Tulsa Smart Growth Conference 1996

TULSA: OUR NEXT 100 YEARS
Mayor / AIA Conference on City Design
January 18, 1996
Speaker: Jonathan Barnett, FAIA

Introduction by Leisa McNulty, AIA

Leisa McNulty: Hello. My name is Leisa McNulty, president of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), Eastern Oklahoma Chapter. I am here to introduce our next speaker. I had the pleasure of driving Mr. Barnett around the city yesterday on a tour before giving his presentation so he would be a little more familiar with Tulsa. Of course, yesterday it was quite warm and it was a nice day to be driving around. I told him that we were supposed to have snow today, and he was a little bit skeptical about that, to which I said, "Well, in Oklahoma you never know." Anyway, I want to restate our thanks to all of you for being here, in spite of the snow, and I think it is a wonderful turnout and a great event, and we are very pleased to have you all here.

I first heard Jonathan Barnett speak a couple of years ago when he came to Tulsa and spoke to the AIA. I remember thinking at that time that his concepts about urban growth and development trends should be heard by a wider audience. So when we began planning the conference for Tulsa: The Next 100 Years, Mr. Barnett immediately came to mind as a knowledgeable educator in urban planning who could help this community enhance our vision for the future development of Tulsa.

Jonathan Barnett is a noted professor, writer, and design consultant who has helped shape the urban environment in many U.S. cities. He is a professor of architecture and director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York. He was also the director of urban design for the City of New York and advisor to such cities as Cleveland; Norfolk, Va.; Pittsburgh, Pa.; Charleston, S.C.; and Kansas City. His work with these cities also involved the ongoing process of design management, including the use of public investment in parks, open spaces, streetscape and the use of design guidelines and special zoning provisions to shape the work of individual developers and architects. Mr. Barnett's books include Introduction to Urban Design and The Elusive City. His most recent book, The Fractured Metropolis: Improving the New City, Restoring the Old City and Reshaping the Region, explores new reality and opportunities for the design of the metropolitan region. Barnett cites specific examples from around the United States, demonstrating how bypassed areas in the old city can facilitate development at the metropolitan edges without destroying the landscape, and how metropolitan planning can repair our environment and communities.

Truly a distinguished urban planner, we are honored to have him here with us today. Please join me in welcoming Jonathan Barnett.

Jonathan Barnett: I am very much aware that while cities have a lot in common, they are also very different from each other. And while I can come here and suggest methodology and possibilities to you, I certainly can't stand up here and tell you what you ought to do.

I do think that there are some things I can show you that will help you focus on what you can do about the future of your community and I think the most important point I need to make to you is that there is no such thing as a free market in real estate. Yes, there is a very strong and highly competitive private market in real estate. But it is not a free market. In fact, none of us really has an idea of what a free market in real estate would be like.

So when you hear people get up and say, "Get government out of my way, let the private market operate," or "Government is part of the problem and not the solution," when people talk about property rights, I think you need to bring to these statements a certain degree of skepticism. Sure, there are property values, but property values are very often created by public action.

I watched the news last night and heard a report about the possibility of a flat tax. Let's examine what a flat tax might do to the property values of individual houses in the U.S. If you don't have mortgage interest deductions, most of the expert opinion that I've read indicates that the value of a house will be cut by one-quarter to one-third, which is essentially the value of the tax deduction.

Well now, what a flat tax would do to the value of a rental property or apartments, that's a little harder to calculate. Presumably, more people would decide to rent if the tax deduction for owning property were taken away, and that would raise rents. On the other hand, the owner of the rental property would lose the depreciation deduction, which is this wonderful piece of fiction that real estate loses its value, when you all know in recent times, it has gained in value. So it's been a tremendous asset to developers to be able to deduct every year the depreciation of their property. If that deduction disappears, we would have some interesting re-evaluation take place in the market. Let's look at another example. Let's look at highways. Supposing the federal government, instead of interfering with local affairs by paying 90 percent of the cost of highways, had simply lent the communities the money and expected repayment, so that instead of freeways they were all toll roads. A moment's reflection will tell us that suburban development has been heavily subsidized by having free highways.

The most important influence on the real-estate market is development regulation. The incentives for development are often created by government. Almost everything that happens in most cities, with the exception of Houston, is very heavily controlled by development regulation, so that everything that gets built is subject to zoning or subdivision or some combination of both these things.

Most major development requires some change in development regulation. So there are public hearings and public discussion, and nothing really happens until there has been a lot of deliberation by government bodies. So I think the conclusion is inescapable that everything that happens around you is very heavily regulated and heavily subsidized. Which leads to what is my favorite message from the fortune cookie: "If you get what you ask for, why can't you get what you want?"

