CITICHAT 42/2007 - 26 October 2007
Year-end review 1 - Transportation
I said last week that in ten years time, the inner city of Johannesburg will be unrecognisable from the city of today! One of the reasons for this will be ‘transportation’ and, more particularly in relation to the inner city, transportation infrastructure.
Surely one of the major issues that differentiates a ‘world class’ city from the ‘run-of-the-mill’ is transportation? Those of you who have spent time in most European and US cities will have been struck by the choice of a variety of public transport on offer that makes it a pleasure to connect from point A to point B. At the other end of the scale, visitors to South African cities just cannot understand how our citizens cope without visible, understandable, safe and dependable transport. Now we have a flurry of activity aimed at reversing our current situation through the Gautrain, the Bus Rapid Transport System (BRT), the Inner City Distribution System (ICDS), Rea Vaya (what appears to have been the Integrated Transportation System under a new name,) Yet, with the plethora of systems being provided there are also inherent dangers if we do not approach transportation planning with the right motives and objectives. Gary Toth, a US transportation planner for over thirty years says “ I was part of a profession that for five decades viewed its mission as simply accommodating the demands of traffic, whether on local streets or on state and national highways. The quality of life in communities and the condition of the environment were someone else’s business; our job was to move cars and trucks (I would add ‘buses’) as smoothly and rapidly as possible…..but as time went on, it became clear to me that the real point of transportation projects should be building successful communities and fostering economic prosperity”
Roberta Brandes Gratz, “The Living City” wrote this back in 1994 “Healthy cities contain a rich mix of old and new buildings and uses, high style and ordinary, large and modest, all in place due to historical economic and social forces involving the actions of many different people and institutions over a period of decades, even centuries. And healthy cities recognize the crucial need to maintain or rebuild a mass transit infrastructure. Cities become suburban and cannot function as cities if auto-dependency overtakes mass transit options. They become office parks on top of shopping malls and parking garages instead.”
This reference to “healthy cities” probably owes its origin to city guru, the late Jane Jacobs, who made these comments in a 1993 radio interview ”There is a kind of mass transit cities used to be very rich in, and Toronto still is, the kind that is part of the fabric of the city itself, doesn’t just go overhead and take people whoosh, but links all kinds of places within the city and that’s the kind of mass transit we need to begin to reconstitute…..It’s a necessity for people to go to work. It’s a necessity for people to get to hospitals, to schools. It isn’t just a frill. In a really healthy city, it’s something that knots the whole thing together and has a great deal to do with the economy.”
At about the time of that broadcast, I commented on an extensive investigation that the City undertook into an Inner City Distribution System (ICDS) based on a light rail solution. The costs proved to be indigestible to the city councillors of the time and, notwithstanding that it would have been a unique solution, ahead of its time, it died a natural death thus joining a number of similar initiatives in the graveyard of great but unrealised dreams.
Ten years later I commented in Citichat on an investigation into another ICDS which considered road-based (bus and mini-bus taxi) as well as rail options.
I wrote that “The inner city really suffers the lack of a decent, efficient, inexpensive and reliable public transportation system. In fact if we consider our quest for ‘’world class” city status, this is a huge hole that just must be fixed.”
Roberta Brandes Gratz again; “…..cities and towns alike will rise or fall on how transportation dilemmas are resolved. All development and redevelopment is shaped by transportation.”
Then in 2004 I wrote “…. Transportation….appears to have not progressed greatly during the past decade. In fact the situation in various parts of the city looks, at best, chaotic!” I went on to say that this was in spite of some significant work having been accomplished in that “Two plans that will have a significant impact on the inner city have been developed. The first is the Integrated Transport Plan and the second is the Inner City Distribution System. The former proposes a strategy that should achieve, over time, “a safe and efficient transportation system, with a public transport focus, that will support a world class city; connecting businesses, people and places in a sustainable and cost effective manner and through this, improve the standard of living and quality of life of all the city’s inhabitants and the overall competitiveness and growth of the City’s economy.” The second of the plans was yet more research into an Inner City Distribution System. This examined how accessibility and connectivity within the inner city could be improved and how it could be integrated with the Gautrain, etc. The ICDS model used, tested 16, 35 and 55 seater mini-taxis/commuter buses as well as tram and light rail systems. The final proposal was for a road based system and I stated, “if we go that route, we will be missing out on a probably never-to-be-repeated opportunity to put in place the kind of system that we will be able to show off in 2010 and beyond as evidence of our move to World Class status.”
Well, it’s all about to start changing again! From the above it is clear that the issue of an integrated transport plan has been on Joburg’s radar screen for an awfully long time and many of us have had the feeling for years that all we had, in fact, was a plan on the radar screen. As with so many other issues, something special was needed to actually galvanise action, to move the plan from the radar screen to ground level implementation. In the case of our transportation plan, the ‘something special’ was the 2010 World Cup! Remember all those pictures and comments of happy commuters at the previous event in Germany! Yet, even when forward motion became inevitable because of 2010, it was again checked by late changes to the master-plan. It had not apparently previously been envisaged that the major component of our plan would be in the form not only of ‘Bus Rapid Transport’ (BRT), but, that the BRT model would be what I call the “South American Model” or, more particularly that operating in Bogota, Colombia. This ‘South American solution’ came about only in July/August last year as a result of the city’s councilor responsible for transportation visiting South America. The years of planning that led to the whole integrated transportation system and ICDS had to be re-jigged hurriedly in 12 to 18 months which is why, even with all the 2010 pressure, we are still in the starting blocks!
The basics of the Bogota model (which are a refinement of the earlier Brazilian Curitiba model) are the use on main ‘trunk’ service routes of “large articulated buses running on segregated bus ways with level boarding and closed stations” The ‘large articulated buses’ will carry 90 passengers. Then there will be a complementary service of “regular non-articulated, 60 passenger, buses with doors on both sides to allow operations in the segregated streets as well as normal streets” and, finally, a feeder service of “midi buses that will operate in mixed traffic in feeder routes.” The proliferation of combi-taxis as we know them, will largely disappear according to a report in Business Day earlier this week “with the existing taxi and bus operators on the affected routes” becoming “the joint operators of the system”.
There was a good article and pic in the Financial Mail last week that showed what the Bogota model looks like but we haven’t seen such illustrations superimposed on our own city grid. In fact, having seen and experienced the Curitiba model personally, I have difficulty in transposing it onto our generally narrow congested streets which is when both the practical difficulties and the impact it will have on the urban fabric will become real. Looking at the proposed routing in the inner city, I am greatly concerned that Gary Toth’s recollections of the past transportation planning approach are being revisited on us. With the greatest respect to those who have spent many midnight hours over the inner city routing, it looks to me like a transport system imposed on our grid rather than generated by the real needs of communities and places to be linked together. A couple of our important central city north/south connector roads will become fully dedicated busways totally displacing other vehicles and providing a tight central transport ‘box’ framed by Rissik, west; Quartz, east and Smit/Wolmarans (north) and Main (south) To the east of this ‘box’ is a large loop around the eastern inner city areas to just beyond Ellis Park and a narrower loop westward stopping short of the ‘double-decker’ highway – why the opportunity to connect to the Oriental Plaza and Fordsburg is not grasped is hard to understand. Linkage to the broader Integrated Transport Network by way of BRT is provided at the south west, east and north behind the Metro Centre.
