Solar Freeways

A Swedish architect, Mans Tham, proposes covering the nearly 500 miles of freeway in LA County with solar panels. Tham's "Solar Serpents in Paradise" leverage the enormity and urban geography of freeways to produce something positive: locally produced renewable energy that can be fed easily into the existing grid, thereby reducing the need for environmentally destructive solar farms in the desert.

Just covering the 10 freeway from downtown to Santa Monica would produce enough electricity to power all the households in Venice. There is also the potential to provide electric charging stations under freeway over passes and to use the carbon dioxide rich air from the freeway to grow algae on underutilized shoulder space.

Regardless of what one may think of freeways, they are likely to remain part of the built environment for many years to come. But simply denigrating freeways as hulking concrete structures that divide communities and degrade local air quality ignores their potential for becoming part of the sustainability solution. Taking sunken infrastructure investments and repurposing them to serve current needs saves time, money, land and is probably the most effective way for existing urban areas like Los Angeles to transition into a more sustainable future.

Decentralized Energy Infrastructure

As electric cars and plug-in hybrids continue to increase their market share in the United States, efforts to decentralize the energy infrastructure for these cars will undoubtedly help make places like Los Angeles more environmentally, economically and socially sustainable. I first introduced the idea of decentralized energy infrastructure in an earlier post, "Greener Cars and Fewer Gas Stations." To understand the point I'm trying make, consider that the fewer of these we need...

Gas station in Los Angeles

...means more land is available for developments like this:

Sierra Bonita affordable housing in West Hollywood

And with more housing and commercial development like Sierra Bonita in the heart of the city means there's less pressure to continue building at the urban fringe.

Sprawl in Santa Clarita

I applaud GM for partnering with Envision Solar to install their solar-powered charging trees at GM dealerships. Each "tree" can generate enough electricity to fully charge one Chevy Volt in a day. Making these charging trees available for private residences is the next logical step to improving the urban landscape in Los Angeles and making the region more sustainable.

Chevy Volt with Envision Solar-Powered Charing "Tree"

"Better Block" Project

The Oak Cliff neighborhood in Dallas transformed a tired stretch of street into a vibrant community center by gathering donations from local businesses and putting their DIY attitude to work. Their project is called "Better Blocks" and it's about greening the city and reclaiming streets for people, whether they be on foot, sitting outside a cafe or riding a bike. In 24 hours they were able to turn this:

Into this:

Making Los Angeles sustainable is about more than energy and resources; people and place matter. Reorienting streets for people, as demonstrated here and by the overwhelming success of CicLAvia last weekend, can help produce healthy, vibrant and safe communities that are socially sustainable.

It would be nice to see the enthusiasm generated by CicLAvia translated into an effort, like Better Blocks, to repurpose some LA's widest boulevards into people-based places. Clearly it doesn't take much in the form of resources or time to make a big impact. Use the DIY-model provided by Better Blocks and test-run certain neighborhood streets. Inexpensive and temporary demonstration pilot projects are a great way to generate community and business support, and help justify more expensive and permanent infrastructure investments later on. This approach may not be successful everywhere but with so little capital and time needed to implement a pilot program, the City has little reason not support such an effort.

Which streets would you like to see LA turn into "Better Blocks"?

CicLAvia this Sunday - 10/10/10

Check out the street map here. The event is this Sunday, from 10am - 3pm. Enjoy a car-free Sunday in LA!

CicLAvia youtube video

WeHo Spur

Joel Garreau made the point in his book, Edge City, that “every American city that is growing is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles.” Studying the patterns of growth found within the Los Angeles region allow us to examine the principle dynamics of contemporary urbanization (de-centered growth, poly-nucleation and sprawl) and propose appropriate planning solutions. These dynamics have produced the unique urban form and scattered travel patterns (and congestion) that characterize Los Angeles today, which many planners are now working so hard to fix.

A tremendous amount of work is being done to correct the problems and negative externalities caused by decades of unchecked growth. Extending the "subway to the sea" is one such effort, which is clearly vital to the public health, economic strength and cultural vitality of the Westside and the region. Despite the overwhelming evidence demonstrating the need for extending the subway west under Wilshire Boulevard, which I support strongly, building a transportation network based on a hub and spoke model ignores the very nature of urban growth and travel patterns in Los Angeles. Not all roads lead to downtown, nor should they. Building a de-centered, poly-nucleated transportation network that relies on linkages and connections would mirror the urban system that it is purported to serve.

