TEDx Charlotte - Are we innovative yet?

10 a.m. - Waiting for TEDx to start, in basement auditorium at Knight Theater, looking at psychedelic floral video displays in darkened auditorium. Architect Tom Low of the Charlotte Duany Plater-Zyberk Audience and founder of Civic by Design is pacing up front along with Manoj Kesavan, another local architect who's one of the TEDx Charlotte organizers. We're supposed to be learning about and experiencing innovative ideas, I think.

I should probably have read the material better. But this has been a week of 11- and 12-hour workdays. This morning before heading here I had to set out sprinklers for our newly re-seeded lawn, clean up last night's dirty kitchen, make breakfast, fix a torn hem on my slacks, emails a friend who's about to be unreachable, to set up the time and place for a lunch date, etc. etc. It reminds me of something I read recently, attributed to Jane Jacobs: An efficient city can't be an innovative city. I conclude this applies to personal lives, too. Too many tasks, duties and to-do-list work eats away at the time your brain needs to float free.

So I wonder: Have the past decades of workplace pressure for increased "productivity" – which means fewer workers, more work, faster work, longer workweeks, constant availability to the office – has all that had an effect on U.S. innovation?

Corbu? Or You?

Yesterday I posed the question of who should be on the list of worst urbanists – spinning off Planetizen.com's entertaining Top 100 Urbanists list.

The easy, cliched choice would be Le Corbusier, the brilliant but destructive architect whose vision for the city of the future was one of tall towers surrounded by large lawns and big highways. In other words, this guy invented Charlotte's suburban office park development Ballantyne, as well as this nation's many failed public housing towers. But Corbu was avant-garde and influential, and many others took up his theories. This was especially true in the U.S., where they dovetailed nicely with the auto and petroleum industries' push to get everyone into automobiles and driving a lot.


But thinking of Le Corbusier made me think of General Motors and its famous Futurama display at the 1939-40 New York Worlds Fair, depicted at right. Surely the automobile and petroleum industries – with their powerful influence on Congress and highway funding and with GM's purchase of many urban streetcar systems in order to dismantle them – did more to shape the nation's cities for the worse than any one architect could.

But then, of course, it's worth remembering that while Le Corbusier did influence huge numbers of architects in this country, Walter Gropius and his colleague Sigfried Giedion (who wrote "Space Time and Architecture") probably influenced more, during Gropius' many years at the Harvard School of Design. So maybe Gropius and Giedion should be on the list.
But again, wait. Architects challenge us to think. They may be wrong but who, really, decides what gets built? It's government that makes the rules that shape our cities. What about Herbert Hoover, who before he became president was Commerce Secretary and commissioned the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act, which to this day underpins most land use ordinances in America and whose very foundation rests upon the theory that separating uses is the way to a safe and healthy city or town. As Jane Jacobs later showed us, it really isn't.

The federal government funded the interstate highway system, envisioned as a way to connect cities. But when it entered the city it caused open, ugly wounds to the urban fabric that continues to damage cities to this day.

It was the federal government whose rules for backing mortgage loans created the redlining that cut off access to credit for anyone who A) was black, or B) lived anywhere near black people, or C) was one of a variety of so-called undesirable ethnics, such as Mexican or Bohemian or D) lived anywhere near any of those so-called undesirable ethnics.

It was the federal government, again through its financing rules, that encouraged the sprawling, low-density suburban subdivision design that vanquished more urban dwelling forms.

Consider: The government is by the people, for the people and of the people. It's all of us. So maybe that worst urban thinker arrow should spin around and start pointing at all of us?

Charlotte architect one of 'Greatest Urban Thinkers'

The late Jane Jacobs leads the vote so far with at least 660, but Lewis Mumford (270) and Kevin A. Lynch (281) are virtually neck and neck. The horse race? An online contest by the Web site Planetizen.com for Greatest Urban Thinker. Here's a link.

I was cheered to see Charlotte architect Terry Shook (below) on the list, though rather far down it, with 7 votes last I looked. S.C.-based developer Vince Graham is also on the list, with 5 votes.

It's an interesting list and provocative intellectual exercise, because you have to ponder whether some of the anti-urbanists, such as New York's Robert Moses and Le Corbusier, were more influential than urbanists such as Mumford and Jacobs.

The Planetizen gang decided to leave a bit muddy the issue of whether "influential" should mean "brilliant thinker about cities" or "had the biggest impact." Here's what they say:

"What about Le Corbusier, who remains an influential figure in architecture but has been labeled Enemy Number One by urban planners? Like Time Magazine, we've left the definition deliberately vague to encompass those who've had the most influence on the way we think about cities and/or how cities are shaped, for better or for worse. "

I e-mailed Shook (a UNC Charlotte alum) to alert him to his appearance in company of Mumford, Lynch, Daniel Burnham and other Big Names. He replied: " Really? ... Any idea on how I got on there?" (Which I'm pretty sure means he wasn't voting for himself ... )

You can vote for up to 15. Have at it.

One last note: If you're interested in reading about how Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses fought one another in New York over a series of urban redevelopment projects (Jacobs won the battles) look for "Wrestling With Moses," by Anthony Flint of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. I've read it; it's well-researched, well-written and quite entertaining.

Why razing NoDa really isn't a good idea

Plenty of you disagreed with my previous analysis of the threat to NoDa from the transit-oriented development. Many people said, in essence, it's dump, tear it town. I predict you'll get your wish within the next 10 to 15 years.

Those of you enthralled with all-new development that wipes away anything that was there before seem to think it's about nostalgia. It isn't. It's about entrepreneurs and small businesses, the very basic elements that build a local economy.

New buildings have expensive rents. Old buildings have cheaper rent. Old buildings breed entrepreneurs. It's not the architecture, it's the price of the space.

As urbanist writer Jane Jacobs put it, "Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. ... If a city area has only new buildings, the enterprises that can exist there are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new construction. ... New ideas must use old buildings."

In addition, companies that lend money to developers to finance new developments typically require that the space be leased to "proven" retailers, in other words, chains. That's why you don't see small, local businesses going into new buildings. Starbucks is welcome. Smelly Cat Coffeehouse isn't.