Point of view matters: the scourge of modelitis

When I say "city", what image pops into your mind? How would you visualize a city?

Are they images that look a bit like these?

Montréal from Mont Royal

Chicago's downtown in Google Earth

Tokyo from the observatory of Roppongi hills

Well, if this is the case, you may be suffering from modelitis.

What is modelitis? Well, modelitis is when people judge a city's look based on how it looks as a model or as seen from afar, rather than how it looks from the city itself.

The issue is a matter of point of view. Too often, people (often planners and architects) seem to care about a certain point of view of cities that city residents and workers do not regularly, or ever, have. When you make the model of a city, you tend to look down at it. It can be useful in that it allows people to look at a city as a whole, but that point of view is largely meaningless as few people can "enjoy" it.

Which point of view should be favored?

Who has that point of view in real-life? Well, birds, for one. The tiny minority who has the chance of having top-floor offices with windows or apartments in skyscrapers. People flying inside helicopters or planes. And... that's pretty much it.

Is this really the objective? To design cities so that birds will find them attractive? Meanwhile, the vast majority of people who live, work or shop in cities view cities from the ground, or from windows often no more than 4 or 5 stories up. THIS is the point of view that is important, but it is too often ignored by planners and architects used to make their decisions based on models or computer simulations that tend to favor this bird's eye view.

Why is there a focus on the bird's eye view?

I think the main reason is simple: in previous eras, the ability to visualize a city from the sky was very limited, if not completely absent. Likewise, knowledge was more technical than theoretical, so even when builders wanted to beautify buildings, in general this was done with a focus on the point of view they had as they were building them.

Old buildings in Clermont-Ferrand, note the attention to details on the windows, the cornice, etc...

A church in France, again, note the attention to details, especially on the gate

In previous eras, there was no distinction between architect and engineer, those who designed buildings also directly oversaw their construction. Architecture was a very hands-on profession. But in the modern era, architects work mainly with paper, models and computer simulations. Those who end up overseeing the construction of what they design are engineers, and finally, those who actually build the building are laborers who have zero input in the design of anything. Which means that all the authority for design decisions has migrated far away from the actual building, the point of view of the designer is thus completely different from that of the people who will actually use the building or reside near it.

The apotheosis of this is brutalist architecture, where buildings are made of concrete, lacking fine details, but emphasizing their shape instead.

Empire State Plaza in Albany is a brutalist masterpiece, it looks awesome from the sky

But it absolutely lacks in details for pedestrians up close, the only reason you would be near these buildings is if you were on the way in or out

So architects are now completely divorced from the point of view of the users of what they design, they instead are focused on their models and their simulations which gives them a bird's eye view of their buildings. As they're not incompetent, they make the buildings look good, but they look good from THEIR point of view. And thus, we have "modelitis".

Effects of modelitis

Modelitis infects more than just architects, planners are also affected by that perversion of focusing on the wrong perspective.

A still from a video about what makes city attractive, that shows a SATELLITE VIEW of Paris as an example of order and complexity, never mind that no Parisian ever had this view of their city, save perhaps an astronaut or two.

This makes planners adopt regulations that prioritize a perspective that should not be prioritized, meaning the bird's eye view or the skyline view (which is only visible from afar, and thus, not from the city itself).

The irony is that even urbanists who rebel against brutalism often articulated their criticism from the perspective of a model: versus the modernist skyscraper, they opposed a strict height-limited city, supposedly to preserve the "human scale". That criticism is also steeped in modelitis because it still focuses on the vertical scale and on uniformity as seen from afar. Someone who sees cities from the point of view of a pedestrian knows that the human scale is horizontal, not vertical. Meaning that the height of buildings isn't that relevant to human scale, what matters is how wide they are and their proximity to one another.

