Urban Policy

Bulldozing Our Cities May Wreck Our Future

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:47:00 -0400

The Obama administration is reportedly considering backing a radical plan to shrink deteriorating American cities by bulldozing entire neighborhoods and returning the land to nature. The idea, which originated in Flint, Mich. -- cratered by the auto industry implosion -- is to persuade disintegrating and depopulated cities to embrace their shrinkage, destroy abandoned infrastructure, save money and thereby stave off fiscal ruin.

Obama's Urban Opportunity

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:17:00 -0400

The Height of Power

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 11:00:00 -0500

For more than two centuries, it has been a wannabe among the great world capitals. But now, Washington is finally ready for its close-up.

Don't Trash Big Boxes, Repackage Them!

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 16:22:00 -0500

The Washington Post assembled a team of artists, architects, engineers and developers to think creatively about what to do with spaces once occupied by big box stores -- our most common, underrated and increasingly available major buildings. Below are some of their ideas.

Build A Town in a Parking Lot

As a developer, what Leinberger hates about parking lots is that they just sit there not making him any money. Fortunately, that can be fixed. The vast acreage of big-box parking lots seems almost providentially proportioned to be turned into walkable city blocks, he says. What you have to do is lay these blocks out with parking garages at their core, and encrust those with an outer layer of shops and apartments on all sides. That makes one block. Put together a whole bunch of these blocks, with the shops and apartments facing each other across the newly defined streets, and you've got a chunk of city. As it happens, prefabricated parking deck trusses span about 60 feet. So let's say you make your parking deck a loaf 60 feet wide and 120 feet deep. If you face it on all sides with shops that are 50 feet deep, well, voilà -- you've got yourself a walkable city block, with just enough space left over for sidewalks, bike lanes and streets. Then you build apartments or offices over the shops. Didn't you always want to live a croissant's throw away from a Target? We thought so. The great challenge is that big-box stores always have excellent automobile accessibility. So there's that enormous highway out there at the edge of your former parking lot. You want to make that into a boulevard -- a Champs-Elysees.

Windows? Windows? Big boxes don't need no stinking windows. If humans want to live in this building, however, they do. So the first thing is to core out the center of the big box, so you have a garden open to the sky for people to look into, suggests Roger K. Lewis, the emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Maryland who writes The Post's Shaping the City column.

The exterior walls are not hard to punch windows into -- structurally, they're just steel uprights sometimes reinforced with diagonal struts. Then you punch skylights in over the interior walkways, and the apartments almost start laying themselves out. You add a balcony here, a second floor there, a sleeping loft over yonder, and you're looking at the niftiest affordable housing ever. Unless you make them too nice. Then the yuppies are going to want to move in, and there goes the neighborhood.

The Garden of Gaithersburg

Decide for yourself what this says about the zeitgeist, but everybody wanted to make these things into gardens. You want a growth industry? This takes the "eat local" movement to a whole new level.

Organic gardeners routinely lay down weed-suppressing black plastic into which they poke holes to plant their seeds. Asphalt is just like that, only a little thicker, observes Darrel Rippeteau, principal of Rippeteau Architects. So in the process of creating a truck garden (below), the parking lot becomes an orchard. Under the parking lot you find an elaborate network of drainage pipes -- if you think big-box owners want to see women in high heels slipping on ice, you are out of your mind. In its new incarnation, the system collects rainwater for irrigation. In fact, the water can be piped into the fire-suppression sprinkler system in the big box, which now serves as a monster mister. (You could also go hydroponic.) Much of the roof, of course, has become glass or translucent plastic. Those gigunda halogens make great grow lights. The concrete slab floor works as a heat sump. Major-league climate control comes with the package. Much of the produce is packed up in the back and shipped to farmers' markets. But you can also pick your own.

Once it sinks in how big that roof is, one's thoughts quickly turn to solar voltaic, as demonstrated by Phil Esocoff, principal of the architecture firm Esocoff and Associates, who also adds a recharging area for electric cars and a veneer of apartments for people who really want to get near their groceries. He also specifies that everything be easily disassembled and moved as the economics of the box location changes. Once you get into how high those ceilings are, Harold Linton's mind turned to letting the grow space of the big box become the Virginia Arbor Conservatory. Yes, trees. Linton is chair of George Mason University's Department of Art and Visual Technology. Or how about a vineyard? Rusty Meadows, an engineer by training who is director of the Washington office of Perkins + Will, an outfit that specializes in commercial buildings, loves the idea of the Clos de Germantown.

