5.11.09
19.10.09
Planetizen article on short comings of Portland plan
Beloved and Abandoned: A Platting Named Portland
Oregon
History / Preservation
Land Use
Op-Ed
Portland
simple grid
19 October 2009 - 5:00am
Author:
Douglas Pollard
Fanis Grammenos
For American planners, Portland, OR is held up as a shining example of urban planning, and credit is given to its compact grid. But is Portland's grid worthy of adulation? Perhaps not, say Fanis Grammenos and Douglas Pollard of Urban Pattern Associates.
In the 4000-year history of the grid, American incarnations are relatively new, appearing first about 300 years ago, frequently as a simple, orthogonal and often square (such as Portland's) 'Hippodamian' grid, named after the planner of Miletus around 473 BC (Fig 1).
A session in the recent 2009 New Partners for Smart Growth conference focused on 'The Beautiful American Grid — the Embodiment of Smart Growth,' which lamented the fact that the grid 'gets no respect'.
Figure 1. From Miletus (473 BC) to Barcelona (1859) and to Portland (1867), the grid has resurfaced in many alternative sizes of square blocks and in variations of elongated rectangles (NY 1811).
This alleged lack of respect seems at odds with most planning literature, which extols its virtues and mirrors prevalent New Urbanist practice. This disparity between theory and practice simultaneously confuses the practitioner and frustrates the theoretician. It deserves detailed attention if only to clarify this schism and enable site plan designers to know when and why they could apply 'the Grid'. Clarity about its attributes may also open the way for its regeneration.
Recognition and RespectCurrent planning literature brims with references to "the grid" in juxtaposition with curvilinear and dendrite conventional suburban layouts. The "grid" as a network concept has been widely accepted and is now regarded as a superior geometry for laying out greenfield and infill sites.
Figure 2. Portland's (Hippodamian) Grid overlaid on a Virtual Earth bird's eye view of Pearl District. The centre lines of streets intersect at 260 foot intervals.
For example, in 1992 we read that "Streets ought to be laid out largely in straight segments, as they were until the 1940s. After all, the vast majority of our successful towns and cities, from Cambridge to Portland, were laid out this way." (Duany). The grid gets credit for city success, at least by inference, but is this credit warranted?
Portland's network offers an instructive example for discussing grids because of the grid’s nature (an unadulterated Hippodamian grid and the densest of all American city grids (Fig 2, MS Earth), its size and the City’s planning celebrity status. We read again that "Portland owes much of its success to its tiny blocks that create an incredibly porous network of streets, each of which can be quite small as a result" ( Jeff Speck, 2005). In this praise, it is not simply the grid in general, but the small blocks in particular that impart success.
In articles, project brochures and city planning reports "the grid" stands alone; the other contestant, mid-to-late 1900s suburban networks, has been wholly discredited in mainstream planning. One can hardly pay more respect.
Affiliation and AffectionPortland’s street grid pattern has attracted attention indirectly and directly. Indirectly, because the City of Portland has taken many first-ever, brave and decisive measures to manage growth, and cities and planners hold it up as a model of civic vision. Inevitably, attributes of the city -- such as its grid -- are seen by affiliation as paradigmatic.
Personal testimonies of visiting planners who express adulation for Portland add a second indirect layer of attention. Constantly on the outlook for an ideal urban pattern, planners list Portland as a favorite and some boast "I love that city!" with emotion. Recently, a local movement to rename the city in order to project these strong emotions was set in motion. But strong feelings such as these may be entangled between actual attributes and personal associations, hard to unravel for practical purposes, as other cities also share such emotional investment, at times.
Urbanists and romanticists have expressed equally strong sentiments about Paris, London, Barcelona, Curitiba, Amsterdam and Venice. Of the six, only Barcelona adopted the Hippodamian grid in 1859 for its vast expansion, and Venice, without a classic grid, is the preeminent pedestrian haven, yet neither city matches the urbanist’s praise for Portland. Whatever the mix of reasons, Portland dominates the American planners' imagination feelings and talk. Disentangling this intangible realm can be an elusive goal; grounds and figures on the other hand may produce tangible results.
Grounds and FiguresPragmatic reasons may play a part in this adoration. The extreme simplicity of the plan, for example -- a uniform, perfectly orthogonal, expandable checkerboard -- could be one. As a drawing, the plan has a feel of flawlessness, the appearance of perfection, particularly in contrast with labyrinthine medieval town plans or recent bewildering suburbs (Figure 3). When this perfection is combined with a pleasant experience on the ground an indissoluble match is made.
Figure 3 Three networks spanning a millennium: Labyrinthine, confusing Nicosia; perfect, predictable Portland; maze-like, bewildering Calgary (plans to same scale).
The degree of connectivity of the street network could count as another practical reason. 'Network', by definition, is a set of linked components, whether a spider-net, a fishnet, or the Internet - all networks connect. What distinguishes them is the manner, geometry and frequency of connection: leaf, tree, blood vessels, telephone and web networks are dendrite, hierarchical (fractal) but fishnets are not. Portland’s is a dense fishnet with nodes at every 200 feet, which produce 360 intersections per square mile -- the highest ratio in America, and 3 to 5 times higher than current developments. For example, older and newer areas in Toronto, typical of most cities, range from 72 to 119 intersections per square mile in suburbs and 163 to 190 in older areas with a grid. As connectivity rose in importance as a planning principle, Portland’s grid emerges as a supreme example.
Coupled with connectivity, its rectilinear geometry is indisputably more advantageous for navigation on foot, car or bike than any alternatives. Visitors often feel lost and disoriented in medieval towns and in contemporary suburbs and this feeling leads to anxiety and even fear and a sense that all is not well.
What explains why the simplest, purest, most interconnected and easily navigated rectilinear grid, in spite of all the praise, has, evidently, not been applied in any contemporary urbanist plan, whether infill or greenfield? What caused the disaffection?
