Category Archives: Criticism

The Neighborhood Unit – A Concept that Should Be Laid to Rest

25 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by in Academia, Criticism, Planning, Transportation, Urbanism

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

,

Criticism of modernistic urban planning and its failures tends to epitomize Le Corbusier as the main culprit behind the change in planning approach during the 20th century. Some may suggest that without Corbusier our urban planning would remain humanistic and rational like at has been during most of human history. While Corbusier definitely deserves an honorary place among the people who destroyed the profession of urban planning and created inhuman habitats, he was far from being alone, and was working in the zeitgeist of his time when many other planners envisaged a slew of anti-urban plans.

One of the modernistic concepts which is (unfortunately) still very much alive is the Neighborhood Unit. This concept was summarized by Clarence Perry in 1929 for New York Regional Survey and is the main subject of this post. Below is the most recognized diagram that is associated with Perry’s work. You may note that Perry surrounded his ideal neighborhood with highways and on further inspection you may also note that he avoided making any direct links from one neighborhood street to another neighborhood across the highway, thus making sure its neighborhood remains in its own limited world.

Neighborhood Unit Diagram. “New York Regional Survey, Vol 7” by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.
Neighborhood Unit Diagram

Perry advocated for planning of an autonomous unit centered around an elementary school with just a little bit of everyday needs in it. When reading his seminal text a few points pop up, that are unfortunately still very prevalent in current planning practices almost a hundred years later. For one, Perry’s meticulous analysis the elementary school (from page 46) carefully examines the number of children in an average household and goes on to use this demographic information as if it was written in stone. Well, as it happens average households in New York today are quite different than they were a hundred years ago (they are much smaller with much fewer families having three children or more) and will probably be very different in another hundred years. The same goes for his analysis of shopping needs (from page 76) which again assumes that society is static. Perry goes into enormous details on the specific shops that are needed inside a neighborhood unit (including a millinery, which is a fancy word for a hat making shop) versus those that should only be found downtown.

The basic assumption is that everything is static – demographics (family size) do not change and society needs at large do not change (schools, churches and so forth). Furthermore, as far as urban development goes, Perry assumes that in the future everything of importance will be concentrated in the downtown and no significant urban changes will occur in terms of metropolitan development and land use dispersal. To some degree, assumptions of an unchanging future are the backbone of all modernistic urban planning. After analyzing people’s needs Perry proceeds towards the street network he thought would liberate people. The text embraces full automobility as inevitable and predicts that in the future everyone will have an automobile and every trip outside of the neighborhood unit will be done by one. It assumes only two kinds of streets – local streets and fast highways. There is no place for main streets (major commercial streets) in Perry’s world. Against this unrealistic background Perry tried to address pedestrian needs and made his neighborhoods completely disconnected from each other and from the city that they were added to.

The diagram below shows how Perry viewed the classic American open-ended grid that is at the base of all the decent urbanism that still remains in the US. In his view the grid led to nowhere in particular, while his closed street scheme leads to “place where people want to go”. In practice the grid leads to a myriad of destinations open to change and growth, while a closed and disconnected street network leads to a place that’s quite resistible to change.

Where do you want to go today?
The neighborhood unit - Perry-42

The prevalence of the Neighborhood Unit concept in urban planning and current state of debate on its merits and downsides is neatly articulated in a recently published academic paper in the Journal of Urbanism by Michael Mehaffy, Sergio Porta and Ombretta Romice. The paper is titled: “The “neighborhood unit” on trial: a case study in the impacts of urban morphology”. Mehaffy et al. show that even advocates that work on urban planning reform such as the American New Urbanism tend to view the Neighborhood Unit in a positive way. The paper goes on to show how Perry tried to separate between slow pedestrians and fast moving vehicles so as to accomodate vehicular traffic to the largest degree possible. The authors dig deep and discuss how Neighborhood Unit plans may lead to increased segregation and significantly hamper public transit:

By not centering neighborhoods on arterials, the Perry model and its variants create a fragmented transit service area that cannot be serviced cost-effectively. According to such critics, this failure has a significant impact on the viability of a public transit system, and on the resulting ability to reduce carbon emissions from urban transportation.

