The uncreative city #1: food policy

West Side Market, Cleveland. Photo from West Side Market.

I wrote a few weeks ago about having a food security and foodways set of policies for the city rather than narrow-mindedly focusing solely upon "grocery stores" as has Councilmember Cheh for dealing with "food deserts." See "Do we need a grocery ambassador or a city-wide food security/foodways plan?"

Sure, I am concerned about food deserts, but one problem is how food deserts are measured and in DC, where 2/3 of the city borders Montgomery and Prince George's Counties in Maryland, many groceries stores are located just across the border in Maryland, and it is crazy to not consider these stores--all located within the typical 3 mile retail trade area of a supermarket--as serving DC residents.

Today I came across what look to be two new incredible resources on community food systems, the new Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development and the companion website, AgDEV Online, a Community of Practice Website. They are subscription products and likely well worth the combined price of $56-$73/annually. Right now, the inaugural issue of the journal is open access through October 1st.

This reminds me of something I have been meaning to write for awhile, a follow up to the previous entry, with regard to the idea of spurring innovation and community revitalization through urban food and food security policies.

The above-mentioned legislation by Councilmember Cheh focuses on attracting supermarkets to the city. What about trying to create an East of the River Public Market?

Like Eastern Market or the DC Farmers Market, or great public markets such as the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia or the West Side Market in Cleveland--both are far more fabulous than the public markets that remain in DC and would be better models.

Articles that I clipped to mention in this context include these pieces from the travel sections of the New York Times, "Seattle's New Food Market" about the development of the Melrose Market in the Capital Hill neighborhood, and "A Fresh Face in South London" about the revitalization of the Brixton Market in South London.

And in two weeks, on September 10th, my friends-colleagues at Neighbors in the Strip in Pittsburgh are opening their version, the of a Pittsburgh Public Market, to provide the ability for farmers and smaller businesses to sell in the Strip District food district, in spaces smaller than those that are available on Penn Avenue, where most of the prime spots are not available anyway.

Facebook photo by Prasad of the Spice grocery store under construction at the Pittsburgh Public Market.

And last October, a permanent food store, called the Downtown Phoenix Public Market, but not a public market in the traditional sense, selling products from local vendors, opened adjacent to the site of the Farmers Market in Downtown Phoenix, providing a grocery store for area residents open 7 days/week. (Suzanne and I happened to be there for the weekend soft opening.)

The Melrose Market is privately owned, just like the Belvedere Square Market in North Baltimore. Both are upscale. But nothing says that a privately owned public market has to be upscale and expensive.

There are other examples of the creation of new markets as a community revitalization initiative, such as the Midtown Global Exchange Market in Minneapolis, in a public/nonprofit-private partnership.

What prevents DC from being equally creative?, from using the framework of a public market in Anacostia to accomplish multiple objectives:

- food access;

- places for farmers and food producers in the region to sell their products;

- economic revitalization and business development in an area of the city where poverty persists;

- health promotion -- you could incorporate my idea of a teaching and demonstration kitchen for wellness and health education, and you could even have a WIC-approved products store;

- business development -- a place to locate new businesses by DC residents including;

- a commercial grade "community kitchen" to support business development initiatives comparable to similar food and catering business incubators elsewhere such as the La Cocina in San Francisco and Mi Kitchen es su Kitchen in Brooklyn.

- although a community kitchen can also support group food initiatives, not just commercial activity. For example, rural Virginia is known for community canneries, where local gardeners have access to commercial quality kitchen equipment and technical assistance to can or freeze home-grown produce. See "Community canneries" from American Profile.

- a meals preparation "store" where people can come together and make multiple meals for their families in bulk;

- maybe the University of Maryland could even set up a satellite ice cream bar;

etc.


Teaching kitchen, River Market, Little Rock, Arkansas. Photo courtesy of Daman Hammond.


Community canning. Lee O'Neill and others process vegetables at the Keezletown (Va.) Community Cannery, which has supported food preservation since 1942. Image by Doug Miller from American Profile Magazine.

What creates DC from being equally creative is pretty simple. Lack of vision. Lack of creativity. A failure to get out and go beyond the borders of the city and shake things up and think about things in new and different ways. And a failure to think about policies that are integrative and achieve multiple objectives simultaneously rather than one thing only.

Failure to have a comprehensive solid waste reduction strategy for DC seems costly

Maybe not, since DC is being paid for its solid waste, which is used as fuel for a waste to energy facility in Northern Virginia. See "D.C.'s trash is now Fairfax facility's treasured commodity" from the Washington Post.


Building materials to be dumped at the Fort Totten Waste Transfer Station.

When I ride home from Capitol Hill, I use the Metropolitan Branch Trail because it allows me to avoid the uphill climb between Michigan Avenue and Taylor Street on North Capitol--I find the climb demoralizing. Going this way takes me past the Fort Totten Waste Transfer Station (there is still a hill but it's much shorter), and I always check out the line of cars and trucks waiting to dump "trash" and much of the trash--building materials, old furniture, tree branches, etc.--seems like it could be harvested for other purposes besides a landfill. Even if Fairfax pays for the trash and burns it, it seems like it still makes more sense to reuse and recycle what can be recaptured, and overall to reduce the waste stream, especially of compostable yard waste and food waste.

Downed tree, 3rd and Oglethorpe NW, July 27th, 2010.

But when I read articles like this, say "Finding New Life (and Profit) in Doomed Trees," from the New York Times, which discusses a company in Seattle that harvests downed trees--something I've suggested be done in DC for a few years, especially after every bad storm results in so many fallen trees, and I think of the wood being landfilled rather than used.

Or seeing this piece on urban composting in the Express, "Natural Wonders In Urban Environs: Methods of Composting in the District," which reports that some guy is charging households $8/week to compost their food waste, when NYC supports the Lower East Side Ecology Center, which puts bins out at Union Square and other locations where people can deposit their food waste for composting at no charge, or when cities like Seattle added food waste (separated of course) to their "trash" pick up procedures, or how cities like Montreal have compost bins in parks and food waste is composted there.

Union Square Composting Station
Open M, W, Fri, Sat 8:30-5pm, year-round


Also, Montgomery County, Maryland has a massive yard waste reduction program which includes providing people with free composting aids--something that is harder to do for rowhouse type neighborhoods in the core of the city. But this is because the State of Maryland has requirements for local jurisdictions with regard to reduction of the waste stream.

Then again, if I could get a bunch of households in Columbia Heights to pay me $8/week to compost their food waste, maybe I ought to go into that business myself. You only need three bins in order to do serious high-speed composting.

Compost bins in a pocket park at Rue Montcalm and Blvd. Rene Levesque in Montreal

A missed point in temporary urbanism

There are two issues in so-called "temporary urbanism":

1. activating what would be un-used spaces
2. supporting innovation, which tends to have a hard time getting placement in popular areas.

The focus on temporary urbanism now is in utilizing vacant space.

