Cross-posted from

Guerilla urbanism can take many forms, as there are myriad ways to reactivate an abandoned public space or vacant building. Art exhibitions, temporary shops, ad hoc concerts — different approaches work for different properties, and it really depends on the space, neighborhood, and city in question.

It’s either fitting or frivolous, then, that one New Orleans resident seems to have turned to Chuck E. Cheese’s for inspiration.

Josh Ente, who works at the New Orleans-based filmmaking company Court 13 (you might know them for this Sundance winner or this music video), recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to help him turn a crumbling house into giant ball pit. Imagine neighborhood kids, their parents, and young-at-heart adults gathering at an outdoor community pool filled with bouncy balls, and you get a close approximation to what Ente envisions. (See it in the video accompanying Ente’s proposal below.)

The house, located on the border of the Marigny and Bywater sections of the city, is mostly a gutted skeleton, with only the walls and roof beams remaining. Though south of St. Claude Avenue — the widely acknowledged dividing line between struggling areas to the street’s north and the relatively prosperous ones closer to the Mississippi River — the house stands out as a typical example of post-Katrina blight.

A quick search on the New Orleans Assessor’s website finds that the building does have owners, though their mailing address places them nearly 100 miles away in Zachary, La. The legal description lists the property as “burned.”

Ente’s plan is to remove the roof, string netting around the wall frames, cover exposed beams with padding, and fill the open 30-by-16-foot space with 10- and 15-inch bouncy balls (preferable, apparently, to the smaller variety found in McDonald’s play areas).

“There’s really important work to do to bring attention to the blight and slow progress in New Orleans, and on an immediate level, to improve a dangerous pockmark in my neighborhood,” Ente writes in his Kickstarter proposal. “Fortunately the only way I know how to fight these serious problems is to facilitate absurd, riotous joy with equal and opposite force.”

The ball pit idea joins a number of other projects looking to bring life to vacant buildings in the area. Nearby, for instance, a group of artists and musicians turned a former Creole cottage into an enormous, interactive music box.

Ente estimates that the project will cost around $4,000, and expects it will open to the public in early May. He plans to keep the ball pit open until the summer gets too hot.

Cross-posted from Next American City.

Mike Lydon is a board member of Congress for the New Urbanism in New York and founder of the Miami- and New York City-based planning firm, The Street Plans Collaborative. In 2009 he coauthored, with Andres Duany and Jeff Speck, The Smart Growth Manual, the quintessential textbook for building sustainable projects. Here Lydon talks zoning codes, cycling infrastructure, and why streets should accommodate all forms of transportation, not pit one against the other.

Q. It’s been over two years since The Smart Growth Manual was published. What are some of the more promising developments in urban planning you’ve seen since then?

A. The passing of a citywide form-based code in Miami, Fla., as well as Denver, Colo., are two very exciting things that happened just after that book came out. Smart Growth talks about different scales of development, from the windowpane all the way up to the region. But really, the nuts and bolts of what’s allowed, and how things get built over time via a zoning code, are very important to codifying smart growth. A lot of the time, you’ll find cities that have policies in the direction of walkability, smart growth, infill, density, and all these good buzzwords in the planning field, but their regulations don’t support it. In fact, in a lot of cases, those regulations make it illegal. So it’s very exciting to see cities changing out their zoning codes wholesale to ones that [are] more appropriate for the 21st century.

Another exciting trend is the rise of cycling and the livable streets movement. This is playing out in a number of different forms and in a number of different places across the country. You’re seeing increased demand for cycling and walking infrastructure. High-visibility advances like bike sharing [are] becoming very popular, and cities are striving to achieve more and more options with transportation.

Q. As a cycling advocate, what do you think is the most important step that still needs to be made so that non-cyclists can begin to see bikes as a serious means of transit?

A. It’s not just one step. It’s a series of concurrent steps that need to happen. One of the overarching things is education and improving the general sense of the law — what’s legal and how do I get around? — both from a driving perspective and a cycling perspective. When the infrastructure is designed well — and it’s designed to meet the needs of people who would like to be cycling, but are not because they’re afraid for their safety — then you begin to see big upticks in cycling.

