Shared Spaces

Village centers in Europe are experimenting with "Shared Spaces" -- simplifying roads by removing traffic signals and expanding pedestrian sidewalks.

Shared Spaces

Tappan Zee Bridge's Awkward Location Explained

"The Tappan Zee crosses one of the widest points on the Hudson — the bridge is more than three miles long. And if you go just a few miles south, the river gets much narrower...Why did they build the Tappan Zee where they did, rather than building it a few miles south?

"It turns out, the bridge was part of a much larger project: The New York State Thruway, one of the first modern highway systems.  There was an alternate proposal for a bridge at a narrower spot nearby. The proposal was put forward by top engineers at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.  But that proposal was killed by New York governor Thomas E. Dewey...

"The Port Authority — the body that proposed putting the bridge further south — had a monopoly over all bridges built in a 25-mile radius around the Statue of Liberty.  If the bridge had been built just a bit south of its current location — that is, if it had been built across a narrower stretch of the river — it would have been in the territory that belonged to the Port Authority.  As a result, the Port Authority — not the State of New York — would have gotten the revenue from tolls on the bridge. And Dewey needed that toll revenue to fund the rest of the Thruway." -- David Kestenbaum, A Big Bridge in the Wrong Place, NPR

Tappan Zee Bridge's Awkward Location Explained

Trending Towards Suburban "Main Street Living" and "Transit-Oriented Development"

"Millennials have traditionally been painted as a generation obsessed with urban living, but just like their parents and grandparents, they wants homes and good schools for their kids. While this demographic has put off having kids longer than previous generations, studies suggest a larger number will soon become parents, and quickly fuel a suburban boom, especially in areas surrounding markets such as Hartford, Milwaukee and Pittsburgh, which have seen post-recession job growth in the core. One ULI survey shows that six out of ten Gen-Y respondents expect to live in a detached single-family home five years from now. Of course, this doesn't mean they'll be living in the suburbs of yesterday. Suburbs (and developers) that replicate more Main Street living, including transit-oriented development and offer transportation options connected to big urban centers will see continued growth." -- "The Top 10 Emerging Trends Shaping Real Estate in 2016," Patrick Sisson, Curbed

Trending Towards Suburban "Main Street Living" and "Transit-Oriented Development"

Return on Energy Investment

"[The World Bank is] investing in transformational energy projects across the region – and the world – because reliable and affordable power supplies aid business development greatly; every $1 invested in the power supply generates more than $15 in incremental GDP." 

– Jim Kim, President of The World Bank

Return on Energy Investment

Vancouver House

Post by Bjarke Ingels (BIG).

Bjarke Ingles is one of the most innovative starchitects in urban design right now.  This blog previous wrote about him in this 2012 post.

Vancouver House

Cities of Tomorrow

The New Cities Foundation put together a short video about urban expansion that describes the need for re-imagined cities with 21st century infrastructure.  It is well worth watching.  Notice the many clips of Songdo and interviews with people connected to the massive project.

Cities of Tomorrow

How Export Industrialization Spurs Growth

"Export success trickles down to the rest of developing economies. Since producers of non-traded goods and services, such as housebuilders and lawyers, must compete with exporters for labour, they need to pay attractive wages. At the same time the chance of well-paid work in manufacturing creates an incentive for workers to move to cities and invest in education. An industrialising export sector is like a speedboat that pulls the rest of the economy out of poverty." -- Emerging Economies: Arrested Development

How Export Industrialization Spurs Growth

Predicting Global Economic Trends

Skybox Imaging

While Big Data firms often struggle to find applications for their hordes of information, Skybox moves from a data collection firm to a business packaging highly useful information.  Using aerial imagery and video from a fleet of micro-satellites, Skybox applies computer algorithms to analyze, track, and predict global economic trends.  The Wall Street Journal explains:

"In 2010, an analyst at UBS discovered that if he bought satellite images of parking lots of Wal-Mart stores, he could predict the company's sales figures before they were revealed in its quarterly earnings report, because cars in lots equal shoppers in stores.

