This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web’s leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community.

Traffic is essentially “an engineering issue,” says author Tom Vanderbilt. “But there’s also a layer of culture.”

That layer of culture determines, to a large extent, how traffic can become a problem. This idea is explored in Vanderbilt’s 2008 book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), a Planetizen Top Book of the year. He recently expanded on that idea for a discussion about traffic put on by Zocalo Public Square in (where better?) Los Angeles. A write-up of the event and video of the discussion with UCLA researcher Eric Morris is also available.

Tom Vanderbilt discusses his book Traffic as UCLA researcher and New York Times Freakonomics blogger Eric Morris listens.Courtesy Planetizen.comPeople in L.A. love these sorts of discussions. We’ve got a mess of a traffic problem in this city — from intense congestion to freeway domination to a late-blooming public transit system. Something about events focused on transportation and traffic just seems to pull people together here, almost like a support group. “Hi, I’m Nate, and I have a problem with traffic congestion.”

The human impact of traffic is easy to see, but less apparent is the human cause — a point made crystal clear by Vanderbilt’s work. Obviously it’s humans causing traffic, but what about humans is actually the source? What about how we act, interact, and live makes a bunch of drivers into a traffic jam? Vanderbilt’s book cites a lot of data that offers some indication. The data shows how men cause more of a certain kind of accident than women, and how teenagers cause more crashes when there are other teens in the car with them, and a variety of other demographic- and behavior-based conclusions. These may be fairly straightforward, but Vanderbilt’s discussion brings up what may be a more important if underappreciated cause of most traffic: the lack of an interactive social structure in driving.

“Traffic has a lack of a feedback system,” says Venderbilt. “There’s no repeat interaction.”

So if I never have to see you again on the road, am I really going to be as courteous as I would be if I saw you every day? Most people probably want to think yes, but their actions say no.

Sittin’ in Silicon Valley.richardmasoner via flickrVanderbilt cites the work of psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who researches why regular people can be convinced to do terrible or evil things. One of his explanations is a concept he calls de-individuation — the act of disregarding other people as individuals. Vanderbilt draws the connection to traffic, where it’s not a person driving a car next to you in traffic, but just a car. It’s just a box on wheels — and it’s in your way.

Interaction between drivers is seen by many as a way to improve safety, but also a way to improve efficiency. If people have an idea about what others are going to do before they do it, they can react accordingly, or at least not be surprised. It’s also the principle behind the move to remove signs from roadways. By removing that reliance on clearly defined rules, people are forced to fall back on their highly evolved but incredibly elemental communication skills. In the end, it’s all about being cognizant of each other and working together to get where we all need to go. After all, that’s not a finite resource. I can get to my job on time just as well as anyone else on the road, and my success does not limit theirs.

Maybe what we really need is a support group. Or at least the realization that, as fellow Planetizen Interchange blogger Josh Stephens once wrote, we’re not in traffic, we are traffic.

This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web’s leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community.

I couldn’t resist. I knew it was going to be a madhouse in downtown L.A. for Michael Jackson’s memorial service, but I had to go see what it was like — not because I’m a super fan, but purely for the urban novelty of a huge swath of downtown closed off for thousands of fans and mourners.

But what really struck me as I was wandering around amongst the masses was the huge percentage of them that were neither fans nor mourners. Lined along the sidewalks leading to the memorial’s venue were dozens of vendors, selling everything you could think of with Michael Jackson’s name or face pasted on. From buttons to t-shirts to hand-painted portraits, the informal economy was booming down at MJ Central.

In this video of the sidewalk leading up to the venue, vendors are selling everything from posters to stickers to tickets into the memorial service itself.

I don’t want to blow things out of proportion, but for a lot of people, this event was kind of a big deal. You can read all about the excitement and anticipation for the memorial all over the mainstream press, but one point I think is worth re-stating here is that this was an incredibly unique event for any city. And the city treated it that way. The (not incredibly coherent) map below shows the streets closed or affected by the memorial, and you can see it’s no small footprint.

