The debate about the reality of global warming, and the human role in precipitating climate change, has been largely put to rest. Four working groups from the United Nations–sponsored Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (2007) have come to a consensus that would be gratifying if it were not so frightening. Yes, the globe is warming they say. Yes, humans are the primary agent for this change. Yes, the consequences may be dire. The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (2007) was also released last year by the Treasury Department of the British Government, whose only task was to assess the financial implications of global warming. That report warned that the costs of correcting this problem were affordable in the short term, but if nothing was done soon, the coming global economic calamity would make the depression of the 1930s look like a period of great luxury.

As a graduate student studying urban design and planning, Matt Tomasulo organized a clever wayfinding project to encourage residents of Raleigh, North Carolina, to walk more rather than drive. With a group of confederates, he designed and produced 27 Coroplast signs, each one-foot square, printed with simple messages such as: “It’s a 7 Minute Walk to Raleigh City Cemetery,” color-coded by destination category, with an arrow pointing the way. The group attached these with zipties to stoplight poles and the like around three downtown intersections. It took less than 45 minutes to install them all—after dark, because, although the signs looked official, this effort was “unsanctioned,” as Tomasulo put it.

As you might expect, the city had the signs taken down. And that could have been the end of it: a provocative gesture and a smart portfolio piece. But in fact, Walk Raleigh has undergone an unexpected metamorphosis since it first appeared back in 2012, evolving into Walk [Your City] (WalkYourCity.org), an ambitious attempt to take the underlying idea nationwide and work with (instead of around) city and planning officials. This year, Tomasulo’s fledgling organization received a $182,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, sparking a new phase for the project that includes a particularly thoughtful series of deployments coordinated with officials in San Jose, California.

This surprising outcome owes much to shrewd uses of technology—and perhaps even more to the input of a handful of planning officials who saw deeper potential in what could have been a fun but ephemeral stunt.

The core of Tomasulo’s original insight was to probe and attempt to shift perceptions of walking: he’d come upon some interesting research suggesting that people often choose not to walk because a destination simply “feels” farther away than it really is.

Older downtowns such as Raleigh’s are often “more walkable than people realize,” says Julie Campoli, an urban designer and author of Made for Walking: Density and Neighborhood Form (2012), published by the Lincoln Institute. But in many cases, decades of traffic engineering have eroded the sense of walkability in built environments where signage is arranged to be visible to drivers, and offers distance information in the car-centric form of miles. For the most part, she says, “The streets are designed for cars.”

Tomasulo did his own research in Raleigh, asking neighbors and others if they would, say, walk rather than drive to a certain grocery store if it took 14 minutes. “They’d say, ‘Sure, sometimes, at least.’ And I’d say: ‘Well, it’s 12 minutes.’ Again and again I had this conversation. People would say, ‘I always thought it was too far to walk.’”

Thus Tomasulo’s original signs were oriented to pedestrian eye level, and described distance in terms of minutes to a particular destination of potential interest. Tomasulo documented and promoted the project on Facebook. The enthusiasm there helped attract media attention, climaxing in a visit from a BBC video crew.

That’s when Tomasulo reached out via Twitter to Mitchell Silver, Raleigh’s then planning director, and a former president of the American Planning Association. Silver didn’t know much about Walk Raleigh, but agreed to talk to the BBC anyway, discussing the desirability of pro-walking efforts and praising this one as a “very cool” example . . . that probably should have gotten a permit first. The clip got even more attention. And when that resulted in inquiries about the signs’ legality, Silver removed them himself and returned them to Tomasulo.

But Silver also recognized the bigger opportunity. Raleigh’s long-term comprehensive plan explicitly called for an emphasis on increasing walkability (and bike-ability), an issue that resonated with the fast-growing municipality’s notably young population (about 70 percent under age 47 at the time). “It really became a critical thing,” he recalls. “Are we going to embrace innovation? Did Walk Raleigh do something wrong or are our codes out of date?” says Silver, now commissioner of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. “Innovation tests regulation. Matt, without realizing it, tested us.”

The short-term solution: Tomasulo could donate his signs to the city, which could then reinstall them on an “educational pilot” basis. To help Silver convince the City Council, Tomasulo used online petition tool SignOn.org to gather 1,255 signature in three days. The Council unanimously approved the return of Walk Raleigh.

Tomasulo pushed a little further. (He has since finished with school, and has a Masters in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and another in landscape architecture from North Carolina State University.) Raising $11,364 on Kickstarter, he and partners built WalkYourCity.org, which offers customizable signage templates to anyone, anywhere. This has led to more than 100 communities creating citizen-led projects in large and small municipalities across the U.S. and beyond.

That shouldn’t be a surprise, given what Campoli describes as a growing interest in walkability among citizens and planners alike. The smart growth movement has revived interest in compact city forms, she says, “And in the last ten years, that has converged in this idea of walkability.” Particularly in key demographics—millenials and empty-nesters prominently among them—there has been a recognition that car culture is “not as wonderful as it was made out to be,” she observes.

And there’s an economic dimension for cities, she adds. One way to gauge that is through growing real-estate values associated with more compact, walkable forms.

The economic impact factor inspired a recent collaboration with officials in San Jose, which stands out as an example of how tactical urbanism can cross over into real-world planning influence. Sal Alvarez, of the city’s Office of Economic Development, was a fan of WalkYourCity.org as an open online platform—but pointed out that “The city will probably come take the signs down,” he says. “You need a champion on the inside, really.” He and Jessica Zenk of the city’s Department of Transportation served that role in San Jose, quickly launching three pilot programs.

