Subject Matters III by John J. Parman

Subject Matters III

John J. Parman

Jointly published by

Pallas Bookstore & Gallery / @_p_a_l_l_a_s_

Contents Foreword .................................................................................. Opener On campuses and their communities New campuses for new communities (2005) ...................................... 1 Campus planning in a hybrid world (2020) ....................................... 9 "Place" on the post-pandemic campus (2021) ....................................13 Berkeley: campus and community (2013) .......................................... 17 Universities in the Age of MOOCs (2014) ...................................... 40 U.C. Berkeley and the Bay Region (2016) ...................................... 44 Catalyst for a revived public realm (2019) ......................................... 56 Utopia revised (1990)........................................................................ 69 On cities, their planning, and other topics SF's post-earthquake waterfront (2008) .......................................... 74 The nature of our prosperity (2008) .................................................. 77 Histoire d'eau (1997) ..........................................................................79 Islands and enclaves (1997) ................................................................ 81 Circle Tour (2001)............................................................................. 84 Shanghai's emerging profile (2009) .................................................. 87 Stuck in beta (2021) ............................................................................ 93 Boris Johnson's wakeup call (2020) ................................................. 96 Don't call it progress (2020) ............................................................. 101 Rage against the machines? (2014) ................................................. 105 Connectivity and place (2017) .......................................................... 108 Kevin Kelly looks ahead (2017) .......................................................... 111 On listening to a pandemic (2020) ................................................... 116 Author profile.................................................................................... 119

Foreword Subject Matters includes my own work and work written with

others, most of it for publication. At least one of the journals has disappeared, while updates to websites disrupted some archives. Even when an article can be accessed, you often need an academic affiliation to do so without paying exorbitantly just to read it. All of this spurred me to put this together. In doing so, I haven't hesitated to edit in some cases. I'm an editor, after all, so that impulse is always there. But I've tried not to rewrite my own history as a writer: if an article made predictions that didn't pan out, I let them stand. Elizabeth Snowden, founder of the Pallas Bookstore & Gallery in San Francisco and my partner in our editorial studio, helped bring this and other books I've produced to life by her willingness to put them on display. Tipping my hat to Pallas, I've used my photocollages as illustrations. Those wanting topic-appropriate images can readily find them on the web. In the fall of 1972, I met Richard Bender. He became my advisor, my sponsor, and ultimately my writing partner. A good deal of what I've written over these nearly 50 years had him as coauthor and often as instigator, prodding me to work on things he occasioned. It is therefore with true gratitude that I dedicate this series, of which this is the third volume, to him.

On Campuses and their Communities

New campuses for new communities (2005) Universities and colleges can be great forces for urbanity in their communities. Just how this potential is realized, however, has been the subject of various interpretations through history. There is a tendency in America today to think that a university or a college campus must be a place apart. If every new academic or institutional “need” is seen as a new building, they proliferate, undermining the sense of place that both the campus and its community value. There are other options. While models like Jefferson’s University of Virginia and venerable Ivy League campuses still shape our sense of an appropriate setting for academic life, an even older root— going back to Bologna, Padua, and Paris—situates the academy within the polis and makes it an integral part of everyday life. The urbanity of this model reflects the historic tendency of towns and cities to mix uses in a fine-grained way that creates and enlivens culture as well as stimulates the local economy. For many such institutions, a more intensive mix of uses may also reflect financial necessity, leading them to seek partners in their communities with whom to integrate facilities. The need for alternatives to a territorial, facilities-oriented approach to campus planning was brought home to us in the late 1990s with the financial collapse of the American Center in Paris. Following the completion of a magnificent building designed by Frank Gehry, its director publicly reflected on how he had thought he was building a $40-million asset, when in fact he had built a $6million-a-year liability. Universities have learned from their own past to the extent that they are developing more flexible buildings today and often forming new partnerships to share the cost with others, including developers. Urban universities are also increasingly looking beyond their own campus boundaries to grow. Arizona State University, for example, is expanding across metropolitan Phoenix, while Harvard is shifting its science and technology faculties to a new campus across the Charles River. Bard College has established a study and research center in Manhattan, just as ASU, with its main campus in Tempe, is moving into downtown Phoenix. All of these developments point to a recognition that these institutions realize their futures lie at least partly in looking beyond

traditional campus boundaries, integrating university programs with those of the city at large. Such a rethinking of seemingly fundamental tenets of American campus design is particularly relevant today as “learning” becomes a lifelong, year-round pursuit. Postsecondary education is now a necessary accompaniment of adult life, enabling people to ramp up skills, get needed credentials, and finally move from work to the rest of life. Given this, the idea of building a traditional university or college campus may be more and more of a distraction from what real investment in higher education is coming to mean. The rise of exurbia A rethinking of what a campus is may prove especially beneficial in “exurbia.” This is the name recently given to sprawling new communities like Mesa, Arizona, which are frequently home to as many people as older cities like St. Louis. Such locales evince all the forms of the twentieth-century American suburb, but without any sense of being tied to an original center. They are a logical next step from what Joel Kotkin and others have noted about U.S. demography: that since 1960, more than 90 percent of all population growth in America’s metropolitan areas has taken place in suburbia.1 Another social critic, David Brooks, attributes the rightward shift in American politics to exurbia, which he contends is not simply an “opting out” of the city, but also a more utopian impulse to reinvent the city, in the tradition of new towns from Ebenezer Howard forward.2 Exurbia may only be passing through a suburban stage on the way to becoming a new metropolis. But universities and colleges may contribute to this transition by helping to give it much-needed cultural and civic life. A missed opportunity Despite the potential benefits that a rethinking of the relation between campus and city might entail, most large university systems continue to build according to old models. A good example is the construction of a tenth campus of the University of California, now underway in Merced. Merced is one of a chain of towns and small cities extending south from Sacramento to Bakersfield in the state’s vast Central Valley. This formerly agricultural area is today

developing according to the classic exurban scenario, and all indications are that it will become California’s third megalopolis by 2050. As a result of this growth, the population of formerly sleepy Merced is expected to rise to 200,000 in the next forty years. As the setting for a new urban agglomeration, the Central Valley has several things going for it. Older patterns of infrastructure and commerce already link its towns with a major highway (California 99) and several north-south rail lines, one of which the state may rebuild to accommodate high-speed passenger service. Furthermore, its older town centers, largely developed in the early twentieth century, offer attractive grids of tree-lined residential streets and tidy, if underutilized, commercial cores. Yet, instead of seizing on the potential offered by this pattern of existing settlement, with its transportation and communications infrastructure already in place, U.C. chose to locate its new campus (for an eventual population of some 30,000 students) on open ranchland some six miles out of town. The University of California has a history of locating its new campuses on open land. Its oldest campus, at Berkeley, was founded when the university moved out of its original headquarters in downtown Oakland. Built on grazing land in a town that was mostly a summer refuge for San Franciscans, U.C. Berkeley was eventually surrounded by a new city that grew up around it. The real antecedents for U.C. Merced are, however, the U.C. campuses developed in the 1950s and 1960s, like Santa Cruz and San Diego. Both were organized around separate, inward-looking academic/residential colleges. Both were also deliberately held at a distance from surrounding cities, a strategy that has proved especially problematic at Santa Cruz, where it has largely eliminated any possibility to share facilities with the larger community. The planning of the Merced campus, following a skillful overall work by a team led by John Kriken of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, San Francisco, largely adheres to this traditional territorial model.3 It proposes a tree-lined street grid, recognizing this as a pattern of Central Valley towns, as well as an effective way to make a compact and urbane campus that can mitigate the area’s extremely hot summers and cold, windy winters. But at Merced the distance between the existing town and the new campus appears to impede initial opportunities for synergy between the campus and the

Merced community. With its implications for extended infrastructure, travel time, energy use, and pollution, six miles is just too far. If the planners had looked further back, past U.C.’s suburban precedents of the 1950s and ‘60s, they might have discovered models that specifically anticipated ways that a campus and a community might better evolve together. But this would undoubtedly have involved building closer to town, or even in town, and the political leaders of the multi-campus U.C. system did not want to take on the problem of assembling land in an area where patterns of development had already been established. Instead, they opted to site the new campus on “empty,” supposedly trouble-free, land that they were able to obtain relatively easily. As it has turned out, however, environmental problems related to the presence of vernal pools and other environmental constraints have now contributed to a nearly decade-long delay in construction. Today, they have also led to the first phase of the campus being located on an adjoining former golf course, an area not included in its original 2001 master plan. One other obvious problem with the chosen site was the lack of any surrounding amenities. To make up for this, however, a new General Plan for the City of Merced, produced in parallel with that for the campus, calls for a series of planned residential developments between the existing town and the site of the campus, anchored by a “town center”—a private shopping area. Meanwhile, although the opportunity was constantly pointed out during the planning process, the town and the university both failed to engage each other and find concrete ways they could benefit from the other’s presence. Libraries, museums, medical facilities, playfields, stadiums, and even things like utilities and police and fire services were all potential candidates for joint development. By banking land for future growth, they could both have gained from the rise in Merced land values. From a regional standpoint, the decision was similarly flawed. If a site had been selected that was more closely related to Highway 99 and the north-south rail corridors that historically linked the Central Valley towns, it might have better fulfilled U.C. Merced’s potential to serve the whole region, not just one part of it. Indeed, in the runup to the opening of the new campus, the university has opened

academic sub-centers in other valley towns and cities, and it has become clear that many students will commute from their homes up and down the valley. Given such an existing pattern, it is ironic that the final decision focuses all the state’s resources in one out-of-theway location. An American "new town"? Ironically, U.C. Davis—the one campus that most obviously reflects the University of California’s land-grant heritage (for years, one of its great strengths was agriculture and natural resources-related research)—comes closest to being the model that might have provided the most sensible basis for a design that could have served both U.C. Merced and the larger Central Valley community. Adjoining a rail and freeway corridor that links the Bay Area to Sacramento, Davis falls within a fast-developing “exurban” corridor—one that extends from Vallejo to Sacramento, Roseville, Placerville, Truckee, and Reno, Like the Merced campus, the Davis campus was originally laid out on a grid pattern; unlike Merced, the Davis campus was conceived as a loose extension of the adjacent town. Even the creek that runs through it helps connect them. U.C. Davis was not the only alternative that could have been seized upon as a precedent. Before the Merced site was chosen, the larger Central Valley city of Fresno had proposed that the core of the new campus occupy a section of its early-twentieth- century downtown, the Fourth Street Mall. This area had been a center of prosperity in the pre-freeway era, but for many years it had been bypassed, as suburban development spread to the northeast. In addition to many underutilized properties, it offered good proximity to an existing train station and good access from Highway 99. Those with experience of European campuses might recognize the Bologna model in such a plan to re-inhabit an older urban area. In the U.S., the benefits of such a strategy have also been reaped in Manhattan, where NYU has for years renovated industrial lofts as classrooms and student residences, and in a broader sense has adapted itself to the urban fabric of that city. DePaul has also followed this strategy in Chicago’s Loop. In other historic European towns like Siena, a further benefit is that the university can play the role of custodian of important elements of its historic

fabric, while locating other parts of its program, like laboratories and athletic facilities, outside the town’s historic zone. Looking farther afield, it is possible to see an even more relevant example. In the 1960s, about the same time that U.C. Santa Cruz was being developed, the French new town of Cergy-Pontoise was being created outside of Paris. The town was to incorporate several existing villages, but universities were planned to be among its earliest new elements. Today these institutions include ESSEC, one of the leading business and management schools in Europe. A technical university was also created, and it now supports many of the high-tech companies that have relocated to the region. They were initially brought in as a way to provide jobs that would induce people to move there or “reverse commute” from central Paris—part of a regional strategy that also saw the development of the RER line passing through Paris to connect these new towns to central Paris, and Orly and Charles de Gaulle airports. The success of these planning initiatives 40 years ago has now become fully evident.4 Cergy-Pontoise today has a population of close to 200,000 people, including 25,000 university students. The recent development of high-speed rail service to the U.K. has situated Cergy-Pontoise along a linear network of towns that are becoming proximate to London as well as Paris, underscoring its role in an expanded regional economy. Businesses in the town are already connected to this corridor’s fiber-optic line, which runs along the National Highway right-of-way next to the technical university at Cergy-Pontoise. Evolving exurbia Unlike the vast majority of new U.S. communities, the development of Cergy-Pontoise involved a major initial public investment in physical and social infrastructure. And a conscious goal of the newtown effort around Paris was to shift growth outside the city. In contrast to the French model, such peripheral development in the U.S. usually emerges “in reverse.” The private sector usually leads the way—with low-density projects coming first, followed typically by privately developed shopping malls. If there is an existing town, as there is in Merced, it often must compete with— and may ultimately be undermined by—this piecemeal development. The choice of where to locate a major public university could,

however, have been regarded as a strategic intervention to encourage a more sensible and coherent (and less costly and destructive) pattern of development. While the planning of the U.C. Merced campus aimed within its own boundaries for this kind of coherence, it missed it entirely in terms of what the campus could do for Merced, and vice versa. This was equally true for the Merced General Plan—which suggests that both entities failed to understand the exurban phenomenon. Exurbia has tended to grow on an ad-hoc basis as an agglomeration of “planned communities” that are relatively low density and car dependent, with few public or community spaces. Schools and churches are often the first civic buildings, and cultural life often begins with them, along with shopping and movies. In this context, a university or college campus could help provide the missing elements—the “collegial” and cultural settings that support the civic and cultural life of the community—along with opportunities for education and training. An example of such a relationship is the Texas community of Cypress-Fairchild (actually a school district) outside Houston, where the local government partnered with a community-college district to develop a campus whose civic, cultural, learning, and recreational facilities serve a population that runs the gamut from toddlers (and their moms) to younger postsecondary students, adult workers, and the retirees who enroll in its Senior Academy—one of its fastest growing programs. It is characteristic of these exurban campuses to capitalize on the interplay between learning and a broader community of learners. Another characteristic is how their physical form evolves in relation to their communities. Cy-Fair College is both a college campus and a government center, with both contributing to its development. The need for stewardship The last point reflects on what should be an important concern for campus planners generally: that, in developing a university or college in an exurban context, it may be particularly important to tailor development to where a community is in its lifecycle. Following such a tenet, what would have made more sense in a place like Merced than to utilize already existing, undervalued resources as a way to build together toward a common future?

In 50 years, U.C. Merced may come to seem a part of its community. By then, the population of the town may, in classic exurban style, “fill in” the agricultural land between the new campus and the existing town. It may even grow right up to its gates, so to speak, and create the same problems of boundaries and edges that cause such difficulties between other U.C. campuses and their surrounding neighborhoods. Until then, the town will gain less than it should from the presence of the campus, and vice versa. The region too will get less from U.C. Merced than it should. That towns or cities and their colleges or universities need to see each other as partners is the salient point. Both need to share a sense of stewardship. As Frederic Law Olmsted put it, a campus needs to provide settings for learning for its students that reflect “the work of disciplined mind.” In exurbia, especially early on in its development, doing so may be particularly valuable. Ebenezer Howard, who we might think of as one of the fathers of exurbia, saw new towns as an opportunity to build a new civilization. In a real sense, the campuses of the new exurban universities and colleges, U.C. Merced among them, are opportunities to bring the benefits of the city to areas that are ready to embrace them, but in a new form. Notes: 1. Joel Kotkin,The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution is Reshaping the American Landscape, Random House, 2000. 2. David Brooks, “Take a Ride to Exurbia,” The New York Times, November 9, 2004. 3. John Lund Kriken, “Principles of Campus Master Planning,” Planning for Higher Education, July-August 2004; and University of California Office of the President, Long Range Development Plan: The University of California, Merced, Public Draft, August 2001. 4. Bertrand Warnier, “Cergy-Pontoise: Du Projet à la Realité,” Atlas Commente, Pierre Mardaga Editions, 2004. Written with Richard Bender for Places 17:1, 2005, pp. 54–59, reprinted in arcCA, 05:4, 2005.

Campus planning in a hybrid world (2020) In March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic shifted our university—the University of California, Berkeley—totally online, along with the whole of education from childcare up across the country and most of the planet. In the wake of this forced and unprecedented experiment, debates about what it means remain ongoing. Will the episodic dream of a placeless university, or at minimum a hybrid place/placeless one, come true? Millennia of experience argue for giving higher education a local, physical anchor. And most universities and colleges have this anchor as their starting place, even as they consider what their ongoing experience with virtual teaching, research, and administration means. Campus planners, those most directly responsible for pondering the future of universities as physical places, are avid followers of this experiment and the debates around it. The future of a university is guided by two questions: “What kind of places suit this institution?” and “How much of them do we need?” These questions look beyond the campus proper to ask how its community finds housing, services, entertainment, and culture in its university city and the metropolis around it. Instead of thinking of place and placeless as opposites, it may be better for today’s campus planners to embrace the concept of ba, a “shared space for emerging relationships, providing a platform for advancing individual and/or collective knowledge.”1 Put forward by the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida and his followers, Ikujiro Nonaka and Noboru Konno, ba views the real and virtual worlds as inextricably intermingled. Instead of focusing on physical settings, campus planners should ask how their universities can best enable the relationships that advance knowledge, wherever they occur. This capacious, real-and-virtual take on place takes in the full repertory of physical spaces and connective tissue that support a university community, a milieu in which campus planners are engaged participants in what amounts to a democratic process. The 178 acres of the U.C. Berkeley campus were never an island. From the start, Berkeley, a university city, has shared the broad values and purposes of its institution. The two are as much part of the cosmos as they are part of the East Bay, nestled in its hills, but both are prone to overcrowding. They form a whole that is set 9

within a larger context that unfolds in response to the same pressures, the same pandemic, the same economic and political turmoil. Having put our lives on hold en masse, with lingering questions about how to revive the campus and much else for full human use, planners need to look ahead open-endedly. This is the real spirit of “Never let a pandemic go to waste.” By slowing things down, they can get a clearer sense of what really matters for the university, discounting the instant pundits’ overreactions to the pandemic’s disruptions while taking seriously the working assumptions it challenges. Heading into the pandemic, U.C. Berkeley projected that its campus population would grow to 70,000 faculty, researchers, administrators, staff, and students. That announcement led the City of Berkeley to bring a lawsuit, as this would nearly double a previously agreed-to cap. This raises a series of questions: What kind of place is a finite 178-acre campus with 70,000 people? Where will they be housed? How and at what pace will they get back and forth? U.C. Berkeley combines four-year undergraduate programs, graduate programs, and a vast amount of research. Should it delegate some of this to other institutions? Should it continue to grow as it currently is? The impact of 70,000 people suggests an oncampus experience like Venice with mass tourism. The pandemic has halted mass tourism and other features of a “peak global” world that were starting to unravel before it hit. Political disagreements between China and the U.S. had already sparked a decline in enrollments at U.C. Berkeley from Chinese nationals. More worryingly, they were eroding the trust relationships that make research possible between U.C. Berkeley and equivalent institutions in China, and also hindering Chinese investment in research here. A change in administrations may ease these problems, but they raise larger questions about the nature of a university community: How local should it be? What are its responsibilities to its metropolitan region and, as a leading research university, to the nation and the world? These questions are especially timely as U.C. Berkeley begins its Long-Range Development Plan (LRDP) process, a 20-year projection of the campus’s physical growth to meet its programmatic needs in light of its institutional ambitions. The

pandemic is likely to weigh on the deliberations of the long-range planners. Trying to operate as a placeless university is like the “work from home” (WFH) efforts of other large organizations in the region to stay in business. Acceptable as a temporary exigency, WFH ignores the impacts it puts on the milieu. Unchecked growth raises the same red flag. If the milieu is the real context, then its planning has to be systemic. That is, it has to account for the externalities that affect ordinary people and the environment. As the Bay Region revives from the pandemic’s shutdown, there are substantive debates that reflect people’s experience of what just happened. Central business districts and suburban corporate campuses both face doubts about their future from a workforce that’s less convinced of the benefits of workplace proximity and more resistant to the long commutes that come with it. Parents, reintroduced to their school-age children, question if having two full-time careers is worth the damage. Homeless people, newly housed in hotels, disprove political assumptions that this wasn’t possible. Tourists and tourism have much less priority. In short, how the region sees itself is in flux. Next steps are hard to predict, but the solution space is considerably enlarged. Among the pandemic’s most dramatic and almost immediate effects in the Bay Region was to clear the air. This raised questions about our continued dependence on petroleum-fueled cars, trucks, buses, and trains, and it showed how the region functions as an ecosystem, with the nature of the economy driving environmental degradation. Higher education, as a network, fits into this interconnected milieu. A 20-year plan for U.C. Berkeley has to account for the ecosystem in which it is situated, a larger whole that struggles currently to provide education, healthcare, housing, and transit at anything like a mass scale. The pandemic revealed a series of frayed and broken systems. U.C. Berkeley exemplifies where we are today. Starved of state funding for several decades, it more closely resembles a private institution like Stanford in the way it depends on other sources of revenue to stay afloat. The cost of attending is higher, and individual programs that can attract higher-paying students charge considerably more. The pandemic has exposed what a creaking machine it’s become, potentially unsustainable. The LRDP invites the campus to consider, not for the first time, what a leading public

research university should be in a world moving toward a new midcentury—how it can spur relationships and create vital knowledge, fulfilling once again a mandate that goes back to its roots as a Land Grant institution. It’s interesting to us that the Slow Movement, applied initially in the Bay Region to food, is relevant to these deliberations. Like ba, Slow has always aimed to bridge local and global. Alice Waters, its leading spokesperson, understood that the survival of the local required a symbiotic relationship with markets or constituencies beyond itself. But phenomena like mass tourism are the shadow side of the local/global relationship—what goes wrong when it loses its balance. Inherent in the idea of Slow, whether applied to food and cuisine or towns and cities, is the idea of constant deliberation to keep the relationship in check, recognizing that the local is ever vulnerable to damaging, even ruinous exploitation. Ba asks us to consider the relationships we hope to foster, and Slow asks us to consider how to balance the local and communal with the national and international. The risk of local and communal is provinciality, while the risk of national and international is homogenization, leveling, and the loss or eradication of difference. Between them is the cosmopolitan world that universities have always sought, local and global at once. Notes: 1. Ikujiro Nonaka and Noboru Konno, "The Concept of Ba: Building a Foundation for Knowledge Creation," California Management Review 40:3, Spring 1998. Written with Emily B. Marthinesen and Richard Bender for Common Edge, 6 July 2020, and then republished by ArchDaily, 9 July 2020. The article grew out of once-a-week, 90-minute conversations that the three of us, writing partners since 2012, have had on Zoom across the pandemic. (Bender and I have been writing partners almost from our first encounter in the fall of 1972.)

