and fast communication systems. On the other hand, this activity is greatly reduced most successful residential communities using strict controls. These measures help New York City to re-invent itself by focusing on the tension caused by these two uses. Living and working become a kind of multi-layered space in the city due, in large part to a strict adherence to zoning regulation. These and other development “codes” provide objective measures of dimension, proportion, and performance for continuous evaluation and succeeding adaptations to change. These rules regulate the adaptive reuse of buildings and guide the replication of several relatively fixed building types to produce an efficient mechanism for growth at low risk.
The promise of urban density begins with the mathematical and functional certainty of the city-grid. It is a symbol of the infinite, a set of lines or pathways moving outward into space and around the globe. The negative effect is urban sprawl – a paucity of centeredness promoted by these low-risk growth patterns. Within this framework, New York City has remained an island geographically and politically. In this sense, NYC symbolizes a "circle". It is limited. These limitations are many but they also yield opportunities to solve serious problems with a modest but continuously impressive degree of success. Managing the stress and risk linked to these restraints produce vibrant multiple uses of the urban space.
New York offers a dynamic mix of affordable and means tested housing units in proximity to unregulated apartments. It has converted its industrial waterfront into a new public realm yet retaining (hopefully) its core industrial capacity to design and manufacture locally consumed products. Density guarantees an acclimatizing response to change.
The Promise to Eliminate Disadvantage
When examining the question of equity or fairness we define issues such as residential segregation using rent and acquisition cost and we evaluate differences in these costs by the constructs of race and class to measure social disadvantage. The former (residential segregation) accelerates real estate values by isolating competitive interests and various forms of exclusion (social disadvantage) serve to manage or disguise this behavior. For the most part, these actions help maintain advantages by distributing privileges. These distribution activities are common among all economic classes; however, when used spatially the data describes a broad range of comparative economic disadvantages established between groups as a land use question.
The image of hub and wheel dominates as a symbol of urbanism. It is an easily recognized pattern within cities and conurbations such as New York, London, and Tokyo. The settlement of multiple “hubs” and outland support areas are in a continuous state of decay and renewal. In the buildings and neighborhoods formed, multiple sets of questions about the design of these places and the experience of living in them are prolific. A nearly universal example would be the spatial relationship between a felony assault and walking through a housing complex. Queries that seek a relationship in these experiences (causal or otherwise) hope to improve urban life by improving its space. Using the example of the mass transit system as a catalyst for stimulating urban change will help illustrate this point.
The mass transportation system provides a useful metaphor of the catalyst. We all ride in the same rod-shaped cars of the NYC subway system. The number that defines the percentage of “choice riders” in the system at any point in time regardless of economic status is a key unknown. What conditions and purposes make it the first choice for travel? Would understanding this in detail help improve and expand investment in public transit at lower risk? Unlike the intellectual and social advocacy provided by the business and housing development community, mass transit professionals have been unable to posit the case for more broadly based sources of revenue. Clearly, the cost of public transit and its importance in the region is a responsibility that goes well beyond the economic capacity of its ridership. Is the missing element from the transportation community the lack of a public advocacy policy and a progressive approach to change? Is not the advancement of stronger public transit policy serve to reduce per capita carbon output, or the elimination social disadvantage by removing isolation?
The Promise of Multi-Sector Knowledge Capital
The public transportation has yet developed a response to social change that is equivalent to that of the business development community or the affordable housing development agencies. With all three frameworks in play, we could see a higher level of coordination and the capacity to model development solutions prior to implementation. New evidence-driven algorithms that produce financial, geographic, and architectural imaging are readily available. This technology also supports the continued expansion of connected data base systems to monitor real time conditions. The promise of combined data that links housing, business, and transportation not only helps to form new questions, but they are more likely to be the right ones at the right time.
Recent offerings in upper Manhattan for example suggest enormous economic windfalls to land owners that are adjacent to major mass transit resources. These windfalls would be in trade for density bonuses that make room for a full range of mixed-use affordable housing/business development options.
Given current market conditions, development pressure in upper Manhattan could produce something like a “deal or no deal” policy. This policy would support a multiple layering of dense uses and purposes along the major transit corridors, but it would not support these changes without a reciprocal development solution that would prevent displacement throughout the rest of the community.
Urban places defined as immigrant barrios or racial ghettos have spatially defined dimensions for comparison. For example, moving from Manhattan’s Upper East Side uptown to Harlem, and Harlem uptown to Washington Heights reveals frightening differences of income and social class in terms of race, ethnic background, and national origin. Nevertheless, a transit system provides for movement from one to the other with great ease. These adjacencies are possible regardless of household income when the opportunity includes free movement throughout in a city that offers a life of dignity and purpose.
This unique New York City combination is a product of planning and urban design. It exhibits the possibility of an urbanized earth that is both environmentally and socially adaptable to the global challenge and that it is possible to implement environmental and economic reforms concurrently. The integration of prime land uses as a multi-sector investment represents the dual capability of renewing the human place as well as, the human spirit. The urbanized earth is a place where every resident can find low cost access to employment, affordable training, and housing that includes levels of basic community support for personal enrichment sufficient to end all of the pathological aspects of poverty and environmental degradation. The promise of a well-integrated system of movement, opportunity for business growth and affordable housing offers nothing less than a vitally civil society on a much greener and ecologically diverse earth.
SUGGEST BOOKS AND REPORTS
Aside from an occasional rant, a strong, vital argument for more progress in producing an equitable public transportation system is: Highway Robbery:Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity Use either link to read a major portion of the book now by Bullard Johnson and Torres, 2000.
The State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth website or here to download a pdf of the report
BUY
Highway Robbery from Amazon Now
VIEW A RELEVANT VIDEO
A world of 100 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJHJH3C23-8
Description of Images
- Cellular Image of London Developed by spatial syntax institute at the London University
- Mass Transit system of NYC illustrates geographic distorion of the HUB and spoke of urban develoment
- Image of Inwood Manhattan, a snapshot of the "deal or no deal" land use development policy emphasizing areas recommended for high density develoment in context. Also points out the "waterfront contradiction" if waterborne transit is not present.