Thousands of people attended, both with tickets and without, jamming streets and sidewalks. Despite the peculiarity, this was a very urban moment for an otherwise underutilized downtown area. And the city’s informal economy responded as expected. I saw dozens, but there very well could have been hundreds of people selling memorabilia, food, water, and probably a whole lot of single silver gloves.

It might seem tacky or disrespectful to turn a funeral into a money-making opportunity, but I guess that’s how business works. However you want to lay your moral judgment on these vendors, I think they offer an important example of something cities should start to think harder about. Street vending is a vital part of any active urban area, and while it would seem to be a response to vibrant places, I think it also plays a big role in making places vibrant.

People like to interact, people need things, and — especially right now — people need jobs. Making it easier for people to legitimately utilize the public-ness of streets and sidewalks for commerce would be an easy way to create those needed jobs, serve the wants and needs of consumers and create some much-needed interaction in areas that are increasingly devoid of people.

So sell on, Michael Jackson t-shirt vendors. Fill that niche and provide all you can. You may not be curing the economy, but you’re at least offering a glimpse of how local, informal businesses can contribute in a not-unpositive way to the character and vibrancy of cities.

This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web’s leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community.

Cities are filled with spaces intended for the public — but many of them are clearly owned and operated by the private sector. Though cities bend rules to get these spaces built, the public benefit is often outweighed by the cost. The challenge now is to make them better.

The difference between what is public and what is private is usually pretty clear. A city park is available to everyone. Your neighbor’s living room is not. But the line dividing public and private can blur, and when it does, spaces get ambiguous, and questions arise. Who can use them? What are they for? Who’s in charge?

These spaces exist in cities all over the country, mainly in the form of plazas in front of office buildings — built by developers, owned by private interests, but used by the public. The downtowns of America are littered with them, which has periodically caused debate about what to do with these private-yet-public spaces. Most recently, a report from the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) sought to document and evaluate these privately owned public spaces in the downtown office district of San Francisco. The report looks at the history of these spaces, the policies that permitted, shaped, and even encouraged them — and where their designs often fall short.

Privately owned public spaces in San Francisco and throughout the country have produced mixed results over the years. They’re typically built as a trade-off between the city and the developer in which the city allows the developer to build more or higher in exchange for developing a plaza, atrium, or a seating area for public use. New York City was the first to institute this trade-off, now known as incentive zoning, and other cities like San Francisco have followed.

“By allowing bigger buildings than would otherwise be allowed by the zoning, the city is essentially saying ‘we’re willing to violate legally what we would otherwise think is appropriate because we’re getting something back in return that is even better.’ So it better be better,” said Jerold Kayden, professor and co-chair of the Department of Urban Planning at Harvard University. He’s also the author of “Privately Owned Public Space: The New York City Experience”, an extensive study of more than 500 of these spaces conducted from 1998 to 1999. His study, and the subsequent studies it inspired, have found that the public benefit of these spaces is largely disproportionate to the benefits enjoyed by developers.

A corporate plaza in downtown Los Angeles — in the public realm, but under private control.

SPUR’s report proposes a new way forward for these spaces, but progress depends on the past — maybe even more than on the future. Of the 68 spaces the report documented, 45 were built before 1985. Nearly half of these suffer from what the SPUR report’s authors call “inferior design”, making them less useful to the public they are intended to serve. A variety of changes are needed to make these places more useful, according to the recommendations in the report, which range from improved signage to expanded hours of operation to the provision of moveable seating.

“These spaces are only as public as they’re used by the public,” said Sarah Karlinsky, SPUR’s deputy director. “So their publicness increases through use, basically, and the only way people know to use them is to know that they exist. And the only way for them to know that they exist is through publicity of the spaces.”

