It's taken me a few days to absorb the California Supreme Court decision in California Redevelopment Association v. Matosantos , which effectively killed redevelopment in California. Although I was a longtime critic of isolated cases of abuse, it believe it was a huge mistake to relegate the entire institution to the glue factory of failed policies. Wiser heads at CP&DR maintain that a creative compromise is possible that would allow redevelopment to survive in some altered form. But if redevelopment is dead, then, what can cities do to build up their downtown areas and attract business? My proposal: Planning and design. Cities should use their next general plan updates—the process by which most California cities think about their futures—as the chief way of determining the way the city should look and function.  Here are my suggestions, naïve or not: 1) \t Adopt a vision statement, e.g. "We want a walkable downtown area full of large and small merchants that places a priority on historic ‘fabric' and regional character." 2) \t The vision statement should identify the most important parcels suitable for infill development. Residential mixed-use (including low income and senior housing) and transit orientation are big plusses.   3) \t This is potentially controversial:  Cities should stick with their general plans, and not give them away to WalMart, Costco or a developer who's touting a sports stadium or convention center hotel. Difficult? Probably, but if cities are not willing to stick to their own plans, they can't control their future. 4) \t Even more controversial:  Cities must be willing to buy land and/or property at market rate (as opposed to through eminent domain). The purpose, of course, is to convey the parcels at below-market rates to developers who agree to build what the city needs, i.e. a specialty grocery, plus a chain drug store, 20 "in-line" merchants, at least half of which would be local mom-and-pop retailers, plus some housing within walking distance of a transit station. If cities don't have the cash, they still have some bonding authority. The developer can agree to pay the debt service on those bonds for three years or so, prior to the completion of the new development , so the city ends up revenue neutral on the deal.  (The cash value of the discount price on the land would be equal to money spent on debt service.) The real test here, of course, is whether local governments can "sell" new development to their constituents.  And that's a different bucket of eels entirely.

In releasing his proposed 2012-13 budget last Thursday, Gov. Jerry Brown also proposed a major reorganization of state government that would separate transportation and housing at the same time Brown's policy thrust is intended to link the two closer together. In particular, Brown has proposed a major restructuring of the Business, Transportation, and Housing (BTH) Agency that would have here parts: All housing functions, as well as business regulation functions, would be merged with the current State and Consumer Services Agency to create a new Business and Consumer Services Agency. Within this new agency, the Californai Housing Finance Agency would be merged into the Department of Housing & Community Development. Economic development functions within BTH, such as the California Infrastructure Bank, would be moved to the Governor's Office of Economic Development. These changes would leave only transportation functions within BTH, which would be renamed the Transportation Agency. These functions include Caltrans, the California Transportation Commission, and the California High-Speed Rail Authority. The separation of transportation and housing comes at a time when the Brown administration – as well as regional and local officials around the state – are trying to bring housing and transportation into closer alignment. In particular, SB 375 brought Regional Transportation Plans into close alignment with the Regional Housing Needs Assessment process, which is overseen by HCD. "With the reorganization, it separates the disciplines of transportation, housing, and economic development," said Mike McKeever, executive director of the Sacramento Area Council of Governments. "Those are disciplines that are important to be more and more integrated." For McKeever and the other metropolitan planning organizations -- which are charged with implementing SB 375 -- the reshuffle means they have more places than ever to go to in the state government. They have to interact with Transportation on transportation funding issues; with the California Air Resoures Bboard (part of the California Environmental Protetion Agency) on greenhouse gas emissions targets; and now with the revamped HCD, under Consumer and Business Services, on RHNA even though SB 375 calls for MPOs to address all three of these in concert. But Anna Caballero, the former Salinas mayor and assemblymember who is Brown's State and Consumer Services secretary, said she is optimistic about the restructuring's impact on SB 375 planning and the role of the state's Strategic Growth Council. "I don't see it being a problem," said Caballero. "I really think the SGC is the place where you link the two." Presumably Caballero will be the secretary of the combined agency containing the housing functions. She was actually mentioned as a possible HCD director before be selected as consumer secretary. McKeever did not disagree with Caballero. "What I think this means is that it's going to be even more important than before that the SGC be an important, meaningful, component of the state government," said McKeever. "And I hope that the governor would make it clear to the council that it's a high priority of his that they use their statutory authority to integrate the various silos of state government." Gary Gallegos, McKeever's counterpart at the San Diego Association of Governments, welcomes the reorganization wholeheartedly. In fact, he has long spoken out in favor of a seperate transportation agency. Working with Sacramento, "is always complicated," said Gallegos. "I'm not sure that it will be any more or less complicated."  Gallegos noted that, for instance, MPOs have to work closely with the Air Resources Board on SB 375 issues and that BTH is not necessarily very integrated because a BTH secretary may tend to favor one function over the others. Therefore, he said that the reorganization, and especially the consolidation of transportation functions, will do more good than harm. Moreover, he noted that SANDAG considers SCS planning to be a "bottom-up" process involving member cities, so working with the state is a lesser concern.  However, the reshuffle may still create a problem at the SGC. The SGC has six members – including four Cabinet secretaries and the head of the Governor's Office of Planning & Research – and is charged with coordinating all state actions to support the goal of sustainable development. However, while the BTH secretary is on the council, Caballero is not. A statutory change would be required to add her. Although he has been in office for a year, Brown has never appointed a BTH secretary – the only Cabinet position he has not filled. Caltrans had not had a director since last spring, and veteran civil servant Cathy Creswell has been acting as the interim HCD director. The directorship of the Governor's Office of Economic Development is also vacant.

Amid all the debating and litigating around redevelopment's demise, it's sometimes easy to forget what, exactly, Californians are fighting over. But this week's premature release of Gov. Jerry Brown's 2102 budget offers a handy reminder: it's money.  Even after the Supreme Court ruling, the Brown Administration is assuming that the state will reap $1.7 billion in 2011-12 from the end of redevelopment -- and $1.8 billion in 2012-13, said H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the Department of Finance. Had the Supreme Court decided the other way, striking down both AB 1x 26 and AB 1x 27, then the governor would have been in a roughly $11 billion pickle rather than merely a $9.2 billion one.   The Department of Finance estimates that the total tax increment that will be liberated by the demise of redevelopment amounts to roughly $5 billion, but roughly $2 billion of that will immediately go back to successor agencies so that they can fulfill RDAs' debt obligations.  The governor's budget estimates that of the $1.7 billion that will be recovered from RDA's this year, $1.05 billion will go to K-14 schools, thus offsetting the state's Prop. 98 General Fund obligation. That leaves nearly $600 million for "pass-through" payments to counties ($340 million), cities ($220 million), and special districts ($170 million).  What's surprising about these numbers is that they are nearly the same as those that the governor presented in his 2011-12 budget.  Many supporters of redevelopment have claimed that the actual amount of money that will become available is far lower than $1.7 billion, and in the past year agencies have been scrambling to enter into new contracts and to shield assets. The Department of Finance is, however, confident in the numbers that it is using.  "We update our numbers based on the data we get from the Controller's office," said Finance spokesperson H.D. Palmer. "Those are our best estimates based upon the actual data we have and the modeling we have for property tax revenue."  If those numbers turn out to be off-base, the governor will revise the budget accordingly.  "As with anything, if there are any changes to those projections based on data we get after we've locked in the budget we use those accordingly when we get to the May revision," said Palmer.   Palmer said, however, that the department is not worried about all those deals that took place in 2011. The Department of Finance is prepared to undo any such deals that it considers illegitimate. A provision in AB 1x 26 enables the department to review all transactions that took place after Jan. 1, 2011.   "If there are any that don't represent a true contractual obligations, that would be unwound and the proceeds would be divided up among the jurisdictions," said Palmer.  Now the governor just has to come up with the rest of the $9.2 billion.