"We're looking at Foxconn every week," Mr. Berkenstock [co-founder of Skybox] says, because measuring the density of trucks outside the Taiwanese company's manufacturing facilities tells Skybox when the next iPhone will be released.

"Skybox can determine how much oil is being pumped out of the ground in Saudi Arabia by imaging oil-storage tanks from above. The company can peg the likely price of grain months in advance by measuring the health of every square yard of cropland on Earth." -- Amid Stratospheric Valuations, Google Unearths a Deal With Skybox, Wall Street Journal, 6/15/2014

Google reported purchased Skybox for $500 million.  This acquisition emphasizes the search giant's continued goal of revolutionizing the world's access to new sources of information.

Predicting Global Economic Trends

End of the BRICs

"When the [BRIC] acronym came into common use, a decade ago, the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—contributed roughly 20 percent of global economic growth. Although China was already the heavyweight, it did not yet dominate: in 2004, the country contributed 13 percent of global growth in gross domestic product, while Brazil, Russia, and India combined contributed 9 percent, with similar growth rates. Compare that with the experience of the past two years. China accounted for 26 percent of global economic growth in 2012 and for 29 percent in 2013. The collective share of Brazil, Russia, and India has shrunk to just 7 percent."

– Gordon Orr, What could happen in China in 2014?

End of the BRICs

The Waterfront at Camden City

The Waterfront at Camden City
with views overlooking the Delaware River and Philadelphia
(Click to Enlarge)

The goal of The Waterfront project is to connect an underutilized waterfront along the Delaware River with Downtown Camden.  The two are currently separated by 48 acres of surface parking, disconnecting some of the most valuable land from the rest of the city.  The Waterfront will create a safe, walkable residential community, a thriving commercial plaza and a job-creating office cluster.

The Waterfront Presentation Board
(Click to Enlarge)

Design Team (left to right): Sharon Williams, Greg Contente, Sean Esrafily

Wood Model of Proposed Camden Developments
Waterfront District seen along the bottom of the photo.

Keep reading »

The Waterfront at Camden City

The Port of Paulsboro

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In a push to adapt and reposition itself in a global 21^st century economy, the South Jersey Port Corporation and the Gloucester County Improvement Authority are re-outfitting a closed industrial site to create a multimodal port in Southern New Jersey.  This report analyzes existing conditions at the port site and explores how infrastructure improvements contribute to the port’s productive advantage.

Because of contamination at an old oil storage and distribution facility, BP cheaply leased their property to the Borough of Paulsboro as the site to develop a marine port facility.  Benefiting from a strategic location along the Delaware River, the port inherits centuries of accumulated infrastructure surrounding it.  An existing marine channel backbones the site, while Shortline and Class 1 railroads and an interstate highway connect the marine terminal to the American hinterland.

Investments in infrastructure that support freight movement will facilitate port operations and further promote commerce in the region.  Major stimulus begins with remediation of industrial land and the construction of the new marine terminal, but additional improvements enhance the Port of Paulsboro’s connectivity.   Track expansions in Paulsboro and in the region add to the rail network’s reach.  A new Freight as a Good Neighbor access road allows trucks to avoid residential neighborhoods when connecting from the port to the interstate highway.  And the Missing Moves Project seeks to alleviate bottleneck congestion along the regional truck corridor.

With a large tract of land, Paulsboro also offers customizable co-location opportunities that allow for value-added distribution or manufacturing on site.  This becomes especially important since the port is positioned to handle specialty cargo.  Combined with unique multimodal access, this flexibility gives the port a competitive edge in handling and processing heavy steel plates for offshore wind turbines.  Reaping the benefits of these productive advantages, the port expects to create 2,500 jobs, while the offshore wind industry will employ an additional 2,000 workers.  In total, employment multipliers predict the port to support 20,000 direct and indirect jobs.

