A Treatise on Liveable Urbanism
Said of Ebenezer Howard by Jane Jacobs:
"His aim was the creation of self-sufficient small towns, really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life with others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge."
As urbanists and influencers, we must resist the urge to be the Planner in Charge, and instead should focus on infrastructure to enable and encourage people with plans of their own to have places to meet, talk, strive, fail, learn, teach, collaborate, change, and succeed without too much oversight and without putting too many wickets in the way.
Terminology - Pods and podification.
Pod: a detachable or self-contained unit on an aircraft, spacecraft, vehicle, or vessel, having a particular function.
The use here of the term “pod” as an urban concept grew out of discussions over the summer and fall of 2018, between a few of us in Tulsa. Scott coined the term to refer to a notional urban neighborhood that contained a critical yet vaguely defined set of amenities that confer lifestyle viability, and somewhere along the manufactured term “podification” arose as the desirable process to get from today’s reality to the target reality. This document intends to outline an approach for “podification” of a greenfield suburb or small city, though much of the thinking comes out of discussions about uplifting existing suburbs.
As has been well described in literature, the growth of suburbia after World War II reflects the overwhelming success of auto culture, and Tulsa emerged as one of the penultimate examples of car-centric municipal suburbia. The success of the car helped fuel massive changes in cities, and over the decades what started off as deliberate plans and clear success in pursuing often nefarious goals has evolved into unthinking suburban growth with significant emerging challenges.
The issues facing transportation today are neither simple nor obvious, as to a significant degree they reflect natural manifestations of our auto-centric society. Complex systems, especially complex adaptive system of the sort involving human decisions and interactions, evolve somewhat unpredictably and eventually exhibit emergent properties that are often undesirable. In early years of the automotive world, the obvious values of increased connectivity to desirable destinations and isolation from undesirable industries and maligned neighbors ruled the day, but over time the societal environment and all of the various subsystems evolved, and now various social, environmental, and economic problems eventually have become dominant and intractable.
Unfortunately, by the time these issues became obvious, the auto-centric system was massive and hard to change, and it is not easy to even determine how to go about making changes. The sort of thinking that created the system, with big visible efforts by powerful leaders and entrepreneurial business interests, is now powerless in the face of inertia and entrenched interests which resist change at every turn, and the powerful at best are uninterested in change or actively support the status quo. What is needed now is not a forceful shift, but new feedback loops that eat away at the existing system and its problems, first identifying and then facilitating new goals and urban approaches. This document intends to demonstrate, in a small area, a different way of viewing mobility, accessibility, and infrastructure.
The problems with auto transit are by now well covered by various authors and activists. A few include:
- "Safety" - over 40K Americans killed every year, and many more seriously and permanently injured. Yet only 4% of crashes state vehicle or road conditions as the primary cause, and 95% are human errors. Simple human weaknesses, now well-known in the psychology of industrial safety, cannot be mitigated by the current driving paradigm, and cell-phones are making the issue worse."
- "Health - vehicle-enabled suburban lifestyles helped create our sedentary lifestyles. Commute length correlates with weight gain, and with health issues. People are designed to walk, and the loss of useful walks is an unexpected driver of decreasing longevity."
- Happiness - only recently have psychology studies uncovered much of the underpinnings of happiness, and the perhaps counterintuitive fact that the things that people think will make them happy often do not. People believe they want a large house and big yard in the suburbs, nicely isolated from noisy neighbors and city bustle, and with easy drives for work and play. Yet the pleasures of material items quickly fades, and the stress of time spent in commutes and lack of human contact remains.
- Costs - Today, Tulsans spend 24% of their income on transportation, and this does not include externalized costs hidden behind infrastructure costs, health issues, and emotional stress. Such a fraction is a bit more than average for the US, but not by much. The typical car has 3 to 5 parking places for it (say, home, work, and one or more for shopping), at costs of $6K (surface lot) to $35K (structured parking) per space, plus a significant cost for roadways. Yet these costs are often obscured, and what is perceived is the “free” notion of roads and unfettered vehicle mobility.
- Pollution - vehicle emissions are, in most cases, the largest contributor to air pollution in most cities, and a major contributor to CO2, ozone, and other emissions worldwide. Using a low-efficiency ICE to propel a 4000lb vehicle to carry a 175lb human is terribly inefficient.
Certainly, with investment in technology some of the issues could be addressed, and proponents of self-driving cars and EVs charged by rooftop solar argue these effectively, but a series of efforts to address visible symptoms will not resolve the fundamental impacts of suburban lifestyles on human health and happiness, so a different approach is warranted. Let’s instead determine the sort of lifestyle that should promote health and happiness, and then determine paths to get to that from the current cityscapes.
