defining the 'new'

INSERT INFILL
A new formula in residential development that contains all the elements of an “urban condition” within a single system including retail, restaurants, and entertainment venues.

These developments are often designed around mass transit hubs, encouraging pedestrian communities. Self contained units can be plugged into any “void” as instantly generated neighborhoods.
This approach assumes that by providing these fixed components, an urban lifestyle can be synthesized.


UNDERCOVER BIG BROTHER

(links) * public-private partnerships

A phenomenon that describes the sometimes hidden relationships and partnerships between public and private sectors.

The private sector’s control of public rights, activity, and resources is often made possible through public-private partnerships between corporations and city government. Mega-scale businesses are afforded protection by city government and city bureaucracy benefits from tax revenue generated by developments.
These partnerships are deceptive because they allow the government to act on the behalf of big business under the guise of public good. They generally advance the interests of the private sector and the market under the banner of sharing power with the poor and the state.

The struggle for control of the sidewalks along and intersecting Las Vegas Boulevard South offers an interesting illustration of the power of the larger hotels when coupled with that of government. In 1993 MGM Grand was able to persuade the county commission to give the casino control of the sidewalk alongside its hotel by declaring it to be private property belonging to the casino in return for an easement guaranteeing public access. The casino was thus allowed to have police arrest any “undesirable” members of the public, such as strikers, sidewalk vendors, and sex-industry leafleter for trespassing on its sidewalk. In 1994, Metro police arrested more than five hundred Culinary Union picketers who were demonstrating on “sidewalk private property” belonging to MGM Grand. When a Nevada deputy attorney protested these provisions as unconstitutional he was asked to resign, when he refused, he was fired. The “understanding” between the major casino-hotels of Las Vegas and the city and county police, thus appear to favor the former by providing special government protection in order to benefit the interests of the casino.


Sometimes these partnerships can also take the form of special incentives and resources that the city gives to a developer in exchange for tax revenues generated by the developer’s proposal. In the case of Seattle for example, the city in support of billionaire developer Paul Allen’s proposed development of South Lake Union has approved his Vulcan-backed South Lake Union streetcar, signed off on zoning changes that will allow biotech companies to build taller buildings in the area, invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in infrastructure improvements in South Lake Union, and passed several resolutions expressing support for a biotech hub in the area.

These kind of public private partnerships blur the distinction between private and public life and render zones of the city unclear not only in terms of their character but also their jurisdiction, becoming legally ambiguous.


PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP (3P)

A partnership between the public and private sector for the purpose of delivering a project or service which was traditionally provided by the public sector. Controversially, public private relationships have diverted monies earmarked for public benefits to private interests or as private profit.

The PPP process recognizes that both the public sector and the private sector have certain advantages relative to the other in the performance of specific tasks, and can enable public services and infrastructure to be provided in the most economically efficient manner by allowing each sector to do what it does best. These emergent political alliances were clearly, though not always explicitly, committed to economic growth (particularly downtown) with the private sector as the primary engine for, and beneficiary of, that development.
Although urban renewal was launched and initially justified as an effort to improve the housing condition justified as an effort to improve the housing conditions of low-income residents, it quickly became a massive public subsidy for private business development, particularly downtown commercial real estates. In the case of the South Lake Union project, Paul Allen's 2001 property deal with the city requires him to build at least 50 units of affordable housing. The city plans to spend an estimated $500 million on infrastructure, utilities, and amenities. The City Council recently approved his plan to construct 35 lower-rate rental units in a new neighborhood development. It replaces a 33-unit vintage low-income building, the Lillian Apartments, which Allen hurriedly tore down in 2002 despite protests. The new structure's lowest rents—$740—will be three times the Lillian's lowest rents. Yet, while partially fulfilling a contractual agreement as part of the 2001 sale, Allen was also able to grab about $3 million in city tax breaks for providing the "low-rent" units.


CROSSDRESSING

The private sector playing dress-up with the publics clothes.

