When the 2007–2008 class of Loeb Fellows from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design met for the first time in May 2007 to discuss options for the study trip that would conclude a year at Harvard the following spring, we quickly agreed on a number of criteria. We were looking for a place where change was happening now; a place where a visit five years before or hence would be a different experience; a place dealing with significant environmental, transportation, and housing challenges; a place looking for ways to preserve some of its past while moving into the future; and a place where it was possible to see the role that outside designers and consultants were playing. Most of all, the Loeb Fellows were looking for a place where they could be inspired by the leadership and vision they would experience. China quickly moved to the top of the list of places to be considered.

Ethan Seltzer is a professor in the Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University. He previously served for six years as the director of the school, and prior to that for eleven years as the founding director of Portland State’s Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies.

Before joining Portland State in 1992 he served as the land use supervisor for Metro, the regional government in the Portland area; assistant to Portland City Commissioner Mike Lindberg; assistant coordinator for the Southeast Uplift Neighborhood Program in Portland; and coordinator of the Drinking Water Project for the Oregon Environmental Council.

Seltzer received his Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning and Master of Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania. His doctoral dissertation examined the role of citizen participation in environmental planning. Current research interests include regional planning, regionalism, regional development, and planning in the Pacific Northwest.

In addition to his current work with the Lincoln Institute, his publications include chapters titled Maintaining the Working Landscape: The Portland Metro Urban Growth Boundary, in Regional Planning for Open Space, edited by Arnold van der Valk and Terry van Dijk (Routledge 2009); and It’s Not an Experiment: Regional Planning at Metro, 1990 to the Present, in The Portland Edge, edited by Connie Ozawa (Island Press 2004).

Land Lines: How did you become associated with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy?

Ethan Seltzer: Regional planning has been at the center of my career for a long time. I used to be the land use supervisor for Metro, the regional government in the Portland metropolitan region. In the late 1980s we were just starting work on what is now the Region 2040 Growth Concept. Part of that work involved seeking out new ideas about planning, land use, land management, and related topics, and through that search, I started to engage with the Lincoln Institute. A few years later, I was part of a planning project organized through the Regional Plan Association in New York that brought U.S. and Japanese planners together. I met Armando Carbonell (chair of the Institute’s Department of Planning and Urban Form) through that process, and we have remained collaborators on a number of projects since then.

Land Lines: What was the first project you conducted for the Lincoln Institute?

Ethan Seltzer: The first one I recall had to do with re-establishing a dialogue around regional planning and building on the ideas put forth by the old Regional Plan Association of America going back to the 1920s. I was also a part of numerous Lincoln Institute seminars, including one held in Chicago on the relationships and interdependencies between cities and suburbs. The papers were published by the Institute in 2000 in the book Urban-Suburban Interdependencies, edited by Rosalind Greenstein and Wim Wiewel. Since then I have been involved in several Institute-sponsored projects and events, most recently in conjunction with the showing of the film Portland: Quest for the Livable City as part of the Making Sense of Place documentary film series.

Land Lines: How has your association with the Lincoln Institute influenced your research?

Ethan Seltzer: I think the Lincoln Institute is one of the only, maybe the only, institution that has consistently focused on the confluence of issues associated with planning practice, place, regionalism, and land use. There are few other places that address these issues in such a thoughtful, deliberate manner. The support that the Lincoln Institute provides for thinking and writing about these issues is part of what makes it possible for me to find both an audience and like-minded colleagues. There are other networks important to me as well, notably the connections provided by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. Nonetheless, the Lincoln Institute is uniquely a forum for the things that I am most interested in and where I hope to contribute.

Land Lines: What are your current projects for the Lincoln Institute?

Ethan Seltzer: I am working on a book on regional planning in America with an explicit focus on practice. I teach courses in regional planning and, though there is an interesting literature on the reasons why regional planning might make sense and the stark challenges to pulling it off, there is not much information available regarding what regional planners do, and how regional planning is distinguished from other types of planning (i.e., city, urban, transportation).

With support from the Lincoln Institute, and in collaboration with coeditor Armando Carbonell, I was able to recruit a group of talented authors and put together a series of chapters that, we expect, will more completely present what gets done in the name of regional planning in the United States today. We also hope this project will provide a basis for better understanding the unique aspects of regional planning practice.

The working title for the book is American Regional Planning: Practice and Prospect. Coauthors include Tim Beatley, Robert Fishman, Kate Foster, John Fregonese and CJ Gabbe, Frank and Deborah Popper, Manuel Pastor and Chris Benner, Gerrit Knaap and Rebecca Lewis, Fritz Steiner, and Bob Yaro. The manuscript will be completed this fall and the book will be published in the spring of 2011.

Land Lines: Regional planning seems to be a really challenging idea in America. Why are you so interested in it?

Ethan Seltzer: You are absolutely right, but it’s often hard to find a place in the scheme of things for regions and regional planning. The history of America is told with broad, sweeping regions in mind—the South, New England, the West—but the history of planning in America is largely one of local institutions, states, and the federal government.

Regional planning, then, is both present at the outset and a latecomer to the planning game. The institutional turf is quite congested. Although the need for better regional coordination and planning actually predates the “invention” of modern city planning in America (consider that the Burnham Plan for Chicago was a regional plan), regional planning has never been able to mount a convincing challenge to the profoundly local emphasis of planning.

Still, it simply makes too much sense to put aside regional planning for long. One need not be a rocket scientist to recognize that many of the things we care about and depend on are not well managed or defined by local jurisdictions. When I worked as the land use supervisor for Metro in Portland, I was struck by the fact that everyone—rich, poor, and in-between—lived regional lives. That is, households in our region were working, socializing, recreating, worshipping, schooling, and sleeping in territories of their own devising, none of which corresponded to any single local jurisdiction. Consequently, planning by jurisdiction, which is the norm in Oregon and elsewhere, becomes a more complicated proposition. It really makes one wonder for whom the planning is intended. If it is simply about maintaining local property values, then we’ve both made that task overly complicated and are poorly serving a whole host of larger values, goals, and objectives.

However, the other thing that struck me while working for Metro is that if people don’t feel empowered to address the issues right in front of them when they walk out the front of their house or apartment building, then they will never relate to the kinds of things we are talking about at the regional scale. Local empowerment made regional planning and growth management possible. Local and regional, then, go hand in hand, and you cannot have one without the other.

Having worked at the regional level, served as president of my local planning commission, and provided planning assistance to neighborhood associations early in my career, I am familiar with the ongoing tensions between these scales—the scale at which we live in the region, and the scale at which we are empowered at the locality. I think this tension is always going to be present, and I am under no illusions that it will evaporate or that the region will “win” any time in the future.

Still, I, like others, keep coming back to the region because to ignore it is to give up on things that are important to our sense of place and quality of life. The region helps us understand the world and how it works, and makes one look deeply into the causal relationships that link us together and to the natural world. I guess the ecologist in me will never give up on that.

