The winning design.Photo: Ying chee Chui

Well, sort of. Two years ago, MIT architecture professors launched the 1K House Project, a design competition challenging students to come up with a home that could be built for $1,000. 14 designs emerged from the studio, and Ying chee Chui’s Pinwheel House came out on top.

A prototype of Chui’s house was recently completed in Mianyang in the Sichuan Province of China. The bill rang up to quite a bit more than $1,000: It cost $5,925 in total. But the project suggests that with a little investment, we can make well-designed, structurally sound homes available to even the poorest of the poor — a promising sign in a world where, if things continue as they’ve been, 900 million people will live in slums by 2020.

The Pinwheel House consists of four rectangular rooms arranged like a pinwheel around a square central courtyard. And the house is both adaptable and modular. Inside, movable screens separate rooms of different functions. And each rectangular section is constructed in the same way, minimizing the amount of labor and learning that goes into the building process. As families grow in size or affluence, they can buy another module and add it on to their existing floor plan.

The design is specifically aimed at the world’s poor, as it allows families to start small and expand as money allows. While many shacks and shanties grow this way, if each addition isn’t designed and built properly, this can lead to structural issues that can arise during a natural disaster. Additions to Pinwheel Houses shouldn’t suffer from these problems.

And natural disasters are part of the plan: The walls of the Pinwheel House are made of hollow brick reinforced with rebar, while the wooden-beam roof adds additional strength to the structure. It is designed to withstand a magnitude 8.0 earthquake. Given the devastation wrought by shoddy building in the wake of Sichuan’s magnitude 8.0 earthquake or Haiti’s magnitude 7.0 quake, that’s a reassuring footnote to a clever design.

The 1K House was inspired by MIT’s One Laptop Per Child project, which sought to build a portable, rugged computer for developing countries that would cost $100. The laptop project never quite reached its price target — parts simply cost too much, and its current price is estimated at just over $200. The Pinwheel House’s cost overruns reinforce the difficulties of building high-quality products at low costs. Chui said part of the added expense was because the prototype was around 300 square feet larger than his original design. (Housing bloat is something most Americans should be familiar with.) But trimming the footprint to 500 square feet would drop the costs to around $4,000, he said. Building these houses in bulk would trim even more fat off the price.

Even if the Pinwheel House is able to reach a sought-after base price of $1,000, it’ll still be a long reach for the 1.3 billion people that live on less than $1.25 per day. Perhaps governments with a little cash on hand — or a lot, like China — will take advantage of the low cost and high quality to invest in housing for their poorest citizens.

High-rises make some compelling economic sense, too: They cram a ton of floor space into expensive real estate markets like Tokyo and New York City. Economist Ed Glaeser, in his book The Triumph of Cities, goes so far as to say they’re the saviors of our cities. If you worship at the Church of Density, then skyscrapers are not just your Bible, they’re your ticket to the afterlife.

But while skyscrapers may save your soul, they won’t save the environment. Michael Mehaffy at the New Urban Network has written an extensive paper explaining why.

On a pound-for-pound basis, skyscrapers don’t make a lot of environmental sense. As the floors stack higher, the amount of concrete and steel bound up in the building increases nonlinearly, as does the energy required to make the raw materials and assemble them into final form. High-rises require 60 percent more energy per floor in raw materials than low-rise development, according to one study. And while you’d think the places would be cheaper to heat and cool, owing to shared walls, ceilings, and floors, those gains are often lost due to exposure to the wind and sun. To top it off, most high rises don’t have operable windows, meaning you can’t just crack the window to cool the place off — that air has to be conditioned.

Ah, you say, but if cities grow up, they’ll stop mowing down farms and forests as they expand endlessly outward. But skyscrapers have done a questionable job of reducing sprawl. In part, that’s because many are office buildings. Office towers do a marvelous job of concentrating brainpower downtown, but they have done little to increase the density of people living in cities. When quittin’ time comes, most office workers go home to a more thinly populated neighborhood. Writes Mehaffy:

Office buildings, of course, don’t do anything by themselves to increase residential density, and depend for many of their benefits on their location and the pattern of commuting. If they are confined to largely single-use office districts whose employees empty out in the evening, decamping to remote residential enclaves, then this is clearly not much of an ecological benefit.