Each is concentrated and strategic. The first leverages the popularity of the newish San Pedro Square Market, a concentration of restaurants and businesses in the city’s two-square-mile downtown. It’s a favored local destination, but the sort that people often drive to and from without exploring. So a set of 47 signs points to attractions in the adjacent Little Italy district, a park with extensive walking trails, the arena where the city’s National Hockey League team plays, and a second park that has been the focus of ongoing revitalization efforts. A second downtown project involved recruiting a dozen volunteers to help put up 74 signs meant to draw links between the city’s SoFa arts district and walking-distance landmarks like the convention center.

The popularity of these two experiments inspired a city council member to propose the third, set in a neighborhood outside the downtown core. This centers on a road currently being converted from four lanes to two, with a middle turn lane and bike lane to enable a shift away from vehicle travel. Tomasulo has added a new batch of color-coded sign designs that point specifically to other car-alternative infrastructure, including bike-share locations and Caltrain stops. The city has been gathering traffic data around this project that may help measure the impact of these 50 or so signs at 12 intersections. To Alvarez, the signs are useful tools in pushing the cultural changes that help make infrastructure shifts take hold.

More broadly, San Jose officials are working with Tomasulo to “put some tools in the toolbox” of Walk [Your City] to encourage and help enthusiasts to find their own champions within local municipalities, so these projects can contribute to the planning process. “If you don’t get the city to buy in at some point,” Campoli says, “you’re not going to get that permanent change that a short-term event is intended to lead to.”

Back in Raleigh, the original project is evolving into a permanent feature of the landscape, with fully vetted and planned campaigns in four neighborhoods, and a partnership with Blue Cross/Blue Shield. That’s a solid example of what Silver advocated: a city embracing a grassroots urbanism project instead of just regulating.

But the San Jose example is showing how much the reverse proposition matters, too: tactical urbanism can benefit from embracing official planning structures. Tomasulo certainly sounds pleased with his project’s transition from “unsanctioned” experiment to active partnerships with insiders in San Jose and elsewhere. He uses a term he picked up for officials whose enthusiasm, creativity, and practical how-to-get-it-done wisdom cuts against an all-too-common stereotype. “They’re not bureaucrats,” he says. “They’re herocrats.”

Rob Walker (robwalker.net) is a contributor to Design Observer and The New York Times.

Q & A with Mario Coyula

Q. Why is Havana so acclaimed for its beautiful old buildings and neighborhoods?

A. More than two hundred years ago Havana was the preeminent city in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean basin. Established as a service-oriented Spanish colonial settlement, the city spread west and southwest from its initial development next to the port, leaving behind a valuable built heritage representing many different architectural styles over more than four centuries.

The historic character of Havana persists both by accident and by design: By accident, because the 1959 revolution quickly stopped an on-going process of replacing fine old buildings with high-rise condominiums; by design, because one early goal of the new government was to reduce rural poverty and improve living conditions in the countryside and smaller cities and towns. As a result, Havana became more dilapidated, but the population goal was cut short, and the city was spared the fate of traumatic urban renewal and speculative real estate development.

Q. What are the two faces of Havana referred to in the title of your forthcoming book, Havana: Two Faces of the Antillean Metropolis?

A. Every city has at least two faces, depending on the social, cultural and political bias of the observer. Havana had many very wealthy people, but many poor people as well. Some people will tell you that pre-revolutionary Havana was a wonderful, glamorous city, a perfect place to live until communism arrived. Others will recall it as a place ridden with poverty, discrimination and social injustice; they believe that the revolution opened equal opportunities to all.

Some will tell you that present-day Havana is on the verge of collapse because of the lack of maintenance, and dull because of the lack of services and choices. Others will point out that because of that, Havana’s unique architecture was protected from redevelopment. People in the inner districts may be overcrowded, but they have not been expelled by gentrification. In every case, it is both things at the same time. Maybe that is what makes Havana so fascinating.

Q. What is the mission of the Group for the Integrated Development of the Capital?

A. The Group was created in 1987 as an interdisciplinary team of experts to advise the city government on urban policies. Our mission is to place on an equal footing the economic and social development of the city, emphasizing the active participation of the city’s residents. Preserving Havana’s extensive built heritage represents an impossible drain of state funds at a time when the Cuban economy is severely impaired. Yet investment is critical to reassert Havana’s leading role in the region and to create an urban environment that can stimulate economic growth and improve the quality of life of the residents.

New investments should encourage residents to identify and solve their own problems, and progress must be monitored to avoid negative impacts on the natural environment as well as the built and social fabric. Planning for change in Havana demands a pattern of development that would be economically feasible, environmentally sound, socially fair and politically participatory. We want to work with investors who understand and respect the community, to help build a social identity and neighborhood commitment through improving material aspects such as housing, transportation, education and health.

Q. What is the role of the neighborhood transformation workshops started by the Group?

A. These are organizations of neighborhood residents, guided and stimulated by architects, social workers, planners and engineers. We try to find professionals who actually live full-time in the neighborhood for each group. The groups choose and manage revitalization, housing construction, recreation, or other economic and social projects, according to their own vision and priorities for community development in their specific neighborhoods.

Some of the workshops have chosen to focus on the manufacture of building materials, even by recycling rubble (an abundant raw material in Havana!), using these for their own projects but also selling them to other groups. Other neighborhood workshops have chosen to focus on urban gardening or recycling waste. Most importantly, these workshops encourage the self-reliance and commitment of the residents, thus developing a local pride that helps prevent marginality.

