Category: Urbanism
What’s the Infrastructure’s Highest Value?
A piece of land and infrastructure may have multiple uses. Land might be needed for urban development or for a highway. A two-track structure might be needed for freight or passenger service. A right-of-way might be needed for multiple kinds of rail, or a road, or a power line easement, or a park. In all cases, the correct policy choice is to allocate the land to the use that has the highest social value, and this use depends on the situation at hand. It should not be allocated to whatever one fancies.
Concretely, let us consider the following cases:
1. The High Line. Occasionally, railfans grumble about the linear park, and say it should’ve had passenger rail service instead; read the comments on Ben Kabak’s post on linear parks, or New York City subway forums. But in reality, the High Line is very useful as a park in a busy neighborhood that doesn’t have other parks. In contrast, it’s nearly worthless as a transit line: it’s parallel to a north-south subway that’s operating well below capacity, it would be nightmarishly difficult to connect to any existing line, and the only east-west service it could possibly be useful for is connecting to 14th Street, not the most important job destination in the city.
2. The Northeast Corridor in Rhode Island, south of Providence. The expansion of MBTA commuter rail southward into sprawling exurbs is a major failure of regional transportation policy. Providence is not all that congested by the standards of the larger Northeastern cities; auto-oriented commuter rail toward it is doomed to fail, and near-downtown parking is cheap and plentiful. (The commute market from Warwick and Wickford Junction to Boston is trivial.) In contrast, the line is perfect for intercity service, since it has relatively gentle curves outside city limits, and is straight south of East Greenwich. The South County project not only costs $200,000 per weekday rider, but also makes poor use of high-speed track. Since the line is more important as high-speed rail than as a commuter line, Amtrak should be more aggressive about demanding that commuter projects create their own capacity.
3. The Northeast Corridor in Maryland, north of Baltimore. For the same reasons as the MBTA extension’s eventual failure, MARC underperforms north of Baltimore. Although the line has extensive three- and four-track segments, the bridges are two-tracked, and high-speed rail should again be given priority, including canceling commuter rail if necessary. Ironically, because of more extensive four-tracking, the need for bypasses around Wilmington and perhaps North East, and the at-grade track layout, Perryville is quite easy to connect to Philadelphia by commuter rail without interfering with intercity rail.
4. Caltrain to San Jose, the MBTA to Providence, MARC to Baltimore. In contrast with the situation in points #2-3, those three lines are all useful commuter lines; they are all similar in that they connect two distinct cities that share suburbs, with a rump extension that exists purely for show (into Gilroy, Perryville, and soon to be Wickford Junction). Any and all high-speed rail use of these corridors should permit a reasonable frequency of commuter trains, with timed overtakes when possible and full four-tracking otherwise. On Caltrain, in particular, interference with commuter rail is one reason why the chosen Pacheco Pass alignment is inferior to the Altamont alignment.
5. The Lower Montauk Line. Despite perennial railfan desires (and an empty Bloomberg campaign promise, since scrubbed from his campaign website) to restore passenger service, there’s not much point in regional rail that stub-ends in Long Island City. To give an idea how much demand there is, the LIRR currently runs 5 trains per day per direction into Long Island City. Thus, the line is more useful for freight trains than for passenger trains. This will change if, and only if, there is a way to connect the line to Manhattan through the existing LIRR tunnels, or perhaps new tunnels, but then the cost is going to be orders of magnitude higher than just restoring service.
6. Urban freeways, e.g. the BQE. American freeways were built at a time when, even more so than today, land was allocated based on political power rather than any sort of social consensus or market pricing concept. While Japanese cities have to make do with 4-lane freeways due to high land costs and strong property rights protections, American cities demolished entire neighborhoods to make room for freeways with wide exclusion zones around them. The land occupied by some would be more useful for additional neighborhood housing growth than it is for a freeway. For example, the BQE hogs prime real estate in Williamsburg, right next to the under-capacity Marcy Avenue subway station, and to a lesser extent in the rest of Brooklyn and Queens, and this land could be used for high-density development instead.
Megaregional Change
Just as transportation networks can create a new megaregion, so can they work to destroy one. Back in 1910, the golden age of manufacturing centralization, the US had a megaregion, namely the core formed by the quadrilateral whose vertices are Boston, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Baltimore. Outside this quadrilateral, there were almost no large industrial cities, and the main exceptions were either right outside and represented extensions (Kansas City, the Twin Cities) or in California (San Francisco), representing a separate manufacturing network.
The formation of the Northeast megaregion was really a replacement of the old megaregion with a different system. The US used to have a general core area and a periphery. It was never perfect – the North’s dominance of the South was only complete after city regions developed elsewhere, so there was never a total dominance of the manufacturing belt. But it was still far richer than the periphery, and each city had a separate industry to specialize in. In contrast, what we see today is different: there are still core and periphery regions, but instead of one giant core, we have a spikier core, spread relatively evenly nationwide. The Northeast’s four major cities are all core, but there are core cities everywhere, so in a sense we get a core and periphery in each major region of the US. Megaregions occur along clusters of core cities surrounded by their nearby dependencies.
Just as the new, smaller megaregions are bound by high-speed rail or by regular rail and freeway networks, the old one was bound by the emerging freight rail network. Lower transportation costs made it easy to manufacture everything in one place and ship it elsewhere. Once a core-periphery model sets in, it takes a large difference in income to make it worthwhile to start locating factories elsewhere.
