Urban Planning

Starters of urban change (9) Municipalities

Municipalities can be a powerful starter of urban change… or of inertia, depending on their ability to create positive dynamics on their territory. This is related to their accounts, and that is interesting in this year in which we will go vote for municipal councils in Spain and France. In the US the local administration system differs from state to state, so the only rational way to compare would be to take any given state in the US and compare to a given European country.

What follows is a (primary) analysis of data from the Virtual Office for the financial coordination with local entities (http://serviciosweb.meh.es/apps/EntidadesLocales/), which aggregates data from over 8.000 Spanish municipalities and Diputaciones and other organs classified as Local Entities. These are data from closed fiscal years with real accounting results, in a series running between 2003 and 2013 (last available year). Data are in thousands of euros for each year (inflation is not accounted for). For those out of Spain, most of urbanism and housing expenditure has been private for decades. Local administrations get resources in that field through taxation and a compulsory free cession that builders must deliver when they execute an operation, consisting in a percentage of building rights and the lots where it sits (the sale of these lots is often most of the “land lots sold” item).

As a result of that analysis, three charts show matters that are somehow linked to urban planning and related matters.

Income in Spanish local entities, selected items

Income in Spanish local entities, selected items

Income: local governments got to an all-time high for income in 2009; as of 2013 they were slightly under the 2006 level. The tax on urban real estate (data before 2009 make no difference between urban and non-urban) changes from 15% of total income in 2003 to 25% in 2013, while lot sales were reduced from 3,4% to 0,34% (in 2006 they reached 6%). The privative use of public domains went from 1,5% to 3,1%, as it is clearly apparent in the public space with sidewalk café and restaurant terraces, at least in part as a response to tobacco laws. The tax on urban land value increases has only grown from 2,9% to 3,6%, with quite reduced oscillations.

Investment in Spanish local entities, selected items

Investment in Spanish local entities, selected items

Investment: the investment on new infrastructure and general use goods was almost 7% in 2003, and it has gone down to 2,2% in 2013. When it comes to maintain these infrastructure and goods we have gone from 3,4 to 1,6% over the same period, and new/maintenance costs for operational services have followed a similar pattern.

Investment in Spanish local entities, selected items

Investment in Spanish local entities, selected items

Detailed investment: the real investment (not taking into account personnel costs and other elements) of the Spanish municipalities has followed a more complex curve. Up to 2010 this real investment was over 25% of the total expenditure, but since then they have lost weight (9,4% in 2013). Urbanism and housing were around a third of real investment up to 2010, and since they have increased to reach 44% in 2013, even if the absolute figure is half that of 2003. To give an order of magnitude, education (in which local administrations have a limited role) went down from 4% to 3% over that period, and its absolute value was reduced to a third of the 2003 figure.

Overall, the evolution of income and expenditure has been somewhat balanced (added figures for the whole period show more income than expenditure), but there have been relevant changes in relative weights. Land lots sold, whose expansion was related to the real estate bubble, have reduced substantially, while real estate taxes have increased. Investment in new infrastructure have reduced nearing those concerning infrastructure maintenance. Real investment in housing and urbanism has increased its weight in the overall real investment. But as in absolute terms this investment has been strongly reduced, today it is limited to solve previous deficits

Starters of urban change (8) Inheriting
A part of the Texeira Map (1656) in Madrid, in what now is a much denser area.

A part of the Texeira Map (1656) in Madrid, in what now is a much denser area.

The transmission of property through heritage can contribute to the urban shape and/or to social structure. Some individual home areas can get densified over time as the need to divide the original lot arises through heritage by a group of brothers, for instance; this is quite more complex with current planning systems in which the subdivision of existing lots can be limited. When inheritance implies an apartment, its subdivision can depend on many elements and be more complex, as creating a new kitchen or bathroom requires a connection to the building’s services that is more difficult to solve in an independent way. This logic (division) makes sense in a growing demography, and also in peripheral areas (it is more difficult in central cities).

What happens when populations decrease, as they do in some European countries? Sure, we have shrinking cities, and then we have Detroit in America. Even if the city loses population, there are chances that the demand for built space will still exist, as it could be driven by other non- residential demands. Many things can happen:

  • You can inherit your parent’s property and live there; this has been a common fact in history, and it is worth reminding that demographic growth has been slow over long periods of time, which explains the stability of the urban fabric in many cities up to the industrial age.
  • Heritage can become an idle property; as you get no clients, you just have a home that no one uses. This has always existed, but now it could become more common.
  • Even in a shrinking city, brothers or other relatives happen, so you could get in a trap as no agreement could be reached between those benefited by the inheritance; in the end, property could again end up idle.