Intended uses and users

Often, the problem with many of these spaces is the fact that they are underused. The office lunch crowd typically fills benches and seating areas, but after lunch and after office hours, the spaces are virtually abandoned.

“These spaces do provide amenities for downtown workers, mostly white collar workers and employees. I don’t want to say that these are completely with no use,” says Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, professor and chair of the Department of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. She’s also co-author of “Urban Design Downtown: Poetics and Politics of Form”, which looks at downtown Los Angeles’ public spaces. “With more residents in downtown, I believe there’s going to be more use of these spaces. But I think they will keep some of their characteristics that still make them more private than public spaces.”

The root of the problem posed by these spaces, the experts say, is their ambiguity. They are intended for the public, but when the “public” is a crowd of, say, homeless people, many of these public spaces teeter more toward the private edge of the spectrum. In her studies of L.A.’s public spaces for her 1998 book, Loukaitou-Sideris noted a distinct stratum of users of these spaces — and little patience for anyone else.

“They do target a very specific segment of the public, which is more of the white collar office worker, the tenant of the building, the shopper, and they don’t have much tolerance for the rowdy teenager or the bag lady or the homeless person,” she said.

The blurry line is harnessed and the crowd is selectively determined in many of these public spaces by what Loukaitou-Sideris calls “soft control” and “hard control.”

“There is certainly a screening of who gets to use these places through mostly soft control, and this means the price of the merchandise, the fact that you have to buy something in order to sit, the fact that major entrances are through parking structures,” she said. “And sometimes the hard control practices are through private security, that if they see someone that looks more like a bag lady or homeless or even if you’re underdressed, you would be asked to probably leave.”

A plaque in Los Angeles indicating which part of the sidewalk is actually private property.

SPUR also recommends the creation of a watchdog or “friends of” group to look after and program activities in these spaces. It’s an idea based on Advocates for Privately-Owned Public Space, a non-profit set up in New York City by Kayden after the publication of his study in 2000. The group is a largely volunteer-run organization that monitors the city’s privately owned public spaces and works with the city to encourage upgrades and promote use.

“This ends up being, to be sure, a second best alternative, but it’s better than the third best alternative, which is to do nothing,” said Kayden. “There are other mechanisms that can be used, but having a friend of these spaces or an advocate of these spaces I think is a very reasonable idea.”

“What’s crucial is to recognize these are public spaces and they lack an overall person to look after them.”

Karlinsky agrees with Kayden that such public-private partnerships are likely the best way to ensure the maintenance and operation of these spaces, especially as city positions are cut and budgets plummet.

“I think it’s going to be a combination of grassroots work and the public sector taking hold of some of the ideas,” Karlinsky said. “I’d like to think that the public sector will be responsive to these recommendations, to the extent that they can be.”

She’s hoping the report will guide policy relating to future privately owned public spaces in an effort to improve their design and utility to the public. But given the current economic downturn, t
he report’s recommendations for new spaces may not get too many chances to take shape.

Adapting to changing downtowns

“Because of the troubles in the real estate sector, we have not seen that many more coming about — at least in Los Angeles — and I would speculate in many other cities,” said Loukaitou-Sideris, of the likely slowdown in the construction of such spaces.

“I mean, we can change the rules now going forward, but how many new office buildings are going up in San Francisco right now? Or Los Angeles?” Kayden asks. “Over the next five years, I don’t think we’re going to see a hell of a lot of new buildings with public space. So let’s focus on the existing inventory.”

And as downtowns across the country enter into a renaissance of redevelopment and residentialization, new questions emerge about what role these spaces play — and should play — as downtown demographics shift. More housing and increasing downtown populations are seen as good signs for privately owned public spaces.

“I think the more people who live in the city in addition to work in the city and visit the city, the more possibility there is for use of these spaces,” says Kayden, “but only if they’re attractive and functional and even creative and inventive.”

