At Its Core, the Word “Urban” Is About Life on Foot

Posted on February 18, 2013 by patrick

On this blog, I’ll be discussing a variety of topics regarding questions of town-building for Carrboro, North Carolina and other places. But one I’ll probably come back to again and again is the word “urban.” Knowing that, I want to be as clear as possible about what I mean when I use this term.

In growth debates, this tends to mean a lot of things to a lot of people. More than a few people hear “urban” and immediately think “Manhattan” or “New York.” Interestingly enough, I think that when people say New York, they actually do mean “Manhattan,” and not Brooklyn, Queens, or any of the other boroughs. They are thinking of super-tall buildings first and foremost, and Manhattan has the highest concentration of skyscrapers in one place in the USA.

Others think more broadly of large cities with very large populations, places that generally have over one million inhabitants in a single municipality. This definition can encompass neighborhoods and communities of very different physical character. It may include skyscraper districts, mid-rise districts, and low-density neighborhoods often found 3 to 10 miles from an American city center.

However, I think the definition of urban can be made very simple, and most accurate, by tying it to one function: walking. Here is the simplest definition I can offer:

If you live, work or visit somewhere that numerous people regularly walk from one place to another for a variety of reasons other than recreation or exercise, then you are living in, working in, or visiting an urban place.

Christopher Columbus Park, Boston – a Place for Walking

This is really the key to figuring out if a place is urban or not. Fundamentally, I believe that once we have stopped talking about agricultural landscapes and communities where farming is a principal activity, we are better off organizing our communities around urban principles instead of not doing so. This blog will be about explaining why I think this is true, and how we can build cities and towns full of beautiful urban neighborhoods.

With that in mind, what are some of the primary reasons why we should build urban places?

1. Health of Individuals. Getting around on foot rather than in a car provides significant health benefits. Most doctors will tell you that walking is close to “the perfect exercise” – low impact, able to be participated in for most of one’s life, and requiring little special equipment or money to participate. A community that makes it safe, easy and pleasant for people to walk for non-recreational purposes is one that is investing in the long-term health of its population.

2. Health of Shared Common Resources. Initiatives that convert auto trips to transit trips and particularly bicycle and walking trips lower a community’s per-trip air pollution and per-trip carbon footprint. Developing in a more compact growth pattern, by putting more uses and residents within walking distance of each other- reduces development pressure on farmland and on land around water resources.

3. Reduced Lifecycle Costs for Infrastructure. If we build 150 homes on 450 acres (1 home per 3-acre lot) then attaching those homes to a local sewer system such as OWASA will require a network of publicly maintained pipes that provides drainage across 70 percent of one square mile. Building those same homes at 15 dwelling units to the acre means that any expanded sewer network will need to cover 1.6 percent of one square mile. Joe Minicozzi of Asheville has probably done a better job than anyone documenting this issue.

4. A Healthy, Innovative Local Business Ecosystem A compact, reasonably dense neighborhood can support its own district of small businesses. Finer grain block sizes in city streets inherently lead you away from big-box retail owned by large corporations and international investors, and towards smaller format stores with a greater likelihood of a local owner running the business. Greater population densities create opportunity for greater variety in dining choices and for agglomeration benefits in many industries.

5. Vibrant Public Spaces By building compactly and in an urban pattern, one of the best outcomes is the ability to create special places that people cherish because they function as social centers as well as perhaps cultural or artistic centers. Locally, the Weaver Street Market Lawn is the best example of such a place.

A Latin Dance Band gets the crowd moving on the Weaver Street Market Lawn at the 2012 Carrboro Music Festival.

Whether you’re a local elected official, a developer, or a citizen, if we’re going to build better urban places, it’s always good to ask – “is this proposed change going to help or hinder Life On Foot in the neighborhood and the town?”

How are Carrboro Residents Distributed Across Town?

Posted on February 12, 2013 by patrick

Recently, a programming guru at MIT, Brandon Martin-Anderson decided to make a map of every person in the US Census- all 300+ million of us. The map assigns a dot for every person to the Census Block they live in, and then displays it. You can see the interactive map here, zoomed to a level that shows Hillsborough, Durham, Carrboro and Chapel Hill, mostly. Anderson has since added Canada and Mexico Census data as well.

Here’s a slightly more zoomed-in look at our neck of the woods. The main commercial section of Franklin Street is shown in blue.