Other redeveloped brownfield sites at Keystone Industrial Port Complex in Bucks County and the less-than-effective iPort12 distribution center in Carteret further emphasize the requisite formula for developing a new port – it all depends on improving existing freight networks.  Successful brownfield redevelopment projects leverage cheap land with extensive infrastructure networks to create hubs where port functions and value-added industrial services support one another.  Cohabitation provides a productive advantage that attracts new industrial activity and creates jobs.  Following this proven development model, the Port of Paulsboro capitalizes on its inherent advantages as it revives an old industrial hub in South Jersey.

Keep reading »

The Port of Paulsboro

The East Row, Minneapolis

(Click to Enlarge)

For the Urban Land Institute's Hines Urban Design Competition, we created The East Row development plan, which would add a live, work, play entertainment district around Minneapolis's new Metrodome.

The East Row, Minneapolis

Iranian Presidential Elections

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (left) and Hooshang Amirahmadi (right)

My graduate school advisor and professor of Urban Economics is running for President in Iran.  A revered political and international development consultant to leaders in Washington and in London, Professor Hooshang Amirahmadi always contended that a Western approach to governance could quickly turn around the fortunes of Iran and speedily increase its development.  Below is the economic platform Professor Amirahmadi presents to Iran.

Of all the issues Iranians confront in deciding their next president, the economy is the most imperative. With a high inflation rate, widespread unemployment, sluggish growth, low productivity, plummeting national currency, plunging industrial production, declining income, widening income gap, and growing poverty, hardly anyone in the country is immune from the dismal state of the economy. This is unfortunate since Iran is actually a wealthy country with vast natural resources, a highly-educated workforce, arable land, diverse climates, access to the strategic waterways, and many other favorable attributes.

The economic problems and the mismatch between Iran’s economic achievements and its rich resources are largely rooted in mismanagement and economic sanctions. These and other underlying causes are removable and thus the economic problems entirely solvable if the upcoming presidential election was to produce the right executive leadership. The next president must understand Iran’s economic predicament and its causes, comprehend the world economy, and be able to put an economic development plan for the nation and implement it using a skillful team of economists and international advisors.

As President of Iran, I will turn Iran’s economic plight around by formulating an economic plan based on three principles: economic productivity, export-led industrialization, and labor-market globalization. I will also immediately remove sanctions and mismanagement by resolving the nuclear dispute, normalizing relations with the West, resolving factional infighting and appointing a highly competent economic and international advisory team. These steps will help in opening the global economy to Iran and in establishing a stable economic policy, thus creating a climate of permanency and certainty for productive investments.

Keep reading »

Iranian Presidential Elections

Economic Growth

The Importance of Broadband Expansion on Economic Growth

In the US, "for every one percentage point increase in broadband penetration in a state, employment is projected to increase by 0.2 to 0.3 percent per year...A 7 percentage point boost in national broadband adoption could lead to $662 million in annual healthcare savings, and $6.4 billion in annual mileage savings...[In Michigan] just one percentage point increase in broadband penetration could create or save approximately 12,388 jobs statewide." -- Broadband’s Economic Impact in Michigan, InfrastructureUSA, also see Technology Infrastructure

The Importance of Economic Growth in Indian Politics

In India, if a minister oversees rapid growth within his state, "each extra percentage point of growth raises the chances of [a candidate from that minister's party] winning a seat in the national parliament by 5-6 percentage points." -- The Capitalist Manifesto: How to Get India Moving Again

Economic Growth

King Abdullah Economic City: Interview with Fahd Al-Rasheed

The follow interview is taken from McKinsey Quarterly's Rethinking Infrastructure.  It lays out a clear, honest explanation of the type of challenges and thought processes that go into successfully creating and inhabiting a city built from scratch.

The King Abdullah Economic City is a critical component of Saudi Arabia’s effort to diversify its economy, attract foreign investment, modernize its society, and provide jobs for citizens, 65 percent of whom are under the age of 30. The city is one of four such Saudi urban megaprojects, similar to China’s flourishing special economic zones. It will contain a port, expected to become operational this year, that will rank among the world’s ten largest such facilities, an industrial sector to support energy-intensive industries, a business district for local and international tenants, a tourism center, hospitals, schools, and a residential district with more than 300,000 apartments and villas.

