What Happened to the Great Urban Design Projects?

The state of Massacusetts has left most of its bridges unpainted since the Romney Administration. They are now deeply pitted by corrosion and most will need to be repaced within 20 years. The Route 2 span over Route 128 is being replaced right now because the unpainted support girders rusted out, and the job is costing $millions.

Oh come on, haven't you seen the unbelievable stealth fighters, bombers, and even ships we've built, not to mention really cool drones and robotic infantry fighters. We're just using our creative talents in more practical areas.

But hey, as far as urban design, you neglect one of our modern highlights, the World Trade Center Station. I know it took 9 years, 5 billion dollars, and looks like the outside of a parking lot, but hey, who else could have done that but America!

It's amazing how many of us use the infrastructure that was built a century ago. It's also amazing that our government spending is so tied down in entitlements and military spending that we aren't doing more new projects.

How about a world class electric grid run on taxes that anyone can bring power to. How about high speed safe Wi-Fi available to everyone, more parks and trees? More playgrounds, new schools. These projects add value and they also create good paying jobs and national pride.

We already know why there’s no infrastructure repair. Blocking of the jobs bill and blocking of infrastructure spending. On the very day President Obama was inaugurated, Republican leadership, in the form of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Eric Canter, et al, swore they would do whatever it takes to make President Obama a one-term president. Up to and including blocking expenditures even the Republicans wanted. They would destroy the economy and even shutdown the government – for the explicit purpose of “not allowing the President any victories or successes.” You voted for no infrastructure repair when you voted Republican.

What happened is that REPUBLICANS decided to spend billions on obstruction, upending the Affordable Care Act, trips to address the Senate by leaders who were anti-American, committees to examine the same silly stuff over and over again, efforts to help states take away voting rights, and women's rights to reproductive health care, PLUS billions more on military expansion and weapons for our enemies in the Middle East. Lets not forget that the Republican dominated congress has the power to legislate spending bills, not the president, but usually they have just tacked on the spending to little invisible bills, while the press wasn't looking carefully enough.

A surprisingly myopic commentary from an experienced urban-design critic: "Atlanta -- yes, Atlanta!" Are you really stunned, Ms. Arieff, that Atlanta is capable of implementing a good plan? And does Los Angeles really deserve to be dismissed as an "unlikely candidate to bring awe to infrastructure"? Please leave your Bay Area provincialism on the corner of Van Ness and Attitude when writing for a less-prejudiced audience, Ms. Arieff.

The global billionaires, weened and supported by U.S. tax dollars and the military worldwide, have now abandoned the United States. Now that they control half of the world's wealth they have moved beyond nation states and consider us just another third world country, with a big military that they can deploy to control resources.
Through their corporate mass media, they have convinced the American people that their is no money; that the poor stole it all (!!??). They write legislation, slashing investment in infrastructure to pay for tax cuts for themselves, and have it rubber stamped by their rental politicians.
Infrastructure involves long term thinking. Billionaires only think as far ahead as the next quarterly report, and about who has the biggest pile of money stashed in offshore accounts.
As long as let the billionaires have their way with government policy at all levels of government our infrastructure will continue too fall apart.
We could be building a economy based on nearly free renewable energy, with high speed rail (China has magnetic levitation rail while we have the Excella), expanding local transportation, walkable downtowns, etc.... Instead we are letting our country go to seed.
If you believe infrastructure is essential to the future of our country, than you need to join the movement to take government back from the billionaires. Research suggests we need 3.5% of the population actively organizing for democracy in order to reverse this disaster. Help!

Phoenix, Arizona, has more miles of canals (131) than Venice. The city is bisected by trails used for biking, running and walking. It has the largest urban park system in the country, by far. The desert and mountain preservation efforts and park infrastructure projects of Phoenix, Scottsdale and Maricopa county are immense and spectacular. Thanks to East and West coast parochialism, you will never read about them in the New York Times.

As in the architecture of our infrastructure, so in the architecture of our politics. We've strayed too far from bold vision, too long.