"Place" on the post-pandemic campus (2021) Late summer 2021, U.C. Berkeley: The pandemic we thought was behind us has returned to torment us as variants. The students have returned and are likely to pass these variants back and forth. Most of those stricken will suffer what amounts to a bad flu—but, given the size of the campus population, we can expect some deaths. For once, the campus is ahead of the region’s tech industry, which put the brakes on a return to physical workplaces. Debates continue about the costs and benefits of working remotely. The university is engaged with two large housing projects south and west of the campus proper, along with a new college replacing Tolman Hall opposite Arch Street along Hearst Avenue. All three reflect current thinking on academic development, which is to say that all three look back more than they look around or ahead. Given that buildings like this are intended to last for generations—Tolman Hall only lasted 70 years, a relatively short lifespan by campus standards—the future in question extends at least to 2100. We’ll be long dead when they get there, but the century’s end is a sober reminder that whatever we build now will still be here then. Accurately predicting the campus's immediate future in light of the pandemic is challenged by the daunting range of issues that have surfaced. Much that seemed fixed as inherently place-bound proved not to be, and the detachment from place proved liberating in removing brutal commutes and allowing some families to rebalance work with the needs of young children. Others chose to quit cities in search of less expensive options, especially for housing. A new divide opened up between the relatively affluent and those below that crucial, shifting threshold. Climate change, with its attendant extreme weather events, wildfires, and droughts, made some of the moves to the country problematic for the affluent and poor alike. But the point was made: place matters, but “where” is a looser construct, less justifiably mandatory for participants. The pandemic revealed two things about a U.C. Berkeley community that had almost entirely shifted online: first, routine collegial engagement went far beyond the normal boundaries of the campus; and second, the introduction of “higher production values” in some talks and lectures, leveraging the medium; and the relative intimacy that the medium itself provided, gave participants a clearer 13

sense of the speakers and of each other. Something was lost, of course—the spontaneity of interaction in a seminar room, for example, and the side chats and banter that pervade campus settings. And the virtual interface has limits, especially for large gatherings. But a hybrid approach to research and teaching, as opposed to a purely place-based one, is clearly feasible. So, something has been gained that it would be a mistake to lose. Part of it is leverage, the ability of the university to accommodate a larger cohort without necessarily burdening the physical campus, the wider community, and the region. Given that a campus population of 70,000 was mooted just prior to the pandemic, such leverage may be crucial to address current distortions imposed by the decline of full tuition–paying students from abroad, which was already evident before the pandemic due to political tensions. Decisions now being made about new campus buildings—capital projects that can be reasonably expected to support the university’s teaching and research activities for decades—speak to conventional, business-as-usual approaches. But something more radical will be needed to ensure that U.C. Berkeley is still among the world's leading public research universities in 2100. It starts with taking seriously the reality that the university is a networked organization within a much wider network. The flatness, fluidity, and openness this implies radically alter how the university will operates. It points to an eco-systemic view of it as a real/virtual construct, accepting as given an interconnectedness that transcends local space and time. The university’s historic campus and environs are real places that anchor a local community. Overlaying them is a vast network of academic and research communities—peer organizations that are also place-centered, with buildings and campuses to plan and tend. Rooted in their own localities, they share U.C. Berkeley's need to leverage the central lesson of the pandemic: place may still matter, but a hybrid future is inevitable, just as it is for the office workplace. Not only are these different organizations comparing notes, but they’re aware that pandemics—like the effects of climate change— are recurring in ever-faster cycles. Hedging campuses against their disruptions should be part of any serious plan for their resilience. The pandemic more or less inverted the previous hierarchy between real places and the parallel virtual realm that came along with us no matter where we were. That realm became the locus of

our interactions, interspersed with brief forays into the truly local or longer retreats to places truly distant. We've now resumed a wary relationship with many of the places that the pandemic walled off. Being walled off, we came to see these places as optional: potentially desirable for what they offer, but no longer mandatory. When bosses tried to insist, many headed for the door. Organizations ready to be hybrid were there to welcome them—with a new-found advantage. Even before the pandemic, many campuses were encouraging a richer mix of activities in their immediate vicinity. The pandemic showed the desirability of doing this, as the truly local gained importance. It also showed how the relative malleability of local buildings and settings, their potential to accommodate change. Time proved malleable when organizations mastered it. Too many tried to maintain their pre-pandemic schedules, missing the point. Scaling up by addition or replacement still how most campuses transform. Both are under way at U.C. Berkeley, but they raise the question, What’s the aim? Is it to build or is it to transform—a verb that implies opening out to the future? The U.C. Berkeley Campus, given loose precincts and porous edges by its early planners, is an example of a successful framework for constant evolution. As the campus moves into its third decade in this networked century, whatever it builds or renovates needs to situate itself in a framework that's now as much virtual as real—an augmented reality that will reshape how people relate to it, spatially and otherwise. Written with Emily B. Marthinesen and Richard Bender for Common Edge, 13 September 2021. This version is edited to sharpen and clarify some points.

Berkeley: campus and community (2013) From early on, universities and their cities have had relationships marked by synergy and hostility. If the idea of a university has two threads, then one of them—the model of Cambridge and Oxford—chose to remove itself from the city, while the other—the model of Bologna and Paris—embraced it. Today, of course, a university like Cambridge anchors an adjoining city that is one of Europe’s innovation hubs. The University of California, Berkeley, now the flagship campus of a much larger university system, is a hybrid of these two models—urban, but recognizably a campus park set apart from the surrounding city. This essay reprises the development of the Berkeley campus, noting along the way that the university’s steady expansion overflowed the original boundaries of the campus and also that, as it grew, U.C. Berkeley influenced a sometimes cooperative, sometimes resistant community. The campus began more or less in the countryside, but the town—now the city—of Berkeley grew up right around it. Although our focus is more on the campus than the community, it is now unavoidably clear that they are joined at the hip—not just where they overlap, but in the larger sense of mutual dependence. Concluding that it’s not too early to look out to a new midcentury and speculate what both might become by 2050, we end our essay by considering how the campus and the community might evolve. This takes the form of three scenarios that look out from 2012 toward futures that we characterize as Small, Large, and Slow. In a sense, the first two are caricatures of an ongoing dispute over density between the forces of preservation and of growth, while the third attempts reconciliation. The campus isn’t precisely a park, but it anchors the city with open space, making it easier to add density around it. In 2011, a referendum in Berkeley endorsed the city’s plan to redevelop the downtown area west of the campus at a higher density, including two 16-story buildings. As the plan is implemented, it will be important to give this and other campus edges breathing room, weaving together buildings, pedestrian and view corridors, and open space to make for a desirable and complementary whole that is not simply a response to regional density targets.

1. Introduction This moment—a dozen or so years into a new century—is an interesting one to consider the flagship campus of the University of California and the community that grew up around it. At a certain point in the university’s evolution, spurred by state and federal largesse, it took on the highly specialized nature of a 20th-century research university in the American sense. Colleges that formed in

the initial postwar boom spawned new programs and institute. As public monies declined, private donors were lined up to fill the gap and fund major buildings or parts of buildings with their names attached. Fragmentation was the price that the campus paid for specialization. In an era of relative austerity, the overlap among these disparate parts has made for an unwieldy and inefficient structure that is hard to sustain. When the “Great Recession” hit in 2008, no one could say for certain how long austerity would last. The initial response was to cut across the board—reducing salaries, eliminating lectureships, and trimming staff; five year later, it is clear that a return to business as usual is impossible. What Schumpeter called “creative destruction” may be the most fruitful way to look at the opportunity this crisis presents. The city government of Berkeley has a comparable dilemma, having built up a structure dependent on revenue flows that are way below their high-water mark. Much as the University of California’s access to state funds depends on the passage of a statewide referendum to increase taxes, the city’s ability to continue as it has assumed that a similar citywide measure on the November 2012 ballot will pass. Both are stopgap measures, though, that—if they pass—will merely postpone the more radical rethinking and restructuring that both need to shift their respective models of higher education and governance. As the phrase “relative austerity” implies, neither the campus nor the city lack for money. Their budgets are lower than they were, but still substantial by the most of the world’s measure. If funding at their present levels proves to be their likely future, both in fact still have substantial room to rebalance and transform. Interestingly, they have every possibility of doing this together—of recognizing the extent to which their fates have always been entwined. The pregnancy of this moment is precisely this. Over its history, California has been seen as showing the way forward for others. Berkeley, the campus and the community, has always been among the leaders. The campus is legendary for its “reserved parking” signs for Nobel laureates—so valuable today that the winners joke that the monetary prize pales in comparison. Berkeley’s economists are credited for helping turn Indonesia around, among other countries. In 2012, their attentions are perhaps justifiably focused on

Washington, D.C. and Sacramento. The city is bound up with this. Despite bouts of antagonism, there is both pride and influence. The community’s attention to ecology and its progressive approach to integrating the disabled, for example, have been matched by campus actions. On these and other issues, it is hard to say where one begins and the other leaves off. 2. The Campus and the Community John Galen Howard’s plan for the Berkeley campus exemplifies the strategy of creating a setting for architecture. It was a beaux arts plan that reflected the way popes and kings built. It leveled the land. Although the campus was organized as a series of steps, Howard treated it as if it were flat. He designed buildings for it that had no relationship to the local materials and climate. Bernard Maybeck, whose work and planning for the campus was more organic, was pushed aside. The idea of making the plan for a grand campus largely came from Maybeck, but after the competition that he put together was held, the Regents’ own dreams and ambitions took precedence. Two of them, Hearst and Stanford, regents and U.S. senators, had to change trains in Chicago when they traveled east. They would have seen Chicago’s World’s Fair, with its “White City” modeled on imperial Rome. This image, which reflected America’s budding imperialism, appealed to these patrons of “the Athens of the West.” Maybeck, respecting the natural influence on the campus, crept in at the edges. Howard set the beaux arts pieces down between the two branches of Strawberry Creek, at a distance from riparian nature. These remnants were where Maybeck designed the Men’s Faculty Club and the original architecture school. Howard’s shingle-style Women’s Faculty Club and Naval Architecture Building demonstrate his acceptance of—indeed, his endorsement and participation in—the leitmotif of informality which from almost the beginning formed a counterpoint to the beaux-arts grandeur of the campus’s inner core. Remarkably, this framework—partly formal, rooted in classicism and expressive of California’s sense of its own destiny, and partly organic, rooted in the land itself, predating Howard’s interventions—has held. The principal legacy of the Campus Planning Study Group, with which all three authors were

associated, was to draw attention to it often enough—and to stress the responsibility of stewardship that rested on successive campus administrators, deans, and academic entrepreneurs—to give it both currency and acceptance. Thus, the campus, which was in real danger of being paved over by Houston-style growth in the 1970s, has in fact been developed more thoughtfully. The results are far from perfect, but the setting that Maybeck and Howard in their different ways envisioned is still palpable. The university is joined at the hip with Berkeley, the city that grew up around it. Their relationship has sometimes been fraught, as with the People’s Park riots of the late 1960s. Today, though, the city faces many of the same budgetary issues as the university. Both have seen state funding of local programs dry up, forcing them to look for other sources of revenue. City taxes and service fees have increased in parallel with university tuition and student fees. Both have shed staff, reduced compensation, and begun to grapple with unsustainable benefits schemes typical of public-sector employment in the U.S. The diminishing financial role of the state in the day-to-day operations of U.C. Berkeley and the city puts them both at an interesting crossroads. Despite the pressures of their current situations, they have inherent advantages which position them well for the future, if they can see it and capitalize on it. Not the least of this are the long-term prospects of the Bay Area, currently anchored by high-tech and biotech and tied to the Pacific Rim by cultural as well as economic ties. In 2012, the region is doing better than many others in the U.S., owing to especially to its high-tech and socialmedia clusters in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. The economic challenge is to diversify from there—a shift in which U.C. Berkeley is likely to have a strong role. In the absence of strong regional government, the Bay Area has evolved a coalition of public agencies, institutions, and business interests that often coalesce around issues of regional economic and environmental importance. U.C. Berkeley is part of it, as well. The governmental challenge is to make a real regional government of the coalition, preserving its checks and balances—but not the local veto power and the many regulatory lacunae that dog it now. Within the region, Berkeley—campus and community—enjoys the advantages of a physical location of considerable beauty and

amenity, directly accessible by transit to the main regional destinations and two of the region’s three airports. U.C. Berkeley is an essentially urban campus with a park-like setting. Berkeley combines a relatively dense center and arterials with residential neighborhoods. Good bus transit to Oakland gives students access to housing beyond the city’s borders in newly vibrant areas. As this implies, the university and the city have brighter futures than their current challenges suggest. Both stand to benefit if they address them together and work toward joint solutions whenever possible. To understand better the history of this relationship, it is helpful to consider how the campus grew. The university is a public institution, aloof from local codes and regulations, and catering to constituents, some of which were outsiders—although latterly outsiders with voting power to affect local elections. All of this makes for a certain inherent tension, exacerbated by the steady expansion of the campus. 3. Campus Growth: 1870–1970 In 1860, the College of California—then located in Oakland— dedicated its new campus, 160 acres of farmland between the north and south branches of Strawberry Creek. In 1864, the College Homestead Association was formed to acquire and sell lots around the campus. Two years later, the Association bought an additional 320 acres for speculative residential development to benefit the college, and its trustees hired Frederick Law Olmsted to plan the future development of these combined holdings. The Morrill Act of 1862 established federal land grants to the states for colleges of agriculture and “mechanics” (engineering). In 1866, the California legislature took advantage of the Morrill Act to found a new state college on a site north of the College of California campus. In 1867, the College offered its campus as the site of a merged, state-supported institution, the University of California. A series of campus plans followed. The 1870 plan of San Francisco architect David Farquharson updated Olmsted’s plan by adding more buildings. One of the first two, South Hall, built in 1873, still exists. The Farquharson plan clustered the new buildings where Olmsted had originally placed them, with the view corridor toward Golden Gate as the organizing axis. In 1897, Phoebe Apperson Hearst funded an international competition, based on a

program developed by Regent and lawyer Jacob Reinstein and the architect Bernard Maybeck. The winner was the eminent French architect Emile Bénard, who subsequently came to Berkeley to adapt his Beaux Arts plan to the campus’s realities. His plan shifted the Olmsted axis to the north, lining it up with the emerging street grid of the town. It left Strawberry Creek free to meander through campus. When Bénard declined the position of Campus Architect, returning to France in 1900, the Regents resolved that his plan could only be modified with the approval of a majority of an advisory committee. This body consisted of the original competition jurors plus three prominent architects, one of whom—John Galen Howard—became Supervising Architect for the University in 1902. Howard immediately took the position that the Bénard plan was preliminary, more of a suggestion rather than a template for how to proceed. Designing the Hearst Memorial Mining Building, the first of his many buildings for the university, Howard aligned it with the existing campus nucleus, a legacy of Olmsted and Farquharson. He modified the Bénard plan in 1908, adopting their Golden Gate axis, and again in 1914 by orienting new buildings to the campus interior—that is, to this axis—rather than toward the campus periphery. George Kelham, a San Francisco architect who also planned the U.C. Los Angeles campus, succeeded Howard as Supervising Architect in 1927. During his tenure, the campus was extended south to Bancroft Avenue. In 1938, he was succeeded by San Francisco architect Arthur Brown, Jr., who departed from the Beaux Arts style of his predecessors to build in the stripped-down classical style affordable in the Depression. He also commissioned a modern-style dormitory complex, Stern Hall, designed by William Wurster. Brown’s 1944 plan relegated dormitories to sites off the main campus, made Strawberry Creek the armature of campus open space, and sited new development—limited in height to four stories—along an axis extending south from the Hearst Mining Building. Surging postwar enrollment at the university, accompanied by new prosperity and growth in the town, placed both in a steadily more urban context. When Brown stepped down as Supervising Architect in 1948, the Regents established the Office of Architects

and Engineers in 1949 to replace him. In 1955, the Regents created a Committee on Campus Planning—Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr, Architecture Dean William Wurster, and Regent Donald McLaughlin. Working with Louis DeMonte, Chief of Staff of the Office of Architects and Engineers, they produced the 1956 plan, which contemplated a modern campus with at least 25,000 students, to be accommodated “without sacrificing the beautiful physical setting.” The 1956 plan increased the density of the central campus through redevelopment, removing obsolete and temporary buildings and increasing the size of new ones. Building coverage was set at 25 percent. The plan increased close-in parking, sought to limit off-campus development to uses requiring campus access, and called for consultation and cooperation with the town through the City of Berkeley Liaison Committee, headed by Wurster from 1953 to 1957. The 1962 Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) reflected the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California, which called for the student population of the Berkeley campus to rise to 27,500, 45 percent of which would be graduate students. (The issues of campus population and the balance of undergraduate and graduate student enrollment persist as points of contention between the university and the city. It arose most recently in relation to student housing in the Southside district adjoining the campus. The current enrollment breakdown is about 25,000 undergraduate students and 10,000 graduate students.) To preserve the 25 percent coverage limit, the LRDP accepted the need for highrise buildings. Academic clusters were maintained, but major new campus buildings were added, along with multilevel parking structures at the periphery. In the 10 years following the 1962 LRDP, two million square feet of buildings were added, bringing total campus building development to seven million square feet. 4. Campus Revival: 1970–1990 People only become aware that something is amiss when clear evidence of the fact is unavoidably in view. This truism proved true on the Berkeley campus when Evans Hall, a mediocre highrise building, was allowed to block the view corridor toward the Golden Gate envisioned early on in the campus’s beaux-arts plan. Then the threatened demolition of Howard’s shingle-style, 1914 Naval

Architecture Building brought the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association out in protest. In response, Chancellor Albert Bowker turned to Dean Richard Bender to establish and lead a campusbased based effort to understand the history and current situation of the Berkeley campus. With a faculty and student staff and an office on the 9th floor of Wurster Hall, the Campus Planning Study Group (CPSG) set to work. One of CPSG’s responsibilities was to inventory the large number of historic buildings and places on the campus and protect them by nominating them for the National Register of Historic Buildings and Places. Another was to revive and update the campus’s planning framework as a guide to stewardship and future growth. This meant understanding the framework that Howard and Maybeck had put in place and going beyond it to identify the individual precincts that had grown up as the campus evolved. These two efforts were complementary in that the National Register nominations established that the clusters of buildings around landscaped settings were the real source of the campus’s significance. Both were carried out in collaboration with the city and the Berkeley Architectural History Association. The CPSG developed guidelines for developing new buildings within the classical core and around and the informal landscape around and beyond the two forks of Strawberry Creek. The CPSG also carried out studies of the individual campus precincts, in an effort to project how each could densify without losing the spirit of the place. Finally, the CPSG also studied the development of the areas adjoining the campus, including the Downtown and Southside areas. These studies influenced decision-making about specific new building projects. They also informed the deliberations of the newly formed Campus Design Review Committee. Finally, by picturing a “plan of plans” that summarized its findings and suggested future development framework, the group set the stage for the LRDP process, tied to environmental impact review (EIR) that is now the norm at Berkeley and the other University of California campuses. The CPSG had several kinds of influence, but the most important was a kind of moral suasion: thanks to its work, it became harder, even with abundant building funds in hand, for would-be builders to ignore the fabric of the campus, because more and more people

understood it and valued it. This is not to say that the fabric wasn’t sometimes ignored, but the trend was positive. Over time, the campus became a better client, too, getting better results from the architects, landscape architects, and planners it hired. The other important result of the CPSG’s efforts was to point to the settings of the campus as the more important means to understand and preserve its essential qualities. This began with the broad sense of the classical core and natural edges, but it took in the way the different precincts were anchored and activated by larger and smaller open spaces, by pathways, by views, and by buildings of a certain type and scale. This fine-grained understanding of what existed set the stage for a more sophisticated, more nuanced consideration of how it might evolve. The CPSG’s understanding of the campus was urbane and the value if placed on urbanity has survived, persisted, and grown. Its legacy is as much a moral suasion as specific plans for individual precincts. By helping ordinary people, untrained in planning, design, or history, to grasp how its buildings and settings contribute to the quality of life of the university community and its neighbors, the CPSG has made the process of design advocacy easier for a generation of campus planners. 5. Campus and Community: 1990–2010 In the early 1990s, the Regents of the University of California began formally to require each campus to prepare an LRDP that would define its specific planning, development, and academic goals. U.C. Berkeley completed a 15-year LRDP in 1990 and began work on the 2020 LRDP less than 10 years later. Certified by the Regents in 2005, it was accompanied by such other important documents as the New Century Plan, the Landscape Master Plan, the Landscape Heritage Plan, and the Strategic Academic Plan. All together, they provided an integrated, context-responsive framework for U.C. Berkeley’s future. That the 2020 LRDP was conceived as a framework rather than a vision is the key to its effectiveness. The LRDP identified and addressed critical issues facing the U.C. Berkeley campus. It is an institution- and site-specific document that provides both a conceptual physical planning context and an academic context for making a wide range of decisions about the future of the campus

and its environs. Unlike its 1990 predecessor, the 2020 LRDP addressed how the university and the city could work together. The campus as a physical setting: The critical question answered for U.C. Berkeley through the 2020 LRDP planning process was, “How can we support both development and stewardship of our campus?” The LRDP process provided an approach to stewardship, defined direction for campus development, and provided a framework for understanding the physical character of the campus. One of its important tasks was to identify appropriate future building sites and decide on their development capacities. The 2020 LRDP used campus history to understand these opportunities and put into place a structure for growth and change. The U.C. Berkeley campus encompasses National Register-nominated buildings and landscapes. Campus expansion is constrained by dense city development along three of its edges. Along the fourth edge, steeply sloping land that incorporates the Hayward Fault makes development almost impossible. In considering the campus future, it was clear that the LRDP would have to address where the campus would grow. How much growth and what types of programs would be important to understand; but, for the purposes of the plan and its on-going effectiveness, specific growth and programs became less important than developing a consistent and overall approach to that development. Along with the many “places of interaction” found on the campus, the LRDP identifies and describes two important campus characteristics based on the campus’s historic development: the classical core and the natural and picturesque landscape. While many campus buildings, especially those built in the postwar period, do not fit neatly into these two categories, in general, the architecture of the campus reflects a mediated conversation between the buildings of the classical core and those linked to the natural setting of creeks and hills—the framework handed down by Howard and Maybeck. The campus and the city: Both the 1990 LRDP and the 2020 LRDP acknowledge the adjacent city environments as they relate to the campus proper. Both LRDPs propose campus-related development in these areas, but the 2020 LRDP goes further in linking the “adjacent blocks” to the campus’s physical and academic framework. The 2020 LRDP reflects the changed political context that had led, a few years earlier, to a joint Southside planning effort by the City of Berkeley and U.C. Berkeley. Although it was not adopted, the later City Southside Plan, adopted by Berkeley City Council in 2011, was clearly informed by an understanding and acceptance of the ideas of the joint plan. Of particular importance is the principle that the Southside is an area the city shares with the university, a place whose physical and social character is shaped by both. The idea that the Southside is an area with fluid boundaries and integrated campus/city spaces and activities is new. Earlier plans took no account of the community in positing

U.C. Berkeley’s acquisition and development of property in the Southside, primarily for housing. Despite its broader view, the 2020 LRDP stopped short of considering how the university and the city might share resources in the future. Since 2004, their cooperation has pointed more and more in this direction, though, as the university has played an ever-larger role in using and developing its edges. Downtown Berkeley adjoins the west edge of the campus and is its main gateway. Since the CPSG studied the area, the university has acquired and leased significant amounts of space there, but neither the 1990 nor the 2020 LRDP looked closely at how the area relates to the campus. After the Regents certified the 2020 LRDP, the City of Berkeley sued the University of California, arguing that proposed mitigations for the impacts on the city of U.C. Berkeley’s future development were inadequate. In settling the lawsuit, the university and the city agreed to co-develop a plan for downtown Berkeley. The Downtown Area Plan (DAP) reflects changes in the way U.C. Berkeley views the downtown. It may also reflect changes in the way it views the campus itself. Much of the DAP is concerned with conventional planning issues. However, the parts which address U.C. Berkeley uses— identified as “University Interests”—envision settings in which flexible, mixed uses of all types coexist. In particular, the importance of the economic relationship between the university and the city is stressed. The DAP recognizes their shared interest in a viable downtown, with each having a role to play in achieving it. The 2020 LRDP accepted the idea of the campus as a park, seeing this as one of its great strengths. At the same time that it provides a framework for the stewardship of the campus’s rich landscape and building resources, the 2020 LRDP anticipates some basic changes in the way the campus is used. For example, it reserves campus buildings and future building sites for key academic activities, including instruction and research. Administrative and auxiliary activities, including athletics, recreation, and parking, are pushed beyond the edges of the campus park. This step has consequences for the city. It posits an essentially car-free campus, for example, and proposes to locate new student housing based on travel time from the center of campus on foot, bike, or transit. The city’s own policies favor a car-free downtown, but the community is divided on the issue. Steps to accommodate bikes and give them priority over cars, comparable to what is happening now in San Francisco, have been piecemeal and inconsistent. The 2020 LRDP made assumptions about these efforts. In fact, the most robust current partnerships between the university and the city are focused on transportation demand management (TDM). The DAP and the Streets and Open Space Improvement Plan (SOSIP) both suggest ways to link the physical campus and the downtown. Using scale, massing, and landscape, these plans define ways in which the university’s growth in the downtown preserves the character of both. The DAP also supports economic connections between the campus and the city,

particularly related to university uses and spin-offs in the downtown. Technology transfer—based on university research and development—plays a key role in such economic initiatives as the Green Corridor, which seeks to develop green technology as an industrial base for the East Bay. While the 2020 LRDP does not address these activities, they are one of the main considerations now in campus planning for new development. The campus and the region: The 2020 LRDP viewed the campus as part of the region and thus one of an interconnected series of plans. Although the campus edge remains clearly defined, elements of the campus—people, buildings, and activities—have moved into adjoining neighborhoods. U.C. Berkeley facilities and activities are also located elsewhere in Berkeley and other East Bay cities. The 2020 LRDP, the DAP and the Southside Plan jointly created a development framework that took in this larger context. While the historic campus remains an extraordinary place, a source of identity for town and gown alike, the plans envision the university being more fully integrated into the surrounding community physically and economically. Transportation networks—reflected in regional planning for public transit, roads, and parking—also link campus planning and the 2020 LRDP to the wider Bay Area. The 2020 LRDP recognizes a mobile campus population, with many people living beyond the traditional near-campus neighborhoods. While people’s daily presence on the campus may matter less, their ability to connect with the campus—in reality and virtually—will be increasingly important. The plans’ main focus is physical, however. The 2020 LRDP, the city’s Southside Plan, and the DAP all address transportation issues affecting the city and the university, recognizing the interconnectedness of the issues involved and their resolution. From the perspective of 2004, it was clear that mobility was a factor of growing importance for the campus. Today, mobility’s implications are more visible and much more pervasive. Paradoxically, the tech-based industries that have thrived in the Bay Area have embraced rather than abandoned place, although they use it more intensively than before. Often preferring to repurpose the buildings of the previous generation rather than building new ones, these fast-growing companies have abandoned the “free address” approach to downsizing real estate in favor of higher overall densities paired with an array of amenities. The spaces are deliberately open-ended, inviting users to shape and reshape them, but they integrate (and showcase) the work of local artists—peers of their young workers—and use the outdoors to support community at different scales. They are not bad precedents for any campus.