Q. What are the respective roles of the central government and the neighborhoods in the revitalization of Havana?

A. The central government has found it increasingly difficult to meet the needs of the neighborhoods, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union. Fuel, food and transportation were once supplied and managed centrally, or even imported. Citizens grew to expect a benevolent government to take care of things from the top down. Now one of our biggest challenges is to energize and empower citizens to provide these things locally, from the bottom up. For example, the government has authorized the creation of tens of thousands of small, community gardens on vacant lots, and the surplus from these gardens is sold in city markets.

Q. What are the pros and cons of tourism development in Havana?

A. On the one hand, tourism can attract new investment and income that will help to improve the living standard of the city’s residents. On the other hand, large-scale construction just for tourists can overwhelm the local built environment, and encourage Cubans to see tourists not as fellow human beings but just as an economic resource—almost the way the hungry man in the old Charlie Chaplin film saw everyone around him as a roast chicken or a delicious dessert.

I would rather attract many small investors than a few large ones and find ways of reusing some of the city’s old mansions as small-scale hotels. That way, we can manage both the benefits and the risks of tourism more effectively, and spread the benefits and costs more thinly across many neighborhoods. This pattern should be more sustainable and less vulnerable in an unfriendly external context, including the American embargo.

Q. The Group has built a huge scale model of Havana. How do you use it?

A. We use the model as an educational tool, to help people see the city as a whole and to place their neighborhood within it. Because the buildings are color-coded by the period when they were constructed, the model also helps people see how the city grew, and how newer buildings replaced or overwhelmed older ones. The model was built at a scale of 1:1000 and now covers 112 square meters. It is exhibited in a custom-made pavilion that serves as an information center for anyone living in or visiting the city.

We also use model to test the visual impact of new projects. By placing proposed buildings on their intended sites, we help people get more information on different options and opportunities. This process has actually stopped some inappropriate, disruptive projects because everyone—planners, developers, neighborhood residents—could see clearly how a new structure would impact the community.

Editor’s Note: Architect and planner Mario Coyula spoke at the Lincoln Institute, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the Kennedy School of Government in April about the history and architecture of Havana, his home town. He has been a full professor at the Faculty of Architecture of Havana since 1964 and is vice-director of the Group for the Integrated Development of the Capital (GDIC). Dr. Coyula is also a member of several commissions, scientific councils and advisory councils. He is a co-author of the forthcoming book Havana: Two Faces of the Antillean Metropolis (New York and London: John Wiley and Sons, 1997) with Roberto Segre and Joseph L. Scarpaci, Jr.

The conservation movement has used both private enterprises and public programs to preserve lands of ecological, aesthetic, and historical value. One notably successful effort has employed referenda for the conservation of open space. Between 1998 and 2006, some 1,550 referenda appeared on state, county, and municipal ballots across the United States, and their success rate was very high: nearly 80 percent of these measures passed, many by a wide margin.

El acceso universal a internet de alta velocidad es un sueño generalizado en estos tiempos. Todos, desde el presidente de Google, Inc. hasta cualquiera de nosotros, lo hemos anhelado. Y la prensa tecnológica se inunda de irritadas críticas, preguntándose por qué las velocidades de banda ancha habituales en los Estados Unidos están tan retrasadas con respecto a las que existen, por ejemplo, en Corea del Sur.

Sin embargo, hace sólo cinco años este no era un tema candente. En aquel entonces, el debate (y las acciones) no era liderado por el gobierno federal o el sector privado. Los primeros en movilizarse fueron diversos municipios con un pensamiento innovador: ciudades y distritos como Chattanooga, Tennessee; Lafayette, Louisiana; Sandy, Oregón; y Opelika, Alabama.

De más está decir que los motivos y las soluciones eran variadas. No obstante, ahora que la conectividad de alta velocidad se está reconociendo como una infraestructura urbana fundamental, Chattanooga se ha convertido en un caso de estudio muy útil. El proceso por el cual llegó a autodenominarse “gigaciudad” (en referencia a la disponibilidad de conexiones a Internet con velocidades de transferencia de datos de 1 gigabit por segundo, es decir, hasta 200 veces más rápidas que la velocidad habitual de banda ancha que tienen muchos estadounidenses) comenzó con una iniciativa municipal visionaria desarrollada mediante una meditada coordinación entre el sector público y el privado. Recientemente esta medida ha comenzado incluso a mostrar efectos tangibles en la planificación y el desarrollo de la ciudad, especialmente la nueva imagen que se le está dando al centro de la ciudad, rezagado durante tanto tiempo. En resumen, Chattanooga está comenzando a responder a una pregunta crucial: Una vez que una ciudad tiene acceso a Internet de primera clase, ¿qué hace en realidad con ello?

Esta historia comienza hace más de una década, cuando EPB, la empresa de energía eléctrica propiedad de la ciudad de Chattanooga, planificaba una mejora importante en su red eléctrica. El director ejecutivo de EPB, Harold Depriest, abogaba por un plan que consistía en el despliegue de cables de fibra óptica que también pudieran usarse para el acceso a Internet. Una vez eliminados los obstáculos normativos locales, el nuevo sistema se construyó hacia el año 2010, y cada cliente de energía eléctrica de EPB en el área de Chattanooga (lo que significó prácticamente todos los hogares y negocios) obtuvo acceso a Internet de 1 gigabit. Sin embargo, había que pagar por este servicio, al igual que se pagaba la electricidad, y el precio que se estableció al principio para el acceso a la velocidad más rápida de Internet fue de aproximadamente US$350 al mes.

