Scenes from a new film on post-Katrina New Orleans, which chronicles the city’s troubled attempts to deal with its destruction, while planning its reconstruction.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina dealt the city of New Orleans a near-fatal blow from which it has yet to recover. With entire neighborhoods underwater, communities suddenly finding themselves in exile and city services and infrastructure in disarray, the prospects for reconstruction looked bleak. Hundreds lost their lives in the disaster, while economic damaged was estimated to be over $100 billion.

Over four years later, a battle still rages in New Orleans over where, what and how to rebuild.

Producer and director Luisa Dantas has been following the reconstruction process on the ground in New Orleans since 2006. Working alongside local social justice and grassroots organizations, Dantas has pieced together a narrative about post-Katrina reality called “Land of Opportunity.”

From the website: “A feature-length film and multi-platform project, LAND OF OPPORTUNITY follows a diverse group of people in the early years of post-catastrophe New Orleans as they struggle with the most American of pursuits: seizing opportunity in the wake of tragedy. We get to know local and displaced residents, urban planners, immigrant laborers, and activists, as they try to build a better future for themselves and their families while restoring the “water-proof soul” of America.”

Land of Opportunity is scheduled to be released in 2010.

Check out the trailer:

More clips:

Sectioned Off from JoLu on Vimeo.

Out of Site from JoLu on Vimeo.

Deep Sixed from JoLu on Vimeo.

St. Joe (experimental short) from JoLu on Vimeo.

Tel Aviv’s affordable housing plan remains on paper, while rents continue to rise.

In August of 2008, the Tel Aviv Municipality announced with much fanfare that it had a “revolutionary plan” to build hundreds of affordable apartments for young people in the city.

One year and a global financial crisis later, apartment prices in the city continue their inexorable climb. Mayor Ron Huldai, who announced the plan just months before the local election, was re-elected, and the plan to build affordable housing vanished from the headlines.

Meanwhile young people, faced with rent hikes at the end of their leases, have increasingly decided to move out of the city center. Those who stubbornly insist on staying put have crowded into smaller, more dilapidated apartments. Others have come up with creative ways to save money, like converting their living rooms into an extra bedroom.

What happened to Tel Aviv’s revolutionary plan?

*****

One thing, at least, is clear: work on the plan is done. Earlier this year, in May, the municipality announced that the Municipal Commission for Affordable Housing, the panel of experts that put together the plan, had completed its work.

The commission, composed of external consultants from various disciplines alongside municipal officials, had come up with a list of recommendations that sketched out approximately what an affordable housing program in Tel Aviv would look like. Now it was up to the political echelon to decide what to do with those recommendations, which aspects to approve and how to proceed with the initiative.

To date, the commission’s work is still awaiting approval. Despite the city’s promise back in May that the plan would be presented to the mayor and deputy mayors “in the coming weeks,” that has yet to happen. The commission’s full report, which contains details on the various policy tools under discussion, has not been released to the public.

Dr. Emily Silverman, a researcher from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology’s Center for Urban and Regional Studies, headed the team of professional advisors to the Municipal Commission for Affordable Housing.

“Our main recommendation was that new residential projects built in the center and north of the city include affordable units for rent,” she says. “In exchange for these units, developers would be given extra building rights.”

Silverman continues: “Another recommendation was to push forward building plans in the south of the city and in Jaffa which have already been approved, but have yet to be built due to various regulatory obstacles. Pushing forward those plans would significantly increase the supply of housing.” Indeed, according to press releases put out by the municipality last August, two such projects, slated to contain some 1,650 new apartments, were to be pushed forward immediately.

In addition, a range of other policy tools were proposed, and the commission even suggested specific plots of land for pilot projects.

As to why the commission’s recommendations have yet to be approved, Silverman blames the delay on opposition to the plan among senior figures in the municipality.

The municipality, for its part, appears to be keeping its cards close to its chest for the moment. In response to an inquiry regarding the delay in approving the plan, the Tel Aviv Municipality told Metro:  “The subject of affordable housing is a strategic issue of great significance. Therefore it is important that the approach be allowed to mature in order to reach an operative state. The same goes for the full publication [of the commission’s recommendations].”

*****

The concept of affordable housing is not really new in Israel. From the early days of the state, government policy aimed to make decent, affordable housing accessible to the majority of the population. The Housing Ministry, which wielded tremendous power and influence, once built entire cities from scratch and provided housing for millions of new immigrants.

Over the years, however, as Israel’s centralized, socialist economy gave way to a privatized, capitalist one, the state effectively withdrew from the housing market and the Housing Ministry lost much of its power and resources. The government ceased building public housing apartments for low-income populations, and instead began selling off publicly-owned apartments. In cities like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where changes in the rental market threatened to make housing out of reach even for middle-income people, pressure began to grow for local governments to intervene.