This morning the California Supreme Court issued a ruling upholding a law that disbands the state's nearly 400 redevelopment agencies. The ruling upholds the constitutionality of AB 1X 26, the budget bill that eliminates redevelopment agencies while striking down AB 1X 27, the bill that would have allowed redevelopment agencies to continue operating as long as their host jurisdictions paid remittance fees to the state. The bills were designed to reap an estimated $1.6 billion in funds that lawmakers said were necessary to help offset the state's budget deficit.   The ruling, which was unanimous except for Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye's dissent regarding the AB 1X 27 decision, fulfills what many in the redevelopment community considered their "worst nightmare." Laywers who represented the California Redevelopment Association had tried to argue that the two bills were "inseverable," but the court rejected this argument.  Gov. Jerry Brown hailed the ruling's effect on the state budget but did not comment on redevelopemnt itself.  In a statement, Brown said, "Today's ruling by the California Supreme Court validates a key component of the state budget and guarantees more than a billion dollars of ongoing funding for schools and public safety." The California Redevelopment Association and other supporters of redevelopment are expected to lobby for legislation that would reinstate redevelopment.  Updates to follow on cp-dr.com.

There must have been something in the water affecting women in the early 1960s, and it wasn't just DDT.  This year, planners have celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of a great book, but it is not just one book or one author who deserves celebration. While eggshells collapsed, killing new life in the nest, three women � speaking for the countless other women (and men) who had grown weary of the false promises of the 1950s � issued crucial, intertwined dissents through equal parts activism and prose. That the planner is the most obscure among the three is unfortunate, but, ultimately, her impact may be no less profound than the other members of her sorority.  Rachel Carson, Betty Friedan, and Jane Jacobs tore at the social fabric of America at the very moment when the country's own global dominance was more assured than ever. They each published their pathbreaking works, in such rapid succession that the sequence hardly matters: Jacobs published Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, having begun writing it in 1958; Silent Spring followed in September 1962; and The Feminine Mystique completed the cycle--from city to forest to bedroom--five months later.  Though Jacobs' ink was dry by the time The Feminine Mystique went to press, it's entirely likely that each was loosing her fury upon her Smith-Corona at exactly the same time, bound by common ribbons of outrage and lucidity.  I am not old enough to know whether anybody at the time marveled at this coincidence. But through the distance of 50 years, it seems that they arose at a remarkable moment. So close were their publication dates, and so original was each book, that surely none can be considered an influence on the others: they were, all together, products of both their time and extraordinary contemplation. E.O. Wilson wrote that Carson "delivered a galvanic jolt to public consciousness;" that Friedan did the same is indisputable. Whether many people beyond lower Manhattan knew of Jacobs is less clear.  A casual reading of The Feminine Mystique, Silent Spring, and Death and Life suggests that each relied on what can only be described as an abiding faith in perceptiveness, observation, and simple common sense -- the type of common sense that social science often attempts to discredit. Each too spun literature out of dreary subjects: murderous chemicals, urban blight, ennui. All three relied focused not of the esoteric, learned, and complicated but instead of the achingly familiar: baked goods, birdsongs, stoops. They mix analysis with storytelling. Jacobs describes ideal streetcorners just as Carson invokes a pastoral ideal before burying it in invisible toxins. Friedan reveals the shocking complexity of the kitchen table upon which she herself served those fatal meals. They reaffirmed the beauty -- unquantifiable, nearly indescribable, but eminently palpable -- that had been forgotten in the aesthetic cataclysm of the 1950s, and then they painstakingly explained what had happened and what could be done. They exposed the ego of the builder, the thoughtlessness of the industrialist, and the despair of the so-called housewife -- things that turn into nonsense if you try to enter them into a spreadsheet. That's why each of their nonfiction tomes qualifies as literature: not because they aren't based on fact (which they are) but rather because they, like any other great work of art, attempt to drive at truth.  Though they chose different images, they all wrote about the same thing. Carson's concern for nature echoes Jacobs' concern for the built environment. The lifestyle that Friedan describes is the almost-inevitable result of the urban form that Jacobs laments. Both Jacobs and Carson (not to mention Friedan herself) are shining examples of the types of women that Friedan believed all women could and should be. They are to Friedan what the poet Whitman was to essayist Emerson: the embodiment, in a country that so much enjoys speaking of its greatness, of unspeakably great hopes.  How these particular truths all erupted in the span of two years is as delicious a question as history ever will provoke. As a historical coincidence, the ascendency of Friedan, Carson, and Jacobs ranks up there -- in all seriousness -- with the question of how Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Target all came into being in the same year, thus exacerbating to this very day the problems that all three women railed against. (That year happened to be 1962.)  The great postwar sigh of relief that blew over the country in the late 1940s brought with it the toxins that would become the problems of the 1960s. The Baby Boom, Levittown, and even the chemical industry all seemed benign in their inception. Prior to 1919, women's most immediate goal had a name--suffrage--and therefore was easier to combat. But not until the end of the 1950s did women's problems, and so many others that arose in the years following World War II, reach critical mass.  What burst forth in the early 1960s was building up throughout the 1950s. It's no wonder that the regimented "Organization Man" ethos of 1950s business culture found foils in independent, iconoclastic, literary women perhaps oppressed yet unbound by the hierarchy. Moreover, the task of exposing the defects of 1950s America may have fallen to women if only because many men were invested in the status quo, what with their black suits, skinny ties, and slide rules. They were not inclined to incite revolution -- they were, in many ways, the ones against whom the revolution was incited.    While corporations hummed along, Friedan, Jacobs, and Carson were simply the first to look around them, realize how deeply the problems had sunk in, and then air their realizations publically. They were quite unlike, for instance, Martin Luther King, whose own protests of the early 1960s trace their lineage literally to the Old Testament; the injustices that he fought against and died for were manifest equally to all who suffered them and all who did not.  Betty Friedan launched feminism. Rachel Carson launched environmentalism. They tower over their fields like few other leaders -- male or female -- do. But, if you ask plenty of people involved with urban planning, Jacobs' name belongs atop the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower, and the Space Needle all stacked atop each other. In fact, within planning circles, she is more powerful than ever, as her ideas have made that generational trek from radicalism to budding orthodoxy.  