Archinect - News

Urban street-network sprawl is trending globally, new study finds

2020-02-11T15:10:00-05:00

Satellite images dating back to 1975 allow researchers to map how millions of cul-de-sacs and dead-ends have proliferated in street networks worldwide. [...] A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences charts a worrying global shift towards more-sprawling and less-hooked-up street networks over time.

The study's authors, Christopher Barrington-Leigh at McGill University and Adam Millard-Ball at UC Santa Cruz, were able to identify the global trend toward urban street-network sprawl by analyzing high-resolution data from OpenStreetMap and satellite imagery of urbanization since 1975 and then measuring the "street-network disconnectedness index (SNDi), based on every mapped node and edge in the world."

The documented global drop in street connectivity due to the proliferation of urban and suburban developments that feature cul-de-sacs, dead-ends, and gated communities should require a "rapid policy response, including regulation and pricing tools," the study suggests, "to avoid further costly lock-in during this current, final phase of the urbanization process."

The researchers write that their street-network measure can predict future climate, energy, health, and social outcomes related to urban form.

California's SB-50 densification bill is back again

2020-01-08T13:58:00-05:00

Now SB 50 allows cities two years to adopt their own plans to achieve the bill’s central goal, which is to greatly increase the amount of market-rate and affordable housing built near transit and job centers [...] without increasing car travel or concentrating the new homes in low-income areas while leaving more affluent areas untouched.

Writing in The Los Angeles Times, opinion columnist Kerry Cavanaugh highlights some of the recent changes made to proposed legislation from California State Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco.

Wiener's SB 50 measure is a statewide densification initiative that's been a work in progress for several years. The latest iteration of the far-reaching plan is aimed at pacifying local-control advocates, including members of the Los Angeles City Council, who would like more of a say in terms of how they might implement the proposal's mandate to modestly increase residential densities within a quarter-mile of high-frequency transit stops across the state. The bill could help the state reach its ambitious goal of building over 3.5 million new residential units across the state by 2025.

120,000-resident suburb under construction in California's Central Valley

2019-09-25T18:15:00-04:00

About 450 houses have been sold so far at Riverstone and 73 at Tesoro Viejo, which already has a school (Hillside Elementary) plus a cafe and fire/sheriff’s substation in its fledgling “town center.” Together, these “master-planned communities” along with other proposed developments with names like Gunner Ranch West, North Shore at Millerton and TraVigne form what Madera County officials project will be a city of 120,000 people.

California's urban housing crisis, fueled by lackluster housing production in the state's population centers, is fueling sprawl that is eating up wilderness and agricultural land around cities like Fresno.

Madera County supervisor Brett Frazier told The Fresno Bee, “The assumption was this was just going to be another bedroom community. But when you drive through it you see it’s something different. In the next 20 years, it’ll truly be a new city.”

Driverless technology is about to reshape the real estate industry

2018-02-16T18:06:00-05:00

The link between property and transport has been perhaps the most durable in human history. Since the ancients, few things have delivered higher land values with more certainty than advances in transport, from roads to canals, railways to highways. [...] But now, the dawn of the driverless car—promising a utopia of stress-free commutes, urban playgrounds and the end of parking hassles—threatens to complicate the calculus for anyone buying property.

Bloomberg Technology explains how the real estate industry is already preparing for all that sweet, sweet valuable space to open up for development once the widespread arrival of driverless vehicles makes parked cars — and the blocked square footage they occupy — a thing of the past.

MIT study predicts autonomous vehicles to fuel construction boom

2017-10-24T19:46:00-04:00

It’s 2027 (or 2037) and the age of the self-driving car. City-dwellers have traded in their car keys for ride hails. Street parking has been replaced by wider sidewalks and bike lanes, while developers are busy converting garages into much-needed housing. That’s one vision of how self-driving cars will affect U.S. real estate, laid out in a report by MIT’s Center for Real Estate. But it’s not the only one.

"Even as reclaimed parking spaces fuel a downtown building boom," Bloomberg reports, "autonomous vehicles will encourage builders to push deeper into the exurban fringe, confident that homebuyers will tolerate longer commutes now that they don’t have to drive, according to the report [...]."

Read the full report Real Trends: The Future of Real Estate in the United States here.

How autonomous vehicles will accelerate suburban sprawl

2016-06-21T13:21:00-04:00

If Mr. Ratti’s projections are correct, and self-driving cars can radically reduce traffic without cannibalizing existing mass transit—the hypotheticals pile up—it is possible that self-driving cars will make many cities livable in a way they aren’t now. Imagine if every U.S. city had a hybrid public-private mass-transit system on par with those in New York City or Washington, D.C., comprised entirely of self-driving vehicles.

