Past
11/8/11: TedxPhilly, speaker
10/26-27/11: Syracuse University, visiting lecturer
10/11/11: Design in Action conference, Emerging Practitioners Panel, moderator

At a time when politicians are debating billion-dollar transportation projects, Van Alen Institute is taking the conversation to the public. American culture is driven by colorful narratives and imagery, yet the story of high-speed rail has been told in black and white, with facts and figures (or drab maps and speeding bullet trains). It’s clear a broader vision is needed to add complexity and depth to this national discussion, and Life at the Speed of Rail is designed to offer just that.

Above all, high-speed rail poses an urgent design challenge—one calling for creative solutions at every scale, from the café car to the megaregion. In this Call for Design Ideas, entrants are asked to produce projects and narratives picturing the wide-ranging impacts that a new transportation network will have on the nation’s communities, whether urban or rural, rail-riding or car-centric, heartland or borderland. By collecting these ideas and images of a transformed America—be they specific, pragmatic, or speculative—we’ll better understand the hopes and fears of our current moment and be better equipped to decide whether and how we build this new infrastructure.

In recent months, this neighborhood has also been terrorized by a killer who choked and raped his victims in the area’s ubiquitous abandoned houses and vacant lots. If only these deserted places could be charged as accomplices to the so-called Kensington Strangler’s three murders and two sexual assaults, and for aiding and abetting the drug use and prostitution that have caused so many of the neighborhood’s problems. But the empty lots with their discarded furniture and ghetto kudzu and the weather-beaten houses with boarded-up windows won’t be going anywhere soon.

It’s been nearly 30 years since James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling published their broken windows theory, positing that the torn social fabric that allows for vandalism also encourages other kinds of crime and disinvestment in a neighborhood. The theory validated the inclination to improve the built environment first, in the hopes that once a sense of confidence has been restored other aspects of an engaged community will follow. And in places on the cusp of gentrification or economic recovery, like certain New York areas in the ’90s, quality-of-life campaigns have been proven to clean up the streets and reduce crime.

Indeed, as gentrification has slowly crept northward in Philadelphia, Kensington residents have gained some hope from a newly branded arts corridor, a few rejuvenated parks and street improvements, all thanks to the efforts of an invaluable local community development corporation. But this scattershot approach has failed to create the kind of holistic change needed in this neighborhood — or its counterparts in St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit and Baltimore.

Many cities have also sought to transform undeveloped lots into green space and urban agriculture. It’s a natural fit and, again, in Kensington a full city block has been converted from an industrial brownfield to an admirably active farm. But land-based strategies that try to reinvent this vacant lot or that blighted ground do little to stem the larger social trends that created the spatial problem in the first place.

Philadelphia, like many Rust Belt cities, was so deeply hurt by the loss of manufacturing that began in the 1950s that it has yet to recover. Gone were the jobs that even high-school dropouts could leverage to achieve stable lives, and with them went the housing stock. Today, we are left with a city where the number of jobs requiring postsecondary education has grown, while more than 60 percent of Philadelphia’s adults read at a sixth grade level or below, creating a miserable mismatch that leaves both employers and the unemployed in need.

That’s why any plan to mitigate the vacant property crisis must not only include innovative urban planning, but also try to restore employment opportunities. We need to literally build jobs on neglected and undeveloped land.

There are a number of organizations in Philadelphia that provide models for dealing with vacancy and joblessness as intertwined problems. For example, the Job Opportunity Investment Network, a public-private partnership, supports workforce training programs that have a hyperlocal impact.

One such program is the West Philadelphia Skills Initiative, which provides low-skill residents with intensive education and then matches graduates with jobs at the prestigious universities and medical centers within walking distance of their homes. While the jobs help people leave poverty behind, they ensure that the new wealth created remains in their neighborhoods, helping stabilize these downtrodden communities.

Roots to Re-Entry enrolls convicts in a horticulture vocational and life-skills training program that, upon their release, leads to landscaping jobs. Part of the training includes growing organic food that is donated to Philadelphia’s neediest, showing how this work can nourish impoverished neighborhoods.

Such programs can teach residents the skills they need to reimagine the urban voids they encounter every day. Cities, in turn, should partner with neighborhood groups to determine the most suitable abandoned buildings and lots for development, luring companies and projects that would employ newly retrained residents.

Strategies that deal with vacant spaces by generating new paths to employment aim to do more than fixing broken windows ever could. They seek to change the dynamics of the local economy by creating better communities, not just prettier ones, where abandoned properties are viewed as job sites rather than crime scenes waiting to happen.

