13 ms·

College campuses are designed at human-scale – cities can be too

274 points by jseliger 6y ago

Mountain_Skies 6y ago
Cities and universities serve very different populations. A university typically has four groups it serves: students, faculty, administration, and staff. Each of these groups tend to have only small variations in needs within their group. If you can design for the needs of these four groups, you're doing well. A city on the other hand may have hundreds or even thousands of different groups of differing conflicting needs. Even a smallish city with a population of 20,000 is going to have more complexity than a large university with 40,000 students plus several thousand in the other three groups.
- mc32 6y ago
  Also they aren’t considering Stanford which has one of the largest campuses by Area and you need shuttles to get from one area to another (even excluding the nature preserves).
  - timzaman 6y ago
    Stanford is probably not a great example. It's exactly because the campus is and has always been so big that it's setup wide and grand.
    - legerdemain 6y ago
      Stanford is a perfectly fine example. I used to visit Stanford several times a week. Walking briskly, you can cross the core of campus, where most of the instructional buildings are, in about 15 minutes from one end to another. The athletic center and undergraduate dorms are located around the periphery of this core. I assume students don't typically go back to their dorms multiple times per day. The engineering campus is pretty compact. The medical complex is, yes, another brisk ten-minute walk, but I doubt many students need to go between the hospital and the rest of campus more than once a day. If your daily schedule takes you from the dorms to the core of campus, and then to the hospital, and then to the campus gym, and then to the student union or the main library, then yes, maybe you'll choose to take a shuttle. But for an able-bodied person, these are very reasonable distances to travel on foot, and certainly on a bicycle or scooter. For comparison, I went to a university with a much smaller campus, and it was still at least a ten-minute walk from one end to another. And it was fine.
- sine_reality 6y ago
  Could you elaborate on a few of the hundreds of different groups you are referring to within a city, as well as their conflicting needs?
  - SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
    I'm interested to find out what makes these groups so different that being a walkable area is incompatible between them.
    - pjm331 6y ago
      i'll take a stab at what the author of that comment might have meant - how I understood it at least there are 2 ways you can define "walkable" 1. it is physically possible to walk there - e.g. there are paved sidewalks 2. it is convenient to walk from the place you are to the place you need to be i think that the misunderstanding here might be that you and the comment above are thinking about 1 while the problem is actually 2 to pull a quote from the article: "students who live in dormitories are able to work, eat and worship all within walking distance of their homes" there's also a link to this concept of a "15 minute neighborhood"[1] where everyone can walk to their basic daily needs w/in 15 minutes, or beautifully summarized as “Put the stuff closer together so it's easier to get to the stuff.” so the proposed problem is that the set of things w/in that "daily needs" category, AKA the "stuff", might grow, due to the increasing diversity of the population you're servicing, to a point where its not possible to give that to everyone [1]https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/9/6/7-rules-for-creating-15-minute-neighborhoods https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/9/6/7-rules-for-cre...
  - falcolas 6y ago
    Small retail shops. Huge retail shops (Wallmarts/Targets). Non-profit retail (Goodwill). Restaurants (Coffee shops, family restaurants, Olive Gardens) Utility buildings. Utility Workers. Housing; low- medium- high- and no income. Plus some for the 0.01%. Schools; Pre- elementary- middle- high-schools and College. Office space. Pools. Gyms. Hospitals. Doctor offices. Animal shelters. Green spaces. Cinemas. Amusement parks. Fire departments. Police departments. Community centers. Jails. Courthouses. City/County/State/Country centers. Temporary housing (From hotels to short-term rentals) Commercial shipping (by rail, road, and sea) Car storage (travel between distant cities) And perhaps most importantly, competition (that is, alternatives) for all of the above; since campuses tend to be monopolies for many offerings.
- paul_f 6y ago
  Faculty and staff rarely live on campus. Often they live in suburban enclaves and drive to campus. They also tend to have spouses with jobs elsewhere and children who don't go to school on campus. Faculty parking can be one of the most contentious issues for any college or University. This idyllic myth of presented a college campus is only true for the students.
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > Cities and universities serve very different populations. As Jane Jacobs observed many decades ago: you don't live in a city, you live in a neighbourhood. * https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/jane-jacobs-street-smarts https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/jane-jacobs-st... You design the urban environment where, with-in a fifteen minute walk, you have grocery stores, butchers, coffee shops, dry cleaners, pubs, a library, dentists, doctor offices, elementary school, bakery, flower shops, etc. It's not that hard: we were doing it for a long-time before WW2. You can have big houses: * https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Westminster+Ave,+Toronto,+ON https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Westminster+Ave,+Toron... And small houses in it: * https://www.google.com/maps/place/100+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+ON https://www.google.com/maps/place/100+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+... All with backyards and (laneway) garages. Throw in some (medium-rise) apartment buildings while you're at it: * https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Fermanagh+Ave,+Toronto,+ON https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Fermanagh+Ave,+Toronto... High enough density for pubic transit, which makes car ownership optional and not a necessity.
  - ulucs 6y ago
    Toronto is a bad example for sane housing, you have to pay over a thousand dollars for a single room that gets sunlight and the prices just kept rising until covid
    - ghaff 6y ago
      The parent also mentioned Jane Jacobs who a lot of people like to remember for getting highway construction blocked and, as they say, supported walkable neighborhoods that were communities. I would also guess that Jacobs would also have been perfectly fine with Wet Village "NIMBYs" blocking high-rise residential construction if they didn't want it. Livable neighborhoods probably correlate better to high housing prices than low.
      - throw0101a 6y ago
        Is high-rise (>10 storeys) really needed? Or would mid-rise (5-10) be sufficient? Certainly some areas could use high (near major transit hubs), but towers don't have to be planted everywhere.
gregw2 6y ago
I think the points made in the article are fine, there is something to the way colleges facilitate community and their physical design encourages walkability and enables that... but I would offer one caveat to this which cities should avoid when considering what to imitate and what not to. I have noticed a correlation between excessive building costs and campaigns and the two industries whose prices have most outpaced inflation the last 20 years: healthcare/hospitals and education/colleges. Alumni returning to their colleges after 20-50 years may notice the following phenomena: there are a lot more buildings (with donor names on them) but there is an incredible number of empty rooms at any one point in time... many more than when they went to school back in the day. (This also manifests in a lot more time-consuming walking to get around due to the lower density of usable space.) This trend is neither wise nor sustainable nor just. And college administrators should be held accountable for it, not given a pat on the back for raising money and spending it (despite the nice line on their resume). Alternate metrics of success should be culturally encouraged and measured. How could this be done? I don't know if LEED certification (which is an award given to buildings meeting various sustainability/efficiency criteria and has Gold/silver/bronze-type ratings which are thus indirectly a bragging right mentioned by anyone in academia who gets buildings built) measures actual building utilization... I suspect not. Typically LEED covers initial construction and is awarded at the end of construction, and thus could not include use-after-buildout metrics/grading, but LEED or something like it should attempt to measure something like that, and that should be a sign of true administrative competence (and also efficient use of donor funds by the way.) I wonder if the very sensors which are used to shut off lights when people aren't around and any "energy/CO2 savings metrics" from those sensors could be cheaply repurposed and inverted to also measure the creation of just such a building utilization metric (look how much carbon we wasted and continue to waste heating/cooling a building people aren't using?)