Health and Happiness
Rationally, the goal for a good life should include a hefty focus on health and happiness. Happiness has been a guiding factor since before the Revolution (“pursuit of happiness”), and psychologists such as Maslow and his pyramid helped refine the basics. Today, happiness is understood as a more nuanced and complex mix of factors, with some of them being static and others dynamic, and some absolute and others relative. Many if not most, such factors are seen differently by individuals in terms of what they believe will make them happy in advance, versus after the fact in how they actually feel.
In a nutshell, material items suffer from recency bias, so a new car or a new house seems like it will make a person happy, and it does, but only for a little while. Experiences, especially ones with variation, do not decay in the same way. So, for example, a nice car and big house in the suburbs sounds really nice, but quickly the new wears off the car and the attraction of extra rooms and a big lawn fade, while the routine experiences of commuting (with a mix of repeated and novel stresses for each drive) are forever newly aggravating, lawn chores are mildly unpleasant each time, and the car payments, mortgage, and utilities create a base level expense and associated stress that must be managed.
Worse, experiences are recollected based largely on “peak and end” perceptions, so since rarely does any commute have high pleasantness each drive is instead recalled by the worst particular aspect of the drive plus the last minute or two of the drive. If that drive happens to include a delay due to a crash and then a congested off-ramp or long lights for the last mile, then it will be remembered more negatively. Hardly ever is a car commute pleasurable.
Other aspects of life are perceived relatively, and many items related to income and lifestyle are perceived in this manner. Relatively speaking, having a slightly less-nice car or slightly smaller house compared to the Jones’ does create unhappiness, as does making less money than a sibling, friend, or the guy next to you at work. It is therefore easier to be happier in neighborhoods where your house, car, or income are above the average than in one where you’re in the lower tier.
As for what does promote happiness, besides the converse of the above, is socialization. People are social creatures and for most individuals there are clear benefits of a few hours per day of human interactions. Individuals are much happier if they have close friends, even just one or two, and are happier if they have routine interactions with neighbors. Dunbar’s research has been proven out, and happiness seems to follow his general model with frequent socialization at the various levels of intimate, close friend, neighbor, acquaintance, and workmate. Even introverts, who tend to say they dislike interactions, will report greater overall life satisfaction if they endure frequent random interactions which they say they do not appreciate at the time.
Social interaction is not however automatic or boundless, and studies show that most people have about an hour per day of out-and-about interactions, a larger budget of close-to-home socialization, and a varying but usually modest need for self-imposed isolation. Commute time, whether public transit or personal auto, tends to subtract from this time budget, and so those with longer commutes tend to have little interest in outside trips for errands or socialization. Most of us recognize this feeling, “it was rough day at work, then a traffic jam on the drive home, and once I got home I just wanted to sit and watch TV”, and this is the crux of the suburban lifestyle problem.
Studies show that most people say they appreciate a short commute to “decompress”, and in actuality correlation studies bear this out. People do like having some division between work life and home life, especially if work life is stressful or compelling in some way. Those who work from home can thus struggle with creating separation, though it’s not an insurmountable problem. The best duration commute is about 15 minutes, and anything longer significantly subtracts from happiness. Not all commutes are created equal, though, as walking and biking commutes are typically reported to be enjoyable, sometimes with comments like “best part of my day”, especially if the route is interesting and pleasant. Auto commutes universally generate stress, and public transit varies. A train ride with limited delay is fairly neutral, while a bus with delays is stressful. As noted above, peak and end factors dominate, so a boring but routine 15 minute train or bus ride with a nice walk for 5 minutes has a happier impact than a shorter car ride.
Work happiness is also a major factor in life satisfaction. A good work environment provides challenge, a sense of accomplishment, and self-determination. People very much like to have control of their environment, and even a small modicum of control makes a big difference in life satisfaction. Ideally people not only have “good jobs” that provide the emotional perks above, and a reasonable income, but also have viable options for jobs and careers to choose between.
Today, many people make independent choices for housing and work, and the result is a commute. A person takes Job A over Job B because it pays $10K more and has more responsibility, and House X in the suburbs over Apartment Y because it has more square footage and curb appeal. Unfortunately, if Job A and House X require a 45 minute driving commute, while Job B and Apartment Y only a 15 minute walk, unhappiness is going to result for those choosing the former.
All things else being equal, adding 30 minutes to a commute has about the same negative impact as a 40% cut in salary (other studies came up with a value of about $40K), and that’s just for other elements being similar. Trading a walking or biking commute for a car commute make things worse. Often, the reality ends up being worse yet, as the compounding effects of longer commute creates more car costs, higher wages results in great tax burdens, and different neighbors generate relative level-of-success stresses.