This focus on verticality is a clear effect of modelitis, higher stories are usually not visible from the ground for pedestrians. Even when they are, people tend to look down, not up, so most people will not even notice how tall buildings really are unless they take the time to check. A focus on a proper point of view, one of pedestrians, would focus on how a building's 3 or 4 lowest stories meet the street, not on how high it is, ESPECIALLY when the sidewalks have awnings, in which case the buildings are largely not even visible!

At the foot of the Empire State Building, sorry for the windshield perspective, the actual height of the building is irrelevant

So even if you care about harmony and order in urbanism, you should focus on the harmony and order as seen from the street, not as seen on a model of the city or from the sky. For example, Vancouver has had good urban planners who understood this and allowed skyscrapers that also had podiums that maintained the "street walls".

"Vancouverism", towers are present without disrupting the "walls" of the street", they are in the background, not the foreground

This is the view from the street, again, forgive the windshield perspective

Modelitis largely forgets the fact that buildings aren't art pieces, they are primarily consumer products, and cities aren't art galleries. It prioritizes the look of a city on a model and not whether or not it fulfills its role in responding to residents' needs and desires. A city which planners suffer from modelitis will keep making decisions based on what looks good, if this happens to satisfy people's needs, it will only do so by luck, not by design. Worse, the point of view that is prioritized is one that few if any people have, so even though the city's development is shaped by aesthetic preoccupations, it may not even look good for the residents who may be faced by wind-swept plaza, blank walls and boring streets... but hey, if they take an helicopter ride, what a view they'll have!

Modelitis applied on an urban park: Square Viger in Montréal

Square Viger in Montréal is an example, I think, of modelitis applied on the design of an urban park. It is highly controversial and the current mayor thinks of simply having it redone from the ground up.

Here is what it looks like from a bird's eye perspective:

So from the sky, it offers a lot of patterns which don't look too bad. Rather than a flat surface, there are different landings separated by small flights of stairs.

However, here is what it looks like from the point of view of people walking on the sidewalk:

This is extremely non-welcoming, and as a result, the square is deserted, apart from the homeless, drug addicts and drug dealers. Let's count down the elements that make it unfriendly to people.

1. All in concrete. There are a few trees and plants put on the concrete structures, but they have low visibility and, in the case of the plants, basically invisible when people are under these structures
2. Right angles everywhere which increases the unorganic nature of the concrete.
3. Too many stairs. Stairs are not a pleasant place to walk in, so they should be avoided where possible. They are hard on the knees, slow down travel and are a safety risk. Dividing the square needlessly into several landings separated by small stairways was a huge mistake.
4. Too many blind spots. The concrete structures and small walls result in many places being hidden from the street or from the rest of the square, this creates a feeling of insecurity as who knows who can be hidden there, especially when one knows the usual "population" that hangs around the place.

As a result, it is an unmitigated disaster, no one goes there if they can avoid it. Local residents will even make detours to avoid it, even if it is the shortest path to their destination. 

Yet, architects and the artist community still defend the square. They swear the design is good and part of Montréal's heritage. Basically, they're saying that the problem is the public who is not "educated" enough to enjoy the Square. Again, this comes back to the problem of seeing urban developments as art rather than as consumer products. On an artistic model, this may be a good design, but a Square is meant to be a public place that welcomes people to it and invite them to relax inside. In this case, the judgment of the "consumers" is clear: it is a total failure.

Conclusion

So, to sum up, it is crucial when judging cities to judge them from the point of view that matters, that of pedestrians or of residents looking out their windows. Too many people favor a bird's eye view of cities, or one from afar (skyline) that is not relevant to the actual people who live, work and shop inside cities. This results in misguided rules that ultimately hurt a city's potential at fulfilling its primary role of providing a good place to live and in which economical, cultural and social activities may occur.

