The Age of Participation

The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association held a Grand Opening party last night for its new Urban Center at 654 Mission Street. The event was a great success, with the party taking over the new building, a bar next door and the Annie Street alley. The jazz band outside was incredible, dropping some jazz standards mixed in with some interpretations of classic 80s tunes. They even came into the Urban Center at one point during the night, playing the entire time as they were relocating.

Anyhow, at one point during the night, I ended up speaking with a San Francisco urban designer. Although this designer has been in the city for a while, she told me that she began her career in Europe. This led me to ask her how the urban design process is different here than in Europe.

She gave two examples in response. First, she said that there is much less leeway to stray from the "master plan" in European cities (although many American cities have master plans, they are usually policy documents and not legally binding on city councils and planning commissions). Second, she said that the participation process is much more robust here.

I was excited to hear this second point. It reminded me of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and his first impressions of new world democracy, where citizens were constantly participating in the formation of their own societies. Unfortunately, de Tocqueville's America seems largely brushed under the rug these days, or at least seated on a giant nation-sized couch watching the latest episode of Grey's Anatomy. Although many of us keep at least half an eye toward the government, much of that attention is directed towards Washington, D.C. and the latest goings-on with the Obama Administration. In contrast, how often do people devote their attention to the beneficial growth of their own city/town/suburb?

Coincidentally, I spent a couple hours on Wednesday night at a community workshop meant to kick off the Northeast Embarcadero Study (Embarcadero from Washington to North Point streets). What struck me most about the workshop was just how old everyone was at the meeting. The average age had to be well past 50, with only a handful of people below 40 (not counting the representatives from the Planning Department). I understand that these things start fairly early (this one kicked off around 5:45 p.m.), that it is hard for people to get out of work, and that people under 50 may have "better things to do" than go to a community workshop, but it was disheartening to think that my generation (and those slightly older and younger) was so improperly represented at what seemed to me a very important discussion.

We (as Americans, as San Francisco residents) have a great opportunity to be part of the urban development process and to steer the future of this city (and our country), yet it seems like local government (well, all government) is often overrun by special interests and those with too much time on their hands. Are we to blame? Or is the system rigged from the start and we are better off not wasting our time?

The answer is likely to lie somewhere in between. Most San Franciscans probably have no idea that these meetings even exist. Only after the fact, when the development has begun or finished, will they applaud the new space or decry the poor planning. The opportunity to participate in the process will be lost by that point and they will attribute the results to some higher planning/development power that makes all the decisions in this fair city.

But what if the common man and woman did care about local government and planning decisions? What if the front page of the paper discussed city development rather than the latest inane thing that Rush Limbaugh said?

As discussed before, we may have a problem with our focus and our perception of which issues matter and on what level. The development of our cities and towns has a profound effect on our lives and the lives of those to follow us, yet we spend little time giving these issues any attention.

Urban Mathematics = Cities are Alive

A rap scholar once said, "You wanna know how to rhyme you better learn how to add." Steven Strogatz, professor of applied mathematics, makes the persuasive argument that if you want to understand cities, it might help to learn some math too.

Strogatz illustrates, among other things, that larger (more populous) cities need less infrastructure than small ones. He attributes this to economies of scale:

For instance, if one city is 10 times as populous as another one, does it need 10 times as many gas stations? No. Bigger cities have more gas stations than smaller ones (of course), but not nearly in direct proportion to their size. The number of gas stations grows only in proportion to the 0.77 power of population. The crucial thing is that 0.77 is less than 1. This implies that the bigger a city is, the fewer gas stations it has per person. Put simply, bigger cities enjoy economies of scale. In this sense, bigger is greener.

Strogatz ultimately argues that this same ratio is applicable to other living organisms: proof that cities are living, breathing things. Makes sense to me.

For the full NY Times column click here.

Street Study: Divisadero

2.5 miles

38 blocks

Runs from Marina Blvd to Castro St

Bus lines:

24 (north/south)

6, 7, 71, 21, 31, 38, 2, 4, 1, 3, 41, 45, 28, 43, 76, 30 (east/west)

Zoning Patterns:

Castro to Haight (2 1/2 blocks): RH-3 [Residential Housing, 3 units per lot]

Haight to Sacramento (19 blocks): Neighborhood Commercial-2 [Small-Scale] with a 4 block patch of NC-3 [Moderate Scale] around Geary St. and a patch of RM-3 [Medium Density Residential, Mixed]

Sacramento to Lombard (11 blocks): Residential [RH-3, RH-2, RH-1, RH-1(D), RM-1, patches of RH-3, RM-2]

Lombard to Chestnut (2 blocks): Neighborhood Commercial [NC-2, NC-3]

Francisco to Marina (6 blocks): Residential [RH-3 with RM-3 at the corners, a block of P(ublic) between North Point and Beach, and a row of RH-1 facing the Bay]

[note: this will be the first of several "street studies." please comment with requests for the study of a particular street or further information that you would like to see included in each study.]