In 2009 the urban planning web portal Planetizen.com (whose parent company hosts CP&DR's website) conducted a poll, albeit an unscientific one, of history's 100 "greatest urban thinkers." Jacobs won with 6,000 votes out of 14,000 cast. Contemporary architect and planner Andres Duany came in runner-up and yet received only one-fifth as many votes. And, even so, a piece of each of his votes belongs to Jacobs, since Duany's New Urbanist movement is derived directly and unapologetically from Jacobs' ideas. Today, nearly every urban plan that makes headlines can trace its lineage back to Jacobs' promotion of pedestrianism, mixed land uses, community cohesion, and local economies.  Yet Jacobs herself has no -ism.  Jacobs' relative obscurity owes itself to several reasons, not the least of which is the obscurity of her field. Nearly four billion humans live in cities entirely unaware of the forces that create those cities. Being the most local of political pursuits, planning is, for the most part, a leaderless profession. It relies on the principle that what is good for San Juan Capistrano is not necessarily good for San Juan Bautista.  There is also the problem of words. Protest though she might, even her impassioned literature cannot in and of itself effect change when the built environment is at stake. A reader can read the Feminine Mystique, or even just the first chapter, and join Friedan's movement instantly. Likewise, environmentalism lends itself to individual, and sometimes instant, behavioral changes. In Carson's case, it required the abandonment of DDT: a politically challenging but logistically simple gesture that culminated in its outright ban in the United States in 1972, only ten years after Carson brought its evils to light.  But what do you do when the enemy is set -- literally -- in stone?  Like many other revolutionaries, Jacobs wrote sometimes in militaristic terms. With an eye as much towards the cannon ball as the wrecking ball, Jacobs abandons diplomacy by the fifth word of Death and Life: "This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding." Although Jacobs' real-life conflict with New York's dictatorial "master builder" Robert Moses was a mighty contest and a great story, Jacobs' real enemy was not a person, and anger would have gotten her so far. She hews to the the inspirational in the very next sentence: "It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning to the Sunday supplements and women's magazines." Jacobs spoke for a genuinely marginalized group: people who wanted to live in dense, diverse, stimulating vibrant cities. But because the urban instinct is not an immutable characteristic of either individuals or groups, these people do not define a protected class, and they have no human antagonist or oppressor. Instead, they have a system, so dispersed and purposeful that it seems almost to have no agency or leadership of its own, even as "whole communities are torn apart and sown to the winds with a reaping of cynicism, resentment, and despair that must be seen and heard to be believed." What Jacobs fought against, in the 1950s and even today, was progress itself: progress as defined by an elite few.  Few concepts yield so many definitions as Modernism does, but for the purpose of Jacobs' activism it entailed the use of engineering, technology, and large-scale industry to alter and expand cities to accommodate the automobile; aesthetically it favors formal efficiency, "honest" use of industrial materials, and lack of ornamentation. Ideologically, Modernism is bound up in the curious fixation with "progress" that prevailed in the middle of the 20th century. At the time, progress achieved an untenably narrow definition that loosely correlated with the notion that the human condition could always be improved upon, typically through science, technology, and rationality. Jacobs' objection to Modernism was no esoteric academic exercise, of the sort that plays out at conferences, swaddled in obtuse theory and excess syllables. She despised Modernism with perfect clarity--the sort of clarity to which Modernist design often lays claim.  "Human progress," as Dr. King points out in his letter from a Birmingham jail, "never rolls in on wheels of inevitability." Indeed, if you ask Jacobs, it does not roll in on wheels at all. Just as Carson heard the silence, Jacobs needed little more than the halo of a streetlamp in order to view the failure that was so prevalent in New York City and just about everywhere else. She saw that "all the art and science of city planning is helpless to stem decay--and the spiritlessness that precedes decay--in ever more massive swatches of cities." Jacobs was, perhaps, the first leader in history ever to lead a movement against progress without being branded an anarchist or nihilist. She ascribed, however, to a heretical notion: the old was better than the new.  By the time Moses proposed the evisceration of lower Manhattan, "progress" had long overshot its mark (or missed its exit, if you will).  The rest of the story is history doubling back on itself. Starting in 1968 with the Jacobs-led defeat of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, countless similar instances of would-be urbanicide were also halted. Since then, some highways have been disassembled and many ghastly public housing projects have been demolished. Formalized in the late 1990s, a wholesale movement to promote historically inspired neighborhoods has arisen in the form of New Urbanism and other ideologies, almost all of which openly proclaim their allegiance to Jacobs, who moved to Toronto in 1969 and, until her death in 2006, engaged in virtually no more rabble-rousing as she instead wrote several more excellent books.  For the purpose of today's progressive urbanism, Life and Death did all the leading, and it did so anachronistically, drawing planners and architects back in time to a moment when cities were built at a human scale and with human pleasures in mind. Jacobs led first and foremost by reminding readers that rationality -- and its co-conspirator, paternalism -- cannot constantly arrive at better and better answers. A world insane enough to, say, deny black people their basic human rights surely cannot be neatly tamed by freeways, subdivisions, and glass towers.  Though Jacobs' her civic activism was based on the ideas that she articulated in Death and Life, the book was not a template for how to get what she wanted. Rather, it rather a vision of what she wanted. So, while Jacobs' two personas -- author and activist -- lend credibility to each other, they easily could have existed in each other's absence. New York is probably glad that they did not.  Though Jacobs probably is not a household name even today, she touched the lives of millions of people whose cities have been planned with her ideas in mind, and those numbers are growing. By now her eminence within the field is more than complete, but her veneration followed a slow process--possibly for the better, given the limits of veneration. To this day her goals are realized through countless dispersed, time-consuming, excruciating battles that take place over and over again and are fought by intimates, not by larger-than-life demagogues that sometimes pass for leaders.  Indeed, the revolution that Jacobs incited is condemned to take place at a nearly glacial pace. Building things takes long enough. How long it takes to not build things sounds like a calculation that only a Zen master could perform. Try putting that in your general plan update.  Then again, it's still easier to un-build a city than to resurrect an extinct species.  Though the American population is rooted in cities, the vast bulk of American literature that speaks of landscape does so of the natural landscape. Cities hardly existed when the early American novelists and short-story writers -- Irving, Hawthorne, Cooper -- were writing. The primacy of nature in American culture and consciousness was cemented by Thoreau and Emerson. Since their time, everyone from Mark Twain to John Steinbeck to Cormac McCarthy has reveled in the non-urban landscape, thus leading America through road trips, Frontier idylls, suburban disaffection rather than inquiries into back alleys and bursting subway cars.  But for everyone who lives in cities and believes in what they offer -- including a way for Americans to achieve Carson's goal of leaving nature alone and a venue in which to achieve Friedan's goal of self-actualization -- Jane Jacobs, even 50 years later, remains the leader who, more so than any other American, gave voice to their desires and a nest for their dreams.