Phase 1A of the overall transport plan must be in place by the Confederation Cup, 2009, this includes 40 kms of busway and 48 stations and Phase 1B must be in place for 2010 – 86 kms and 102 stations. The other phases of the plan will roll-out thereafter. Total budget, according to Business Day, is some R2 billion. This is a huge call particularly in an era of other major 2010 construction commitments.
The result of the ‘new’ transportation approach is that many of the inner city streets will clearly change and, in turn, the ‘feel’ of the inner city will br dramatically altered. But the other humongous change to the inner city will be the creation of the International Transit and Shopping Centre (ITSC) together with the development that it will inevitably attract. This enormous project will stretch from Queen Elizabeth Bridge in the west to Joubert Park in the east and from Wolmarans Street in the north to Bree Street in the south – its footprint covers almost a quadrant of what we would have dubbed the old ‘CBD’. At some stage in the future it will probably also be extended to close the gap between the Queen Elizabeth and Nelson Mandela Bridges by decking over the railway lines to create a new, mixed use, mainly residential area.
The ITSC will provide (1) consolidated parking ranking and waiting areas for long-distance taxis currently concentrated around Joubert Park and ranked in the Kazerne parking garages (which will be demolished) and those dispatched from the roof above Park Station - Park Central - and the long distance and international buses that rank both in Park Station and the surrounding streets of Braamfontein.; (2) a major retail mall built along the lines of the retail ‘malls’ of international airports such as at OR Tambo (3) major pedestrian linkages connecting to the Gautrain and Park stations, taxi and bus ranks and (4) a multi-level structure that will incorporate all of the above and that will ultimately form a platform off which literally dozens blocks of residential accommodation will be built. The project will obviously be built in numerous phases but the initial phase will be that marked 1 above. The ultimate cost will run into billions of rand – the initial work over the next few years will probably be between a half a billion and a billion rand!
The Gautrain station (R100 million) is already well under way opposite the northern end of Park Station between Wolmarans and Smit Streets – it will link into Park Station and the mega-development ITSC development. The Gautrain will run from here to Rosebank, Sandton and Marlboro where it will branch off the link to OR Tambo International Airport. From Marlboro it will also link to Midrand, Centurion, Pretoria and Hatfield. All of the Gautrain stations are already under construction and the transit nodes they are creating are attracting new investment – the R22 billion Gautrain is merely the conduit for massive development.
I recently had the good fortune to be invited to a presentation by ARUP, the global multi-disciplinary design and consulting group, on the occasion of the establishment of a specialist transit interchange unit in South Africa. They showed us some of the transit projects that they have been associated with in the UK, Europe, Middle and Far East, etc and shared the philosophy that they have developed in addressing such projects. It was an exciting display of just what can be achieved by developing around the concept of transportation rather than by merely providing transportation for its own sake. Key words that were illustrated from their experience were accessibility; integration; developmental value; operations; sustainability and constructability and, again, the need to connect communities was emphasized.
The Urban Land Institute (ULI) provides some powerful principles for successful development around transit emphasizing again that “transit is a tool to help achieve a community vision”; to be effective partnerships with the development community need to be forged; “think development when you think transit”; “BUILD A PLACE NOT A PROJECT”; make retail development market driven not transit driven; just as people from every part of the economic spectrum use transit, people from every part of the economic spectrum like to live near transit .
Some more earned wisdom from Gary Toth: “Traffic planners and public officials need to foster land-use planning at the community level, ….. this includes creating more attractive places that people will want to visit in both existing developments and new ones. A strong sense of place benefits the overall transportation system” “ View streets as places – streets take up as much as a third of a community’s land, yet, under planning policies of the past 70 years, people have given up their rights to public property”
Our proposed transportation intervention is going to change the look and the feel of the inner city and improve our mobility but unless it also “sustains our communities, protects our environment and helps restore our physical fitness and health” it will merely be meeting a knee jerk reaction fulfilling a passing need, the short-term transportation of 2010 visitors! We need to heed and lean heavily on appropriate international experience if we are going to be going beyond short-term plaudits!
Regards, neil
Friday, October 26, 2007
Friday, October 12, 2007
Livability Citichat 12 October 2007
CITICHAT 41/2007 - 12 October 2007
Making the city a better place to live.
In ten years time, the inner city of Johannesburg will be unrecognisable from the city of today!
Over the next five to six weeks Citichat will be looking at changes that have happened over the past decade, those currently planned or underway and some possibilities for the future. The rapidly looming 2010, meeting the ever increasing demand for housing, a transportation system that will have a widespread and dramatic impact on the city and the changing nature of the demand for commercial premises will all put new pressures on the urban fabric. The timeous and proactive response to these pressures will be critical. The infrastructure that will have to deal with these responses will also be crucial and, here, I am not referring to physical infrastructure, although that is clearly an aspect, but to the social and institutional infrastructure. These have not always been particularly successful over the last decade with progress often being made despite them rather than because of them. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that some have grossly retarded progress. Over the past couple of months it has become clear that many aspects of the public sector, at all levels, are feeble if working at all. Response times and planning are just not good enough for the age we live in; in-fighting and one-upmanship bedevils the public sector and the right words become a refrain against which a background of lack of action is palpable. I see a quotation from a major group of property owners/managers in the recently released ‘Trafalgar Inner City Report 2007’ to the effect that “the council continues lagging private sector improvements”. Questions are being asked by the private sector of the ability of council to take cognisance of the real changes being currently experienced in their planning for the future.
I thought that 2010 would be a unifying factor providing all levels and groups with a common goal but I see continuous stratification and priority differentiation with different groups doing there own thing. Irrespective, the inner city will change, dramatically.
As mentioned, the ‘Trafalgar Inner City Report 2007’was published a couple of weeks back, the sixth year it has been produced, but this year appears to be a break from its previous local analytic approach to providing broader commentaries on various aspects of inner cities locally and internationally by a range of contributors. You can source it on www.innercityreport.co.za and it makes interesting reading with a wealth of excellent articles from a variety of people with international exposure as well as local experience. A number of its articles are particularly pertinent and thought provoking. Just one example amongst many, from Ian FiFe’s “Street Sadness” – Ian is known as a highly competent journalist but he is also a director/shareholder of a black-owned sectional title investor company thus qualifying him to draw this sort of conclusion: “When a sectional title building goes wrong, the owners need help. Cutting their electricity raises their suffering and increases the seething resentment in the city. Expropriating their building for the Better Buildings Programme – the Johannesburg Property Company initiative aimed at eradication inner city slums – destroys their lives. A careful combination of understanding, connecting and persuading is a step in the right direction. We do not have better answers. More appropriate and skilled people among the local authorities must accept this problem for what it is and find the best solutions. When they find it, many intractable inner city problems will slowly be resolved.”
In his Foreword to this year’s Report, the Chairman of Trafalgar, Neville Schaeffer, makes some interesting comments about international urban issues including the following:
“Inner cities around the world share the same problems. Each one has experienced a time in their history where the degradation and neglect has created cesspools of slum lands rife for building hijackers, greedy slum lords and yet still home to thousands of people desperately seeking a better life than one from which they are trying to escape”.