- Aunche 6y ago
  Part of the problem is that rich people want to leave behind a lasting legacy, and what better way than buy a building for the campus. At my alma mater, someone got a building named after them despite only donating a fraction of its construction costs, let alone maintenance. No doubt the ballooning tuition costs are subsidizing this man's legacy.
wonder_er 6y ago
I live in a small college town (Golden, CO) and I love biking through campus, or, when the weather is nice, sitting under a tree and reading a book for a little while. I'd love for some of those design patterns (grassy streets, walking paths more than roads, etc) to percolate outwards into the rest of Golden.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
One big thing this article overlooks is that colleges are free to ban anti-social people from their campus. Cities are not. There are fairly string rules for college and if you step over the line, you can be expelled and trespassed from campus with much lower burden of proof than a criminal trial. I have noticed as density of a people living together goes up, there is more need for conformity. Singapore and Japan have some of the nicest high density cities in the world, but they also have one of the highest rates of people being conformant. One final issue is pandemics. College campuses have had a horrible rate of transmission when students have been there, so much in fact that a lot of schools kept students from returning to campus for schooling making them take online classes.
- unreal6 6y ago
  It seems that many obtrusive anti-social behaviors would pertain to actions inside the home and there have always been bylaws and standards when living in apartment or condo buildings (eg noise, pets, grills/fire hazards). That being said, this still limits individual freedoms non-trivially.
CincinnatiMan 6y ago
Would cities be more desirable for a lot of people if they were only made up of college-educated (or college-viable) people? I think for a lot of suburban dwellers, their main concern is quality of the public schools. Enable them and their kids to be surrounded by other highly educated people who place high value on schooling, and they'll come back in droves.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Being able to discriminate against residents is the reason colleges can have the high density walkable neighborhoods they do. Much of the value proposition in moving to spaced out neighborhoods requiring cars is that you filter out people who can’t afford cars or driving longer distances.
  - DubiousPusher 6y ago
    I see this levelled a lot, especially by urban dwellers but I've never met this person that moved to the suburbs so they wouldn't have to see a pedestrian. Most people I'm aware of move out because they have some innate claustrophobia, like a little more nature, want to have a garden, want to have a workshop. Is there some low key xenophobia prevailing in the burbs? For sure. Are a lot of them bothered seeing homeless people because they're no longer used to it? For sure. Do a lot of them vote against policy that might alleviate poverty because it's easier to judge the empoverished from a distance? For sure. But I really don't think that's the fundamental motivator for people to move. Everyone needs an Oasis. Some people find it in the stacks at the library, some in their own bedroom and some on 1/4 acres of manicured lawn and bushes.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      > But I really don't think that's the fundamental motivator for people to move. It’s not xenophobia, or any other ideological hate for others. It’s simply the result of optimizing for your own kids’ outcome. The country dismantled mental health care facilities and the law doesn’t allow for involuntary committals. The country’s drug policies and lack of economic opportunities created addicts who may not be able to be helped. Overall, we don’t have the stomach for the necessary wealth transfer needed to fix broken families (providing poor parents with sufficient wages and time off and healthcare so they still have time to be at home with their kids). As an individual, there isn’t much you can do to in the timeframe of raising your kids to solve these issues. So you do the next best thing (if you can afford it). You run away from the problem as much as you can. Which also helps exacerbate the issues. And it’s all part and parcel of the increasingly wide wealth/income/opportunity gaps.
timzaman 6y ago
Yep classic stereotype american culture and urban planning. One of the main things i dislike most about the bay area. Cars come first.
ww520 6y ago
College life and real life have no comparison. Students are cramped in small dorm rooms shared by multiple people, many with shared public bathrooms. Students "work" (attending class/studying) at small place, chairs with a small board as desk in classroom or small desks in library. There's one or a few shared cafeterias on campus. Close to no variety shops on campus. In almost all aspects of campus life, things and spaces are cramped and choices are few. Students only endure it because they know it's only for a few years. People don't want to live or work like a student for the rest of their life. Plus the cost of college has spiraled out of control year after year.
- ARandomerDude 6y ago
  Exactly right. Couple that with the various types of work people are required to do and it's a doubly bad thesis. On my street alone, my neighbors include an oil field worker, a landscaper, a steel factory worker, and a UPS driver. So while the human-scale idea might work for white-collar office jobs (analogous to college campus life), there's no way it works for other professions that require separation distances for safety or logistical reasons. Before the suburban boom, we tried human scale with dangerous or large-area jobs with company housing, stores, etc. and it resulted in high prices and monopolies. Given the choice, I'll pay for the roads and sit in traffic.
  - watwut 6y ago
    Neither oil field worker nor steel factory worker will work at the exact place where he is having bedroom. Both have to travel further away regardless of how human-scale their houses/flats are in. Once they are home, they both benefit from shops, restaurants, gyms, green spaces and what not within walking distance. Their kids benefit from the same. They themselves benefit from not having to drive their kids everywhere.
- m463 6y ago
  Another point is that college students do not all live on-campus and in dorms. Depending on the school, it's possible to live in the dorm the first year, and possibly move to another form of housing or off-campus as time goes on. Many students put up with the dorms and roommates because they don't know any better at first. When they do know better, they work out other arrangements with a little more room (and fewer rules)
benrbray 6y ago
For those saying that the density of college campuses simply isn't suitable when many different types of lifestyle converge, I urge you to look at Japan or Europe for an example of density working at scale. Density doesn't mean everyone is forced to live in a studio apartment either. I live in Tokyo in a 3-story house paying less in rent than I ever did in Atlanta, Seattle, or Ann Arbor. The biggest difference is the expansive train systems, allowing for clusters of shops and restaurants that are accessible without a car. And not a parking lot in sight (good riddance)!
- jdcaron 6y ago
  Unused cars & parking lots take a lot of space in cities.
  - SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
    As well as the huge danger of street side parking with drivers swerving in/out and opening doors without looking. In my city there is a single city block which has no roads (special vehicle access only) and consists of a bunch of high rise apts buildings with restaurants on the bottom level. I stumbled on this area by accident and I was blown away, it was like I had walked in to an alternate universe. There were a group of kids playing in what looks like your typical suburb parkland except this is right in the middle of the city which would normally be packed out with cars and concrete. Makes me wish more of the city was like this.
- someperson 6y ago
  > expensive train systems I think you meant "expansive"?
  - SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
    Or extensive.
  - benrbray 6y ago
    Haha typed on mobile, my bad. The trains are pretty cheap compared to the cost of car ownership in America. From another comment I wrote: > I live pretty far from central Tokyo and for between 200-350yen one way I can get to Shinjuku / Shibuya / Ikebukuro / Ueno and everywhere in between. So that's 400-700yen round trip for a night out. > In Seattle or Atlanta? You'd be extremely lucky if your destination within a 15min walk of a bus stop or train station. In Atlanta good luck not getting mugged while waiting for the bus at night. Uber typically costs $10-15 one way (although to be fair you can split the cost between friends if you're travelling together). > Or if you own a car in the US, you can reliably get from A to B, but you're paying between $5-10/day for insurance (whether you use the car that day or not) and $10-20 to park if you're in a city.