6. The Great Recession The Great Recession that began in 2007 hit California with unusual force. Berkeley—the university and the city—have struggled with its

consequences. With the state’s finances in disarray, the public support on which both had relied to some degree steadily diminished. Low returns and outright loss es in public pensions made the burden of university and city employee pensions more burdensome. Even as parts of the California economy recovered, tax revenues have lagged. Both the state and the city are proposing tax increases, to be voted on in November 2012, that are cast as “make or break” decisions about public institutions like the University of California, California State University, and California Community College systems, and equally about the level of services that the City of Berkeley provides. The importance of higher education to the state and national economies is not lost on its key industries. Intel CEO Paul Ottelini, for example, has served as an advisor to the Obama administration to bolster mathematics, science, and technical education. His and other high-tech companies are major contributors to higher education in the state in a self-interested effort to increase the pool of qualified candidates for employment in their industry in the California and other U.S. states. For its part, the State of California has recently backed away from more radical proposals to cut public funding of the University and its flagship campus. This reflects both the reality of its importance to the state economy and the pressure of alumni, current students, and their parents. “The university matters” is the message, but funding is still difficult. “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste”—this memorable phrase by Rahm Emanuel, President Barack Obama’s then chief of staff, is applicable to Berkeley, campus and city, in 2012. Like Governor Brown, they have lacked the political will to face up to the fiscal realities of a post-Great Recession world. This is not to say that economic stringency will last forever, but that real recovery will not occur until the public sector undertakes the kind of fundamental restructuring that the private sector has undergone on a more regular basis since the end of the postwar boom decades. The University of California as it exists today is very much a product of this long boom, which saw the development of many new campuses and the emergence of U.C. Berkeley as the exemplar of the large public research university. Although public support for higher education has ebbed and flowed in the decades since the 1973 Oil Embargo—the first Jerry

Brown administration—the University of California did not really experience a fundamental financial crisis until the Great Recession. Thus, its underlying cost structure rose to a level that is unsustainable in the current and likely future economic climate. Like the state itself and virtually all California towns and cities, the City of Berkeley has a similar problem. Because solving it requires the political will to tackle entrenched and politically active interests, solutions have been slow in coming. A truism of U.S. politics is that politicians prefer a crisis to “boil over” sufficiently to provide political cover for long-delayed action to acting in advance to forestall the crisis. The erosion of party politics in California and nationally reflects independent voters’ impatience with the state of affairs. The University of California and the Berkeley campus have at least expressed a willingness to tackle the problem. How they will do so is not yet clear—understandably so, since it is not yet clear what will be required, even in the short run, as the state struggles to balance its budget. Still, the outline is visible. At the macro level, greater rationalization is needed among the three systems of higher education in the state, eliminating redundancy among facilities and programs in order to preserve the most viable components and heighten their synergy. Across the board, there is a need to leverage resources far more effectively, to apply Buckminster Fuller’s principle of “doing ever more with ever less.” There is also pressure simply to do less—to focus the university on its strengths. Easily said, but of course Berkeley is comprehensively strong, so the debate about “less” often pits political and business priorities against academic and cultural ones. Reforming a university is not for the fainthearted, as is shown by recent events in the U.K. and at the University of Virginia. Even at U.C. Berkeley, experiments in collaboration among departments still founder over jealousy and asserted prerogatives, despite an oft-stated commitment to fostering innovation. The City of Berkeley’s situation is more like that of the healthcare “industry” in the region. After years and years of expansion and rising costs, healthcare providers have run into mounting resistance from the public and private sectors that ultimately fund them. To cope with falling revenues, insurers and providers initially penalized physicians and patients, starving the former of revenue and the latter of services. Today, though, insurers and providers are finally

leveraging digital tools that are absolutely common in most of the private-sector economy. The City of Berkeley is belatedly showing signs an interest in doing the same thing, having first tried to maintain the status quo through myriad new fees and steadily diminishing services that it continued to provide in “customary” ways to preserve staff. This aside on the politics of the campus and community as institutions may seem beyond the purview of this chapter, but it is needed to give context to the next section, which will speculate on their future. In our view, the Great Recession is really a turning point, an impossible-to-ignore signal that an era—the postwar era of U.S. hegemony and California expansion and largess—is over. To revive and thrive, the campus and the community have no choice but to accept that the decades ahead, the road to 2050, is fundamentally different than the decades that brought them through the postwar era to 2010. 7. Three Midcentury Scenarios Even in 2013, it is possible to see the outlines of the Berkeley that future generations may encounter at midcentury—less than 40 years hence. Forecasts are notoriously inaccurate, tending to project the present—overestimating current trends—and underestimate the future’s potential to surprise. A comparable forecast for 2012 would have been made around the time of the oil embargo. Reality has some aspects of what might have been predicted for it, but a great deal was missed. To sidestep this dilemma, let’s think of two of these scenarios as "Berkeley Small" and "Berkeley Large." The former reflects a “less is more” approach by the campus and the community, while the latter takes a “more is more” approach, perhaps in partnership with corporations and developers, seeing physical growth as the way forward. Large reflects the viewpoint of Smart Growth, which argues that higher-density—and mostly highrise—redevelopment is more sustainable, if concentrated around transit nodes, and more able to support urban services than less dense development. The arguments are sound, but the result projects are often crude. Small may reflect the views of preservationists and others that oppose growth for its own sake, but it could also reflect reformers intent on leveraging technology, broadly defined, to fulfill Fuller’s

principle, with its implication of a diminishing demand for physical space. The high-tech industry has applied this principle since 1990, with global companies like Hewlett Packard halving their real estate holdings, with other sectors of the economy following suit. In between the two is a third scenario, "Berkeley Slow," that takes a more deliberate approach to growth, looking for ways to avoid the imposed austerity of "Berkeley Small" and the downsides possible from the unchecked development "Berkeley Large" might unleash. Berkeley Small: In this scenario, the campus and the community accept the 2012 economy as the new base and begin to organize around it. The university reconsiders its size and its approach to education and research. It reinvents its undergraduate program as a smaller and less inclusive liberal arts college. With state funding no longer tied to enrollment, U.C. Berkeley targets the “best and brightest” students. It might opt to ensure that everyone admitted can attend, regardless of their ability to pay, continuing the role it now plays in creating California’s leadership meritocracy. Alternatively, it could limit financial aid, reducing undergraduate enrollment by two thirds or more. Professional schools would follow suit. Research, too, would shift to areas of “direct public interest,” with an emphasis on economic benefit. Specialist scholarship based on the campus’s unique resources would continue, but lab-based research might shift elsewhere—to off-campus facilities shared with industry sponsors, for example, or to other campuses. With fewer opportunities for research, the graduate program would also shrink in size. By mid-century, campus enrollment would drop to 12,000 students, a third of the current population. With a stable smaller population, the campus meets its space needs mainly through renovation and reuse. Parts of the campus park are consciously shared with the community as valued open or cultural space. Adjoining districts benefit from the campus’s proximity, but are no longer owned or dominated by it. For its part, the city accepts that it isn’t Concord, Oakland, or San Francisco. It refocuses its policies to emphasize the quality of life of a population of around 100,000 residents, placing greater emphasis on preserving buildings and settings that are seen as intrinsic to the city’s sense of place. Growth is not proscribed, but it’s definitely reconsidered. The presence of artists and artisans and the thriving of local businesses are considered positive signs of urbanity, rather than a way-station on the road to progress. Berkeley Large: In this scenario, the campus and the community hitch their wagons to the global economy. The university expands on all fronts. Using new technologies and in response to worldwide demand, it transforms its curriculum and research programs in an effort to offset diminished state funding. Financial aid is focused on the most promising students in need of

it; everyone else pays full tuition. Research is increasingly channeled into areas of state, national, and business priority, but the Nobel Prize tradition is maintained, with the campus consciously investing in areas of breakthrough research. As the East Bay becomes more urban, the campus anchors a sizeable cohort of businesses that depend on it for high-level scientific, technical, design, and managerial talent. The East Bay’s connection with California’s high-speed rail network, finally in place at midcentury, proves a geographic advantage. For its part, the city follows through on its 2012 vision of a vastly denser downtown and a high-tech and biotech-focused West Berkeley. Wholesale reform of transit infrastructure, part of the statewide deal brokered to make high-speed rail politically feasible, revives Berkeley as a regional destination, resulting in the resurgence and redevelopment of the Downtown. The joint campus-community revival of of Telegraph Avenue, completed in 2025 and accompanied by the city-sanctioned replacement of People’s Park with student and senior housing, helps stabilize this volatile corridor. Higherdensity redevelopment along its transit corridors enables the city to grow to 200,000 residents by 2050. Berkeley Slow: U.C. Berkeley maintains its current size and footprint, but uses new technologies and teaching strategies to leverage its faculty and resources more effectively to enroll more students. Building on partnerships with other public institutions and a robust online program, the university limits the campus to upper division undergraduate and graduate. Programs that shorten the time needed to get a final degree proliferate. The goal is to reduce the overall tuition load while making the on-campus experience richer. Lab-based research in science and engineering is located outside the campus in areas of Berkeley and other East Bay cities that are focused on joint university/corporate R&D. Barriers to cooperation and joint development between the university and the city diminish. The campus and community increasingly look for opportunities for shared use. The university joins forces with Berkeley High School and Berkeley City College to establish an East Bay Learning Commons that compliments the Downtown Arts District now anchored by the Berkeley Art Museum and theater. The revival of Telegraph Avenue, long identified as an important priority, is achieved through joint effort. The City of Berkeley, like others in the region, questions the tenets of Smart Growth. While its emphasis on transit-oriented development is accepted, its singular focus on density targets is rejected, together with its reliance on large, developer-led projects to meet them. Statewide reforms in urban development 2020 restore by-right development below a certain threshold. Small business is similarly re-enfranchised. Planning agreements that balance growth with urbanity and set out “generational” understandings about where and how larger-scale projects can occur replace the politicized, top-down, case-by-case process that, for decades, locked the city and its citizens in acrimony. By midcentury, the city has 150,000 people. Its

downtown is denser, but widely considered a model of urbane, thoughtful redevelopment. Its neighborhoods are recognizable themselves, but new transit options have selectively increased the density of their walkable commercial centers. The city works better. A big part of that “working better” reflects the combined efforts by the campus and the community to secure the benefits of regional and statewide investment in transit infrastructure and in the transition from a private carbased economy to a hybrid model that uses an array of strategies to reduce car trips and get people to walk, bike, and ride. Local transit, now “smart” and better attuned to its customers, replaces the cumbersome and underutilized bus routes of old. A fundamental reworking of the street system finally makes Berkeley safe for bikers and pedestrians, while microcars and car-sharing wean residents from larger cars. Moving goods follows transit’s lead, aiming for low impact and convenience.

These three scenarios have a degree overlap in their aims and outcomes. We pose Slow to suggest the likelihood of a hybrid, partly unpredictable process—dialectal, perhaps—that moves toward a future that won’t please all comers, but builds in enough deliberation, reconsideration, and recalibration to push the future of the campus and the community in a positive direction. Implicit in Slow is a sense of the value of both as actual places with characteristics, such as the integration of communal open space and the fostering of a sense of community through a whole range of means that blur the boundaries of town and gown and maintain settings and features that have been in the picture almost from the start. 8. Future roles and responsibilities Concerns about the cost of higher education and the need to move it into the 21st century are skewing consideration of the university’s future. The best analogy is probably to healthcare, which in the U.S. is in the midst of a similar crisis of access and affordability. Both have lagged other sectors in leveraging technology. Doing so opens up new possibilities for using the campus more effectively, connecting it more seamlessly to the broader public education system in California, and making greater use of the resources— human and otherwise—within the University of California system itself. The campus and the city both operate on the “long clock” that Stewart Brand described. The Berkeley campus has roots in both

historic models of the university—Cambridge and Oxford on the one hand, and Bologna and Paris on the other. The city, brought into the 20th century by a remarkable cohort of activists that literally saw it as “the Athens of the West,” also looks back at a much older tradition. Both traditions stress the importance of supporting the community. Neither precludes integrating the innovations of modern life, but the people and settings that uniquely define them take precedence. The university and the city have pressing need to restructure, but if they don’t rethink how they interact with and support their constituent communities, it won’t make much difference. "Place"— the collectivity of buildings, settings, and connecting elements that the university and the city encompass and share—is essential. Most people think of place as “hardware,” but it engenders the “soft” activities that fall outside the planner’s calculus. The efforts of socialmedia companies to avoid over-specifying what a given place is meant to be and to do are moves in this direction. In 2050, we expect that the campus and the community around it will be recognizably what they are today, despite changes that would make a visitor from 2012 express surprise, even amazement. And while some town-and-gown tension is probably inevitable, we expect that the university and the city will enjoy a closer partnership than now, based on a broader recognition of their shared interests. A likely reason for this will be their need to relate effectively to the regional and statewide context in which both operate. Silicon Valley has a higher profile than the East Bay as the “tech capital” of an industry whose boundaries are increasingly blurred by the digital revolution sweeping publishing and entertainment—sectors whose “capitals” are New York and Los Angeles, respectively. Yet U.C. Berkeley ranks high in the eyes of China, not least because it is seen as America’s preeminent public university. As the U.S. accommodates itself to parity with China and other fast-growing economies, California has a renewed incentive to forge its own path, especially in relation to the Pacific Rim, for which it is both a major trading partner and continental gateway. With a European-sized economy, even now the ninth largest in the world, the state is likely to benefit from the leadership and partnership of its institutions and the private sector. Arguably, this duo has done more for California than its politicians since the activism of the Pat

Brown administration first brought the modern University of California system into existence. As the flagship campus of one of the world’s leading public universities, U.C. Berkeley has a responsibility to California, to the nation, and the best and brightest minds across the planet. Part of this responsibility is to redefine for a new century the land grant tradition of public universities of which it is part. That idea, now 150 years old, retains at outsized importance, as exemplified by Cornell University’s development of a second campus in New York City to serve one of the economic engines of the state, region, and nation. Along with it is the willingness of major universities, public and private, to share course content with the least developed world, giving institutions and individual scholars and researchers in those countries online access to world-class curricula and teaching. Finally, prodded by limits of public finance, there is a new determination to reform and streamline the streams of public and private education across the state. If this is the macro-environment within which Berkeley—campus and community—will approach the midcentury, the microenvironment is still best understood as a real place. Despite the attractions of online learning, everyone recognizes that time spent on the campus with a cohort of fellow students has intrinsic value. At the same time, the four years that tradition defines as the undergraduate experience is properly in question, as is the model of a “talking head” lecturing to hundreds of students. They can absorb the lectures on their own time and save face-to-face encounters for discussion and clarification. Visiting the campus today, a graduate from the 1970s might note that the language lab is gone and students gather in wireless-equipped cafés, listening to music and interacting virtually. What persist are seminar rooms, studios for hands-on work, and lectures as events—chances to see and hear the luminaries as real people. Much isn’t really new, but has still made some settings obsolete. 9. The road to 2050 The Campus Planning Study Group explained the campus to a new generation. A similar impulse has guided successive LRDPs. The implementers rarely get everything right, but they manage to avoid the worst missteps of their predecessors. As this suggests, the

university is further down this path than the city. A comparable understanding of its districts and neighborhoods and, at another scale, its regional context and connections would, if it reflected broad agreement and shared understanding, help set the terms for discussion and decision-making about the city’s future as a place. Right now, that’s missing. Planning a campus or a city has a strong and necessary element of stewardship. This is probably more honored at U.C. Berkeley than within the Berkeley city government, but then the city’s critics are almost exclusively focused on preservation, providing a check that may eventually lead to a better balance. The role of steward comes down to finding a way forward that reconciles complex and often contradictory motives for growth and preservation. It comes down to keeping tradition in view while asking, again and again, how best to maintain it given changing needs, problems, and constituents. Part of being a steward is simply to pose the questions, “Is this really worth doing?” and “Isn’t there a better way?” The university is a better steward than the city because it has a longer institutional memory and less pressure—or fewer incentives—to embrace change for short-term, sometimes selfinterested reasons. Within what is becoming a working partnership, it has more reason and an easier time taking this view. It can even sometimes “play the heavy,” opposing changes that are inimical to the community. And while the partnership between the university and the city is a pragmatic one, still much opposed in some quarters, it reflects a basic truth about their common fate: they constitute a single community. "Place" and "community," then, are operative words for both as they contemplate life together in 2050. The work of CPSG a generation ago could be a useful precedent for a planning process that lets the university and city find shared common ground with each other and with their respective constituents. Making use of Berkeley’s district-based government, the two could sponsor an analogous effort to understand and inventory the existing conditions of its seven districts and their neighborhoods, pointing to strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Like CPSG’s initial work, the products of these efforts could be less of a plan for the future and more of a consensus about the broad framework within which any plans for the future would unfold. Plans have a way of being kidnapped by the immediate

interests of politicians and organized “neighbors.” Calling it a study and focusing on elements and a framework would help to sidestep this outcome. We believe that the university is better positioned than the city to lead this process. Moreover, its involvement in spearheading it would acknowledge their mutual dependence—the extent to which the failure of either one to sustain itself and thrive would constitute a growing disaster for the other. The university would have to overcome lingering suspicion of its motives within the community, but it is the senior partner in the relationship, with greater resources and more staying power. What we are proposing is a study group, not simply a study—an ongoing commitment to engage the community. Ideally, its focus would include the campus itself as the city’s eighth district. That way, the 2030, 2040, and 2050 LRDPs will be not just the plans of the university, but increasingly of the city it shares. That way, any and all plans that these two overlapping communities make will reflect a collective sense of what matters—of the qualities of place, broadly understood, that are intrinsic, vital, valued, preserved. Written with Richard Bender and Emily B. Marthinsen for the first UniverCities Conference, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, November 2013; published as a chapter in Anthony S.C. Teo, ed., Univer-Cities, World Scientific, Singapore, 2013, pp. 51–82, and reprinted in Univer-Cities, Volume II, World Scientific, Singapore, 2015, pp. 39–65.

Universities in the age of MOOCs (2014) "The University is so much bigger than the little islands of buildings that we think of it as."—Michael Pollan

The buzz began about two years ago: massive open online courses MOOCs - and online competitors to traditional universities and colleges - like Coursera, EdX, Minerva, and Udacity - were muscling in. Whether they constituted a threat or an opportunity was open to debate. For many, higher education looked like print journalism or conventional TV: way overdue for the creative destruction the tech sector, et al, routinely doled out. Two years ago, we started writing a chapter, "Berkeley: Campus and Community," for our friend Anthony Teo's book, UniversCities. This made us think about an institution and a city that more or less grew up together over roughly a 150-year trajectory. By the standards of Cambridge, this is not much time. Even Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard's hometown, has a much longer history. Yet 15 decades were long enough to garner numerous Nobel Prizes and other signs of prowess. More significantly, despite the depredations of an episodically dicey economy, Berkeley is still the people's university, the flagship of a nine-campus system that is fed in part by graduates of the state's community colleges. Access and affordability still matter, despite a steady falling off in state funding. We seem to be past our initial love affair with MOOC’s. Glowing articles and inspirational stories by passionate early adopters have given way to signs of student disenchantment, and practical questions about assessment and accreditation. Hybrid forms are developing that use technology’s tools but provide opportunities for face-to-face engagement. How best to use them to educate the next generation is a big issue in higher education. Almost none of the resulting academic-planning scenarios, however, address what will become of the campus itself. There is much talk about the bricksand-mortar student experience, but very little attention to the places where it occurs. Tipping our hats to Michael Pollan, both the campus and the adjoining community figure. As Teo's book suggests, they are joined at the hip. A challenge for higher education is how to take advantage of the unique opportunities offered by the physical campus and its

environs as the nature of the college and university experience changes. In considering MOOC pros and cons, discussion of the student experience often focuses on late-night conversations and serendipitous face-to-face interactions with others. At least one of the new educational enterprises is addressing this directly by establishing student living and gathering places in different cities; and there are reports of MOOC students arranging meet-ups and creating social media groups. But the campus experience goes beyond this. Paraphrasing Michael Pollan, we could say that a university is so much bigger than little islands of people. A major university has three responsibilities: to teach, to extend knowledge through research and creative endeavor, and to serve society in a civic sense. This is especially true of a public university like Berkeley, but its peers among private universities have a similar impulse. A university unfolds to what Stewart Brand calls "the clock of the long now," as much a steward of culture as of its campus. Like the for-profit colleges and universities that are their forebears, the newest online models are focused only on teaching and arguably, only on teaching that lends itself to online media. Traditional colleges and universities are, in contrast, essentially open-ended in relation to teaching, research, and public service. In the midst of academic committee work, it's easy to lose sight of this. These institutions may move slowly, but in fact they change dramatically over time. They are designed to accommodate the new, but that process distinguishes carefully between the framework - the guarantors of longevity - and the infill - the ideas in good currency flowing through their portals. Teo has expressed the view that this is Asia's moment, that higher education here is poised to grow and prosper as California's did in the decades following World War II. We don't doubt it. Almost lost in the MOOC buzz, though, was the remarkable initiative of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a global competition to develop an entirely new university campus on Roosevelt Island. Won by Cornell and Israel's Teknion, this project is, among things, an endorsement of place. Columbia and NYU, the city's two great private universities, have their own plans. This is Asia's moment, we agree, but a metropolitan renaissance is also under way that could raise all boats.