Overall, inheriting in a shrinking city reinforces the use value of a property against its financial value; and you can only sleep in one bed per night (at least under normal circumstances), so if the inherited property is not adjacent to your home you would probably find complex to use both everyday. Conversely, inheriting in a shrinking city can increase the financial value of a property, but you will be able to use it only if you have other properties (you would probably prefer to have at least one sheltered bed every night…) or if you can subdivide the inherited property.

This catalyzer of urban change is real, but incremental. But for a disaster, inheritances are random, both in space and in time, even if you can suppose that a new neighborhood will have replaced its original population in 30-40 years due to old age.

Biblio (117) Four case studies on urban agriculture

Biblio 117

A report by the Urban Development and Resilience Unit of the World Bank, studying cases in Bangalore (India), Accra (Ghana), Nairobi (Kenya) and Lima (Peru). It seems that urban agriculture helps the first wave of migrants to cities, now old, to survive; it is also used by many as a complement to other sources of revenue, including informal jobs. Those urban farmers are usually the owners of the land they cultivate, and the reports sees reason to be optimistic about the development of this kind of agriculture.

Maps 2015 (5) Up & down in Granada

cat-gran-2

The results of a little escapade on the side of the cadastral data for volumes. If it is built, it must be drawn to ask for taxes… and those bases can be used. Here, around the Granada cathedral, that despite its imposing physical volume is considered by the Cadastre as one level building (albeit one with high ceilings…). On the first image, what can be seen at street level. On the second one, the volumes that are completely hidden (deep red is for buildings that according to data have no underground levels). These images don’t portray what happens in the intermediary situation, i.e., when the floor of a room is under the street level but its ceiling is above it, but for not more than a meter (to be seen soon, as it is interesting in a hilly city as Granada…).

cat-gran-1

Starters of urban change (3) Horses, cars and rooms
A garage door in a small appartment building in Spain

A garage door in a small appartment building in Spain

At the dawn of the XXth century the car appears. Up until then people move around cities walking or by horse. Urban families with horses or other transportation animals, usually expensive, were a minority. The advent of mass car and its expansion through all the social layers implies a new dimensional problem; a horse is quite smaller than a car, and even a horse vehicle can be more flexible in dimension.

A horse box can be some 3×3 m, as the animal is seldom more than 2 m long. If you leave some horses temporarily tied to a post in the street, they occupy even smaller spaces; if you consider carts, things can be a little different. Alongside cars, bikes appear with an even more reduced footprint.

A current car can be some 4 to 5 meter long, with a total width of 2 m considering lateral mirrors. The biggest difference when compared to the horse in urban terms is that the animal usually belonged to a firm or a family with a firm, while automobiles are now in almost each family, and they feel the need to have them near their homes. So going from horses to cars is not so much a public space congestion due to moving elements, as you can see in historical photos from before the car that street where packed with all sort of contraptions; it is rather how to park a much higher number of vehicles in a distributed way through the city.

Around 1990 only the rich had a carriage; most homes had no space for vehicles. The first bylaws requiring a parking space associated with a home are usually from the 1960s-1970s, when cars became really massive in Europe and North America. And here comes architectural typology; in single home areas, with large lots, the garage finds easily its place as an ancillary building, or you park on streets that, due to the low density, have no great problem. The biggest problem comes with vertical homes. Using the block core is a solution, but one that comes at the cost of the demise of that core as a residual space. Burying the garage needs ramps of a certain length, and space is not always there. Adapting older buildings, mainly ones on small lots, is often impossible.

Today there are two visions, in a moment in which (at least in Europe or North America… and well, mostly nowhere…) horses are no longer an alternative. Some call to retain the current quotas defining a mandatory parking provision related to the number of homes, even if sometimes the same administration that enforces that rule later allows developers to sell to different buyers parking lots and apartments, so creating a pressure on on-street parking as some prefer to avoid the high cost of an in-building space. This option leads to a persistence in the creation of a car-centric infrastructure. Meanwhile, some demand the end of such mandatory quotas; this would not be a prohibition of in-building parking, but as it would no longer be a mandatory space, it would be added to the planning-allocated buildable floor area, so developers should choose between apartment space and parking lots, giving a different voluntary quota to different neighborhoods.

