Archive for February, 2007

Take the survey.

Leading New Urbanist Andrés Duany recently wrote an article explaining why the unique culture of New Orleans has been missed in many of the debates swirling over how to rebuild. The inexpensive, owner-built housing found in New Orleans is increasingly rare in the United States. According to Dunay, freedom from housing debt is integral to the culture of the Crescent City, making it possible for people to spend more time cooking, playing music, and making art. What’s his solution?

Somehow the building culture that created the original New Orleans must be reinstated. The hurdle of drawings, permitting, contractors, inspections—the professionalism of it all—eliminates self-building. Somehow there must be a process whereupon people can build simple, functional houses for themselves, either by themselves or by barter with professionals. There must be free house designs that can be built in small stages and that do not require an architect, complicated permits, or inspections; there must be common-sense technical standards. Without this there will be the pall of debt for everyone.

Sounds like a lot of the things we’re trying to do for software through open-source. I think architects could start a revolution similar to what’s happening in OSS that would profoundly influence urban development worldwide. Looks like someone’s making it happen.

The New York Times offers this article on small houses. Their take is that although many are building these as second homes, an increasing number of people are buying prime land for preservation purposes and want to leave a smaller footprint. Also of note, once people decide on a low cost pre-fab, they’re more willing to splurge on the land. Several people initially desired to set something up right away and expand later, only to discover they enjoyed the outdoors enough to forgo additions. Living in California doesn’t hurt either.

Yahoo! has a new service called Pipes. Essentially, you can take RSS feeds, web searches, Flickr photos, news headlines, and other sources to make your own searches. I looked for any pipes containing the word ‘neighborhood’ and happened upon this one. Give it a shot!

Enjoy!

My friend Keith Casey made an observation about the similarities between good software design and good urban planning:

To be honest, this is how much of the most successful software is developed. It doesn’t spring out of nothingness fully formed with an ideal architecture and design. Instead, the first version comes out of natural use from something simpler. It’s the second version where everyone can benefit from the lessons learned and the mistakes made. There’s no shame in that.

This is exactly the problem facing urban planning today: a lot of time and effort goes into coming up with just the right mix of transit oriented design/mixed uses/density/walkability/other words ending in -ity, only to have it all tossed out or gutted to satisfy a present need. We would do better to implement design standards (make room is left for sidewalks, bring buildings closer to the street, put parking in the back, etc..) than to obsess over whether or not an area is planned to be dense enough.

Software developers frequently fall into the same trap. Hours are spent coming up with a design to take care of every whim a user might have, only to miss that one unforeseen scenario that brings the developer back to “refactor” the code.