Category Archives: Israel

Pedestrian Movement and the Built Environment in One Simple Diagram

28 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by in Academia, Israel, Land-Use, Tel Aviv, Transportation

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Following the previous post which discussed actual observed pedestrian movement and commercial streets in Tel Aviv, we now turn to the major theoretical contribution we made in our last paper regarding the connection between the built environment and pedestrian movement.

In order to understand the connection between pedestrians and urban environment we have quantified a lot of built environment features. Those variables were divided into four different dimensions:

  1. A spatial dimension. This dimension is related to the structure of the road network, meaning the basic urban space mainly consisting of streets and squares. This dimension of the built environment is relatively stable and does not change. Various studies have already shown the importance of the street network configuration to pedestrian movement as well as other urban dynamics.
  2. A functional dimension. This dimension relates to land use and we included in it the distribution of retail fronts and proximity to public transit.
  3. A physical dimension. This dimension is related to actual street sections, meaning the width of the sidewalk and carriageway, which determines how easily a pedestrian can cross a street.
  4. A demographic dimension. This dimension is related to residential and employment densities.

While conducting this study I have spent numerous hours doing field surveys to map all kinds of missing data. Specifically, retail fronts locations as well as road and pavement widths are not easy to come by. As the age of Big and Open Data is fast approaching I hope that more types of data will be collected on a regular basis, leaving us with more time for analysis. After we have collected all the quantitative data we ran endless statistical correlations to better understand how the built environment and movement are tied together. The conclusions below are derived from the statistical connections we found.

Our study draws heavily on space syntax theory, which emphasizes the dominance of the street network structure on various urban dynamics. One of the best known papers in this field deals with the connection between urban space and pedesrtian movement. This paper from 1993, written by Bill Hillier and others describes the natural movement of people in urban space and connects movement, land use and street network structure.

Hillier offers the following diagram as a description of the interaction between movement and the spatial and functional dimensions. Hillier presents the argument that the spatial configuration is the basis of urban processes. He shows that the configuration can impact both movement and land use, but land use and movement cannot impact the spatial configuration. Movement and land use have a reciprocal connection, meaning that movement may induce retail development and that retail may in turn impact movement in its area. In the diagram below movement is marked with M, retail is marked with A (for attraction) and street network is marked with C (for configuration):

Hillier et al. (1993) pedestrian movement diagram

Original Hillier

Our findings are in line with Hillier’s diagram. Our theoretical contribution is an extension of Hillier’s diagram to include the physical dimension and add the urban area type (traditional vs.contemporary) as the basis of the generation of urban space itself.  The physical dimension was found to be impacted by the configuration and to have an impact on movement (similar to the functional dimension). Essentially, sidewalk width may change due to people movement and in turn change the movement pattern. In the diagram below you can see Hillier’s original triangle to the right and at the the top is the urban area type which impacts all the urban environment dimensions.

Lerman and Omer (2016) pedestrian movement diagram

DiagramForBlog

The next post will deal with specific finding and the struggle to find the best movement model for every city.

Where People Go and Commercial Streets Grow

26 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by in Academia, Israel, Land-Use, Planning, Tel Aviv, Transportation

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The next few posts will be dedicated to my PhD dissertation dealing with pedestrian movement in different urban contexts. The paper containing my dissertation’s major findings has been accepted for publication in the journal – “Computers, Environment and Urban Systems” – and for a limited time is available for free. The paper was written together with my advisor, Itzhak Omer, under the title:

Urban Area Types and Spatial Distribution of Pedestrians: Lessons from Tel Aviv

Essentially, this study aims to examine what conditions lead to greater pedestrian movement in urban space. To achieve this goal we have quantified various attributes of the built environment and then checked their statistical association with the level of observed pedestrian movement. The research was carried in four different areas in the city of Tel Aviv. Each of those areas was split into a traditional urban area and a contemporary one, reflecting the major shift that occurred during the 20th century in urban planning from a humanistic discipline to a technocratic one. In this sense Tel Aviv is an ideal case for such an investigation containing both contemporary and traditional urban areas in close proximity.