This article is so perfect. In addition to a "Moon Shot" to cure cancer, we need something like it to rebuild our cities and infrastructure. American cities should be the most desirable urban places in the world to live, especially since more and more of us are going to live there. But we have a long way to go. It's hard to drive through LA or Detroit and not despair. Like many other problems in the US, the dismal state of our cities and infrastructure is a manifestation of a bean-counter mentality in all levels of goverent and the disastrous antipathy for all things in the shared public domain. If our politicians chose to invest in our country rather than squander trillions in foreign wars, we could have more jobs, better cities and better lives.

Americans once built the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam, great national parks, and the interstate highway system that links us together. Americans once set foot on the moon, and returned to earth.

Now, America is the land of grim cities, pot-holed, overcrowded roads, ugly concrete highway bridges of dubious safety, millions of idle youths with addled brains, and incomplete social services.

No wonder Americans are angry and hostile! Ugliness, idleness, uncertainty, and bureaucracy are vexatious to the human spirit. Shouldn’t American governance and politics be blamed?

Atlanta is an inner city of a half million people at the center of a metropolitan region of 5.5 million. It is an island of liberalism in a sea of hostility. The suburbs are conservative and uncooperative, and the State government is conservatively dysfunctional with an occasional outburst of wackiness. Yet, this small inner city has a remarkable record of accomplishments in the face of hostility. It has a heavy rail transportation network and the world’s busiest, most efficient airport. The BeltLine is just another good idea that, once supported by elected officials, has taken on a life of its own.

I felt drawn to this piece by the picture of the futuristic bridge. As depressed as I sometimes feel by the missed opportunities of our nation, primarily in the potential economic boom of transforming to a green economy that we seem at risk of missing, I find myself re-energized when I see pictures of what our country could look like thirty or fifty years from now if we choose to act boldly. I've seen amazing designs for livable energy-independent buildings, decentralized grids powered by the sun and wind, a restoration of urban green spaces. I have to keep remembering that imagining a better future is the essential first step to getting there.

Exhibit A in the decline of American infrastructure exceptionalism is the new eastern span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge (aka the Two Browns bridge), which took 25 years and five billion dollars to traverse a mile of mud flats, and is already rusting in place. The story of its design & construction & decline is such a farrago that the best we can expect is that one day the Coen brothers might make a movie out of it. I'm not laughing, I'm crying.

Terrific article.

And, to this discussion, see Cincinnati and its new streetcar and the Renaissance (yes) of historic Over-the-Rhine. Cities for two generations were abused, neglected, avoided, shunned...and now are reviving, you might say blooming. It's where people -- and not just young professionals -- want to live again, and for a hundred good reasons, money and environment included. There is awe in tracks and bridges (see too Roebling's FIRST suspension bridge, across the Ohio River between Cincy and Covington).

And then, speaking of Cincinnati, there's the magnificent Art Deco Union Terminal, an example of design and planning from the past which puts in ever starker contrast the vanilla boredom and inefficiency which took hold post-war, shopping centers as the poster-awful example. Wait a minute -- a train station in the middle of a city, configured originally with a streetcar pass-through? This in 1933. And the much-loved Terminal is about to receive a world class restoration.

These things bode well. Repair! Conserve! Imagine! Build!

These projects go against the idea that government can do anything - so popular in the Conservative mindset today. NY state invested $7M two hundred years ago in the Erie Canal which led to NYC becoming the largest city in the US and a major global trade center. The last time private enterprise took on such a project was the Pennsylvania RR one hundred years ago - connecting mid-Atlantic rail routes to New England through NYC. It was successful but Pennsylvania RR went bankrupt.

The Beltline is a cool walking path, it is by no means a wonder. Capping the Connector and reconnecting the east/west parts of the city would be a grand strategy worth pursuing.

Those looking for great urban projects need search no further than the new Tappan Zee bridge currently under construction--its web site is newnybridge.com

The old bridge can be charitably described as utilitarian. I do not recall any protesters demanding its preservation. The new bridge (yet to be named) will not only improve traffic capacity but will built with graceful chamfered towers and cables. It will include a bicycle and pedestrian path with 6 belvederes overlooking the river, each reflecting on a different aspect of the culture and history of the lower Hudson valley.

