the Grand Manner City

Sources: http://thebizjam.com/2010/10/26/washington-metro-ipod-maps

Grand Manner refers to "an idealized aesthetic style derived from classical art". The cities of the Grand Manner are cities usually planned in a formative way.

Washington DC is a typical Grand Manner City. Based on Spiro Kostof's study, there are three primary characteristics that can describe Washington DC's uniqueness in plans. First, it is a planned city rather than a spontaneously self-grown city with organic or disorder streets and alleys. Second, it has grand radial avenues superimposed on grid system. It might be the first city in America with the combination city structure of the grid and the diagonal. Third, the landscape is deliberately incorporated into the Grand Manner plan, not only serving as the greenery for the public, but also part of the demonstration tool for the manifestation.

due process

Due process clause comes from the Fifth Amendment that “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The first clause is called due process clause, and the second taking clause. The Fourteenth Amendment essentially repeats the same clause, but applies to the states and their creatures -- local governments.

According to Land Use Planning and Development Regulation Law by Julian Conrad Juergensmeyer and Thomas E. Roberts, there are two types of due process: substantive due process and procedural duo process. “Substantive due process limits the exercise of the police power by requiring that a land use regulation promote the health, safety, morals, or general welfare by a rational means. It protects against arbitrary or capricious actions.” However, compared to substantive due process which deals with “why a deprivation occurred,” procedural due process “asks how the deprivation came to be.” Procedural due process attaches to administrative and quasi-judicial decisionmaking, rather than legislation which substantive due process attached to. An example of procedural due process is a proper notice on public hearing during the rezoning process. 

Ultra Vires

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, ultra vires, originally Latin, means “beyond the scope or in excess of legal power or authority.” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ultra%20vires) Usually than not, the power/authority here refers to the Constitution. Ultra vires is a statutory claim; once the court finds a law exceeds the power granted by the Constitution, it will declare the law to be ultra vires. Two conditions can lead to ultra vires: either substantive (the law is beyond the power), or procedural (the process is not proper). Under the circumstance of zoning, the Board of Zoning Appeals (ZBA) plays the quasi-judicial role to hear the appeals on the administrative decisions. It is ZBA who judges whether a law (such as a rezoning) is ultra vires or not. 

Public Space

"A public space is a social space such as a town square that is open and accessible to all, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, age or socio-economic level. One of the earliest examples of public spaces are commons. For example, no fees or paid tickets are required for entry, nor are the entrants discriminated based on background." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_space).

Public space is built to serve the society for multiple purposes. It can add the beauty to the surrounding environment of citizens; it can provide people with a place to gather together and hang out; it can also present as a symbol of certain area. Whether a public space can be successful or not is influenced by many social factors. The economic development level, the historical experience, the culture background, and many other aspects of a society can influence the use of a public space. Therefore, building a public space is not only a geographical issue but also a social issue for planners.






View at Piazza della Signoria from the front balcony of Palazzo Vecchio, in Florence. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Piazza_della_Signoria.jpg)

Transit-oriented development

Sources: http://funniez.net/Latest/bodyheatforabuilding.html

Sources: http://www.collaborativelandscape.org/wiki/Ostermalmstorg

Definition: Transit-oriented development is a city planning and design principle striving to maximize access to public transport. By locating a mixture of housing, office, retail and other amenities within a half-mile of public transportation, it advocates a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood accompanied with better and equal access to jobs and urban resources. (content from wikipedia.org).

In the effort to stop the spreading of the suburbanization and control the decentralization after the World War II, American architect and urbanist Peter Calthorpe sparked the notion of mixed-use development and density around transit in the 1990s. As the pioneer of New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe illustrated his idea about the compact and active use of transit in the neighborhood development in his book "The American Metropolis-Ecology, Community, and the American Dream" in 1993. (content from The Transit Metropolis)

However, unlike the prevailing of New Urbanism in the states in the past decades, especially in the new suburban town construction, there had not been a lot of mature practice of TOD. Except in some old metropolis such as New York or Chicago, where the train or metro has been kept as the connection tool for the nearby suburban area to the downtown, the transit cease to achieve popularization in the United States. But if you look outside the United States, you will find that more than half a century ago, some cities in Europe had already adopted a regional vision of transit, using a well-developed transit system to stimulate and find new growth for economy and re-locate its job market.