In contrast to the dysfunctional Neighborhood Unit a few examples of real city development with emphasis on well connected urban fabric are given: London, Barcelona and my personal favorite – Portland, Oregon.

Perry’s Neighborhood Unit concept did not wreak havoc only in the USA, but spread across the globe. Israel, which was established during the modernistic golden age (1948) embraced the Neighborhood Unit concept with zeal and now has many municipalities made only of Neighborhood units with no real city parts whatsoever. One example for such a place is the port city of Ashdod (established 1956) which consists of a large port and industrial area to its north and 17 Neighborhood Units to the south. The city has about 250,000 people in it, but instead of utilizing this congregation of people it is actually made up of 17 villages of 10,000-20,000 people, each with its own slowly decaying low-level commerce. Below is Ashdod’s map with its disconnected neighborhoods.

Ashdod is now trying to take one of its arterial roads and turn it into a real urban street, connecting its disjointed neighborhoods (you can read more about it here) with an ambitious plan that tackles street network changes, land use changes, commercial development and public transit. Whether such a change is feasible is open to debate.

In conclusion, planners need to be aware of the Neighborhood Unit’s major shortcomings and should resist the urge to plan a closed and segregated ideal and never-changing urban habitats. After all, those places may be much worse than open-ended places that are open to change.

Planning Committee Sinks Apartment Tower into Groundwater in Tel Aviv

23 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by in Criticism, Housing, Israel, Parking, Planning, Tel Aviv

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Tel Aviv, the financial center of Israel, is notoriously known for its housing shortage and rapidly rising prices (some of it due to the incompetent Israel planning regime). On more than one occasion it seems as if the regulations have been put in place to insure chronic housing shortage. Building anything next to something else is almost impossible, while creating new cheap apartments in centrally located areas belongs to the realm of science fiction.

Last week gave us just such as an example in a project called the Young Towers (although nobody living today will be young when they are completed). This project consists of two towers of over 40 floors each (video visualization here), under construction right next to the corner of Arlozorov Street and Begin Road (named after the late Israel PM Menachem Begin and not related to any actual beginnings). Although the project is located in the commercial center of the metro area next to the largest train station in Israel and with plenty of public transit access, the authorities made the developer build six underground floors (!) for car housing parking. Digging that deep the developers had not reached molten lava, but did hit the groundwater sucking money and time out of the project. Even a special Dutch expert brought in to address the issue (and who knows better than the Dutch how to keep the sea dry) could not handle the situation. This is a photo taken from this article (in Hebrew) describing the boondoggle that the project got drowned in:

Groundwater stops construction of an extensive underground parking lot. (source)
Apartment Blockers in Tel Aviv

This shows Israeli planning at its current worst and resembles many situations in places that are not as backward as Tel Aviv. The main priority of planning committees in Israel lies in providing cheap accommodation for cars, while every other objective (housing, schools and so forth) gets pushed back. Israel has planning regulations that dictate the provision of at least one off-street parking spot for each new residential unit, while completely ignoring the size of the new unit and its location. On top of this policy directive, municipalities tend to provide free on-street parking at all times, leading many underground lots to be underused as people keep searching for free spots above ground.

Alan Durning from the Sightline Institute composed an eye-opening post on such mandatory parking lots in Seattle, which he termed “Apartment Blockers” due to the cost and time they add to the construction of new housing units, and the fact that these requirements lead to reductions in the amount of housing units a developer is allowed to build:

City requirements for off-street parking spaces jack up rents. They jack it up a lot at the bottom of the housing ladder. Proportionally speaking, the bigger the quota and the smaller the apartment, the larger the rent hike. For one-bedroom apartments with two parking places, as is required in places including Bothell and Federal Way, Washington, as much as one-third of the rent may actually pay for parking. A flotilla of studies supports that claim, and I’ll summarize them in this article, but first, a case study of residential real estate development may illuminate how critical parking is to the affordability of housing.

While Tel Aviv may be a little bit behind regarding rational urban development it’s surprising that even urban role models such as Portland, Oregon have the same stupid rules. We can take some comfort in the fact that more people are aware that “free” parking is anything but free, and that parking is, in fact, not a public good. Even the city of Mumbai has finally started to charge a fee for on-street parking.

Tel Aviv should learn the obvious lesson from this groundwater case and start focusing its planning priorities on those among us who really need central and affordable housing – humans.