There are some who believe that cities are subject to cycles of growth and decline and it’s just a question of riding out the bad times so that you can capitalise on the good. I don’t subscribe to that belief, and I’m not suggesting that Neville Schaeffer does - certainly I have found that cities internationally face very similar problems to ourselves and that cities internationally are experiencing a major upturn. The group I recently took to various US cities were staggered by the similarities of problems being addressed! We do seem to think that our issues are unique, far from it! Whatever the reasons, and there are many, I believe in response to the threats and problems that beset ‘downtowns’, or inner cities, it is what you do and how you do it that is critical. By ‘you’ I mean government (local government in particular), business and the broader community, collectively
On our recent trip to the US we saw the impact that mayors can have on a city - in the American system, Executive Mayors dictate the policies of their term of office far more visibly than here – one of the cities we visited has an Executive Mayor not in the least bit interested in the ‘downtown’ which has, as a result, regressed during his term of office and everyone is looking forward to his successor who will, it is believed, again bring balance to the situation. Suffering from ‘term-of-office’ disease seems to be an international phenomenum – previously the city officials brought a continuity and order to city progress but that seems to no longer be the case and, locally, we certainly have the enormous problem of loss of institutional memory. Policy changes appear within an individual mayor’s term not because of improvement but because the previous policy appears to have been forgotten!
The Executive Mayor of New York preaches a different gospel from his officials – he was commenting on his city officials’ tendency to ‘buy’ stakeholders by financially supporting new building initiatives – his policy, he stated is “not to give tax incentives to get companies to locate here” A better policy, he said, is to “bribe employees” by making the city a better place to live. Yes! I would have added …”for everyone.” We use the same terminology but our actions are not consistent with the meaning of the words!
In Portland, last year, I saw a really active community, keeping a close, collective watch on what the city was doing, being properly consulted and being stridently vocal about issues that they disagreed with, and listened to! And, actually getting their hands dirty when necessary. Here, 13 years after 1994, we still have a community divided on class, race and economy. To some extent I believe that the political system must shoulder a great deal of the blame. Representative community needs far more active support than a ward councilor system where the ability and commitment of the councilor seems to be the sole determinant of ‘community involvement’.
In the States and the UK in general, business appears to be far more broad- minded by being involved and committed to the macro picture whilst keeping a close watch on their own bottom-lines. Here, generally, it is the latter that appears far too often to be the main motivator.
Let’s face it, most people, and certainly local government and business, stood to one side for many years decrying the city’s degradation but doing virtually nothing to change it – in fact exacerbating decline through either doing nothing and/or not acting in the best interests of the city. It is only since the current Executive Mayor’s first term of office that we have experienced positive action that, together with the improved national and local economy, and the lure of 2010, has resulted in a clear upturn. This was initially fuelled by local government’s own investments in key infrastructure that, in turn, attracted the private sector and it is the private sector that have largely maintained the impetus over the past few years with Council, apart from some noteable exceptions, becoming quite moribund. I was, this week, enquiring about the resolution of a problem that first surfaced almost exactly a year ago to be told that the two departments involved were at a ‘stand off’ because of a disagreement of how to proceed – so no-one is dealing with the issue! Wednesday evening’s ‘Star’ trumpets “Metro cops get tough in inner city ” – it’s about time, crime has been with us for years! The Metro police talk ad infinitum about ‘zero tolerance’ but stand around corners to catch cell phone drivers whilst metres away squeegee men visibly and actively pursue their intimadatory practice and vendors badger motorists. Zero tolerance?
If I sound negative, I’m not. I still have great faith in the future of the inner city and there is still no doubt in my mind that we are going to see an extraordinarily different inner city emerging over the next decade or two and we’ll start to look at it in depth from next week.
Enjoy the rugby, cheers, neil
Making the city a better place to live.
In ten years time, the inner city of Johannesburg will be unrecognisable from the city of today!
Over the next five to six weeks Citichat will be looking at changes that have happened over the past decade, those currently planned or underway and some possibilities for the future. The rapidly looming 2010, meeting the ever increasing demand for housing, a transportation system that will have a widespread and dramatic impact on the city and the changing nature of the demand for commercial premises will all put new pressures on the urban fabric. The timeous and proactive response to these pressures will be critical. The infrastructure that will have to deal with these responses will also be crucial and, here, I am not referring to physical infrastructure, although that is clearly an aspect, but to the social and institutional infrastructure. These have not always been particularly successful over the last decade with progress often being made despite them rather than because of them. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that some have grossly retarded progress. Over the past couple of months it has become clear that many aspects of the public sector, at all levels, are feeble if working at all. Response times and planning are just not good enough for the age we live in; in-fighting and one-upmanship bedevils the public sector and the right words become a refrain against which a background of lack of action is palpable. I see a quotation from a major group of property owners/managers in the recently released ‘Trafalgar Inner City Report 2007’ to the effect that “the council continues lagging private sector improvements”. Questions are being asked by the private sector of the ability of council to take cognisance of the real changes being currently experienced in their planning for the future.
I thought that 2010 would be a unifying factor providing all levels and groups with a common goal but I see continuous stratification and priority differentiation with different groups doing there own thing. Irrespective, the inner city will change, dramatically.
As mentioned, the ‘Trafalgar Inner City Report 2007’was published a couple of weeks back, the sixth year it has been produced, but this year appears to be a break from its previous local analytic approach to providing broader commentaries on various aspects of inner cities locally and internationally by a range of contributors. You can source it on www.innercityreport.co.za and it makes interesting reading with a wealth of excellent articles from a variety of people with international exposure as well as local experience. A number of its articles are particularly pertinent and thought provoking. Just one example amongst many, from Ian FiFe’s “Street Sadness” – Ian is known as a highly competent journalist but he is also a director/shareholder of a black-owned sectional title investor company thus qualifying him to draw this sort of conclusion: “When a sectional title building goes wrong, the owners need help. Cutting their electricity raises their suffering and increases the seething resentment in the city. Expropriating their building for the Better Buildings Programme – the Johannesburg Property Company initiative aimed at eradication inner city slums – destroys their lives. A careful combination of understanding, connecting and persuading is a step in the right direction. We do not have better answers. More appropriate and skilled people among the local authorities must accept this problem for what it is and find the best solutions. When they find it, many intractable inner city problems will slowly be resolved.”
In his Foreword to this year’s Report, the Chairman of Trafalgar, Neville Schaeffer, makes some interesting comments about international urban issues including the following:
“Inner cities around the world share the same problems. Each one has experienced a time in their history where the degradation and neglect has created cesspools of slum lands rife for building hijackers, greedy slum lords and yet still home to thousands of people desperately seeking a better life than one from which they are trying to escape”.
There are some who believe that cities are subject to cycles of growth and decline and it’s just a question of riding out the bad times so that you can capitalise on the good. I don’t subscribe to that belief, and I’m not suggesting that Neville Schaeffer does - certainly I have found that cities internationally face very similar problems to ourselves and that cities internationally are experiencing a major upturn. The group I recently took to various US cities were staggered by the similarities of problems being addressed! We do seem to think that our issues are unique, far from it! Whatever the reasons, and there are many, I believe in response to the threats and problems that beset ‘downtowns’, or inner cities, it is what you do and how you do it that is critical. By ‘you’ I mean government (local government in particular), business and the broader community, collectively
On our recent trip to the US we saw the impact that mayors can have on a city - in the American system, Executive Mayors dictate the policies of their term of office far more visibly than here – one of the cities we visited has an Executive Mayor not in the least bit interested in the ‘downtown’ which has, as a result, regressed during his term of office and everyone is looking forward to his successor who will, it is believed, again bring balance to the situation. Suffering from ‘term-of-office’ disease seems to be an international phenomenum – previously the city officials brought a continuity and order to city progress but that seems to no longer be the case and, locally, we certainly have the enormous problem of loss of institutional memory. Policy changes appear within an individual mayor’s term not because of improvement but because the previous policy appears to have been forgotten!
