Winter, and What to Eat in the City?

Front Street Market, Rochester, New York, 1916.

If we live in cities, we are usually not farmers. But if we live in cities we do have to eat. I often find myself thinking about food and the next city, and food and the last city. Maybe I should stop writing at dinner time. Anyway, let’s explore a bit.

Nowadays (I just love saying that: nowadays) we don’t have to fret much about what to eat in December or January or any snowy, cold month. We can simply repair to the nearest supermarket – in our case our local Wegmans – and feast on any of 50,000 plus items on the shelf. From all over the world. If it’s cold and we’re buried in snow (and we are) we can still enjoy fresh everything from somewhere else. After all, it’s always summer somewhere….

Never mind that the industrialized food industry is eating us alive. Rising food prices are everywhere around us – fuel costs rising, droughts all over the place. And now we know that most of the stuff, wherever it may come from, isn’t really what we should be eating. We’ve all read Michael Pollan, or if we haven’t we should immediately, and most of us have seen “Food, Inc.”

All of this got me to wondering. Was the city of 100 years ago self-sufficient food-wise? Can a city be self-sufficient in feeding itself? What did we do about food 100 years ago? In Rochester 100 years ago there were two really amazing food markets. But before we visit them – and you’ll enjoy the tour – let’s put this question into some kind of context.

In about 1910, the average family annual income was $750. And in those times, most families spent just under 50 percent of their income on food (easy when there’s no roaming charges, satellite fees, costs for apps, or car insurance and gas for two or three vehicles in the drive). By my math, the average American family spent $322.50 on food in 1910. Today we spend something like 15 percent of our annual income, averaging $50k a year, (hint: $7,500). In 1910, 40 percent of Americans were farmers. In 1910, there were virtually no heart attacks. In 1913, Elmer McCollum and Marquerite Davis discovered vitamin A, and a nutrition craze was ignited. By 1920 food processing of one kind or another was the largest industry in the nation. In the 1920s electric refrigeration began to emerge. The first refrigerators cost twice as much as a Model T.

So a hundred years ago, we had no artificial way to keep anything over a long duration. If we were lucky we had a root cellar. That was about it. So the first thing I felt I had to understand was: what did we eat a century ago? I read through dozens and dozens of books from the period, and I can now offer a terrific snapshot of an answer to that question.

The writer and cook is Mary Janvrin. The place is Detroit. The time is 1901. Here is Mary’s recommended December weekly menu.

Monday

Breakfast: Graham bread (whole wheat bread); griddle cakes; breakfast stew; fried potatoes. Dinner: Soup; boiled corn beef with turnips, potatoes and cabbage; baked apple dumplings with sauce. Supper: Biscuit; cold beef; canned cherries; cake.

Tuesday

Breakfast: Buttered toast; fried apples; cold turkey, broiled. Dinner: Roast turkey; cranberry sauce; potatoes; canned corn; canned fruit and cream. Supper: Cold turkey, mush and milk; buns; jam.

Wednesday

Breakfast: Corn muffins; breaded veal cutlets, Saratoga potatoes (potato chips). Dinner: Stewed oysters; roast mutton with potatoes, tomatoes, celery; pineapple ice cream; jelly; cake. Supper: Toasted muffins; cold mutton sliced; apple croutes.

Thursday

Breakfast: Hot rolls; scrambled eggs; breakfast stew. Dinner: Roast quail or fowl; baked potatoes, lima beans; celery; pumpkin pie. Supper: Cold rolls; cold tongue sliced; baked apples; tea cakes.

Friday

Breakfast: Buckwheat cakes; smoked sausage broiled; hominy croquettes. Dinner: Baked or broiled fish; mashed potatoes; cabbage salad; hot peach pie with cream. Supper: Light biscuit; steamed oysters; canned fruit with cake.

Saturday

Breakfast: Buckwheat cakes; rabbit stew; potato cakes. Dinner: Chicken fricassee; baked potatoes; baked turnips; cottage pudding with sauce. Supper: French rolls; Welsh rarebit; cake; jam.

