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Monday, December 16, 2013

Some praise, but also criticism of Enrique Peñalosa's TED talk about cities



I have a few comments about Enrique Peñalosa's recent TED talk, which has been making the rounds. I'll say up front that he makes a lot of very good comments and it is worth watching. He's right: a bus with 80 people ought to have dedicated lanes. The streets should be safe for children and families. We have to rein in sprawl. But I have some criticism of the example pictures that he shows. I think that they undermine his message.

(all images are from the TED talk)


Here we see his example of a bus rapid transit system in his country. I'll say that from a technical perspective, it's pretty neat. Cheap labor costs, reuse of existing roadway, good ridership all make this a cost-effective project. The big problem is the location. This is highway-median transit. Look at what the people have to walk across just to get to the station. The 3 lanes of cars that you can see are only a fraction of the total. There's even more lanes of cars outside the frame of the picture, on the other side of the pointlessly landscaped median. This is about as anti-urban a scene as you can get. For all that he talks about equity for people, this is an example of a highway where the vast majority of the space is dedicated to private automobiles. And I think that this is a miserable example and it won't inspire anyone to want to copy it. It puts the transit in a very inhospitable location.



This is an example from Guangzhou, China. It's slightly better, in that there's only 6 lanes of traffic surrounding the busway. But it's still a hideously wide, Hypertrophic corridor: there's even grade separation of pedestrians. You can't cross this street without going up and over. It's a highway. If you want to talk about superiority over subways, then you need to show us a corridor with urbanism that matches what a subway can provide. This is not that. This is not human scaled. This is a massive hole in the city.


A terrifying vision, Enrique Peñalosa's "Radiant City"
Now, at this point in the TED talk is where Peñalosa goes off the deep end. The last 2 pictures could have been dismissed as just unfortunate choices. But this here is his "vision" of the city of the future. And it is HORRIFYING!

The picture painted here is one that might make Le Corbusier's heart warm. Towers in the park. Giant highways. Grade separated pedestrian ways. It's practically a compendium of what-not-to-do in urban areas. This is a vision which was implemented in 20th century cities and turned out to be a complete disaster (e.g. 1950s public housing projects). What in the world is Enrique thinking?



I picked out these two examples of streets with large pedestrian/bikeway areas. Actually, it's not clear if the top example even has a roadway for cars. The major problem with these two pictures is: where's the life? Both are in almost completely dead scenes. There's no street life. There's no "eyes on the street" because they're both set in desolate places. Instead there's tons of "buffering greenspace." These would make fine recreational paths through a park. But for a city street, these violate the first principles of safety in numbers. Perhaps this is not his vision for a city street, he's not entirely clear. I hope not. This is not the vision of a vibrant city. At best, it is the vision of an outlying suburb. Compare that to this picture he also shows:


Isn't that obviously much better? Life, people, a human-friendly street and neighborhood. Simple. But not from Colombia.

I don't know what to make of Enrique Peñalosa in this talk. On the one hand, he says lots of good things, and even shows some nice pictures from places like Amsterdam. On the other hand, he highlights examples from his own country that look like the worst of the tragic mistakes from 1950s urban planning.

7 comments:

  1. Strongly agree -- why on earth does he want to replicate Soviet atrocities when a highly dense form suitable for pedestrian/transit living, that is also beautiful, vital, and human, is already existing in Colombia?

    http://i.imgur.com/BnAQFxd.jpg
    http://i.imgur.com/dPjs0fz.jpg
    http://i.imgur.com/3thXKPp.jpg

    What also really jumps out at me from all those 'Radiant City' drawings these guys put out is the strong atomization inherent in their environments. You have totally private space in the apartments of those towers, and then totally public, exposed space in the form of massive carriageways/green space. They've lost the intermediary vocabulary of courtyards, alleys, lanes, streets, patios, balconies that provide a healthy intermediary space that allows human beings to merge in and out of public and private. You can see Peñalosa maybe grasping at this a little with those shared patios on top of his Radiant Towers, which is a minor improvement.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jarrett sent me this comment, because he was unable to get past the filter:

    ```Do not project developed-world urbanist expectations onto the developing world! And do not let your aesthetic preferences make you an opponent of liberation.

    Developing world BRT is about moving great masses of people who already have a disincentive to driving, and the standard busy-road-median, while not ideal urban design, is an overwhelming, transformative improvement in millions of lives.