An obvious solution would be to build residential towers next to office towers. But residential high-rises have their own set of problems. High-rises have also been called vertical gated-communities, isolating their wealthy residents from the neighborhoods outside. Many of the more plebeian towers were built in the 1950s and 1960s to house people displaced when neighborhoods were bulldozed to make way for freeways. They were badly neglected and quickly became symbols of urban blight.

There are other reasons why people are loath to live 50 stories above the ground. Many of us prefer to be closer to the action on the street. Families also tend to shy away from tower living, with its limited or non-existent outdoor space.

Mehaffy advocates for lower-slung, higher-density development like that found in many neighborhoods built at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. He says the “sweet spot” is around 50 people per acre, or about 32,000 people per square mile. (Think Brooklyn or Baltimore.) Beyond that point, he says the beneficial effects of density begin to level off.

It’s not clear where he got that number, but I can say it’s startlingly high: New York City has around 30,000 people per square mile. Can you hit that kind of density without stretching toward the sky? It’s possible: The city of Paris clocks in at about 54,300 people per square mile, and height restrictions have kept the height of most buildings there to five or six stories, tops. Still, New York City and central Paris are expensive places to live — not everyone can afford it. That highlights one of the confounding factors in the quest to densify cities: It drives up the cost of living. High-rises only contribute to the problem because they’re so expensive to build and maintain.

Creating dense, livable cities is a difficult problem, and difficult problems are seldom solved simply. High-rises have been pitched as that easy solution. They’re not.

That’s not to say skyscrapers don’t have a place in cities — they absolutely do, whether they house offices, condos, or shops. But they’re not a silver bullet. I’d hate to see us start stacking floor on top of floor until we’ve lost touch with the world. We’re more creative than that, right?

Image: Erich Ferdinand

Well, that’s exactly what the brave folks at Tallahassee’s StarMetro did to surly commuters one morning this summer. After decades of buses tracing the same routes from the outskirts to downtown and back, planners took the old map, threw it in the garbage, and replaced it with something they thought would more efficiently connect workers with their jobs.

Emily Badger writes for The Atlantic Cities:

The result that morning was something like chaos. But over the next few weeks, riders settled into a system that serves them in a radically new way: It actually takes them where they need to go. All of the city’s previous routes went one place: downtown. But by 2005, just 14 percent of the region’s jobs were located there. And the results of a 2009 on-board survey showed that only 6.8 percent of StarMetro’s riders were trying to get there.

Despite the best efforts of urbanists to keep jobs downtown — and despite recent news that some companies are moving back into the city from the ‘burbs — the old blueprint has been dying a slow and painful death. Its roots date back to 1826 when economist Johann Heinrich von Thünen developed a model describing which crops should be grown where based on how much it cost, and how long it took, to get those crops to market. To make money, farmers had to sell their harvest in the city, so his schematic involved a series of concentric rings emanating from the city center, with dairy farms in the innermost ring (milk and cheese are heavy) and ranches on the farthest fringe (those future hamburgers can walk to town themselves).

Of course, our man von Thünen was writing during the days when things had to be hauled cross-country via oxcart. We’ve made some improvements to transportation since then, and agriculture has gone global. But we’ve stubbornly held to the idea that the market — and jobs — ought to be downtown. It’s not that a central business district is a bad idea; it’s just that the modern service economy demands that people work all over town. And it’s the suburbs that have seen the most dramatic job growth in recent years. Couple these factors with the fluidity of the labor market and you have a workforce that demands mobility.

For many people, that means driving a car, but rerouting transit systems to more closely mirror passengers’ actual travel patterns is a sensible way to reduce car dependence. It also has the benefit of greatly shortening rides for people who are dependent on transit.