Sunday

Breakfast: Muffins; broiled spare ribs; fried potatoes. Dinner: Soup; roast turkey garnished with fried oysters; mashed potatoes; turnips; cranberry sauce; celery; pudding. Supper: Biscuit sandwiches; cold turkey; jelly; cake.

From “Queen of the Household: a carefully classified and alphabetically arranged repository of useful information on subjects that constantly arise in the daily life of a housekeeper.” Mary Janvrin. Copyright 1901. Detroit

Interesting, yes? Getting fresh meat wasn’t too much of a problem in Detroit, or here in Rochester. Pork, beef, fowl, even oysters wouldn’t have been hard to find at the market.

Eggs and chickens are easy. Apples are easy – root cellar. Same with root vegetables, and wheats for breads, muffins and rolls. Only a few things on the menu seem like a bit of a stretch – celery, though it does store for quite a while, tomatoes, and the canned stuff (which could include the tomatoes).

Of course it’s worth noting that in 1910 a single canning machine could do 35,000 cans a day. By 1910, the canned food folks were producing something over 3 billion cans of food a year in the U.S.

So the menu was stuff you could find easily, stuff you could store for long periods, and stuff you could find that was new – the canned stuff.

True, there is no Caesar Salad on her menu, or broccolini (we’re having broccolini tonight). Lots of meats, breads, potatoes, apples and vegetables that store. And a few surprises – pineapple ice cream?

So now we can go to the markets, and look at how the city of 1910 got its sustenance.

First was the Front Street market, down by the river and near the canal. This market was a bit rough, as you will see, but it was the place where you could find a side a beef, or a whole pig, or a crate full of live chickens. Lets take a look.

Buyers and sellers in the snow.

Lots of chickens.

Pork.

Even more chickens.

And finally, Front Street market in a view from 1923.

Rattlesnake Pete’s bar and snake museum was right around the corner, and you could certainly find lots more for sale on Front Street than just food. A rowdy, boisterous, busy place, all year round. Here’s Pete’s place, in 1919.

On to the second market worth visiting. Originally, Front Street was the market place for the city – the Public Market was here too. But in 1905 the Public Market – voted in 2010 as the best Public Market in the nation – moved to its present location. Now in the center of the city, and adjacent to the rail lines, the Market was big, and always well attended. Farmers came to the Market to sell their goods, and the place always was filled with a wide range of edibles – and other goods as well.

Here’s the Market, taken by Mr. Stone in 1905, just as it opened.

And here are some views of the place in full swing. Most of these views were taken in the fall of 1911.

If you look closely, you can see many of the items included in Mary Janvrin’s menu.

Just as a frame of reference, here’s a view of the Market recently, from nearly the same spot. Hmm – pineapples?

Crowds today, and crowded then as well.

Here you can get a good idea of the correlation between Mary Janvrin’s weekly bill of fare, and what you could find in the backs of the farmer’s wagons.

And finally (I have stored many more of these images, but I think you get the idea) two panoramic views to give you a sense of the scale of the Public Market’s operation in 1911.

So the city fed itself much more by itself a hundred years ago. Yes, food came to the city by train and lorry. But the largest percentage of foodstuff came to the city by wagon, from local sources.

As we try to imagine cities that can survive on their own resources, we only need to look back in order to see our way forward.

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Rochester and Sustainability: A Report Card

Photo by David Mohney, City Hall Photo Lab, from the Monroe County Library Collection, c-0001910.

Rochester’s green grade: F. F for Fail. Failing. Failed.

I went looking around this morning at what cities are doing to become more sustainable. I went to a bunch of .gov web sites from a selection of municipalities to see how they talked about sustainability, and what they were doing about the subject.

On Rochester’s website, the city says that our recycling program, our graffiti removal program, and a clean up program called Rochester Clean Sweep are helping us to have a better environment. That’s it. Thus the grade.

Cleveland’s Mayor, Frank Jackson, has announced his intention to make that city a model of sustainability, through a city-wide program called Sustainable Cleveland 2019. There is broad support for the initiative, and they are using the catch phrase “Green City Blue Lake.” They see this initiative both as a way to construct a better city, and as a way to compete with other cities for jobs, young people, and economic development.

