URBAN DESIGN
UPDATE
Newsletter of the Institute for Urban Design May/June 2006 Vol. 22 No. 3 SUCCESSFUL BASE CONVERSIONS, TOPIC OF INSTITUTE’S MAY 25 PROGRAM, ARE CONTINGENT ON INVESTMENT STRATEGY Decommissioned military bases offer one of the best opportunities for adjacent towns to acquire more land on which private developers can build new communities. This is the opportunity explored at the Institute’s May 25 Base Conversion Workshop. Land purchase and environmental clean up make the development opportunity also a challenge as reflected in interview that follows. Bayonne Benefits: $30 Million Fed Cleanup
Nancy Kist, executive director of the Bayonne Local Redevelopment Authority, offers a run-down on how the redevelopment of the Bayonne port is being financed. In funding the redevelopment of the Bayonne port facility, the Bayonne Local Redevelopment Authority--which received the facility from the Federal Government at no cost— benefited from several sources of federal funding for various projects on the site. “'For example,” reports Nancy Kist, “ the federal government had an ongoing responsibility of environmental cleanup that they funded to the tune of about $11.5 million.” In addition, Kist relays, there have been a number of funding opportunities both through the Army Corps of Engineers and through the US Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration (EDA), including $7 million in demolition and $16 million for shoreline stabilization added to another $2.5 million for shoreline stabilization from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. A combination of grants and low-interest loans from the New Jersey Environmental Infrastructure Trust Fund as well as funding from the US EPA, all totaling roughly $8 million, support improvements for the sewage treatment system and water distribution system on the facility. Meanwhile, Royal Caribbean, the shoreline's first long-term redeveloper, has already committed approximately $16 million in capital improvements for berths and terminal buildings, of which $11 million has already been expended.”
San Diego Benefits: $25 Million Private Infrastructure
Primary funding for infrastructural improvements such as the construction of roads and streets, says Kist, comes from the sale of land to private developers, such as Trammell Crow and D.R. Horton, which buy lots outright at market rate from the Redevelopment Authority. This type of arrangement is not unusual for the redevelopment of governmentowned ports. For example, in the case of the San Diego Naval Training Center conversion-- undertaken by Corky McMillin, which was selected as the site's master developer in 1999—the developer was deeded 80 acres on which to build and sell residential units, in exchange for taking on the financial risk of funding $25 million in infrastructure for the site. Together, Trammell Crow and D.R. Horton plan to build 750 residential, multifamily units, comprising a mix of for-sale and rentals. Says Peter Porraro of Trammell Crow, “There was a hefty fee involved with submitting to the RFP, but it's a great piece of real estate: It's accessible to Manhattan, and there's not a lot of undeveloped waterfront property left in this area these days. So it was worth it to us to take the risk.” by Anna Holtzman
NEW PROJECTS
Cleveland
The St. Paul Riverfront Corporation is launching a $2 billion next phase of economic and environmental revitalization, reports Patrick Seeb, Executive Director of the corporation. Under the leadership of Democratic Mayor Chris Coleman, a planned floodwall around St. Paul’s 75-year old in-town airport, will go forward under the motto: “More Natural, More Urban and More Connected”. Tim Griffin, Director of the St. Paul Design Center, which operates under the aegis of the $1.5 million St. Paul Riverfront Corporation, is focused on seeing that the city’s neighborhoods reconnect with the Mississippi in way consistent with the St. Paul on the Mississippi Development Framework. Toronto Urban Design Consultant Ken Greenberg, who helped launch the St. Paul Design Center in 1998, remains in touch with the city. Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio seeks to continue research on Shrinking Cities, reports Steve Rugare, who expects to work with Robert Brown, head of Cleveland City Planning and Hunter Morrison, now working at Youngstown State University. Steven Fong, the newly appointed Dean at Kent State’s School of Architecture, seeks to emphasize research at the college, including how to strengthen the Midwest mega-region in which the college rests, by highlighting shared resource possibilities and even moving the architecture graduate programs to downtown Cleveland. The New York Times Magazine, May 21, confirms that urban design is now a popular topic. Included Fellows and friends of the Institute: Daniel Libeskind, Michael Sorkin, Karen van Langden (who, as dean of University of Virginia School of Architecture, lives in Jefferson’s Pavilion IX on the Lawn, Charlottesville), Andrés Duany in Biloxi and Bernard Khoury’s designs for Beirut.
