Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (36 page)

The dispersal system also happens to be unfair even to those capable of driving. In
The Option of Urbanism
, the land-use strategist Christopher Leinberger explained how patterns of sprawl development punish poor drivers: Most cities develop “favored quarters” where the (mostly white) rich tend to live and shop. In sprawl, those favored quarters are fed by investment in new highways, malls, and job centers. Priced out of such districts, poor people are forced to drive farther to work, meaning they buy more gas and contribute more in gas taxes, which have traditionally gone toward funding more highway improvements in the favored quarters that exclude them.

Now the poorest fifth of American families pour more than 40 percent of their income into owning and maintaining cars. When working families move far from their jobs in order to find affordable homes, they can end up blowing their savings just getting there—which is exactly the condition that led so many of San Joaquin County’s super-commuters to foreclosure.
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Residents of favored districts have long guarded against new density that might bring in poorer people. Their preferences have been woven right into zoning codes, and they have found their way into infrastructure decisions. (In Los Angeles, a subway linking downtown with the ocean in Santa Monica was delayed for nearly two decades partly because residents in affluent Hancock Park and Beverly Hills did not want their community to be directly accessible from poorer East and South L.A.) American cities have actually been getting more segregated by income class for the past three decades.

To Be Fair

These inequities need to be confronted: in part for the sake of the poor, who have every bit as much right to the public benefits of the city as the wealthy; in part for the soul of the city, which, as the Greeks knew, was above all a
shared
project; and in part for purely pragmatic reasons—in a fairer city, life can be better for everyone.

In the fair city, people who share space on transit enjoy the right-of-way on congested roads.

In the fair city, streets are safe for everyone, especially children. (As Peñalosa points out: your streets are not inclusive until you can imagine an eight-year-old or an eighty-year-old walking safely and independently. This might seem an audacious goal until you actually see the very old and the very young walking and cycling on the streets of Copenhagen or Vauban, and now El Paraíso.)

In the fair city, everyone has access to parks, shops, services, and healthy food.

This access is almost never realized by accident. Public parks, for example, tend to reflect the preferences of the socioeconomic class whose members designed them—typically middle-class professionals with kids. But kid-friendly design is not necessarily friendly to everyone else. I realized this in Copenhagen when planners walked me through the recently renovated Nørrebro Park, an inner-city green space. There was the lawn for lovers’ picnics and pickup soccer. There was the children’s playground. But off to one side, there was also an unadorned hut surrounded by a high wooden fence. This was the zone designed by and for a demographic that some people call drunken bums.

“We asked everyone in the neighborhood to come to our planning meetings, but we realized that the alcoholics, the guys who just sit around all day and drink in the park, never showed up,” planner Henrik Lyng told me as we wandered through the park. “So we just bought a case of beer, came down here, and found them.”

The drinkers told Lyng they wanted a place to hang out where they wouldn’t be bothered by or bother other park users. They wanted a place to meet. They also wanted a toilet. That’s what they got.

I met a few of the regulars in that compound: rough, red-eyed men accompanied by rather fierce dogs. The guys said that the fence ensured that their dogs didn’t scare the children in the playground. They picked up the litter and looked out for each other. The compound was their common living room. Nørrebro Park works for everyone because it acknowledges through design that everyone has a right to be there.

But we face a couple of daunting challenges getting to the fair city. First of all, in most places, the happy redesigns I’ve been talking about—from bike lanes, traffic calming, good transit, and pop-up plazas to bylaws that ensure vibrant commercial streets—appear first in favored districts because their residents have the time, money, and political influence to make them happen. That’s one problem. The other is that wherever they are implemented, such livability measures actually drive up land values. This may be good news for property owners and city coffers, but it is a disaster for renters. For example, a new light-rail line through Seattle’s Rainier Valley has attracted lots of new investment—but it has also begun to squeeze out people of color. New York City’s celebrated High Line Park has caused lightning-fast gentrification: the cost of residential property within a five-minute walk of the park more than doubled during the eight years straddling the park’s opening in 2009.