Whether new life in downtowns across the country result in new use of these spaces remains to be seen, but in the meantime, studies like SPUR’s report, the work of Jerold Kayden in New York and various other resulting studies in cities around the U.S. will offer new ideas for taking more advantage of the public spaces cities have. They’ve all identified areas in which privately owned public spaces fail, but they also express the understanding that these places can and do serve a purpose.

“At their best, they do add. They’re not Central Park. They’re not Pershing [Square] Park. They’re not Golden Gate Park. They’re not that size and they’re not that good,” said Kayden. “But they’re scattered about and they provide in a dense congested city environment the possibility for all of the sorts of informal kinds of activities, solitary or in groups, that you might like to have that you can’t have in the middle of the street or in the middle of the sidewalk.”

This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web’s leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community.

The green marketplace is the marketplace of the future. From Wal-Mart to Toyota to the neighborhood dry cleaner, it seems like every business is going out of its way to tell us how green it is. That could either be a great thing, because these businesses are actually using environmentally friendly practices, or it could be a bad thing, because they’re just claiming to be green. Regardless of which it is, one thing is certain: they say they’re green because that’s what we want to hear.

The green market’s existence and growth was hammered home by the recent VerdeXchange Green Marketmakers Conference in Los Angeles. The conference pulled together an impressive list of green-thinking politicians, public officials, private business people, and practitioners from around the globe to discuss trends in the environmentally conscious market and to outline how businesses and communities can actually be as green as they love to say they are.

As it goes with these types of events, there were a lot of people talking about all the great things they’re doing, all the great things they’re going to be doing, and all the great things they could be doing if the government worked better. Beyond the spin and the sell, a few major themes stuck out to me (based on a select few of the day’s many sessions).

Renewable Energy Transmission</strong

It seems like every single person in attendance talked at some point about renewable energy. It’s an appropriate subject, and one that seems to dominate the general perception of what it means to be green. An aspect I hadn’t really given much thought to previously is transmission. Getting all that renewable power from the plant out into the grid is a pretty crucial element of the whole scheme, and one that has been a major hurdle, possibly even more than development of the renewable energy technology itself.

Cities love to tout how much alternative and renewable energy they use, but that amount is severely limited by how easily that power can get to the city. Many within the renewable industry have bemoaned the federal and state permitting process, which they say creates sometimes excruciating timeframes. They’re calling for an update to the permitting process that can get projects moving — and generating energy — faster. But with thousands of miles of transmission lines, the footprint can have a major impact on communities and habitats. Siting power plants and transmission lines seems to be one of the major challenges ahead for the renewables industry.

California’s Environmental Leadership

The state has been at the forefront of many environmental movements, and recent legislation within California has offered guidance for the rest of the country. It’s notable that on the day of this conference, President Barack Obama reversed a controversial Bush administration decision, and ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider a state plan to set higher emissions standards for automobiles. That law, AB1493, has garnered the support of 13 other states and is widely seen as a major step in expanding the government’s influence over fuel efficiency in the U.S.

Another of California’s laws that received plenty of lip service was AB32, The Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which requires the state to bring greenhouse gas emissions down to 1990 levels by 2020. It’s no Kyoto, but many green thinkers are calling it a good step for the country’s most populous state.

And the third California crowd-pleaser is the “anti-sprawl” legislation SB375, which requires metropolitan planning organizations to include provisions in planning documents that aim at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The 2008 law basically ties land use decisions to the greenhouse gas emissions they inevitably cause. The end result is, ideally, communities throughout the state that are built to limit the damage their physical form creates.

Water

Water is life, and here in America we are wasting our life. Twisted agricultural subsidies, desert-based explosive development, and the love of the lawn have pushed our needs beyond our means. As many speakers discussed, people and communities are going to have to, first, change their lifestyles and, second, get way more creative in reusing our most important resource.