The best example of rail-based metropolis might be Stockholm, the capital city of Sweden.Stockholm benefited a lot from the development of rail transit after using rail transit to transform a monocentric city to polycentric metropolis. It is maybe the first and only one Western European city where a integrated public transit system is prevailing while the automobility is receding. Why the rail transit can be successful in Stockholm, an affluent city with the highest automobile occupancy rate ? The primary reason responsible for the huge success of rail transit would be the coordination of new town development and rail transit services under an integrated and farsighted, regional planning framework.

GIS Geographic Information System

GIS stands for Geographic Information System, a set of computer tools to store, edit, manage, analyze and display both aspatial data and spatial data tied to a particular location on the earth. GIS has been widely used in landuse planning, housing analysis, sociological analysis and environmental planning. With more powerful data sharing tool, GIS currently serves as an useful aid for public participation in the process of urban planning.

Though the concept of manipulating space-related date can date back to the time when "early tribesmen who made sketches on hides or formed crude models of clay as aids" to food hunting and war making, modern GIS was actually inspired by computers in the mid 20th century. Dr. Roger Tomlinson, "Father of GIS", led his team to develop the Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS) in the mid-1960s. The breakthrough in GIS history was the establishment of the Environmental Systems Research Institute by Laura and Jack Dangermond in 1969, with the core idea of "linking spatial representation with attributes in a table", a powerful idea which enabled the relevant software Arc Info to capture 90% of today's market. (Price M. Mastering ArcGIS (5th ed). 2010) The newest version is Arc GIS 10, with a totally new interface different from the previous version Arc GIS 9.3. (for more information, you can go to http://www.esri.com/)

My experience working with GIS varies from quantitative analysis to 3-D displaying and animation making. From my point of view, similar to any other planning and design software, to master GIS only requires some practice. However, the myth underneath GIS is projection, the way to intepret the true three-dimendion location on the earth to a two-dimension coordinate system. The importance of projection is undebatable because of the chasm between the round shape of the earth and the planar feature of the map. Unfortunately, none projection method is undistorted; they distort either the shape/angle of a place, or the distance/area. For the American Continent, Universal Transverse Mercator Coordinate System and State Planne Coordinate System are the major two projected coordinate systems. Two GIS courses are offered at Taubman College, UP406 Introduction to GIS instructed by Prof. Lan Deng, and UP507 Intermediate GIS by Joe Grengs.

The GIS map from http://designandgeography.com/ shows housing price changes based on panel date from 1990-2010. To our disappointment, Michigan has been suffering a serious housing price decline in the last ten years, counteracting the rise from 1990-2000. This trend did go with the severe population loss revealed in Census 2010.

Infrastructure

Generally speaking infrastructure refers to all the stuff that we use every day but never think about: water from the tap; the road to work; the ferry across the harbour, the footbridge we cross when we walk to lunch; the blackberry messages sent into invisible lines of communication. Infrastructure is made manifest when we take the Mid-level Escalator; the energy harnessed when we take a shower, we turn on a light, take the subway. Infrastructure also includes larger things that make the global economy go round: airports, energy facilities, schools, hospitals and transit rail links, sea ports.

An unexpected consequence of the huge amount of infrastructure spending to come over the next few years is that it will continue the symbiotic convergence of economic and social systems between America, Asia and Europe.


Challenge: Poorly conceived urban infrastructure investments today will have negative environmental, economic, and social impacts in the future.


Strategy :To place sustainable development, infrastructure, and the environment at the forefront of our poverty reduction efforts.


Response: Putting sustainable infrastructure at the forefront by promoting infrastructure investment, improving water and sanitation, focusing on clean and renewable energy, driving sustainable transport forward, unleashing the power of the carbon market, and supporting private sector operations and public-private funding.

Necropolis

Necropolis means “a large elaborate cemetery of an ancient city” (www.m-w.com)

The world necropolis, as used in urban planning and urban design, is referred to the final phase of urban development, the dead of city. This word was used by Louis Mumford in his famous work <The city in history> to describe the evolution of city from the form of polis in ancient Greece to metropolis, megalopolis, tyrannopolis, parisitopolis and necropolis in the end. Mumford compares city as a container, with certain volume and capacity. The bigger the city, the worse it would be. He urges urban development needs to be controlled in a moderate scale. Otherwise it would implode and end in a graveyard of dust. 