That’s not to say StarMetro’s plan went off without a hitch. There are a few people who remain royally pissed off — witness the new Twitter account, @StarmetroFail. But on the whole, StarMetro seems to be working out the kinks. The new lines no longer resemble the starburst patten that characterizes so many mass transit systems. Instead, the map looks more like a plate covered with tangled spaghetti. (Really, that’s a compliment.)

Tallahassee may be the most recent city to scrap its old bus map for a sleeker, newer model, but here’s hoping it’s not the last. As Badger’s article points out, the Brookings Institution has singled out systems in Chicago, Atlanta, and Philadelphia as failing to give commuters the routes they need.

A little common sense might take these towns a long way. As StarMero senior planner Samuel Scheib told Badger, “I’m all for urbanization, I’m all for denser places. But the reality is that people need to get to work.”

Read the full Atlantic Cities story — with before and after maps of Tallahassee’s bus system — here.

Not that kind of ghost town.Photo: Pascal Bovet

The town has yet to be built, but when it’s completed it will be a testing ground where researchers can study how, say, smart grids or intelligent traffic systems will work in the real world. The proposed $200 million project will be built by Pegasus Global Holdings, a tech incubator and consulting company, on land owned by the state of New Mexico. The exact site has yet to be determined, but the idea is to turn the region into a Silicon Valley of next-generation infrastructure companies.

Building a town like this from scratch may appear wasteful at first glance; there are plenty of existing cities that could benefit from a few next-gen retrofits. But doing so has numerous advantages. For starters, in the absence of actual residents, scientists working at the site won’t have to worry about the consequences of intentional blackouts, traffic jams, or sewage backups. New Mexico’s hosting of the project should be no surprise: This is the state that greenlit a spaceport and turned the actual ghost town of Playas into a training center for anti-terrorism operations, after all.

The Pegasus site will be open to scientists from academia, industry, and nonprofit organizations. Users will be charged fees based on usage to run and maintain the facility. Any surplus electricity, purified water, or other “utility output,” as the company calls it, will be sold back to the real, non-ghost grid. Pegasus will also benefit by identifying promising startup companies or incubating technologies that rake in profits when they come to market.

With any luck, the rest of us will benefit, too — from new infrastructure technologies that lower cities’ environmental footprints, all pre-tested and approved in an empty ghost town.

It’s no secret that cities produce fewer greenhouse-gas emissions per person than suburbs or rural areas — and some cities are better at keeping emissions down than others. Take New York City: Its dense urban structure and well-developed mass transit system keeps emissions well below somewhere like the sprawling and car-dependent Houston. But cities are more than just monolithic entities; factors like climate, manufacturing, car ownership, and wealth work differentially between cities and within city boundaries to influence greenhouse-gas emissions.

A review paper published in Environment & Urbanization dug into per capita emissions data for 100 cities from around the world to see which variables played a role. The paper’s authors also added a new twist by dissecting one city, Toronto, to see how rates varied neighborhood by neighborhood.

Zooming in from the national level to the city itself, the authors report that Toronto’s metro area has lower emissions than its home province of Ontario, which itself has lower emissions than Canada as a whole. The city itself fared better than the surrounding suburbs (not a big surprise). As they went further, they discovered enclaves of high per capita emissions even within the city center. The culprit? Wealth: Residents of tonier neighborhoods drove more and lived in older, less energy efficient housing, something preservation groups will surely be dismayed to hear.

The affluence story plays out on the global scale, too: Wealthy cities like New York, Beijing, Frankfurt, and London have much higher per capita emissions than poor cities like Dhaka in Bangladesh or Bangalore in India.

But wealth isn’t the sole the offender. Climate is a large driver, but that’s not to say we should all ditch jackets and move to the Sunbelt. For example, Boston still has lower emissions rates than Austin and Philadelphia has lower emissions than Miami. A city’s source of electricity also plays a role, as do the qualities of its workforce. Cities like San Francisco and Portland can lay down such enviable carbon footprints because they tick those boxes in just the right way. Both enjoy mild climates that all but eliminate the need for air conditioning. Both are also heavily invested in the knowledge economy. San Francisco has particularly dense development, which reduces transportation emissions, while Portland gets a large portion of its electricity from hydroelectric power.