Census Dotmap of Chapel Hill / Carrboro

If you look at the Chapel Hill / Carrboro map long enough, you’ll notice a few things:

There’s a “core” of population density (circled in red) that includes the UNC campus, the MLK corridor about halfway between Foster’s Market and Estes Drive, West Carrboro’s apartment complexes along NC 54 and Smith Level Road, and Southern Village.
The large white spaces in the center of both Chapel Hill and Carrboro are contiguous Census Blocks that are dominated by employment and not residents, so they appear to be empty. They simply have few or zero residents. In 2020, projects like Greenbridge, 140 West, 300 East Main and Shelton Station should change these blocks a good deal.
There are some other denser clusters of population near Eastowne/Sage Rd/Erwin Rd and at some apartment complexes on MLK near Timberlyne.
Southern Village is clearly more dense than Meadowmont.
Suburban Carrboro is generally a little more dense than suburban Chapel Hill.

If we further zoom in on Carrboro, and match the dots up to a street map, you can also see that the densest neighborhoods in town are Abbey Court/Collins Crossing condominiums, and generally the entire area bounded by Jones Ferry Rd, Barnes St, and NC 54; Estes Park Apts, the entire area bounded by NC 54 and Old Fayetteville Rd; and the apartment complexes along Smith Level Rd close to Carrboro High School.

Carrboro Density – click to embiggen

Where Are The Jobs in Carrboro? Mostly Downtown.

Posted on February 11, 2013 by patrick

I find that few things can tell a more effective story about a community than a map. One of my favorite tools to appear over the last few years is the US Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer-Housing Dynamics (LEHD) On The Map tool. On The Map works by combining Census and American Community Survey data with state and federal data sources on employment to provide insights on where people live and work.

Using the tool I ran a query on the Carrboro municipal boundaries for “all jobs” in 2010, and this is the resulting map. The total number of jobs in 2010 in Carrboro was estimated by LEHD to be a little under 4,700. But to me the most interesting thing was how heavily concentrated Carrboro’s job base is in downtown. If you look at the map you can see that there is some employment scattered through pretty much every neighborhood, and you can spot both the commercial cluster at Carrboro Plaza and relatively speaking, the town’s newest moderate-size node of employment, Carrboro High School.

Source: Census Longitudinal Employment-Housing Dynamics Data “On The Map” Tool

Looking at the data by Census Block Group (a collection of several Census blocks) provides another window into how concentrated employment is in downtown Carrboro. A full 53% of all jobs in Carrboro are located in the Census block group that straddles Main Street and lies between the Chapel Hill town border and North Greensboro Street. The block group containing Town Hall, OWASA, 605 W Main, Chapel Hill Tire, and the commercial cluster from there to Looking Glass Cafe on the west side of Main Street has the second largest number of jobs.

The mill village comes in third due to businesses on the north side of Main Street, the West Weaver Street businesses, as well as Fitch Lumber. The fourth block group includes Carrboro Plaza, the Food Lion, Burger King, and other businesses on Jones Ferry Rd, as well as some medical offices and all the employees of the apartment complexes between Old Fayetteville Rd and NC 54.

Source: Census Longitudinal Employment-Housing Dynamics Data “On The Map” Tool

Taken together, these four Census block groups hold 82% of employment in Carrboro. It is also worth noting that at the time of writing (early February 2013) the new Hampton Inn going up in downtown is in the heart of the 53% block group, and the new PTA Thrift shop is right at the border of where the 14% block group and 9% block group meet at the intersection of Main Street and Jones Ferry Rd.

I don’t have anything else to add on this data for now, but will likely refer back to this post in the future in other discussions.

Carrboro: North Carolina’s Market Town?

Posted on February 6, 2013 by patrick

Carrboro Farmers’ Market

Yesterday I talked about Informal Markets — events that are marked by an agreed-upon time and place to sell and buy goods, but may lack features of a permanent retail establishment. When I think about the things that the town of Carrboro has going for it, our talent for finding room for Informal Markets is near the top of the list. When I began researching this post, I was not surprised to find that Carrboro has been finding a place for Informal Markets in the community for over 35 years.

Like Krakow, Carrboro has nurtured an informal market into a formal one in the heart of the community- the Carrboro Farmers’ Market. On their website, the Farmers’ Market even refers to itself as a previously informal market!

Prior to 1977, there had been a series of markets in the Chapel Hill area, which were run informally by a group of area farmers. The move to Carrboro began in 1977 with two simultaneous events. First, a project was under development by a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health, called the North Carolina Agricultural Marketing Project. The project’s goal was to provide an outlet for local farmers to sell their produce on a regular basis while providing townspeople greater access to high quality fresh produce.

Second, the town of Carrboro was investigating ways to assure that the downtown area remained an active and vibrant part of the community. In an effort to meet this goal, the town successfully sought funding from the NC General Assembly to build a shelter for a farmers’ market. The university project helped the farmers formalize an organizational structure, and the town selected The Chapel Hill-Carrboro Farmers’ Market to run a market under the new shelter on Roberson Street on land leased from Carr Mill Mall.

If interested, you can read the rest of the market’s history here.