But after the economy improves and spaces get leased up, where is the support for innovation and incubators?

And where was the support for access to such spaces that were vacant (because of high asking prices for rent) during the good times?

I've been suggesting that underutilized spaces downtown could be used to support arts and other retail-like ventures since 2002, including talking up the Pittsfield, Mass. Storefront Artist Project.

See:

- "Pop-Up Stores Help Landlords Fill Retail Space" from the Wall Street Journal
- "For artists, storefront on a shoestring" from the Washington Post, about a temporary retail exhibit for fashion designers on H Street NE called the Temporarium

Here's the job description we don't have at MWCOG or WMATA

MWCOG = the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. The Transportation Planning Board of the COG is the "metropolitan planning organization" for the purposes of federal transporation planning and regional coordination.

WMATA = the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority. It runs the metropolitan area subway system and bus services.

The closest organization in the region to this kind of job description is Arlington Transportation Partners, the contracting organization that handles most of Arlington County's transportation management functions, in association with various agencies and people who do work directly for Arlington County and are "government employees."

====================================

DIRECTOR OF INNOVATION

Salary Range: $136,941 to $171,176

Metrolinx, an agency of the Government of Ontario, is realizing its vision to bring about an integrated, traveller-focused, multi-modal transportation system that enhances prosperity, sustainability and quality of life for the GTHA region.

To support this, Metrolinx has identified innovation as a core corporate value and is looking for a unique and experienced individual to work with a team of diverse professionals in the transportation, planning, finance and sustainable development disciplines to identify, develop, incubate and champion innovative ideas, concepts and best practices needed to meet Metrolinx’s short and long-term goals. Reporting to the Vice President of Policy and Planning, this management executive will work collaboratively with all Metrolinx business areas, including GO Transit, an operating division, and public and private sector transportation leadership to identify future lines of business at both the strategic and tactical levels.

As the Director of Innovation, you will be responsible for:

• Researching, evaluating, and filtering ideas and concepts including those from senior management, and working closely with all business areas to use new and existing customer insights to advance the corporate value of innovation.
• Identifying policies, internal processes, and external services for improved modal integration, efficiency and alignment with The Big Move and overall corporate mission, vision, goals and values
• Developing and directing research focused on transportation innovation and making improvements to the traveler experience.
• Developing the business case model to support innovative ideas from incubation to independence
• Overseeing senior stakeholder forums made up of diverse public and private sector interests to remain current and ahead of the curve.
• Bringing a diverse perspective to the field of transportation, to grasp issues, opportunities and roadblocks and subsequently utilizing your range of knowledge and political acuity to minimize barriers and to maximize opportunities.
• Integrating potential innovations with Metrolinx’s “The Big Move” plan, the GO 2020 strategic plan and the overall needs of travellers throughout the GTHA.

Qualifications: Completion of a post-graduate university degree in Planning, Engineering, Business Administration or Public Policy or any combination of education, training, and experience deemed equivalent. Minimum ten (10) years experience in the development of corporate strategy or project management in the transportation and/or urban planning fields that includes direct exposure to, or demonstrated working knowledge of;

· Developing and fostering innovation in policy, procedures and services.

· Managing / Directing high profile and highly complex projects that are organic and require the ability to adapt to changing goals and direction.

· Directing and managing cross-functional corporate teams, and multi-disciplinary consultant contracts.

· Integrating a diverse portfolio of issues into actionable directives.

· Generating and testing hypotheses, and incubating ideas.

· Leading by empowering others to innovate and continuously improve.

· Superior interpersonal communication skills (written, oral, and listening) and extremely strong presentation skills for public audiences and senior public officials.

· Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area planning and socio-political issues (rural, suburban, and urban) that have the potential to impact the success of Metrolinx and its operating division GO Transit.

· Diplomatic personal conduct in highly sensitive and / or political environments, with the ability to negotiate and foster a climate of openness and transparency.

Resumes must be received by the Human Resources Office, Metrolinx, 20 Bay Street, Suite 600, Toronto, M5J 2W3, email: humanresources@metrolinx.com no later than September 15, 2010, quoting File Number 10-220.

The overhang of retail space nationally

From "Beall's Outlet takes advantage of open retail space to continue aggressive expansion" in the St. Petersburg Times:

Colliers International estimates ... a staggering 300 million square feet of empty big-box retail space nationally. The 120 million square feet vacated just since 2008 by the likes of Circuit City, Linens n' Things and supermarkets equals all the shopping center space in Baltimore, Cincinnati and Kansas City combined.

National Association for Interpretation

Just came across this group, the National Association for Interpretation. From their website:

... a professional association for those involved in the interpretation of natural and cultural heritage resources in settings such as parks, zoos, museums, nature centers, aquaria, botanical gardens, and historical sites. For more than 50 years. NAI and its parent organizations have encouraged networking, training, and collaboration among members and partners in support of our mission: inspiring leadership and excellence to advance heritage interpretation as a profession.

They sponsor a national conference and publish a journal as well as a magazine, which has many thematic issues, publish and sell books about the field, etc.

Rico skateboarding on 1st (First) Street NE, Washington, DC

RIco skateboarding on 1st (First) Street NE, Washington, DC
Originally uploaded by rllayman

I asked him if I could take his photo. Afterwards we had a conversation about biking, skateboarding, local organizing on sustainable transportation, the city's expansion of bike lanes, and then "where can you go and meet up with other people who want to bicycle." As regards to that question, while they aren't quite ready yet, I suggested BicycleSPACE, the new bike shop at 5th and I Street NW, which I think is gonna work to do stuff like that.

(In active transportation planning, generally you also deal with skateboarding and inline skating in terms of the space required in the context of trail and bikeway planning and other users.)

Empty storefront with sticker graffiti, storefront, 900 block of H Street NE, Washington, DC, north side

Empty storefront with sticker graffiti, storefront, 900 block of H Street NE, Washington, DC, north side
Originally uploaded by rllayman

A "temporary" parking lot on a site where the development plans fell through, with a city govt. sign heralding their involvement with the project

A "temporary" parking lot on a site where the development plans fell through, with a city govt. sign heralding their involvement with the project
Originally uploaded by rllayman

Frankly, I've wondered why the city govt. (I wrote about this years before with regard to the DC Dept. of Housing and Community Development) wants to put up a sign on failed projects or decrepit empty buildings and lots. It's not the best marketing tool, at least for citizens, who live with these empty or underutilized facilities for years and years if not decades.

Letter to the editor of the Washington Business Journal on urban supermarkets

Last week, the On Site magazine supplement of the Washington Business Journal had a piece about how great the local supermarket chains are at integrating their big stores into the urban fabric ("Changing demographics usher in a new golden age for D.C. supermarkets").

While it is great that these companies are opening new stores in the center city, for the most part they aren't doing it much differently than how they do stores in the suburbs. So I wrote a letter about it, which the WBJ ran, "Urban Safeway design misses the mark."