Variation on a Garden

This additional garden transformation is the work of Esocoff & Associates. The vast roof supports solar voltaics, which enables not only a greenhouse, but a recharging area for electric cars, and a veneer of apartments for people who really want to get near their groceries. Everything is designed to be easily disassembled and moved as the economics of the box location changes.

The SoHo of the Suburbs

Give this assignment to artists and they start thinking about buildings comparable to circus tents that are sitting in former rail yards and pretty soon they wind up with ideas for artists living and working and exhibiting that are possibly unlike any other on Earth. Peter Winant and Tom Ashcraft are both sculptors and associate chairs of the Department of Art and Visual Technology at George Mason. Thinking about how "the circus tent opens and folds and closes," they got the idea to open up both ends of the big box, and start rolling in railroad freight cars and trailer-size freight containers. They're cheap, fairly maneuverable and stackable, like a kid's blocks.

If you pile two or more, the upper ones can be for living and eating and entertaining, and the lower ones given over to studios where the art is made. The big center sliding doors of the freight cars can open up to galleries in which the public interacts with the work of the artists.

The ways you stack these things in turn define courtyards and stages and display spaces where people can sit and converse and make music and have small-scale performances. The inside space would transition to the outdoor space, which could be filled with basketball courts, tennis courts, gardens and green space.

All of this would be the product of artists' hands, work and money. Nothing would cost any single artist much more than $30,000 or $40,000, Winant estimates.

But wait a minute, you say. If you open up the ends of the big box to the weather, even if you have a roof, won't that place get awfully cold in the winter? "They'll have wood stoves," says Winant. "They're artists, right? They'll get pallets, break them up and burn them." After all, what is art without suffering?

Hydroponic Truck Farm Market

Architect Darrel Rippeteau suggests a garden center that provides seasonal vegetables and fruits to local markets.

The big box stores' roofing panels could be swapped out for translucent skylights. Consumers could walk through the space to browse the offerings as at any standard farmers market, or make drive-through purchases with the aid of a small road through the middle of the space.

Fruits and vegetables could be grown hydroponically and continuously all year, allowing for good horticultural practices. The space's existing sprinkler system would become a mechanism for daily watering.

La Vigne de la Grande BoÎte

Imagine a big box in which the roof as well as the parking lots are covered with wine grapes.

That's what Rusty Meadows and Tammy Tim, of the Washington office of Perkins + Will, did.

The interior of the big box has plenty of space for a retail outlet as well as areas for bottling, case storage, processing and shipping. It also features a wine-making school and a cafe

Virginia Arbor Conservatory

An expansive selection of plants native to Virginia grow inside and outside this tree-hugger's paradise. The facility's roof has been rolled back to form skylit portals for various groupings of trees and plants. The space would serve as both a commercial outlet for shoppers and an educational institute for individuals and communities seeking to learn more about landscape concepts and environmental applications to residential and commercial design plans.

Big Box & Beyond

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 15:25:00 -0500

For the purposes of this morning's discussion, the amazing thing about the Spam Museum -- as in the meat product -- is not that it exists. It's that it was created out of an abandoned Kmart. "The renovation of the Kmart building into what you see here today has the drama of a great epic," says Julie Craven, publicity representative for Spam in Austin, Minn. "We are going to be in this building for a long, long time. . . . We love it here."

A City Built on Impermanence -- And That's OK

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 07:41:00 -0400

SHANGHAI -- "Most of them are so superbly ugly that they're exciting." That's what Qingyun Ma, dean of the architecture school at USC, told me last Tuesday afternoon when I asked him what he thought of this city's remarkable explosion of skyscrapers.

We were in a taxi heading east on the elevated Yan'an Highway, in the heart of the city, continuing a conversation we had started an hour earlier in a conference room at the architecture firm he runs here in the French Concession neighborhood.

A year and a half after coming to L.A. to take over the architecture department at USC, Ma, 42, a Chinese citizen, is just finishing the renovation of his house near the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. He's officially in L.A. during the academic year, and he spends his summers in Shanghai running his firm, MADA s.p.a.m. (the lowercase letters stand for strategy, planning, architecture and media). But the peripatetic Ma also seems to be a global nomad, spending much of his time at 35,000 feet above sea level, crisscrossing the globe sharing his views on architecture and obsolescence.