Land Lines: What other kinds of research topics have you been investigating?

Ethan Seltzer: I guess you could summarize my work under several headings. I have written about planning in Portland, particularly regional planning and the way that Metro developed a regional growth management plan. That work has been incorporated in publications and projects in the United States, Japan, and the Netherlands.

More recently, I have been engaged in the work of America 2050 on megaregions. I have provided information about Cascadia, the megaregion of the Pacific Northwest, and participated in several research seminars organized to further our understanding of the nature of megaregions, planning for megaregions, and the utility of that concept for better understanding issues associated with sustainability and competitiveness in the years ahead.

I have also worked with Connie Ozawa, a colleague at Portland State, on the kinds of skills needed by entry-level planners, and therefore the nature of the relationship between graduate planning education and planning practice. I am also working with colleagues at the University of Oregon and Oregon State University to investigate the dynamics underlying and opportunities for bridging the “urban/rural” divide in Oregon. A book on that topic will be published by Oregon State Press in 2011. The fundamental themes that tie all of this together have to do with place and practice—the place being the Portland metropolitan region and the Pacific Northwest, and the practice being what actually gets done by planners.

Land Lines: Any last thoughts?

Ethan Seltzer: In an interesting way, the Lincoln Institute’s association with the ideas of Henry George and their extension into thematic areas of land as property, taxation, and land planning is very contemporary. The challenges we face in the United States and globally due to climate change and instability, the pressure for sustainability, urbanization, and the future of our cities and metropolitan regions all come together around these themes.

Ultimately, the challenges that we talk about in sweeping terms must make sense and be addressed democratically and locally. Pulling that off in a manner that acknowledges the global context for local action is really about infusing what we do as planners and academicians with a new ethical commitment to acknowledging and acting at the true scales at which these issues operate.

Gran parte del consumo de energía del país se produce en las ciudades. En los Estados Unidos, alrededor de tres cuartas parte de la energía consumida está relacionada con las áreas urbanas. De acuerdo con esto, las ciudades ofrecen oportunidades significativas para ahorrar energía aumentando su eficiencia, pero sigue habiendo obstáculos importantes: ¿Las fuerzas del mercado bastarán para producir ganancias de eficiencia cuando corresponda, o estas soluciones de mercado se verán impedidas por fallas del mercado, tales como información imperfecta, falta de financiamiento o riesgos incomprendidos? ¿Cuánto valora la gente el ahorro de energía, y cuán sensibles son a los cambios en los precios de la energía? El Instituto Lincoln organizó una conferencia sobre la eficiencia energética y las ciudades en octubre de 2012 para tratar estos y otros temas relacionados. A continuación esbozamos algunos de ellos.

Valoración de la eficiencia energética

Los consumidores deberían estar dispuestos a pagar más por espacios de vivienda que usan menos energía. La evidencia demuestra que los usuarios de espacios comerciales valoran la eficiencia energética y están dispuestos a pagar más por ella, y muchos estudios confirman que el espacio de oficinas y comercial con certificación LEED se vende o alquila a precios superiores en comparación con el espacio tradicional. La evidencia de esta preferencia es claramente menor en lo que se refiere a las residencias, en parte porque la mayoría de los compradores de viviendas no puede determinar fácilmente la eficiencia energética de una vivienda, sobre todo si es nueva y no hay registro sobre su consumo energético.

Algunos desarrollos residenciales se están clasificando ahora mediante procedimientos similares a la certificación LEED o la clasificación Energy Star, como la utilizada en los equipos electrodomésticos. En California, las viviendas que tienen la mayor clasificación de eficiencia energética se venden por un precio de aproximadamente un 9 por ciento mayor que las unidades con eficiencia energética promedio. Similares diferencias de precios para casas certificadas con el nivel de eficiencia máximo, usando un procedimiento de certificación europeo, se han observado en los Países Bajos. Algunas de estas diferencias de precios se justifican por el mayor nivel de confort brindado por estos edificios, además del ahorro de energía. También parece probable que el aumento de precios por eficiencia energética que se observan en California sea tres veces mayor que incremento gradual del costo del aumento de eficiencia en dichas viviendas.

Cómo determinar el costo

El costo de integrar eficiencia energética en los edificios nuevos es menor que el costo de mejorar la eficiencia en edificios existentes. Una casa construida después del año 2000 usa alrededor del 25 por ciento menos de energía por metro cuadrado que una casa construida en la década de 1960 o antes. El potencial técnico para mejorar la eficiencia energética en casas más viejas parece ser obvio, pero sus propietarios enfrentan dos desafíos: determinar qué mejoras tienen el mayor beneficio por dólar invertido y obtener un contratista y financiamiento para realizar el trabajo. Si bien hay muchas herramientas de diagnóstico disponibles para evaluar las viviendas existentes, su exactitud es muy variable y depende completamente de las características detalladas tanto de la vivienda y como del estilo de vida de la unidad familiar. La obtención de un contratista y de financiamiento puede suponer altos costos de transacción para los propietarios, en términos de esfuerzo, tiempo y dinero. Muchas compañías de servicios públicos ofrecen soporte técnico y financiero para la modernización de la eficiencia energética, pero el progreso ha sido lento.

Cómo cambiar el consumo de energía

Quizá sea más fácil cambiar los estilos de vida residenciales que modernizar los edificios viejos, y muchas compañías de servicios públicos están experimentando con métodos para modificar el comportamiento de la unidad familiar. El programa más común consiste en “animar” a las familias a desarrollar hábitos más eficientes proporcionándoles informes periódicos del consumo doméstico de energía que comparan su reciente uso de energía con el de sus vecinos. Los análisis demuestran que estos informes tienen no solo un impacto a corto plazo en el consumo de energía del hogar sino también un impacto acumulativo a más largo plazo que continúa después de interrumpidos los informes. Los ahorros de energía de estos programas son pequeños, y oscilan entre medio kilovatio-hora hasta un kilovatio-hora por día para un hogar medio, pero el bajo costo del programa lo hace tan rentable como muchas otras estrategias.

Reconocimiento a John Quigley

Esta conferencia fue organizada conjuntamente con John Quigley, profesor de Economía de la Universidad de California en Berkeley, quien falleció antes de que ésta se llevara a cabo. Además de sus artículos originales sobre la energía y las ciudades, algunos de sus antiguos alumnos, colegas y coautores presentaron otros artículos sobre economía urbana. Todos estos trabajos serán publicados en una próxima edición especial de Regional Science and Urban Economics, que reconocerá las contribuciones de John Quigley a lo largo de su larga y sobresaliente carrera.

As coastal cities continue to face the potentially expensive threat of increasingly volatile weather, storm surge, and sea level rise associated with climate change, building resilience has become a top planning priority. But resilience has multiple dimensions. It means not only building things, like flood gates and hardened infrastructure, but also keeping natural systems such as wetlands free of development—and, in many cases, deciding not to rebuild in the most vulnerable places. Therein lies an evolving and complex issue affecting private property rights.