CP&DR usually publishes a top-10 list of the biggest planning stories of the year, but the process enumerating the stories this year took a strange turn this year. Until they repeal Proposition 13 or Nevada launches an invasion, the convoluted quest to kill the state's nearly 400 redevelopment agencies and/or send their tax increment back to Sacramento is a mega-story for the ages and by far the biggest story of the year. CP&DR has published a news story, feature, or piece of commentary in nearly every biweekly of the past year, since the governor released his budget in mid-January. While redevelopment and its nuances could have occupied an entire top-10 list, we decided to include eight other, unrelated stories on the list. Many of this year's other top stories refer to long-term trends, including the future of high speed rail and the implementation of Sustainable Communities Strategies in fulfillment of Senate Bill 375. Then again, if you're impatient, you can pull a permit for a parklet and have a new urban space up and running in no time. Death and Life (?) of Redevelopment The first chapter in this year's redevelopment saga is that of the governor's original budget  and the confusion, lobbying, and negotiation that followed. The second was the legislative battle, which ended in the passage of AB 1x 26 and AB 1x 27 , the paired bills that disband redevelopment agencies while offering them the option to stay in business if they agree to pay remittance payments. The third, which is still ongoing, is that of the lawsuit  filed by the California Redevelopment Association and League of California Cities in order to repeal the two budget bills. Meanwhile, this situation has led to robust discussions about how redevelopment could be reformed and reborn . The state Supreme Court has heard oral arguments and is currently deliberating on a fate that could include everything from reinstatement of the status quo to outright elimination of all redevelopment in the state. SB 375 Implementation After years of anticipation, the state's �big four' metropolitan planning organizations have begun to roll out their Sustainable Communities Strategies, the centerpiece of Senate Bill 375's effort to link land use planning with transportation planning. So far, the San Diego Association of Governments and the Southern California Council of Governments have released their draft regional transportation plans and sustainable communities strategies. SANDAG's plan  has already drawn fire for focusing too heavily on highways and passenger cars. Environmental groups recently filed suit against the agency, under the contention that the plan runs afoul of CEQA. Meanwhile, SCAG's brand-new draft has received an enthusiastic response. Once these plans are adopted, they will guide development in their respective regions for over 20 years. That is, of course, if recession ever ends and development picks up again. Jerry Brown Planners had high hopes for the governorship of Jerry Brown, who recently came off a stint as the mayor of Oakland and therefore, it was assumed, would bring an urban sensibility to the job. His choice of a downtown loft in Sacramento burnished his urban cred, and many consider him to be a friend of planning and of cities. While the governor's Office of Planning and Research had languished over the past few years, and faced legislative attempts to kill it, Brown re-energized it with the appointment of attorney Ken Alex to head the office and with the occasional cameo appearance at Strategic Growth Council meetings . Nevertheless, Brown will be forever remembered as the governor who came into office with a $20 billion budget shortfall and for coming up with what some consider a nearly heretical scheme to do away with redevelopment in order to help balance the state budget. High-Speed Rail A few weeks ago the estimated price tag for California's planned high-speed rail network went from roughly $40 billion to nearly $100 billion. Though its supporters press onward, this revision may mean that the system's odds of ever getting built has become ever more slim. The demise of high speed rail might delight certain jurisdictions -- such as those on the San Francisco Peninsula that have sued over perceived negative local impacts  -- and would devastate others, such as those that are planning major multimodal stations and transit-oriented development. For the time being, planning in places like San Jose, Fresno, and Palmdale continues apace, but until the first spikes are laid, its unclear whether those cities' train will ever come in. Tea Party We know about NIMBY's and LULU's, but they probably didn't teach you about the Tea Party in planning school. This year the Tea Party have not only raised a fuss about the whole concept of regional planning -- by speaking out against the Sustainable Communities Strategy in the Bay Area , among other places -- but have even gone so far as to reject the use of federal funds for a transit center in Lodi . Many Tea Party activists simply do not trust government to do anything right and therefore are wary of any new land use plans. Others, however, oppose smart growth in part on the grounds that it's part of a United Nations conspiracy. Whether the UN really is out to control the world one city at a time or whether the Tea Party proves to be a short-lived political fad, they have made the year far more interesting for planners in California. Institutionalization of Infill  Infill development has been a trend for a while now, but not a lot of developers know how to do it -- or can afford to do it in this economic climate. The mid-2000s saw major developers set up "urban" units, many of which failed. This year, though, infill has gone from a concept to an organized movement, led in part by the newly established California Infill Builders Association . The IBA wasted no time in trying to sway lawmakers in Sacramento, with the introduction of AB 710 . Though that measure failed -- setting up a potential rivalry between for-profit infill builders and nonprofit affordable housing developers -- it's likely that we'll see more from them in the coming year to promote what might become the signature development pattern of the next generation. CEQA Reform Has a crack formed in the armor of the California Environmental Quality Act? While many planners and developers are clamoring for wholesale reform of CEQA based on claims that it unnecessarily slows development and makes projects vulnerable to frivolous lawsuits, radical reform may still be a ways off. However, with the advent of Senate Bill 375, which offers modest CEQA exemptions for certain infill projects and, more importantly, the passage of SB 226 , which offers modest streamlining for certain projects in urban areas. Census Results In 2011 we learned that California is getting bigger, but it's also getting slower. Preliminary number-crunching of the 2010 U.S. Census reveals that the state's rate of growth has declined to its lowest rate since annexation from Mexico. Many of those 37.2 million Californians who are already here are pushing into retirement age, and demographers predict that this shift will have deep, long-term implications for development. Elderly residents may return to urban cores, while there may not be a large enough influx of new residents to occupy the already built housing stock in the outer suburbs. Parklets & Streetcars Anyone who needs some nice news going into 2012 need look no further than parklets. Parklets likely will not save California's cities, but they do represent what advocates describe as an inexpensive, low-impact way to create public space atop conventional curbside parking spaces. As major interventions rely on huge expenditures of public capital, parklets hew towards the do-it-yourself movement. They have caught on in San Francisco, and major cities around the state -- including Los Angeles, Oakland, and Long Beach -- have parkets programs in the works. CP&DR's parklet story was one of the most-read articles of the year. Meanwhile, several California cities have caught on to the streetcar craze. While decidedly more expensive than 120-square-foot wooden platforms, streetcars are being promoted for much the same reason that parklets are �as place-making strategies as transportation strategies.

Everyone loves parks, right? They're a crucial amenity for young and old alike. Well, apparently not everybody.  As the Los Angeles Times recently reported, the City of Los Angeles recently spent over $600,000 designing and building a pocket park in South Los Angeles.  However, not a single resident got to enjoy it because the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) soon acquired the land via eminent domain and bulldozed the park to make way for a new school.  This is an extreme example of the lack of coordination between the city and LAUSD.  Ideally, to meet the educational and recreational needs of communities, the two entities should not only be talking to each other, but should also be pursuing joint use projects that serve residents as both schools and parks.         Increasing access to recreational facilities that already exist at schools is one of the oldest and most effective ways to provide more opportunities for physical activity and play in neighborhoods.  After all, even the most under-served areas have schools.  At a time of budget cuts and shortfalls, maximizing access to existing facilities—rather than focusing on constructing new ones—is the most efficient and economical use of public resources.   Schools offer recreational amenities, which may be made available to the public during non-school hours.  However, many school facilities are often locked and inaccessible to residents who might otherwise use them on weekday evenings and weekends.  Understandably, some school districts restrict access to their facilities because they lack the capacity and/or funds to run programs, and they may have concerns about additional legal or maintenance costs that might arise from using school property beyond regular school hours. But these obstacles are not insurmountable.  A joint use agreement offers a way for school districts to open their facilities for community use.  It is a written agreement between a school district and one or more public or private entities setting forth the terms and conditions for sharing the use of the district's facilities.  Such an agreement can provide community access to school property by allowing the district to share with another agency the costs and risks associated with opening the property for after-hours use.   In recent years, the Community-School-Park Plan developed by People for Parks has emerged as a strategy to maximize the use of and enhance existing facilities in Los Angeles by opening up elementary schools for public recreation and community services.  The plan also calls for the replacement of asphalt on school playgrounds with lawns and trees, and the creation of new joint use facilities that serve the community as both schools and parks.  This approach is slowly being implemented, with the projects at Trinity Street (South L.A.) and Vine Street (Hollywood) elementary schools completed this year.   In an ideal world, school facilities should be planned, constructed, and used in a way that enables them to effectively serve the requirements not only of the schools but also of the community at large.  In reality, however, schools are under the jurisdiction of school districts formed with an important, but narrow mission: to meet the educational needs of students.   There are also administrative challenges associated with joint use.  In the case of new schools, issues can arise in the planning phase because the needs and budget contributions of the school district and the local jurisdiction have to be ascertained and coordinated.  The two parties must negotiate compromises to resolve conflicting requirements.  Also, successful implementation of a joint use agreement requires the approval and cooperation of the new principal and staff assigned to the new school.               Intervention by local and/or state political leaders may be necessary to make joint use happen.  Over the years, I have learned that discussions and negotiations at the staff level can drag on for extended periods of time with or without progress due to the complexity of such arrangements and the bureaucratic nature of the organizations.  To expedite matters and actually get agreements reached, politicians would need to get involved and be in direct contact with the leadership of school districts. The joint use of schools as recreational facilities has been successful in many communities in California.  Local jurisdictions and school districts should work together to pursue joint use projects that meet both the educational and recreational needs of underserved communities, especially those lacking parks and other amenities.  To do so, they must first talk to each other, avoid the bureaucratic disaster referenced earlier, overcome challenges, and truly plan together.  After all, planning is all about vision, foresight, and coordination. --Clement Lau (Clement Lau is a planner with the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation. He is currently working with several L.A.-area school districts on joint use issues.)