The Disaffection: SpeculationOne clue comes out of a believable legend about Portland’s grid. Unlike other American cities that were laid out by erudite generals or governors, such as Oglethorpe (Savannah, 1735) or William Penn (Philadelphia, 1701), Portland's plan was apparently conceived by scrupulous speculators who reasoned that more corner lots would yield higher profit on the land investment, hence the maximum number of intersections. Interestingly, the 1812 Commissioners Plan for New York was also denigrated as a 'speculator grid'. The 'speculator' label would usually damage the prospects of any plan; speculation is perceived as shortsighted, greedy, and at times suspect activity -- as opposed to "planning" which is a long term, public-good, goal-centered activity.
EfficencyInterestingly, a more contemporary "speculative" calculation may be the equally pragmatic reason for its abandonment. The Portland grid uses 42% of land in right of ways for streets and has the highest length of road infrastructure of any alternatives. Simply put, nearly half of the land is used up in accessing the other half. A recent comparison of an existing 338 hectare subdivision’s curvilinear pattern to an overlaid TND plan showed that the land for roads was respectively 88 and 122 hectares or 40% higher for TND with a corresponding increase in infrastructure costs (IBI) (Figure 4). No developer or municipality would savor this arithmetic.
In business districts, small blocks may force buildings to gain height and thus increase the per block net density, a financial advantage, but the gross density of such district would be comparatively lower than that of another with larger blocks and similarly tall buildings. On balance, more buildable land means more opportunities to build, tall or otherwise, and therefore more rentable space, revenue and activity.
Evidently, Portland’s founders either understood little about infrastructure costs or judged them irrelevant; a judgment that no planner, developer or municipality today would take at face value. When economic efficiency matters, Portland’s grid fails the grade.
Figure 4. Comparative Building Block sizes of Portland, Suburb and Suburb TND (partial plans). (Note the total eclipse of 4-way intersections in both newer plans).
AestheticsReasons that relate to urban design aesthetics can also be seen as contributing to the disaffection with Portland’s platting. Starting with Camilo Sitte in 1892, who said categorically: "Artistically speaking, not one of them [grid patterns] is of any interest, for in their veins pulses not a single drop of artistic blood." The string of unfavourable comments continues to 1994 with "Upon reflection, we realized that the developers [who hired us] had a valid concern, one related to the shopping-center developers' understanding that human beings do not like endless vistas." (Duany).This insight into people's behaviour was confirmed by academic research recently (Ewing). Add to this backdrop the common, if superficial, perception of cookie-cutter planning and endless monotony, and distaste for the Portland grid emerges, particularly in eclectic urban designers.
EnvironmentSince Ian McHarg's 1969 classic book, Design with Nature, planners have been keenly conscious of the potential negative impact of land development on natural systems. Soon after, pioneering projects, such as Village Homes (1975), responded to this concern. Recently we heard: "The New Urbanism does not do grids that quash nature" (Duany 2001) followed by a movement for Low Imprint New Urbanism in 2007 (LINU). Permeability and rain water management have emerged as key indicators of a plan's fitness. On these measures, the Portland grid occupies the negative end of the spectrum of impermeability with the most road surface. With environmental concerns and regulations rising to the top of the planning agenda, any low performance plan would be disfavoured.
Compact, dense development, such as happens in downtowns, lowers the pressure for expansion and its incursion on natural environments. However, though a city's bioregion may be better off, the dense downtowns still exports large amounts of storm water and, with it, pollution. No part of the city need be absolved of the imperative to curb outflow; greening unnecessary asphalt is a viable first step. In that vein, Portland has retrofitted some streets.
Safety and mobilityPractical considerations about traffic flow and safety may also undermine its presence in contemporary plans. The term 'gridlock' fixed in the planner’s vocabulary the sudden realization that the grid and car traffic may, at times, be wholly incompatible and that the conflict increases with the grid’s density, as the space for stacking diminishes. The alternative to the grid, 3-way intersections, has been established as the safest and as enabling good flow. (Lovegrove, IBI). When streets in a grid become alternating one-ways, as in most downtowns, they create virtual 3-way intersections throughout an entire district, and achieve both safety and flow. Virtual 3-ways result also from traffic circles, as in Seattle and Vancouver, and from roundabouts, now gaining acceptance in America.
Figure 5. Diagram in ITE’s 1999, advisory document on TND street network planning.
The ordinary impression on the ground that the Portland grid 'works' in contemporary traffic conditions is casually taken as a sign of suitability. This view obscures an entire century of engineered physical, mechanical and management adaptations which are overlaid on the 1866 platting. Remove these (in a thought experiment) and imagine the outcome. Clearly, an ill-suited geometry is made to work with interventions such as dividing lines, medians, traffic signs, traffic lights, directional signs, bollards, street widening, one-ways, traffic circles or roundabouts and many others.
Abandoning the GridThe current map of Portland shows the transformations the city’s grid has gone through since the 1866 platting, a century before environmental and traffic issues drew the spotlight.
In the car-less world of 1891, a variation called ‘Ladd’s neighborhood’ was built, ignoring the surrounding perfect grid and follows a Beaux-Arts, L’Enfant-inspired plan with diagonal streets, (Figure 5) disrupting it.
Figure 6. Three layouts showing the departure from the idea of the 'grid' (all plans to same scale)
It also introduces a hierarchy of alley, local and collector streets by size and location presaging contemporary urban transportation models. In a sea of formless, perfect uniformity, it brings an organizing module (about 160 acres) that anticipates Perry's Neighbourhood Unit (1923), which also assigns a hierarchy to its streets, and, likewise, protects it from through traffic.
Transformations also happened within and beyond the 1866 city outline over time: blocks doubled or tripled in length, some streets became discontinuous and, later, curvilinear streets appeared. More recently, some of the city streets were closed to cars, effectively doubling the block size and introducing a pedestrian space in the middle; an adaptation that produces a high quality public realm which is in short supply in an extensively asphalted grid. All these transformations occurring next to an “ideal” grid leave a trail of desertion which is hard to reconcile with the affection found in literature.