The Executive Mayor of New York preaches a different gospel from his officials – he was commenting on his city officials’ tendency to ‘buy’ stakeholders by financially supporting new building initiatives – his policy, he stated is “not to give tax incentives to get companies to locate here” A better policy, he said, is to “bribe employees” by making the city a better place to live. Yes! I would have added …”for everyone.” We use the same terminology but our actions are not consistent with the meaning of the words!
In Portland, last year, I saw a really active community, keeping a close, collective watch on what the city was doing, being properly consulted and being stridently vocal about issues that they disagreed with, and listened to! And, actually getting their hands dirty when necessary. Here, 13 years after 1994, we still have a community divided on class, race and economy. To some extent I believe that the political system must shoulder a great deal of the blame. Representative community needs far more active support than a ward councilor system where the ability and commitment of the councilor seems to be the sole determinant of ‘community involvement’.
In the States and the UK in general, business appears to be far more broad- minded by being involved and committed to the macro picture whilst keeping a close watch on their own bottom-lines. Here, generally, it is the latter that appears far too often to be the main motivator.
Let’s face it, most people, and certainly local government and business, stood to one side for many years decrying the city’s degradation but doing virtually nothing to change it – in fact exacerbating decline through either doing nothing and/or not acting in the best interests of the city. It is only since the current Executive Mayor’s first term of office that we have experienced positive action that, together with the improved national and local economy, and the lure of 2010, has resulted in a clear upturn. This was initially fuelled by local government’s own investments in key infrastructure that, in turn, attracted the private sector and it is the private sector that have largely maintained the impetus over the past few years with Council, apart from some noteable exceptions, becoming quite moribund. I was, this week, enquiring about the resolution of a problem that first surfaced almost exactly a year ago to be told that the two departments involved were at a ‘stand off’ because of a disagreement of how to proceed – so no-one is dealing with the issue! Wednesday evening’s ‘Star’ trumpets “Metro cops get tough in inner city ” – it’s about time, crime has been with us for years! The Metro police talk ad infinitum about ‘zero tolerance’ but stand around corners to catch cell phone drivers whilst metres away squeegee men visibly and actively pursue their intimadatory practice and vendors badger motorists. Zero tolerance?
If I sound negative, I’m not. I still have great faith in the future of the inner city and there is still no doubt in my mind that we are going to see an extraordinarily different inner city emerging over the next decade or two and we’ll start to look at it in depth from next week.
Enjoy the rugby, cheers, neil
Friday, October 5, 2007
IDA NYC 2007 Citichat 5 October 2006
CITICHAT 40/2007 - 5 October 2007
IDA Conference and quotable quotes
Just to wrap up on my recent trip to the USA and then, next week, back to Joburg and we’ll look at what’s been happening in Joeys over the past year.
This week, some thoughts from the International Downtown Association’s 53rd Conference and World Congress held in New York City from 14 to 18 September and some quotes, many of which are relevant to us, from various articles, speakers or people we work-shopped with,.
IDA partners with a number of international urban bodies to expand its Annual Conference into a World Congress every 3 years. The first of these was in Coventry, England in 1997 and since then the Congress has alternated between the UK and the States. The next one is to be held in London in 2010, thereafter it starts to go global with Montreal, Canada in 2013 whilst 2016 will be our turn in South Africa with the main conference probably being held in Cape Town but with Joburg also featuring strongly.
This year’s conference/congress was held in the heart of Times Square, New York City, and was attended by over 1000 delegates from all over the world. The conference theme was ‘Big Dreams, Bold Ideas’. Preceding the conference there were tours and professional development workshops ranging from retail to branding, law enforcement to Improvement District establishment and management. The conference programme itself provided a number of plenaries with key-note speakers (six) and then a huge variety of sessions (95 in all during 7 or 8 parallel periods) where the biggest problem was which session to attend. Impossible to bring you even a broad feel of content but here, firstly, are a couple of issues that I resonated with and secondly, some quotes from a variety of people we met with or heard speak (with thanks to Ashwin Daya from the Mandela Bay Development Agency who managed to capture them). Reviewing the issues that interested me show my personal growth from ‘clean and safe’ ten-plus years ago to ‘place and space’!
Keynote Speaker, Lars Gemzoe who is a senior consultant and associate partner in the Gehl Architects practice and a senior lecturer in Urban Design at the School of Architecture, Copenhagen:
• “All cities have statistics and information and departments that deal with cars but no departments or statistics on public space and pedestrians.”
• “The people in the city tend to be invisible and poorly represented in the planning process”
Public space, he pointed out, fulfils a number of needs:
• Pleasure – “one of the pleasures of daily life is to walk and bicycle.”
• Economic – “great public spaces are highly valued by people, businesses and property owners”
• Recreation – “ urban recreation where the presence of other people provides social interaction”
• Social – “The city is a meeting place, people watching is one of the great attractions of a city - both watching and being watched”
• Democratic and fun - Public space is democratically driven and adds an open society dimension to cities. Empty streets are not inviting nor safe – public space adds a general human dimension to a city offering sheer fun and surprise”
Gemzoe says that if public spaces provided are of good quality, people will come “the city is a gallery for contemporary art and we need policies that promote active ground floor frontages”
He made an interesting comment about Melbourne, saying that it is like any other modern city of the world but when it comes to street life and public space it is like Paris, one of the most livable cities in the world.
Comments made by Paul Levy (Philadelphia Center City District)
The quality of public spaces does matter. There are things that you can influence – litter and grafitti; customer friendliness; night time lighting; visitor signs; special events, neglected facades, roller shutter doors. You need public standards and these need to be enforced by the police. Police are especially trained in this kind of work – Special Protocol Outreach Teams (SPOT) deal with behavioural and health issues. A Special Services Police Team deals with homeless and behavioural issues. –
Enforcing standards of public behaviour means:
• No night sleeping on parks
• No urination in publlc
• No public feeding
Housing the homeless
I was interested in the change of approach that has come about in some American cities over the last decade in relation to the issue of homelessness. High proportions of Americans living on the street have mental problems or substance abuse problems. (Washington DC – 20% of people live below the poverty level; 36% are functionally illiterate: 8% unemployed although there is agreement that the actual figure is way higher than the official number!) There appears to be a very strong approach to now providing appropriate housing and moving away from the ‘shelter’ approach. New York calls this type of housing “supportive housing” – and it consists of fully furnished and equipped one-bedroomed units in blocks that offer in-house support services. The buildings provide vegetable gardens, teaching space and courtyard playgrounds. Services include a nurse; psychiatrist; case management; clinical management; housing assistance all on site. Expensive? I don’t think it should necessarily be so – we provide all those services from centralised government funded departments – surely it would be better to decentralise into practical hands-on involvement? The capital costs seem to be generated in different ways in different states – some states appear to adopt a surcharge on commercial development of $10/square foot but this prejudices commercial development. Vacouver, if I remember correctly, puts a surcharge on middle/upper income development of (Canadian) $16/sq ft for low income housing and related infrastructure.
