Urban Planning

Last updated Jun 16, 2021 Edit Source

• Seed

See also: Arcosanti

Brand argues that many great buildings achieved their greatness by gradual stepwise evolution over time. New buildings need to be designed with the expectation that they will evolve, because they usually outlive their initial use. Even if a building does not change its use (e.g. it remains the same university department), the needs of its users will change and the building will need to adapt. This should be done, for example, by making sure that changing the space layout in the building is possible without changing the structure.

Why Housing Is So Expensive — Particularly in Blue States

• The five states in the U.S. with the highest rates of homelessness are New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon and Washington. Some of the bluest states in the country, not one red state on that list.
• Housing is fundamental. When you fail to provide it, that failure reverberates throughout society, it lays waste to all your other carefully laid policy plans and ideals
  • That means a state like California — that prides itself on all the green energy infrastructure it’s building — is pricing people who would want to live in that infrastructure into states where they use more fossil fuels
• Two housing affordability problems
  • Supply hasn’t kept up with the demand: high-cost metros, places with great job markets haven’t been building enough housing to accommodate population growth and job growth for something like the last 30 years.
    • Democratic places have very strong demand for housing so a lot of high-income people who bid up the housing prices
    • Democratic administrations have imposed a lot of rules on construction processes (sometimes for progressive reasons like protecting the environment or giving voice to community)
      • But in some senses, it’s now been — the impulse to give communities control has been weaponized by wealthy white communities, which then used this to say you can’t build apartments and low-income housing in our wealthy neighborhoods
  • Housing cost is too high relative to low incomes: the poorest households everywhere in the country spend more than half of their income on housing costs, and that leaves them too little money left over to pay for things like food and transportation and health care.
    • If you spend more than 30 percent, HUD says that you are cost-burdened. And if you spend more than 50 percent, they say you are severely cost-burdened
• Federal housing vouchers!
  • Housing vouchers are actually one of the most effective anti-poverty programs we have.
  • They can rent an apartment on the private market. They spend 30 percent of their income, whatever dollar value that is, and the federal government picks up the tab for the rest of this.
  • Critique: if you just give everybody a voucher, or a check, or a subsidy, all that’s going to happen is that landlords or other kinds of housing suppliers are going to pocket that
    • Response: works well for housing-abundant but highly priced areas. For supply-constrained places, we need to also build more homes.
• Democratic process
  • Small-d democratic processes where people get to engage in their local government and make their voice heard, are not actually that democratic.
  • It’s not representative. And we know this, in part, from the work of political scientists who have looked at the characteristics of people who show up to a neighborhood meeting.
  • Actually seems to disallow experimentation
    • In theory: democracy allows compared to other systems is a lot of different kinds of systems to flourish and we can see what works best.
    • But what is really striking reading your work and looking at housing is actually how little experimentation is possible. And this estimate you make, really, really is wild. That it is illegal to build anything except single-family detached houses on roughly 75 percent of land in most cities today.
  • If most of the houses that already exist in your city are currently illegal under zoning, it raises questions about what the zoning is trying to do.
    • Cambridge, Massachusetts is a perfect example. The vast majority of parcels in Cambridge, Massachusetts have what are called nonconforming uses. So the structure there is in violation of current zoning laws. Either it’s too tall or too close to the street or a structure that’s illegal.
  • We’ve made communes illegal in a lot of places
    • So the boarding house that had one communal kitchen, and meals got cooked, and everybody had, essentially, a bedroom, but you all ate your meals together or ate out at a restaurant all the time, that was very typical. And certainly earliest cities — workers moved from farms to cities, and they all just rented a room in a boarding house and that was pretty much the option. It was much, much cheaper.
    • But what we’ve essentially done is say middle class preferences for having nuclear families and having your own kitchen and bath, that’s the only housing structure that’s allowed.
  • What about the resurgence of co-living arrangements?
• Homes as investment
  • We’ve really pushed housing as the engine of middle class wealth. We have really pushed people to stock a ton of their money and wealth and long-term financial security or intergenerational financial security in homes.
  • And so that also creates a politics where people are very, very nervous about anything that might negatively affect their home values
• Environmental
  • We think a lot about “Are there going to be any negative consequences to anybody from building here” — without thinking about the flip side, “if we don’t build here, what are the negative consequences?”"

• cities are the backbone and hope of social change
• either great benefit but also digital cages of surveillance and control
• what is the role of cities in the post-pandemic phase?
  • laboratories for democratic and sustainable innovations
  • smart, equitable, democratic cities
• tech has market AND social power
  • 9T market cap, more than the entirety of european stock market
• IMPORTANT QUESTIONS
  • smart for whom?
  • cities for whom?
• types of cities
  • big tech first → e.g. toronto (sidewalk labs)
  • turn data into common good and infrastructure
  • SHOULD be people first → make digital transformation work for all
    • reduce inequalities
    • affordable housing
    • health care
    • sustainable mobility
    • ecological transition
    • green public psaces
    • reduce carbon emissions
  • THEN see how we can apply tech
  • avoid techno-solutionism -> maintenance of existing systems
• involves citizen decision making
  • Making and Maintenance of OSS tech + tech that preserves privacy
• zero carbon cities of the future (energy transition)
  • electrify our mobility, shift to renewables
  • creating green spaces
  • super blocks → make larger blocks, reclaim some roads for public use
• agile digital transformation
  • ethical digital standards for cities
  • open source, open standards, interoperability
  • reproducibility
  • public money ↔ public code
  • data is the raw material of the digital economy
    • ML will increase ROI by anywhere from 10 to 30 percent
  • data extractivism
    • surveillance capitalism → you are not the customer or even the product, you are the raw material
    • black box society → strong need for public engagement
      • what are the social, ethical, racial & geopolitical implications of automated decision systems ( software is political)
      • latent costs of externalities related to manipulating data
    • new deal on data → data as digital public goods
      • data sovereignty, data portability, data trusts (data commons)
      • privacy + security by design
      • data infrastructure at city-scale
      • open standards, open APIs
      • access to historical, anonymized, and aggregated data which minimized privacy risks
      • assess automated decision systems and ensure accountability (make algorithms public)
• questions
  • how do you have mass citizen participation if there’s mass inequalities in the city?
    • how do you include the traditionally excluded?
    • participitary populations → ohh this would only be digitally native citizens
      • actually not necessarily true, lots of more senior citizens and more impoverished people
      • not a ‘facebook democracy’ → click here to sign a petition to solve a problem
      • hybrid process, physical participation, digital part just enhances participation
    • people of marginalized communities trust the government less (theyve failed them in the past)
      • make public institutions more transparent and accountable too, not just a citizen problem