LA and the Global Warming Diet

I've met Frances Anderton three times. First, through her monthly radio show on KCRW, DnA (Design and Architecture), which includes discussions with guests from a wide range of design-related fields, both LA-centric and beyond. The second time I met Frances was at an event for GOOD magazine in December called GOOD Design: LA where she was one of roughly ten designers presenting bite-sized versions of single design-based solutions for pressing urban issues (a version of this presentation serves as her guest blog entry that follows below). The third time I met Frances was when she appeared in Dana Cuff's PhD colloquium as a guest judge for our first weekly challenge - a kind of architecture methods meets top chef model for quick, deep research with a dash of competitive angst. That particular challenge asked us to evaluate the LA Times' recently published list of the ten best houses in Southern California. Though my team didn't win that challenge, we did, serendipitously, quote Frances's own incisive list of 'must see' architecture from the Time Out guide to the city. Her critiques that day were insightful, focused, useful, and brilliant. Anyone put on the spot to play judge to the careful and constructed research of ten sensitive and serious PhD students knows what an art it is to absorb, synthesize, evaluate, and return with original commentary that simultaneously expands and critiques what is on the table.

Frances has been in LA since 1991, when she moved here from England to become the editor of LA Architect. Her first taste of Los Angeles came through a special assignment for The Architectural Review, a long-standing and well-regarded monthly magazine where she was an Associate Editor. Before that, she studied architecture at the Bartlett and traveled globally. Her early taste of LA has turned into a career of thinking and writing on her now home city through contributions to dwell magazine and the New York Times, lecturing at REDCAT, the Hammer, and the Skirball among others and, after first volunteering at KCRW, becoming the guest host of DnA and the full-time producer of To The Point and Which Way, LA? both hosted by Warren Olney. Though Frances is not a contributor to the Expanding Architecture publication, she most certainly is expanding architecture through her work in media, public media in particular.

Her entry that follows takes off from the previous three by discussing a single small act with large repercussions that relies not only on the change of human behavior but the adjustment of our built environment to support that change. The shift away from indolence, lethargy, and apathy, is most certainly one of human decision, but is also one of environmental, infrastructural, cultural, and urban support. If we wait for everyone to start walking before we build the sidewalks, we are too late. Our task as designers, visionaries, thinkers, writers, activists, neighborhood members - at whatever scale and in whatever capacity that comes to us - is to produce the city that enables the population to better produce itself.

Thanks to Frances and all of my guests for their brilliant and thoughtful contributions to cause of the week. Reimagine your role, hire an architect, eat a taco, walk your kid to school - they are small, and huge, all at the same time. Here is the final installation to the guest blog series:


LA and the Global Warming Diet
Frances Anderton, host of DnA

There is no question that physical design can solve many problems. But sometimes problems are of our own making and can be tackled through changes in our own behavior.

A huge problem in LA is traffic: congestion, air quality and carbon emissions; another big problem is a large population of children at risk of obesity. I decided to put those two together and look at how we might help alleviate both, simply through ceasing to drive kids to school. Places implementing this plan call it the Global Warming Diet.

I was inspired to focus on this when I happened to see a movie called Strangers When We Meet, made in 1960. The movie is a strange melodrama featuring Kirk Douglas as a “modern” architect having a passionate affair with a housewife played by Kim Novak. What really made an impression on me was the opening scene, which depicted kids in affluent LA walking or cycling to the bus stop in their comfortable, hilly LA neighborhood - the spatial and temporal origins of auto culture - rather than being ferried in cars to their school.

Fast forward almost 50 years: I walk my four year-old daughter, Summer, to her preschool, which is a few blocks from our apartment in Santa Monica. With the exception of a couple people walking dogs, and maybe one or two parents and kids, Summer and I are alone on the streets. Typically, the streets, even in our very safe neighborhood, are empty. I find this distressing. Where are all the kids, and their parents? Even if they live just a few blocks away, Summer’s classmates tend to be driven to school.

In the past 50 years the number of kids who walk or cycle to school has dropped from around 90% to almost 10%. Not only are kids missing out on a basic, healthful, childhood experience -- walking or cycling in the neighborhood with their friends or parents – but many of the children that are not walking or cycling are in cars and that means more cars on the streets, which in turn means more congestion, more bad air, more carbon emissions and, additionally, more children not getting enough exercise.

My solution for LA is to reduce cars simply by encouraging kids to walk or cycle to school or to the school bus. While my focus is on children, and on traffic at a specific time of day, I believe the lessons of this could be applied to other kinds of trips and other demographics.

Here’s a quick look at some stats, provided to me by two national advocacy groups, Environmental Defense and Active Living By Design, as well as the Centers for Disease Control.


CONGESTION:
It is estimated that 25% of morning traffic during the school year is parents driving their kids to school.

That’s a quarter of all cars!!!