Cumbernauld – the Worst Place Ever Planned

02 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by in Britain, Criticism, Urbanism

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, ,

Glorious urban failures provide us with excellent opportunities to learn and understand mistaken urban planning concepts and their consequences. This post focuses on one of the more dramatic urban failures, which happened to take place in Britain.

After the second world war, the modernistic approach to architecture and urban planning took hold. While many Europeans countries did not build as much as less developed countries after the war, they still managed to build extensively, and especially Britain. Following the New Towns Act of 1946, the British government promoted the development of tens of new towns in the 1950s and 1960s – probably the worst period of town planning in the West and maybe even the entire world throughout history. On top of all the crappy cities built in Britain during this period, Cumbernauld shines the brightest (or gloomiest). Cumbernauld was established during the 1950s as an independent town north east of Glasgow and at the time was considered the greatest achievement of town building ever and a role model for cities across the world.

Before delving into details, we should note the zeitgeist that led to the building of Cumbernauld. It was the height of Brutalist Modernism and the dominant town planners vision consisted of complete separation between pedestrians and vehicles in the name of safety and freedom of movement. This approach created a town with no crosswalks, and plenty of overpasses and underpasses for pedestrians. On top of the brutal architecture and infantile transportation planning there was a complete separation of land uses, meaning the entire city was made of residential buildings only, and only in its center there were commerce and other uses.

The structure of Cumbernauld city center deserves a special scrutiny. This is not a classic city center of commercial streets with mixed-use buildings along them (including residences, offices and public buildings), but a rather a single huge mega-structure that goes by the name Cumbernauld Town Center. This building was supposed to be built in five phases and have an enormous section of 800 meters on its long side (that’s over 13 street blocks in the compact downtown of Portland, Oregon). Instead of a real city center, this mega-structure was supposed to contain all the functions that the planners thought real cities should have in their center- commerce, education, public buildings, offices, a hospital, a central bus station, a large parking lot for thousands of cars and so on in one huge structure. The planners strove to make the the residential areas in Cumbernauld as sterile as possible so that everyone will conduct whatever business they have under the roof of a single structure. The utopia that the planners of Cumbernauld offered won many prizes and critiques and influenced an entire generation of architects and planners for better or worse. Following the criticism of Cumbernauld, a movie came out in 1970 that describes the high quality of life in the new town and its innovative and successful urban planning. The movie makers boasted that Cumbernauld is the city of the future and would serve as a role model for many cities still to be built.

The PR movie in its entirety is here. The essence can be seen from 11:00 at which point the transportation plan which is the root of all evil is described:

Unfortunately, the reality struck in the faces of the planners. The city center mega-structure of Cumbernauld was partially built over the years, and parts of it were demolished (including the hotel that was there once) and transformed to a modern shopping mall. Cumbernauld never became the city of the future and it’s just a poor suburb of Glasgow today. The town itself and especially its city center structure are notoriously known as the worst urban plan ever conceived in the UK and have won prizes for extremely bad architecture, most notably the Carbuncle Award (twice!). Here’s a short video clip from 2005 on the Cumbernauld dystopia (and another article):

The town itself still draws the attention of planning circles and like other bad places offers a great subject for public discussions:

The subject of post-war planning and new towns in Britain and elsewhere deserves further attention, and I hope to return to this subject soon.

Israeli Planning is Homogeneous and Wasteful

30 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by in Academia, Criticism, Housing, Israel, Planning, Urbanism

≈ 2 Comments

This post is based on an academic paper by Daniel Orenstein and Steven Hamburg. The paper sheds light on the Israeli planning system which seems to be producing homogeneous and wasteful products. The full name of the paper is: “Population and pavement: population growth and land development in Israel” and it was published in Population and Environement journal.

The reserach examines the connection between the population growth in Israel and the urban development in the years 1961-1995 (based on four population censuses in the years 1961, 1972, 1983 and 1995). The authors looked at the national level, district level (the six districts that make up Israel) and local level (by examining 40 local authorities). The paper focuses on the conversion of open land to built-up land across time. This land conversion process is compared with population growth has and the way regulation impacts on this process. This reserach was carried out against the background of the necessity to avoid obliterating the remaining open land in Israel. The researchers raise three questions:

1. What is the connection between population growth in Israel and the rate of converting open land to built-up land?

2. Does the scale of analysis affect the strength and magitude of this correlation (scale means national, district or local)?