This post will focus on the observed pedestrian movement volume and the retail fronts distribution. First, let’s have a look at the chosen research areas and their division to traditional and contemporary urban areas. The map below shows the research areas in the context of the city of Tel Aviv (click to enlarge):

ResearchZones

The close up aerial photos below show clearly the differences in the street network between the traditional connected areas to the contemporary less connected areas:

The first area (marked with the number) is centered on Ibn Gabirol Street, which is one of the major commercial streets in the city. The second area comprises of Florentine Neighborhood. In these areas both the traditional and contemporary parts were planned, yet they differ significantly in the connectivity levels and in land use composition. In both cases the contemporary area is a super-grid of the older traditional area next to it. In addition, Florentine’s contemporary area was planned as an industrial area and as a result have a rather low residential density.

The third area comprises of the neighborhoods of Hatikvah (traditional) and Yad Eliyahu (contemporary), while the fourth area is made of the neighborhoods of Shapira (traditional) and Kiriyat Shalom (contemporary). In both of these case the traditional neighborhoods were unplanned in some sense and had a bottom-up process of generation. In contrast, both of their contemporary counterparts were planned from the top in the fashion of early modernistic planning after the second world war.

The following map shows our findings regarding observed pedestrian movement volume and retail fronts distribution in all of the research areas. The pedestrian movement volume is distributed in a heavy-tailed way, meaning that there are only a few streets that carry a lot of movement while most of the streets carry low movement volumes. To visualize this we have emphasized the points where the top 10% of pedestrian movement was observed with red points and the next 20% are highlighted using orange points. In this context, heavy pedestrian movement means over 400 pedestrian per hour and medium movement rate means stands for over 200 pedestrians per hour. As for retail distribution – streets sections in which both sides have retail are marked with red lines, while streets with only one side of retails are marked with orange lines.

PedestrianCountAndRetail

Basically, the traditional areas have a more connected street network, with a higher presence of retail fronts and a higher volume of pedestrian movement. Moreover, even in the traditional sub-area where the lowest pedestrian movement volume was observed (which is Shapira Neighborhood in the top of area number 4), the average movement volume per road segment was higher still than that in the contemporary sub-area with the highest pedestrian movement volume (which is the eastern Ibn Gabirol area – to the right of area number 1). Pedestrian movement is higher in that traditional area even though the residential and employment densities are lower than that of the contemporary sub-area.

It can be clearly seen that in all traditional urban area commercial streets have successfully developed, while in the contemporary urban areas no commercial streets managed to grow. This happened regardless of municipal regulations that sometimes tries to prohibit commercial development and at other times tries to promote it. The commercial streets have all developed along the most central streets. Over the fine grid of Florentine (top-right in area number 2) an extensive grid of commercials street had sprouted from the top-right intersection, which is a rather central intersection in the city of Tel Aviv.

In conclusion, urban commerce does not happen based on an abstract will of a planner, but is the result of certain conditions, where the most important aspect is the road network, its intensity and the centrality it provides to certain streets. The next post will deal with the statistical associations themselves between commerce, street centrality and pedestrian movement. In addition, these findings are in line with other studies on the growth of urban commercial activity. Recommended reading on this subject include the following papers, which are free to access:

“The effects of block size and form in North American and Australian city centres” by Arnis Siskna. This paper examines 12 CBDs of North-American and Australian cities and reaches findings on land use formation based on the street network and morphological structure. Siskna points to the spontaneous development of urban commerce in the shape of a spiky potato.

Another and better known paper extends Siskna’s findings: “Centrality as a process: accounting for attraction inequalities in deformed grids” by Bill Hillier. In this paper Hillier suggests several insights regarding the development of intense urban centers and the needed conditions for them.

And as previously mentioned, you can find my new paper which further confirms and extends on Hillier’s work here.

Modernist Planning Results in Fewer and Less Predictable Pedestrians

20 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by in Academia, Israel, Land-Use, Planning, Transportation

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I am glad to share with you a paper that I have co-authored and which was published recently in the International Journal of Geographic Information Science. The paper was written by Prof. Itzhak Omer of Tel Aviv University, Dr. Yodan Rofè of Ben-Gurion University and myself. The full title of the paper is:

“The impact of planning on pedestrian movement: contrasting pedestrian movement models in pre-modern and modern neighborhoods in Israel”

As evident from the name of the paper, this publication deals with the impact of planning on pedestrian movement. We analysed pedestrian movement in 14 neighborhoods in four different cities in Israel – Kfar Saba, Bat Yam, Ashdod and Beer Sheva. These neighborhood where divided to two categories – modern and pre-modern. Essentially, modern neighborhood are those that were planned along modernistic urban planning approach, which adheres to separation of uses and hierarchical road structure. In contrast, pre-modern planning which tends to be denser with a lot more mix of uses and less hierarchical road structure. Basically, all the neighborhoods planned after the establishment of the state of Israel (1948) are modern, while most of the neighborhoods that were established prior to the Israeli state independence are pre-modern. Moreover, the cities of Bat Yam and Kfar Saba have many more pre-modern parts than the cities of Beer Sheva and Ashdod (this city was established in 1956 and consist only of modern planning).