Finally, I think that we must keep in mind three things:

1. The human scale is horizontal, not vertical: human beings do not usually look up, so the actual height of buildings is not that relevant, but distances that are too great between locations tend to discourage people from exploring areas and from walking from one place to another and so destroys the strength of urban areas.
2. Buildings are first and foremost consumer products: buildings exist to provide locations where people may live or where economical, cultural and/or social activities may occur. This is why they exist and their primary function. Aesthetic considerations are not meaningless, but they should be a secondary preoccupation. Sacrificing function to protect a desired form is a perversion of architecture, that should always put the human being, his needs and his desires, at the center of its process.
3. A pedestrian-friendly design should focus on detail, not shape: buildings in many, if not most, highly attractive places are often basically simple boxes, but they compensate by focusing on the details of wall, windows and doors to provide things to look at when people are up close. The form of buildings can only ever be glimpsed by looking at a distance, and often only by looking at it from the sky.

In defense of by-right zoning: the dangers of arbitrary planning

An argument I've sometimes heard when strict zoning is criticized is that it's not so bad, because developers can simply ask for a zoning change or variances, which is certainly true. This is hard to get when you are in a residential area, but in most downtowns, which are primarily offices and commercial areas, the local opposition will be much less, so developers have more chances to get it.

Some urbanists and architects also like this approach because it gives a way for urban planners to review any given project and extract concessions from the developer in return for approving the zoning change they request. Since developers are often seen by urban planners and architects as greedy people who have no sense of aesthetics, subjecting their projects to review by "proper" architects and planners is viewed as a good thing, and the zoning change provides a lever to force developers to change their plans. They refuse, they don't get their zoning change.

So, is this actually a good approach? To have zoning limits so strict that almost all projects have to demand variances and changes and reviewed by urban planners and architects?

Uncertainty and land prices

I've already made the argument that land prices are extremely useful in shaping cities. Urban development is an economic enterprise, and as such is extremely reactive to price signals, the most important one here is the price of land. Any person wishing to develop an area must first buy the land on which the development will occur. The more expensive the land, the higher the density of what developers will build. If land is too expensive, then low-density projects are nonviable economically and so are excluded. If land is cheap, then low-density projects are viable and may occur.

But what determines the value of land? The land owner wants to sell for the highest possible price, the land buyer wants to buy for the lowest possible price, but what yardstick helps to determine the proper value of land?

Well, my theory, which I believe is pretty sound, is that the potential profit value of development is what decides how much the land will sell for. In essence, a development generates revenues that are the difference between the market value per square foot and the construction cost, times the number of square feet that can be built.

Land owners know this and will set their expectations for the price of the land they sell accordingly. It's important to understand that, generally speaking, only the building itself generates revenue. Parking (unless it is tolled) doesn't generate revenues, neither do trees or grass (green buffer space), etc... It's the building that generates revenues, that is either rented or sold to people who want to use it. The rarer the land, the more land owners can negotiate a higher share of these expected revenues, the more abundant the land, the lower the share they can negotiate.

So what does that mean for urban developments? The market value is largely an input from the real estate market, it's relatively easy to get from looking at other developments. Construction costs can also often be approximated based on local construction costs. So the big question here is how many square feet of revenue-generating floor area can you build? That will determine what the land is worth.

So we come back here to the Floor-Area Ratio. I once said that it was not a proper vector for urban regulations because there is no direct negative externality of FAR that justifies its direct regulatory control. However, I may have jumped to conclusions too soon. The point is that controlling FAR may actually help the market determine with a greater amount of certainty the total potential revenue of development on land.

For example, if the value of office space is, say 300$ per square foot (not the rent, the actual value), and the construction cost is 200$ per square foot, that's a total revenue of 100$ per square foot. If allowed FAR is 200%, then that means that development revenue is limited to 2 square feet of revenue-generating floor area per square foot of land. So there is a ((300$/sq ft - 200$/sq ft) X 2 sq ft floor area/sq ft of land) 200$ revenue associated to each square foot of land, which is a hard cap on land value. If land owners get on average half the total revenue, then the land value would be about 100$ per square foot.

So when FAR is limited, either directly or through a combination of height limit and lot coverage limit (setbacks, margins, etc...)...