They were kind enough to unlock the story--normally letters to the editor are not part of the content they normally make available to non-subscribers (and hey, we should all subscribe now, shouldn't we?)--for the blogosphere and especially the readers of this blog.

This is paragraph 2:

I have been critical for years about how supermarkets, especially in D.C., are reintegrated into the urban fabric. It’s not just about the size of the facility, it’s also about how the supermarket connects to the street and extends the quality of the urban experience, by bringing the store outside and the street inside. (Think about the excitement of the crowds walking on M Street NW in Georgetown and how to continue that experience inside the store.)

They did add a word in one paragraph which changes the meaning, but you probably won't notice:

The grocery retailers in D.C. design and merchandise their stores for the most part just like their suburban counterparts, making proximity the only factor with some power for differentiation.

The second word, grocery, should be excised. I was referring to all retailers, not just supermarkets. That then makes the comparison of Carytown, Hampden in Baltimore, and Downtown Frederick more relevant.

Produce at Night, Astoria, Queens. Flickr photo by Joey in Vermont.

Second thoughts about this poster

Amount of space required to transport the user the same number of passengers by car, bus, or bicycle
Originally uploaded by rllayman

Image: Amount of space required to transport the user the same number of passengers by car, bus, or bicycle, Urban Ambassadors, Des Moines, IA


In a previous entry I said this poster was one of the best versions of this concept, which has been done by many organizations and in many places over the years.

The idea that is expressed is that you can move people more efficiently by transit, on foot, or by bicycle.

Efficiency is defined by the amount of space required to move the same number of people according to the specific mode.

In this poster, the bicyclists are spread out along the same distance as the space taken by cars. I think that's misleading. 40 bicycles, in traffic, don't take up the same amount of space, linearly--I guess you could look at this as two bike lanes versus four lanes of motor vehicles--as the cars.

In any case, I am not sure the way this is expressed graphically hits people over the head strongly enough, in terms of the point.

What do you think?

When transportation logic overrules the heart: The American Ideas Institute's new center on transportation

The American Ideas Institute is a conservative think tank which publishes the magazine American Conservative. The Institute received a grant (from the Rockefeller Foundation) to set up a transportation initiative. It will be run by William Lind, who co-wrote with the late Paul Weyrich--a well-known hard core conservative (except on transit)--many interesting papers for the American Public Transportation Association on transit and why conservatives should support it.

They launched the website for the project earlier this week, starting with an online symposium on why conservatives should support public transit.

- Keep America Moving

[Funny story: Paul Weyrich was a hard core conservative but loved transit, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s published a magazine called the New Electric Railway Journal, which focused on new fixed rail transit initiatives in the U.S. such as the San Diego Trolley. His Free Congress Foundation was based just a couple blocks from where I lived in the H Street neighborhood, but I never went over there.

Initially, they worked with George Mason U to publish the journal, and got some federal money to do it. Some prominent Democratic U.S. Senator, I don't remember which one, criticized this grant, because of Weyrich's politics. I actually wrote a letter to the Senator, saying that the issue isn't about politics, but about high quality transit. A high level staffer called me to argue, but I remained firm. I said, he's hard right politically, but has the correct position on transit, and for this particular grant, that's all that should matter. I wish I would have been prescient enough to say "someone like Weyrich might be able to get more conservatives to support transit than people like us."]

So when I heard about this site, I was expecting articles by Wendell Cox, Randal O'Toole, and Sam Staley (actually Sam writes some good stuff), an encomium to bus rapid transit (since money goes to road builders, many conservatives support this form of transit), and some foolish article on personal rapid transit.

Or I was expecting incredibly misleading statements such as those by the Heritage Foundation terming dedicated funding from the Federal Government for the Washington DC subway system--which is relied upon by hundreds of thousands of federal workers going to and from work--as the largest earmark of all time.

But nope, the website for the program starts out with a bunch of well argued short thought articles on different topics on why transit is important.

I was confused at first, because for the most part, these aren't articles by "conservatives" but by leading urbanists, transportationists, and smart growth types, of mostly the "progressive" stripe. The articles by "conservatives" such as Glen Bottoms, a former FTA official, are focused more on addressable problems (cost overruns, appropriate technologies, etc.).

It looks like this project will be a great contribution to the discourse.

Crazy Virginia, Sane(r) Jurisdictions: regional planning in Greater Richmond

Politics at the state level in Virginia is relatively wacked, when all is said and done, as there is a rabid conservative streak that is beyond explanation, such as the various spurious politically-motivated lawsuits by the State Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli ("Va. Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli: The rise of the confounding conservative" from the Post).

The Greater Richmond area though is more focused on its revitalization and is engaging in a regional planning effort. See "Get Together on a Greater Richmond" from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. (For budget regions, the T-D is no longer distributed in hard copy form in the Washington area, so I don't read it much anymore...)

They will be having a public workshop, called the Capital Region Collaborative Feedback Meeting, a cooperative effort between the Richmond Regional Planning District Commission (RRPDC) and the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce, which is also supported by the Partnership for Smarter Growth.

Thursday, September 16, 2010 from 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM (ET)
Location:
St. John's Church Parish Hall
2401 East Broad Street
Richmond, VA

The draft of regional priorities can be viewed by visiting the RRPDC web site at Richmond Regional Planning District Commission website.

Collecting and preserving local ephemera

Postcard, Observation-Buffet-Lounge Car of The Trail Blazer (scan)
Originally uploaded by rllayman

Last weekend, Antiques Roadshow was in town ("'Antiques Roadshow' gets 5000 visitors in Washington" from the Post). It got me to thinking about how at least in the DC area, we don't have an active program for the acquisition and preservation of ephemera and objects in a local museum. Sure we have the Historical Society and local societies across the region, plus special collections in libraries such as the Washingtoniana collection at the main branch of the DC Library.

But who is going to estate sales and buying clothes with Raleigh, Garfinckel, Woodward & Lothrop, or Hecht's tags, hatboxes, newspapers, magazines, books, and other ephemera for the locality, for both preservation and display?

(One of the reasons I've kept a particular woolen overcoat that I happened to find in a thrift store in Pittsburgh is because it has a Hughes & Hatcher label from an old Detroit area chain that has been out of business now for more than 25 years.)

I look for postcards, magazines, newspapers (mostly for the ads from local businesses, not the stories) and other stuff. But my financial means limit my ability to collect very much.

Another thing I look to do is look for postcards in other locales when I am traveling. People visit Washington and send postcards back home. That's a good way to buy Washington-area postcards more cheaply than you can around here.

In Montreal, the Provincial library has a "back alley" section and they set up the ground floor edge of the building as stalls for booksellers, and on certain days of the week, they open for business. We went the Friday night before we left, and found a bunch of good stuff, including these postcards from Detroit (remember I am from Detroit, and it is across the river from Windsor, Ontario, and back in the day was visited by many people from across Canada) as well as Washington and other places.

Postcards are cool because they communicate about places and events that the community thought were important.


