Episode Summary
- The MIXING middle gives communities an opportunity to build wealth, increase density, and mix the use of their communities.
- This, leads to #2, more interesting street scapes and public areas creating the crucible of public life for people to show off and be seen.
- Sprawl affects us all. And communities are still trying to figure out how to balance creating the right infrastructure investments while also building community.
Links To Sources
Why did front yard business become illegal? (8 min vid)
And a follow up: the mixing middle (Review competition criteria - Canada)
How one award highlights the debate on the future of transportation (4 min read)
Musician, Brian Eno on street design. The image alone will get you thinking. (33 min read: paywall possible)
Outside The Episode
Rather than an entire front yard, what about a local coffee shop on the corner?
An image of the Interstate 15 project in the city of Lehi, UT. This project took home the top prize in the Quality of Life/Community Development category in September 2021.
Transcript
Hey everybody it's Kyle. Where, on this podcast, I share, discuss, ponder, and try to connect some dots through the best content I've discovered each week related to urban planning, architecture, and cities.
Ultimately, trying to learn, what are the patterns of development?
I've been spending more time on Youtube. I don't usually consume content there...but for some reason I've been doing that lately. Maybe it's because my significant other has been spending more time at work lately.
Anyway anyway...
I shared the Montreal Video and the pedestrian streets last week. This week I stumbled through...across..."about here" a channel about urbanism. Looks like they're based in Vancouver. And the latest video has 811k views. That's a lot of eyeballs on an urban planning video.
It's titled why did we make front yard businesses illegal. And it's a great video. For a lot of reasons. Well edited, he's got a funky intro theme, it's well produced, there's some fun character showing through. But the content, the message is good. I'll outline my key takeaways here:
-We've talked alot out the missing middle here as a pattern of development. I think it's more of a missing pattern of development, one we want to bring back.
And in this video they talk about the MIXING Middle. How adding businesses into the front yards of houses can increase density, restore lost urban fabric, and build wealth for people in the community.
-Then as the video title implies, after showing example after example of all these ecclectic little spaces in Vancouver, the video talks about why they're illegal.
And it's set backs, and an attempt to preserve wealth in the community. Lawns used to be the symbol of wealth. If you didn't need space you owned to be productive, you'd made it. So as the city...or cities everywhere...adopted set backs a rule that required houses be so far away from the curb it essentially eliminated the ability for someone to put a business in their front yard.
Part of the reasons set backs where appealing at the turn of the 20th century was to help ensure cleaner streets, leave room for the possibility of expansion and with the extra space you can get more sunlight into buildings. Unfortunately the set backs not only eliminated the opportunity for business to be in front of houses (the early day "mixed use" zoning) it also made for street scapes that weren't scaled for humans but were scaled for cars.
Which leads to the next article.
An interview between Brian Hill (a Swedish Urban Strategist) and musician Brian Eno. Brian Eno is well known in musical circles. He's probably best know for his work as an ambient musical artist he's also the guy who made the windows 95 start up sound.
Brian Eno, describes him self as a "non-musician". I'd describe him as a lateral thinker. And this guy has shared his perspective on street design. I'll share a couple of highlights here:
- Think like a gardener not an architect by designing beginnings not endings.
- Artists are to cities what worms are to soil.
- Places which accommodate the very young and the very old are loved by everybody else too.
- Make places for people to look at each other and to show off to each other.
- Shared public space is the crucible of community.
There's.
Just.
So much wisdom there. It's beautiful. The perspective of the gardener. Design for the beginning, not the end.
Also the shared public space is the crucible. We talked about that last week the women of Montreal and Paris running political platforms on that exact principle. How do we reclaim space we already have and make it more accessible for the young and the old. It's just too good.
Ok. Ok. Enough fan boy action.
Let's look at the other side of the coin.
An article from the Washington Post by Ian Duncan.
I'm quoting the work from Mr. Duncan now:
"For years, drivers heading through the booming Utah city of Lehi would run into a bottleneck as Interstate 15 narrowed from six lanes in each direction to four. But last year a project to widen the busy freeway — a top priority of local leaders — was completed.
When a national group representing state highway officials presented the project with an award for community development and quality of life, citing its inclusion of pedestrian and bike paths, it looked like validation for a job well done."
This is Kyle again...when you look at pictures of this thing. It looks like...a huge 12 lane high way. It's dirt and asphalt and car.
Top twitter comments of the work: This is like giving the death start a quality of life award for its great work with alderaan.
Another twitter comment: I think I'm going to need the definition of "life" and "quality" from you.
This award, and the project, encapsulate the current debate over infrastructure in our county. Critics call it absurd for how little it's actually contributing to community (it's not building community, it's just moving people through it faster).
Advocates for the project point to the fact that commute times have been reduced.
Critics say just because you include a bike lane doesn't mean it's "better" who would be biking there?
Local leaders worried that if they didn't fix the traffic problem it would hamper growth in their community.
This is what happens when you get sprawl. And of course it will be interesting to see how low commute times stay considering the concept of induced demand.
Which leads us to our 3 patterns of the week:
- The MIXING middle gives communities an opportunity to build wealth, increase density, and mix the use of their communities.
- This, leads to #2, more interesting street scapes and public areas creating the crucible of public life for people to show off and be seen
- Sprawl affects us all. And communities are still trying to figure out how to balance creating the right infrastructure investments while also building community.
That's all for this week...
Talk to y'all soon.