Israeli municipalities, however, strapped for cash and constrained by antiquated legal structures (the law setting out the powers of local authorities in Israel is a leftover from the British Mandate), were hardly in a position to respond. The demand for a new sort of affordable urban housing grew out of this situation, led by young people struggling to remain in their urban neighborhoods and academics who pointed out that many cities around the world, including London, New York and Paris, had successfully implemented programs to regulate rents and build affordable housing units. In both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the issue played a key role in the elections for mayor in late 2008.

Initially, officials inside the Tel Aviv Municipality approached the idea with trepidation. Mayor Ron Huldai was quoted more than once criticizing the idea in the media.

Dr. Emily Silverman recalls that the project, ironically, grew out of an attempt by the municipality to justify not taking action. It was back in 2007, Silverman recalls, that calls from local politicians calling on the city to explore the issue of affordable housing were growing louder. In response, City Engineer Chezi Berkowitz asked the municipal planning team to draw up a professional opinion explaining why the municipality did not have the capability to create such a project, based on two previous assessments of the issue written by economists.

However, when members of the planning team consulted with Silverman, a known expert on the subject, she managed to convince them that it was possible. The planners in turn convinced the City Engineer, and thus the idea for the commission was born.

*****

Another irony is this: even if the plan is eventually approved and implemented, it probably won’t lower rents across the board. A certain number of people, it’s unclear how many, would be eligible for cheaper apartments, but the steps that the municipality is currently considering are not expected to have a significant impact on the greater housing market.

Gil Gan-Mor is a human rights lawyer at The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and a leading advocate of housing rights and affordable housing. ACRI is part of the Coalition for the Advancement of Affordable Housing in Israel, which also includes The Association for Distributive Justice, Bimkom – Planners for Planning Rights, and research institutes from Tel Aviv University, the University of Haifa and the Technion. The coalition has started a Hebrew-language blog as a platform for public discussion on the issue and is working on passing an affordable housing law in the Knesset.

Gan-Mor says he supports the move to create affordable housing in Tel Aviv, but believes that the city’s plan in its current form leaves much to be desired.

“The municipality could decide to set up a rent control mechanism that would allow landlords to raise rents incrementally, according to a set percentage every year,” says Gan-Mor. “Today, landlords take advantage of a lack of supply to hike rents substantially, and if a renter doesn’t agree to this, he simply has to look elsewhere.”

Dr. Emily Silverman admits that building a large number of affordable apartments for a specific group would probably not have a significant effect on the general rental market. “Affordable housing programs don’t usually result in a general lowering of prices, except for the target population,” she says.

However, she adds, speeding up construction of already-approved plans in order to increase supply (which was recommended by the commission) could theoretically lower rents across the city – it’s a matter of supply and demand. Silverman agrees that rent control mechanisms could also potentially benefit all of the city’s renters.

The problem, says Gan-Mor, is that regulatory tools, like rent control, which have been implemented successfully in many places in the world are not even being discussed – at least not according to the information that the municipality has made public. Says Gan-Mor: “The city’s method of releasing information through periodic press releases does not allow for a proper public discussion of the issue.”

He also notes that the municipality is considering making army service a condition for eligibility for affordable housing, a move which would effectively exclude the Arab community of Jaffa from the program.

Questions have also been raised regarding the project’s choice of target population. The commission’s mandate was to find affordable solutions for households with monthly incomes of between NIS 12,000-13,000. Last year, Dr. Emily Silverman described the target group to Metro as “moderate-income, socially-mobile young professionals.” For this population, the city would offer rents of around NIS 2,800.

However, as Gan-Mor points out, the plan provides no solutions for low-income residents of the city.

The municipality admits that this is the case, but argues that it does not have the resources to provide housing assistance to a low-income population. The Tel Aviv Municipality told Metro: “Public housing, everywhere in the world and in Israel as well, is the responsibility of the government, and not the responsibility of the local authority. The municipality does not have the capability to supply public housing like the government, without any means or appropriate tools. Therefore, the recommendations define the target population as an intermediate population, which is able to pay, but unable to afford to live in the city at market rates.”

To Gan-Mor, the city’s refusal to provide housing aid to low-income families is unacceptable. “The municipality’s plan states that it trusts the government to provide housing assistance for people in the lower income deciles,” he says. “The problem with this is that the State has scaled back its public housing programs in recent years. The waiting period for public housing in the center of the country can be over ten years, and rental subsidies provided by the government are way too low to cover rents in the Tel Aviv area. The inevitable result is that people with low incomes are forced to leave the city.”

*****

Not everyone, of course, is convinced of the merits of affordable housing. A number of conservative economists have publicly expressed their doubts about the plan. One of them is Dr. Yair Duchin, a professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem who made headlines last month when he called the idea of providing affordable housing in Tel Aviv “idiotic.”

Though he admits that, from a social perspective, there may be a problem in Tel Aviv’s housing market, Duchin says he prefers to look at the larger picture. The country’s periphery, he says, is emptying out. “Youth from all over Israel, including graduates of universities in Haifa and Be’er Sheva, are streaming to Tel Aviv. Affordable housing will only serve to attract more of them.”