CHILDHOOD OBESITY:
Forty years ago, nearly 90% of children who lived within a mile of school walked or biked to school. Today only 13% of all trips to school are made on foot or by bike.

In that same 40 years the number of overweight children has doubled! And 35% of kids do not get regular exercise these days.

The Surgeon General says we should all have 30 minutes of physical activity per day. You can get that walking just half a mile to school and back.


AIR QUALITY
Taking cars off the streets would obviously help improve air quality, but note how driving a child to school specifically worsens their personal air quality:

Moving cars expel VOCs (that’s Volatile Organic Carbons AKA foul air pollutants) but when a car is idling, as when waiting to pick up kids from school -- it puts out 3 times the normal amount of VOCs! And if you are idling behind the tailpipe of another car, your car sucks in the air pollutants, even when you turn off the recycled air. It’s like putting kids in a smoking room. That’s what parents are doing when they sit in an idling car at school.


CARBON EMISSIONS
For each mile you drive, your vehicle creates 1.29 lbs of CO2. Multiply that by 200 days in the school year, and one mile to school (there and back, twice). Add fifteen minutes each way of idling time and you’ve expelled 1872 lbs of CO2 per year.

Multiply this by 700,000 children (the approximate number of kids in the LA School District) and that’s 6,552,000 tons put out into the atmosphere by LA parents per year.

Those are four good arguments for getting kids out of the car and onto foot or pedal. But there’s tremendous resistance from parents, on the grounds of time and distance from school, and fears -- of a child being abducted or hit by a moving car or subject to violence en route to school.
Some of these fears are legitimate, specifically accidents and, in less safe neighborhoods, violence on the street – though it’s worth noting that the most common place for a child to be hit by a car is, guess where, at a school, by another parent.

Some fears border on the paranoid, like abductions.

As one Pasadena mom who cycles with her son to school – and he is the ONLY boy in his school who does -- pointed out: “as rates of child abduction and abuse move down, rates of Type II diabetes, hypertension and other obesity-related ailments in children move up. That means not all the candy is coming from strangers. Which scenario should provoke more panic: the possibility that your child may become one of the approximately 100 children who are kidnapped by strangers each year, or one of the country's 58 million overweight adults?
And some concerns, like distance, have some validity but not enough to warrant the huge drop in kids’ walking and cycling.

CHILD ABDUCTION
Kidnapping makes up less than 2% of all violent crimes against youth and of those only 4% of all kidnappings occur near a school. Of the 800,000 abductions or so that occur annually, only around 100 were by a stranger or non-family member. Stats show that child abductions have been moving downwards over the last 20 years.


DISTANCE FROM SCHOOL
Over the last 40 years the number of schools has decreased relative to numbers of children, meaning that more children are living at a distance from their school.

In 1969, 34% of children lived less than a mile from school, and 33% lived 3 or more miles from school.

By 2001, 21% of children lived less than a mile from school, and 50% lived 3 or more miles from school.

Yes, that is a challenge, but. . .

Active transport to school has also significantly declined among children who still live less than 1 or 2 miles from school.

Not to mention, in the last five years there’s been a turnaround with 76 new schools built in LA alone.

I believe one could alleviate most of the concerns by having the parent or older family member or teacher accompany kids to school, which affords the added benefit of more leisurely time spent with our kids enjoying the neighborhood.
I also believe, following Jane Jacobs' thinking about cities, that the more kids there are on the streets, the more visibility they have and the greater safety in numbers.

This kind of thinking is already being applied elsewhere. In other parts of America – many of them as hostile to walkers and bikers as LA – communities are introducing Kids Walk-to-School programs in which convoys of kids and teachers walk together. Where possible, they are combining them with efforts at traffic calming and the creation of bike and walkable routes. You can get more info about this by clicking here.

But the real challenge here is changing a pattern of behavior and assumptions we’ve become used to.

It’s commonly viewed these days that today’s 30 and 40-something parents are the most overprotective ever, terrified of letting kids experience the big wide world - and that’s an attitude shared by overprotective schools. The Pasadena mom who rides with her son says that the school asks children NOT to cycle. I know of schools on the Westside that prioritize drivers over walkers at drop-off and pick-up.

At the same time, our careers and electronic lives are so consuming that it’s easy for us not to take time out to walk with a child and smell the roses.

But in doing so we’ve lost touch with our bodies and with our neighborhoods. So while we wait for LA to develop its public transit system, while we wait for everyone to drive a low emissions, low gas consumption car, let’s urge parents and policymakers to take a simple step towards minimizing the traffic, cleaning the atmosphere, regaining children’s health, and enlivening our neighborhoods, by getting kids back onto the streets.

Requiem for a Dying Dream?