To encourage cities to trim their per capita emissions, the paper’s authors argue that governments should look to the success they had with solid waste reduction. While it’s true that many cities succeeded in reducing the amount of trash they send to the landfill, the comparison isn’t apt at this point. Cities pay to dispose of garbage; some do so handsomely. Currently, there’s no truly global price on carbon emissions. Never underestimate the ability of money to drive change.

There is some hope, though: Because urban areas produce a large portion of global greenhouse-gas emissions, city governments can take action that national governments have been hesitant to embrace.

City bicyclists know the dangers of the door zone: In this three feet of road closest to parked cars, it’s not uncommon for careless drivers (or cops — see below) to swing their doors open without looking. The ensuing collision of metal, glass, and flesh can be disastrous, and since most bike lanes are nestled up against parked cars, the door zone also effectively cuts many bike lanes in half. There are a number of better ways to design bike lanes, but redesigning a street costs money — something most cities are short on these days.

In bike-centric cities like San Francisco, the door zone can be a big problem. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) notes that dooring is the second most common cause of injury while biking, so the agency set out to do something about it. Their economical solution involved painting a few lines to alert riders to the extent of the door zone. From the San Francisco Streets Blog:

On sections of Polk Street, the SFMTA has painted in a batch of T’s in the bike lanes that are supposed to guide bicyclists away from the door zone. While the treatment seems to be an improvement over typical door zone lanes, it also highlights how little street width is available for cyclists to ride safely.

Streetsblog San Francisco says studies performed by the SFMTA show the added lines have increased the average distance from the curb cyclists ride from 10.3 feet to 10.9 feet. While that may not seem like a lot, it was enough that the number of cyclists riding in the door zone on Howard Street, one of the trial streets, dropped from 24 percent to 10 percent. Riders on Polk Street moved from an average 10 feet to 10.4 feet from the curb, and door zone cyclists dropped from 41 percent to 30 percent.

The ideal option would be to give cyclists more of the road; cycle tracks do this while using parked cars to keep car traffic out of the bike lanes. But those require more money to implement. So until cities reconfigure streets to accommodate cycle tracks (or even wider bike lanes), these cross-hatches may be the best hope for keeping cyclists safe from the menacing thwack of the door zone.

Photo: Thomas Hawk

Three years ago California passed SB 375, a bill which calls on cities and metropolitan regions to reduce vehicle emissions by fostering denser urban areas, linking transit systems, and coordinating land use. As you might imagine, this made many Tea Partiers both apoplectic with rage and filled with fear. The rage comes from the government trying to do anything productive; the fear comes from a United Nations effort that encourages sustainable development, otherwise known as Agenda 21. 

Agenda 21 is the conspiracy theory du jour among less-grounded libertarians. The voluntary effort, they say, say proves the United Nations is out to strip our nation of its sovereignty. Naturally, this is the first step towards a worldwide totalitarian government. Organizers of planning meetings in the San Francisco Bay Area discovered regional planning is apparently a key part of this nefarious global plot. And though the Bay Area and its plan to implement SB 375 (known as One Bay Area) seems to have borne the brunt of Tea Party aggression so far, vocal and occasionally disruptive members have been popping up at planning sessions across the state.

From Josh Stephens well-researched article at the California Planning & Development Report:

At the One Bay Area meeting in Concord, they questioned presentations from the audience. An activist who goes by the username “cvminutemen” posted on YouTube a two-hour video of the entire meeting, with a preface suggesting that One Bay Area is part of a comprehensive, global conspiracy. The preface to the video characterizes smart growth, liveable communities, and social justice as attacks on “freedom,” “your prosperity,” “your property rights,” and “the American dream.” And it ironically questions planning that claims to serve “the greater good.”