In Cincinnati, Mayor Mark Mallory has created the Green Cincinnati Plan, for similar purposes, and the City is planning for a new streetcar system to enhance transit options there.

In Washington, Mayor Fenty has a program called Green DC. The city has been very active in working with citizens to provide tax credits for updating residential water, heat and cooling systems. And DC is currently constructing a streetcar to enhance the Metro, bus, and circulator systems that make DC one of the most walkable cities in nation: 34% of residents do not own a car.

Monroe County, in which Rochester sits, has something they call Green Monroe. You can see what’s up in sustainable projects and initiatives - it’s pretty pathetic. But at least they talk about the issues a bit. Grade: D-. At least it’s not an F.

Here in municipal politics: silence. No word from leadership on green subjects.

End of story. Or worse.

Locals: tell me if I am missing something.

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Rochester: What Happened?

A reader here has just asked me a good question about Rochester urbanism and the character and order of this region: what happened? He noted that Rochester was once a dense, compact city, surrounded by neighborhoods of tree-lined streets and lovely homes, in a region rich with all kinds of natural resources – lake, river, countryside. And today – not so much.

East Avenue, 1917.

So, Daniel, here is at least part of what happened. Glad you asked – this will let me get a few things off my chest. I have said some of this before in earlier posts, but I feel like a good rant. Get comfy, because this is going to take a while.

First, the car. I once asked a curatorial colleague of mine, and a historian of technology, to try to tell me what the city of the horse was like – the city before cars, and trolleys. It turns out that that city was pretty dreadful – smelly, filthy, and crowded with big, sweaty, and often sick animals. So when the electric streetcar came along (thanks, Frank Sprague), and later the automobile, city dwellers were enormously relieved. They were happy to jettison their present ills for a horseless future, notwithstanding a blissful ignorance of the almost inestimable price we would pay for a total embrace of the car, and the mobility it provided. Now we know.

A city of horses – Chicago in the early 20th century.

Victor Hugo wrote, in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, “This will destroy that… The book will destroy the edifice.” In some way, he was saying that the new technology of printing would destroy old ways of story telling embodied in buildings, and cities. And today we can say: “This will kill that…  the car will destroy the city.”

Detroit. Plenty of parking.

For the sake of our convenience and in favor of the automobile, we have destroyed the city, and the countryside. I tried once to make a relatively precise estimate of how much of what was once downtown Rochester was now a parking lot. Once I got to more than 50%, I gave up.

Downtown Rochester, from Google Earth.

As another of our readers said recently, “In America we don’t solve social problems, we move away from them.” So the second thing that happened is that it got easier and easier to ignore the poor, the different, the minority, the other. We could just build highways by tearing down ‘their’ neighborhoods, create nearly impregnable barriers between “us” and “them” like the Inner Loop, and drive off into the sunset.

The moat. Photo from empirestateroads.com.

But unfortunately, there is no such thing as geographical salvation. (Who said that first? Not I). Avoiding our differences, and our varying needs, has proven to be both impossible, and almost unbelievably expensive. And still we have the inequities we had, now principally centered in increasingly abandoned inner city neighborhoods. To illustrate this indifference to social needs, and social equity, just take a look almost any day at the pages of our local paper, the Democrat and Chronicle.

There we find that if a crime happened in Rochester, it took place in the “city.” As in: “City man found stabbed.” Or: “City bank robbed at gunpoint.” And if the crime happened somewhere else, the place-name is given, in lieu of the word ‘city.’

From today’s D & C.

I am an outsider, and many locals may think I am lunatic for mentioning this (I may well be lunatic), but this pejorative use of the word city sums up how many in the region feel. I am more than surprised that I hear this quite a lot: the city is the place where crime is, where bad things happen, where poor people, and different people, live. The city is to be avoided, the city is crowded, the city is smelly, dirty, polluted, ugly, dangerous.

