5 ms·

This was one of the big failures of modernism and related architectural schools. Being charitable, the thinking at the time was somewhat mechanistic: that you

This was one of the big failures of modernism and related architectural schools. Being charitable, the thinking at the time was somewhat mechanistic: that you could build utopic urban environments from first principles as massive campuses vs individual buildings. Inevitable these projects underestimated the organic and evolutionary complexity of urban environments. No single design team organized by some maestro can come close to anticipating and designing around all the needs of an urban neighborhood. But on the other hand, these mega projects were a simple story to sell politically. Look, we're being bold and thinking big, we're going to actually address problems in housing supply vs kicking the can down the road, etc. Someone else saying they needed to think in terms of flexible zoning and a variety of tax incentives looks not nearly so compelling. Today we look back on these projects differently, because the failure of "housing projects" in the US, UK, and elsewhere are a familiar meme almost, so people are much more skeptical about mega projects working out.

ghaff 4y ago
One interesting aspect of how many people view urban planning is that a lot of urbanists like to point to the like of Jane Jacobs who (correctly IMO) opposed a lot of centralized planning, especially with respect to roads. At the same time, she favored organic and community-oriented development which I suspect a lot of people today would consider NIMBY and would mostly be opposed to large-scale housing developments. She did live in the West Village after all.
- wahern 4y ago
  Large-scale housing developments exist largely because of the regulatory burden. If you need to spend years, if not decades, shepherding a project through a bureaucracy, then you need that economy of scale in units of housing per unit of regulation to make a project financially viable. The lesser the regulatory burden, the more organic development you'd see, including a much larger proportion of smaller projects and smaller buildings. Large steel or steel + concrete structures are grossly inefficient in terms of construction costs per square footage, except where property values are incredibly high. (Wherever you see such structures in areas without extremely expensive property prices, you can be sure there are other factors at play--regulation, government funding, etc.) That's why 5-over-1 (wood framing over concrete) is so common where possible. Some people might complain that many 5-over-1 buildings have too large of a footprint, but that's also largely due to the same regulatory economics. Anyhow, if communities simply made a laundry list of things they don't want--e.g. no more than 4 stories, ground footprint smaller than N square feet, etc--and then provided for approval by-right (i.e. if your project meets those restrictions, you're automatically approved), then most areas suffering from severe housing supply issues would be in a dramatically better situation than they are now, California especially. But NIMBYs won't accept approval by-right; they want every project, no matter how small, to go through the same endless gauntlet where every interest group or interested party effectively gets a veto based on whatever imaginary impact they can think of ([insert comparison to security theater and fantastical terrorist threats]), with predictable and deliberate results.
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    > But NIMBYs won't accept approval by-right; they want every project, no matter how small, to go through the same endless gauntlet where every interest group or interested party effectively gets a veto based on whatever imaginary impact they can think of ([insert comparison to security theater and fantastical terrorist threats]), with predictable and deliberate results. Just because a project was approved by right doesn't mean that NIMBYs won't file a lawsuit against you anyways to find some reason to get the project canned.
    - wahern 4y ago
