Learning from Savannah

Eric Orozco has been mining some valuable lessons from the City of Savannah for over nine months now, making his blog series one of the longest-running and insightful I've read. My only experience with Savannah consists of a three-day stay in an historic district Bed and Breakfast, filled with hours of wandering and eating and more wandering. I came away with a fascination for the city and the intangible sense of magic everyone attributes to it. Eric's posts help me put words on some of this.

I don't have much to add beyond attempting a general summary of the posts thus far, in hopes they will keep coming!

(By the way, read the posts and expect to be drawn from Savannah into meaty philosophical dialogue and then back again.)

1. Odonomia and the Garden of Good and Evil.  When it comes to shaping cities, we like to classify our approaches as either form-based or use-based, when in reality this taxonomy breaks down on a number of levels. Most of the activity of real city building happens "illicitly," that is outside of the neat taxonomy we envision and apply in advance to a place. The unique wards of Savannah are an example of a rigid order that exhibits a wonderful diversity in both form and function in it's application throughout the city. I can't resist the money quote:

"It is as if the Platonic pattern from the mind of Oglethorpe (conceived for reasons very different than Savannah's needs today) was dropped into a fecund soup and allowed to copulate with the wonderful imaginations of every square district."

2. Savannah's Kind of Blue. Miles Davis, like the city itself, creates beauty by improvising on theme.

3. The Invisible Signs of Savannah. One of the aspects of Savannah's attractiveness is what it lacks: street signals and signs. Compared to a similarly connected street grid in Charlotte, a much lower percentage of Savannah's intersections have signs or signals. Instead, this city allows "the intimate scales of its fine-grain environment to dictate traffic control."

4. What the Savannah Square can do better than the Roundabout. While roundabouts have been a trend over the last few years for regulating traffic flow at intersections, the Savannah square is a similar alternative better suited for multimodal and urban settings. This is a brilliant post with diagrams that just needs to be read in it's entirety. The conclusion,

"Consider employing the Savannah square-flow strategy as smarter way to handle traffic flow while promoting a density-efficient land use mixture and bike and pedestrian friendliness. I would only use a roundabout when at least one of the intersecting streets (preferably both) is a thoroughfare or high-volume traffic street. Otherwise, I'd prefer to square it."

5. Admiring a Beauty. Like the medieval penchant for systematic order, the street grid of Savannah holds together nicely while creating a truly immersive experience for those traveling through it.

6. From Savannah to the Burbs: The American Art of Subdivision.The American suburb presents a puzzling question. How did a country that praises non-conformity and individual expression end up with an overall landscape of sameness? And what drives us to cluster around people like ourselves? The large-scale repetition of form has deep roots in American culture, and Savannah itself has its origins in a strictly egalitarian subdivision of land. Every settler was given a "tything" of 10 lots of 60' by 90' each, compactly arranged in town and a 45-acre allotment parcel for farming outside of town.

Savannah was built specifically to reproduce itself in a cellular fashion at a regional level,

"Carefully inspecting the arrangement of the 45-acre farm tracts, however, one can discern that they were arranged in a manner to encourage the future formation of hamlets and townships in the countryside, suggesting a fractal strategy of expansion for the entire colonization scheme of Georgia."

 7. "Not For Us But For Others" -- The Humanitarian Roots of America's First Subdivision. The original planners of Savannah must have had Chistopher Wren's London in mind as they laid out the street pattern. The British Enlightenment led to forms of city planning that were open to various possibilities of adjustment yet tightly geometric at the same time.

One difference between Savannah and the contemporary subdivision is the altruistic intent that the original trustees committed to while engaging in design. The town was explicitly for the poor and religiously persecuted.

"We would not be exaggerating to claim that Savannah is veritably America's first planned "habitat for humanity". The city was founded to give down-and-out British folks a second chance at life and prosperity."

The original Savannah had no center. Each of Oglethorpe's wards stood alone, and no hierarchy existed between them, keeping with the underpinnings of England's nascent movement toward liberalism. Interestingly, Oglethorpe himself never accepted a permanent lot, preferring to reside in tent directly along the river. He truly wanted it to be a city "not for us but for others."