Part salesman, part philosopher, Ma prides himself on being able to articulate what he thinks are the most important principles of contemporary architecture: 1) Architecture is more about ideas than materials; 2) Ideas should not be inscribed in stone forever; 3) The idea has to be beautiful; and 4) Architecture has to be for others.

I'm not entirely sure how all of this fits together, but I get his message about impermanence. It all goes back to the skyscrapers and why ugliness excites him.

"If they're ugly, they'll be torn down sooner," he explained before launching into a critique of historic preservation. Even as Westerners marvel at the enormity of China's urban building boom, they also tend to bemoan the ongoing demolition of the country's architectural patrimony. Even my guidebook complains about China's "perverse delight in destroying its own heritage" and the fact that in Shanghai, an enormous city of 19 million souls, only 600-odd buildings have been designated as protected historical sites, compared with nearly 40,000 in London.

Ma sheds no tears for the quaint buildings that have given way to thousands of new structures -- and they aren't all ugly by any means. In fact, he barely conceals his disdain for architectural nostalgia. "The concept behind historic preservation is foolish," he said. "It assumes that there is infinite space for future generations. We have to allow people in the future to build their environments based on their own needs and intelligence."

It turns out that L.A.'s lack of historical sentimentality is one of the reasons Ma enjoys his adopted home. "L.A. is for the future," he said.

And that makes it like his home country. "I think our sense of our ancient lineage gives us a perpetual sense of obsolescence," he said, referring to the Chinese. "I think we know that whatever we're experiencing now is part of a long passage. Each new dynasty replaced the buildings that had been constructed by the last one."

So far at USC, Ma has mostly played the role of fundraiser and spokesperson. But he hopes over time to imbue future generations of American architects with a sense of humility and obligation to society.

"Much of Western architectural education is wrong," he told me. "Architects are trained to be perfect men in the pursuit of absolute truth. They're taught that their ideas should be made concrete in the form of a building that lasts forever. But that's selfish."

As for U.S. architecture schools, Ma -- who has an undergraduate degree from Tsinghua University in China and a graduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania -- finds them "form-based rather than performance-based," meaning that they're too focused on aesthetics and not enough on how their designs actually "perform in society."

"Architecture schools have become too vocational and focus too much on professional and skill-based training and not enough on leadership. The education should be a lot more philosophical."

Ma thinks that the aggressive modernization of Shanghai is threatening to Westerners because everything here is suddenly changing and transforming, without a backward glance. Perhaps he's right: We come from a relatively young culture, which could make us especially hungry for a sense of permanence and stability, and especially insistent that ancient cultures remain, well, ancient (particularly the ones we want to visit). Perhaps he's also suggesting that we'd like to keep China in its place.

Ma's worldview embraces a certain kind of chaos that he might say actually defines "tradition," at least in the built environment: Things change, and that's the way it always has been.

Maybe that's as realistic as it gets. But from my seat in the taxi, I can't help hoping that only the ugly buildings meet the fate Ma sees. May the beautiful ones survive.

Picturing Paradise

Ron Tang — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:02:00 -0400

Sometimes I miss Los Angeles. I live and work smack in the middle of it. But sometimes I still miss it.

I figure I can place the origins of my nostalgia in the year I spent in Madrid, when I was 14. That was when I made Joni Mitchell's Vietnam War-era paean to my home state my personal anthem. Although I can't say I was homesick for family and friends, I sure identified with Mitchell's longing for warmth and refuge in L.A. Feeling lonely in Europe, she wrote:

Still a lot of lands to see

But I wouldn't want to stay here

It's too old and cold and settled in its ways here

Oh, but California

California I'm coming home

I came home and discovered, of course, that all of what she craved -- and what I thought I missed -- L.A. couldn't realistically deliver. Was I disillusioned? No doubt. But my nostalgic notion of L.A. has never left me. I've never shaken the feeling that L.A. should live up to my expectations.