From at least the turn of the 20th century, the Supreme Court has wrestled with a basic question: When does land use regulation constitute a taking, requiring compensation for property owners under the 5th amendment of the U.S. Constitution (“ . . . nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.”)? Since Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon, 260 U.S. 393 (1922) and Euclid v. Amber Realty, 272 U.S. 365 (1926), the essence of the rulings has been that government has considerable leeway in its power to regulate land use. In Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005), the high court affirmed the state’s power to use eminent domain for economic development in the 21st century.

In June 2013, however, a decision on a Florida development project seemed to indicate a subtle shift in another direction. In Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District, the justices ruled 5 to 4 that government was overzealous in imposing mitigation requirements on developers as conditions for building permits. Coy Koontz, Sr., who had wanted to build a small shopping center on his property, objected to a Florida water management district’s demands that he pay for off-site wetlands restoration to offset environmental damage caused by the construction. Citing two cases, Nollan v. California Coastal Commission, 483 U.S. 825 (1987) and Dolan v. City of Tigard, 512 U.S. 374 (1994), Koontz claimed that the requirements constituted a taking for exceeding a “rough proportionality” between the requirements and the scope of damages caused by the development. In 2011, the Florida Supreme Court rejected Koontz’s argument, but in June the high court ruled that the mitigation requirements on the builder went too far.

The ruling alarmed some environmentalists and groups such as the American Planning Association, who feared new limits on the government’s ability to control development and impose requirements to restore and conserve natural areas. The concern extended to coastal metropolitan regions preparing for the impacts of climate change, such as New York City, which in May proposed a model $20 billion plan that is a mix of strategies for living with water and keeping it out. Property rights experts speculated that developers could cite the Koontz case as justification to refuse to pay into a fund for such initiatives.

At a broader level, the question remains: After an event like Hurricane Sandy, is government within its rights to forbid rebuilding or to modify regulations in order to prevent new building? The legal answer is essentially yes, according to Jerold Kayden, an attorney and professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, who was part of the Lincoln Institute’s Journalists Forum on Land and the Built Environment, held in April.

Particularly as more data become available on sea level rise and storm surge, government has the legal right to restrict owners from building on a vacant lot that is subject to flooding and sea level rise, or from rebuilding a home that has been destroyed. But, Kayden said, “politically, it’s another story.”

New York and New Jersey represented two different approaches to post-Sandy reconstruction. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg called for a mix of rebuilding and “strategic retreat,” while New Jersey Governor Chris Christie focused on allocating money to residents so they could rebuild on parcels battered by the storm—even when the property remained in harm’s way.

The City of Boston, meanwhile, has begun to require waterfront developers to prepare for rising seas and storm surge by relocating mechanicals from basements to higher floors, among other measures. As the Koontz case opens the door for heightened scrutiny of various measures imposed by local government as a condition for building, developers might sue over these expensive, climate-related requirements, arguing that they are too burdensome and may constitute a regulatory taking.

While property rights lawsuits over reconstruction and restrictions on new building in coastal areas will no doubt continue to proliferate, Pratap Talwar, principal at the Thompson Design Group, presented an alternative in long-range planning that could help prevent such conflicts from arising. He detailed for the journalists the case study of Long Branch, New Jersey, which overhauled its planning process several years ago to include tougher standards but also a fast-track process for development that satisfied the guidelines. Long Branch was the one mile of New Jersey shore that weathered Sandy relatively intact, Talwar said.

Journalists Forum on Land and the Built Environment: The Resilient City

Thirty-five leading writers and editors who cover urban issues attended the 6th Journalists Forum on Land and the Built Environment on April 20, 2013, at Lincoln House. The theme was The Resilient City, from coastal municipalities preparing for sea level rise and storm surge to legacy cities trying to evolve despite diminished populations and business activity.

Kai-Uwe Bergmann, principal at Bjarke Ingels Group, opened the forum with a look at urban design innovations that maximize efficiency in land, housing, and major infrastructure projects. Johanna Greenbaum from Kushner Companies, who helped run New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s microhousing initiative, detailed that project as well as other similar efforts around the country to accom-modate singles and couples who can live in just 300 square feet.

Alan Mallach, co-author of the Lincoln Institute’s policy focus report Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities, noted signs of resurgence in places such as the Central West End in St. Louis or Over-the-Rhine neighborhood in Cincinnati, while acknowledging the challenges facing Camden, New Jersey; Flint and Detroit, Michigan; and Youngstown, Ohio. Antoine Belaieff, Innovation Director at MetroLinx, detailed the use of social media to gain citizen input on a $16 billion investment in resilient transportation infrastructure in the Toronto area.

John Macomber, from Harvard Business School, led a session on the global city by recognizing the hundreds of millions of people who continue to migrate from rural to urban areas, requiring large-scale planning for infrastructure. Martim Smolka, director of the Lincoln Institute’s Program on Latin America and the Caribbean, lamented widespread dislocations caused by preparations for the World Cup and the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Bing Wang, from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, noted that 11 cities in China have populations over 10 million—and yet the rapidly growing nation is only halfway to its expected urbanization.

John Werner, chief mobilizing officer at Citizens Schools, spelled out how urban school systems can ignite passion in students by bringing in outside professionals as teachers and mentors. Gordon Feller of Cisco Systems envisioned a completely connected world and an Internet of everything, joined by Washington Post investigative reporter Dan Keating, who shared his experiences extracting data from various levels of government.

The forum had to be shortened because of the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers in the Cambridge-Watertown area—but that event prompted dialogue about the “shelter in place” request by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, security and public space, and another kind of resilience in the Boston area. Several participants wrote about the events, including Emily Badger at The Atlantic Cities, Donald Luzzatto at the Virginian Pilot, and Inga Saffron at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The springtime gathering is a partnership of the Lincoln Institute, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The mission is to bring journalists together to share ideas and learn about cutting-edge trends in the coverage of cities, architecture, and urban planning. — AF

Five years ago, New Orleans resident Mandy Pumilia was concerned about the number of apparently blighted structures in her neighborhood, known as Bywater, where she is currently vice president of the neighborhood association. Despite post-Katrina recovery efforts, it was hard to identify and track truly troubled properties, and she didn’t have access to city data that could have helped. Instead, she built her own Google spreadsheet and filled it in with the results of her own research and legwork. “It was an arduous process,” she recalls. And despite her tech savvy and determination, it was a solution with limits: it wasn’t easy to share the information beyond people she knew directly, and keeping up with property-specific city hearings was a chore.

Since then, a web app called BlightStatus (blightstatus.nola.gov) has become a valuable new tool for her neighborhood recovery efforts. Created in 2012 by Code for America, a nonprofit specializing in open-source projects that benefit local government, BlightStatus makes it simpler for citizens like Pumilia to access property details, more deeply engaging them in managing blight and other planning challenges. The effort caught the attention of other cities and led to a spinoff startup called Civic Insight, which is now deploying its technology in Dallas, Atlanta, Palo Alto, Sacramento, and other places.

