 |
||
 Oct. 6, 2006 | Vol 5 No. 18 |
||
|
|
||
|
In This Issue: – Whither The Towers In The Park – Where Have All the CEOs Gone? – Sprawl Has Different Causes Than Chicago Author Suggests – Calendar Whither The Towers In The Park Something similar must be going through the minds of the executives from Metropolitan Life, who are preparing to sell for $5 billion or more the sprawling Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town complex on Manhattan’s East Side. Comprising 11,000 apartments in 110 buildings on 80 acres (which hold about 25,000 residents), the development is a small city. The project, started during World War II at a time of communal solidarity to provide moderate priced housing for returning veterans, is about to make a mythical transformation from solid workhorse to golden goose. I can think of a lot of reasons Met Life should not be allowed to do this. The biggest is that the company was given the original public streets that lay underneath the project, as well as various tax breaks, with at least some understanding that there was public purpose involved. Selling the entire project now for private profit does not fit in with that. As with projects reaching maturity in many affordable housing programs, the city finds itself facing an expiration date after which modestly priced homes are at the mercy of the market. Still, it’s hard not to marvel a bit at the probable coming transformation of the area from middle class to luxury land. The company has been sprucing up the development with a new fountain and exterior touches, and individual units are being renovated as they transition from subsidized to market rate. All in all, it’s amazing that a place that resembles the poorest post-war housing projects can attract such big bucks. These tall, cross-shaped brick towers set amid green grass, plazas and atop parking lots are classic Corbusier-style towers in the park, named after Swiss architect Le Corbusier who came up with this “radiant city” design in the 1920s. A remarkably successful “meme,” urban planners all over the world were taken with the idea. These towers were constructed in nearly every ideological environment, from Stalinist Russia, to Socialist Sweden, to lean and mean capitalist New York. But success as an idea is not the same as success in fact. Now probably no urban planning concept is more reviled. If ideas have peaks and valleys, towers in the park is in a valley. And yet, what are the proposed towers by Frank Gehry for Atlantic Yards site in Brooklyn other than “towers in the park.” The planned towers for the World Trade Center site are at least somewhat “towers in the park,” or at least, towers in plazas. Personally, I find the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper towers some of the ugliest in the city. Grim and monolithic, lacking ornamentation, they seem like an Orwellian projection of some Big Brother alternate future we managed to mostly avoid. True, you do see kids frolicking in the green spaces, and even the equivalent of stoop sales, but overall the grassy area between buildings seems like leftover land, that could have been put to better use within a traditional street grid. It’s interesting to speculate how much the towers’ design and setting is boosting or more likely, depressing the sale price. But it’s impossible to say for sure. Perhaps some people see freedom and liberation in the tall sleek towers set amid wide swaths of grass. But regardless of how one feels about towers in the park, it is better to avoid blanket axioms on the subject. New York has proved that both poor and rich people can live in tall towers. The problem with urban planning is that there is a lot of pseudo-science generated that says people can or cannot live in such-and-such a context. But people, being squishy, are famously able to prove wrong any rule that sets forth how they will behave in advance. Right now, the buoyant real estate values of present-day Manhattan can probably support just about any housing style, even, say, a giant toilet seat in the sky. But real estate values may not always be so high, so let the buyer beware. – Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region. Review: “Corporate Citizenship and Urban Problem-Solving: The Changing Civic Role of Business Leaders in American Cities,” by Royce Hanson, Hal Wolman, David Connolly and Katherine Pearson. Published by the George Washington Institute of Public Policy for the Brookings Institution, September 2006. Where Have All the CEOs Gone? For those yearning for a renewed era of vigorous leadership from a few corporate titans, this recent report by the George Washington Institute of Public Policy for the Brookings Institution delivers a clear message: Get over it, and then look for a new model; there’s little chance of the old model coming back. The trend is so pervasive that the 19 cities studied showed strikingly similar patterns of disengagement by major CEOs and their companies. Why has this happened? Mergers and acquisitions, banking deregulation, the decline of large manufacturing companies, the movement of corporate headquarters to suburban locations and the increasing political and technical complexity of public issues have led to a pool of CEO civic leaders that is “shallower, more transient, and less influential.” The report underemphasizes certain factors, such as how the increasing global perspective of firms has weakened identification with physical location, and overemphasized others, such as the decline in manufacturing. While the latter had a great impact in places like Cleveland or Pittsburgh, there is no reason that a service company like Federal Express or Wal-Mart couldn’t have just as much local clout. Also, the survey did not include the three largest cities – New York, Los Angeles and Chicago – which arguably have somewhat different issues as leading global centers. Still, the overall analysis rings true, and contains some interesting findings. In nearly every city, both business and civic leaders cited the loss of major bank CEOs who were willing and able to shape deals and mobilize capital. This is a largely unrecognized consequence of the deregulation of the finance industry. The degree to which business organizations have adopted a regional, rather than central city agenda, is also striking. The regional focus reflects both the dispersion of corporate activity to the suburbs and an increasing recognition – a correct one – that economies operate on a metropolitan scale. The most important contribution of the report is that it describes how business, civic and political players have at least partially filled the space left as corporate leadership has retreated. Non-profit institutions, such as universities, hospitals and foundations, have assumed more prominent roles in both financing and leading civic improvement efforts. While they have a different set of priorities, their financial resources have grown, and they often have deeper roots in the community than most businesses. The professional staff at business organizations has also grown