The goal of building a shelter for local farmers in the late 1970s and later again in the 1990s was all about giving permanence to an Informal Market, and formalizing it to make it into a community institution rather than an intermittent event.

The Shrimp Man

But a funny thing can happen when you turn an Informal Market into a community institution…you sometimes attract new Informal Markets. If you’ve ever walked on the sidewalk across from Town Hall on a sunny day when the Farmers’ Market is in full swing, you’ve probably seen The Shrimp Man, adding to the diversity of food on sale with fresh fish from the coast. I’ve purchased both shrimp and scallops from him in the past.

Bike Swap

Many who have lived here for more than a few years remember the bike shop Cycle 9 which used to be in the half of Looking Glass Cafe that is adjacent to 605 W. Main. A few years back, on a Saturday morning during Farmers’ Market hours, two blocks to the north of the market, I bought a jogging stroller at an outdoor Bike Swap and sale that Looking Glass and Cycle 9 co-sponsored.

On certain market Saturdays in the summer you can find a man with a trailer selling watermelons in the parking lot of Oddities and Such across from the fire station. Between the end of April and June, it’s not uncommon to see impromptu multi-household yard sales on the corner of the White Oak condominiums property as units turn over with graduation.

In all four of these cases, the sellers are taking advantage of the foot traffic of the now formalized community institution that is the Farmers’ Market, and adding to local commerce for a few hours. Beyond providing a gravitational center for other informal commerce to revolve around on Saturday mornings, the grounds for the Farmers’ Market have also become home to the Really Really Free Market, the (soon to appear) Carrboro Wild Food and Herb market, and the occasional food truck rodeo. (a likely subject for a future post as food trucks represent another kind of informal commerce)

What Carrboro is Getting Right Regarding Informal Markets

In many parts of the world, governments just leave informal markets alone and stay out of their way. In the United States, it is far more likely that a persistent informal market will be met with investigation or clamp-downs from local governments. Carrboro has followed a more nuanced approach, first and foremost by simply not freaking out when an Informal Market asserts itself in the community. The way that food truck operations around town have been absorbed into the rhythm of life without much drama compared to other communities is indicative of Carrboro’s general laissez-faire approach.

Another key has been encouraging non-Farmers’ Market events to take place at the Town Commons, and helping groups get to use the space at low or no cost, even when the groups manage to get in their own way. The Town seems to correctly intuit that the more the Town Commons gets used, the better — and that zero-revenue-for-the-town events are fine as long as they do not generate significant costs.

I think the final piece the town is getting right is employing a relatively light hand in terms of enforcement of codes about outdoor selling of goods. One night a few years ago, E and I were walking home from downtown and talked with a man sitting in the grassy portion of the town parking lot on the corner of West Weaver/Greensboro. He was selling lizard-themed art priced at $15 to $30 from a tricked-out recumbent bicycle with considerable LED lighting. The cop parked in the car a few feet away let him be.

Closing Thoughts

Carrboro is pretty left-leaning, and one of the things that comes with that is the occasional “People’s Republic of Carrboro” joke. But on further examination, I think you’ll find that few towns embrace and support local capitalism in quite the same way. I think a question this poses for local economic development is if we’re good at this, what’s the next step in becoming “North Carolina’s Market Town?” How could we double down on this quality that people seem to enjoy about living here, and use it to provide more opportunities for local merchants to sell goods and to attract visitors to shop here?

My current thinking on this is informed by July 4, 2009 – the day the Farmers’ Market had to take over Main Street because the Town Commons was already filled with attractions for the 4th of July festivities. For that morning, the town used one of its key assets (street space) to create a whole new commercial zone for 3 to 4 hours. I thought it was wonderful. Here’s what it looked like.

In Street Farmers’ Market

I’ve heard at times in the past that the waiting list to get a spot to sell at the Carrboro Farmers’ Market is quite long. If that is still true, that’s a good indicator that more merchant space could be filled here on Saturdays. I think it would be interesting to gauge interest of vendors on that waiting list and others to see if a quarterly “Carrboro Grand Market” that perhaps closed West Weaver Street from Main to Greensboro during the same hours as the Farmers’ Market, and allowed for vendors (food/clothing/art/whatever!) to sell in the street like the farmers did in 2009 — would be worthwhile.

How Cities Capture Informal Markets: Lessons from Poland

Posted on February 5, 2013 by patrick

Why do we have cities and towns?

While medieval towns were established for a variety of reasons, including defense or access to key resources such as water or arable land, it is important not to overlook trade. In addition to specialization after the beginning of agriculture, geography and topography brought travelers together in many places. The confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers to form the Ohio River practically guaranteed that there would be a settlement there in the future, very close to where the skyscrapers of Pittsburgh now stand. Anyone traveling from any one of those waterways to either of the other two would likely meet others there making trips in similar or opposing directions, creating a natural place to stop, exchange information about travel and perhaps swap supplies.