“Tenían muy, muy pocos clientes”, recuerda Ken Hays, presidente de The Enterprise Center, una organización sin fines de lucro que, desde el año 2014, se ha enfocado (a petición de los funcionarios municipales electos) en desarrollar estrategias en torno a lo que los habitantes de Chattanooga denominan “el giga”. Según Hays, el presidente de Lamp Post Group, una exitosa empresa de capital de riesgo dedicada a la tecnología, expresó su adhesión inmediatamente. Sin embargo, a nivel ciudadano, “no teníamos el mismo entusiasmo” que el debate sobre el acceso a Internet de 1 giga genera hoy en día. En 2010 “no había muchos buenos casos de estudio”, concluye Hays.

Sin embargo, un gran cambio estaba en marcha. El anuncio de Google Fiber (la incursión del gigante de las búsquedas en Internet en el desarrollo de infraestructura de Internet de alta velocidad) despertó nuevo interés. Además, en el año 2013, Jenny Toomey, directora de la Fundación Ford que se dedica a los derechos en Internet, ayudó a organizar una especie de cumbre para que los funcionarios de municipios como Chattanooga, Lafayette y otras ciudades pudieran reunirse y comparar notas. “Todavía era muy incipiente en ese momento”, recuerda George W. McCarthy, presidente y director ejecutivo del Instituto Lincoln y economista, quien, en ese entonces, era director de la iniciativa Oportunidad Metropolitana de la Fundación Ford. Sin embargo, según McCarthy, esa cumbre marcó el inicio de nuevas conversaciones sobre la forma en que tales iniciativas podrían hacer más competitivas y equitativas a las ciudades, así como también menos dependientes de las soluciones que provienen exclusivamente del sector privado y que, con frecuencia, consideramos más eficientes que las ofrecidas por el gobierno. “Y dos años después de esa cumbre, el tema acaba de explotar”, concluye McCarthy.

De hecho, la cumbre se convirtió en ese tipo de acontecimiento extraño que dio a luz a una nueva organización, Next Century Cities, fundada en 2014 y que actualmente posee una membresía de más de 100 municipios. Esta organización comparte las buenas prácticas basadas en un plan según el cual el acceso a Internet de alta velocidad es una cuestión de infraestructura fundamental e independiente que las comunidades pueden y deben controlar y diseñar.

Contra este telón de fondo, Chattanooga estaba tomando medidas para demostrar cómo podría aprovecharse “el giga”. The Lamp Post Group se había trasladado al centro de la ciudad y el acceso a Internet de alta velocidad era sólo el comienzo para los jóvenes emprendedores y especialistas en tecnología que deseaba atraer. “Si no tenemos opciones de vivienda, si no tenemos un espacio abierto, si no tenemos cafeterías de moda… se irán a ciudades que sí los tengan”, señala Kim White, presidente y director ejecutivo de River City Company, una organización de desarrollo sin fines de lucro.

A partir de 2013, River City propuso, mediante un plan para el centro de la ciudad y un estudio de mercado, estrategias para mejorar la accesibilidad a peatones y ciclistas, los espacios verdes y, en especial, las opciones de vivienda. Más de 600 personas participaron en el proceso de planificación posterior, el cual tuvo como meta final la revitalización (o demolición) de 22 edificios. Hoy en día, según White, la mitad de dichos edificios están en proceso de redesarrollo y se han invertido más de 400 millones de dólares en el centro de la ciudad. En el próximo año y medio se incorporarán 1.500 apartamentos al mercado de la zona del centro, además de nuevas viviendas para estudiantes y plazas de hotel. La ciudad ha ofrecido incentivos fiscales, algunos de los cuales se han diseñado con el fin de que un cierto porcentaje de las nuevas viviendas sea económicamente asequible. La ciudad también invirtió 2,8 millones de dólares en un parque en el centro de la ciudad, que representa una parte “clave” del plan para “ofrecer áreas donde la gente pueda reunirse y disfrutar del espacio público”, según señala White. Uno de los proyectos de apartamentos, el edificio Tomorrow, ofrecerá “microunidades” y un restaurante a pie de calle. “No creo que hubiéramos podido atraer estos tipos de negocios ni la curiosidad de los jóvenes” sin el empuje brindado por el aspecto tecnológico y de acceso a Internet de alta velocidad, concluye White. “Esto nos ha dado a conocer”.

Según Hays, el giga también inspiró una iniciativa respaldada por el municipio, consistente en identificar estrategias clave de desarrollo que dieron como resultado un “distrito innovador” en el centro de la ciudad impulsado por Enterprise Center. El fundamento de esta iniciativa consiste en restaurar un edificio de oficinas de 10 pisos para transformarlo en el Centro de Innovación Edney, que tendrá espacios de trabajo compartido y alojará a la sede de CO.LAB., una organización incubadora de negocios locales. La Universidad de Tennessee en Chattanooga tiene un proyecto consistente en un laboratorio de impresoras 3D en el distrito innovador; incluso se ha remodelado la oficina del centro de la Biblioteca Pública de Chattanooga, para incluir un espacio educativo tecnocéntrico.