ConclusionFor reasons of land efficiency, infrastructure cost, municipal expenses, rainwater management, traffic safety and flow, and the demand for increased pedestrian share of public space, the praised, pure Portland platting will likely not find new followers.
Portland will remain a adored and beloved by urbanists, but her Hippodamian grid layout seems destined for the archives, abandoned as a good idea of a byegone era. This transcendence leaves urbanists, who seek to regenerate a contemporary urban pattern that is as pure, complete and systematic, looking for alternatives: ones which excite the same first blush of adoration and delight and lead to a deep abiding love, but also hold up to intense scrutiny of their economic, social and environmental performance.
Fanis Grammenos is a principal of Urban Pattern Associates and was a Senior Researcher at Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation for over 20 years. He focused on housing affordability, building adaptability, municipal regulations, sustainable development and, recently, on street network patterns. Prior to that he was a housing developer. He holds a degree in Architecture from the U of Waterloo.
Douglas Pollard is a Senior Researcher at the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
Oregon
History / Preservation
Land Use
Op-Ed
Portland
simple grid
19 October 2009 - 5:00am
Author:
Douglas Pollard
Fanis Grammenos
For American planners, Portland, OR is held up as a shining example of urban planning, and credit is given to its compact grid. But is Portland's grid worthy of adulation? Perhaps not, say Fanis Grammenos and Douglas Pollard of Urban Pattern Associates.
In the 4000-year history of the grid, American incarnations are relatively new, appearing first about 300 years ago, frequently as a simple, orthogonal and often square (such as Portland's) 'Hippodamian' grid, named after the planner of Miletus around 473 BC (Fig 1).
A session in the recent 2009 New Partners for Smart Growth conference focused on 'The Beautiful American Grid — the Embodiment of Smart Growth,' which lamented the fact that the grid 'gets no respect'.
Figure 1. From Miletus (473 BC) to Barcelona (1859) and to Portland (1867), the grid has resurfaced in many alternative sizes of square blocks and in variations of elongated rectangles (NY 1811).
This alleged lack of respect seems at odds with most planning literature, which extols its virtues and mirrors prevalent New Urbanist practice. This disparity between theory and practice simultaneously confuses the practitioner and frustrates the theoretician. It deserves detailed attention if only to clarify this schism and enable site plan designers to know when and why they could apply 'the Grid'. Clarity about its attributes may also open the way for its regeneration.
Recognition and RespectCurrent planning literature brims with references to "the grid" in juxtaposition with curvilinear and dendrite conventional suburban layouts. The "grid" as a network concept has been widely accepted and is now regarded as a superior geometry for laying out greenfield and infill sites.
Figure 2. Portland's (Hippodamian) Grid overlaid on a Virtual Earth bird's eye view of Pearl District. The centre lines of streets intersect at 260 foot intervals.
For example, in 1992 we read that "Streets ought to be laid out largely in straight segments, as they were until the 1940s. After all, the vast majority of our successful towns and cities, from Cambridge to Portland, were laid out this way." (Duany). The grid gets credit for city success, at least by inference, but is this credit warranted?
Portland's network offers an instructive example for discussing grids because of the grid’s nature (an unadulterated Hippodamian grid and the densest of all American city grids (Fig 2, MS Earth), its size and the City’s planning celebrity status. We read again that "Portland owes much of its success to its tiny blocks that create an incredibly porous network of streets, each of which can be quite small as a result" ( Jeff Speck, 2005). In this praise, it is not simply the grid in general, but the small blocks in particular that impart success.
In articles, project brochures and city planning reports "the grid" stands alone; the other contestant, mid-to-late 1900s suburban networks, has been wholly discredited in mainstream planning. One can hardly pay more respect.
Affiliation and AffectionPortland’s street grid pattern has attracted attention indirectly and directly. Indirectly, because the City of Portland has taken many first-ever, brave and decisive measures to manage growth, and cities and planners hold it up as a model of civic vision. Inevitably, attributes of the city -- such as its grid -- are seen by affiliation as paradigmatic.
Personal testimonies of visiting planners who express adulation for Portland add a second indirect layer of attention. Constantly on the outlook for an ideal urban pattern, planners list Portland as a favorite and some boast "I love that city!" with emotion. Recently, a local movement to rename the city in order to project these strong emotions was set in motion. But strong feelings such as these may be entangled between actual attributes and personal associations, hard to unravel for practical purposes, as other cities also share such emotional investment, at times.
Urbanists and romanticists have expressed equally strong sentiments about Paris, London, Barcelona, Curitiba, Amsterdam and Venice. Of the six, only Barcelona adopted the Hippodamian grid in 1859 for its vast expansion, and Venice, without a classic grid, is the preeminent pedestrian haven, yet neither city matches the urbanist’s praise for Portland. Whatever the mix of reasons, Portland dominates the American planners' imagination feelings and talk. Disentangling this intangible realm can be an elusive goal; grounds and figures on the other hand may produce tangible results.
Grounds and FiguresPragmatic reasons may play a part in this adoration. The extreme simplicity of the plan, for example -- a uniform, perfectly orthogonal, expandable checkerboard -- could be one. As a drawing, the plan has a feel of flawlessness, the appearance of perfection, particularly in contrast with labyrinthine medieval town plans or recent bewildering suburbs (Figure 3). When this perfection is combined with a pleasant experience on the ground an indissoluble match is made.
Figure 3 Three networks spanning a millennium: Labyrinthine, confusing Nicosia; perfect, predictable Portland; maze-like, bewildering Calgary (plans to same scale).
