Another great day at the De Lange Conference. Here were some of the notable quotes and excerpts:

Today 1 in 7 people are living in slums and shanties, and in 20 years it will be 1 in 3. This is the market for housing in the world, and the most important priority for architects, urban planners, and developers to address.

In the time it took the government to do flood elevation analysis on three homes, our group of volunteers had done 3,000 homes.

-Cameron Sinclair, Architecture for Humanity

 

 

If China’s government doesn’t maintain a growth rate of 7% per year, they’re facing a very real threat of uprising from the growing middle-class that demands opportunities for upward mobility.

 

The current models for water supply in Northern China predict that Beijing will completely run out of water within 100 years without some kind of drastic change.

 

The scale and speed or urbanization in China is the equivalent of moving the entire US and Scandinavia from the interior to the coast in the next 40 years.

 

Congestion is the environmental problem. Not because of the emissions of the cars themselves, which technically could be eliminated, or even the manufacturing which is much harder (but theoretically possible) to do cleanly; but because the space requirements for all the cars create an anti-human environment.

- Gary Lawrence, ARUP

 

Development means qualitative increase. Growth means quantitative increase.

 

If we took the land area of Houston (city limits) we could fit about 70 garden cities with walkable centers, linked by transit, and greenbelts surrounding. [Based on Ebeneezer Howard's Garden City concept] It turns out that this would hold a population of about 2 million people, and over 80% of the land area would be greenbelt. That’s basically the same population of Houston’s city limits today, minus the 80% greenspace.

- David Crossley, Houston Tomorrow

 

“Yes! You can change American attitudes and habits, but you need to not rush from non-cooperation to punishment. That is the biggest American mistake, to not appreciate that people are multi-motivated and can be influenced in more ways than by threatening punishment. [In response to question from the audience.]

 

People are more altruistic than you think. They will cooperate (with new ideas and new lifestyles) when things are well explained and when they see true conviction in their leadership.

- Antanas Mokus, Former Mayor of Bogota Columbia

 

The challenge is to create places that people intuitively like.

 

[Quoting William Whyte] It’s hard to create a place that doesn’t attract people, what’s remarkable is how frequently this has been accomplished.

 

We need to rethink streets as places. When you plan for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic. When you plan for people, you get people.

 

Good places build healthy activity. People attract people. Focus on place and you do everything differently.

 

When you go to a good place you see affection. That’s the indicator. And affection is contagious, it spreads, and it’s good for you!

-Fred Kent, President of the Project for Public Spaces

 

I’ll probably have a lot more in-depth on these as we progress through the week. Overall it was another solid day! I’ll end with one bit of conversation that came up at lunch, this was from Guy Hagstette, the President of the Discovery Green Conservancy. He made this observation:

When the public spends billions on a new freeway and it opens and sits mostly empty for most of the day, people say, “That’s great! The city did a great job!”

But when those same people see an empty bus drive past them on the weekend, the cry out, “What a waste of money! We shouldn’t be paying for this!”

This is a brilliant observation. People seem to have no difficulty understanding that there cannot be traffic where there is no road, and that new roads will begin carrying more traffic as new development comes in to take advantage of the infrastructure. The permanence of the investment and comprehensiveness of the road network attracts traffic eventually, but it takes some time. The same is true of transit! Ridership will increase if quality of service and comprehensiveness of the network increases.

I’ll have more coming throughout the week, and if you have comments or observations on the conference or my notes, sound off in the comments!