I forget which book I got this from (I think The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier), but it took until the postwar period for first-third world income disparity to grow to the point that American companies started offshoring factories. Until then, what is now the first world consistently had higher economic growth than what is now the third world, even absent colonial relationships. Of course within a country the costs of moving factories are lower and so the wealth disparity required to change the core-periphery dynamic is different, but the principle is similar. For decades, there wasn’t much city growth in the South. California grew very quickly, since it had gold and then oil and needed to manufacture its own goods since transportation costs across the Rockies were too high for it to import everything from the East. But, as Jane Jacobs quotes Henry Grady on the situation of the region around Atlanta:
I attended a funeral once in Pickens county in my State. They buried him in the midst of a marble quarry: they cut through solid marble to make his grave; and yet a little tombstone they put above him was from Vermont. They buried him in the heart of a pine forest, and yet the pine coffin was imported from Cincinnati. They buried him within touch of an iron mine, and yet the nails in his coffin and the iron in the shovel that dug his grave were imported from Pittsburg. They buried him by the side of the best sheep-grazing country on the earth, and yet the wool in the coffin bands and the coffin bands themselves were brought from the North. The South didn’t furnish a thing on earth for that funeral but the corpse and the hole in the ground.
Of course, something similar to what happened in the US between about 1910 and the 1960s is happening on a global scale: the dominance of the US, Europe, and Japan is in decline, and third-world economic growth is now consistently above first-world growth.
Paul Krugman suggests that this change in agglomeration patterns comes from further income growth, noting that China today looks a lot like the US of 1910. While he talks about it in terms of city specialization, this is equally true in terms of the location of the core. China’s core today is a contiguous region stretching from Guangdong to just north of Shanghai, plus Beijing. It’s entirely possible that in fifty years it will look different – that the small cities between the megaregions around Shanghai and Guangdong will rust while new cores will develop around large interior cities.
An HSR Country is a Centralized Country
1950s’ Japan was a fairly monocentric country, in which everything was in Tokyo. When it built the Shinkansen, the expectation was that fast travel nationwide would make it easier to do business in the other cities, reducing centralization. Instead, the opposite happened: the Shinkansen made it easier to get to and from Tokyo, increasing centralization. At the same time, the US, which forwent its rail system and built the Interstate system, saw its manufacturing belt disintegrate, with production moving to the South. If we think of high-speed rail as a nationwide version of rapid transit, then we get the same pattern seen in cities, in which transit works hand-in-hand with centralization.
As with transit, there are exceptions – namely, Germany. Germany’s point-to-point HSR network coexists with its polycentric layout. What this suggests is that HSR does not create centralization so much as reinforces it when it already exists. The Shinkansen made the rest of Japan more dependent on Tokyo, and the TGV has made most of France more dependent on Paris, but that’s because the existing traffic patterns were such that only lines connecting to or near the capital would be competitive. Thus, only connections from a provincial city to the capital are fast, and the loss of province-to-province connectivity (more precisely the deemphasizing of such connections, since both Japan and France continued to build nationwide freeway networks) leads to a loss of independence in the provinces. Lille has redeveloped with the help of the TGV, but this has involved marketing itself as a city close to Paris, Brussels, and London. It’s not the same as Paris itself, which gets by without needing to tout how close it is to London or Lyon.
This does not detract from the fact that HSR can lead to development. Lille really did redevelop with the help of the TGV. Many cities right outside Ile-de-France, such as Tours, are seeing a property boom fueled by fast train links to Paris. The Shinkansen helped bind the Tokaido-Sanyo megaregion, redeveloping cities at appropriate commute range, for example Mishima. The issue here is that a city bound by a megaregion is no longer an independent region, for all that entails.
The consequence in the US is of course not that HSR will turn the country into a single-city country. The US is too big and decentralized. But within each region, HSR is going to bind megaregions together in a way that leads to the same loss of independence. In the Northeast, we can expect the region to be far more dependent on its four primary cities, especially New York. Providence would benefit from being about 20 minutes from Boston and 1:15 from New York, but it would be drawn fully into those two cities’ orbits. The economic development it can expect is not the sort that still clusters in New York and Boston, but rather the lower-end development that is worthwhile to outsource to lower-cost regions. It would be competing with Middlesex County, New Jersey for jobs, rather than with Midtown or even with Downtown Brooklyn. Likewise, in California, we can expect to see more dependence on Los Angeles ans San Francisco, with Bakersfield and Fresno relegated to secondary status.
What I’m doing here is describing in grimmer terms what is cheerfully described as development in various pro-HSR brochures. An advanced economic system, including fast transportation, will lead to specialization, and this includes specialization into center and hinterland. This is new economic geography: reduced transportation costs lead to more rather than less specialization, and HSR reduces transportation costs with respect to time for certain kinds of work.
Ironically, what this implies is that the best way to preserve independence is to not build any binding infrastructure, or engage in national planning. Toronto will remain independent of New York so long as there are separate currencies, separate national markets, and different infrastructure clusters; there’s not much demand for New York-Toronto travel (the air market has about 100,000 monthly passengers in both directions; the top intranational market, New York-Miami, has about a million), so there will not be any new infrastructure between New York and Toronto anytime soon, which will further reinforce those cities’ distinct economies. Montreal, which occasionally seeks HSR to New York as economic development, is doing so explicitly to have an economic basin separate from Toronto’s; it is willing to sacrifice economic independence to achieve some independence from Toronto.
This seems to have been Jane Jacobs’ view in The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Although she wrote about the economic links of the original manufacturing belt megaregion, she wrote even more about the economic links within each city region, and had a dim view of megaprojects; in Cities and the Wealth of Nations, she also rejected national currencies, and proposed city-states as a replacement for nation-states. I have little doubt that she would oppose HSR, just as later in life she came to oppose rapid transit and support jitneys.
Not believing that everything Jacobs said is gospel, I take a more neutral view. The HSR-bound megaregion is more efficient in a way than having ten independent cities along the Northeast Corridor, just as New York is better off today as a single city than it would have been as separate cities if the 1898 amalgamation had not gone through, despite the loss of independence Brooklyn has endured. However, this efficiency is achieved via a brutal division of labor between the cities: some become core, some become periphery.
