Ponder the Trade-Offs of Streamlining the Solar Panel Installation Codes

Solar panel installation code streamlining sounds like a great idea, but as with many other standard code implementation campaigns standardization may not truly mean standardization in its pure sense not simply because one city may want to be the exception but because different cities have different needs and knowledge of solar. 

Plus on from a more realistic and historical point, the “all politics are local” mantra of the U.S. and the historical autonomy given to cities dating back to the founding days of the nation leads me to believe that even if the federal government chooses to implement basic solar installation standards, some cities will still have additional permitting forms. For some more progressive cities, which in the case of Solar tend to be located in California, the national negotiated and consensus “standards” will be basic at best, and thus they may still choose to implement their own requirements. However, isn’t the permitting process just part of the cost of doing business in the construction industry?

As the New York Times article, “Solar Firms Frustrated by Permits” by Tom Zeller Jr.  reports: a recent report released today by SunRun, one of the nation’s largest solar leasing companies (& endorsed by numerous solar service and installation firms) “urges the Obama administration to do more to encourage local officials to adopt the codes and procedures outlined by the solar ABC’s — including the creation of a prize program similar to the Race to the Top Fund, a $4.35 billion program created as part of the 2009 stimulus package to encourage and reward states for efforts to reform education.” Though this suggestion sounds like a stimulating recommendation with lots of potential, it should be taken with a grain of salt. Solar panels are only one component of the solar industry that by the way is loosing market power because of solar power technology innovation and not the permitting process. In the same vein, the solar industry is just one component (and solution) on the renewable energy spectrum. The bigger concern and probably the reason why a doing a similar program to the Race to the Top Fund for solar panel installation is controversial is such a narrowly focused program may be exclusionary and discourage innovation in other renewable energy sources that may be more cost-effective and greener.

Grad School Reflections: Starchitecture, the New Beauty and the Beast

Like a fool in love, before my International Placemaking course I viewed starchitecture and monumental development behind rose-colored glasses. I was especially enamored with Calatrava-like bridges, more so than with Hong Kong and Dubai global city mega-project fabrications.  I was smitten by the economic development benefits and the brilliant ingenuity and engineering behind jaw-dropping design. As a result, I neglected to see the lurching dark side where the quest for starchitecture leaves the poor in the shadows.

I found Miriana Fix’s article, “Bridge to Speculation,” very interesting. For me it highlighted the power of agency showing that it matters who tells the story. Her article also made me think about what is really going on with Sao Paolo’s planners. Is Sao Paolo simply not planning for low-income people who live in the favela’s because it is full of bad planners who could care less about the public’s welfare and only favor the rich?  Is it that planners are pushing projects based on political agendas that they have no means of influencing even if they disagree with the direction? Or is it a little bit of both? I would like to think that Sao Paolo is not full of bad planners, but even this is very arbitrary, my notion of bad might be very different from someone else’s notion of bad.

What puzzles me the most is how governments can completely ignore certain undesirable populations within their jurisdictions, as if ignoring them will make them go away. Continuing to ignore the poor and further marginalizing a subset of a country’s population is not an appropriate method to diminish poverty and it can also be argues that it negatively affects the middle and upper class. Governments are very vain. They want to be able to show-off spectacular cityscapes and at the same time pretend that the poverty that hovers over them will disappear with the trickle down effects of city beautification projects like the cable-stayed bridge over the Pinheiros River in Sao Paolo. Unfortunately, this is seldom the case in the real world.

I am also deeply puzzled by the issue of what planners should do when larger political agendas are in direct contradiction to their ideologies and pareto optimal solutions. To be fair, this problem is not unique to Sao Paolo it appears in cities over and over in many different forms. Throwing in the towel is not an option. Like entrepreneurs, planners need to be idealistic, innovative and believe that we can make a difference in the constant uphill battle between social equity and market inequality.

This course offered a robust survey of the different elements and politics planners have to deal with around the world. Every week it made me think about who planners plan for? And why some people are ignored in the planning process. I think this course could better prepare planners for international and national practice by including more material about the planning infrastructure and framework in place in different countries. Exposure to the rules of the game and will help us better understand why certain projects and policies happen.