EPB, cuya visión original de la fibra óptica puso en movimiento la idea de la gigaciudad, ya hace tiempo que ha logrado dar con una solución respecto a los precios (en la actualidad, el acceso a Internet de velocidad de 1 giga cuesta desde aproximadamente US$70 al mes) y ha atraído a más de 70.000 clientes. Desde hace poco también ofrece a los residentes de bajos recursos que reúnan ciertos requisitos acceso a Internet de 100 megabit, mucho más rápido que la mayoría de las conexiones de banda ancha disponibles en los Estados Unidos, por US$27 al mes. Además, las acciones de EPB para expandirse a las áreas adyacentes a Chattanooga que no reciben servicios se han convertido en un componente importante de las medidas más amplias que están surgiendo para desafiar las normas en muchos estados, desde Texas a Minnesota o Washington, las cuales limitan efectivamente a los municipios a la hora de ofrecer sus propias conexiones a Internet de alta velocidad.

En resumen: las cosas han cambiado mucho, tanto en Chattanooga como en otras ciudades y distritos que han impulsado el desarrollo de una infraestructura de Internet que el sector privado no estaba ofreciendo. “La mayor parte de este trabajo se está dando en este mismo momento a nivel municipal”, comenta Deb Socia, directora de Next Century Cities. “Son los alcaldes, los administradores municipales y los gerentes de sistemas los que están tomando medidas para averiguar qué necesitan sus ciudades”. Las implicaciones que esto tiene para cuestiones cívicas fundamentales como la educación, la salud, la seguridad, etc. todavía están en pleno desarrollo. Y, precisamente debido a que el debate y la planificación se están dando a nivel municipal, esta cuestión no dependerá solamente de consideraciones de mercado que favorecen lo redituable sobre lo posible. “Lo mejor de esto”, resume McCarthy, “es que se trata de una cuestión integradora, no excluyente”.

Rob Walker (robwalker.net) es colaborador de Design Observer y The New York Times.

Land use planning involves intertemporal decisionmaking—the consideration of a subsequent decision before a first decision is made. Decisions in the urban development process include the purchase, assembly or subdivision of land; the provision of transportation, electric, water and wastewater services; the application for and approval of building permits; and the sale of improved property to final users.

The ability to analyze this process has been limited by the lack of dynamic models of development stages, time-series data on land use decisionmaking, and empirical approaches to analyzing multiple events in time and space. In part for these reasons, there has been almost no empirical evidence on the process of planning or the effects of plans on subsequent development.

To gain new insights into the effects of planning on the urban development process, we have developed theoretical models of urban planning, constructed a dynamic geographic information system, and developed computer algorithms for interpreting and displaying urban development events. The information system is characterized by a high degree of spatial and temporal resolution and the ability to observe development activity over time.

As a result, the information system facilitates the observation of spatial and dynamic processes that characterize urban development, the formation and testing of hypotheses about such processes, and the exercise of high-resolution simulations based on statistically confirmed relationships.

Study Site on Portland’s Westside Corridor

The information system is built upon the Regional Land Information System (RLIS) developed by Metro, the regional government of Portland, Oregon. RLIS is a comprehensive Geographic Information System (GIS) containing layers that depict tax lots and their attributes; planning designations and zoning regulations; soil, water and environmental resources; infrastructure facilities and capacities; government boundaries, tax districts and transportation zones; and census data for the entire Portland metropolitan area.

RLIS has been enhanced to include attributes of development events, such as land sales, subdivisions, and changes in plan designations and zoning. Although the system currently includes only the years 1991 to 1995, it is an unusually comprehensive, high-resolution, and dynamic research and planning tool.

To test the utility of the information system, we examined the urban development process in Portland’s Westside corridor, where a new light rail system is scheduled to begin service in 1998. Construction of the Westside segment began in 1992, and the far western station locations were finalized on July 28, 1993. When complete, the Westside line will connect the western suburbs of Hillsboro and Beaverton to downtown Portland and to the eastern sections of the light rail system.

Ambitious plans for the metropolitan area call for high-density development along Portland’s light rail corridors to contain growth within the urban growth boundary. By focusing on the Westside corridor, it is possible to evaluate whether the development decisions and transactions of land owners and local governments are influenced by anticipated light rail infrastructure investments and consistent with regional development plans.

Mapping the Development Process

The development process can be examined using dynamic geographic visualization—that is, the observation of urban development events at varying temporal and geographic scales. Using a tax-lot base map, for example, and by illuminating tax lots when certain events occur in a sequence of frames, it is possible to watch the urban development process much like a movie. The sequence of frames printed in this issue of Land Lines illustrates selected development activities from 1991 to 1995 in an approximately one-square-mile area around the proposed Orenco light rail station. Since it is difficult to reproduce the frames here, please go directly to the authors’ web page for mapping details at http://www.urban.uiuc.edu/projects/portland/lincoln.html

The first frame shows the sale of several large industrial properties in 1991, when the route of the rail line was known, but not the station location. In 1992, a demolition and construction permit was issued on a large industrial parcel. The third frame shows the station location, with development on industrial land near the station and increasing sales activity in the subdivision in the northwest corner of the study area.

The fourth frame shows that a station overlay zone was adopted in 1994. It subjected building permits in the station area to a special review process to assure that proposed developments are transit supportive. The frame also shows a marked increase in residential sales in the northwest subdivision and in the old town of Orenco in the inner southeast corner of the study area. The fifth frame shows a continuation of sales and development activity in both residential and industrial parts of the study area.

This series of frames captures an intriguing pattern of development events. First, the number of sales and permits in the study area before the announcement of the station location suggests that the station was sited in an area of active industrial development. Second, the activity in both the conventional subdivision in the northwest corner and in the township of Orenco indicates that the announcement of the station location accelerated nearby residential development activity.

