Waterless

Desertification in China. Image by Benoit Aquin.

Today, some additional facts about water, or its absence. As an opening frame of reference, it takes 150 gallons of water to make a loaf of our daily bread.

The North China Plain is a desert, some of which is natural but much of which is man made. Herders and farmers in this region have managed to turn more than 110,000 square kilometers here into desert since 1950. During one dust storm in 2006 (there were 17 that year) 300,000 tons of dust were deposited in Beijing in one night. Often the dust from this desert reaches the west coast of North America.

Desertification in China. Image by Benoit Aquin.

Beneath the North China Plain is a shallow aquifer. The water there is more than 1,000 feet deep, and it’s sufficiently depleted that irrigation is no longer economically viable for agriculture.

A dust storm in China. Image by Benoit Aquin.

Nearer to Beijing, wells are often drilled more than half a mile to find water. Water use there is expected to surge 30% this summer because of the Olympics. As a result, farmers in the region have been instructed to grow corn rather than rice – corn requires less water.

In China’s Qinhai Province there were once 4,077 lakes. In the last 20 years, more than 2,000 have disappeared. In Hebei Province, surrounding Beijing, 969 of the regions 1,052 lakes are now gone. And in Africa, Lake Chad, once a landmark for astronauts in space, is just about gone.

Lake Chad, in 1972, and 15 years later in 1987. Almost gone.

And the water situation is even worse in India. Here ends today’s lesson.

Dust, China. Image by Benoit Aquin.

Footnote: Go out and buy this book immediately: “Plan B 3.0, Mobilizing to Save Civilization,” by Dr. Lester Brown, published by Norton Press. It will scare the daylights out of you, but it offers some hope.

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Oil and Water

 Scenic Hancock, Maryland

Gasoline in our region is running about $4.25/gallon at the moment. Every day the Post is filled with stories about rising oil prices and the resulting affect on all kinds of things: food; UPS and FedEx and the shipping business; the hospitality industry and dwindling numbers of travelers; the failing airlines; and a million other twitches. The notion that we have reached peak oil production, that we must now conserve, buy smaller cars, use public transit, ride a bike to work - all of these are becoming widely understood as required changes to our lives. Economic pressures are seeing to that.

Good. Really, really late, but good. As non-car people, we here root for rising prices every day, since apparently it is only this that spurs us to action. Wait until the price of gasoline doubles – this will force even more sweeping realizations, and I hope actions to change our lives, and our cities.

So as we think about the infrastructure we need in order to make these changes, rising gas prices suggest that we build many fewer roads, much less parking, much more transit, no more strip shopping centers. Much of this has been widely discussed here.

But many scientists agree that there is one precious resource that will require even greater changes in our cities and our lives as it becomes more and more scarce, a resource that most of us take for granted, and waste, every day. Water.

The Nile, in Cairo.

As I have been thinking about infrastructure for the next city, I have repeatedly bumped up against scientific evidence about the massive water problems that we earthlings now face, and will increasingly struggle with in the next several decades. Some of the research comes to some pretty terrifying conclusions.  As the National Geographic reminded us 15 years ago, “All the water that will ever be is, right now.”

Consider a few facts:

• it takes 4,800 gallons of water to make a pound of coffee
• it takes 2,500 gallons of water to make a hamburger
• the average American bathtub holds about 90 gallons of water
• in the last century, as the earth’s population has tripled, water useage has risen sixfold
• by 2025, 75% of the earth’s population will face some degree of water scarcity (scarcity = water use exceeding sustainable limits)
• 2.8 billion people – 40% of the world population – live today in water sheds or basins with some scarcity

This, and much more, I have gleaned from the Worldwatch Institute’s “State of the World 2008″ report, which I suggest you go out and find today, along with Lester Brown’s (he founded Worldwatch, and now heads the Earth Policy Institute) “Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.”

There are lots of technologies, lots of ways to conserve and recycle water, and more are being developed every day. So there are techniques, things that we can do in conserving water and treating waste, that could really help in agriculture (70% of world water usage), industry (20% of world water usage, and domestic consumption (10% of world water usage).

Will we fight wars over water as we have fought wars over oil? Water rights have already started wars, and it seems likely this will continue, or escalate, before the infrastructure is in place to equitably distribute and treat water resources. Here is a good quote from “The State of the World 2008″:

“Managing water as an economic good is an important way of achieving efficient and equitable use, and of encouraging conservation and protection of water resources.”

The real question that has been bugging me is this: what will it take to get us to address water issues as we are just now beginning to seriously tackle oil issues? Would it help if your shower tomorrow morning cost $4.00 a gallon? Would you want to find some of those conservation and treatment options right away, and revise the infrastructure of the next city? Seems like a sure thing.