All great metropolises have myths and meta-narratives through which we filter our own personal experiences. When my father visited me during the years I lived in New York City, he couldn't help but see the city through the lens of movies he had seen as a child -- New Yorkers arriving at the theater in top hats and tails. And how many American college kids head for Paris harboring a Hemingway Lost Generation dream? We carry with us preconceived notions of what places are or should be, and we're always grappling with the gap between fantasy and reality.

But no city is more burdened by its myth than L.A. That's because ours -- crafted by regional boosters even before the birth of L.A. as a modern American city -- is the ultimate myth: Los Angeles as paradise. It makes the gulf between the ideal and the real deeper here than anywhere else.

Think about it. In London, most people do go to pubs, just as you'd think they would. In Paris, the locals do routinely hang out in cafes. But how many people do you know in L.A. who actually match the description of the perfectly sculpted, sun-loving beachgoers who populate this town in the world's imaginations?

Because the real people and the real place were never destined to match expectations, L.A. has long been a source of disillusionment. First came noir in the 1930s and '40s, but by the end of the 20th century, hellishness was more than the theme of a novel or the way to light a movie. The 1992 riots were the moment when shadows trumped the sun. Over the last few decades, much of the writing on the city has devolved into a long dialectical argument over whether L.A. is really heaven or hell.

Now there are signs that we're emerging from the grip of this facile dichotomy. One powerful example is the week-old exhibition at the Huntington Library: "This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in Los Angeles Photographs."

Jennifer Watts, the show's co-curator, told me she was tired of what she called "extremist renderings of L.A," the Manichean battle between sunshine and noir. Nor was she intent on undermining L.A. stereotypes. As she put it, "There are powerful kernels of truth in the stereotypes," and the exhibition takes the paradisiacal as its starting point. Still, it's not judgmental when we don't live up to the hype. To my mind, the most engaging photographs capture the chasm and the connection between the ideal and the real; they put heaven and hell in one frame.

Like John Divola's "Zuma #63," a sublime, color-saturated portrait of an abandoned, fire-ravaged, vandalized house on the Pacific's edge at sundown. And then there's Garry Winogrand's 1969 black-and-white image: three young women sporting bouffant hairdos and miniskirts walking past a beggar in a wheelchair on the Walk of Fame. Things are not what they seem in Tinseltown, but the afternoon light still telegraphs beauty, glamour, paradise.

When I got home from the Huntington, I pulled my copy of John Fante's 1939 Los Angeles novel "Ask the Dust" off the shelf and found again a passage that puts into words the same thing the Huntington photographs capture -- embrace paradise, embrace disillusionment.

"You'll eat hamburgers year after year and live in dusty, vermin-infested apartments and hotels, but every morning you'll see the mighty sun, the eternal blue of the sky, and the streets full of sleek women you never will possess, and the hot semi-tropical nights will reek of romance you'll never have, but you'll still be in paradise, boys, in the land of sunshine."

Amen.

Our Urban Future

Ron Tang — Wed, 14 May 2008 06:45:00 -0400

Half of the world’s population now lives in cities, a number that will climb to 75% by the middle of the century. This development marks a radical break in human history, for humanity has until recently been overwhelmingly rural, concerned first and foremost with brute survival.

In “The Communist Manifesto,” Karl Marx referred to “the idiocy of rural life” -- or so the mistranslation goes -- as an enduring problem. In fact, Marx wasn’t talking about “idiocy” at all. Rather, he was referring to the isolation and stasis of rural life, and how it had long stymied creativity and the diffusion of ideas. Marx was right about the emancipating power of the city, and he would surely be pleased by our far more interconnected world. The highest expression of this interconnectedness is the sparkling network of global cities that has mushroomed during the past several decades, the main subject of “The Endless City”, a wide-ranging survey produced by the ongoing Urban Age Project.

As you’d expect from a book produced by more than 30 contributors -- among them lawyers, activists, architects, politicians, planners, sociologists, and historians -- "The Endless City” runs the gamut from the dazzlingly insightful to the depressingly hackneyed. At its heart is a close look at six global cities: New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg, and Berlin. Perhaps the most entertaining aspect of the book is its use of clever metrics to show how similar and, more often, how different these cities really are -- by comparing, for example, the amount of green space in New York (14%) and Berlin (35.6%), or the daily commute in London (1 hour and 24 minutes) and Mexico City (2 hours and 30 minutes).