Front setback and minimum margins reducing the area the building can cover, here, the maximum coverage is 42% of the lot, if there is a height limit, then FAR is indirectly limited (for example, if 5 stories are allowed, maximum FAR is 210%)

...or through minimum parking requirements, then this helps clear up the uncertainty as to the amount of revenue-producing floor area that can be built on any given lot. This helps both the seller and the buyer of the land establish a potential land value, and thus helps them come to an agreement on price much faster.

But what happens when you keep zoning very strict with the expectation that you will consider requests for variances and zoning changes on a case-by-case basis?

Well, in that case, an arbitrary component is introduced, creating uncertainty. The zoning may currently limit FAR to 100%, but maybe in one case the city allowed one project to have 200% FAR based on a zoning change request. What message does that send to every land owner in the area? Even if your land is zoned for a 100% FAR, you should price your land as if it were zoned twice as high. Of course, developers would be wary to pay such high prices, because there's no guarantee they'll get a zoning change.

The result is making development less likely, as land owners price their lots well over what they are currently zoned for while developers, afraid of risk, may balk at the idea of paying land a certain price that is only justified with a zoning change.

Other impacts: corruption, blackmail and administrative bottleneck

Everywhere in the world, arbitrary power is always associated with another phenomenon: corruption. Without strict guidelines, public administrators have the freedom to make decisions based only on their own feelings without having to explain them to anyone. As a result, given the massive amount of money involved, developers have an incentive to do all they can to get administrators to come down on their side. I'm sure developers would prefer doing their thing without having to grease a few palms, but in the context of arbitrary urban planning, the temptation may be too great.

This may also go the other way, with either administrators or even sometimes NIMBY groups using the situation as leverage to extort favors from developers. For example, forcing developers to pay directly for the repair or replacement of local infrastructure, or forcing the developer to provide public goods like parks in exchange for building permits. This can result in much higher prices for new constructions as all the burden of providing for local infrastructure needs can be unloaded on them alone. This doesn't mean that having developers provide certain social goods is a totally bad idea, rules that establish certain fees to contribute to a local infrastructure fund to pay for the marginal cost of new developments may be a sensible approach, but this has to be set in the rules long before any project is proposed.

Finally, there is one final drawback. Setting up a case-by-case review process of every project is extremely expensive in terms of labor and time. Since cities have a limited amount of planners and architects, if there is a construction boom, then the review process might get congested as the urban planning department is overwhelmed with projects to review and comment. This can lead to delays and a limit on how many projects get the green light in cities, limiting new constructions just when demand is highest for them.

All these factors coalesce into one major final negative effect: the elimination of small-scale developers who do not have the funds and expertise to deal with all these issues and of small-scale developments that do not yield the revenues to justify facing down all that process.

In conclusion

I think what cities need is not more control by urban planners and architects, but less... arbitrary inputs in the development process need to be reduced to a minimum. Where rules exist, they must be applied upstream, based on clear, established guidelines to reduce, or even eliminate, uncertainty. When upzoning is required to deal with higher demand (and I believe rules must have a pro-redevelopment bias), this upzoning should be gradual and affect a large area, not just spot-by-spot rezoning based on specific requests. Even exceptional projects should ideally be realized in the context of specific rules, for instance through the purchase of "air rights" (buying unused FAR limits or height limits from lesser density developments) or incentive-based zoning (giving FAR or height bonuses for certain initiatives).

As in most things, in terms of urban development, the rule of law must be predominant, not the rule of men, in order to provide certainty and to level the playing field.

The perverse effects of on-street parking

I've been silent for quite a while, a result of my moving to a condo in downtown Montréal, but now it's finally (mostly) over, so back to our scheduled programming...

So let's get back to one of my biggest heresies with regards to conventional urbanism: namely my opposition of on-street parking.