 

At sea.

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Progress in Chicago?

From the 1909 Plan of Chicago, a view by Jules Guerin.

I really do want to get back to exploring some issues related to urban infrastructure and the next city, but I keep getting distracted by wacky news items.

As most of you know, Chicago celebrates the centennial of the 1909 Plan of Chicago next year, and the City is planning a whole host of events, celebrations, conversations and exhibitions to mark the date, look back to a critical moment in the life of Chicago, and look forward to meeting the challenges the City faces in the future. I am worried that this will be more laudatory and celebratory than challenging, provocative or useful, but I am hopeful that some good things will happen.

But less hopeful today than yesterday. This morning I learned that a cabal of Chicagons – many of them friends! – have decided to invite starchitects Zaha Hadid (London) and Ben van Berkel (Amsterdam) to design temporary pavilions in Millennium Park for the celebration. 

                   

Zaha Hadid’s Innsbruck subway station;  Ben van Berkel’s (UNStudio) Mercedes Museum

Now mind you, I’m not cranky that they did not invite Chicagoans, though I do recall much text in the 1909 Plan that talked about urban patriotism, which should have at least given them pause. But so be it. It’s a grand celebration.

What bothers me is the fear that making a statement may well be more important to these Chicagoans than what gets said.  They go and hire the flashiest celebrities they can find – will they get style or substance in return? In this age when personal expression seems to valued above any kind of civility, this could be dangerous stuff.

I hope Chicago gets more for its money than the architectural equivalent of loud blabbering on some jerk’s cell phone: a lot of noise, and who cares, anyway?

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Beijing, CNN, and A Town Square

Steven Holl’s Linked Hybrid in Beijing. Image from flickr.

Stephanie Busari of CNN in London wrote today to offer a link to the CNN International article she wrote about Beijing. Take a look. It’s nice to have been able to give her our perspective.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/06/18/beijing.hybrid/index.html

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Thoughts for Building in the Next City

After writing about the New York Times articles of June 8th in the last two posts, I was contacted by a young woman in London who writes for CNN. She is doing a piece on Steven Holl’s ‘Linked Hybrid’ (LH) development in Beijing, shown below. She wanted me to chat with her about the project.

During our exchange of emails, she asked me for some additional thoughts about the development, which I was happy to offer. And then came the punchline – she had contacted Mr. Holl, and asked him if he thought his LH had “isolationist overtones.” Mr Holl replied that LH was “no more isolationist than Greenwich Village.”

 

This reply was a bit astonishing to me. Now I will let you be the judge. Take a look at this (taken at almost precisely the same altitude) thanks to Google Earth:

  

Steven Holl’s Linked Hybrid in construction, Beijing. Image from Google Earth.

 

 Greenwich Village. Image from Google Earth.

Interesting, yes?

 

I looked at these images and found myself recalling a wonderful quote from Alain de Botton’s “The Architecture of Happiness.”  

 

“The great modern houses are happy to admit to their youth and honestly to benefit from the advances of contemporary materials, but they also know how to respond to the appealing themes of their ancestry and can thereby heal the traumas generated by an era of brutally rapid change. Without patronizing the history they profess to love, they show us how we, too, might carry the valuable parts of the past and the local into a restless global future.”

 

Well said. Worth keeping in mind as Beijing, and all other next cities, unfold with breathtaking speed.

  

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Next Cities – The Street, The Block

Steven Holl’s ‘Linked Hybrid’ project, in Beijing, just 2.5 miles from the extraordinary Forbidden City. Image from flickr.

I continue to muse about the New York Times Magazine’s recent architecture issue entitled “The Next City.” In the feature piece, “The New, New City,” architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff talks about the dazzling speed and scale of redevelopment in places like Shenzhen or Beijing or Dubai, and suggests that building cities, big cities, from scratch in three or four decades, is without precedent. (What about my home town, Chicago, where the population increased more than tenfold in 40 years?). He suggests that the size and chaos of these places robs architects and urbanists of any intelligible starting point for designing the new. Well maybe, and maybe not.

I will give Ouroussoff one point: contemporary development in Beijing and Shenzhen and Dubai is really awful. Unfortunately, some of the examples he touts as models for the future, as exceedingly ‘innovative,’ as benchmarks of new 21st century urbanism, are among the most significant failures.