Development corporations combine shopping, entertainment, recreation, and sometimes housing--all the ingredients of an urban lifestyle in a controlled environment that passes itself off as public space. Lifestyle centers simultaneously deny that they are shopping centers and branded environments while at the same time presenting a totalized, themed environment. There is an ambiguous relationship between efforts at generating interest and creating a "sense of place," and the extreme control being exercised by the rules in effect in these places, governing dress and behavior, signage and architecture.

Cross-dressing is private space masquerading as public space, minus any sense of spontaneity or unpredictability, except for that which arouses the senses or encourages you to shop more. Las Ramblas, a new mixed-use casino development under construction on Las Vegas Strip has a four-block promenade mall that takes on all of the characteristics of a public place like its namesake, La Rambla, Barcelona. In essence, it simulates the experience of a public space, by offering outdoor pedestrian elements, such as plazas, and arcades, a variety of retail, and entertainment, but maintains control of allowable activity.


POLITICAL GODFATHERISM

Wealthy individuals who have the power to personally influence public governance and control city resources.

City officials will structure sweetheart real estate deals with developers in exchange for campaign contributions as in the case of Seattle’s Mayor who is being forced to return illegal office fund contributions from Vulcan, Paul Allen’s real estate corporation. A closer examination at what Paul Allen might be getting in return for his 'donation' of $10 million to the city for South Lake Union Park demonstrates the kind of power such individuals can have over city resources. In 2001, the city sold eight South Lake Union properties to one of Allen's 25 real-estate subsidiaries operating under Vulcan's command—in this case, the subsidiary called City Investors XI. Allen got the eight parcels for $20.1 million. According to city planning documents, most if not all of the $20.1 million Allen paid for the land will be reinvested by the city in his neighborhood, mostly for transportation improvements. They are partly vacant, industrial sites and include parking lots. Allen owns 58 acres in the South Lake Union neighborhood, which cost at least $250 million. Besides the $10 million tax deduction from the foundation contribution, his Vulcan holding company is seeking another $10 million in contractual changes involving some of that acreage, which still must be approved by the City Council.


VERTICAL SUBURBANISM
Conventionally suburban development trends affecting an urban context in the form of Vertical Suburban sprawl. Vertical residential mega-structures mimic a suburban formula of simplistic sprawl organizational systems, in a vertical rather then horizontal extension.

What makes the suburb prototypical is the disruption of functional and social complexity and the compulsive consumption of space within a territorial frame. Suburbs do not offer a practical model for a contemporary urban metropolis made of dense and complex neighborhoods because they are repetitive.

Like their suburban counterparts, repeated residential prototypes are equally isolating only denser.



REPETITIVE URBAN PROTOTYPE

Urban design strategies based on mono-typological high-rise structures could well be the exactly proportioned counterpart of horizontal sprawl!



INNIE/OUTIE

A condition that occurs when there is no longer a marked distinction between inside and outside, public space and private space.

Seattle’s Public Library and the Freemont Street Experience in Las Vegas both exemplify aspects of this condition. The Fremont Street Experience, a public/private collaboration between the City of Las Vegas and Downtown casino owners, is an example of urban revitalization that does not change the existing fabric but alters its relationships by introducing a pedestrian condition that renegotiates the casino’s territory and extends its vibrant interior environment into the streets and groups them into a single unit. It demonstrates an effort to revitalize downtown Las Vegas by attempting to wrap the entire downtown under a canopy of lights spanning four city blocks.
If you could imagine turning the Freemont Street Experience on its head so that it stood vertically, you might get something like the Seattle Public library which stacks its programmatic zones one atop one another like buildings along a vertical street. OMA calls these programmatic zones "platforms." In ascending order, they are designed for parking; entrance and orientation; community meeting rooms; book stacks and circulation desks; and administration offices. The platforms are staggered to create overhangs on the street, as stipulated by city planners, and to take advantage of city views. The top level of each platform, akin to a roof, is an open, public space. The interior's overhanging platforms have been draped with a metal and glass building skin, as if it were a piece of cloth. Hence the exterior folds to enclose its interior mass. The interior becomes a greenhouse, the exterior a compressed, Rubik's Cube reflecting Downtown Seattle’s skyline.