MEETING THE PRESS Charlottesville, Biloxi, Beirut Dialogue of Cities is topic for Conseil Internationale des Critiques d’ Architecture
meeting June 1-3 in Vancouver reports Vancouver Sun architecture critic, Trevor Boddy, who helped create the group. Fellow Louise Noelle, Mexico City, will attend. www.cicarchitecture.org Ellen Posner will coordinate a panel on architecture criticism with Kenneth Frampton at the National Arts Club on September 11. Participating will be Stan Allen, Princeton, and Mary McLeod, Columbia.
JANE JACOBS: A Rorschach for Writers
PEOPLE ON THE MOVE
New Orleans
The death of Jane Jacobs has provided a Rorschach moment for reporters observing her passing. Nicolai Ouroussoff, writing in the April 30 New York Times: “As we mourn her death, we may want to mourn a bit for Mr. Moses as well.” Ouroussoff does not recall first hand how tough but thrilling were Jacobs’ victories over Moses. Roger Strauss, New York Review of Books, clumps Jacobs together with Rachel Carson, Betty Friedan and Julia Child, as outsiders who questioned conventional wisdom. Jacobs’ place will rest with other writers of her time. Michael Sorkin, The Architect’s Newspaper, hit the right pitch in saying “Her immortality will come from having written a book.” Daniel Libeskind continues to visit Sri Lanka where he devotes time to prepare a master plan for a fishing village destroyed in a December 2005 tsunami. But in late May he was back in New York as part of a new committee to help move forward the 9/11 Memorial based on design by Ron Arad and Peter Walker . . . Lance Jay Brown reports that a May 12-14 AIA Regional and Urban Design Committee Charette reveals that design savvy local leaders are emerging . . . Robert Ivy, who, as editor of Architectural Record, has produced some of the best reportage on New Orleans, will curate the show on New Orleans at the Venice Biennale, Cities: People, Society, Architecture . . . Also headed for New Orleans this summer is former Fellow Darren Walker, Director, Working Communities, Rockefeller Foundation, New York. The Foundation provides some $6.5 million to planning in New Orleans. The development of the plan will be managed by the Community Fund Support organization of the Greater New Orleans Foundation . . . Ken Greenberg continues to work on Regent Park, Toronto, to regenerate Canada’s oldest and largest public housing project with some 4,500 new units of housing around a public square . . . Jean Gath, Pfeiffer Assoc., travels often to Dobbs Ferry, to prepare a campus Master Plan for Mercy College.
PREVIEW OF VANCOUVER’S WORLD URBAN FORUM PROMISES LOTS OF INFORMATION, LITTLE URBAN DESIGN FOCUS By Trevor Boddy, Architecture Critic, Vancouver Sun The United Nation’s World Urban Forum comes to Vancouver June 17-23, with a theme of “Sustainable Cities: Turning Ideas Into Action.” This will be the first time that the U.N. Environment Program has been funded by a national government, and the up to 15,000 attendees expected will make this North America’s largest-ever international gathering of urbanists. Tours for delegates of Vancouver’s innovations in shaping high-density, socially-mixed neighborhoods will be a program highlight, but the discipline of urban design is almost absent from this global look at cities. How this could be says something of the strictures of United Nations-related programs, but it may say even more about the current global status of urban design as a profession.
Vancouver ‘76 Fuller, Soleri, Mead
W.U.F. comes on the 30th anniversary of the first of these planetary gatherings, Vancouver’s Habitat event of 1976. The focus then was - in the lingo of the times “human settlements”, and intellectuals, architects and urban designers were important contributors to that gathering, which was split between the United Nations’ sessions downtown, and a funky idea fair constructed at a former seaplane base on Jericho Beach. The event changed my life—I attended as a second year architecture student, and embarked on new passions for urban design, international development and design writing because of it. In addition to demonstrations of the latest solar design, urban infrastructure and innovative construction techniques I saw at the Jericho Forum, Habitat 76 attracted some of the finest minds of the era. Margaret Mead, Buckminster Fuller, Pierre Trudeau, Paolo Soleri and a thenunknown Mother Theresa all presented their views on the future of cities. Not so for Vancouver this time. Intellectuals and professionals are conspicuous by their absence in the W.U.F. program, and not surprisingly, in the squad of federal bureaucrats and trade show impresarios who devised it. When W.U.F. Commissioner General Charles Kelly was asked in a recent interview why today’s equivalents to Mead and Fuller are not coming to the 2006 event, his quick answer was that “they do not exist, and besides, we want pragmatic doers.”