In the case of West Chandler Boulevard Neighborhood Association v. City of Los Angeles , the Court of Appeal, Second Appellate District, considered the validity of the City of Los Angeles' grant of a conditional use permit, height variance and parking variance to a Chabad of North Hollywood, which was operating a synagogue in a residential neighborhood within the city.  Starting in 1981, the city granted Chabad a conditional use permit and parking variance to operate a synagogue in an R-1 zone for a congregation of 45 people. The variance allowed the synagogue to maintain seven spaces, as opposed to 20, as normally required under the city's zoning code. Approximately 25 years later, the congregation had grown to 200 people.  As a result, in March 2007, Chabad applied to the city for a demolition permit to demolish the existing one-story building and two variances – one to construct a 16,000 square foot, three-story building of 45 feet (instead of 36 feet in height), and the second to allow five parking spaces instead of the required 83 spaces.  The city prepared a mitigated negative declaration for the project finding that the environmental impacts of the project would be reduced to less than significant with mitigation.  The city held a public hearing on the application on February 4, 2008, where various residents voiced concerns about the impacts of the project on parking and views, among others. Then in November of 2008, the city's Zoning Administrator conditionally approved Chabad's application, including a conditional use permit for Chabad to build a larger synagogue in the R-1 zone, but reducing its size by around 6,000 square feet to 10,300 square feet. The ZA denied the height variance request, but approved the variance request for five parking spaces, and limited the hours of operation from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. The neighbors appealed the ZA's determination to the area planning commission. But, Chabad also appealed asking for an even larger building and longer hours of operation than in the original application.  The area planning commission held a hearing on the appeals in February of 2009. It sided with the neighbors in granting their appeal and denying Chabad's appeal. Specifically, the area planning commission made findings that the project was too large for the size of the lot, would be materially detrimental to the character of the neighborhood, was inconsistent with the city's general plan, and lacked sufficient parking. In June 2009, pursuant to the city charter, the city council asserted jurisdiction over the planning commission's decision and scheduled a hearing for three days later. At that hearing one of the council members proposed to modify the project as approved by the ZA, deny the neighbors' appeal of the ZA's decision, and grant Chabad's appeal of the ZA's decision. The council did not provide the neighbors an opportunity to address the council member's proposal. Ultimately, the council voted for the council member's proposal to modify the project and grant Chabad a conditional use permit to construct a 12,000 square foot synagogue, 28 feet high, and with five parking spaces. The neighbors timely appealed the council's decision to the superior court. The trial court denied the neighbors' petition for writ of mandate on the grounds that the findings made by the City council in support of the conditional use permit and the parking variance were supported by substantial evidence; it also determined that the neighbors had somehow waived their due process rights and CEQA claims.  The appellate court reversed, granting the writ and ordering the city to comply with its own charter and zoning code in reviewing the ZA's determinations. It first found that the council had the authority, under the city charter, to review the planning commission's decision on the conditional use permit and variance, but that in doing so, the council "stepped into the shoes of the planning commission."  The appellate court also held that the neighbors did not waive the issue of whether the City Council violated the holding in Topanga Assn. for a Scenic Community v. County of Los Angeles (1974) 11 Cal.3d 506 case and the city's own zoning code by failing to explain and make findings as to why the Zoning Administrators' decision was incorrect. Finally, the appellate court held that in reviewing the conditional use permit, the city council was required to make its decision based on the record, as to whether the Zoning Administrator erred or abused her discretion, and it was required to base its decision on the variance only on the evidence and findings of the ZA and the city council was only entitled to modify the ZA's decision, as it did, by making specific findings as to how the ZA erred, which it did not do.  Thus, the appellate court determined city council abused its discretion by failing to make the proper findings as required by the Topanga case. The court declined to address the issue of whether the city council violated the neighbor's due process rights in refusing to allow them to speak at the city council hearing on the conditional use permit and variance. The Case:  West Chandler Boulevard Neighborhood Association v. City of Los Angeles (2011) 198 Cal. App. 4th 1506; 2011 Cal. App. LEXIS 1162. August 16, 2011, published September 6, 2011.

In the case of South Orange County Wastewater Authority v. City of Dana Point (2011) 196 Cal. App. 4th 1604 ("South Orange"), the Court of Appeal for the Fourth Appellate District was asked to order an environmental impact report (EIR) be prepared to assess the impact on the environment of a proposed project pursuant to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The Court of Appeal declined to order such an EIR. The Court of Appeal also addressed whether the adopted project was inconsistent with the city's general plan and zoning ordinance, and found that the project was consistent. Background In 2007, a landowner submitted an application to the City of Dana Point to create a new commercial and mixed use zoning under the city's zoning code and to rezone its property from the new commercial to mixed use district. The property to be developed sits on the coastal shoreline, adjacent to the South Orange County Wastewater Authority's sewage treatment plant. The city prepared an initial study and determined that any impacts the project might have on the environment could be mitigated. Accordingly, the city prepared a mitigated negative declaration and circulated it for review in February 2008.  The city revised the MND and recirculated it in October 2008. Given the location of the project, the Coastal Commission also has land use jurisdiction and would need to approve the Project. At both the Planning Commission and City Council, the wastewater authority challenged the project on the grounds that the plant emitted noise, and bad smells, and that it created water runoff on the project site, which would negatively impact future residents.  On July 27, 2009, the City redesignated and rezoned the project site, and adopted an MND for the project. The authority filed a challenge to the city's approvals seeking that an EIR be prepared to address the odor issues, and alleging that the general plan amendments rendered the land use element internally inconsistent. The trial court denied the authority's request for writ of mandate, which the authority appealed. Issues/Holdings Was an EIR required to study the impact of odors from the existing sewage treatment plant on the Project (e.g., redesignation and rezoning of land)? No. Did the general plan amendment create an internal inconsistency? No. CEQA Issue The Court of Appeal first reviewed the standard of review in an MND case – whether there is substantial evidence in the record supporting a fair argument of a significant environmental impact. It then reviewed the purpose of CEQA, and highlighted the fact that CEQA is intended to study a project's impacts on the existing environment, not vice versa. Presumably irritated with the authority's intent – that of protecting itself from nuisance complaints by potential future neighbors based on putrid odors from the plant – the Court of Appeal noted that " objection to the adoption of the MND for the rezoning essentially turns CEQA upside down." The Court of Appeal analogized the situation to the one in the Baird v. County of Contra Costa (1995) 32 Cal.App.4th 1464 ("Baird") case, where neighbors of an addiction treatment facility urged that an EIR be prepared for the expansion of the facility on the grounds that the site was contaminated. As in this case, the appellate court in Baird held that and EIR was not necessary since the expansion of the facility would not have any impact on the environment. The authority raised CEQA Guideline section 15126.2, subdivision (a) in support of its position. That subsection states that an EIR must analyze significant environmental effects a project might cause by bringing development and people to the affected area. The Court of Appeal declined to adopt the rationale and noted that "the guideline deals with the content of an EIR after it has been determined one is necessary. It does not address the question at issue here: whether an EIR is necessary at all." The authority also argued that the city was piecemealing the project. More specifically, the authority urged that the city should be required to consider a development project – not just land use changes on the site because to do so conceals cumulative impacts. But, the Court of Appeal noted that neither the scope nor size of a project on the site adjacent to the sewage plant would affect the odors emanating from the sewage plant. General Plan Consistency A general plan is internally inconsistent when one required element conflicts with another or when a part of one element conflicts with another part of the same element.  In this case, the city added a new mixed-used land use designation to its general plan. The new mixed-used designation did not conflict with any other designations, nor did it conflict with any of the goals or policies contained in the land use element. The authority claimed that the new designation was not internally consistent because it did not include a way in which to ensure that the new designation was compatible with surrounding uses. The Court of Appeal dismissed this argument finding that no land use designation is required to do such a thing. Conclusion This decision reaffirms the decisions in Baird and in the City of Long Beach v. Los Angeles Unified School District (2009) 176 CalApp.4th 889, both which held that CEQA is intended to identify effects of the proposed project, not the effects of the existing environment on that project. The Case: South Orange County Wastewater Authority v. City of Dana Point (2011) 196 Cal. App. 4th 1604; 127 Cal Rptr. 3d 636; 2011 Cal. App. LEXIS 859. June 30, 2011. The Attorneys:  Bowie, Arneson, Wiles & Giannone, Wendy H. Wiles and Jeffrey A. Hoskinson for Plaintiff and Appellant. Rutan & Tucker, Robert S. Bower and John A. Ramirez for Defendant and Respondent. Katherine J. Hart is an attorney in the firm of Abbott & Kindermann , LLP, of Sacramento.

