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URBAN DIFFERENCE & CHANGE YALE ARCH 4247 + MORGAN STATE ARCH 418 Faculty: Justin Garrett Moore, AICP, NOMA and Samia Kirchner, Ph.D. Teaching Assistant: Lilly Agutu Our cities and their socioeconomic and built environments continue to exemplify difference. From housing and health to mobility and monuments, cities small and large, north and south—like New Haven and Baltimore—demonstrate intractable disparities. The disparate impacts made apparent by the COVID-19 pandemic and the reinvigorated and global Black Lives Matter movement demanding change are remarkable. Change is another essential indicator of difference in urban environments, such as disinvestment, disaster, or gentrification. Cities must navigate how considerations like climate change and growing income inequality intersect with politics, culture, gender equality and identity, immigration, migration, and technology, among other conditions and forms of disruption. In Urban Difference and Change, we explored some key questions: • How are cities and their environments shaped by difference, including the legacies and derivatives of colonialism and modernism? • How do the structures and systems of difference operate in our spaces, places, and cities? • How might we better understand and find agency in the past, present, and future of urban contexts using an anti-racist and decolonial approach to design and urbanism? • How can frameworks like cultural heritage, environmental conservation, and social equity and inclusion challenge dominant narratives or unjust past and present conditions? The course operated as an online (via Zoom) trans-institutional collaboration between Yale University SoA in New Haven, Connecticut, and Morgan State University SA+P in Baltimore, Maryland. This partnership allowed for interaction among students from different backgrounds and fields of study in order to share a learning environment and bring diverse experiences and perspectives to our work. The format of the course included readings, presentations, conversations, and case studies in the first half of the semester. The second half of the semester focused on the development of students’ independent research and design for place-based or issue-based projects or research focused on difference and change in the urban environment. Our collective work from the seminar is compiled, in an unedited and in-process state, in this online publication.
HOUSIN
01 ___LIVING SOILS_Vicky Achnani 02 ___DESIGN PRINCIPLE FOR HIGH-D 03 ___RENT OVER BUY IN BALTIMORE_
NG
DENSITY CITY BLOCK__Yuyi Zhou __Julia Cochran
LIVING SOILS
Urban Farming in the Brownsville Neighbourhood Vicky Achnani
Possible Partnership
DESIGN PRINCIPLE FOR HIGH-DENSITY CITY BLOCK Project Subtitle Yuyi Zhou
March 20, 1948 Stuyvesant Town looking northwest INTRODUCTION
DENSITY DEFINATION
The phrase “ high density” sounds a lot like a synonym for overcrowding and congestion, for too-tall buildings and greedy real estate developers, unwanted neighbors and lost parking spaces. But these stereotypes do not stand for that we need to abandon high-density cities. With specific design policies, we can make density so much better.
It is essentially a metric for quantifying persons or buildings or housing units in a given space in an urban setting. No widely agreed density measurement technique is available. Housing Density” measures the average number of residents divided by the footprint of the project in a project like Tudor City, and also takes into account how much area the buildings occupy on the site.”
* Resource: Domain 4- Performance Based Built Environment, https://www.reading.ac.uk/PeBBu/state_of_art/urban_approaches/high_density/high_density.htm.
‘Density’ is a concept used in community planning and urban design to refer to the number of inhabitants in
a given urbanized area. As such, it has to be distinguished from other measures of population density. Urban density is considered an integral factor of understanding how cities operate. In a number of fields, including economics, health, innovation, psychology and ecology, as well as biodiversity, urban density-related research takes place.
DENSITY MEASUREMENT
The number of residents living in a given urban area is urban density which is an important part of how cities work. Due to the commonly accepted belief that neighborhoods work more successfully as people live in denser urban areas, many contemporary urban architects support higher densities. However, while traffic thinning and parking space reductions are not in effect, there are mitigating factors such as higher traffic congestion. They prefer to be more walkable and have greater opportunities for transit as cities have high densities. However, they will become relatively inefficient if cities are permitted to spread from the middle without the help of smart growth planning. Sustainability has many aspects for urban planners in Germany, but mobility, how people get around, is the most important of these. They ignore resilience and quality of life options as cities rely on cars as their main means of transportation, which can only come about when urban fabrics are designed around their individual users rather than their cars.
