On the Park Bench - Author’s Forum - A History of Street Networks: From Grids to Sprawl and Beyond

so i'm gonna let people come in for a minute or so then we're gonna begin hey welcome to on the park bench a public square conversation brought to you by the congress for the new urbanism on the park bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and allied industries providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time the webinar series is a platform for seeing new members to engage debate and collaborate on the pressing and emerging issues we're all facing now let us know if you'd like to hear about something or from someone and we'll try to line it up today we have an author's form which is a series within on the park bench discussing recently published books by urbanists and or of interest to urbanists the author's form is produced by duru tadani architect and urbanist who works behind the scenes to put this together thank you duru today's author's form is a history of street networks from greeks to sprawl and beyond with author lawrence auerbach and the discussion with andres dewani norman garrick paul crabtree recall and douglas duwani share your thoughts hashtag on the park bench www.tinyurl.com ottv feedback and register for our next webinar tuesday may 4th columbus downtown development corporation parks proving their worth join us as a panel discusses the role parks will play in the future of wellness development and community in our cities see go to cnu.org resources on the park bench hyphens in between and i want to remind everybody of cb29 design for change our 29th congress for the new urbanism coming up may 19th through 21st it's going to focus on the interaction of design and power the power design holds to influence the way we live to physically change and adapt the spaces we inhabit is how as well as how we can use it to achieve the change we want to see in neighborhoods towns cities and across regions the cmu 29 program is going to break the mold of previous congresses with multiple formats to maximize the benefits of the virtual congress and encourage creativity and innovation from participants learn more at cmu.org cnu29 we've got a great discussion today with author lawrence auerbach a history of street networks from grids to sprawl and beyond he is an independent writer and editor specializing in urban design and sustainable transportation he's been involved in the new urbanism and smart growth for two decades working on a variety of topics including project evaluation street networks and green urbanism he wrote the tnd design rating standards listed in the epa compilation of smart growth scorecards and served on the review panel for epa's award for smart growth achievement several times he configured it to the books the language of towns and cities 2012 and the charter of the new urbanism second edition 2013 lawrence helped to write portions of the lead for neighborhood development rating system and has written many important blog essays he served on the boards of the institute for architecture and art mid-atlantic chapter and the congress for the new urbanism dc chapter we've got a great panel today i'm going to make these introductions brief because we have a lot to get to but of dpz co-design norman garrick professor of civil and environmental engineering university of connecticut paul crabtree of crabtree group inc and recall of hall planning and engineering not pictured it's douglas duwani landscape architect and i'm rob studeville with cnu editor of cnu's online journal public square and senior communications advisor a history of street networks from grids to sprawl and beyond explores the origins and institutionalization of modern roadway networks particularly the networks of urban sprawl the book surveys an international history of these powerful yet unheralded infrastructure systems now um we're going to get i'm going to give a brief discussion of the structure of this webinar today uh we're going to start with a uh with a description of the book by andreas duwani and then move on to a presentation by the author lawrence auerbach who's going to talk and explore about some of the uh some some of the uh material from the book and then we're going to have a panel discussion from our excellent panel today mostly a panel of engineers uh with the exception of andreas who's uh an architect and an urbanist and um douglas who's a landscape architect and so i'm looking forward to that and i'm going to uh now stop oh yeah i should mention that we're going to uh we're going to have q a from the audience but it's going to take a little bit longer today to get to that q a because of the the panel discussion that we have but we will get to that uh probably after the our point um so please ask your questions in the q a function of zoom uh as they occur to you and we'll get to them i am stopping sharing my screen and andreas you can take over okay can you hear me yes perfectly okay uh so um uh we had a little chat before this began and lawrence uh basically said that he was bracing himself for me to say something controversial which is absolutely to be expected well uh the only controversial thing that i'm going to say today is that i am such an extravagant admirer of this book that it's almost unbelievable and i may actually spoil it for everyone else by not allowing or perhaps not not creating a space for criticism so when this book arrived thank you lawrence i've known lawrence for a very long time and i know he has been a very very important player in the background a great team player and behind actually so many of the most important initiatives of the new urbanism he's there and he's making them better and doing really steady and i think very very polished work when this book arrived and i saw it and i said well one more brilliant book by another brilliant new urbanist i've got about a dozen you know um i don't know i've got i've got dozens of books um by new urbanist uh just emily taylon writes one a year and i was thinking well here's one more uh great and then i uh i put it aside and i began looking at it and uh wherever my eyes landed i was just extravagantly impressed with what i saw and i'd like what i read and what i saw and i'd like to just say a few things and position it in what where this book sits in i think the the uh the discourse of urbanism the first is that it is absolutely comprehensive it really it begins with michelangelo and it ends yesterday with uh you know the the very the la the the the last words are about evb vehicles of the small kind the micro vehicles which are exactly what i'm talking about what i've been talking about this week so it's very comprehensive and uh uh the second thing about his comprehensiveness is that it pulls together i have a pretty good shelf on what i consider the history of uh not just uh you know traffic uh but actually uh public space it is in fact what uh streets are the public space of america streets are the public spaces of most cities i think squares and plazas and and and parks get too much credit they're a tiny percentage of the public space and the streets are the public space and if engineers knew that they were actually the designers of the public space of america they would actually have um i think it would it would just attract the best minds um it isn't just about doing something that's akin to plumbing and doing black box calculations it's actually the design of the public space of america this brings up one more thing which is about our tr our engineers the four that are here the other four that we we all know about they are very special because they're generalists most engineers know only one thing this is the dimension that the book says and that's the way it has to be i think if you speak to any one of the of the four engineers present and the other four they're actually experts on architecture they're experts in marketing they're experts in landscape they're experts in hydrology one of the things that i think defines a new urbanist is actually that they're generalists you know the fact that you have douglas who is an expert in philosophy and who uh uh can also design very nitty gritty curbs uh in the in the city shows the kind of thing we