A Town Square – On the Move

Hecker and Decker are on the move – to Rochester, NY. Here’s a look at our new neighborhood.

Rochester at 20,000 feet.

Stay tuned for further developments as we settle in to a new home place.

Sneak Peek

Since we began posting here at A Town Square, in November of 2007, it has always been with an eye to using the blog as a research and development platform for a book, or something like a book. Who knows – maybe an HBO mini-series.

The book, with a working title of The Next City: Shaping a Useable Future, may or may not ever see the light of day. But the premise for the effort is simple – the cities we live in are obsolete, and simply cannot meet the challenges of what lies ahead. We can understand these challenges in economic terms, or environmental terms, or in terms of over-population, or in terms of shortages of jobs, water, energy, food, money. But our cities, the real engines of all nations, are obsolete. And we need to reinvent them at the speed of light.

So all the while I have been posting here, I have been doing so with the book’s table of contents in mind. And now I have collected something like 40 posts, put them in chapters, and self-published them as a 180 page book, which you can see at  www.blurb.com. I have also collected the four posts on vernacular urbanism and put them in a slim 32 page volume, also at www.blurb.com.

So if you’d like, you can go there, type in the book titles, and take a look. And tell me what you think. Remember, as good friend Larry correctly observed recently, these are books about books. Tools. Means, not ends. The real work lies ahead.

 Me? I’m going fishing now, for a publisher.

What Does Growth Really Mean?

I’ll make this short. I am very cranky this afternoon, and I admit it. The lead from the AP wire, a few minutes ago: “Consumers are saving more than they’re spending, and that has investors worried.” What?!?!

Okay, so what, really, is the point of our economy? A rising GDP is the whole game? After a long swooning flirtation with seemingly unending profligacy, consumers are now chastened, are saving, and that worries investors? Nuts. Just totally nuts.

Investors, guess what? The growth you have in mind is not the growth anybody wants anymore. Sorry guys – the big banks are shot, the auto industry has tanked, homebuilders are dropping like flies, the malls are ghost towns. It’s over (at least I wish it was).

Hey, world of investors and makers of things, why not try investing in and making things that will help us? Local stuff, stuff that eases the frightening messes we face. Can we not replace GDP with something that makes sense, something that measures how we are doing in creating cities that are actually capable of sustaining us, and our children’s children?

What, in the end, is growth for? Riches, but then what? It’s easy to see that we have spent decades building an economy that has wrecked our cities, our countrysides, our air, our water, our food. (By the way investors, are you keeping track of how many films have been released in the last three months dealing with our food disaster? Opportunity?).

Can we get you to pay attention, please?

Getting Off the Grids III – Local Utility

I have speculated here repeatedly about taking a single existing urban block off the grids. I have come to believe that the scale of a single city block may be the most affordable, and rational, way to retool existing urban neighborhood infrastructures: power, heat, water, gardens, all in the alley. And now it turns out that I am way, way behind the curve. Here’s what I mean.

Today my sister, in Salem, Oregon (her blog is on our blogroll, at the right – On the Way), sent me this image, and I instantly fell out of my chair. Take a look.

This is the day, in 1937, when the cornerstone was laid for the new Oregon State Capitol. Seems innocuous enough, right? Big crowd, speechifying – a memorable day.

Ah, but let’s zoom in to the neighborhood at the lower right of this image for a closer inspection.

A nice neighborhood of homes, across from the Capitol, right? But look more closely. See that building in the alley, the one with the chimney? That’s the steam heating plant for the whole block. All of the garages, and the heat source for all the homes, are pooled in the alley, in the center of the block. My sister’s 80+ year old neighbor remembers this well – his grandfather lived in one of those houses.

Could be that electricity for the block came from here as well, using a mini dynamo version of the one Westinghouse and Tesla used to electrify the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, in Chicago. It looks like a power pole at the left of the steam plant, but I can’t tell for sure.

Now let’s take an even closer look. I think the image will hold up for one more pass at an even lower altitude.

In the middle of the block, opposite the steam plant, is a huge garden.

So that makes all heat, some food, and maybe power managed for one city block. Not bad at all, for 1937. What’s old is new again, I guess. The block was torn down in the 40s to make way for what was at first a sunken garden (an area  that was used as a gubernatorial helicopter landing zone for awhile) and finally as the site of  Oregon’s cherry tree lined mall. And so this amazing and independent little community disappeared with only this photograph, and some memories, left behind.