Now, I learned this lesson originally working for John Lindsay 30 years ago. Mayor Lindsay was a dynamic and effective mayor, and I think he had a lot of sympathy for the kinds of issues that I consider important.

Early in his first term, a group of real-estate investors who had contributed to his campaign came to him and said, "If you look at this map of the upper east side of Manhattan, you can see that along the avenues there is this strip of zoning and it says 'R10.' In the middle of the block it says 'R6.' It is very inconsistent that you should have high-density zoning on the avenues, and in the same neighborhood you should have low density right next door. Why don't you even it out, make it more reasonable?"

So the mayor, who had just hired all these urban designers to work for him, called us up and asked me, as director of this urban-design group, to come to the meeting and explain to him what the implications of this were. I asked a photographer to take some pictures to explain it, and he made a photo montage. It showed what the zoning would permit, which is a replication of the tall buildings along the avenue instead of the lower buildings on the street. The purpose of the lower zoning was to keep some light and air between these tall buildings. Mayor Lindsay saw these photos and said, "OK, I understand what you are talking about. Those little (zoning) lines on the map have this enormous effect on the physical form of the city."

So the real-estate developers were told that this wasn't as unreasonable as Mayor Lindsay had been given to understand. The whole lesson that those little lines on the map had this enormous effect on the physical form of the city was a lesson to me, as well.

There was also a proposal to re-map a section of Third Avenue in New York City to have the same high-density zoning it had on the upper east side. We made a model just to show what would happen if every site developed. We studied the effect of the different ground rules. Each of these towers represents 40 percent of the lot, which, at that time, was a new kind of zoning the city had just enacted. If you went back to the zoning that the city had previously, which allowed buildings to cover 70 percent of the lot, the same amount of floor area produces something different. It explains why the effects of the new zoning were so unexpected. The people in the neighborhoods were used to large buildings, but they weren't used to having them so tall. So there was another thing we learned, that if you take the traditional New York City policies of re-mapping the neighborhood to high-density along the main streets, but you did it 100 feet back, you get yet a different pattern. You have low buildings framing the street with the tall buildings framed by the low buildings. This seems to be a very satisfactory way of assimilating the tall buildings into the city.

[Barnett displays a slide of a 1904 cartoon, in which the artist shows unrelated buildings of differing height and style.] The artist thought he was talking about the confusion of style that existed among architects, but what this cartoon says to me is that there is a confusion between buildings that were built before the invention of the elevator and buildings that were made possible by the elevator.

If you look at buildings like the Wainwright Building (or some of the buildings here in Tulsa), you see ornamentation on the front, then you go around the side and there is none. The reason is that the developer assumed the new tall buildings would be treated the same as the older buildings and eventually the city would also develop up to this new height. So one of the things city designers have been struggling with ever since the invention of the elevator is how to assimilate the tall buildings into a city and still have reasonable relationships between buildings and streets.

One possibility is to say that the buildings that frame the street should be of a traditional height and the taller ones should be set back. There are rules that you can write into your zoning ordinances that do this. For example, again in New York City, we have the Lincoln Square Special Zoning District. It says that a building must hold the street line at a height of 85 feet and the dotted line says there should be an arcade. These things, if a developer knows about them in advance, are not necessarily expensive; it's only a questions of knowing about it beforehand. As a result, that neighborhood has developed in that way.

There's another lesson in this. The architects will see it immediately, and I think you can all see it -- no matter how good your zoning is, it doesn't guarantee you a good building. So there are other things that the public sector should do that would help, including design guidelines of some detail and design review.

The other point I want to make to you is, what you can do for buildings, you can do for regions. The same principles that apply to individual buildings of a city can be applied to the whole metropolitan region.

Now, I was warned before I came here that growth boundaries are not considered a popular topic in this community. Then the mayor reminded us this morning of your great frontier tradition. I'm not trying to tell you what to do; in fact, I'm heading for the airport right after this conference concludes. However, let me show you some diagrams that were developed in Seattle (which are not too different from the three future alternatives for Tulsa that Bob Jones showed us a few minutes ago), that were developed as a part of a public discussion about public transit. I will not try to tell you that all the other cities in the country have it all figured out. In fact, Seattle has had a terrible time getting a vote to support the bond issue for this public plan, and this whole issue is still in flux.

They developed these diagrams to help the public understand what the implications of the transportation and land-use decisions are. Washington is a state that already had a growth-boundary legislation requirement. This is an aerial view of the Seattle metropolitan region as it looks today, and this is the de facto regional plan that you would have if you follow the current zoning ordinances in the community. You get a fairly dispersed growth, and what happens is the growth starts creeping up the valley into the surrounding hillsides. If you were very strict and you said that all new development would take place within a few metro centers, this would be a very tight version of a growth boundary. Underneath it, you see the existing development pattern; only in Seattle/Tacoma do you see major development.