From a health perspective, the suburban commuting lifestyle contributes to the overall negative health trends of the modern US citizen. Time spent in cars is time spent sitting, and already at work and at home we spend too much time sitting -- people were built to walk, and we are good at it. We are not healthy when we just sit.
Cars trips promote sitting, but they also detract from walking, and this is obvious and easily demonstrated. A trip to the store without a car requires walking, and either carrying bags or using some sort of cart for goods. Depending on the sort of trip, it could include stairs, sidewalks, curbs, bus entry/egress, and of course hundreds or thousands of steps, all as a natural and useful component of the trip. With a car, there are 25 steps into the garage, a few steps from the car to the store, and very little effort or steps in between. There is not enough exercise to raise heart rate, and not enough lifting and carrying to build strength.
And, once you live in a car-centric neighborhood, most destinations are too far to walk, so all errands and visits are car trips, and increasing fractions of time are spent sitting, and lower fractions spent walking. Even deliberate exercise tends to become a car trip, as driving to the gym or park or trail will become the norm. As suburbs expand and traffic increases, which is the tendency, more time is spent on each trip and that time spent then detracts from desire to interact or take more trips. The self-reinforcing cycle promotes a lifestyle that has just a few modes: sitting at work, sitting in a car, and sitting at home, and often the sitting time gets in the way of high-value social interactions. Recent studies correlate commuting duration with common health issues such as diabetes and heart disease, and inversely with happiness and quality of relationships.
Transportation Networks
At this point, we can park the happiness and health discussion and focus for a bit on the purpose of transportation, and why cars have been so successful. Clearly, roads and transportation can be seen as a networking problem, and indeed we talk about “road networks” and traffic engineers can view congestion as a queuing problem (and vice versa, as data networks talk about data traffic). There are various sorts of networks, but for our purposes we can consider sources, destinations, routes, and traffic.
Source and destination locations are interchangeable from a trip perspective, so let’s just simplify and consider all target locations as “destinations”. For most of us, there are a few important such destinations, including home, work, school, and a variety of other amenities. The networks are roads, rails, paths, sidewalks, and other ways of getting from point A to point B. The traffic is other travelers, and perhaps we should also consider the vehicles, or modes of transit, as they directly impact the character of the trip and the traffic.
For any trip we might consider, we have a mental model of costs, which may include at least the following, generally applicable for multiple transit options:
- Time - absolute time to be spent (20 minute trip), and perhaps relative availability (must be back by 5:00 for the game, etc.)
- Expense - actual direct costs, such as tolls and gas, and indirect costs such as vehicle insurance and amortization. More obvious costs tend to carry outsized weight.
- Pleasantness - aspects such as weather, and conditions of the trip.
- Risk - physical considerations of safety and health, plus perhaps opportunity cost
- Utility - value of completing the trip
- Destination - where to go
Since we’re human, we don’t really thoroughly and accurately assess our options for each trip, but instead have quick, habit-based decisions (Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow). Once we do something a few times in one way, it tends to stick, for good or ill.
For most trips, we could thus consider if there are multiple options on destination, and then add up the positive points (utility, pleasantness) and subtract the negatives (risk, expense, time) and decide which option to take, and whether to go at all. So far this is all pretty basic, but there are a few important nuances, especially the fungibility of destinations. If a trip has multiple viable destinations, say to get a coke or dozen eggs, then the choices are different than if it’s to get Gruyere cheese or red roses, and that flexibility makes a difference as costs add up. Sometimes the starting point is flexible too, such as when instead of coming from home you start from work or a previous errand.
In a car-centric suburbia world, we tend to make lots of short trips there and back, because travel time tends to be short, and often we don’t try very hard to string trips together, or to plan. People who live in the country are familiar with a more planned approach, as trip costs are much higher, so more value is packed into longer but less frequent trips.
If we live further out or have a less-than-accessible amenities, then transit time can be a bit longer, but we naturally compensate by planning a bit more efficiently, and we can also trade an optimal source for an adequate one. In economics terms this ability to select “good enough” choices is termed “satisficing”, and if one can be content with such results then life can be much simpler than for those who demand “optimization”.
This is the point that some will say “but you’re impacting utility”, and that may be true in the abstract, but it’s equally true that having more local stores and traveling less can offer the same utility as having fewer stores and traveling further, with few downsides. And this is an important consideration for localization: empirically, the frequency of visits to a place is a direct function of distance, with an inverse equivalence: places half as far typically get visited twice as often. This is the key for "accessibility over mobility" as induced demand works to our advantage.