gumby 6y ago
One thing universities have little of is small children. MIT's married student housing isn't large and is off to one side. There is no faculty housing beyond the president (all of whom have had no kids or adult kids). Stanford's married student housing (and the faculty neighborhood) is a larger percentage and includes playgrounds, rec facilities and even two elementary schools. Still, it's less family friendly than Palo Alto or Menlo Park.
- ketzo 6y ago
  This might come off as naive, but I feel like that would that be pretty easy to solve, as far as urban design problems go, right? Kids mostly don't need specialized facilities -- just more of the same kind of buildings. If you took a college and turned one of its buildings into an elementary school and one of its quads into a playground, you're most of the way to being "child-friendly." Or so I would think? Don't have kids, in case that wasn't obvious. Hopefully this doesn't sound rude -- I just mean to say that a college campus's child-unfriendliness isn't a reason not to copy the model, since it's easily fixed.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- gyc 6y ago
  The university I attended had a single family home neighborhood only a few walkable away where many faculty members lived and raise their families.
- jacobolus 6y ago
  Take it from someone who grew up in a comparable suburb (if anything more kid-friendly than those two), but also spent a substantial amount of time in a more walkable city in Mexico: Places like Palo Alto and Menlo Park are terrible for children of all ages. San Francisco or Cambridge near the MIT campus would be a much cooler place to grow up. (Though unfortunately these places are getting less diverse every year, as housing becomes increasingly unaffordable.) Because everyone travels by car, children in suburbs are completely dependent on adults. There are few things to do, and many kids are end up stuck at home or carted from one over-scripted activity to another by overwhelmed parents. Their social lives are strongly circumscribed, with little chance to make cross-age connections. Kids have a much better time in real walkable cities, where they can be more independent and there are more available resources and activities relevant to every kind of interest and hobby. Those suburbs are optimized for wealthy able-bodied adults age 35-60 who like driving their cars. Everyone else is a second-class citizen. Yuppie parents of school-aged children say they are moving to the suburbs for the sake of their kids, but it is more about their own convenience and biases/preconceptions.
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
>"There are many reasons why the college environment facilitates relationships and personal connections. Everyone there is at a similar age and stage in life. Classes and majors tend to group students by interests and personality traits. There is also a relative freedom from responsibility. One factor often overlooked, though, is the structure of colleges themselves. Because of their scale and walkability, college campuses meet human social needs in a way that is impossible for many of our nation’s towns and cities." This is a very important understanding for future city/urban planners!
closeparen 6y ago
A large college campus is 50-75k people. This is evidence that our towns can be human scale. A city is 10x to 100x that. I don’t think you can scale up the time that students spend walking by 10-100x and still be okay. You’re going to need some kind of wheeled transportation, and the layout might have to accommodate it in a way that a college campus with purely walkable trips doesn’t.
- SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
  The difference I think is that students frequently have to move between buildings while people outside of education typically visit 2 - 3 buildings (including home) in a day. With remote work you could just make sure you are with in close walking distance of the supermarket / retail as well as a public transport stop that gets you to all the places you visit occasionally (the beach, etc)
- ryukafalz 6y ago
  Let me give you an example from my own experience. I live in Philadelphia, a fairly large city that's still extremely walkable in certain parts. Before I moved recently, I was paying around $900/month for a studio apartment in the city center. From there, it was a short walk to any number of nearby restaurants (including a corner store on my block), a <5 minute walk to the nearby commuter rail station, a <10 minute walk to the nearby city subway station, a <15 minute walk to a major regional hospital, and about a 30 minute walk to my office (this was generally the longest trip I'd have to make with any frequency, and honestly a walking commute was pretty nice). I did keep my car around largely because I have friends and family outside the city, but if it weren't for that it would largely not be necessary. Within the city, the subway system gets you pretty far outside of the immediate walkable area near my old apartment; my only complaint is that there are parts of the city that aren't as well-connected by public transit. Philadelphia is an extremely human-centric city, which makes sense as it was established well before cars were invented.
asciimov 6y ago
As a person who has spent a great deal of time in rural areas, I don't think I would be happy in the long term living in cramped apartments. Too much noise and too many people. In the suburban sprawl in which I live, the 10-12 feet between houses seems too close. Yet as much as I long for space, I will always be tied to some metro, with access to healthcare and cultural outlets.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  > Too much noise I think people that make this argument against apartments fail to appreciate the difference that a quality construction makes. I lived in early 2000's apartments where I could hear my upstairs neighbour blasting drum and bass in the stairwell. However, I could hear literally nothing once I closed my apartment door. I have also lived in a 1930's terraced house where I could literally hear my next door neighbour coughing. Construction quality matters a lot more than how cramped or not your housing conditions are.
- mleonhard 6y ago
  Cars produce most city noise, especially muffler-less motorcycles and trucks. Without cars you can have a nice calm quiet safely-walkable community.
- ghaff 6y ago
  How close do you need to be? With an hour distance, you can get pretty far into exurbs with multi-acre plots or even rural areas from most cities.
ChrisLomont 6y ago
Colleges have of tens thousands of people doing a quite limited number of things - mostly classes and teaching, with some support staff or service easily placed around campus. It's easy to plan for that. I'd guess most campuses in the US can easily be walked across multiple times a day. I went to Purdue, W. Lafayette, about 40K students, and didn't need a car. One could walk between classes and dorms and food trivially. Cities of hundreds of thousands to millions of people have easily thousands and thousands of varying jobs, different size and scale employers, a huge range of skilled and unskilled labor, a vast array of specialists and specialty employers, and even several entire campuses - a massive amount of different requirements. It's not reasonable to expect everyone to have employment within close range, so immediately people need cars to commute. It's not reasonable to put some large employers evenly mixed with housing - no one wants the garbage facility or any of a host of companies next door. Many companies also have huge inflow/outflow requirements like trains, shipping, power, waste, again complicating the picture, since people need to travel larger distances to reach them. Zoning laws didn't just pop up to prevent campus living everywhere - they popped up to solve the issues that occur when living and industry was co-mingled. So while I'd love to have all of life be as serene and pretty as a top university, I also prefer to have specialized jobs and places to do such work, and I don't see how these can possibly be merged.
known 6y ago
Ethnic integration in Singapore https://archive.is/WgXtO https://archive.is/WgXtO
stopping 6y ago
