The Trouble with Urban Design

Let’s suppose we want to build an interesting, walkable, mixed-use neighborhood.

Now suppose that we put together a bunch of land and divide it up into the nicest traditional urban grid you’ve ever seen, a carefully massaged irregular grid that is porous yet discourages through traffic as well as any suburban loop-and-cul-de-sac pattern. Since land-use regulation just hampers the ability of small-scale actors to create the fine-grained urbanism we know and love, we put all the land up for sale as unrestricted reserves. Lyondell promptly comes in and buys the entire parcel and turns it into a polymer manufacturing facility. FAIL. Granted, the world needs polymers… but the original objective was walkable mixed-use.

So why not get out the deed restrictions?

We plat out the same street network, we figure out good locations for commercial, multi-family, single-family, etc are and then we put varying levels of deed restrictions on everything. Over the next few years the development fills out, until there’s houses and coffeeshops and schools and all sorts of goodness all together. Slowly the neighborhood ages and takes on a nice patina. Since everything is mostly built out to the maximum allowed by deed restriction, the landscape stays remarkably the same. Eventually the neighborhood becomes so familiar to its inhabitants that any change seems jarring, even revolting. One summer a couple of frenchmen move in, tear down one of the quaint bungalows, and in its place construct a sleek, ultramodern edifice – the love child of Ayn Rand and Le Corbusier.

The neighbors revolt. The new dwelling is a blight on their quaint, historic neighborhood, a giant middle finger to their shared community values. Of course, not everyone minds. The 78-year-old widower likes the new house, which is now the highlight of his evening dog-walking ritual. The German couple down the street wish there was more modern architecture in this part of town. But the majority of the residents are up in arms. Inflamed, they march to the City and demand new regulations. The minimalist deed restrictions, which cover only building envelope, use, and landscaping, aren’t enough anymore. The new District plan will govern window placement, exterior finishes (brick, wood, or other natural material ONLY), all sorts of other minute details. As older building stock is replaced with new construction (all of it a poor imitation of the architectural styles of yore), the neighborhood becomes less interesting. Oddballs and misfits and various and sundry creative types move out, leaving a rash of soulless yuppies. FAIL.

What went wrong? Urban Design went wrong.

Now don’t misunderstand me. I’m not here to dis the Urban Design profession. In fact, the sole proprietorship LLC I created as a shell for my research activities is incorporated in the state of Texas as an Urban Design firm. So you might (if you were stretching it) even call me an urban designer.

However, there’s a serious flaw in the profession. To illustrate:

The vast majority of academic programs in urban design are subsidiaries of (or began as subsidiaries of) larger colleges of architecture. Thus urban planning and design are approached with an architect’s hand.

How do we construct buildings? Specifications are drawn up. A site is selected. Details are worked up. Detailed plans are drawn. Then from these plans a structure is built up. It’s an effective method that’s served us well for millennia.

But the construction of neighborhoods and cities is not architecture, but horticulture.

Cities are grown. All of the most interesting places are the result of tens, hundreds, or thousands of years of iterative additions and changes made to an initial starting point. Transportation works this way. Indian trails provided the routes for missionary roads and cattle drives. Railroads followed the cattle trails, and the US highway system followed the railroads. In many places the interstates were built right over the US highways, hence feeder roads – a way for the engineers to avoid the additional expense of retroactive access control.

Cities likewise work this way. The vibrancy and livability of Houston’s Inner Loop owes a lot of the efforts of the original developers, who laid out streets and planted trees that are still extant. But it was the expiration of the 25-year deed restrictions between 1925 and 1935 which enabled it to become what it is today. The vast majority of the interesting, independent businesses and multifamily housing options in the Inner Loop would not have been possible without the expiry of these restrictions.

This is horticulture. When you first plant flora, there must be some initial order. (This is the plat.) In the early stages of growth, plantings need lots of care – watering, fertilizing, and in the case of trees, nylon cords and stakes to help them grow straight. (These are deed restrictions.) But as the plants mature, the need for assistance drops off until it’s strictly an aesthetic preference. Those wanting a manicured look can continue to prune their trees, shape their hedges, edge their lawns. (This is a mature deed-restricted neighborhood with a minimalist or inactive HOA.) Those wanting something a bit more natural and organic can, at some point, cease regular pruning entirely. (This is an unrestricted neighborhood, business or industrial district.)

The developers of yore understood this. The grid street pattern that forms the basis of so many American cities wasn’t *just* designed for ease in land surveying – it was also designed to accommodate almost any kind of development. At the small end, blocks could be cut up into tiny lots for little houses – at the large end, an industrial site could occupy several contiguous blocks. And in the interim were the half-block and quarter-block office buildings that make up downtown Houston and so many other cities.

Once we understood that cities were growths, that development really “just happened,” and we built beefy street networks to handle anything that came along. It worked – if it hadn’t, the American CBD concept wouldn’t exist. But somewhere along the way the designers lost sight of the fact that cities evolve over time, and that land subdivision should accommodate future growth. Instead, we began to rely on THE PLAN.

With THE PLAN, Cities everywhere projected growth, at lengthy time horizons, then scientifically designed infrastructure to meet exactly that projected growth. This result was predictable; whenever projections were off, infrastructure was inadequate. Because we have no zoning, Houston hasn’t fallen into this trap at the macro level. Other cities’ projections for growth are heavily tied up in their own land-use plans, so whenever the plans change the infrastructure is rendered inadequate. But because Houston has no land-use plan, its growth projections must accommodate a great variety of development scenarios.

This extra-wide margin for error means that our citywide infrastructure, transportation in particular, is built extra beefy in anticipation of future growth. Suburban Houston is criscrossed with many, many four-lane divided arterials where a two-lane asphalt section would do just fine. Our urban fringes are dotted with gigantic four-way stop intersections in places too distant to warrant a signal or roundabout. Our major infrastructure is ready for whatever growth is coming.

But at the micro level, things are another story. The city code prohibits grid residential areas (something like “street plans must discourage through traffic”) and explicitly outlaws small blocks (see: minimum intersection spacing). National developers poop out the same standardized street patterns as are found in any other American subdivision. And one-size-fits-all minimum parking regulations act as a disincentive towards the kind of shared, on-street parking that makes grid business districts an attractive financial proposition for the private sector. As a result, suburban Houston is ill-equipped for future urban growth. Localized areas of congestion bear this out – think Gessner at IH-10, where Mall and Medical are sprouting without a local grid to circulate their cars.

The Uptown people have figured this out, and as a result there is a plan to iteratively add local streets as Uptown redevelops so that the Uptown grid becomes more fine-grained over time. It’s a splendid idea.

But the great failure of Urban Design is that we’re no longer building any more Inner Loops. We’re not platting out any new streets that can later be developed into dense, mixed-use urbanism. The area around Kirby and Westheimer was once entirely single-family residential and low-rise commercial. Now it’s got West Ave, 2727 Kirby, and who knows what else. But will the low-rise, single-family neighborhoods of today be able to support the same sort of redevelopment 30, 50, or 70 years from now? Not with the urban design we’re currently using. And that’s a problem, because it means that an element of our prosperity – a small one perhaps, but still statistically significant – is not sustainable.

We need to be building neighborhoods now that are immediately livable, but also provide the building blocks for future densification. We’re not. This is a problem.