Quality of Life
Dan Doctoroff, Deputy Mayor of Economic Development and Rebuilding of New York, whom I quoted a couple of weeks back, said in his keynote address that one of the most critical issues for a city to aim for is “quality of life” – it attracts more people, they help the tax base increase and there is more money to invest again quality of life issues. (OK, OK, we attract more people with no related tax increase but that is largely because of non-enforcement at our borders, etc!) You need a multi-faceted approach, he said, focusing on transportation, housing and public space.
Whilst NYC lost the 2012 Olympic Bid to London, they have proceeded with the 5000 affordable housing units that had been planned for the Olympic Village through a partnership between the city and 7 real estate developers on a non profit basis and an agreement with the trade unions for ‘second tier’ wages for this kind of housing.
In the latter regard, parks in NYC are being completely overhauled to become safe and attractive spaces for rich and poor.
Doctoroff emphasised In realtion to quality of life how parks in NYC are being completely overhauled to become safe and attractive spaces for rich and poor.
Hugh Hardy (H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture) spoke about “Place Making 101” and gave these six key issues for design of good urban spaces and places
• A Clear Plan
• Character – personable but not overpowering
• Colour – not only quantity but also range
• Tactile – you must be able to ‘feel’ the difference
• Diversity - incorporate diffferent surfaces, hard and soft
• Landscape – everything must bond together
Quoting Jane Jacobs – “we’re good for each other” he re-iterated that “cities are all about people wanting to be together”
Walkable Urbanism
Chris Liebenberger of Brookings Institute spoke on “Walkable Urbanism – the New Benchmark ” and traced a fascinating history of how cities developed from Sumer in 5500 BC where everything was planned within a walking distance of 1 500 to 3 500 feet and early Philadelphia where less than 1 in 50 lived more than a mile from work to modern cities that generally exist “in a world made safe for a car” . Today, in the US, for every 1% population growth there is 8 to 12% land-use consumption! The unintended consequences of this are a lesser quality of life through:
• Auto dependency
• Poor access to jobs
• Social segregation
• Exclusion of non-drivers from society
• Secession of the elite
• NIMBY neighbourhood groups
• Land consumption
• Air and water pollution
• Climate change
• Obesity and asthma
• Injuries and deaths from car related accidents
• Impact on family finance
• Impact on fiscal finances (subsidies)
• Infrastructure and dependency on oil
Conclusion: we need a new way to develop the built environment – we must invest in walkable urban infrastructure!
Richard Bradley – Executive Director, Downtown DC BID, Washington
“Capitalists look for opportunity and certainty”
“ A brand is a promise of an experience”
‘”Clean and safe are basics that you never move away from”
“Thank heavens for bureaucracy - we would otherwise not have a city”
“The solutions to most of our problems are Partnerships”
“Social workers are the “glue” of our social welfare problems in the city”
Paul Levy – Executive Director, Central City District (CCD) BID, Philadelphia
“ You never say its not my job!”
“I don’t open my mouth on an issue unless I have a solution to it!”
“What excites me is the ability to have an impact on the environment”
“Buildings should shape public spaces”
“People attract People”
“Big is not always bad – its only bad if its badly designed”
“Give the politicians all the credit – I don’t need to be re-elected every few years”
Vincent van der Poole – Secretary General of Caribbean Tourism Organisation
“Advertising works best when it reminds people of something positive that they have heard of”
“There is no greater promoter of an area than a real estate developer”
Dan Doctoroff – Deputy Mayor, Economic Development, New York City
“ We will steal anyone’s ideas as long as they are good!”
Dan Biederman – Bryant Park Coro/Bryant Park Management Corp, New York City
“Be patient – some of these initiatives take time”
“Don’t fall in love with a vendor” ( referring to suppliers / service providers etc )
OK, so, after all these truisms its back to Joeys and reality next week,
Cheers, neil
IDA Conference and quotable quotes
Just to wrap up on my recent trip to the USA and then, next week, back to Joburg and we’ll look at what’s been happening in Joeys over the past year.
This week, some thoughts from the International Downtown Association’s 53rd Conference and World Congress held in New York City from 14 to 18 September and some quotes, many of which are relevant to us, from various articles, speakers or people we work-shopped with,.
IDA partners with a number of international urban bodies to expand its Annual Conference into a World Congress every 3 years. The first of these was in Coventry, England in 1997 and since then the Congress has alternated between the UK and the States. The next one is to be held in London in 2010, thereafter it starts to go global with Montreal, Canada in 2013 whilst 2016 will be our turn in South Africa with the main conference probably being held in Cape Town but with Joburg also featuring strongly.
This year’s conference/congress was held in the heart of Times Square, New York City, and was attended by over 1000 delegates from all over the world. The conference theme was ‘Big Dreams, Bold Ideas’. Preceding the conference there were tours and professional development workshops ranging from retail to branding, law enforcement to Improvement District establishment and management. The conference programme itself provided a number of plenaries with key-note speakers (six) and then a huge variety of sessions (95 in all during 7 or 8 parallel periods) where the biggest problem was which session to attend. Impossible to bring you even a broad feel of content but here, firstly, are a couple of issues that I resonated with and secondly, some quotes from a variety of people we met with or heard speak (with thanks to Ashwin Daya from the Mandela Bay Development Agency who managed to capture them). Reviewing the issues that interested me show my personal growth from ‘clean and safe’ ten-plus years ago to ‘place and space’!
Keynote Speaker, Lars Gemzoe who is a senior consultant and associate partner in the Gehl Architects practice and a senior lecturer in Urban Design at the School of Architecture, Copenhagen:
• “All cities have statistics and information and departments that deal with cars but no departments or statistics on public space and pedestrians.”
• “The people in the city tend to be invisible and poorly represented in the planning process”
Public space, he pointed out, fulfils a number of needs:
• Pleasure – “one of the pleasures of daily life is to walk and bicycle.”
• Economic – “great public spaces are highly valued by people, businesses and property owners”
• Recreation – “ urban recreation where the presence of other people provides social interaction”
• Social – “The city is a meeting place, people watching is one of the great attractions of a city - both watching and being watched”
• Democratic and fun - Public space is democratically driven and adds an open society dimension to cities. Empty streets are not inviting nor safe – public space adds a general human dimension to a city offering sheer fun and surprise”
Gemzoe says that if public spaces provided are of good quality, people will come “the city is a gallery for contemporary art and we need policies that promote active ground floor frontages”
He made an interesting comment about Melbourne, saying that it is like any other modern city of the world but when it comes to street life and public space it is like Paris, one of the most livable cities in the world.