NEIGHBORHOODIES

Your 'Hood on your Chest,
Your Heart on Your Sleeve

Forget those sweatshirts that say "Brooklyn," or even worse, "New York." Michael de Zayas is here to help you announce to the world through your sweatshirt that you are from one particular neighborhood, one street or, if you want to get really specific, one address.

Mr. de Zayas, 28, is the president and sole employee of Neighborhoodies, a three-month-old business dedicated to making hooded sweatshirts emblazoned with the names of particular neighborhoods. The sweatshirts are made to order for the enclave-conscious shopper, a species that Mr. de Zayas believes is especially prevalent within New York.

"Once you're here, saying 'I love New York' is kind of meaningless," Mr. de Zayas said. "Everyone who lives here loves it, or they leave. So, why do you love New York? It's because you love Fort Greene, or Carnegie Hill, or Astoria."



CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE

Individual property owners and ordinary citizens whose rights are violated by abusive government officials who unfairly and unaccountably administer laws and regulations in order to benefit the private sector. With their own objectives in mind, local government and private entities are willing to sacrifice public rights in order to serve their own interests for wealth and power and ordinary citizens are caught in the cross-fire.

Developing small infill parcels can carry a higher cost than larger projects because developers have to assemble numerous parcels. Land costs on residential infill sites in Las Vegas have been estimated to be two to three times the cost of raw land at the fringe. One of the ways around the high costs of developing infill properties is to use eminent domain.

Eminent domain was used in Las Vegas amid a furor of dissent when private property was taken in order to build the so-called Freemont Street Experience. The use of eminent domain in Las Vegas exemplifies how local Government and businesses can abuse the administration of law in order to condemn land privately owned under the guise of public use by transferring the property for private use.



PROCESS, PROJECTS, PLANNING, and PLANNERS

Project Planners dominate the citadels of power. Planning professionals, developers, Wall Street investors, and the like consider Project Planning the only approach worth talking about, the only one requiring complicated financial packages. Only Project Planning, of course, is dependent on them. Project Planners dismiss anything else as irrelevant, anything that places more confidence in the judgment of citizen users. Downtowns are pockmarked with their accomplishments. Only Project Planners, their followers, and the public persuaded by their rhetoric define these downtowns as reborn. Rebuilt yes, reborn, hardly.

Opponents of Project Planning recognize and celebrate the complexity of urbanism and the interconnectedness of all components. These "Urban Husbanders" assume assets and resources are already in place to be reinvigorated and built onto in order to stimulate a place-based rejuvenation that adds to the long-evolving, existing strengths, instead of replacing them. Planning is meant to be about problem solving, relying heavily on the expertise of citizen users, the accumulated experience and wisdom of the community. Urban Husbanders advocate introducing change incrementally and monitoring it carefully, providing a great opportunity to learn from each step. They involve many entrepreneurs of various sizes, not just one big developer, and rely only on modest doses of government support, if any. They work to add a layer of organic urban growth rather than replace what has taken decades to grow. This layer may look and feel in many ways radically different from what was there before, but fundamentally the connection between before and after is not broken.

Creating a sense of place requires community in the truest sense of that word. Not just a bunch of people, but people who come together as one to create shared vision, a vision that leads to a sense of neighborhood, of place. Of course, for this to happen, there first has to be a community of people residing in a neighborhood. New Economy Towns start with the buildings and hope that real community will eventually come about in time. In spite of the New Urbanist talk about place making and neighborhood building, the New Urbanism is, more often than not, nothing more than soothingly disguised profit making at the expense of others, at best, and at worst, ill-advised social engineering,
given that manufacturing and services have all relocated to more profitable locations, cities increasingly exist to cater to a spectacle-filled lifestyle...places where we consume urban lifestyle rather than actually creating it.