The S.S. Aquarama, postcard, circa 1961 (scan). The back of the postcard reads: this multi-million dollar luxury liner maintains a daily round trip sailing schedule between Detroit, Michigan and Cleveland, Ohio during the summer months. It carries both passengers and automobiles; has four restaurants, three dance decks, colorful cocktail lounges and soda bars. The Detroit terminal is at the foot of W. Grand Boulevard.


Postcard, Junction of the Edsel Ford Expressway and the John Lodge Expressway, Detroit, circa 1961. The back reads: Not yet completed but with construction progressing rapidly, this modern highway system greatly facilitates movement of motor traffic in this metropolitan area. Three levels of traffic cross at this interchange. That's the Fisher Building at left background.

Why do you think the power of political protest has declined?

Section from an Anti-freeway protest poster, Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis, Washington DC, circa 1960s.

I am doing some filing of stuff (clippings, etc.) that piled up around the house while I was working in Baltimore County, and I came across this piece, "Power of protest on the wane," from the Baltimore Sun.

My first job in DC was an an assistant to the director (and later I was marketing director) of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group focused mostly on nutrition and advocacy policy. The group militantly denied that it was a "Nader Group" even though the founding directors all met while working for Ralph Nader. They were scientists with PhDs and they bristled having to take orders from lawyers...


Gallaudet announces it's new choice for President, and much of the student body holds a rally at the front gate to protest that choice. Pictured, Alumnus Tawny Holmes, last year's student body government president, addresses a crowd of students that has gathered at the Florida avenue entrance to campus. 2006 Washington Post photo by Bill O'Leary.

Back then, you could send out a press release and hold a press conference and you would get coverage by the local newspapers and media, as well as from some of the Washington bureaus of the national media.

Protest Signs, Campaign to integrate Uline Arena, (1948-49).

Now, it was a bit easier for CSPI than for a typical advocacy group for at least two reasons (1) everybody eats, so they have somewhat of an interest in food and they'll pay attention; (2) newspapers have food and/or health and science sections, there are magazines dedicated to health and food issues, television news covers food and health issues, and back then there even used to be "consumer" beats at some newspapers (notably the New York Times and the Washington Post, although the New Orleans Times-Picayune had a great daily column too) and local television stations, such as Roberta Baskin at WRC-TV (Channel 4 in DC) and Lea Thompson at WJLA-TV (Channel 7 in DC.

Hurricane Katrina related ACORN Protest, near Hart Senate Office Building (Independence Ave. NE).

The times have changed considered since then. As the media outlets have gone through repeated personnel reductions they have fewer reporters to cover stories. And that makes it a lot harder to get attention.

At the same time, I have a sense that they don't care either.

The web and blogs and social media do make a difference in terms of local organizing. But at the same time, you need to be able to reach and communicate through traditional media, in order to reach broader audiences, rather than only the zealots.

I do have a fair amount of interaction with journalists still, because the blog and my activism and the reasonably objective way I write lend me credibility. Sometimes I make it into a story through a quote, sometimes I don't but I provide background on the issues at hand and take them on tours of various places.

And I will write to journalists/media outlets when I have something to say (positive or negative) about the stories or coverage -- which sometimes you also read about in the blog. E.g., I have noticed a distinct difference for the better in the word choice and headlines in stories by Markham Heid of the Examiner after I wrote a blog entry about the unobjective and leading word choices frequently present in his articles. Sometimes that includes letters to the editor, one of which will be in the Washington Business Journal this Friday.

But for people who are less articulate or quick with a blog post or who haven't spent years working on issues, or for those organizations working on particularly challenging causes, what are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to get access when despite all the outlets, audiences are shrinking at the same time they are growing?

And how are we supposed to make change happen?

Resources:

- Making Local News, about television news, by Phyllis Kaniss

- Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media, by Michael Parenti

- The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making of the New Left, this is the reworking of Todd Gitlin's dissertation, which was about the impact of mass media on the operations of the Students for a Democratic Society, both internally within the organization, and externally in how they were perceived by people reading and seeing tv stories about them.

- I have a bunch of books by Robert McChesney too (typically about how the broadcast industry shifted from a community focus to an entertainment one, delivered by corporate media organizations rather than locally organized outlets), plus there is always the writings of Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann

Neighborhood protest against the creation of a lane for cars on the sidewalk of Park Road in front of the Giant Supermarket at Tivoli Square in Columbia Heights. Eventually, Giant and Horning Brothers Development Corp. backed down and removed it.

Public transit campaign to pass the federal surface transportation bill

APTA_WESUPPORT_150x200
Originally uploaded by rllayman

It's not news to readers of this blog and others that there is a great tension between the "road" lobby, which is focused on building highways for the most part and continuing to extend the automobile-based mobility paradigm, and the sustainable transportation lobby, which either separately or together works to promote walking, bicycling, and transit. (Walking and bicycling are also referred to as "active transportation" modes.)

Like so much else in American society and public opinion, this issue is contentious, in part because it comes down to the difference between personal mobility and mass mobility and optimal use of scarce public and private resources.

For me, not owning a car means that I can "afford" to still own a house in a relatively expensive housing market in a fairly good, well-connected location, while working in public interest type jobs where I often don't make that much money (oh, but the psychic rewards....) compared to the private sector.

I can do this because I have the benefit of access to a robust local transit system (subway and bus service), complemented by regional commuter railroad service to either Maryland or Virginia through separate services, in a community where a certain number of my typical daily destinations (work, school, stores, post office, libraries, parks, etc.) are also accessible to me by either walking or biking as well.

Walking, Bicycling, and Transit Work Together

Catchment area or "mobility shed" of public transit stops for pedestrians and cyclists. Image from Planning and design for pedestrians and cyclists published by VeloQuebec.

This is a potential competitive advantage for many center cities, and it is an advantage already present in cities like New York City, Boston, Philadelphia (although it could be better leveraged), Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington.

In cities like Baltimore, it doesn't work at present because the fixed rail transit network isn't very extensive, but it could, with more investment, and instead of being a declining city, Baltimore would be able to reposition as a community of choice.

----------------
The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) is leading a major initiative to encourage U.S. lawmakers to pass a long-term surface transportation bill. It was up for reauthorization about two years ago, but a new comprehensive bill hasn't been created or passed, they merely extended the term of the previous bill.

APTA’s basic position is that public transit plays a huge role in our local and national economies and advances the nation’s position toward a cleaner environment and energy independence. Quality of life is also, of course, a huge pillar underlying the importance of public transportation.

As part of the “Public Transportation Takes Us There” campaign, APTA has an online petition to connect and collect and codify the collective voice of public transit users and supporters nationwide.

This initiative will culminate in a presentation of the petition to legislators at a major Capitol Hill event in late September.

Why I will sign the petition

Because transit enables quality of life, convenience, mobility, and freedom to get around without a car.

What do I mean by optimality?