Following are the maps of all the research neighborhoods in their respective cities. Dashed lines mark pre-modern neighborhoods while continuous lines mark modern neighborhoods.

All 14 research neighborhoods
NeighPicAll

We did pedestrian movement surveys in all the research neighborhoods and examined the statistical correlations of  the movement volume with relevant quantifiable variables that describe the built environment. For the analysis of the road structure we have relied heavily on space syntax. Other variables were derived from land use distribution – especially retail and demographic variables such as population densities.

Significant disparities in pedestrian movement volume were found among the cities and among the different neighborhoods. The pre-modern neighborhoods had about twice the pedestrian movement volume of the modern neighborhoods on average. Also, retail fronts were found to be much more prevalent in pre-modern neighborhoods than in modern neighborhoods. The chart below shows the average pedestrian movement volume (per hour) observed in the surveyed road section in all research neighborhoods. In red are the pre-modern neighborhoods, blue signifies the modern neighborhoods and green represents the average for each city. The city of Bat Yam, which is one of the denseset municipalities in Israel has remarkably higher movement volume than the other three cities.

Average pedestrian movement volume per hour in the surveyed road section in all research neighborhoods. Red is for pre-modern neighborhoods, blue for modern neighborhoods and green for entire city average.

Furthermore, our extensive statistical correlations showed that movement in pre-modern neighborhoods is far more predictable than in modern neighborhoods. At the last phase of this study we tried to produce a generic movement model for each type of neighborhood. To validate this model we analysed pedestrian movement in four more neighborhoods in Kfar Saba and in another city called Hod Hasharon (one neighborhood of each type in each city). The model had far more success in the pre-modern neighborhood than in the modern ones.

Besides addressing the issue of pedestrian movement in modern and pre-modern neighborhoods, the paper adds significant findings related to space syntax and the usability of its various attributes. For example, metrically derived attributes (based on metric distance and not on topological and angular distance) were found to be extremely inconsistent. The main conclusion I take from this work is quoted below:

Our study shows that traditional pre-modern urban neighborhoods, with a well-connected street structure, are likely to have not only more walking within them but also a more predictable spatial distribution of pedestrian volume than modern neighborhoods, that are characterized by hierarchical tree-like street layout associated with the idea of the neighborhood unit. We have identified that the correlation of pedestrian volume with the street network’s configuration attributes are significantly higher in pre-modern urban neighborhoods than in the modern neighborhoods. Furthermore, our study revealed that the distribution of pedestrian volume in these neighborhood types interacts differentially with the street network. In modern street layouts, the different types of configuration attributes (topological, angular, and metric) tend to be much more varied in their correlation with pedestrian volume across scale.

 

The full paper provides all the results and findings, expands on the use of space syntax in this research and describe in detail the statistical methods employed. You can find the full paper here, and if you cannot access the full paper and would like to read it you can contact me here and I’ll send you a copy.

Planning Committee Sinks Apartment Tower into Groundwater in Tel Aviv

23 Thursday Apr 2015

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

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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.

An Innovative Pedestrian Transportation Plan and Its Academic Publication

21 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by in Academia, Israel, Planning, Transportation

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This post describes a planning project I’ve been involved with, in which we created an innovative pedestrian transportation plan for the city of Bat Yam in Israel. Bat Yam is an inner suburb in the Tel Aviv Metropolitan area where about 130,000 people live just south of the municipality of Tel Aviv. Besides the novel transportation plan, we have managed to publish an academic paper, adding to the global discussion on city and transporation planning. The paper was published in Geographic Analysis (together with Dr. Yodan Rofè and Prof. Itzhak Omer) in a special issue dedicated to Street Networks and Spatial Analysis, following a workshop in Dresden last year. A non-final version of the paper can be found here (or you can contact me for the final version). And now to the actual story itself.

