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The Shanghai Surprise: Urban Planning Is Sexy!

 
I'm writing this on the plane flying back after a ten day trip circumnavigating the globe. I started in Oxford (for the wonderful TEDGlobal conference) where my wife and I walked alongside the ancient wall built around the original town limits. I ended it taking the 200 mph MagLev train to the Shanghai airport. In other words, the trip started in the 12th century, and ended in the 22nd. 

On my last morning in Shanghai, thanks to many Twitter recommendations, I visited the Urban Planning Exhibition. It's justifiably famous for the vast scale model they have of the entire city. But what I was most struck by, however, was the rest of the exhibition—and the general fact that there was an entire museum, prominently located, devoted to the art and science of city planning. There were sections of the space devoted to Shanghai's past that felt like other city museums I had been to. But what set this one apart was the top floor, which featured elaborate displays documenting the massive projects underway in the region: high-speed rail, the rapidly growing Pundong area, the revitalization of several urban riverfronts, and many environmental initiatives. This was not an archive of Shanghai's past; it was an advertisement for its future.
If you happen to be a planning nerd, as I am, this was nirvana, an Apple Store of urban infrastructure. But I think the displays were exciting enough that you'd find it inspiring just as an ordinary citizen of the city. This is in part because you can already feel the positive impact that planning has had on the city--not just in that MagLev train, but also in the many delightful parks that have been build in the past decade or two in the downtown area. It got me thinking that we could use a comparable exhibition space in New York. We are in the middle of many epic projects in NYC right now: the massive riverfront designs, including Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Second Avenue Subway, the steady improvement of JFK, the million trees project. It is, empirically, the most active period of public works innovation since the heyday of Robert Moses. But it's hard to see all those enterprises as a coherent unit, as something to be excited about. In fact, the opposite usually happens: they're a construction site, complicating traffic, creating noise and chaos.

This is symptomatic of a larger problem, which is that states and central planners generally do a terrible job advertising their achievements. Every miraculous new toy that is produced by the marketplace (along with all the ordinary toys) arrives on the shelves with millions of dollars worth of advertising explaining how great it is, and how it will improve our lives. But the innovations that come from the public sector rarely have those promotional budgets. Every election year, we get ads telling us how great the politicians are, but we never get ads telling us how great Brooklyn Bridge Park is. That imbalance ends up cementing our existing assumption that markets are better than governments at improving our quality of life. But that isn't always so. I'll take one Brooklyn Bridge Park over a thousand new brands of detergent, thank you very much.

I realize this may sound a little odd coming from someone who wrote an entire book celebrating the power of bottom-up, distributed systems, a book that took the Jane Jacobs side in the Jacobs-vs-Moses dispute. I'm still a big believer in those decentralized forces, and indeed the streets of Shanghai are full of them. But you can't self-organize a subway system. There are certain parts of urban life that will always have to be centrally planned (though hopefully with true community feedback along the way.) My point is that we could learn from the way Shanghai has celebrated its planners' vision for the future of the city, in part because it's fun to see all the cool stuff in the pipeline, and in part because it's important to remind ourselves that governments can be a positive force for innovation and change too.

What's fascinating in all of this, of course, is China's communist history, and its long (and often dark) tradition of celebrating the achievements of the state. (It's worth noting the urban planning exhibition is right off of People's Square, and around the corner from Tomorrow Square, now populated by Ferrari dealers.) I suppose the argument could be made that states are already powerful enough; they don't need marketing budgets. But I think if the achievements you're celebrating are indeed real ones, whose benefits are shared by the wider population of the city, then creating something like the Exhibition of Urban Planning can make a lot of sense. I don't pretend to know enough about contemporary China to evaluate whether there are exaggerations or omissions in Shanghai's Exhibition. But I know enough about the plans underway in New York to think that the city could benefit from marketing its own achievements and ambitions. It's not propaganda if you're actually telling the truth.

Social Traffic Jams

I'm slowly getting my Brooklyn rhythm back, after six weeks on Shelter Island and a week in the UK, and one of the things that I've noticed very acutely over the past few days is something that my wife and I first noticed when we moved to Park Slope five years ago: you have to budget an extra ten minutes whenever you walk somewhere in this neighborhood, because you invariably run into people you know, people with whom you inevitably want to have a fun little neighborly chat. Yesterday morning, coming back from the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket with breakfast (green tomatoes!), I ran into one of my best friends from college out walking his dog. This morning, picking up pastries for the family at Colson Patisserie, I saw my college girlfriend with her two kids sitting outside in front of the bakery. So both days, I showed up fifteen minutes late with breakfast to a household of ravenous boys.