Of course, this may be sufficient consolation in the small cities that would love to become suburbs of successful cities. At the time of this writing, Fresno’s unemployment rate is 15%, and Bakersfield’s is 14%. The Central Valley is seeking prisons as a form of job creation. Providence is better off, but despite recent economic growth and slow absorption into Greater Boston, it’s one of the higher-unemployment regions in the Northeast. Loss of independence is not necessarily bad. But conversely, the fact that this development is good does not mean that it will really turn the smaller cities into productive city regions; it will just make them more comfortable peripheries of cities in which there’s so much that the residents don’t have to care about intercity travel.
Different Kinds of Centralization (Hoisted from Comments)
As an addendum to my post about transit cities and centralization, let me explain that the term centralized city really means two different things. One is diffuse centralization throughout the core, typical of pedestrian cities and bus cities and of Paris ex-La Défense; the other is spiky centralization around geographically small transit hubs, for examples Midtown Manhattan, the Chicago Loop, and Central Tokyo. A transit city will tend toward the latter kind of centralization, which is based on walking distance from the subway.
By bus city, I mean a specific kind of urbanism that never existed in the West, but crops up repeatedly elsewhere. It occurs when a city grows too large for walking and cycling while it’s still too poor to build rapid transit, whose construction costs are very high as a share of GDP in developing-world cities. Old buses are not expensive to buy, and their main cost component is labor, which isn’t expensive in a poor city; Beijing for example has only recently gotten rid of conductors on buses.
For a good source on different typologies, I as usual recommend Paul Barter’s thesis – it’s not the main subject of the thesis, but the thesis explains it as background. Bus cities, much like pedestrian cities (which are cities where most people walk to work), tend to be dense all over and monocentric in the sense that there aren’t large suburban centers around them, but they do not have a dominant CBD since buses don’t have the capacity.
Paris is unique among first-world megacities in having preserved this arrangement with its height limits. But it’s still moving in the spiky direction somewhat: the RER has wide stop spacing, which encourages spiky development; and the proposed orbital may be marketed as a circumferential line, but it’s for the most part just a north-south line through La Défense that’s being run together with other lines to potential secondary centers. The difference is that La Défense is more sterile and less pedestrian-friendly than Midtown Manhattan and the Chicago Loop. I may write about this in another post, but greenfield CBDs seem to be always worse for pedestrians than legacy ones, and if the legacy CBD hasn’t evolved to the spiky transit city form, then urbanists may conflate the spiky transit city form with the pedestrian-unfriendliness of the greenfield CBD.
Transit city centralization works differently – it’s based on walking distance from the main rapid transit nodes. Recall that transfers at the downtown end are the most inconvenient for suburban commuters, so that one subway stop away from the center is too far. This makes the transit city CBD inherently geographically small, so that the job density is much higher than that of any other urban form; the job density can also be higher because of the larger amount of space afforded by skyscrapers.
In contrast, the transit city is unlikely to be monocentric. A dominant CBD accessed by rapid transit is a geography that tends to create extremely long commutes – much longer than car-accessible edgeless cities, though not longer than trying to access the same CBD by car – and this leads governments to promote the growth of secondary centers, which are also spiky. Because those secondary centers look like CBDs and not like endless sprawl as do the secondary centers in the US, they make the city look polycentric, even if measured in terms of the CBD’s share of metro area employment they’re very CBD-dominated. When I say a transit city is inherently a centralized city, I do not mean that secondary centers are impossible or undesirable, just that the CBD needs to have a relatively large share of jobs, and that the secondary centers should be actual centers – if they can’t be like Shinjuku, they should be like Jamaica or Newark or how Tysons Corner wants to look in 20 years and not like how Tysons Corner looks now.
For example of how this kind of centralization emerges from the other kind, we can look at the evolution of cities that built large rapid transit networks. Tokyo around Nihonbashi would be the best example, but New York around City Hall is as good. While Lower Manhattan is clearly a smaller CBD than Midtown, it still looks like a spiky CBD, which it did not a hundred years ago. If you plot the locations of the skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan, with few exceptions they’re all south of Chambers, usually far south; peak employment is around Fulton and Wall Streets. The old elevated terminal for Brooklyn trains at Park Row would be inappropriately located. North of Chambers there are city neighborhoods with names like Chinatown or TriBeCa, which are mixed-use enough to have many jobs but have nowhere near the job density of Wall Street.
A related kind of centralization occurs in a multipolar city region, composed of many small cities. None of the cities of the Ruhr is large enough to spawn spiky subcenters on its own, but because the region has grown so interdependent it’s as big as a megacity, the legacy centers in the various cities have turned into a spiky centralization, only without one CBD dominating the rest.
I think it’s the last kind of spiky centralization that transit advocates think of when they propose to turn LA into a multipolar region. Or perhaps it’s in a limbo between a true multipolar region and a unipolar one with well-defined, transit-oriented secondary CBDs. On the one hand, the transit lines proposed in and beyond Measure R are not very downtown-centric. Each direction out of downtown generally gets one line, the exception being the west because of the low-hanging Expo Line fruit and the higher-demand Wilshire corridor. The focus is on connectivity between different poles, since unlike a true transit city Los Angeles has no capacity crunch on its transit system. The subway proposal for going beyond Measure R is to continue south of Wilshire on Vermont, missing downtown entirely, rather than, say, continuing east of Union Station along Whittier.
But on the other hand, the secondary cores are defined in relation to downtown – west (Santa Monica, UCLA), north (Burbank), south (Long Beach), and so on. It’s not like the organic buildup of agglomeration that merged the various cities of the Ruhr into one megaregion, or the merger of the metro areas of New York and Newark, or on a larger scale San Francisco and San Jose. Instead, these secondary cores emerged as secondary to Downtown LA, and only became big because Downtown LA’s transportation capacity is limited by the lack of rapid transit. Put another way, a transit revival in Los Angeles that includes rapid transit construction would make Los Angeles more downtown-oriented rather than less.