Third, the demolitions approved just before and the building permits approved just after the station location was announced suggest that redevelopment of industrial land near the station is concurrent with the building of the light rail system. Such concurrency of private and public development activity is a fundamental objective of land use planning. Finally, the imposition of the interim development restrictions does not appear to have slowed the rate of development activity. In fact, the increased certainty about the regulatory environment may have increased activity.

This five-year display of development events may be unique to the Orenco station area. Certainly, previous land use plans, sewer system investments and industrial expansion patterns have influenced development in the area. Nevertheless, the ability to track parcel-by-parcel activity in the county-wide database will enable in-depth examination of the extent to which dynamic and spatial relationships between development events and land use plans are significant and pervasive.

The regional and local governments of metropolitan Portland are engaged in an extensive planning endeavor to shape the extent, location and nature of urban development over the next four decades. As implementation proceeds, the information system will enable us to monitor the planning, regulation and development process and, for at least this metropolitan area, assess whether and how planning matters.

__________________

The authors are affiliated with the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Chengri Ding is a post-doctoral fellow specializing in the use of geographical information systems for urban economic analysis. Lewis Hopkins is professor and head of the department. Gerrit Knaap is associate professor, currently on sabbatical as a visiting fellow at the Center for Urban Policy and the Environment at Indiana University and a senior research fellow at the American Planning Association. Support for their research has been provided by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy; the University of Illinois Research Board; the Metro of Portland, Oregon; Washington County, Oregon; the Tri-county Transportation District of Portland, Oregon; and the National Science Foundation.

The development of new land and tax systems in countries in political and economic transition in Central and Eastern Europe reflects a unique array of historical, social, political, and economic circumstances. While all transitional countries seeking admission to the European Union (EU) have initiated comprehensive reforms to encourage free markets and democratic governments, the three Baltic nations—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—made privatization and restitution of property rights a prime objective immediately after their independence in the early 1990s. These actions, together with a desire to stimulate real estate markets and capture tax revenues for improved public services, made them the first of the transitional countries to introduce value-based taxation of real property.

Universal high-speed Internet access is a popular dream these days—everyone from the president to Google, Inc., has embraced it. And the tech press is full of testy critiques wondering why typical broadband speeds in the United States lag so far behind those in, say, South Korea.

Just five years ago, this wasn’t such a hot topic. Back then, the discussion—and action—wasn’t led by the federal government or the private sector. The first movers were a number of diverse but forward-thinking municipalities: cities and towns like Chattanooga, Tennessee; Lafayette, Louisiana; Sandy, Oregon; and Opelika, Alabama.

Motives and solutions varied, of course. But as high-speed connectivity is becoming recognized as crucial civic infrastructure, Chattanooga makes for a useful case study. Its journey to self-proclaimed “Gig City” status—referring to the availability of Internet connections with 1 gigabit-per-second data transfer speeds, up to 200 times faster than typical broadband speed for many Americans—started with visionary municipal initiative, built upon via thoughtful private and public coordination. Most recently, this effort has even begun to show tangible effects on city planning and development, particularly in the form of an in-progress reimagining of a long-sleepy downtown core. In short, Chattanooga is starting to answer a vital question: once a city has world-class Internet access, what do you actually do with it?

The story begins more than a decade ago, when Chattanooga’s city-owned electric utility, EPB, was planning a major upgrade to its power grid. Its CEO, Harold Depriest, argued for a plan that involved deploying fiber-optic cable that could also be used for Internet access. After clearing local regulatory hurdles, the new system was built out by 2010, and every EPB power customer in the Chattanooga area—meaning pretty much every home or business—had gigabit access. But you had to pay for it, just like electricity. And the early pricing for the fastest access was about $350 a month.

“They had very, very few takers,” recalls Ken Hays, president of The Enterprise Center, a nonprofit that since 2014 has focused, at the behest of local elected officials, on strategizing around what Chattanoogans call “the gig.” The head of Lamp Post Group, a successful local tech-focused venture firm, made a point of signing up immediately, Hays continues. But on a citywide level, “we didn’t have the excitement” that talk of gig-level access generates today. And in 2010, he adds, “there weren’t many good case studies out there.”

But broader change was afoot. The announcement of Google Fiber—the Internet search giant’s foray into building out high-speed online infrastructure—sparked new interest. And in 2013, Jenny Toomey, a Ford Foundation director focused on Internet rights, helped organize a summit of sorts where officials from municipalities like Chattanooga, Lafayette, and elsewhere could meet and compare notes. “It was still pretty nascent at the time,” recalls Lincoln Institute President and CEO George W. McCarthy, an economist who was then director of metropolitan opportunity at the Ford Foundation. But that summit, he continues, helped spark new conversations about how such initiatives can make cities more competitive and more equitable, and less reliant on the purely private-sector solutions we often assume are more efficient than government. “And over the course of two years since, this issue has just exploded,” he says.

In fact, that summit turned out to be the rare event that actually spawned a new organization: Next Century Cities, founded in 2014, now has more than 100 member municipalities. They share best practices around an agenda that treats high-speed Internet access as a fundamental, nonpartisan infrastructure issue that communities can and should control and shape.

Against this backdrop, Chattanooga was taking steps to demonstrate how “the gig” could be leveraged. The Lamp Post Group had moved into downtown space, and superlative Internet access was just a starting point for the young, tech-savvy workers and entrepreneurs it wanted to attract. “If we don’t have housing, if we don’t have open space, if we don’t have cool coffee shops—they’re going to go to cities that have all that,” says Kim White, president and CEO of nonprofit development organization River City Company.