8. John Locke's Savannah. The form of Savannah is not only shaped by the liberal ideals of equal opportunity for everyone, but also the everyday give and take of trades and services inherent to a dense urban marketplace. This type of human interaction should make us cautious about criticism of the suburbs on the basis of appearances of homogeneity and segregation. The real driver of community is not merely proximity of homes to each other - some urban areas can be as stratified as any suburb - but the existence of real people who serve as connectors across social groups. These connections can be surprisingly active in many of today's suburbs.

Following the lead of Savannah can help planners retrofit existing suburbs and, at the same time, help our urban areas become friendlier to the demographic conventionally attracted to suburbs. The city can teach us how to mix equal economic opportunity with truly vibrant community.

The setting of a food revolution

After getting recommendations from three friends independently I felt obliged to check out Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution (It's still on hulu until June 5th). Definitely well worth the 4+ hours. You've got the drama of clashing personalities and the group hug scenes perfected by a decade of reality TV, but this show simply has the traction to carry real change beyond the scope of the show itself. I've decided it's not actually reality TV at all, but a documentary of a grassroots movement in progress.

Could this be a revolution that is televised after all? (that is, if you can look passed the irony of sponsorship from Healthy Choices pre-packaged dinners). The prize selection committee at TED seemed to think so, and Jamie Oliver's acceptance speech is a good introduction to what he's up to.

Pullman Square in Huntington, West Virginia. Flickr Credit: Sarah.WV

What I'm interested in is the deeply place-based strategy he has taken. He recognizes that eating well is not only an individual choice, but it's also profoundly influenced by the structure of the community you find yourself in. Do the markets stock healthy food at reasonable prices? Can you get to them? Do schools serve genuine food? Is there an overall culture of self-reliant food preparation? Seeing the problem this way naturally lends itself to picking one place, Huntington, West Virginia, getting every local institution on board, building enthusiasm and the synergy of community action, and finally creating a model city.

This movement needed a physical space to launch from. It needed Jamie's Kitchen (now Huntington's Kitchen) to be, not only a useful space for gathering, but an architectural expression of the whole idea. It is noteworthy that he chose the very center of the city, right off the beautiful Pullman Square on 3rd Avenue, for the location.

When I drove across the country the summer before last, I made a point to ask everyone I met this question: "where is the very center of your town?"

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In some towns, people would be puzzled by the whole concept. There was nothing to latch on to. Maybe the Walmart, but probably not. In other towns, the response would be immediate, and it was always some place they were proud of. It was a public living room for the whole community. I stopped briefly in Huntington but unfortunately never had a chance to talk to anyone.  I have a feeling they may have said Pullman Square if I had.

Jamie also knows that public space is the lifeblood of any grassroots movement. He closed down the street out in front of the kitchen and set up forty tables for one big cooking lesson. He organized a flash mob in the central gathering area of Marshall University to drum up interest from students. Once again, the center counts. The airwaves and cables could get his message into every private living room and every driver's seat, but the true source of energy happened when crowds united in one place. The fact that this occurred outside on public streets meant the whole city was the arena.

Right, I know the show is really about food. But it's also about place. These are the questions that I'm naturally asking while I watched. How can we physically structure our communities so that someone like Jamie can come in and have a fighting chance at starting a revolution?

Two responses to the terrorism question

Both the New York response and the Washington response to security threats just happen to be on display in the same week ...

The New York response to terrorism has been "see something, say something." These were the words that the T-shirt vendor who alerted a mounted police officer of the smoking SUV told reporters as he stepped into a taxi cab. As Fred Kaplan points out in Slate, this is not unlike the message of the great New Yorker Jane Jacobs.

"Jane Jacobs observed that sidewalks and their users are "active participants in the drama of civilization versus barbarism" (by "barbarism," she meant crime) and that a continuously busy sidewalk is a safe sidewalk, because those who have business there—"the natural proprietors of the street"—provide "eyes upon the street...