Adam Smith, he of the "invisible hand," predicted that around now, the nations of the world would be moving toward a rough parity. And this is where we're headed. The age of hegemony is giving way to one of regional centers, each with its metropolis. How this plays out is no sure thing. Successive world wars are there to remind us that rivalries die hard, but they also drive home the futility of these squabbles. The university, in particular, is the great countervailing force to prejudice, shortsightedness, chauvinism. Along with its role as economic pump-primer, it enables people and ideas to circulate. Rooted in a specific place, it looks out over time and space, a natural steward of both. This is a long way from campus and community, but a reminder of what's at stake. One of the heartening things of late has been to watch the great urban newspapers right themselves, figure the online thing out, and get back to what they do best. We value it, and in the end, that perception of value makes it work. Universities and colleges are no different. Not every one of America's 4,000 will survive in this brave new world, but many will find their way, understanding more clearly what they're about. We have no doubt that higher education at midcentury will be different than it is today, but we believe the campus will, by and large, be part of it, that the frame it provides will persist. Written with Richard Bender and Emily B. Marthinsen as a coda to our paper and chapter for Antony S.C. Teo's Univer-Cities Conference I in Singapore.

U.C. Berkeley and the Bay Region (2016) In 2013, we looked ahead to 2050 and imagined Berkeley, city and campus, as a "Univer-City." We noted that the future of the University of California at Berkeley would be closely tied to the future of the Bay Region and of California. We posited two scenarios—"Berkeley Small" and "Berkeley Large"—and then described a third alternative, "Berkeley Slow," that reimagined how students, faculty, and staff interact and the places and spaces, real and virtual, where collegial interaction occurs. We were particularly interested in how the university and the city could leverage and reinforce the best of each. What do we now see happening at the university, in Berkeley, and in the Bay Region? And how does this affect campus planning and the changing physical location and character of the campus environment? In the four years since our last presentation, the Bay Region itself has become an ever-more intentional Univer-City. As Univer-Cities develop, individualistic notions of distinct colleges and universities change. This was illustrated a few months ago with the announcement that Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Patricia Chan were establishing a $3 billion health research effort connecting three of the region’s powerhouse universities: U.C. Berkeley, U.C. San Francisco, and Stanford. Does the independent physical campus, for a college or university still matter? We think, emphatically, that it does. We are clearly, however, in a time of transition and experimentation for higher education. Rather than new and distinct colleges and universities (and campuses for them), we are starting to see a kind of eco-system of higher education emerge: the Univer-City recast as a regional hub for learning, research and innovation of all kinds. The Zuckerberg and Chan gift reflects this. Instead of developing entirely new campuses, institutions are joining forces as closely linked networks. Physical campuses are important and in place, but connections among all components of the “higher education sector” are enriched. Administrative, political, and cultural boundaries limiting academic relationships between institutions break down. Shared enterprise becomes common and the differences between public and private universities less important as activities, resources, and initiatives develop organically among them. 44

Opportunity and austerity Experiments in organizing, delivering, and innovating higher education have shaped long- and short-term decisions made by colleges and universities began in the dotcom era. Opportunities presented by distance learning, privatization, and civic, institutional, and business partnerships have all affected the shape and form of higher education today. None of these experiments has produced a viable new model, so defining the future of a public research university remains a challenge. Yet we have learned a few things: The physical campus matters: Although the distinction between town and gown no longer holds—scholarship and instruction in partnership with private and public interests is commonplace—the campus’s “sense of place” gives these activities identity. Serendipitous interactions no longer require people to cross physical paths; and profound communities can develop over great distances without physical presence. At the same time, though, the importance of the physical environment of campuses has grown and its value as part of our cities has increased. The campus is a setting for civic education and experiment; it provides amenities; and, for many people, an education in design of environments—built and natural. The need to apply new thinking about higher education to campuses in order to transform them makes campus planning more complex, but it also points squarely at the future. Austerity is also a driver of change: Ironically, many of the experiments that U.C. Berkeley and other public universities have carried out were motivated by the strictures of austerity budgets and mindsets. Both colleges and universities—and their physical campuses--reflect the time and context of their origins. Abraham Lincoln created the great public universities of the United States in 1862. Despite the existential threat to the Union in that first year of the American Civil War, with the Confederate army in ascendance, President Lincoln and the U.S. Congress authorized the establishment of land-grant universities in support of the country’s future economic growth. Thanks for Lincoln’s foresight, these colleges and universities—located outside the cities and focused on agriculture, forestry, and mining—proved to be the drivers of much of the post-Civil War economy, especially in the American West. Not unlike the Civil War period, public higher education in most of the U.S. today is facing challenging circumstances. Ours is a time of austerity. Ironically, it’s an austerity amid plenty. By 2016, California had recovered from recession and a four-year drought, supplanting France as the fifth largest economy in the world. That achievement is tempered by deficits in housing, transit, infrastructure, environmental management, and public investment—including higher education. While austerity can spur

innovation, it can also lead to inequity, misdirection, and false economies. Every decision is a balancing act. The percentage of state funding for U.C. Berkeley has decreased from 50% thirty years ago to 14% today. Student tuition and fees, just 17 % of total revenue in 2008 is now about 30%, forcing us to confront the question: is “public” higher education now providing a private rather than a community benefit? The response to this question drives policy debate and decisionmaking on issues from student debt to enrollment growth to research agendas to every kind of capital investment. Because the stakes are so high— not only preserving but also strengthening the public mission and role of universities—understanding new and changing relationships of cities and universities is critical to society’s future well-being. In the 150 years since the first federal legislations, public colleges and universities have grown to encompass a much larger portfolio—instruction, service and research in a wide range of disciplines, providing access opportunities for increasingly diverse populations. Public colleges and universities support the most advanced research, both basic and applied, leading the way in solving global problems and enhancing lives—through science and technology as well as through the social sciences and the arts. Importantly, public colleges and universities educate students as citizens underscoring the critical connection—in fact, the integration-- between these institutions and their political/social/cultural and economic environments. The physical campus itself plays a significant role—and important towns and cities have grown and developed around them.

Back to the Future If, over the past 10 years or so, the enthusiastic embrace by colleges and universities of various futures has proved illusory—MOOCs are perhaps the best-known example—the University of California has seen larger bets underperform, as with U.C. Merced, or falter, as with the Berkeley Global Campus. Planning for a 10th University of California campus in the Central Valley began in the late 1980s. There is no question that the vision— political, educational, and physical—looked back to best practices learned from mid-20th-century public university campuses. A high profile, comprehensive, and political site-selection process led eventually to the development of the UC Merced Campus on its current site—a 2,000-acre parcel of land about eight miles from the historic center of Merced, the seat of Merced County in the San Joaquin Valley. A more-or-less conventional campus, albeit with advanced sustainable features, was planned and partially implemented at the site. Care was taken to create a campus community with thoughtfully designed buildings and common 46

spaces. However, development of the bricks-and-mortar campus slowed as state funded capital investment became increasingly difficult in our stressed budget climate. A number of approaches to campus development have been explored in the past five years; and, after a multi-year competitive process, the University of California has just announced the latest initiative, the U.C. Merced 2020 Project. At the time the current site was selected, U.C. Berkeley Professor Bender put forward an alternative proposal: rather than developing a self-contained campus, he suggested using the rail corridor that connects Merced and other Central Valley cities to distribute the 10th campus’s facilities in their transit-accessible downtowns. The proposal anticipated the eco-systems that many of today’s UniverCities are creating: settings for higher education that integrate with their communities economically, socially, and culturally. Interestingly, the cost of new construction at the campus site— and, likely, but harder to measure, the more appealing character of the historic downtown—has led U.C. Merced to locate a number of its academic programs and administrative activities downtown, adapting and reusing historic buildings as well as building new ones. Downtown Merced has become a lively center for the arts, with the campus and the community sharing performance venues, cafés, stores, and public spaces. U.C. Merced 2020 aims to recreate a downtown experience on the self-contained campus by partnering with the private sector. Renderings show active, mixed-use spaces along a main street. A legacy of the vision that placed the campus out of town, its development may stretch out beyond 2020. The Berkeley Global Campus was a more recent initiative of the current Berkeley Chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, to create a separate, five-million-square-foot campus as a focus of federal and joint university/corporate R&D investment. Initially prompted by the expansion plans of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Global Campus went through a multi-year planning effort that included competitive site selection, conventional master planning, a lengthy community engagement process and consultation with many, many potential partners—academic, real estate, industry—in the U.S. and abroad. The Berkeley initiative had a counterpart in Cornell Tech in New York City, a partnership of Cornell University and the Technion–

Israel Institute of Technology. Launched by then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg through an international competition that attracted competing proposals from Stanford and other institutions, Cornell Tech is now a reality in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, and its new campus on Roosevelt Island is under construction. The Berkeley Global Campus, however, did not fare so well. This past summer, Chancellor Dirks announced that, for the time being, its development as a campus was on-hold. The concept—that real estate developers, foreign universities, and private industry would invest in the development of a new bricks-and-mortar campus in that location—proved unfounded. In hindsight, the expediencydriven choice of a university-owned property as the site reflected the worst of austerity thinking. Its collapse provides an opportunity to recalibrate. As the innovation guru Edward De Bono notes, “Good ideas often emerge from bad ones.” It can also be helpful, in looking for those good ideas, to ask where those bad ideas come from. Unpacking the competition The strong interest that the Berkeley Global Campus initially attracted reflected the sense from potential bidders that it would either relate to the historic U.C. Berkeley Campus—taking sites in the downtown district, for example—or would be sufficiently accessible by transit that proximity wouldn’t be an issue. The potential of a five-million-square-foot building program was of course the bigger draw, but a good location—even without an immediate commitment to build—would still be promising to developers. When Chancellor Dirks and his advisers chose Richmond Field Station, their competition devolved to architects. Five local and national firms submitted designs. Following the competition, the international firm BIG was hired by a donor to provide a sixth scheme. While the local team tried in earnest to address the site’s numerous environmental challenges, none of the competing firms challenged the site itself. Richmond Field Station, originally a military installation from World War II, is really only accessible from the U.C. Berkeley Campus by car. Transit access may eventually be provided as part of

an extension of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system to San Rafael in Marin County, crossing the Richmond Bridge. The site adjoins residential and other waterfront development, so a station serving both would make sense. Its development is unlikely to take place in the next 20 years, given competing priorities for transit. Yet Richmond Field Station was chosen, both because U.C. Berkeley owned it and because it could accommodate the full fivemillion-square-foot building program. The “expediency” of this choice, made to keep the idea alive when Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories withdrew its commitment, doomed the Berkeley Global Campus concept, but the decision to develop a single new campus rather than a distributed one was also a factor. U.C. San Francisco at Mission Bay In opting for a single campus to house its consolidated building program, U.C. Berkeley was likely influenced by U.C. San Francisco’s Research Campus in Mission Bay. Like the Berkeley Global Campus, the Mission Bay Campus began as a competition among world-class architecture firms. Unlike the Berkeley Global Campus, Mission Bay was a Redevelopment Area and former railyard owned by Catellus, the former real estate arm of the Southern Pacific Railway. In planning since the 1970s, the project was stalled. Then-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and the city’s business leaders joined forces, in part to keep U.C. San Francisco's medical research facilities from migrating to a competing site in Brisbane, south of San Francisco. By giving U.C. San Francisco a substantial site for its Research Campus, Catellus (and the City of San Francisco) finally found a way to get construction started and attract the region’s biotech industry as office/lab building tenants. It worked. Today, the Research Campus is adjoined by privatesector office buildings focused on the biotech and tech industries. A new hospital, jointly developed by U.C. San Francisco and the City of San Francisco, is in operation to the south. On paper, this success story seems like a good model. In reality, it is mostly inapplicable, and not just because of the differences in the two sites. Mission Bay reflects 1990s-style planning, in which different uses are kept within their respective precincts. Nominally mixed use, the mix it achieves is more suburban than urban. Density is allocated in “ground-

scraper” blocks of offices, labs, and—to the north—housing. Today, a development like this would likely aim for a richer, denser mix. Today's desire for urbanity is reflected in working and living styles that favor mobility and make the boundaries between organizations and activities more porous than they used to be. While tech giants like Apple cling to secrecy, their competitors are opening up, locating closer to where their talent lives and collocating R&D with the startups they help incubate and accelerate. This trend, which started in the tech industry, has spread to biotech. It has also spurred new partnerships with universities. Alternative models of accommodation These shifts have not eliminated the need for large-scale accommodation in the biotech and tech industries in the Bay Region, but new strategies have emerged that range beyond (and possibly challenge) the two models on which the Berkeley Global Campus drew. One strategy is the vertical campus, which in San Francisco is best exemplified by Salesforce. After almost building a new midrise campus in Mission Bay, this fast-growing tech company chose instead to lease space in downtown San Francisco’s transit corridor, becoming the anchor tenant in the new Salesforce Tower, the city’s tallest building. When completed, the tower will adjoin the redeveloped Transbay Terminal, a transit hub that will eventually connect the local and regional transit network with a high-speed intercity rail system. Salesforce’s decision to locate along downtown San Francisco’s regional transit corridor points to the importance of mobility for today’s biotech and tech employees. Mobility means two things: shorter commutes, if possible, between work and home; and the ability to work from different locations during the workday and workweek. The Bay Region suffers from chronic shortages of “closein” housing that even well-paid biotech and tech employees can afford, and also from decades of underinvestment in transit. To compensate, employees work remotely to avoid rush-hour commuting and to get individual work done that is easier outside the conventional workplace than within it. The workplace proper is mostly there to support teamwork, but the rise of startups and the incubators and accelerators that accompany them has made larger biotech and tech companies look hard at those settings in terms of

fostering innovation. Co-working spaces are proliferating in the Bay Region to support startups and help them scale. They are replacing ground-floor retail and supplanting office spaces upstairs, offering on-demand workspace as an alternative to conventional leasing. The Bay Region today and in 2050 Let’s stop briefly to consider the Bay Region itself. It has an economy the size of the Netherlands and is a huge factor in California’s position as an economy bigger than France and Brazil. The region is wealthy, but it lacks an effective regional government. (Los Angeles, in contrast, is a city and county that embraces and governs most of its metropolitan area.) While there are regional authorities with clout, investment in transit has lagged and housing development is largely left to the market. Neither the state, which came close to a Greece-like default in the wake of the 2008 “Great Recession,” nor the federal government, which takes more tax dollars from California than it gives back, have filled the gap. The Bay Region’s wealth literally reflects the presence and prowess of its research universities. U.C. Berkeley and U.C. San Francisco together spurred the region’s biotech sector, one of the larger such clusters in the US. Stanford spawned Silicon Valley and is closely tied to Tech's growth and reinvention. Ensuring that the Bay Region remains a world center for basic and applied research in science and technology is a widely shared goal. Despite the lack of adequate investment, the Bay Region has a reasonably robust armature for future growth that can support the historic ties between its flagship research universities and the current and emerging sectors that will maintain and extend the region’s importance as a global research center. The transit corridors and urban centers that will sustain this growth are already in place. What remains is to bring them to contemporary standards of capacity and performance while preserving the qualities that make the Bay Region so attractive as a setting: the presence of nature and the quality of life. The urban centers in question include: Berkeley–Oakland–Fremont (U.C. Berkeley); San Francisco– Peninsula (U.C. San Francisco and Stanford); and the Silicon Valley “arc” anchored by downtown San Jose (but connected by cross-bay rapid transit links between Palo Alto and Fremont, and between San Mateo and Hayward).

Secondary corridors, like Concord–Walnut Creek–San Ramon and Berkeley–San Rafael, will create new urban centers at the region’s edge that relate to adjoining counties to the north and east. Similarly, Silicon Valley’s current arc will by 2050 link by intercity rail to Santa Cruz and Monterey to the south. These urban centers will carry the bulk of new growth, which will be closely linked to transit access and the availability of housing, amenities, and services. Most important, they will be urban, with sufficient urbanity to compete with older centers in the region as attractive places to live and work. Their urban densities will enable the Bay Region to maintain the growth boundaries that preserve its open spaces for agriculture, recreation, and nature (including flood control and wildlife preservation). Research universities and their regions Looking out to 2050, we foresee a shift from “Univers-Cities” to metropolises like the Bay Region that build on the innovating power of basic and applied research that universities provide their economies. These regions will actively support their universities, public and private, as core institutions. Whether they are public or private will be less important than their public identity as being partners with their regions in a shared, symbiotic future. Reflecting a collective vision will help the universities transcend old rivalries and fulfill their role as enlightened stewards of their regions’ human capital. Despite its size and wealth, the Bay Region and its three Universities are competing on the national and world stages. To maintain the region’s drawing power as a leading center for advanced research in the sciences and technology, its three flagship research universities are stronger as a cooperative whole than as competing parts. Their main strengths as institutions are also complementary: U.C. Berkeley on pure science and biotech; U.C. San Francisco on biotech and medical research; and Stanford on applied science, technology, and medical research. In relation to the regional armature outlined previously, each institution relates to a different but adjoining urban center and transit corridor. Expanding within it and then using the armature to promote collaboration is the one strategy that will allow three institutions to leverage the region’s future growth.

Looking ahead, it’s not hard to imagine the form this will take. U.C. Berkeley will extend south along the East Bay, finding common ground with Stanford in the high-tech manufacturing corridor centered in Fremont. U.C. San Francisco will overlap U.C. Berkeley and Stanford in the areas of medical and biotech research, with its Mission Bay Campus as a hub. Stanford will tie more closely with Silicon Valley and the South Bay, while building new ties to the biotech and tech hubs in San Francisco. Faster transit and denser transit-linked development will bring the three institutions much closer together, creating greater synergy among research teams and more effective use of talent and resources. The goal will be for researchers on all three campuses to have ready access to the others for lectures and collaboration. As longtime observers of the region, we are confident this sanguine view of the future prospects of its flagship research universities is justified. It’s also appropriate that the two public universities join forces with the private one to support the region’s continuing prosperity from their different standpoints. U.C. Berkeley and U.C. San Francisco are steeped in a long tradition of research with public benefit, while Stanford has been about applying the research for economic benefit. The complementary and overlapping nature of their roles blurs the distinctions in positive and creative ways, we believe, that will benefit all three. The land–grant college at midcentury By 2050, almost two centuries will have passed since Abraham Lincoln signed the legislation that set up the Land Grant College system that became the network of public research universities. U.C. Berkeley is one of them, along with other U.C. Campuses. The willingness of the Bay Region’s technology entrepreneurs to fund research in the sciences and medicine reflects their estimation of this legacy and their confidence that it will endure. As California asserts itself as an economic force literally built on the breakthrough research of its leading universities, the condition of its flagship public research university will strengthen. While the current moment in U.S. politics finds these institutions portrayed almost as the enemies of a new order proud of its ignorance, the stewards of the US economy are clearer on the vital role they play. Yet this is not

enough. To regain the ground they’ve lost, these institutions need to revive the public mission that spurred their founding. While U.C. Berkeley and U.C. San Francisco will benefit from making common cause with Stanford to heighten the region’s standing as a global research center, U.C. Berkeley is and will always be a public research university whose reason for being is to train the next generation of leaders in the arts, sciences, and professions. It is a “people’s university” in a way that Stanford is not. At the same time, U.C. Berkeley’s roots as a land-grant college obligate it to support California’s economy “on the ground,” establishing ties to its communities to sustain its long-term growth in the face of the natural and manmade issues that hinder it. U.C. Berkeley exists to apply its research for the communal good. After 2008, U.C. Berkeley flirted with becoming close to private, despite its history. To the extent that it is portrayed as elitist and unaffordable, it risks losing political support. So far, U.C. Berkeley has kept the public in California on its side, despite its critics. Austerity is always relative. When choices are to be made about where to allocate investment, the clear benefits of one over another come to the fore. The land grant colleges proved their worth historically by propelling the U.S. economy forward, transcending agriculture—their initial focus—by embracing and supporting development in a wider sense. They helped America envision its future, state by state. That role is every bit as crucial today as it was in the midst of a Civil War. In many ways, we’re at that juncture again—two diverging views of our prospects, one of which ignores history and devalues science. Helping to lead the country out of this wilderness is why Lincoln enacted them, so that responsibility is clear. When we look ahead, we see institutions that have found their voice and purpose once again, envisioning a country that is unafraid to be a beacon for knowledge and its application. California, always at the forefront, will shine all the brighter for this recommitment to its public, communal role. U.C. Berkeley, one of America’s great public research universities, will be there, Fiat Lux. Originally written with Emily B. Marthinsen for the second Univer-Cities Conference, University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia, November 2016, and then published as a chapter in Anthony S.C. Teo, ed., Univer-Cities, Volume III, World Scientific, Singapore, 2018, pp. 87–99.