The degree of connectivity of the street network could count as another practical reason. 'Network', by definition, is a set of linked components, whether a spider-net, a fishnet, or the Internet - all networks connect. What distinguishes them is the manner, geometry and frequency of connection: leaf, tree, blood vessels, telephone and web networks are dendrite, hierarchical (fractal) but fishnets are not. Portland’s is a dense fishnet with nodes at every 200 feet, which produce 360 intersections per square mile -- the highest ratio in America, and 3 to 5 times higher than current developments. For example, older and newer areas in Toronto, typical of most cities, range from 72 to 119 intersections per square mile in suburbs and 163 to 190 in older areas with a grid. As connectivity rose in importance as a planning principle, Portland’s grid emerges as a supreme example.
Coupled with connectivity, its rectilinear geometry is indisputably more advantageous for navigation on foot, car or bike than any alternatives. Visitors often feel lost and disoriented in medieval towns and in contemporary suburbs and this feeling leads to anxiety and even fear and a sense that all is not well.
What explains why the simplest, purest, most interconnected and easily navigated rectilinear grid, in spite of all the praise, has, evidently, not been applied in any contemporary urbanist plan, whether infill or greenfield? What caused the disaffection?
The Disaffection: SpeculationOne clue comes out of a believable legend about Portland’s grid. Unlike other American cities that were laid out by erudite generals or governors, such as Oglethorpe (Savannah, 1735) or William Penn (Philadelphia, 1701), Portland's plan was apparently conceived by scrupulous speculators who reasoned that more corner lots would yield higher profit on the land investment, hence the maximum number of intersections. Interestingly, the 1812 Commissioners Plan for New York was also denigrated as a 'speculator grid'. The 'speculator' label would usually damage the prospects of any plan; speculation is perceived as shortsighted, greedy, and at times suspect activity -- as opposed to "planning" which is a long term, public-good, goal-centered activity.
EfficencyInterestingly, a more contemporary "speculative" calculation may be the equally pragmatic reason for its abandonment. The Portland grid uses 42% of land in right of ways for streets and has the highest length of road infrastructure of any alternatives. Simply put, nearly half of the land is used up in accessing the other half. A recent comparison of an existing 338 hectare subdivision’s curvilinear pattern to an overlaid TND plan showed that the land for roads was respectively 88 and 122 hectares or 40% higher for TND with a corresponding increase in infrastructure costs (IBI) (Figure 4). No developer or municipality would savor this arithmetic.
In business districts, small blocks may force buildings to gain height and thus increase the per block net density, a financial advantage, but the gross density of such district would be comparatively lower than that of another with larger blocks and similarly tall buildings. On balance, more buildable land means more opportunities to build, tall or otherwise, and therefore more rentable space, revenue and activity.
Evidently, Portland’s founders either understood little about infrastructure costs or judged them irrelevant; a judgment that no planner, developer or municipality today would take at face value. When economic efficiency matters, Portland’s grid fails the grade.
Figure 4. Comparative Building Block sizes of Portland, Suburb and Suburb TND (partial plans). (Note the total eclipse of 4-way intersections in both newer plans).
AestheticsReasons that relate to urban design aesthetics can also be seen as contributing to the disaffection with Portland’s platting. Starting with Camilo Sitte in 1892, who said categorically: "Artistically speaking, not one of them [grid patterns] is of any interest, for in their veins pulses not a single drop of artistic blood." The string of unfavourable comments continues to 1994 with "Upon reflection, we realized that the developers [who hired us] had a valid concern, one related to the shopping-center developers' understanding that human beings do not like endless vistas." (Duany).This insight into people's behaviour was confirmed by academic research recently (Ewing). Add to this backdrop the common, if superficial, perception of cookie-cutter planning and endless monotony, and distaste for the Portland grid emerges, particularly in eclectic urban designers.
EnvironmentSince Ian McHarg's 1969 classic book, Design with Nature, planners have been keenly conscious of the potential negative impact of land development on natural systems. Soon after, pioneering projects, such as Village Homes (1975), responded to this concern. Recently we heard: "The New Urbanism does not do grids that quash nature" (Duany 2001) followed by a movement for Low Imprint New Urbanism in 2007 (LINU). Permeability and rain water management have emerged as key indicators of a plan's fitness. On these measures, the Portland grid occupies the negative end of the spectrum of impermeability with the most road surface. With environmental concerns and regulations rising to the top of the planning agenda, any low performance plan would be disfavoured.
Compact, dense development, such as happens in downtowns, lowers the pressure for expansion and its incursion on natural environments. However, though a city's bioregion may be better off, the dense downtowns still exports large amounts of storm water and, with it, pollution. No part of the city need be absolved of the imperative to curb outflow; greening unnecessary asphalt is a viable first step. In that vein, Portland has retrofitted some streets.
Safety and mobilityPractical considerations about traffic flow and safety may also undermine its presence in contemporary plans. The term 'gridlock' fixed in the planner’s vocabulary the sudden realization that the grid and car traffic may, at times, be wholly incompatible and that the conflict increases with the grid’s density, as the space for stacking diminishes. The alternative to the grid, 3-way intersections, has been established as the safest and as enabling good flow. (Lovegrove, IBI). When streets in a grid become alternating one-ways, as in most downtowns, they create virtual 3-way intersections throughout an entire district, and achieve both safety and flow. Virtual 3-ways result also from traffic circles, as in Seattle and Vancouver, and from roundabouts, now gaining acceptance in America.
Figure 5. Diagram in ITE’s 1999, advisory document on TND street network planning.
The ordinary impression on the ground that the Portland grid 'works' in contemporary traffic conditions is casually taken as a sign of suitability. This view obscures an entire century of engineered physical, mechanical and management adaptations which are overlaid on the 1866 platting. Remove these (in a thought experiment) and imagine the outcome. Clearly, an ill-suited geometry is made to work with interventions such as dividing lines, medians, traffic signs, traffic lights, directional signs, bollards, street widening, one-ways, traffic circles or roundabouts and many others.
Abandoning the GridThe current map of Portland shows the transformations the city’s grid has gone through since the 1866 platting, a century before environmental and traffic issues drew the spotlight.
In the car-less world of 1891, a variation called ‘Ladd’s neighborhood’ was built, ignoring the surrounding perfect grid and follows a Beaux-Arts, L’Enfant-inspired plan with diagonal streets, (Figure 5) disrupting it.