A Transit City is a Centralized City
In New York, a large fraction of employment clusters in a rectangle bounded roughly by 59th Street, 2nd Avenue, 42nd Street, and 9th Avenue. Although it’s a commonplace that New York employment is centralized around Manhattan, in reality most of Manhattan is residential, and employment is concentrated in a few square kilometers in the heart of Midtown. This is where the subway lines converge from all directions – elsewhere there simply isn’t enough capacity. Of course it wasn’t always like this: Manhattan’s population in the 1890s was the same as it is today, and it was clustered toward the southern third of the island, but employment was relatively evenly distributed in the downtown area. What has happened since then is that New York became a transit city.
There’s a strong correlation between the form of a city and the mix of transportation options people use. This extends well beyond density, but the principle is the same. Transit is at its best at high intensity, because this is what supports high-frequency service. Cars are the opposite: even on a normal urban street, a car alone will beat any rapid transit line, but every additional car will slow down the road dramatically, so that at even the moderate intensity of an edge city gridlock ensues.
Although usually this principle is stated in terms of density, it’s equally true for work centralization. The pedestrian city and the bus city will be dense all over, and feature high job density scattered across neighborhoods: walking is too slow for the transit city pattern to emerge, and buses have too little capacity. But dedicated rapid transit wants to serve an area right next to the stations, and once a network is built, a CBD grows around the central area. This CBD is typically small, just a few square kilometers. Even vaguely CBD-ish locations, such as Penn Station, are too far, as one commonly quoted figure about work locations demonstrates. The CBD isn’t even large enough to encompass all of the 34h-59th Street strip that the tourist guidebooks define as Midtown. The subway lines only form a tight mesh in a subset of that general area.
The job density of such a CBD is measured in hundreds of thousands per square kilometers, requiring many high-rise towers, several of which are supertall. In contrast, most of New York’s residences are mid-rise, and Tokyo’s are low- and mid-rise; their residential densities in the low tens of thousands per square kilometer are high enough that they are considered the epitome of density, but their CBDs are an order of magnitude denser.
Of the major transit cities of the world, Paris is the only one that’s resisted this trend with its height limit, but instead a transit-like CBD started out in La Défense, and the same pattern that comes from the subway in New York or Tokyo or the L in Chicago emerges with the RER. Of course, Paris maintains very high residential density, but its job distribution is more in line with that of a bus city – employment is dense all over, and the Downtown Paris employment density peak is less pronounced than in comparable transit city downtowns.
This does not mean a transit city needs to have empty trains going in the reverse-peak direction, as Cap’n Transit, Jarrett Walker, and others charge. A transit city will have job destinations outside the CBD, growing around rapid transit junctions: for example, Tokyo has Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Ikebukuro, all of which are so replete with high-rises it’s hard easy to forget they’re secondary job centers. While there is still a pronounced peak direction, people rely on transit so much that they take it for regular errands, supporting very high off-peak frequency by the standards of trains with drivers.
New York has something similar in Downtown Brooklyn, Jamaica, and Long Island City, but the modal split of those job destinations is much less favorable to transit – 50% in Downtown Brooklyn and Long Island City and 30% in Jamaica, according to a study of New York’s secondary job centers that I can no longer find. This is a general feature of many old American cities: the core looks like a transit city, but beyond it is a car-centric city, filled with edge cities and edgeless cities. Because the layout beyond the core is car-centric, the off-peak and reverse-peak traffic that supports high all-day bidirectional frequency on the Tokyo rail network, or for that matter on most New York City Subway lines, does not exist. The preference of American commuter rail agencies for peak-only service comes partly from an operating model that makes it impossible to run frequent off- and reverse-peak service, but also from a job distribution that makes the market for such runs small even under the best industry practice.
A corollary of this fact is that the multipolarity of other cities, for example Los Angeles, is not an asset. It would be an asset if those job centers were intense and could be easily served by transit; in reality, they have moderate intensity, nothing like that of the secondary centers of Tokyo or even New York, and serving many of them requires digging new subway lines. Burbank, on the legacy Metrolink network, could make a reasonable site for a transit-oriented secondary center, if commuter rail operations were modernized and local transit lines were extended to it; the Westside and Santa Monica do not, and the hope is that the investment in the Subway to the Sea could enable them to grow to reasonable size.
The key here is that the reason Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, and Shibuya are as transit-oriented as Central Tokyo is that they historically arose as connection points between the Yamanote Line and the private railroads. In particular, they already had rapid transit fanning out from multiple directions when they became major job centers. But Tokyo’s transit development history is peculiar; most other cities did not have large electrified rapid transit systems terminating at the edge of the urban core prior to building local subway lines.
A second corollary then is a strategy that sought to make New York a more transit-oriented city would treat centralization differently. It should turn the secondary centers into transit nodes in their own right, with tails extending as far out as reasonably possible. Jamaica already has some of the infrastructure, but it’s used poorly because of antiquated LIRR practices; the same can’t be said of Flushing, so a priority should be to build reasonable-quality transit from multiple directions, connecting Flushing with College Point and Jamaica and modernizing the LIRR so that it could connect it with Bayside.
A point that many people writing about this neglect (with pleasant exceptions like Cap’n Transit, the Streetsblog crowd, and Paul Barter) is that this requires both the carrot of more transit and the stick of less parking. In any case it’s hard to create high job densities when much of the land is used for parking. But on top of that parking mandates make it difficult for transit to be competitive when it’s expected to include railyards and depots in its budget and roads are not.