The Sustainable Communities Strategy unveiled in December by the Southern California Association of Governments struck its member cities and counties with all the uncertainty of an unwrapped Christmas gift.  Rather than surprise the six counties and 191 cities that make up the SCAG region, SCAG planners spent the better part of the past two years surveying their members' own plans and their own projections for population growth and future development in order to develop an SCS that would be far more predictive than prescriptive. As such, SCAG tried to build consensus pre-emptively for the regional plan rather than attempt to come up with a document that would compel cities and counties to change course or to otherwise compel jurisdictions to alter their development patterns. Under SB 375, SCAG must adopt an SCS by next April. "This is very different from what some feared when SB 375 was adopted that we might see a top-down regional imposition of one-size-fits-all," said Richard Lambros, senior policy advisor for the Building Industry Association of Southern California. "That is not what this plan is." Though the SCAG region includes a diverse array of jurisdictions, the SCS attempts to bring some uniformity to the region by identifying a handful of "community types," defined according to density, jobs-housing mix, and transit access. These "types" include, in roughly descending order of density, urban, city, town, suburban, and rural. With these types in mind, the SCS encourages the development of housing in main street and downtown areas. Roughly 1 million new housing units will be directed towards urban, city, and town areas, with 417,00 units directed towards suburbs; suburban areas currently comprise roughly 40% of the region's households but will receive only 28% of projected growth. And much of that growth will be in denser housing types than the region has historically been accustomed to. "We're portraying in our SCS 68% multifamily between today and 2035," said Douglas Williford, SCAG's deputy executive director. "That is about the reverse of what happened in the past." The SCS outlines a plan for integrating the transportation network and related strategies with an overall land use pattern that responds to projected growth, housing needs and changing demographics, and transportation demands. "There was lot of outreach to all 191 cities and six counties," said SCAG President and Santa Monica City Council Member Pam O'Connor. "The document is based on the existing general plan in all of those cities. That's the core foundation." "It was the most collaborative process I think our agency has ever gone through," said Williford. "It surprised us, to be honest, we ended up with over 80 percent attendance of our 197 jurisdictions within our region." The result of this approach, unveiled as the SCAG draft SCS/Regional Transportation Plan at the Dec. 1 Regional Council meeting in Los Angeles, is a twofold benefit: first, the strategy has been roundly praised by member jurisdictions; and, second, if followed in full by 2035, it may beat regional per capita emissions reduction targets set by the state. As mandated by Senate Bill 375, the SCS is intended to reduce the region's per capita greenhouse gas emissions 13 percent by 2035; the draft SCS predicts reductions of 16% by 2035 and on-target reductions of 8% by 2020.  Williford said he is "100% confident" that the region can reach those targets. "We wouldn't have gone over and above our initial targets unless we were completely confident of success." Although new development in the region has been relatively stagnant during the recession, SCAG's growth projections call for the region to add 4 million residents and over 1 million households by 2035.  These optimistic numbers and a unanimous vote to release the draft plan for public review is a far cry from the last major discussions surrounding SB 375. Just over a year ago factions in the Regional Council were at odds over the per capita targets, with representatives of some suburban jurisdictions lobbying for less ambitions targets than SCAG staff had originally recommended. Those factions won out, and the California Air Resources Board assigned SCAG the lower targets.  Now that the targets are set, almost no one seems to have a problem with the regional planning scheme that the SCS envisions.  "The fight that happened was important, because that's the civil discourse that's got to happen," said Simi Valley City Council Member and incoming SCAG President Glen Becerra. "I think we're there now. The agreement is there for the targets we need to hit." Becerra originally led the lobbying in favor of lower targets. Developers and builders were also wary of the higher targets, but they too have expressed support for the draft RPT/SCS. "We have been focused on four key principles that we hoped to see in the SCS: local control, providing reasonable flexibility, positive economic impacts, and making sure it would be realistic in its market assumptions for real estate and housing," said the BIA's Lambros. "We're very pleased that the SCS as drafted seems to have addressed all of our concerns." In fact, a certain amount of regional pride has come to surround the SCS, with Regional Council members suggesting that the SCAG region could be a model for cooperation--a model that policymakers in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., would be wise to emulate, according to some speakers at the Regional Council meeting. Adding to its appeal, the RTP/SCS is being pitched in part as a job-creation scheme, with transportation-related projects generating nearly 170,000 annual jobs, according to SCAG estimates. SCAG also predicts a healthy multiplier, of $2.90 generated for every $1 spent implementing the RTP/SCS.  Beyond these optimistic predictions, the SCS was devised in such a way that it would be nearly impossible for it to fail. The drafting has been more of an information-gathering process than a planning process. SCAG planners researched the general plans of nearly all of the region's jurisdictions and matched them up against population growth predictions for the region. They confirmed that the vast majority of jurisdictions are already pursuing development strategies that promote higher-density housing and place it along transit corridors. These patterns have long been advocated by SCAG through its Compass Blueprint regional planning strategy and other decentralized efforts. "Beginning in the 1990s the amount of emphasis�.on smart-growth type planning and implementation of actual projects that was already going on," said Williford. "There were in fact hundreds of examples around the SCAG region of great projects that were either focused already on transit areas�or downtown mixed-use re-visioning that were entirely consistent with the goals of SB 375." "We did not want it to be a blue sky plan that was not realistic," added Williford. "We wanted it to be a progressive plan that was absolutely realistic." Complementing this approach to regional planning are subregional SCS's that are being prepared locally for Orange County and for the Gateway Cities subregion (including Long Beach and neighboring cities of southern Los Angeles County). Of the four metropolitan planning organizations statewide that are required to craft SCS's under SB 375, only SCAG was granted special dispensation to draft subregional plans, in part because SCAG is by far the state's largest MPO region in both population and land area. The concession, as well as deference to cities' general plans, was considered crucial for buy-in among SCAG members.  The SCS attempts to create a unified picture of growth in the region by identifying "High Quality Transit Areas," in which a great deal of projected growth will occur. A HQTA is generally a walkable transit village, consistent with the adopted SCS that has a minimum density of 20 dwelling units per acre and is within a � mile of a well-serviced transit stop, and includes transit corridors with minimum 15-minute or less service frequency during peak commute hours. The RTP/SCS assumes that 51 percent of new housing developed between 2008 and 2035 will be within HQTAs, along with 53 percent of new employment growth (compared with 39 and 48 percent, respectively in 2008). The RTP/SCS predicts that the number of households in HQTAs will double by 2035.  