are and by the way people like peter swift have learned to draw as well as most architects you know so that is uh what makes i think all of us special but especially unusual in the engineering profession that i think has been taught to focus on only one thing in order to solve problems now about this book the first when you finally open it and you've gotten through emily taylon's and everybody else's book aaron ben joseph's you know those big piles of books you realize and your eyes as i said land anywhere is that it is actually perfectly clear at no point that my eyes land on any and any sentence or paragraph that wasn't limped perfectly clear and completely free of fluff and cat which is unheard of in almost any field and it can communicate at the highest level and also to regular folk and that's really an achievement it is very very easy to read one of the things that makes it easy to read is that although there are i think something like nine chapters the chapters are subdivided into sub sections that are rarely rarely more than two pages long and in these two pages um lawrence just nails the subject you know he just gets it down whether it's about a person or about a principal or about an event or about a theory you read two pages and you say i know exactly what that's about let's you know and so you get a constant feeling of satisfaction and for some reason you don't get the feeling of being overwhelmed which is what happens when writing is dense somehow the writing is very dense but it doesn't feel dense it's almost miraculous in that way there's a lightness to it that uh just shows an extraordinary skill okay now um that doesn't mean it isn't scholarly um i have whole books on a book at least on a topic that lawrence covers in in three pages which is amazing but the scholarly the scholarship is extraordinary at the rear there are 50 pages a little bit over 50 pages of closely spaced notes and footnotes you know that's what went into it i don't think is anything has been left out and if you want to look further there it is but there will be no need to look further because this is this is what you need to know it's uh in fact if you look further you might actually get confused by by people writing about simple things and overwhelming them by by writing too much okay now one thing that is rarely said but books these days give my hurt my eyes if not my teeth okay uh they're they're the books the typography is too small there's a fashion of making the ink gray it's very very hard it's irritating to read most books the other thing and this is not this is perfect the typography the layout the spacing everything is perfect and even more unusual all the illustrations of which there must be i don't know whether 100 or certainly more of a 100 they've been put through a filter a kind of a kind of gray filter that makes them compatible so you don't get you know black and white and then bright color and then a bad uh you know a bad image of some kind everything has been kind of um produced into what in films is called continuity the book has beautiful continuity all the images show you exactly you know by this kind of gray filter it shows you exactly what you need to know you don't have to squint and you're not distracted by extraneous things so although it is not a conventionally beautiful book you know the kind that have bleed photographs to the edges and you know different page colors it's actually at first appearance it is actually quite a dull looking book almost out of date you know something out of the 50s but it's not it's actually beautifully produced and just right if you want to read it and learn a lot and i really admire that part because i find most books irritate graphically so it's beautifully produced fifth and this is something that comes through you know there are books that are written let's say about food or some about paper clips or some about the history of uh you know climate change or the history of the hat and through these very small apertures these um these uh authors uh brilliantly manage to actually portray all of society you know everything about the society about its concerns its troubles its aspirations you know and uh and um they're kind of miraculous books this book is like that also okay it it yes it is about street networks but i think it's the worst thing about the book i mean probably the only bad thing is that the title doesn't do it justice it's not about grids it's about it's about the entire of the idea of society through its movement system so through its ability to move and so what you learn uh on the side is uh you get a history of four centuries and more precise and a very precise history of two centuries uh on society so it isn't i mean you you don't need to know anything or be or even care about about streets and grids and movement systems to just learn a huge amount about our world and so i think of all the kind of small apertures through which people write books that are histories of society i think this is one of absolutely one of the best and probably because because movement networks are in fact a very good a very good aperture to which to look uh through which to approach now uh this book had is has the characteristic of being a kind of assassin there are books periodically that are written that obviate the need for any further book on the topic like for example pattern language is probably the best known but there have been other books like for example if you look at raymond unwin's town planning and practice there wasn't a need to publish another book as comprehensive as that one for a very long time and uh this one has that aspect this is like an hourglass you know uh all these grains of sand in the upper half all the people and the ideas and the experiments and the aspirations they come through this book and then at the end it disaggregates and after this i don't think there will be a need there may be a need for an appendix lawrence as you as we see how the next 10 or 20 years come out you know with all the troubles we're about to have and as we know 21st century is a tough time but uh it may need an addendum it might need an additional addition but it will not need another cut there will be no need for a further need for a comprehensive book on on this kind of history so by the way on the side you also get the history of urban planning and i think one of the things that new urbanists don't know enough about they really don't they don't know enough about their own history the history of urban planning they're very practical they're very uh oriented to the current situation and they really don't know not even the professors particularly know where these ideas came from that actually they didn't come come out of nowhere they were actually human beings that invented dendritic systems they were human beings that invented the grid that adjusted the grid that adjusted the diagonals you know that that invented great separation there is a history and that history is profoundly satisfying and one of the things that does and here's where it stands about there among uh the many books of the new urbanism there is a large number of books that are persuasive for example uh or lecturers that are persuasive for example joe manicotsi is an extraordinarily persuasive lecturers suburban nation our book was extraordinarily persuasive okay so there's that we have a lot of persuasion one of the things i notice about our our conferences and congresses is we spend too much time persuading people that are already there because they're convinced and then there's another kind of book which is technical the counter books have sometimes been technical certainly the smart code and the modules are technical they tell you what to do this is what you do but they don't really explain why this is that middle a kind of missing middle that explains why okay we should probably be getting to yeah i'm almost done between the persuasion between the persuasion and the technical books if you know why this happened it will give you the confidence to stand up for the ideas because too many people buckle okay because they don't know where it came from and they're overwhelmed and this is the kind of book that sits in the middle and we'll let