Most North American and European urbanists tend to favor on-street parking. The reasoning is that cars parked on the street narrow the roadway and protects pedestrians from cars in movement. It also protects the pedestrian corridor from intrusion by cars. My counter-argument is that on-street parking claims the street for cars exclusively and pushes pedestrians on narrow sidewalks, squeezing them between building walls and steel walls. As streets are the most dominant public place in cities, parked cars result in them being taken away wholly for vehicles, in movement or parked.

I also believe that one of the first rules of good urban design is that we must treat cars as a shameful disease to be hidden from the public view so that urban design can be centered on human beings. The presence of too many cars is deleterious to any urban environment, so having cars right in your face, parked on the curb, is the exact opposite of what we should aim for. Hide the cars away so that you can focus the environment on people, not vehicles.

Compare and contrast:

Lyon in France, remember that this isn't the point of view of pedestrians, but of car drivers, pedestrians are pushed to the side

Sendai, in this case, pedestrians really have this view

Another place in Lyon, look at the lack of space between cars and building walls, is this some place to hang around in?

One residential street in Sendai

 Now look at these major arterial streets, again in Lyon and Sendai:

Arterial in Lyon

Arterial in Sendai

But again, this is a view from the street, not from the sidewalk, where people will actually walk, what do the sidewalks in each example look like?

Lyon, narrow sidewalks, where only two people can walk side by side, stuck between cars and walls

Sendai, sidewalks seem 2 to 3 times as large, providing a comfortable walking area no matter how many pedestrians there are, and even a bike path

Anyway, taste may be subjective, and while I much prefer the Japanese examples, some may favor the French ones. But that is not the point of this post. I'm instead going to think about the practical ramifications of on-street parking

The government as a parking provider

One of the most evident consequences of deciding to satisfy parking needs with on-street parking is making the government a main parking provider, if not the most important parking provider. Streets are almost the very definition of a public good, they can't readily be privatized, they must be planned and publicly provided. As a result, that means that the parking spots that can be found on the street are also publicly-owned. 

So when governments commit to build on-street parking everywhere, how much parking are we talking about here?

Well, if we take one average city block that is 300 meters or 1 000 feet long and 60 meters or 200 feet deep, and we have a public right-of-way that has 2 3-meter (10 ft) lanes, 2 2,5-meter (8 feet) shoulders for parking and 2 1,5-meter wide sidewalks (5 ft)...

Basic ROW shape

...that is a total of about 14 meters or 46 ft of ROW.

So the typical block would look a bit like this:

Typical block, in red, the parking places

We then have a 74 m x 314 m block size, including public ROW, for a total of 23 236 square meters, around 5,8 acres.

We have 720 meters of parking space on the street (2 x 60 m + 2 x 300 m). Supposing an average of 6 meters per car, that is 120 parking spots, which occupy about 8% of the land area.

So by committing to build space for parking on the street, the government commits to building 51 parking spots per hectare or around 21 per acre, or for a bigger scale, around 5 000 parking spots per square kilometer (13 000 per square mile).

So if you have a city with a  built area of 200 square kilometers (80 square miles), that city will have built around 1 million on-street parking spots. That is undeniably a massive amount of parking, all provided by the city government.

Ramifications of the government as a parking provider

The fact that the government is a parking provider has a lot of consequences. Since the government is providing so much parking, parking will be seen as a public service, because, well, it is a service that is provided by public authorities. People who depend on that service will therefore hold the government accountable for the quantity and quality of parking. In other words, more than just a parking provider, the government will be forced to take on the role of managing the parking supply in order to satisfy its voters.

This role of supply manager is actually what leads governments to adopt minimum parking requirements and limits on density (most of the objections to new developments in already dense areas are rooted in fear of overwhelming existing on-street parking, making it harder for residents to find parking there). Off-street parking requirements were conceived initially as a way to prevent parking overflow on city streets, in order to keep parking spaces free on the street, it was required of developers to build off-street parking so that the people who live/work/shop in these developments wouldn't overwhelm the public provision of on-street parking spaces.