Transit, walking, and biking are the most space efficient and cost effective ways to get people from place to place (provided there is tight connectivity between origins and destinations, density, and mixed uses--see both Jane Jacobs Death and Life of Great American Cities and Steve Belmont's Cities in Full for the details).

The Urban Ambassadors group of sustainability advocates in Des Moines, Iowa did one of those events, where they compared how much space is required to move 40 people, and took photos. (Their final version of a poster is one of the best, using the photos with additional graphic design elements to make the point simply and effectively.)


Also see this article about their project, "Photos offer a challenge: Consider your commute from the Des Moines Register.

GE Streetcar/trolleybus ad, 1940.

What University of Maryland can learn from Arizona State University

See "Light rail makes commute easier for ASU students" and "Peers help ASU students master light-rail" from the Arizona Republic.

From article 1:

Although he never used public transportation in his hometown of Temecula, Calif., Arizona State University junior Andrew Wolfe of Tempe looked at home while standing in a Metro light rail car headed downtown Phoenix about noon Thursday.

The criminal justice major has been taking the light rail from Tempe to the school's downtown Phoenix campus right after it started operating in December 2008, and has had a lot of practice...

Wolfe and Esquibell are among the more than 2,200 students who have a U-Pass, an all-access public transportation card that grants bearers unlimited rides on all local, express and Rapid routes and light rail for nine months. Students pay $80 for services that cost $765.

From article 2:

A new volunteer program aims to make taking the light rail easier on rookies during the first two weeks of each semester. The Student Transit Ambassador program is a joint venture between Arizona State University's Parking and Transit Services and Metro light rail. Student volunteers who have undergone training with Metro are placed at the three stops most used by students during peak times five days a week.

Understanding national government through the lens of Growth Machine and Urban Regime theories

It's frustrating for me to read the "local" newspaper's coverage, in this case the Washington Post, of structural failure in organizations for a couple reasons. First, they don't seem to have an understanding of how organizations work generally. Relatedly, they don't understand that organizations are systems and have processes to produce their output(s).

I rail about this all the time and won't repeat myself here, too much. Basically, journalists focus on individuals and have a kind of bias that the "system" (which they don't understand) "works" and when it doesn't it's an aberration that has been corrected and will not occur again.

The former director of the media watchdog FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) describes this as the "bias of the center" and it is discussed in this article, "Propaganda from the middle of the road: the centrist ideology of the news media," which was published in 1989, and which I still remember, because of importance of the concepts it discussed.

While Jeff Cohen was talking (this was a speech originally) about reporting on national and international politics, the trope is relevant to local news reporting too.

Second, newspapers and journalists for the most part fail to think about the intersection of politics and business and how it works in practical terms.

Regular readers are probably bored about my constant mention of the Growth Machine and the Urban Regime. From "A superb lesson in DC "growth machine" politics from Loose Lips (Washington City Paper)":

... the Growth Machine thesis, first laid out by sociologist Harvey Molotch, in the seminal article, City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place. From the abstract:

A city and, more generally, any locality, is conceived as the areal expression of the interests of some land-based elite. Such an elite is seen to profit through the increasing intensification of the land use of the area in which its members hold a common interest. An elite competes with other land-based elites in an effort to have growth-inducing resources invested within its own area as opposed to that of another. Governmental authority, at the local and nonlocal levels, is utilized to assist in achieving this growth at the expense of competing localities. Conditions of community life are largely a consequence of the social, economic, and political forces embodied in this growth machine.

Political scientist Clarence Stone, a professor at University of Maryland has a competing thesis, that of the "urban regime." I don't think these theories are competing so much as different sides of the same coin. "Growth Machine" theory explains the motivation of "the land-based elite," and "urban regime" theory explains in detail how the land-based elite operates and functions.

Professor Stone was kind enough to send me his recent paper, "Now What? The continuing evolution of Urban Regime analysis," from 2005. He writes:

An urban regime can be preliminarily defined as the informal arrangements through which a locality is governed (Stone 1989). Because governance is about sustained efforts, it is important to think in agenda terms rather than about stand-alone issues. By agenda I mean the set of challenges which policy makers accord priority. A concern with agendas takes us away from focusing on short-term controversies and instead directs attention to continuing efforts and the level of weight they carry in the political life of a community. Rather than treating issues as if they are disconnected, a governance perspective calls for considering how any given issue fits into a flow of decisions and actions. This approach enlarges the scope of what is being analyzed, looking at the forest not a particular tree here or there. (emphasis added, in this paragraph and below)

In discussing Atlanta, Stone writes: "Land use, transportation, and housing formed an interrelated agenda that the city's major economic interests were keen to advance;" and

By looking closely at the policy role of business leaders and how their position in the civic structure of a community enabled that role, he identified connections between Atlanta's governing coalition and the resources it brought to bear, and on to the scheme of cooperation that made this informal system work. In his own way, Hunter had identified the key elements in an urban regime – governing coalition, agenda, resources, and mode of cooperation. These elements could be brought into the next debate about analyzing local politics, a debate about structural determinism.

Extending the Growth Machine and Urban Regime Concepts to the National Arena

The reality is that things function similarly at the national level of government too. It's just that the Growth Machine is not organized in terms of place. Instead, it's organized by "capital" and business sector, and "the governing coalition"is made up of business people and their representatives, elected officials, and government workers and appointees. This coalition focuses the regulatory structure on managing the regulatory function in ways that maximize business success and profits by minimizing regulatory cost and rules and regulations.

The tension is between representing the people, what Foglesong in Planning the Capitalist City calls the "democracy" contradiction, and representing the interests of capital, what Foglesong called "the property contradiction" in terms of local urban planning and zoning practice, and what in this context I would call the "capital" contradiction.

As industrial sectors have been reorganized on a global scale and the extra-normal profits that used to be generated by oligarchic and monopolistic participants in home markets once relatively free of competitors from outside the home country have dissipated, industries have worked to significantly reduce costs and eliminate slack costs, ranging from labor to the cost of complying with rules and regulations.

To make profits in a hypercompetitive arena, many companies choose to take significant risks as well in terms of the health and safety of their operations figuring that either they will luck out and things won't go catastrophic, or that they can afford the cost if it does. (see Union Carbide and Bhopal, BP and its refinery in Texas, BP and drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, GE and the Love Canal, GE and its practices with its appliance division, that peanut processor that went out of business due to contamination, mining disasters in Appalachia, etc.)

Industrial companies do this through trade associations and big lobbying budgets, and through the revolving door of people working for government then working for industry then working for government (e.g., Dick Cheney and oil industry policy, his sojourns in government bridged by working for Halliburton, the oil services firm).

So while the Washington Post believes that its expose of the U.S. Department of the Interior's branch which "regulated and promoted"--which yes is a contradiction that should have been fixed a long time ago-- the oil exploration and production industry is so significant that it deserves to be the top story of today's edition, for me it says very little that I don't already know. See "Lessons from oil agency's ties."

