Urban visions, strategies and priorities

I just returned from a workshop on "The Greening of the City" in Boston. During a breakout session on land use planning I attended participants were asked to to describe "rural" and "urban" - each with just one word. Most used positive words to describe rural (clean, natural, scenic, etc.). With two exceptions the term urban generated negative images (dirty, industrial, polluted, etc.).

Of course, most of us live in cities. Density matters. Planners will be challenged to create sustainable, resource-conserving, healthy, desirable cities . (GW)

West Coast cities vie for savoir-faire

By Andrew S. Ross
SF Gate
November 8, 2009

What do four West Coast cities want to be when they grow up?

"We want to be the most European city, the Copenhagen or Amsterdam of America," said Susan Anderson, Portland, Ore.'s planning and sustainability director, extolling her city's drive to be the most walkable, getting-around-without-a-car place to live.

Anderson and three other planning directors, including San Francisco's John Rahaim, were sharing their "vision, strategies and priorities" at an Urban Land Institute panel last week titled "What Makes a World-Class City: Investment Opportunities for the Future." There was much talk of neighborhood planning, mass transit, open space, sustainable development, infrastructure investment and so forth. And that financing might be a bit of problem.

What I wanted to know was what cities Anderson's fellow panelists most wanted their cities to be like.

-- "Sydney, Australia, comes to mind," said San Diego's planning director, William Anderson. "And maybe Boulder, Colo." Both, he thought, represented what San Diego is looking for. "To be a city that coexists with its native habitat."

-- "We want to be like Portland," said Seattle planning Director Diane Sugimura, with a laugh. Her city is looking to revise its master plan amid a serious development slowdown. "But I also like Barcelona, Havana, Copenhagen, Vancouver and New York. A mix of all of them."

-- "I thought we were the most European city," said Rahaim, sotto voce. His model city: San Francisco, "to be the best that it can be." I waited. "Maybe a combination of Barcelona and Sydney, embracing a celebration of our past while looking to our future."

And, as we know, San Franciscans are as one when it comes to looking to the future.

Urban bigs: Few argue that San Francisco qualifies as a world "destination" of choice. But a power city? Not so much.

According to the 2009 Global Power City Index, unveiled at the ULI conference, San Francisco ranks 26th out of 35 world cities, below Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Boston; Copenhagen; and Amsterdam, to name a few. (links.sfgate.com/ZIPD)

Not that the index, compiled by Japan's Mori Memorial Foundation, an arm of Japan's largest private developer, should be taken entirely seriously. For one thing, San Francisco's 47 square miles and 800,000 population is put alongside megalopolises like New York and London (ranked No. 1 and No. 2) and city states like Singapore (No. 5). Decidedly odd: Mumbai, India, ranks higher than San Francisco in the livability category. Yes, we have quality of life problems, but come on.

Richard Bender, professor emeritus of architecture at UC Berkeley, says he has problems with some of the index's methodology, including the Mumbai ranking. "It's a work in progress," said Bender, who works with the Mori Foundation and advised on the index compilation. But, he said, there are lessons for San Francisco if it aspires to be an urban world power.

"The city needs to get it together regionally. It needs to think of itself as being the center of a metropolitan landscape," he said. Meaning: More attention should be paid to regional coordination of planning and development. "San Francisco is one piece of a larger cloud. The challenge is pulling the pieces together."

Local high achievers: Not that the Bay Area went away from the conference entirely empty-handed.

-- Described as "an extraordinary green-building achievement," the new California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park received a Global Award for Excellence, which recognizes "the world's best cross-regional models in land-use practices."

-- Casa del Maestro, a 70-unit affordable apartment development for teachers of the Santa Clara Unified School District, received the ULI-sponsored Jack Kemp Workforce Housing Models of Excellence Award. The project is the work of Mill Valley residential developer Thompson/Dorfman.

Lawyer alert: "Overcoming recent challenges in face of a difficult economic and regulatory environment" is the subject of a two-day West Coast General Counsel conference at the San Francisco Fairmont Hotel, beginning Wednesday. Gubernatorial candidate-in-waiting Jerry Brown is the keynoter. Legal eagles from Intel, Chevron, Cisco Systems, PG&E and other Bay Area majors are scheduled to be heard from.