In the baseland region measurement, a crucial area of variation and uncertainty is what is included and what is omitted to make density estimates genuinely comparable. Is it either the place or the whole neighbourhood? In the spectrum of density definitions, this is the main dimension of variance. As can be seen below in the table, this basically results in a large difference in density. This densities are for a hypothetical site set in an area where, in dwelling units (DUs) per acre, each residential area has the same site density, but different concepts of density contribute to very different steps.
Density is the number of units in a given land area— people, houses, trees, square feet of buildings. It differs considerably depending on the base land area used in the measurement of density. The plot or site density is almost always larger than the community density, since a lot of property that does not have houses is included in the base land area measurement on a neighborhood scale. Population density depends on the density of all housing units and the size of the household. Given the density of a certain housing unit, the population density for small homes, such as empty nests, would be lower than for big families with many children. Building construction density is calculated by many spatial metrics relating to how much of the building environment is on the ground. Many calculate bulk construction and are very crude. It is much harder to measure more critical design consistency challenges.
Density is a term used a lot. Density is a range of units in a given region at its simplest. There are, however, no agreed-upon common density concepts, but of position and occupation has come up with an idiosyncratic view.
Density Measure Table The distinction between these figures is that more and more non-residential applications are applied to the equation as the base land area is considered rises. These non-residential uses have residential densities of zero and therefore lower overall residential densities in these larger fields, such as offices and open space. Such more inclusive densities are major indicators that have a lot to tell about concerns such as the site’s general walkability. However, with these estimates, if the desired goal is to reach a city density of 4 housing units per acre, then the density of the site would need to be even higher.
VISUALIZING HIGH-DENSITY 5,000 people per square mile
In the Palisades, winding streets are lined with large houses (~5,000 ppsm)
In Brookland, detached single family homes sit on lots with front setbacks and spacious backyards (~6,000 ppsm)
15,000 people per square mile
Lamond-Riggs achieves a similar population density with suburban-style duplexes (~13,000 ppsm)
Though walkable, most of Georgetown isn’t particularly dense, with blocks of tiny rowhouses clocking in at about 15,000 ppsm
20,000 - 30,000 people per square mile
With a mix of both historic and new-construction rowhouses, this block group in Hill East sits at around 22,000 ppsm
In Fort Dupont, garden apartments centered around green space and surface parking give this area a density of roughly 27,000 ppsm
30,000 - 40,000 people per square mile
In Glover Park, rows of attached houses line a network of relatively narrow streets (~31,000 ppsm)
A mix of duplexes and garden apartments puts this part of Shipley Terrace at about 35,000 ppsm
40,000 - 50,000 people per square mile
In Rosslyn, parking lots and highways surround these 7- to 10-story apartment buildings (~47,000 ppsm) 50,000 - 60,000 people per square mile
These apartment complexes on Massachusetts Avenue don’t cover a lot of land area, but their height makes them relatively dense (~53,000 ppsm)
These blocks bordering the south end of Adams Morgan are almost entirely filled with large rowhouses, with a few bigger apartment buildings situated on the main thoroughfares (~45,000 ppsm)
Dupont Circle’s streets blend rowhouses with 4- to 8-story prewar apartment buildings (~55,000 ppsm)
THE BENEFITS OF DENSITY ---No need to abadon high-density urban planning Growing residential density, at its simplest, means housing the same number of people on a smaller amount of land (Chart 1), or housing a larger number of people on the same amount of land. ( Diagram 2). We can see that density has strong consequences for the protection of open space and land-based infrastructure, such as areas of natural heritage, environmentally vulnerable sites and prime agricultural land. ( Diagram 3). Commuting times and lengths are also influenced by density. An rise in population density means that the schools, restaurants, employment and facilities that occur in towns and suburban centres are situated closer to a larger number of residents. Higher densities are almost invariably associated with greater travel distances and travel times, although higher density does not always lead to shortened travel time. When we consider some additional facts of urban economics, additional advantages become obvious. 1) As split into a larger number of individuals, the fixed costs of major infrastructure ventures, such as bridges, sewage and water mains, decline. For massive public spending on services such as parks, libraries and ice rinks, the same is true. 2) Until service provision becomes feasible, many services and organizations rely on a critical mass of potential consumers within a given catchment area. This is also true of small-scale retail companies, schools and transportation systems in the area. The cost effectiveness of supplying highways, utilities, community services and social initiatives is improved by rising residential density. The selection of companies and facilities that can be offered within a city is often expanded by rising residential density. More favorable impacts on travel time are triggered by a broader variety of places of work, shopping and leisure closer at hand. Incresing Ddiagram * Resource: Lorey, Annie; The Bill That Could Make California Livable Again. JANUARY 13, 2020
* Diagram Resource: American Families Face a Growing Rent Burden: High housing costs threaten financial security and put homeownership out of reach for many
Inherently, the reduced unit sizes associated with higher density housing types are more affordable - a boon for many households with smaller room requirements: single people, new couples and single parent households, as well as those with statistically lower average incomes - veterans, disadvantaged individuals and new immigrant families.