How is this any different from the so-called "iron triangle" described by political scientists in the 1970s with regard to policymaking (see this entry from Wikipedia, from which this image is also taken). Or the concerns that President Eisenhower raised about the growth of the military-industrial complex?

The real issue is the linking of politicians, government agencies and workers, and capital as organized by industrial sector or issue group as the governing coalition or "Growth Machine" that sets a common agenda and system for working together and provides the resources in people, money, and legal representation necessary to make it all happen.

What happened with the Minerals Management Service happens with virtually every federal government agency. Hey editors of the Washington Post, did you notice yesterday's front page article about the egg recall? ("Most eggs produced by a few firms : Safety inspections fall through cracks as industry consolidates ") Do you think this is a systematic problem with industry as it is organized in the United States or just happenstance, a number of freakish coincidences?

(Inter)national developers and national chains make national deals but with local consequences

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Update: Also see "Costco Targets Mall Space to Expand Its Reach," from the Wall Street Journal.
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The Costco at the Wheaton Mall is a big deal regionally and especially in Montgomery County and Wheaton. See "Costco mulls move to Wheaton>" and Wheaton players divided on Costco move" from the Gazette, and "Costco gas station at issue in Wheaton" from the Post.

There was a big hullabaloo over a gas station on the site, which for a long time was a deal breaker, and the county government seemed willing to bend, and give Costco a pass vis-a-vis the normal review requirements that are in place for gasoline stations, which from a zoning standpoint, are considered a necessary evil with additional review being necessary to reduce negative impacts.

But according to Retail Traffic Magazine, this Costco deal with Westfield in Wheaton is merely one of similar deals they are working on around the country. See "Westfield Reaches Deal to Bring Costco to Three Markets."

This kind of national agreement leasing is something that happens across the industry, and is one of the factors that makes it very difficult for independent retailers to compete in local markets.

People hours, not "museum" hours

The Brooklyn Museum is going to expand its hours 3 nights/week, according to "Brooklyn Museum to Extend Hours" in the New York Times. From the article:

... staying open until 6 p.m. on Wednesdays and 10 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays. (It is currently open until 5 p.m. on those days.) To offset the change, the museum will open an hour later, at 11 a.m. ...

“Clearly there’s a need for more opportunities post-5 o’clock, whether it’s families with kids getting out of school, or people coming from work, or younger people going on dates,” the museum’s director, Arnold L. Lehman, said in a phone interview. “We wanted to make a change that would better accommodate a very broad-based audience.”

He said that the museum would organize programs for Thursday and Friday evenings, like lectures and films. “It’s not going to be a duplicate of First Saturdays at all,” he said, referring to a popular current program, on the first Saturday of every month, which involves music and dancing and has a party-like atmosphere. The Thursday and Friday evening programming will be “much more relaxed and very gallery-oriented and education-oriented,” Mr. Lehman said.

The museum will hire a few extra people in visitor services and the store to accommodate the new hours, he said, “but in both instances our hope is that our suggested admission will more than cover whatever costs we have.”

One of the ideas I've written about since around 2002 is the idea of extending hours for the Smithsonian Museums at least one evening each week.

These are the kinds of issues that could be grappled with in a cultural planning effort for the city. While the national museums and cultural institutions are for the most part insulated and disconnected from local cultural policy, by engaging in a process at least the issues and opportunities could be raised, even if it will take decades to make change happen.

Note though that the New York Times reported in June that the "Brooklyn Museum’s Populism Hasn’t Lured Crowds." Maybe they are doing it wrong. Maybe the audience for art and culture just isn't as big as we want it to be.

From the article:

When it opened a new glass entrance in 2004 meant to beckon the masses, the Brooklyn Museum said it hoped to triple attendance in 10 years by concentrating on a local audience. It had stopped worrying about competing with Manhattan museums or about its image — despite its world-class collections — as a poor man’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Instead, the museum invited the neighborhood to view its McKim, Mead & White Beaux-Arts building as a community resource and openly celebrated popular culture with shows like its recent photographic history of rock ’n’ roll.

But six years in, the effort to build an audience is not working. Attendance in 2009 dropped 23 percent from the year before, to about 340,000, though other New York cultural institutions remained stable.

Almost a quarter of the attendees were people who came for First Saturdays, free nights at the museum that include music, dancing, food, cash bar, gallery talks and films. ...

Mr. Lehman says he takes pride in the fact that even though the Brooklyn Museum’s audience hasn’t grown, it has become younger and more diverse. A 2008 museum survey showed that roughly half of the attendees were first-time visitors. The average age was 35, a large portion of the visitors (40 percent) came from Brooklyn, and more than 40 percent identified themselves as people of color.

Sounds to me like they need to focus significant effort on what direct marketers call conversion and renewals...

(Road) Dieting is good for you and more specific car dieting options for the city

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports:

A recent study ["Evaluation of Lane Reduction “Road Diet” Measures on Crashes"] released by the Federal Highway Administration offers more evidence that rechannelizing four-lane streets to two lanes with a center turn lane can reduce collision rates without worsening congestion.

The study looked at "road diets" in several cities and suburbs in California and Washington, including Bellevue and Seattle. It also analyzed data from small towns in Iowa. The study looked at four-lane rechannelized similar to the city's proposal for Northeast 125th Street in North Seattle and other recent lane reductions on Stone Way North and Nickerson Street in which the fourth lane was converted to another use such as bike lanes or sidewalks.

The data from Washington and California showed a 19 percent reduction in collisions. The data from Iowa showed a 47 percent decrease.

Light rail in Portland. Flickr photo by fotojo.

Urban road dieting

I think that some of the options for "road dieting" are different in traditional center cities, which often don't have the wide traffic sewers that we may typically associate with suburban driving conditions, but still prioritize the movement of motor vehicles over walking, bicycling, and transit in many ways, sometimes without realizing it.

What we might call "car dieting" options in the center city include:

• prioritizing bus transit service by providing dedicated on-street lanes and prioritization at traffic signals (dedicated lanes only work when they are in use a lot]
  
• deploying light rail and streetcar transit through in-street operations and traffic signal prioritization rather than operating on right of way separated from other vehicles
  
• converting one way streets into two way streets (e.g., during rush hours Constitution Avenue in NE DC used to function as a one way street in and out of the city, now it is two way without hour restrictions)
• converting street right of way into on-street cycle tracks for bicyclists
  
• changing pavement treatments, such as using Belgian block, in pedestrian priority areas, to provide visual, aural, and physical clues to drivers of motor vehicles that they should drive more slowly
• setting 30kph/40kph/50kph speed limits for motor vehicles such as was pioneered in Graz, Austria, and has since been taken up by cities throughout Europe and more recently in a number of the arondissements in Montreal.
• charging closer to market rates for on street residential parking permits -- Toronto does this, while I am unfamiliar with any prominent examples in the U.S.
• congestion charges such as those deployed in London or Stockholm. We have no such examples in North America at present.
• High occupancy vehicle requirements for at least one lane during rush hours on key inbound/outbound streets used by commuters. (I have promoted this idea for a few years now, but I didn't really think about it until reading a very old op-ed in the Washington Post by Patrick Hare, the same person who came up with the idea for DC's Metropolitan Branch Trail)
• angle parking -- this is a tough one. Angle parking adds parking inventory, but it does slow down traffic. However, it still prioritizes driving and can end up denying the use of precious right of way space for preferred bicycle accommodation treatments such as cycle tracks
  
• along with all the typical streetscape treatment design techniques ("Complete Streets" concepts) such as curb bulb outs and the like that work to better balance walking conditions vis-a-vis motor vehicles.
  