But what a transit city doesn’t need is job dispersal. The importance of creating secondary centers is strictly as alternatives to auto-oriented edge cities and edgeless cities, since whatever happens, not all jobs will be in the CBD. A large city with rapid transit connecting to all major neighborhoods will automatically have high transportation capacity. Rapid transit is good at transporting tens of thousands of people in one direction in the peak hour; let it do what it’s good at.
Managed Diversity
Putin’s Russia is described as a managed democracy: a country that holds elections and maintains a democratic facade, but is in reality autocratic and brutal toward dissenters. On the same principle, the trend in gentrified first-world cities can be described as managed diversity. City leaders will build cultural districts for popular minorities – Chinatowns, Little Indias – and even amenities for well-assimilated gays and lesbians. Then when nobody looks or cares they will promote police brutality, ignore hate crimes, and do nothing to fight discrimination or segregation.
Ever since Richard Florida told cities that being gay-tolerant would make them more prosperous (and happier, and economically freer), and perhaps even before, mayors in more liberal American cities have dedicated gay bars and found nice clean areas for some amount of counterculture to exist. While this represents a welcome change from the days of the Stonewall raid, the attitude toward less photogenic minorities is changing at glacial pace. See, for example, police and emergency service treatment of the transgendered, a minority that so far has not been on anyone’s list of interest groups to be nice to. For another example, look at community groups’ treatment of sex workers. And while the emphasis on the power of diversity leads to recognition of people who do good work, it can also lead to pinkwashing, in which companies with dubious human rights records sponsor events that make them look better.
If things are getting better, it’s in fits and starts, and usually the credit should go to local organizations that pushed for them rather than to top-down leadership. Even Bloomberg, a top-down reformer whose record on e.g. needle exchange is strongly positive, cut funding to the program in the recession. Other sources of authority have much less positive records on such issues. The process of civil rights activism is partly about putting a minority group’s status in the limelight, so that it becomes one of the groups leaders hug in order to look good.
This relates to what I brought up in my previous post, about the distinction between individuality and individualism. The pro-gentrification mayors who worry about property values and investment have no trouble with harsh attitudes toward protesters or minorities or the homeless or sex workers. In much more general terms than this, Risk and Culture alludes to this by noting the alliance between individualists and hierarchists, something that can also be seen in real estate developers’ embrace of bigoted attitudes as a source of profit.
This is not to say that individualism is opposed to individuality. For all I know, they could even be correlated. But they’re distinct. In my experience, if you go to any group or event or community that fights for radical self-expression of a group that’s not terribly photogenic (for example, BDSM), the political attitudes will range from libertarian to mainline liberal to far left. Some will be radical libertarians, motivated by the idea that racism (and by extension other forms of discrimination) is a type of collectivism; others will have communitarian and egalitarian motivations. And if you go to a community that practices radical individualism, for example Seasteaders, you’ll see a mixture of people who think women’s suffrage was bad and people who find the above brutality to be a special type of communism.
The importance of this is that a city leader who supports diversity that looks good and says all the right things about gay rights and immigration may still engage in brutal activity toward people who are different where we are not looking.
When Jane Jacobs tried to identify the characteristics that make a good diverse neighborhood, she was talking about physical and economic diversity. But she might as well have been talking about diversity as understood today, as an issue of a space that’s open to everyone and not just members of a dominant social group. A city that takes diversity seriously will have not just ritzy gay bars and civil rights museums, important as they are; it’ll also have harm reduction programs, and unmolested BDSM clubs, and shelters for homeless transgendered youth, and sex workers who feel safe when the police is nearby, and an ironclad anti-discrimination law.
None of the above will come from benevolent, progressive mayors who think diversity is good for the city economy, though such mayors may be instrumental in helping implement these policies, as in the example of Bloomberg’s funding for needle exchange. They come from activists in the community in question, a community that is almost by definition more than just one neighborhood (in which the majority is frequently NIMBY) and is instead a city- or region-wide network. After all, gay rights, too, used to be a radical movement struggling to gain even minor foothold in New York and San Francisco, and it’s decades after the fact that mayors embrace gays as a source of good diversity. And the same is true of every other group that’s currently typecast as deviant or nonconforming.
Cities and Multiple Equilibria
A growing idea among emergent urbanists is that there’s a natural form to the city, one that maximizes activity and that thrives in the absence of regulation. In this view, any sort of urban planning, from postwar suburbia to the Manhattan grid, is just a constraint that makes cities less livable, and in contrast, there is an urban form that people have a near-universal taste for, and all others are some response to bad regulations. Social problems are caused by bad urban form, and the reason American reformers wanted to move everyone to the suburbs was just that the cities failed to look like European cities.
There is an implicit ideology in this view, which is only occasionally hinted at: the ideology of single equilibrium. It holds that there’s just one stable state of nature, and all attempts to change it will just lead to an eventual return to equilibrium, and the greater the change, the more violent the return will be. If there’s a persistent situation away from the equilibrium, it’s a result of pernicious regulations. In economics, it’s the neo-classical school, shaken only by the Great Depression and by the Keynesian argument that depression is every bit an equilibrium as full employment. In every environmental controversy, it’s the individualist cultural bias holding that nature will always return to equilibrium, contrasting with the egalitarian view that nature is inherently fragile, the hierarchical view that it tolerates change within some boundaries to be determined by the experts, and the fatalist view that it is capricious.
Reality is of course more complicated than that. Cities can have multiple equilibria. Unplanned Tokyo and London are happy just the way they are; so are New York, Atlanta, Singapore, Paris, Tel Aviv, and Moscow, each planned in its own way. If people in those cities dislike the current situation, it’s not out of dislike of the present urban form but out of discontent with unemployment, living costs, economic inequality, and other social ills. And if people in mature cities dislike situations that are caused explicitly by their urban layout, then it comes from narrow urban and transportation issues, e.g. California’s air pollution problem.