Comments made by Paul Levy (Philadelphia Center City District)
The quality of public spaces does matter. There are things that you can influence – litter and grafitti; customer friendliness; night time lighting; visitor signs; special events, neglected facades, roller shutter doors. You need public standards and these need to be enforced by the police. Police are especially trained in this kind of work – Special Protocol Outreach Teams (SPOT) deal with behavioural and health issues. A Special Services Police Team deals with homeless and behavioural issues. –
Enforcing standards of public behaviour means:
• No night sleeping on parks
• No urination in publlc
• No public feeding
Housing the homeless
I was interested in the change of approach that has come about in some American cities over the last decade in relation to the issue of homelessness. High proportions of Americans living on the street have mental problems or substance abuse problems. (Washington DC – 20% of people live below the poverty level; 36% are functionally illiterate: 8% unemployed although there is agreement that the actual figure is way higher than the official number!) There appears to be a very strong approach to now providing appropriate housing and moving away from the ‘shelter’ approach. New York calls this type of housing “supportive housing” – and it consists of fully furnished and equipped one-bedroomed units in blocks that offer in-house support services. The buildings provide vegetable gardens, teaching space and courtyard playgrounds. Services include a nurse; psychiatrist; case management; clinical management; housing assistance all on site. Expensive? I don’t think it should necessarily be so – we provide all those services from centralised government funded departments – surely it would be better to decentralise into practical hands-on involvement? The capital costs seem to be generated in different ways in different states – some states appear to adopt a surcharge on commercial development of $10/square foot but this prejudices commercial development. Vacouver, if I remember correctly, puts a surcharge on middle/upper income development of (Canadian) $16/sq ft for low income housing and related infrastructure.
Quality of Life
Dan Doctoroff, Deputy Mayor of Economic Development and Rebuilding of New York, whom I quoted a couple of weeks back, said in his keynote address that one of the most critical issues for a city to aim for is “quality of life” – it attracts more people, they help the tax base increase and there is more money to invest again quality of life issues. (OK, OK, we attract more people with no related tax increase but that is largely because of non-enforcement at our borders, etc!) You need a multi-faceted approach, he said, focusing on transportation, housing and public space.
Whilst NYC lost the 2012 Olympic Bid to London, they have proceeded with the 5000 affordable housing units that had been planned for the Olympic Village through a partnership between the city and 7 real estate developers on a non profit basis and an agreement with the trade unions for ‘second tier’ wages for this kind of housing.
In the latter regard, parks in NYC are being completely overhauled to become safe and attractive spaces for rich and poor.
Doctoroff emphasised In realtion to quality of life how parks in NYC are being completely overhauled to become safe and attractive spaces for rich and poor.
Hugh Hardy (H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture) spoke about “Place Making 101” and gave these six key issues for design of good urban spaces and places
• A Clear Plan
• Character – personable but not overpowering
• Colour – not only quantity but also range
• Tactile – you must be able to ‘feel’ the difference
• Diversity - incorporate diffferent surfaces, hard and soft
• Landscape – everything must bond together
Quoting Jane Jacobs – “we’re good for each other” he re-iterated that “cities are all about people wanting to be together”
Walkable Urbanism
Chris Liebenberger of Brookings Institute spoke on “Walkable Urbanism – the New Benchmark ” and traced a fascinating history of how cities developed from Sumer in 5500 BC where everything was planned within a walking distance of 1 500 to 3 500 feet and early Philadelphia where less than 1 in 50 lived more than a mile from work to modern cities that generally exist “in a world made safe for a car” . Today, in the US, for every 1% population growth there is 8 to 12% land-use consumption! The unintended consequences of this are a lesser quality of life through:
• Auto dependency
• Poor access to jobs
• Social segregation
• Exclusion of non-drivers from society
• Secession of the elite
• NIMBY neighbourhood groups
• Land consumption
• Air and water pollution
• Climate change
• Obesity and asthma
• Injuries and deaths from car related accidents
• Impact on family finance
• Impact on fiscal finances (subsidies)
• Infrastructure and dependency on oil
Conclusion: we need a new way to develop the built environment – we must invest in walkable urban infrastructure!
Richard Bradley – Executive Director, Downtown DC BID, Washington
“Capitalists look for opportunity and certainty”
“ A brand is a promise of an experience”
‘”Clean and safe are basics that you never move away from”
“Thank heavens for bureaucracy - we would otherwise not have a city”
“The solutions to most of our problems are Partnerships”
“Social workers are the “glue” of our social welfare problems in the city”
Paul Levy – Executive Director, Central City District (CCD) BID, Philadelphia
“ You never say its not my job!”
“I don’t open my mouth on an issue unless I have a solution to it!”
“What excites me is the ability to have an impact on the environment”
“Buildings should shape public spaces”
“People attract People”
“Big is not always bad – its only bad if its badly designed”
“Give the politicians all the credit – I don’t need to be re-elected every few years”
Vincent van der Poole – Secretary General of Caribbean Tourism Organisation
“Advertising works best when it reminds people of something positive that they have heard of”
“There is no greater promoter of an area than a real estate developer”
Dan Doctoroff – Deputy Mayor, Economic Development, New York City
“ We will steal anyone’s ideas as long as they are good!”
Dan Biederman – Bryant Park Coro/Bryant Park Management Corp, New York City
“Be patient – some of these initiatives take time”
“Don’t fall in love with a vendor” ( referring to suppliers / service providers etc )
OK, so, after all these truisms its back to Joeys and reality next week,
Cheers, neil
Harlem Citichat 5 October 2007
CITICHAT 39/2007 - 5 October 2007
Harlem hits the high notes!
Subsequent to attendance at the IDA (International Downtown Association) 53rd Conference and World Congress held in New York City from 14 to 18 September, “our group” – five South Africans from Joburg, Pretoria and PE plus a Canadian from Toronto which had visited Washington DC and Philadelphia prior to the conference – visited a number of Improvement Districts operating both in Manhattan and Brooklyn. One of these was the 125th Street BID (Business Improvement District). The area in which the 125th Street BID operates, mid-town Manhattan, has a history with which South Africans can resonate and a current programme we can learn from.
Ever ebullient Barbara Askins, the President of the 125th Street BID - she was in Joburg for our ‘Cities in Change’ conference in 2003 - gave our group a wonderful overview of the dedicated work of her organisation over the past eighteen years.
125th Street is of course in Harlem and Harlem stretches across Manhattan from the East River to the Hudson River and from the north boundary of Central Park, 110th Street, right up to 159th Street. 125th Street serves as this region’s business corridor but also functions as a local retail street providing a multitude of cultural, commercial and institutional offerings. Like Johannesburg, the area has a turbulent history of colonialism, apartheid (but not legislated), slavery, oppression, ghettoisation, crime and poverty but in these past couple of decades it has experienced the beginnings of an economic and social turnaround which it will build on through a new ‘vision’ for the area.
Originally settled by the Dutch in 1637, the area was initially named Nieuw Haarlem after the Dutch city of Haarlem, which was later anglicised to Harlem by the British when they took over in 1664. The Dutch and British settlements were at the expense of local Native Americans. The settlement area remained a farming community until land values declined when the farmland was worked out somewhere between 1850 and 1870. The land was then occupied by Irish squatters - Irish or not, not good for land prices! Recovery began with the extension of the elevated railways to the area in 1880 and the decision to extend the underground railway to the area. Anticipation of these transport connections to the buoyant downtown area sparked off a building boom, but, as with many such booms, it ended in a glut of space. Much of this space was taken up by Eastern European Jews in the early 1900s and Jewish Harlem peaked in 1917 but thereafter declined. By 1930 part of it was known as Italian Harlem, now known as Spanish Harlem. So it had its fair share of occupants of international origin! The decline of living conditions for African-American New Yorkers in other parts of the city led to them beginning to move to the area from as early as 1880 but more en masse from 1904. By 1920, Central Harlem was predominantly African-American but land holding seemed to have remained predominantly in white hands until the ‘60s. The population density had skyrocketed. Whereas Manhattan in 2000 had a density of 27 000 per sq km, Harlem in the 1920s was over 83 000. There was, however, no investment in private homes or businesses for nearly eight decades up to the 1990s. The area declined dramatically, buildings were abandoned, drug dealing, anti-social behaviour and crime moved in – huge parallels to Hillbrow – there were also riots in 1935 and 1943. Harlem has however always been known as one of the centres of African American culture – the 1920s/30s had spawned great jazz and many resultant clubs and theatres, such as the Cotton Club where the legendary Duke Ellington played – attendance was restricted to whites – and the famous Apollo Theatre, opened in 1934, which is still in use today. As an aside, one of the conference social functions was held in the Hip Hop Cultural Centre at the Magic Johnson Theatre which houses some unique artefacts as well as being a performance venue. Using Hip Hop to attract young people they are then exposed to career development, civil rights, diet, nutrition, financial literacy and political awareness.