Grad School Reflections: Segregation A La Carte in Latin America

As I read both Clara Irazabal’s “A Planned City Comes of Age: Rethinking Ciudad Guayana Today,” and Nora Libertun de Duren’s “Planning A la Carte” I couldn’t help but think: “Is this a planning success or a planning failure? Was it the plan that failed or was it the system that caused the plan to fail?”

Plans for the most part start off with good intentions, the problem is that good intentions of what “ought to be” are subjective, and they are in the eye of the beholder. Another other problem is that plan as you may, a plan is simply not enough to produce or ensure what “ought to be.” Ciudad Guayana and the gated communities of Buenos Aires give us two examples of how planned cities and communities are not what they were meant to be.

In the case of Ciudad Guayana I think the system caused the plan to fail. And by the system I mean the political culture and political will pushing the project forward. Irazabal discusses how the economically-based idea of development resulted in a “somewhat inhuman quality: scattered, large buildings in vast areas, the social classes clearly separated with the poor marginalized outside the planned areas.” I find it ironic how the recently elected national democratic government of Venezuela invited planners from MIT and Harvard and put their best people on the team to plan a city that did not include the poor and created a spatially awkward landscape of scattered buildings. Did they think that poverty would somehow disappear or fix itself over night?

The excessive fiscal avarice and myopic planning vision of the municipalities in the Buenos Aires metropolitan region are the main reasons that I think the gated communities of Buenos Aires are a planning failure. While the municipal flexibility to rezone land uses for development projects spurred the development of gated communities, the municipalities should have been more exigent and required developers to pay higher development fees so that municipalities could put in place distributional programs for the un-gated poor. In the end, as seen in the picture above, gated communities have created more class segregation and distributional disparities within Buenos Aires than the good that came from the increased local income from tax-payers and permits, job creation, and infrastructure development provided by developers in exchange for project approval. Evidence of these distributional disparities can be seen in this video news story: http://www.france24.com/en/20100814-report-argentina-buenos-aires-gated-communities-barbed-wire-violence linking the public safety issues in Buenos Aires today to the segregation of the ‘haves’ and ‘haves nots’ exacerbated by gated communities.

Poverty is an extremely complex issue that planners need to plan for unlike the case of Ciudad Guayana. Similarly, planners need to think of more comprehensive plans and consider long-term effects and not just worry about how to increase revenue and or put in place piece-mail infrastructure like the case in the suburban gated communities of Buenos Aires.

Grad School Reflections: No Metro Cards & Taxi Wars

I really enjoyed both of the assigned New York Times articles as they detailed the jarring tribulations of one of the most crowned planning solutions of our times: bus transit rapid systems. In fact, each article made me chuckle a bit. As each article retold very vivid scenarios of why planners should not and cannot operate in a vacuum in any circumstance they were also great reminders of the reality of the implementation process and the ultimate test of any project: the people.

It is quite alarming to read about the taxi wars in the greater Johannesburg metropolitan area against the newly established bus system, but it is hard to merely discount them as illicit acts of rage. In a way, the acts are understandable, because even though the BRT system solution has many positive qualities for the general good of society and it aims to promote greater social equity, in this case it also has at least one negative quality: displacement. Its existence will displace the current small business operators that own the minibus taxis that provide transportation for over 14 million South Africans. The minibus taxis owners are understandably enraged because to them this new bus system is equivalent to a new Wal-Mart store that provides exactly what they do at a much lower price that they cannot compete with.

In New York City the problem with the newly implemented BRT system along Second and First Avenue manifest itself in a slightly different way: the transition process. The transition and integration of the new system is simply not logical to customers, New Yorkers cannot understand why they cannot pay with the customary Metrocard – and I quite frankly can’t either. Especially since the New York BRT system hardly incorporates any of the other BRT characteristics such as the elevated passenger loading zone and much more exclusive lanes that have distinguished the BRT’s performance from regular bus service performance. Thus, the critiques around the new system are dominated by the dissatisfaction with the general lack of foresight in the mechanics of how riders can use the new system. From the article we get that this small detail may be enough to dissuade customers from using this great new system and may make the difference in the ultimate success of the BRT in New York City.

