StrongTowns: Checking In with the Source

Building detail in downtown Petaluma

In my last couple of posts (here and here), I gave a North Bay example of the StrongTowns philosophy on the long-term financial realities of infrastructure.  My goal was to encourage North Bay folks, especially those in Petaluma, to attend the upcoming StrongTowns and Urban3 meetings in Santa Rosa.  The encouragement will continue for the next few posts.  Today, I’m going to step partly out of the way. instead encouraging readers to partake directly from StrongTowns.

My first recommendation is the StrongTowns Curbside Chat.  The Curbside Chat was the entry point into StrongTowns for many folks, including me.  Petaluma Urban Chat had decided to do collective reading as a way of building group knowledge.  A member successfully suggested the Curbside Chat as our first book.  When I wrote about the decision, Chuck Marohn of StrongTowns spotted my words on the internet, sent a stack of the Curbside Chat booklets, and agreed to participate in a video chat with the group.

The experience was great.  Indeed it might have been the first confirmation that I was on the right track with this blog.

But that didn’t mean that I found the Curbside Chat booklet to be perfect.  I thought it used too many graphics that represented legitimate truths, but weren’t as rigorously data-based as I could have wished.  I love graphics that vividly illustrate fundamental truths based on fully verifiable data.  But graphs that rely even a little bit on hand-waving make me uncomfortable.  And so I would have wished that the booklet, as it was then, had more good arguments and fewer pretty pictures.

The Curbside Chat as it now exists on the internet meets most of my concerns.  More text-based, this version is closer to being a rigorous proof of the StrongTowns thinking.  Admittedly, some hand-waving is still done, but only because a detailed dollar-by-dollar verification of the philosophy would require more time than the average internet attention span.

The current Curbside Chat, when combined with an objective eye to the land-use patterns and municipal finances around us, makes a compelling story.

The Curbside Chat is presented in six parts, the last two of which are videos.  My suggestion is to consume one part at a time, separated by mindless tasks, such as holiday light removal, so the lessons can gradually seep in.

Even if you’re planning on attending the Santa Rosa events, where the Curbside Chat will form at least a portion of the program, you should still review the Curbside Chat on-line.  Think of it as an opportunity to hear Einstein lecture on relativity or to listen to Beethoven conduct his Fifth Symphony.  Would you go in cold, assuming you could learn everything during the events?  Or would you do advance study, so you were ready to appreciate the nuances?

Not that Marohn is either Einstein or Beethoven.  (Sorry, Chuck.)   But the same principle applies.  Advance study will help with comprehension.

If your time is limited (and when isn’t it?), the Curbside Chat should be your primary focus in preparing for the StrongTowns visit.  However, I can recommend a podcast that might provide an alternative perspective on the StrongTowns message.

In a reminder that StrongTowns isn’t dogma nearly as much as it’s a different way of thinking, Chuck Marohn of StrongTowns joins John Howard Kunstler for one of the Kunstlercast podcasts.  I’ve written about Kunstler previously, generally finding him the designated flamethrower of the urbanist world.

But in the podcast format, Kunstler’s angry sarcasm is mostly under wraps, with he and Marohn discussing a range of topics from the financial bottom lines of many small towns to the effect of the Dakotas oil boom and bust on Marohn’s home state of Minnesota to an abortive attempt by a group of Hassidic Jews to move from Brooklyn to the plains of Kansas to the often ill-conceived efforts by churches to rebuild community.

None of the topics by themselves are paradigm-changing, but they provide a casual look at how folks who grasp the StrongTowns philosophy can view the world from a different angle.

If time is limited, stick with the Curbside Chat.  But if time permits, listen to part of the podcast.  It puts a more human face on the uncomfortable elements of the StrongTowns message.

Next time, I’ll stay with the StrongTowns website, digging a little deeper into the content and pointing toward the stuff that I think has the greatest applicability to the North Bay, always with the goal of encouraging folks to attend the upcoming StrongTowns events in Santa Rosa.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Intro to Urbanism, Part Ten: Summing Up, Further Reading, and an Example Life

One of my favorite college memories, at least among those I can share publicly, is from my senior year.  I was in the living room of my student apartment, reclining in a beanbag chair, enjoying an Oly, and listening as I copied a vinyl album onto reel-to-reel tape.  (Did I mention it was the 70s?)