“Of course the mayor of Tel Aviv wants to attract a young, strong, productive population. That’s perfectly legitimate. But there are also national goals. I think that the country’s limited resources should not be invested in those who want to live in central Tel Aviv.”

As for Tel Aviv’s young residents, Duchin suggests that they move out of the city, to Bat Yam, Holon or Petach Tikvah. If enough people move out of central Tel Aviv, he says, perhaps market forces alone will be enough to lower rents.

*****

For Prof. Noah Efron, a city council member from opposition party City for All (Ir Likulanu), it’s pretty clear why the plan is not going anywhere. “Nobody within the municipality wants to advance it, so it’s simply not being advanced,” he says.

While Efron thinks that the commission’s plan is insufficient, he admits that “it’s excellent for what it is,” and should be implemented right away. Noting that City for All has a much more extensive affordable housing plan of its own, Efron says he believes that the municipality’s plan has the potential to establish a number of important principles.

“The implementation of mixed housing, building for the rental market, dealing with apartment sizes – talking about these issues, even on a small scale, can begin to change the discussion about housing in the city and create important precedents, making it easier for the city’s planning committees to insist that developers build projects that are mixed, and not just for the rich or super-rich.”

To a limited extent, that has already begun to happen. Even without an official stamp on the commission’s plan, city planning committees have begun to use the momentum created by its work to require developers to integrate affordable housing units into new projects.

This is what happened, for example, in discussions regarding the former site of the city’s wholesale market. An enormous real estate project is planned for the 60-dunam site, which sits partially on city-owned land near Carlibach Street. When representatives from several local political parties insisted that the plan include an element of affordable housing, the developer agreed to add 60 small, affordable rental units.

“In the scheme of things,” says Efron, “it’s a drop in the bucket. But it’s also a sign that, if we continue to be vigilant in the municipal committees and bring enough public pressure to bear, we can begin this process, eventually making it into the norm. The municipality has publicly committed to doing this, now we have to push it to honor its commitments.”

This article was originally published in The Jerusalem Post’s “Metro” supplement on Sept. 11, 2009 (click here for a pdf of the original print version).

A dramatic plan that would change the face of Tel Aviv is likely to be approved, despite the adamant opposition of residents and charges of sloppy and unprofessional planning.

The future of Neveh Tzedek? A map, prepared by the residents’ committee, illustrating future construction plans. (Image via: www.nevetzedek.org)

The Tel Aviv City Council held a meeting yesterday to discuss a handful of building plans that, if approved, would effectively transform some of the city’s most historic areas beyond recognition.

The discussion, which some council members described as “fateful” and “dramatic,” drew a large number of city residents eager to have a say in the planning of their neighborhoods. The meeting, however, was conducted in a manner that seemed designed to exclude the public, and avoided discussion of the plans’ repercussions for the city’s future development.

The plans under discussion included the widening of Yitzchak Elchanan Street, north of Neveh Tzedek, as well as the new Mesila Highway, south of the neighborhood. Both are plans for new traffic arteries, lined with skyscrapers, that together would form a ring of traffic and tall buildings around Neveh Tzedek, one of Tel Aviv’s oldest and most charming (and richest) neighborhoods.

When connected with the Shlavim Highway, another skyscraper-lined expressway being promoted by the city, the roads would create a major new traffic artery, channelling cars from the Holon Interchange south of the city to the office towers along Rothschild Boulevard.

The plans were drawn up after a higher planning committee ordered Tel Aviv to formulate a comprehensive planning document, instead of haphazardly promoting a collection of individual building plans and roads, as it had done until then. The city recently presented and approved the comprehensive plan, resulting in several appeals being submitted by city council members.

The day got off to a bad start when dozens of residents were refused entry into the meeting. Instead of being held in the usual city council hall, the discussion took place in a small meeting room on the 12th floor of the municipality building, with officials claiming there was not enough space to let everyone in. The residents did eventually manage to get in, though, and made sure to make their presence felt, jeering the plan’s proponents and applauding when some council members spoke out against them.

Left: Dozens of angry residents were initially denied entry into the meeting, on the grounds that there was not enough space for the public.

Opponents of the plans claimed that they would necessitate the destruction of two schools near Neveh Tzedek, form a “separation wall” of concrete buildings between south neighborhoods instead of connecting them and ruin the character of neighborhoods slated for preservation. The Mesila Highway, a three-story right-of-way (a subway line and an underground highway below street level, with a park on surface) was criticized as unrealistic and unlikely to ever actually take shape.

The plans themselves, which were neither printed nor submitted for public review, were only presented halfway through the meeting, on the request of a council member. Several neighborhood representatives criticized them as being superficial, unprofessional and hastily put together.

The documents contained no serious discussion, for example, of the effects that the tall buildings would have on breezes, or of where their shadows would fall. Apparently, no one thought about where all of the new residents’ children would go to school, or what effect their cars would have on the already traffic-clogged area. Some council members pointed out that the new residential buildings, in all likelihood populated largely by foreign residents who live outside Tel Aviv, would add little to the fabric of life in that part of the city.