Much of the focus here was on reusing — like the wastewater reuse projects that have finally surpassed the yuck factor to become viable methods of recharging groundwater supplies. There are both technical opportunities for the green market people to explore and conservation methods cities and regions should consider. Combining the two — creative technologies and creative ideas — will help to spread the idea that protecting water sources means much more than turning off the tap while you brush your teeth.

What was great to see in the attendants of this conference was a broad range of industries and professions. There was also a huge Japanese presence, highlighting the nation’s advancements in green technologies. But no matter where they came from, the people at this conference were highly passionate and interested. Above all, they were primarily business people. This is not the environmentalist movement of the ’70s — or even the ’90s, for that matter. These are savvy people who not only see business opportunities, but intrinsically link environmental stewardship with their own success. The hippies grew up, and they’re showing that the environmental movement is about more than just green in the pipe. It’s also about green in the wallet.

This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web’s leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community.

Green alley projects are popping up in cities all over the U.S. and Canada, in an effort to make the concrete jungle a little better at absorbing rainwater. A new program in Los Angeles goes beyond the runoff to actively integrate these once-derelict spaces into the urban fold.

Across Los Angeles, the city’s alleyways account for more than 900 linear miles of pavement. If you put them all together, the city’s alleys would make up about 3 square miles — about half the size of L.A.’s Griffith Park, twice the size of New York’s Central Park, or the equivalent of about 400 Wal-Marts (not including parking). They’re peppered throughout the city, in neighborhoods, commercial zones, downtown, and L.A.’s industrial areas. But for the most part, these alleys are ignored.

“In many, many parts of the city, absolutely nothing happens in these places,” said Jennifer Wolch, a professor of geography at the University of Southern California and director of the university’s Center for Sustainable Cities. “Very, very low traffic, very little pedestrian activity. They’re basically just sitting there.” The Center has published a series of reports on the use and perception of the city’s alleyways and finds that activity occurs in alleys only about 20 percent of the time — and much of that activity involves either driving or walking through.

By their nature, alleyways are utilitarian spaces. Often built as access routes to parking facilities or loading zones, these mini-streets were never intended to be vibrant elements of the urban fabric. But now, some in L.A. are starting to think that maybe they should be.

Wolch and the Center for Sustainable Cities are leading the push, rallying for the creation of a Green Alleys Subcommittee of L.A.’s Green Streets Committee and working with planners and other city officials to get green alleys on the city’s official agenda. The objective is to rework the city’s alleys to reduce runoff and better absorb rainwater through the use of permeable pavements, landscaping, and bioswales. In December, the city council agreed, and created a citywide Green Alleys Program.

Precedents and Potential

It’s an idea taking root all over North America. In 2006, the city of Chicago announced a pilot plan to begin converting the city’s alleyways into green, permeable areas that would absorb stormwater and improve local water quality. Now, alley conversion funding is included as line item in the city budget, and more than 80 green alleys have been installed.

A program in Seattle also targets stormwater by addressing road and alley design. By reducing impervious surfaces, installing bioswales, and increasing the amount of landscaping along roadways, the city has reduced stormwater flooding and facilitated groundwater recharge. In a two-year study of one pilot project, the amount of stormwater leaving the street was reduced almost completely. A similar program has also been established in Vancouver, with three completed pilot projects.

Addressing stormwater has been the primary focus of these programs, but in Los Angeles, officials are taking a wider view.

“It’s not just about capturing stormwater,” said Simon Pastucha of the L.A. Planning Department’s Urban Design Studio, which is working on design guidelines and selection criteria for the city’s Green Alleys Program. He says planners in the city are going to have to think more broadly about the way alleys are used in the city — and get more creative when they think about what they could become.

“That might be a pedestrian path, or that might be a green link, or maybe the alley’s almost not needed for utility purposes,” Pastucha said. “So what else can we do with the alley if garbage trucks don’t need to drive down it, if people don’t need access to their driveways? What else can we do with it to keep it active?”

