1) Self-organizing. The urban planner Donald Shoup's anti-car, anti-regulation approach is understood to reflect the scientific theory of self-organizing systems.
2) Autonomous buildings. Houses and other buildings should strive not only to be energy self-sufficient, but self-sufficient in terms of producing and processing water and waste water. The goal is minimal use of the grid. This would conform to the theory of self-organizing systems.
3) High density and mixed use. These two terms imply one another. Mixed use also accords with self-organization.
4) Location. The best places for land development are in the dry, arid regions. For example, southern California is the ideal environment for land development, whereas northern California should be more off limits.
5) Rewilding. To some extent, places like northern California should be gradually reconverted to wilderness.
6) Beauty. Buildings should be more than beige boxes.
7) Durability. As in northern Europe, buildings should be built to last for centuries, unlike the fiberboard McMansions of the United States.
Self-organization and urban planning.
Self-organization is a process where some form of overall order or coordination arises out of the local interactions between smaller component parts of an initially disordered system.
The process of self-organization can be spontaneous, and it is not necessarily controlled by any auxiliary agent outside of the system. It is often triggered by random fluctuations that are amplified by positive feedback. The resulting organization is wholly decentralized or distributed over all the components of the system.
In effect, a relatively small set of local rules can foster a stable, even sophisticated system.
The idea of self-organized systems was previously introduced and applied to a couple of different aspects of urban planning.
These were, specifically, parking and autonomous houses.
It was argued that the urban planner Donald Shoup's counterintuitive idea that parking should be deregulated in order to promote walkable cities is a classic case of a self-organized system. Such a system was explained as being largely self-regulating, with a minimum set of rules.
It was likewise argued that building codes should be redesigned to de-emphasize restrictions on height and size. Residential structures would instead be required to be autonomous, or largely off the grid in terms of resource consumption. That is, buildings would be required to produce much of their own electricity and to have starkly low levels of energy consumption; likewise with water consumption; moreover, buildings would to a greater extent than they do now also deal internally with the outputs that they produce (e.g., rain water that otherwise goes into storm drains, and sewerage).
This is not so much de-regulation as it would be re-regulation. For example, if buildings were required to be largely off the grid, this would limit their size.
LOCATION
One cardinal rule for development might be that it should be built in areas that have the sparsest signs of natural life.
For example, here is a map of global rainfall patterns.
In the United States, the "best" place for living would be the driest places, which are in the Rocky Mountain states and the southwest.
Here's a glimpse of what land development in the desert looks like.
Las Vegas:
California:
Dubai:
Of course, these desert areas have their own ecosystems, but building in the desert minimizes environmental impact.
What to do with the un-built land?
Rewilding
Rewilding is large-scale conservation aimed at restoring and protecting natural processes and core wilderness areas, providing connectivity between such areas, and protecting or reintroducing apex predators and keystone species. Rewilding projects may require ecological restoration or wilderness engineering, particularly to restore connectivity between fragmented protected areas, and reintroduction of predators where extirpated.
The warmest and rainiest regions of the US should be rewilded. That would be the southeast, but also northern California, and to a lesser degree, the Pacific northwest and the northeastern United States.
Durability
To understand the need for ultra-durable buildings, one must first understand the concept of “embodied energy”.
Embodied energy is the sum of all the energy required to produce any goods or services, considered as if that energy was incorporated or 'embodied' in the product itself. The concept can be useful in determining the effectiveness of energy-producing or energy-saving devices, or the "real" replacement cost of a building, and, because energy-inputs usually entail greenhouse gas emissions, in deciding whether a product contributes to or mitigates global warming. One fundamental purpose for measuring this quantity is to compare the amount of energy produced or saved by the product in question to the amount of energy consumed in producing it.
Embodied energy is not just numerical figure of total energy inputs into a product, but the method of estimating that number.
The history of constructing a system of accounts which records the energy flows through an environment can be traced back to the origins of accounting itself.
Embodied energy is an accounting method which aims to find the sum total of the energy necessary for an entire product life-cycle. Determining what constitutes this life-cycle includes assessing the relevance and extent of energy into raw material extraction, transport, manufacture, assembly, installation, disassembly, deconstruction and/or decomposition as well as human and secondary resources. Different methodologies produce different understandings of the scale and scope of application and the type of energy embodied.