After all sides’ claims were presented, Deputy Mayor Doron Sapir, who chaired the meeting, declared a closed discussion and asked all observers to leave.

Only after the meeting ended did it become clear that someone had actually drawn up an alternative plan, in which the thousands of housing units proposed by the city would be built in low-rise buildings instead of skyscrapers. No one had mentioned this alternative during the meeting itself, although neighborhood representatives had expressed their clear preference for such an alternative.

In the end, the plans will probably be approved. That’s the way it is in Tel Aviv – Mayor Ron Huldai demands strict discipline from members of his coalition, and he knows that he can easily find the votes to pass any proposal he likes. The fact that so many major new roads (accompanied, of course, by parking lots, giant intersections, gas stations, etc.) are being approved in southern Tel Aviv speaks volumes about the city’s planning policy. Increasingly, the mythical light rail, which is still not even close to implementation, is looking like a smoke screen.

The bottom line is that the city backed itself into a corner. By encouraging developers to buy up large plots of land in an area of the city that it thought no one cared about, city planners found themselves with a series of plans for tall buildings in an area where no other building rises above four stories. By promoting skyscrapers around Neveh Tzedek, the city found itself antagonizing a hornet’s nest of wealthy and well-connected citizens. And by excluding opinionated residents from most of the planning process, the city found itself with an uncompromising front of opposition that no longer believes a single word uttered by its officials.

While the future of the area remains unclear, there is still reason for optimism. Politicians are slow learners, preferring a bitter fight to the end over an agreed-upon compromise. However, a line in the sand has been drawn by residents and activists in the city, and a new kind of politics is slowly taking shape in the city.

Originally published at GreenProphet.com.

I recently joined the Tel Aviv Bicycle Association, an organization that advocates for bike-friendly planning in the city.

“At this point in time, Tel Aviv is like a martial artist who has mastered the basics, and must decide if he wants to invest the effort in order to become a professional.”

This was the assessment offered recently by one municipal official regarding the city’s efforts to promote itself as a bike-friendly place during recent years. The city, he said, is at a crossroads. It has already built the easy bike paths in places with ample space, obvious demand and uncomplicated zoning. Now it must decide if it wants to go all the way.

Last week I joined the planning team of the Tel Aviv Bicycle Association (תל אביב בשביל אופניים), a local bike advocacy group. The organization, an offshoot of Israel Bicycle Association, has been inactive for several years, but is now back in action. And the municipality, it seems, is eager to cooperate.

Cycling in Tel Aviv is an issue that is very dear to my heart. Living in Jaffa, I have become used to “commuting” to the city by bike almost every day. Luckily for me, a new boardwalk, complete with an excellent bike path, was built along the beach just before I moved down here. In other parts of the city, biking is neither pleasant nor easy, and can often feel like an extreme sport.

The city’s pleasant climate (for most of the year anyway) and flat topography make investments in bicycle transportation a no brainer – especially considering the huge success that bikes as a form of transportation has had in places with a less pleasant climate, such as Portland, Copenhagen and Amsterdam.

At the moment, Tel Aviv for Bikes is composed of a handful of volunteers: architects, urban planners and bike enthusiasts. The group’s goal is to transform the city into a place in which riding a bicycle (for fun, to school, to work) is a safe, fun and inviting activity.

Left: A “bike lane” in Tel Aviv is often little more than a stencil painted onto a sidewalk. The city claims to have created 100 km of bike paths, but many of them are of questionable quality.

The good news is that the city seems to be on board. There is a special budget for paving bike lanes, and 3 professionals at the municipality who are in charge of planning new routes. The mayor has lately been painting himself as an enthusiastic supporter, and there are rumors that the bike budget will be doubled in next year’s budget. There is also a master plan for bike lanes in the city, a pretty good one, and bike lanes are now being integrated into road-building projects.

The bad news is that things are moving very slowly. The yearly budget, 7 million NIS, is enough to pave a few short segments here and there, but not nearly enough to bring about the biking revolution that the city needs. Most of the bike lanes that are being paved, however, are budgeted as part of larger projects, such as the new boardwalk near Jaffa.

Our first project at Tel Aviv for Bikes will be to conduct a survey of existing bike lanes and suggest specific steps to improve their flaws. Stay tuned to this blog for more updates in the future…

A few thoughts on moving toward greater urban sustainability in Tel Aviv, published on The Jerusalem Post’s op-ed page.

At the ripe old age of 100, the city of Tel Aviv has earned the right to a bit of introspection. From its origins as a dusty “garden suburb” of the ancient port city of Jaffa to its lofty position today as the thriving heart of the country, the city has come a long way. Despite the many mistakes that have been made over the years, Tel Aviv has developed as an exceedingly pleasant place to live, with a dynamic energy that attracts admiring visitors from around the world.