Come on folks – you’re talking about Rochester here! Get a grip. Cities are our future, and our friends, not cesspools. The best North American cities – Vancouver, Portland, Chicago, Manhattan, Toronto, others - are now seen as places where you MUST live and work downtown. Not in a suburb like Greece, or Webster, but downtown. And how many folks now live in downtown Rochester? About 4,000. But really people, all the rest of downtown is really safe – it’s parking.

Onward. The third thing that happened as we found it attractive to spread out all over the place is that we began to duplicate, then triplicate, then logarithmically multiply our infrastructure. More and more expressways and roads, sewers, waste water facilities, libraries, public safety forces, streetlights, signposts, gas lines – you name it. And we did this to the extent that today, we can no longer afford all this stuff. And it’s all falling apart.

The physical infrastructure of the civil engineers is crumbling and decrepit. And the attendant social and civic infrastructure is not sustainable either. Just look at your tax bill – we’re maxed out, and constantly arguing about it: what should we close, consolidate, abandon, do without.

Sadly, most of the old infrastructure isn’t worth anything anyway. Whether we are speaking of the need for digital infrastructure to support the life ahead, or sustainable systems of energy and water that will allow us to enjoy a secure and durable urban future, the stuff we need is not the stuff we have now, and the stuff we have now and argue about fixing isn’t worth a damn. Time to start over – get out your checkbooks. Headline: “City dweller scorns new subdivision in Gates.”

Painting by Eric Garner.

The fourth thing we did is to mistake innovation for progress. As I said in my most recent post, Rochester has always been a center for innovation – especially technical innovation. People who track such things point to the enormous number of patents that have been registered by Rochesterians over the last century or so. Good. But not enough.

It’s a bit like looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Innovation has to be about more than new stuff. Properly, innovation should be about preparing us to lead better lives. And here I mean that a better life is one that increases the common wealth, and the common well-being. Not just a new flat screen or iPhone, but a truly better life – a life that we can be sure will be available to our children’s children’s children. We no longer have that assurance – things are closing in on us pretty fast, and endlessly we read about the shrinking standards of living we can expect in the future. It’s past time to put on our real thinking caps and figure out how to prepare Rochester, or Anycity USA, for what lies ahead.

And now I’ll quit raving. But wait – one more thing happened, I think worth noting. Fifth, we abandoned the local. What local? Any local. Local food, local services, local artisans, local greengrocers, local butchers, local clothing shops, local lampshade makers, local anything.

I see this so vividly as I thumb through the absolutely extraordinary photo archive of local news photographer Albert Stone. I cherish his archive – it’s an exquisite gift to all of us. His images are powerful testimony to the city we have lost – a city bustling with energy and vitality, and filled with local everything.

Front Street, 1922.

Main Street, 1922.

Why did we abandon the local? Because the local seemed more expensive, slower, less reliable. And that’s how we have defined progress – progress, we say with our consumer dollars, is fast cheapness.

And thanks to all the subsidies we put in place, that definition is fulfilled. Subsidize roads, farmers, energy, any of a thousand things we do subsidize every day, and the national or transnational seems cheaper. But it turns out that this cheapness was and is really, really expensive. Much too expensive. How could we have traded Scrantom’s for Staples? Really nuts.

Scrantom’s last stand – Midtown Plaza. Photo from flickr.

So there you have it, dear reader - five things that happened to Rochester that created the city we have today. Aren’t you glad you asked?

I’ll bet you didn’t expect a full-scaled rant from a raving lunatic.

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Let the Innovation Begin

“Innovate: to start or introduce something new. To create.” Webster’s

Rochesterians enjoy a long tradition of creating the new: cameras, optics, copying machines, telegraphy, and today medicine and science, even corporate R&D (GM has its fuel cell research facility here, as an example). There is and has always been a lot of brainpower here.

Innovators here have always been good at developing the latest widget, and enjoying the resulting profits. And sharing them – thank you, Mr. Eastman.

But the challenges facing this city and its region now require more than the latest widget. The innovation Rochester needs now, in order to enjoy a durable and sustainable future, requires nothing less than redefining progress. Let me explain.

I read an extraordinary article the other day on resilience theory and cities at seedmagazine.com. In the course of the piece the writer, Maywa Montenegro, penned two very memorable and telling sentences. The first: “A city’s lifeblood is a continuous flow of stuff.” Energy, water, food flow in. Waste, carbon dioxide, and perhaps innovative widgets flow out. Hmmm. I have thought a lot about this – even written about it here – but that one sentence sums up city life with enormous concision – a continuous flow of stuff, in and out.

And the second, even more clear and potent: “No city today could survive on its own resources.” Not one? Nope.

So there it is. If Rochester wants to be the home of innovation, then let’s figure out how to become a city whose flow of stuff, both ins and outs, is completely the result of our own resources. Sounds like a simple challenge, but in order to approach success, this region would need to rethink and remake nearly everything. Let the innovation begin.

We hear every day about shrinking resources, so the need to move our city, and region, toward independence is not as screwy as it might sound. But getting even remotely close to independence, however necessary, would be a staggering task. One example: consider how a city like Rochester could get off the grid, and generate sufficient energy and food to securely and durably sustain itself. Imagine how different this city would be if we accepted this challenge. I suppose that lawsuits about wind turbines would probably cease pretty quickly….

I sit here in my studio trying to imagine what that next Rochester would be like. As I ruminate, I make lists of all the things that would have to change – and I consider how those changes would reshape the city. Here are just five ways this city, and region, would change if we became resource independent. An independent Rochester would be:

Carless. Obviously, no oil – no cars. Perhaps a local innovator will perfect some kind of personal transportation device that we can power without oil, and can be made from local resources. Otherwise it’s feet, folks.

But since mobility is a central requirement in any urban setting, we will need some local innovator to figure out transit options that can propel us from one neighborhood to another. Fuel cell street cars or buses? Solar powered jitneys? Wind powered land ferries?

Carless at Main and Fitzhugh, 1910.

Dense. In order to limit energy used for (wasted by) sprawling all over the landscape, we  will need to live closer together. There are almost unlimited numbers of studies that illustrate that increased urban density is central to an increase in sustainability – define that word how you will. And since Rochester has almost no alleys, where an increase in density is easy to achieve, I guess we can just start converting our garages into homes. Won’t need that car, anyway.

Rare in Rochester – Wentworth Apartments at East and Gibbs, 1925.

Nodal. Need a new flat screen? Hop in the car and trundle over to Best Buy. There are two here, both at huge malls. But in the next Rochester, no car, so no trip to Best Buy. Instead, we will gather in neighborhoods, or urban nodes, where there is retail and institutional redundancy – a diverse mixture of uses to support daily life. Maybe some innovator will figure out how to turn the malls and strip centers into sustainable neighborhoods – food markets, health care facilities, shops, homes, schools, and all the other places we need to live our lives. This will need to get repeated in each node or neighborhood.

A local neighborhood center – Versage Brothers Grocery and Philips Robbins Tin Shop, Roofing, Heating, 1919.

Walkable. If we are carless and dense and nodal, we must be walkable. Rochesterians pride themselves on the fact that they can get anywhere in the region in 15 or 20 minutes. It’s a kind of standing joke here, you hear it so often. But when we say this, we mean in a car. Imagine a Rochester where you can get anywhere you need to go in 15 or 20 minutes – on foot.

Most of us – not all, but most – can walk about a mile in 20 minutes. So this begins to give you a sense of the order of things in the next Rochester – nodes of about 2 miles in diameter. Maybe a wee bit smaller. But you will need to walk to all you need in about a mile in any direction.

If you begin to think like this, it’s fun to go to Google Earth and start plotting out the neighborhoods and their centers. Do try this at home.

Main Street vendors, 1927.

Green. If we must grow what we eat locally, then suddenly that vacant lot down the street becomes a coveted asset. Gardens will spring up all over the place, as will markets. We have a challenging climate here – winter is a bit long, and very white - so we will have to grow our own in the good months, and figure out how to store and distribute during the cold months.