Half the world lives in cities – or not

2016-06-09T17:48:00-04:00

Last month, the journal Science published a special issue examining the challenges and opportunities of an urbanizing world. Titled “Urban Planet” and featuring an image of clouds wafting across skyscrapers in Dubai, the issue opened with an eye-catching statistic: “More than half of the world’s people now live in cities.” Of course, that number would be even more impressive if it were actually true.

According to the article, the statistic that half the world's population lives in cities is misleading. Many of these people live in towns and small urban enclaves, not the bustling metropolises conjured by the stat.

The author argues that such thinking makes one overlook sprawling fringe areas, which face challenges that require as much attention as a bustling city.

In related news:

Part of the supercharged suburban sprawl near Dallas

2015-12-28T02:06:00-05:00

This year, Chinese families represented for the first time the largest group of overseas home buyers in the United States. Big spenders on new homes are helping prop up local economies in the Midwest...The interest from Chinese buyers is reshaping demographics in Texas.

As Part II of a series of articles exploring how China's financial heft and economic clout influence the world, Dionne Searcy and Keith Bradsher illuminate how Chinese real-estate investors are driving prices and development not just for "luxury condos in Manhattan and McMansions in Silicon Valley" but "mini-mansions" in Plano or Corinth.

Sprawl isn't just bad for cities – it's bad for friendships too

2015-10-29T12:50:00-04:00

Our ability to form and maintain friendships is shaped in crucial ways by the physical spaces in which we live. [...] in America we have settled on patterns of land use that might as well have been designed to prevent spontaneous encounters, the kind out of which rich social ties are built. [...] We do not encounter one another in cars. We grind along together anonymously, often in misery.

The 27 patterns that make up the world's cities and suburbs

2015-10-09T12:30:00-04:00

What's interesting about these 27 categories that Wheeler has defined, covering the full range of development patterns in two dozen metropolitan regions he has studied worldwide, is that most of them are new. [..] "We have had an explosion of different types of built landscapes in the last century," says Wheeler, who is working on a book about these patterns.

An example of the patterns identified by Stephen Wheeler, professor at UC Davis' Department of Human Ecology, culled from meticulous work with Google satellite imagery:

You can view more of his maps here.

Egypt's urban growth threatens Nile farmland

2015-07-09T21:30:00-04:00

Most Egyptians have always lived in the fertile stretch along the Nile, the nation’s breadbasket which accounts for less than 10 per cent of Egypt’s territory. But urban growth has become the chief threat to agricultural land as farmers haphazardly – and illegally – build new houses to make room for the next generation. Construction surged even more amid a security vacuum that followed the 2011 popular uprising that ousted the country’s long-time autocrat, Hosni Mubarak.

Urban sprawl costs the American economy more than US$1 trillion per year

2015-03-24T14:05:00-04:00

A new analysis authored by Todd Litman at the Victoria Transport Policy Institute concludes that sprawl costs the U.S. economy more than $1 trillion every year. [...] The optimal density Litman uses in the report is only about 23 people per hectare. Add those 2.2 billion people to global cities at a density of about Atlanta, and we'd need the equivalent of all the land in India to accommodate them.

Previously: The true costs of sprawl

Here's a direct link to Todd Litman's study Analysis of Public Policies that Unintentionally Encourage and Subsidize Sprawl.

The true costs of sprawl

2015-03-05T14:04:00-05:00

How much more does it cost the public to build infrastructure and provide services for sprawling development compared to more compact neighborhoods? A lot more, according to this handy summary from the Canadian environmental think tank Sustainable Prosperity. To create this graphic, the organization synthesized a study by the Halifax Regional Municipality [PDF] in Nova Scotia, and the research is worth a closer look.

New study finds that Los Angeles is actually the nation's least sprawling metro

2015-02-17T15:37:00-05:00

A new study by Thomas Laidley, a sociology doctoral student at NYU [...], uses satellite images to develop a new and improved “Sprawl Index,” which he links to a wide range of outcome measures. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that L.A. ranks as the least sprawling metro in the country, ahead of New York and San Francisco.

Previously:

Atlanta plans big for bikes, and Atlantans turn out big time

2014-10-17T18:13:00-04:00

The massive Beltline and an impressive grid of protected lanes that will connect the trail system to key urban destinations are poised to remake transportation in the city that anchors the country's ninth-largest metro area. [...] As the video above shows, Atlanta's embrace of active space is part of a psychic shift in a city that's shaking off its old Sprawlville USA image with a combination of bike, transit and affordable housing infrastructure.

Similar bike-friendly development is underway in the South's other notorious mega sprawl metro area, Houston: The Bayou Greenways Plan: A Game-Changer for Houston?

Seven Myths About New Urbanism

2014-09-24T15:21:00-04:00

Joel Kotkin, a fellow at Chapman University and an untiring defender of the suburbs, begins a recent column in the Washington Post with a valid question: “What is a city for?” He then proceeds to get that question completely wrong. But really, we should be thanking him. In his article, he neatly sums up many of the key myths emerging from the anti-urbanism set, making my job of debunking these myths a lot easier.