Catalyst for a revived public realm (2019) “Since 2008, state legislatures have cut $14 billion in funding from public universities, or 20 percent. In 2008, President Obama asked Congress for $12 billion to revitalize the nation’s community-college system. He didn’t get it. But between 2013 and 2018, a lone American university—already the richest in the world—raised $9.6 billion in a single fund-raising campaign.”—Tara Westover, New York Times, 29 September 2019

California’s mid-20th century was a heady moment when International Style modernism, brought here by Europeans like Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra, mixed with the home-grown regionalism of the West Coast. It ushered in California’s boom decades, through the 1960s, that saw new University of California (U.C.) Campuses built and the Bay Region’s BART transit system put in. There is still a fascination with midcentury modernism in the US, but the Bay Region has other traditions to draw on—and a reputation for iconoclasm. Wherever it goes next, we can depend on this being a contentious, drawn-out, and imaginative process. As we write this, a new midcentury is just a bit more than a generation away. Inequality is now a defining, across-the-board issue for the Bay Region, a problem of scarcity amid abundance, exacerbated by a tiered economy whose disparities in wealth, so visible on our urban streets, are fueling a movement to rein in its excesses and address shortages and inequities. As in most democracies, this is a messy, politicized process. Tackling the structural problems exemplified by the region’s lack of fiscal autonomy and its unequal tax regime, requires political will. But it also requires a widely shared vision of its public realm as a viable and thriving framework. Horst Rittel, a U.C. Berkeley Professor and polymath, noted how the issues that dog the public realm are interconnected, each manifestation a symptom of a larger failing. Thus, homelessness is tied to decades of chronically low housing production, but also to the way mental illness lost its public funding and treatment facilities, the privatization of public space, the fraying of the public safety net, and the steady loss of housing options at the margins. Homelessness is now a category, the subject of programs that soak up considerable public and philanthropic monies. It has spawned businesses, some of which resemble or even overlap private prison providers. In a 56

similar way, education has a grey zone of for-profit operators, organized around lacunae in the way public and private education work. Every inconsistency is an opportunity to fill the gap, but gapfilling is often an expensive and unsatisfactory workaround: not always, but too often. “Start where you are” the Buddhists say. U.C. Berkeley and its community are the seeds of an ecosystem that, spreading across the Bay Region, could rethink how the public realm as a framework provides the goods, services, and settings that are basic to livability. They can't solve the region’s problems, but they could show how such problems could be resolved by approaching them holistically— not by challenging the multiplicity of current and future institutions, enterprises, groups, and individuals involved, but by linking them as an ecosystem, a network that becomes accustomed to tackling its problems cooperatively, looking past existing boundaries to ask if there’s a larger problem that needs tackling, and combining political will with enough shared vision of the outcomes to preserve livability and urbanity—the qualities that make the Bay Region uniquely what it is—and bring them forward as defining features. Introduction This is our third essay for the Univer-Cities Conference. In 2013, we considered U.C. Berkeley’s past, present, and future as a leading public university in a community, Berkeley, that was founded not long before its establishment. In 2016, we looked at the roles played by U.C. Berkeley, U.C. San Francisco, and Stanford in making the Bay Region a global center for research and innovation in science and technology. Arguing for closer collaboration among them, we noted how the lack of investment in infrastructure has hindered the growth of new centers and made intercity movement slow and cumbersome. Unless addressed, we wrote, these deficits will make the region less and less attractive—and competitive—as a global R&D center. Our previous essays took note of U.C. Berkeley’s origins as a landgrant college, benefiting from an 1862 Act of Congress aimed at extending public higher education across the country and applying scientific and technological research to the pillars its economy— agriculture, manufacturing, and mining. The ideal of the public university, rooted in the Land Grant College Act, has had

remarkable staying power at U.C. Berkeley, despite a steady decline in state funding. This “origin story” is pertinent to the issues of inequality raised by the 2019 Univer-Cities Conference. U.C. Berkeley is guided by a mission that was set at its founding. Along with institutional goals, this self-defining exercise took in the community around it, acknowledging and privileging their interconnectedness. One of its founding assumptions was that it would play an outsized role in creating and influencing the public realm. U.C. Berkeley has always been more than just a physical campus set within a community. From the start, it was intended to shape the cultural, economic, political, and social landscape of the state and region. Exempted from local control by this broader mandate, U.C. Berkeley has grown to its current size and stature. This has made for an unequal and often uneasy marriage with the city around it. At a time of rising inequality, however, their ability to act in tandem is an advantage. It may make them a potential model for other universities and colleges as they tackle inequality. The public realm is a spatially-defined framework of publicly accessible goods and services. It typically includes education, healthcare, housing, and transit—the availability and affordability are two measures of societal equity. In the U.S., this framework is delivered by a patchwork of organizations, public and private, funded and administered in multiple ways. In the Bay Region, only transit answers to a nascent public authority. Within this schema, higher education is part of a larger category that also takes in childcare; primary and secondary education; job-and-career-related education and training; and adult education and lifelong learning. The Bay Region’s universities and colleges—public and private alike—emphasize the value of their immediate and larger settings. The idea of a campus as a real place persists as a focal point of plans for consolidation, redevelopment, and expansion. Campuses impact the public realm, positively and negatively, and vice versa. U.C. Berkeley, with a daytime population of 50,000 people, tries to be a good neighbor to the city around it, but the shortcomings of the Bay Region’s public realm make this harder—a situation shared by other institutions as they consider their longer-term prospects, and also of course by their host cities.

Higher education as a public good Higher education provided opportunities for individuals and, importantly, the places they lived and worked to grow and prosper. Higher education in the U.S. provided a path out of poverty and out of the working class for generations of immigrants, formerly enslaved people, and others. Colleges and universities varied greatly, of course, in assets and resources, but overall, a college education was a ticket to opportunity in the United States for most of the 20th century. Towns and cities, large and small, with colleges and universities benefited economically and culturally from their presence. University and college towns are well-liked; and, as recently as the 2008 crisis and its aftermath, they have weathered economic ups and downs successfully. But inequality is now part of higher education’s narrative. Student homelessness and crushing debt get the headlines, but at an average cost of $50,000 or more per year, it is a challenging expense for middle-class families that are ineligible for financial aid. A college education is also increasingly viewed as a private good—an opportunity for individual growth, decoupled from positive community impact. Despite the long-term career benefit of higher education, a growing portion of the American public no longer sees it as a surefire route to social mobility. To address these issues and return higher education to its broader societal mandate, it is timely to reconsider it as an ecosystem. To do so, we have to look beyond the conventional focus on individual institutions and their campuses. Because U.C. Berkeley is part of a 10-campus system, our 2013 essay nodded to this statewide network. Its importance to the Bay Region as a global research center led us, in 2016, to ask how greater cooperation with Stanford and U.C. San Francisco could support that claim. In our view, higher education is a key component of the framework that constitutes the public realm of every metropolis. We should therefore think of it as an ecosystem that includes universities, colleges, academies, centers, and schools that award post-secondary certificates and degrees. Large and small, public and private, distinguished and ordinary, they form the “universe” that employs faculty and attracts students to the region, as well as contributing to its economy. We tend to think of Univer-Cities in terms of the top-tier institutions, but they are typically a fraction of

what this and other metropolitan regions offer. An ecosystem including all of them as an interconnected regional network raises their collective value as a public good. That higher education is an ecosystem was anticipated by a 1956 compact that organized public higher education in California into three tiers: the U.C. System; the California State University (C.S.U.) System; and the California Community College System. The private side includes large institutions like the California Institute of Technology, the University of Southern California, and Stanford, and smaller ones focused on liberal arts, art, design, and other fields. There are also sectarian and women’s colleges. In the Bay Region alone, there are four public universities, numerous public community colleges, and a wide range of private universities, colleges, academies, conservatories, and schools—a diverse network that shares the challenge of excelling as a public good in a climate of rising costs and growing inequality. Blurring the Distinctions In the U.S., we often begin discussing higher education by distinguishing between public and private universities. Yet the bright line that separated the two is becoming less distinct. Public and private now best describes their historic foundations and, up to a point, their governance. Changes, notably in how both types of institutions are funded, suggests more similarities than differences. Conversations at public universities throughout the U.S. echo those at U.C. Berkeley: the amount of funding from the state has so diminished that, per a previous Chancellor, it may no longer be accurate to call U.C. Berkeley “public” in any meaningful way. Funding for U.C. Berkeley comes from four sources: state allocations; funded research (mainly federal); tuition and fees; philanthropy; and income from endowments and patents. A private research university like Stanford has the same funding sources but in different proportions. Even the origin stories of the two universities speak of the largesse of the Hearst and Stanford families, part of California’s Gold Rush aristocracy. U.C. Berkeley is a bargain for undergraduates, but elite private universities in the US like Stanford use their huge endowments to ensure some diversity in their student bodies. While different, the two institutions are much less different than they seem. And they are growing more alike.

Yet they share a sense of themselves as part of the region’s public realm. They were founded to educate its best and brightest, and help generate innovation and create the wealth that would keep graduates from leaving and attract many others to join them. If U.C. Berkeley claimed to be “the Athens of the West,” it was a claim in which Leland Stanford had an equal stake. Silicon Valley and the Green New Deal Stanford University is closely associated with Silicon Valley, the cradle of the contemporary tech sector. U.C. Berkeley and U.C. San Francisco are metropolitan universities. U.C. Berkeley both educates the region’s knowledge workforce and carries out the “pure” research that fuels innovation in sectors beyond Tech. U.C. San Francisco combines a teaching medical center with specialized medical research, and operates a network of clinics, as does Stanford. If there is any distinction between Stanford and the U.C. Campuses, it may be in the way that the respective ethos of Silicon Valley and of Berkeley and San Francisco still differ. In broad-brush terms, Silicon Valley is libertarian, influenced by Ayn Rand’s brand of it from the 1960s and 1970s. Rooted in Tech, an evolving sector with global ambitions, it operates from an unwavering self-belief that is hostile and disruptive to the public realm. In particular, Silicon Valley's moguls have sought to limit taxes. Even as its founders and the companies themselves have expanded their philanthropy, Tech's share of the tax burden of maintaining and investing in public goods and services is not equal to its impacts on them. It demands much more than it gives. Berkeley and San Francisco, in contrast, range in ethos from liberal to socialist. They believe in the public realm, but their ability to invest in it is stymied by structural problems including a state tax regime that is overdependent on real property and consumption, and gets much less funding from the federal government for entitlement programs and infrastructure projects. The Green New Deal, a policy proposal put forward by Democratic Socialists in the Democratic Party, speaks to the metropolitan Bay Region’s Progressive ethos, which sees a strong role government—federal to local—in planning, administering, and funding the public realm as a framework of publicly accessible, affordable goods and services. To work, the Green New Deal

would have to address the structural problems of California’s existing tax regime, which largely exempts corporate profits and, concurrently, sees net outflows in federal taxes to other states. These two different value systems, also reflected at the national level, are part of the context in which the higher education ecosystem in the Bay Region operates. They help explain why an economy the size of the Netherlands can neither provide nor invest in public goods and services at the same level. Singapore could be a model, but the region lacks Singapore’s political autonomy and will. Even compared to Los Angeles, whose city-county government maps its metropolitan area closely, the Bay Region lacks a political center. While there are efforts to form one by combining the transit authority with a new entity focused on housing, the closest thing to a regional political power is a working coalition of Bay Area state legislators. They are pushing legislation to override local controls on housing production and impose limits on rents. While aimed at a headline manifestation of inequality in the region, affordable housing, these measures target perceived roadblocks rather than increasing public investment and subsidies. Higher education is affected by these shortcomings. As an ecosystem, potentially with pre-school, primary, and secondary education in its purview, it could address them. By acting in concert to find collective solutions, it could show cities and counties in the region how to cooperate for a similar purpose. As stewards of the region’s future, it could exercise moral suasion, mediating between each ethos's advocates, who are often at loggerheads. Evolving Berkeley’s own ecosystem Before they can generate a wider ecosystem, U.C. Berkeley and the City of Berkeley both need to take concrete steps to firm up their own. They won’t be starting from scratch. Despite the friction inherent in any long relationship, their ties and interdependence continue. We foresee four steps that would build on them and turn a nascent ecosystem into a real one. Step one: Campus–community cooperation: Our first essay looked at Berkeley as an archetypal university city. The two grew up together. In the spirit of modus vivendi, the university has steadily expanded its cooperation with the city in recent years, doing more institutionally to address its impacts, especially on the west and south sides of campus.

The jointly developed Downtown Area Plan (DAP) makes Center Street the pedestrian entry to the campus from the west, connecting to the city’s main transit station. UC Berkeley and the city both contributed to BART’s recent renovation of the station plaza. More important, DAP raised the overall density and broadened the mix of uses downtown, positioning the university as a major partner in its redevelopment. The decision to move the University Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive to Center Street, across from campus and a block from transit, underlined the area’s importance as a cultural and tourist destination, accessible from across the region. New university buildings clustered north of University Avenue and east of Shattuck Avenue are expanding downtown Berkeley as a mixed, walkable, urban-scale academic, commercial, cultural, and residential district. The newest academic building houses classrooms, offices, and research facilities for Education, Psychology, and Public Health. All three have communityfocused programs that benefit from the building’s close proximity to transit. Ground-floor retail serves the academic community and nearby residents, filling in a gap in the gourmet corridor along Shattuck Avenue to the north, anchored by Alice Water’s Chez Panisse. The building has leasable Class A office space—in short supply in Berkeley—to fill out its academic program. The decision to build the additional space honors DAP’s commitment to higher density. It contrasts with a nearby “surge” building that, at three stories, only met the university’s immediate need. The south entrance to campus, Sproul Plaza, has been redeveloped to support a student body that lives and works in new ways. Moffitt Library, the main undergraduate library, which terminates the campus’s south entry sequence, has been similarly transformed to support new ways of learning. The library is as much about meeting and conferring with peers as it is about supporting individual study. Research librarians are there to help students navigate a world of online, digitized resources or request books and journals from offsite storage. Amazon has an outlet in Sproul Plaza that provides safe delivery of goods, separate from students’ housing. Between the campus edge and Dwight Way, five blocks south, the university has added housing on its own and with partners. Following a fire that destroyed an older apartment building on the Telegraph Avenue corridor, the university took a master lease in the redeveloped property to help its private owner secure financing. Fifty years after the turmoil that led to People’s Park, the university and the city will replace it with student and homeless housing, a move strongly supported by the surrounding district and its Council representative, although not without controversy among “old lefties” in the community. The university owns the land and is legally free to develop it as it chooses, but it chose to work cooperatively for resolution. And vice versa, of course—trust has been steadily built by mutual planning and follow-through. For its part, the community has passed bond measures to invest in affordable housing. How the money is spent is decided by citizen commissions that include former campus planning staff, familiar to the Mayor and Council as co-authors of the joint plans now being implemented. The current faculty is engaged as advisors—the Terner Center, for example,

weighs in on housing. These relationships are longstanding but informal, reflecting the porosity of town and gown. Step 2: The community-serving campus: Higher education across the Bay Region has a range of “campus” models. Stanford, like Berkeley, grew around a historic core of older buildings and formal open spaces. U.C. San Francisco added a separate research campus to augment its original Parnassus Heights home. California College of the Arts (CCA) is shifting from its small, venerable campus off College Avenue in Oakland, south of U.C. Berkeley to an urban campus in a former industrial area below Potrero Hill and west of Mission Bay. Academy of Art University is even more dispersed across San Francisco, while the San Francisco Art Institute has opened a second facility at Fort Mason, a new arts-and-culture anchor in the city’s Marina District. The sheer variety of types weighs against the idea of a campus as a “world apart.” The range of students served and the forms their access takes is blurring the boundaries still further. U.C. Berkeley’s 178-acre campus reflects the tiered, real-and-virtual nature of the boundary. You need a card or an email address for entry to parts of it, but a growing cohort of others is accommodated, for a fee or as a public good. Despite decades of active, changing use, the campus still reads as a park. This reflects the deft hands of its early planners and its founding campus architect. With its west entry a short walk from regional transit, this is a place people visit, whether or not they have formal ties to the university. Even as it blends into the districts that adjoin it, the campus setting, with its Beaux Arts monuments, defines the community. Following the recommendations of the Campus Planning Study Group, set down in the early 1980s, U.C. Berkeley began to develop the central campus at a generally higher density and, when possible, make more intensive use of existing buildings through redevelopment and a variety of revenuegenerating activities beyond the daytime, fulltime academic program. The Berkeley campus has long been an important regional destination for performing arts and intercollegiate athletic competitions. Zellerbach Hall, its main concert hall and playhouse, opened in 1968. It brings world-known artists and their audiences to the Berkeley campus. Hertz Hall and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive are also popular cultural destinations, augmented by year-round art-and-culture workshops and summer camps. Cal’s football stadium and basketball arena draw thousands of alumni and fans. Its aquatic center and track stadium host high-school and well as university events. On the academic side, long-time professional and continuing education programs like those of the Haas School of Business and U.C. Berkeley Extension are now accompanied by career development, degree, and certificate programs that connect U.C. Berkeley to a wider network of higher education in the region. Campus/community interaction has grown in importance. U.C. Berkeley’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) runs a four-quarter program of short courses for “inquiring adults,” most in settings beyond the campus. BAMPFA, the university’s art museum, hosts

academic courses with weekly public lectures. The nearby Magnes Museum, newly acquired by the University, also hosts joint events related to its collection and mission. Some U.C. Berkeley activities make use of facilities at other campuses, beginning to create a kind of physical network for the higher education ecosystem that we describe. Shared facilities like the Stanford Linear Accelerator are well-known, but U.C. Berkeley's hockey team has used Stanford’s fields to practice and play, while some U.C. Berkeley students are housed at Holy Names University in Oakland. This pattern of shared use is likely to grow as the higher education ecosystem looks to its members and beyond them to find housing, theater venues, clinical and research space, and other facilities that serve their own needs and those of the wider community. Step three: public education as a network: U.C. and C.S.U. shape the academic side of the California Community College System by setting the requirements and standards for transfer and advancement to upper division status. The U.C. System has made a point of fostering this relationship to further its goals for student diversity and equality of access. If there is an argument for expanding California’s education ecosystem to address its quality fully and consciously from pre-school on up, these two goals are at the heart of it. Below the university level, the public institutions involved are tied to their communities, with wide variation in their resources and quality of outcomes; private schools are tied to their sponsors. To recast them as an eco-system would leave much to the traditions and prerogatives of its member institutions, but deal systemically with their limiting factors. Of these factors, inequality of access to resources across public K–12 education stands out. For most families the tradeoffs are between housing costs and school quality. Affluent suburbs have strong, well-funded public schools. Many urban communities have a mix of good public schools and bad, while some have no good public schools at all. To the extent that parents face shortages or an outright lack of good public schools, their children’s futures are endangered. This has a cascading impact on the regional economy, crimping the social mobility that higher education makes possible by shutting whole cohorts of young people from its potential ranks. An interesting example for higher education’s involvement in public K–12 education is Ball State University’s partnership with the Muncie, Indiana, Community Schools. Ball State University is a state university, founded in Muncie in 1918, with 22,500 students. Muncie, a postindustrial city of 70,000 people, is a regional healthcare center for east central Indiana. Its public schools were in sufficient crisis that the State of Indiana took control of them in 2018. By mutual agreement, the university formed a partnership with the city’s schools, appointing a new board, embarking on an academic innovation plan for the K–12 program, developed jointly with schools, to be completed in 2020. With public and foundation funding, the program is envisioned as a testbed for new ideas and initiatives in K–12 education. The private

University of Chicago’s Laboratory Schools, founded in 1896 by the educator-philosopher John Dewey, is an earlier precedent. Currently, students in their last two years at Berkeley High School can take courses at the university if their academic programs warrant it. The one lab-type activity U.C. Berkeley maintains is the Harold E. Jones Child Study Center, founded in 1927. One of the oldest such centers in the US, its childcare program, in a facility designed by the AIA Gold Medalist Joseph Esherick, gives priority to the university community, but also serves community residents. A clear opportunity for Berkeley, campus and community, is to expand these relationships. U.C. Berkeley is heavily involved in Berkeley’s Vision 2020 Initiative, which addresses public schools. Since 2005, its School of Education has partnered with Aspire Public Schools, a non-profit charter management organization, to run Richmond Aspire California College Preparatory Academy in nearby Richmond, California. Aspire operates 40 public charter schools in California and Tennessee. Berkeley Unified School District’s autonomy from the City of Berkeley means that any new initiatives involving the city’s public schools would need its participation. Vision 2020 suggests that the Berkeley community would welcome their expansion.

Inequality as a Societal Leitmotif Inequality is part of higher education’s narrative. In her 29 September 2019 New York Times review of The Years that Matter Most by Paul Tough, Tara Westover writes, We are divided economically and politically, and education sits conspicuously at the center of both divides. Whether you have a college degree turns out to be one of the strongest predictors of your political preferences and your income. Reading Tough’s book, you cannot fail to notice that we have allowed the inequities of our economic system to be reproduced in our education system. We then ask ourselves why so many Americans no longer believe in college or degrees, why they perceive education as not for them but rather as a good distributed by the elites to elites. The answer is straightforward: If we want others to believe in public education, we first have to believe in it ourselves.

Higher education’s issues of inequality reflect larger ones in the U.S. symptomatic of the disparities created by the unequal distribution of wealth and of access to basic goods, services, and settings. A narrative of inequality across society has become a leitmotif that seems to defy resolution. If established politicians here are in trouble, it is in large part because their standard solutions only

address parts of the problem while leaving the rest untouched or worse. In her 1998 essay, “Community Property,” U.C. Los Angeles Professor Dana Cuff made the point that the redevelopment of postindustrial sites, tapping public funds and subsidies, is a flawed model. Such projects—Manhattan’s Hudson Yards is the latest US example—are still held out as a valid way for metropolitan regions to revive the public realm. In a 1970 interview, George Candilis, the late planner of the Mirail redevelopment project in Toulouse, argued that 20 years is too short to transform the urban fabric in the way such projects propose to do. Whatever is built so quickly risks becoming prematurely obsolete—a phenomenon already visible in China. More important, these projects invest public money in essentially private goods. The model is tipped toward corporate and individual beneficiaries, another instance of elites serving elites. To support the public realm as a broadly accessible framework, it has to be insulated from the distorting effects of private capital seeking immediate returns and targeting the wealthy. Candilis was right: 20 years is nothing in the evolution of a city—too brief to subject private and public interests to longer-term measures of value. Success for developers is mainly financial, with affordability and public access kept to the minimum needed to obtain planning approvals. The bankruptcy of the model in larger terms reflects a public interest that has consistently been too narrowly served. The appearance of such “externalities” as inequality and environmental degradation is a warning signal that is currently flashing brightly. And yet redevelopment is still held out as a valid model for improving the public realm: “progress” given speculative form and sold on that basis, now with state laws to force its approval at the community level—laws enacted in the name of affordability, by legislators who believe the public realm will benefit. The univer-city as an alternate model Part of the power of the U.C. Berkeley Campus is its ability to inspire people. The vast majority of it is publicly accessible, part of the public realm in a broad rather than a narrow sense. From the outset, it was intended as a long-lived, open-ended framework. Its most important feature is that it can evolve, reflecting time and

experience, even as it adheres to foundational values. In light of this, Daniel Burnham’s famous maxim should be, “Make no narrow plans.” The campus and community fit and work together synergistically, but they also form a larger whole that is “alive” and responsive to change. This may still be more their potential than their reality, but they are nonetheless a good place to try things out—a seedbed and a laboratory. This is recognizably an extension of its founding purpose—the same idea that, on the private side, led to Leland Stanford’s public-spirited gift of his namesake university in honor of his son. It reconnects higher education in the Bay Region to the public realm in a new way, making use of its unique position as a unifier of such opposites as public and private or research and career. The UC Berkeley Campus has banners that ask, “Remember when no one lived to be 120?” Seeing a different future is why you want higher education in your midst—to spark the public imagination to anticipate positive change and support it realization. Awareness of how the interconnectedness of the public realm makes it stronger is the other reason. Walter Hood, a Masters in Landscape Architecture student at UC Berkeley, just won a MacArthur Grant for a career devoted to showing how place and community transform each other, empowered by a mutual understanding that builds trust and makes collective, long-term action possible. A univer-city like Berkeley is a catalyst for transformation, as Hood grasped early on. His grant is for genius, but the spirit of the place is also honored. Inequality is felt most acutely as a lack of access to public goods and as a future constricted by too narrow a view. At a time when the young take the old to task for failing them, rebalancing the public realm through education and example is the heart of the matter. It’s called “higher education” for a reason. Written with Emily B. Marthinsen and Richard Bender for the third UniverCities Conference, Singapore November 2019, and then published in Anthony S.C. Teo, ed., Univer-Cities, Volume IV, World Scientific, Singapore, 2021, pp. 63–78.