Historically, this view was more associated with suburbanization and urban renewal. Of course those involved a hefty amount of zoning, but the same could be said of e.g. Christopher Alexander’s support of height limits. In both cases, problems that are really about social relations and poverty are associated with urban design and are used as an excuse to heavily modify cities; that, and not the tenement urban form, was what drove New York’s elite to want suburbanization. Indeed, suburbanization happened in almost all developed countries; the romanticism for the countryside by residents of the rich cities is part of 19th century nationalism, and happened across the first world, regardless of how cities actually looked like.
Nearly every combination of urban form and social class exists somewhere in the world. Just because Americans like some unplanned urban neighborhoods and are gentrifying the cities does not mean that there’s a universal desire for anything, or that people in suburbs are just repressed about how bad their social environment is.
To deal with the fact that people like urban environments that are very different, and that there are persistent cultural tastes determined by a few decades of policy, people who believe in single equilibria have to stretch reality more and more to get the achieved picture. James Howard Kunstler is an especially egregious example: since people don’t mind sprawl and city development that he doesn’t like (he views Manhattan as “despotically mechanistic” and sympathizes with Lewis Mumford for hating cities based on his experience on the Upper West Side), he’s spun a fantasy in which peak oil is going to create ruralization and destroy the suburbs, while also doing so in peaceful enough a way that he’ll survive to see the resulting utopia. But he’s really not doing anything Mumford didn’t do. Mumford couldn’t stand cities and thought their inhabitants just didn’t know they needed urban renewal; Kunstler thinks the same about post-1830 urban development.
Conversely, development that’s generally considered good but violates the rules needs to be shoehorned into the rules. That’s where you get people claiming that Paris is traditional urbanism, where in reality its wide boulevards are every bit as planned as Manhattan’s, just along a radial plan rather than a grid.
Because of the association between this view of nature and political libertarianism, we see defenses framed in terms of nature very frequently. It’s not only individualists or libertarians who do this (read most environmentalist tracts), and there are emergent urbanists who hint at desirability more (for example, Charlie Gardner), but this view and the insistence on natural law are still correlated. The idea inherent in this view is that what’s desirable is what the market wants, and what the market wants should be divined by looking at cases in which there is no government intervention.
The problem is that it’s very hard to really disentangle the economy from politics. It’s easy enough when it comes to consumer goods and other cases in which markets clearly work, but when it comes to infrastructure and collective decisions, it’s much harder – hard enough that Randall O’Toole can pretend that government regulations of parking and subsidies for roads are trivial and call himself a libertarian. The obvious response is to point out the opposite, how government subsidies permeate the opposing view, which is easy enough with a person as dishonest as O’Toole. But in reality it’s often impossible to distinguish political from economic actions, and the cases where there is a clear-cut difference are rare enough that they can be shoehorned into a single theory ad hoc; most urbanist theories have more serious proponents than the people who’ve become the spokespeople of suburbanism.
The reason I insist on consensus as a decision-making tool is that it avoids this assumption that all cities have to look essentially the same. And the reason I did a mini-experiment asking commenters where they grew up and what kind of urbanism they’re comfortable with is precisely that people are different. Formal community structures of course privilege some people and ignore others – most importantly, they elevate existing long-term residents and ignore transients and people who are priced out of the neighborhood. They also lead to unpredictable results, depending on hyper-local issues of culture and history or on charismatic local leaders. But the idea of having different people come together and talk about how they’d like their city to look like is much more powerful than trying to derive a natural order from first principles and treating all other orders as deviations.
Consensus and Vision
The death of Steve Jobs has led to impromptu discussions about the nature of his genius, causing some to call for a Steve Jobs of transit. Human Transit quotes such calls in comments and tries to strike a balance between good organization and singular vision; Market Urbanism tweets that it’s impossible only because of public control.
Instead of this fantasy for someone who will have enough power to make transit great, let us step back and ask what makes transit cities work. It’s not really vision – the inventions that have made transit more useful in the last few decades (for example, the takt and the integrated timetable) are so distributed that it’s impossible to assign them a single inventor or even agency. And in the US, the last true visionary of urban transportation, Robert Moses, had about the same effect on the city he ruled that such visionaries as Stalin and Mao had over their countries.
The absolute worst quote one can invoke in the field is Henry Ford’s apocryphal claim that if he’d asked customers what they’d wanted, they’d have said faster horses; Ford may never have said that, but he believed something along these lines, and as a result lost the market to General Motors in the 1920s. People tend to project the same attitude, with far more success, to Steve Jobs: he saved Apple from ruin when he came back, he saw potential in Xerox’s computers that nobody else did, he focused on great design above all. Some of this is due to the cult of personality Jobs created around himself, unparalleled in the industry; a better assessment of Apple’s early growth comes from Malcolm Gladwell, who dispenses with Great Man histories and talks about innovation as an incremental process requiring multiple different business cultures to get anywhere.
In cities, there really is a need for consensus rather than autocratic vision. The reason Moses was so bad for New York is not just that he happened to be wrong about how cities should look. Roads were not his only sin, and on one account, the use of tolls, he was better than the national road builders. No; he reigned over a city that to him existed only on maps and in models, routing expressways through blocks with the wrong ethnic mix and depriving neighborhoods of amenities in retribution for not being able to complete his plans. Because he was insulated from anyone who could tell him what the effect of his policies was, and had no effective opposition, he could steamroll over just anyone.
The reality is that any Steve Jobs-like autocrat is going to act the same. Moses did it; Janette Sadik-Khan is doing it, delaying even popular projects in Upper Manhattan because of the perception that it’s against livability; Jaime Lerner did it, moving pollution from Curitiba to its suburbs and slowing but not preventing the spread of cars. In contrast, Jane Jacobs’ own observations of her struggle are the opposite, focusing on consensus and participation and crediting “hundreds of people” with saving the West Village. Everything I said about consensus and cities and about democratic consensus applies here.