I wonder if it's possible to make a fully-walkable city modelled after a college campus. Let's play with some numbers. I'll make some conservative estimates of space requirements. Indoor residential space: 400 square feet per occupant + 200 sf fudge factor Indoor retail space: 25 sf per-capita + 25 sf margin Indoor office/misc job space: 200 sf per office worker + 50 sf margin Indoor schooling/daycare: 150 sf per student + 50 sf margin Indoor supporting infrastructure: 20 sf per capita > Hospital requirement is only around 1 sf, so I'm just adding an arbitrary margin to account for rarely-visited indoor locations (e.g. churches, community centers), storage for city vehicles (fire department), waste management, etc. Rough population proportions by age group in U.S.: 0-18: 24% ("student age") 19-64: 63% ("working age") >65: 13% ("retirement age") Let's take all of the worst-case numbers, that every working-age person requires office space. The total space requirement for a population of 1000 individuals is: Residential + Retail + Office + School + Infra [600 * 1000] + [50 * 1000] + [250 * (1000 * 0.63)] + [200 * (1000 * 0.24)] + [20 * 1000] 600k (Residential) + 50k (Retail) + 157.5k (Office) + 48k (School) + 20k (Infra) 875.5k square feet per thousand residents Or, 875.5 square feet of indoor space per person. This is largely dominated by residential and office space, which are highly favorable for high density construction. Now, let's consider what a "walkable distance" is for an average person. I'm very happy to walk anywhere within a 10-minute radius (1/2 mile), but can probably live with 20-30 minutes if there is good bike infrastructure. For now let's just discuss the walking case. A 1/2 mile radius is 0.78 square miles, so a perfectly walkable space would contain all of the services I need within 0.78 square miles, or 21.7 million square feet. How many people can we fit? Filling all of this space with single-story structures would allow us to fit 25,000 people. There are some obvious adjustments we need to make. First, we can realistically build 3 or 4-story structures for residential and office space. Next, we have to adjust for necessary road infrastructure (emergency services, delivery, waste management, etc). New York City dedicates around 50% of its land to roads and open spaces. Using suburban road densities, we can spend 10% of our land on simple 2-way streets. The remaining 90% can be spent on buildings and outdoor space. Let's say we dedicate 30% of the total land to buildings (6.5 million sf), which leaves 60% outdoor space (13 million sf). This is a fairly comfortable estimate based on looking at a map of my college campus. How many people can we fit? Let's assume some densities: Residential: 4-story buildings Retail: 1-story (could possibly go 2, but makes delivery logistics harder) Office: 4-story School: 2-story Infra: 1-story The footprint requirements per thousand people are: 600k/4 + 50k + 157.5k/4 + 48k/2 + 20k = 284k square feet per thousand residents This means our 60% open, fully-walkable space can support a bit over 23,000 people, for a population density of 29k per square mile. For reference, this is slightly higher than New York City. So, what happens when we bring parking space back into the mix? A 150-car parking lot requires an acre of space, or about 300 sf of parking lot per car. Imagine your city needs two parking spaces per car (one for home, one for work). Even if each family of 4 owns just one car (this seems like quite an underestimate), the parking requirement for our city of 23,000 people is 11,500 spaces. This amounts to 3.45 million square feet of pavement alone, just for parking! In other words, 0.123 square miles of our 0.47 sq.mi. walkable area is now parking lot. Now, how much extra road do we need to facilitate moving all of these vehicles? I'd estimate we need to dedicate at least as much extra space for driving as we do for parking, so now 0.25 square miles (53%) of our outdoor space is now dedicated to personal vehicles. Sure, Amdahl's law of parking infrastructure allows us to reclaim half of this space back if we decide to build multi-story parking structures or hide them underground, but this is a huge waste of resources considering that our city doesn't even need passenger transport of any kind! In summary: Using some very conservative estimates and medium density, a walkable circular area of 1/2 mile radius (0.78 square miles) can quite comfortably fit 23,000 people with adequate space for residence, office, retail, schools, and remaining city infra. If we dedicate 10% of the land for minimum-necessary roads (emergency services + transportation of goods and waste), we still have 60% of the land remaining for green open space and walking. If we want to add cars, we easily lose over half of this walkable space to parking and additional road. In all of these estimates, I tried to favor cars as much as possible.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Counter-example: They designed the Bijlmer neighbourhood (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijlmermeer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijlmermeer) to be pedestrian-friendly, with parks, walkways between the buildings, and no cars allowed. But it didn't really work out.
- faichai 6y ago
  Isn’t this more of a high-rise failure. The first picture from the link shows some rather monumental structures that tower over occupants and users of green spaces. Later in the Wikipedia article they talk about tearing some of these down. As well as amenities, green spaces etc there is always a requirement for buildings to be of ‘human’ scale for it to feel liveable. Also there are benefits to organic growth over centralised planning as growth can adapt to requirements of a place. Centralised planning tends to be too rigid and once a failure becomes apparent it is difficult to re-plan without sacrificing some other amenity.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    99 Percent Invisible episodes. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/bijlmer-city-future-part-1/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/bijlmer-city-future-p... Basically a Le Corbusier disaster. >Also there are benefits to organic growth over centralised planning as growth can adapt to requirements of a place That's certainly true and is basically one of the things Jane Jacobs argued for. Note, though, that doesn't necessarily lead to dense housing/inexpensive housing which is what many of the urbanist folks who comment here care a great deal about.
LatteLazy 6y ago
Can they be? Everyone who has tried has failed AFAIK. Milton Keynes here in the UK was a "Garden City", it's become a byword for soullessness and low livability. Meanwhile London, the uncontrollable millenia old mess, goes from strength to strength...
- nmca 6y ago
  But London is rather un-american in its practicalities right? It's a total expensive pain to drive, as roads are narrow and there's a 20usd a day fee to do so. But public transport is great and wherever you live there are walkable amenities.
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    I think it depends on your definition of American. New York isn't that different (heavily train using, very limited parking, but on a grid pattern). I get what you mean though, NYC is an exception really. There is a "rule" about how cities get "stuck" on the transport type they use when they reach a certain size. Hence NYC and London are (mid distance) train centric. Newer cities in the western US are car heavy. Singapore is metro rail.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Central London, yes. But 54% of London households own at least one car. [1] That's in the same ballpark as Manhattan. And everyone I know if the UK outside of London own car(s). Europe generally is less car-centric than the US but lots of people still own cars. [1] http://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-are-there-in-london.pdf http://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-ar...
reddog 6y ago
I enjoyed my time living on campus and I understand the authors point, but a college campus is the ulitmate elitist gated community. Imagine a city that required you pass an IQ test, submit your high school grades and an essay, ask for the last 2 years of tax returns and credit history, scanned your social media posts and reviewed all your hobbies and extra-ciricular activities before they would consider letting you become a resident. Then, once you moved in, they would monitor your speech and other activites to make sure they were up to community codes and standards. College campuses make suburbia look like Burning Man.
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  Yeah let's not forget how many people take out massive debt (which they often struggle to ever pay back) just to be part of this gated community for 4 years. It's not a good example for someone to think of at first.
- ryan93 6y ago
  Hes just talking about housing density.
LoSboccacc 6y ago
- let's put heavy industry at a walking distance Said noone ever. The walkable city model ignores the driving factor for commuting, the rest is just bike shedding.
- SECProto 6y ago
  Or use a different example, inclusive zoning in Japan is generally very mixed, with good outcomes for walking/cycling/transit. The only exclusive zoning areas is for industrial. https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm...
mbg721 6y ago
College campuses are also designed at great expense, which they recoup through various fees, mandatory dining plans, etc.
dfilppi 6y ago
Cities are obsolete
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
Colleges excel at: - common spaces - dense housing - walkability - community eating - socialization Eating, sleeping, working, and socializing is all, just from a distance/time/transportation/logistics standpoint, markedly optimized over "real" life. And people are much happier in college towns. Even in far flung rural areas, major college towns are massive draws and economic engines. Why do all those minimum wage professors accept their lot in life? Living in a college town is a huge positive.