I am hopeful that communities on both sides of the river will seize this opportunity to expand biking and walking trails to connect with the bridge. There are already bike trails in Tappan, NY extending up through Piermont to Nyack. If these could be extended southward into New Jersey on unused, overgrown rail beds it would be a great boon to bicyclists from Bergen County and further south.

Grand, imaginative infrastructure projects may come in quite different forms than the traditional railways and bridges; and in the case of the Bay Area, it seems grand visions today mostly come from the technology sector.

For example, the development of autonomous vehicles, led by Google -- now joined by Apple, Tesla, Uber, etc -- may greatly transform cities, in ways planners and architects haven't much anticipated or we yet understand. AVs might hugely reduce vehicle accidents, which currently kill over 1M people a year.

Or, take the global race to create low-cost wide-distance telecom/Internet service, with Facebook, Google, SpaceX, OneWeb, etc in a race to build satellite or balloon or hybrid systems. This may catalyze opportunity and development in the world's fastest-growing cities and regions as much as physical infrastructure ever has.

Even further from railroads & bridges, we could look at the rapid evolution of blockchain and decentralization protocols as a giant, transformative infrastructure project being built by 10,000s of engineers and entrepreneurs, and $B's of investment. This has potential to transform finance, governance, cooperative work/economic models, etc, possibly enabling more equitable and transparent working models for many sectors. This might end up a more important bridge than the Golden Gate, which while iconic, after all still mostly serves a few little-populated, wealthy SF sub/exurbs.

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Tim McCormick
San Francisco tjm.org @tmccormick

So what happened to so many of these wonderful projects? They've become perfect metaphors for just what you can expect from trusting everything to private enterprise, especially in this era of tax and labour policies that seem all too deliberately designed to create a modern Gilded Age. Better keep up your payments to your life insurance companies, boys and girls, in case today's lack of infrastructure maintenance becomes an all-too-personal experience - as a portion of bridge roadway collapses, spilling you into the drink.

In search of something "awesome", the SF Bay got an overpriced, unmaintainable, disaster-prone design. The complexity of construction is so high that many mistakes were made, and a single flaw that threatens the integrity of the bridge may be essentially unrepairable. I'd rather have a bridge that doesn't provoke any oohs and aahs but we can count on to stay up and leaves billions of dollars more in the taxpayers' pockets.

Hi. Nice article and the pictures were great - I'd never seen the Millau Viaduct, and the Chand Baori stepwell makes me want one at home - which is just a couple blocks from where the Chicago River picture was taken.

I have to point out that the flow of the Chicago River wasn't redirected away from Lake Michigan to "mitigate the effects of extreme weather". It was to keep the every day sewer water from running out into the lake, where we get our drinking water. Before water treatment plants and fancy things like that, the simple approach to keeping lake water drinkable was to put a lock system at the mouth of the river, and then dig the Sanitary and Ship Canal to connect the south part of the Chicago River to the Illinois River - and on to the Mississippi.

There is a huge project in Chicago to deal with extreme weather, though, and it reduces the times the Chicago River lock has to open to allow flood surges into the lake - "Deep Tunnel". It's an underground system of tunnels to store polluted flood runoff - over 2 billion gallons worth - after heavy storms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_and_Reservoir_Plan

Anyone interested in infrastructure and how even the most mundane parts of it can catch the eye might also check out Brian Hayes' "Infrastructure: The Book of Everything for the Industrial Landscape".

Unless you count the Great Wall of Trump, even the discussion of inspiring public works are stillborn in this gun-worshiping backwater. As that visionary Hillary Clinton loves to note, we are America, not England or France.

And let's not forget the exquisite Viaduc de Millau in southwestern France, designed by Foster and Virlogeux!

In Scotland there is that marvel of engineering the Forth Rail bridge.

We are building the ugliest buildings ever! Does doing something on the cheap, mean that it must be ugly?

WHERE ARE THE PATRONS?