In this video, CEO and managing director Fahd Al-Rasheed describes the vision behind this massive infrastructure project and the challenges of moving from the drawing board to implementation while keeping the goals of growth and sustainability squarely in mind. This interview was conducted by McKinsey’s Rik Kirkland in Istanbul, Turkey, in November 2012. What follows is an edited transcript of Fahd Al-Rasheed’s remarks.

King Abdullah Economic City: A new model

The government of Saudi Arabia is thinking about what does government look like in the 21st century in terms of delivery to citizens of the private sector. And they’ve implemented that. Now, the city itself is based on several components. One is a port that, in my mind, will change the logistics map globally. The trade routes will change, stoppages, et cetera. And it will have a very positive impact on transportation costs over the long term. It will be one of the largest ten ports in the world, and the first phase is going to be opened end of next year [2013]. It will have a logistics back end to it.

The second is the industrial zone, which is focused on what we can do best, which is energy-intensive industries. We are trying to attract many of those. We have a very competitive advantage. The third, really, is tourism. And we understand we can’t compete with Paris, Dubai, and New York, but we are still the 17th most visited country in the world because of the Hajj and Umrah for Muslims. So we’re trying to address how can we serve these visitors in a more elaborate way and provide them with tourism opportunities around their religious experience.

And then there’s housing. The population of the kingdom is 65 percent under 30. We need to build four million housing units over the next 20 years, so we need housing, and we’re set up for that. If we get 10 percent of that market, we’ll build up the city, end to end, by 2030. We’re targeting two million people. It’s the size, physically, of Washington, DC. The port will be one of the largest ten ports in the world.

Keep reading »

King Abdullah Economic City: Interview with Fahd Al-Rasheed

SimCity: An Urban Planner’s Perspective (Guest Post written by Brandon McKoy)

The day has finally arrived. The day I, and thousands of others, have been looking forward to for over a decade. The day when we could once again cobble together our conditions for a perfect living environment and hope they create a blossoming education and clean energy utopia instead of a society bereft with crime and poverty. Today is the day that SimCity, the venerated city simulation series that has helped spawn a generation of urban planners, releases for the PC – don’t worry Apple owners, a version for you is just around the corner in Spring.

Layer function allows players
to experience "the data of everything"
Photo Source: Polygon SimCity Review

I was lucky enough to play the three beta tests of the new SimCity and was thoroughly impressed with how easy it is to access information on my city’s performance. At the click of a button players are able to bring up data layers that graphically show how a city is running, from whether the potable water is polluted to which areas of the city don’t have proper access to education. This makes it easier to determine how to tackle your city’s problems as players know exactly what problems exist and where these occur.

Just like any real city, when changes are instituted they have effects in other areas, usually creating a different set of problems for players to deal with down the line.  During the Beta tests I started a recycling program for my city, but I needed to upgrade my roads so that my trucks could get around town and collect recyclables quickly enough to keep up with demand.  Once I was able to breakdown the recyclables and send them to my trade port, I then had to decide whether to ship them through the freight depot or send them to my commercial and clean industrial entities. Of course all of this required a sufficient traffic system that makes it easy for deliveries and pick-ups. Only later did I realize that by focusing on this worthy endeavor I had completely overlooked my power plant's continuing need for coal from the world market, causing some of my buildings to be abandoned due to lack of power. Like I said, focus and changes in one area can lead to problems in others if you're not careful - you really have to spin multiple plates at once to keep things rolling smoothly.

The game has been built from the bottom up this time around, with the Sims who reside in your city making decisions about where they will work, live, and play in real-time. This means that everything that happens in your city is the result of citizens reacting to what you have constructed, making it a simulation that is incredibly close to being able to replicate real-world conditions – in fact, some people are already using the game for modeling.

A new addition to the game is regional play which allows a player and others in his network to control their own cities in a region together. This provides the opportunity to share services between cities and help out one another. For instance, in Beta play, when my city was having a crime problem and my police force couldn't keep up, another city in the region volunteered some of their police cars to patrol my city and help out.