you give you the confidence stand up to to either technical people or uh just political people and that happens to me the last of my notes so i'm going to go and mute right let me share my screen here thank you andres your praise and attention are extraordinary maybe even over the top and i thank you as sincerely as i can thanks also to rob studeville dhiru to donnie and leah galagos for organizing the cnu authors forum series it's a remarkable service for authors and readers alike okay so i've been writing about new urbanism for 20 years or so and to me one of the most interesting topics is the factors that impede or prevent new urbanism surveys find that thirty to as much as sixty percent of the us market prefers new urbanism but only ten to twenty five percent of households reside in even slightly walkable neighborhoods lawrence i can't hear you see your screen okay let's see on the bottom did you click on the share screen i am we can see him you can see can you see his screen oh no yeah i'm clicking on it leah do you have a suggestion or maybe can you do it for him no i can't i can't share a screen for him did the person who started allow all to share screens it says i might i might need permission from the host yeah and the host is leah if you tried hitting your green button leah work this out in a minute for everybody out there lawrence can you try again please i'm clicking on it yeah sometimes there's a delay no i'm sorry i'm not seeing um he's got permission i could try logging out and logging back in maybe try to do that quickly okay if you do that quickly i don't know if any of the folks have anything to say or while he's doing that um thoughts on lawrence's book from anybody in the panel one thing i was gonna i forgot to say is that uh you should all click on lawrence's homepage to see not only what he's done but how much useful stuff he has done that is still useful and that some of us don't even know about which is i didn't it slipped past me and uh uh so i think the home page would be a really good and it would it's very enriching to look at it there's a suggestion that the powerpoint presentation be emailed to the host could be emailed to me and i could advance it um okay what's a home page we see you lawrence okay can you see my screen i can now i can see you you have to share the screen and then um and then select a window that would be your presentation there you go excellent all right finally uh let's see going forward surveys find that 30 too much is 60 percent of the us market prefers new urbanism but only 10 to 25 percent of households reside in even slightly walkable neighborhoods this means that in the us alone the unserved market for new urbanism is tens of millions of households why is that one set of obstacles is traffic planning regulations and customs having to do with roadway networks those rules make good design difficult or impossible they perpetuate the widespread pattern of suburban sprawl roadway networks here's a few examples to illustrate what i'm talking about these maps are from sprawlmap.org and the cul-de-sacs are colored in red this is boulder county colorado outside the city of boulder antioch california in the san francisco metropolitan area and uk examples suburban belfast ireland and warrington england where newtown development surrounds the historic core although their details are somewhat different these sprawl patterns are based on similar design principles they are very difficult to retrofit and inhospitable to infill and that is by design so how do these patterns originate we know that excessive traffic conflicts with roadway livability the general thesis of my book is that city builders consistently used one basic idea to address that conflict the separation of different types of traffic from each other based on function for example freight traffic was separated from passenger traffic through traffic was separated from local traffic and so on the various methods of traffic separation can be sorted more or less naturally into four themes vertical separation and in the horizontal dimension divided in solar and fast roadways vertical schemes began to appear in earnest soon after passenger rail was introduced like this 1845 scheme for london the idea was to bring railroad speed to city streets which would relieve congestion and shorten commutes schemes like this one created multi-level urbanism with powered vehicles and pedestrian-oriented frontages on multiple levels they promised to spur business development create new social spaces and provide architectural beauty this 1891 scheme by the architect alfred thorpe may have been the first serious proposal for a city-wide elevated roadway network west street in lower manhattan was a critical bottleneck in america's transportation system and its persistent congestion motivated many proposals from the 1860s to the 1920s thorpe's scheme served freight wagons on the ground level and trains on the second level the third level would have new storefronts and a boulevard and promenade that he described as splendid in 1925 manhattan borough president julius miller proposed a similar scheme but he had to split it for political reasons the rail element was moved a few blocks inland and became the high line the road element became the west side elevated highway this illustrates how pedestrian orientation was eliminated from this genre and it transformed into elevated freeways divided roadways from the 1600s to the 1800s in europe this type was often associated with elite recreation and social exclusion this is the avenue of the empress in paris around 1858 baron hausmann made a spur-of-the-moment decision that the avenue should be 120 meters or 390 feet wide the widest boulevard in the world at the time the central travel way was divided into three lanes for equestrians pedestrians and the center for general traffic during the reign of napoleon iii the avenue became part of the daily ritual a giant parade of carriages displaying the wealth and status of the city's elite the avenue's divided lanes reinforced social stratification in paris later designers had the goal of rationalizing chaotic traffic streams that contained many incompatible modes and vehicles frederick law olmsted designed this parkway for beacon street in boston in 1886. it had dedicated space for five travel modes and was one of the first proposals for bicycle lanes on a city boulevard insular roadways are partially or totally withdrawn from general traffic circulation they date from ancient times and were often motivated by a desire for protection as well as social exclusion and status for example through most of the 19th century many of london's privately managed neighborhoods had street barriers they wanted to restrict offensive traffic types ensure quiet and insulate themselves from lower class districts the city had as many as 300 barriers at any one time but they were fought and eventually banned critics said they created lengthy annoying detours and were unfair devices of elitist exclusion in the u.s frederick law olmsted worried that business development would degrade his elegant residential suburbs he believed that inconvenient street patterns would permanently suppress all neighborhood change his plan for riverside in 1869 illustrated his principles on the side facing downtown chicago external connections were closely spaced on the other sides connections where one-eighth is frequent even where there were no natural barriers this idea was later called the traffic island or cellular pattern a network of high-volume arterials forms the boundaries of residential cells inside the cells street layouts discourage or block through traffic and the number of external connections is limited clarence perry an educator and social activist was a leading popularizer of the cellular concept in 1929 he declared we are going to live in cells the cellular city is the inevitable byproduct of an automobile age the traffic engineering and land planning sectors took up the idea with alacrity it promised a tantalizing combination of safe residential environments and high-speed vehicular movement it offered a model for the automobile age that could structure suburbs and restructure cities the u.s federal housing