Historically, the patrons of fine public works have been members of the aristocracy (in Europe) and the super-wealthy in 19th and early 20th Century America. More recently, it has fallen to the government to fund our transportation, education, and other edifices of public infrastructure.

During our period of maximum investment in infrarstructure, the 50s and 60s, the government was funded with higher taxes on the wealthy, channeling their historical role in funding things the less wealthy could not afford through the federal tax system. But today's less- or no-government Tea Party self-serving wealthy have starved the country of their historic contribution to such investments. And American infrastructure is in embarrassing decline.

Until we restore the funding for investments in "Rebuilding America" from the only source of wealth available to do the job (viz, taxes on the wealthy, or public-private partnerships using private funds as profitable investments), we will be living off our heritage and slowly sinking into second-world status.

While our bridges, highways and other transport systems represent perhaps the most visible infrastructure elements rotting away, our education system is the most important. That climate-change and evolution deniers can be a potent political force is only suggestive of the damage that can be caused to our infrastructure and society by failing to invest in better education as well.

When I was a grad student at UCLA in the 1980s there was a plan to build an elevated bike freeway across West LA as a way to demonstrate alternative forms of transportation. The vision was compelling, like the Atlanta BeltLine, and was seen as a model for the world. But it basically was planned and committeed to death... over 8 years worth before finally peetering away.

I suspect there are vastly more "Great Urban Design Projects" that end up as shelved visions than those that finally are realized. It does demonstrate that such projects are far more complex, socially and in terms of engineering, than simply carrying out a plan. I suspect the visions that do get realized are those that satisfy a compelling need for an urban area.

Turn you gaze 90 degrees from the Old Golden Gate and behold the modern Bay Lights of the San Francisco Bay Bridge (http://thebaylights.org/). Now THAT is great urban design!

We have Teach for America, Code for America - and now we need Architect for America.

As I travel around the country in my motorhome, I get to see first hand our nation's crumbling infrastructure. I've removed the chrome trim rims from the wheels having lost several to potholes. Preferring secondary roads to the interstates, I've noticed and increasing number of "Road Closed" signs and that scene-jarring orange barrier fence that is often fallen down and bleached by the sun, which indicates that there is little hope for a fix. As a nation, have we given up?

line 'em up: the failure to recognize "infrastructure as a catalyst;" the failure to recognize education as a catalyst; the failure to recognize good health as a catalyst, etc., etc., and the failure to recognize the cost of the anxiety therefrom is what has us in dark, deep water, flailing, often at each other, without compass.

The "Great Urban Design Projects" died when the voters of this nation embraced the mantra that their "taxes are too damn high" and that "government is the problem". Infrastructure, not just its construction, but its maintenance and repair, has gotten short shrift ever since. Private developers will only build what they can find the financing for -- and that financing will only be forthcoming if there's money to be made. But there's no money to be made in new sewer or water lines, construction of new electrical grid facilities, bridges and roadways, dredged harbors and rivers, or water treatment plants. Those are projects that only a government looking out for the greater good of the nation will undertake. Unless and until its citizenry wakes up from its stupor, stupidity and selfishness, this country too will ebb further into decline.

I would say the answer to Ms. Arieff’s question can be seen in the contrast between the pictures in the slide show and the article itself. Apart from the ancient Chand Baori stepwell, the pictures are mostly of iconic structures with billion dollar price tags (For example, the Gotthard Base Tunnel will cost around $10 billion when it is completed this year). In contrast to these structures, Ms. Arieff discusses at length the Atlanta Beltline. That project is more about building consensus than showcasing extraordinary feats of engineering. As Ryan Gravel points out, “People don’t love the physical thing of the BeltLine.” Instead, “They love that it’s changing the city. It allows us to look beyond the shortcomings of the city and look ahead to the future and be excited about that.” If that’s what great urban design looks like in the 21st century, I’ll take it.

Why fix a bridge, repair a road or improve the railroad if we can instead give the .1% another tax cut. They need this money to pay for their private planes and limos.