Actually, Rochester has one of the oldest public markets in continuous operation in the U.S. It wasn’t that long ago that Rochesterians used the market, all year around, to purchase all their grub. What we need now is a handful of innovators who can teach the rest of us new ways to craft our seasonal menus with the stuff we have sprouting in the backyard.

The Rochester Public Market, 1905.

Innovators – commence innovating! Oh, but do try to remember that we have done most of this once before. What’s old is new again, I guess. Onward.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Cities, Scale and Economics

We hear every day now about the staggering sums of money being thrown at this and that sinking sector of our nation’s economy. It’s hard to understand the scale of all of this. I am just now starting to figure out what a toxic asset is, and I am struggling to grasp what $700 billion dollars means. Or $50 billion to the automakers. So I have been sitting here trying to think of ways to understand all this money talk.

Here is what I have calculated today, cast in terms that even a feeble minded architect can understand.

How much to build a real high-speed rail line from DC to New York? Gets cars off the road, shuttle aircraft out of the skies. Current estimates suggest that high speed rail costs about $50 million a mile to construct. You can quibble with me if you’d like, but I don’t think I am too far off.

                                 

Amtrak’s Acela, and France’s TGV High Speed Rail.

So the line between DC and NYC, around 200 miles, would run about $10 billion. That doesn’t seem so bad, when compared to the fact that we have just poured $50 billion down the carmaker sink hole, an amount that is clearly not going to be nearly enough to save them. DC to NYC in about an hour. Good.

Last year, Amtrak’s Acela carried about 3.2 million passengers. On a dedicated right-of-way, high speed rail could easily double this figure. So let’s say, for the sake of easy math, that the passenger count jumps to 10 million. That would mean that the system would cost $1,000 per passenger for a year. Or $100 per passenger over 10 years. Change the ridership calculations if you’d like, but the cost of the system seems pretty manageable even if I am off by an order of magnitude.

As an aside, the Eurostar high speed system in Europe carries 800 passengers per train, with 15 trains per hour. If you run this out, and figure that that capacity would run, say, 12 hours a day, that’s 144,000 folks per day. Now run that out a bit further, and figure 260 days per year, the number of work days at 5 days a week per year. That’s 37,440,000 passengers per year. 10,000,000 passengers per year doesn’t sound like much of a stretch.

Now this is sounding pretty good, after you figure out the additional cost of all the crud that wouldn’t be spewed into the atmosphere by the planes and cars that high speed rail could supplant. (High speed will save a couple of hundred million pounds of carbon dioxide pollution per year in the bargain).

Okay, what’s next. Let’s tackle energy, heat and power for homes, in lieu of repairing the national electrical grid. If we can generate all our power and heat at home, we can substantially decrease what needs to be invested in the grid. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) publishes a report card on our nation’s infrastructure every year, and most recently they estimate that we must spend $1.5 trillion dollars between now and 2030 to upgrade the grid. They give our energy system a D+ grade. Sounds high to me.

The EPA has issued a report that examines distributed CHP (combined heat and power) systems, a decentralized, local way of generating all of the heat, power, and cooling for an individual home with high efficiency, using a variety of different fuels and ultimately a fuel cell, taking the house off the grid. They are still expensive – about $15,000 per household. So do the math. That means that 100 million homes (there are about 105 million homes in the US) could install CHP in lieu of spending $1.5 trillion on the grid, and generate all the power, heat and cooling each house requires with a new unit in the basement. Not bad.

The Dachs Mini-CHP unit, manufactured in the UK.

Now what? Food. Here’s another good calculation to give you a sense of scale and economics. Scientists tell us that thanks to our system of industrialized agriculture, an average meal travels 1,500 mile to get to our plate. Now if a semi trailer truck gets about 7 miles per gallon (you can check me on this), then the 1,500 mile trip will use about 215 gallons of fuel. With diesel fuel at about $2.20 a gallon, the cost of your meal should be $473.