274 points by jseliger 6y ago

Cities and universities serve very different populations. A university typically has four groups it serves: students, faculty, administration, and staff. Each of these groups tend to have only small variations in needs within their group. If you can design for the needs of these four groups, you're doing well. A city on the other hand may have hundreds or even thousands of different groups of differing conflicting needs. Even a smallish city with a population of 20,000 is going to have more complexity than a large university with 40,000 students plus several thousand in the other three groups.

mc32 6y ago
Also they aren’t considering Stanford which has one of the largest campuses by Area and you need shuttles to get from one area to another (even excluding the nature preserves).
- timzaman 6y ago
  Stanford is probably not a great example. It's exactly because the campus is and has always been so big that it's setup wide and grand.
  - legerdemain 6y ago
    Stanford is a perfectly fine example. I used to visit Stanford several times a week. Walking briskly, you can cross the core of campus, where most of the instructional buildings are, in about 15 minutes from one end to another. The athletic center and undergraduate dorms are located around the periphery of this core. I assume students don't typically go back to their dorms multiple times per day. The engineering campus is pretty compact. The medical complex is, yes, another brisk ten-minute walk, but I doubt many students need to go between the hospital and the rest of campus more than once a day. If your daily schedule takes you from the dorms to the core of campus, and then to the hospital, and then to the campus gym, and then to the student union or the main library, then yes, maybe you'll choose to take a shuttle. But for an able-bodied person, these are very reasonable distances to travel on foot, and certainly on a bicycle or scooter. For comparison, I went to a university with a much smaller campus, and it was still at least a ten-minute walk from one end to another. And it was fine.
sine_reality 6y ago
Could you elaborate on a few of the hundreds of different groups you are referring to within a city, as well as their conflicting needs?
- SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
  I'm interested to find out what makes these groups so different that being a walkable area is incompatible between them.
  - pjm331 6y ago
    i'll take a stab at what the author of that comment might have meant - how I understood it at least there are 2 ways you can define "walkable" 1. it is physically possible to walk there - e.g. there are paved sidewalks 2. it is convenient to walk from the place you are to the place you need to be i think that the misunderstanding here might be that you and the comment above are thinking about 1 while the problem is actually 2 to pull a quote from the article: "students who live in dormitories are able to work, eat and worship all within walking distance of their homes" there's also a link to this concept of a "15 minute neighborhood"[1] where everyone can walk to their basic daily needs w/in 15 minutes, or beautifully summarized as “Put the stuff closer together so it's easier to get to the stuff.” so the proposed problem is that the set of things w/in that "daily needs" category, AKA the "stuff", might grow, due to the increasing diversity of the population you're servicing, to a point where its not possible to give that to everyone [1]https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/9/6/7-rules-for-creating-15-minute-neighborhoods https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/9/6/7-rules-for-cre...
- falcolas 6y ago
  Small retail shops. Huge retail shops (Wallmarts/Targets). Non-profit retail (Goodwill). Restaurants (Coffee shops, family restaurants, Olive Gardens) Utility buildings. Utility Workers. Housing; low- medium- high- and no income. Plus some for the 0.01%. Schools; Pre- elementary- middle- high-schools and College. Office space. Pools. Gyms. Hospitals. Doctor offices. Animal shelters. Green spaces. Cinemas. Amusement parks. Fire departments. Police departments. Community centers. Jails. Courthouses. City/County/State/Country centers. Temporary housing (From hotels to short-term rentals) Commercial shipping (by rail, road, and sea) Car storage (travel between distant cities) And perhaps most importantly, competition (that is, alternatives) for all of the above; since campuses tend to be monopolies for many offerings.
paul_f 6y ago
Faculty and staff rarely live on campus. Often they live in suburban enclaves and drive to campus. They also tend to have spouses with jobs elsewhere and children who don't go to school on campus. Faculty parking can be one of the most contentious issues for any college or University. This idyllic myth of presented a college campus is only true for the students.
throw0101a 6y ago
> Cities and universities serve very different populations. As Jane Jacobs observed many decades ago: you don't live in a city, you live in a neighbourhood. * https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/jane-jacobs-street-smarts https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/jane-jacobs-st... You design the urban environment where, with-in a fifteen minute walk, you have grocery stores, butchers, coffee shops, dry cleaners, pubs, a library, dentists, doctor offices, elementary school, bakery, flower shops, etc. It's not that hard: we were doing it for a long-time before WW2. You can have big houses: * https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Westminster+Ave,+Toronto,+ON https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Westminster+Ave,+Toron... And small houses in it: * https://www.google.com/maps/place/100+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+ON https://www.google.com/maps/place/100+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+... All with backyards and (laneway) garages. Throw in some (medium-rise) apartment buildings while you're at it: * https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Fermanagh+Ave,+Toronto,+ON https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Fermanagh+Ave,+Toronto... High enough density for pubic transit, which makes car ownership optional and not a necessity.
- ulucs 6y ago
  Toronto is a bad example for sane housing, you have to pay over a thousand dollars for a single room that gets sunlight and the prices just kept rising until covid
  - ghaff 6y ago
    The parent also mentioned Jane Jacobs who a lot of people like to remember for getting highway construction blocked and, as they say, supported walkable neighborhoods that were communities. I would also guess that Jacobs would also have been perfectly fine with Wet Village "NIMBYs" blocking high-rise residential construction if they didn't want it. Livable neighborhoods probably correlate better to high housing prices than low.
    - throw0101a 6y ago
      Is high-rise (>10 storeys) really needed? Or would mid-rise (5-10) be sufficient? Certainly some areas could use high (near major transit hubs), but towers don't have to be planted everywhere.

gregw2 6y ago

I think the points made in the article are fine, there is something to the way colleges facilitate community and their physical design encourages walkability and enables that... but I would offer one caveat to this which cities should avoid when considering what to imitate and what not to. I have noticed a correlation between excessive building costs and campaigns and the two industries whose prices have most outpaced inflation the last 20 years: healthcare/hospitals and education/colleges. Alumni returning to their colleges after 20-50 years may notice the following phenomena: there are a lot more buildings (with donor names on them) but there is an incredible number of empty rooms at any one point in time... many more than when they went to school back in the day. (This also manifests in a lot more time-consuming walking to get around due to the lower density of usable space.) This trend is neither wise nor sustainable nor just. And college administrators should be held accountable for it, not given a pat on the back for raising money and spending it (despite the nice line on their resume). Alternate metrics of success should be culturally encouraged and measured. How could this be done? I don't know if LEED certification (which is an award given to buildings meeting various sustainability/efficiency criteria and has Gold/silver/bronze-type ratings which are thus indirectly a bragging right mentioned by anyone in academia who gets buildings built) measures actual building utilization... I suspect not. Typically LEED covers initial construction and is awarded at the end of construction, and thus could not include use-after-buildout metrics/grading, but LEED or something like it should attempt to measure something like that, and that should be a sign of true administrative competence (and also efficient use of donor funds by the way.) I wonder if the very sensors which are used to shut off lights when people aren't around and any "energy/CO2 savings metrics" from those sensors could be cheaply repurposed and inverted to also measure the creation of just such a building utilization metric (look how much carbon we wasted and continue to waste heating/cooling a building people aren't using?)