Coming: RAIC Urban Design Award
Vancouver ‘05 Habitat Jam 30,000 Messages
Part of the reason for this turn is pragmatic, as W.U.F. organizers used a number of June Vancouver gatherings of built environment professional organizations —the first World Planning Congress, national conventions for Canadian architects and landscape architects—as an excuse to consider these subjects covered off. While there are occasional papers on urban design topics at the planner’s gathering and a new national award for urban design from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, virtually the only Vancouver sessions concentrating on urban design will be courtesy of the landscape architects, who now dominate the practice of urban design in Canada. Another key reason why the Vancouver program has taken this turn was the December, 2005 Habitat Jam, an on-line talkfest that received 39,000 messages from 134 countries, and predictably was dominated by Greens, the NGO community and young anti-globalists. Kelly’s team used content analysis software to winnow down 600 themes and 100 best ideas from these e-missives, and from this have constructed their key sessions and dialogues, a bit of bottom-up legerdemain that disguises a paucity of direction for the W.U.F. program. The Vancouverites tried to google the future of the world’s cities, and failed. By far the most interesting Vancouver date for urban designers will be what is being called “Super Saturday” on June 17. This will be the most public and participatory of the W.U.F. events, with tours of Vancouver neighborhoods and buildings, several large design charrettes, art gallery talks and an intriguing street-side installation by the newly-
formed Vancouver Urban Design Forum. The V.U.D.F has picked four small marginal sites along Vancouver’s eastside Commercial Drive to showcase temporary constructions and demonstration urban uses on neglected leftovers of land. Commercial Drive is an inner city early 20th century linear strip, once Vancouver’s Little Italy, then its Telegraph Avenue, now a conflicted street balancing gentrification with hard core poverty, much of it Native Indians leaving their reservations for the city. The downtown condo boom and some of North America’s highest real estate prices and rents has meant that independent bookstores, non-chain coffeehouses, office rental rates appropriate to start-up companies, and other markers of the creative city are rapidly disappearing from Vancouver’s downtown peninsula, a land-limited zone where escalating condo-only development may be masking a possible long-term failure: consolidating the city centre into a new role as a resort, not a diverse downtown. The V.U.D.F. organizers propose that recent Vancouver urban design “has been about the culture of the view; we are interested instead in the micro-practices of place-making, and the sustainability that comes with imaginatively linking residual sites with functions that enliven the city.” Vancouver
Urban Design Forum
V.U.D.F. is an organization of urban designers in government, private practice, development companies, academe and the media that might be a prototype for similar organizations in other cities. Our contemporary reality—and the lesson of a World Urban Forum almost bereft of designer’s insights and methodologies—is that urban designers may themselves have to get on the NGO trail if we hope our messages and our skill-sets will extend beyond our current clients and peers. By the sheer example of Vancouver’s magnificent but now out-of-control urban dynamism, World Urban Forum 2006 delegates will leave with more questions than answers about the current state of urban design.
HABITAT UN AND TOYO UNIVERSITY, TOKYO, WILL CO-SPONSOR INSTITUTE’S OCTOBER 18 PROGRAM IN NEW YORK The Institute’s October 18 program will open with a welcome from UN’s Anna Tibaijuka, Executive Director of Habitat. Co-sponsored by Tomonori Matsuo, President of Toyo University, Tokyo, it will focus on urban design issues in Tokyo as well as New Orleans, about which Rockefeller Foundation’s Darren Walker will describe their $6.5 million program for planning New Orleans. Suha Ozhan, former Secretary General, Aga Khan Award, will present issues of urban design in the Muslim world. For details see the Institute’s website: www. Ifud.org
UPDATE, published six times a year, welcomes contributions from members.