Change – the creation of sense of place – begins not with center-of-strength organizations, such as the New Urban Town Builders Collaborative, but with neighborhood relationships. It is the neighborhood narratives of place that are the roots of neighborhood revitalization. Neighborhoods cannot be dragged out of stagnation by developers, even the New Urbanists. If neighborhoods have no shared vision for their future there is no future. Shared neighborhood vision cannot be imposed from outside in, it must arise organically within.



Cities have two alternatives. They can work to become more competitive in terms of jobs, attracting skilled workers and middle-class families, or they can refocus their efforts on providing playpens for the idle rich, the restless young, and tourists. All too often the latter strategy is what many municipalities appear to be adopting. A number of cities now regard tourism, culture, and entertainment as "core" assets.

I'm always interested in the ways that place can be branded and re-branded to evoke distinct feelings and experiences. A place's identity extends to the people who inhabit it too, though--and the ways that place becomes an extension of individual and collective identity has a lot of power. the fusion of individual and spatial identity... an actual (or imagined...really the possibilities are endless) place that is personally significant. Creative Class-driven redevelopment efforts: they usually price out the people they attempt to attract. That merely means it is an imperfect system.

And the truth is that in the great struggle between cities and suburbs, raging now for a century or more, the verdict is finally in: Cities lost. The vast majority of people prefer the ``burbs.'' The long-predicted comeback of the traditional city isn't in the cards.


"DREAM WORLD'

For those of us who love cities, it's hard to believe that the future of civilized life lies in the suburbs. You call that civilized?

``Metropolitan elites live in a dream world,'' Kotkin says. ``If 1,000 people move into lower downtown Denver in the last year, the elites think it's a trend: stories in the newspaper, panel discussions, general celebration. Meanwhile, 10,000 people leave the city for the suburbs, and the elites ignore it.''

Traditional U.S. cities stopped growing 50 years ago and are now shrinking. Since 1950, almost all the growth in U.S. metropolitan areas has been beyond the city limits, in suburbs -- sprawl, in a word.

And the trend seems to be accelerating. Census data released earlier this month show that during the 1990s, one city after another lost population, even as the counties surrounding them grew. In Ohio, for example, Cincinnati's Hamilton County shrunk by 2.4 percent. Neighboring Boone County, in Kentucky, grew 49.3 percent. Even further out from the city, Grant County, Kentucky, grew by 42.2 percent.

``They think they can revive their cities if they make them `hip and cool,''' he says, referring to the street festivals, cafes, arts fairs, high-end boutiques and other yuppie delights that attract the young and single, the childless and rich.

``But that's not how cities last,'' he says. ``You can't build a long-term civic culture around transient populations.''

What any healthy city requires is a stable base of middle- class families. But the conditions necessary for attracting and keeping families are precisely what city planners ignore.

``They've forgotten the basics,'' Kotkin says. ``Are the schools good? Are the streets clean and safe? It's a lot easier to satisfy the yuppies with no kids than to fix the schools.''


PRETTY NOT GRITTY CITY
The solution to urban ills; a solution that claims to sweep clean parts of the city to create an urban landscape that favors “progress over stagnation, science over superstition, prosperity over depression, conservation over wastefulness, beauty over ugliness, serenity over tensions, enchantment over drabness, wealth over squalor, cleanliness over dirtiness, efficiency over inefficiency, success over failure, convenience over inconvenience, comfort over discomfort, security over insecurity, and happiness over unhappiness”.

“It's an entire city all under one roof, to be built and operated by private enterprise alone. There will not be just one, but many such cities throughout the entire world. Boasting no crime, no pollution, and no over-crowding, a veritable utopia for those who've grown weary of trying to find solutions to today's urban problems”.