Situated almost exactly in between Boston and New York, Hartford, Connecticut, is a classic mid-sized legacy city with great potential for reinvention. In this episode of the Land Matters podcast, planning commissioner Sara Bronin talks about the cutting-edge urban planning practices she hopes will put the city back on the map, after decades of decline.

“In light of the city’s structural challenges in terms of how it gets taxes and how it relates to the state, we’ve really felt within the city we have to take matters into our own hands,” Bronin says. Among the revitalization initiatives: a complete overhaul of an outdated zoning code, which has smoothed the way for lower-cost redevelopment of abandoned factories and other historic buildings now accommodating makers spaces and craft breweries.

An architect and law professor, Bronin helped kick off the Lincoln Institute’s recent scenario planning workshop in Hartford, put on in partnership with the Capitol Region Council of Governments.  The metropolitan region is starting to use scenario planning to project multiple futures for the area, in housing, economic development, and transportation.

With a population of about 125,000 – nearly 1 million including the communities all around it—Hartford is the state capital and the fourth largest city in the state. Once a center of innovation and commerce—inventions include firearms, typewriters, tools, sewing machines, bicycles, and even one of the nation’s first electric cars, plus the beginnings of the modern-day insurance industry – Hartford endured population and manufacturing loss, a decline in property tax revenue, crime and high unemployment dating back at least to the 1960s.

Adding to the challenges, a portion of Interstate 84 through downtown has reached the end of its lifespan, and needs to be rebuilt or reconfigured. Possible solutions include replacing sections with surface boulevards, lowering portions of the freeway, or building extensive tunnels for both vehicular traffic and high-speed rail.

That last proposal suggests a path to renewal through some big-picture thinking. Under the Rebooting New England initiative, Amtrak’s high-speed Acela route would go through Hartford between New York and Boston, placing the city at the center of a new Northeast megaregion – and instantly opening up housing and labor markets through faster connections among all the cities of southern New England. The proposal was inspired by the UK’s Northern Powerhouse effort linking older industrial cities north of London.

Zoning reform, scenario planning, major infrastructure investments, and megaregions are all in the mix, and get thorough consideration in this wide-ranging conversation.

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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The Downtown Highway That Could Drive Hartford’s Comeback

Anthony Flint is senior fellow in the Office of the President at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Photograph: Sara Bronin speaks at the third annual Consortium for Scenario Planning Conference, which took place in November in Hartford, Connecticut. Credit: Diego Lomelli Trejo.

As a rule, 12-acre development projects don’t tend to receive national or international attention. But that hasn’t been the case for Quayside, a parcel off Lake Ontario in Toronto. Two years ago, Waterfront Toronto—the government entity overseeing the redevelopment and reconfiguration of a larger swath of real estate along the Don River that includes Quayside—brought in Sidewalk Labs as a private partner. A subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, Sidewalk Labs pledged to invest $50 million in the endeavor. The company seemed an ideal choice to help make Quayside a kind of prototype “smart city” neighborhood, and produced ambitious plans.

It also produced no small amount of controversy, and at times it has appeared that the entire partnership might implode. That threat seems to have passed, at least temporarily. All the friction has had an unexpected result: Quayside could prove to be a much more valuable prototype for smart city planning than originally imagined.

That’s not because of what has been built (which is, to date, nothing), but rather because of the way its bumpy ride has clarified the core smart-city issues that need to be resolved before any building can happen—not just in Toronto, but in any urban area. While it’s hard to find an example of a smart city project that’s quite as comprehensive as Quayside aims to be, there are many playing out on a more limited scale, from Kansas City’s “smart city corridor” effort centered on a two-mile streetcar line to the LinkNYC program (also from Sidewalk Labs) replacing pay phones in New York City with WiFi-enabled kiosks.

The biggest issue needing resolution may be privacy. That may seem intuitive, and Sidewalk Labs itself professed to be aware of, and sensitive to, privacy concerns in its initial proposal. That proposal included plenty of the sort of tech-forward ideas you’d expect from a Google-connected entity, from heated bike lanes to autonomous delivery robots. Many of the proposed elements relied upon sophisticated sensors to collect data and guide efficiency in everything from trash collection to traffic to lighting.

While Sidewalk’s proposal addressed privacy, the company was apparently caught off guard when it was criticized for leaving too much discretion to private-sector tech vendors. Among those unimpressed: former Ontario privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian, a prominent privacy advocate Sidewalk had added to its advisory board who promptly resigned from that role.

Cavoukian, now the executive director of the privacy-focused Global Privacy & Security by Design Centre consultancy, explains that she recognizes the potential value of data collection for shaping a neighborhood or a city. But she believes, in essence, that in the context of the “smart” city, securing privacy is a planning-level decision better left to the public sector. “The technology, the sensors, will be on 24-seven,” she says. “There’s no opportunity for people to consent or revoke consent. They have no choice.”