Embodied energy is crucial to understanding energy inputs over a building’s lifespan. One irony is that because more resources are being invested today in making buildings energy efficient, those buildings are more expensive to construct, and thus have higher levels of embodied energy.
Although most of the focus for improving energy efficiency in buildings has been on their operational emissions, it is estimated that about 30% of all energy consumed throughout the lifetime of a building can be in its embodied energy (this percentage varies based on factors such as age of building, climate, and materials). In the past, this percentage was much lower, but as much focus has been placed on reducing operational emissions (such as efficiency improvements in heating and cooling systems), the embodied energy contribution has come much more into play. Examples of embodied energy include: the energy used to extract raw resources, process materials, assemble product components, transport between each step, construction, maintenance and repair, deconstruction and disposal. As such, it is important to employ a whole-life carbon accounting framework in analyzing the carbon emissions in buildings.
The price of a product tends to be directly proportional to its embodied energy. One irony of this is that electric cars tend to cost more, and so they have higher initial energy inputs (embodied energy).
The longer a product lasts, the more its embodied energy is, in a sense, amortized.
The same might be said of renewable energy resources. An array of solar panels might cost $10,000 and last for 30 years. In a sense, those panels represent $10,000 of carbon entering the atmosphere in the form of the embodied energy; yet if those panels pay for themselves in ten years, over the next 20 years they will preclude $20,000 worth of carbon from entering the atmosphere.
Likewise, a concrete home might have higher energy inputs in its construction than a wooden house. But the concrete home might last for centuries, precluding further embodied energy inputs.
In Japan, homes are not built to last for a long time. This is both a financial and environmental problem.
In Western countries, a home is typically an investment that most people expect to one day sell at a profit. In Japan, a house is a consumer good that rapidly depreciates in value, like a car. Because Japanese house hunters prize new construction, they will pay a premium for land, but build their own home on it.
S-House architect Yuusuke Karasawa said the average life of a Japanese house is actually about 15 years. “Fundamentally, Japanese people do not like secondhand houses,” he said.
It has been attributed to multiple sources: The relative high cost of land in Japan, which leaves little money left over for a substantial home; the historic disposability of light, wooden houses designed for a country prone to earthquakes; the poor quality and small size of homes built during Japan’s boom years from the 1950s to the 1970s; ever-changing safety regulations; the human tendency to imagine that something of a previous owner’s personality adheres to an object, which is an intense feeling in Japan; the powerful desire to express oneself uniquely in one’s personal life as an escape from a disciplined, regimented society; all of these reasons combine in a self-fulfilling prophecy of rapid home obsolescence.
Embodied energy is also a challenge for public policy in terms of infrastructure and facilities.
In the case of Australia, during a ten-year drought, the government spent more than $10 billion constructing desalination plants. But when the drought ended, those plants were mothballed. Environmentalists heaved a sigh of relief for the petroleum that would not have to be burned in order to run the plants.
But that misses the point. In terms of embodied energy, in a sense, $10 billion worth of carbon was poured into the atmosphere to build those unused plants.
In terms of neglecting the reality of embodied energy, another problematic public policy was the "Car Allowance Rebate System" (CARS), colloquially known as "Cash for Clunkers", which lasted throughout July, 2009.
Vehicle must be less than 25 years old on the trade-in date.
Only the purchase or 5 year minimum lease of new vehicles qualify.
Generally, trade-in vehicles must get a weighted combined average rating of 18 or fewer miles per gallon (some very large pickup trucks and cargo vans have different requirements).
Trade-in vehicles must be registered and insured continuously for the full year preceding the trade-in.
Trade-in vehicles must be in driveable condition.
The program ran from July 1, 2009 until August 24, 2009
The program requires the scrapping of the eligible trade-in vehicle and that the dealer disclose to the customer an estimate of the scrap value of the trade-in. The scrap value, however minimal, will be in addition to the rebate, and not in place of the rebate.
The new car bought under the plan must have a suggested retail price of no more than $45,000, and for passenger automobiles, the new vehicle must have a combined fuel economy value of at least 22 mpg.
