Blog: June, 2011
Weekly Snapshot: In Europe, Irking Drivers is Urban Policy
Bike crosswalk in Budapest. Photo by flickr user WVS.
Read full story at the New York Times >>
More from the week in urbanism:
Car share companies eye part of the curb
In San Francisco, the MTA has proposed a plan that would allow carsharing companies to rent individual parking spots on public streets.
Read full story at the SF Examiner >>
Are there too many homes in America?
A study suggests that the United States is facing a housing shortage thanks to an increase in housing prices throughout the past decade and a major decline in homebuilding.
Read full story at the Atlantic >>
Bike-Part Vending Machine Arrives in Minneapolis
In an effort to improve biking infrastructure, Minneapolis, MN has opened its first self-service bicycle repair kiosk.
Young Urbanists summer film series
Join fellow Young Urbanists for a summer movie series not to be missed. We will screen three films this summer investigating urban planning from the micro- to macro-scale...and yes, there will be popcorn!
Manufactured Landscapes on July 19 >>
Echotone on August 16 >>
Pruitt-Igoe Myth on August 30 >>
Urbanition: SF and Sydney Artists Re-think Our Use of Public Space
You are bART, a project by REBAR
The piece is part of the inaugural Sister City Biennial exhibition Urbanition, co-produced by the San Francisco Arts Commission and Sydney-based CarriageWorks and on view at the SFAC Gallery through this Saturday. Urbanition includes three works from San Francisco-based artists and three from Sydney-based artists, each tasked with proposing visionary solutions for a more humane, green and livable future for the two cities.
This Wednesday, June 29, SPUR hosts a lunchtime forum with the exhibition's three San Francisco-based artists: REBAR, Amy Balkin, whose piece would transform the Sutro Baths into a Sydney-style public beach, and Sergio De La Torre, whose mobile dinner-party cart creates a space for conversations about community issues.
All of the participating artists challenge ideas of urban mobility and public space, and in the case of REBAR and the Sydney-based group Makeshift, mobile space.
Where REBAR’s piece looks to harness the potential of public transit as physical civic space, Makeshift’s project, The Restless Quarter, looks to mobile spaces as a future adaptation to climate change events in an “age of unsettlement.” The project borrows from existing mobile services and structures and builds upon them, thinking about how our ways of living, sharing services, and access to infrastructure might become more dynamic and responsive.
Meet the SF artists at our lunchtime forum this Wednesday >>
Should We Plan for Sprawl?
Daly City, San Francisco's suburban neighbor. Photo by flickr user WarzauWynn
Many in the audience called on MTC and ABAG to add an additional scenario focused on equity, jobs and the environment. There were several dozen supporters of this scenario, and they heavily outnumbered the small contingent who spoke about the evils of central planning, socialism, income distribution and the perceived illegality of the entire planning process. SPUR weighed in on the debate with a policy letter to the MTC commissioners. At the meeting, we boiled down our recommendations to two main points:
Good Government Awards: How Susan Fernyak prevented an H1N1 disaster
SPUR’s 31st annual Good Government Awards, held earlier this year, honored five City of San Francisco employees and teams who have performed exceptionally, becoming models for other agencies and cities around the country.
In recognition of her vital role in the City, her leadership in developing the City's Infectious Disease Response Plan and for her exemplary response to the 2009 outbreak of the H1N1 Influenza, Dr. Susan Fernyak has been selected for a 2011 MFAC Public Managerial Excellence Award. Dr. Fernyak's response to the H1N1 epidemic was not only an exceptional response for the City and County of San Francisco, but also influenced and changed the way the state and federal government as well as many other cities responded to the epidemic. It allowed for vaccines to be available in San Francisco a week before any neighboring counties and kept the number of H1N1 cases per capita lower than in other localities. She also commands the respect of her staff, other departments and colleagues in the private sector.