Then again, some are quick to point out that higher density does not eliminate the type of suburban, single-family developments that have long characterized Southern California. "We want folks to recognize that there's still room in this plan for well-planned greenfield development," said Lambros. "We don't want folks to think that the adoption of the SCS means the elimination of certain housing types." Becerra, of Simi Valley, said that despite his initial skepticism about the emissions targets, these development patterns do not represent a major imposition, even for a largely suburban city. "It won't really have a dramatic re-direction of our community," said Becerra. "Our community was already on-target with our updated general plan. We're not talking about 100 units to the acre. We're talking about 15 units to the acre." Of course, an HQTA can only succeed if the transit actually exists. The RTP calls for $216.9 billion of investment in transportation infrastructure. That includes roughly $50 billion for local bus and rail transit, plus $72 billion for highway upgrades. Infrastructure to promote walking and bicycling alone is budgeted for $6 billion, to increase the region's bikeway miles from roughly 4,000 to over 10,000 and to upgrade 12,000 miles of sidewalks.  The RTP includes financial projections that would fund these investments. Some funding comes from local tax measure that have already been implemented, while other funding comes from more speculative sources, including a mileage-based user fee intended to replace the current gas tax. That fee is projected to raise $110 billion. However, many officials are cautious about spending funds that have not yet materialized.  "Every plan is implemented incrementally," said O'Connor. "We build what we can." Funding also poses a challenge to cities, many of which are hoping to update their general plans to complement the SCS and yet do not have the funds for such an intensive planning exercise. "City governments�.are more than ready to respond to this marketplace and respond to changes and do intelligent long-term land-use planning," said Williford. "But they need help." Though Williford and others admitted that funding is tight, especially with the possible elimination of redevelopment throughout the state, he said that SCAG is disbursing planning funds through a grant program. SCAG gave out $14.5 million in planning grants this year and Wiliford said that SCAG hopes to put out another call for projects shortly, though a timeline has not been announced. Contacts & Resources SCAG RTP/SCS Site: http://rtpscs.scag.ca.gov/Pages/default.aspx Glenn Becerra incoming president of SCAG, Simi Valley City Council Member Lucy Dunn, Executive Director, Orange County Business Council, 949.476.2242 Rich Lambros, Sr. Policy Advisor to BIA Southern California, 949.553.9500 Pam O'Connor, President, Southern California Association of Governments, Santa Monica City Council Member, 213.236.1800 Douglas Williford, Deputy Executive Director, Southern California Association of Governments, 213.236.1919

Over the past few years, publishers have put out enough books on urban sustainability to make Al Gore blush. Unfortunately, making a city sustainable takes a lot longer than does writing a book about making cities sustainable. So while green fatigue may have crept in, 2011 brought an eclectic array of books about urbanism and, in particular, about California. CP&DR has received some captivating titles this year, and somehow, California (or at least Los Angeles) continues to fascinate authors and photographers alike.  This year's crop of CP&DR's most intriguing books ranges from a micro-history of the Hollywood Sign, to a luscious glossary of urban terms in the Language of Towns and Cities, to what may prove to be this generation's most enduring, wide-ranging account of urbanism, Triumph of the City. Though many California cities no longer have bookstores at which to pick up any of the following titles, CP&DR presents its inaugural roundup of urban books from the past year, just in time for the holidays.  BOOKS OF THE WORLD Triumph of the City By Edward Glaeser Penguin Press In a previous era, Harvard professor Ed Glaeser, bedecked in his trademark three-piece suit, might have been the one of the technocrats out there with his slide rule and transit, "scientifically" deciding just how much of a neighborhood to knock down. But, today, urban planning's very own Don Draper has put quantitative analysis to a far more humane use. If Jane Jacobs wrote from the heart, Glaeser writes decidedly from the head. But he reaches much the same conclusions as Jacobs did: cities are wonderful and, most importantly for Glaeser, cities create value. Much of the data analysis--not to mention the poetic connections between Renaissance art, the Golden Age of Athens, and call centers in Bangalore--is intuitive to contemporary progressive urbanists. True to his conservative manner, Glaeser does not call for radical re-visioning of cities. His arguments imply that everything from historic preservation to urban agriculture to congestion pricing can be valuable only insofar as they support a city's ability to nurture ideas and increase prosperity. See original CP&DR Review , Vol. 26, No. 8, April 2011. The Language of Towns and Cities: A Visual Dictionary Dhiru A. Thadani, ed. Rizzoli This is the gift that keeps on giving. The Language of Cities and Towns, an extensive glossary of planning and architectural terms, couldn't be read in one sitting, or even in one year.  Lushly illustrated with photos, maps, and diagrams, it can remind planners of why they do what they do, and it can teach non-planners a little bit of the vocabulary that often makes planning so inaccessible.  The metaphorical use of "language" to describe architectural form is often a cop-out, invoked when a designer or critic actually has nothing to say about a building. Indeed, "visual language" is an oxymoron. But this book takes language literally, with entries on everything from accessibility to fenestration to "parking: off-street automated system" to zeitgeist. Eminent architects and urbanists including Andres Duany, Doug Kelbaug, James Howard Kunstler, and Robert A.M. Stern contributed entries to this monumental coffee-table edifice.  Living in the Endless City The Urban Age Project Phaidon The growth of the world's urban population -- famously topping 50% in 2007, presumably never to reverse course -- has also occasioned the growth of books about that urban population. Exhibit 1 was The Endless City, published in 2007 to celebrate and theorize that global tipping point, and now comes its companion doorstop, Living in the Endless City.  Living in the Endless City offers 430 pages of arresting photos, bold graphics, and statistics exploring what it means for humans to live side-by-side by the tens of millions. While its predecessor focused on six cities on four continents, Living in the Endless City mutes its ambition by focusing on only three cities: Mumbai, Sao Paulo, and Istanbul. Why those three, and why so few, is unclear. Among the images of skylines, graffiti, and traffic are essays by urban scholars – Saskia Sassen, Bruce Katz, and Richard Sennett among them -- all trying to explain what this moment means and how humans are going to cope with cities that just won't stop growing.  BOOKS OF CALIFORNIA The Hollywood Sign By Leo Braudy Yale University Press Consider this for a moment: The single most famous landmark in the nation's second-largest city is not a skyscraper, a museum, a seat of government, or even a home. It is a sign. The semiotic implications are, to say the least, probably too much for the typical starlet's mind to grasp. Or even the typical professor, for that matter. Was there ever a more potent symbol of Los Angeles' superficiality?  For all the theorizing we can do about the Hollywood Sign, Leo Braudy's little history of a big sign adds a nice footnote to the saga of glitz that is Hollywood. Braudy acknowledges that "Hollywood" is a place, an industry, and an idea all wrapped into one, and he does a nice job explaining how the sign fits into all three. His account ranges from the early 1900s, when it was a dusty outpost, to the arrival of movie moguls, to the "Hollywoodland" real estate boom, and onward. He chronicles the sign's deterioration in the 1970s and the campaigns to save the sign, when the movie industry has shown rare flashes of civic pride. As it turns out, something two-dimensional can reveal stories that are more than skin-deep. Even in Hollywood.  Cityscapes: San Francisco and its Buildings By John King Heyday Books Cityscapes is the opposite of The Hollywood Sign. In his introduction, longtime San Francisco Chronicle architecture critic John King notes that San Francisco is often considered greater than the sum of its parts, often overshadowing individual architectural works that punctuate its liberal Victorian splendor. Hence, the book's title. King's mission in Cityscapes, though, is to see the trees for the forest, by highlighting 50 structures that he considers quirky, iconic, and uniquely San Francisco. King includes superstars like the Transamerica Pyramid and de Young Museum, but also reserves equal love for BART stations, beaux arts apartment buildings, houseboats, and an odd pile of logs called "The Spire." Pocket-sized, much like San Francisco itself, Cityscapes is a splendid handbook to California's most urbane city.  