The aforementioned WP column already managed to spark a lively discussion last month here on Archinect.

Wowza: Scale Maps of Barcelona and Atlanta Show the Waste of Sprawl

2014-09-03T14:49:00-04:00

Urban densities are not trivial, they severely limit the transport mode choice and change only very slowly. Because of the large differences in densities between Atlanta and Barcelona about the same length of metro line is accessible to 60% of the population in Barcelona but only 4% in Atlanta. The low density of Atlanta render this city improper for rail transit.

Why haven't China's cities learned from America's mistakes?

2014-08-26T13:43:00-04:00

In the wake of economic reforms in the 1990s that helped set off the largest urban migration in history, China had the rare opportunity to embrace cutting-edge city-building approaches as it expanded its skyline. It could have avoided the mistakes that made Los Angeles into the land of gridlock, or bypassed the errors that turned the banlieues of Paris into what one American planner calls “festering urban sores”. But China looked back instead of forward.

Meanwhile in Africa: Urban China: Chinese Urbanism in Africa

Why sprawl may be bad for your health

2014-08-17T16:06:00-04:00

Marshall, Garrick and Piatkowski are talking about a different set of health concerns: not communicable diseases like cholera, but lifestyle diseases like diabetes. "The literature suggests," they write, "that the shift in industrialized nations toward a more sedentary lifestyle is linked to increasingly auto-dependent lifestyles, which in turn is linked to lower density developments and auto-friendly land uses." Maybe we're designing places, in other words, that make it harder to be active.

The U.S. Cities That Sprawled the Most (and Least) Between 2000 and 2010

2014-06-04T14:15:00-04:00

A new report from Reid Ewing and Shima Hamidi of the University of Utah, lead researchers on the aforementioned rankings, gets at that question. Ewing and Hamidi scored the largest 162 U.S. urbanized areas on the Sprawl Index — or, if you're feeling optimistic, the Compactness Index — for 2010. (Urbanized areas reflect development better than fixed metro area boundaries do.) Then they applied the index to the same cities in 2000 to show the change over time.

America's Oddly Beautiful Suburban Sprawl, Photographed From The Sky

2014-04-29T13:51:00-04:00

In a series of photos taken over seven years, now published in a new book called Ciphers, photographer Christoph Gielen shows a different perspective on sprawl, intended to get more people to question typical patterns of development. "I meant for Ciphers to be provocative at a time when we are witnessing a phenomenal escalation in urban construction ... when entire cities are emerging fully formed in India and China, rather than slowly evolving," says Gielen.

Southern California not so sprawling after all

2014-04-02T18:46:00-04:00

It may not seem like it when you’re stuck in traffic on the 110 Freeway, but Southern California is home to some of the least-sprawling metro areas in the country. That’s according to a study out today from Smart Growth America, which attempted to measure the concept of urban sprawl in 221 metro areas nationwide. The study ranked the Los Angeles, Orange County and Santa Barbara regions in the 25 least-sprawling.

Like It or Not, Most Urban Freeways Are Here to Stay

2014-02-20T21:27:00-05:00

So it is that nearly a third of the interstate system consists of stretches through our cities, in the form of loops, spurs and freeways. So it is that American motorists drive nearly twice as many miles on urban interstates as they do the lengthier rural legs. So it is that every metropolis in the country has reorganized itself around these roads, and that they've shaped where we live and work, how we shop, what we eat, and how we pass our time.

Every pool in Los Angeles, mapped

2013-12-03T11:22:00-05:00

Two academics wondered about the number of swimming pools in the L.A. Basin. They got their answer with computer mapping, but [...] along the way, they discovered something more than just the real-world versions of the iconic David Hockney pool utopias. Their project also proved that two non-experts were able to take a massive amount of freely available data to peek into other people's lives.

Britain could become Los Angeles-style ghetto under planning reforms, warns Lord [Richard] Rogers

2011-11-16T00:00:01-05:00

A leading architect has launched a scathing attack on Government planning reforms and warned that large parts of the country could resemble Los Angeles. Lord [Richard] Rogers of Riverside claims that under the plans Britain's biggest cities could merge into one enormous urban sprawl.

Comparison of other major cities that can fit inside LA

2011-08-26T12:14:00-04:00

Los Angeles has infamously been known for its urban sprawl. A recently released map makes it look like LA could easily swallow several major US cities inside its bloated city limits belly. See the map below and follow the subsequent discussion on reddit.com.

Directly related: the exhibition Rethink LA: Perspectives on a Future City tries to tackle the homegrown problem, envision ways that could help Los Angeles lose some of the body fat and prepare for a brighter future. Rethink LA is on display for one more week, until September 4, at the A+D Museum, 6032 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles.