Place Recovery
We embarked nearly two decades ago on a quest to figure out what we now call Sprawl Recovery, because the Ponzi scheme of sprawl will eventually bankrupt every US city built primarily on sprawl, as Charles Marohn and Joe Minicozzi have long illustrated. This makes the extreme makeover of recovery from the strong additction to sprawl America's largest community-rebuilding challenge. In 2005 we were thrust into the middle of the Katrina recovery effort. Of those years of work that followed, many lessons were learned, including learning first how to design and build the Tiny Homes known as Katrina Cottages, and later SmartDwellings. More recently, we've been involved in efforts to help places recover from decades of disinvestment, but without the plague of displacement that almost always comes with gentrification. Most recently, it has become clear that as climate change advances and people leave where they have long lived in search of a better home that is more sustainable, we need to have tools for creating their new neighborhoods in the cities and towns which welcome them. The sections that follow describe the top principles on which each of the four recovery efforts should be based. Please help us out in the comments that follow if you feel we're missing something even more important.
Sprawl Recovery
Sprawl Recovery is America's greatest physical challenge. Most people #LivingInSprawl can't afford to walk away from their life's largest investment, but #SuburbanDecline has been sucking the value out of their homes in many places in the US since 2008. #ExtremeMakeover #DoTheMath
Human blubber (fat) and urban blubber (#sprawl) share many unhealthy characteristics, and both are often fatal. The human obesity epidemic is matched in deadliness only by the sprawl epidemic. And each feed on the other in a deadly spiral.
Sprawl, or cancer of he city, supplants the DNA, or living traditions of healthy tissue with its own unhealthy DNA of single-use zoning and industrial development processes, hijacking the healthy growth process. #LivingCity #SignsOfLife
Sprawl is a pattern, not a location.
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Public Health
Of all the addiction battles behind which the American Medical Association could throw its weight, none is more important than the battle for Sprawl Recovery because the addiction of sprawl affects more Americans, and in more ways, than any other addiction. Walk Appeal is a one of the keys.
Disaster Recovery
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Infrastructure Recovery
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Economic Recovery
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Recovery of Local Culture
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Disinvestment Recovery
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Preserve the Good
buildings
streets
civic spaces
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Climate Refugee Recovery
This is 18 inches of seawater in West Avenue on South Beach during the King Tides of 2013. The last rain had been several days previous. The seawater was running in from the sea and bubbling up through the storm sewers because the sea level that night was higher than the street level. Here's a video I shot that night.
When we first moved to South Beach in 2003, "sunny day flooding" wasn't even a term. But it began in a few years and by 2013 it was a serious thing because of sea level rise. The city installed huge pumps, and for awhile they worked. Except when the power failed, of course. The city began raising streets on the low-lying side of the island, but lost their nerve for reasons they never made public. There was one champion of street-raising on the commission, but the others prevailed. We could see the handwriting on the wall, so by 2018 we were looking for somewhere else to live. An excellent opportunity arose, and we moved to much higher ground hundreds of miles inland.
To Wanda and I, climate refugees aren't hypothetical because we are two of them. Sea level rise is only one of the threats. Wildfires are destroying western towns, and the Colorado River is running dry, threatening the drinking water of an entire region. Drought is also destroying food-producing capabilities of large regions. Hurricanes are increasing in power; when Katrina devastated the US Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama they said it was a thousand year storm. Rita, just as strong, showed up two weeks later just down the coast. And then the monster that was Dorian sat on top of Marsh Harbour in The Bahamas for two days with the force of an F4 tornado. I can't think of another time in human history when a place was devastated by a storm so strong for so long.
There is no doubt that there will be major migrations away from the worst of the climate change impacts, and it's already happening, as Wanda and I can personally attest. There are several ways this can play out. This post is based on sea level rise, but the adaptation measures that are the body of the post apply to all of the climate change impacts. The items below are the three most important strategies for successful adaptation by moving away from threats.
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Common Tools
Sprawl recovery, the recovery of places from serious disinvestment fueled by steep inequities, disaster recovery, and making places for families and larger communities fleeing climate change seemed like four great but separate challenges until recently. Taken individually, each challenge seems too daunting, especially in an age when local and state & provincial governments are struggling financially. But over time it became clear that most of the processes and tools applicable to any one of the four challenges could be calibrated for the other three as well, and that each of the four is a seedbed of new tool development that could aid the others. These are some of the most obvious processes and tools, but please leave a comment at the bottom of this page for others you feel like we should include... thanks!
Tactical Takeoff
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Frontage Recovery
Recovery of a place begins with the thinnest of interventions: shopfronts can be as little as 8’ deep. What seems weakest is actually strongest, as nothing is so interesting to people walking on the street as what happens in that first 8’. In the beginning, the frontages can be occupied with highly mobile businesses like food carts, then replaced with constructed shopfronts like the one in this image as the food carts are reused down the street. Eventually, as the recovery gains strength, the frontages can eventually be occupied with more robust buildings.
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Sprawl is an addiction fueled by cars. A century ago when there were few cars, they did little damage, like a person who has a couple drinks and calls it an evening. But we’ve been bingeing on cars since WWII and it might be fatal if we don’t recover from sprawl soon.
One of the first actions of #SprawlRecovery is building neighborhood centers composed at first of ephemeral #SingleCrewWorkplaces like #FoodCarts and #ShopSheds. Make it insanely easy to get started, not hard like it is now.
Maker spaces are morning’s first light for the revitalization of a neighborhood. But when the neighborhood recovers, the space will be too expensive so the maker space must move elsewhere and start with another neighborhood. Encourage them!
Cool new restaurants are #SignsOfRecovery in a struggling #neighborhood. Restauranteurs are usually good cool-hunters because their success depends on it.
Count the number of food carts, grocery sheds, and other temporary business structures in a recovering town center. The more, the better. They are owned by those with lots of hope but little means. The latter will change. You should join them. #SimpleIndicatorComplexCondition
The highest standard of #PlaceRecovery techniques are those that do not depend on government funding. Work hard to think of things that can take on a life of their own and keep going profitably, no matter who gets elected.
If you have a great #PlaceRecovery idea, share it with a university. Many of them are looking for ideas to test, and may provide a lot of support to your initiative. But don’t count on that; be sure it stands on its own with no outside support. #SimpleIndicatorComplexCondition
The best thing a town can do is to foster the creation of more small businesses. The benefits are many and intertwining. The first step in doing so is giving people hope. Show them how easy it is to get started in your town.
Without saying as much, Walmart and other retailers to the poor have convinced millions that cheap is better than free, even though many homemade (free) things have far more value, charm, and meaning than cheap things. https://t.co/dOkUw5pHpl
Homemade things, town-made things and region-made things have good stories to tell. Even if something made in China has a good story, it’s one we likely will never hear.
Years ago while designing a new town, a billionaire friend of the developer quietly came up to me and said “if you design this place just for us, we won’t come. We bore each other senseless when it’s just us. But with most people not like us? That’s an interesting place.”
The problem with dying downtowns is that once they start dying, people say "it's because we don't have enough parking" and so they tear down more buildings for parking lots, accelerating the decline. #DowntownParkingLots are death to downtown. Do on-street, on-alley & structures.
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