Next and the City
Thursday, 10 Feb 2005
NEW YORK CITY, N.Y.
One fact is being repeated by speaker after speaker at Verdopolis: This year, for the first time in human history, more of the world's people are living in cities than in rural areas. At Thursday morning's panel on "The Green City," the speakers are taking on the challenges of this "new urbanism."
Stephen Kellert, a professor of social ecology at Yale University, leads off by setting up the "crisis of the urban built environment." We've degraded and depleted our natural systems; we're alienated from nature, and it's making us tired and sick. We now create environments for captive animals full of natural features and diverse stimuli, even as we build urban environments for ourselves that are more like the barren cages of 19th century zoos. People feel better in broad landscapes -- with horizontal views of the area around us -- because we evolved in that kind of environment. But our cities are made up of massively vertical buildings, our views cut off inside and out.
It's fundamentally un-ecological, in Kellert's view, and we won't have sustainable cities until we change it. Not quite the unabashed optimism of yesterday's future-energy panel, but he's got a point.
The first thing I wrote about in yesterday's dispatch was the view of Central Park from the seventh floor of the Steelcase Building, where Verdopolis is in session. It was remarkable because it was an open expanse that I wasn't used to seeing, from that height, on a regular basis. Looking out at that urban forest, I was seeing more than the trees -- I was seeing status.
If you're a New Yorker who regularly gazes down from above at Central Park, rather than eyeballing a flat expanse of wall across the street, or a window into your neighbor's kitchen, you -- or your employer -- are probably pretty darn rich. Most people in most cities around the world are not rich. They don't have views like this, or even trees like this. The impact seems less tangible than green-city factors like energy usage or air pollution, but it's bad for human health, productivity, and happiness. With most of the world's people living in cities, that's bad for the future.
Kellert's ideas for solutions go beyond environmental mitigation, into creating buildings that embody and enhance nature, inside and out: green roofs and even whole floors opened up to create restorative horizontal views, designs that embrace natural forms (he mentions early Gothic architecture later on in the Q&A), and restoring context -- of place, of watershed, of cultural roots -- into urban design.
The next speaker, Peter Fleischer, is in charge of developing a future green city right now, right between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Governor's Island is a 172-acre daub of land in New York Harbor, about 800 yards off the southern tip of Manhattan and maybe half that from the Brooklyn waterfront. A military outpost for over a century, the federal government sold it back to New York City a few years ago for one dollar. Fleischer calls it "the green looking back at the city," and as senior vice president of the Governor's Island Preservation and Education Committee, he's in charge of coming up with a master plan to turn about 150 acres of the island into public open space, an environmental education facility, conference center, arts and culture venue, historic site, and tourist magnet -- all featuring green infrastructure as well as green development.
Fleischer regales us with the island's potential, showing not only the amazing skyline view from the island (that broad horizontal expanse again) but also the less palatable parking lots and 1950s electrical rooms that the military left behind. It's a complex restoration project that Fleischer is convinced can be done well, and clearly he loves both the challenge and the place. When asked later to name his emblematic green city -- Venice, Portland, and Stockholm all come up in the conversation -- he instead tells a story from his own Verdopolis-in-progress: "When we opened Governor's Island to the public last summer, after years and years in the military, I saw a family sitting in a green area next to a fort for a picnic," he says, leaning their backs against the fort's wall. Thanks to being a military base for the past century or so, Governor's Island is public land today, not real estate for the wealthy, and in the vanguard of green urban design. It's Fleischer's idea of a peace dividend.
The final panelist, transportation designer Cesar Vergara, engages the audience with his world-weary but entertaining style. "I'm just a lowly industrial designer," he says. "I've spent the last 20 years of my life trying to make buses and trains look nice."
"Good transportation design fosters a good attitude in people," Vergara says, and then -- as I'm finding is typical at Verdopolis -- presents an idea that once I've heard it, is so smart it's startling. To sell multibillion-dollar mass-transportation projects, start with the last thing: Design the vehicle.
Mass-transit projects are big losers with politicians, Vergara explains; there's no incentive to support the spending when they know they'll probably be long gone by the time the benefits are a reality. So voters have to put heat on the politicians. But these projects are big losers with the voters, too, because they cost so much.
Vergara believes you don't try to sell the project by putting a map on the wall with a little squiggly line going across and a big dollar number at the bottom. Design appealing vehicles that have geographical and cultural relevance to the people and the city.
"We want things that look good. Transportation design has been grossly neglected" compared to architecture, he says.
Here in New York City, I've seen something like this happen. About four years ago, when new subway cars were gradually introduced onto New York's L line, the Metropolitan Transit Authority made it an event. The press eagerly followed the progress of the shakedown runs. My friends and I all hoped we'd get to ride one -- we reported sightings to each other. I went out of my way to ride the L, hoping to catch a new train.
This was a lot more than the abject gratitude New Yorkers typically feel when something improves in the subway system, instead of falling apart.
It was because these cars are wonderfully designed. They have bright, easy-to-read signage, benches with lumbar support, bright lighting, dark flecked tile that hides grime on the car floor, and electronic maps and LED screens showing the stop. The car fronts have these cheery, vaguely anthropomorphic smiling faces intentionally designed to elicit warm feelings in weary commuters. They are great looking, and riding them, you feel like they reflect something great about the city.
Cesar Vergara is not giving any ground on the inevitability of the personal car in his vision of the green city.
"The car of the future is a railroad car," Vergara says, "and there's a bike waiting for you at the other end of the ride."
‘Heretic’ battles straw man
Gore on the Daily Show: extended dance remix
Blowing up our clean energy future
Comments
View as Flat