administration issued powerful guidance like this extremely cellular plan it was a neighborhood unit on 460 acres or 186 hectares but it had only two external connections insularity from the surrounding roads and properties was nearly absolute a subset of the cellular pattern is the dendritic or tree-like pattern these patterns typically typically consist of arterials which branch into collector streets which branch into cul-de-sacs raymond unwin working in the early 1900s made superblock and cul-de-sac layouts a signature element of garden city planning he wanted to promote social intimacy provide refuge from automobile noise and reduced development costs this plan for hampstead garden suburb in london had superblocks up to a quarter mile long 26 acres in area with cut through pedestrian paths unwind's principles were extremely influential to uk development patterns and later trends like the new towns movement some schemes retrofitted existing grids into dendritic patterns this 1933 proposal for hastings street in detroit was intended to demolish a vital center of black american business and culture in the name of slum clearance the grid would be severed to form rows of cul-de-sacs and the main streets would be transformed into freeways and partially limited access arterials elements of this plan were built later in the 1930s and the chrysler freeway replaced hastings street in the 1960s dendritic subdivision designs reached a tipping point in american architectural establishment in the 1940s this 1946 plan from the harvard graduate school of design anticipated the winding cul-de-sac patterns that would dominate american suburbs in the late night in the late 20th century the plan aimed to provide healthy living closer to nature jobs and daily needs within walking distance and rapid unimpeded car travel most plans that were inspired by garden city planning like this one had superblocks with cut-through footpaths but the urban land institute advised against cut-through paths in the 1940s because of privacy and crime concerns and they were generally rejected by the american housing market they were much more prevalent in european countries especially the uk and denmark fast roadways those intended for speed driving had origins in the sport of horse trotting formal and informal races were held on park and suburban roads and as traffic volumes increased in the late 19th century racers pushed for exclusive facilities the most famous was the harlem river speedway in manhattan only fast carriages were allowed on the two and a half mile road and it had iron railings and three underpasses to keep pedestrians off the road surface you can see an underpass in the bottom corner of this picture horse carriage speedways established the legal and cultural precedence for high-speed motor traffic in urban settings nationwide the most advanced speedways borrowed all but a select class of vehicles eliminated access to adjacent properties banned at great street intersections and had high speed curvilinear geometry motor vehicle drivers began campaigning for similar roadways thomas mcdonald chief of the u.s bureau of public roads for 34 years established the guiding vision for the us interstate freeway system by 1925 if not earlier he believed that highways penetrating city centers were the most important traffic planning priority around the same time starting in the 1920s these four methods of traffic separation began to be sifted and blended that was spurred by mass automobile ownership and the rise of the auto industry as a major political power the blending of cellular planning and urban freeway planning was exceptionally successful after world war ii i'll describe a few milestones in that process in 1943 bpr chief thomas mcdonald informed the american society of civil engineers that freeways and expressways would restructure cities according to the cellular principle he said this remodeling into neighborhood cells was necessary for their survival of cities an important tool to accomplish that remodeling was a policy called functional classification the policy classified roadways into a few types to guide roadway design at an administration its purpose was to concentrate funding and traffic on a relative few yet elaborate highways and arterials functional classification helped guide suburban development into cellular patterns the policy was advanced by the auto industry highway engineers and the federal government in close partnership a powerful group called the automotive safety foundation led the corporate effort to mandate functional classification in the u.s the group was entirely funded and directed by automakers and associated industries from the 1940s to the 1960s asf was the leading purveyor of state and city traffic plans and classification schemes that determine the control funding and design of urban highways and arterials this vision of urban freeways is from their first initiative in california in 1946 the planning sector also contributed to the push for cellular layouts one of the largest planning efforts of the 1950s the chicago area transportation study said that urban freeway networks were required in order for the cellular pattern to work at all otherwise the bounding arterials would be overloaded with longer distance traffic this diagram from the study showed how existing grids could be obstructed to create cellular layouts the chicago study was a model for the 1962 federal highway act which required metropolitan area planning so there was this tight linkage between the cellular pattern freeways and auto dependency the auto companies were well aware of this and that was one reason they supported functional classification so strongly this emblem was created by asf to show the changes that functional classification would bring to urban areas from the older walkable city centers to progressively more sprawling and disconnected roadway patterns in the outer suburbs asf state highway engineers and their allies finally got functional classification mandated in the u.s in 1973. their efforts had lasting impacts on u.s roadway patterns from 1980 to 2017 urban freeway mileage more than doubled and urban arterial mileage increased 80 percent both outpacing urban population growth america's new roadway networks became more sprawling and disconnected just as asf had pictured in recent decades america's new street networks have been some of the most disconnected in the developed world and in terms of extent america stands far beyond the rest no other country has as much disconnected street network sprawl that has enormous consequences for america's quality of life because disconnected street networks are correlated with more driving more car pollution and more life years lost to crash injuries and fatalities the neo-traditional urban design movement arose in the 1960s and 1970s to counter the worst aspects of status quo urban planning and it aimed to reduce the extremes of traffic separation the st lawrence neighborhood near downtown toronto was designed in 1975-1976 and was the first neo-traditional neighborhood to be built sixty percent of its dwellings were affordable and it was a pioneering example of brownfield infill the traffic plan kept the through streets that crossed the freeway on the southern border and it added interior loops that formed extra small blocks the plan was a conscious rejection of auto oriented super block and ring road planning it was intended to promote connections in building variety and engage with the surrounding community and historical context the la villette project for paris was a 1976 competition entry by leon creer it was the first neo-traditional plan to gain international recognition at first glance this looks like a simple grid but note the width of the bordering avenues they indicate the scale of the plan the blocks were tiny the streets were very narrow most had one travel lane and even the main axial thoroughfare had only two travel lanes half the streets were car free or car limited and a bordering boulevard served as a bypass route for through traffic curving along the top here career said that compact mixed use of neighborhoods similar to this were the only solution to urban traffic problems all the early