It was late in the school year.  Only a couple of weeks later, my roommate and I would be disturbed from studying for finals by the sound of students marching on our street, celebrating the fall of Saigon.  (Did I mention it was Berkeley?)

The record I was copying was “Flavours” by the Guess Who.  The album came late in the history of the Guess Who and foreshadowed their later rebirth as Bachman Turner Overdrive.  The earlier pop sound of the band was being replaced by a deeper, darker bass-oriented sound.  The song that was playing was “Long Gone”.  The few lyrics, that were more in the nature of tortured aphorisms in a low register, felt like they had to fight their way to the surface through the bass line, only to be immediately reabsorbed by the music.

As I was thus imbibing and listening, my roommate returned from class, tossed his books on the table, and headed to the refrigerator for his own beer.  But before popping the top, he cocked his head toward the music with a puzzled look.  “Who’s the group?”

“The Guess Who.”

“Doesn’t sound much like the Guess Who.”

Before I could a respond, the deep voice rose from the dark pool of driving bass.  “Who the hell are you to try and criticize?”

My roommate, flustered by the perfectly timed interjection, fumbled to reply.  “Well ... I ... um …”

The voice declared “You’re still learning how to form an opinion.”

Thoroughly flummoxed, my roommate sank onto the couch to drink his beer and to listen to the remainder of the album in silence.

My reel-to-reel tape player has long since slipped a belt.  It may remain in the attic, in a corner next to a dusty pile of reel-to-reel tapes including the one with “Flavours”.  Other than occasionally smiling about the time that my roommate was humiliated by a piece of vinyl, I rarely thought about the album over the years.

But then I bought the CD last fall.  And I worked it into my rotation as I was working on my New Year’s “Intro to Urbanism”.  And I soon found that “You’re still learning how to form an opinion” was haunting me.  Although in my case, it wasn’t so much forming an opinion as in expressing it effectively that was troubling.

Today is the conclusion of my New Year’s “Intro to Urbanism” series.  I’m pleased that I undertook the task.  And I don’t disown anything I wrote.  (Although I may soon take another stab at a definition.)

But I’m not satisfied with the effort.

Over the nearly 500 posts in this blog, I’ve learned how to polish a single idea and present it in a single post, most of which met my personal standards for logic and grammar.  I was selecting, polishing, and sharing a single pearl in cupped hands.  And I think I’ve succeed, at least moderately.

But the “Intro” was a different task, more so than I had realized when I blithely accepted the challenge.  It was assembling a string of pearls of matching styles.  And I underestimated how different that would be from writing single posts.

I don’t regret making the effort.  I only regret not doing better for those who follow me.  But I’m not surrendering.  I’ll work and rework what I wrote this year, with a better understanding of the task, and be ready with a new and improved “Intro” for January 2016.  I can’t allow the words from a long ago Guess Who song to haunt me again.

Summing It Up: Whatever misgiving I may have about the total product, I’ve reached the end of “Intro to Urbanism”.  After presenting my modest credentials, I offered a definition for urbanism.  (That’s the definition I may rework.)  I explained why urbanism matters, digging deeply into the finances and also touching on energy usage.  Lastly, I wrote about how public places, streets, and buildings function differently in an urbanist world.

All that remains is to provide ideas for those who are motivated to do further study.

Organizations: Although there are a great many organizations doing fine work, I find the material that speaks best to me at the Congress for the New Urbanism, StrongTowns, Smart Growth America, and Project for Public Places.  For a couple of those organizations, some of their material is behind paywalls, but the free stuff is still worth your attention.  Plus, joining is also a good idea.

Books: If you prefer to hold stuff in your hands, even if it’s an e-book, “Suburban Nation” by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck is often cited as a starting point for modern urbanism.

“Happy City” by Charles Montgomery writes persuasively on how the drive to suburbia hasn’t made us happier.