Things like traffic enforcement, education, and outreach, and encouraging initiatives like open streets, bike sharing, bicycle events — all of these things add up to make places more bike-friendly. But if there’s not an attractive facility for people to use, one that will actually get them where they want to go, it’s hard to get a surge in cycling. Cities that are advancing the most are those that have built the most attractive infrastructure. Places like Seattle, Portland, New York City, and Boston now are seeing big, big upticks in urban cycling.

Q. Even in cities that have made huge advancements in bike infrastructure, cyclists sometimes still have a problem with authorities taking them seriously. In New York, for instance, police have busted cyclists for doing perfectly legal things, while drivers who actually strike cyclists often don’t face appropriate consequences. How do we change the conversation?

A. This is a very difficult challenge. Surveys show that the majority of New Yorkers support cycling and want more cycling infrastructure. The rolling out of the bike-share system is certainly a vote of confidence on that level. But we have a major enforcement problem. And I think there’s this false dichotomy that we have to target one versus the other: That it’s the cyclists that are making all the illegal maneuvers and being dangerous, or the motor vehicles that are doing it.

What we’re talking about are safer streets for everybody, and how that’s accomplished is by making the changes that make cycling easier. What that really means is not necessarily just accommodating doing things on a bike, but narrowing the number of lanes overall, widening sidewalks, shortening pedestrian crossing times, making cyclists and pedestrians more visible — all these things add up to a safer street, not just for cyclists but for people driving. Too often the point is missed that we’re really trying to make a safer city for everybody — no matter how you get around — and we start to segment these things into different modes [of transportation] that we prefer. That’s a losing proposition from the beginning. It’s got to be for all modes, not just for one.

Q. Let’s say you had unlimited resources to reconstruct a streetscape however you wanted. What would it look like?

A. It would probably have three-to-five-story buildings, maybe mixed use, pretty much built up to the edge of the sidewalk. It would have a nice, wide sidewalk with trees, benches, cafe seating. And then towards the middle, a protected bike lane facility that meets the needs of the majority — simple bike lanes don’t go quite far enough for a large population of people.

Narrow travel lanes. In Europe you’ve got buses that travel on nine-foot lanes. Here we have standards of 11-12 [feet]. Parallel parking is usually a good thing for streets, one that can create friction and slow down motorists. It also creates a barrier between people biking and people walking, not just from a comfort perspective but also from a pollution perspective: Having that buffer means you’re less close to the exhaust from passing vehicles.

Having very visible, clear crosswalks at every intersection, every corner. It sounds ridiculous that I have to say that, but you go to so many cities and that’s not the case. I’d like to see people of all ages on the street as well — a really dynamic atmosphere where you feel comfortable doing any number of different activities.

Q. What suggestions would you have for cities that are a little newer and were built to accommodate automobiles rather than walking? What are the next steps that cities like Phoenix can take?

A. You’ve got to show people the possibilities. It’s so hard to imagine what a typical street in Phoenix could become for anyone who lives there. It’s built for cars, you travel through it in a car, and it’s very hard to reach out of that bubble. But there are ways to do it, and it’s not just showing [residents] a fancy rendering or a nice photoshopped drawing. We’re finding out that this doesn’t sell the vision as much as it does to actually make a change on the street in a very short period of time. So if you can show someone the aspects or characteristics of what a block looks like after adding those bike lanes temporarily, show what a street looks like when it has parallel parking, bring more activity to the edge of a sidewalk … it gives people an experience that they can’t get from a rendering or an image. We’re finding, as we incorporate more of those techniques into our implementation plans, that [they have] a huge positive effect on building support and interest, continuing the conversation, and chipping away at the large-scale problem.

Excerpted from a longer interview in Next American City.

One of John Norquist’s best-known achievements as mayor of Milwaukee — an office he held from 1988 to 2004 — was demolishing the Park East Freeway, a 1960s-era expressway that restricted access to the city’s downtown. Today, he is CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism, an organization that promotes urban highway removal and walkable, mixed-use urban development.