I think that's what a lot of planners, in small private conversations, would say they might like to see happen. However, it's looking back to a world that has vanished. In this day of the automobile it's very unlikely you could get this.

Here is another version of the same ideal in which you have many more centers. Next is a straw alternative, but it's an informative one in which you say, let's disperse everything. Let's discourage all the existing centers and let's have all new development take place in this dispersed suburban pattern. This pattern covers something like twice as much area in the region.

There was a ballot in the newspaper. It wasn't really an official vote, but the people voted. Guess what -- a compromise. You had larger centers and a group of smaller centers. This was the agreed-upon concept that was supported by a transportation plan and growth boundaries. In Washington, you have a very strong environmental movement and a different topography than you do here. It's perhaps more obvious why people have to live in harmony with nature in the state of Washington than it is here, but I think it's equally important here.The main point that I'm making to you is, if you are getting what you ask for, which is the form of development that's taking place in your region right now, and you don't like it, you can change it. Now, having talked about building and regions, the same alternatives are available to you in districts. Consider, for example, the suburban strip. This one happens to be in Kansas City, although it could be just about anywhere. Everyone now looks at these things and says they're kind of regrettable, but it's the market at work. I submit to you that it's not the market at work at all. It's the magic of modern zoning.

All of the good-government advocates, all the urban designers and planners, have felt that zoning was an essential element in any community's future. In the 1950s, almost all the communities enacted zoning ordinances. Tulsa was ahead of the curve on that, but I'll bet you amended it in the '50s. The trouble is that when these ordinances were adopted, people forgot that the prototypes that were created for the ordinances were developed in the 1920s. One of the elements that was zoned into nearly every community in the U.S. is this commercial strip.

I'm quite sure it comes from the old cities that had streetcars. Along streetcar streets and apartments and townhouse districts in older cities, you had a pattern of continuous shops springing up along the frontage where streetcars ran, because the streetcar is probably the closest thing we've ever had to a linear form of transportation.

So the streetcar created linear shopping districts in cities. When the land-use attorneys were making maps they had this artifact in front of them, of a main street with the shopping zoned along it continuously on both sides, and they applied this in the suburban areas at a much larger scale where the access was not a streetcar but an automobile. Now, I'm sure that everybody's experience has been that this is a pretty crazy way to plan. Because you have two conflicting objectives: You have these people who are trying to go from point A to point B, and you have people trying to enter or leave one of these businesses. You know, turn lanes in the center are aptly named suicide lanes. This layout actually doesn't make any sense, but it's so common it's become a fact of nature.

These are some diagrams that have been prepared over a photograph of a commercial strip on Long Island in New York City. Looking at a zoning map, this is a projection of the future. It's the same, only more so. That is, the strip just keeps getting bigger and it keeps on going. Then we asked ourselves, just for the purpose of illustration, what would happen if you changed some of the rules.

First of all, where there was no commercial strip, it's been de-mapped. Where there is a commercial strip, but it's weak, the zoning in this diagram has been changed to multi-family, which is often a very hard use to locate in suburban areas. You also turn the access around to the surrounding neighborhoods. Then along this portion of the strip, the development has been intensified and made more like a town. What's been introduced are things like parking garages and other development incentives that we have become used to when re-developing downtowns in cities but, up until now, have not been done in the suburbs.

In California, there is legislation that promotes this, called Specific Plan Legislation. I believe it's available in Oregon, and it's just been adopted in Arizona. What this Specific Plan Legislation allows you to do is make a zoning plan for an area without condemning it or making it an urban-renewal district. When you re-develop your property, it must be in accordance with very detailed zoning plans. It's adding, I guess, insult to injury, but I think it's a nice touch: In California, if you're in one of the districts, you can be asked to help pay for the plan.

In any case, it's not totally utopian to look at this positive alternative for this strip. It would take 25 or 30 years to do it, but there are some communities in the U.S. that are already starting to look at this. It is something that could be done, whether by an alliance of property owners, by changes in zoning, or by a specific plan.

Now, let's consider the interchange. Once upon a time, there was a small town along the railroad. So here is the little town on the railway, a good form of transportation, and here is the highway, or so-called "town-less highway." Which is to say it's just a method of going from one place to another. Then the people in the community are asked to re-zone the area around the interchange to permit gas stations, motels, and other businesses that are highly highway related.

Now here's the interchange, here's the hotel, but now there's a shopping center -- and this is the classic shopping center, with parking designed for the peak usage, the few weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and a very small part of it is used most of the rest of the year. Here are the out-parcels or pads along the perimeter of the lot. Here is an office building, there are factories. Here you find what are really the ingredients of a small city, but, if you stay at the hotel, in the morning you must come out and get in your car. There is no sidewalk, no front door. You have to drive over to this office building, you park, you go in the door from the parking lot. At lunch time, everybody comes out, you get in a car, you drive over here, you find a restaurant or you go into the mall. It's not an ideal set of urban relationships. If anyone had known what was in store when the area was re-zoned -- and perhaps more important, if the public sector, in making the zoning, had been willing to say, "OK, folks, we're going to designate development around the interchange, but only in one quadrant" -- you could get a quite different result.