So, despite other considerations, what we actually do is bias toward places that are close, and that is oddly independent of what apparent utility might indicate; if a store is nearby, you will tend to go there disproportionately more often, compared to what you might expect. Without really thinking about it, we realign our view of utility and costs to bias toward nearer resources, and probably apply some satisficing to enable such patterns as well. As an added bonus, people who walk will often select routes based on interest, beauty, or simply variety, which drivers rarely do.
Pods
City planners tend to focus on increasing speeds and improving connectivity, and citizens (drivers) tend to complain about congestion and time spent traveling, and yet this in part an artifact of central planning and zoning from 50 years ago. Planners still have a notion of “capture distance” for retail spaces, often optimistically estimating a larger market footprint, and often double-counting the same residences for multiple retail centers.
As consumers, we tend to mentally map out the retail resources, and our brains are very good at this. However, we should turn the question over, and instead of saying “How can we get from here to a list of places with the things we want?” we should ask “How can we ensure that places with things we want are close to where we should live or be?”. This is accessibility exactly -- having access to what we desire, and that is important, not mobility per se. And thus is born the notion of the “pod”: a neighborhood area that is deliberately intended to contain within a walkable area the majority of amenities needed for a satisfactory lifestyle and thereby to promote frequent social and business interactions in a tight local area. A pod is basically an intentionally created 15-minute neighborhood, but with frequent needs closer and less frequent needs further away.
The concept of a cohesive neighborhood is not new, but determining what amenities should be close and what can easily be further away is probably novel. Since there is clearly a willingness to trade-off some visits with distance it should be possible to create a fractal map of sorts, with repeated patterns of common destinations in each locality amidst sparser overlays of less visited or more unique destinations, leading finally to destinations for which only one may be appropriate for an entire municipality.
Since the goal is to have critical amenities near to all, there is then an implied minimum density which is defined by the reasonable distance and the needed population to support each business. Ideally the pods would be interconnected by transit, such that the effective distance of some adjacent pods is still small enough to enable frequent businesses.
The first need then is to define what should be in every viable pod. In general, the first three “places” have been defined in literature already: first places (home), second places (work), and third places (social locations, variously pubs, churches, parks, libraries, etc.). What else is needed to constitute a viable neighborhood? Once we have neighborhoods, we have the ‘destinations’ for Development Oriented Transit, and transit becomes a mechanism to connect pods. And, with a goal of having transit, the transit hubs should naturally become core points for pods, and thereby anchor Transit Oriented Development.
For pod amenities, Walkscore provides some good hints in its categories, which are:
Restaurants, Bars, Coffee, Groceries, Parks, Schools, Entertainment, and Errands. Interestingly, Walkscore covers many discretionary amenities, but of course cannot cover First and Second places which are individual in nature. This leads to another possibility, that of introducing fungibility to the residential “place”. In the US, it is not uncommon to relocate for work to another city, but quite rare to move simply to save a local commute, and if the cost of relocating could be made lower perhaps there is opportunity to further reduce transit needs. Still, people tend to grow attached to neighborhoods, and ideally each pod would have a good mix of First and Second Places.
First Places: Housing is a critical consideration, and possibilities may extend for low-density single-family housing to high-density apartments. While a range of cost points is a reasonable expectation, the necessary density to support critical retail will likely dictate lower density limits, and single-family areas may struggle to be viable pods. This will be revisited later in this paper. For now, it worth noting that people require privacy and a semblance of control over their environment, and good First Places should provide both, without much intrusion from neighbors, strangers, or the world in general.
Second Places: Jobs are perhaps the single most important consideration for most individuals, and from a municipal perspective at least some pods should be focused on high-value primary jobs that are competitive on regional, national, and international scales. Of course, some such industries maybe be too spatially large, noxious, or hazardous to have as part of pods, and this reflects the reality that guided zoning in the early days of the 20th century.
In the 21st century, however, most high-value business have a heavy intellectual and information component, and there is no reason such jobs cannot be integrated into pods. Pods with a mix of business and residential places will best support highly desired amenities such restaurants and bars, as breakfast, coffee, lunch, after-work, dinner, and entertainment needs can overlap across establishments. And, of course, having home and work closely located will reduce time and effort spent commuting, and enable a large fraction of workers to walk or bike to work.
An important consideration for businesses, especially high-complexity employers, is connectivity to suppliers, employees, customers, universities, investors, and even competitors. This leads to the concept of Innovation Districts, and then to Innovation Networks, which is a topic for another paper. For this discussion, is should suffice to say that effective interconnection between business pods, dedicated resources like factories and universities, and employees is an important goal.