      Fair enough. In my head I'm implicitly assuming that in a state like California approval by-right would necessarily require as a practical matter reform to, for example, CEQA so EIS reports couldn't be so trivially challenged. But in the abstract it's the same pathology--the opposition abusing legal procedures to hold up projects indefinitely, rather than advocating for and relying on substantive law. The problem with the latter is that it makes the opposition uncomfortably accountable; it becomes much more transparent that requirement X is responsible for Y costs, which allows the public to make more informed decisions about the utility of X.
  - runamok 4y ago
    Even with approval by right many buildings that exist could not be built today. Sometimes for good reasons like fire code but often not. https://la.urbanize.city/post/forbidden-city-how-los-angeles-banned-some-its-most-popular-buildings https://la.urbanize.city/post/forbidden-city-how-los-angeles... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-percent-of-manhattans-buildings-could-not-be-built-today.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-... (archive of same without paywall: https://archive.ph/mvLpO https://archive.ph/mvLpO )
  - laurencerowe 4y ago
    Six stories is probably my preferred urban scale, but the 5 over 1 buildings we get in the US are just terrible. A six story apartment in Berlin has windows front and back while the US version has windows only on one side due to the long central corridor to connect to the two stairwells required by US regulations (a result of the wood construction?)
Barrin92 4y ago
I don't buy the failure narrative at all. In a lot of Eastern European and also to an extent Western European cities large housing projects work reasonably well especially for lower income households, they've kept rents affordable, they're energy efficient and they aided in rapid urbanisation. Many of them don't look great but they pretty much did their job given the limited resources that a lot of cities had available. If you look at modernist cities around the world, in India for example as well, cities that took inspiration from this kind of planning have generally good standards of living, costs, little homelessness and decent environmental footprints.
- HarryHirsch 4y ago
  On the other hand, they(TM) have an interest in the failure narrative being perpetuated. The housing shortfall in the US is severe, somewhere around 5 million units, depending on where you look. A good chunk of the electorate cannot afford starting their own household, they live with roommates or their parents. Imagine they pointed to 1960s Lisbon or late 1950s Soviet Russia and insisted the government implement a sensible housing policy. It would be a bloodbath for investors and consequently cannot be allowed to happen.
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    > Imagine they pointed to 1960s Lisbon or late 1950s Soviet Russia and insisted the government implement a sensible housing policy. It would be a bloodbath for investors and consequently cannot be allowed to happen. Those buildings would be illegal in most of the US. If similar quality and floor space per inhabitant was legal to build you could indeed solve housing problems in short order. No need to have the state do it. If flophouses/SROs were legal developers would build them.
  - simonh 4y ago
    >It would be a bloodbath for investors and consequently cannot be allowed to happen. If it will be a bloodbath for investors it's not a matter of not allowing it, people just won't invest and it won't happen anyway. Or the government will massively subsidise it and under-wright it to make it happen, and the public purse will carry the can. If it were financially viable on it's own, the private sector would most likely do it anyway, but if you're starting from the point of financial non-viability of your housing scheme as a starting assumption, blaming investors seems a bit silly.
usrusr 4y ago
The thinking at the time was driven by greenery: you take the early industrial urban density that was a lifeless (except for humans) city of stone, but stack the humans a few times higher to open up room for trees and birds and perhaps a little pond. Everybody gets their own window to nature, as if they had a cabin in the woods! That's how their reasoning went, but humans aren't that easy to fool.
scotty79 4y ago
> No single design team organized by some maestro can come close to anticipating and designing around all the needs of an urban neighborhood. This is also true about people who designed american urban sprawl.