Starting in 2013, a city-center plan and market study conducted by River City proposed strategies to enhance walkability, bikeability, green space, and—especially—housing options. More than 600 people participated in the subsequent planning process, which ultimately targeted 22 buildings for revitalization (or demolition). Today, half of those are being redeveloped, says White, and more than $400 million has been invested downtown; in the next year and a half, 1,500 apartments will be added to the downtown market, plus new student housing and hotel beds. The city has provided tax incentives, some of which are designed to keep a certain percentage of the new housing stock affordable. The city has also invested $2.8 million in a downtown park that’s a “key” part of the plan, White continues, to “have areas where people can come together and enjoy public space.” One of the apartment projects, the Tomorrow Building, will offer “micro-units” and a street-level restaurant. “I don’t think we would have attracted these kinds of businesses and younger people coming to look,” without the gig/tech spark, White concludes. “It put us on the map.”

The gig was also the inspiration for a city-backed initiative identifying core development strategies that led to the Enterprise Center pushing a downtown “innovation district,” says Hays. Its centerpiece involves making over a 10-story office building into The Edney Innovation Center, featuring co-working spaces as well as the headquarters of local business incubator CO.LAB. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga has a project involving a 3D printer lab in the Innovation District, and even the downtown branch of the Chattanooga Public Library has been made over to include a tech-centric education space.

EPB, whose original fiber-optic vision set the Gig City idea in motion, has long since figured out more workable pricing schemes—gig access now starts at about $70 a month—and drawn more than 70,000 customers. More recently, it has also offered qualified low-income residents 100-megabit access, which is still much faster than most broadband in the U.S., for $27 a month. And its efforts to expand into underserved areas adjacent to Chattanooga have become an important component of broader efforts to challenge regulations in many states, from Texas to Minnesota to Washington, that effectively restrict municipalities from building their own high-speed access solutions.

In short, a lot has changed—in Chattanooga and in other cities and towns that have pushed for Internet infrastructure that the private sector wasn’t providing. “Most of this work right now is happening at the local level,” says Deb Socia, who heads Next Century Cities. “It’s mayors and city managers and CIOs taking the steps to figure out what their city needs.” The implications for crucial civic issues from education to health care to security are still playing out. And precisely because the thinking and planning is happening on a municipal level, it won’t be driven solely by market considerations that favor what’s profitable instead of what’s possible. “The beauty of it is,” McCarthy summarizes, “it’s a both/and argument.”

Rob Walker (robwalker.net) is a contributor to Design Observer and The New York Times.

In four years, there will be a fresh count of Americans. The 2000 Census will reveal how many of us there are, who we are in terms of race, nativity, income, family size and occupation, what kind of housing we occupy, where we live and where we work.

All these numbers, but especially the latter two, will reflect what is happening to what planners and social scientists call settlement patterns. The Census will show how people and jobs are distributed regionally between North and South and East and West; within regions between metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas; and within metropolitan areas between cities and suburbs.

Settlement patterns have been transformed radically in the twentieth century (see graph 1). On a regional basis, the trend has been from East to West and North to South. In the decade between 1980 and 1990, for example, three states in the West and South accounted for 50 percent of the nation’s population growth: California, Florida and Texas.

Within all regions, the trend has been toward ever larger metropolitan agglomerations. By 1990, metropolitan areas of 1,000,000 or more accounted for 50 percent of the nation’s population. Within metropolitan areas, cities grew faster than suburbs at the beginning of the century, but by the 1950s the trend was sharply in favor of the suburbs, which now account for more than half of the nation’s population.

Will the 2000 Census confirm the continuation of these trends? What stakes do we have in the outcome? Quite a few. We worry about trends that erode the economic base of cities because we are concerned about job opportunities for the poor who are committed, by choice or circumstance, to live in the city. We are also concerned about the health of the tax base, which affects the capacity of the local government to deal with the needs of all its residents.

We also worry about land use patterns in the suburbs which both require and increase auto-dependency. This trend in turn leads to more auto travel, aggravates congestion, pollutes the air, and complicates our international relations because of our heavy dependence on imported oil.

We are in the throes of a revolution comparable in scope to the revolution in transportation technology that heavily influenced settlement patterns in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The transportation revolution, from ships and trains to cars and planes, made it possible for both workers and their employers to have a wider choice of locations.

The pace of the revolution in data processing and communications, which began slowly in the middle of the twentieth century, has quickened rapidly in recent years. We speak of a post-industrial information economy. By that we mean that information constitutes an ever-increasing share of the Gross National Product, both as “input” to the production of other goods and services and as “output” in the form of entertainment and related activities.

Household Location Decisions

How will settlement patterns be affected by the transition to an information economy? Let us first consider the worker’s choice of a residential location. In classical urban economics, this choice is seen as a “trade-off” between the merits of a particular place in terms of quality of life and the cost of commuting to work. As the transportation revolution reduced the time and money costs of commuting, more and more workers were able to afford to locate in what they considered an attractive suburb that offered the lifestyle they preferred: a private home with a lawn, good schools, parks and open space, shopping facilities, and friendly neighbors.

The New York Times of July 14, 1996, reports that because of the revolution in communications and data processing, accompanied by company downsizing, as many as 40 million people work at least part time at home, with about 8,000 home-based businesses starting daily.