Third Places: In the parlance, Third Places have out-sized value not so much in the items they provide but in the socialization. Third Places vary according to individual tastes, but are marked by a sense of community, acceptance, and lack of pressure. For some, these may be a bar like Cheers (where everybody knows your name), a church, an Elks lodge, or a slow-pace coffee shop. Typically these are places where one can spend pleasant times with a set of friends for fairly low or zero cost, and these provide a less private venue than a personal home, and a less professional venue than work. Many people lack Third Places in their lives, and this is one of the failings of modern suburbia. With a goal of being readily accessible, Third Places should clearly be numerous and small, so that they can be close to residences and therefore visited often.
Parks and Public Spaces: Every pod should have outdoor places including parks and pavilions. The important aspect here is availability, and range of scaling points. Major parks may sometimes be transit destination of their own, but everybody should have ready access to grass and trees for themselves, their pets, and their children within a few minutes of home. Paved areas, for concerts, tent fairs, or simply congregating and talking are good too, and these should have clear visibility of the sky (there are guidelines for such places) and ranges of open and bounded areas to enable individuals to control their psychological levels of exposure. Parks should vary in size, but small “pocket parks” should be numerous and distributed such that individuals can visit or even happen upon them in the pursuit of daily activities. Of course trees should be part of street edges and private spaces as well.
Schools: Every pod, as a residential zone, should have an elementary school which is accessible by walking, and ideally close enough that no busing or driving is needed at all. For older children, biking should be a safe and reasonable option that provides a modicum of bounded independence, and could perhaps be shared between pods. High-schools will tend to be larger, and biking or transit should be expected.
Destinations: As mentioned previously, some desirable locations like ball fields, concert arenas, hospitals, and large businesses or shopping areas will not fit the pod model, and these should be considered destinations in their own right. For most people, unless these locations represent a work location (Second Place), these will be relatively rare but high-value visits, and transit (public transit, Uber, Zipcar) may be needed. The goal for a city is to have a good variety of such high-value destinations to help market the city to prospective residents, to provide wider experiences for locals, and to attract visitors for tourism. Depending on the city, there may of course by natural attractions (a river, beach, nearby mountain, wilderness) for which a city or pod may serve as a gateway.
Grocery and Pharmacy: Availability of groceries is a critical need for a residential zone, and yet significant parts of Tulsa have lacked access, both in challenged neighborhoods of north Tulsa and the relative wealthy but business-centric downtown area. However, when there are no full-service grocery stores other vendors expand to fill at least part of the void. Convenience stores often offer both ready-to-eat meals and canned or dry goods, and dollar stores offer a wide variety of dry goods and sometimes carry a few fresh items.
With an aging population, neighborhoods universally require a pharmacy as well, and major chain pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens offer a range of food items as well. Finally, online vendors like Amazon make grocery deliveries easy as well.
Unfortunately when other stores carry groceries, critical mass for a grocery is harder to reach. A North Carolina city formed a grocery co-op to serve a food desert similar to Tulsa amidst much fanfare and high expectations, but it fairly quickly failed as expected demand never materialized. Still, groceries of some sort, at least the basic necessities, should be available in every pod, while a full grocery store might in some cases be a transit destination for weekly trips.
Coffee: Morning or night, access to coffee is a critical neighborhood need. Ideally, there are time-efficient options and ambience options, but such proliferation is a function of population.
Restaurants and Bars: Restaurants and bars, covering a broad range of dining and entertainment options, are a mainstay of urban retail, and should be represented in every pod.
Shopping: Retail shopping is rarely a daily destination for most residents, but availability in a pod or at least a nearby pod of service shops and vendors such as dry cleaners, tailors, shoe repair, hardware, greeting cards, and pet supplies helps fill out retail zones, and such specialty stores represent the next tier of common yet less ubiquitous stores. For some specialty vendors, such as aquarium supplies or appliance parts, a store may represent a modest draw across a fairly large area.
Customer Base
The above generalities point out the qualitative assets of viable neighborhoods, but an important consideration is the population and density required to support each type of business, including retail, healthcare, office, and even industrial. The typical population base required to support each type of retail business is listed below, and of course significantly greater populations are needed to support multiples of each type.
For a traditional grocery store, conventional wisdom is that a population of 20K is required, but in many areas empirical data indicates that on average 8800 people support a supermarket. With average sizes for supermarkets creeping up (to over 60K sq feet, thanks to Walmart), a pod-based store would require unrealistically high population densities. For smaller convenience stores, a much smaller number can of course suffice, and as few as 1000 houses empirical does support a small store in some locales. On average, every household can support about 11.6 sq ft of grocery retail, so for any population density a corresponding store size can be estimated.