“Walkable City” by Jeff Speck is a small gem of a book, imminently accessible yet powerful.

If you prefer to have your activism fueled by moral outrage, “The Geography of Nowhere” by James Howard Kunstler might meet your need.

Finally, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” is the legitimate capstone of great urbanist reading lists.  The insights of Jane Jacobs ring as true today as when she wrote them over fifty years ago.

But the concepts in Jacobs’ masterworks can be complex.  I usually recommend starting elsewhere and working up to Jacobs.  However, I have a reader who, intrigued by my blog, secured a copy of Jacobs and plowed right through it.  It was something like learning to swim by leaping from the high dive.  But the reader survived just fine and has become a strong-willed advocate for urbanist causes.

Twitter: Okay, there’s a lot of superfluous fluff on Twitter, but there’s also a lot of great stuff if you can be discerning.  I’d start my urbanist follow list with Chuck Marohn of StrongTowns (@clmarohn), Brent Toderian, former chief planner for Vancouver, B.C. (@BrentToderian), and Jeff Speck (@JeffSpeckAICP).  If you check in just once a day and follow a link provided by just one of these folks, you’ll soon learn much.  I promise.

This Blog: I won’t put myself anywhere near the level of the organizations, authors, and Twitter folks I’ve listed above.  But I try to highlight some of the best stuff they offer, sometimes connecting it to real world examples in the North Bay.  Plus I appreciate readers.  They’re my only compensation.  If you want to receive an email every time I publish a new blog, drop me an email at my address below.  Or just check in regularly.

Example Life: One last thing.  Some may have followed the “Intro” thinking that the theories were interesting, but that most people didn’t really want to live in an urbanist world.  To those folks, let me tell you about a recent conversation I had.

Over the holidays, I chatted with a lovely niece I rarely see.  She, her husband, and her two young sons were visiting from their new home in Berlin, Germany.  Our schedules overlapped for a short time on Boxing Day.

The two make an affluent couple.  The husband is unwinding from a fifteen-year career in international banking and is plotting his next moves.  My niece has been a successful graphic designer in New York City and London, and is now working to establish herself in Berlin.

So where and how do they live?  Quite happily in a 1,100 square-foot home on the sixth and top floor of a new building in a busy Berlin neighborhood.  They own a car, with twin car seats strapped in back, but find that most of their daily lives can be most easily accomplished on foot or on the extensive transit system.  And on the occasions when the car is the best option for an outing, they report that traffic is quite manageable because so many people are using transit or walking.

Nor is this their first time living a relatively urban lifestyle.  Their lives in New York City and London were similar.

My niece and her husband aren’t unique.  They’re typical of the coming generation.  And if we want our cities to thrive as the new generations take charge, we need to be paying attention.

Thanks for hanging around for the “Intro to Urbanism”.  Hopefully I’ve given you a good start toward understanding urbanism.  And hopefully you can build upon that start before a deep, disembodied voice accuses you of not knowing how to form an opinion.

Next time, I’ll share a recent program from Canadian television on the public health and mobility benefits of urbanism.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

CNU 22: Techno Narcissism

I returned a few days ago from CNU 22, the 22nd annual meeting of the Congress for the New Urbanism.  The conference was filled with urbanist ideas and will lead to many blog posts.  Going to a CNU annual meeting to learn more about urbanism is like standing under nearby Niagara Falls to slake a thirst.

This will be my third post based on CNU 22.  I began with some broad insights about urbanism that were honed by the conference.

Next, I began to focus in a little more tightly on urbanist themes, but not in depth.  Just short snippets of conversations or observations to give a flavor of the conference.  That’s the mode in which I’ll continue today.

Eventually, I’ll delve more deeply into to the CNU 22 content, but that level of analysis is still more than a week away.  For today, it’s strictly snapshots.

Techno Narcissism: I’ve written about James Howard Kunstler on multiple occasions, including a review of his book “The Geography of Nowhere” and his response to the Chris Christie bridge controversy in New Jersey.