ghaff 4y ago

One interesting aspect of how many people view urban planning is that a lot of urbanists like to point to the like of Jane Jacobs who (correctly IMO) opposed a lot of centralized planning, especially with respect to roads. At the same time, she favored organic and community-oriented development which I suspect a lot of people today would consider NIMBY and would mostly be opposed to large-scale housing developments. She did live in the West Village after all.

wahern 4y ago
Large-scale housing developments exist largely because of the regulatory burden. If you need to spend years, if not decades, shepherding a project through a bureaucracy, then you need that economy of scale in units of housing per unit of regulation to make a project financially viable. The lesser the regulatory burden, the more organic development you'd see, including a much larger proportion of smaller projects and smaller buildings. Large steel or steel + concrete structures are grossly inefficient in terms of construction costs per square footage, except where property values are incredibly high. (Wherever you see such structures in areas without extremely expensive property prices, you can be sure there are other factors at play--regulation, government funding, etc.) That's why 5-over-1 (wood framing over concrete) is so common where possible. Some people might complain that many 5-over-1 buildings have too large of a footprint, but that's also largely due to the same regulatory economics. Anyhow, if communities simply made a laundry list of things they don't want--e.g. no more than 4 stories, ground footprint smaller than N square feet, etc--and then provided for approval by-right (i.e. if your project meets those restrictions, you're automatically approved), then most areas suffering from severe housing supply issues would be in a dramatically better situation than they are now, California especially. But NIMBYs won't accept approval by-right; they want every project, no matter how small, to go through the same endless gauntlet where every interest group or interested party effectively gets a veto based on whatever imaginary impact they can think of ([insert comparison to security theater and fantastical terrorist threats]), with predictable and deliberate results.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  > But NIMBYs won't accept approval by-right; they want every project, no matter how small, to go through the same endless gauntlet where every interest group or interested party effectively gets a veto based on whatever imaginary impact they can think of ([insert comparison to security theater and fantastical terrorist threats]), with predictable and deliberate results. Just because a project was approved by right doesn't mean that NIMBYs won't file a lawsuit against you anyways to find some reason to get the project canned.
  - wahern 4y ago
    Fair enough. In my head I'm implicitly assuming that in a state like California approval by-right would necessarily require as a practical matter reform to, for example, CEQA so EIS reports couldn't be so trivially challenged. But in the abstract it's the same pathology--the opposition abusing legal procedures to hold up projects indefinitely, rather than advocating for and relying on substantive law. The problem with the latter is that it makes the opposition uncomfortably accountable; it becomes much more transparent that requirement X is responsible for Y costs, which allows the public to make more informed decisions about the utility of X.
- runamok 4y ago
  Even with approval by right many buildings that exist could not be built today. Sometimes for good reasons like fire code but often not. https://la.urbanize.city/post/forbidden-city-how-los-angeles-banned-some-its-most-popular-buildings https://la.urbanize.city/post/forbidden-city-how-los-angeles... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-percent-of-manhattans-buildings-could-not-be-built-today.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-... (archive of same without paywall: https://archive.ph/mvLpO https://archive.ph/mvLpO )
- laurencerowe 4y ago
  Six stories is probably my preferred urban scale, but the 5 over 1 buildings we get in the US are just terrible. A six story apartment in Berlin has windows front and back while the US version has windows only on one side due to the long central corridor to connect to the two stairwells required by US regulations (a result of the wood construction?)

Barrin92 4y ago

I don't buy the failure narrative at all. In a lot of Eastern European and also to an extent Western European cities large housing projects work reasonably well especially for lower income households, they've kept rents affordable, they're energy efficient and they aided in rapid urbanisation. Many of them don't look great but they pretty much did their job given the limited resources that a lot of cities had available. If you look at modernist cities around the world, in India for example as well, cities that took inspiration from this kind of planning have generally good standards of living, costs, little homelessness and decent environmental footprints.

HarryHirsch 4y ago
On the other hand, they(TM) have an interest in the failure narrative being perpetuated. The housing shortfall in the US is severe, somewhere around 5 million units, depending on where you look. A good chunk of the electorate cannot afford starting their own household, they live with roommates or their parents. Imagine they pointed to 1960s Lisbon or late 1950s Soviet Russia and insisted the government implement a sensible housing policy. It would be a bloodbath for investors and consequently cannot be allowed to happen.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  > Imagine they pointed to 1960s Lisbon or late 1950s Soviet Russia and insisted the government implement a sensible housing policy. It would be a bloodbath for investors and consequently cannot be allowed to happen. Those buildings would be illegal in most of the US. If similar quality and floor space per inhabitant was legal to build you could indeed solve housing problems in short order. No need to have the state do it. If flophouses/SROs were legal developers would build them.
- simonh 4y ago
  >It would be a bloodbath for investors and consequently cannot be allowed to happen. If it will be a bloodbath for investors it's not a matter of not allowing it, people just won't invest and it won't happen anyway. Or the government will massively subsidise it and under-wright it to make it happen, and the public purse will carry the can. If it were financially viable on it's own, the private sector would most likely do it anyway, but if you're starting from the point of financial non-viability of your housing scheme as a starting assumption, blaming investors seems a bit silly.

usrusr 4y ago

The thinking at the time was driven by greenery: you take the early industrial urban density that was a lifeless (except for humans) city of stone, but stack the humans a few times higher to open up room for trees and birds and perhaps a little pond. Everybody gets their own window to nature, as if they had a cabin in the woods! That's how their reasoning went, but humans aren't that easy to fool.

scotty79 4y ago

> No single design team organized by some maestro can come close to anticipating and designing around all the needs of an urban neighborhood. This is also true about people who designed american urban sprawl.