Bernie Sanders is for stopping this nonsense. Hillary Clinton may be for stopping the nonsense, but mostly likely in an incremental fashion that doesn't hurt the wealth of her banking friends. The Gods Of Profit (GOP) party would have to check with their donors to see if it was OK or not.

Vote for Bernie Sanders 2016

Dear Ms. Rip Van Winkle,

While you were sleeping or away or whatever, America began and continues its going out of business sale.

The bridge in the photograph is located in the south of France. It was built by a highly innovative method on flat land and rolled out across the valley it spans.

The US is flat out anti-science and anti-innovation.

"Yet engineers, planners and policy makers tend to focus on wonky stuff like percentage of parkland per person. They’re awash in acronyms like V.M.T. (vehicle miles traveled), too reliant on planning terms like modeshare that don’t resonate with the general public."

Ode to the Automobile

Ode to the Automobile,
Noxious and fast.

Insatiable fossil-thirst
Takes more than fanciful
Mobility provides.

-BBM

Reliance on convenient transportation is ineluctably tied to convenience. But, disposable facility for vanity's sake is wantonly destructive. We need a healthier, more-human scale.

"A century later, we’ve lost our collective faith in the power of great projects like the Golden Gate, not to mention our trust in the government to fix a pothole on time and on budget,"

No. We have not all lost faith.
We are 30 years past the introduction of Grover Norquist's 'No New Taxes/Taxpayer Protection' pledge. By 2012, 95 % of Republican politicians in the country had signed allegiance to it - NOT TO THEIR COUNTRY.
When they sign that pledge, they are agreeing with Norquist that they want to drown their country's government in a bathtub.
We can't accomplish anything if half the federal government's legislators and the legislatures of half the states are controlled by people who cannot envision any kind of future independent of their pathologically rigid Libertarian ideology.
We can't accomplish anything with an offset this to pay for that/rob Peter to pay Paul appropriation mentality. And, when they refuse to address the tax code, that's what they are left with.
Since, I don't see the Real Republicans shaking free of the Faux Republican Libertarians anytime soon, it's up to the Democrats to remind people of what Our Country was before we followed Ronald Reagan down the rabbit hole of Voo-Doo economics and lost our souls and vision for real greatness and jobs for all building and maintaining that greatness.

The reason infrastructure on this scale has largely fallen off the agenda of governments, especially in the United States, is that we are in an era of politics in which public goods of all kinds have largely been displaced by emphasis on private acquisition and wealth. Infrastructural innovation for the wealthy continues apace: see the skinny super tall residential towers popping up in NYC. Meanwhile, projects that benefit all languish. We need to restore the social value of the very idea of 'the public,' before we will start to see these sorts of infrastructural innovations happening at the pace they should be.

Allison's use of the term urban design is rather loose. Bridging through or across nature is not urban design. It is simply a bridge. A new bridge soon to be built across the east arts district plus the L.A. River in downtown Los Angeles very much pertains to urban design.

I like her basic question very much though. However, the idea or concept of 'urban design' better concerns as-built urban density, the more dense, the more appropriate is the use of the term. At its best, urban design encompasses imaginative programming and linkages, design quality, social awareness, response to historic content and civic symbolism.

"American infrastructure is deferred home maintenance on a massive scale."

Our cars are another example. At first, people were doing repairs to keep older cars running instead of buying new cars. Now, we see more and more wrecked cars just driving on and on anyway. That is our infrastructure too.

"The Golden Gate Bridge, which is orange, is the best-known and best-loved bridge in the world. "

Is it? Is it really? The world is a pretty big place, and perhaps Ms. Arieff just asked her friends in San Francisco. I guess I would have let this remark pass if she hadn't added on "in the world," because then there would have been ambiguity about the domain of her claim, but no, she had to go overboard. Even if we grant best-known, surely it's not the best-loved. In the U.S. there's the Brooklyn Bridge. In the U.K. there's Tower Bridge. In Paris there's the Pont Alexandre III. In Venice there's the Ponte di Rialto. In Florence there's Ponte Vecchio. In Rome there's Pont Sant'Angelo. And then there's the Pont d'Avignon. If I were to ask *my* friends, they would all love any of these over the Golden Gate.