No wonder these measures are viewed with suspicion. In a reversal of the last century’s prevailing trend, wealthy people are increasingly colonizing inner cities while poor people and new immigrants are pushed to the suburban fringes. Some of the less wealthy who still manage to occupy a place in the connected city understand the relationship between amenities and affordability. In Berlin, activists succesfully prevented the BMW Guggenheim Lab from staging three months of free events in the gritty district of Kreuzberg, knowing it would speed up gentrification in the area. In my own neighborhood in East Vancouver, the renovation of a public park in 2010 prompted organized protests by people who were worried that the spruced-up green space would cause nearby rents to rise. The fear is justified: the forces of supply and demand have helped make housing in some of the world’s most livable cities—such as Vancouver and Melbourne—the least affordable.
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So any sincere effort to build the fair city must also confront the unfairnesses wrought by markets and geography. Just as Peñalosa infused civic benefits into Bogotá’s slums, wealthy cities must provide affordable housing, and different kinds of housing, in even the most favored neighborhoods.

Some cities have been making that slow journey toward equity. In the last century, Americans came to admit that rules that effectively banned poor people or people of color from certain neighborhoods were wrong. Similarly, governments and the courts have acknowledged that land zoning that excludes apartments and affordable housing from neighborhoods also constitutes a form of segregation. In 1973 the wealthy county of Montgomery, Maryland, passed a bylaw stating that 15 percent of dwellings in every new subdivision in every part of the county must be suitable for people of low or moderate income. That way the people who work in the county could actually live there. It worked: thousands of lower-income residents have since found homes in one of the wealthiest parts in the state. The bylaw has been copied in hundreds of other cities.

Lately though, the housing equity challenge has boomeranged. As wealthy people rediscover the convenience and pleasure of central city living, poor people are being pushed out to the urban fringe. Cities that care must take aggressive and creative design interventions to ensure these neighborhoods serve everyone. What might that look like in the age of scarce public funds?

Vancouver again provides inspiration, this time on the site of Woodward’s, an abandoned department store that marked the frontier between super-shiny Vancouverism and the grit of Canada’s poorest neighborhood. Housing activists, private developers, the City, and senior levels of government collaborated on a plan to populate the site with a university, retail stores, and the usual clutch of cafés—all beneath three residential towers.
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The model was unprecedented: One of the towers contains subsidized housing for families. Another offers bomb-proof rooms for dirt-poor singles, most of whom arrive with addictions and mental illness. The tallest of the three towers, dubbed the W, offers fancy condominiums at market prices.

The subsidized component of the project depended in part on public dollars, but it also depended on the willingness of hundreds of buyers to pay top dollar for upscale condos situated amid the maelstrom of poverty and open drug use. Bob Rennie, the marketer selling the W, challenged buyers with the slogan “Be Bold or Move to Suburbia.” It was an audacious (and, some in the neighborhood charged, unforgivably classist) dare, but it worked. The tower’s suites, priced from $350,000 to $1.4 million, sold out within a month.

How could design help people of such disparate means live in such proximity? The project architect, Gregory Henriquez, employed a keen appreciation for status aspirations and anxieties in his solutions. Each tower got its own lobby: a segregation that was requested both by Rennie and by the Portland Hotel Society, the agency that would run the social housing component. (Poorer residents could not afford the lobby upgrades inevitably requested by the wealthy. And their representatives admitted that it might be psychologically hard for the poor to ride the elevator daily with people who were so much richer.) Another nod to privacy and status: Henriquez fitted the windows of the singles housing with hardy sliding blinds. Residents dealing with mental illness and paranoia could shut out the light of the world without taping up their windows with tinfoil and newspaper, thus preserving the views from market condominiums across the courtyard. The Woodward’s block’s street edges may be disappointingly bare, but inside that block is a grand public atrium through which the entire spectrum of neighbors pass and occasionally mingle, while students take shots at the basketball hoop at its heart. Woodward’s has proved so convivial that it has accelerated gentrification in the area, but it has done so while locking two hundred affordable homes in place.