In 1994 an Empowerment Zone was established and money was funnelled into investment in the area. We had a small window when a similar programme was run by the Department of Local Government in the Gauteng Provincial administration in the ‘90s on an obviously much smaller budget and the city scored with money for the Gandhi Square revitalisation.
The Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Community (EZ/EC) programme had been established in 1993 by the Clinton Administration as part of their community revitalization strategy. The programme was designed to empower people and communities across the United States by inspiring Americans to work together to develop strategic plans designed to create jobs and opportunities in the US’s most impoverished urban and rural areas. A nation wide competition for the designation of six urban EZs and sixty-five urban ECs (Enterprise Communities) began in January of 1994 and each awarded federal grant funds along with various tax benefits for EZ-based businesses. A community-based strategic plan for revitalization was the fundamental requirement requiring communities to asses their assets and problems, and creating a vision of a better future, and structure a plan for achieving that vision.
72 urban areas and 33 rural communities were designated in the first round of the competition each urban Empowerment Zone receiving $100 million and each rural, $40 million, in performance grants for job creation and job-related activities. Upper Manhattan, which includes Harlem, was one of the designated areas.
In 1999, 20 additional economically distressed communities were designated as Round II Empowerment Zones, making them eligible to share in $3.8 billion in federal grants and tax-exempt bonding authority. Becoming one of the designated EZs was clearly a big fillip for the Harlem community and area.
The 125th Street BID was established in 1989 with an extremely restricted budget which allowed for only two issues to be tackled initially – the design and production of a banner and sorting out a major street vendor (hawker) problem – 125th Street was jammed with hawkers! This was addressed by establishing a designated ‘African’ market area to which all hawkers were moved (it is still going strong!) and this was followed by a street cleaning and maintenance programme. The BID then obtained a planning grant that enabled them to undertake some good, basic research into various aspects of the area. As Barbara notes “ The detailed pedestrian counts (part of the research) empowered the BID in its further research, as no-one else had that level of information.”
A relatively short while back, the New York City Council advised that it had developed a vision for 125th Street which came as something of a surprise to the locals! The vision included designating a small area of 125th Street for cultural purposes. Pulling as many political levers as possible, the community blocked the implementation of the vision and the BID set about creating a “community vision” in partnership with the Urban Design Lab and The Earth Institute both at neighbouring Columbia University. Columbia were a strategic partner particularly as the University has been kenn to obtain a further 17 acre site in Harlem and the BID and community were able to influence the design of their project to ensure its community integration. Here, in Joburg, no influence appears to have affected the Wits campus, only recently have they relaxed their introverted focus and softened the barrier between themselves and Braamfontein. However, I wander - two issues that became central to their research findings were the inherent value of their cultural base and their need for applied ecology – they want to pilot a programme to convert food waste from their many restaurants and take-aways into energy!
The excellent report resulted “Creating a Cultural Destination” was their response to the City’s proposals and was generated “through a series of studios and studies” which “led to the creation of a performance model that integrates academia with actual business stakeholders to solve problems.” The document presents “arguments that describe the risk of losing one of Harlem’s most precious gems, its history and culture,” and it incorporates practical and deliverable recommendations. The report highlights some of the challenges that face cultural non-profit organisations that are located on 125th Street and this really sounds like home!
• Rapidly rising rents and property prices forcing closure or relocation
• Inadequate economic support
• Inability to sustain necessary patronage and foot traffic figures
The recommendations of the Report make interesting reading particularly for those in the cultural community and include rezoning the area as a ‘special purpose zoning district’ that will provide 25% bonus floor areas to developments for allocation to cultural usage. The rezonings are aimed at meeting their sustainability needs – “ green buildings, good jobs, affordable space for community based buildings and, most importantly, a lasting cultural presence that keeps the historic essence of 125th Street alive for generations to come”
The Vision comments that “Too often, planners of cultural districts have failed to define the full breadth of what comprises culture. By default they have focused on elite “high art” institutions and prominent performance venues and have neglected to include and plan for a broad range of cultural activities.” Hmmm!
There is a long road between vision and action and they still have to get formal approval of the proposals and find the funding but with the dedication and enthusiasm, and track record, I have no doubt that a return trip to Harlem in a few years time will see huge changes for the better.
And now Harlem is getting the recognition it deserves from an unexpected quarter. I received an e-mail from Barbara on Wednesday advising that 125th Street has just been named as one of the 10 Great Streets in America for 2007 by the American Planning Association (APA). The Executive Director of the APA said “We’re excited to name 125th Street as one of the first corridors to be designated an APA Great Street. This Street, as with Harlem, has had a turbulent and, at times, strained history. Yet, through hard times and good, 125th has withstood the changes and remains one of the cultural touchstones for Black Americans.”
The APA Great Places “offer better choices for where and how people work and live. They are enjoyable, safe and desirable. They are places where people want to be – not only to visit, but to live and work there everyday. America’s truly great neighbourhoods are defined by many unique criteria, including architectural features, accessibility, functionality, and community involvement. Through Great Places in America, APA recognizes the unique and authentic attributes of essential building blocks of great communities – streets, neighbourhoods and public spaces.”
Great idea to identify great public places that ‘exemplify exceptional character and highlight the role planners and planning play in creating communities of lasting value.” Anyone want to have a go for SA streets?
Ciao, neil
Harlem hits the high notes!
Subsequent to attendance at the IDA (International Downtown Association) 53rd Conference and World Congress held in New York City from 14 to 18 September, “our group” – five South Africans from Joburg, Pretoria and PE plus a Canadian from Toronto which had visited Washington DC and Philadelphia prior to the conference – visited a number of Improvement Districts operating both in Manhattan and Brooklyn. One of these was the 125th Street BID (Business Improvement District). The area in which the 125th Street BID operates, mid-town Manhattan, has a history with which South Africans can resonate and a current programme we can learn from.
Ever ebullient Barbara Askins, the President of the 125th Street BID - she was in Joburg for our ‘Cities in Change’ conference in 2003 - gave our group a wonderful overview of the dedicated work of her organisation over the past eighteen years.
125th Street is of course in Harlem and Harlem stretches across Manhattan from the East River to the Hudson River and from the north boundary of Central Park, 110th Street, right up to 159th Street. 125th Street serves as this region’s business corridor but also functions as a local retail street providing a multitude of cultural, commercial and institutional offerings. Like Johannesburg, the area has a turbulent history of colonialism, apartheid (but not legislated), slavery, oppression, ghettoisation, crime and poverty but in these past couple of decades it has experienced the beginnings of an economic and social turnaround which it will build on through a new ‘vision’ for the area.