At various times, I’ve described Kunstler as an urbanist rabble-rouser or an urbanist flame-thrower.  But at CNU 22, I decided that he was more the urbanist Hunter S. Thompson.  The image was cemented when he attended an early Saturday presentation, deep in the bowels of the convention center in a partially dimmed room far from sunlight, wearing the darkest possible sunglasses.  Perhaps he was hiding the damage from a busy Friday night.  Perhaps he was burnishing an image.  Either way, he made a statement.

But he’d made his greatest mark at CNU 22 when he spoke at a plenary session the day before.  He’s a fiery and compelling speaker.  As the speaker after him noted, the scariest three words on the urbanism speaking circuit are “You follow Kunstler.”

He made numerous outrageous and incendiary comments, reminding me that I’m happy he’s on my side of the debate, not the other.

But that one comment that stuck out for me was his description of the vertical farms that have been proposed by a handful of architects.  The concept is large, multi-million-dollar green walls dedicated to growing produce for the population.  It seemed an odd and unnecessary idea to me, filling a need that could be met far more cost-effectively on an acre of bare land at the city fringes.  I suspected that architectural egos were overwhelming common sense.

Kunstler wasn’t as temperate in his response.  He described the concept as “techno narcissist bullshit”.

Not the words I would have chosen, but not ones with which I would disagree either.

(For the record, Kunstler is fine with urban gardens, using the flat rooftops that would otherwise sit empty.  It’s only the expensive vertical farms that attract his disdain.)

(Also for the record, I share most of Kunstler’s concerns about the path of civilization, but not the full extent of his pessimism.  I expect that we’ll muddle through with less catastrophic disruption than he does.  Although it’s past time to start muddling in the right direction.)

Under- Representation of Engineers:   On the first day of the conference, I attended a session on tactical urbanism, which is comprised of small-scale, low-cost interventions that try to prove up the concepts of urbanism without significant risk.

As the half-day session got underway, the organizers asked for a show of hands about the backgrounds of the participants.  Not surprisingly, most were urban planners, architects, or community activists.  But it was still disappointing that in a crowd of fifty-some people, there were only two engineers, including me.

I suspect that much of the conference had a similar ratio.  It’s a shame that more engineers don’t look at the bigger picture.  Perhaps it’s an indictment of the engineering education system.  Perhaps it’s the nature of the folks who are attracted to engineering as a career.  Either way, I’m pleased to fall several standard deviations from the mean.

Daffodils: At the tactical urbanism session, a community organizer from near Buffalo described a clandestine traffic project undertaken by him and his cohorts.  It was a great story that I’ll describe more fully in another post.

The climax came when the group, in the dead of the night, marked out an alternative curb line, trying to slow traffic and to improve pedestrian safety.  In addition to white paint, they marked the new line with orange traffic cones screwed into the pavement.

Then, to ensure that the citizens understood that it hadn’t been the public works department doing the work, the vigilante traffic engineers put a daffodil into each cone before they disappeared into the night.

To me, the thought of orange traffic cones topped with yellow daffodils is an enduring mental image of tactical urbanism.

IOBY:  An organization has been founded to help with crowd-funding of tactical urbanist projects.  The founder spoke at the tactical urbanist session, noting that her company accomplishes two goals, raising money and raising public awareness to opportunities and challenges.  She suspected that the latter will ultimately prove more important.

But the fun part was the name she chose for her organization.  Recognizing that NIMBYism (Not in My Back Yard) is often the opponent of tactical urbanism, she called her effort IOBY for “In Our Backyard”.   I love the message.

In my next post, more on CNU 22.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

P.S. The photo is of a former single-family home about a block from the convention center and reflect the former glory of Buffalo.

James Howard Kunstler Tackles Chris Christie

I’ve written before about James Howard Kunstler.  He’s perhaps the nearest thing urbanism has to a rabid bulldog.  I usually agree with most of what Kunstler has to say, although I often cringe at how he expresses himself.   I prefer not to describe urbanism as “smart growth” for fear of appearing condescending to folks who haven’t yet seen the light.  I similarly worry that Kunstler runs the risk of unnecessarily radicalizing the advocates of sprawl.