Aunche 6y ago
Part of the problem is that rich people want to leave behind a lasting legacy, and what better way than buy a building for the campus. At my alma mater, someone got a building named after them despite only donating a fraction of its construction costs, let alone maintenance. No doubt the ballooning tuition costs are subsidizing this man's legacy.

wonder_er 6y ago

I live in a small college town (Golden, CO) and I love biking through campus, or, when the weather is nice, sitting under a tree and reading a book for a little while. I'd love for some of those design patterns (grassy streets, walking paths more than roads, etc) to percolate outwards into the rest of Golden.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

One big thing this article overlooks is that colleges are free to ban anti-social people from their campus. Cities are not. There are fairly string rules for college and if you step over the line, you can be expelled and trespassed from campus with much lower burden of proof than a criminal trial. I have noticed as density of a people living together goes up, there is more need for conformity. Singapore and Japan have some of the nicest high density cities in the world, but they also have one of the highest rates of people being conformant. One final issue is pandemics. College campuses have had a horrible rate of transmission when students have been there, so much in fact that a lot of schools kept students from returning to campus for schooling making them take online classes.

unreal6 6y ago
It seems that many obtrusive anti-social behaviors would pertain to actions inside the home and there have always been bylaws and standards when living in apartment or condo buildings (eg noise, pets, grills/fire hazards). That being said, this still limits individual freedoms non-trivially.

CincinnatiMan 6y ago

Would cities be more desirable for a lot of people if they were only made up of college-educated (or college-viable) people? I think for a lot of suburban dwellers, their main concern is quality of the public schools. Enable them and their kids to be surrounded by other highly educated people who place high value on schooling, and they'll come back in droves.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
Being able to discriminate against residents is the reason colleges can have the high density walkable neighborhoods they do. Much of the value proposition in moving to spaced out neighborhoods requiring cars is that you filter out people who can’t afford cars or driving longer distances.
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  I see this levelled a lot, especially by urban dwellers but I've never met this person that moved to the suburbs so they wouldn't have to see a pedestrian. Most people I'm aware of move out because they have some innate claustrophobia, like a little more nature, want to have a garden, want to have a workshop. Is there some low key xenophobia prevailing in the burbs? For sure. Are a lot of them bothered seeing homeless people because they're no longer used to it? For sure. Do a lot of them vote against policy that might alleviate poverty because it's easier to judge the empoverished from a distance? For sure. But I really don't think that's the fundamental motivator for people to move. Everyone needs an Oasis. Some people find it in the stacks at the library, some in their own bedroom and some on 1/4 acres of manicured lawn and bushes.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    > But I really don't think that's the fundamental motivator for people to move. It’s not xenophobia, or any other ideological hate for others. It’s simply the result of optimizing for your own kids’ outcome. The country dismantled mental health care facilities and the law doesn’t allow for involuntary committals. The country’s drug policies and lack of economic opportunities created addicts who may not be able to be helped. Overall, we don’t have the stomach for the necessary wealth transfer needed to fix broken families (providing poor parents with sufficient wages and time off and healthcare so they still have time to be at home with their kids). As an individual, there isn’t much you can do to in the timeframe of raising your kids to solve these issues. So you do the next best thing (if you can afford it). You run away from the problem as much as you can. Which also helps exacerbate the issues. And it’s all part and parcel of the increasingly wide wealth/income/opportunity gaps.

timzaman 6y ago

Yep classic stereotype american culture and urban planning. One of the main things i dislike most about the bay area. Cars come first.

ww520 6y ago

College life and real life have no comparison. Students are cramped in small dorm rooms shared by multiple people, many with shared public bathrooms. Students "work" (attending class/studying) at small place, chairs with a small board as desk in classroom or small desks in library. There's one or a few shared cafeterias on campus. Close to no variety shops on campus. In almost all aspects of campus life, things and spaces are cramped and choices are few. Students only endure it because they know it's only for a few years. People don't want to live or work like a student for the rest of their life. Plus the cost of college has spiraled out of control year after year.

ARandomerDude 6y ago
Exactly right. Couple that with the various types of work people are required to do and it's a doubly bad thesis. On my street alone, my neighbors include an oil field worker, a landscaper, a steel factory worker, and a UPS driver. So while the human-scale idea might work for white-collar office jobs (analogous to college campus life), there's no way it works for other professions that require separation distances for safety or logistical reasons. Before the suburban boom, we tried human scale with dangerous or large-area jobs with company housing, stores, etc. and it resulted in high prices and monopolies. Given the choice, I'll pay for the roads and sit in traffic.
- watwut 6y ago
  Neither oil field worker nor steel factory worker will work at the exact place where he is having bedroom. Both have to travel further away regardless of how human-scale their houses/flats are in. Once they are home, they both benefit from shops, restaurants, gyms, green spaces and what not within walking distance. Their kids benefit from the same. They themselves benefit from not having to drive their kids everywhere.
m463 6y ago
Another point is that college students do not all live on-campus and in dorms. Depending on the school, it's possible to live in the dorm the first year, and possibly move to another form of housing or off-campus as time goes on. Many students put up with the dorms and roommates because they don't know any better at first. When they do know better, they work out other arrangements with a little more room (and fewer rules)

benrbray 6y ago

For those saying that the density of college campuses simply isn't suitable when many different types of lifestyle converge, I urge you to look at Japan or Europe for an example of density working at scale. Density doesn't mean everyone is forced to live in a studio apartment either. I live in Tokyo in a 3-story house paying less in rent than I ever did in Atlanta, Seattle, or Ann Arbor. The biggest difference is the expansive train systems, allowing for clusters of shops and restaurants that are accessible without a car. And not a parking lot in sight (good riddance)!

jdcaron 6y ago
Unused cars & parking lots take a lot of space in cities.
- SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
  As well as the huge danger of street side parking with drivers swerving in/out and opening doors without looking. In my city there is a single city block which has no roads (special vehicle access only) and consists of a bunch of high rise apts buildings with restaurants on the bottom level. I stumbled on this area by accident and I was blown away, it was like I had walked in to an alternate universe. There were a group of kids playing in what looks like your typical suburb parkland except this is right in the middle of the city which would normally be packed out with cars and concrete. Makes me wish more of the city was like this.
someperson 6y ago
> expensive train systems I think you meant "expansive"?
- SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
  Or extensive.
- benrbray 6y ago
  Haha typed on mobile, my bad. The trains are pretty cheap compared to the cost of car ownership in America. From another comment I wrote: > I live pretty far from central Tokyo and for between 200-350yen one way I can get to Shinjuku / Shibuya / Ikebukuro / Ueno and everywhere in between. So that's 400-700yen round trip for a night out. > In Seattle or Atlanta? You'd be extremely lucky if your destination within a 15min walk of a bus stop or train station. In Atlanta good luck not getting mugged while waiting for the bus at night. Uber typically costs $10-15 one way (although to be fair you can split the cost between friends if you're travelling together). > Or if you own a car in the US, you can reliably get from A to B, but you're paying between $5-10/day for insurance (whether you use the car that day or not) and $10-20 to park if you're in a city.