She specifically advocates what she terms a “privacy by design” strategy, which “scrubs” data at the point of collection. For instance: Cameras or sensors gathering traffic data might also pick up license plate numbers. If Cavoukian and other privacy advocates have their way, that level of personal data would simply not be collected. “You still have the value rendered from the [aggregate] data,” she says. “But you don’t have the privacy risks because you’ve de-identified the data.” The essence of the privacy by design idea is that it privileges the public interest over private use of data; Cavoukian has pointed to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation—which strictly protects individual privacy and has forced even the biggest tech players to adjust since its implementation in 2018—as a model.

Sidewalk Labs proposed gathering wide swaths of data in a kind of “trust,” with private vendors encouraged to anonymize data. To critics like Cavoukian, this delayed privacy decisions until too late in the process: post-planning, post-implementation, less a baseline than an afterthought. One poll found that 60 percent of Toronto residents who were aware of the plan didn’t trust Sidewalk’s data collection. The two sides are still working out details, but have agreed for now that sensor-gathered data will be treated as a public asset, not a private one. (Sidewalk Labs did not respond to an interview request.)

The Toronto proposal was controversial for other reasons. Notably, it sought oversight of much more than the original 12-acre parcel, dangling the possibility of locating a new Google Canadian headquarters along the city’s waterfront as part of a scheme that would give Sidewalk latitude over 190 acres of potentially lucrative properties. This proposal was turned back, but spurred a useful debate about smart cities and equity.

Jennifer Clark, a professor and head of the City and Regional Planning Section at the Knowlton School of Architecture in the College of Engineering at the Ohio State University, has studied smart city efforts around the world, and is the author of Uneven Innovation: The Work of Smart Cities, forthcoming from Columbia University Press in February 2020. As she explains, technology businesses and government or planning entities come to these collaborations with distinct perspectives. Enterprises like Sidewalk Labs that are devoted to new city technologies, she says, “come from a particular orientation of thinking about who the ‘user’ is. They’re very much thinking through a consumer model, with users and consumers as essentially the same thing. That’s not how planners think about it in cities. Users are citizens.”

Similarly, companies designing the technology meant to make a city “smart” are looking for a revenue model that will not just fund a given project, but can ultimately prove profitable—which guides the nature of their prototyping products and services that might be applied elsewhere. Clark points out that a seldom-discussed element of the smart city phenomenon is its “uneven implementation.” Quayside and the wider waterfront redevelopment it is part of are expected to result in high-value properties, used and frequented by a demographic attractive to businesses.

“There’s an assumption that if you do these urban development districts, you’re experimenting on the model, you get the model right and then you do broad deployment, so that there’s equity,” Clark says. But frequently, in practice, “there is no path to that.” Whatever innovations emerge tend to recur in demographically similar contexts.

What often underlies this dynamic is a kind of power mismatch. The private side of a development partnership is often richly funded, in a position to offer financial incentives, and thus to essentially dictate terms; the public side may have fewer resources, and less sophistication about assessing or fully deploying cutting-edge technology. But in this case, Clark notes, the Quayside story (which she addresses in her book) may be a bit different.

“Toronto has a history of community organizing and community development,” she notes. “And the community organizations there have a sophisticated understanding of the data collection practices that were proposed.” Thus the privacy pushback, and how it gets resolved, might prove to be the real lasting payoff, especially if it’s resolved in a way others can emulate.

A replicable model, one that offers guidelines for both technology and the rules that technology must play by, is essentially the outcome that Cavoukian wants. She is now working with Waterfront Toronto, and explicitly hopes that Quayside—with either Sidewalk Labs or new partners—can become a rejoinder to the surveillance-oriented versions of the smart city that are taking shape in tech-advanced urban areas from Shanghai to Dubai.

“We want to be the first to show how you could do this and put that out as a model,” she says. “We want a smart city of privacy.”

Rob Walker is a journalist covering design, technology, and other subjects. His book The Art of Noticing was published in May 2019. 

Photograph: Rendering of an interior pedestrian walkway at Quayside. Credit: Picture Plane for Heatherwick Studio for Sidewalk Labs.

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy collaborated with the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design to publish Design with Nature Now, showcasing some of the most advanced ecological design projects in the world today. We asked some of the book’s contributors to weigh in on Ian McHarg’s lasting influence and what will make it possible to design with nature at scale today.

Above: Some of the book’s authors and editors at the Cambridge book launch in October 2019. Front row: Frederick Steiner, Laurel McSherry, Anne Whiston Spirn. Second row: Andrew Revkin, Erle Ellis. Third row: Alan Berger, Emily McKeigue, Jonah Susskind. Fourth row: Maureen Clarke, William Whitaker. 

“I think we need to get serious about regenerative design. Regeneration involves recovery and rebuilding, yes, but also restoration, renewal, and revitalization. Regeneration improves ecosystems by contributing to ecosystem services rather than depleting them. Several of the Design With Nature Now projects illustrate this. For instance, Freshkills Park is more about regeneration than resiliency as it is transforming a huge landfill into a new, healthy landscape.”

— Frederick Steiner, Dean and Paley Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design; Volume Editor and Author of “Green the Earth, Restore the Earth, Heal the Earth,” Design with Nature Now

Above: After operating as a garbage dump for more than 50 years, Staten Island’s FreshKills Landfill was transformed into a public park starting in the early 2010s. The grasslands park, which will stretch over 2,000 acres once it is completed in 2036, will offer spaces for athletics, education, and recreation.