Figure 6. Three layouts showing the departure from the idea of the 'grid' (all plans to same scale)
It also introduces a hierarchy of alley, local and collector streets by size and location presaging contemporary urban transportation models. In a sea of formless, perfect uniformity, it brings an organizing module (about 160 acres) that anticipates Perry's Neighbourhood Unit (1923), which also assigns a hierarchy to its streets, and, likewise, protects it from through traffic.
Transformations also happened within and beyond the 1866 city outline over time: blocks doubled or tripled in length, some streets became discontinuous and, later, curvilinear streets appeared. More recently, some of the city streets were closed to cars, effectively doubling the block size and introducing a pedestrian space in the middle; an adaptation that produces a high quality public realm which is in short supply in an extensively asphalted grid. All these transformations occurring next to an “ideal” grid leave a trail of desertion which is hard to reconcile with the affection found in literature.
ConclusionFor reasons of land efficiency, infrastructure cost, municipal expenses, rainwater management, traffic safety and flow, and the demand for increased pedestrian share of public space, the praised, pure Portland platting will likely not find new followers.
Portland will remain a adored and beloved by urbanists, but her Hippodamian grid layout seems destined for the archives, abandoned as a good idea of a byegone era. This transcendence leaves urbanists, who seek to regenerate a contemporary urban pattern that is as pure, complete and systematic, looking for alternatives: ones which excite the same first blush of adoration and delight and lead to a deep abiding love, but also hold up to intense scrutiny of their economic, social and environmental performance.
Fanis Grammenos is a principal of Urban Pattern Associates and was a Senior Researcher at Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation for over 20 years. He focused on housing affordability, building adaptability, municipal regulations, sustainable development and, recently, on street network patterns. Prior to that he was a housing developer. He holds a degree in Architecture from the U of Waterloo.
Douglas Pollard is a Senior Researcher at the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
12.10.09
29.7.09
the Stranger Embarrassment of Riches article on Seattle
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/an-embarrassment-of-riches/Content?oid=1886755
beautiful home break-up story from NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/garden/23divorce.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=lakehouse&st=cse
6.7.09
Daniel Libeskind- architect
http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_libeskind_s_17_words_of_architectural_inspiration.html
24.6.09
10.6.09
8.6.09
2.6.09
1.6.09
29.5.09
26.5.09
Atlantic article on happiness- Harvard study (from Kai)
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/happiness/2
The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).
The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).
19.5.09
Hip Young Cities
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124242099361525009.html#mod=whats_news_free?mod=igoogle_wsj_gadgv1
18.5.09
WA Post article on Obama goofing up on nuclear energy
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/17/AR2009051702254.html?hpid=topnews
WA Post article on the high price of being poor
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/17/AR2009051702053.html
29.3.09
fewer work week hours argument
Compulsory Consumption
A Preservation Institute White Paper
Productivity (output per worker hour) tends to go up over time because better technology is used for production. During the twentieth century, productivity increased by just over 2.3% per year. This productivity growth has a huge impact when it is compounded over a century: the average worker in 2000 produced eight times a much in an hour as the average worker in 1900.
There are two common fallacies about the relation between productivity and unemployment:
- The Lump of Labor Fallacy: From the nineteenth century through the 1930s, labor unions commonly said that shorter work hours would reduce unemployment. Some economists claimed that unions believed there is a certain amount of work to be done; as productivity increases, workers get this work done in less time, causing unemployment. Economists called this the “lump of labor fallacy,” because there is not a fixed amount of work to be done, and: we can take advantage of higher productivity to produce more.
- The Compulsory Consumption Fallacy: Since the end of World War II, most economists and politicians have said that we must promote economic growth to avoid unemployment: we must stimulate the economy to provide jobs. This assumes that there are fixed work hours, so workers produce more as productivity increases. To avoid unemployment, we must consume as much as the workers can produce. This is the conventional wisdom of our time, and it should be called the “compulsory consumption fallacy,” because it says we must produce and consume more, whether we want the products or not, purely to avoid unemployment.
Productivity and Unemployment
We can see more clearly why these are fallacies by expanding the equation used to calculate productivity:
productivity = total output / total hours worked
Total hours worked are equal to (average hours per employed worker * total number of employed workers), so we can expand this equation to:
productivity = total output / (avg hours per employed worker * employed workers)
This expanded equation makes it very clear that, as productivity increases, any combination of the following can happen:
- Total output can increase. In other words, there can be economic growth.
- Average hours per employed worker can decrease. In other words, there can be shorter work hours.
- The number of employed workers can decrease. In other words, there can be higher unemployment.
We generally want to avoid higher unemployment, and the other two possibilities are the sources of the two fallacies. The lump of labor fallacy assumes that work hours must decrease and ignores the possibility that economic growth can absorb productivity gains. The compulsory consumption fallacy assumes that total output must increase and ignores the possibility that shorter work hours can balance the productivity gains.
Optimum Output
Clearly, we can avoid unemployment either by shortening the work week, or by increasing output, or by some combination of the two.
Which of these should we do? Which combination gives us the optimum level of output? Market economic theory gives us a very clear answer: workers should be able to choose their hours, and optimum output depends on each worker’s choice between more free time and more income.
In market theory, the choice between free time and income is the same as the choice between any two commodities. To maximize their satisfaction, consumers have to be able to choose how much of each of the two commodities they want to buy.
Imagine, for example, that you could not buy beef and beans separately, because traditional custom and government regulation require you to buy packages that include one pound of beef and one pound of beans. This would be completely unsatisfactory for people who are wealthy enough to eat beef at every meal and who do not like to eat beans. It would also be completely unsatisfactory for people who are too poor to afford beef and who just want to eat beans (and, of course, for vegetarians). There would be some people in the middle who happen to want this exact combination of beef and beans, at current prices, but they would be in the minority. Most people would get less satisfaction from buying this standard package of beef and beans than they would from choosing how much of each they want to buy.