Again, in making up our own story, we've had the opportunity to cook the books a little bit. Here's a little town, here's the railroad, here are some garages that have been built to help the commuters, but also to provide overflow parking for this business center, which includes a mall in this location, landscaped parking lots, and the office building along the perimeter. What we're trying to say in this diagram is that you're actually sharing the parking spaces. For example, when the hotel parking lot is filling up, the office parking lots are emptying, and so on.

This is another detailed plan for the same kind of situation, by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, which is part of a development they were proposing in Florida. What they are suggesting is that you can have a three-anchor mall. Here are the three stores, here is an office building, and here is the parking for normal times in the shopping area (three cars per 1,000 square feet of gross leasable area of retail and the other two cars would be parked on the street). Again, it's an untried concept, but it's plausible. What you've done in this case is you've taken the shopping center and accepted it as an artifact but you've put it back into the community. This is starting to happen in a few places and I think it's an important issue.

This is Overland Park in suburban Kansas City, an example of typical new high-quality development along a highway. Here is the interstate, here's the interchange, here is this development. This is from the annual report of the principal developer. They are obviously very proud of this. To me, what I see when I look at this are two very serious problems. One could be called "parcel-itis." Quail Valley is one parcel, here's another residential parcel, here's Corporate Woods, an office park, and then all of these building are what have been called "single-family office buildings." Each one has its own little yard surrounded by its own little parking. It's all the ingredients of a city, and when you go down at ground level, and look at it, it's not so terrible.

It's hard to stand up at the podium and say to people, "Listen, this is bad." It's not bad, it's perfectly acceptable. However -- see these footprints on the sidewalk here? Those are the footprints of a student of mine who went to take the photograph. In fact, it's impressive that there is a sidewalk at all, because obviously all the determined exercise enthusiasts use the treadmill, the stair machine, or they jog. They don't actually walk from one place to another. So if you're going to this restaurant, you'd clearly have to drive, as is true of nearly all the buildings in Overland Park. It's not the buildings, although architectural critics among us might say that there could be some improvements, but the actual development is perfectly OK. It's the disposition of the development and the landscaping that is not working very well. It's not the automobile as access, although obviously we are learning that in suburban districts, if you depend completely on the automobile you get a lot of congestion. It's what happens when you park the car that is actually the design problem.

This is a diagram, some of which has now been built, of the Reston (Va.) Town Center. This portion of it has been built, there is a hotel, three office buildings and, on the main street, there are shops right on the street. There are arcades in the buildings with some shops there. Right now, it's really an office park that is themed to be a city. The hope is, to the extent that there will be residential, more offices and shopping, that the owner will be able to create a real city.

Unfortunately, this is one of about 72 office centers along this pathway between Dulles Airport and the city center in Arlington and on into Washington, D.C. If Fairfax County had zoned this as a real town center for west Fairfax County, much more development would have come into it, and I think it would have been much more effective as a piece of planning. What's nice about the Reston Town Center, designed by RTKL, is to see that the market has actually built something that looks like a city in a suburban area. There are a couple more examples of this.

One of my favorites is in downtown Boca Raton in Florida. The site was an older shopping center that, like many shopping centers right now, failed. It was a two-department-store mall, and it just didn't go with competition from the more sophisticated, larger shopping centers. So the City of Boca Raton actually purchased it, and it was re-developed as a project called Mizner Park, which breaks every rule in the shopping center book. It's a street, in fact a very broad boulevard on the Parisian or Barcelona pattern. Along the arcades are stores. One of the infallible rules of shopping center development that people are always telling architects is that you must be able to see the store from one side of the mall to the other. That rule is totally broken here. Instead of just being a shopping center, there are apartments, and on the other side of the street are offices. It's a capsule of what could happen in a community. It's a full residential-commercial-office district, and it's been very successful financially.

People say, "Well, that's in Florida where the climate is good. In Tulsa, that wouldn't work." The architect of this, Richard Heapes of Cooper Carey and Associates, has now, because of the success of this project, been asked to do a whole bunch of them around the country. One of them is in Northbrook, Ill. You should keep your eye on this project. If this concept of building a street instead of a mall succeeds in Northbrook, I think it will work just about anywhere.

The advantage of it is you can drive into the center, you can possibly park on the street, and even if you can't park on the street you can drive by your destination and see where it is, so when you park you have a good visual idea of where it is. Most shopping malls are designed to keep you permanently confused so you'll do more shopping than you intended. It's not a failure of design, it's an intention. A lot of people are getting tired of this. They say, "I want to go buy a thing from a store and I don't want to put up with all of this."