It’s not enough to nudge the market toward equity. Governments must step in with subsidized social housing, rent controls, initiatives for housing cooperatives, or other policy measures. I don’t want to stray beyond the scope of this book—which is about design rather than social policy—but I must acknowledge that such mixing rarely happens if governments don’t step in to smooth the way. What’s clear is that fairness demands that cities stop concentrating subsidized housing in poor zones so all residents and their children can enjoy equal access to decent schools and services. This mixing is the mark of a civilized, democratic, and ethical society.

The Equity Dividend

The Bogotá experiment may not have made up for all the city’s grinding inequities. But it was a spectacular beginning, and to the surprise of many, it proved that the fairer city is not a radical proposition at all.

The campaign to impeach Peñalosa failed, partly because the mayor implemented his program so swiftly. He enjoyed broad executive powers and hired a motivated, partisan team to carry out a vision he had been fine-tuning for years. What it lacked in public process, it made up for in deliveries. As he moved into the second and third years of his three-year term, the equity program began to pay off for everyone, and the mayor’s approval rating hit 80 percent.

The changes after three years were stunning: the downtown core was revitalized, school enrollment grew by 30 percent, and running water was provided to hundreds of thousands more homes. By 2001, almost twice as many people were cycling to work in the city, saving the average minimum-wage worker the equivalent of a month and a half’s salary that year.

But here is the amazing thing: the happy city program, with its aggressive focus on creating a fairer city, did not only benefit the poor. It made life better for almost everyone.

The TransMilenio moved so many people so efficiently that car drivers crossed the city faster as well: commuting times fell by a fifth. The streets were calmer. By the end of Peñalosa’s term, people were crashing their cars less and killing each other less frequently, too: the accident rate fell by nearly half, and so did the murder rate, even as the country as a whole got more violent. There was a massive improvement in air quality: along all the TransMilenio routes, the noxious fumes and dust clouds cleared, and real estate values along the routes spiked, too.

Bogotans got healthier. Those who lived near the new parks, especially seniors, started walking more. Bogotans over the age of sixty actually reported getting more exercise if they lived in a neighborhood with a TransMilenio station. Just like the LYNX light-rail line in Charlotte, the TransMilenio changed people’s behavior, but it did it at a fraction of the cost by giving the formerly lowly bus the highest status on the road.

The city had experienced a massive spike in feelings of optimism. People believed that life was good and getting better, a feeling they had not shared in decades, not even during Mockus’s super-citizen years. After Peñalosa’s term (sequential terms are illegal in the city), Mockus ran for mayor again. He gained Peñalosa’s endorsement—and won the race—in part by promising to continue the ambitious infrastructure plans, which he carried out in his second term. The next mayor, Luis Garzón, continued some of those plans. In their terms, the software and hardware agendas merged, and the city experienced its best times in anyone’s memory.

Ricardo Montezuma, an urbanist at the National University of Colombia, told me that Mockus and Peñalosa proved to Bogotans that they could have any city they wished for. Over their terms, Bogotanos’ perception of the city utterly changed. “Twelve years ago, eighty percent of us were completely pessimistic about our future. Now it’s the opposite. Most of us are optimistic,” Montezuma told me in 2007. “Why is this important? Because in a big way a city is really just the sum of what people think about it. The city is a subjective thing.”

Montezuma’s point is not that form doesn’t matter. It is that the city is an idea to which each citizen contributes and from which each citizen should benefit.

Whether you call it a happiness program, a fairness agenda, or a straight-up war on cars, Peñalosa’s program was more than ideology written onto the city. It brought the benefits of the city to a much greater number of people. It maximized utility in a way that would have pleased Jeremy Bentham himself. It was deeply rational, in a way that American cities have not been for decades.