Nuclear power plant lighting the city
Photo Source: Brandon McKoy

Regional play allows more than just sharing of services – each region has a “Great Works Site” which allows cities to work together to create something spectacular. This feature provides the ability for cities to collaborate on a project that will benefit the entire region and requires players to coordinate their activities in pursuit of a collective goal. For example, having a good education system leads to research projects that unlock larger developments in the game, such as an international airport, more efficient wind turbines, or a space station. All of the cities in the region can then work together to provide the necessary resources to construct these projects. Collaboration happens along the lines of a residential city providing students to a educational city/university town, which provides skilled workers to build the international airport in the industrial city, which ultimately provides passenger access the tourism city, and so on and so forth. None of this would be possible without intercity collaboration.

Keep reading »

SimCity: An Urban Planner’s Perspective (Guest Post written by Brandon McKoy)

Expanding Power of Emerging Market Cities

(Click Graphic to Enlarge)
The world's economic center of gravity shifts
McKinsey Quarterly, Feb 2013

Expanding Power of Emerging Market Cities

Wise Colombian Investment

Colombia spearheads the list of second tier emerging markets (also known as CIVITS nations – Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, South Africa).  Colombia's strong and steady growth has made it very attractive for some time now.  As an emerging market, the South American nation inherently has structural problems, but its active responsiveness to certain economic hurdles is a solid indicator of the country's ability to sustain positive strides. The World Bank notes “The efficiency and productivity of Colombia's urban system will be a key determinant in the ability of the country to transition from a middle income to a higher-income economy.”  While success is always is the details, the example presented below shows how Colombia is laying the foundation for ambitious and much needed urban planning projects, mixing in the physical, the social and the institutional needs of the country.

Colombian coal mines and port locations
Note: Distances may not be large,
but transportation is hindered by obstructive
mountains and poor rail/road infrastructure 
Source: Inter-American Coal

Problem: “In Colombia, physical distances are exacerbated by economic distances. Costs for freight transport on domestic roads from Bogotá to the Atlantic are about $94 per ton, while international maritime transport to the United States is about $75 per ton. Moving products from Bogotá to Barranquilla costs $88 per ton, and Bogotá to Buenaventura $54 per ton. Shipping goods from Cartagena or Buenaventura to Rotterdam or Shanghai is about $60 per ton—that is, less than the transport costs from Bogotá to the ports for the Atlantic and slightly higher for the Pacific. Logistic costs are also high…Lowering transport costs will catalyze growth and improve overall efficiency across the system of cities in Colombia. The Colombia Urbanization Review identified two possible ways to reduce costs: improvements to intermodality and investments in specific corridors that will face high congestion as soon as 2020.” – Planning, Connecting & Financing Cities Now: Priorities for City Leaders

Project Description: The objective of the program is to
support the strengthening of the Government of
Colombia’s policy framework on productive and
sustainable cities.

Colombia Planned Highway  Investment
(beyond scope of World Bank Loan)
Source: Tunnel Talk

Response: A $150M World Bank loan "to support the strengthening of the Government of Colombia's policy framework on productive and sustainable cities."  The World Bank's “Programmatic Productive and Sustainable Cities Development Policy Loan (DPL) Program will support a comprehensive set of policy and regulatory reforms that aim to: (i) improve access to basic water and sanitation and urban transport services, and mitigate vulnerability to natural disasters for the urban poor; (ii) promote the provision of affordable and safe low-income housing solutions; (iii) strengthen the ability of sub-national entities to coordinate and finance the structuring and implementation of regional and metropolitan development initiatives; and (iv) improve the productivity of the system of cities through improved connectivity within the network of cities and between cities and ports to external markets. These reforms are vital to support the system of cities in Colombia, in which cities are able to grow to their highest potential, and be engines for sustainable growth in the country.” – Productive and Sustainable Cities Development Policy Loan

For more details, see Tunnel Talk's article on Colombia Highway RFPs, the World Bank's Program Information Document, Colombia Urbanization Review or Planning, Connecting & Financing Cities Now: Priorities for City Leaders (pg 92).