neo-traditional projects demonstrated ways to tame cut through traffic none had simple grids extending in all directions and that was one of the elements that distinguished traditional urban design from neo-traditional in conclusion i believe that an understanding of street network history can help urban designers and advocates win the argument for better street networks another thing that could help is a consensus among urban designers about the meaning of better because there is little guidance available to new orleans new urbanism practitioners about cellularity we have several excellent resources that explain why street connectivity is recommended and beneficial but we have no in-depth guidance about the recommended degree of cellularity in a range of contexts or case studies performance evaluations and so on i hope that my book will direct more attention to street network design in general and help remove impediments to new urban plans and retrofits thank you for listening and with that i'll turn the floor over to the panel discussion i'll jump in here thanks thanks lawrence i really enjoyed working with you on on the rainwater initiative and in fact the the article that you wrote dense and beautiful stormwater management was so comprehensive and completed pretty much ended our our efforts it was it wrote the book on it and uh it was a done deal so um very good work on that um one one of the things that i've been fascinated about on on on this subject is the virtuous goals of the of the you know planning leaders of the 20s and 30s like clarence stein um i particularly got fascinated with him with his radburn and then baldwin hills village which he said was the ultimate culmination of the red burn ideas and i spent a day there and it's a beautiful park setting with um very tall sycamore trees and i spent a couple hours there on a saturday and i saw two people in that beautiful park setting and i walked around the block and it was all um backs of houses there was and then there was a separated parking lot that required um security forces to walk people to their units and then there was a strip shopping center with parking in front and i was just fascinated how his goals were so virtuous and he was so certain that he had solved the problem of of the automobile and it's sort of i think a cautionary tale for us that really demands self-criticism and some humility about our virtuous goals excellent point uh that's a theme i see over and over people focusing on small scale and and and missing the forest for the trees not not seeing the larger scale impacts so you know providing uh great environments on on a particular cul-de-sac but not paying attention to the arterial next door that that is the result this is rick hall i totally agree with paul on the on the uh the virtuous nature of many of these thought leaders through history um but this book lawrence uh there there's such a rich history here for us to observe that we can consider those um uh fine ideas and find motivation of each of the individuals yet we can see when the results went sour and why they went sour the i like the idea that you gave jane jacobs four pages that's beautiful i learned that jane jacobs used to work in the propaganda business for the u.s government during world war ii so um robert moses didn't have a chance robert moses had no chance that um going up against her i mean and she you say was a modernist she was supporting all the modernist ideas of urban renewal and and freeways until she walked some of the neighborhoods that were that had faced urban renewal and saw the cultural disaster that that was putting forward so thanks for that history chapters one through seven are of the rich history chapters eight nine and ten are our experience and you've documented that so well um so i'll tell you here's here's my pronouncement on the book until the transportation engineers all study history from this book the shift will not occur the shift will not occur until all the transportation engineers study from this book and a few others but mainly this book and and then their eyes will open there will be a paradigm shift in in oh they say oh you mean we are the modernists we are the functionalists uh in this ball game so thank you again for that real quickly your recommendations are beautiful you say study the history fear the freeways be cautious with the cellular patterns and review the past solutions they may have come back around but finally know the history before we can advance very well written very well summarized on the last page thank you very much lawrence thank you rick uh that's amazing for you to say very kind um i don't know if it's the last word i don't know if it's the only word pro i would say no and absolutely not it's it's not the last or the only word uh uh but but i'm uh i'd be more than happy to just to make a good contribution so um lawrence i would like to amplify that last point you made um about the fact that this is absolutely not the last word i think this history is so rich and so fascinating and it it the the the um lessons from it are so numerous including understanding where ideas came from but also understanding what happens when ideas get morphed from what from the beginning point to the end a lot of what seems to fail in some of these ideas is what gets left out in the implementation phase so the last point you ended up with is the need to really understand at a city-wide level at the um regional level how different systems work and i think there's still so much work to be done on that um that this is definitely there needs to be a lot of work done the history is going to help us get there but i don't know if i i agree with rick in saying that um this is going to change any minds in the um engineering community uh yes i agree that engineers need to know their history but i don't see it necessarily changing how things get done until we start to recognize that what we are trying to do is not just about moving vehicles and that is not the only thing that we are being paid for but we are being paid to make communities i think that is the recognition that is really lacking from how governance from how the professional organizations from how the engineering acts so that idea of bringing all of these bits together and understanding at the center of city making is how we deal with movement i think if we don't get to that point then i don't see um this utopia that rick um is seeing in in looking at the history so you would say necessary but not sufficient not sufficient at all agree may i may i just add one thing to this there are mechanisms in the united states that always happen to secede from things that don't work and we're very aware of people who leave the urban areas for suburban areas we're aware of people who leave england and arrive in new england and people who leave the northeast and go to the to go to the sun belt we know that we can succeed the great mechanism we have is the homeowners association you know which actually allows you to write your own rules and the pud the pud being the physical and the homeowners association being the administrative they have never been fully used for pilot projects and we used to use them you know dpz was very good at at an at uh at using that platform what has been happening over the years and very quickly is that the engineers have grabbed hold of the standards outside the pud right out that pud was supposed to release us from and homeowners association and now the standards apply within these experimental platforms you know if the pud could be restored to its original intention back in the 1970s when they were written and the homeowners associations in the 80s we could actually posit utopias and experiment and so perhaps the first step would be to push back and say give us back the authentic pud and property owners association so i i actually have a point to make about that um the the charter of the cnu talks about regional and regional planning and regional uh regional planning but we almost never engage at that level as as a organization and really i think that is fundamental to the changes we are talking about here because we are talking about patterns of movement that are fundamentally at regional scales