There is, very quietly, a re-birth of storefront retailing in the U.S. A lot of the people in the development business are still denying it, but if you go around you can see what I call mall stores opening up on streets. You go to Halstead Street in Chicago, the Marina district in San Francisco, Third Avenue on the upper east side in New York City, and you see street frontages full of the kind of stores that used to only go into malls. I tried to get information about this from people in the retail business, and it's very hard to get them to admit it. The only people who would talk to me were the Sharper Image. They said what they want are guys in suits. So anywhere there are a lot of guys in suits is where they're going to put their stores. Ann Taylor, Banana Republic, and a lot of other retailers going into these street-front locations wouldn't tell me what the basis of their choices were. Keep an eye on them; it's an interesting development.

I thought I should show you something from Charleston, as Mayor Riley is here. I have had the honor of being the urban-design advisor to the City of Charleston for many years now. Only Mayor Riley doesn't need a lot of urban-design advice; it's highly periodic. However, I was one of the planners, along with Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jacque Robertson of Cooper Robertson, and Warren Byrd, who is a landscape architect, in doing a master plan for Daniel Island, which is a big area, 4,500 acres, that has been annexed to the City of Charleston. What I want to show you first was this interchange. This is an existing highway, the Mark Clark Expressway. What the traffic engineers had suggested was an additional overpass for a local street going across the expressway so that you have one bridge crossed by another bridge. Then you have, of course, a complete dead area immediately around it. What we were able to come up with instead is to come off the highway and go under it, then you get on the local street system of the actual town that is being created as the center of Daniel Island. This is quite hard to sell to the authorities. I hope, Mayor Riley, that it's still on track. They didn't like it at the state office of transportation. However, on the other hand, embarrassingly enough, it's much cheaper. So I think they're going to go along with it.

What's very important in Daniel Island is the point Bob Jones made earlier, to try to have the development for people in harmony with nature. In South Carolina, which has a coastal zone management regime, there's a certain amount of government authority that says you must stay in harmony with nature. The owner of the property, which is a foundation, is very interested in doing an exemplary project. It also wants to make money. The island is a beautiful site with trees and landscape, and the floor has a public open-space network designed to fit in with the existing natural landscape to a large degree. It's a function of how you lay it out in order to preserve open space.

Here's the land-use plan as it fits into the natural environment with the different neighborhoods around a town center. This has something to do with the Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany formulations of the traditional town, but it is also very influenced by the traditional suburb. We had a lot of discussion about this. In these first areas, which are now under design, people are going to get smaller lots, houses closer together, garages turned away from the street or in some cases facing an alley. These are the things that traditional neighborhood development advocates, but they also will be part of a larger plan where these neighborhoods are satellites to this larger town center that is around the interchange.

I want to take you through a quick look at this town center. There are certain uses like your big box retailer that just don't fit on your traditional street. So this little downtown is going to have two parts to it. It's going to have lots that are suitable for the big grocery store, the big drug store, and other users that are inevitable and desirable in these communities. It will also have street-front retailing in area walking distance.

Military bases have vanished from public consciousness. They were cut out of cities 50 or 60 years ago, and they are out of the real-estate market. People have gotten along without them so they almost don't realize they exist any longer. One that I've worked on, with Kohn Peterson Fox out of New York City, is the Philadelphia Naval Ship Yard. It's an important employer, or has been, but people had forgotten it existed.

This is the situation: Here's the airstrip, here's sort of the urban core, a lot of brick buildings that were very town-like in character, here's the shipyard, which the Navy is keeping for the time being. It's an interesting problem in terms of what uses you can put here. Sure, you can put in an industrial park, but are your tenants going to be the same industries that are elsewhere in the city? Are you just getting people to move from north Philadelphia to south Philadelphia at great expenses to the community with no long-term benefit? You don't want to set up an office core that's competitive to downtown. Coopers and Lybrand was the real-estate consultant for this project and, in my opinion, really didn't come up with an immediate use. When you are a designer, you need someone to tell you that there's going to be a hotel, three office buildings, garden apartments and so on. When you don't have that kind of information, it's very difficult to make a plan. So what we had to learn at this naval base, and what I think is a lesson, is that you can't make a land-use based plan, because a market is going to determine the land uses, and there won't be a market unless you create something for the market to work within.

What becomes important is the framework, the design framework that you create and you can't do it on a lot by lot basis. It's going to be like Daniel Island, you're going to have to come in there with a street and park system that is built before development comes in. The real estate market is quite used to doing this with master-planned communities in the suburbs. It's not a stretch for bankers to bank roll a big several thousand acre master-planned community which might have a build out of 20 years. When you say that we want to do that on 200, 500, or 1000 acres of the old city, bankers say you are out of your mind.