Opportunities abound, according to Pastucha, but a lot of the potential depends on the place. An alley in industrial L.A. could hardly be treated the same as one behind a schoolyard. So planners are trying to figure out how to integrate appropriate uses throughout the city in an organic way.

But it’s not just planners who are rethinking alleyways. Business owners in the Hollywood Business Improvement District recently approved a new tax assessment on themselves that creates a fund dedicated to the alleys of Hollywood. The $125,000-a-year fund is supported by about 50 business owners in the area. And while the initial goals are cleanup and maintenance, merchants are hopeful that their alleys can become more than dumping grounds, according to Hollywood BID Assistant Executive Director Sarah MacPherson.

“There’s kind of this European vision of outdoor dining and retail entrances through the alley,” said MacPherson of the possible future of Hollywood’s alleyways. “They have a very pedestrian scale, unlike many large boulevards that we see in Los Angeles, so it’s a very unique way of experiencing Hollywood and a very unique way of experiencing an urban area.”

Cities like Portland and San Francisco have shown that alleys can be embraced in commercial areas, with successful dining and retail establishments taking advantage of these distinctive outdoor areas. But in L.A., alleyways are for the most part background players, hidden throughout the city’s residential areas.

Is That a Pocket Park in Your Alley, Or Are You Just Happy to Green Me?

The highest concentration of alleys is in dense single-family residential neighborhoods, according to one of the reports produced by USC’s Center for Sustainable Cities. The majority of these are in South Los Angeles, a sprawling, primarily low-income part of the city that has struggled for decades with crime. Alleys in this part of town have the unfortunate reputation of being dirty, scary, and hotbeds for criminal activity. This reputation — often founded in reality — has led many in South Los Angeles to be wary of alleys and to only use them if necessary.

Things got bad enough that in the mid-1990s L.A. instituted a program to gate off problematic alleyways. To prevent criminal activities like drug sales and dumping, a citywide Nuisance Alley Closure Program gated off alleys and shifted maintenance responsibility to adjacent neighbors, according to the city’s Board of Public Works. The result, however, was a mixed blessing.

“It wasn’t a very good program in the sense that there was no money to fix these places up and there also wasn’t any money for maintenance,” said Wolch, who says many alleys simply went untended once the gates went up. “On the one hand it made them safer in a way, but it also made them more of a problem in terms of maintenance. At a minimum they were just derelict spaces.”

The California Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that gating off alleys is illegal, so the practice has stopped, but many alleys remain behind bars. Bringing them back into the public sphere is a big part of L.A.’s Green Alleys Program, and one that distinguishes it from those in other cities. Part of the effort is to utilize the alleys in residential areas like South L.A. to create new public green spaces and green connectors.

“There are many parts of the city where there’s so little playspace and greenspace that to ignore this space is shortsighted,” Wolch said.

Only 7.8 percent of the city is parkspace, making L.A. the most park-poor big city in America. Re-envisioning alleys as pocket park spaces is one way to address the shortage, a
ccording to Wolch, who envisions landscaped alleys providing connections between housing and schools, parks and shops.

Making these changes is the goal of the city’s Green Alleys Program, but they are not likely to come easy. An obvious hurdle is funding, given the current economic downturn that has affected many city budgets, Los Angeles included. But through public-private partnerships and various stormwater-related state and federal programs, generating funding for alley greening projects is still feasible, according to Wolch. Another equivalent challenge is actually internal: getting alleys on the radar of other planners.

The Green Alleys Program is currently in the process of establishing design and project selection criteria to include in planning documents, like specific plans that make alley consideration a requirement for planners. A full set of design criteria aren’t expected for about a year. Aside from initial staff funding for policy development, the L.A. City Council’s approval of the Green Alleys program doesn’t include any funding for pilot programs.

Despite the lack of funding, citizens groups and other organizations have already come forward with ideas for alley projects throughout the city. And as the Green Alleys Program gets started, the idea of reimagining the city’s alleyways also seems to have gained momentum.