Without on-street parking, the government could have left developers to deal with their parking problems by themselves, or let the market provide only as much parking as drivers were willing to pay for. With on-street parking, city governments were forced to intervene, as a major parking provider itself, it couldn't turn a blind eye on issues of parking supply and demand. The government can't say that parking issues aren't its business when it is the main parking provider in the city.

Of course, in a situation where on-street parking is significantly under-priced or even free, any off-street parking operator choosing to put a price on its parking lot can expect people to just park on the street if there is any place available there, which can result in parking overflow on streets even as the parking lot stays empty. This can lead to the city government coming down on that parking owner, because this is exactly the situation that the city government sought to avoid by having minimum parking requirements.

Economic ramifications

In case I've not made it clear enough, my position on parking is the following: there should only be as much parking as drivers are willing to pay for, parking supply should neither be inflated by government (minimum requirements) nor limited by government (maximum parking rules).

In general, letting developers decide how much parking to build should result in this "user payer" situation, as they will make economic calculations and build only as much parking as they can justify economically. But what happens when they have to compete with on-street parking, often provided for free by the government? It completely distorts the market, private off-street parking options will generally not even exist, because who would park there for a fee when they could park for free on the street? At least, not unless on-street parking is completely overwhelmed.

As a result, on-street parking completely destroys the pricing mechanism for parking. Donald Shoup favored a pricing ideal for on-street parking in that the price of parking should be such that 80% of parking spots are occupied, if it's more, rise the price, if it's less, lower it. That is one approach... but implementing it still means that much (if not most) of the time in most locations, the proper price to reach that goal is... 0$. So you still have people being provided a parking spot for free in many places, especially in low-density areas. Yet on-street parking still has a cost, it's not free to provide.

The reason why the market can provide a good approximation of "user-payer" in many cases is that supply is free to increase or decrease with price. If the price of a good increases, then developers will provide more of it to profit from it. On the other hand, if the price of a good decreases, or if more profitable uses of resources come to be, supply can decrease as previously profitable parking spaces can become less profitable than alternatives, or even outright unprofitable.

The owner of a private parking lot has the option of continuing operating his lot or selling for development, in the case presented here, over a 30-year analysis, it's better to keep operating the lot...

But if the value of land increases, it may become more profitable to just sell the lot for development, reducing the supply of parking but increasing the supply of land to develop

But with on-street parking, that's not the case at all. We are dealing with a fixed supply set up by the government. You can vary the price, but you cannot decrease the supply, at least, not in any useful way. One of the big problems is the geographic form of on-street parking. These narrow bands of asphalt between the travel lanes and sidewalk are utterly useless for developers. The best you can do is rearrange them to be wider sidewalks, bike paths or a green buffer between street and sidewalk, but nothing else. There is no versatility here, because the land cannot be recuperated for development, it doesn't have to compete with alternative, productive uses for it.

So if we agree that a proper parking policy should result in parking users paying for the parking that they use so that their transport choice isn't subsidized, then on-street parking is the greatest thorn in our side. It is hard to price, and the supply is fixed and cannot vary depending on demand, and as a result, in lower density areas, it will push out private for-fee parking and result in on-street parking and mandated off-street parking being free.

Conclusion

So there was my take on the perverse effects of on-street parking, how it makes providing parking and managing parking supply a government responsibility while disrupting the pricing mechanism for parking spots, largely eliminating for-profit parking businesses except in a few exceptional places. I accept that, unfortunately, most North American city streets are already built much too wide to accommodate parking, but I think that on-street parking is one of the greatest obstacles to a sane parking policy that would have drivers assume the full cost of the parking they use.

Parking shouldn't be a government's responsibility, yet that is ultimately the result of allowing on-street parking to be massively used. This leads to the absurd hypocrisy that city governments will take more seriously their "responsibility" to provide sufficient parking to all drivers, but not their responsibility to make sure all their residents can find proper housing. As if an human being not being able to afford a place to live in is sad, yet tolerable, but a car without a parking space is unacceptable.