and if we don't start to engage there then we are setting up ourselves for failure yes we're going to have nice pockets of urbanity but we're never going to have functional con community on a regional scale right you know uh the 15-minute city which is now so popular uh we've been studying it with a rob and uh the 15-minute walk the 15-minute bike the 50-minute electric vehicle neighborhood electric vehicle and the 15-minute truck give us the basis for that regional planning we just never had we only had the five-minute pedestrian shed that's been part of our problem okay and we only had the 15-minute pedestrian shed we never had the 15-minute automobile ship do you know how many people live in a 15-minute automotive wheel shed or even an ev vehicle 1.4 million with an electric an electric bike can reach 1.4 million people at a um uh in 15 minutes at at 20 miles an hour and that might be the basis that would allow us to engage this because it's our it's in our dna it's in our method in our system and perhaps that's the next step for new urbanism to get i agree wise is getting off the pedestrianism and saying what do cars do what do electric vehicles do what about that 1.4 million people that we can actually bicycle to it's interesting and what about the commuter rail well the commuter rail actually is overly liberating what i found when i diagrammed it is that you know if you can say well paris um paris has a very dense network of commuter rail basically it destroys the discipline that's what's interesting about it you know when you when you draw it you know the everything can be anywhere the hospital can be anywhere uh within huge regions within regions of six and ten million people and so i actually the commuter rail destroys that discipline you sound like a martian why don't you what do you think it is i had one one reaction to uh norman's comment which was um there's a lot of proposals for uh blocking off streets uh low traffic neighborhoods uh putting in diverters um and uh that that's not the only way to reduce uh traffic um volumes if if a community is looking to reduce uh traffic volumes to to improve livability there's also policy solutions emissions charges congestion charges limited traffic zones those are the kinds of things that that need to be conceived and discussed and implemented on the regional scale so that's that's all a part of regional governance so i just wanted to jump in here and say that we're almost at the one hour mark and then we're going to continue this discussion i wanted to remind everybody who's watching uh that you can ask questions in the q a using the q a format of zoom and that if people have to leave now we're going to be posting the uh the video uh you know within about a day or so and everybody can see the answers uh hopefully we'll uh will continue for for about another half an hour or so on this discussion uh if we get enough questions from the audience um uh so uh we can um um i don't know if anybody has any kind of last thoughts on this uh on the uh the panel discussion right now yeah i'd like to to throw in one last idea um robert um rob the the idea of context context um andres introduced the transect to us one through six um i remember being in the room when that first uh was was uh discussed and then florida d.o.t has come up as a state dot with eight classifications and they are using those classifications to determine how to design the streets within each one and every mile of highway in the state of florida that they own each has a clear classification and their design manual has been rewritten to emphasize those areas of context so we can be urban and design urban be rural and design rural and i think the the evolution of that is in addition to this history that uh uh we that we have in the book uh will combine to give us a surge forward uh lawrence have you seen that classification system from florida and and what do you think about that i have seen it it's it's uh florida is one of the leading states in this in this field of um context-related uh traffic planning uh there's only a few states that had that have made such progress uh and they really should be commended for what they're attempting to do what they're uh striving for um i don't know how it's been implemented i'd like to learn more about that the the outcomes uh but so far it looks good lawrence can could you all hear me now yeah yeah oh fantastic there was a little obviously a technical issue yeah that caught me because i'm on phone and computer listen the book is splendid i don't know about we have any time do we have enough time for any other comments yeah sure um get ready really are you sure yes well the book is the the book is is well i have a category in which what books will be read in the next century and yours made that grade which is very very very few you really have an extraordinary achievement period it's extraordinary okay so a critique of your book involves the the actual maze of the intellects that have been trying to figure out the traffic problem you know it's an intellectual book about intellectual theory and i want to do a meta theoretical critique of it if i may use an incredibly heavy word okay which is if the source is a perfect compendium of all the theory that has been cooked up and practiced by traffic engineers and people concerned with traffic the critique has to develop by looking at actual human ecology and human habitat in its original patterns because they're always transformed in other words a super block or a penetrated super block becomes is not a block of blocks in a traditional city and there are you know any number of examples that follow this one of the ways that you can cut the gordian knot is happen in the last red which is only a few months ago in which i realized that people were talking thinking they were doing a pedestrian scheme but couldn't stop talking about cars how many charades have you been in which everybody advances pedestrianism and 97 of all the talk and actual design is based on car talk do you see what i mean so we're really talking about a gravity well we're talking about a black hole and the black hole may actually be which is what's meta theoretical and maybe your book may be a companion of technical reasoning you see what i mean so what can be the basis of a critique of technical reasoning and it can only be human ecology in its natural patterns whether you study islam or an ancient historic city or go to nepal things like that and that may be the actual critique of the car you know because in reality the cities that are best loved and have capacity for 15 minute increments are actually retrofit for the car you know as you have a mount village or you have an indian city that was not designed with car movement but just with bear supply market movement in mind and it's retrofitted for the car now as the city itself and its patterns which are complex are the actual critique of traffic engineering and engineering thinking and i'm sure it's not all over your head but it's it's a new it's another departure point on your book and as you have exhausted the compendium of technical thinking you see what i mean you've given us a the core history of technical thought and the question really becomes is what is not technical thought what are natural organic patterns seen throughout history in all cities from which new urbanism a lot of people have derived a lot of input and why can't we study it and why do fish really not talk about water is how i would put it for fish to talk about water that has to be reason and abstraction enough that you can develop technical solutions you know but what is the habitat of the fish you're saying so that's what remains what is not technical because a technical answer may just cause catch us within another subset of maze and the real question is can tactical reasoning actually douglas why are you so high-tech completely why do you have to have so many things going at the same time that we can't carry no but that's that's an excellent point douglas stop talking yeah hey um i douglas one way to do about to to think about this is havana is a very interesting um um is a very interesting lab we were both there at a very interesting time back in 96 i think