The image shows the debris of Roman Empire. It is not only a history but also a lesson. (http://www.thejupiter.info/about/author/admin/page/5/)

“From the standpoint of both politics and urbanism, Rome remains a significant lesson of what to avoid: its history presents a series of classic danger signals to warn one when life is moving in the wrong direction. Wherever crowds gather in suffocating numbers, wherever rents rise steeply and housing conditions deteriorate, wherever a one-sided exploitation of distant territories removes the pressure to achieve balance and harmony nearer at hand, there the precedents of Roman building almost automatically revive, as they have come back today: the arena, the tall tenement, the mass contests and exhibitions, the football matches, the international beauty contests, the strip-tease made ubiquitous by advertisement, the constant titillation of the senses by sex, liquor, and violence – all in true Roman style. These are symptoms of the end: magnifications of demoralized power, minifications of life. When these signs multiply, Necropolis is near, though not a stone has yet crumbled. For the barbarian has already captured the city from within. Come hangman! Come vulture!”

cited from book<The City in History> p242 by  Lewis Mumford

Garden City

Garden Cities were intended to be "planned, self contained, communities surrounded by "greenbelts" (parks), containing proportionate areas of residences, industry, and agriculture." The Garden City movement is a method of urban planning initiated by Sir Ebenezer Howard in 1898. (http://en.wikipedia.org/).

Ebenezer Howard introduced his blueprint of garden city in 1898 with a book titled To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, which was later reissued as Garden Cities of Tomorrow in 1902. With a fixed limit of 32,000 people and 1,000 acres of land, garden city was planned to be a place that integrated the best of town (economic and social opportunities) and country (fresh air and nature) (Hall, 2002, Cities of Tomorrow). As Howard himself proposed, garden cities should be surrounded by large area of green belt, contain farmes and all kinds of urban institutions, and connect to each other by an "Inter-Municipal Railway". Beside the physical forms of garden city, there is also social, political, and economical importance rooted in Howard's design of Garden City plan. As interpreted by Hall (2002), "freedom and cooperation" are the heart of the plan.

In United Kingdom, Letchworth and Welwyn are two true garden cities built in the first 40 years(1900-1940) of Garden City Movement.

This picture illustrated Ebenezer Howard's 3 magnets diagram which addressed the question "Where will the people go?" the choices being Town, Country or Town-Country. (http://en.wikipedia.org/).

by Shu Yang

The Brookings Institution

The Brookings Institution is an influential nonprofit public policy organization and think tank providing recommendations for decision makers based on independent research conducted by leading experts both in government and academia through five initiatives: economic studies, foreign policy, global economy and development, governance studies, and metropolitan policy program (which is the one most relevant to architects, urban planners and designers). Its major goals are: to “strengthen American democracy”, to “foster the economic and social welfare, security and opportunity of all Americans”, and to “secure a more open, safe, prosperous and cooperative international system”. Located in Washington, DC, the Brookings Institution influences a lot of foreign countries through various collaborations with universities around the world (such as Tsinghua University in China).  Professor Christopher B. Leinberger from Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, currently works as a visiting fellow expertise in real estate and downtown redevelopment.

Using open data source from authorities such as the Census Bureau and Economic Development Administration, the high-quality researches on various topics about cities and metropolitan areas conducted by the Brookings Institution serve as very reliable resources for urban studies. Current research topics in the Metropolitan Program include the state of metropolitan America, the metropolitan economy initiative, the walkable urbanism series, and the earned income tax credit series.

For more information, please go to the Brookings Institution website at http://www.brookings.edu

(Picture: President Obama making a speech at the Brookings Institution, 2009, addressing using TARP to stimulate new jobs. Source: www.Washingtontimes.com)

(Paraphrased by the author. Source from The Brookings Institution website: http://www.brookings.edu)

Pruitt-Igoe Public Housing Project

The Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis, Missouri was designed by Minoru Yamasaki in the mid-1950s. It was named for two public figures, one black, one white, and the housing was intended for a segregated population. When city laws desegregated public housing, the project became primarily occupied by blacks. It was intended to be a solution for inner city housing problems, following the vision of modern architects like Le Corbusier, and was given a lot of publicity as a positive way to address urban renewal. Its construction and design was constrained by the fact that it was a publicly funded project, with specifications set by the government. Residents of the project were extremely poor and there was a very high crime rate, two issues that were often highlighted in the news, locally, nationally and even internationally. The project was a failure from early on and demolition began in the early 1970s, less than 20 years after it was built. Pruitt-Igoe's demise was likely due to a combination of architectural, social, economic, and economic factors. (content from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe )

Image from the USGS (US Geological Survey) in the public domain.

Yamasaki later designed the World Trade Center.

Public housing projects to compare: Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes both in Chicago; Lafayette Park in Detroit.

posted by theresa rohlck