HOV 2 Lane in Alexandria, Virginia.


After seeing and using Montreal's version of cycle tracks--they do one cycle track with two lanes, rather than one dedicated cycle track for each direction--I am an even more fervent believer in cycle tracks. Plus I think their method is less expensive and is more practical given the number of bicyclists that typically bicycle in North American cities, which is much less than it is in the Netherlands or Denmark.


Traffic calming and pedestrian prioritization has been implemented in streetscape projects in the Brookland neighborhood of DC, such as on Monroe Street NE.

Quote of the Day: "The key is we've got to get out of this parochial mind-set."

-- Councilwoman Sharon Wolcott, City of Surprise, Arizona

It turns out that there is an instrument called the National Citizens Survey, developed in association with the International City/County Management Association, that communities can use to measure citizen perception of the quality of life within their communities, conducting a needs assessment. And they can compare the results to other communities.

The Arizona Republic has a story "Survey: Surprise residents want better transit, more retail" on the results in Surprise.

2010 DC Historic Preservation Conference

Friday Sept. 24th and Saturday Sept. 25th.

More information here.

Primary election special: If your name is "Michael Brown" does it matter who you are?

Mike DeBonis of the Post reports, in "Orange ekes out straw poll win in his own backyard," that Phil Mendelson, one of the City Council's only independent voices and the Democratic candidate that I support for the At-Large seat in the Sept. 14th primary, lost the Ward 5 straw poll to another candidate named Michael Brown, presumably because people thought they were voting for the guy who claims he was an All-Met basketball star, but wasn't, according to Dave McKenna of the Washington City Paper in this article, "D.C. Councilmember Michael Brown's Athletic Identity Theft: He Was Never A High School All-Met."
Holy s***.

I mean before you read any further, I have to disclose that I think a lot of the people in Ward 5 are wacked, judging by my experience as a volunteer and then for one year (about) as program manager for the now-deceased Brookland Main Street program.

These people are advocating for undergrounding the electrical wires on Brookland's 12th Street now, after the street construction already has been done. See the article from the biased local publication Brookland Heartbeat, for more on that story, "12th Street Power Lines,"

Where were they during the design of the street construction program? They were busy screaming and carrying on and telling DDOT that they and their design and their contractors were f*****.

That doesn't strike me as an efficient method for getting DDOT to go up against Pepco on their policies and outlandish charges (a City Council study estimated a cost of undergrounding wires at about 1/8 of the cost that Pepco quotes) to get them to do something that costs money.

I know when you're a public servant that you are supposed to help people, but as Professor Donald Shoup says, [when you have limited resources, it's best to focus resources] "on the people who are already helping themselves."

There are plenty of other wacked stories I could recount. Suffice it to say that Suzanne and I looked at a couple of houses in Brookland, but then said no #$%^&*()#$%^&*( way were we going to live in Ward 5 or Brookland.

So this election result doesn't surprise me at all. These are the same people who believe that because Ft. Lincoln residents live in Ward 5, that they have more right to participate in and knowledge about Florida Market (at Florida Avenue and 6th Street NE, about 3 miles away), than the people who live across the street, but in a different ward, Ward 6.

Still Phil better be printing up lots of flyers with the photo of the white Michael Brown...

Another big NPS problem: unlit parks at night

This is a safety issue, because certain NPS "parks" are intra-neighborhood facilities that either serve transportation needs outside of park hours, abut residential areas, and/or end up being dark holes in the activity fabric that can serve as order vacuums and abet crime. (Also see this article, "The Jury's Out on Hotel's Lights; Dupont Circle Bulbs Divide Community," from the Post in 2001 with regard to Dupont Circle.)

Last weekend, a bicyclist was murdered, likely in a robbery attempt, coming home from work later at night (after midnight), in the vicinity of Sherman Circle on Kansas Avenue. The police department hasn't updated their website with a press release on the murder, but see this entry, "Catholic University Senior Fatally Shot At Sherman Circle DC," from the Hangover Helper and this, "DC Cyclist Shot on the Way Home From Work," from Washcycle.

This is personally very scary for me because when I travel to the Columbia Heights-Mt. Pleasant-Dupont Circle-Georgetown-Adams Morgan areas, my route takes me on Kansas Avenue from 3rd St. to 13th St. NW, right through this area. And I ride at all hours.

As I write, Delegate Norton is having a press conference at Sherman Circle, and she is calling for lights.

From email:

Norton to go to Sherman Circle to Encourage Lights in an NPS Park to Enhance Public Safety

WASHINGTON, DC -- Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) today will go to Sherman Circle, at the intersection of Kansas and Illinois Avenues NW at 3:00 p.m. to meet with D.C. Councilmember Muriel Bowser (D-Ward 4) and to inspect a National Park Service (NPS) park close to where a homicide occurred in Ward 4 over the weekend. The community is concerned about the absence of lights in the park. The Congresswoman said, “This park beautifies the neighborhood, but it is dark at night, making it almost impossible for neighbors to feel safe. I want to see if a few lights can make this park a welcoming venue.” Norton spoke to U.S. Park Police Chief Salvatore Lauro this afternoon and appreciates that the park police and NPS agreed to send representatives to the meeting at the park.

But this is a more general problem across the city, with many similar examples of potential problem areas. Of course, as areas improve, or in areas where there is greater residential density, there ends up being more positive public activity on the streets, which helps to discourage order vacuums.

But many NPS installations are located in areas where that isn't the case, and there should be neighborhood-based parks security plans in place to deal with the problem. Since the Park Police are so beleaguered and don't have enough staff anyway, lights in certain parks, depending on coming up with a categorization method/service profile matrix and making assessments and decisions, ought to occur.

WMATA and safety

Day 1 on the Washington Metro, Railway Age
Originally uploaded by rllayman

Since I have been so harsh for the past year+ on WMATA and their systems failures and culture failures with regard to safety, it's only fair to mention that interim general manager Richard Sarles had a very nice op ed in the Post a week ago about the steps he's taking in terms of leading the necessary changes forward. See "Changing the safety culture at Metro."

Activating park spaces

Casual Elegance
Originally uploaded by M.V. Jantzen

Note in the previous entry, I mentioned that I didn't include any books on park planning. Well, we should all read about Olmsted. And I am waiting for David Barth to codify his "City Revival" approach to parks planning into a textbook. I would be first in line to buy. Of course, the Trust for Public Land publishes many great reports and primers on the subject (and I missed Peter Harnik's recent presentation at the National Building Museum). The Project for Public Spaces has a report, Public Parks, Private Partners and there is this special issue of Places Journal.