Logic suggests that some of this new-found workplace freedom will manifest itself in location choices that favor places considered desirable, be they in the farther reaches of suburbia, exurbia, or rural America. On the other hand, if these dispersed self-employed workers end up commuting less, their freedom may not “cost” the society more in terms of congestion and pollution.

Business Location Decisions

What about the conventional company and its location decisions? Like the household, the company does a “balancing” act when it chooses a location. From the perspective of product distribution, Place A might be preferred. From the perspective of the inputs of materials, Place B might be ideal. From the point of view of labor costs, Place C might be best. For tax purposes and related “public” issues, Place D might be most beneficial.

If the entire company has to be in one place, then compromise is inevitable. But if the communications revolution permits the “dis-integration” of the company via the physical separation of functions or the “outsourcing” of particular functions, then what used to be one location decision becomes a multiplicity of decisions, each component responding to a compelling argument for a particular place.

The classic example is the “front” office of a bank or insurance company in the midst of a congested city center with the “back” office in a rural area in another region or even in another country.

Settlement Trends

How these changes in household and business location choices will ultimately affect settlement patterns in metropolitan America was the subject of a major study by the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), an agency that served the U.S. Congress for many decades but was abolished by the Congress in 1995. The summary chapter in The Technological Reshaping of Metropolitan America states that “technology is connecting economic activities, enabling them to be physically farther apart, reducing the competitive advantage of high-cost, congested urban locations, and allowing people and businesses more (but not total) freedom to choose where they will live and work.”

But OTA concludes that “the new wave of information technologies will not prove to be the salvation of a rural U.S. economy that has undergone decades of population and job loss as its natural resource-based economy has shrunk.” Rather, most economic activity will locate in large and medium-sized metropolitan areas (see graph 2).

“Technological change. . .threatens the economic well being of many central and inner cities, and older suburbs of metropolitan areas,” the report continues. Overall, the trends suggest that these places will find it hard to compete without economic development policies designed to offset their competitive disadvantages.

In short, the OTA expects that, the communications revolution notwithstanding, the 2000 Census will report a continuation of the trends manifested throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. The favored locus of activity in both residential and business terms will be the outer suburbs of metropolitan areas. Given our concerns with the adverse effects of prevailing settlement patterns, the challenge to land policy is greater than ever.

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Benjamin Chinitz is an urban economist who served as director of research at the Lincoln Institute from 1987 to 1990. He continues to serve as a faculty associate at the Institute and as visiting professor in urban and regional planning at Florida Atlantic University.

Thomas Horan is director of Applied Social and Policy Research at Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, CA.

A major tragedy of empirical work is the low ratio of analysis to data, in part due to the lack of publicly available datasets. Many data collectors are reluctant to share data with other researchers until they have harvested all its new insights. Accordingly, researchers often collect new data because they cannot access existing information.

A new initiative of the Lincoln Institute is to compile data relevant to the analysis of land and tax policy, make it available on our Web site, and encourage new research. Three very different datasets are currently available, and a fourth is under development.

Significant Features of the Property Tax. This database title refers to the well-known publication, Significant Features of Fiscal Federalism, produced by the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, which between 1959 and 1996 reported on the relationships among local, state, and national levels of government. This online and interactive database, produced and continually updated in partnership with the George Washington Institute of Public Policy, presents property tax data for all 50 states

Great care is taken to ensure that data reported across jurisdictions are comparable and similarly defined. Users may access property tax information and data online in standard tables or create new downloadable tables containing the specific data they seek. Unlike many interactive databases, Significant Features also includes many table entries in text that explain, for example, how each state categorizes property, defines taxable value, and restricts or caps rates and assessments.

Land and Property Values in the U.S. These more traditional tabular files contain numeric data on the values and rents of residential properties in the United States. The national ratio of rents to prices for the stock of all owner-occupied housing is available quarterly from 1960 to the present. National indices of prices and values of housing (land inclusive of structures), land, and structures are available quarterly from 1975 to the present and annually from 1930 to the present. For 46 metropolitan areas, quarterly indices of prices and values of single-family, owner-occupied housing (land inclusive of structures), land, and structures are available from 1985 to the present.

The implicit rents of owner-occupied housing, the value of structures, and the value of residential land are rarely observed directly, and therefore are estimated using techniques that are explained on the Web site. These data were created and are updated by Morris A. Davis, a fellow at the Lincoln Institute and faculty member at the University of Wisconsin School of Business, Department of Real Estate and Land Economics.

University Real Estate Development Cases. Many university real estate development projects involve the expansion of facilities, the upgrading of neighboring properties, and long-term investment in real estate. Such projects are often controversial when they displace current residents and businesses or transform neighborhoods. As part of the Lincoln Institute’s research on town-gown issues, this database presents quantitative and qualitative information on 897 projects that are outside traditional campus boundaries. These cases provide a useful composite picture of recent university real estate activities.

Digital Maps of Urban Spatial Extension. Visiting fellow Shlomo Angel is examining the spatial growth of a sample of global cities and has created a set of digital maps derived from satellite data and historic sources. Focusing on measures of developed versus undeveloped land, the maps form the basis for several Lincoln Institute working papers on the spatial growth of cities over time. The maps will exist as digital files that can be downloaded and analyzed by others who want to pursue related work.

These datasets are the Lincoln Institute’s first steps toward increasing the availability of data to researchers, analysts, policy makers, and concerned citizens with an interest in land policy and taxation. The information is freely accessible on the Tools and Resources section of the Institute Web site at www.lincolninst.edu.