The table below indicates typical supported footage by store type for a variety of retail businesses. Most retail types support significantly smaller footage than grocery, but it instructive to view the supported total of about 70 sq ft per household, which says that for my square-mile neighborhood a total of 115,000 sq ft of retail could be supported. For a typical 4-corner retail format, which is common in suburbia, all the square footage that can be supported by a full section of large SFU houses could be easily located in a single corner, and in the current case here there is more than this much retail already built, and it is understandably in long, slow decline.
A similar approach can be used for office space, though the variance is larger. State by state, office space varies from as little as 5 sq ft per capita for a rural western state, to perhaps 25 sq ft for a less agricultural eastern state, and as much as 50 to 75 sq ft per capita for major cities. For simplicity, a number of 50 will be used for a greenfield city that is targeting high-tech (and therefore office-centric) business. Note that these number are per capita, not per household, so retail support is not actually as strong as office demand.
Following along, industrial space is also quite variable, and again the cities tend to have denser industrial footprints than states do overall. States mostly vary between 10 and 75 sq ft of industrial space per capita, while many larger cities are well over 150 sq ft. A number of 140 sq ft, matching Kansas City, will be used as a reasonably MidWest sort of industrial target.
Housing can also be estimated per capita, and today that number is 950 sq ft per person, though the number varies widely between low-cost and high-expense living areas. NYC and SF, for example, have lower space per capita today than in 1910, while south central homes are twice the size, on average.
Density
For density calculations, the critical factor is the geographic collection area (of residential space) required for retail support, and secondarily for office and industrial business. Typically, a walking distance of ¼ mile, or a 5 minute walk, is considered to be the reasonable limit before people elect to drive, or at least to take some form of transit. In other countries, and some US locales, biking as an option can extend the radius to about a mile, as can scooters or neighborhood vehicles. This is a significant difference as quadrupling the radius expands captured population by a factor of 16. Of course most areas will represent a mix of high-density and lower-density residences, with what constitutes high and low being somewhat variable by region as well, but in general having a core of high-density apartments near the pod center would greatly help to reach critical mass for retail and office businesses.
For Urbanists, the perfect ¼-mile walking world might look something like below, with many moderate-density neighborhoods each with a central retail and office core, or perhaps a thin commercial ribbon along the bus line. Here and there will be a higher-density TOD area with tall apartments and dense retail surrounding a transit stop. In this optimal world, every residence is within ¼ mile of some form of transit and some limited shopping, with enough density to support the retail areas throughout. Nowhere in Tulsa is like this today, but if we consider building a city from scratch, it is worth considering what a layout could be.
In the traditional car-centric city, broad irregular blocks with a system of fairly wide neighborhood roads, collectors, and arterials feeding into a highway network is the norm, but earlier people-centric cities had a tighter grid (often irregular in antiquity, but then tightly regular after the Industrial Revolution) with narrower mixed-use streets and no real notion of collectors, and the few highways needed for long-distance trade tended to go directly into the edge of town. For many early pre-transit or railroad towns that transitioned to cars this led either to a main street highway through town which destroyed walkability or to a bypass highway that abandoned the town entirely.
For a people-centric city, the pattern proven out over thousands of years is a pragmatic choice, though the technology options for modern transit are fairly new and can affect the layout. Fortunately, there are plenty of workable models for transit cities around the world, and modern mass transit, when underground, can provide the people traffic without the hazard of automotive highways. Of course streets are still required, as they have been historically, both for human traffic and vehicles such construction, buses, street cars, delivery trucks, and emergency vehicles. Even taxis may have a place, but what should be conspicuously missing is private automobiles, as they drive sprawl and create isolation for everybody in the city, and then provide mobility only for the fortunate few.
The benefits for having no private cars on city streets are multiple, but a few include:
- Reducing Congestion: a city street can only handle motion of a limited number of vehicles, and this number is fairly small (for example, Manhattan can handle something like 7,000 moving vehicles, for many millions of people). Trying to handle more cars doesn’t work well, but takes up a lot of space in road lanes inefficiently.
- Eliminating Parking: Taking up space for parking adds to the cost of infrastructure (don’t waste high-value city infrastructure on low-value uses), and reduces the density of people and amenities. People have to walk further, which reduces accessibility of amenities.
- Improving Safety: People in cars tend to feel invincible, and tend to hurry. People also make human mistakes, and so people having control of vehicles in the midst of unarmored humans is a poor mix.