The scenarios presented in both New York Times articles are clear reminders that citizens still have the last word in the success of any planning idea, even if it is meant to be benevolently inclusive. The people will apply basic tests to demonstrate if it is in fact inclusive or not.  The evidence from Soweto and Johannesburg, and the streets of New York highlight different ways in which citizens may exercise their ability to make or break a planning solution as heralded as the bus transit rapid system.

Grad School Reflections: Public Parks, The Key to Livable Communities Book Talk

At the AIA Book Talk at the Center for Architecture in NYC on November 30, 2010, Professor Alex Garvin from Yale discusses his book, Public Parks, The Key to Livable Communities. The book focuses on the important role that public parks play in the daily lives of citizens. To Garvin public parks come in many forms, are constantly changing and are usually manmade. He sites the conventional Central Park and Prospect Park Olmstead models, the greened boulevards in Paris and in San Antonio’s Riverwalk and in traffic islands, beaches as great models, but stresses that there is not a one-size fits all model. He argues that there are six key roles that parks play in urban society: (1) enhancing personal well-being and public health, (2) incubating a civil society, (3) sustaining a livable environment, (4) providing a public realm framework for private development, (5) evolving interaction between people and nature and park stewardship. Parks train citizens to coexist without conflict, lower crime rates, and prevent stormwater run-off pollution. Lastly, for Garvin proper park maintenance is just as important as a convenient location and good design.

Grad School Reflections: Who's at the Haiti Reconstruction Planning Table?

What happened in Haiti, or perhaps a better question is “what will happen in Haiti after the January 12^th earthquake,” especially in terms of planning.

It is evident that each speaker at the panel on Monday, November 1, 2010 at Columbia University, Before Design, Rebuilding Haiti after the Earthquake, has a unique connection to Haiti that has influenced their ideas of how the reconstruction of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince and its peripheries should materialize. For better or worse, each speaker also represents a player (it may not be them per se but certainly someone that will exemplify similar ideologies) that will help determine the reconstruction plan and the ultimate rebuilding process in Haiti. Marc-Andre Franche, represents the passionate civil service diplomat; while Charles Marks is the unassuming condescending foreigner (and architect) ready to build, help and protect the ignorant locals from the predators of capitalism; on the other hand, Jesse Keenan embodies, the land tenure equity advocate disguised as an attorney; and Dowoti Desir personifies the educated Haitian Diaspora that will help ensure cultural sensibility remains acute in the reconstruction efforts. To craft the appropriate reconstruction plan these players will also need to be joined by two other main players: the Haitian government and the Haitian locals from all social strata.

Ninety seconds and a 7.0 magnitude earthquake shook Haiti on January 12, 2010 crumbling a significant portion of its capital’s city centre down to bits and rubble. Certainly, it was not just 90 seconds of shaking that implicated such a catastrophic effect on the Caribbean nation, but rather the problem in Haiti came from deeper roots than just the earth’s tectonic shakedown. As Marc-Andre Franche suggests, the deeper roots of the problem  are found in the fallacy of the Haitian government’s short-sighted planning efforts and its belief that short term and long term planning could start at the same time. However, to me it seems that Franche is too generous in his assessment, and that in fact only short term and piece-mail planning happened in Haiti. Congruently, the severity of the impact on the built environment suggests that real long term planning was continually de-prioritized and indefinitely pushed out to a never present future that finally arrived on January 12, 2010. Today, the earthquake is regarded as both a natural and manmade disaster, with the human component taking more of the blame because of the lack of regulation and planning foresight from the Haitian government.

For me, the biggest lesson learned from the panel was the underlining cultural components that are and will continue to be present in Haiti’s reconstruction process. Who really are the people at the table that will plan the new pillars of Haiti, and are their morals in the right place? Sure, the four speakers agree that Haitians should rebuild Haiti, but what does this mean? Do they mean: Haitian planners, Haitian architects, Haitian money, Haitian workers, or Haitian construction companies? If we take the panel to represent some of the ideology creating the Haitian reconstruction plan, as I have, then equity, cultural sensibility and quality infrastructure seem to be paramount. However, I am left wondering if the earthquake’s present memory is enough to motivate Haiti’s government to move towards more equitable planning, or will it continue to procure more socially stratified infrastructure; my hope is that it will seize the opportunity to “build back better (Marc-Andre Franche).”