Planning for public life
Note: this was originally published by Plaza de Armas, where I write a column about city planning, place making, and community in San Antonio.
A Pattern Language, the 1977 community planning guide by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, describes an important neighborhood design pattern called Activity Nodes. Their description begins with a complaint: “One of the greatest problems in existing communities is the fact that the available public life in them is spread so thin that it has no impact on the community. It is not in any real sense available to the community.” San Antonio overhauled its City Master Plan three years after the publication of those words, but most would agree that the problem articulated by Alexander and his colleagues holds true here today.
It’s not that public space doesn’t exist. We have public parks, plazas, and squares, playgrounds and hiking trails. But in too many cases, these public spaces are not well integrated with the streetscape or with commercial and residential development. The Pearl Brewery development should give San Antonio a taste of what is possible, even if that particular project isn’t perfect. An amphitheater connects to the Museum Reach of the Riverwalk, well designed to provide ample space for public events, but also to function as a small park. A theme of food and drink gives the Pearl a sense of identity, with its high-quality restaurants and farmers market. A mix of retail and office space with apartments and condos keeps the complex at least somewhat active throughout the day. › Continue reading
Can art meet business in X Marks the Art?
Note: this was originally published by Plaza de Armas, where I write a column about city planning, place making, and community in San Antonio.
This Tuesday another public art deadline rolls around for San Antonio artists: applications are due for Cut and Paste, a program run by Public Art San Antonio that is “intended to prompt dialogue surrounding Downtown San Antonio, and to activate underutilized downtown properties” by filling empty storefronts with original artworks. This is the second wave of X Marks the Art, following on successful installations by Thomas Cummins, Cathy Cunningham-Little, Mat Kubo, and others. Eight properties are listed on the website, all within the bounds of Alamo, Flores, Commerce, and Travis streets.
X Marks the Art was launched in August 2011, using a model similar to Chicago’s Pop-Up Art Loop. But it’s hardly the first of its kind in San Antonio. Throughout 2003 and into 2004, Celia Mendoza organized installations by both local and visiting artists in vacant spaces in the city center. She called the project artWHERE, and worked with several real estate companies to gain temporary access to unused spaces. Mendoza says she launched the project simply because “there were all these great spaces downtown that were vacant, and I wanted to go inside.” › Continue reading
Alta Vista street art
Just noticed this new street art piece on a walk with my dog down to San Pedro Park. It’s painted on the side of a boarded-up ice house that has been closed for a few years:
Assessing the vibrancy campaign
Note: this was originally published by Plaza de Armas, where I write a column about city planning, place making, and community in San Antonio.
In a recent essay in The Baffler, Thomas Frank launched a vicious broadside against The Vibrant. You know the one: that mysterious quality all American cities are hotly pursuing, apart from those, like Portland and Austin, that have already caught it by the tail. No one’s exactly sure what it is or how to measure it, but it seems to involve plenty of artists and musicians riding bikes to coffee shops. Over the last decade, American policymakers have decided that whatever it is, it’s good for business.
Much of Frank’s ire is directed at the term itself. He spends nearly half the essay — almost 2,000 words — ruthlessly demonstrating the vacuity of “vibrancy.” To be sure, I’ll think twice before discussing a new Castro initiative’s prospects of finally making downtown vibrant again, or the possibility that a brewpub could launch a vibrant new era for the near East Side.
But the former Wall Street Journal columnist and Harper’s contributor proceeds to make some incisive points about what the vibrancy campaign actually means for our communities. Here’s his stab at a definition: “Vibrant is a quality you find in cities or neighborhoods where there is an arts or music ‘scene,’ lots of restaurants and food markets of a certain highbrow type, trophy architecture to memorialize the scene’s otherwise transient life, and an audience of prosperous people who are interested in all these things.”
Of course, the audience of prosperous people is the point. Artists had been relied upon in the past to get the gentrification ball rolling, and were then expected move on to the next blighted area just as the prosperous professionals moved in. In our brave new economy, having a few “creatives” wandering the streets is a rather nice amenity. › Continue reading
Developing community development
Note: this was originally published by Plaza de Armas, where I write a column about city planning, place making, and community in San Antonio.
In 1866, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was memorably described as “hell with the lid taken off” in an Atlantic Monthly article that depicted soot-soaked air and a river “streaked with petroleum.” For more than a century, this reputation was not much diminished. But not long after the Obama administration held the 2009 G-20 conference in this rust-belt city that had transformed its economy and weathered the Great Recession impressively, Pittsburgh began popping up on “most livable city” lists and being hailed as an urban success story.
Pittsburgh had watched the bottom drop out of its manufacturing-based economy and its unemployment rate hit 18 percent in the early 1980s. Hundreds of thousands of residents fled the city. So it set about doing many of the things San Antonio (among other cities) has been trying to do: it diversified its economy into health care and research, primarily through Carnegie-Mellon University; it cleaned up its water and air quality; it modernized its manufacturing sector.
But experts on the history of Pittsburgh also point to a robust record of public-private partnerships through a network of community development corporations (CDCs) as a key to Pittsburgh’s transformation into “the jewel of the rust belt.” › Continue reading
Defining the Alamo
My most recent column in Plaza de Armas covers an ongoing debate about how to improve Alamo Plaza — and in the process how to understand its meaning to San Antonio visitors and residents. My characterization of the factions was informed to a large extent by a recent article in the Express-News. Today I received a thoughtful response from Gary L. Foreman (author of the Alamo Plaza Restoration Project) that I think is worth publishing in its entirety. I certainly hope his understanding of the planning process is more accurate than what came across in my column and in the Express-News piece, and there are reasons to think it is. The Alamo is a contentious place, which makes it fertile ground for a vital dialogue about history, culture, and place. My hope — and I think Gary’s and Phil’s — is that we can use this dialogue to build a stronger community. › Continue reading
San Antonio builds a better block
Note: this was originally published by Plaza de Armas, where I write a column about city planning, place making, and community in San Antonio.