What we've diagrammed is that you need to set up a system of roads and public space that organizes this, so that there's a new main street. It provides a definition and access to this old area where you clean up the street pattern and re-organize some of the old buildings. Then there are a number of different things that might occur depending on who, in the long run, expresses interest to the Philadelphia Development Authority. So here's your basic urban design concept, it's an access system and a park system. Then here's some of the things that could happen. Maybe it a free trade zone, or maybe it's an industrial park that has large sites and the city goes out and markets them to people that are new the region. Maybe it's a theme park and entertainment area, right across are the stadiums for the city's baseball and football franchises so it's not a crazy idea it's got excellent access. So what you're looking at is a structure in which you come back, you create streets, you create parks, you have land in one ownership. It seems to me that this is a pattern for older parts of the city and it's going to take a shift in you political approach.

what is needed is a vision

Dating back to the Model Cities Program, people have always talked about neighborhood determination and I think that is very important. In the last 30 years, there's been a tremendous emptying out of some of the older urban neighborhood in all cities. Neighborhood determination is, by itself, no longer the major criterion because you have so much vacant land.

What's needed is a vision of what a whole district in the older part of a city could be. It seems to me that these are actually tremendous development opportunities. These older parts of the city have tremendous advantages in terms of locations and tremendous advantages in infrastructure. You've got all the roads, sewers, and utilities, which when you build and develop in a "green field" situation like the Daniel Island, they have to be extended and created. So many cities are not getting mileage out of the huge investment they have to make. Some of the people that understand this are the utility companies who are big boosters of holding development in the city.

what has been deterioration in cities is also a major development opportunity

People have to focus on the fact that what has been deterioration in cities is also a major development opportunity and it's the other side of the coin of limiting growth at the fringe. If you make a plan for your region and you way there ought to be a limit to how far leap-frog development keeps on going out, that the center of gravity in the community shouldn't continue to shift farther and farther from the original center, you make that determination. You can do this, it seems to me, as a matter of design, and enforce it, with growth boundaries, and with the decisions not to extend infrastructure, you don't subsidize it with new roads and new highways, then you have to provide another location for development.

The other location for development, it seems to me, is the older parts of cities. There's a social objective here too. It seems that all neighborhoods ought to have housing for all types of citizens. Different family size, different incomes could be accommodated everywhere and the only thing that's going to deal with poverty concentration in cities is to persuade people who are not poor to come back and live there too. Then these areas will have the infrastructure of people, the organizations, the churches, the public interest groups that you find in any normal neighborhood and which can't exist in a neighborhood where everybody has serious personal problems.

I don't have a cure for poverty but I think that what people already know is that if you can dilute poverty by having people who are less fortunate living next to people who are more fortunate, you get a better society than if you concentrate all the people who have no asset and no hope all in one place. Otherwise, you start writing off, as many communities appear to be doing, some of the older parts of the city, saying, "I just don't go there, I don't want to know about it." Unfortunately, what now happening now politically in the U.S., is your getting a majority of people in Congress elected from the suburban areas that don't have any connection to the older cities.

I think that design, although it's not a social policy, is a way of showing people what can be done with older areas. It can be an instrument of social policy.

create this restored natural environment, which then becomes an address for new investment Here's another set of diagrams, again from the Regional Planning Association, this is a piece of the Pacaic River in Newark. It has the same relationship to Manhattan as the Naval Shipyard is Philadelphia, although it's in a different state.

Here is vision. It shows you can take an old river ruined environment and restore it. This land is almost unused now, there's an area on the Mystic River in Boston where this has actually been done, the technology is known, it cost about $60,000 an acre to do it in Boston which seems to me to me a pretty good investment, to create this kind of restored natural environment, which then becomes an address for new investment. You're not going to get people to come into a place like this unless you do something to make it as good as areas at the urban fringe that are attracting them now. Although this is a visionary drawing, it seems to have a lot of practical potential.

urban infrastructure

I'm going to talk to you a little bit about urban infrastructure. This is an old project. A lot of cities, even good cities that are well managed like Seattle made bad mistakes with highways in the early days of highway construction. What happened in Seattle is that they built a very large expressway between the near-end residential neighborhoods and the downtown. They also invested a good long time ago, 25-30 years, on a corrective, which was a park which covered the freeway, called, of course, Freeway Park. What happened is the freeway is decked over with the park. It's very expensive way of doing this. The break in the city, created by the freeway, is bridged over, which is a lot better than a freeway.

Then there's the Robert Moses East River Drive. This technology isn't new. The people who lived at Sutton Place were so influential, they were able to get the East River Drive built, they had to accommodate it by having the park in their front and back yards over the highway. So we've always known how to do it, it's a question of money.