Norquist, who is also author of The Wealth of Cities, an argument for using the free market to achieve urbanist goals, will be one of the featured speakers at the Congress’ 20th annual gathering in West Palm Beach, Fla., this May. Here, he discusses urban highway removal — where it’s been done, where it will happen next, and why we as a nation must overcome our obsession with reducing congestion.

Q. As local leaders around the country are now seriously considering highway removal in some form or another, how do you suggest convincing concerned residents that such a move is right for them and their city?

A. Well, you have to change the discussion from pure traffic count comparison to traffic distribution. A robust street grid, with lots of connections, will distribute traffic much better than a few large freeways.

For example, when the Embarcadero Freeway, a double-deck freeway [in San Francisco], was torn down, a majority of the trips — according to a study by the city of San Francisco — got shorter and faster because of the increased connectivity. With the freeway, there were a lot of trips where you overshot your destination and had to come back. It also attracted trips that didn’t add any value to the neighborhood: People going from Oakland to Marin County were cutting through San Francisco. When the freeway was torn down and replaced by a boulevard, it suddenly didn’t look so attractive to go that way, and [drivers] found a different way to get to Marin Country or, in some cases, didn’t make the trip.

Q. What is the best way to fund urban highway removal?

A. A lot of freeways are headed beyond their design life, so they have to be rebuilt. You can’t just resurface them again. It’s cheaper to just tear it down and replace it with a surface street, so you win the cost argument by comparing it with rebuilding the freeway.

As far as other funds that are available, you can try for some of the TIGER grants … But I think the biggest single way to finance these things is to compare them with rebuilding the existing structure. In the case of Milwaukee, it cost about a third as much to tear it down as it would’ve been to rebuild it.

Q. What are some of the highway removal projects around the country that you consider particularly admirable?

The West Side Highway in 1979. (Photo by m.joedicke.)

A. New York’s West Side Highway was closed in 1975. It fell down once in ’73, and they repaired it, and it fell down again in ’75. At the end of its 40-year design life, it fell down right on schedule. And it was just really expensive, and politically unpopular, to rebuild it … The result of the West Side Highway coming down was [that] it really helped the rebirth of the real estate market in Chelsea, Tribeca, Battery Park City.

In Portland, the riverfront section of the expressway was removed and there was a huge property value increase. People could see the [Willamette] River, and without the freeway in the way, that made a huge difference.

And then in Seoul, South Korea, is the most spectacular one of all: They took out a freeway with over 150,000 cars a day and replaced it with two moving lanes on each side of a river, which they restored. And it works just fine because they have a really rich street grid in Seoul.

Basically, freeways don’t belong in densely populated cities. They create more problems than they solve. They’re very expensive, so almost nobody’s building new ones. That tells you that they’re sort of doomed: When you’re not doing new ones, you’re going to eventually have to remove the old ones.

Q. What about some of the pending projects? Are there any that stick out in your mind?

A. I’d really, really love to see the Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans reach a point where it can be removed. I think the neighborhood’s pretty well convinced that it’s a great idea. Two aldermembers are for it. There’s a third councilmember who’s still debating if it’s a good idea, and then the mayor has said favorable things about it. He’s not completely locked in yet, but there’s a good chance of the Claiborne coming down.

We’ve got to take care of some concerns, like the Port of New Orleans — they haven’t quite wrapped their mind around us yet as a good thing for them. There are a lot of truck movements that have to do with the port, and some of those trucks go on the Claiborne. But it’s only three miles long, and a multi-lane boulevard would be able to handle the traffic at almost the same speed — not quite as fast, but it might even work better in rush hour because it wouldn’t congest as much.

That’s one of the things about freeways: They tend to fail when you need them the most. They fill up, and then there’s no escaping. Once you’re on it, you just have to wait until they uncongest. Whereas when you’re on a surface street — like, say, Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. — even though it’s a big road that carries a lot of traffic, it really doesn’t come to a complete standstill, because there are so many cross streets that, if the thing congests, then people go to a different street instead. They turn right, get off the street and go to Massachusetts Ave., or Wisconsin Ave., or one of the other streets.