Sometimes it seems, however, that the city’s leadership might not possess the wisdom to nurture the very things that make the city great. Thus it was a welcome surprise to hear that City Hall had chosen to kick off the city’s 100^th birthday celebrations with a conference on urban sustainability.

The Centennial Conference on Urban Sustainability, held earlier this month, could have provided an opportunity for a serious discussion of the city’s past and future development. The city invited a series of excellent speakers from abroad, who brought fresh ideas to the table. Despite this, many of the discussions felt stale and lacking in substantive debate.

Below are a few thoughts on moving toward greater urban sustainability in Tel Aviv, based on what was (and wasn’t) said at the event.

1.       Be modest.

This month’s conference was anything but modest. The mayor, city engineer and a host of other official personalities waxed poetic about their own accomplishments. It was clear that the city’s leadership thinks very highly of itself and its own abilities, but not very highly of other people’s ideas – especially when they raise doubts about the way the city is used to doing things.

Way back in the 1960′s, American theorist Jane Jacobs argued that large-scale urban development schemes often do more damage to cities than good – and leave behind scars that persist in the urban fabric for generations.

To those who shape the city: be modest. Tread lightly today, for tomorrow the theories and ideologies that guide you will likely be discredited and discarded in favor of new ways of thinking.

2.       Choose: cars or people.

“Better cars do not make a better city, they make a city worse,” said Richard Register in his presentation at the conference. In many cities around the world, the car is now seen as the greatest enemy of the livable city. In Israel, the car is still king.

In Tel Aviv, there are plans for new highways all over the city (these, for some reason, did not feature prominently in presentations by city officials). In both Haifa and Jerusalem, expensive mass transit projects have not stopped city planners from attempting to widen streets in the city center, often necessitating large-scale demolition of historic buildings.

Cars take space away from people, fill the streets with noise, pollute the air and even hit people, sometimes maiming and killing them. Cars multiply: more and more cars hit the streets every year, and this means we must provide them with new roads. Even if, as Tel Aviv’s planners hope, the city’s streets fill up with non-polluting electric cars, our problems will not be solved.

And with the aggressive disregard that Israeli drivers show for the safety of pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers every day on the city’s streets, why should we keep building our cities as if drivers’ rights are sacred – especially considering that traffic problems could be easily solved with better public transportation?

City planners must choose: a city for cars, or a city for people. They can’t have both.

3.       Make decision-making more inclusive.

Urban decision-making is by its very nature a complex process – a balancing act between many and diverse interests, which requires endless patience and an open mind. Our mayor, a former Air Force commander and high school principal, tends to view decision-making as a hierarchical affair: one man gives the orders and everyone else must fall into line.

Perhaps the real test of a city’s openness is how it is perceived by neighborhood activists. But ask some of the people in south Tel Aviv struggling for progress in their communities what they think of the city’s decision makers, and they will likely paint an unflattering picture. In Jaffa, as noted during one of the conference panels, an entire community is living under constant threat of eviction.

No city can be sustainable unless its communities feel that their needs matter.

4.       The grass aint greener.

Israel is in the midst of a very serious water crisis. Despite reaching a compromise with the Water Authority which will allow them to continue watering parks, Israel’s local authorities must consider how to adapt their landscaped open spaces to the country’s semi-arid climate.

Somehow, grassy lawns have become the default choice for yards and urban parks, despite the fact that grass is not native to this part of the world and requires huge amounts of water to survive. In Tel Aviv’s new seaside parks, especially around Jaffa, entire stretches of land have become vast lawns: sod rugs stitched together over the sand, sustained by extensive sprinkler systems.

Native plants and grasses, the kind that grow naturally up and down Israel’s coastline, consume little water and can often survive without any special irrigation systems.

Landscape architects, take note.

5.       Think outside the glass box.

Land is scarce, argues City Hall, and therefore Israeli cities must densify. In practice, this translates into a disjointed skyline, with new skyscrapers popping up haphazardly wherever developers can find enough empty land. Despite stubborn opposition to high-rise buildings from residents, City Hall often sides with the developers.

However, there is already plenty of evidence that the tall buildings we are building today are more compatible with short-term profits than long-term sustainability, and add little to the functioning of the city. In his presentation, urban creativity guru Charles Landry described Tel Aviv’s tall buildings as “isolated blobs” lacking any real interaction with the street.

Still, for economic as well as cultural reasons, skyscrapers are promoted. A plan for one of the last new neighborhoods in the north of the city called “Manhattan on the Sea” proposes a new “downtown” of 30-35 story buildings.

Walkable, mixed-use, human-scale neighborhoods can be just as dense (or denser, if they allocate less space to roads and parking lots) as high-rise areas, while providing a more humanizing environment. City Hall knows this – a study that it commissioned revealed no clear correlation between building heights and population density in Tel Aviv’s neighborhoods.

6.       Define sustainable.

“Sustainability” is one of those words for which everyone has their own definition. With enough convincing, almost anything, no matter how ordinary, can be presented as “green” or “sustainable.”

