Interview with Daniel Iacofano
Why is this book needed now?
This is a critical time for cities across America. In many ways, cities are doing better than they have in decades. They’re redeveloping, renewing and becoming choice places to live again. The understanding of urban design and what makes a vital city has increased. There is a growing sophistication, both among planners and residents, about what makes a vibrant community and a healthy place to live, and what is good design as opposed to bad design.
But right now, the focus is mainly on physical design, perhaps because design is tangible and easy to grasp. If an area looks good, it seems as if we’ve made progress. But behind the façade, behind the walls, people may actually be losing economic ground because of the lack of equity and value obtained from these changes. In fact, much building under the rubric of New Urbanism may be having a negative effect: it may be displacing the most vulnerable communities and reducing their opportunities.
What’s the solution?
We must stop cycling between emphasizing social policies as we did in the 1960s and emphasizing design considerations as we did with Urban Renewal in the 1950s and might be lured into doing now. The pendulum needs to stop in the middle. We can ensure that good physical design also includes the social, economic and cultural aspects of cities so that all residents share in the benefits of new development.
Some developments already have local hire requirements. Is that enough?
Local hire policies are definitely part of this idea, but they don’t go nearly far enough. The idea is that the entire local community needs to benefit from the new investment that’s taking place. They get the impacts; they must also get a proportionate share of the benefits.
In cities today we have massive disparities visible in the urban fabric. People of color, those with low income, or who are disadvantaged in one way or another are living in the areas with the worst pollution. They have the worst air and they have the greatest traffic, noise and impacts on their neighborhoods. They have deteriorating parks, schools, hospitals and other community facilities. They lack connectivity with the rest of the urban environment. When you add those up, they are significant restrictions or barriers to upward mobility.
Haven’t these disparities always been visible?
Yes, but there’s another trend in play now: data gathering and tracking of the disparate health impacts that fall on communities of color and low income as a result of their degraded environments.
Hurricane Katrina, for example, was a massive public display, fully covered by the media, of all of those impacts. It revealed that the people who are the most vulnerable economically are also in weaker positions in the physical environment. They are living in conditions that, in terms of quality, are well below those of the rest of the population. Inclusive city design addresses these kinds of inequities.
Can you think of some communities where inclusive city design could make a difference?
Turkey Creek, a historic neighborhood in Gulfport, Mississippi, was established by freed slaves after the Civil War. They were given the worst quality land—marshland, subject to flooding year after year. Now, they’re surrounded by development, their land is valuable and there’s a great deal of pressure to push out the original inhabitants to make way for expensive development. It’s the type of situation you see throughout the country.
On the West Coast, in San Diego, there’s Barrio Logan, a neighborhood sandwiched between the port, rail lines, light rail and a freeway. This is a fragment of urban neighborhood bounded by major public infrastructure on three sides, and the economic pressures are great. Again, everyone’s saying that this is a great area to redevelop.
But if we go into these two communities and say, “Let’s use our New Urbanist design concepts of mixed-use prototypes and form-based zoning,” then we’ll be making the same mistake that we’ve made elsewhere: applying physical design without understanding the social fabric.
What’s the first step needed to change this syndrome?
We need to say this to developers and redevelopment agencies: “When you redevelop a neighborhood, you must recognize the impacts this will have on the local inhabitants and you must develop policies to allow them to share in the benefit.” This is already happening in San Francisco with community benefit zoning. Under this approach, the right to develop a certain square footage is given in return for explicitly measurable benefits in that same neighborhood. Those benefits are measured in terms of parks, community facilities, ongoing costs of maintenance and operations, sidewalks, schools, transit—all the things that communities need to be healthy.
How is your approach different from developers simply paying mitigation fees?
The problem is that those funds get commingled with the city’s funding system, and they aren’t necessarily targeted to go back to the locale that is experiencing the impact. We’re saying that it needs to be explicit that tax increments generated thanks to the revitalization—and the uptick in property values—need to go back to the area that generated them.
You place a very strong emphasis on public participation to address shortcomings in some New Urbanist design approaches.
When you provide opportunities for people to learn about their environment, they become proactive co-creators of that environment.
There was a study in the Mayan peninsula in Mexico. A geography class taught the local inhabitants how to map their agricultural areas, products and farmlands. Mapping became an empowerment tool, helping the community understand the extent of their resources so they could better control and manage them. It showed them that if they didn’t learn how to map themselves, they would be mapped by somebody else who had designs on their resources. In other words, it told the locals to “map or be mapped.”
That phrase, “map or be mapped,” sticks in my mind because that’s what public participation does: when local communities understand and control their resources, it’s much harder for an outside developer to come in, develop the area and leave the people who live there out of the picture.
Are there any specific examples of design under so-called New Urbanism that may look good from the outside, but don’t achieve the principles of social inclusion you espouse?
The Bay Street project in Emeryville, California, fails on many different levels. It purports to be a Main Street, with cars driving through, but it’s really a mall without a roof, with housing integrated into it. There are no neighborhood-serving stores where the people who live there can shop; you don’t go into a Gap every day—that store is a regional draw. And people who work there can’t afford to live there. There are no free gathering spaces and no parks. It’s not an authentic neighborhood and socially it just doesn’t work.
From the point of view of design, it’s really abysmal. Again, they’re trying to mimic a street, with sidewalks, streets and gutters. But it would have been better from an accessibility perspective—for people with disabilities—to eliminate the curbs and use a different technique of delineating the pedestrian right-of-way from the auto right-of-way. That’s where urban design is moving, by the way—towards a shared right-of-way.
So they totally missed it in Emeryville because they were lured into old ideas of what a city looks like. They had the opportunity to control the environment and make it universal design; instead they erected their own barriers. It was an uncritical re-adaptation of a Main Street icon and fails in what it’s trying to do. They began with a packaged idea and made no attempt to create an authentic environment.
Can you think of a redevelopment that is authentic?
It’s hard to create authenticity; it evolves over time, people shape it, people make their own choices that change how the environment functions. It’s adaptive to the user population, like so many neighborhoods in San Francisco, New York or Portland. Many neighborhoods work extremely well, but it’s a very hard thing to manufacture from the ground up as a matter of design.
Petaluma, California, rebuilt its downtown with a New Urbanist approach. Everything there is three or four stories of housing over retail. But they retained historic buildings in the industrial space, and elements that helped the downtown continue to relate to the river and waterfront. So it is successful from that standpoint.
You speak about “cultural meaning” as an important goal that inclusive city design must embrace. What do you mean by that?
Cities throughout the ages have functioned in many different ways: as centers of commerce, information exchanges, places to live and places of protection, for example. But they’re also expressions of the culture of a society. A city is a living record of its society, power structure, culture, business, architectural styles and artistic innovations—a visual repository of dreams, ambitions and hard work.
We need to create cities that are truly democratic and inclusive, that embody and promote the standards and goals voiced in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. The cultural expression in our cities needs to reflect the fact that all people are welcome, all people have something there that they can relate to. That’s a challenge for America today. Each city is unique and I can’t say exactly what each would look like, but I am sure of one thing: it’s not just bricks and mortar. Our cities need to be public spaces where we’re giving the best of what the city has to offer to everyone.
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