For us here on Capitol Hill, perhaps the most telling fact that we will not succeed in reconstructing our infrastructure at the regional or metropolitan scale is a statement from Pepco, our power provider, that the utility plans to source a whopping 20% of our electricity from renewable sources by the year 2020. Hmm. Where did I leave my time machine?

Thanks, dear sister.

Want a Surprise?

We went for a stroll this morning, in lovely Capitol Hill. And to my complete delight, we discovered a wonderful surprise just blocks from our house. Take a look.

Yes, folks, those are rails for the DC streetcar. They are sitting quietly on a prepared bed, next to a slab that will extend the width of the sidewalk on this side of the street. This view is from 7th and H Streets NE, looking west. It’s only rails, and construction of this part of the system will no doubt take a very long time. But hope springs eternal….

H Street has been torn up for months as the City undertakes an array of improvements in the infrastructure, set to culminate in a new and lovely streetscape. (Full disclosure: the streetscape plan was designed by two good friends and colleagues).

The H Street corridor has seen much redevelopment in the last couple of years. Much of the street looks like this today:

Photo from flickr.

Lots of board-ups, and even some vacant lots. H Street was once a booming retail strip, but the street was heavily damaged during the riots of ‘68. And now the businesses that are there are being augmented by new development, and the street bustles most hours of the day. The building at the far left of this image, for example, is now open and operating, upstairs and down – progress is clear on every block. Perhaps once the streetcar is running here again, the tempo of redevelopment will increase. We’ll see – it could be a long time before there really is new transit on this street.

The City has been debating and arguing over streetcars for years. Most of the discussion has been pretty foolish – a lot of folks arguing instead for more highways, parking lots, and endless increases in the further destruction of the city by cars. This in a city rated as one of the worst in the nation for traffic and congestion. Perhaps now that the car age begins to wane, this incomprehensible auto-fetish will ebb as well.

Anyway, somehow a reduced compromise version of the proposed streetcar system made it past all the whiners and morons and into the City’s Comprehensive Plan. And so this morning, we see the fact that, unbelievably, there will at least be tracks.  Take another look.

A sight for sore eyes.

A Little and a Lot

The largest city on earth – Tokyo. Image by Altus.

I have often found myself reflecting here on matters of scale – of blocks and streets, of cities and neighborhoods. Recently I have found myself thinking about the relationship between the really, really big, and the fairly tiny. Let me explain.

We lead our daily lives in familiar, and usually quite circumscribed, places: a neighborhood, a row of houses, a nearby bus or subway stop, an office in a corner of downtown. We don’t often find ourselves thinking of a whole city at one moment, much less the even larger regions surrounding our urban centers. It can be hard to imagine that the daily choices we make inside our tiny little bubbles mean anything very much in the really big picture. But let’s think about that for a moment.

Workday morning, sometime around 6:30am. The alarm goes off – ugh. Reach over and switch on the light, and prepare for another day. Ahh – the light bulb goes on.

But is it a Pharox bulb, a new kind of lamp that lasts 35 years and is 15% more efficient than even a Compact Fluorescent Lamp (CFL)? It should be – the manufacturer, Lemnis, tells us that if every Dutch home replaced 4 regular light bulbs with 4 Pharox bulbs, the energy saved would power Amsterdam for a year. I guess the little things add up pretty fast.

Amsterdam. Image by the City of Amsterdam.

Now let’s head downstairs to make coffee and look at the newpaper. Some of us do still read the newspaper.

Okay, got that coffee bubbling? That pound can of coffee you just opened will make something like 42 cups. How much water to make the pound of coffee? 2,650 gallons. Ouch! (Oh, and about 37 gallons of water for a pound of paper). Get out your calculator and start to do some quick math with me. Say there are 100,000,000 regular coffee drinkers in the U.S. And let’s stick with the average per capita coffee consumption figure offered by the World Resource Institute: 4.2 kilograms – 9.24 pounds. That means that we use over 2.5 trillion gallons of water a year on our coffee. Ahh – the little pleasures in life.

Time for a shower. Ten minutes? About 40 gallons of water. And think about this: 95% of all water consumed in an average American household goes down the drain. Since an average household uses about 128,000 gallons a year, that means that 121,600 gallons washes away. I’ll let you do the math on this one – 110,000,000 households in America.