Q. Despite underuse and pretty bad congestion on many urban freeways across the country, there’s still this strong, vocal element against removing freeways, people who still want them in their cities.

A. It is a hard sell, because it’s counterintuitive. So the average person hears that you want to tear down the Claiborne Expressway, and they go, “You want to do what? How could you be against that big road? Cars probably need it. Traffic needs it.” So you have a lot of explaining to do, and it takes years, sometimes, to get to the point where the public says, “Oh, yeah, maybe that isn’t such an idiotic idea after all.”

Q. Do you think that stems from a misunderstanding of highways and their effect, or is there something else at play there?

A. Everybody’s been sort of trained to believe that if you’ve got a traffic problem, all you have to do is make the pipe bigger, you know, make the road wider and that’ll solve the problem.

The Detroit metropolitan area is covered with freeways … More than any other place in the country, the Michigan DOT pretty much got its way. And they have solved the problem that they identified, which was congestion … So by creating a transportation system that encouraged people to leave town — the population of the city is about a third of what it was since 1950.

[Detroit] had 300 miles of streetcars at the end of the war. That’s all gone … The street grid has been cut up, so it’s hard to move around on the surface streets. [But] the stated goal was to battle congestion, and in Detroit, they did it. And there are side effects.

You could take care of congestion in New York in a similar way: If you eliminate the 700 miles of subway, eliminate the commuter trains, build the Cross-Manhattan Expressway, put the West Side Highway back in — build all the freeways that Robert Moses didn’t get around to building — you could probably solve the congestion problem in New York. Manhattan’s population would drop from 2 million down to half a million, and the city would become a really poor place instead of a rich place.

The point I’m making is that, since the postwar period, federal transportation policy has been focused on eliminating congestion, and that’s too narrow a goal. The goal ought to be: What adds value to society? What adds value to the economy? If you look at the richest places in America, they’re the most congested.

Cross-posted from Next American City.

Ellen Dunham-Jones is a professor of architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology and coauthor of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, the quintessential guidebook for making sprawl more sustainable. She will be one of the featured speakers at the 20th Congress for the New Urbanism in West Palm Beach, Fla., this May. Here, she discusses vital demographic shifts, different redevelopment strategies, and some of the more impressive retrofitting projects going on in the U.S.

Q. A recent survey found that for the first time, most Americans prefer a walkable neighborhood to a large house. What do you think accounts for this shift, and what does it mean for how we plan our suburbs in the near future?

A. I think it reflects some of the changes in demographics. The reality is that the generations we have designed the suburbs for have grown up to the point where the Baby Boomers, who were the original babies for the suburbs and are now mostly empty nesters, no longer need minivans to cart kids around. In fact, their households, for the most part, don’t even have kids anymore.

And then you have also got an enormous number of Gen Y folks, in their 20s and 30s, whose jobs are out in the suburbs. But they’re frankly looking for some nightlife. They’d like to meet people. They don’t want to just go around in cars everywhere. They are looking for those kinds of walkable neighborhoods where they can socialize.

I think that’s the same dynamic at work with a lot of the Baby Boomers: Two-thirds of suburban households do not have children in them, and as people desire to get a little more social, they are finding that walking is great. They’re really looking for that life that exists in those walkable places.

Q. In suburban communities around the country, have you found that local leadership and developers are heeding the public’s growing penchant for more urban-like places to live, or are they still caught up in the thirst for sprawl?

A. In different markets you see very different dynamics happening. But overall, one thing the recession has done is it has given the municipal planners a chance to catch their breath and talk to their communities about what kind of future they really envision.

Before the recession, most of the redevelopments that were trying to be more walkable were really developer-led — developers who saw the underperforming asphalt in suburbia as an opportunity to address growing markets. But zoning codes and buildings codes had not caught up with that. The recession has allowed many communities to revise their regulations and really position themselves to capture that coming demand as the economy fully recovers.

But it varies: There are certain communities that are still very interested in going back to the old model of sprawl, and there are plenty of developers who do that too.

Q. What suburban redevelopment projects stand out in your mind, and what types of receptions do they get?

A. What’s interesting is there are so many different projects. [Retrofitting Suburbia coauthor] June Williamson and I have been cataloging these for many years. We’ve got about 250 projects in the database right now. We categorize them according to three different overall strategies.