3. What are the regulatory means that infulence the rate of open land conversion and in what ways?

To carry out the research a number of specific areas all across where chosen including urban, suburban and rural settlements which are also ethnically diverse (meaning taking into account also predominately Arab settlements and not only predominately Jewish settlements). Out of 250 local authorities in Israel 40 were examined (for more please see pager 9-10 in the paper itself). After the selection of the research areas the paper elaborates on the methods used, which employed analysis of aerial photos from different years in order to assess the amoung of land that was converted from open to built. To make the story short I’ll focus on the major findings that arise from this paper.

The first important finding in the national level is that the rate of open land conversion to built-up land is higher than the rate in which the population is growing. Furthermore, this conversion rate is even higher if the sparsely populated Galilee and Negev regions are taken out of the equation. Namely, the open land we build on for the additional population is being eroded at a rate that is growing over time. We waste our land faster than we used to. Another somewhat intuitive finding shows that the rate of sprawl (open land conversion for each additional resident) is higher for the rural settlements and for the northern settlements.

In contrast to the national level, when looking at the sprawl rate at the local authority level, we see that the planning gets more and more homogeneous. The rural regions have a lower sprwal rate than in the past, while the urban areas have a rising rate of sprawl approaching the rural rate. The Arab settlements (which had a tendency for higher sprawl rate) have a decreasing rate of sprawl, while the Jewish settlements have a rising rate of sprawl approching the Arab rate. Thus, while at the national and district levels we are eroding open land at a rising rate (also by establishing new settlements), at the local planning level the urban planning becomes more and more homogeneous. In the words of the researchers:

Sprawl (more space consumed per additional unit of population) is increasing over time at both the national and district scale, yet the locality data do not corroborate these results. The locality data suggest a growing homogenization of development across the Israeli landscape.

Particular attention was given to the effects of the Jewish population dispersal doctrine on the rate of open land conversion (this doctrine goes back to 1948 and aims to redistribute of the Jews in Israel while idealizing rural agrarian lifestyle). It was found that this doctrine is responsible for more open land erosion than the rest of the faulty Israel planning regime. And here is the text itself:

The amount of land developed in the peripheral areas was significantly higher than in the core area, once variation due to population growth and other related factors are removed. Likewise, development in Arab localities was less than in Jewish localities (controlling for other factors), although this difference was statistically significant only for the full 1961–1995 study period. These results reflect a consistent Israeli policy to encourage internal migration of Jewish citizens to the peripheral areas, while concurrently restraining the growth of Arab localities (Falah 1991; Khamaisi 1993; Yiftachel and Rumley 1991), despite the preference of most Jews to live in high-density urban communities in the geographic core area of the country (Kellerman 1993). Various national policies have attempted to attract Jews to the peripheral areas (Kellerman 1993; Newman 1984, 1989). Among them was the development of small, exurban communities with larger homes. By attracting people to these communities, policy magnifies the impact of local population growth on open space in Jewish, rural localities where the amount of land developed per capita is an order of magnitude higher than in any other type of development.

The most astonishing find is the failure to stop open land erosion even in districts where there is not much open land left. Namely, even in places where there is not much open land left, the sprawl rate is not declining. Here it is (emphasis mine):

One somewhat surprising result of the population–development relationship is that for districts in which open land is becoming increasingly scarce, an expected slowing of land development relative to population growth with a concomitant increased importance of open space was not evident. We would have expected to see the rate of land development slow as open space became increasingly rare. Rather, we see the rate of loss of open-space increase (and the rate of land development increase) as open land reserves become smaller. This is true even in the case of the Tel Aviv district, where only a small amount of land (*20%) remained open space by 1990.

In conclusion – at the local level our planning is becoming more and more uniform and provides indication about a central technocratic systems that operate with no context, and creates a uniform built environment. At the district level we are unable to save the open land at all. And at the national level, the loss of open land is at a higher rate than the rate of population growth. For the good of this small and precious country, its planning systems need to be completely reorganized and most of the regulation and the ideology standing behind them have to be shredded – the sooner the better.