Time to head for the office. Let’s say you’re 20 miles from work. Start up that Expedition on the driveway, and off you go. Weekly fuel consumption? About 17 gallons of gas. Let’s try the Vespa instead. Weekly fuel consumption: just shy of 3 gallons. Now you can use your calculator again – 115,000,000 commuters daily, times however many gallons of gas you burn to get to work. Big numbers, again. Really big. Maybe you should take the bus, yes?

After a morning of hard work, it’s time for some lunch. Stroll over to the local joint for a quarter-pounder, some fries and a diet. How much water to get that burger onto your plate? 3,000 gallons. On average, the entire population of the nation eats about 2 burgers a week. That would be nearly 610,000,000 burgers. Multiply again, please: 1.8 trillion gallons of water a week for our burgers. A week. Are you lovin’ it?

Time to head home. Did you remember to turn off your computer? If you leave it on every night, that electricity wasted would be equal to more than 912 kilowatt hours (kwH) over the course of a year. If there are 10 of you in the office, and you all leave your computers on, you will have wasted the annual power consumption of an average American household.

Now let’s say that 30% of the U.S. workforce uses computers, and leaves them on at night. That would be 45,000,000 workers. Wasting enough electricity to power 4.5 million homes for a year. Chicago plus Philadelphia, with enough left over to throw in Akron. Turn off your damn computer!

Quite a day, yes? The little things we do, the seemingly meaningless choices we make, have huge implications. A little does mean a lot when you do the math.

Getting Off the Grids, Part II

In April (April 12th, to be exact) I wrote a piece that explored how to find a way to disconnect from all the infrastructure grids in a context of existing urban (and historic) rowhouses. I concluded that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for a single rowhouse to wiggle free of all the connections: sewer, water, gas, electricity, communications.

But after some study, I realized that perhaps at the scale of a single block, it might be possible. In fact, perhaps working at the block-sized scale would be the best way to begin to create a new kind of infrastructural network. I used our block of 57 rowhouses as an example. Here’s our block:

Recently a reader wrote with a list of 7 questions about my proposed one-block demonstration project. And so, Part II of the inquiry. Here are his questions:

• What are the barriers to doing this? What would it take?
• Would local government support help?
• What building code changes would be required?
• How would it be financed?
• Could a charitable foundation help?
• What would the demonstration project cost?
• How would the knowledge gained be transferable?

Let me try and tackle these queries. First, to recap, for our block I proposed a District CHP plant, fired by biomass or something like that, as the main source of heating and power. And then a District Waste-water Treatment plant to recycle water. These technologies exist – nothing new here, really. Then I proposed augmenting those facilities with renewables- solar array, wind turbines, and added composting for a variety of solid wastes. All of this stuff gets deployed in the alley at the middle of our block. Perhaps with room left over for community gardens.

As far as I know, there is no demonstration project like this in an existing urban setting. Some new stuff, but nothing historic and retrofitted. But unless we tear all of our cities down and start over, we are going to have to learn how to remake the existing urban infrastructure into a sustainable set of systems. So: onward.

Barriers? Well, first I will have to achieve consensus with my neighbors. Every one of them. Since doing this new infrastructure will involve cost, disruptions during construction, a pooling of  private real estate for common use, and potential missteps as we figure this out, I suspect achieving consensus will be very difficult, if not impossible. Only when my neighbors can see and feel the compelling need for an alternate to existing infrastructure will they be inclined to sign on. It’s going to be a stretch.

While some of us feel strongly that we cannot do this fast enough, and have a pretty good idea what lies ahead for our obsolete cities, most of my neighbors don’t feel any real sense of urgency. For most Americans, as I said recently here, it’s just a matter of “Once we get through this.”

Then there are all kinds of legal barriers. Vacating the alley. Setting up some form of block-wide utility corporation to own and manage the infrastructure. Do we set the block up as some kind of condo-like legal arrangement? Lots to figure out here.

And of course, the local government, the City of Washington, could help a lot. There are utilities back in the alley underground, and these will need relocating. And all the overhead wires will have to go, once we’re ready. The City could offer financial help, too – incentives, tax breaks, grants and low-interest loans.

Washington has a program called “Green Energy DC,” set up to offer incentives for renewable energy improvements. But their whole allocation for 2009 is already spoken for, and the total amount available is $2,000,000. it will take more than that to get our block off the grids, so not this year, or next.

 The program, which passes through federal money, is aimed at solar and wind energy. Interestingly, they specifically bar utilities from participation, and since we are creating a block sized utility, this could be a problem. Programs at the municipal level really aren’t in place to assist with a project of this scope and kind. Not yet, anyway.