Watch our video on Susan Fernyak's work:
Traffic Safety in the Age of the Bicycle
It’s easy to point out what activities are dangerous and illegal in Gabriel’s video: pedestrians jaywalking, bikes travelling against traffic, cars running red lights or refusing to yield when turning. But it’s not always easy to know the correct way for cars, bicycles and pedestrians to interact. For instance, did you know that in California, when making a right turn on a street with a bike lane, a car is required to merge into the bike lane anywhere between 50 and 200 feet before the intersection? In other states, such as Oregon, the car would make its turn at the intersection, crossing the bike lane. Differences between states may be one reason that laws related to bicyclists are not as well known as other traffic laws.
The SFMTA estimates that bike ridership in San Francisco increased 58 percent between 2006 and 2010, and the organization is taking steps to make travelling around the city safer and easier for cyclists. Most recently, the SFMTA painted “bike boxes” on Market Street, adding to those already at 14th and Folsom streets and at Scott and Oak streets. Bike boxes are solid green squares on the pavement just before the crosswalk, behind which cars must stop but on which bicyclists may idle. This creates a designated space for cyclists to pause at red lights, rather than leaving them stranded between cars, and could help make drivers more aware of cyclists around them. However, it could also prevent drivers from making right-on-red turns.
The SFMTA has also approved 34 miles of new bike lanes for San Francisco. These include a lane down 17th Street from Castro Street to the Bay, a lane on Kirkham Street from 7th Avenue to the Great Highway, and an extension of the lanes on JFK Drive that would continue on Oak and Fell Streets, connecting Divisadero to Golden Gate Park and the ocean. These new lanes and improvements could make biking in the city safer and easier, and make bike movements more predictable for motorists trying to avoid them -- so long as everyone follows the rules. Whether the improvements will cut down on the aggressive driving, cycling and jaywalking featured in Gabriel’s video remains to be seen.
The Chronicle Building's Latest Transformation
Since the DeYoung Brothers first founded the The Daily Dramatic Chronicle in 1865, the home of San Francisco’s pioneering newspaper has been an incubator for ideas and innovation. Within a decade of its founding, the San Francisco Chronicle had the largest circulation of any newspaper west of the Mississippi River. The company has moved twice since then, and its headquarters buildings have always represented changing ideas about design and planning in the city.
Today that's more true than ever: the Chronicle’s current home at 901 Mission Street is part of the 5M project, a redevelopment project that fosters innovation by providing space, funding and counseling to startup companies. This Tuesday, June 21, SPUR will hold a forum on artisan manufacturing at TechShop, a member-based workshop located at 926 Howard Street and part of the 5M block.
Before we visit this latest incarnation, let's look back at the history and transformation of the Chron's many headquarters.
The first Chronicle office was at the corner of Bush and Kearny Streets, shown below in 1880.
First Chronicle office, Bush and Kearny Streets, 1880
Source: San Francisco Public Library
Once the newspaper gained momentum, the DeYoung Brothers commissioned legendary skyscraper architects Burnham and Root of Chicago to design the original Chronicle Building (also known as the “Old” Chronicle Building or the DeYoung Building). Completed in 1889, it was located at 690 Market Street, at the corner of Third and Kearny Streets. After the 1906 earthquake and fire, Burnham’s local architect, Willis Polk, rebuilt the building, which was restored in 2007 and is now listed as a local historic landmark. The iconic design of the original headquarters building, the first skyscraper in San Francisco and the first steel frame building in the west, represented the city's turn-of-the-century prosperity and its earnest rebuilding effort.
“Old” Chronicle Building at 690 Market Street, 1904
Source: San Francisco Public Library
In 1924, as the newspaper continued to grow, the Chron's owners commissioned a new headquarters and newspaper publishing plant at 901 Mission Street, at the corner of Fifth and Mission. Designed by Charles Peter Weeks & William Peyton Day, the building was constructed in the Gothic Revival style, said to reflect the scholastic and romantic nature of the newspaper business. This building was re-clad with stucco and stripped of much of its Gothic Revival detailing in 1968. The 901 Mission Street building has served as the home base of the Chronicle for eighty-seven years and is currently undergoing a transformation of a different kind. .jpg)
Source: SF Chronicle
Today, the Chronicle’s home is part of the enterprising 5M project. The current tenants of the project include TechShop (a membership-based workshop), Intersection for the Arts (an alternative nonprofit art space), the Hub Bay Area (an international social entrepreneurs' collective), and Square (a mobile payment firm).