In New Orleans, BlightStatus aggregates information on inspections, code complaints, hearings, judgments, foreclosures, and more. This data is generally siloed or hard to access, but the app gathers and updates most of it daily. Users can search by address or use an interactive map to search at the neighborhood or citywide level. Particularly useful: a “watch list” feature that lets someone like Pumilia keep tabs on specific properties, and sends timely alerts about hearings and other developments. “And it makes it easier for me to empower other residents,” she adds, “so I’m not the only keeper of information.”

When other cities noticed New Orleans’ embrace of the app and expressed interest in a similar tool, Code for America adapted the technology to work elsewhere. “We seemed to hit a nerve,” says Eddie Tejeda, one of the BlightStatus creators. Specifics varied from place to place, but grappling with official property data was clearly a widespread frustration. Lots of people want information about buildings and property, Tejeda continues, but what’s available is often “really hard to work with”; digging through it requires knowledge and experience.

With an investment from the Knight Foundation, the group formed Civic Insight in 2013, using their New Orleans work as a template that could be scaled for other cities large and small, with varied needs and data sets. (Setup and annual subscription-like fees vary by population: roughly $1,000 to $10,000 for the base rate plus 20 to 70 cents per capita.) Among its newer clients, Dallas is proving a particularly important case study. A sprawling metropolis with wildly diverse neighborhoods, from pricey and thriving to severely economically challenged, it’s helping demonstrate that this approach to open-data technology isn’t just for triage in a place like post-Katrina New Orleans.

The connection came via Habitat for Humanity. The nonprofit’s New Orleans chapter has been an enthusiastic user of BlightStatus. Members passed the word to colleagues in Dallas, where the city has been grappling with strategies for using data to define, track, and address blight and related issues, such as identifying problem landlords. Launched in late 2014 with data similar to the information collected in New Orleans, the Dallas version will incorporate additional crime and tax-related statistics that locals want to access more readily, says Theresa O’Donnell, the city’s chief planning officer, who spoke about the app at the Lincoln Institute’s Big City Planning Directors conference in Cambridge in October 2014. “As we get these programs up and started,” she says, “we can rely more on citizens to let us know if [our blight efforts] are working or not.”

Atlanta and Sacramento are rolling out their own programs to make use of the app this year, and other Civic Insight efforts are forthcoming in Fort Worth, Texas, and elsewhere. Client goals aren’t limited to blight issues, notes Tejeda, now Civic Insight’s CEO: in Palo Alto, where zoning, development, and construction are hot topics, architects and homeowners use the app to keep up with permitting processes. That flexibility is by intent. “It’s relatively quick for us to map [raw data] to our application,” he explains. “The role we play is being the translator between what the city has, and what the public needs.” (The app is also built to accommodate new data sets—and it’s no surprise that active citizens like Pumilia, in New Orleans, have lots of suggestions that Civic Insight is working to accommodate.)

Comprehensive data sets and other digital tools have helped to guide planners and other city officials for years, but what Civic Insight is up to is the next logical step. “There’s this great opportunity to harness this data—sort of hidden data, for many cities—and bring it to life” in ways that are useful to citizens and planners alike, points out Lincoln Institute fellow Peter Pollock, the former head of planning in Boulder, Colorado.

Such accessibility matters because policy makers must “coproduce the good city” with residents, Pollock continues. “Planners are in the business of harnessing community energy around a vision for the future,” he says. That means zoning and permitting—but also maintenance and compliance. “It’s not just building the city; it’s care and feeding of the city over time.”

Still, the Civic Insight proposition may seem confusing at first: How does a city benefit by hoping citizens will pore over information that it already owns? But that’s the point. Opening up data to people who really know the neighborhoods where they live and work amounts to a kind of crowd-sourcing strategy for planning-level city maintenance.

Just ask Pumilia. This is the essence of what she was trying to do in New Orleans with her DIY spreadsheet and a whole lot of grit a few years ago. Now she can monitor her neighborhood more easily and direct others to BlightStatus so they too can quickly round up the information they need and prod the city about troublesome properties.

Dipping into the data as we speak, she calls up the history of one local address: “So there are one, two, three, four, five cases against this property,” she says. In short, she has just whipped up a ready-made dossier of neglect—one that helped persuade officials to start a process that should lead to the auction of that property.

Sometimes, Pumilia says with a laugh, “It requires citizen action to inspire people to do their jobs.”

We are inaugurating our fourteenth volume year of Land Lines with a new look and feel—more color, more articles, more news about our faculty, and more announcements about our courses, publications and special projects.

In the past five years our educational programs have expanded to reach policy makers and practitioners in federal, state and local government throughout the United States and in many countries of Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia. Our faculty has developed a broad range of introductory and advanced professional development courses that explore both the theory and practice of land and tax policy.

The Institute’s Department of Valuation and Taxation, chaired by Joan Youngman, has three major goals: improving public and scholarly debate on the taxation of land value; addressing the economic impact, feasibility, political acceptability, and appropriate use of value-based taxes; and contributing to a better understanding of the valuation process for tax purposes. The local property tax, as the primary value-based tax in the United States, is a major focus of the Institute’s work, but we analyze a variety of revenue instruments, particularly with regard to their treatment of land value increments attributable to public investment.

The Department of Planning and Development, cochaired by Rosalind Greenstein and Armando Carbonell, links interests in the theory and practice of planning with an understanding of how land markets operate. Our concerns focus on urban and regional planning and design, land conservation, urban redevelopment, and the behavior of land markets. We are particularly interested in the integration of urban and environmental systems; the planning process and its outcomes; the interplay of public and private roles in decisions involving land policy and land use; the effect of land markets and the institutions that support them on the city and its residents; and the role of land and real estate in the larger economy and in poverty alleviation.

Building on our experiences in Latin America since 1993, Martim Smolka directs the Institute’s Program on Latin America and the Caribbean in developing activities oriented toward both scholars and practitioners, including legislative and executive policy officials and upper-level technical staff. Programs focus on five priority topics: value capture policies and implementation of instruments to mobilize land value increments; property taxation systems that can meet the needs of rapid urbanization; regulatory environments supporting large-scale urban intervention; security of tenure, regularization and urban upgrading programs; and urban land market forces, including spatial and social segregation, speculation, vacant land and related issues.

Each issue of Land Lines will continue to feature articles by faculty who share the ideas discussed and lessons learned in Institute-sponsored courses. In addition, we will announce upcoming courses, lectures and other programs that are open to a general audience, and we will keep you informed about new publications, web-based programs and other resources that address our work in land and tax policy.

While the issue of managing suburban growth has long been on the Lincoln Institute’s agenda, “sprawl” is now receiving a great deal of attention from citizens, policy analysts and policymakers, as well as the popular press. However, crafting policies to respond to suburban growth is extremely difficult for a variety of reasons.