havana was originally the kind of city especially old havana and centrobana was the kind of city douglas is talking about which is structured you know that began prior to the tech and then the cars came in and it was somewhat retrofitted but then what happened was there was a complete economic collapse and when we arrived there uh there was first of all they were back to horses which was delightful you know with little bells uh everybody was tanned and everybody was fit and slim and you said well this really works this is amazing you know the great economic break when russia gave up on cuba but then what happened is they they the cars came back so what do we do about that as soon as there was an economy the cars came back and uh that's what totally defeats me is the reversion of the car even when circumstances are perfect one thing that's i've gotten interested in uh lately is the sprawl patterns of low-income and developing countries because they're very different from uh the anglo-american european type of sprawl yeah um and uh i'm interested in uh the the social cultural institutional factors that that cause those differences and what kind of prospects they have for retrofitting uh compared to our more formal and plan type of sprawl that we have in uh anglo-american countries we have a question um is what what can we do to get connecticut cities back on track they're a poster child for urban abuse for the motoring metastasis the sprawl largely because of the former humane pattern is still there but thoroughly compromised or under leveraged uh meanwhile the parking garages keep going up in places like hartford and bridgeport the cities they're a wreck any thoughts on a place like connecticut yeah man i think one of the best books i've read on american urban history is a book on new haven actually and it gave it's one of these aperture books that um that uh lead to the whole the whole history of urbanism and one of the things i remembered is that the corner stores quote-unquote cornerstones disappeared two decades began to disappear two decades before the act of the automobile and the theory the theory of the author who was a yale professor was that as soon as factory work stopped being quite so miserable says a lot of people that operated corner stores where they did it for food just to get less expensive food they were not profitable but they were better than working at the dark satanic mills you know uh seven and a half days a week and when the union movement actually fixed it began to fix that circumstance people went to the factories and so i bring up um i bring up paul's analysis of radburn and why it didn't work an early analysis is that the front doors give to the park the front doors of the houses give to the park and the rear or kitchen doors give to the cul-de-sacs and since ninety percent of american arrivals are through the kitchen then no one actually thinks that going out the front door to the park everybody goes out the back door and i think it's very subtle human things that douglas often talks about like what's the human factor because the failure may not be what we think you know it might be something like the advent you know they just got the back and front door backwards or the advent of television or whatever you know i have a very different take on um the connecticut urban urbanism there is now a group by a colleague of mine from the law school she's also an urban planner sarah browning and she started last summer a group called desegregate connecticut and what we see in connecticut is urbanism built around racism is what i would describe it um all of our so-called cities um hartford connecticut with 128 000 people is almost entirely black or hispanic um we just had we have been working on a project looking at tods and one of the issues that come up is that white people this we were told this by a developer white people in connecticut do not ride on buses um in connecticut the term city it means a place where poor minorities live so the patterns that we see in connecticut are so intertwined with how people see the state from a economic and from a um racial point of view that i think to start changing patterns in connecticut we're going to have to deal with those issues of how we see ourselves from a racial point of view yeah yep you have a question um about functional classification for lawrence and uh um it says that if functional classification systems are very hard to retrofit do separated bypass retrofitting declining shopping centers and e-bikes offer any hope they offer hope um on on a a scaled basis uh for for retrofitting individual uh neighborhoods and sites there's less hope from those specific those specific strategies there's less hope for reforming entire systems that might help regional transit and um bike connectivity um kind of see this this in um the the response in london the low traffic neighborhoods in london they've been uh implemented on sort of a well their tactical urbanism um i can i have a map that shows all the low traffic neighborhoods in the city and there's no overall coordination it was never conceived that way and they've been very controversial some of them have been overturned contrast that to uh barcelona which is is planning on a much more uh systemic uh system of of uh a and b streets sort of a tartan grid uh much more attention to multiple networks serving different modes different purposes and probably likely to be much more successful so i guess that's the thoughts i have uh i would just say that uh you know continue to ask questions in the q and a i had a question um there was a study that came out uh fairly recently just a few months ago uh by a uh a professor at usc called jeff named jeff boeing and uh it looked at uh the street networks around the country uh since about 1940 to the present day and he concluded that street networks were making a comeback i don't know if lawrence if you've seen this study but um his conclusions were that the connectivity since 2000 was on a significant increase across the united states for a number of different reasons um have you seen it and what do you think of that yeah i've seen several studies like that i've seen that one and they say that the u.s disconnected street networks in the u.s reached a peak in the 1990s and they've been becoming more connected since then which is great news we're making progress but we're still one of the worst different different studies come up with different actual relative numbers according to how they define connectivity some say we've only made a little bit of progress some say we're all the way back to where we were in the 1950s like jeff lowing's um it just depends on how they define connectivity so again i think a a major issue is the systemic thinking we can improve connectivity within developments but if it's something like that fha plan that i showed then that's not really getting us towards urbanism and functional traffic networks and biking networks kind of things that we'd like to promote lawrence this is rick again the i believe context is the number one issue we will never have street networks uh improved on their own by greater connectivity greater narrowness lower speeds it's always going to have to come from the kind of neighborhoods that people want and know and love and then the streets will be subordinate they will be secondary to the determination of the kind of neighborhood and and urban patterns that we like we we new urbanism um should really branch into the hopes and fears of of of the the citizens they ride in cars because they like the idea of going far with little fear okay it's fear of negative impacts negative interactions with other people and the racism just charges in on on that kind of a problem and so we've got to solve the the uh the uh the the impacts of racism on the patterns that we that we have institutionalized but we need to study what what the fears are before we can get enough people comfortable with the other modes of transportation uh um um rick this other people comfortable one of the things about new urbanist is we engaged very very early on the public process public participation and remember there was jane jacobs did a bit charlie moore did a bit but we really made