I heard John Norquist, who is the Mayor of Milwaukee, make a very interesting statement, that a lot of the infrastructure in the United States, is getting on the 35-40 years old and most of it was built not to last much longer than that. So many of the cities are going to be dealing with the question of re-building the highways that were built in the 1950's. What I think the engineering and construction establishment will push is the enlargement when these things are re-built. They'll say, instead of 8 lanes, let have 17 lanes.

wait a minute folks, some of these elevated highways were not such a good idea

Another option is to say, wait a minute folks, some of these elevated highways were not such a good idea. As we are paying for the re-construction, maybe we can re-construct then in some other fashion. That will mean that a lot of cities that were separated rather forcibly from their near-in suburbs, which contributed to the deterioration of those suburbs, will have an re-development opportunity.

You have an opportunity to re-consider some of these decisions in the next generation

It's not clear that your inner ring road around downtown has to be a high speed highway. It might be that it could be a boulevard at grade with come traffic signals. Because it s a distributor and you get back, on a high speed highway and you go where you're going. The whole idea of having people by-pass downtown via high speed highways turns out to be predictive. You build a by-pass and people by-pass. You are going to have an opportunity to re-consider some of these decisions in the next generation.

the re-generation of downtown "the art of relationships"

In closing I want to say a little bit about the re-generation of downtown. This is an area of urban design, or as Bob puts it so well "the art of relationships" that has been carried out most effectively in the United States. We now have virtually two generations of experience with downtown re-development. Cities have become very sophisticated. You've done a lot yourselves in this community to try to ensure the continuation of a successful downtown. I think one of the very important messages that came out of Bob's presentation is how many of the good things that you have in your community were produced by plans, by designs, by government action, by concerted action, by business people.

design guidelines for all the new development in downtown

I've been a consultant for the city of Cleveland for a number of years and one of the things we've managed to do is create a set of design guidelines for all the new development in downtown. That's not been hard to do because no one develops in downtown Cleveland without the cooperation of the city government because they want the incentives that the city government has to provide. Land assemblage, tax subsidies for hotels, and various other government incentives are the hidden ingredient here.

All of downtown Cleveland is now covered by maps like this which shows what is expected of development that occurs on individual properties. For example, it says recognize the axis of Euclid Avenue, hold the street line of this building. Recognize the cornice line of this historic building in construction of a new building next to it. Cesar Pelli, who was the architect for this new building, created a new building that was quite different in size and scale but very cleverly designed so you don't feel that they are desperate or totally unrelated on the ground.

Cleveland has also been able to look at tower location, which is an important part of city design. These three towers exist, this is the new Pelli tower, this was a building that was built earlier, this was a tower which has been very carefully planned but the bank that was in this building ate the bank that was in this building, so that they suddenly didn't need this one any longer. One of Cleveland's leading developers now has a big piece of open land acquired through urban renewal which they are making payment, so we hope they do something.

What you see in this model photo is that, because this city's assistance was required in putting this development together, making the land assemblage, having the tax subsidy for the hotel, the tower placement and various other urban design issues could be regulated in return.

This is downtown Pittsburgh, another city that I've spent a lot of years working on downtown development. One thing you notice immediately in this city is that the whole skyline has actually been designed. That is, the zoning code requires a lower height, development is not allowed to go above a certain height, at the edge of the core. Only in the core can they go up to these tall buildings. The developers of these buildings were extremely upset, that the city was unwilling to change the zoning code from the edge condition to the center condition and they kind of outsmarted the city in some respect by putting this giant clamp on the top of the building which enhances the apparent height by a considerable amount. It's still stays within the reasonable expectation of what a city should look like.

So the whole city skyline has been shaped by this concept that it should be higher in the middle and lower around the perimeter. Within that skyline there are a bunch of individual buildings, this is Phillips Johnson's PPG headquarters which is a building entirely of mirrored glass, this was done just after Johnson had done the AT&T building in NYC and had announced in the press that the glass building was dead. Then the people from PPG Industries walked in the door and he found a way to resurrect the glass building very quickly. This is the U.S. Steel building which of course is built of steel. This is another building developed by U.S. Steel which is also built of steel, painted steel, like a bridge.

design guidelines are written for the city or for the district, not for the individual property

This is one quadrant of Pittsburgh which the city's re-development authority has acquired. This is their new convention center in the equivalent of the Doubletree hotel. The convention center hotel wasn't built and they had sort of expected that the private market would build it but the private market looked the other way. So the city, who should have done this before, built the convention center, and bought this site. They issued a request for proposals for development and they issued it with guidelines which I helped to draft. The winning developer took the guidelines and put them on a map and said "hey, wait a minute guys, you're asking us to set back here and then you have a line along here which you're also asking us to set back and this is unreasonable. You're pushing us north, you're pushing us south, what are you trying to do to us?" The city said, well, you knew about these guidelines when you decided you wanted to buy the property and we have a lot of faith in you ability, and the ability of your architect, we're sure you can solve this.