Utopia revised (1990) The University of California's Irvine Campus, planned by William Pereira in the early 1960s, is undergoing a new cycle of construction. Pereira has been dead five years, and his successors are no longer consultants to the campus. Longtime campus architect David Neuman, an admirer of Pereira and the force behind the present expansion, has moved to Stanford University. Yet, despite these changes and the engagement of many prominent architects by the campus, the original Pereira Plan lives on. Pereira's 1963 Master Plan was part of a larger scheme for densifying for developing the mammoth Irvine Ranch property in Orange County, southeast of Los Angeles. What Pereira envisioned was nothing less than a new city—one in which the university would play a central role. To tie town to gown, Pereira proposed a town center, comprising the nascent city of Irvine and housing for 10,000 residents, linked to the campus entrance by a pedestrian bridge. For the campus, he proposed a wheel-and-spokes plan that owes much to Ebenezer Howard's Garden City: a circular park ringed by six quadrangles, which are connected to the center by radiating malls. Pedestrian circulation is provided by an inner ring, a half-mile in diameter, linking undergraduate classroom buildings and an outer ring (or "ring mall") connecting more-specialized facilities. Pereira shrewdly located the utility runs in the rings and spokes, but the success of his plan may be due more to the fact that each university department has its own quad, thus minimizing the turf battles that regularly occur on other campuses. Much of Pereira's vision has been realized, at least in diagram. Aldrich Park, as the central park is now called, is a "sacred" (i.e., restricted from development) arboretum, unadorned even by the futuristic campanile Pereira planned for it as a focal point. The quads also follow the broad outlines of Pereira's plan, although they lack his promised grand vistas of the surrounding terrain. While the rolling topography of the campus prevents such vistas, the informal landscape and often misguided placement of the buildings make it hard to sense the campus's geometry. During the last years of its association with U.C. Irvine, the firm of Johnson Fain & Pereira took a new look at campus development. After Pereira's death, the firm questioned the basic tenets of his plan 69

and even proposed to overlay an orthogonal road grid on the campus to improve access, orientation, and movement. A fragment of this impulse survives in the firm's award-winning Main Street plan for the campus's gateway quadrangle. This project was a response to the university's failure to dominate the surrounding city, as Pereira envisioned. Instead of growing into a thriving downtown for Irvine and focal point for the campus, the town center became a small shopping area and residential district. To compensate for the lack of 24-hour activity, Johnson Fain & Pereira proposed to create a traditional storefront, pedestrian-scale commercial street across from university property. Although Main Street is part of the campus's 1980 Long Range Development Plan, its implementation is far from certain. One of David Neuman's acts as campus architect was to secure some retail frontage as part of Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons's Irvine City Theater, which faces the would-be Main Street (currently Pereira Drive). However, neither Neuman nor his successors were able to change the orientation of Kaplan McLaughlin Diaz's massive student center, now under construction. Except for a corner entry, it turns a blank wall to Pereira Drive. Largely for economic reasons, Neuman and his successors— notably Robert Dennenbrink, manager of environmental planning and campus design—have chosen to develop separate plans for each quadrangle. These plans are the work of architects commissioned to design new buildings within the quadrangles. Of these, Frank Gehry's plan for the engineering quad and the San Francisco firm MBT Associates' physical sciences complex have been completed. Robert Stern's humanities and fine arts complex is under way, The completed projects show considerable evidence of placemaking. Stern's new dance studio in the fine arts village is well-sited in relation to its surroundings, and Gehry's two engineering buildings mark the beginning of a human-scale plaza that Zimmer Gunsul Frasca's larger engineering building will complete. The campus architects have tried to unify the area plans by modestly refining Pereira's framework. They have completed a loop road around the central campus, strengthened the intersections between the ring mall and the radial malls within each quad, and extended the malls to create a stronger visual and pedestrian connection between the new developments and the center. These

improvements depart only a little from the Pereira Plan, however. Sadly, Pereira has saddled the campus with a framework that isolates its academic units and, thanks to its gargantuan scale, reinforces their isolation. The one part of the campus that offers any real hope of enlivening and unifying the larger setting is the pristine and uncrossable central park. One of Johnson Fain & Pereira's rejected schemes for Main Street saw it cutting straight across the park as a major, walkable urban street that would actually go somewhere and provide life at the heart of the campus. Pereira's Master Plan for U.C. Irvine was utopian, part of his vision of an ideal community. This is the source both of its strength and its downfall, for it lacks the fine-grained, self-organizing patterns of development characteristic of more vital, pedestrianoriented settings. Johnson Fain & Pereira's belated proposal to impose a street grid on the campus reflected the firm's recognition of that failure—and its first, groping efforts to redress it. The planners were right to reassess the campus. In the absence of a new vision for future development, U.C. Irvine runs the risk of becoming an architectural zoo—isolated precincts that never add up to a community. Written for Architecture, January 1990, pp. 66–67.

On cities, their planning, and other topics

SF's post-earthquake waterfront (2008) The best thing to happen to San Francisco's waterfront in recent years was the City's decision to remove rather than repair the double-decker Embarcadero Freeway after the 1989 earthquake. Built with much dissent in the 1960s, the freeway created a formidable barrier between the harbor and the rest of the city. Only the towers north of Market Street could look over it to enjoy the magnificent view of San Francisco Bay, Yerba Buena and Treasure Islands, and the distant East Bay hills. When the freeway came down, that view became common property. About 10 years later, the stars briefly aligned again and the Port of San Francisco managed to secure the redevelopment of the Ferry Building, a landmark on the waterfront at the foot of Market Street. Rebuilt as office workspace anchored by a market hall focused on food raised or grown in the region, it was and is a huge success. The development of a pedestrian promenade along the water, extending south to Harrison Street, and the renovation of several finger-pier buildings to the north, created a "pleasure zone" along the central waterfront that gives tourists an illusory sense of its revival. In fact, the Port of San Francisco, which controls some 600 acres stretched out about 7,5 miles along San Francisco Bay, faces a bill for deferred maintenance of about $1,5 billion (in 2006 dollars) to bring its facilities into minimal compliance with the City of San Francisco's current standards for urban-scale development. With annual revenues of about $60 million, the Port of San Francisco cannot finance this work on its own, so the burden falls piecemeal on private-sector developers of Port-owned properties. Unlike the Port of Oakland, which controls a containership port, Oakland International Airport, and Jack London Square, a mixeduse destination, the Port of San Francisco—despite its huge land holdings—has a limited ability to generate ongoing revenues and develop new projects that would increase them. Its port activities are limited to a pier serving cruise ships and a dry dock. The City of San Francisco, such regional bodies as the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, and the State of California regulate its activities, including leasing Port properties for redevelopment.

Impetus from a changing city Meanwhile, the city itself has grown apace. After decades of planning and false starts, Mission Bay—the former railyard of the Southern Pacific Railway—is on its way to becoming a real district, anchored by the research campus of the University of California, San Francisco, and surrounded by a mix of uses, including new hospital to be jointly run by the City and U.C. San Francisco, the nearby offices and labs of biotech companies, and a substantial amount of new housing. Dogpatch, the industrial neighborhood directly south of Mission Bay, is also transforming. while Hunters Point, a former U.S. Navy base and piers, is in the planning stage that Mission Bay was 15 years ago. Across the ship channel from the Ferry Building, Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island—another former U.S. Navy base—is being planned as a housing community. These changes may spur a reconsideration of San Francisco's waterfront. While recent projects such as redeveloping a waterside site adjoining the Giants Stadium and building two new waterside restaurants at the ends of Folsom and Harrison Streets point to a commercial future, new, largely residential neighborhoods to their west may generate a push for more public parks and promenades to accompany any new large-scale commercial redevelopment. What's needed is a vision Reviving the waterfront requires leadership from the City of San Francisco that is mostly nonexistent. The Port of San Francisco is operationally self-sufficient, but the deferred cost of maintaining its infrastructure, including renovating or replacing its rotting and largely unusable finger piers, raises questions about its viability. (Any bond measure needs the City of San Francisco as a sponsor.) Also missing is a vision of the waterfront suited to San Francisco's longer-term future. One saving grace of the Port's penury is that very few of the large redevelopment projects proposed for the waterfront were realized. Many were ill-fitting, as Fei Tsen, the Port's former real estate director, has noted. One reason for the City of San Francisco to invest in the waterfront's restoration would be to make it a true community resource, both with public access to the Bay and with piers restored as public destinations like Fort Mason along the north waterfront, recast as an arts and cultural venue.

To reconnect the waterfront convincingly to the city, it would be better to leave a narrower outboard edge as a maritime zone dedicated to Port and public use, and redevelop the inboard parcels behind it at a higher density. This too would require a political solution that would broker a comprehensive leasehold arrangement between the Port and developers. Here, the model of Mission Bay suggests itself. That project only took wing when the mayor and business leaders put politics aside and came up with a pre-agreed plan for its redevelopment, bypassing the normal "hell" of San Francisco's convoluted and highly politicized entitlements process. Realizing it's a city on the water The redevelopment of the Ferry Building as a gathering place for residents and tourists alike has reinforced a public perception of San Francisco as having a real and active waterfront. Visitors are aware of the ferries that take people to and from bayside destinations in Marin, Napa, and Alameda counties. Treasure Island will also have regular ferry service from San Francisco as it is redeveloped. San Francisco's waterfront faces particular challenges from sea level rise. Its transit access and walkability contribute to steps being taken regionally to reduce car and truck emissions, but tide surges already threaten its seawall and finger piers. But the waterfront is now indelibly part of San Francisco's identity. The cost of securing its future may have grown higher, but the public has embraced it. Written with Richard Bender and published (as "The Future of San Francisco's Waterfront") in Portus 15, May 2008, pp. 62–65.

The nature of our prosperity (2008) Despite its early history as a garrison town at the north end of "King's Highway" that led from mission to mission from Baja California as far north as San Rafael, San Francisco only became a real city during the Gold Rush in the mid-19th century. In that era, its waterfront became a crucial link to the east coast and a point of entry for laborers from East Asia who built the railroads on which the fortunes of Leland Stanford and others were based. That predominance lasted through World War II, after which Alameda, Oakland, Richmond, and Vallejo—military shipyards and supply ports—gradually supplanted San Francisco as a working port. Yet San Francisco is truly a city on the water. From the Presidio, which housed the original Spanish garrison, from Fort Mason and Fisherman's Wharf, from the Ferry Building, and other landmarks, the Bay in its different moods and views is a constant presence. The Bay exemplifies another truth about San Francisco's waterfront—that it is part of a regional ecosystem that takes in different rivers, like the Napa, the Sacramento, and the San Joaquin that flow into it directly or through the Delta to its east, an expanse of water, wetlands, and levees that serve as the kidneys of much of California's fresh water system. Regulating this quite vulnerable eco-region is a daunting challenge, especially in the Delta. (Only 2007's subprime mortgage crisis kept housing developers from reclaiming and building on land in the Delta using "super-levees.") In September 2008, San Francisco will host an international conference on Slow Food. One of criticism of the Port of San Francisco is the slow pace at which things happen. As fresh water emerges as a limit to California's growth, slowing things down gives the Bay Region time to consider how to grow sustainably. Slow Food is a useful metaphor for thinking about this. Linked with pleasure, Slow Food is really about the nature of prosperity. It recognizes that much that makes us happy is the result of careful stewardship. True prosperity is sustainable, a healthy cycle. Applied to San Francisco's waterfront, it suggests that what ails the Port is its unsustainable situation—try as it may, it will never generate the conditions for its own renewal. That will have to come from the City of San Francisco and also from the State of California—as a holistic solution that acknowledges the communal value of the waterfront. 77

The Presidio, now a national park hobbled by the need to be selfsustaining, has some of the Port's problems, A better precedent is the National Seashore, which preserved coastal land for public use north and south of the Golden Gate, engaging the private sector and multiple public agencies in its creation. It is better because it approaches San Francisco's waterfront as a regional asset. The Roman state expected its citizens to be city builders, giving them a framework for doing this that took in the new city's region, as aqueducts and other infrastructure attest. The Bay Area lacks a framework that is comparably understood by its citizens—one that aims to sustain the region, not shortsightedly exploit it to benefit the few over the many, especially when it puts so many at risk. It also often lacks the means to think regionally and act locally. Changing this will make revitalizing San Francisco's waterfront a natural act. Written with Richard Bender and published (as "The Regional Context of San Francisco's Waterfront") in Portus 15, May 2008, pp. 66–67.

Histoire d'eau (1997) In 1991, a student at New York's Cooper Union discovered the archive of the former New York City Department of Docks. It was a crowded and disorganized mass of documents and drawings—many of high artistic accomplishment—which were poorly stored, minimally catalogued, and unprotected by any form of security. Its deteriorated condition was compounded by the fact that the city was in the process of dissolving the agency that had created it, leaving the prospect of any future care for the invaluable collection in doubt. In general, the collection was unknown. Most of its holdings had never been properly studied or conserved, and the materials had never been publicly displayed. We felt compelled to assist the city in its cataloguing and preservation.

The outcome is this remarkable book. It provides the most interesting of histories, a profusely illustrated one that carries the reader from document to document—maps and charts, plans and elevations, and photos that show the city's docks and dockside buildings as they were in their heyday. These last are juxtaposed with new photos that show the same structures today—decayed, bereft of purpose, and largely abandoned. Perhaps because they were drawn from an archive of "working" documents, serving a technical rather than an artistic or even a historical purpose, these illustrations sate one's hunger to understand how the waterfront was made, used, and peopled, how the technology evolved to build it, how it crested and declined, and how the city bridged over it and then edged it with highways. The men are here, as well—civil engineers and city builders. The waterfront was theirs to exploit and conquer. Somewhere between Robert Moses and the Reichmanns, it stopped being infrastructure. It became something else, real estate or a community resource, depending on your perspective. And then finally it just stopped altogether. Current ecological taboos in waterfront development, such as landfill; a dramatically drained public infrastructure budget; community associations with agenda of their own; public suspicion of government duplicity, especially in giving municipal assets to private developers; and the ambitions of individual organizations and agencies to give their own exclusive definition to the waterfront: all these factors have conspired to paralyze the decision-making process.

Since the early 1990s, the City and State of New York have begun the process of replanning the waterfront. It is a slow and continuing affair, perhaps made less urgent by the general collapse of development in the city at the outset of the decade. The last two chapters of the book describe the plan and the many schemes put forward since the late 1980s for the waterfront's transformation. With a few exceptions, they go unrealized. In his introduction to this wonderful history, John Hejduk of Cooper Union reminds us that the waterfront was the doorway to America for countless immigrants. Should it not now house the dispossessed of the city, he asks? It is a fair question, especially when we consider that in cities like Hong Kong and Singapore, housing is infrastructure. At the very least, it would give the waterfront a renewed sense of purpose. Perhaps then we will find the means— and the vision—to revive it. I would be remiss to end this review without noting that both the exceptionally good book and the archival work which made it possible were sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. I know from personal experience how much difference even a small grant from the Endowment can make to a project like this. Thanks to the right wing of Congress and our President's ongoing neglect, the Endowment today is only a shadow of what it was only a few years ago. An undertaking of this sort, a book of this quality, can no longer count on the Endowment's support, because it has so little money. This book is proof of what that money could buy—the preservation of an important history almost lost. What else is out there, and who will save it now? A review of Kevin Bone, ed., The New York Waterfront: Evolution and Building Culture of the Port and Harbor, Monacelli, 1997, written for Aquapolis 4, 1997, p. 69. Let me acknowledge Rinio Bruttomesso and Marta Moretti, editors of Aquapolis and Portus, who asked for our contributions.

Islands and enclaves (1997) Part of the landscape of my youth are three islands—Block Island, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket—tourist islands by then, but one of them had been a center of whaling in the 19th century. I sailed to them in my father's sloop, up from Annapolis, and also in a chartered sloop from Falmouth in which we made the passage to Nantucket in a gale, easily my most memorable voyage. I was reminded of these islands, Martha's Vineyard especially, when I visited Orcas Island early this summer. It is one of the larger of a chain of islands in the strait that separates Vancouver, Victoria Island, and Washington's Olympic Peninsula. Unlike the islands off Rhode Island and Massachusetts, the San Juan Islands—named by their Spanish discovers—define an ambiguous border between America and Canada. This ambiguity began even with their discovery, almost simultaneously, by the Spanish and English, each giving different place names to the islands and their bays and inlets. The straits which extend from Puget Sound lead westward to the Pacific and also toward the northwest—along the east side of Victoria Island— to form an inland passage to Alaska. Well into the 19th century, the fearsome natives of the latter passage were a source of dread to the indigenous tribes and white settlers living further south. Like the Vikings in relation to England and Ireland, these tribes of the north regularly swept down into Puget Sound to pillage and plunder. Indeed, their name for the area and its inhabitants was also their word for slave. The threat of their attack, into the 1850s, fostered cooperation between the English and Americans. In 1849, the Hudson's Bay Company began to administer Victoria Island and to trade actively across the strait. In the next 10 years, the Company came into periodic conflict with Americans in the San Juan Islands, which had become a haven for fugitives from both sides. Most of these disputes centered on attempts by one side or the other to bring some miscreant to justice. In 1859, an American pig farmer on San Juan Island shot a pig owned by an agent of the Company. His effort to have the farmer prosecuted (although he had immediately offered restitution) set off the Pig War, a series of bloodless encounters between the Company and the Americans. One of the latter, 81

Brigadier General William Harney, saw in these skirmishes the possibility of annexing not only the disputed San Juan Islands, but also Victoria Island. The Americans spent that spring and summer launching a series of provocations, with open warfare only avoided because of the discretion of the Company. The arrival of Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, "hero" of the Mexican War, put an end to these territorial ambitions. Bringing Harney to heel, Scott negotiated a settlement with the Company that left Victoria Island in English hands. Despite this, the threat of annexation was heard again regularly into the 1870s. It was not until the middle of that decade that General Ulysses Grant, as President of the United States, formally settled the northwest border, essentially confirming what Scott has negotiated 15 years previously. Nearly 125 years have passed since then. From farming, fishing, lumber, and the fur trade, the San Juan Islands have embraced tourism and the genteel farms and vacation houses of the rich. Like the islands of Rhode Island and Massachusetts, the San Juan Islands are an enclave. The largess of one wealthy land owner, Robert Moran, gave Orcas Island a large public park and beach, but most of the islands and their shorelines are in private hands. Their privacy is reinforced by the fact that they are reachable only by the car ferries that travel daily from Anacortes west across the strait to Sidney on Victoria Island. In California, with its perpetual strife between right and left, and between private and public interests, the shoreline and the land adjoining it are administered by a Coastal Commission. Right of public access is assured, but the Commission also decides—in detail—what can be built. It has done so for two decades now, but despite this, as I have witnessed, Bodega Bay has been transformed from a small coastal village into a suburb. It's not alone. Orcas Island, in contrast, remains unspoiled—its houses modest, its shoreline protected. It is difficult to compare California, which is at turns rapacious and guilt-stricken, with a small island that's mostly owned by old families and some new ones with similar values. A more apt comparison may be with a community like Santa Barbara, which has a sense of itself—a sense of place—that it enforces vigorously, drawing on its wealth and influence. In a state that allows oil drilling on and along the coast—beachfront communities like

Hermosa Beach in Los Angeles are dotted with them—Santa Barbara has held drilling at bay, preserved itself, remained a beautiful town overlooking an unspoiled sea. In his lovely and moving book, News from Nowhere, William Morris wrote of a Thames countryside reclaimed as a socialist paradise—of men and women acting as he would, savoring the open air, the clear river, the smell of freshly mowed hay. Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer who in our time is probably closest to Morris in expressing this love of place that lead to its stewardship, argues always for local sovereignty—for the primacy of local interests, tied to place, over the dictates of the so-called general interest, whether of large corporations or the state. Accustomed to our rights, duly reinforced by state law, we Californians are used to having unimpeded access to our shores. At another level, we look on unworriedly as developers transform the Central Valley from farmland to endless suburbs—much as the New Jersey of my childhood, a paradise of small farms, was paved over in the 1950s and 1960s. Small enclaves persist, but most are swept away. With Morris and Berry, the San Juan Island say no. We can hardly believe it, but there it is. Or rather, there they still are. A review of David Richardson, Pig Island Wars: The San Juans of Northwest Washington, 2nd edition, Orcas, 1990; Gordon Keith, The Ferryboat Islands, Dolphin Bay, 1989; and Judy Gilson Moody, A Place in the Islands: How Private Landowners Shape the Future of the San Juans, San Juan Preservation Trust, 1995; written for Aquapolis 3, 1997, p. 73.

Circle Tour (2001) Sometimes in midtown you forget that Manhattan is an island, bur then you find yourself west of 8th Avenue and the cold wind off the Hudson reminds you. The waterfront, which of course takes in the city's other four boroughs, has been a focus of development since its founding. Beyond the Edge, a new book from Princeton Architectural Press and New York's Van Alen Institute, is unusual for its breadth and its singular viewpoint. For this is, first and foremost, a personal account of the topic. Our guide is Raymond W. Gastil, the Van Alen Institute's director, described on the back flap as "a staunch advocate of New York City's waterfront." This description brings to mind someone like Teddy Roosevelt, bur Gastil proves to be a model of equanimity. This is signaled literally at the beginning: "The waterfront calls for an open mind," he writes. His thesis is that "today's most successful waterfronts offer the experiences and articulate the values of an open society, in which ideas are exchanged freely, transparent transactions are valued, and people are free to come and go." The history he recounts starts with the seawall begun by General George McClellan in 1871, the bulwark of New York as a vast commercial/industrial waterfront. Next comes Robert Moses, who saw the waterfront as a handy dumping ground for his elevated highways. Then come such mega-projects as the World Trade Center and Battery Park City. (An entire chapter of this history is given over to the artists and playwrights who confronted the waterfront as a subject and used it as a canvas, making Gastil's point that culture has become a driver of its redevelopment. He cites Gehry's East River proposal as a late example—is it art, a megaproject, or both?). This introductory discussion ends with waterfront parks like Battery Park's Esplanade and Gantry Plaza in Long Island City. He's sympathetic to the Esplanade, despite its critics, but equally open to Gantry Plaza's efforts to restore a sense of the waterfront as the water's edge for real, not a seawall. He makes the point that underlying its design is a changed ecology, a vastly cleaner harbor than the city fronted on 30 or 40 years before. Our guide then sits us down to lunch and recounts in quick succession contemporary 84

trends in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Genoa, Yokohama, London, Barcelona, Bilbao, San Francisco, Boston, and Philadelphia. These are told mostly as accounts of the work of planners and designers he likes - OMA, FO Architects, Will Alsop, and Field Office. Yet there are also capsule histories, enough to give a sense of what's going on there. Lunch is over, the tour resumes. This time, it's a forced march through a series of larger and smaller projects, including several ballparks and at least one freeway, that Gastil feels exemplify "the city of the verge." As he puts it, "New York has the opportunity to generate extraordinary design for its waterfront, but to achieve this, it needs both to absorb lessons from port cities around tl1e world and to learn from its own recent failures and successes." The leitmotif of these projects is their often-contentious public process. This themc was raised earlier when Gastil described the fate of Venturi, Scott-Brown and Anderson/Schwartz's competitionwinning design for the Whitehall Ferry Terminal, whose giant clock was seen by Staten Island Borough President Guy Molinari as an affront. That was in 1992. In 1999, Jean Nouvcl's Hotel and Cinema proposal for Brooklyn's Fulton Ferry received a similar reception from community activists: "Dead on arrival." Our guide pulls us aside and whispers, Designs like Nouvel's are often wildcards in the planning process, images so compelling that they make developers and community residents alike think about a site in a new way. They also assert that design is a visual art, not a management one, yet as evidenced by Nouvel's debacle, one will not work without the other. Architects and planners, in the throes of an allAmerican theory of management as unboundedly fungible, sometimes come to believe that a planning process can be as much a "design" as anything else and that this is a plausible and creative approach. As a whole, the public meetings, the private meetings, the reviews, and the note raking can be embraced as a design challenge in and of itself.

In other words, the storms, the borer-worms (ironically, back chewing at the docks now that the water's cleaner), and the power and majesty of the sea are just so much background to the cauldron of public discourse. Our guide pauses as we take this in, then reminds us where he started. Then he points to several projects that try to do something new and even grand within this daunting context: Alexander Garvin's proposal for the 2012 Olympics is one— done, Gastil says, "in a pragmatic, New York way, not razing 85

neighborhoods and building hundreds of new structures as Barcelona did." The Jets Stadium is another, which the architects Kohn Pedersen Fox have stepped in to revive. Gasril compares its riverfront "woodland wedge," designed by landscape architect Julie Bargmann, to Weiss/Manfredi's Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, which he applauds for the philosophy behind it: We reject the standard paradigms: neither the ideal of the untouched site, awaiting the architect's free-standing monolith, nor its opposite, the privileged "natural" or "historical" site to which any architectural intervention must defer, arc legitimate for contemporary work. Instead, it is necessary to work from a definition of landscape that incorporates infrastructure (rail lines, highway off-ramps, utility lines), history (geologic, political, cultural), and natural systems (water, vegetation, toxicity)".