I've started thinking of these little incidents as social traffic jams -- you're trying to get from point x to point y, but your social network gets in the way.  I think they're probably pretty rare, at least in most environments that Americans now call home. They don't happen in car-centric cities and suburbs, for obvious reasons; you need public space and pedestrian speed of sidewalks to stop and have a chat with your neighbor. And at least in my experience, they rarely happened in Manhattan, because the extreme density of Manhattan forces people to enter into an implicit agreement that they won't talk to each other -- otherwise you'd never get anything done. (That was my experience in the Village at least, though I'm sure some will disagree. When I lived around Columbia in grad school, I had more social traffic jams because of the campus environment, I suspect.) I think the phenomenon is yet another sign of that unique mix of big city density and small town conviviality that you get in Brooklyn brownstone neighborhoods. I'd be really interested to hear if this is a common experience in other communities around the city (and in other cities around the world...)

George Will: SBJ Says Beer Is Good For You

Our busy family trip to Northern California last week meant that I didn't get a chance to link to George Will's excellent (and very flattering) column about beer and civilization, "Survival of the Sudsiest":

The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer. To understand why, consult Steven Johnson's marvelous 2006 book, "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World." It is a great scientific detective story about how a horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighborhood pump for drinking water.

I like how he extends the Everything Bad Is Good For You theme all the way into Ghost Map. (I'm ashamed to say I have a comparable riff about coffee in the new book.) By the way, anyone interested in reading more about beverages and world history should read the superb A History Of The World In Six Glasses.

I've also been chuckling about the fact that I've been quoted now in columns by George Will and David Brooks in the same month. I am seriously going to start losing credibility at the Park Slope Food Co-Op.

 

My Year In Cities

I've always liked Jason's "year in cities" recap that he posts at the start of a new year, so I thought I'd follow suit with my own list. Multiple visits are indicated by a number in parentheses after the city name. Interesting to see here that San Fran beats out DC (my original hometown and where my parents still live). Also, note that the multiple Vegas trips were all for speeches and not blackjack/strip clubs.

I haven't compiled this list in the past, but I think this would certainly be at least tied with the last year or two in terms of the volume and breadth of travel. (Both those years were book tour years, unlike this year, which adds at least six or seven cities to the list.) I can imagine that this data would be really interesting to look at over a twenty-year period, charting both the changes over time, and the overall distribution.

If you are a good friend of mine living in any of these cities, and I didn't manage to say hi on my way through, rest assured that my layover in most of these places was as short as humanly possible, given that my wife was at home with the three kids.

Brooklyn, NY
Washington, DC (6)
Grand Cayman
Helsinki, Finland
San Francisco (7)
Las Vegas (3)
Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida (2)
Orlando, Florida (2)
Palm Beach, Florida
New Brunswick, NJ
Indianapolis, IN
Minneapolis, MN
Boston, MA
Edgartown, MA
Los Angeles, CA
Manchester-By-The-Sea, MA
Clemson, SC
Pittsburgh, PA
Shelter Island, NY (3)
Providence, RI
Rochester, NY
Salt Lake City, UT
Birmingham, AL
Barcelona, Spain
London, UK
Chicago, IL
Montego Bay, Jamaica

Wonderful essay by Andrew Blum about "Jane Jacobs in an Age of Global Change":

Jacobs fought modernist urban planning’s “dishonest mask of pretended order,” and what concerns me today about cities is a corollary: Call it the dishonest mask of pretended localism. Thanks in great part to Jacobs, we talk a lot about preserving neighborhoods, which most often means keeping them the way they are. But for me, preserving an urban community—not merely its architecture, its open space, or its independently owned stores—now means recognizing what the local is made of, the warp and weft of all its pieces, wherever they come from, near or far. And that requires recognizing the global community behind it—for better or worse, in the face of both nostalgia and change.

Tivoli Comes To Brooklyn?

This could be a really nice compromise:

A world-famous Danish amusement park that inspired Walt Disney to build Disneyland is considering expanding operations to Coney Island, officials said. Robert Lieber, president of the city's Economic Development Corp., flew to Copenhagen last week with other top agency officials to meet with representatives from Tivoli Gardens

I've been to the original Tivoli Gardens and it strikes me that this could be an excellent fit. I have a lifelong DisneyWorld obsession, but I've always felt like a pure Disneyfication of Coney Island would be a disaster. On the other hand, there's a lot of today's Coney Island that's just kind of lame -- and I say that as someone who takes his kids there at least ten times a year. What you want is a mix of the freak show present and the the original turn-of-the-century excitement, without it feeling too stale and mall-like. I could easily see a Tivoli park hitting that sweet spot, assuming they don't take over the entire boardwalk.