But that’s not the only irony. The Tea Party activists also fear that One Bay Area, and SB 375 in particular, will do irreparable damage to their suburban and exurban lifestyles. In reality, the bill will likely have the opposite effect, encouraging people to stay in cities, thus freeing the suburbs from the travails of population growth –  something Randy Rentschler, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation commission, pointed out.

“The people who reside in less dense areas would probably have figured out, if they had allowed themselves, that we’re not planning on doing anything to Clayton,” said Rentschler, in reference to a city on the edge of the Central Valley. “The cities are taking things that you don’t want.”

That simple logic doesn’t seem to have fazed the ironclad Kool-Aid of Tea Partiers, though. Their distrust of the government has trickled down to the local level (if it wasn’t there already). Hopefully planners can still hear the voices of reason above the noise.

Yorkville: a quiet rural community until the McMansions sprouted.Photo: Liza P

Perhaps nowhere is this blight more evident than in the seat of Illinois’ Kendall County: Yorkville, situated 50 miles from Chicago’s Loop. Kendall County led the pack when it came to exurban growth in the 2000s. It was the fastest growing county in the country — its 110 percent growth rate outpaced even the surging southern sprawlburbias. Dirk Johnson at the Chicago News Cooperative details Kendall County’s remarkable fall:

In 2009 and 2010, the top foreclosure rates in Illinois were in Kendall, Kane, and Will Counties. On the new suburban frontier along the farthest fringes of the Chicago region, where cheap land and rising prices once triggered a rush of buyers, some newer developments have become ghost towns in places like Yorkville, Frankfort, Sugar Grove, and Hampshire.

Instead of corn, farm fields sprouted McMansions. They emerged wherever speculation was highest, like small shoots in anticipation of rain. But in some places, the rain never came.

Fuel prices soared, housing demand tanked, and Kendall County’s growth stalled. It sounds like a tale of deserved comeuppance for hubris, but the community simply responded to the signals the market gave them. The tone of the story takes a turn when you realize the people who live here — who always lived here — are the ones that will suffer the most. Workaday folks who bought at the wrong time are now trapped in their homes. Kids who once had time for extracurriculars now have to work a job to help the family. The school district built a gleaming $183-million high school to accommodate the crush of students that never came. As a result, the district has had to cut expenses even more than most.

It’s easy, in hindsight, to harshly judge exurbs like Kendall County, but the reality is, they didn’t have time to prepare. The housing boom hit them like a gold rush, and their governments and people were ill-prepared. Towns like Yorkville, which started the decade with just over 6,000 people, do not have the planning mechanisms in place to properly deal with the nearly 18,000 people it has now.

Such growth is usually dependent on an outside factor: the city. There simply aren’t enough jobs in those towns to make mixed-use development happen. The story of Yorkville is a cautionary tale for small towns on the fringe of metropolitan areas: Have a plan in place. No one wants to become an unsustainable exurb, but few prepare for the possibility. Explosive growth isn’t always a panacea. Allow too much and it’ll not only ruin a small town’s charming character — it could kill its future.

The Midtown Greenway in Minneapolis.Photo: livewomba

These accolades aren’t exactly unexpected: Minneapolis has put a lot of effort into bolstering its bike-friendliness. Money from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program has given Minneapolis — along with Columbia, Mo., Marin County, Calif., and Sheboygan County, Wis. — a total of $25 million to improve biking and walking infrastructure. But the city deserves much credit for its laser-like focus on improving biking conditions.

We can trace much of the city’s bike renaissance to the Midtown Greenway, a 5.5-mile former railroad opened in 2000 that has since has become a non-automotive superhighway. Cyclists and pedestrians can hop on and off at various points with ease, and the striking Martin Olav Sabo Bridge sends cyclists over busy Hiawatha Avenue. The path even has its own dedicated bike shop complete with bike parking, water, bathrooms, and showers for commuters. Basically, it’s a cyclist’s dream.

