What Happened to the Great Urban Design Projects? | Hacker News Reader

What Happened to the Great Urban Design Projects?

nytimes.com

24 pointsjseliger16 comments

Seattle, by the way, is actually building a lot of rail, and it's going so well that people want more of it: http://www.seattleweekly.com/home/962706-129/bertha-who-seat....

An awful lot of the really big ones (on the scale of towns and cities) were bloody awful. Aesthetically pleasing on paper, but unliveable. Logical minds planning carefully separated zones and routes and so on in ways that looked nice on paper and created soulless cities with broken public spaces.

An excellent read on this is "Seeing Like a State", by James Scott. The chapters on forestry and collectivised agriculture are similarly interesting.

What happened to the great projects is that the governments responsible generally flubbed their ability to balance a budget so badly that people lost faith in their ability to deliver anything. The MTA Second System was a glorious and wonderful idea on paper, and any New Yorker would love having it, but look what actually became of those lofty ideals: one useful connection and the station named "Grand Street" (B/D) plus a bankruptcy.

Increased labor costs (thanks in part to pro-union prevailing-wage legislation) and environmental-planning holdups in years since haven't helped get things built for less money, either, and we've suffered a parade of boondoggle public-transportation projects, like the Acela service: crazy-money wasted on designing new trainsets instead of importing existing ones, and then the trains are run at normal-train speeds for most of their trip. Next up: California high-speed rail. Not that this is specific to public transit, mind you: the Big Dig should disabuse anyone of that notion. And even when the government supposedly tries to be efficient, we end up with scandals like with the new Bay Bridge.

Bonus points, too, when the laughable micro-projects with insane price tags that are approved find themselves over-budget and end up dropping some of the promises that they did make. (In the Bay Area I know there are people who still complain about how VTA promised to run light rail up West San Carlos Ave, from downtown to the Valley Fair mall, and the old BART/VTA institutional/political rivalry is still running after all these decades.)

How can we restore our faith, asks our intrepid columnist? You'll need to get the governments involved to get their acts together, and then it will be pretty automatic as they demonstrate competence. I wouldn't hold my breath, though.

The government and especially municipal bodies are staffed by people from the community. If you want the government to change, there is a way to do so: generate more interest in what it does, how it functions. Get more people involved/interested, including yourself :) .

This is merely a restatement of the ideal of government, and doesn't address the fundamental complaint of the GP.

Government isn't incompetent because it's made up of incompetent individuals -- it's incompetent because it's been deeply captured by special interest groups, including, but not limited to, public sector unions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

(TL;DR: When studying government from an economics perspective, the sum of rational self-interest actions across all actors isn't very well aligned with the overall public interest.)

I was not aware that this was an entire field of study! Thank you. I will need to do more reading.

How exactly do you "deeply capture" government? I had the impression that these "Special Interest" groups can press their agendas precisely because they can staff government with people who are pliable to their agenda. If enough people with no "special interests" can be elected to positions of power, wouldn't that immediately remove corruption?

Special interest isn't some kind of singular evil, it's whenever someone's interest aren't perfectly aligned with the community. It's easy to fixate on the big ticket stuff such as outright corruption, nepotism and so on, but it's also about a general dynamic that exist benignly at all levels of bureaucratic organisations: discovering the public interest gets increasingly difficult the deeper into the details you get + I'd like to be seen to be doing a good job to advance my career. Is fixing this or that pothole first more in the public interest? The citizen with the persistent letters to the right people (and/or the influential blog/the ability/luck to make a Facebook post viral) typically gets to decide.

This dynamic scales up the chain. When you're buying a new IT system, do you get five clever guys down on Main Street to do it, or do you get Microsoft/IBM with all the promises of synergy in the cloud, the 15 page SLA (think of the bus count!) - and an invitation to that big "trade show" in Vegas? In practically all situations, even without corruption, the rational choice is to go with Microsoft. First, if it doesn't quite work, well, you have reams of case studies and white papers to point to, you really did do your homework, it must be us doing something wrong, let's get McKinsey to write a report. If it goes down, look at the fancy SLA. Plenty of cover that you don't have with the local guys - indeed, you'll learn just how many of your colleagues could have told you from the beginning that it would never have worked. And if it did work, all that nice money you saved disappears from your next budget to have the equivalent of Microsoft fix potholes in the next department. Concentrated benefits, dispersed costs. Again, all of this without specific incompetence or corruption, without being specifically pliable to any outside interest.

The problem is cars. Older cities were designed too, they were just designed for people instead of cars. A lot of what looks like spontaneous generation was just designed so well you can't see the design.

Jakriborg is a city built in 1990 designed for people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakriborg

I think we wasted all our capital on freeways and cloverleafs

Your reply reminded me of a lecture from an ocw course I'm watching on and off. He covers a bit about infrastructure design and policy choices in that lecture. I thought it was really interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpcbBk5ckas

This talk by Andrés Duany is quite interesting as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwd4Lq0Xvgc

Its not that simple. Sure, it was much more complicated back then since you had to think of trams and public transportation whereas now you just build highways. But, the amount of corruption in public projects has increased tremendously, spending on infrastructure has reduced etc.

I have been working on integrating some ideas. http://tinyvillages.org.

Note that the files are on Github and it really isn't about one person or group doing a complete design. One of the things that I have started thinking about that needs to be fleshed out more on that page is Open Source Engineering and ways to make zoning and all aspects of urban systems more component-based as well as moving beyond code/standard and form-based to common information systems platforms that will facilitate automation of planning/approval and smart/sensor network data integration.

I see that each house have their own kitchen. How do you justify that. Seems extremely wasteful.

Balance between shared and personal space. I would never live somewhere where I had no other option than a shared kitchen, community, coop, whatever.

I find it amusing that the photo that heads the article of the Millau Viaduct which, while truly a good example of the sort of project they are advocating, could hardly be called "urban".

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