Here is the eligibility criteria:
One problem is that the description above of trade-in vehicles is that they were not really "clunkers". Some were relatively new cars. That they were SUVs or trucks that got poorer mileage than the vehicles that replaced them does not take into consideration the energy that the so-called "clunkers" embodied. In some cases, the government might have been effectively subsidizing the dumping of more carbon into the atmosphere.
The issue of embodied energy is overlooked in the construction of nuclear power plants.
The cost of a large nuclear power plant is about $10 billion. That's a lot of carbon that is produced building such a plant, even though the plant may not be producing greenhouse gases as a bi-product of generating electricity.
Silicon Valley
Land development in Silicon Valley would be a test case of these principles.
CUPERTINO, Calif. — Silicon Valley is bent on disrupting the world. Its products affect how millions upon millions of people live and work. But when it comes to the physical space that many technologists call home, there are increasing demands to leave things alone.
The heart of Silicon Valley is a 75-mile strip of land anchored by San Francisco at one end and San Jose at the other. In between is a suburbia strewn with corporate campuses and the estates of those who run them. Congested and forbiddingly expensive, it is a region choking on its own success.
There has been a backlash in Silicon Valley against further land development.
“Silicon Valley has been flashing a ‘vacancy’ sign for decades — come here and build a company,” said Larry A. Rosenthal, a specialist in land use and urban policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “Now some people are saying, ‘We’ve hit our limit.’ They may be reaching their threshold tolerance for pain.”
On Tuesday, voters across Silicon Valley will vote on a slew of initiatives intended to rein in that growth. In one community, they can keep houses off the surrounding hills for 20 years; in another, they will have the option to reduce an already low annual cap on housing construction; in a third, there is a measure to restrict sprawl.
At the heart of it all is a fondness for suburban life and an aversion to cities.
“We’re going from suburban to urban, with nothing in between,” said Lisa M. Gillmor, the mayor of Santa Clara, a hub for tech companies. “The community is reacting in a hugely negative way. We almost have riots.”
The fate of a former shopping mall is emblematic. Developers want to turn it into an vast office space with some apartments.
Here in Cupertino, the hometown of Apple, voters will decide the fate of a ghost mall called Vallco, once home to Macy’s, Sears and J.C. Penney. The developers promise a futuristic remake that includes the world’s largest green roof, 800 apartments and two million square feet of office space. The architect Rafael Viñoly said it was the most important project of his career.
All those offices will add up to at least 10,000 jobs, say opponents who wonder where all those people are going to live. Only a few will be able to afford Cupertino, a city of 60,000 where the median home price is $1.6 million. But traveling a long distance to cheaper communities will further stress the area’s jammed roads, and some of those communities do not want to house large numbers of commuters in the first place.
With the principle of mixed use in mind, and with it high density, it might have been best to build apartments that would potentially house those 10,000 workers. Eight hundred apartments does not cut it, and the housing shortage on site represents a commuting nightmare.
A dozen miles northwest of the Vallco mall is Palo Alto, with a small-town atmosphere that many residents cherish but that also serves as an incubator for many start-ups.
“We have a pretty insatiable demand for whatever office space we construct until there’s 24-hour gridlock and people say, ‘What’s the point?’ ” said Mayor Pat Burt, who is a start-up entrepreneur himself. His instinct is for moderation: “A glass of wine at dinner is good. Chugging a gallon is not.”
The proposed solution is to slow down the construction of new office space.
That might not make as much sense as building residential units in place with any new office space.
About one-third of voters in Silicon Valley are now wary of new growth. They are often called 'residentialists' -- meaning, they seek to defend the residential suburbs, as opposed to the emergence of a genuine city.
In Palo Alto’s recent survey of registered voters, 30 percent said too much growth and development was either a very or an extremely serious problem. Such sentiments are reshaping the political landscape, powering what are called locally “the residentialists.”
Eleven candidates are vying on Tuesday for four slots on Palo Alto’s City Council. Nearly all say they support an annual cap of 50,000 square feet of new office space, a limit enacted last year. Several endorsed an outright moratorium on new construction.
That does not reflect a perfect consensus.
That makes Leonard Ely, a candidate who is a third-generation Palo Altan, something of an anomaly. Mr. Ely is a commercial real estate broker, but his advocacy for growth goes beyond his profession.