So if these cities are so different, one has to wonder: What can they possibly have in common? Drawing on the work of Saskia Sassen, one of the book’s contributors, “The Endless City” defines a global city as a major metropolis that dominates what you might call the key command functions of the global economy. Yes, globalization means that capital and even labor are hyper-mobile, but face-to-face interaction still counts. The leadership class has to actually live somewhere, and they tend to cluster with others like themselves. Armies of hangers-on and aspiring somebodies follow, whether we’re talking about gentrifying Brooklyn or the slums of Soweto.

Deyan Sudjic of London’s Design Museum introduces each of the cities surveyed, and he deserves to be singled out for his consistently intelligent, often counterintuitive observations. Mr. Sudjic is admirably unhysterical, and his great strength is that he stresses that urban forms change over time, and that suburbia is not to be scorned.

Not all of his fellow contributors are so enlightened, and some in particular are locked in a narrow model of class antagonism. In an otherwise stimulating essay on the idea of the open city, Richard Sennett, the renowned sociologist, suggests that urban gentrification is about displacing the inner-city poor. But this overlooks the fact that cities tend to have a lot of residential volatility -- people move in and out of a neighborhood all the time. When an area improves, people become less inclined to move out, but it’s not as though there is a tribe of inner-city indigenous people that has lived in, say, London’s borough of Hammersmith & Fulham since time immemorial. The irony is that Mr. Sennett presents himself as the heir of Jane Jacobs, a fierce opponent of the central planners who sought to turn untamed urban landscapes into sterile Modernist nightmares. Rather than condemn the free market as such, Mr. Sennett would be better served by explicitly championing the cause of small-scale entrepreneurs and property owners fighting against eminent domain abuse and the absurd zoning restrictions he rightly criticizes. This has relevance not only in the cities of the north, but also in the expanding metropolises of Africa and Asia, where the fight for stable property rights represents the first step toward lasting prosperity.

It is worth emphasizing that most of the new global cities are very different from, say, New York or London. Some, indeed, are scarcely recognizable as cities. Vast slums in Lagos and Dhaka now dwarf Boston and Brussels. By 2020, there will be 1.4 billion slum dwellers in the world, which is to say more slum dwellers than there are Chinese or Indians. And though Westerners tend to look on this urban frontier with dread, as a slow-motion crisis to be contained, we must remember two things: first, that New York was a pestilential hellhole until relatively recently, and second, that we have much to learn from how these strange new cities are surviving and thriving.

“The Endless City” restricts its discussion of this fast-expanding urban universe to a brief discussion of African urbanism, which is heavy on ethnographic jargon and light on substance. The section on Mexico City offers more insight, yet it is a story of the past, a middle-income city in a middle-income country that is no longer defined by explosive growth. Fortunately, it seems that a future edition of “The Endless City” will tackle Mumbai.

Mumbai is just one of many cities, New York included, that could stand to learn from London. Mr. Sudjic finds much to admire in the leadership of London’s former mayor Ken Livingstone, who embraced congestion pricing and brownfield development as paths to a greener, denser city. But in truth London’s longer-term success is rooted in its tradition of decentralized self-government. For all his outsize ego, Mr. Livingstone had far fewer powers than Mayor Bloomberg. Indeed, as Gerald Frug argues in a smart essay on local government, New York is an extreme outlier in its extreme concentration of power -- it is, remarkably, more centralized than communist Shanghai. Whereas New York is divided into five powerless boroughs, real power in London is in the elected governments of its 32 boroughs, which deliver services and make planning decisions. The borough governments are more responsive to the needs of neighborhoods, and they embody the different sensibilities that prevail in different parts of town. Because the global cities of the global south are at least as diverse as London, it stands to reason that they will also resist one-size-fits-all solutions. One hopes they won’t be misruled by an overmighty City Hall located far from the slums.

Book reviewed in this article

Ricky Burdett & Deyan Sudjic, The Endless City, 512pp., Phaidon.

It's a Critical Time of Our Sign

Ron Tang — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

I don't know about you, but I'm proud of the fact that the most celebrated symbol of our city isn't a statue that was a gift from the French. I also think it's fitting that it isn't burdened with heavy ideology, profound symbolism or deep meaning. Nobody ever accused the Hollywood sign of inspiring high-minded musings about the essence of our city, let alone the exalted mission of our nation. If anything, it evokes a sordid lust for fame and fortune.