and assumed more of the agenda-setting, membership mobilization and government relations roles formerly assumed by CEOs. The next rung of the corporate hierarchy, such as Executive VPs and other senior staff, are playing larger roles on the expanding boards of business and civic groups. The authors emphasize the obvious downside of this alignment. An executive vice president cannot move as fast as a CEO. Larger and more diverse groups and alliances require more management of bureaucracies and reduce the chances for bold, decisive action. If the old system isn’t coming back, however, it’s essential to recognize and build on the advantages of this new environment. Involving more people at the outset can build a stronger, better grounded civic effort. A regional perspective can also potentially address many of the competitive and equity issues that a city focus cannot. The report recommends that mayors pursue both an “inside game” that nurtures alliances with both individual CEOs and civic organizations, and an “outside game” that makes connections with suburban and regional institutions to link the fate of the city and region. While some projects and issues may be more difficult to address, those that resonate across business, civic and community interests may have a greater chance of success. Affordable housing is one example of this. In high-cost places such as the Tri-State region, business groups, who need lower cost housing for workers, have made unlikely alliances with housing advocates and environmental groups around concrete policy objectives such as inclusionary zoning programs and transit-oriented development projects. Although the report doesn’t say so, there is also a glimmer of hope for continued corporate leadership simply because smart corporate leaders recognize that place matters in the global economy. Despite or because of globalization, American business overall has became more dependent on the ability of U.S. cities and regions to provide the infrastructure, quality of life and business environment to attract labor, capital and markets in a competitive international economy. Savvy business leaders understand this, and will find ways to act on it. Sprawl Has Different Causes Than Chicago Author Suggests The University of Chicago last year published a book by Robert Bruegmann, an art historian from the windy city, called Sprawl: A Compact History. Just coming out this month in paperback, the Chicago school permeates Sprawl the way sweeping radial turns do subdivisions. In Bruegmann’s view, sprawl has given the middle class the type of large homes once only the aristocracy enjoyed. Side effects such as loss of open space or traffic congestion are explained away, and sprawl critics are called cultural elitists. While praising sprawl as a populist triumph, Bruegmann discounts other explanations for sprawl, such as low-interest federal loans or government-built highways. In my view government transportation spending – local, state and federal – has been most responsible for the low-density, dispersed development that defines sprawl-style development both nationally and in the Tri-State region over the last 75 years. Simply put, a subdivision, office park or shopping mall can’t exist without a government-built road or grade-separated, limited access freeway nearby. Just as early 19th century canals produced canal-centered cities; just as streetcar lines and railroads a century ago produced streetcar suburbs and railroad-centered towns; so too freeways and roads in the 20th century have produced sprawl. Transportation has always shaped development patterns, and government has always largely shaped transportation. This trend stretches from ancient Rome building roads across Europe, to New York State building the Erie Canal in 1817, to states building highways and airports today. I bet the degree to which a country sprawls today can be predicted by looking at its overall transportation budget and the percentages spent on centralizing-mediums like mass transit, and decentralizing mediums like highways. Bruegmann tries to get around tying sprawl to a particular mode of transport by saying that cities have “sprawled from time immemorial.” Even the wealthy ancient Romans, Bruegmann notes, liked their villas in the country. But this is a false analogy. Sure, there were a few homes and farms outside a medieval city, but living just outside the walls of medieval Barcelona in 1200 AD is simply not the same thing as living 50 miles from downtown Houston today along I-10. At one point Bruegmann says: “. . . it is not really logical to blame postwar urban freeways for sprawl. . . there is no particular reason to think that the decentralization caused by roads has been any different in kind than that caused by the railroads.” Really? Railroads a century and a half ago caused cities like New York to extend themselves, but that’s not the same as decentralization. Overall densities were higher in cities after railroads and then subways were introduced than before, which is very different than what happened after highways were introduced. This is a matter of physics. Simply put, you can’t cram a lot of homes and businesses around a highway because all the cars used by the residents or workers need to be stored somewhere. Railway and subway stations don’t have that problem. Plus, you need many more times the lanes of highway to transport the same number of people that one rail line can. This isn’t to say that the book Sprawl is all bad. The art historian is a wonderful observer, and has logged many frequent flier miles in journeys around the globe documenting the various types of late 20th century development. His descriptions of development patterns in less observed nations like Germany, Italy, India, and Thailand, accompanied by personal photos, are great. He’s also correct that the trend lines in all these countries are toward sprawl, not away from it. But as anyone who has ever owned a stock knows, differences in degree matter. Sure Western Europe is tending toward sprawl. I described it in my 1995 article “Eurosprawl.” But the built environment is still much more compact in, say, France, to name one of the key sprawlers. People live in smaller homes, but they have more access to the countryside, walk more, bicycle more and spend less time stuck in traffic. Most Americans don’t have those kinds of choices, although many Tri-Staters do. But Bruegmann can’t or won’t see that, and thus always portrays sprawl as providing more choices, not fewer.
|
|
|
October 12, 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. October 17, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. October 19-20 October 24, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. October 11, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. October 19, 5:00 – 9:00 p.m. October 20, 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
|
|
|
||
|
Spotlight on The Region A publication of Regional Plan Association, Robert Yaro, President, Alex Marshall, Senior Editor 212-253-2727, x360 alex@rpa.org www.rpa.org |
|