Perhaps the time has come to formulate (with the full and equal participation, of course, of all stakeholders) a clear picture of what a truly sustainable Tel Aviv would look like.

A serious dialogue with the many green organizations and community groups that fight every day for a more sustainable and human city (and which, by the way, were not invited to take part in the conference) would be a good place to start.

Article and photos by Jesse Fox. Originally published on The Jerusalem Post’s “Comment & Features” page on April 26 2009 (pdf, online version).

In its new comprehensive plan, Raleigh, NC aims to depart from its traditional sprawl and encourage a more sustainable vision of growth.

A draft of Raleigh’s new comprehensive plan: concentrating dense, walkable neighborhoods along public transit corridors.

Raleigh, North Carolina, like many other relatively young cities in the southern USA, is all sprawl. Aside from a few square blocks downtown, occupied by the city’s central business district and surrounding ghetto, Raleigh is more accurately described as an endless collection of suburban developments, tied together by a network of highways and ring roads. During the 16 years that I lived in Raleigh, I never once rode a city bus (aside from the ubiquitous yellow school bus, of course), and seldom visited the city’s downtown of my own free will (I went to school there for several years, but that’s another story).

However, the winds of change in the USA are apparently blowing pretty hard these days, and even Raleigh is beginning to think about changing its development patterns. Last month, a public hearing was held to discuss Raleigh’s new “draft comprehensive plan,” a document which aims to reverse decades of sprawl development and instead encourage mixed-use, high density construction along transit lines.

In an article entitled “Imagine Raleigh Without Sprawl,” indyweek.com describes the discussion about planning for the next 20 years that is happening in NC’s capital city. According to the article, a “stream of visiting experts” has brought a pretty consistent message to town: suburban sprawl is unsustainable, and has no future. In fact, building more and more drivable suburban neighborhoods lowers the quality of life for everyone living in them.

The experts proposed a concept thus far unknown in Raleigh: walkable urbanism. And in order to create it, the planners suggested transforming strip malls and shopping centers into mixed-use apartment buildings, complete with affordable housing units, sidewalk storefronts, public plazas and (gasp) buses.

For the moment, it appears that this discussion is taking place between professional planners. It would certainly be interesting to hear the reactions of Raleigh natives, used to long commutes and hours of mall shopping on weekends, to these ideas. But if a place like Raleigh manages to pull something like this off, it will be an unprecedented feat. Perhaps the first point of reference could be Charlotte, NC, which has apparently managed to pull off a sort of urban renaissance in recent years.

Via indyweek.com. More on Raleigh’s comprehensive plan here.

“In every man there is a poet, and in the city in which he lives there should be mystery, secrets, and surprises.”

After 9 months of work, ten architectural firms presented their proposals for a “Grand Paris 2030″ to French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday. Sarkozy had asked the firms to “project 20 years into the future and dream up the world’s most sustainable post-Kyoto metropolis,” according to an article in the Telegraph. France 24 noted that three themes were common to all of the plans: sustainable development, transportation, and connecting central Paris with its suburbs.

Some of the proposals include:

Building 20 “sustainable towns” of half a million people each in the Paris area, while doubling the amount of forested land and integrating agriculture into the landscape on the city’s outskirts.

Extending the city all the way to the Channel port of Le Havre via Rouen along the Seine, thus maximizing the potential of the Seine waterfront and realizing Napoleon Bonaparte’s idea of a city with the Seine as its main street.

Uniting cut-off communities by replacing the rain lines that separate them with green spaces to bring them together, while filling the city with renewable energy production and redesigning areas so as to limit commute times to a half hour.

Paris architect Roland Castro, whose team included a sociologist, a writer and a philosopher, said:

“We applied the philosopher’s concept that in every man there is a poet, and in the city in which he lives there should be mystery, secrets, and surprises.”

At this point, the proposals are all very conceptual (Sarkozy reportedly gave the planners “the absolute freedom to dream”), but as Nicolai Ouroussoff notes in the New York Times: All forsook flashy imagery for a deep analysis of the city’s diverse communities and the fraying tissue that binds them together… all of the projects recognize the strong link between urban policy and social equality.”

Next, the plans will be presented to the public, and a public exhibition of the plans will open April 29.

Via The Telegraph, France 24

TreeHugger: Richard, you are a 35 year veteran in the still-evolving field of ecocity building. What led you to formulate your philosophy on the subject?

Masdar City: zero waste, no cars, carbon-neutral, and powered by renewable energy. Could this be the template for future cities?

Workers from the Indian subcontinent building a field of photovoltaic solar panels in Masdar City.

Whereas some of the big plans for new ecological cities elsewhere in the world have faltered of late, work on Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City is well underway and plowing ahead at full speed. A small army of workers and heavy equipment currently inhabit the 6.5 square kilometer site of the future eco-city.