I imagine all those aspiring starlets from the Midwest coming to L.A. and sighing as they look up at that sign for the first time. I'm pretty sure they're not thinking about the tired, the poor or those poor devils yearning to breathe free.

Erected in 1923 as an advertisement for an upscale real estate development, it turns out that 85 years later, the Hollywood sign is still doing the trick.

Last week, a Chicago investment firm that owns 138 acres just to the west of the "H" announced that L.A. officials had failed to muster the $22 million it claims is required to preserve the site. The Chicago guys claim five luxury homes, or one insanely big family compound, will fit on the parcel.

But, true to form, Councilman Tom LaBonge, one of the city's biggest cheerleaders, is fighting back. Last Wednesday, LaBonge called a news conference in front of Griffith Observatory to ask the boys from Chicago "to do the right thing" and sell the parcel for the $6 million the city says it's worth. Standing a few feet from the observatory's slightly creepy bronze bust of James Dean, LaBonge argued against developing the land, mostly on ecological grounds. The city needs more open space. New houses there would be vulnerable to fires. Griffith Park's wildlife need the corridor the parcel provides.

But the crux of his argument was cultural, even spiritual.

"I'm not a poet," the loquacious and famously rambling councilman demurred at one point. But LaBonge's clumsy rhetoric nonetheless hit the right points: He talked about the hike he took in the hills that very morning, the "strength" that an untouched Cahuenga Peak gives our city and the need for L.A.'s most prominent symbol to rise above all the "clutter" below. Earlier, he told The Times that the view of the sign against the pristine hilltop was "good for the psyche of Los Angeles."

But preservation has always been a hard sell in this city built on impulse, boosterism and real estate speculation. Even the original sign wasn't supposed to last more than a year and a half. Particularly in Hollywood, a place director John Schlesinger once called "an extraordinary kind of temporary place," it's hard not to see the irony of opposing development to preserve the uncluttered view of a sign that was built as an advertisement for real estate. Perhaps more than any other metropolis, in Los Angeles you have to defy history in order to preserve it.

This isn't the first time the Hollywood sign has been at the center of controversy and our municipal psyche. Six years ago, before Angelenos voted on the fate of several secession movements, the city of L.A. and the proponents of the ultimately stillborn city of Hollywood went to court over who would get the sign if the city's voters granted a divorce. L.A. would have lost.

In the late 1970s, a campaign to save the deteriorating icon also inspired a rare outburst of non-sports-related civic pride. It included the first act of L.A. civic philanthropy I was ever aware of. I was in elementary school in Glendale when shock rocker Alice Cooper donated $27,000 to buy the sign a new "O," and I remember thinking it was cool that that scary-looking guy cared. Other donors, such as Gene Autry and Hugh Hefner, were not yet on my radar screen.

LaBonge wants to sit down with the Chicagoans to see if they'll see reason. But he confesses that Plan B may include calling up some rich Hollywood types to ask them to throw down some cash for the common good. The price tag is a whole lot higher than it was in the 1970s, and buying chaparral may not be as sexy as forking over the purchase price of a mammoth new 45-foot high letter.

But, silly as it sounds, this might be another one of those rare moments when Angelenos actually muster up some civic pride.

They shouldn't think they're doing it just for us locals. They'd also be fueling the dreams of the huddled masses from Peoria and beyond.

Can't Stand the Heat

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:51:00 -0400

It’s all the suburbs’ fault. You know, everything -- traffic congestion, overweight kids, social alienation. Oh, and lest we forget, global warming and rising energy costs, too.

That latest knock against the burbs has caught on widely. With their multiplying McMansions and exploding Explorers, the burbs are the reason we’re paying so much for gas and heating oil and spewing all those emissions that are heating up the atmosphere --or so a host of urban proponents tells us. It’s time to ditch the burbs and go back to the city. New York, Boston, Chicago -- these densely packed metropolises are "models of environmentalism," declares John Norquist, the former Milwaukee mayor who now heads the Congress for a New Urbanism.

But before you sell your ranch house and plunk down big bucks for that cozy condo in the city, take a closer look at the claims of big cities’ environmental superiority. Here’s one point that’s generally relegated to academic journals and scientific magazines: Highly concentrated urban areas can contribute to overall warming that extends beyond their physical boundaries.