This may explain why busy areas like Times Square aren't attacked by terrorists more often. The crowds make them tempting targets: lots of people mean lots of potential victims and subsequent media attention. But those same crowds—especially the regulars, who are always looking out on the street—make an attack harder to conceal and, therefore, to pull off."

The Washington response is the opposite. It is to keep people out of sensitive areas entirely. This is what happened yesterday when the decision was made to close the front doors of the U.S. Supreme Court. Now the public will have to enter through a secured underground entrance to the side. Justices Breyer and Ginsburg were not amused.

"To many members of the public, this Court’s main entrance and front steps are not only a means to, but also a metaphor for, access to the Court itself.

This is why, even though visitors will remain able to leave via the front entrance, I find dispiriting the Court’s decision to refuse to permit the public to enter. I certainly recognize the concerns identified in the two security studies that led to this recent decision (which reaffirmed a decision made several years ago). But potential security threats will exist regardless of which entrance we use. And, in making this decision, it is important not to undervalue the symbolic and historic importance of allowing visitors to enter the Court after walking up Gilbert’s famed front steps."

I'm not trying to suggest that one is better than the other. How would I know? Times Square is a target because of its many people, and the Courthouse is a target because of its symbolism (and the Justices themselves). It makes sense that different questions would yield different answers.

American [new urbanist] Makeover

Excellent video series. It's a viral self-fundraising campaign that depends on building support as more episodes are filmed. I'm looking forward to its continuation. (ht Smart growth America)

"American Makeover is a six-part web series on new urbanism, the antidote to sprawl. We need backers - please make a donation to help greenlight this series!  Episode 1 was filmed on location in Atlanta, Georgia and Glenwood Park, a new urbanist influenced neighborhood near downtown Atlanta."

Urban places and authentic marketing

This month's Harvard Business Review features a story on the many businesses that are deciding to move back to the city. A few decades after the great push to relocate to the suburbs, the tables have turned as the business climate in general has changed.

What's intriguing about this story is not simply the locational decision-making, but how the urban and the sprawl environment lead to very different ways of doing business. For example, take the standard retail or food service operation. If you've set up shop in sprawl, you have a matter of seconds to make your potential customer want to stop and come in. This is simply because he is traveling 45 miles an hour and experiencing the outdoors through a windshield.

This forces you to decouple the marketing from the actual customer interface and reconnect it back again through branding. The hope is that Joe driver has built enough of a positive experience through television commercials and other ads beforehand that they all come rushing back to him the moment he sees your brand hoisted on a sign above the highway. This process tends toward economies of scale in a big way, hence the dominant position of franchises and multinational companies.

The customer interface in an urban environment has the ability to be more prolonged and textured. The proverbial window shopping experience piques the imagination of customers by putting actual products right in front of them. The window display can be changed, so the experience changes with time. The chalk board announces the special of the day. Perhaps there are smells wafting out from the bakery, or the familiar clanging of glasses alerting the customer to the bustle of a restaurant inside. The retail environment can spill out onto the public realm and beckon passers-by to ease themselves in, something William H. Whyte called the "sensory street." Most importantly, the customers themselves are on display, either siting outside at cafe tables or browsing the goods in the window. People are attracted to the hub-bub.

The whole urban marketing experience is more relational, playing off both the merchant-client relationship and the client-client relationships. Branding may always be important for establishing trust and connecting experiences to each other, but in cities that function as cities it's not the only game in town. This arrangement allows local businesses to vie head-to-head with the major franchises.

The article concludes:

"In many ways, New Urbanism and the trends it captures are part of broader recent changes businesses already accept: the shift to an experience economy, consumers’ and employees’ demands for greater corporate social responsibility, an emphasis on work/life balance, and the importance of interaction between companies and their customers. The demographic aspect is simply the newest part of an ongoing conversation. Companies that recognize the larger trend, however, and seize the opportunities that it presents will contribute to its social impact—and may gain a competitive advantage in the process."