In short, a technological evolution that has changed many things in cities, including typologies.

Maps 2015 (3) Bogota

I’m clearly used to read maps and deduce such things as differences in building heights from a planar view. But sometimes it is clearly better to see what this means in a 3D view. According to cadastral data, this is how central Bogota (Colombia) looks like in terms of built bulk. The background map is from SOM, and altimetry data is SRTM.
Bogota-1c
Bogota-1d Bogota-1a Bogota-1b

Starters of urban change (2) Taxes and the « casas a la malicia » in renaissance Madrid
A part of the 1749 map of Madrid

A plate of the 1749 map of Madrid

Madrid becomes the Spanish capital in 1561, and this implies the institution of the the “regalia de aposento”, making mandatory for citizens to provide half their own homes to provide shelter for Royal officials. It seems that municipal authorities agreed with the King this provision in exchange for the benefits of becoming the permanent capital of the country. This fee was established in the middle ages, when the court was moving from city to city, and it was a transitory problem for citizens, but by making Madrid the permanent capital this became a nuisance that influenced architecture.

Every home was subject to the mandate, but some had dimensions or arrangements that complicated divisions. As a result, citizens decided often to build homes that could evade partition, and this led to the name of “malice houses”. Anyway, these homes were subject to a monetary fee, so there was first a need to institute a tax raising office, and later to create, in the 1749-1759 period, the first city cadaster.

regalia aposento

You can consult on the internet a full compendium of the legal texts on the issue… from 1738. As often in past texts, it is quite interesting to read the description of the kind of royal officials that had a right to shelter…

A translation of the specific text on the malice homes (page 28 on the electronic text) would be:

“in any home that can be easily divided in two parts, and that is in this city of Madrid, where the Royal court is, the half belongs to its Majesty as a result of the shelter rights… , and those that cannot be divided as they have just one room, an appraisal of their product must be made, and the owner will contribute with a third of it to the shelter rights, leaving to the owner the spaces from a third to a half, that he should give; and those homes are called of difficult partition, of third part, or malice”.

So evading a fee did led for a long time to an architectural production in Madrid that was defined by one level, one-room homes. Sometimes there were rooms on an upper level that was not visible from the street, and in some cases the homes were deemed indivisible due to their internal divisions. As a conclusion, neighbors preferred a bad architecture to a fee on their privacy.

Starters of urban change (1)

What drives change in the urban tissues? What matters in that question is how diverse the answer can be; there are changes from the bottom up (individual answers to problems that seem personal, but whose sum can produce some kind of “emergent intelligence”), as well as defined from the top of the pyramid (actions defined from the public administration which can lead to direct actions or to mandates to individuals to act in a given manner). Here is a quite concise catalogue of the possible situations, a kind of “table of contents” of what will follow:

  • Bottom-up
    • Changes in the dimension of the use unit (households, firms, public facilities…) that mean a change in the physical dimensions of the associated spaces, either through reduction or through extension. For instance, if the number and median size of households rises and urban growth is not possible, what you get are either overcrowded homes or extensions of current homes, either in width or in height.
    • Technological changes that imply a larger choice of locations, be it for homes or for other uses. For instance, cars have allowed urban sprawl.
    • An evolution of social demand that triggers an evolution in the way the functions of spaces in a typology are arranged. If the demand for balconies increases, home façades will change accordingly, transforming the urban landscape.
    • Changes in ownership conditions: a neighborhood in which the residents are mainly owners of their homes can look different from one in which rental is the main condition.
  • Top- down
    • Political or technological factors determine how the land can be used: if city walls become obsolete, either as a result of the evolution of military technology or of the disappearance of the risk of war, cities can demolish them and extend.
    • Fiscal conditions: when some architectural types are subject to higher taxes, this can change the real estate market and the building production.
    • Urban planning: plan define mandatory conditions. Paris, Manhattan or Kyoto have particular urban landscapes as in a given moment the decision was taken to organize streets in a certain way and to define how buildings should look.

What is often said to be “the charm of the city” is the combination of all those elements, with varying degrees of poetry and bureaucratic zeal.

Biblio (114) The formation of urban spatial structures : markets vs design

Biblio-114-the formation of urban spatial structures

This work by Alain Bertaud analyses the links between design (he is an urban planner- architect) and market, providing answers to why it is not advisable to have private streets or why some things work better as public goods. Taking examples from Hartford, CT, to China, he analyses the links between economy and urban planning. Interesting, and open to debate.