Once a certain number of people agree that on a certain day, at a certain time, in a specific place, that goods will be sold or traded- an Informal Market has appeared. Go back far enough in history and you will find whole cities that emerged around the increasing formalization (permanent structures for trade, accompanying space for residents who work as traders) of some of these Informal Markets, while other such markets disappeared.

A great example of a market that became the heart of a city is Krakow, Poland, which has been reported in written records as a center of trade since before the year 1000. Krakow’s Rynek Główny (Main Market Square) is the largest public square in Europe, with its centerpiece being the Cloth Hall, where linen was sold in the current building as early as 1555 and is still sold there today. (Pictures below are all my own from a trip DW and I took to Poland in 2006)

Cloth Hall, Rynek Główny (Main Market Square), Krakow

Adjacent to the Cloth Hall is the 14th-century St. Mary’s Basilica, which replaced an earlier church on the same site from the 13th-century. The smaller buildings to the right now contain stores on the bottom floor and homes and offices above, which is probably similar to uses for the last several centuries.

Moonrise By St. Mary’s Basilica, Rynek Główny (Main Market Square), Krakow

Another more recent example in Poland of an Informal Market becoming formalized that we were lucky to see is the now-defunct Russian Market of Warsaw, which was unfortunately destroyed to make way for a new soccer stadium for the European Football Championship 2012 tournament. In 1989, the City of Warsaw leased a previously abandoned Soviet-era stadium to a private company who turned it into the largest open-air market in Europe. The market over time came to have a reputation for selling black-market Russian military goods, liquor, pirated media, and more mundane items such as clothing. By the time we visited in 2006, the market did not seem particularly dangerous in any way, but it had become so large that while the old stadium still held many vendors, it had also spilled beyond the stadium walls into a network of streets and paths reaching to the nearest bus station, creating a 1/3-mile long line of commerce.

Russian Market Alley, Warsaw, Poland, 2006

To me, the most interesting thing about this fascinating piece of Warsaw was that it had become so routinized into the life of the neighborhood and the city — the market definitely carried many goods that were not being reported for sale, even if they were legal goods. We found out about it by reading the Lonely Planet guidebook on Poland. The City of Warsaw had more or less turned a crumbling stadium with a sketchy past into an attraction, albeit a mostly local one, complete with its own bus station. I think it’s fair to say that when your Informal Market has a bus station, it’s no longer an informal affair.

Dworzec Bus Station, Russian Market, Warsaw, Poland, 2006

Both the Krakow and Warsaw examples indicate what mature Informal Markets can look like, the former completely formalized and integrated into the very core of the city, and the latter reaching a mature state in which it is still not part of the full, legal, traditional city economy but is still nevertheless a safe, established, and accepted community institution.

The reason this is interesting to me is that a lot of communities in the US are almost hard-wired to stomp out Informal Markets (and I’m talking about markets of legitimate goods, not pirated DVDs, etc) anywhere they spring up without thinking about what they are doing or why. But Carrboro is pretty good at tapping the potential of Informal Markets for making our community a more vibrant and interesting place to live, and this characteristic of the town is something we might consider how to capitalize on. Tune in tomorrow for a discussion of the Informal Markets of Carrboro.

Here We Go – Hello Carrboro!

Posted on February 3, 2013 by patrick

Well, here goes nothing. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a city and town planning blog for a few years, and I think it’s time to give it a shot. Here are some of the ideas that I’ll be working with on this site, in no particular order.

All things being equal, I believe it is better to build communities in an urban pattern than a suburban pattern, for numerous reasons. But most importantly, an urban pattern makes it possible to live a significant portion of one’s life on foot, while a suburban pattern generally makes this difficult, if not impossible. A community where you can participate by walking (or using a wheelchair) is inherently inclusive physically, and this generates numerous benefits socially. I’ll talk about these benefits as time goes by.

Being urban has nothing to do with the size of a community in terms of population or building height, though they are often correlated. You can have urban towns of under 500 people, and suburban cities of hundreds of thousands of residents.

I believe that the benefits of a community built in an urban pattern inevitably demonstrate network effects; the more continuous urban fabric in your community, the more variety you will find in local restaurants, the better your transit system will function, the stronger and deeper your labor markets become, and the more opportunities there are for people of all ages, backgrounds, and income levels to enjoy shared community benefits.

I hope to kickstart discussions of some ideas that I think don’t get enough attention, as well as respond to emerging local issues in Carrboro. As I do, I’d love to hear what you think as well. My first regular piece comes out Tuesday at 7:00 am, and focuses on Informal Markets and their history in cities and towns around the world. I hope you come back and check it out.

Thanks for reading!

CityBeautiful21

Urban Planning for the 21st Century