urbanter

Via SF Streetsblog:

“You see a vision right in front of your door,” Mayor Lee told an audience of residents and agency officials who collaborated on the project. “A vision that’s going to bring about slowing the traffic, trees, permeable landscaping - all kinds of things that you see other neighborhoods get.”

Read the full story here.

- Elizabeth Titus

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Image: Newcomb Avenue conceptual plan diagram, via SF Streetsblog (PDF)

On Saturday I attended the 2011 Stanford Black Law Student Association’s Conference called The Evolving City.  The morning session consisted of a presentation on the revitalization of the Hunters Point Shipyard which struck me as a vision for economic development that stands in contrast to the situation Gerad described earlier this week.  While he mentioned that Chile’s increasing prosperity has replaced historical buildings with world-class skyscrapers and shopping malls, the Hunters Point plan promises to pay homage to its cultural roots.  Kofi Bonner, Regional Vice President of Lennar Urban, the developer of the community’s master plan, highlighted their commitment to current residents by rebuilding of Alice Griffith Public Housing with no displacement of current residents, making 32 percent of its housing below-market rate, and incorporating an international-themed African Marketplace.

But how much of the final plan will actually benefit the residents?  Lennar is negotiating with the 49ers, who are considering a stadium site in the master plan. Current designs also include over 3 million square feet of R&D space targeting green-tech and clean-tech businesses.  The $1 billion for transportation and public infrastructure will certainly Hunters Point residents much needed access to other parts of the city, but it will also make it more feasible of a location for the city’s ever-expanding white-collar population.  But in the end, might gentrification be a good thing for the neighborhood, to some extent? This is the problem that seems to plague planners, community organizers, developers, and politicians alike. This project stands a better chance than most in protecting current residents, as far as I can tell, because of the incredible involvement from the Citizens Advisory Committee spearheaded by Veronica Hunnicutt, one of the panelists. In all, the project seems to be well-implemented and planned.

What also impressed me was the level of cooperation between groups that seem to have inherent tension: community, military, and development.  With one representative from each sector, the panelists walked through Hunters Point’s story as a military base, industrial shipping area, and opportunity site for the current project. Lennar has provided for an astounding number of community benefits including workforce development, scholarship funds, and homeownership assistance.  

Continue here to view the urban design plans for the Candlestick Park (stadium) alternative and learn more about the project. 

This post was going to be about Hypercities, to which @westcenter alerted me today - but boy, is there a lot to dig into: hundreds of years’ worth of maps and media about some of the world’s beloved cities, presented by scholars in a beautiful and novel way.

I’m just getting started, so I’m turning - and taking you along - to “You are listening to Los Angeles,” an audio complement to the views like this one from Hypercities, of Los Angeles in 2010:

The “You are listening to…” site combines three elements to create an urban soundtrack in, well, a beautiful and novel way: a sweeping photo of the cityscape, a track of ambient music and a stream of scanner traffic - the live radio chatter of Los Angeles police. Sibling sites exist for New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Montreal.

The effect of the radio chatter, in particular, must be different for everybody. When I was growing up, the scanner was almost always on at home or at the office of the weekly newspaper my mom edits. She used it to track the news, but lots of families we knew kept scanners at home for other reasons - keeping tabs on a father or son in the fire department, staying on top of gossip.

For us, the scanner narrated city life, such as it was. Slow days and false alarms gave way to emergencies small - cat-in-tree stuff - and large, like the time the barn behind Nilsen’s burned down on Main Street on Christmas night. Mostly, the scanner crackled on low volume in the background as we worked or cooked dinner. At my first newspaper internship away from home, the editor kept three scanners on at all times: one at home, one in the car and one in the office. It was a soothing reminder a home and a way to learn the new city. When the “sidewalk ballet” turned dramatic - a chase, a collision, a fight - the crescendo of the scanner cued us, the city’s characters, to take our places.

The scanner has its own language, the language of some of urban life’s most enduring characters, reviled or celebrated as they were in cities’ histories - police officers, highway patrolmen, firefighters - and reporters pride themselves on fluency. “Brace yourself,” a colleague once told me on my way to cover an accident. “It’s an 1144.” Someone had been killed.

Of course, you won’t necessarily hear tragedy on “You are listening to…”. The creator of the site demonstrates the point by streaming both the music and the scanner traffic continuously: city life goes on and on, mundane mixing with extreme. And perhaps for you, the music, the image or another thought is entirely more evocative than the scanner. I imagine reactions vary widely among people, backgrounds and cities, raising questions such as: what happens when urban noise comes to the foreground, as it does at this site? Which sounds provoke emotion? Which narrate the city experience? For whom and why?

For further reading, I suggest “Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience” by Michael Bull (h/t Urban Studies 114). I’ll get back to Hypercities and the sounds of LA. If you’re tuning in at home: happy listening.

- Elizabeth Titus

As Stanford students, we live in the midst of a never-ending construction project and thus construction outside of the bubble seems routine and unremarkable.  I wouldn’t be surprised if those of us who use SFO Airport as a gateway home failed to notice the enormous, and really quite remarkable, project that has been going on there for the last 3 years. The project is a brand new domestic terminal—housing American Airlines and Virgin Airlines— and was finally opened to the public this past weekend (April 9^th). 

It is a bit misleading, however, to call it brand new, when 90% of the building materials were recycled from the old terminal built in 1954. This is a remarkable feat given building codes and energy efficiency requirements.  The new terminal, called T2, does not only pass the energy efficiency test, however, it jumps way beyond all California codes and will most likely become the first LEED Gold-certified airport terminal in the US. Cool! Well actually I didn’t know what LEED was at first, let alone what it takes to become “gold” certified. I looked it up though and found that LEED provides certification, through a neutral/outsider party, about how “green” or eco-friendly a building is.  The LEED website points out that achieving gold level certification is a huge challenge and very impressive for a commercial site. 

The reused building materials are not the only eco-friendly components earning SFO the recognition.  The new terminal recycles 75% of solid waste (meaning all the utensils and food will be recyclable like it is here at Stanford), uses recycled water for toilets, provides pre-conditioned air to all of the gated planes, saving 15,000 tons of CO₂ emissions/yr (WOW!), and incorporates energy efficient lighting, including row upon row of skylights. Currently, these measures are only implemented in T2, but SFO says that it will soon extend these measures to apply to the whole airport.

A final feature of the terminal is what SFO is calling “hydration stations.” Essentially this is just a clever way of saying they are going to place fancy water faucets around the terminal where you can fill up reusable (or presumably any sort of) water bottles.  Yes, this is just a gimmick, cherry-on-top feature, but I am sure I will have a goofy smile on my face the first time I go to fill up my bottle in the terminal :D  

~taylor mcadam