The article takes issue with the kind of criticism that is found on popular architecture blogs. We know this brand of lament well: the web is killing everything that was ever good, and, in this case, Kelly is wringing his hands that “speculative” bloggers who focus more on cultural mashups than straightforward dissections of architectural projects — in the style of, say, Paul Goldberger — have failed to produce what he blandly calls “informed, intelligent criticism.” And because the blogosphere is the new establishment, this means that we can expect that this kind of writing and the figures behind it are here to stay.

Although Kelly takes aim at a few British bloggers (Bad British Architecture, Strange Harvest, etc.), I was most interested in his attack on BLDGBLOG, which he calls “probably the most influential architecture blog in the world.” Its author is Geoff Manaugh, whom Kelly calls an “institution.” Manaugh’s response to Kelly makes two key points: first, Manaugh has never attempted to replace traditional architecture criticism, nor does he hope to cultivate an audience that is looking for that kind of stuff; and second, he would welcome an alternative to his own style of blogging that might resemble the smart, level-headed approaches of the LA Times‘ architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne or The Center for Land Use Interpretation‘s founder Matthew Coolidge. He then ends by saying:

Imagine a world, then, where critics like Peter Kelly actually step up and demonstrate how to do the things they so enjoy pointing out as lacking in others. If they could succeed at this — and find an audience, and push an agenda, and gather influence, and raise the stakes of what it means to be an architecture blogger — then we would all, as writers and readers and builders, be stronger because of it.

To my mind, the reason why there isn’t more of Peter Kelly’s kind of writing is that there aren’t enough places where one can make a living writing about architecture. There are probably fewer than a dozen people who make a living in the United States writing about architecture (and don’t get the majority of their incomes through editing, teaching or consulting). The problem, in other words, isn’t that Geoff Manaugh is a popular blogger, but that the vision of Peter Kelly’s ideal critic isn’t economically feasible these days. Until a new business model, or a better way of funding criticism through a smaller niche of avid readers, is figured out we can expect to see the number of pages (even webpages) dedicated to serious criticism dwindle: even the monthly critiques by Robert Campbell and Michael Sorkin had to be cut from Architectural Record‘s coverage in 2010.)This economic impossibility needs to be recognized before proposing a utopian world where architecture critics have all the necessary resources to provide the informed, intelligent criticism expected of them. Otherwise it’s like saying our urban education system should rival that of private schools without recognizing that there aren’t unlimited funds to support that revolution.

A sense of responsibility for guiding public discussion about architecture is what I miss most.

So what is the appropriate response to this situation that we all find a bit disappointing? Is it to voice frustration with the new guard that is innovating? No. Instead, we should be asking: Why does the Old Establishment, which is adequately supported, suck so much? Why is Nicolai Ouroussoff still the lead critic for the Times when his writing, at its best, is greeted with a shrug? And while we all love Paul Goldberger, why hasn’t The New Yorker given someone else a chance to write the occasional piece of criticism for the magazine? If we’re going to be using new means to create a dialogue about architecture criticism, it might be interesting to do it in a way that is purposefully attempting to overthrow the PMS (pale, male, stale) guard.Kelly presumes that BLDGBLOG is incredibly influential, and it is, in so far as it has widened the context and lens through which we see architecture. But it doesn’t shape the architecture profession (that’s not what it sets out to do) and it doesn’t serve as much of a reference about what’s happened in architecture over the past few years. Like most blogs, it’s really more of a catalog of Manaugh’s personal interests.If the old architecture criticism establishment continues to be boring and a new establishment continues to mine the esoteric margins of architectural thought rather than the work of architects, what is at risk is a clear sense of who is debating the direction of architecture as practice or discipline. Kelly blames Manaugh et al. for lacking the right style or substance; Manaugh seems to shirk responsibility for the future of online dialogue about architecture.Perhaps magazines like Architectural Record feel too much of a responsibility for charting what’s happening in highbrow, mainstream architecture and don’t allow for enough personal, tangential conversation. But that sense of authority and responsibility for guiding public understanding and discussion about architecture is what I miss most about the old establishment. I miss that much more than the writing style in which old media expressed itself or even the architecture that old media referenced. When Herbert Muschamp was the critic for the Times, he felt a responsibility to curate a series of alternatives to the SOM-designed replacement for the World Trade Center — is there anyone writing right now who would take on that role of architectural shaman?What should someone with the privilege of being listened to do then? Manaugh’s call for a more vibrant criticism scene, which enriches the thinking of writers and architects, is just one example of how he can wield his power to greater effect. We all seem to agree that we need more online voices that are actively challenging architecture and architecture criticism as they are practiced. To use a Manaugh-style analogy: he’s shown us the playing field and now he’s kicking around a soccer ball waiting for a game of pick-up. Anyone else inspired to answer this call to action? At the very least, I think this debate has revived the On Criticism series on this website, so game on!