New housing models suitable to these changing population realities would be needed as American cities mature and diversify.
Increased residential density, viewed differently, is mostly the product of supplying Canadian communities with a greater variety of housing options. This variety of housing contributes to a variety of advantages.
Higher numbers of young couples, single parent-headed households, and recent immigrant families mean higher demand for more compact and affordable housing options. With adequate, well-designed amenity space, higher density townhouses, low-rise and high-rise apartments will offer excellent alternative models of family housing. Integrated into new or current neighborhoods, they will lead to a housing mix that is more suited to the evolving demands of American society for family housing.
Driven by single and semi-detached homes in low-density neighbourhoods. For elderly homeowners who choose to live within their neighbourhoods while downsizing to more manageable, senior-friendly accommodation, there are limited choices. Responsive infill will provide the housing styles required to allow seniors to age in place when shifting to more age-appropriate housing conditions. New developments, designed with a greater density of residences, offer a variety of living opportunities that make it easier to age in a place.
The conventional suburban housing model is gradually considered to be a bad match for American demographic realities.
Benefits of Density * Diagram Resource: American Families Face a Growing Rent Burden: High housing costs threaten financial security and put homeownership out of reach for many American Families Face a Growing Rent Burden: High housing costs threaten financial security and put homeownership out of reach for many
HIGH DENSITY =/= CROWDED ---Crowed are created by missing regulations
Kowloon Walled City, 1993 One of the most heavily inhabited areas on Earth once existed just north of Hong Kong Island. From the 1950s until 1994, in Kowloon Walled City, a vast complex of 300 interconnected buildings that filled a city block, more than 33,000 people lived and worked. In Kowloon, an area north of Hong Kong Island, Kowloon Walled City was a heavily inhabited, unmanaged village. What started as a Chinese military fort grew into a village of squatters containing a mass of 300 high-rise interconnected houses. In the early 20th century, the town started out as a low-rise squatter settlement. Hong Kong saw a huge influx of Chinese refugees during World War II. This has contributed to the city’s shortage of jobs. In addition, developers in Kowloon and others with “squatter’s rights” constructed high-rise buildings on the space to capitalize on the need for housing. At its height, the 6.4-acre community was home to more than 33,000 residents. Some felt it was the most heavily inhabited location on earth.
The Walled City, although situated in Hong Kong, was officially a Chinese military castle. When both China and the British-run Hong Kong government ignored it, this put the settlement in legal purgatory. There was no enforcement of rules, legislation, even building codes. “There has never been any top-down instructions or training for how the venue should be. It evolved as an organic response to the needs of individuals,’ says the photographer, Grey Girard. In Kowloon, the only rule imposed was the height of the house. The building was not permitted to be taller than 13 or 14 floors because the airport was so close. The Walled City was dominated from the 1950s through the 1970s by the Chinese mafia, dubbed the Triads. It acquired a reputation for prostitution, gambling, and cocaine as a sanctuary. The Walled City streets and alleyways were narrow. Some of them were no more than six feet tall and others were so narrow that one had to pass across them sideways. In the upper floors, a vast network of tunnels also made it possible to traverse the width of the town without stepping on the ground floor.
The Walled City was not the kind of place you liked, particularly at night, to walk around. Many people were trapped on the roads or alleys that they knew well on their way to work and home. It was easy to start up a company because laws and permits were not applied in the area. Compared to the rest of the world, rentals, largely regulated by those with “squatter’s rights,” were poor. In Hong Kong, physicians, dentists, and other licensed practitioners who emigrated from China learned that their licenses were not valid. As rules were not followed there, many took up offices in the Walled City. The town is popular as a location where the working class of Hong Kong went to the doctor or dentist. Appointments were cheaper and there was no place else in the area for the doctors and dentists to work. Due to the vast volumes of pipes, cables, and open gutters snaking through the building, the Walled City has its own micro-climate. Constantly hot, sticky, and moist were the lower stages. The rooftops of Kowloon will turn into a communal hangout during the afternoons and evenings, because of the smelly, humid conditions down below. People will hang out, or perform instruments, do laundry or homework.