You can access the full paper here (and if you do not have access and still want to read it you can leave a reply or contact me).

Stations to Nowhere

22 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Criticism, Israel, Planning, Transportation

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

The two largest municipal authorities in Israel, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, decided to help their train stations regain their former glory from the Ottoman period (a period that was definitely better in terms of urban planning). Unfortunately, instead of using the money to improve the convenience and operation of the actual train stations, they have spent an enournous sum of money on defunct stations that serve no trasportation purposes.

The city of Tel Aviv has revamped the Hatachana Compound (literally – The Station) and turned it into an open air mall, but its usage is rather low and the market that opened there has already closed down due to slow business. This came as no surprise, since the compound sits on the remnants of Manshiya (a neighborhood of Yaffo which was completely destroyed in the 1960s in a slum clearence scheme that created a lot of surface parking while diminishing housing supply). This compound is relatively inaccessible, and can only be reached by car, but since parking lots are not that interesting to visit this compound is not succeeding.

The Station Compound in Tel Aviv. On the road to nowhere.
ריקנות במתחם התחנה

Not to be left behind, the municipality of Jerusalem decided to turn its deserted old train station to an open air mall, too. In contrast to the Tel Avivian compound, the Jerusalem station compound (which is called The First Station) is slightly less disconnected from the city, even though its hiding behind the German Colony neighborhood, which has its own successful commercial street. The common featrues of both these stations is that no trains have pass by them in years. The station in Tel Aviv has been defunct since the establishment of the state in 1948 and the station in Jerusalem has been deserted for 15 years.

But it doesn’t have to be like this. Many cities in the world are renovating major transport terminals that are actually used for transportation and not just for consumption. Train station are obvious examples – the Utrecht central station is undergoing a major renovation. Another good example is the Antwerp central train station, which may be the most beautiful station anywhere in the world, and has undergone a major renovation in the previous decade. Even in North America there are more than a few examples. For instance, we can look at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. This building was opened at the same year as Jerusalem first station (1892). It was never completely abandoned, but it was run down for many years, due to the highway that ran over it and came down in 1989, among other things. In 2003 this building was reopened after a massive overhaul and the ferry service came back and was expanded. On top of the maritime accessibility that this building has, it is also situated near a major intersection of the San Francisco light rail system (which is rather flimsy).

The Ferry Building in San Francisco. (cc-by Bruce Turner)Ferry Building

Another good case is Lonsdale Quay in a city called North Vancouver (which actually lies north of Vancouver). This is another main station of ferries leading from Vancouver’s northern suburbs to the city itself. Before the conversion to a ferry station, this place was a dockyark. This is another fancy transportation hub, which not only cater to tourists, but also to many locals who pass there every day.

Public space in Lonsdale Quay in North VancouverLonsdale Quay Public Space

Do Comprehensive Land-Use Plans Have any Real Meaning?

14 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Academia, Criticism, Israel, Land-Use, Planning, Urbanism

≈ Leave a comment

The Israeli planning system deserves a few posts on its problems and challenges. Today, we’ll deal with a study that attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of district master plans with regards to the actual implementation. This post is based on an academic paper written by Dr. Nurit Alfasi, Mr. Jonathan Almagor and Prof. Itzhak Benenson, and which can be found here. This paper was published in Land Use Policy Journal under the title: “The actual impact of comprehensive land-use plans: Insights from high resolution observations.” The researchers have made an attempt to estimate how much does actual construction conform to the actual plans by comparing aerial photographs to district master plans. The results of this study shed light on the ineffectiveness of the urban planning in Israel and should signal to the Minstry of Internal Affairs (that is responsible for most of the actual planning) that it is time to change the way in which the system operates.