Amazingly enough, they could solve this. When the development was announced, this office tower was held behind this magic line. I think the developer asked a good question, why in the world did we make the building set back like this. On this side, there's the setback is the entrance to the convention center and on the other side, you can see in this model photo, this is Grant Street which is the city's principal street and what we are looking at is this Greyhound bus terminal and here, which is right at the end of Grant Street on its axis, and it's about a 24,000 square foot site, big enough for an office building. We're saying, maybe its a little optimistic in the current real estate market but back in the 80's it seemed plausible, that there would one day be an office building here. This would have a much preferred site at the end of G. Street, but it needed some breathing space and therefore this set back, this open space in front of this office tower. The setbacks were not for the development of the site, it was for the development next door.

understanding design guidelines

It seems to me that's a very important part of understanding design guidelines. Design guidelines are written for the city or for the district, not necessarily for the individual property. Someone has to represent the interest of the larger area in the design discussion. That's one of the things urban designers do is they make these guidelines for the placement of buildings.

I will conclude with a few slides of Norfolk Virginia which is another place that has done a tremendous amount of work over a very long period of time to re-invent itself. One of the things they did very early on was that they tore down a whole bunch of old building in what had been the core of their city and that was 25-30 years ago.

They have gone through, I don't know how many , different plans for re-development of that area and no one has ever built anything. What they did, through design, they have shifted their center of the city from the core, to the perimeter where you'd have the advantage of being on the waterfront. This is one of those festive marketplaces, one of the first building developed by the Enterprise Corporation, a spin-off of the Rouse Corporation. You can see a pattern, which is not unfamiliar, there are a lot of parking lots dispersed among a few larger buildings along this main street--everything else is pretty scattered.

This building has been constructed, it's a conference center and hotel, which, of course, the city subsidized to build. On this center track, in the middle of the city, after a lot of consideration, we showed an office building complex. We had a panel advisory service from the Urban Land Institute (ULI), they said there is no way there could ever be a shopping center there. The Mayor, at that time Mason Andrews, who for a long time had been a member of Council, had been advocating major retail investment in downtown for many years and to shut him up the re-development authority, brought in these experts on land-use from all over the United States and they said, very politely, forget it. However, Mayor Andrews didn't give up, he adjusted at the recommendations of the ULI, but he kept pushing the re-development authority. Curiously enough, there's now going to be a shopping center on that site. This is another aerial photo that shows the festival market place, which wasn't doing as well as everyone hoped in the new Townpoint Park. What's been suggested for the Pier is a new Maritime Museum, it's also been built now and is helping to bring more people into the community, and they are working on downtown housing, they've built some of it. That still leaves Norfolk with a much stronger edge but with this big hole in the middle.

take another look at downtowns, not at by-passed areas, but as central locations

Here is a plan, it's not the latest plan for the new Mall which will be dropped into this urban situation. It's very dependent on these enormous garages because we don't want the perimeter parking lot that characterizes the suburban mall. We've written design guidelines that say that these buildings shall hold the street lines. This is Monticello Street, an old retail street, that sits back here on the edge of a historic district. The mall has a somewhat squashed appearance, it comes in among all these existing buildings. Contrary to what the Urban Land Institute said, I think its going to be possible to build something like this. Of course the hidden ingredient, as you might imagine, is that the city is a major partner in this development. They are helping to front end the cost of the parking garages. I am assured by everybody that the city will end up making money by this. What makes it possible for the Urban Land Institute to be wrong, and Mayor Andrews, who is by profession a gynecologist to be far more expert on urban development than the ULI, is that he saw something that the ULI didn't really see--that downtown is now the center of this enormous expressway network. The leading malls are on the far east side. What is true now, is that the Taubman Organization, who is going to build this shopping center, is looking at this development, not as a downtown mall but as a highway location. It's right off this major highway.

So one of the things that I think its time to do, and I think real estate investors are starting to do, is take another look at downtowns, not at by-passed areas, but as central locations. Because what ever the defects of the highway networks have been, almost all of them center on the traditional metro city. Now that all of these areas are being developed, the city center suddenly is the place again, which has the most access for the most people in the most areas of the region. The future of downtown, and the old inner-city neighborhoods, can be very bright because they have tremendous access which none of these fringe locations individually has. So in the next generation, it would be very possible to see a major re-generation of all cities and there would be a vision of people living in harmony with nature, in both the suburban fringe and the restoration of the natural environment in the older cities. The neighborhood would again become diverse in the old cities and, I hope, also in the fringe areas in the suburbs. While this wouldn't solve all problems, it would be a much better city than the city we have today.