First, we lack a public consensus about what sprawl is. Even paraphrasing former US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, “. . . but I know it when I see it” does not work in this case. For example, one often hears from anti-sprawl activists that they do not want their community to be “another Los Angeles.” However, Los Angeles is more densely populated today than it was 30 years ago.

Dowell Myers and Alicia Kitsuse report that “the Los Angeles urbanized area (the region excluding mountains and deserts) has the highest gross population densities among the 20 largest metropolitan regions, higher even than New York.”1 Exploring deeper, one finds that “Los Angeles” is code for a variety of social problems that are concentrated in our nation’s cities, such as urban crime, teenage pregnancy, poverty, persistent unemployment, and a variety of other concerns, not the least of which is the organization of uses in metropolitan space.

A second challenge to crafting policies to respond to suburban growth is the threat to anticipated economic gain by some of those who own undeveloped land on the fringes of metropolitan areas. For example, one can imagine the great interest these landowners would have in negotiations to redraw urban growth boundaries. The line on the map can have significant monetary implications for a parcel depending on which side of the line it lands.

A third challenge is the variety of existing policies and laws that have encouraged suburban growth over the past 50 years. In a recent Institute-supported study, Patricia Burgess and Thomas Bier make a strong case that governmental fragmentation on two fronts contributes to a policy environment that supports sprawl.2 Fragmentation between levels of government makes regional planning approaches difficult, while fragmentation across functional agencies impedes comprehensive solutions. In another study, Joseph Gyourko and Richard Voith have argued that the combination of the federal mortgage interest deductions and local-level exclusionary zoning have encouraged low-density residential development in jurisdictions surrounding central cities.3

Finally, there is little agreement about desired future development patterns. Thus, if the forces that create sprawl are based on a combination of federal, state and local policies, if our existing landscape reflects both public and private actions, and if the desired future is unclear, how does one even begin to address the issue? The Lincoln Institute’s mission is to contribute to and improve the quality of debate about land policies. Toward that end, our work on sprawl is multi-dimensional, focusing on educational programs for policy officials at the federal, state and local levels.

Programs for Federal and State Officials

Land use issues have increased in importance on the federal policy agenda, and the Institute has begun working with Region 1 of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), based in Boston, to develop a training course for senior administrators. Many staff at EPA are not schooled in land use planning, but their work in traditional EPA areas such as water or air quality requires that they pay attention to land use issues.

Harvey Jacobs, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, developed and taught a course to two groups of EPA administrators in the fall of 1998. Response to the two-day program, which included the historical and institutional context of land use planning, was so positive that the EPA asked the Institute to offer this program annually as part of EPA’s required orientation for new administrators.

At the state level, the Institute has recently supported programs to facilitate information exchanges among legislators and planning directors. Patricia Salkin of the Government Law Center at the Albany Law School has researched lessons to be learned from states that attempted state-level legislation on growth management, but failed. Among her findings was the lack of in-depth knowledge among state legislators and executive-level policymakers about the causes and consequences of suburban sprawl. In order for any kind of growth management legislation to be passed successfully, sponsorship is needed by the appropriate legislator. Depending on the state, this might be the chair of the Local Affairs Committee or a different committee leader.

In an attempt to respond to this need for better understanding about sprawl on the part of legislators and their staffs, the Lincoln Institute and the Albany Law School cosponsored a briefing session in February 1999, in Albany. It coincided with the legislative session and, fortuitously, was held on the day of a press conference announcing that the bipartisan “Smart Growth Economic Competitiveness Act of 1999” had been filed in both houses of the New York legislature. The bill includes three key provisions:

(1) It charges the Governor to create an inter-agency council to review existing policies related to growth and development.

(2) It creates a task force to study the issue and come up with recommendations.

(3) It asks the Governor to provide grants for regional compact efforts.

National experts on sprawl, state legislators and commissioners, and Mayor William A. Johnson of Rochester and members of his staff exchanged up-to-date information on related state-level efforts, as well as possible resources for their continued work on this issue. The briefing session gave prominence to the issue of growth management at an important juncture in the state’s history. Perhaps most useful to the legislators and other senior-level policymakers was the neutral forum that the briefing provided for frank discussion of the complexities of “smart growth.” While the event was designed with legislators in mind, it is clear that participants from the executive branch who attended the briefing session also benefited.

In another attempt to target our educational programs to key decision makers, the Lincoln Institute, the Regional Plan Association (RPA) and the New Jersey State Planning Commission cosponsored a leadership retreat for state planning directors from ten of the eleven Northeast states. The directors, or in states without a state planning director a representative from the executive branch, met in Princeton in March for a day characterized by peer-to-peer training.

States with nascent state-level efforts were able to learn from those with more institutionalized programs. While Delaware is as different from New York as Connecticut is from Maine, their state officials were able to benefit enormously from stepping outside their individual political, geographic and economic contexts and considering alternative solutions to similar problems. While each state must construct strategies appropriate to its own needs, all states face many common concerns.

The gathering also provided an opportunity to contribute to a larger, region-wide planning effort. Among the initiatives presented by Robert Yaro, executive director of RPA, was Amtrak’s introduction of high-speed rail service between Boston and Washington, DC, which may leverage substantial economic growth for cities along the corridor. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington will clearly benefit from rapid, comfortable transportation between terminals. However, it may be in smaller cities such as Providence, Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, Stamford, Newark, Trenton and Wilmington where high-speed rail could have a far greater impact. Frequent service to these cities, where airline connections are limited, could bring new investment as well as increased access to other employment centers for their residents.

RPA is drafting a proposal to provide the analysis and preliminary recommendations needed to evaluate the benefits of the Amtrak service. The state planning officers at the Princeton meeting felt that the initiative would be of great interest to their governors and agreed to take the RPA proposal back to their states in an effort to broaden the coalition in support of Amtrak’s high-speed rail service in the Northeast Corridor.

Programs for Local Officials and Community-Based Organizations

At the local level, strategies to address suburban sprawl also need to focus on development and redevelopment in the cities, and the Institute is expanding its course offerings to groups long interested in urban policy. Last November, the Institute cosponsored “Breaking Barriers, Building Partnerships: Urban Vacant Land Redevelopment” with the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations. Meeting in Boston, staff from community development corporations and private and non-profit lenders explored strategies for bringing underutilized land back into use. A similar group gathered in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in May for a workshop cosponsored by the North Carolina Community Development Initiative and the Kenan Institute for Private Enterprise. The hands-on training was designed to give participants experience in generating alternative financing strategies for urban redevelopment

In another effort in the Southeast, the Lincoln Institute provided support to Spelman College as part of an effort to contribute to the redevelopment of its neighborhood in Atlanta. In June, Spelman and its partners from the Atlantic University Center held a community summit as part of a larger initiative to identify both neighborhood needs and university-community strategies to address those needs.