With that said, I still acknowledge that a Kunstler rant can be great fun.  And the Chris Christie bridge scandal gave Kunstler a fine opportunity to become apoplectic.

I don’t agree with everything Kunstler writes about Christie or New Jersey, but I think Kunstler speaks a lot of truth, even if the volume level is higher than I would have set it.  Take a read and see what you think.

If I haven’t exhausted your willingness to read links, let me offer another one.  Rather than urbanism, this one is more about how a food craze grew out of a woman’s attempt to strengthen her hold on mental health.  But there are a couple of urbanism insights that caught my attention in a very fundamental way.  One has to do with building relationships with strangers on a street corner.  The other speaks to how to build community among the patrons of a coffee shop.  And both use coconuts.

If that sounds interesting, take a look at this story about the growing toast craze.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Book Review: “The Geography of Nowhere”

Today is roughly the nine-month anniversary of this blog. With the gestation period complete, it’s time to introduce you to the really addictive stuff of urbanism. But the introduction comes with a note of caution. James Howard Kunstler is a marvelously entertaining author. However, his blend of eloquence, bluster, and self-righteousness can subvert weaker minds, leading them to become the bane of community meetings and dinner parties.

I’ll introduce you to Kunstler. Whether you choose to pursue him further is up to you. Choose wisely.

"The Geography of Nowhere" was Kunstler’s first work and remains his best known effort. It’s an extended diatribe about the recent pattern of American land use. It made Kunstler an immediate fixture in the urbanist world, although one who is treated much like a live grenade.

Kunstler begins "The Geography of Nowhere" at top speed and ramps up from there. He starts Chapter 1 by recounting the story of Judge Doom from "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?", the fictional character supposedly responsible for Los Angeles becoming engirded by freeways. Within a couple of paragraphs, Kunstler is quoting Lewis Mumford, the dean of American urban academicians in the first half of the 20th century.

And then, still on only his second page, Kunstler presents his thesis in the over-blown rhetoric of which he is a master:

"Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading – the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the ‘gourmet mansardic’ junk-food joints, the Orwellian office ‘parks’ featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chaingang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call ‘growth’."

Finding it hard to maintain that level of fire, the first part of the book is an uneven review of the history of how American land use came to its current state. However, Kunstler still manages to insert some zingers, such as the suggestion that the triumph of modern architecture was the direct result of Hitler’s preference for classical architecture. In Kunstler’s theory, the victors of World War II were forced to adopt modern architecture to avoid any connection to Nazism.

Another eye-opening moment is his claim that the long-time residential street width of 36 feet was chosen to provide sufficient space to clear the debris after a nuclear war.

The book wanders through a review of the urban histories of Detroit, Portland, and Los Angeles. Kunstler offers worthwhile and entertaining insights, but seems unsure of his path to a conclusion.

He begins to regain his footing when he reviews the places he calls "Capitals of Unreality". He notes the absurdity of people driving to Disney World, parking in over-sized lots, and then celebrating the car-free aura of Main Street USA.

He really gets rolling in his description of Woodstock, Vermont, portraying an economy based on the captains of industry arriving in luxury SUVs to shop for mementos of a time before industry or luxury SUVs held sway in Woodstock. The description induces both grins and grimaces.

Having restored his momentum and moving toward a grand finale, Kunstler offers his credentials for commenting on American land use.

"Born in 1948, I have lived my entire life in America’s high imperial moment. During this epoch of stupendous wealth and power, we have managed to ruin our greatest cities, throw away our small towns, and impose over the countryside a joyless junk habitat which we can no longer afford to support. Indulging in a fetish of commercialized individualism, we did away with the public realm, and with nothing left but private life in private homes and private cars, we wonder what happened to the spirit of community. We created a landscape of scary places and became a nation of scary people"

"The Geography of Nowhere" is the Long Island Iced Tea of urbanism. It can taste so good going down that you run the risk of over-imbibing and making a fool of yourself. But, excepting the occasional overstatement, Kunstler largely speaks the truth. An uncomfortable truth. Only you can make the decision whether you can handle the truth.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated. Please comment below or email me. And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)