These cities are all becoming manic expressions of fundamentally defective ideas about how to make urbanism. Some are architectural petting zoos, some are designer-label crazy, some are crazy quilts of new construction, each walled and isolated from the larger fabric of the place. Some are quickly filling up with construction that most resembles the worst of 20th century American urban renewal, and of course they are all filled to the brim with cars. At a time when beautiful and humanely designed cities may represent some hope for the future, these places look pretty hopeless.

Instead of writing breathlessly about how the starchitects are ‘innovating’ by creating architecture that does nothing to add to the common well being of a place, Ouroussoff should be talking about the basics in urbanism, reminding city designers, leaders, and developers to remember what, in the end, makes any city a great city. The street, the block. This is the place to start building the new.

First, last and always, great places, great cities, begin with great public domains, and in particular with their streets. We all own the street: it is the place where we all belong, where we can move and linger, where we can erect monuments to tell our stories, where we can sit and watch our neighbors, or sit and sip and read the news of the day.

Steven Holl’s city streets, 20 stories above, in Beijing. Image from flickr.

Whether in grids, as in so many American cities, or in meandering knots of non-linear pathways, all cities must begin with their public realms, their streets. Streets make blocks, and blocks are where buildings go. Simple.

In the 1950s and 1960s we experimented with what was then called the superblock, and especially in the planning and construction of subsidized housing. Now that we have thankfully torn most of this down, we can say we’ve learned a lesson – streets at the fine grained scale of small blocks make the best cities. Steven Holl’s ‘Linked Hybrid’ project, and so many other new developments in Beijing and elsewhere, are, sadly, superblock designs. 

And this, in Beijing, which has a fascinating pattern of layers of streets and blocks. In the central city, there is a grid of major streets that is very large – say 2,500 feet wide (east to west) and well over 3,000 feet long north to south. Then, interior to this large block is a fine grain of minor streets and passageways, with most streets running east and west, and passages, or even narrower streets, running north and south. This secondary, and finer, layer of streets breaks the city into manageable, walkable blocks.

Go to Google Earth and take a look at Beijing. The damage is everywhere in evidence – huge superblock developments are the pattern of choice for almost all that’s new. But the starting points of a fine grained urbanism – the street, the block - are still there to act as inspiration.

Seems to me like a good place to start.

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The Next City?

Shenzhen, China. Image by Sze Tsung Leong for the New York Times.

This past weekend the New York Times Magazine was devoted to architecture and urban design, and the issue was entitled “The Next City.” I was crestfallen to see that the title of our project here had been scooped up. I was certain that we had been rendered obsolete – surely the NYT would get great journalists to talk about all of the issues facing the next city, and they would do so in a provocative and insightful way. They would spend time, and column inches, talking about making cities, even new and exploding cities in the developing world, sustainable and green and fit for their burgeoning populations. I was really bummed.

Until I read the magazine. At first I was puzzled, and then, as I began to reflect on what I had read, I started to get angry. Really angry.

The cities we live in, whether east or west, whether giant and new, or older and suffused with history, are simply not sustainable. We must address this, in all of its complexity, and we must do this now. We are burning through the earth’s resources at a breathtaking rate, (especially we Americans), and as population increases, and the east develops so very quickly, it is absolutely clear that we are on a path to cataclysm. Does the NYTM’s Next City talk about any of this? Shamefully, it does not.

Half the world’s population now lives in cities. By 2050, most scientists (and the NYTM) tell us that 75% of the population will live in cities. Clearly, cities are the best laboratory for searching for, and we hope finding, the best next forms of habitation, piece by piece, neighborhood by neighborhood.

So what do we get from the NYTM? Starchitects. Celebrities. A highbrow version of Access Hollywood. Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl, Bernard Tschumi, Herzog & de Meuron and many more. What a waste of paper and pixels!

Nicolai Ouroussoff, the NYT’s architecture critic, writes the most dazzlingly, stupefyingly wrongheaded piece of all, entitled “The New, New City.” He investigates exploding cities like Shenzhen, Dubai, Beijing, cities without precedent of any kind, he says, and he muses about what approach poor architects like Holl and Koolhaas should take when they are working at huge scale and blazing speed. Where shall they go for inspiration, guidance, context in these placeless voids where they are work? He says: “…the notion of finding “authenticity” in a sprawling metropolitan area that is barely 30 years old seems absurd.” Oh? 

(Think of this: as America urbanized in the 19th century, the national population doubled, from 38.6 million in 1870 to 76.2 million in 1900, and from 25.7% urban to 39.6% urban. U.S. cities went from inchoate miasmas to real urban centers in this 30 year period).