The same is by and large true of transit. Although the subject is more technical, the role of experts is similar to their role in urbanism: answering narrow technical questions (“does the soil allow this building type to be built?”, “how much will it cost to run trains faster?”), helping people see tradeoffs and make their own choices, bringing up foreign examples that local activists may not be familiar with. They’re just one of several interest groups that have to be heard.
I think people who ascribe invention to great individuals finding things consumers didn’t even know they wanted are projecting the history of the 19th century to present times. At the time, invention was done individually, often by people without formal education. It was already fairly incremental, but much less so than today, and was portrayed as even less incremental since to get a patent approved the inventor had to play up his own role and denigrate previous innovations. Since it was not done in the context of large companies or universities, the corporate culture issue that Gladwell focuses on didn’t apply. The economy, too, was understood as a process involving discrete inventions, rather than a constant rate of growth, as Andrew Odlyzko’s monograph on the Railway Mania discusses in chapter 15.
We no longer live in such a world. Fixed-route public transportation has existed since the 1820s. Practically all innovations within transit since have been slow, continuous improvements, done by large groups of people or by many individuals working independently. Even implementations of previous ideas that became wildly successful are rarely the heroic fit of a mastermind. The few cases that are, such as Jaime Lerner’s dirt-cheap BRT, indeed spawn rants about democratic consensus and raves about vision and fast decisions.
In contrast, I do not see any mention in mainstream US media of the role of Swiss consensus politics in the backing of the Gotthard Base Tunnel or in SBB’s 50% over-the-decade growth in passenger rail traffic. If there’s a story about Tokyo or Hong Kong, it’ll be about skyscrapers and development, not about their collective decisions to restrain car traffic while rapid transit was still in development. And while China’s rapid expansion of transit and high-speed rail, at much lower cost than in the US, has gotten much media coverage, scant attention has been paid to Spain even though its costs are lower and its expansion is nearly as rapid.
What’s happening is that people imagine single heroes to do what is really the work of many. Alternatively, they romanticize autocrats, even ones who were unmitigated disasters, such as Moses. Even stories about consensus and social movements get rewritten as stories about great people, for example Jane Jacobs, or more broadly Martin Luther King. It’s an aesthetic that treats everything as a story, and in the 19th century, it often was: in other words, it’s steampunk. The difference is that steampunk artists don’t wish to return to a world in which women have to wear corsets. And in similar vein, people who imagine benevolent, visionary dictators should not try to confuse their fiction with reality.
Aesthetics and Usability
New York is spending multiple billions of dollars on two signature projects in Lower Manhattan of which the more expensive (PATH terminal at $3.8 billion) has no transportation benefits and the less expensive (Fulton Street Transit Center at $1.4 billion) has small transportation benefits. This has led Stephen Smith and Ben Kabak to posit an opposition between spending on aesthetic design and spending on good transit, leading a few irate commenters to declare that they don’t like ugly transit and that design matters. In principle Stephen and Ben are right and the commenters are wrong, but the main issue involved is broader, and somewhat different.
The first observations I made of the photos Stephen provides is that the example he gives of ugly transit, Shinjuku Station, is in fact quite aesthetic. It has nothing on any average Mediterranean city, but neither does Grand Central. From the photos I’ve seen of Shinjuku, and my best recollection of staying one night in the area ten years ago, it looks fine from street level. The opposite is true of PATH’s Calatrava terminal, which looks like a monument to the architect more than a useful train station for ordinary passengers.
What passes for great design, in other words, is not based on normal street-level impressions. It’s based on how things look in drawings or aerial photos and on the ability of the project to act as a monument. Medieval cathedrals were designed to be big to make the individual feel small compared to the greatness of the institution that built them; the same is true of modern signature train stations and downtown revitalization skyscrapers. The Twin Towers were not designed for high office capacity; the commercial floor area ratio on the site of World Trade Center was 10, compared with 33 for the Empire State Building. They were designed for urban renewal, and thus looked much better from the air than from the ground; the same is true of the Calatrava terminal.
More in general, this relates to what I said about London and how it looks better on a map than on street level. This is less about aesthetics and more about usability, but the general argument is the same.
Grids, clockface schedules, and simple fare systems all have this benefit that occasional users, or regular users going outside their usual train line or neighborhood, can easily grasp what is going on. Living in ungridded Tel Aviv, I knew how my own neighborhood’s street network looked like; similarly, a colleague who reverse commutes from Boston knows the timetable of the trains useful to her. The supposedly beautiful schedules or street networks that planners come up with aren’t as usable.
The conflation of usability and aesthetics can easily lead people to think that spending billions on an iconic train station has any benefit except to Calatrava and his company. A commenter on Second Avenue Sagas even mentioned Apple as an example of design-based success. In reality, the iPod is easier to browse than any MP3 player that came before it, leading to success at a time when Apple’s brand was in the gutter; and unlike the BlackBerry that it displaced, the iPhone has games and customizable apps and a touchscreen that everyone other than me seems to like. It’s those devices that form Apple’s core product, measured by operating income; the Mac, which is based purely on design and brand, is a niche.
So the question is what usability-oriented spending could have been done in Lower Manhattan. This is of course purely academic. Like the original World Trade Center, those post-9/11 projects have never been about the needs of users, or even about simple aesthetics; they’ve always been about agency self-aggrandizing. But for $5.2 billion, they could have done a lot to build a Hoboken-Fulton Street-Flatbush tunnel and run RER-style service (at European construction costs, they could’ve built the entire tunnel and had change to spare; at New York construction costs, probably not). They could’ve integrated the fares between PATH and the subway, instead of having each agency seek an incompatible smartcard standard (Cubic for PATH, the ISO standard for the MTA). Instead, they spent about a billion on improvements for pedestrian circulation at Fulton Street and burned the rest of the money on the altar of starchitect aesthetics.