Our experiences in these programs confirm the complex factors influencing current development patterns: the variety of social, economic, technological and political forces; complex and sometimes conflicting policies at the local, state and federal levels; and the actions of those in the public, private and non-profit sectors. Through this work we have come to understand the need for basic information about the broader issue of land markets. In particular we are interested in how and why land markets operate as they do and the implications of land market activity on various public and private stakeholders. Future curriculum development efforts in this area will concentrate on materials to help policymakers and citizens gain a better appreciation of these markets. In doing so, we will have a fuller understanding of the sprawl issue: what causes sprawl, where interventions will be effective, and the characteristics of successful interventions.

Rosalind Greenstein is a senior fellow and director of the program in land markets at the Lincoln Institute.

Notes

1. Myers, Dowell, and Alicia Kitsuse, “The Debate over Future Density of Development: An Interpretive Review.” Lincoln Institute Working Paper, 1999: 22.

2. Burgess, Patricia, and Thomas Bier, “Public Policy and ‘Rural Sprawl’: Lessons from Northeast Ohio.” Lincoln Institute Working Paper, 1998.

3. Gyourko, Joseph, and Richard Voith, “The Tax Treatment of Housing and Its Effects on Bounded and Unbounded Communities.” Lincoln Institute Working Paper, 1999.

Una versión más actualizada de este artículo está disponible como parte del capítulo 6 del libro Perspectivas urbanas: Temas críticos en políticas de suelo de América Latina.

La descentralización del estado, el crecimiento de las empresas y la participación comunitaria en los asuntos públicos, están presentando nuevos retos para el desarrollo de las instituciones enfocadas en las políticas de tierras y su implementación en a través de América Latina. Los alcaldes y consejos locales están asumiendo nuevas responsabilidades en las áreas de protección ambiental, transporte urbano, infraestructura básica, financiamiento local, servicios sociales y desarrollo económico. Al mismo tiempo, las empresas y organizaciones civiles encuentran nuevas vías para asegurar la atención pública de sus exigencias mediante el urbanismo participativo, la administración de presupuestos, la cofinanciación y el control a nivel local.

De este modo, la descentralización y participación democrática están construyendo un medio en el cual las alianzas publico-privadas pueden desarrollar proyectos conjuntos de interés común tanto para individuos como para el gobierno. Sin embargo, a muchas instituciones les falta mucho para adaptarse totalmente a sus nuevos papeles de planificación, regulación y evaluación.

Las culturas de apatía y desconfianza hacia el gobierno arraigadas desde hace mucho tiempo, deben transformarse en una confianza común capaz de movilizar las mejores tradiciones comunitarias de los latinoamericanos. El patronazgo político y económico y la corrupción del estado, deben reemplazarse por responsabilidad política y administrativa. Leyes municipales, de contratación y de administración obsoletas aún restringen la capacidad tanto de los gobiernos locales como de la sociedad civil de interactuar creativamente por medio de arreglos contractuales y de cofinanciación.

Los retos institucionales y los dilemas de políticas que actualmente enfrenta el Área Metropolitana de San Salvador (AMSS) ilustran las transformaciones que ocurren a lo largo de la región. Después de años de guerra civil, los salvadoreños firmaron un acuerdo de paz en 1992 que proporcionó un marco de competencia real entre los partidos políticos y estimuló una participación más activa por parte de las empresas, las organizaciones no gubernamentales (ONGs) y las organizaciones comunitarias. La AMSS comprende varias municipalidades, algunas de ellas dirigidas por alcaldes de partidos de oposición al gobierno central. El cuerpo coordinador del AMSS es el Consejo de Alcaldes, que a su vez es dirigido por la Oficina Metropolitana de Planificación.

Con asistencia técnica de ONGs internacionales, la AMSS ha preparado un plan integral de desarrollo. Instrumentos contemporáneos de planificación urbana tales como la macrozonificación, los impuestos a la propiedad de tasa variable, la recuperación de plusvalías para la protección del medio ambiente, los consorcios público-privados y los coeficientes de uso de suelo están siendo considerados en la implementación de políticas de tierra, de desarrollo y de protección del medio ambiente. De hecho, los salvadoreños tienen el apoyo de varios centros de investigación que están familiarizados con el uso e impacto de estos y otros instrumentos en otras partes del mundo. Actualmente, su necesidad fundamental es movilizar a los protagonistas metropolitanos, tanto públicos como privados, en dirección a políticas comunes y desarrollar instrumentos compartidos para su aplicación.

Cerca del final, PRISMA, una prominente ONG salvadoreña y centro urbano de investigación, invitó al Instituto Lincoln a desarrollar un taller conjunto sobre herramientas de administración urbana, mecanismos de coordinación intergubernamental para áreas metropolitanas e iniciativas público-privadas para ciudades sustentables. El taller, llevado a cabo en El Salvador en octubre, contó con la participación de representantes de alta jerarquía en el gobierno central, así como alcaldes, funcionarios de planificación y otras autoridades del AMSS; así como representantes de asociaciones de construcción y desarrollo y algunas instituciones y organizaciones comunitarias.

Los oradores del Instituto Lincoln presentaron experiencias de Taiwan, Filipinas, México y otros países de América Latina que destacaron las políticas e instrumentos capaces de armonizar los intereses de diversos inversionistas urbanos y coordinar varios niveles de gobierno para el uso de la tierra y objetivos de desarrollo urbano. Los salvadoreños explicaron sus preocupaciones inmediatas, como la falta de coordinación intergubernamental para proteger el ambiente urbano, las discontinuidades en las medidas políticas, arbitrariedades a todos los niveles del gobierno e incertidumbres legales y administrativas.

Los participantes del taller concluyeron que para fomentar el nuevo marco legal e institucional que busca el AMSS, los salvadoreños necesitan ampliar las discusiones a otros protagonistas urbanos. También necesitan continuar trabajando con instituciones como el Instituto Lincoln, que tienen la confianza y credibilidad para presentar políticas de administración de tierra reconocidas internacionalmente y pueden ayudar a construir consenso entre intereses públicos y privados.

Mario Lungo es investigador en PRISMA, el Programa Salvadoreño de Investigación y Medio Ambiente; Alejandra Mortarini es la directora de los programas para Latinoamérica y el Caribe del Instituto Lincoln; y el abogado colombiano Fernando Rojas, es miembro visitante del instituto este año.

Local governments exercise greater land use authority in the United States than in any other advanced democracy. Yet local governments have themselves evolved piecemeal in the typical U.S. metropolitan area, producing a pattern of fragmented authority. Most notably, as metropolitan areas have exploded outward, the local government system has adapted mainly by creating new suburbs and single-function districts rather than by expanding the boundaries of existing central cities.

Illustratively, when Robert Wood studied the New York metropolitan region in the late 1950s, he counted roughly 1,400 local governments. When Jameson Doig and Michael Danielson examined the same region in the early 1980s, the number had grown to 2,200, of which more than 800 exercised land use regulatory authority.