This past week I had the good fortune to be invited to the limited LA simulcast of the fantastically-inspiring TED conference. So as not to divert too much space from our third guest, I will mention now just one of the speakers and his serendipitous relevance. The founder of Twitter (which, if you don't know, is basically a free service that allows you to send mass text messages of under 140 characters to your friends/subscribers for an instant update on your current activities) was a surprise guest among the fifteen I heard speak on Friday. Though he told the story of this side project gone viral (his last side project was 'blogger' by the way) its inventive and entrepreneurial applications devised by users themselves are far more intriguing than its original limited intentions of social networking. For example, Twitter was used in the recent LA fires to report spreading flames and property conditions to an entire neighborhood in a matter of seconds. Lately, though, it's been used in LA to send salivating amateur gourmands the most current location of the hottest new meal (yes, it is mobile). Jonathan Gold, our Pulitzer prize winning food columnist, wrote just this week on Kogi, the Korean taco truck that has people lining up for HOURS in vacant parking lots to get a sliver of spicy pork, shredded cabbage, sesame and citrus (according to the expert). By subscribing to their Twitter feed, not only can you find their location, you also feel like one of their friends. Alice sends out short notes with capital 'L's which gives the slight sense that we are all in an anime with pigtails wearing knee-high leather boots (ok, maybe that's just me). The point is, our guest this week is particularly timely and relevant; beyond the objects of interest, he speaks to the deeper content of the battle over public space that mobile culture, and mobile food in particular, instigates. At least in LA, three people with a small refrigerator are combating new legal restrictions with high technology to resist the sound of the requiem.

José L.S. Gámez is an Associate Professor of Architecture, a member of the Latin American Studies faculty, and currently a Research Fellow with the Institute for Social Capital at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I was lucky enough to teach with José at UNCC where he also now serves as the Coordinator of the Design + Society Research Center for the School of Architecture. His research and design practices explore questions of cultural identity in architecture and urban design, the impacts of Latino immigration upon urban space, and critical practices in Chicano Art. In addition to his co-authored introduction in Expanding Architecture, his research is published in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies and Places: A Forum of Environmental Design. A big thank you, thank you to José for spanning space and time in this cause of the week, Requiem for a Dying Dream?


José L.S. Gámez
Requiem for a Dying Dream?


About a year ago, I wrote an essay examining the emergent public realm fostered by Latino immigrants and the mobile architecture of Taco Trucks. My aim was to show how places like Charlotte and Los Angeles are really not very different given the influences that transnational forces have brought upon urban centers across the country. Times change and what a difference a few days (well, weeks and months) can make.

Two things have happened since that essay went to print (forthcoming in a book titled Global Charlotte):

1). The economy tanked—even in recession proof Charlotte. This means that much of the construction labor force in the region, which happens to be about 90% Spanish speaking, has found itself idly biding time—a stark contrast to the Charlotte construction market just 6 months ago.

2). And, the City of Charlotte, in its infinite 21st century wisdom, passed an ordinance that limits the operating hours of Taco Trucks (they must now close up by 9:00pm), forces Taco Trucks to maintain a 400 foot distance between both residential areas and other Taco Trucks, and establishes that activities associated with Taco eating (talking loudly, listening to music, maybe even gathering to eat together with friends) can be a nuisance to local neighbors.

In these two things, Charlotte remains LA’s younger queen sister city. Our economies are, like those across the country, seemingly at a standstill. While each of us feels this in direct ways, the extent of fallout of this economic downturn can sometimes be easily overlooked—my Taco Trucks (objects of research, cultural fueling station, last bastion of public life) are vanishing. This tells me that the public policies created by officials in Charlotte and in LA (yes, LA has had an on-going Taco-based urban drama for quite a while) are putting a final nail into the coffins of some dying dreams.

So, what does this have to do with “something, one thing, that we might each do or one action that we might each take” in order to address social injustice? Last week Gail Peter Borden suggested that we hire an architect—that the value an architect can bring to any scale problem would/can be transformational.

I agree. But, with one caveat. We as designers, architects, planners, civic officials, must see that our role involves creating systems, plans, policies, programs, buildings, spaces, places and actions that are enabling not limiting. Small action with a big point—eat at a Taco Truck.

We are the architects of change and by frequenting these now embattled culinary carts, you can send a message that both supports the micro-economies of newcomers (in the case of Charlotte) or re-affirms the importance of an economy with deep historical roots (as in the case of LA). Charlotte’s Taco-based legislation illustrates how space itself is differentially allocated to various sectors of the public. Tacos have been criminalized while hot dog stands, bar-b-cue carts, and other mobile culinary ventures are allowed to move about the city without impunity. LA’s struggle is portrayed as one framed by property rights and competition in a marketplace. And, yet, for those who have no access to physical space, competition in a place of commerce is already closed. If the right to work, to participate in public culture, to life, liberty and freedom of expression are all basic freedoms to be afforded to all human beings, then those freedoms must be granted access to physical spaces in which they may be pursued.