Last week, a flock of journalists set out from the center of Abu Dhabi to get a peek at what will eventually be the world’s first modern ecological city. The tour, part of this week’s World Future Energy Summit, was organized by the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company’s Masdar Initiative, the corporate entity that is building the project, with the goal of giving the world an early look at its flagship project.

Khaled Awad, Director of Property Development at the Masdar Initiative, gestures toward Masdar City’s first buildings. Behind him, Masdar’s perimeter fence and empty land on which the city will be built.

Work in Progress

On a surprisingly overcast day (the following day it actually rained, a rarity in this part of the world), Masdar’s builders explained their plans for this as yet mostly empty piece of land.

An entirely carfree city, multi-story parking lots will be built outside its walls. Masdar will be bisected by a light rail line, and a personal rapid transit (PRT – something between an electric car and a mini-light rail) system will take passengers to within 100 meters of any destination in the city.

Construction workers are already hard at work erecting “stage one” of the project, which includes a 10MW solar power farm, the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company’s corporate headquarters, and Masdar Institute, an academic institution, developed in cooperation with MIT, that will focus on sustainable energy research.

First Tenants Move in this Fall

Right: The Masdar Institute going up in Masdar City. By the fall, students will already be studying here.

With the understated confidence common to many of Masdar’s project managers, Khaled Awad, who oversees the city’s construction, tells us that Masdar Institute’s first class of students will already be living and studying here by the fall of 2009. No one here raises any doubts about this. In Abu Dhabi, decisions are made resolutely and carried out at lightning speed.

The rest of the city will be a mix of residential construction and office buildings, as well as retail and public spaces. Not just any company can rent office space here – Masdar is keen to attract cleantech companies and other businesses with an environmental focus. Employees of these firms will also be given first access to rental apartments as they are built.

Solar Rooftops

The next stop on the tour is an experimental site for testing photovoltaic panels. Forty one systems, from thirty three different suppliers, have been set up here in order to see how they stand up to local heat, humidity and soil. In a small building nearby, the productivity of each system is measured. According to measurements taken thus far, the solar panels being tested here have about twice the energy output that they would in a European climate.

Left: The media gets an early look at Masdar’s progress.

Inspired by traditional Middle Eastern urban forms, Masdar’s plan calls for a skyline of low, flat roofs, all of which will be utilized for solar energy production. The city’s planners estimate that by putting photovoltaic panels on all of the city’s roofs, around three million square meters, they can create just about enough energy to meet the needs of the entire city (an estimated 200-230MW of electricity).

Solar Energy to Power Construction

On the other side of the site, local company Enviromena is building a 55 acre, 10MW solar plant, the largest in the Middle East. Work is almost done, and the plant is expected to be connected to the electric grid in March. These panels will meet the project’s energy demands during the initial construction period.

The panels are mounted on stands made out of partially recycled concrete, locally made steel and reused wood. With the emirate’s leadership and massive funds behind them, the project’s managers have discovered their ability to demand products that are not even available on the market.

For example, explains Awad, Masdar’s builders decided that steel would significantly increase the project’s ecological footprint, and went looking for alternatives. To their surprise, the market responded, supplying 100% recycled steel that even beat the market price for conventional steel.

Aluminum, another construction material whose manufacturing process requires massive amounts of energy (Masdar takes all of this energy into account when determining the city’s overall footprint), was initially banned. However, after finding themselves shut out of the project, manufacturers approached Masdar with 95% recycled aluminum, which requires much less energy to produce, at the same competitive rates.

In the foreground, a sea of solar energy to power Masdar’s construction. Beyond the perimeter fence, another unsustainable real estate project goes up next door.

Revolution or Gimmick?

Sandwiched between an expanding airport, a new neighborhood of luxury villas , a golf club and various other real estate projects, Masdar City will be a self-contained island of sustainability – a city within a city. Just under a million people live in Abu Dhabi; Masdar will house only some 40,000. Another 50,000 commuters will work inside its walls.

Masdar and its partners are keen to market the project as a “manifesto for sustainable life” – the antidote to the outdated cities of the 20th century. This is the great potential of the city, as a testing ground for a variety of new and so far unproven technologies, and as a convincing argument for sustainable city design. If Masdar is a success, it will raise the bar for city planners, architects and elected officials around the world.

However, if Masdar City remains an isolated experiment in sustainable living, disconnected from the rest of Abu Dhabi (where rampant construction, wasteful energy use and the dominance of the fossil fuel economy remain the norm), its impact at home will be limited, and it will be seen by many as a green smokescreen, a gimmick whose real purpose is to draw attention away from some of the emirate’s less sustainable endeavors.

Coming Soon? A rendering of life in Masdar City (courtesy of Masdar).

One thing is clear: Masdar City is real, not just some paper fantasy. Whether a vehicle for Abu Dhabi’s transformation into a locus of green in the Middle East or merely a clever marketing strategy, Masdar City is already rising from the desert, the first large-scale attempt at ecological new city planning in the world.