Critics levy numerous charges against this system. Above all, they contend it invites parochialism and, in dealing with issues of regional scale, gridlock. These failings are particularly apparent when the potential ends of land use policy are controversial. But they are visible in many other circumstances as well—wherever, for example, there is substantial risk that the instruments of policy (from regional overrides of local zoning to the siting of new incinerators) will be highly controversial and no consensus has yet emerged about the severity of a crisis that might justify accepting such risk.

In other respects, however, the system is both adaptive and finely tuned to citizen desires. Numerous functions have been shifted from localities to regional authorities and higher levels of government in recent decades, yet the changes have been highly selective and incremental.

When broad agreement has emerged that a particular function—such as mass transit or environmental protection—requires decisionmaking and management at supra-local scale, the political leaders in many metropolitan areas have frequently crafted new institutional arrangements. They have typically defined the new institutions quite precisely, however, so as to avoid sapping local authority any more than necessary to deal with the specific problems that gave rise to the consensus for change. Where large numbers of voters still favor local control, moreover—as, preeminently, in the field of land use regulation—metropolitan-area political leaders have taken great care to avoid disturbing it.

To be sure, certain objectives are all but impossible to realize through this piecemeal, consensus-dependent mode of institutional adaptation (most notably, greater class and racial integration at regional scale, and prevention of urban sprawl). But others (e.g., the preservation of neighborhood character and vigorous grassroots democracy) are accomplished much more reliably than would be likely in a more “rationalized” system.

Balancing Communal and Individualistic Values

Controversies about this system invariably reflect a mix of conflicting interests and values. Since a considerable body of scholarship exists on the interests most commonly in dispute, let us concentrate here on the values.

Americans consider land use issues within the framework of two disparate ideologies: one communal and egalitarian, the other individualistic and disposed to leave distributional outcomes to the marketplace. In any given controversy, self-interested groups organize their briefs around aspects of one or the other of these ideologies. So it is easy to miss the crucial fact that both enjoy near-consensual support. Americans favor both private capitalism and government action to further collective values–each in its place. The disputes typically arise in situations where parties disagree about which ideology ought to take precedence or about how the differing ideological claims should be balanced.

The land use arena is chock full of such points. Ownership is private. Most development initiative is private. And tradition favors viewing land as a market commodity. But most human activities take place on land; the byproducts of land use profoundly affect every aspect of the human environment; and no one is an owner every place he or she goes. So everyone has a powerful stake in the preservation of some common spaces, in society’s rules for behavior in such spaces, and in some regulation of land use “overspill” effects.

Owners themselves, moreover, are eager for collective services. The value of urban real estate hinges critically on the availability and quality of such services, from highway access to public safety to education. In addition, neighborhood characteristics and the level of investor confidence in the neighborhood’s future profoundly affect real estate values. As a result, whether their aim is development or simply enjoyment of what they already have, property owners are drawn inevitably to the public realm.

Within the public realm, however, communal values–including the presumption of equal access to collective services regardless of income or wealth–predominate. This poses a severe problem for relatively affluent property owners who are reluctant to trigger wide egalitarian claims.

The fragmentation of metropolitan areas into independent suburbs, a problem for some, is for these voters a solution. It provides a means of confining the application of communal norms within relatively small population groups. And it makes available to such groups an instrument of extraordinary power for the pursuit and preservation of homogeneity: land use regulation.

Public Regulation vs Market Forces

Pressures have built in recent decades, nonetheless, for public land use action on a wider scale. Some of these pressures (e.g., for major infrastructure investments and for environmental protection) come largely from property owners themselves and do not pose much redistributive threat even when higher-level governments assume responsibility for action. Nearly all of the centralization that has occurred has been in response to pressures of this sort.

A second set of pressures for supra-local action has come primarily from less favored groups and their political representatives, seeking fiscal equalization and residential integration. There have been considerable shifts of money in response to these pressures. But resistance has been fierce to reforms that might force racial or class integration at the neighborhood level. With rare exceptions it has been successful.

The reform idea with the greatest apparent potential to override local land use parochialism would be a shift of some land use regulatory authority to the state level. Movement in this direction occurred in about one-quarter of the states during the 1970s and 1980s. Except in the notable cases of Oregon and Florida, however, the changes were slight, and the historic pattern of local land use autonomy remained firmly entrenched. Concerns about growth, moreover, rather than concerns about equality or integration drove these state land use reforms. Consequently, with weak real estate markets in the early 1990s interest in them has waned.

The question remains whether shifting land use authority from the local to the state level, if it does occur, will be likely to produce more egalitarian and integrationist outcomes than would the existing pattern of fragmented land use governance. One can plausibly argue that it will, stressing that egalitarian norms tend to prevail within (even if not between) U.S. public jurisdictions. Thinking of the immediate future, however, the likelihood is that such shifts will be rare and that, even when they occur, their egalitarian impacts will be meager.

For better or worse, the overwhelming trend of the 1990s, at all levels of government, is toward greater market deference rather than more vigorous public action to achieve redistributive objectives.

_____________

Alan Altshuler is professor in urban policy and planning and director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is also a faculty associate of the Lincoln Institute, which distributes several of his publications. This article is reprinted with permission from the 1995-96 Annual Report of the Taubman Center.

For the past several years, the Lincoln Institute has been collaborating with the Loeb Fellowship Program based at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. The program was established in 1970 through the generosity of Harvard alumnus John L. Loeb to allow mid-career professionals to study independently and gain additional tools to help revitalize the built and natural environment. The 2001-2002 Loeb Fellows took their end-of-the-year class trip to Cuba in mid-June, including two days in Santiago de Cuba and four in Havana, with a side trip from Havana to Trinidad and destinations in between.

With its neoclassical facades, white cobbles, Caribbean clouds and pastel paint, Trinidad is frozen in time like a watercolor postcard. Because Cuba’s architectural heritage is the focus of growing international attention and it’s not threatened by waves of new construction, the future of the past seems assured. The future itself is much more difficult to find. As our Loeb Fellowship group searched for clues in three cities and parts of the countryside, we found that despite economic stagnation and international political tension Cubans are hard at work on a future that is uniquely theirs.

An influx of tourist dollars and an aggressive, uniquely Cuban preservation campaign have begun to seize the riches of Old Havana from the jaws of benign neglect. After at least one bad experience with new construction, the Office of the City Historian, which coordinates the impressive large-scale restoration and revitalization of Old Havana, is still grappling with the problem of integrating the new with the historic. One way of addressing the problem is to closely oversee the design of block-sized developments. We walked by one large, modern parking structure inside Old Havana that will be rebuilt as a multi-use building, with parking beside it, according to a design intended to replicate the scale and some of the monumental features of a colonial convent that once stood on the site. Although some residents are being relocated here and elsewhere, many are returning to their homes after their neighborhoods are rehabilitated.