Sending a spur of the subway through West Hollywood to connect to the existing Red Line station at Hollywood and Highland is exactly the sort of linkage that I'm talking about. Providing transportation connections that don't require a ride through downtown increase options for riders and facilitate easy access to other parts of the region like West Hollywood, while making the rail system more robust and effective overall.

The public comment period for the Westside Subway extension ends October 18, 2010. Be sure to email your comments in support of a West Hollywood alignment by clicking on the link under "Contact Us." 

"Whiskey's for drinking; water's for fighting."

Los Angeles lives on the water it imports from Northern California and the Colorado River. California is expected to add millions of new residents over the next couple decades, many of which are likely to reside somewhere in Southern California. Constrained resources and rising demand make our reliance on imported water unsustainable. Also, transporting water is incredibly energy intensive. According to some estimates, 20% of California's carbon dioxide emissions result from pumping water throughout the state.

Some people are already thinking about to how reconcile the demand for growth and development with the environmental, economic and social imperative to build sustainably. A recent article by Metropolis Magazine discusses the nexus between water and sustainability. The article culminates in a call to action for those interested in designing a sustainable vision for our cities:

"The Living City Design Competition calls on the world’s most ambitious designers to create an inspiring but realistic vision for the future of civilization. Competition teams will conceptually retrofit existing cities, demonstrating how real communities might transform their relationship with the resources that sustain them. These re-imagined cities must achieve each Imperative of the Living Building Challenge, the built environment’s most rigorous performance standard.

To be certified under the Living Building Challenge, a project must capture and treat all of its own water onsite using ecologically sound processes. It must also ensure that 100% of storm water and building discharge feeds the project’s internal water demands or is released onto adjacent sites for management through gradual surface flow, groundwater recharge, agricultural use or adjacent building needs."

Los Angeles River

The challenge to have no net import and no net export of water within a given site is the ultimate metric for water sustainability and ought to be the goal for all buildings in the Los Angeles region. There is no reason why resources and money should be spent to send rainwater out to sea when it could be harnessed for more productive uses, thereby eliminating the need for the costly and damaging practice of importing water.

Getting Past Semantics

The term "sustainability" as a planning concept is vague and poorly defined. Understanding what it means and how best to harness its principles to craft a more positive urban experience have been undermined by our lazy use of language. Bill Barnes from the National League of Cities made a similar point recently, correctly pointing out that the term "sustainability" has been thrown around so freely that we don't really know what we're talking about any more. Discussions about green building, LEED, mass transit, TOD, etc. make it seem as though sustainability is everything. But if it is, then maybe it's nothing? Clearly that's not the case either but to better understand how sustainability impacts planning and our collective vision for the built environment, we need to do a better job defining the terms of the debate. That is the mission of this blog - to provide an open platform for discussing the sort thinking and development that embody and express the core principles of a sustainable built environment.

Zoning a Post-Modern Metropolis

The first major revision of Los Angeles’ zoning codes were introduced recently to the Planning Commission. The goal, according to an article by the Architect’s Newspaper, is to create consistent timelines for land-use approvals; make zoning review more flexible and consistent; allow for abbreviated review processes for minor deviations from the zoning code; create consistent procedures for modifying existing projects; and streamline zoning approval for projects that meet specific plan standards. A final vote is expected before Thanksgiving.

This project reaffirms planner’s modernist belief in the efficacy of zoning and its usefulness as a way of creating order from chaos; the primary tool for planners to rationalize complex urban problems and diagnose well-packaged solutions. The problem is that Los Angeles is continuing to use a decidedly modernist way of thinking in a post-modern world.

Concentric Zone Theory Model

Post-modernism breaks down the hegemony of modernist rationality, allowing for multiple and equally privileged ways of experiencing and understanding cities. The transition to postmodern thought has been accompanied by a similar shift in the production of cities; the Chicago School’s modernist view of urban structure with a central core organizing the hinterland, characterized by the concentric zone theory, has given way to a postmodern view that replaces modernism’s center city logic with multiple logics all happening at the urban periphery and a breakdown in the distinction between inter- and intra-urban structure.

The Los Angeles School introduced the idea that Los Angeles is the archetype of postmodern urbanism whose patterns of urban growth and change carry explanatory power for cities beyond the five county metropolitan region. Joel Garreau made the same point in Edge City, “every American city that is growing is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles.” The physical manifestations of postmodern urbanism are visible in LA and so the city is a useful lens for examining the principle dynamics of contemporary urbanization and their impact on planning practice. The multiple logics (re)produced by de-centered growth, poly-nucleation, and sprawl all come home to roost in Los Angeles.