And I realized with the urban design recommendations below that I forgot to mention Cy Paumier's Creating a Vibrant City Center.

MV Jantzen has a post at GGW about how instead of opening a Shake Shack in a building, our reality show fop Tom Collicchio ought to open one in a local park.

The problem is that the parks where this needs to happen are controlled by the National Park Service, which has policies antithetical to improving the quality of the public space.

PPS's experience with Bryant Park in NYC is classic.

You'd think after 30 years, that the experience of revitalizing that park might trickle down and influence the National Park Service.

Nope.

So we're stuck and F****** both.

Note that the photo of the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park is by MV Jantzen. Similarly, the Schenley Plaza Park in Pittsburgh is activated in this and other ways.


Schenley Park is in Pittsburgh's Oakland Cultural District, has a merry go round, cafe, movable tables and chairs, and opens out to the Carnegie Library. I was there in October so it was a bit chilly and less active when I took this photo.

The most important books in planning (although I am behind on my reading)

1. Death and Life of Great American Cities - to understand what urbanism is and why it works or doesn't. (For extra credit, you can read her first substantive article on the subject, "Downtown is for People," which was published in Fortune Magazine in April 1958, and later in the compendium The Vanishing Metropolis--which compiled the 6 articles in the series of pieces commissioned by William Whyte, then the editor of Fortune Magazine. I am proud to say that not only do I have the book, I have 5 of the 6 original magazine issues, including the issue in which Jacobs' article appeared, which I found--really Suzanne found them--at an estate sale in Bethesda.)

2. Cities in Full -- takes Jacobs' concepts to the next level by providing deeper insight into why places work the way they do, in terms of housing, commerce, employment, and transit.

3. Geography of Urban Transportation Systems -- it's a textbook, with chapters by a variety of individuals. It's very well written and straightforward. Every planner should take at least one course in transportation planning.

4. Building Neighborhood Confidence and Understanding Neighborhood Change by Rolf Goetze -- these two books, long out of print, explain the processes undergirding the stabilization and improvement of neighborhoods. (My friend Tom Litke also really likes The Art of Revitalization, which is a study of a number of neighborhoods in Chicago.) You could also complement these books with Mallach's Bringing Buildings Back.

5. To understand commercial district revitalization and neighborhood economic improvement, probably Community Economic Development Handbook by Mihalio Temali, as well as the handbook from the Main Street Center, Marketing an Image: How to Develop a Compelling Message and Identity for Main Street. (I suppose then you would have to read Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations by Jacobs, but I have to admit that I have only skimmed these books, although I own both.) + the various ULI "ten steps" papers:

• Ten Steps for Developing Successful Town Centers
• Ten Steps for Rebuilding Neighborhood Retail
• Ten Steps for Rethinking the Mall
• Reinventing Suburban Business Districts
• Reinventing America's Suburban Strips

Although the description of the Main Street book is completely misleading. It discusses how to position a commercial district based on its economic capacity and opportunity, and how to do a market study and why. I haven't read the new Downtown Revitalization Handbook, but at least compared to all the other Main Street publications that I've read and worked to apply, this is the best one. Temali's book goes beyond the Main Street approach and takes on microenterprise development and rebuilding jobs at the neighborhood and sub-district levels in cities. He is a leading community development practitioner in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region.

Note that I basically can't talk to "average" people, including planners and area bloggers, about commercial district revitalization and retail development, because they don't understand how retail business works, how the industry is organized, entrepreneurialism, etc. Read this stuff, then we can talk.

6. Urban Design Compendium -- a great introduction to urban design, along with William Whyte's City: Rediscovering the Center. The latter book is out of print, but a portion of it is in print in the book The Social Life of Small Urban Places. Of course, Jan Gehl's paper, "Close Encounters with Buildings" covers much of the same ground, and extends the principles, and is a lot shorter. (I haven't yet managed to acquire or read any of Gehl's books. They are usually out of print.) Oh, and Cy Paumier's Creating a Vibrant City Center, published by ULI.

7. If you don't want to read all those other books and you don't want to get too technical, I always recommend Robert Gratz's Cities: Back from the Edge as a good case study book, based on Jane Jacobs. The case studies make the concepts much easier to grasp. I say if you're only going to read one book, Cities: Back from the Edge is the one to read.

At this point, we go into advanced level work...

8. If you get to this point, you really need to understand the unseemliness of it all, the politics and the process. Planning the Capitalist City by Foglesong is long out of print, but an excellent primer on the development of the roots of urban capitalism and urban planning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Urban Fortunes: Towards the Political Economy of Place by Logan and Molotch outlines the Growth Machine thesis, which I am very fond of in terms of its explanatory power in why local political and economic elites are united and do what they do. That's from sociology.

The political science approach is called the Urban Regime, which I think is better than the Growth Machine in terms of explaining how the process actually works, how the local political and economic elites organize and coordinate their agenda. Clarence Stone's Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988 is a solid tome from that school.

Then to understand how it works in DC, Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C. is the best--theory into practice so to speak--especially chapter 4, on real estate development. The authors are journalists, and unfamiliar with either the growth machine or urban regime theories, but their book is a powerful case study that shows how the theories are in fact executed.

9. Then, I would say the books on the creative economy by Charles Landry and Richard Florida. They each have a few books between them, pick one from each and you can't go wrong. Landry really challenges how we should think about the revitalization process, while Richard Florida focuses more on human capital.

10. You need to understand "branding and identity," and there is no better resource than Simon Anholt. Either Brand America or Competitive Identity: The New Brand Management for Nations, Cities and Regions.

Damn, I see he has a new book, Places, which I will have to get and read forthwith.

11. I would follow the readings on branding and identity with with a bunch of books on marketing and design so you can put it into practice. Start with Maximarketing* (an old book but still worthwhile even from the pre-Internet days), maybe the Marketing Imagination*, Strategic Marketing for nonprofit organizations*, Social Marketing*, The Wayfinding Handbook, Festival Graphics, Designing Brand Identity, Worldbranding, and Wayfinding: Designing and Implementing Graphic Navigational Systems. (I still need to find a great book on branding.) I read these books with an * long before getting interested in planning.

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What's missing?

12. A solid set of recommendations on community engagement, civic participation, and organizing.

13. Understanding organizations. Although one of the most important books I ever read was the Social Psychology of Organizations.

14. Parks planning.

15. Housing. Which I don't work on.

I've only taken a couple planning classes. Note that only Planning the Capitalist City was on the reading list for one of the courses, although reading a syllabus for a class taught by Dolores Hayden of Yale University is how I was introduced to the Growth Machine theory, in the paper City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place.

Of course, you can't get a planning degree without reading Death and Life. The others? I doubt it.