Escape To The Rockaways

I mentioned in the previous post that I thought living in Park Slope was quite a bit like living in London. But here's one reason that it's different, and better, at least for four months a year: Brooklyn is a great beach town! I piled the older boys in the car this morning at about 8:45, and by 9:10, this is what we were doing:

On an early Sunday morning, there's no traffic on the BQE and the Belt and so you can get to Jacob Riis Park on the Rockaways in about twenty minutes, driving most of the way with spectacular views of the harbor and the open ocean. (I realize that the Rockaways are in Queens, for the record.) The beach is largely deserted at that time, even on a perfect July weekend morning, and the water is sublime.

At the risk of sounding like even more of the Brooklyn cheerleader than I usually do, I happened to plant our beach towels about twenty feet from my friend Jonathan Mahler, whose excellent book The Bronx Is Burning is debuting as a miniseries on ESPN this week.  (Jonathan had arrived with his son thirty minutes before.) So we hung out for an hour or two and talked writing and kids and baseball.

It was one of those entirely unplanned encounters, on a beach that's got to be at least a mile or two wide -- what are the odds?

Our Neighborhood In The News

It was all-Park-Slope-all-the-time today in the Sunday Times. The City section lead with a big piece about Brooklyn bloggers that focused on the Slope's Only The Blog Knows Brooklyn, and cited outside.in's survey of America's Bloggiest Neighborhoods a few times. (Too bad they never quite managed to explain what outside.in was exactly.) Then it was onto the Real Estate section, which opened with an ominously titled piece, "The Park Slope Parent Trap." The article ended up being largely a love song to the hood, with a few obligatory skeptics quoted just to make it seem well-rounded. The thing that struck me about the piece was that it was one of the first times I've seen someone say in print what I've often said to friends or visitors about what it's like to live here: that it's the closest thing you can get in New York to living in London. (Big green parks, low-rise Victorian housing, gardens everywhere, etc.) The "Parent Trap" piece reminded me that I never linked to a piece on "Why does everyone hate Park Slope" that ran in TimeOut NY Kids, which included this excellent quote from a "novelist" named Steven Johnson who appears to live in Park Slope:

At least to non-locals (such as Brooks, who doesn’t realize that Williamsburg is actually where the “hipsters” are), the Slope seems to represent all that is reprehensible about gentrified New York and modern urban parenting. “Non–New Yorkers think of it disparagingly as a hipster alterna-playground, and Manhattanites think of it as a sanctimonious PC stroller derby, like one big suburban PTA meeting stuck in a food co-op,” says novelist Steven Johnson, a longtime Sloper who jokes on his blog that “all writers with young children in NYC are legally required to live” there. “To the outside world, it’s too cool for its own good, and inside New York, it’s not cool enough.”

I've had one or two people come up to me since this was published, and gripe about the "one big suburban PTA meeting stuck in a food co-op" line -- thereby confirming all the Gawker stereotypes of humorless Park Slope. So just for the record, I wasn't saying that I think of the Slope in this way. I love Park Slope, probably to a fault. I was saying that's what other people think about what goes on here. And I say that as a card-carrying member of the Park Slope Food Co-Op. (Which is itself a topic for another post...)

Biking To School

We live about fifteen blocks from where our kids go to school -- just long enough to justify taking the bus in the winter, but a nice walk when it's warm out. But ever since the almost-four-year-old starting riding a bike (no training wheels, thanks to the year he spent practicing balancing with his Like-A-Bike), we've been letting the boys ride bikes to school, usually with Dad trailing behind carrying lunch boxes and laptop. But this morning I took my bike too, and we left a few minutes early so that we could detour through Prospect Park. It's an absolutely peak spring morning here, and so we had a lovely tour through the Park, and then rode down the broad sidewalks on 3rd Street, one of the most beautiful streets in the entire city. Getting two young kids off to school can be a major ordeal, particularly in the winter, but this turned the whole experience into something completely fun, for all of us.

As I get older, I find the winters getting harder and harder to tolerate, not just the lack of sunlight, but just as much the lack of green. This winter I started having extended fantasies about moving to Marin County. But mornings like this one make me feel like we're in the exact right place, and lucky to be there.

Large Is Smart

Jason pointed me to this amazing-sounding study on the whole metaphor of cities as biological organisms. Key graph from the coverage is this:

What they found were some general correlations of size and resource consumption that more or less fit the biological organism metaphor, meaning as the city grew in size it required less energy (resources) to sustain it in a proportion called sublinear scaling. What was surprising to the team was when they measured creative output (jobs, wealth generated, innovation) as cities grew, the scaling of this output was not sublinear, but superlinear, meaning as the city grew its creative output grew faster and faster.