Of course there are 20,000 other meals on that same truck, which means that the actual fuel cost per meal is about 2 and 1/2 cents. To feed everybody in the nation for a day, say a billion meals a day, (lots of folks eat more than 3 meals a day) that comes to about $25 million in fuel costs. Per day. And requires about 10 million gallons of fuel. Now here’s the kicker.

CO2 generation for that one day of food: 22.2 pounds per gallon of diesel fuel according to the Department of Energy, thus totaling 222 million pounds. Hmmm – not so good. Average annual US CO2 generation per household: 40,000 pounds, the highest per-household average in the world.

I wanted to add something about water to finish, something that would give me some sense of scale relative to all four of the big issues facing the next city: energy, water, mobility and food. But when I got to water, I found a single fact and was so stunned, I figured I could quit.

Daily – DAILY – water usage in the US is 408 billion gallons, according to the USGS! To put that in some kind of focus, note that we use 390 million gallons of gasoline every day in this nation. So we use 10 times more water than gasoline. 65% of the water is used by industry, about 25% by agriculture, and about 10% for domestic purposes. Yikes.

I guess I am beginning to get a handle on what hundreds of billions of anything might mean. But the better I understand, the worse I feel. There seems to be a big difference between what we think we can afford, and what we can really afford.

I need a bigger calculator.

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American Urbanism: Shovel-ready

 Image from flickr.

“Once we accept that our cities will not be like the cities of the past, it will become possible to see what they might become.” Witold Rybczynski, City Life.

When he wrote those words in 1995, Rybczynski was actually “glimpsing the urban future,” and seeing it as a low-density and low-rise city, amorphous and sprawling, completely reliant on the car, decentralized. And, sadly, that is the city we live in today.

But in another way, Rybczynski was right. The city of the recent past, the 20th century auto dominated sprawling city, whose infrastructure alone we can no longer afford to maintain, is a failure, and obsolete. We must accept this, as he suggests. In fact, our cities and the way we inhabit them must now give way to an alternate vision: now we can begin to see what they must become. The existing American city is one stupendous shovel-ready project.

Image from flickr.

The oft stated goals are obvious: we need to inhabit a next city that we can sustain, and that can sustain us. A durable, useable city that we can afford, a city that actually works to heal the long list of messes we have made. A city that is based on energy we can generate locally, food that doesn’t come from a factory, or a semi, water from a well that won’t run dry, a city in which we no longer need a car for mobility and access to all of our needs. These are the basics, and are pretty easy to see as foundations.

But what may be most interesting about the shovel-readiness of the next city is the fact that it can all be done locally, neighborhood by neighborhood. The next city can be particular, circumstantial, based on what’s at hand, incremental. Based on systems of decentralized and locally installed elements of infrastructure, the next city could emerge block by block.

On our block of 59 rowhouses here in D.C., we could rip up the alley in our post-car, or shared-car, city and we could install a central heating, power and cooling plant there. And maybe a large solar array for all of us. We can gather all of our water, classify it, treat it, and reuse it on our own block. We can rip up a few of our defining streets and build some new buildings there, yielding an increase in mixed-use density for shops, offices, and homes, with room left over for garden plots and markets.

Image from flickr.

Across every city, we can reuse and reprogram and revise. We can renew and reinvent based on the rich array of found conditions available everywhere. Some call this micro-urbanism: a new market under the raised expressway, a town square in an old highway cloverleaf, gardens in old parking lots, malls converted to neighborhoods, parking garages as lofts. And we can recycle all the existing structures we can find, conserving both their narratives, and all the energy they already embody. They’re all shovel-ready.

Taking this approach to urbanism seems like a much better investment, and a stimulus to the economy and our urbanism, than new highway off-ramps. I guess what we need now, in order to see how possible this is to achieve, is a demonstration block. Somewhere where we could try things, discover the problems and pitfalls, find the right technologies and uses, and do so while everybody watches, and learns, as a new kind of community, and city, unfolds.

Time to get the new Urban Policy Czar on this – it’s shovel ready, after all. And what better place to demonstrate the next city than right here in the nation’s Capitol.

Image from flickr.

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