Get rid of the cars, figure out which way the wind is blowing, track the sun, gather the water, make shelter from the heat, or cold. Start there. Make buildings, and urbanisms, that find their basic humanity in trying to create the gentlest and most sustainable places imaginable. Shaded places, sheltering places. Stop talking about modernism (mentioned five times in the piece) and modernists and the Voisin Plan and Corbusier. This is now nearly completely irrelevant. 

Ouroussoff never uses any of the following words: green, sustainable, sustainability, environment, energy, climate, sun, wind, rain, community. The New York Times is irresponsible in letting this drivel reach its hundreds of thousands of readers. Get rid of this guy, and stop talking about architecture and urbanism as if it were fashion. There’s too much at stake. 

Steven Holl’s “Linked Hybrid,” under construction in Beijing. Ouroussoff says: “…one of the most innovative housing complexes anywhere in the world.” Image by Virgile Simon Bertrand.

If Holl’s Beijing project is leading the way, I don’t want to go. As a long time Chicagoan, the Linked Hybrid image reminded me of Presidential Towers, in that city’s West Loop. You can look it up. Not reviled exactly, but certainly not a path to the Beulah land. (Amy says Presidential Towers looks like the Dakota compared to Holl’s ‘Linked Hybrid.’).

But don’t get me wrong – there were a couple of nice pieces in the New York Times Magazine. Jim Lewis wrote a very strong piece entitled “The Exigent City,” which examines ’temporary’ cities, refugee camps, and displacement. He points out that increasingly, refugee camps are less and less temporary. And he concludes that, at the moment, “The world is short a billion homes.”  And he actually uses the word ‘green.’

An interview with Enrique Penalosa, former mayor of Bogota, Colombia has a great quote: “A sidewalk is a symbol of equality.” He got cars off the sidewalks in Bogota, and built more sidewalks, and nearly paid for it with his life. Go figure.

An interesting article about the Dutch practice called MVRDV. They (MVRDV) get what really counts in making cities, even though the article seems a bit too interested in their starpower and their relationship with Brad Pitt. Oh well.

And an interesting piece about yet another trendy practice, Lot-Ek (low-tech), a NYC based practice run by two Neapolitans who are interested in making buildings, and urbanism, from found objects. Their Urban Scan, a database of the industrial and the found in the landscape, is really terrific.

In the end, I wish that the NYTM had taken the time to seriously look at the challenges facing the Next City, and I guess I could live with being scooped. No matter what I do, I will never have a million readers. They do every week. They could help to advance the discussion about future urbanism and the next city, but this time they really, really failed.

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Foundations for the Next City

Sketch by David Macaulay

Systems of infrastructure represent critical foundations for any city, and thinking about infrastructure is an important first step in designing the next city. I find myself musing about this quite a lot – sounds like great dinner conversation, no? Anyway, stick with me for a minute.

The American Society of Civil Engineers, ASCE, has noted, as I mentioned yesterday, that repairing America’s aging and neglected infrastructure would cost $1.6 trillion over the next five years. (For context, recall that the U.S. budget that just passed in Congress is $3 trillion). They have broken down their estimate into 15 categories of systems, from aviation to wastewater. Which got me thinking.

I wonder how much of this we could just abandon as a bad idea, as infrastructure that encourages and supports our unsustainable way of life. How many miles of road could we do without if we had better public transit options? How many bridges? If we build a good high-speed intercity rail system, can we downsize our aviation infrastructure, since flying is one of the worst polluters of all? (And the airline business has clearly fallen and can’t get up).

And how much of the ASCE estimate aims at creating a sustainable next city? Is the estimate aimed at getting all of us as far off the grid as possible? Do they estimate the cost of distributed generation (local electrical generation at or near your home using fuel cells) in lieu of more coal or gas fired plants, and more wire? (No, they don’t). Our electrical distribution grid today, 160,000 miles of high transmission lines carrying the nearly 4 billion kilowatt hours of juice we use every year, is in a dreadful condition. But why not slim down the load the grid carries, and thus reduce the size and cost of the grid, while generating as much power as possible locally using the sun, the wind, and other sustainable means like fuel cells?

The Grid

The sum of this musing is this: how much do we really have to spend to support the infrastructure of the next city? If we don’t build more roads, get rid of as many cars (and parking) as fast as we can, localize power generation, better recycle wastewater, build transit quickly, restore Amtrak so that we have a real passenger rail system, including high-speed rail, repackage all consumable goods to minimize solid waste, in short refocus existing infrastructure on supporting the sustainable cities we must inhabit, how does this change the price tag? And how fast can we make these changes? We must go at a breakneck pace.