When Andrew Howard and Jason Roberts organized their first Better Block event in the Oak Cliff community of Dallas, it was largely an act of civil disobedience.
“We broke as many laws as we could with it,” says Howard. “We were ready to go to jail.”
Their cause wasn’t especially sexy. They weren’t targeting war crimes or racial oppression or animal cruelty. They were dissidents designing streets.
It worked. The Better Block Project has since applied its guerrilla street planning process to four blocks in Dallas, and been invited into at least 20 other cities.
Previously abandoned city blocks have been permanently transformed into vibrant activity centers. Following one event, they saw vacancy rates on the block go from 75 percent to 10 percent, and active strorefronts from 25 percent to 65 percent.
On March 4, San Antonio will host the first in a series of Better Block events, sponsored by the City’s Complete Streets program. › Continue reading
Better Block comes to San Antonio
Since the Better Block Project is coming to San Antonio on March 4, I thought I’d post a couple of videos about the project. My column in Plaza de Armas on Monday discusses the project in more detail.
This first video talks about the logic behind Complete Streets and what the Better Block Project is trying to accomplish:
This one shows what they actually did at the first Better Block in Oak Cliff, Dallas:
The cost of fracking
Photo by Flickr user chibi_ro
One point I make in passing in today’s column about CPS Energy’s solar deal is that the value of solar power is relative to the cost of other sources of electricity, primarily coal, natural gas, and wind. And as more of the environmental costs of the fossil fuel sources are factored into their market prices, solar becomes more attractive.
For instance, CPS opted to close an old coal plant 15 years ahead of schedule shortly before EPA regulations mandating new scrubbers were announced. These scrubbers, which remove mercury and other pollutants from power plant emissions, had been required for new facilities, but a large number of coal plants built in the 1970s had been grandfathered in. So the cost of bringing these aging facilities up to code has pushed some utilities to think seriously about retiring them in favor of cleaner sources of power.
As regulations have made coal more costly, natural gas has become much more affordable, due to the surge in fracking. Right now, fracking is almost totally unregulated. Texas is actually one of the first states to require energy companies to even disclose what they are putting into their fracking compounds. But this situation is likely untenable. Most of the concerns about fracking related to contamination of water supplies as millions of gallons of water and chemicals are forced underground to break apart rock and release natural gas. The EPA recently released a report linking fracking to contamination of water supplies, and recommended that the State of New York tighten its proposed fracking rules.
There are also concerns about the sheer quantity of water being used in these operations. As the Texas Tribune reports, the new Texas law, which will go into effect February 1, requires not just disclosure of the chemicals used but also the amount of water consumed by fracking operations. Although the amount of water used in fracking is a tiny fraction of what a big city consumes, in some regions it can be quite significant. From the Texas Tribune article:
Dan Hardin, the water board’s resource planning director, said fracking is not expected to exceed 2 percent of Texas water use.
But drilling can send the water numbers much higher in rural areas, Hardin said. For example, he projects that in 2020, more than 40 percent of water demand in La Salle County, in the Eagle Ford, will go toward “mining,” a technical term that in this case means almost entirely fracking. Until recently, no water went toward mining there.
As these natural gas operations come under closer scrutiny, and eventually actual regulation, the cost of natural gas will naturally rise. Cities like San Antonio, with ambitious solar and wind projects underway, will see the benefit of a diverse energy portfolio with a high level of renewable sources.
Pocket neighborhoods in San Antonio
The Compound behind Sala Diaz. Photo by Thomas Cummins.
This article was originally published in Plaza de Armas.
On a recent drive through the Government Hill neighborhood, along the edge of Ft Sam Houston, urban developer Peter French noticed something curious: a cluster of eight small homes with a private parking court. The cottages debuted in April 1929 on a lot that stretches one block, from Grayson to Quitman, with a typical width of about 65 feet. All the homes face inward, and are connected by a walkway that bisects the lot.
A small but growing group of urbanists, French among them, see this design as a key to building healthier communities.
These “pocket neighborhoods” simply turn houses away from the street, toward a semi-public space, which often takes the form of a landscaped courtyard. Residents give up their private yards in exchange for a larger communal area where children can play safely and adults can forge stronger relationships as they garden, barbecue, or have a drink with their neighbors after work. Proponents of this style of development claim that it has far-reaching implications for safety and social well-being. Ross Chapin, author of Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating Small Scale Community in a Large Scale World, argues that this layer of small-scale shared space helps “mend [the] broken web of belonging, care and support” that is missing from many suburban communities.
I can’t speak for the relationships forged at the Whippoorwill Cottages (a name for this development that French’s research turned up; they were originally named Grayson Courts), but I do know quite a few people who have lived in a cluster of homes with a shared courtyard off St. Mary’s Street, just south-west of King William. Often referred to simply as “The Compound,” this group of homes was not originally designed as a courtyard neighborhood: all the houses face outward toward either St Mary’s or Stieren Street. Real-estate lawyer and art enthusiast Michael Casey was approached about buying a group of four adjacent duplexes on this corner around 1990. He decided to purchase a vacant house with a large, fenced-in back yard behind the duplexes at the same time.
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