The H&T Index is not "muddled" at all

Wendell Cox thinks he has poked a hole in the Housing and Transportation Index from the Center of Neighborhood Technology:

"The H and T Index is particularly susceptible to misinterpretation by ideological interests contemptuous of America's suburban lifestyle, who would use public policy to force people to live in higher densities. While the H and T Index reports data at the neighborhood level, it is not a neighborhood index. However, the H and T Index does not compare neighborhood housing and transportation costs with neighborhood incomes. Rather, the H and T Index uses the metropolitan median household income."

Cox thinks a true "neighborhood index," as he phrases it, would grab the income number for each block group instead of fixing it for the whole metro area. This would be an accurate portrayal of the housing and transportation cost burden being felt by the current residents of the block group.

However, Cox's alternative quickly descends into absurdity as a measure of affordability, which is the question that an affordability index is naturally asking. For instance, it's quite possible that Cox would have to consider the Beverly Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles County to be affordable, simply because the preponderance of it's uber-weathy denizens happen to have plenty of money to afford living there. We all know that different income groups separate themselves out according to their ability to pay - indeed this is the definition of exclusivity - but the point of the affordability question is to ask how the rest of us would fare in the particular location. Someone finds a job (income is now fixed) and wants to know where within the metro area she can afford to live. That's the question being asked.

All of the peer-review mechanisms we have don't share Cox's problem with the methodology. From the CNT report on the index, Penny Wise Pound Fuelish.

"The H+T Index represents a body of research spanning 20 years that has evolved from location efficiency research in the late 1990s to its vetting in 2008 by transportation experts and subsequent publication in the Transportation Research Record, the Journal of the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies."

Perhaps Cox is so diligently watching out for those "ideological interests contemptuous of America's suburban lifestyle" that he doesn't want to see even accurate data give them any crazy ideas. Besides, as Cox sees it, automobiles are about to get a whole lot more affordable for Americans anyway:

“Transportation costs will be reduced in the future by the far more fuel efficient vehicles being required by Washington.”

I'm tempted to just let this quote sit as a beautiful testament to the desperation of Cox's ideological position, but I can't pass up the chance to hand this one over to Michael Lewyn.

"In other words, don't worry about Americans being impoverished by the cost of a car for every man, woman, and 16-year old in the House: the technological miracle of fuel efficiency will save us.  

Now, this argument has a grain of truth: new EPA regulations will require the average vehicle to get 35 miles per gallon by 2016, so cars will become somewhat more fuel efficient if next year's Republican Congress or the federal courts don't get in the way.  But even so, the benefits of fuel efficiency may be canceled out by gasoline price rises - and even if they don't, gasoline costs comprise only about 30 percent of vehicle-related expenses. In 2007 the average household spent $2384 on gasoline and motor oil, $3244 on car purchases, and $2592 on other vehicle-related expenses ...

Tomorrow's Wonder Cars of the Future will drive the problem away."

Libraries as food desert oases

NPR reports on a clever strategy being rolled out in Baltimore to provide fresh food to underserved neighborhoods. It's being dubbed the Virtual Supermarket. Two library branches have been selected in urban locations where the nearest grocery store is basically inaccessible to anyone without a vehicle. The city public health department helps residents place food orders online using the library computers, and the bag of groceries is delivered the next day from a local grocer.

This program is up and running with the help of a $60,000 federal stimulus grant. According to the NPR story, there are currently a couple of dozen subscribers. This number may grow as people wade into the technology.

There's so much to appreciate about this innovative approach to food access. Delivery costs are held down, because the the orders are aggregated for each day and condensed into a single drop-off point. Libraries get to broaden their horizons a bit, a trend Wendy Waters discussed a little while ago. Some more assistance with computers can only help knock the digital divide down a notch. And, of course, more people get to enjoy the nutritional food at fair prices most of us take for granted.

The department plans to expand Virtual Supermarket to other sites with additional programming, such as cooking demonstrations. Apparently, other cities are watching all of this very closely. Philadelphia has long been known for being on the forefront of food access solutions, but it looks like Baltimore is finding it's own niche.

The following map is from Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. It's their first swat at measuring food deserts in the city.