This is just the situation that most people find themselves in when they look for a job. Because of traditional custom and government regulation, most jobs are forty-hour-per-week jobs: you must take a package that gives you this combination of work and free time. There may be some people who happen to want this exact combination of work and free time, at current wages, but they are in the minority. Most people get less satisfaction from this standard package of income and free time than they would from choosing how much of each they want.
This basic principle of market theory gives us a first approximation of optimum output: optimum output is the amount of output that we would have if people could choose between more income and more free time. For a more complete view of optimum output, we would also have to consider external costs of economic growth. These external costs seem to make optimum output is less than ourput would be chose their work hours freely, thinking of benefits and costs to themselves, ignoring the environmental costs of consuming more.
But since the end of World War II, under the influence of the compulsory consumption fallacy, we have systematically distorted the market in the opposite direction. We have promoted more consumption than people would choose freely, in order to stimulate the economy and avoid unemployment.
Average Work Week in American Manufacturing
(source: Historical Statistics of the United States)
The graph of the average work week in American manufacturing shows this very clearly.
From the beginning of the industrial revolution until the depression, the standard work week went down persistently, largely as a result of labor union demands. In addition to getting higher wages, workers wanted to take some of their increased productivity in the form of shorter work hours.
But ever since the end of World War II, the standard work week has remained constant at 40 hours. In a reaction against the depression, everyone embraced the compulsory consumption fallacy. Federal policy was designed to stimulate the economy and create jobs. And we took all our increased productivity in the form of economic growth, with no reduction in work time.
There is uncertainty about what balance of free time and income people would choose if they had the choice, but the inflection in the graph of the work week shows clearly that we have distorted this decision in the direction of more income and faster growth. From the beginning of the industrial revolution to the depression, work time declined. Suddenly, after World War II, work time stopped declining. This sudden change cannot be explained as a result of choice; it was a result of federal laws establishing a 40-hour week and of federal policies to stimulate the economy and provide more of these 40-hour jobs.
If the historical trend had continued, the standard work week would now be about 30 hours. This would reduce the total environmental impact of our economy by about 25%, dramatically reducing environmental threats such as global warming..
With or without choice of work hours, the federal government would have to fine tune the economy using fiscal and monetary policy to control inflation and unemployment. The point is that this planning currently aims at providing 40-hour jobs, and we must consume enough to provide those 40-hour jobs whether people want the products or not. With choice of work hours, this planning would aim at providing the amount of work hours that people need to purchase things they actually want.
Our Conceptual Blind Spot
It is common to attack the errors of the past and to ignore the equally blatant errors of the present. Our economists still attack the lump of labor fallacy, though the historical graph of work time shows that we have not tried to fight unemployment by reducing the work week since 1945. And our economists ignore the compulsory consumption fallacy, though we have tried to stimulate the economy and promote growth to fight unemployment ever since 1945.
The overwhelming majority of economists and politicians fall into the compulsory consumption fallacy and tell us we need to promote growth to avoid unemployment.
An increasing number of environmentalists tell us that growth is no longer increasing our well being, and that growth must slow or end to avoid ecological collapse. But virtually none of those environmentalists talk about shortening work hours, so their prescriptions for slower growth will fail because they will increase unemployment.
This paper belabors the very obvious point that we can avoid unemployment either by promoting growth or by shortening work hours. We have to belabor this point, because most people ignore it, as obvious as it is.
source: http://www.preservenet.com/studies/CompulsoryConsumption.html
27.3.09
25.3.09
Michael Feldman's What D'Ya Know?
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wyk/arts.artsmain?action=viewArticle&sid=10&id=1208218&pid=1149
16.3.09
RDI Women and Land Event
http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/philanthropy/2009/03/13/womens_day.html
27.2.09
incredible machinist/sculptor
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/arthur_ganson_makes_moving_sculpture.html
Chris Abani on humanity- "ubuntu"
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/chris_abani_muses_on_humanity.html
Barry Schwartz on wisdom
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_our_loss_of_wisdom.html
Barry Schwartz discussion on choice
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html
23.2.09
article on Iran's Jews
What Iran’s Jews Say
Esfahan, Iran
At Palestine Square, opposite a mosque called Al-Aqsa, is a synagogue where Jews of this ancient city gather at dawn. Over the entrance is a banner saying: “Congratulations on the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution from the Jewish community of Esfahan.”
The Jews of Iran remove their shoes, wind leather straps around their arms to attach phylacteries and take their places. Soon the sinuous murmur of Hebrew prayer courses through the cluttered synagogue with its lovely rugs and unhappy plants. Soleiman Sedighpoor, an antiques dealer with a store full of treasures, leads the service from a podium under a chandelier.
I’d visited the bright-eyed Sedighpoor, 61, the previous day at his dusty little shop. He’d sold me, with some reluctance, a bracelet of mother-of-pearl adorned with Persian miniatures. “The father buys, the son sells,” he muttered, before inviting me to the service.
Accepting, I inquired how he felt about the chants of “Death to Israel” — “Marg bar Esraeel” — that punctuate life in Iran.
“Let them say ‘Death to Israel,’ ” he said. “I’ve been in this store 43 years and never had a problem. I’ve visited my relatives in Israel, but when I see something like the attack on Gaza, I demonstrate, too, as an Iranian.”
The Middle East is an uncomfortable neighborhood for minorities, people whose very existence rebukes warring labels of religious and national identity. Yet perhaps 25,000 Jews live on in Iran, the largest such community, along with Turkey’s, in the Muslim Middle East. There are more than a dozen synagogues in Tehran; here in Esfahan a handful caters to about 1,200 Jews, descendants of an almost 3,000-year-old community.
Over the decades since Israel’s creation in 1948, and the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the number of Iranian Jews has dwindled from about 100,000. But the exodus has been far less complete than from Arab countries, where some 800,000 Jews resided when modern Israel came into being.
In Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Iraq — countries where more than 485,000 Jews lived before 1948 — fewer than 2,000 remain. The Arab Jew has perished. The Persian Jew has fared better.
Of course, Israel’s unfinished cycle of wars has been with Arabs, not Persians, a fact that explains some of the discrepancy.
Still a mystery hovers over Iran’s Jews. It’s important to decide what’s more significant: the annihilationist anti-Israel ranting, the Holocaust denial and other Iranian provocations — or the fact of a Jewish community living, working and worshipping in relative tranquillity.
Perhaps I have a bias toward facts over words, but I say the reality of Iranian civility toward Jews tells us more about Iran — its sophistication and culture — than all the inflammatory rhetoric.
That may be because I’m a Jew and have seldom been treated with such consistent warmth as in Iran. Or perhaps I was impressed that the fury over Gaza, trumpeted on posters and Iranian TV, never spilled over into insults or violence toward Jews. Or perhaps it’s because I’m convinced the “Mad Mullah” caricature of Iran and likening of any compromise with it to Munich 1938 — a position popular in some American Jewish circles — is misleading and dangerous.
I know, if many Jews left Iran, it was for a reason. Hostility exists. The trumped-up charges of spying for Israel against a group of Shiraz Jews in 1999 showed the regime at its worst. Jews elect one representative to Parliament, but can vote for a Muslim if they prefer. A Muslim, however, cannot vote for a Jew.
Among minorities, the Bahai — seven of whom were arrested recently on charges of spying for Israel — have suffered brutally harsh treatment.
I asked Morris Motamed, once the Jewish member of the Majlis, if he felt he was used, an Iranian quisling. “I don’t,” he replied. “In fact I feel deep tolerance here toward Jews.” He said “Death to Israel” chants bother him, but went on to criticize the “double standards” that allow Israel, Pakistan and India to have a nuclear bomb, but not Iran.
Double standards don’t work anymore; the Middle East has become too sophisticated. One way to look at Iran’s scurrilous anti-Israel tirades is as a provocation to focus people on Israel’s bomb, its 41-year occupation of the West Bank, its Hamas denial, its repetitive use of overwhelming force. Iranian language can be vile, but any Middle East peace — and engagement with Tehran — will have to take account of these points.
Green Zoneism — the basing of Middle Eastern policy on the construction of imaginary worlds — has led nowhere.
Realism about Iran should take account of Esfehan’s ecumenical Palestine Square. At the synagogue, Benhur Shemian, 22, told me Gaza showed Israel’s government was “criminal,” but still he hoped for peace. At the Al-Aqsa mosque, Monteza Foroughi, 72, pointed to the synagogue and said: “They have their prophet; we have ours. And that’s fine.”19.1.09
the pursuit of knowledge
Vietnam and foliage-killing chemicals is a hard example. (I think America was mostly in the war in fear of communism as a world power, not as much to save lives.) So I will comment on your question:
Is it the duty of a scientist to pursue truth, or knowledge? Or should they attempt to avoid the potential harm that could come from their endeavors?
You mentioned that we have a choice of whether to use the chemical or not. We also had a choice of whether or not to develop the chemical in the first place. I support scientific research (or I wouldn't have a job right now...), but I think it's limits should be explored. I enjoy hearing the tiniest details of biology that are being explored at my place of work, but what does it really mean? It seems to mean that we will know more, in case we can use this knowledge to do good (in the case of my research institution). Do you think there is a limit?
Maybe we are pouring millions of dollars into research that will primarily only aide the wealthier classes who can afford the treatment for a disease or cancer that perhaps primarily occurs in people over 60. I wonder if it would have been better to put that money into eradicating something like malaria, which kills all ages of people, oftentimes people who cannot afford treatment, and have not lead as high quality of lives because of that. I am trying to figure out if this situation means we currently have a limit on the amount of knowledge we need for disease A in an effort to focus the getting of knowledge on disease B. My point is that we do need and want a lot of scientific knowledge and I think it could be spent on better things than chemicals that kill foliage in wars.
So maybe it is not what is good, but constantly trying to figure out what is better?
The other problem is that we can think these things as much as we want, but in reality there are complex politics and disparities that get in the way of ever applying any answer we come up with. In light of that, why does good matter?
Is it the duty of a scientist to pursue truth, or knowledge? Or should they attempt to avoid the potential harm that could come from their endeavors?
You mentioned that we have a choice of whether to use the chemical or not. We also had a choice of whether or not to develop the chemical in the first place. I support scientific research (or I wouldn't have a job right now...), but I think it's limits should be explored. I enjoy hearing the tiniest details of biology that are being explored at my place of work, but what does it really mean? It seems to mean that we will know more, in case we can use this knowledge to do good (in the case of my research institution). Do you think there is a limit?
Maybe we are pouring millions of dollars into research that will primarily only aide the wealthier classes who can afford the treatment for a disease or cancer that perhaps primarily occurs in people over 60. I wonder if it would have been better to put that money into eradicating something like malaria, which kills all ages of people, oftentimes people who cannot afford treatment, and have not lead as high quality of lives because of that. I am trying to figure out if this situation means we currently have a limit on the amount of knowledge we need for disease A in an effort to focus the getting of knowledge on disease B. My point is that we do need and want a lot of scientific knowledge and I think it could be spent on better things than chemicals that kill foliage in wars.
So maybe it is not what is good, but constantly trying to figure out what is better?
The other problem is that we can think these things as much as we want, but in reality there are complex politics and disparities that get in the way of ever applying any answer we come up with. In light of that, why does good matter?
14.1.09
6.1.09
good and bad products
I have been thinking a lot about machines and products. it was something that really struck me in India- every street has a clothes washer who does a great service for very little money and they also end up being a public eye for the street. There are all these small service jobs that end up providing interaction and additional public eye. Here, we have large metal machines in our basements. Once we get those, we need to learn how to use them, we have additional appliances- irons, etc. and additional products- softeners, scented stuff. All of these things only have to do with the room they are in and the clothes that remain clean on our bodies. There is no community involved. The only interaction is when the delivery man brings them from the store to your house.