Suburbanization of Poverty: What’s New?
The current trend toward suburbanization of poverty is worth examining. It is incontrovertible that on the whole, the American poor are moving to the suburbs. Simultaneously, city centers are gentrifying, seeing large increases in income, with an influx of rich and upper middle-class people. This could lead to a French-style geography in which the rich live in central cities and the poor outside them. It’s not my intention to doubt that this trend is happening; my question is whether it represents a break from the past.
On the one hand, the consequences of such a trend clearly do represent a break from the past. We’re already seeing demands from business-oriented groups for more transit investment, and a new focus on urbanism in elite magazines. However, this by itself does not mean that the reasons for this trend are at all new. In fact, in one way, we’ve really been seeing the same trend for fifty years, in which both the inner and the outer limits of poverty are pushed outward. What we saw last decade was just a tipping point in which the expansion of the gentrified core was by itself enough to offset the wealth loss coming from the expansion of the ghetto.
The best example for this is New York, whose regional income distribution is arguably more regularly donut-shaped than that of other Americans metro areas, with less of a favored/ill-favored quarter geography. Furthermore, in Manhattan, there is a sharp color line between the Upper East and West Sides and Harlem, which is relatively easy to discern if you’re a resident. Mad Men contains multiple citations establishing Manhattan north of 86th as a bad area, and based on the geography of the 1970s, Joel Garreau placed the boundary at East 86th and West 96th. By the 1990s, we see citations putting the line at West 110th Street; moreover the Upper West Side has joined up with Morningside Heights, itself gentrified, moving the color line up to about West 123rd. This is a decades-long trend, rather than a recent development. Conversely, the boundary between the poor South Bronx and the middle-class North Bronx has, too, moved north over the decades, and is still moving north as the black middle class leaves for greener pastures.
In general, a similar story played out in the first-ring suburbs of many Rust Belt cities, especially in ill-favored quarters: the places that people used to flee the city to are now cities that people flee.
This is not to say that nothing has changed. Harlem and the South Bronx of today are richer than Harlem and the South Bronx of 1980, leading some people to think that they (especially Harlem) have gentrified far more than they actually have. People are no longer abandoning the Bronx in droves. But in terms of relative geographical income across the metropolitan area, we’ve really just witnessed an expansion of the donut going back to at least the establishment of the first modern suburbs in Westchester and Long Island, nearly a hundred years ago.
What we see is therefore inconsistent with the usual story of suburbanization of poverty. The exurbs are not terribly rich, but the Rust Belt exurbs are a far cry from their housing bust-stricken Sunbelt counterparts. Poverty is suburbanizing from the inside out rather than from the outside in, just as wealth and the upwardly mobile middle class did fifty years ago.
Although this implies that suburbia is unsustainable, the way it implies it is different from the usual explanation. It’s not that the future is bad for low-density settlements and good for high-density ones. It’s that the American urban form and political geography, especially but not only in the suburbs, are fundamentally unsustainable, and require constant growth to persist. Greenfield sites have an inherent advantage with respect to pensions, debt, and fossilized community relations;the debt-fueled system of growth in the US encourages moving on to the next tract rather than maintaining what exists. Thus today’s boomburb is tomorrow’s decaying eyesore. This can only be countered in persistently favored quarters, but those by definition only hold a small proportion of the population; not everyone can live in the richest 15% of the region.
The thing to wonder then is not why suburbs are hollowing from the inside out, but why city centers are expanding and gentrifying so rapidly. One answer is that Jane Jacobs was right, and diverse city neighborhoods can resile from the shock of middle-class flight. Indeed, the only significant non-Jacobsian neighborhoods in the expanding cores tend to be projects, and those tend to significantly lag in gentrification (for example, see Stuyvesant Town – and that’s a project that was originally white-only, thus middle-class). On the other hand, the projects are protected by public ownership laws, regardless of urban form, so even if Jacobs was wrong, developers would only eye them after exhausting private buildings.
A second answer is that today’s gentrified cities are something like greenfield sites. It holds up well with the analogy between gentrification today and suburbanization a century ago. That said, this analogy is political and sociological rather than geographical or economic: cities still have to pay pensions, and the buildings that are now selling for a million dollars per apartment are often very old. On the third hand, the social networks of the newcomers are mostly independent from those of the older residents: for example, they rarely send their children to neighborhood public schools, or if they do, they organize a separate school in the same building as the established school; so on the social level they really are greenfield.
That said, in the future, the trend for suburbanization of poverty can accelerate and become different from what it has been since the 1940s, if it reinforces itself. Cities are getting closer to a tipping point of being richer than their suburbs, possibly even to the point of having better social services for the middle class. This is to some extent already occurring with crime, though we’ve seen an absolute decline more than a relative decline in central cities, and is occurring more slowly with schools. Although on the whole the trend among people who care about schools and crime is to move to the suburbs, if the suburbanization of poverty, coming about from movement of people with other concerns, gets to this tipping point, then a large mass of people will abandon much of suburbia in favor of the cities, as urbanist common wisdom holds that they already are.
At least, they will try. The number of people who can live in a city is bounded by the product of household size and the number of available housing units, and the number of available housing units grows glacially in brownfield sites. Here, gentrified cities cannot imitate the properties of greenfield exurbs. As a result, we can expect to see an acceleration of the current trend of demand for cities translating into high housing prices rather than population growth. In such a scenario, cities will not become middle-class, but rather turn into enclaves of the rich and upper middle class. Of course there’s a natural limit on how high rents can go, especially in New York, Chicago, and other cities with large city proper populations, allowing the middle class to be comfortable in their suburban neighborhoods. But a transition to a French urban geography will be very rapid and self-reinforcing, and the rents will take every penny the upper middle class can afford.
Pedestrian Observations 