It was like a strange garden, an urban one. There were loads of refuse from homes. It was a bit of an eyesore, but the air was light and breezy in contrast to the field below. Since living and working on the lower floors, it was nice to get up there.
Narrow Alley inside Kowloon Walled City
Atomsphere of Kowloon Walled City
HIGH DENSITY REQUIRES HIGH QUALITY PUBLIC SPACE ---Make public spaces work harder & Prioritise green transport and building options In development plans for many states, urban density goals remain modest. Sometimes it is set at around 15 households per hectare. Also reduced density is delivered in operation. Take Australia as a case, previous failed density tests have made it difficult to locally reproduce overseas instances. The great Australian hope of buying a quarter-acre block and the reason for the shame about density remains. In Melbourne, for instance, in the last decade, rapid high-rise growth has created huge numbers of very small residences, some of which are of low quality and lack natural light and ventilation. When new people continue to crowd on services that have not kept pace with inflation, very modest public transit expenditure makes it worse. However, car parking is commonly mandated. Such planning regulations mean that the cost of new apartments requires the cost of several parking floors, and vehicle crossover ramps are peppered with streetscapes. Highways are jammed with vehicles without adequate public transport, sparking citizens’ opposition to more infill expansion. On the highways and parking areas, these cars need to claim valuable space that should be better used for trees and urban greening. Green space is often overlooked in the scramble to reach rapid population growth, but it is critical for community health and well-being and to decrease the impacts of urban heat islands. To control population development, we may not need to migrate to Tamworth or Toowoomba, although it will entail some very substantial changes to our local planning priorities. There has to be a much greater focus on quality and beauty to bring back public interest for infill building. In key planning plans, it will also be committed to raising density goals. For eg, the 2017 update of Plan Melbourne has changed to a target of “over 20 dwellings per hectare.” In order to encourage greater densities in high-activity areas such as sports or town centres, it meets the guidelines of study. It will take time, though, for this transition to be introduced in current and new areas around the region.
Appropriate streetscapes and infrastructure must be complemented by density. This will entail a massive rethink of the role of the car in urban environments, greater investment in public transit and the reallocation to greenery and pedestrians of wide areas of streetscape land. That’s a huge issue, but it’s worth it, as density doesn’t necessarily have to equal “dogbox.” POSSIBLE CHANGE --- Wonerf neighborhood You will find that on-street parking is limited, the speed limit is about 15 km/h and a lot of road space is used for tree planting and garden beds. Taking a (digital) walk through a Woonerf neighborhood in the Netherlands Kids play in the courtyard under the watchful eye of long-time locals. The dense apartments that surround you are not seen because there are trees in the way and at ground level there is a lot to see. Remarkably, in the 1970s, the Dutch only started to step away from car-oriented construction to deliver this type of urban architecture, which puts people and place first.
HIGH DENSITY WOULD BENEFIT FROM DEVELOP AFFORDABLE, MIXED-USE NEIGHBORHOODS The simplicity of living in a small, largely self-contained neighbourhood will contribute to the joy of living in the area. With density, having traditional services becomes more cost efficient. Neighborhoods in the new towns of Singapore provide a combination of public and private projects that are served with a complete selection of conveniently accessible and generally inexpensive services. In Upper Manhattan, another example is. A plan to build a 15-story, 355-unit residence on the site of a derelict garage was thwarted in 2016 by protestors in Upper Manhattan. The building was to be the first private project under the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing policy of Mayor Bill de Blasio, which mandates that at least 20 percent of units must be below market rent in new buildings on rezoned land. The developer was free to bring up a 14-story building with no subsidized apartments without the rezoning. But the developer decided, in exchange for the rezoned extra square feet, that half of the apartments, 178 of them, would be rent-subsidized. “Opponents still took to the streets, declaring “an imminent danger to our neighborhoods and our culture” to the construction of any new market-rate housing.” The developer abandoned the initiative. “In California, pro-densifying legislation such as Senate Bill 50 has been threatened by a similar dynamic that aims to promote transit-oriented midrise development, disallow some low-density single-family zoning, and extend homeowners’ rights to build backyard accessory units, as they are called, “granny flats. Facing a deadline for passage by the State Senate, the new law now provides certain tailored provisions for current tenants. But it is opposed by a growing alliance of tenant advocacy organizations, including the Housing Rights Committee in San Francisco, saying that the law would not do nearly enough to deter landlords from bullying vulnerable residents and predicting its passage will “exacerbate real estate speculation, which has already played a key role in displacing low- and moderate-income tenants, immigrants, seniors and seniors.”