“People always want to keep everything the way it is,” he said. “If my grandmother had been a residentialist, a lot of these people wouldn’t be here. There would still be orchards.”
He favors more expansive height limits in the low-slung downtown. But this, he knows, is extremely unlikely. “A lot of people say I’m crazy for running,” he said.
Mr. Ely is completely correct about the need for deregulated building heights downtown -- and everywhere else. Development should be as big and tall as possible. This is in keeping with the principles of mixed use and high density.
But Mr. Ely is tragically incorrect that this are should have been suburbanized in the first place. In fact, perhaps it should not even have been farm land as it was in his grandmother's time. Ideally, it should be wilderness. Northern California, to some extent, should be a national park.
Silicon Valley, in a perfect world, should not exist between San Francisco and San Jose.
It should exist between Los Angeles and San Diego.
This is in keeping with the principle of restricting growth to drier, arid regions with a less developed ecosystem.
The characteristic development of southern California, with its highways and water system drawing water from the north, was the work of Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown, who served in that post from 1959 to 1967.
Liberals love cities, and lament the "suburban sprawl" of southern California (even though when moves are made to transform the suburbs into city, liberals panic, and become the great enemies of urbanization).
But Governor Brown was from northern California, and it is sometimes theorized that he rapidly developed the south in order to protect his hometown.
This was the right thing to do. The problem is not the "overdevelopment" of southern California, but its current underdevelopment as a collection of low-rise suburbs. It needs to become a great city.
But there are signs of change, even in Silicon Valley.
Financially, office construction brings in tax revenue, whereas homes are a drain on public coffers.
The town of Mountain View, Google’s home, wants to do something about that. Given new marching orders from a reform-minded City Council that was swept into office here two years ago, Mountain View is looking to increase its housing stock by as much as 50 percent — including as many as 10,000 units in the area around Google’s main campus.
“We need to provide housing because there’s a housing shortage,” said Lenny Siegel, a Mountain View councilman. That may seem an obvious tautology, but it turns out to be highly contentious in a state where most cities and suburbs are still dominated by anti-growth politics that seek to maximize the construction of tax-generating offices while minimizing the number of budget-depleting residents.
That explains a lot.
Things are changing, but the old attitudes persist.
Many employees say they would prefer to live closer to work. But these companies reside in small cities that consider themselves suburbs, and the local politics are usually aligned against building dense urban apartments to house them.
Take Palo Alto, the Silicon Valley city that has become emblematic of the state’s reputation for rampant not-in-my-backyard politics. Palo Alto has one of the state’s worst housing shortages. With about three jobs for every housing unit, it has among the most out-of-balance mixes anywhere in Silicon Valley.
But instead of dealing with this issue by building the few thousand or so apartments it would take to make a dent in the problem, the city has mostly looked to restraining a pace of job growth that the mayor described as “unhealthy.”
Farther up the peninsula near San Francisco, the small city of Brisbane told a developer that its proposal for a mixed-use development with offices and 4,000 housing units should have offices for about 15,000 workers, but no new housing.
Play that out a thousand times over and the crux of the state’s housing crisis is clear: Everyone knows housing costs are unsustainable and unfair, and that they pose a threat to the state’s economy. Yet every city seems to be counting on its neighbors to step up and fix it.
But change is happening. Mixed-use urban mega-projects are the way to go.
Mr. Siegel, the city councilman, wants to turn this prototypical example of sprawl into a bustling urban neighborhood. The city has plans for nearly 10,000 new apartments and hopes that businesses like a grocery store, bars and retail shops will follow them.
Here in Mountain View, as in many places, residents are mostly aligned against putting too many apartments near the city’s core single-family-home neighborhoods. The city is looking to create new neighborhoods by pushing growth to areas like North Bayshore, where there are already a lot of jobs and few neighbors to complain.
Versions of that strategy are taking hold across the Bay Area.
Given the political resistance to new housing and the cascade of lawsuits that are a good bet to follow any new proposal, Mr. Meany said he and other developers were more likely to focus on mega-projects with a bigger payoff.
“A planner would go out and say, ‘We should do things regionally and scatter housing throughout the area,’” he said. “But if you’re the developer who has to actually get it done, it is better to go off and find large areas of problematic land than trying to choose the smartest location.”