Beyond the Greenway, Minneapolis has followed a 10-step program of sorts to guide its bike-friendly improvements. Many steps — like dedicated bike lanes, lanes buffered from traffic, and plenty of bike parking — are obvious choices, but others draw on ideas culled from around the country.

One of my favorites is their adoption of bicycle boulevards (which I remember fondly from my time in Berkeley). Bike boulevards route bicycle traffic down nearly deserted side streets, where car traffic is kept low by including speed humps and “diverters” that block cars but allow bikes to pass through. At busy intersections, bikes even get special sensors beneath the pavement to change traffic signals. They’re a great way to get across town in a hurry.

On busier roads where there’s no space for dedicated bike lanes, Minneapolis has painted “advisory” bike lanes. These lanes are demarcated by dashed lines and run on both sides of the street. Since this takes away space from existing car lanes, the city simply removed the old center line. This gives bikes visual priority on the street, and the narrowed center lane slows car traffic. Where possible, the city has reduced the number of regular lanes on some roads to widen bike lanes.

With all these pieces in place, Minneapolis’ seems well-poised to overtake Portland as the country’s top bike city. Though Portland can still boast that 5.8 percent of its commuting trips happen on a bike, Minneapolis is catching up with an impressive 3.8-percent bike commuter rate. The improvements also encourage more errands by bike, and to lure the uncertain, bike lanes and paths also tie into the city’s extensive park system. It’s taken a lot of effort to get to this point (including lots of political support from the mayor’s office), but Minneapolis is getting ever closer to becoming a two-wheeled paradise.

Retrofitting suburbia to support mixed-use and car-free lifestyles is a sticky wicket. Rambling ranch homes and wide-wide-wide roads seem to discourage the walkability and local commerce people desire. But that hasn’t stopped architects, designers, and the like from pitching their proposals. The latest comes from Dutch design group Droog and New York City-based architectural firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The pair set out to retrofit the most suburban of suburbias — Levittown, N.Y.

Most suburban retrofit plans involve plopping accessory buildings in front of or behind houses, or stretching buildings’ original floor plans to add living or commercial space. Droog and Diller Scofidio + Renfro tick both of those boxes, but theirs is more design exercise than serious proposal, so they added a healthy dose of whimsy. Proposed additions to the neighborhood include a literal garage band, a “driveway drive-through,” and a home theater that caters to more than one family.

Greg Lindsay interviewed the project’s masterminds for Fast Co. Design:

“What we think, from looking at New York City, is that this model might be outmoded,” said Diller Scofidio + Renfro partner Charles Renfro at a Saturday morning symposium on the project in Tribeca. “Why not allow people to be in charge of their own futures? As a first step, we thought these residents could be motivated to find their inner service providers,” which led the team to Levittown. “Anybody can be a service provider, and anybody can opt into a service,” at least in New York.

The unique part of this proposed retrofit is its added dimension of entrepreneurship. Many retrofit plans address the physical space, but don’t offer suggestions as to exactly how that space could be used. A storefront could be a coffee shop or clothing boutique, but it’s usually pitched as a simple storefront. The specifics are left as an exercise to the imagined inhabitants. Droog and Diller Scofidio + Renfro go the extra mile.

Many of their suggested applications seem pie-in-the-sky fanciful, but they’re really just subtle masks for very realistic applications. The garage band could easily be rented to creative types, or maybe mechanics, as a literal garage for fixing cars and bikes. The library could easily morph into a bookstore or coffee shop, while the driveway drive-through concept is a suburban take on the food-truck craze that has swept through cities across the country. The front-yard farm is downright practical, even unimaginative, given how popular the idea has become. But the way it blends with the nearby “yard market” is particularly clever. Adding small corner stores like this would do wonders for suburban walkability, and having them buy from neighborhood farms would be a great way to keep it all in the neighborhood.

The Droog and Diller Scofidio + Renfro thought experiment is a nifty set of proposals, and I particularly like the witty way they weave small business into the neighborhood. We need more thought experiments like this. After all, retrofitting suburbia is not going to be easy.