it central and i think we need to you know as generalists we need to understand that it isn't just the market that's preventing policy from happening it's actually the public process the nimby there is progress being done and let me just say why this got brought up douglas and i grew up in barcelona and when we were there in the 70s francisco franco put enormous parking garages underneath every single one of those wide avenues in barcelona just from top to bottom they were dug up for years and so forth so barcelona has an enormous amount of parking underneath the boulevards within very close walking distance of many of the buildings and so when we study how barcelona did it we need to understand the the kind of top-down political process that did that there was the dictator who said this is happening now and he did it so quickly that no the world didn't even notice right now we have the problem of the nimby who will actually is actually getting stronger through the internet my life is miserable now because of the internet and the uh the way that the nimbys are able to actually load up any any process now we need to study this of course in a democracy this is happening there's a professor at yale a french woman called delamore that is actually dealing with the absence of democracy that that represents and is now helping to write the constitution of both iceland and uh norway uh so that that kind of thing cannot happen you know so that the public participation is random because i do believe most people will back what we're proposing here but not in the public process as currently constituted in which just a few people can gate community so as generalists we need to look further and further to what's going to make this possible and not just the physical or the technical but also the political we have a question on the 15-minute city that the 15-minute city embodies the new organism almost completely but this is the first time that these principles have been on the minds of more people globally than ever before and we shouldn't miss this opportunity beyond the 15-minute cities projects that we've heard about uh what else is brewing on this idea maybe i think the 15-minute city idea relates or came out certainly it was popularized most most strongly by the mayor of paris and that grew out of efforts to reclaim to start to reclaim the streets first for buses and then for bike people on bikes and paris is to me is a fascinating city because it is such an author oriented city but it is so admired by so people i have always found this so amazing that you go to this place that is so admired and you choke on pollution and you can't cross the street and paris has spent the last the mere fires have spent the last 15 years trying to change that paradigm and growing out of that in a more holistic way is this idea that really what we need to be doing is getting people to get be able to get around without using cars and so the 50-minute city is related to this idea of reclaiming the city and that's another part of the story that is becoming much more current even in a place like milan um italy which has which went down a totally different rubbish or a whole over the last 50 years so yes i think those two ideas together are two very strong ideas that we can build on as a movement what is it what is the milan model you refer to well milan is um like a lot of italian cities also large streets um very very auto dependent but milan actually used the um pandemic as an excuse to um to start reclaiming um city space and they started out with tactical urbanism type patterns but then they proclaimed that they would make it more permanent just repeat some some things that i've read that that compare the amount of political difficulty uh for a policy compared to how much uh benefit it delivers in in uh one report that i read just uh today was saying the best trade-off is uh allocating more more space for uh for people and and um active transportation reallocating street space um there's lots of policies possible but when you start getting into things like congestion fees uh it's it's very politically difficult technically difficult allocating street space is uh the best bang for the buck yeah yeah yeah um there's a question about hyperloop i don't know if you are familiar with this alarms but you know i guess really high-tech transportation solutions um high-speed rail uh um you know things that that aren't um like building off of the railroad building off the old style railroads in terms of connecting us up in in the in the 21st century i did get into high-tech some when i talked about vertical separation in my book and that's one reason uh vertical separation now at least in terms of multi-level urbanism uh it's it's it's science fiction it's it just hasn't happened uh you you maybe look at uh whacker drive in chicago one of the only actual built examples um it just hasn't happened because it's the challenges are too high the costs are too high uh the the coordination the the the political um uh power that would be required um so uh they make they make good stories uh the media loves these pictures but uh in terms of um actually delivering something something that's viable and feasible i i'm not convinced so we are um we're now an hour and 25 minutes um i don't know if folks have any uh final thoughts on uh on street networks and uh where we go from here and and you know what are the interesting ideas what what may we have missed over the last hour hour and a half when um one thing uh there's a companion book that is almost of the same quality and it's very intimately related which is joseph's book on parking okay and i think they're very intimately related for example i um liz and i have a summer house in france that allows cars everywhere but parking nowhere and that except in one boulevard and that solves an enormous amount of uh the the the traffic so basically the deliveries the emergencies the cold weather days the the the the rain days the kids that had that can't walk you know a mile are solved because the cars can approach the houses but they can't park and so they don't blow out the urban fabric and they incentivize the use of pedestrianism because the car's too far away to go to it so as you leave your front door instead of going to your convenient car you go to your convenient walkable street and so the solution i've always thought that might be led with how parking is managed and so i think erin aaron ben joseph's book is a fantastic companion to this and it's also historical rob there's another book that you may even want to consider for future parts of the series it's called unplanning livable cities and political choices charles siegel he does a masterful job of the history not as not as well as uh lawrence has done but he recommends two things you limit the size of development that a developer can undertake and you limit the speeds to 15 or 20 miles per hour in the city you do those two things limit the speeds and limit the size of development and he says he he complains that we have too much planning that it's the over-regulation that's causing all the difficulty so he says drop the regulations just go with those two principles interesting it's a great idea that's unplanning by charles siegel s-i-e-g-e-l i think that rings true okay at this point i would like to thank everybody man thank you lawrence uh for coming on and and talking about your book uh clearly a lot of enthusiasm for um for for your book um and um uh and all the panelists uh andreas norman douglas paul rick uh and uh duru again for helping to organize this and we will we will uh post this video on the cmu website uh later on this week and so i wanted to thank everybody and wish everybody a good day and hey rob i think we should um congratulate our our viewers we had people from germany malaysia uh england all over the world on this conference it's just amazing so thank everybody for joining yes with some of the technical difficulties thank you to the the panel of uh engineers uh all of whom have taught me so much and contributed to this book just by by uh your activism and your um your your research and your efforts so thank you okay goodbye everybody thank you adios yo nice to see everybody