MTA drama + German Carless Suburb

The controversy over the SFMTA budget continues.  The Board of Supervisors, led by David Chiu, are threatening to reject the budget against MTA's (and the Mayor's) wishes.  A Board of Supervisors' meeting is set for 2pm today and the budget is the 8th item on the agenda.  SF Streetsblog promises to provide a twitter-feed of the highlights.

UPDATE (Wednesday at 11:47 AM PST): It appears a compromise has been reached -- just barely.  Apparently Chiu's motion to table the budget rejection only passed by a vote of 6-5.  Unfortunately, the "compromise" doesn't seem to have much effect on the average San Franciscan.  Fares are still rising and service is still being cut.  It appears that my old hood got hit especially hard, with the 10 being discontinued above broadway and the 20 being cut altogether.  I rode the 10 for more than a year-and-a-half and it was always full of worker bees in the morning and night rush hours.  Guess those middle-class San Franciscans better save up some money for bicycles!  The anti-climactic ending to this struggle offers a perfect microcosm of San Francisco politics circa 2009:  shelter the rich, save the needy, and screw everyone in between.  So much for a transit-first city.

Also: check out this NYTimes article about a German suburb (formerly a Nazi army base) that has rendered autos verboten.  It is encouraging to know that such a revolutionary idea has taken hold in a place with such sordid historical ties.  Could car-free streets be on the way to a suburb or city near you?

Where is the Pie?

Before asking where it is, we may first need to ask, "what is the pie?" Turns out both questions are a bit slippery. The pie may signify the total resources available in a specified area (the Earth, the United States, California, San Francisco, the Western Addition, Divisadero Street, the 500 block of Divisadero, etc.) or perhaps the pie merely signifies the monetary value attributed to a certain economy (ie. the GDP) or market (ever hear someone lament the Dow's shrinkage?). The pie is not easily definable, but how we think about the pie (see below Economies of Scale: oranges) affects what it is.

There is a feeling among many that we must increase the pie. To some people this means increasing consumer spending. Consumers spend more thereby fueling production, increasing the value of the stock market, etc. All is good.* We must wonder though: as the pie increases, as GDP rises, and the Dow reaches new heights, are people actually becoming more resourceful? Are we finding new ways to maximize the value of our limited natural and human resources or are we merely imagining fictitious values? And just where is the pie anyway?

Does the pie live somewhere on Wall Street or in Washington, D.C.? If all of the major banks are healthy and AIG survives its self-fulfilling scare and the mega-corporations of the world begin to give and receive money again, will the pie suddenly regrow before our eyes? Or is the pie more personal than that: does the pie represent our individual opportunities for success or our access to food and jobs, credit and health care?

It is all sort of dizzying to think about, especially for the good old common man, waking in the morning to head to the factory/store/office and picking up a slice of pie on the 1st and 15th. If the Dow is up, says he, my employer is happy and I keep my job, so I am happy. If the Dow is down, woe is me. And he is right! His prospects for financial survival are so heavily intertwined with world markets and macro-financing trends that some remote pie-measurement system (the Dow) does seem important. The pie is centralized. It matters little what potential the good old common man (or the common family/the common community/the common city) actually has, if he is always waiting on the holders of the pie to make a move.

Although the resources of the world (people, land, oil, minerals) are decentralized, our conception of the pie--and the monetary units that represent its worth--are quite centralized. When we think about the pie, we are more likely to think about the stock market than the physical places that we inhabit and the natural resources surrounding us.

Does this matter? you may ask. I would argue yes: mos' definitely. If we invest the bulk of our resources in centralized "markets" with only indirect connections to the particular places in which we live, then we are in effect choosing not to invest in the real, tangible places in which we live, work and play (remember the pseudo-footnote re: opportunity costs). Although many people invest a great deal of money in their home, how many invest locally aside from that? We may "invest" as consumers, but the mindset of the consumer is a passive one. If urban areas are to thrive, investment must come back home.

*Unless of course, consumers could be more resourceful in another role. Each decision involves a shadow of the decision unmade, often referred to as opportunity cost. Thanks to Kendall Dix (http://kendix.blogspot.com) for this ingenious footnoting method.