The biggest stumbling block of all: the building code. Here in DC every project must submit what’s called an Environmental Impact Screening Form. The form asks lots of questions about utilities, discharges, etc. Water flow in gallons per minute, sewage flow in gallons per minute, that kind of stuff. And questions about solid waste as well. And when you submit the form, it is routed to all kinds of city departments – health, police, fire, as well as the building department itself. Currently you cannot get a building permit without submitting, and review time is running about a year.

Essentially, any building permit can be issued once the city is clear that it is protecting the health and welfare of its citizens. Since nobody has ever tried this before here, and since the bureaucracy is in full bloom, I think we can either get some help and cooperation, or we can go home.

Financing the operation would be a trick too. Maybe we could try for some Stim funding. This is a pretty experimental undertaking, with lots of potential problems. Not exactly a slam dunk for yield-oriented capitalizers, I suspect. Banks? Probably not. Maybe we could find a lending institution interested in bolstering their “green” standing. Sounds like a pretty long shot to me.

Maybe the next avenue would be large corporations with an interest in or stake in our trial run. Maybe BP would actually like to demonstrate what “Beyond Petroleum” looks like, and how it works. And I guess the car guys are out.

It’s unlikely that the guys who make our packaged District heating, power, cooling and water units can afford to spot us the equipment, so that won’t work. Any other financing ideas, readers?

Of course the best route, and the most likely, is to get a charitable organization interested in the project. Since I think the cost will be in the neighborhood of $3 million plus, it will likely have to be one of the bigger charitable guys, but this seems like the best route.

Cost, as I said, seems to me to be north of $3 million. That works out to something like $53,000 per unit. I could be off by a lot – I worked up this estimate bysimply surfing the web, rather than calling my local green engineers. But if I am off, it is likely by less than a factor of 4 or so. I need to spend some more time with the numbers. Anybody got any thoughts?

As to transferring the knowledge, that’s the easiest part I think. Document every step, and misstep, and then put it up on a website, write a book, get published in magazines or newspapers (if there are any left), do a TV series, an indie film. I think many would be interested in the process of designing, constructing, and operating. 

One block of historic rowhouses in one of the largest historic districts in the nation – now off the grid. An existing city block, the most essential urban module, now free of the vicissitudes of the existing grids. Nice.

So thanks, readers, for the questions. Now, readers, answers?

Off to Philly

Image from MoMA.

We’re off to Philly for a few days of snooping around. Feel free to have a look around here while we’re gone. Back next week.

Once We Get Through This….

Photo by Toby Melville, REUTERS.

Heard on the streets of the city this afternoon, a gaggle of folks walking in the opposite direction, very much engaged in their conversation. One of the guys says, “Once we get through this….” He meant this economic recession or meltdown or whatever you call it. Which got me to thinking.

I have heard quite a few versions of this snippet in the last couple of weeks. “When the recovery takes shape…,” “when things return to normal…,”  “when things turn around….”  And each time I silently wonder to myself, “What, exactly, does an economic recovery look like?”

My strong and admittedly cynical suspicion is that most folks think that recovery looks just exactly like the last quarter of 2007, say. That is, recovery looks like the city and suburbs of last spring, just before the blizzard of foreclosure and for sale signs, see-through office buildings, and mothballed construction projects stopped in medias res.

Full stop in Vegas. AP photo, for the Boston Globe.

Once we get through this, construction in Las Vegas will resume and all the teetering stunt-itecture will be completed. Once we get through this, we can go back to our old jobs. Once we get through this, everything will be just like it was before. Once we get through this, we Americans, 5% of the world’s population, can get back to using a third of the earth’s resources and generating a third of the earth’s waste.

Not so good. I guess the real question may be: how do we keep any kind of economic recovery from bringing us back to where we started? How do we leverage the loss of trillions and the relatively slight reduction in ridiculous consumption and waste that we’ve seen in the last few months into real change in the culture? Will we ever get over the idea of continuously expanding and unending economic growth?

I am reminded of the words of economist Robert Costanza, who says: “The universally appealing notion of unlimited growth with reduced energy consumption must be put firmly to rest beside the equally appealing but impossible idea of perpetual motion.” Where is Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand when we need it?

Smith, in The Wealth of Nations,written in 1759, posited that someone who was pursuing his or her own economic self interest would be led by an invisible hand to simultaneously, and unintentionally, add to the common good of society. Hah! How about that, Bernie Madoff?