One conclusion I suspect is true is that doing what needs to be done to equip our cities for the future will be very, very expensive. So expensive that it will require real sacrifice. I need to keep thinking about this.

What’s irritating, and very sad, is that most of what needs to be done employs well known, proven and refined technology. We do not have to search for some technological silver bullet, which is good because technology alone will not save us. We could do most of what needs doing starting tomorrow, if we only had the will.

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The Pursuit of Happiness

The School of Athens, Raphael. Plato on the left, Aristotle at right at the painting’s center.

One of our Chicago readers and long-time friend Greg Gleason – who was here with us for dinner recently and suggested formulating ideas for the next city rather than whining that the world was coming to an end – has raised some interesting suggestions worth considering.

At the outset, Greg notes that we suffer from bad public policy aimed at helping us fulfill a dysfunctional idea of the ‘pursuit of happiness.’ The quotation marks are his, and I take him to mean the kind of crass, self indulgent, individualistic, consumer culture of the therapeutic (“I do this or want this or act this way because it makes me feel better”) that passes for happiness in our society. No argument there. Which sent me back to my library, and Mortimer Adler’s wonderful little book, “Aristotle for Everybody.”

It occured to me that Aristotle’s definition of happiness would be a good guide for all public policy makers. Pursue the virtues of love and justice and courage and honesty and modesty and friendliness, for therein lies happiness. Practice moderation and self-restraint. Do not own a Hummer if you live in the city. Eschew McMansions. That kind of thing. We could make this a kind of oath of office.  

Eschew McMansions

Next, Greg suggests that we institute full-cost pricing of the ‘consumption of public resources.’ In this category he places goods like water, food, gasoline, wood: consumable goods. But he adds to this list such things as driving on highways, and the use of other public resources that need maintenance, renewal, and occasional replacement. I love this idea.

First, because the resources he lists are all increasingly scarce. We in the U.S. consume 320 times more than the people in Kenya, for example. (This calculation comes from Prof. Jared Diamond, in a sensational editorial he wrote in the NYTs in January: www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/opinion/02diamond.html). Pricing consumable resources at their true cost is simply a must: we MUST consume less. This does not mean an icky life – the Brits, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French, the Italians all consume less than half the energy and resources we do, as Prof. Diamond points out, and life there is pretty swell.

And second, as someone who has spent a lifetime designing and constructing public infrastructure (roads, bridges, transit, city halls), I have always known that we could build things much more robustly and permanently than we do, but we can never convince politicians to tell taxpayers the dirty little secret: build beautifully and durably the first time for a bit more money, or build it, and pay for it, over and over and over. The current estimate to care for our aging and neglected infrastructure: $1.6 trillion.

His next suggestion is related, and I like it too: make depreciation and replacement costs part of any public budgeting process. This is in lieu of passing all the costs of public construction on to our grandchildren without a clue as to how to pay for them. $1.6 trillion is a lot of money.

Other suggestions include placing a cap on inheritable wealth, requiring that anything above an established limit be given away. I guess I would add given away to a not-for-profit, but since this is not a problem we will ever face, I like this idea, too…

Thanks GG, for joining the conversation!

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The Golden Hour

Every spring we greedily enjoy the brief span of time between the end of winter’s chill, and the onset of Washington’s breathtaking combination of summer heat, humidity, and ferocious mosquitoes. This span of time is brief – 6 to 8 weeks tops – and it is now coming to an abrupt end, but it is a delicious time to sit on the porch, admire our tiny little triangular National Park across the street (merci, Monsieur L’Enfant), and watch the sunlight work its mysterious magic on everything we see. It is the golden hour.

At the golden hour, I often sit on the porch with my current reading material, but I am always so taken with the unfolding scene that the pages rarely turn. Cars rush by taking workers home for dinner; walkers, almost every one connected to something electronic, stroll by oblivious to the surrounding city; dogs get walked; increasingly bikers whiz by; a trillion birds sing as they steal the berries from our garden.

As I sat one recent evening, spellbound by our golden hour, I remembered Grandma Kochel. Actually, she is my great grandmother, and she is gone now – she was born in 1858. Hers is an astonishing story, but it’s a tiny bit of her tale that I was recalling. Grandma Kochel was living alone, on her farm. My Aunt Lu, also gone now but then a young girl of 11 or 12, was visiting that summer, and they had been doing farm chores all day long. Late in the afternoon, in the golden hour, Grandma Kochel poured two glasses of lemonade, and invited Lu to come sit on the back steps. They sat silently for a while, and then Grandma Kochel leaned over to Lu and whispered, “Listen to the farm.”

I guess that’s what I have been doing. Just listening to our farm.

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