- Optimizing Transport Density: Cars move people inefficiently, and they do so using surface space that should be utilized by people. Even if we presume densely-packed platoons of self-driving cars, they will carry a fraction of what a bus or streetcar could. And, if you made cars very small and packed them together, they’d effectively become a train, so just skip the middle step.
- Adding Density: Less space for cars means more space for buildings, which means more people, which means less infrastructure footage and cost per-capita plus more tax revenue, which means financially healthier cities.
10 floors in a box is not a great pattern for livability, though, so instead consider a mixed environment with townhouses (two or three stories), apartments (two or three stories, mostly, with courtyards), and perhaps some high-rises near a more fully urban core. Any single-family residences would necessarily go on the fringes and outskirts, as will industrial facilities and other large-footprint surface users.
Note that public spaces, like large parks, ball fields, arenas, and conference facilities should not be in the urban core, but at the edges. The reasoning is simple: when active mobility -- walking and biking - are the preferred modes of transport, anything that increases distance negatively impacts access and utility. It doesn’t matter whether the space is shared (an arena or ballfield), or private (a parking lot), as it reduces the connectivity of the higher-density amenities. While certainly there is a reasonable middle ground, with trees along the streets and sidewalks, numerous pocket parks readily available to all, and open plazas and forums for congregating and mixing, these should all be small and not intimidating from a distance perspective; in fact, they should be a desirable and interesting component of useful walk.
So, in a mixed area a few acres of low-rise apartments and townhomes will support an acre of retail and office space, and an aggregate area of a few hundred to a few thousand such acres will support a nearby base of industrial, park, and recreational amenities, plus specialty retail. Local transit (buses, streetcars, trolleys, and subways) should interconnect the living/shopping zones with the industrial and public space zones, and of course commuter transit should land in the midst, bringing workers and visitors to the industrial, business, and recreational areas.
In some large cities of such a design, a more fully urban core can make sense, as a “central business district”, where concentrations of related businesses like medical facilities, convention hotels, and larger office businesses may make sense, but with good transit and available real-estate such areas may not be much required. Note that most high-rise cities in the US are in land-constrained areas, and while the vertical component definitely adds density value it also adds cost. In any such area, to avoid creating long commutes, most workers should reside locally, which implies higher-density housing.
Such housing should NOT be a typical high-rise apartment building, where people struggle to manage their degree of isolation, and tend to feel uncomfortable in the elevator and no ownership even of their hall. Instead, such buildings must be re-thought to create “virtual courtyard”, where a handful of residences share some common space, and individuals can manage their privacy levels between personal space, neighbor-shared space, communal space, and public space, all within the building.
Such a city would have something like the following characteristics:
- Tightly gridded streets, 200-250 foot blocks.
- Fairly narrow streets. The “complete streets” with bus lanes, car lanes, bike lanes, sidewalks, and trees are simply too wide to be appropriate for higher-density living.
- Streets will either have bus or rail, or bike highway, or pedestrian-only promenades, but not all at the same time. Any commuter rail will be underground.
- Every street will have mixed-use areas for deliveries, emergency vehicles, and construction equipment. However, this will be low-speed shared-lane with specified delivery zones.
- Speed limits will be universally <20mph for bus, streetcar, bikeway, and other transit areas. Sidewalks and mixed spaces will be 10mph, so if a bike cruises a bit fast on a bike highway, that’s probably OK, but a bike or scooter going 15 or 20 on the mixed-use or sidewalk spaces is out of line.
- Residential areas will typically be 6 stories or less, unless there is a clear need for a denser urban core (for a much larger city). Multi-use will tend to be similar. 3 or 4-story walk-ups will be common.
- No super-blocks will be permitted in the core areas, without a cut-through for walking/biking. Any building that wants to be larger has to be taller, or it has to go on the “industrial” areas near the fringe.
- Public spaces like convention centers and ball fields will be on the fringes. Walkable/bikeable accessibility to routine daily needs will be the priority, not to be infringed by large artifacts, public or private.
- Buses and other forms of transit will connect industrial and large public amenities to the core, such that accessibility remains high.
- Everybody uses the transit, and everybody uses the schools, such that there is egalitarian pressure to keep them excellent for everybody.
- For surrounding areas, with single-family housing, farms, and of course connectivity to the rest of the world, cars and trucks will of course be the norm; however, at the city border (which may move as growth continues), will be park-and-rides for transit.
- Two- to three-story small-building apartments yields about 20 dwellings per acre.
- Separated 3-story walk-ups yields about 30 dwellings per acre, as do dense townhomes.
- Larger 4-story mixed use buildings yield about 70 dwellings per acre, plus a layer of retail/office space.