First, we must clarify what is meant by district master plans. Israel is divided into six different administrative districts. This division was first created during the British Mandate period and was slightly changed after the establishment of the state of Israel, but is no longer relevant. For example, the Tel Aviv District includes the contiguous urban area that was already built in 1948 (Tel Aviv and its inner suburbs from Hertzliya in the north to Bat Yam in the south). The Central District includes what used to be the agricultural hinterland of Tel Aviv and is now part of the suburban sprawl from Natanya to Rishon Letziyon. Even the Southern District includes part of Tel Aviv Metropolitan area, especially the large suburb of Ashdod. So, after understanding this anachronistic districts division we need to deal with the actual district master plan. This is a comprehensive plan that describes the entire land-use specifications (built and planned) for the whole district. Each district has such a plan and this plan is supposed to set the expected development in the district and has to be updated once all of its planned development have been built. In theory, most of the construction should follow the district master plan, and the discussions in the district planning comittee should ensure that all roads, buildings and parks are built according to the approved plan.

The study dealt with the Central District for its area of reserach. This is the district with the most intense real estate activity in Israel and includes all the growing suburbs of Tel Aviv outside of the inner ring. The study focused on the district master plan also knows as DOP 3 (District Ouline Plan no. 3), which was approved back in 1982. In order to compare the actual construction to the plan aerial photographs from the years 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2006 were used – all in all 26 years of development. DOP 3 itself has undergone an update process in 2002 and became DOP 3/21. Twelve different areas inside the Central Districty were sampled, constituting about ten percent of the entire district area.

Several key findings are revealed when examining the plan compared to the actual development. During the years 1980-1990 more that 50% of the areas developed did not conform to the plan land use map. Yep, you got it – 50 perecnt of the development did not conform to the plan. During the years 1990-2000 the plan was getting even further from reality and more than 60 percent of the areas developed did not conform to the district master plan. It can be concluded that only a small part of land development actually occurs in accordance with the plan itself. It should be added that almost all of the non-conforming land developement was approved by the planning committees themselves, meaning that the planners themselves completely ignore the plan that they have approved to much fanfare. We need to remember that the district master plan is a public plan that costs a lot of time and effort. Additionally, this plan is used for countless comittee discussions wasting even more time. In light of the plan irrelavance it would actually be better to work without such a plan that only wastes resources and does not contribute to the actual planning and developement. The reserchers have also checked whether there was so much developement that the plan allotted areas for development were just insufficient. In a thorough examination it appears not to be the case. There remained enough approved land for development that was not devloped, while the actual construction took place on land that was not slated for development. In the words of the authors themselves:

It appears that despite the vast effort and time invested in preparing and authorizing district land-use maps, this is not an efficient planning tool in terms of restricting development in specific locations

Of all the anecdotes that come out from this study, the most ridiculous case is illustrated in the case of a newly established suburb in the 1980s titled Shoham. Shoham was founded entirely on and area defined as a future public park,  meant to be kept open for its unique environmental values (in sharp contrast to the area defined as farmland, which are easy to run over with urban development.) DOP 3 was approved in 1982 and just a few years down the line, the National Planning Council made the decision to build Shoham. But the problems do not relate just to the 1980s and 1990s. In 2002, a new DOP 3 was approved under the name DOP 3/21 which paractically approved almost all the deviations that occured in the preceding years. Over the four years that were checked after the new DOP was approved, non-conforming development has already started to be prevalent and reached 30 percent in a number of the sampled areas.

At the conclusion of the study, the reserachers elaborate on effective planning methods to replace the current system. These methods do not include rigid and meaningless land-use maps, but a defined set of planning principles by which to evaluate local plans before their approval and execution. Such an action can guarantee a faster and more flexible design that also gives better results. I hope that theserecommedations will not remain only on paper.

The complete paper can be found here.

Christopher Leinberger and the Urban Option

09 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by in Book, Criticism, Housing, Israel, Transportation, Urbanism, USA

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, ,

Israel is going through an extreme housing crisis. On top of it, inner city housing prices are skyrocketing in both in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem. It’s quite obvious that all the most coveted areas where many people are eager to live in are the older sections, built before the advent of modernist urban planning. A lot of people want the advantages of high density, centrality, the variety of land uses that can be found in proximity and the opportunities that this combination gives. Prices show that may of us are willing to pay much more for this kind of urbanism than for the quiteness of the suburbs. The real estate market should have been responding to this demand for urban living and provide the appartments for the rising demand, but this is far from simple.