In addition to our forum at TechShop this week, we'll also hear the story behind the visioning and creation of this creative cluster at our Incubators and creative communities forum on August 17.
Join us for the artisan manufacturing forum in the Chronicle Building >>
How Do We Get DENSER?
Due to overwhelming demand pre-registration for this event is closed. A limited number of tickets will be available at the door.
This Tuesday night SPUR will host DENSER, a "Pecha Kucha" night on density, infill and urban development. What's Pecha Kucha? Named after the Japanese word for conversation or “chit chat,” it's a place for designers and other thinkers to showcase their work to the public. In Pecha Kucha's patented fast-and-furious format, presenters are allowed to show 20 slides -- each for just 20 seconds. That's a total of about 6.5 minutes to quickly convey one's ideas or work to the audience, allowing for a greater number of voices and more idea swapping.
Pecha Kucha originated in Tokyo in 2003. Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham Architecture came up with the events as a way for young designers in architecture and other fields to meet, mingle and share their work. It quickly grew, turning into large-scale celebrations of creativity and collaboration, with PK nights now taking place in 418 cities worldwide.
Among the impressive and thought-provoking presenters with us Tuesday night will be John Wong from SWA, Kit Hodge from SF Bicycle Coalition, Craig Scott of Iwamoto/Scott Architecture, David Baker of David Baker Architects, Grady Gillies from UCLA Superstudio, Ben Grant from SPUR, Robin Levitt, Julie Kim, Antonio Roma-Alacala of SF Urban Agriculture Alliance and Pecha Kucha’s Paul Jamtgaard.
The event will begin at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 21, at the SPUR Urban Center. Pre-registration is full, but a limited number of tickets will be available at the door.
Will Bay Area Cities Survive the Next Big Disaster?
What happens the next time we have a major earthquake on the Hayward or San Andreas Fault? What should we be doing right now to make sure we are prepared? On Monday, I spoke at a forum hosted by the Association of Bay Area Governments, “Shaken Awake: Creative Ways to Strengthen Housing and Promote Resilience in Today’s Economy.”
Our session focused on the topic of long-term recovery, the months and years it will take to rebuild our city and our region after a major event. SPUR posits that there are three core functions of government during recovery:
1. Repairing public facilities and services (the assets that government owns/controls)
2. Providing resources and information for private sector actors to repair and rebuild their affected assets
3. Providing vision and leadership for the recovery and rebuilding process.
We sought to determine which of these local governments are most prepared to tackle and which are they least prepared to tackle? As panelist Charles Eadie pointed out, during the recovery phase, there is enormous pressure to rebuild quickly, so planning often happens after the fact, a process he described as “ready, fire, aim.”
The truth is that after the disaster, we will face enormous challenges exacerbated by time compression: the pressure to rebuild our cities quickly while also taking the time to make thoughtful land-use decisions. SPUR is in the process of developing recommendations to help facilitate rapid and thoughtful recovery in the post-disaster period.
Read more about SPUR’s work on disaster recovery >>
Adapt! exhibition explores climate change
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By 2100, seas will rise by an estimated 55 inches, exposing 270,000 people in the Bay Area to flood risk and threatening $62 billion of development. The Bay Area is also likely to see as many as eight times as many "extreme heat" days by the close of the century. What should we do to get ready? Our exhibition Adapt! -- on view in the SPUR Urban Center Gallery through July 22 -- explores how climate change will affect the Bay Area and what our cities need to do now to prepare.
Visit the exhibition >>
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