Studies in cities around the world -- Beijing, Rome, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles and more -- have found that packed concentrations of concrete, asphalt, steel and glass can contribute to a phenomenon known as "heat islands" far more than typically low-density, tree-shaded suburban landscapes. As an October 2006 article in the New Scientist highlighted, "cities can be a couple of degrees warmer during the day and up to 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer at night." This is critical as we deal with what may well be a period of prolonged warming. Urban heat islands may not explain global warming, but they do bear profound environmental, social, economic and health consequences that reach beyond city boundaries. A study of Athens that appeared this year in the journal Climatic Change suggested that the ecological footprint of the urban heat island is one-and-a-half to two times larger than the city’s political borders.

Further, urban heat islands increase the need for air conditioning, which has alarming consequences for energy consumption in our cities. Since air conditioning systems themselves generate heat, this produces a vicious cycle. Some estimate that the annual cost of the energy consumption caused by the urban heat island could exceed $1 billion.

This is not to say that big buildings can’t be made more energy efficient by using new techniques, such as high-tech skin designs, special construction materials to reduce energy consumption, green roofs and passive cooling. But one big problem is that making large buildings green also makes them much more expensive, so that they’re less and less affordable for middle-class and working-class families.

The Environment’s Friend

Low-density areas, on the other hand, lend themselves to much less expensive and more environmentally friendly ways of reducing heat. It often takes nothing more than double-paned windows to reduce the energy consumption of a two- or three-story house. Shade can bring it down even further: A nice maple can cool a two-story house, but it can’t quite do the same for a 10-story apartment building.

Focusing on the suburbs has the added virtue of bringing change to where the action is. Over the past 40 years, the percentage of people opting to live in cities has held steady at 10 percent to 15 percent. And since 2000, more than 90 percent of all metropolitan growth has taken place in the suburbs.

Here’s an Earth-to-greens message: Instead of demonizing the suburbs, why not build better, greener ones and green the ones we already have?

One approach might be to embrace what one writer, Wally Siembab, has dubbed "smart sprawl." Encouraging this sort of development will require a series of steps: reducing commuters’ gas consumption with more fuel-efficient cars, dispersing work to centers close to where workers live and promoting continued growth in home-based work. We’ll also have to protect open spaces by monitoring development and establishing land conservation based on public and private funding, the latter coming from developers who wish to work in suburbs. Building what we call "an archipelago of villages" seems far more reasonable than returning to industrial-age cities and mass transit systems.

Transportation Issues

This is not to say that transit of some kind -- perhaps more cost-efficient and flexible dedicated busways, or local shuttles -- can’t play a role in serving those who can’t or would rather not drive. But short of a crippling fuel shortage or some other catastrophic event, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever see the widespread success of heavily promoted strategies such as dense, transit-oriented developments, or the wholesale abandonment of the suburbs.

We can accommodate our need for space and still leave ample room for a flourishing natural environment, as well as for agriculture. By preserving open space and growing in an environmentally friendly manner, we can provide a break from the monotony of concrete and glass and create ideal landscapes for wildlife preservation.

Such notions -- developed before the term "green" existed -- go back to a host of visionaries such as Ebenezer Howard, James Rouse, Frederick Law Olmstead, Frank Lloyd Wright and Victor Gruen. And they have already been put into practice. Starting in the 1960s in his development of Valencia, north of Los Angeles, Gruen envisioned a "suburbia redeemed" that mixed elements of the urban and the rural.

Valencia’s elaborate network of 28 miles of car-free paseos -- paths designed for pedestrians and bicyclists -- helped make the natural environment accessible to residents. Similarly, The Woodlands, a sprawling development 27 miles from downtown Houston, is a model for a greener suburbia in a region not much celebrated for its environmental values.

Energy Efficiency

All these places evoke a more environment-friendly suburbanism, which also can be promoted in areas that did not benefit from the foresight of a Gruen or a Rouse. Town centers, revived older shopping districts, even re-engineered malls can all be part of a greener, more energy-efficient future in a large number of communities. Dragooning Americans into a dense urban lifestyle that’s attractive to only a relatively small minority isn’t the best way to address concerns about energy and resource depletion or global warming. Instead, we need to take gradual, sensible, realistic steps to improve the increasingly dispersed places where most of us choose to live and work.