Julius Shulman Los Angeles: The Birth of a Modern Metropolis Sam Lubell & Douglas Woods, eds. Rizzoli Previously reviewed in CP&DR (see Vol. 26, No. 14, July 2011 ), Julius Schulman Los Angeles assembles a stunning collection by Los Angeles' signature photographer. Though the debate will forever rage about the spiritual, psychic, and even economic benefits of mid-century modern architecture, no one can deny that the severity and straight lines of the rational age look gorgeous through Shulman's lens. The collection reveals, however, that Shulman was not just a fashion photographer. He was not concerned only with Neutras, Eameses, and Lautners sauntering down the runway. Some of the more humdrum selections from his vast archive reveal a deep fascination with the development of Los Angeles and of the relationship between all those space-age buildings and the natural landscape on which they were placed. Come to Los Angeles for the masterpieces, but stay for the tract homes, factories, and sun-bleached schoolyards of Los Angeles in its heyday.  L.A. Day/L.A. Night By Michael Light Radius Books If Julius Shulman captured Los Angeles as a work in progress, then fellow photographer Michael Light has attempted to capture it as a finished product. As his title suggests, Light's monograph of aerial photos comes in two parts: a series of photos of Los Angeles lit by the sun, and a series in which the city fades into points of light against the darkness. So much has been made of the "sunshine and noir" theme over the years that it's hard to read too much into Light's work. Judging by the eastward tilt of the shadows, his daytime photos all appear to have been taken in the late afternoon, when the light gets soft and the horizon turns into a white blur. His subjects are the industrial nervous system of the city: rail yards, warehouse districts, freeway interchanges, and oil refineries. From his helicopter, the Los Angeles River is the city's spine. As for the city at night, it's neat to think that even when streets are reduced to receding pinpoints and buildings become black silhouettes, Los Angeles can still be recognized as no place other than itself. Light's ambitious photos are accompanied by a brilliant essay by L.A. Times book critic Michael Ulin. Of the day, Ulin writes, "this light..sucks the nuance out of everything, rendering the landscape as desiccated, dry" but then realizes that this lifeless image of L.A. is "nothing more than a trick of the light." At night, though, there are no tricks -- and this is where planners should pay attention: "you cannot walk alone at night in Los Angeles...if harm befalls you, you are irrevocably on your own. This doesnot mean that L.A. is an unsafe city, just an honest one."  Los Angeles in Maps By Glen Creason Rizzoli It's pretty safe to say that Los Angeles In Maps is a required part of any L.A. enthusiast's collection. Starting with an 1857 map of the San Gabriel Mission, ending with the L.A. Times' attempt to create a definitive map of every L.A. neighborhood, Los Angeles in Maps presents 70 historical maps with accompanying essays for each. The collection not only offers striking glimpses into Los Angeles' urban development, but also into the history and culture of map-making itself, with everything from spare maps of housing tracts and sewage networks to whimsically illustrated maps of literary landmarks, murals, and "sunshine fruits and flowers." Google Maps may tell you where you are going in Los Angeles, but Los Angeles in Maps tells you where Los Angeles has been.  OTHER 2011 TITLES OF INTEREST:  The Fate of Cities: Urban America and the Federal Government, 1945–2000 By Roger Biles University of Kansas Press The Agile City: Building Well-Being and Wealth in an Era of Climate Change By James S. Russell Island Press Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World By Doug Saunders Pantheon All Over the Map: Writing on Buildings and Cities By Michael Sorkin Verso Press Small, Gritty, and Green The Promise of America's Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World By Catherine Tumber MIT Press

Just in case you thought that suburbanization of the 20th century was a joint venture between God, the invisible hand, and a pot of gold delivered by the Freedom Fairy, Earl Swift's Big Roads might make you think again.  As it turns out, the interstates and other superhighways that gave life to the suburbs were not preordained. They did not design themselves, and they certainly did not build themselves. Swift gives voice to all those lanes of concrete that we take for granted now but were, in their day, one of the most audacious feats of engineering and public finance in human history.  The story of America's highways starts later than that of America's automobiles, and therein lay the challenge for early road-builders. Not long after the turn of the century, auto companies had hit upon the basic formula for the car, and combustible promoters like Carl Fisher -- a former bicycles salesman turned founder of the Indianapolis 500 --  told Americans to buy them. But for every early auto, there were dozens of stories of getting stuck in the mud, spooking horses, or worse. One particularly harrowing off-road journey was attempted by a certain Army lieutenant named Dwight D. Eisenhower, who participated in the first ever cross-country convoy in 1919. Cannonball Run, it was not.  If there's anyone who doesn't like Ike, it's Earl Swift. Though the Interstate Highway System bears Eisenhower's name and is generally credited to him, Swift's account gives credit to the forgotten engineers who envisioned a national road system while Ike was scarcely out of Basic Training. Upon taking office, Eisenhower called for a national highway system and yet, according to Swift, "didn't kow that the executive and legislative branches had already worked out the details of the network he sought." Though his sources are unclear, Swift accounts for this oversight by reporting that "the thirty-fourth president wasn't much of a reader" and hated long briefings. And thus the Interstate Highway System sprung unsullied from the general's imagination.  The real heroes of big roads, if highway-building can be considered heroic, are Thomas MacDonald and his successor Frank Turner, the engineers who led the federal effort at the helm of the Bureau of Public Roads. MacDonald shephered the national highway system from 1919 to 1953--not only fighting for funding and plotting routes but also inventing the system of highway numbering that remains to this day--with Turner taking over thereafter. Both dull and exacting, nearly to the point of parody (MacDonald responded only to the name "Chief," and then with as few words as possible), neither makes a great protagonist for a national epic. These were men who, according to Swift, "assumed...that everything Americans loved or hated about their cities was quantifiable." For better or worse, their work speaks for itself. In the absence of human drama, Swift delves deep into the policies and funding schemes that first led to the system of U.S. "routes"--the first among them being the scattershot Lincoln Highway--and eventually to the cohesive interstate system that was described in the FDR-era manual Toll Roads and Free Roads and ultimately codified in the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act. Swift covers both the national-scale questions of how many transcontinental highways would be built and how much money Washington would contribute, to the local questions and, particularly, those dark instances in which urban highways did as much to segregate cities nationwide as Jim Crow laws ever did. All told, the government committed 750,000 eminent domain takings in the construction of the interstates.  Swift himself takes a neutral position on the aesthetic value of mega-highways, though he does pay significant attention to the well known (and often racially freighted) battles over urban highways in the 1960s. But his main point is, that for better or worse, those roads didn't get there by accident. And, as a result, neither did the houses, families, and suburban angst that followed them.  The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways Earl Swift Houghton Mifflin Harcourt