By: Diana Lind

Public engagement in the community planning process is a relatively new phenomenon. Is it good evidence of American democracy in action or of public skepticism about the planning profession?

Urban planning with public participation has not always existed, nor has it been deemed necessary. Even 50 years ago, planners were still considered demigods. They had reformed cities to be beautiful, healthier, cleaner, and more stable. Planners had done more for public health than doctors. By making lives much better, they had come to be trusted by the people.

For example, take John Nolen, whose small office delivered hundreds of city plans in the 1920s. How did he do so much? San Diego is an example. He visited the city for a couple of weeks, spoke to whomever he needed to, then got back to Boston, prepared the documents, and mailed them back to San Diego, and … it was implemented over the years.

In the 1950s, planners were still considered so trustworthy that when they had that towers-in-the-park idea, they could flick their hand and get an entire neighborhood demolished. But those inner-city plans became socially toxic almost immediately, and as the suburban promise was betrayed, confidence in top-down planning evaporated.

Participatory planning rose out of that disappointment. It wasn’t just the result of Jane Jacobs versus Robert Moses—it was categorical, a nationwide insurgency by people who had never heard of those two.

The Congress for the New Urbanism has popularized the charrette as a process. Where does it fit into the range of civic engagement?

Bottom-up avoids the big mistakes of top-down planning, but it is quite inefficient. New Urbanism merges the virtues of top-down and bottom-up planning, combining the principles of its charter and the participation through the charrette. This is something new. The planner adjusting principles to local circumstances is a system that has now worked very well indeed hundreds of times.

But we seem to be reaching a tipping point now where municipalities will give up on engaging the public because it’s gotten too time-consuming and too expensive.

We were involved in Miami 21, a citywide charrette. That process was bottom-up and required convincing everyone concerned. It cost millions of dollars and took four years. It was a magnificent result and the most comprehensive such effort by any big city, but it will probably not be repeated. The economy has changed all that.

While the New Urbanist system may work well, it is also expensive. To mount a charrette requires those rare, highly skilled professionals that can speak to regular folk, think clearly, and draw quickly. Charrettes can cost $300,000. We need to get the cost down to $50,000.

The other complaint you’ve voiced is that NIMBYism has become too obstructionist. Is there a better way to get public participation in the design process without a project falling prey to local interests?

Conventional public participation makes the mistake of privileging the neighbors, the people who live within a half-mile of the given proposal. So it becomes extremely difficult to, say, locate a school or an infill project. While democracy doesn’t need a great number of voters to function well, it does require a full cross-section to participate. That is the source of its collective intelligence. You can’t confuse neighbors with the community as a whole.

We propose using the jury pool or the phone book to invite a random group, which is then understood to be apart from the self-interested neighbors, just as the developer or the school board are acknowledged as vested interests. The neighbors must be seen as vested interests as well.

But how are municipalities going to be able to make big decisions?

If you can’t build a bike path or lay a power line that connects to the new solar energy farm, then you can’t engage in the 21st century. We have also been developing the concept of subsidiarity, the design of decisions: what issue, by which people, and when.

The region makes decisions about heavy infrastructure, the neighborhood decides about traffic, the block makes decisions about parking, the household makes decisions about its building, and the individual makes decisions about the bedroom. The smallest group at the latest point in time that can competently make a decision—that is subsidiarity. Thus we’re evolving participatory planning towards a more intelligent democracy.

A lot of architects are working in China, which doesn’t have much of a public process to speak of. Should we copy their model?

It’s much easier to get things done there. But they’re also making terrible mistakes. The outcome of their planning is generally awful and provides evidence that you need some sort of public participation.

But if you want to be cynical about it, the West will benefit from sending over all those irresponsible designers who are screwing up their quality of life. China will become an undesirable place to live. In the future, their best talent will choose to live in San Francisco or Seattle. It is poison-pill planning. The CIA couldn’t do better.

www.americancity.org/opencities