The first is simply re-inhabitation with more community-serving uses. There are loads of examples of dead big-box stores, or dead malls, that have been re-inhabited with libraries, schools, medical facilities, [or] religious facilities, and some of them are really creative. Lots of gyms and recreation facilities going in. On the other hand, often there’s a holding pattern until the economy recovers and more investment might be possible. But they tend to really help the social sustainability of a community, and they provide that cheap space that Jane Jacobs wrote about years ago, that allows the low-profit to come in and, in many ways, to complete a suburban community that hasn’t had space for the arts or for new schools. [There are] a lot of charter schools going into these spaces, and a lot of artists and theater groups going into old spaces.

An ice skating rink at the Belmar. (Photo by Todd Carpenter.)

The second category, redevelopment, is where you tend to get the environmentally sustainable features. That’s where you see an underperforming property more or less bulldozed and urbanized — building on top of parking lots and putting in much more up-to-date green infrastructure. And those projects that stand out — places like Belmar in Lakewood, Colo., outside of Denver — have done a remarkable job of replacing a 100-acre big mall with 22 walkable blocks, lots of green buildings and public streets. It’s the downtown that Lakewood never had. There are about 15 of those projects built in the country now, and another 25 that are in various stages of development. The economy definitely slowed the progress on a lot of the big dead mall retrofit redevelopment. But there are all kinds of redevelopment. Sometimes it’s infilling office parks. In some cases it’s entire subdivisions or garden apartment complexes that have been redeveloped.

The third category, which is really quite surprising, is re-greening. It was very common, before the Clean Water Act, for commercial properties in suburbs to be built on the wetlands. We’d drain them and put in some culverts. Now that those properties are going dead, there is an opportunity to either reconstruct the wetlands or put in parks. We’re finding that dead property is reducing property value around it, but if you put in a park or well-designed bioswales and other kinds of green infrastructure, you are increasing neighborhood property value. These projects are seen as increasing sustainability and improving community.

Q. Among the three that you mentioned, how do you decide which approach is the best for a community?

A. There is definitely no one-size-fits-all. I’m based in Atlanta, and I think there are certain parts of Atlanta where greening makes great sense, and other properties where redevelopment makes sense. What June and I have been encouraging — and other new urbanists like Galina Tachieva and her book, The Sprawl Repair Manual — is more looking at metro-wide: Looking at where are all the vacant properties, the underperforming properties, and doing what we call a “gray field audit” so that strategic decisions can be made. Where are the ecosystems where we can reconnect and get in parks and re-green? Where are the transit and employment centers and the places where we really ought to be redeveloping? And also where should we be really trying to maintain affordable cheap space where we want to keep some re-inhabitation?

In general, I don’t think it’s so much that one region benefits more from a strategy. All three strategies are all useful within a metro, and they’re often even all useful within a single property. Northgate Mall in north Seattle is an older mall that is actually thriving. They wanted to expand, but they had to strike a deal with local environmentalists who were mad that the headwaters of a local creek had been paved over and culverted for a parking lot. So they re-greened that portion of the parking lot in order to get permission to expand. They also built new senior housing, as well as general mixed-use, around the new bioswale that they built there. All three strategies have been employed in different ways to help make the Northgate Mall function as a better neighbor and really be a community anchor.

Q. Are urban design students being taught these, or are they still learning the same things that they had been taught 5-10 years ago?

A. June and I have been incredibly gratified, constantly meeting professors at other schools who say, “Oh yeah, I assigned your book,” or “I had my students work on this.” I see an incredible outpour of interest. I just got back from a two-day workshop with June at the University of New Mexico, and I was astonished at the students who put in really long days and stayed even longer on a Saturday than they had to because they are really eager to learn this.

The argument that June and I make — and I think it resonates well with students — is that we spent the past 50 years designing and developing suburbia, and yet all of the unintended consequences of that, and the continued resource depletion that we’re very well aware of, means that the big design project for the next generation is going to be retrofitting suburbia.