- 6-story mixed-use with fairly small apartments provides almost 200 dwellings per acre, and this is perhaps the least-cost, highest-density option for the target area.
With high densities, a quarter-mile radius of such density would support 250,000 sq ft of retail, versus the 28,000 sq ft of single family homes, and perhaps 300,000 sq ft for office space though of course some retail and office space may centralize in dedicated districts. Such densities mean that every mixed-use neighborhood will have all the basic amenities and a good variety of unique attractions, so accessibility will be high and for those with a bit of mobility a wide range of amenities will be readily reachable.
Each section of mixed-use will also support well over 3M sq ft of industrial space, or about 75 acres. As above, industrial spaces, plus public areas like parks and convention centers, would ideally be outside the central pod and reside in an associated side-pod.
Design Plan
Such development might yield a pattern more like below, with each pod being approximately ½ mile per side (presuming 200ft grids or less, this one is about 3200 ft per side), with about 10,000 people each, and most walks being about 5 minutes to core amenities and transit, and a bit longer edge-to-edge. If each street is about 75 ft wide (2x10 for sidewalks, 2x12 for transit, 20 for deliveries, and the rest for trees and open spaces), then about 50% of the space is taken by buildings and planned open spaces, about 20% for public transit of various sorts, and the rest for active transit, that is, walking and biking.
In the diagram below, a 9-pod cluster would then hold up to 100k residents (though part will be taken for industrial and large-footprint public uses), and the 9-cluster city would be above 500K, with a presumption that some pods would diversify into focused shopping areas, medical zones, large parks, and such. While each pod would be self-contained for 80+% of daily needs, and the cluster for 90+%, there will still be value in unique experiences outside.
Allocation of the 250K sq ft of pod retail to a mix of grocery, convenience, restaurants, bars, and various shops will not always be simply, as one pod may have a large-format grocer (over 60K sq ft) while most many have a much smaller one and some convenience stores. Even with the higher density, focusing on smaller shops for routine needs will improve quality of life for local residents, and big-box retail should be rare, and will perhaps exist only in a single retail pod with ready access from the surrounding car-centric countryside.
Office Space
Many types of offices can be readily located in mixed-use buildings, since insurance brokers, attorneys, investment advisors, pediatricians and dentists, and a wider variety of other service-oriented professionals can locate near their customer base. Depending on the size of their operation, some may choose stand-alone buildings, but the intent would be for most offices to be small and immediately accessible to the customer base.
However, businesses which are not service related, especially those which offer strong primary jobs that support business clusters that are competitive at regional, national, and international levels, will be harder to locate in a distributed fashion. At a minimum, some clustering (and therefore probably some incentives) of high-value businesses should be expected, with businesses in similar technology or market spaces gainfully locating near one another. Excellent information infrastructure will be needed for most nationally-competitive businesses, and expected also by their employees, high-rate fiber must be available throughout the pod.
The important point for locating office spaces in the neighborhood pods is to minimize the need for individuals to commute, and every person who need not commute reduces congestion for the remainder while improving the quality of their own life. Even for those offices which are large and centrally located, there should be residential spaces available in the pod, and of course an adjacent pod or even anywhere in the cluster will be quite convenient.
Pod Lifestyle
With the high-density approach above, city infrastructure should be easier to fund and support than for traditional US cities; after all, high-cost municipal infrastructure will be serving high-value real estate of various sorts. Plus, with the ready access to amenities, limited spending on transportation (little personal expense for cars) and a focus on high-value employment, the tax base should be robust and capable of supporting a range of shared luxuries. Probably the initial issue will be to obtain funding for the first pod, and to attract initial businesses that already have a customer base and a strong prognosis for success. While organic growth of business, especially competitive innovation businesses, is the goal, some relocation of existing businesses will likely be required.
Once people get used to the pod lifestyle, with much walking/biking, the satisficing mechanism should kick in, and trips to other cities and traditional malls should decrease, and be more of an entertainment trip than a necessary errand. Ideally, all pod-dwellers will become no-car households, but for those with routine trips to other cities, such as those with strong family or business ties, parking of personal and business vehicles at the cluster-edge park-and-rides will be available. Others can of course rent or use a car-share. Overall, pod denizens will have much lower VMT than typical small cities, and therefore should enjoy a much higher standard of living than average. Since Millennials already show a pattern of spending more on experiences and less on belongings than recent previous generations, they should adapt readily to the pod lifestyle.
Finally, with more walking and less driving, residents will tend to become physically healthier and with more time spent interacting locally, and with expanded availability of Third Places and fewer lifestyle stresses the emotional health of the community should improve as well. Both of these effects will result in real savings in health spending and that money will become available for discretionary spending.
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