My favorite take on Smith’s Hand is from Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, who said not so long ago: “The reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there.”

The momentum of a giant global economy based on endless expansion is extraordinarily powerful, though absolutely unsustainable, in every sense of that word. How do we turn this thing around?

Maybe we need a 12-step plan. Consumer’s Anonymous. Gather with your neighbors. One day at a time.

The Shapes of Cities, Once and Again

Amsterdam, painted by Jan Micker in 1652, 350 years before Google Earth.

Lately I have been provoked to reflect on the shapes and forms of urbanism past and future, about the nature of compact and dense urban places, and about what makes the next city, or any city, literally sustainable. Let me explain.

This last weekend we had a chance to make a last-minute visit to the National Gallery here, to see a sensational exhibition entitled “Pride of Place: Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age.” Featured were dozens of wonderful paintings, maps, and drawings of 17th century Dutch cities. Unfortunately for my readers, the show closed May 3rd. There is, however, a terrific catalog if you’re inclined.

This was a time of a powerful and compelling urbanism in the Dutch low country: Amsterdam, Delft, Haarlem, The Hague and other cities were burgeoning with wealth, commerce, and an explosion of what Daniel Burnham would much later call civic loyalty.

Jacob van Ruisdael, Haarlem, 1672.

17th century Dutch cities all shared a few common characteristics. They were watery – canals and barges are everywhere in the paintings. They were very dense and very compact. They had extraordinary public spaces, ranging from plazas in front of the City Hall or Church, to marketplaces, to tree lined quays along the banks of the canals (my favorite: the bier kade or beer quay, depicted by Jan van der Heyden in 1670 Amsterdam).

Jan van der Heyden, Amsterdam, 1670. The Bier Kade is at the left.

And interestingly, they were walled. They had very distinct edges. They were separated from the surrounding landscape for reasons of security, certainly. And to contain the water, perhaps. But I think something more may have been involved in maintaining this kind of very sudden and distinct threshold between the urban and the rural. Sustenance. Sustainability.

Cities have always been predicated on surplus. And Dutch cities enjoyed a surplus of foodstuff from the immediate and adjacent fields, as well as the bounties of their commerce and trade with distant markets.

In 1670 Amsterdam was a city of 200,000. This meant nearly a million pounds of food a day, every day, to keep everyone whole. And no Safeway, Costco, or Lean Cuisine in the freeze.

So agricultural land was a critical factor in making this urbanism possible. The dense and compact city could work because there was plenty of tillable land immediately adjacent to the community. Many of these paintings depict a completely rural setting with grazing beeves and rows of potatoes within a few feet of the city walls. Food was very close at hand.

And today, in our cities? Today, less than 2% of Americans are farmers. A typical supermarket stocks over 45,000 items, from all over the world.  We have endless choice, all year round: asparagus in February, cherries in December. Food remains close at hand, thanks to an industrialized agriculture that reaches to every corner of the globe to put food on our tables.

This is a system that is, of course, completely untenable (read unsustainable), from any number of perspectives: pollution, security (when we can no longer sustainably feed ourselves and must rely on others, we can no longer rely on access to necessary quantity and quality), water scarcity, health. While it is true that grain production has increased three-fold since 1950, the real cost of this productivity is becoming clear as water disappears and aquifers dry out, streams and rivers are polluted, the air is filled with livestock methane and CO2, and increased demand drives prices up, both here and abroad. It now takes 10 calories of fuel to produce one calorie of food on Giant’s shelves. That’s five times more than 50 years ago.

So what about the next city? Maybe the Old Masters have something to teach us after all. Take a look at this: 

10,000 feet above Fairfax, Virginia.

Here we are, 15 miles from the Washington Monument, in suburban Virginia. Cul-de-sacs and cars, strip centers, and folks spread out all over the place. You could pick most any American city and find the same patterns of settlement.

Now I am not advocating building walls around our cities. And I am going to continue to stay out of the “what-to-do-with-the-suburbs” debate. But I am struck by those 17th century paintings, that agriculture so close to the dense city. If we actually were to make the next city much more dense, as I think we eventually must, perhaps we too could sustain ourselves from nearby fields.

What, exactly, is a sustainable city? If a sustainable city is one that can support itself, and meet its needs, without doing so at the expense of others present or future, near or far, then perhaps the Dutch cities of the 17th century were indeed a Golden Age. Een taal is nooit genoeg.

Jacob von Ruisdael, view of Amsterdam, 1680.