Originally settled by the Dutch in 1637, the area was initially named Nieuw Haarlem after the Dutch city of Haarlem, which was later anglicised to Harlem by the British when they took over in 1664. The Dutch and British settlements were at the expense of local Native Americans. The settlement area remained a farming community until land values declined when the farmland was worked out somewhere between 1850 and 1870. The land was then occupied by Irish squatters - Irish or not, not good for land prices! Recovery began with the extension of the elevated railways to the area in 1880 and the decision to extend the underground railway to the area. Anticipation of these transport connections to the buoyant downtown area sparked off a building boom, but, as with many such booms, it ended in a glut of space. Much of this space was taken up by Eastern European Jews in the early 1900s and Jewish Harlem peaked in 1917 but thereafter declined. By 1930 part of it was known as Italian Harlem, now known as Spanish Harlem. So it had its fair share of occupants of international origin! The decline of living conditions for African-American New Yorkers in other parts of the city led to them beginning to move to the area from as early as 1880 but more en masse from 1904. By 1920, Central Harlem was predominantly African-American but land holding seemed to have remained predominantly in white hands until the ‘60s. The population density had skyrocketed. Whereas Manhattan in 2000 had a density of 27 000 per sq km, Harlem in the 1920s was over 83 000. There was, however, no investment in private homes or businesses for nearly eight decades up to the 1990s. The area declined dramatically, buildings were abandoned, drug dealing, anti-social behaviour and crime moved in – huge parallels to Hillbrow – there were also riots in 1935 and 1943. Harlem has however always been known as one of the centres of African American culture – the 1920s/30s had spawned great jazz and many resultant clubs and theatres, such as the Cotton Club where the legendary Duke Ellington played – attendance was restricted to whites – and the famous Apollo Theatre, opened in 1934, which is still in use today. As an aside, one of the conference social functions was held in the Hip Hop Cultural Centre at the Magic Johnson Theatre which houses some unique artefacts as well as being a performance venue. Using Hip Hop to attract young people they are then exposed to career development, civil rights, diet, nutrition, financial literacy and political awareness.
In 1994 an Empowerment Zone was established and money was funnelled into investment in the area. We had a small window when a similar programme was run by the Department of Local Government in the Gauteng Provincial administration in the ‘90s on an obviously much smaller budget and the city scored with money for the Gandhi Square revitalisation.
The Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Community (EZ/EC) programme had been established in 1993 by the Clinton Administration as part of their community revitalization strategy. The programme was designed to empower people and communities across the United States by inspiring Americans to work together to develop strategic plans designed to create jobs and opportunities in the US’s most impoverished urban and rural areas. A nation wide competition for the designation of six urban EZs and sixty-five urban ECs (Enterprise Communities) began in January of 1994 and each awarded federal grant funds along with various tax benefits for EZ-based businesses. A community-based strategic plan for revitalization was the fundamental requirement requiring communities to asses their assets and problems, and creating a vision of a better future, and structure a plan for achieving that vision.
72 urban areas and 33 rural communities were designated in the first round of the competition each urban Empowerment Zone receiving $100 million and each rural, $40 million, in performance grants for job creation and job-related activities. Upper Manhattan, which includes Harlem, was one of the designated areas.
In 1999, 20 additional economically distressed communities were designated as Round II Empowerment Zones, making them eligible to share in $3.8 billion in federal grants and tax-exempt bonding authority. Becoming one of the designated EZs was clearly a big fillip for the Harlem community and area.
The 125th Street BID was established in 1989 with an extremely restricted budget which allowed for only two issues to be tackled initially – the design and production of a banner and sorting out a major street vendor (hawker) problem – 125th Street was jammed with hawkers! This was addressed by establishing a designated ‘African’ market area to which all hawkers were moved (it is still going strong!) and this was followed by a street cleaning and maintenance programme. The BID then obtained a planning grant that enabled them to undertake some good, basic research into various aspects of the area. As Barbara notes “ The detailed pedestrian counts (part of the research) empowered the BID in its further research, as no-one else had that level of information.”
A relatively short while back, the New York City Council advised that it had developed a vision for 125th Street which came as something of a surprise to the locals! The vision included designating a small area of 125th Street for cultural purposes. Pulling as many political levers as possible, the community blocked the implementation of the vision and the BID set about creating a “community vision” in partnership with the Urban Design Lab and The Earth Institute both at neighbouring Columbia University. Columbia were a strategic partner particularly as the University has been kenn to obtain a further 17 acre site in Harlem and the BID and community were able to influence the design of their project to ensure its community integration. Here, in Joburg, no influence appears to have affected the Wits campus, only recently have they relaxed their introverted focus and softened the barrier between themselves and Braamfontein. However, I wander - two issues that became central to their research findings were the inherent value of their cultural base and their need for applied ecology – they want to pilot a programme to convert food waste from their many restaurants and take-aways into energy!
The excellent report resulted “Creating a Cultural Destination” was their response to the City’s proposals and was generated “through a series of studios and studies” which “led to the creation of a performance model that integrates academia with actual business stakeholders to solve problems.” The document presents “arguments that describe the risk of losing one of Harlem’s most precious gems, its history and culture,” and it incorporates practical and deliverable recommendations. The report highlights some of the challenges that face cultural non-profit organisations that are located on 125th Street and this really sounds like home!
• Rapidly rising rents and property prices forcing closure or relocation
• Inadequate economic support
• Inability to sustain necessary patronage and foot traffic figures
The recommendations of the Report make interesting reading particularly for those in the cultural community and include rezoning the area as a ‘special purpose zoning district’ that will provide 25% bonus floor areas to developments for allocation to cultural usage. The rezonings are aimed at meeting their sustainability needs – “ green buildings, good jobs, affordable space for community based buildings and, most importantly, a lasting cultural presence that keeps the historic essence of 125th Street alive for generations to come”
The Vision comments that “Too often, planners of cultural districts have failed to define the full breadth of what comprises culture. By default they have focused on elite “high art” institutions and prominent performance venues and have neglected to include and plan for a broad range of cultural activities.” Hmmm!
There is a long road between vision and action and they still have to get formal approval of the proposals and find the funding but with the dedication and enthusiasm, and track record, I have no doubt that a return trip to Harlem in a few years time will see huge changes for the better.
And now Harlem is getting the recognition it deserves from an unexpected quarter. I received an e-mail from Barbara on Wednesday advising that 125th Street has just been named as one of the 10 Great Streets in America for 2007 by the American Planning Association (APA). The Executive Director of the APA said “We’re excited to name 125th Street as one of the first corridors to be designated an APA Great Street. This Street, as with Harlem, has had a turbulent and, at times, strained history. Yet, through hard times and good, 125th has withstood the changes and remains one of the cultural touchstones for Black Americans.”
The APA Great Places “offer better choices for where and how people work and live. They are enjoyable, safe and desirable. They are places where people want to be – not only to visit, but to live and work there everyday. America’s truly great neighbourhoods are defined by many unique criteria, including architectural features, accessibility, functionality, and community involvement. Through Great Places in America, APA recognizes the unique and authentic attributes of essential building blocks of great communities – streets, neighbourhoods and public spaces.”
Great idea to identify great public places that ‘exemplify exceptional character and highlight the role planners and planning play in creating communities of lasting value.” Anyone want to have a go for SA streets?
Ciao, neil
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