gumby 6y ago

One thing universities have little of is small children. MIT's married student housing isn't large and is off to one side. There is no faculty housing beyond the president (all of whom have had no kids or adult kids). Stanford's married student housing (and the faculty neighborhood) is a larger percentage and includes playgrounds, rec facilities and even two elementary schools. Still, it's less family friendly than Palo Alto or Menlo Park.

ketzo 6y ago
This might come off as naive, but I feel like that would that be pretty easy to solve, as far as urban design problems go, right? Kids mostly don't need specialized facilities -- just more of the same kind of buildings. If you took a college and turned one of its buildings into an elementary school and one of its quads into a playground, you're most of the way to being "child-friendly." Or so I would think? Don't have kids, in case that wasn't obvious. Hopefully this doesn't sound rude -- I just mean to say that a college campus's child-unfriendliness isn't a reason not to copy the model, since it's easily fixed.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
gyc 6y ago
The university I attended had a single family home neighborhood only a few walkable away where many faculty members lived and raise their families.
jacobolus 6y ago
Take it from someone who grew up in a comparable suburb (if anything more kid-friendly than those two), but also spent a substantial amount of time in a more walkable city in Mexico: Places like Palo Alto and Menlo Park are terrible for children of all ages. San Francisco or Cambridge near the MIT campus would be a much cooler place to grow up. (Though unfortunately these places are getting less diverse every year, as housing becomes increasingly unaffordable.) Because everyone travels by car, children in suburbs are completely dependent on adults. There are few things to do, and many kids are end up stuck at home or carted from one over-scripted activity to another by overwhelmed parents. Their social lives are strongly circumscribed, with little chance to make cross-age connections. Kids have a much better time in real walkable cities, where they can be more independent and there are more available resources and activities relevant to every kind of interest and hobby. Those suburbs are optimized for wealthy able-bodied adults age 35-60 who like driving their cars. Everyone else is a second-class citizen. Yuppie parents of school-aged children say they are moving to the suburbs for the sake of their kids, but it is more about their own convenience and biases/preconceptions.

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

>"There are many reasons why the college environment facilitates relationships and personal connections. Everyone there is at a similar age and stage in life. Classes and majors tend to group students by interests and personality traits. There is also a relative freedom from responsibility. One factor often overlooked, though, is the structure of colleges themselves. Because of their scale and walkability, college campuses meet human social needs in a way that is impossible for many of our nation’s towns and cities." This is a very important understanding for future city/urban planners!

closeparen 6y ago

A large college campus is 50-75k people. This is evidence that our towns can be human scale. A city is 10x to 100x that. I don’t think you can scale up the time that students spend walking by 10-100x and still be okay. You’re going to need some kind of wheeled transportation, and the layout might have to accommodate it in a way that a college campus with purely walkable trips doesn’t.

SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
The difference I think is that students frequently have to move between buildings while people outside of education typically visit 2 - 3 buildings (including home) in a day. With remote work you could just make sure you are with in close walking distance of the supermarket / retail as well as a public transport stop that gets you to all the places you visit occasionally (the beach, etc)
ryukafalz 6y ago
Let me give you an example from my own experience. I live in Philadelphia, a fairly large city that's still extremely walkable in certain parts. Before I moved recently, I was paying around $900/month for a studio apartment in the city center. From there, it was a short walk to any number of nearby restaurants (including a corner store on my block), a <5 minute walk to the nearby commuter rail station, a <10 minute walk to the nearby city subway station, a <15 minute walk to a major regional hospital, and about a 30 minute walk to my office (this was generally the longest trip I'd have to make with any frequency, and honestly a walking commute was pretty nice). I did keep my car around largely because I have friends and family outside the city, but if it weren't for that it would largely not be necessary. Within the city, the subway system gets you pretty far outside of the immediate walkable area near my old apartment; my only complaint is that there are parts of the city that aren't as well-connected by public transit. Philadelphia is an extremely human-centric city, which makes sense as it was established well before cars were invented.

asciimov 6y ago

As a person who has spent a great deal of time in rural areas, I don't think I would be happy in the long term living in cramped apartments. Too much noise and too many people. In the suburban sprawl in which I live, the 10-12 feet between houses seems too close. Yet as much as I long for space, I will always be tied to some metro, with access to healthcare and cultural outlets.

DoingIsLearning 6y ago
> Too much noise I think people that make this argument against apartments fail to appreciate the difference that a quality construction makes. I lived in early 2000's apartments where I could hear my upstairs neighbour blasting drum and bass in the stairwell. However, I could hear literally nothing once I closed my apartment door. I have also lived in a 1930's terraced house where I could literally hear my next door neighbour coughing. Construction quality matters a lot more than how cramped or not your housing conditions are.
mleonhard 6y ago
Cars produce most city noise, especially muffler-less motorcycles and trucks. Without cars you can have a nice calm quiet safely-walkable community.
ghaff 6y ago
How close do you need to be? With an hour distance, you can get pretty far into exurbs with multi-acre plots or even rural areas from most cities.

ChrisLomont 6y ago

Colleges have of tens thousands of people doing a quite limited number of things - mostly classes and teaching, with some support staff or service easily placed around campus. It's easy to plan for that. I'd guess most campuses in the US can easily be walked across multiple times a day. I went to Purdue, W. Lafayette, about 40K students, and didn't need a car. One could walk between classes and dorms and food trivially. Cities of hundreds of thousands to millions of people have easily thousands and thousands of varying jobs, different size and scale employers, a huge range of skilled and unskilled labor, a vast array of specialists and specialty employers, and even several entire campuses - a massive amount of different requirements. It's not reasonable to expect everyone to have employment within close range, so immediately people need cars to commute. It's not reasonable to put some large employers evenly mixed with housing - no one wants the garbage facility or any of a host of companies next door. Many companies also have huge inflow/outflow requirements like trains, shipping, power, waste, again complicating the picture, since people need to travel larger distances to reach them. Zoning laws didn't just pop up to prevent campus living everywhere - they popped up to solve the issues that occur when living and industry was co-mingled. So while I'd love to have all of life be as serene and pretty as a top university, I also prefer to have specialized jobs and places to do such work, and I don't see how these can possibly be merged.