Which brings us, inevitably, to the World Trade Center site, now New York's ground zero of controversy. It's an appropriate place for the tour to end. As is so often the case, 9/r1's disas1er opened the door to an opportunity: reconnecting Lower Manhattan to the water. Thar much everyone seems to agree on. The rest—the mix and immensity of development, and the way that a memorial is incorporated—is "in debate." At this stage in the public process, everyone is an expert. The principal players, like the developer and his architect, are cast as villains. Behind them, the politicians circle, with the Mayor, the Port Authority, and the Governor each vying for the ultimate right of say. "It's New York, folks," our guide would say. "Ya gotta love it!" A review of Raymond W. Gastil, Beyond the Edge: New York's New Waterfront, Princeton Architectural Press, written for Portus 4, 2001, p. 86.

Shanghai's emerging profile (2009) In the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai was east Asia's most important trade and financial center, but the outbreak of war effectively ended the city's role as China's international gateway. The postwar emphasis on internal development through the 1970s stunted Shanghai's recovery as a global business and trading center. Hong Kong quickly assumed this role for Greater China and, as a consequence, experienced massive growth. Like Singapore, Hong Kong invested in public infrastructure—mass transit, affordable housing, and civic amenities—and also established a supportive climate for business, becoming not just the main business and trading center for east Asia, but a global city. Metropolitan Shanghai is more like Tokyo or Los Angeles than Hong Kong or Singapore, which are much more constrained in land area. Although Tokyo was largely destroyed in the final years of World War II, its urban fabric was well established. As prosperity returned, it was rebuilt rapidly. Shanghai's central core survived the war intact, but modernization was delayed. Economic reforms of 1978 led in time to renewed urban-scale development, initially in Pudong, across the Huangpu River from Puxi, Shanghai's historic downtown core. Pudong's greenfield parcels were developed at an unprecedented pace and scale without disrupting Shanghai proper. Global ranking How does Shanghai, after 20 years of modernizing, compare with other global financial centers? The Mori Global Power City Index ranks New York, London and Singapore as the top three. From a business executive standpoint, Shanghai ranks lower than Singapore (number 3), Hong Kong (number 4), and Tokyo (number 14), its east and southeast Asian peers. Shanghai's biggest draw is its perceived business growth potential. The Global Financial Center Index considers Shanghai "emerging." It has all of the ingredients, but is not yet at the level of London or New York. London benefits from the density of its main financial district; the scale, diversity, and affordability of its public transit system; and the quality, variety, and extent of its cultural facilities. New York has comparable advantages. Shanghai lags behind London, New York,

and Tokyo in its cultural offerings—a problem Tokyo faced in the 1980s. New Yorkers' consistent choice of public transit over private cars for commuting makes their city one of the most energy-efficient in the U.S. This preference encourages walking, which makes New Yorkers healthier and supports the wealth of amenities that makes their city so livable. London is similar in this respect. Compared to them, Shanghai's business and financial centers are insufficiently dense and do not yet have in place the public transit access that people in Hong Kong and Tokyo, for example, take for granted. This is especially true in Pudong. As a result, too many people commute to work in their own cars or in taxis. In the last 10 years, private car ownership in Shanghai has drastically increased. The city has responded by widening the main roads, requiring new development to provide large amounts of structured parking, and banning bicycles from major streets. Not surprisingly, this has led to traffic congestion and pollution—problems that, left unchecked, will make it harder for the city to achieve the walkable urbanity that contributes to the sustainability and livability of the higher-ranking global financial centers. Shanghai is committed to moving into the top tier, as its consistently high level of investment in modernization attests. The city is pursuing different paths to this goal. One, starting soon after 1989, is focused on Pudong's Lujiazui district, Shanghai's new international business center. A second path centers on the older Puxi district—a mix of commercial streets and dense residential neighborhoods that predates World War II. Development in these districts is a good indication of where the city is headed. Shanghai Tower The new highrise business and financial district in Pudong's Lujiazui Finance and Trade Zone is a landmark in Shanghai's modernization. Characterized by tall buildings on large plazas adjoined by wide arterial streets, the district lacks cohesion. Car dependence contributes to traffic congestion. The streets are a barrier to easy pedestrian movement, contributing to each tower's sense of isolation. With the completion of the Shanghai Tower, the Lujiazui district will be anchored by a transit-served super-tall precinct that signals a

new emphasis on walkable urbanism. Designed by Gensler, the tower rises from a pavilion that is open and accessible rather than walled off from its surroundings, and which faces and extends the district's largest park. Although it is linked to adjacent towers and the metro station via below-grade connections, Shanghai Tower is planned to encourage walking and biking at street level, both within the precinct and to and from neighboring areas. Shanghai Tower borrows the strategy of the city's older residential neighborhoods, which organize dwelling units around communal open space. The mixed-use tower rises in 15-story increments, each with a sky garden. Amenity-filled, these atrium spaces lend identity to the activities they support—whether office or hospitality—and provide occupants with a naturally ventilated thermal buffer. Xintiandi Located on the west bank of the Huangpo River, the Puxi district is one of Shanghai's main commercial, cultural, and residential centers. Unlike Lujiazui, Puxi is relatively dense and walkable--a mix of commercial streets, with both new and older buildings, and tightly packed residential neighborhoods of great charm. A former French concession, Puxi features one of Shanghai's most successful recent infill projects, Xintiandi, which earned an Urban Land Institute Award for Excellence in 2003. Shui On Development Limited assembled the large site and worked with city officials to arrive at an overall development plan. What makes Xintiandi stand out is the degree to which historic preservation, community-serving open space, and an array of uses and activities, including shops, cafés, bars, restaurants, housing, hotels, and office space were integrated. The result is a destination that has proven popular with residents and tourists. Xintiandi was a breakthrough project for Shanghai because it proved the value of preserving the past as an element in the evolving cityscape. While the commercial value of that strategy attracted other developers' notice, the greater value of Xintiandi may lie in what it suggests for the city's future: greater urbanity and social equity, both major issues in China.

Challenges of a modern metropolis Developing greater urbanity and reinforcing social equity are closely related. They reflect the ruling party's stated interest in making "Harmony" a guiding theme for China's modernization. These issues are not unique to Shanghai, of course—it shares them with many other cities. In his book, Incomplete Cities, urban planner Yosuke Hirayama describes the redevelopment areas of cities like Berlin and Kobe as "spaces of competition." As long as a city is incomplete, he wrote, "all persons ought to have the right to be heard in the 'space of competition.' Tolerance of myriad views is indeed the distinguishing characteristic of the city. The architect–planner Fumihiko Maki quotes this in his book, Nurturing Dreams, adding that if people in cities traditionally "shared certain commonalities" and "naturally tended to create distinct communities" as they clustered, "this is increasingly rare in contemporary society." It leads to a "vague and abstract overall image of the metropolis." At the same time, "everyone constructs and possesses his or her own image of it." This makes "the physical formation and maintenance of community" much harder. "The city remains stable [only] as long as balance is maintained among the different territories and friction at boundaries is minimal," but the contemporary metropolis tends to rule this out, Maki observes. In embracing the ruling party's goal of Harmony, Shanghai has begun to emphasize the idea of social equity. This takes the form of a conscious effort to reestablish a context and conditions in which sound planning concepts, supportive of a high quality of urban life, can be consistently realized as the city continues to modernize. As a result, there is much greater interest in development strategies that will allow Shanghai to thrive in the future—culturally, economically, environmentally, and socially. Shanghai's 2010 Expo, with its theme of "Better City, Better Life," will reinforce this interest. Eighty percent of the Expo is demountable, to be removed and reused or recycled when it closes. The riverfront park developed for it will remain open for public use, helping to activate what was once a shipyard on the Puxi side of the river. Elements of the shipyard will be preserved and incorporated as the site is redeveloped. Some Expo facilities will be kept as convention and conference space, and as performance venues, to help revive this part of the riverfront.

The Puxi Plan Gensler and Tongji University have prepared a new plan for the Puxi district, underwritten by Shanghai CRED, a developer in the city. The aim of the plan is to modernize Shanghai's historic central core while preserving its character and reinforcing its sustainability. The Puxi Plan responds both to the city's undiminished need for higher-density development and its desire to preserve the past as an integral part of any future. To accomplish this, the plan takes the Puxi district itself as its armature. It has excellent mass transit access, with well-located metro stations across the district. It also has an established street grid with a pedestrian-friendly hierarchy of primary, secondary, and tertiary streets and alleys. The Puxi Plan locates higher-density uses along major streets and clusters them around transit nodes to encourage people to use the metro instead of cars and cabs. The plan limits the extent and impact of higher-density development on adjoining neighborhoods, especially the traditional alley housing that gives Puxi much of its charm and identity. These neighborhoods are to be preserved as a valuable and integral part of Puxi's urban fabric. The plan calls for an evolutionary process, allowing new uses to emerge over time as the district changes rather than trying to specify them at the outset. The plan draws on historic districts like Manhattan's Soho that set clear limits on new development to protect neighborhood character. The Puxi Plan sees the riverfront as a medium-scale cultural zone that can provide the district with smaller, locally focused museums, art galleries, and live performance venues. One larger museum will raise the zone's profile as a cultural destination in the city. Cultural uses have proven to be potent generators of revitalization, with a spillover effect that will add to Puxi's lively urbanity. The cities that Shanghai benchmarks, like London or New York, mix purely financial centers like The City and Wall Street with an array of districts that accommodate business activities of every sort, but play them off against other attractions—food for the soul. In its prewar heyday, Shanghai achieved this. With good planning, it's poised over the next 10 to 20 years to do so again. Written with the planner Michel St. Pierre for Urban Land, September 2009, pp. 124–127. We both worked for Gensler at the time.

Stuck in beta (2021) American suburbs, mined by novelists like John Cheever and, more recently, repopulated by Covid-19-rattled millennials seeking social distance and yards, veer between the utopian and the dystopic. In Radical Suburbs, Dr. Amanda Kolson Hurley considers the outliers, beta versions of what a suburb might be—from Economy, a mid-19th-century religious cooperative near Pittsburgh, to the New Deal's Greenbelt new towns, to postwar experiments like Concord Park north of Philadelphia. Radical Suburbs has three strands. The first is these founders’ desire to reshape their communities to serve their vision of a better life. Kolson Hurley’s examples are an anarchist village embedded in a New Jersey railroad suburb, and two upwardly mobile, architectdesigned residential enclaves outside Boston. The first was organized around a school and library; the other two, a generation later, around young children's need for shared open space and their parents' need for mutual support. The second strand is the desire to create replicable models of new suburban towns incorporating what we might now describe as “new urbanist principles.” These trade the detached house-and-yard ideal for a denser housing typology and planning that emphasizes shared and walkable patterns of use. Kolson Hurley gives Greenbelt, Maryland, as an early example. It was part of an ambitious program by the 1930s New Deal's Resettlement Administration, led by economist Redford Guy Tugwell. He sought to develop Garden City-influenced new towns across the country, promoting a suburban model that used land more efficiently while delivering a higher quality of life for the residents. Greenbelt was billed as the future, and drew 350,000 visitors before it was quickly denounced as communist. Tugwell was sidelined and his program halted. In telling Greenbelt's story, Kolson Hurley makes two related points. First, how often new suburban models have emerged with considerable fanfare, only to fail to take hold, influencing the market but never finding one. Second, how public housing initiatives in the U.S. have been consistently undermined by rightwing politicians, murdered in their cradles by defunding.

Kolson Hurley uses Greenbelt to introduce the third strand of her book: the challenges Black Americans experienced, despite rising affluence, to relocate to the suburbs. Despite federal involvement, they were excluded from Greenbelt. World War II accelerated a Black urban migration. Empowered by the war and by the postwar dismantling of outright segregation, Black families found their housing options crimped. In 1954, Morris Milgram, a Philadelphia builder, set out to develop Concord Park, which he hoped would be an integrated suburban community north of the city. He failed to grasp that Black families' lack of housing options created a pent-up demand for any suburban housing available. Imposing a quota, he limited Blacks to 40 percent of the houses, but over time, it became predominantly Black, with families who have lived there for several generations. Reston, Virginia was also an open community, welcoming both Black and white families. Begun in 1960 by Robert E. Simon, son of a New York City real estate family, Reston was inspired by older European towns and cities, and Europe's new towns. By pioneering planned unit development zoning, Simon mixed uses and heights in ways most suburbs didn't allow. Reston combined town planning sophistication with then-current modernist forms and massing—in warm brick rather than brutal precast. But Simon was ahead of the market and his new community failed to sell. Mobil took it over. Today, Kolson Hurley notes, Reston feels pressured to add higher density to accommodate the demand its quality of life attracts. Simon saw the need for taller buildings—he lived in a 16story one he built—but the proposed new development is more "urban" than some of its residents want. They see higher density as a threat to the "village life" that was part of Simon's original vision. Reston shares this dilemma with many other communities—not only the suburbs or even the exurbs that are steadily urbanizing due to population growth, but also the urban residential neighborhoods that were originally "streetcar suburbs" in relation to their cities' downtowns and industrial zones. President Biden, backed by the New Green Deal, may push for federally funding below-market housing. How to integrate it into existing urban and suburban neighborhoods; how much of it is needed and in what forms: the history Radical Suburbs recounts is relevant to housing debates at the federal, state, and local levels.

Kolson Hurley is asking us to take a new look at how we "make community." Her examples point to such attributes as allocating more land for shared, not private use; seeing gathering as intrinsic to dwelling; and considering walking and biking to local destinations, including transit, as a key measure of livability. She's also asking us to consider the question she raises about Reston: how can we add density without losing the character of what exists? Some contend the question shouldn't be raised at all— that what exists reflects exclusionary tactics. Reston's origin story resists this argument, but other communities have well-documented histories of exclusion. What then? Radical Suburbs stresses the importance of envisioning new models and, crucially, developing policies and strategies to pull them out of Beta and into real use. It won't be easy—America is still "an adventure in real estate," as James Baldwin noted, leaning heavily on the market. What the market delivers is market-rate housing. Augmenting it so that those now excluded are housed well in those communities, too--so that adding density lifts all boats: this is the challenge to our imagination that Kolson Hurley sets out. A review of Amanda Kolson Hurley, Radical Suburbs: Experimental Living on the Fringes of the American City, Belt Publishing, 2019, written as a journal post for ARCADE, 25 March 2021.

Boris Johnson's wakeup call (2020) I did a double-take when The Times of London reported that U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson intends to end local control of real estate development there.1 Reaction was swift and mostly critical. “The antagonism of Johnson and his colleagues towards anything local is clearly visceral,” wrote Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. “But his reform is of a new order. It cancels the democratic right of people to exercise some control over their immediate surroundings, over the character and appearance of their neighborhood. This is not mere nimbyism—any more than Johnson’s friends are mere profiteers. But it is a civil right that deserves better than to be smothered by commissars.” 2 What Johnson is proposing is a hodgepodge of Prince Charles– inflected New Urbanism with John Ruskin–inspired borrowings from Roger Scruton. But in proposing to control real estate development from the top and gut local control long enshrined in British planning law (not to mention the Magna Carta), it is echoed by proposed legislation now in play in California. For readers outside the Golden State, let’s review the situation here and the debate it has engendered: A cohort of politicians—the Bay Area’s Scott Wiener, David Chiu, Nancy Skinner, and Buffy Wicks, and San Diego’s Toni Atkins—are pushing a legislative package3 that would put teeth in statewide housing production targets and dictate new housing types and densities in most California towns and cities, limiting local control. These bills find support from San Francisco’s SPUR, which argues in a recent report that housing should be considered as infrastructure: State government has a very important role to play in addressing the housing crisis because it can create new rules around what gets built where. … State government can also create new sticks and carrots to discourage or encourage certain behaviors. It can diminish local control for jurisdictions that don’t help to address the housing crisis and offer new funding for jurisdictions that work to build the housing needed. It can also reform existing laws, like the California Environmental Quality Act, that make it harder to build housing in already-developed areas.4

SPUR implies that housing is a public good, like others that underpin the public realm. It posits a cultural shift in how housing is 96

viewed, emphasizing the unmet needs of renters and the homeless. This echoes the Green New Deal's sense of housing as a right. It would fund the renovation of existing public housing, to the benefit cities like New York with large, deteriorating stocks of it. While stopping short of renewing federal development of public housing, the Green New Deal at least acknowledges its importance. In the wake of the 2008 Recession, California eliminated redevelopment agencies and cut funding for below-market housing. Rather than restoring funding, some state legislators have blamed local zoning and tried to use state-mandated density bonuses to spur affordable housing development. Both adopted bills and recent amendments to the Housing Density Bonus Law were designed to stimulate affordable housing production through the streamlining of approval processes, the provision of additional density bonuses as incentives, the creation of a CEQA exemption, and the supply of a new funding mechanism for sustainable affordable transitoriented development (TOD).5

Analyzing California housing production against Regional Housing Need Assessments (RHNA) targets, Gabrielle Layton asserts that while market-rate housing production substantially outstripped its RHNA target, production of below-market-rate housing lagged its targets, especially for the "low and very low income" category. “Although it is still too soon to assess the

impact of the two bills passed in 2019,” she notes, “it seems clear that prior incentive approaches are not working as the state is building less new affordable housing than it was in the 2000s.” For this reason, she questions the current legislation’s tilt toward encouraging market-rate housing production.6 SPUR, however, takes the position that market-rate production is crucial to housing affordability: Without a sufficient amount of market-rate housing, high-income workers will continue to outcompete everyone else and shift housing prices for the entire region. Building more housing for market-rate buyers can reduce their impact on the housing market as a whole and help limit rapid increases in price.7

SPUR recommends “housing targets that are almost double the RHNA estimates and slightly more than double the region’s annual

production from 2000 to 2018.”8 While its targets are regional, SPUR cites the McKinsey Global Institute’s projection of a shortfall of 3.5 million units, based on 2025 housing needs—a figure that the legislative package’s authors appear to rely on. Layton has challenged it, calculating the shortfall at 1.4 million units. As she notes, the shortfall is only in the below-market categories; marketrate housing is doing fine, consistently hitting its RHNA targets.9 Layton faults the current legislative package for failing to revive state funding of below-market housing development at its preRecession levels. Instead, the legislation’s authors blame local delays in approvals of higher-density development as the bottleneck and assume that by limiting local control and adding bonus incentives for higher densities, the market will make up all shortfalls. Many of these bills offer additional developer incentives (e.g., increased density) while lowering affordability requirements (e.g., agreements to provide affordable housing) already in place in existing law. … As a result, this could lead to fewer affordable units being constructed as the statewide requirements to receive bonuses may require fewer affordable units.10

The shared issue of overriding local control of real estate development makes the unfolding debate in the U.K. around Johnson’s proposal of particular interest to Californians. That debate is front-page news in the U.K., with a more even field between protagonists, pro and con. The proposal is rightly considered to be radical, even by those who favor it. Unwittingly, Johnson has triggered the debate California should be having. The proposed legislative package in California is largely a product of the state's Progressive Left, supported by think tanks like SPUR and U.C. Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. In contrast to the controversy Johnson and Cummings have raised in the U.K. with their proposal, it is the consensus view here, and the opposition to it is disorganized and underfunded in comparison. Livable California is an example. Running on donatiions, it nonetheless serves as a clearinghouse of information about pending legislation, the sheer complexity of which is an obstacle to the average citizen. It hosts weekly webinars featuring critics and opponents of the legislation. And it rallies its membership to weigh in with the State Legislature—also not a simple matter—when bills

come up for vote. Its colorful chat feed during the webinars reveals the many side issues that housing politics engenders. A local opinion piece typifies three themes that unite the opposition: that overriding local control is unjustified because the housing crisis is overstated; that the legislation is tipped toward market-rate housing; and that the legislation’s authors are doing the bidding of powerful backers and have a built-in conflict of interest.11 It’s true that local control of real estate development in California cities is problematic. Even for very small projects, entitlements and regulatory review can be glacially slow and expensive. The root of the problem, however, is the extent to which the process has become almost universally case-by-case, rendering meaningless the by-right assurances that underpin zoning and building regulation. A case-by-case process encourages spot up-zoning that undermines existing zoning without updating it in a concerted way that would engage the communities involved. If NIMBYism exists, it partly reflects these communities' sense of being abused "from above." The current legislative package does nothing to tackle this problem, substituting a top-down directive to up-zone that limits local checks on the scale and nature of building projects. It does this under the banner of “affordable housing,” emphasizing increased housing production as a cure-all. However, as Layton's data show, market-rate developers are the main beneficiaries. To accept that incentives for increased market-rate housing production will address this in the absence of state funding, you have to believe there’s an overall housing shortfall here of crisis proportions and take SPUR’s “domino effect” premise seriously: As more higher-income households compete for a limited number of available homes on the market, they bid up rents and purchase prices across the board. This particularly affects new entrants into the housing market, making finding a first time home expensive—if not impossible— for everyone but the high earners.12

In both California and in the U.K., the top-down proposals on offer present a Hobson’s Choice between dysfunctional local control and top-down measures that resolve it by eliminating it. Missing is the political will, locally and centrally, to reform local and regional control of development by pressing communities to plan their futures seriously and establish zoning and building regulations that

reflect them. In California, counties are the democratically elected bodies best suited to coordinate these plans, mediating thorny issues of where development should go. Also missing is the political will, both at the state and federal level, to invest public funds in below-market housing production. In California, this will require a tax regime that forces the industries that are the real sources of its wealth to pay their fair share of the public realm. The heated debate in the U.K. is a reminder that the issue of central versus local control isn't trivial. The goals invoked by progressive California legislators may be worthy, but given their focus on overriding local control, they warrant much more scrutiny. SPUR and the Terner Center are too quick to accept their premises and dismiss their critics. Yet, as Boris Johnson has shown, populists far less identified with progress can play this game, too, invoking the same crisis as an excuse to grab the wheel. California’s package is a questionable fix, but SPUR and the Terner Center are all-in. My sense is that we have better options. Back to the drawing board! Notes: 1. Francis Elliott, Melissa York, and Oliver Wright: "Boris Johnson targets wealthy areas in radical shake-up of planning laws, The Times, 6 August 2020. 2. Simon Jenkins, "Boris Johnson cries 'nimbyism,' but his planning changes will be disastrous," The Guardian, 4 August 2020. 3. Gabrielle Layton, "2020 Housing Bills: Legislation in an Age of Uncertainty," Embarcadero Institute, 28 July 2020. 4. Sarah Karlinsky and Kristy Wang, "What Will It Really Take to Create an Affordable Bay Area?" SPUR, March 2020. 5. Layton, op. cit. 6. Layton, ibid. 7. Karlinsky and Wang, op. cit. 8. Karlinsky and Wang, ibid. 9. Layton, "California's 3.5 Million Housing Shortage Number Raises Questions, Embarcadero Institute, July 2019. 10. Layton, "2020 Housing Bills," op. cit. 11. Susan Kirsch, "Nix the Nine: A Remedy for Harmful Housing Policy," Marin Post, 5 July 2020. 12. Karlinsky and Wang, op. cit. Written for Common Edge, 10 August 2020.