Wise Colombian Investment

Designing African Cities

Over the past few months, I have continually wrestled with many questions stemming from an expose on Norman Foster. Norman Foster, the mastermind behind the utopian technology showcase known as Masdar City, feels that his next life challenge rests in Africa, designing urban spaces for the populations that currently fill the world's slums.  A short excerpt (seen below) has repeatedly sent my mind imaging thousands of possibilities of future urban developments, however, I constantly come back to a single quandary: how to create a city in the developing world that largely consists of young, connected, unemployed masses.  This drastically differs from the Masdar model that includes self-driving cars for its wealthy residents.  Accepting demographic constraints as reality and not having false hopes for instant fixes, the true challenge of the 21st century will be to transform urban living for masses of the world population.

Masdar City (click to enlarge)
Source: NYTimes, 9/26/2010

The following are taken from J.M. Ledgard's Norman Foster's New World in Intelligent Life magazine, November/December 2012:

Africa's population will double to 2 billion before 2050. Its urban population will more than quadruple. There are unlikely to be enough jobs for young people to stave off populist unrest. Climate change is likely to jack up food prices and exacerbate water shortages...

[Norman Foster] oversaw a project with Sagoo and others to look more closely at the Dharavi slum in Mumbai. They discovered that what people there needed was horizontal space. "They needed to make and move their products across the ground floor of a dwelling. The other side of the dwelling was the railway line where the goods were displayed and sold. This community could easily subsist in a low-rise settlement, two, maybe three or even four storeys. What would never work would be to put one dwelling on another. It would offer an improved environment, but it would be impossible for them to bake bread to earn a livelihood, or to recycle waste." What is needed in African slums", Foster ventures, "is the industrialisation of units that provide the sanitation, kitchens, energy-harvesting, run-off of rainwater, and a proper infrastructure of drains and sewers. That would be transformational, but that's a very different approach to the design-profession response to wipe it clean and superimpose another order, which completely disregards the fact that, notwithstanding the horrific deprivation, there is an underlying social order and an organic response to needs."

Photo from Foster sponsored research of African cities

Foster emerged from Manchester on his own merits and is not inclined to socialism based on sentiment. Still, the cause of African future cities need not be philanthropy. There is plenty of money to be made from squatters. Most of the economic growth in the world in the coming years will be from the poorest bits of cities in the poorest countries. Companies such as Coca-Cola and Unilever expect their profits from these communities to swell. Nokia will rise or fall according to whether slum-dwellers continue to buy its low-end phones. There is money in Foster's idea of laying down grids, especially for cities yet to be built. And there is reason to be optimistic about new technologies, such as solar-panel roof sheeting, affordable windows, LED lighting, gargantuan rainwater tanks, and high-tech latrines that pay for themselves by filtering urine into water and microwaving excrement into fuel. Africa's dense gatherings of young people present a high degree of political risk, but they also create economic value.

2012 RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship Winning Proposal
(click to enlarge)

"...in an African continent [says Foster] you are creating an urban infrastructure from scratch. So instead of thinking as in the past that you have one authority talking about pylons, another rail, another roads, why not bring those together with tremendous economy and elegance?...Olmsted laid out Central Park at the time when people were herding sheep, horses and carts. Now, bringing back a pedestrian-friendly experience, taking away the dependence on gasoline, why drive when you could walk, design with an understanding that these are very scarce commodities—Africa has that opportunity."

Update (2/18/2013):  It looks like others are reaching similar conclusions...see "These May Be The Least 'Livable' Cities, But They're the Future"

Designing African Cities

Shaping the City of Tomorrow

While I haven't been active on the blog recently, I've been managing to keep busy.  I'll try to post more of my works that I've dedicated my time to these past few months.  We'll start with city building...

 

 (Click pages to enlarge)

Shaping the City of Tomorrow