Now considered a model for financing rehabilitation efforts in other districts of the city, the renewal of Old Havana is based on a system of taxes and joint ventures that includes revenues from the private enterprises profiting from restoration-related tourism. The Office’s US$50 million-per-year budget is divided between construction and social supports for Cubans living within the boundaries of the rehabilitation zone. This can be thought of as a system of “value capture,” long a topic of interest at the Lincoln Institute.

Julio César Pérez, a Cuban architect, urban designer and advocate for community-based planning, was a member of our Loeb Fellowship class. With his special perspective as a local practitioner, he showed our group some favorite examples among the rich legacy of pre-revolutionary Deco and Modern architecture in Havana. Five-story gems are set among the very mixed cityscape of central Havana, which also includes the 28-story Edificio Focsa, with its 375 apartment units, built in the twilight of the Batista years.

On the heels of the international style housing blocks and casinos of the 1950s, the revolution brought its own form of land use revision. Julio told a story of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro playing a game of congratulatory post-revolution golf on the vast green of the former Havana Country Club. “How can we make good use of this land?” they mused, according to the legend. The results of their conversation are the grandly metaphoric and mostly unfinished National Schools of Art designed by Ricardo Porro, Vittorio Garratti and Roberto Gottardi. Their stance is deliberately indifferent to the clubhouse or the plan of the golf course, treating the open area as if it were a large meadow in the wilderness. The buildings are slated for restoration, a project made more complicated by poor siting and hydrological problems.

Julio also singled out more recent examples of large-scale construction in Havana, such as the Melia Cohiba Hotel with its bulky, corporate arch and the Miramar Trade Center, a commercial (dollar) mall across the street. These expensive projects are not only design failures, but also miss the relationship of the site with the sea and the possibility for creating a new quality of place in a developing district.

With the stalled economy and international stalemate of the 1990s, Cuban architect and planner Miguel Coyula and his colleagues have made use of the time and materials at hand to take a more thoughtful approach to land use and development. While vertical cities of steel and glass are popping up on a fast track and enormous scale in cities around the world, one of the world’s largest scale city models is being built out of discarded cigar boxes in Havana. This breathtaking miniature landscape was conceived as an aid to planning and an anchor for the efforts of the Group for the Integrated Development of the Capital (GDIC), which has been advising the city government on planning matters since 1988.

The 1:1000 model of greater Havana has been evolving piece by fitted piece for most of the last decade, and now covers 112 square meters or about a quarter of a basketball court. The model is housed in a specially designed, daylight-filled pavilion in the Mirarmar area near the center of the city, where drop-in visitors can circulate around and above the model on the broad floor and ramping mezzanine levels. Scale models of virtually every structure in the city are mounted on the wood topographical base. The buildings are color-coded to show development at different stages in history: colonial, pre-revolutionary modern (1900-1958) and post-revolutionary.

Miguel describes one construction project, a high-rise for the Committee for Economic Collaboration (CECE), which was cancelled because the model showed it was clearly out of scale for its location in central Havana. The decision seems to be a milestone because it was a very real project and also symbolic of a determination to build with environmental sensitivity—despite pressures to accommodate foreign investors in cash-strapped Cuba.

The primary mission of the GDIC is intimately familiar to Americans involved in planning inside major cities: start with neighborhoods. The group has run a series of “neighborhood transformation workshops” for local residents guided by professional designers and planners, selected from the same area when possible. These projects capture the spirit of the international community design movement, a 45-year-old, U.S.-linked tradition in which designers work directly in the interest of area residents. Since both the hard times of the post-Soviet 1990s and the U.S. embargo began taking their huge economic toll on Cuba, these workshops have gained in significance. They have brought planning and economic development together in a new local context, with neighborhoods tackling projects like urban farming and manufacturing building materials from recycled rubble.

The neighborhood transformation workshops and similar initiatives over the last 20 years have helped to bridge the Cuban revolutionary imperative of equal treatment for all and the very human imperative of making decisions about family, community and daily life. Another example is Architects for the Community, a national civic sector community design practice involved in town construction and environmental planning as well as low-fee design services for individual families. Built on the theories of Argentinean architect Rodolfo Livingston, the practice promotes a direct relationship between the user and the architect while building sustainability and contextual sensitivity into each construction project. Julio worked with the practice for five years before coming to Harvard and he presented a paper with Kathleen Dorgan, another member of the Loeb class, at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture conference in Cuba last spring. As an advocate for more humane and thoughtful land use and building design in his country, Julio is among a number of Cuban architects concerned with traditional values of craft and environmentally appropriate design.

Considering efforts like these, there is hope for a future of construction based on a fine calibration of scale, carefully considered relationships between built fabric and natural features of the surroundings, as well as the comfort and pleasure of the users. The challenge is to find the economic and regulatory means to support appropriate construction. So far, the state has maintained control of land use through direct and almost exclusive ownership, negotiating leases for some private and foreign investment through a delicate and extremely tenuous web of economic and legal formulas for valuing the parcels involved. As the economy becomes tied to the influx of outside currencies, these leases are likely to evolve into more predictable and transparent transactions. Perhaps land sales and heftier taxation are not far behind.

With the coming of foreign investment and the pressures to open up to even more, there will be ample opportunity in the future to be hijacked by land use decisions that are driven by the profit margins of distant organizations, and that would be an unfortunate addition to Cuba’s historic burden. Because, despite the beauty of its landscapes and cityscapes, Cuba is a map of victimization—by colonial conquest, crass economic exploitation, revolutionary confrontation, and brutal Soviet-style development.

The Loeb Fellows got an overview of intense nationalism built upon a deep and diverse culture, cosmopolitan history and the very real achievements of the last 40 years. Cuba is a place of great hardship and also enormous potential, for Cubans and for the rest of the world. We hope that the future does not hold only exploitation and cultural degradation when the barriers to trade and international travel finally fall. We also hope to show that Cuba is a place to learn from the mistakes of the past—theirs and ours—and to find out what is possible when a people are free to protect, respect and enhance their environment.

For more information about the Loeb Fellowship Program, see the website at www.gsd.harvard.edu/loebfell.

Loeb Fellows, 2001-2002

Kathleen Dorgan
Architect and community designer, Storrs, Connecticut

Clair Enlow
Journalist, Seattle

Kathleen Fox
Director, Ohio Arts and Sports Facilities Commission, Columbus.

James Grauley
President, Bank of America’s Community Development Corporation, Atlanta

Seitu Jones
Public artist, Minneapolis

Rick Lowe
Public artist and founder, Project Rowe Houses, Houston

Rubén Martínez
Writer, Los Angeles, and professor of non-fiction writing, University of Houston

Julio César Pérez
Architect, urban planner and professor, Faculty of Architecture, Havana

Virginia Prescott
Radio journalist and interactive media specialist, National Public Radio, New York and Boston

Richard St. John
Director, Conversations for the Common Wealth, Pittsburgh

Marina Stankovic
Architect, Berlin