Christopher Leinberger, an American urbanist and real estate developer, describes a similar phenonmenon in the US in his book “The Option of Urbanism”. For years, the central cities in the US were dwindling and their affluent residents have been moving away to the suburbs, but now the dense urban centers have come back to be the most desirable the most expensive from a real estate perspective. Leinberger claims that the change in lifestyle and urban culture lead more and more people of all ages to prefer dense urban living in city center flats with a variety of transportation choices over spacious living with ample parking and greenery in the suburbs. He also finds parallels in mainstream culture. In 1939 Ford presented the suburban dream for the first time on a large scale, and in the 1970s the major sitcoms like the Brady Bunch have praised the good life in the suburbs, and then in the 1990s Seinfeld (and Sex and the City afterwards) have brought to TV the urban dream of living in a busy city.

OptionofUrbanism

The book subtitle is “Investing in a New American Dream”. Leinbereger is not just another researcher of real estate and urbanism, but also a developer that works toward building walkable urban neighborhoods, which are very hard to create under the current regulations. Leinberger does not divide the urban fabric to city and suburbs according to arbitrary municipal lines, but rather to walkable urban sections and drivale suburban sections. Walkable urban areas usually offer multiple transportation choices besdies walking such as biking, public transit and private vehicles, while in drivable suburban areas that only rational transportion option is private vehicles. Leinberger demonstrates that older suburbs consist of walkable urban areas, while central cities have parts that are drivable only.

The growing demand for walkable urban living over drivable suburban houses is expressed by gentrification processes that change entire neghborhoods from slums to luxury areas where every built square meter is worth its weight in gold. Besides describing the change in consumer preferences, Leinbereger describes how the price of urban built square meter have risen over the years and surpassed the price of built square meter in the suburbs. He goes on to show an interesting reason for the high urban housing and it does not involve a crazy free market running wild, but rather too much regulation in the housing market. This regulation allows for suburban housing only (Leinberger specifies 19 standard real estate products in the American market) and impedes the building of urban housing in walkable areas.

The Israeli equivalent to the American standards are the regulations on parking and public open spaces. At first sight both appear to be logical – all we need is parking for our cars a little bit of grass for grazing. The minimum parking regulations, which enforce developers to provide at least one parking space for each appartment, raises the housing costs and inhibits the creation of high density which is needed for vital urban life. The public open spaces standards also serve to reduce the density. The combination of these regulations makes sure that all newly built neighborhoods will be drivable only and a car will be used for each and every daily errand. This might fit a few people wishes but not everyone. It appears that also in Israel there is a growing population that desire to live in an intensive and dense urban environment. In such an environment more destinations can be reached by cheaper transportation means such as walking and biking. Kids can walk to school and do not need to be chauffeured by their parents – and there is always a coffeeshop nearby. Such environments can provide plenty of opportunities, and there are more than a few people that are willing to pay good money for this.

The jist of Leinberger’s argument is that after over 60 years of building only parking and grass based housing, the dense urban housing became rare and precious and is coveted by young and old alike. At the end of the day, to enable the market to supply new urban housing (and not neccessarily cheap housing in the suburbs) we need to enable the creation of dense neighborhoods wasting little space on pakring and underused large grassy places. Not all new neighborhoods need to be dense and urban, but we should not outlaw the option to live in high density for those who want it. After all, those who live in high density areas also save public infrasturcture expenditures such as electricity and sewage.

Leinberger also expands on the differences between suburban places and urban places, and explains how building in a drivable suburban area actually lowers the quality of life there (new construction hampers movement with private vehicles, lowers the amount of parking available and reduces open spaces), while building in a walkable urban area actually impoves the quality of life (more options to reach a restaurant or an office by foot, more people to support more businesses, more options to provide better transit). At the end of the book, Leinbereger offers ways to create new walkable urban areas and options to fix stagnant suburban areas and deserted malls by building new developments and fixing the road network to make it more walkable (this process has been termed Retroffiting Suburbia by Ellen Dunham-Jones). To conclude, while this book is planted in the American reality, similar suburban processes have occured and are still taking place in Israel. Hopefully, Israel will not have to go through the entire cycle that the US has gone through before realizing it needs to fix the failures of drivable suburbanism.

And whoever want to see the man in action – here’s a recommended video. The first 54 minutes are a lecture that presents the main subjects of the book:

For further reading:

About Christopher Leinberger

Cities Versus Suburbs Is the Wrong Debate

To buy the book on Amazon