known 6y ago

Ethnic integration in Singapore https://archive.is/WgXtO https://archive.is/WgXtO

stopping 6y ago

I wonder if it's possible to make a fully-walkable city modelled after a college campus. Let's play with some numbers. I'll make some conservative estimates of space requirements. Indoor residential space: 400 square feet per occupant + 200 sf fudge factor Indoor retail space: 25 sf per-capita + 25 sf margin Indoor office/misc job space: 200 sf per office worker + 50 sf margin Indoor schooling/daycare: 150 sf per student + 50 sf margin Indoor supporting infrastructure: 20 sf per capita > Hospital requirement is only around 1 sf, so I'm just adding an arbitrary margin to account for rarely-visited indoor locations (e.g. churches, community centers), storage for city vehicles (fire department), waste management, etc. Rough population proportions by age group in U.S.: 0-18: 24% ("student age") 19-64: 63% ("working age") >65: 13% ("retirement age") Let's take all of the worst-case numbers, that every working-age person requires office space. The total space requirement for a population of 1000 individuals is: Residential + Retail + Office + School + Infra [600 * 1000] + [50 * 1000] + [250 * (1000 * 0.63)] + [200 * (1000 * 0.24)] + [20 * 1000] 600k (Residential) + 50k (Retail) + 157.5k (Office) + 48k (School) + 20k (Infra) 875.5k square feet per thousand residents Or, 875.5 square feet of indoor space per person. This is largely dominated by residential and office space, which are highly favorable for high density construction. Now, let's consider what a "walkable distance" is for an average person. I'm very happy to walk anywhere within a 10-minute radius (1/2 mile), but can probably live with 20-30 minutes if there is good bike infrastructure. For now let's just discuss the walking case. A 1/2 mile radius is 0.78 square miles, so a perfectly walkable space would contain all of the services I need within 0.78 square miles, or 21.7 million square feet. How many people can we fit? Filling all of this space with single-story structures would allow us to fit 25,000 people. There are some obvious adjustments we need to make. First, we can realistically build 3 or 4-story structures for residential and office space. Next, we have to adjust for necessary road infrastructure (emergency services, delivery, waste management, etc). New York City dedicates around 50% of its land to roads and open spaces. Using suburban road densities, we can spend 10% of our land on simple 2-way streets. The remaining 90% can be spent on buildings and outdoor space. Let's say we dedicate 30% of the total land to buildings (6.5 million sf), which leaves 60% outdoor space (13 million sf). This is a fairly comfortable estimate based on looking at a map of my college campus. How many people can we fit? Let's assume some densities: Residential: 4-story buildings Retail: 1-story (could possibly go 2, but makes delivery logistics harder) Office: 4-story School: 2-story Infra: 1-story The footprint requirements per thousand people are: 600k/4 + 50k + 157.5k/4 + 48k/2 + 20k = 284k square feet per thousand residents This means our 60% open, fully-walkable space can support a bit over 23,000 people, for a population density of 29k per square mile. For reference, this is slightly higher than New York City. So, what happens when we bring parking space back into the mix? A 150-car parking lot requires an acre of space, or about 300 sf of parking lot per car. Imagine your city needs two parking spaces per car (one for home, one for work). Even if each family of 4 owns just one car (this seems like quite an underestimate), the parking requirement for our city of 23,000 people is 11,500 spaces. This amounts to 3.45 million square feet of pavement alone, just for parking! In other words, 0.123 square miles of our 0.47 sq.mi. walkable area is now parking lot. Now, how much extra road do we need to facilitate moving all of these vehicles? I'd estimate we need to dedicate at least as much extra space for driving as we do for parking, so now 0.25 square miles (53%) of our outdoor space is now dedicated to personal vehicles. Sure, Amdahl's law of parking infrastructure allows us to reclaim half of this space back if we decide to build multi-story parking structures or hide them underground, but this is a huge waste of resources considering that our city doesn't even need passenger transport of any kind! In summary: Using some very conservative estimates and medium density, a walkable circular area of 1/2 mile radius (0.78 square miles) can quite comfortably fit 23,000 people with adequate space for residence, office, retail, schools, and remaining city infra. If we dedicate 10% of the land for minimum-necessary roads (emergency services + transportation of goods and waste), we still have 60% of the land remaining for green open space and walking. If we want to add cars, we easily lose over half of this walkable space to parking and additional road. In all of these estimates, I tried to favor cars as much as possible.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

Counter-example: They designed the Bijlmer neighbourhood (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijlmermeer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijlmermeer) to be pedestrian-friendly, with parks, walkways between the buildings, and no cars allowed. But it didn't really work out.

faichai 6y ago
Isn’t this more of a high-rise failure. The first picture from the link shows some rather monumental structures that tower over occupants and users of green spaces. Later in the Wikipedia article they talk about tearing some of these down. As well as amenities, green spaces etc there is always a requirement for buildings to be of ‘human’ scale for it to feel liveable. Also there are benefits to organic growth over centralised planning as growth can adapt to requirements of a place. Centralised planning tends to be too rigid and once a failure becomes apparent it is difficult to re-plan without sacrificing some other amenity.
- ghaff 6y ago
  99 Percent Invisible episodes. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/bijlmer-city-future-part-1/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/bijlmer-city-future-p... Basically a Le Corbusier disaster. >Also there are benefits to organic growth over centralised planning as growth can adapt to requirements of a place That's certainly true and is basically one of the things Jane Jacobs argued for. Note, though, that doesn't necessarily lead to dense housing/inexpensive housing which is what many of the urbanist folks who comment here care a great deal about.

LatteLazy 6y ago

Can they be? Everyone who has tried has failed AFAIK. Milton Keynes here in the UK was a "Garden City", it's become a byword for soullessness and low livability. Meanwhile London, the uncontrollable millenia old mess, goes from strength to strength...

nmca 6y ago
But London is rather un-american in its practicalities right? It's a total expensive pain to drive, as roads are narrow and there's a 20usd a day fee to do so. But public transport is great and wherever you live there are walkable amenities.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  I think it depends on your definition of American. New York isn't that different (heavily train using, very limited parking, but on a grid pattern). I get what you mean though, NYC is an exception really. There is a "rule" about how cities get "stuck" on the transport type they use when they reach a certain size. Hence NYC and London are (mid distance) train centric. Newer cities in the western US are car heavy. Singapore is metro rail.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Central London, yes. But 54% of London households own at least one car. [1] That's in the same ballpark as Manhattan. And everyone I know if the UK outside of London own car(s). Europe generally is less car-centric than the US but lots of people still own cars. [1] http://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-are-there-in-london.pdf http://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-ar...

reddog 6y ago

I enjoyed my time living on campus and I understand the authors point, but a college campus is the ulitmate elitist gated community. Imagine a city that required you pass an IQ test, submit your high school grades and an essay, ask for the last 2 years of tax returns and credit history, scanned your social media posts and reviewed all your hobbies and extra-ciricular activities before they would consider letting you become a resident. Then, once you moved in, they would monitor your speech and other activites to make sure they were up to community codes and standards. College campuses make suburbia look like Burning Man.

notsureaboutpg 6y ago
Yeah let's not forget how many people take out massive debt (which they often struggle to ever pay back) just to be part of this gated community for 4 years. It's not a good example for someone to think of at first.
ryan93 6y ago
Hes just talking about housing density.

LoSboccacc 6y ago

- let's put heavy industry at a walking distance Said noone ever. The walkable city model ignores the driving factor for commuting, the rest is just bike shedding.

SECProto 6y ago
Or use a different example, inclusive zoning in Japan is generally very mixed, with good outcomes for walking/cycling/transit. The only exclusive zoning areas is for industrial. https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm...

mbg721 6y ago

College campuses are also designed at great expense, which they recoup through various fees, mandatory dining plans, etc.

dfilppi 6y ago

Cities are obsolete

AtlasBarfed 6y ago

Colleges excel at: - common spaces - dense housing - walkability - community eating - socialization Eating, sleeping, working, and socializing is all, just from a distance/time/transportation/logistics standpoint, markedly optimized over "real" life. And people are much happier in college towns. Even in far flung rural areas, major college towns are massive draws and economic engines. Why do all those minimum wage professors accept their lot in life? Living in a college town is a huge positive.