“We need an expansion of McHarg’s methods . . . creatively reimagined to accommodate more complexity and diversity and to design—as much as that is possible—a planetary future with both nature, and human nature, in mind.”

— Andrew Revkin, Director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute Initiative on Communication and Sustainability; Author of “Design as a Quest, Not a Task,” Design with Nature Now

Above: McHarg’s landscape suitability analysis maps, which are widely considered the predicate for Geographic Information Systems (GIS), showed where to locate development and where to leave nature undisturbed.

“I knew nothing about landscape architecture until I read Ian McHarg’s description of the field in the brochure of the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania in 1969. McHarg’s text was a call to action. It spoke directly to me, offering the opportunity to join a profession that would give scope to all my disparate interests: landscape, environment, history, art, photography, social action. I decided to switch from Penn’s doctoral program in art history to landscape architecture.”

— Anne Whiston Spirn, Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning; Author of “A Landscape of Ideas and Action: Place, Process, Form, and Language,” Design with Nature Now

Above: Since 1987, Spirn has directed the West Philadelphia Landscape Project, which aims to improve regional water quality and rebuild healthy neighborhoods through environmental and design education. Over the years, staff and residents have transformed vacant urban lots, built community gardens, proposed green infrastructure elements, and developed school curricula about the region’s history. The above photo shows Aspen Farms in June 2018.

“For climate change adaptation, design with nature is already increasingly in demand, in the form of ‘nature-based solutions’ and green infrastructure. To scale these up, one key element is the integration of these solutions into infrastructure standards, such as those guiding urban development and road construction. On the other hand, I fear that efforts to mitigate climate change through green infrastructure, including green roofs and tree planting to store emissions of carbon from fossil fuels, are no better than a fig leaf hiding the much harder ultimate solution to climate change: the need to transition from carbon emitting to clean energy systems.”

— Erle Ellis, Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author of “Nature as Designer: Emancipating Nonhuman Ecologies in an Increasingly Human World,” Design with Nature Now

Above: Ellis was a keynote speaker at the Design with Nature Now conference hosted by the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology in June 2019.

“McHarg promoted the understanding of natural systems to avoid damaging the resources humans are dependent upon. In McHarg’s time, he had to understand what was in place and what would be there in the foreseeable future if we learned how to manage it. But now, what is there is moving and changing, so it is even more imperative to try to understand natural systems and their behavior.”

— Ignacio Bunster-Ossa, Vice President at AECOM; Author of “McHarg: The Long View, Shortened,” Design with Nature Now

Above: Bunster-Ossa led the development of the Bethlehem SteelStacks Arts + Cultural Campus in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The project, which transformed the former Bethlehem Steel Plant into an arts, culture, and community space, was awarded the Urban Land Institute’s Global Award of Excellence and Rudy Bruner Award.

“Our challenge, if we are to build something greater out of the detritus that escaped McHarg’s grasp, is to intelligently interpret the systemic thinking brought forth by him to generations of landscape architects and regional planners during the later twentieth century. His model must be implemented both to protect pre-development land, and post-development waste.”

— Alan Berger, Leventhal Professor of Advanced Urbanism and Co-Director of the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT; Coauthor of “The Planetary Optic and Finding the Real Ground,” Design with Nature Now

Above: As part of the work at MIT’s P-REX lab, Berger, Berger mapped Philadelphia’s “urban void geography.” The project identified hundreds of small vacant lots to determine how they might be combined into bigger lots in a landscape reuse program. The above map shows vacant parcels, retail areas, toxic release sites, and parks.

“I think the thing that makes McHarg’s ideas still so important is that they were not just McHarg’s ideas. The power of his work came, in many ways, from his ability to consistently convene a robust transdisciplinary conversation. His ideas were generated through the deconstruction of silos within and outside of academia.”

— Jonah Susskind, lecturer in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and researcher at the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism; Coauthor of “The Planetary Optic and Finding the Real Ground,” Design with Nature Now 

Above: McHarg on the set of The Mike Douglas Show in 1969 discussing his book.

“In less than 20 years, McHarg … established the place of design in the awakening environmental consciousness. The pessimism (or was it realism?) in his remarks on the Earth Day stage was a call to action, an expression of outrage at the current state of affairs. People were listening and taking action; the environment had become a great unifying force.”

— William Whitaker, Curator and Collections Manager for the Architectural Archives at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design; Author of “Why Do I Have to Be the Man to Bring You the Bad News,” Design with Nature Now

Above: McHarg in 1970 at Independence Mall during the first Earth Week, which was organized by University of Pennsylvania students and faculty.

Photographs (in order of appearance):

Credit: Maggie Janik.

Credit: Alex S. MacLean, Landslides Aerial Photography. 

Credit: University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts  Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

Credit: Anne Whiston Spirn.

Credit: University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

Credit: Ignacio Bunster-Ossa.

Credit: Alan Berger.

Credit: Ian and Carol McHarg Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

Credit: Courtesy University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.