S.B. 50 will also ban downzoning, or decreasing density, near work centers and transportation infrastructure in California towns and cities. Upzoning would grant developers “carte blanche to cut down trees,” NIMBYs react to wreaking environmental havoc. To drive poor and culturally mixed minorities out of more affluent, overwhelmingly white communities, America, of course, has a long, sordid tradition of downzoning. Terrifying” was the term used by one resident of Silicon Valley at a community meeting to characterize the prospect of a seven- or eight-story apartment building rising as a result of S.B. near the local train station.” The notion of density conjures up taller structures for many New Yorkers, while tall buildings are also poor in density. New Yorkers, in particular, prefer to imagine public housing developments in the midcentury tower-in-the-park style. They compare density with “inner city,” as Yonah Freemark, an urban planning scholar, put it the other day. Public housing is viewed as unsafe, unsuccessful and not incorporated into the local neighborhoods. So they assume that density is the enemy. This definition gets density almost exactly wrong, as’ Housing Density’ points out. Nicholas Dagen Bloom, a public housing researcher and lobbyist, and Matthias Altwicker, a Brooklyn architect, chart the diverse ways in which midcentury reformers in public housing replaced slum housing with far less compact styles of urbanism. In order to provide residents with more light, air and open space, all these highrise slab buildings and H-, Y- and T-shaped housing complexes were built. They were for slum tenements being replaced by quasi-suburban developments. Middle-class initiatives like Co-op City in the Bronx have been characterized by the same strategy. The argument of constructing towers in the park was the low density. Thus, though Jacob Riis described the infamous Lower East Side tenements in “How the Other Half Lives” crammed in some 1,100 people per acre, leaving just 13 percent of the tenement blocks as open land, Queensbridge Houses in Queens, one of North America’s largest public housing complexes, was constructed for 245 people per acre from 1939. Open space existed for three-quarters of the property.
Public housing was meant to “take people out of the city,” said Mr. Freemark, but “there are denser urban neighborhoods where people with choices have almost always preferred to live.”
What “Housing Density” enumerates, Jane Jacobs preached: the lower-density housing projects in New York struggled to attain the standard of life offered by high-density communities.
He cited Chicago, mostly on the wealthier North Side, where the densest neighborhoods are. New York’s predominantly well-to-do Upper West Side is one of the city’s most dense neighborhoods; Brooklyn’s underserved East New York is one of the least dense. Few New York houses are more heavily populated than Chelsea’s London Terrace. Built at the same time as Tudor City, with some 1,600 homes, it’s a 22-story behemoth. To build it, Henry Mandel, a French competitor, demolished rowhouses between Ninth and 10th Avenues along West 23rd Street.
Jacobs didn’t rely on gentrification, because Palo Alto isn’t New York, Barcelona isn’t Hong Kong: density isn’t one size fits all. Urbanism isn’t simply a kit of materials. That said, today’s consequences for rezoning laws such as S.B. are already evident. 50 and for efforts such as the plan by Mayor de Blasio to densify select affordable housing sites by constructing new private mixed-income buildings on their properties.
While Mandel envisioned the occupancy of London Terrace by working-class residents, John O’Hara, Nicole Kidman and Debbie Harry moved into the building over the years. Television executive David Chase purchased Susan Sontag’s London Terrace penthouse for $9.65 million in 2013. To accommodate 931 people per acre, London Terrace was built. It’s about four times as heavily populated as Queensbridge, 18 times as populous as Co-op City, closer to the Paris and Barcelona density of city centers.
I assume that some of the pushback from the group against that principle arises from a lack of shared planning and design. It will help to deliver buy-in, improved neighbourhoods and more affordable housing with the additional costs and complexities of upfront construction. Individuals tend to be invested and like to envision changes. It’s not enough inspiration for public housing tenants who want to see what densifying feels like to help Mr. de Blasio crawl out of a giant fiscal trap to rebuild long-neglected, decaying developments. Solving what ails American cities still needs to be remembered by urbanists and progressives that not all real-estate growth is automatically evil. This includes certain anti-densifying laws and legislation to be reconsidered. And a common interpretation of what density really entails will depend on it. “High Density” is not a bad place to start.
Tudor City
Housing Density