With these cases, we see, as Ed Soja and Barbara Hooper pointed out a few years ago, processes in which difference is actively created in space not for the purposes of declaring a coalition unified in a common goal but, rather, to specifically deny access to a select group.

Nancy Fraser, the legal scholar, eloquently describes architecture and urban design (and their various collateral forms) to be part and parcel of the processes that help to define acceptable models of the public and the public realm. As such, our disciplines, more often than not, aid in the marginalization of constituent members of the public at large in part by typically promoting the notion of a public that is singular (albeit sometimes diverse). For Frazer, this limits our vision. We should think in plural forms—in terms of multiple publics each with commensurate and equal rights.

We must think differently about space itself (be it urban, rural, suburban, developed, underdeveloped, etc.). While witnessing the plight of Latino immigrants in Charlotte, I have come to see things as fundamentally tied to questions of human rights--not civil rights, which assume a sovereign state and its visible membership (this is, by definition, a limited group), but as a basic freedom to which we are all entitled.

As designers of things spatial, we must define our practice and products in terms of human rights. All people deserve equitable access to shelter, to the “public realm,” to space. And, we should demand that space be made available for those who have none. Eat a taco. Support a local immigrant entrepreneur. But most importantly, through our practices, send the message to policy makers that differential access to local spaces, places, streets, and neighborhoods is unacceptable.



** image courtesy of Izel Vargas

any action people can make?

If you have been reading at all about the stimulus package currently under debate in our Congress, then you know one of its main contentions is what seems to be a kind of ideological split between 'projects that provide jobs' and 'projects that improve America for the future'. This split is not so unlike the Republican / Democratic divide where the former has a history of rebuking criticism of country as unpatriotic and the latter more typically sees the country as a work in progress. The hot topics right now are education and infrastructure (coincidentally, two of the things most near and dear to my own heart). Teachers, school administrators, parents, and students are cheering the $160 billion the Obama team has allocated to education, though job advocates are asking what short-term relief such funding will offer. The infrastructure argument is also divided between those who believe 'shovel ready' will translate into status quo priorities and results, and those who believe it's simply better to build something and pay someone to do it now for the sake of the economy than to wait, get it right, and begin to shift the very nature of American mobility. We really do find ourselves in a moment of 'disaster capitalism', where we could allow the economic catastrophe to sidetrack our ambitions in a way that is short-sighted OR we could insist on a vision that, in the long run, will catapult the intellectual and literal shape of our country into a global position of leadership. In the meantime, allowing teachers, janitors, principals, nurses, librarians, engineers, designers, concrete suppliers, etc etc to keep their jobs is no minor contribution in combating the country's economic woes. Doing it right, while capitalizing on the skills present and in process to help lead these troubled times, is its own good investment.


For this week's guest spot, Gail Peter Borden proposes such an action. Gail is currently on the faculty at the University of Southern California School of Architecture and taught previously at North Carolina State University, Catholic University, The Boston Architectural Center and Harvard University. He has worked at a host of architectural firms including Gensler and Associates, Frank Harmon Architect, and The Renzo Piano Building Workshop in Paris where he was a designer on the Potzdamerplatz Project and the renovation of the Centre Georges Pompidou. He started the Borden Partnership in 1998 and has since won numerous design awards, been featured in exhibitions from Raleigh to Hong Kong, and is regularly at national ACSA conferences presenting the latest of his prolific writings. His essay in Expanding Architecture is entitled "Propositions for a New Suburbanism" and here is his cause of the week.

any action people can make?
Gail Peter Borden, AIA

The idea of changing the world with a simple action is an inspirational vision. Hire an architect.

We live in an amazing time of change - some for the good some for the bad, some that will hopefully stay with us and some that are bumps in the societal, formal and intellectual road. To help get through these hire an architect.

Architecture and its relationship to the broader conversation of global finance, social interaction, energy, and culture is at the heart of everything and yet seems left out of the conversation. Hire an architect.

If there is one small action I can suggest that people do - it would be to: hire an architect.

The knowledge and passion and ability held by the profession is immeasurable, yet when I look at the world class talent of my designer friends and colleagues they are all underutilized and looking for opportunity with hearts full of hope. Hire an architect.

As a profession that has implications on how we learn, shop, develop our built environments, interact in the public and private realms, impacting how we grow intellectually and physically, helping to determine how we find happiness and comfort in our environments, these are all the realm of an architect. Hire an architect

Whether you want to turn your front yard into a vegetable garden or devise a new city plan. Hire an architect.

Regardless of scale or scope - perceived significance or permanence, hire an architect.

If you are worried about cost, thinking you cannot afford the services, you might be surprised. I am not trying to devalue the services offered by an architect rather promise you the return will be tenfold. Hire an architect.