Transportation planning is changing. What used to be a concern with motorized vehicles only is evolving into a discipline dealing with multi-modal systems where priority is given to transit and non-motorized means of transport, chief among them being walking. Walking is important for several reasons: reducing reliance on motorized travel, which is rather costly, polluting and accident-prone; walking as part of a daily routine, promotes healthier life-style; and walkability can improve the economy of urban centers. Across the globe, effort are made to improve conditions for pedestrians. Known examples include New York City, Copenhagen and many more. Following this trend, The Israeli government has also published guidelines for streets design (here – in Hebrew). However, pedestrians in Israel are still at the bottom of the transportation and urban planning considerations.

The city of Bat Yam in Israel has chosen to pioneer planning for pedestrians as an integral component of its transportation master plan. The transporation master plan for the city of Bat Yam includes all transportation means (i.e. private vehicles, parking, bicycles and so forth) and was led by PGL Transportation and Engineering Ltd. We were in charge of pedestrian transportation in the overall scheme and we hope that more cities and other public bodies will consider walking as an integral part of urban transportation.

This project touches on one of the growing issues in urban planinng which is evidence-based design. This approach originated in the health and medical fields, and is now entering the realm of city planning. We managed to combine research and praxis and made a contibution towards a change in the area of urban planning. A few different subjects were joined together in this project – Space Syntax, pedestrian movement, general urban transportation and city developement.

Besides analysing pedestrians movement, we had to address expected changes to the urban strcuture of Bat Yam in target year of the plan (2030). The major changes are expected to happen in the southern industrial zone of the city in addition to a new residential neighborhood on open land at the south-western edge of the city. These changes include modifications to the street network as well as land-use changes and plenty of new construction. The southern industrial zone is supposed to grow from current under-utilization to intensely built zone including lots of retail, office and residential high-rise buildings.

We have constructed pedestrian movement models both for the current state of the city of Bat Yam, and for its future state in 2030. The future model included the changes expected to the street network and land-use. The model was constructed based on space syntax methodology and correlated based on pedestrian traffic counts in 69 street segments all over the city. The map of the traffic survey is shown below. I will not go into the entire method (which is explained in detail in the paper) – the large red points represent average movement volume of over 900 pedestrians per hour, the medium points represent average movement volume of over 430 pedestrians per hour, and the small points represent lower volumes.

Three areas in the map have groupings of high movement points. These three areas have some kind of combination of high centrality with high presence of retail. The northern points are in the old center of the city (Memorial Square), the points further south are at the junction of the main commercial street (Balfour Street) and a major east-west street, and the points at the eastern edge are next to the (new) main entrance to the city and its largest shopping mall. Contrary to the municipality’s expectations, pedestrian movement along the beach front (on the western edge of the city) is relatively sparse. Most of the everyday pedestrian movement on a weekday probably is related to functional activity and not to leisure. This movement takes place mainly on the streets that define the epicenter of the city.

Pedestrian movement survey for the city of Bat Yam

PedSurveyHeadTailForPaper

In the movement model itself we managed to achieve a correlation rate of 62% using three variables (not bad compared to similar studies), where the major variable is based on street centrality and the second variable is associated with retail front presence. Thus, we have reached two main conclusions that enable this method to be used in other cities:

1. Pedestrian movement distribution can be explained mainly by spatial structure of the street network. Changes to this network structure are relatively rare, and therefore pedestrian movement distribution will be similar in the year 2030, and the main streets for pedestrian movement will not change in a fundamental way.

2. Because the model is not accurate it should be used with caution. Therefore, we have taken 20% of the streets where pedestrian movement volume is highest and they were declared as the pedestrian core network. This layer was then overlayed on other transportation layers – public transit, private vehicles and bicycles.  This is the place where our model can have impact on the real world and on the future work of the municipality – by directing the focus to streets and places where conflicts among the various road users (pedestrians, bicycles, transit vehicles, and private cars) are expected. This conflict analysis can be used to develop a policy that favors pedestrians as well as to highlight areas where safety improvements are needed. The model also can enable an urban development policy that seeks to improve public space where the highest pedestrian movement rates are expected.

A map of the Superimposed future pedestrian core network, public transit (including planned light rail), bicycle routes (planned), and major vehicular roads.  supermap bat-yam-NEW

As the map shows, there are few important streets, but these few streets carry a large share of the different kinds of transporation means and they are the places where conflicts among road users are expected. These streets deserve most of the planning efforts and investing in them has a large impact on the city and its residents.

The entire paper can be downloaded from here.

Israeli Planning is Homogeneous and Wasteful

30 Thursday Oct 2014

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

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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

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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

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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

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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