Economies of Scale (oranges)

We use the term "economies of scale" to extol the benefits of large corporations. If I want to be an orange salesman, it is theoretically better for me to be able to buy and sell many oranges, especially if selling oranges requires special knowledge or equipment. If it costs $10,000 dollars to buy one orange picking machine, then only people that grow and sell lots of oranges will be able to afford it. If you can buy two machines for $18,000 or three for $25,000, etc., then it makes economic sense that the work of orange selling should remain with those who can afford many groves and many machines. Ditto if you pay labor to pick your oranges. If you only have one picker, you've got to treat him well. After all, this guy knows a little something about the orange business and you develop a close relationship with him since he's you're only picker. Throw a few of his friends in there and the costs per picker drop. After all, these pickers may not know as much about the art of orange picking and as their numbers increase they become more expendable. You can pay them less and devote less attention to each. If one drops by the wayside, it is no matter. 1 of 100 is only 1%, 1 of a 1000 only 0.1%.

If the economic logic is followed, then oranges should be picked by those with the money for large monotonous groves and expensive machines and access to cheap, fungible labor. This helps us all. The pie is bigger. We have specialized orange production, so now oranges are cheaper for everyone and everyone who is not growing oranges can spend their time specializing in some other task. In short, the term "economies of scale" indicates that economies improve when the scale is greater.

We must ask ourselves, however, which economies are we measuring? What scale matters?

If the foremost goal of humanity is indeed to increase the mythical pie of economy, then by all means, we should scale until we can scale no more. Bigger government, bigger business, bigger banks. The more we take advantage of economies of scale, the better off all will be.

But is that true? If the mythical pie is increased does this necessarily mean all are better off? And how do we measure this anyway? By mean income? Median income? Access to health care? Average life span? Happiness surveys?

Realities are dependent on the scale in which we conceive them. If we are constantly focused on the so-called greater good of growth growth growth and economies of scale, we lose sight of the economies on the ground level--the economic relationships between and among people. That is what we are after all: people.

Try looking at the world from a bird's-eye view. Or a nation or a state, even a city. Can you see much about the way people really live? The waking and the sleeping, the eating and the relieving, the enthusiastic desire to improve life or the apathy of hopelessness. The human being must be our greatest untapped resource. We have spent so long with our heads in the sky or comparing numbers on a spreadsheet that we have lost sight of this. Perhaps it is time to readjust our scale and decide just what it is we mean to measure. Time to break the soil and plant our own orange trees.

Transit Woes by the Bay

Although the San Francisco City Charter boasts a voter-approved "Transit-First Policy" (see Section 8A.115), the future of Muni service is uncertain thanks to a reported $128.9 million deficit. The SFMTA budget for FY09-10 is set to be submitted to the Mayor's Office and the Board of Supervisors on May 1, yet the first public hearing to air the proposed deficit-solutions occurred yesterday at City Hall. The proposed solutions include lay-offs of Muni workers, increased fares, parking meter increases, and (you guessed it) service reductions. For more detailed descriptions of the proposals, go here.

Finding a solution to Muni's problems is no easy task. Some believe the Mayor is to blame. Others point to an increase in work orders from other city agencies. Commenters at yesterday's hearing railed against Muni's "bloated management" and "overpaid staff" (to much applause from the crowd), called for stricter fare enforcement, and generally protested the proposed service cuts. Although the MTA appears to be viewing this problem as a pure numbers game, the effect of reduced public transportation services will have an impact on the lives of San Franciscans that is hard to quantify.

As one who is relatively new to the SFMTA's budget problems, I cannot speak to the allegations of mismanagement or overpayment of Muni workers. I do believe, however, that SFMTA's budget problems cannot be fixed with the current myopic proposals to reduce service while simultaneously increasing fares. If the City of San Francisco is serious about its dedication to public transit, then it's time the City took action. The biggest threat to Muni is not the money that is lost by not charging 50c for transfers, but the hordes of drivers in private automobiles that crowd the city streets (especially during rush hour) and don't use Muni. At this point though, it's hard to place all the blame on the drivers. The streets are congested, the buses move slowly, and many crosstown trips require at least one transfer in addition to a good hour of travel time. Rather than just looking for ways to make the budget in 2010, Muni needs someone with the guts to look to 2020 or 2030, to seriously consider the mechanisms for increasing Muni ridership and discouraging automobile usage. Parking meter increases may be a step in the right direction, but a more focused tax on vehicle miles traveled in the City would be better. Ultimately, the SFMTA should focus on making Muni more attractive to potential riders. They could start with proposals to speed up service and make Muni a more realistic option for trips that do not neatly fit along a north/south or east/west route. More than money, the SFMTA needs strong leaders and a steady vision for the future that is not disrupted each time there is a momentary budget crisis.