The essential problem is that planners (and the current re-write of LA’s zoning code) are currently ill equipped to deal postmodern urbanism, regardless how well they may understand its principle dynamics. The cityLAB manifesto of founding director Dana Cuff and her colleagues captures the essence of the problem:

"Transformations of the city exceed our ability to control them … we arrive at results seemingly by fast-forward, without clear grasp of how we got there. Though not necessarily temporally fast, change occurs as a set of discontinuous jump cuts: urban development is not progressive, but it can never turn back; design is increasingly regulated without ever showing improvement."

The rational ordering of cities from core to hinterland no longer applies. Current planning practice with its emphasis on process, technocratic analysis of things like ridership projections for mass transit, and shift away from the state and toward civil society is overwhelmed by more than just the pace of development; the practice of planning itself appears incapable of articulating and implementing a vision for the future of postmodern cities.

Where's the center here?

Planning has always been about responding to contemporary urban trends, beginning with the challenges posed by late-nineteenth century industrial cities, and must now reclaim some of its progressive, reform tradition in order to remain relevant in a postmodern age. To begin, planning must be self-aware and realize that objective rational argument, critique, and morality are not possible in a postmodern world. It would be irresponsible for planning to assume that it could continue to appeal to a rational logic, like strict Euclidean zoning, for making the built environment a better place when the principle dynamics creating and changing cities today are unresponsive to such an approach.

Reading Place

Masdar in Abu Dhabi

I just came across an interesting piece from the blog myurbanist on "reading the evolution of place." The author articulates his message through a brief analysis of eleven pairs of images of various places throughout the world, mostly cities.

Some of his commentary is insightful and strikes at the core of what this blog is trying to accomplish: establishing a new contextually sensitive discourse, systemic and holistic in scope, about sustainability and what it means for the future of the Los Angeles region.

Barrios of Caracas, Venezuela

"Today, we are driven by a new sustainability ethic, necessarily systemic in scope. Carbon-neutrality is the rage, and location efficiency, clean energy and the return of neighborhood are the watchwords of change. Formulas and metrics, and new regulatory systems attempt results, and show the quest to measure how close we are to achieving ideal forms of location and development.

But...context is key, and adaptation to a multi-environmental sense of place, associated imagery and sensation is an essential element of building design, urban development and innovation going forward. Creating beautiful buildings that are able to work for the environment, or crafting appropriate enabling regulations, should also be considered as part of a broader, holistic effort. There is no use in having architects, urban planners, developers and lawyers thinking in isolation about a better future."

Street in Valletta, Malta

His last point about a "broader, holistic effort" is usually directed at our understanding of the environment; a point mentioned to underscore the importance of thinking of the environment in its entirety, rather than as discrete systems. However, I think he's talking about something slightly different and less obvious - that in order for place to be legible in the "sustainable city," architects, urban planners, developers and lawyers need to think and work together. Sustainability is just as much about environmental outcomes as it is about process and collaboration. Without a sustainable practice for producing the sort of urbanism our cities and environment demand, we are never going to make progress toward carbon-neutrality, water independence or any other pressing environmental issue. This is true for Los Angeles just as much as it is for any other big city.

What will LA look like in 2030?

Rending: Michael Maltzan Architecture

Given constrained natural resources and accelerating ecological degradation, environmental sustainability is imperative but has yet to present itself on the urban landscape as a principle element affecting the de-centered growth of contemporary cities like Los Angeles. Nevertheless, in the absence of national leadership, cities are trailblazing new multi-scalar sustainability initiatives and greenhouse gas reduction strategies in order to stave off environmental disaster. The influence of these efforts on urban form is yet to be seen but some of ideas proposed by cityLAB-UCLA, Gensler and Michael Maltzan Architecture for what Los Angeles will look like in 2030 give us a glimpse of what a more socially and environmentally conscious urbanism may look like. Their proposals are part of Newsweek Magazine's series about the Future of Work.

Each of the three entrants framed their discussion of the future of LA around four parameters: home, work, commute and recreation. Each offering differing perspectives and intriguing renderings of a possible but as yet unrealized future. The dynamic interaction of natural systems, infrastructure, housing and people holds tremendous promise for the future of Los Angeles. Clearly there doesn't seem to be any shortage of good ideas. The key at this point is trying to figure out how we get from here to there.