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Don't call it progress (2020) Watching California State Senator Scott Wiener dice up his discredited SB50 as a nine-bill salad, I’m struck by the pass he gets — not just from think tanks like SPUR and the Terner Center, but from YIMBY tweeters: “Scott Wiener is a progressive and the SB50 salad is progress defined” is their consensus. (See the notes below for details on the legislation.) But Wiener has opponents on his left. As the San Francisco Tenants Union notes, he leads the pack in taking funding from real estate and developer interests.1 SFTU questions if SB50’s intent is to bolster housing affordability or repay those donors by forcing higher density development on California cities and towns by overriding local zoning. SB50 is based on the trickle-down theory that adding to the market-rate housing supply will result in greater affordability, SFTU explains. SPUR also subscribes to this theory and is all-in, but SFTU is skeptical. It’s also wary that forcing communities to rezone for higher density will displace minority owners and tenants. SFTU cites NYC’s experience as the reason for its concern.2 This view is corroborated by U.C. Davis Professor Fred Block: Developers continue to focus on high-income customers, and those of low and moderate income face an ever more difficult housing market. The only market-type mechanism available in this context is gentrification. Both smaller developers and families purchase homes in some predominantly lowincome neighborhoods and invest in upgrading the houses.3

Wiener’s opponent in November, Jackie Fielder, is a Democratic Socialist in the mold of the U.S. Representative for New York’s 14th Congressional District, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Fielder has opposed corporations’ dodging their need to pay their fair share of the public realm they impact.4 It is telling that Wiener opposed San Francisco’s Prop. C, which would have taxed corporations in the city to help pay for below-market housing and homeless services. (Seattle also tried this; Jeff Bezos defeated it.) It may take a Democratic Socialist to spot a Left Coast progressive poseur, but Scott Wiener is in the grand tradition of neoliberalism, so adept at changing its stripes to keep its project on

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track: “to become broadly embodied in belief systems about what is possible, what is realistic, what is efficient, what is economic … until it can be hard to imagine an alternative.”5 And why? So “a handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life … to maximize their personal profit.”6 Wiener’s legislative program tracks his donors’ interests. (His donors also include the cannabis industry and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Neoliberal Michael Bloomberg gives his profitmaking activities a wrapping of “good causes” like gun control and limiting consumer access to sugared drinks and tobacco products. Of these, Wiener picked tobacco.) Wiener’s approach to housing legislation aligns with this —he proclaims boosting market-rate housing as the route to housing affordability, benefitting his developer donors, while ensuring that their obligations to fund or produce below-market housing are kept to a minimum. The Green New Deal that Representative Ocasio-Cortez helped put together calls for federally funded renovation of some 1.0 million public housing units.8 That’s the kind of progress that will start to address our below-market shortages. In California, we also need the State to restore the funding for below-market housing production that then-Governor Jerry Brown slashed in 2008. Despite our recovery, those funds have never been restored. Without them, the acute shortage of below-market housing will continue. To the extent that the SB50 salad displaces mostly minority households by giving developers free rein, the shortage could actually get worse. Trickle-down is part of neoliberal magic thinking, like Ronnie’s Laffer Curve and Maggie’s selloff of Council Housing. Call it what it is. It’s not progress. Notes: 1. Jacob Woocher, "Scott Wiener Takes More Real Estate Money Than Any Other Politican In The California Legislature," reposted by the San Francisco Tenants Union, 16 January 2020, and originally posted on KnockLA, 13 January 2020. 2. Caroline Spivack, "How NYC rezonings spur 'racialized displacement' throughout the city," Curbed New York, 5 December 2019. 3. Fred Block, "Beyond the Commodity: Toward a New Understanding of Political Economy, Affairs IV:3, Fall 2020. 4. Jackie Fielder's campaign website, jackieforsenate.com, sets out her positions on housing and other issues. She lost to Wiener in 2020, but

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5. 6. 7. 8.

received around 40 percent of the vote, a respectable showing for a 25-yearold politician. She was also judged to have won their debate "on points." Tessa Holland, Navigating Slow, ‘fast’ and crafted knowledges, Ph.D. Thesis, Newcastle University, December 2017, p. 18. Robert W. McChesney, introduction to Noam Chomsky's Profit Over People, 1999, p. 7. Gabrielle Layton, "2020 Housing Bills: Legislation in an Age of Uncertainty," Embarcadero Institute, 28 July 2020. "A Green New Deal for American Public Housing Communities," Data for Progress, The McHarg Center, 2020.

Posted on Medium (johnjparman.medium.com), 29 August 2020. Gabrielle Layton's efforts to analyze the RHNA and housing shortfall calculations led to her being personally attacked by State Senator Scott Wiener, who—ironically— she and her husband had supported in his 2016 campaign. Layton answered the criticisms of her analysis, including one from a professor at U.C. Davis, but her work was mostly dismissed, vilified, or ignored. Given the aggressive efforts to enforce the RHNA process, how the targets are calculated is important. The housing legislation passed or in play in California is contentious, so it would be helpful if U.C. Berkeley's Terner Center, for example, acted as an arbiter.

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Rage against the machines? (2014) Job growth is a leading indicator. Besides predicting the demand for workspace, it speaks to the “animal spirits” flowing through an economy. So, when publications like The Economist, the Financial Times and the New York Times recently headlined the negative impact of technology on jobs, it caught my attention. The coverage focused on two related aspects of “tech automation”—artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Lately, both have shown signs of encroaching on human turf, directly threatening jobs that only people could do. Almost half—47 percent—of U.S. jobs could be automated out of existence, Oxford’s Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne predict. Not even the professions are immune, adds McKinsey’s James Manyika: AI’s ability to tap the latest data and analyze it rapidly will deliver “generally better answers” compared to those of real doctors and lawyers, he believes. This hints at an increasing tendency to substitute capital for labor in high-wage economies. As MIT economist David Autor notes, robots build cars in Japan, while people build them in India—a relatively low-wage economy. ENR reports a similar trend in construction, with the U.S. following Japan’s lead in introducing robots to the jobsite. Comparing two revolutions A working assumption of the tech revolution has been that rising productivity will spill out into the broader economy, generating jobs there even as it spurs employment in the sector. Proponents of this scenario invoke the industrial revolution, but actual history suggests a bumpier ride. Productivity gains from industrialization became widespread in the 1850s—90 years in—while wages and productivity weren’t fully in sync until around 1900. In other words, the workforce didn’t realize the full benefit of industrialization until 140 years after its inception—around the time Henry Ford proposed to pay his workers well enough that they could buy their own products. No one is arguing that the tech revolution will be this drawn out, but rather that such benefits as job growth and rising wages are by no means assured. As The Economist put it, "technological changes do not affect all workers the same way. Some find that their skills are 105

complementary to new technologies. Others find themselves out of work."1 What’s a human to do? For postindustrial economies, the danger tech automation poses is a bifurcated workforce, with some benefiting from the shift to highervalue activities and others facing marginal employment or outright joblessness. This is the specter of the tech revolution that “half the jobs automated out of existence” invokes. Unemployment is a political issue. China’s recent devaluation of the Yuan seeks to preserve the industrial economy generating many of its jobs. Singapore, a postindustrial economy since the 1980s, subsidizes education, healthcare, housing, and transit to make them available and affordable to lower-wage workers. One of its aims in doing so is to compensate for the tech revolution's “creative destruction” and mitigate its collateral damage. Looking at the human traits that machines can’t easily replicate, The Economist anticipates the growth of “emotional and relational work.” Another possibility is local, bespoke and artisanal production—given wings by social networks and digital marketplaces. Then there’s the tech-enabled “shared” economy: While it threatens businesses that are sources of tax revenue and employment, it could end up generating more of both. This points back to the tech revolution’s liberating promise: to magnify individual efforts and connect them efficiently to wider audiences, potentially monetizing them. By serving as a better market for products and services, the revolution's short-run pain is likely to be offset by the opportunities it creates. Or so it is argued. Tools for conviviality A generation ago, the social thinker Ivan Illich countered by demanding a tech revolution that serves humanity, our convivial species. Too much of tech dehumanizes life. If machines can sell to other machines, they're still no substitute for human consumers. That some jobs may be automated out of existence is very likely, but what’s striking about tech is how much of it is focused on enabling people find communities and markets. They use it to share ideas and keep them in play, deliver projects and services more effective and to sustain community itself. Tech is also an enabler.

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Our human ability to create and reinvent, often with technology of some sort intimately involved, is our human edge. We’re fallible, yes, but—let’s face it—so are machines. (And our hive mind is superior to theirs.) Despite the risks, it’s a revolution worth having. Notes: 1. "The Onrushing Wave," The Economist, 18 January 2014. Written as a Gensler blog post, 28 April 2014, when I was its editorial director.

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Connectivity and place (2017) Given the ubiquity of wireless connectivity, we would expect place itself to change tangibly, along with how we perceive and use it. But spatial changes appear to lag changes in our use and perception. (As tech guru John Seely Brown argues, it takes a generation for a major technology innovation’s impact to be fully felt.) What do we mean by place (these days)? It's still any setting that registers in human terms. The scale and edge conditions of a given place are inexact—we intuit its context from prior experience and whatever we’ve brought with us to help reveal it. Not long ago, this meant maps and guidebooks. Or we gave up and hailed a cab. Now we have Maps, Yelp, and Lyft or Uber (or both) on our phones. We can orient ourselves faster, but has place changed? Signs and symbols have long been layered onto place. The added layers of information that our smart devices give us make it possible to imagine the real signs and symbols disappearing. This is even more likely if mixed reality (MR) devices hit the market, annotating places digitally in real time as we walk through them. In Japan’s tumultuous Tokugawa era, when invasions by warring barons were a problem, the Shogunate made street addresses in Edo, as Tokyo was known, non-sequential, so only the locals could find their way around. A version of this problem arises for Tokyo as its 2020 Olympics approach: a city that’s largely devoid of Western signage is hard to navigate if you don’t read Japanese. A team in Gensler's Tokyo office has proposed a multi-scale signage and wayfinding system, including an app; tourists will need it. No signage—now that would be a change. Having MR could be like acquiring X-ray vision. Not only could we annotate the places we visit, but we could also peer inside, so to speak, by tapping geographic information system (GIS) data about them. We can sort of do this now with our phones, but MR will make the experience more seamless. As connectivity peels back the surfaces of a place, it becomes more accessible. This supports our desire as urban flâneurs to let our interests lead us through the city. Our smartphones give us a degree of agency in space and time, but they also make us the targets of an array of sensing devices. In town, CCTV cameras film us, but the data captured is fragmentary. Cellular networks track us from cellphone tower to cellphone tower, 108

a more-or-less continuous progress unless we turn our phones off. At home and at work, we interact with devices that know we’re there—from personal assistants like Alexa to smart controls like Nest that can adjust the temperature without prompting. As they interact with us, these artificial intelligence-linked devices “learn” from our behavior and feedback. But they may have other agendas. And what happens to the data? Reading the weekend newpapers' glossy supplements, the eyewatering prices attached to the chic backstreet hotels, clothes and baubles they feature suggest they’re not aimed at me. I make that decision as a reader, but as a flâneur, experiencing the digital city as I move through it, I may not get to choose. Sampling my profile, algorithms may decline to annotate parts of what’s around me. Different profiles could change the picture dramatically. A homeless person with a cheap mobile phone might be directed to shelter and services, instead of queuing all day in hopes of getting them. A wealthy person with an iWatch might be invited up for a drink. Either way, our profiles precede us. Editing our experiences of place algorithmically is as much excluding as inclusive. Connectivity draws people to the pop-up cultural and community events that activate city streets, parks, plazas, and other gathering places. In the past, these events took more planning, but now they’re much more spontaneous. In leveraging spontaneity, the event organizers may be thwarting local regulations. Connectivity makes both civic and political events disruptive to those enforcing the gathering places’ status quo. That's why authoritarian regimes tend to shut down connectivity whenever demonstrators are out in force. When the umbrella protestors in Hong Kong found their connectivity disrupted, they used their mobile phones to create a network of their own. Flâneurs and demonstrators alike will use similar workarounds to bypass the algorithmic profilers and the nanny state. But the disruptions that tech’s invasion of place cause will also push status quo arrangements to evolve. Witness how the popularity of house-sharing apps has led cities to revise their regulatory stance. And how car-hailing apps are starting to make inroads into parking and street layouts, ceding space for urban life. This brings us back to “agency in time.” Connectivity conditions us to want our expectations met quickly, if not immediately. The Internet of Things will extend this beyond smart devices. If

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driverless cars ever come on the scene, they may sync with us more seamlessly—arriving as we do and only opening their doors to us. One consequence for place is that time looms larger in how we assess it. Can we get there quickly? On arrival, can we get to what attracted us without delay? Is the journey itself even worth it? This starts to apply to everything. We’ll avoid certain airports if we’ve missed flights there trying to get from gate to gate. If we find a city hard going, or hear it is, we may decide to skip it. Looking around, we see people walking distractedly, slowed down by their focus on their phones. Others, animatedly talking into space, walk faster but seem no more aware of their surroundings. In museums, people with audio guides plant themselves in front of the art, oblivious to other patrons. Connectivity’s impact on place could prove to be a plague, like a boom box on a crowded train. Or not. When it comes to the digital revolution’s impact on place, this suggests, people are the prime movers. They assimilate connectivity into their everyday lives. Irritation, pleasure and indifference shape their behavior. Place is assimilating connectivity along with them, of course. It’s also learning how to interact with us. A Gensler Dialogue blog post from 2017, when I was editorial director.

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Kevin Kelly looks ahead (2017) Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of the tech magazine, Wired, summarizes his thoughts and theses about tech’s future in a new book. As he makes his way through such topics as hyperinteractivity, the end of privacy, the rise of artificial intelligence and robotics, and the scaling effect of data agglomeration, Kelly is always cognizant of tech’s dystopian potential, yet he remains optimistic. Let’s consider this. As the book’s title, The Inevitable, suggests, Kelly believes that resisting tech is futile. Moreover, civilization will temper any untoward consequences. He posits, for example, that the democratization of content creation, in tandem with platforms for sharing and even funding it, will be rescued by the curating function of humans and/or artificial intelligence-driven algorithms. The goal is for content to find its perfect audience, which seems benign and “frictionless,” but risks—as critics of Facebook have noted—spoon-feeding each audience a tailored viewpoint. The ubiquity of smart devices, another win for democratization, can be hacked and sifted to enable unobtrusive social control. In my view, technology is inherently “political.” I put the word in quotes to emphasize that it is subject both to the vagaries of human, often hierarchical manipulation and to formal structures that are politically established and administered. Tech in a corporate sense is also closely tied to global capitalism for funding and commercial exploitation. As Giovanni Arrighi noted in 2009, global capitalism has historically sought to define and operate within “non-territorial spaces-of-flows” that resist local and national regulation.1 Kelly’s optimism about tech may relate to its origins in engineering, mathematics, and the sciences—fields that view the world to varying degrees as “problems to be solved” pragmatically and abstractly. Horst Rittel skewered this optimistic view in 1969, showing that an entire class of “wicked” problems falls outside these fields’ provenance.2 Nassim Nicholas Taleb reinforced this in 2001 with his distinction between moderate and extreme risk. He argued against the hubris of “quants”—traders in financial instruments who believed they could leverage the tools and methods of “fintech,” financial engineering, to beat the market.3 Paul Feyerabend, Rittel’s

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rough contemporary, argued convincingly that the scientific method itself is a fiction and that science is political.4 Arrighi, Rittel, Taleb, and Feyerabend collectively provide a corrective to tech’s optimistic narrative. Arrighi implies that tech is just one more manifestation of global capitalism. Rittel and Taleb point to the irrationality of our species and the randomness of events that undermine tech’s attempts to “tame” its problems. And Arrighi, Rittel, and Feyerabend reject its claims to float above politics, even as its disruptions roil the established order. Tech optimism, like global business’s animal spirits, reflects its perennial confidence that “there’s a fix.” Enumerating the trends, Kelly mostly sticks to the script. When he addresses the tension between hierarchies and networks, the book becomes interesting. Hierarchy's dilemma The real-time adventure that is Chinese national politics hinges in part on whether the ruling party can maintain command-andcontrol in the face of a networked populace and enterprises that need to range free in order to transform its export-based economy. The CCP is not the only large, networked organization facing this dilemma. Kelly notes that global enterprises in general are shifting from products to platforms, a shift that requires them to “act more like governments in keeping opportunities ‘flat’ and equitable” (p. 153). Even a product-focused enterprise can only function in today’s networked world “by keeping its hierarchy from fully taking over,” he adds (p. 153). “The proper dosage of hierarchy is just barely enough to vitalize a very large collective. We’ve learned that while top-down is needed, not much of it is needed” (152–53). While noting the limits of tech-aided “democratization” (or “open source”), which he characterizes as “the brute dumbness of the hive mind” (153), Kelly still believes that tech can pull us into a future that gets us past this. The exhilarating frontier is the myriad ways in which we can mix out-ofcontrolness with small elements of top-down control. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all top down. Now it can contain both control and messiness. Never before have we been able to make systems with as much messy quasi-control in them. We are rushing into an expanding possibility space of decentralization and sharing that was never accessible before because it was not technically possible. (p.152)

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In describing global, networked enterprises, Kelly uses the word "governments," but he really means "governance." Organizations like these have to cede most of their decision-making, order-giving power to “nodes” that are largely autonomous and self-managing. Governance makes this sharing of power possible by providing the guardrails that keep things humming with minimal static. Looking beyond traditional enterprises for a model, Kelly picks Wikipedia. While the choice speaks to his background as the editor of a tech publication, it points to what he calls “the new collectives” (152)—consciously nonhierarchical, yet with just enough hierarchy to uphold their foundational standards and reasons for being. The importance of governance I found his argument for networked collectivities that use techenabled flatness to reset the balance of power to be the most interesting part of Kelly’s book, but achieving this is far from inevitable. Tech has long been split between open source and autonomous teams, on the one hand—the aspects that depend on an absolute minimum of hierarchy—and the gods of command and control, on the other. This split is not unique to tech, of course. In the last decade of his life, Horst Rittel worked on IBIS—issuebased information systems—an initiative that anticipated the enormous computational power tech now possesses. IBIS amounted to a collective memory bank that, prompted, would inform any current debate with a relevant history of the issues and the decisions taken. Rittel argued that the most interesting problems, the real challenges humanity faces, are only resolvable temporarily or provisionally. Along with Buckminster Fuller, he saw that tech could make information both universally, “instantly” available and germane to the issues at hand. Rittel and Fuller both saw information as fodder for open-ended, democratic problem solving, not as grist for top-down social control. `A social compact unites and activates a networked enterprise like Wikipedia. Tech facilitates its radical flatness, enabling it to achieve the light touch that Kelly argues is needed to support and accelerate a network’s creative or productive potential. But governance is key: Wikipedia has the equivalent of a Constitution and Bill of Rights. Never have we needed that governance more than now. Tech on its own won’t provide it, but it could give us faster, more transparent

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ways to model, test, and strengthen new social compacts that let networked communities deal collectively and democratically with the “wicked” problems we perennially face. “Politics,” being human, is irrational, and governance is the best we’ve managed as a species to compensate. Kudos to Kelly for pointing to it; I hope his next book forgoes the trends and focuses on it. Notes: 1. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, Johns Hopkins, 2009, p. 82. His idea of “non-territorial spaces-of-flows” points to the cloud and digital connectivity. 2. Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4,1973, pp.155–173. 3. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness, Random House, 2001. 4. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, New Left Books, 1975. A review of Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Forces that will Shape our Future, Viking, 2016, written for Technology|Architecture + Design (TAD), 1:1, May 2017, pp. 114–115.

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On listening to a pandemic (2020) “Enlightened vision is actualized in the mountains, grasses, trees, earth, stone, fences, and walls. Do not have any doubt about it.” —Dōgen Eihei (1200-1253)

In late January 2020, Vickie Wang left her mother in Taipei and returned to Shanghai as the coronavirus lockdown descended on that metropolis. To allay others’ fears, she started blogging.1 Her daily posts reflect the rolling nature of this catastrophe: it spreads virally, as we say, and to stop it, everything had to stop. As it did, people noticed—despite their misery—how quickly the air cleared up. Even the Himalayas were visible again from the plains of India. The pandemic gives us insight into what life could be like— pace Jeff Bezos and his stopwatch—if the holdovers from Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford were finally expunged from work; and if the oil oligarchy that still runs things, despite the steady tapering of demand, were finally and definitively seen off. We sense we’re at a cusp, that we might find a new operating system beyond even-later, last-mogul-standing capitalism—an OS better suited to our planet. The pandemic makes one big point: a crisis involving all of humanity demands a coordinated, cross-humanity response. Even as they close their borders, every nation-state knows that’s not enough. The constant undermining of cross-border organizations like WHO has to stop and be reversed, rebuilding broad trust and a wellfunded mandate to act appropriately on the other planetary emergencies: climate change and environmental degradation. We see vividly how our terrible habits made them happen. Like a five-pack-a-day smoker who manages to stop, we look in the mirror and see our yellowed faces and fingers returning to health in surprisingly rapid fashion. The ways we work, consume, and travel are ripe for change, to name three obvious things that the pandemic has disrupted. Behind them are all of the societal assumptions— about employment, for example, despite automation’s incursions. We see this, but it takes humanity acting in concert to get to something better. Do we have to wait for it all to fall apart or have we just seen it do so? “Humanity acting in concert” can and probably should be each region taking steps that reflect its own situation and social construct. As with the pandemic, we’ll learn from each other

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while finding different ways forward. We can agree on the main goals. If we work toward them in unison, sharing our experiences and ceasing our bickering, it’s likely that regional progress will add up to planetary progress fairly quickly. Since the oil crisis in the early 1970s, California has led the way in the U.S. on environmental and energy-related regulation. It’s big enough that it sets standards elsewhere, which is why the Trump Administration has muscled in. One opportunity the pandemic affords is for California and other states of the U.S. west to pursue a Green New Deal that sees in our “mountains and rivers without end” a direct and planetary reflection of our health as a species. As Dögen knew a millennium ago, this flips on its head the idea that nature bows to us. The pandemic says no. We need to listen and act. Notes: 1. Vickie Wang: www.vickiew.com/blog Written for ARCADE as a journal post, 22 April 2020.

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John J. Parman is an editorial advisor to ARCADE, Architect's Newspaper, ORO Editions' A+RD research imprint, and Room One Thousand, the annual edited by graduate students at U.C. Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, where he is a visiting scholar. In 1983, he and Laurie Snowden founded Design Book Review, edited by Richard Ingersoll and Cathy Lang Ho, and published it until 1998. In 1989, he and Richard Bender founded the Urban Construction Laboratory to address a range of urban topics. In 2019, he and Elizabeth Snowden founded Snowden & Parman, an editorial consultancy, continuing their ongoing collaboration. Educated in architecture and planning, Parman lectured at U.C. Berkeley and California College of the Arts in the mid-1980s and again in 2004. He had a 40-year career in the field, with stints at EHDD, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and then at Gensler, where, as editorial director, he launched two of its flagship publications, Dialogue (2000) and the Design Forecast (2013). His team's work received the highest awards from Graphis and Arc International, and was twice a finalist for Folio awards for editorial excellence.

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Elizabeth Snowden's Pallas Bookstore & Gallery features rare and unusual art, design, and architecture books, artifacts, and ephemera; exhibits creative work in a variety of media; and mounts invitational events and performances. Opening hours are posted weekly on Instagram (@_p_a_l_l_a_s) or by appointment. Pallas is located at 1111 Geary in San Francisco, just west of Van Ness on the south side of Geary. (Details are at www.thepallasgallery.com)

Elizabeth Snowden and John J. Parman founded their eponymous editorial studio in January 2019. (Details are at www.spedit.net)

Subject Matters III

Articles inside

Berkeley: campus and community (2013

Catalyst for a revived public realm (2019

U.C. Berkeley and the Bay Region (2016

Author profile

Universities in the Age of MOOCs (2014

"Place" on the post-pandemic campus (2021

New campuses for new communities (2005

Campus planning in a hybrid world (2020