    The developing-world reality includes weak law enforcement, so transit lanes need to be self-enforcing. That's why you see the emphasis on infrastructure that protects transit speed and reliability.

    Yes, developing world people love the small town ambience too. But they must work with the cities and right-of-way opportunities that they have. And the must move masses of people that just don't fit through a cute urban design where everything is slow and mixed.

    Efficiency is abundance!

    Jarrett Walker, HumanTransit.org'''

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My response:

      I don't disagree with your comment, because my main critique was not
      on the BRT, but on the urban design element of Peñalosa's talk. I
      think it's great that he and the others were able to take lanes and
      put together a world class BRT system, given the scenario. The mistake
      was building a highway like that in the first place, especially in a
      place where car ownership is so low. You and I know that BRT can be
      built in all sorts of contexts, but the general public could have used
      a better example.

      But there is a second part to his talk where he pushes the idea of a
      particular urban design, and he starts by talking about how many new
      cities and neighborhoods will be developed in the coming decades. He
      correctly identifies the problem: too much space given to cars, and
      too little given to people. But his proposed solution is almost
      identical to the Radiant City ideology that we already know is a
      massive failure, and which has produced many of the problems that he
      so eloquently speaks about.

      He seems to be on board with the superblocks, giant
      towers-in-the-park, the massive highways, parking lots, and the
      isolation created by Corbusier-style urban planning. According to him,
      it can all be fixed by just adding green ped/bike ways. I think he's
      wrong on that, massive amounts of automobile infrastructure is
      unaffordable for the developing world, and by pushing on this
      particular urban design scheme he is detracting from the very good
      work on BRT that he helped bring about.

      Delete
    2. Jarrett writes: ```I think he's working with the realities of Latin America, and I'll be reluctant to second-guess him about those things. I believe in seeing not just the beauty of urban design but also the beauty of mass-liberation, and that's the context of most developing world thinking: Liberate people from poverty and create a more civilized city, partly by helping them not buy a car or motorbike. And liberation requires abundance, which requires speed and frequency and reliability, which in the developing world means clear running ways for buses somewhat divorced from urban design features that would slow down or entangle them.'''

      Delete
    3. My response:

      I agree that he knows more about Latin America than either of us. But
      it's when he started to talk about future cities, and in other regions
      of the world, that I grew concerned. The Transmileno system may serve
      well for accessibility through high mobility given the current state
      of Bogotá. But when talking about a clean slate, new cities, new
      neighborhoods, his proposals would perpetuate or worsen the local
      accessibility problems that push people into purchasing personal
      vehicles. That's because, despite his rhetoric, his proposals seem to
      be for new cities to be built at automobile-scale. It won't matter how
      good the transit is -- if it sucks to walk, then people will aspire to
      buy cars, even if they cannot afford it.

      Delete
    4. Jarrett writes: ```I do think Penalosa is making most of his mark in the developing world, which, we must remember, is most of the world. The Latin American BRT standard is having a huge impact across many countries that I follow, including all of low-income Asia and Africa.

      I agree that superblocks convey "automobile scale" to us in the developed world, but they are also highly efficient development blocks for getting lots of stuff built fast. The developing world is in a desperate hurry to do a lot with not much money, so no authority is going to say we should have less development so that we can have an intimate Portland street grid. Development is wealth for the political right and money for alleviation of poverty for the left. Nobody is going to say no to that anytime soon. If we get superblocks reasonably pierced by bike and ped ways, that's going to have to count as success. That's what I'm seeing in most developing cities I follow.'''

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    5. My response:

      I'm glad that he is getting some good stuff done.

      Regarding superblocks, it's not just that it's automobile-scale in
      distance, it's also automobile-scale in price. Maintaining the
      infrastructure to support superblocks is much more expensive than
      traditional, fine-grained blocks. I think it's telling that
      pre-automobile cities were developed with small blocks. They were not
      wealthy like we are today, local accessibility was paramount, so there
      was no money nor motivation to build large-scale blocks with
      super-sized streets. When such streets were created, it was usually to
      please some aesthetic preference of an elite (e.g. Paris).

      But you are probably right about the political situation with regard
      to developers. They seem to prefer when you hand over large swathes of
      land, much like what was done with Title I housing projects in the
      U.S. I worry that the end result will be similar to the 1950s housing
      projects, even with ped/bike pathways added: total disconnection from
      the urban context around them, followed by crime, fear, and eventual
      flight.

      Delete

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