These are all the same things progressives have been thinking around- being closer to our food, paying correct prices for our goods. We realized that someone is being exploited, so we though, well, there should be fair wages and we should know through what chain the trading happens- and we have the wonderful fair trade movement. I would like to point out that it is entirely different from the foodie movement though, which brings in the local economy. Living in Seattle, the housing market crisis didn't mean to me what it does to parts of the Midwest- because my local economy is thriving from a continuing technology boom.
Is it better to buy a product fair-trade from half-way across the world or a local product? Since it is likely that there is already a company in that half-way across the world country producing a good very cheaply, then giving someone there fair wages seems good. So then we are back to the question, what do we do?
I am willing to buy products made in the USA, but I would much rather see products made in my state. We have cheap goods with little money going to the worker or even producer. Part of the money that stays in our country is how much it costs to ship this stuff everywhere, the other part (which I imagine is a little less than half considering how most retail mark-up is 50%- does anyone know a good website that shows this?) goes to large companies and large advertising systems. Now we have growing unemployment and people are scrambling to think of how to make jobs for people.
As an attempt to answer Kai's question, "what is good?", I personally feel that local cottage industry is good. (In a related note: buy Ren Zimm bags, tehehe) I am pretty sure that making chemicals that kill all the foliage in Vietnam is bad. Can we start there?
These are all the same things progressives have been thinking around- being closer to our food, paying correct prices for our goods. We realized that someone is being exploited, so we though, well, there should be fair wages and we should know through what chain the trading happens- and we have the wonderful fair trade movement. I would like to point out that it is entirely different from the foodie movement though, which brings in the local economy. Living in Seattle, the housing market crisis didn't mean to me what it does to parts of the Midwest- because my local economy is thriving from a continuing technology boom.
Is it better to buy a product fair-trade from half-way across the world or a local product? Since it is likely that there is already a company in that half-way across the world country producing a good very cheaply, then giving someone there fair wages seems good. So then we are back to the question, what do we do?
I am willing to buy products made in the USA, but I would much rather see products made in my state. We have cheap goods with little money going to the worker or even producer. Part of the money that stays in our country is how much it costs to ship this stuff everywhere, the other part (which I imagine is a little less than half considering how most retail mark-up is 50%- does anyone know a good website that shows this?) goes to large companies and large advertising systems. Now we have growing unemployment and people are scrambling to think of how to make jobs for people.
As an attempt to answer Kai's question, "what is good?", I personally feel that local cottage industry is good. (In a related note: buy Ren Zimm bags, tehehe) I am pretty sure that making chemicals that kill all the foliage in Vietnam is bad. Can we start there?
at least it's olives
I'm reading Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions right now and this reminded me a little of our conversation. If you haven't already read it, Kilgore Trout is a science fiction writer riding with a trucker in this part.
The driver said he used to be a hunter and a fisherman, long ago. It broke his heart when he imagined what the marshes and meadows had been like one a hundred years before. "And when you think of the shit that most of these factories make- wash day products, catfood, pop-"
[Kilgore talks about not being much of a conservationist for a while, citing that the Creator of the Universe regularly destroys things with natural disasters.]
They rode in silence for a while, and then the driver made another good point. He said he knew that his truck was turning the atmosphere into poison gas, and that the planet was being turned into pavement so his truck could go anywhere. "So I'm committing suicide," he said.
"Don't worry about it," said Trout.
"My brother is even worse," the driver went on. "He works in a factory that makes chemicals for killing plants and trees in Vietnam. Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes. The chemicals he mentioned were intended to kill all the foliage, so it would be harder for communists to hide from airplanes.
"Don't worry about it," said Trout.
"In the long run, he's committing suicide," said the driver. "Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way."
"I can't tell if you're serious or not," said the driver.
"I won't know myself until I found out whether life is serious or not," said Trout. "It's dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean it's serious, too."
"What?" said Trout.
"Lots worse things we could be hauling than olives."
"Right," said Trout. He had forgotten that the main thing they were doing was moving seventy-eight thousand pounds of olives to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
I am also not sure that there is a reason to take life seriously, but that is at odds with how frustrated I am about our consumer based economy. I recently had this conversation with a guy in the MN airport and we both didn't know how to respond to: what can we do now, where can we go from here?
The driver said he used to be a hunter and a fisherman, long ago. It broke his heart when he imagined what the marshes and meadows had been like one a hundred years before. "And when you think of the shit that most of these factories make- wash day products, catfood, pop-"
.....
He had a point. The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large. [Kilgore talks about not being much of a conservationist for a while, citing that the Creator of the Universe regularly destroys things with natural disasters.]
They rode in silence for a while, and then the driver made another good point. He said he knew that his truck was turning the atmosphere into poison gas, and that the planet was being turned into pavement so his truck could go anywhere. "So I'm committing suicide," he said.
"Don't worry about it," said Trout.
"My brother is even worse," the driver went on. "He works in a factory that makes chemicals for killing plants and trees in Vietnam. Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes. The chemicals he mentioned were intended to kill all the foliage, so it would be harder for communists to hide from airplanes.
"Don't worry about it," said Trout.
"In the long run, he's committing suicide," said the driver. "Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way."
.....
"Good point," said Trout. "I can't tell if you're serious or not," said the driver.
"I won't know myself until I found out whether life is serious or not," said Trout. "It's dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean it's serious, too."
.....
"At least it's olives," said the driver."What?" said Trout.
"Lots worse things we could be hauling than olives."
"Right," said Trout. He had forgotten that the main thing they were doing was moving seventy-eight thousand pounds of olives to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
I am also not sure that there is a reason to take life seriously, but that is at odds with how frustrated I am about our consumer based economy. I recently had this conversation with a guy in the MN airport and we both didn't know how to respond to: what can we do now, where can we go from here?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)