This oil guzzling boomtown is pinning its hopes for the future on the success of this zero-waste, carbon-neutral, ultra-sustainable development. If it succeeds, Abu Dhabi could be on its way to positioning itself as a leader in green business, industry, and city design on a global level.

Originally published at TreeHugger.com on January 21, 2009.

A revolution in green city design or a modern-day Shangri-La?

On this increasingly urban planet, it’s becoming clear that the solutions to our problems will come from our cities. But what happens when it is our cities themselves that are creating most of these problems?

The emergence of the ecocity concept has been one of the most exciting trends in city design in recent years – intelligently designed ecological cities that would revolutionize the way we thought about the environments in which we dwell. As the idea gained traction and exposure over the past few years, a string of ambitious ecocity projects were announced to create new ecocities from scratch.

One of the most famous, and perhaps the most ambitious, was Dongtan. Created by prominent design and engineering firm Arup, the city was supposed to set the standard for building cities that harmonized with their surroundings and respected their inhabitants, present and future.

The Idea: A Green Island off Shanghai

China is experiencing a massive migration from the countryside to cities; one projection sees 5 million new buildings being built in China over the next 20 years. With such an explosion of development on the horizon, some designers saw an opportunity to shape a sustainable design revolution from the ground up. Dongtan, a low-carbon city, carfree city on Chongming Island just off Shanghai, was supposed to be the opening shot of the revolution.

Here is how Arup described it back in 2005:

“Dongtan will produce its own energy from wind, solar, bio-fuel and recycled city waste. Clean technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells will power public transport. A network of cycle and footpaths will help the city achieve close to zero vehicle emissions. Farmland within the Dongtan site will use organic farming methods to grow food.”

The plan fired the imaginations of development professionals and journalists alike. In 2007, Wired Magazine wrote a glowing account of this “great green leap forward” in China, discussing in depth the technical and political challenges facing the designers. The piece concluded optimistically:

“If Dongtan lives up to expectations, it will serve as a model for cities across China and the rest of the developing world — cities that, given new tools, might leapfrog the environmental and public health costs that have always come with economic progress… Even old American and European cities may find bits and pieces of Dongtan that they can use, especially when they redevelop industrial plots or build out at the edges.”

Smoke and Mirrors?

It wasn’t long before a few skeptical voices joined the discussion. In 2007, Ethical Corporation, a website on responsible business practices, came out against Dongtan. Calling it a Potemkin village (a reference to a Russian story about fake villages erected to impress the Empress Catherine II) and “a masterpiece of greenwashing,” Ethical Corporation claimed that Dongtan was never intended to become a reality.

Rather, as a mythical green Shangri-La, Dongtan would serve China as the ultimate greenwashing tool, greening the country’s image abroad while in practice allowing its cities to continue to develop unsustainably at breakneck speed. The contractors and designers involved in the project, according to this theory, had nothing to lose by cooperating, and invaluable connections in the Chinese government to gain.

No Progress on the Ground

In late 2008, a couple of well-known newspapers sent reporters over to Chongming Island to get an impression of how Dongtan was taking shape on the ground. The resulting articles pronounced the project a “pipe dream” and a mere “gleam in the eye.” One Chinese farmer, whose fields lie within the borders of the planned building site, told the UK’s Telegraph that he had never heard of the project.

As it turns out, the plans for Dongtan began to falter in 2006, when Shanghai’s former mayor Chen Liangyu – Dongtan’s most enthusiastic supporter – was arrested for “property-related fraud.” In the wake of the scandal, China’s Communist Party reorganized the city’s leadership and planning structure, leaving Dongtan orphaned.

Since then, the project’s permits have lapsed, and the global economic crash has brought construction projects worldwide to a standstill. Back on Chongming Island, a number of high-rise apartment buildings have gone up, but not in the area earmarked for Dongtan. Despite the fact that these buildings contain no discernible green elements, their developers, in a blatant attempt to take advantage of Dongtan’s hype, are marketing them as green buildings.

Knowledge Transfer

With actual implementation of the project nowhere on the horizon, Dongtan has been recast as a valuable contribution to the global discussion about ecocity design, a “knowledge transfer” in the words of one project manager.

In a 2008 interview for TreeHugger, Arup’s Director for Global Foresight and Innovation Chris Luebkeman told me:

“It’s not a matter of this or that project compensating for all future change – every little bit has to help. What we are trying to do with projects like Dongtan, and ecocity projects elsewhere, is to continually raise the bar.”

Dongtan’s plan and concepts have in fact raised the bar in the theoretical discourse about ecocity planning, and have influenced plans for other new eco-developments that are currently being built. Just by existing in its paper form, Dongtan has a lot to teach the world about the art and science of planning green cities.

However, if Dongtan’s fate is to serve as a strictly conceptual model, perhaps its designers should consider making more of its planning documents public, so that future cities can benefit from the enormous amount of thought that went into this unbuilt city.

This post was originally published on TreeHugger.com on January 5, 2009. Dongtan renderings by Ove Arup and Partners, via The Christian Science Monitor and Wired.