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The article by Roberta Brandes Gratz in the New York Review of Books, featuring an image of the Hudson Yards project.
The long-time colleague of Jane Jacobs writes in the New York Review of Books that "This is a New York story only for now" and "Upzonings and transfers of newly created air rights are occurring slowly in cities around the country."
In yet another timely warning to Portland and other cities, Roberta Brandes Gratz, the long-time friend and colleague of activist and urban champion Jane Jacobs, describes the dangers of reckless upzoning and transfer rights:
I weep for my city; it is committing urban suicide. I am a daughter of Gotham, born and bred. My lifelong interest in the vitality of the city included a thirty-year friendship with famed urbanist Jane Jacobs, with whom I, and a small group of activists, founded the Center for the Living City to build on her legacy…
This is a New York story only for now. Upzonings and transfers of newly created air rights are occurring slowly in cities around the country. When it comes to real estate, New York City may lead the way, but others follow in time.
It appears that Portland is already following this path, notably in the adoption of the Better Housing by Design ordinance, which was opposed by Commissioner Amanda Fritz in a stinging critique (covered in the current Northwest Examiner on Page 1).
Gratz points out how progressive goals like sustainability become a mockery under these and similar "deregulatory upzonings:"
In 2018, Chase Bank announced that it would tear down the fifty-two-story, black-and-silver-ribbed, early Modernist tower at 270 Park Avenue in order to build a new tower at least seventy stories high. This will be the tallest-ever demolition of a perfectly viable building in New York City. In 2002, Chase began a total renovation of the building to LEED standard, a green building certification that gave it "platinum" status, a rating that acknowledges the value of preserving the embodied energy of an existing building and avoids energy use for demolition, landfill, and new construction. Landmark skyscrapers across the country—from the Empire State Building, Chicago's Willis Tower (formerly Sears), and San Francisco's Transamerica—have taken this environmentally responsible approach and upgraded their buildings to LEED platinum standard. And in doing so, Chase also benefitted from the five years of federal environmental tax credits that go with that designation. Then threw it all away.
To achieve the extra height and bulk of the new 270 Park, Chase is taking advantage of the "upzoning" of nearby mid-Manhattan that was applied in 2017 to a seventy-three-block area around Grand Central between 39th and 57th Streets. Upzoning's relaxation of city planning regulations expands the development potential of new buildings by allowing increased height and density (the number of units or amount of floor area on a given lot), and simplifying the transfer of "air rights" from landmarked buildings to new sites within the district. (Air rights are the so-called unused development rights that would allow a hypothetical taller building on a particular lot, but they can be transferred by sale from one lot to another, depending on the district's zoning designation.) A portion of any air rights sale does go into a city fund specifically for area subway and pedestrian improvements—but, in this case, that would be for an area already jammed with pedestrians.
Chase was thus able to buy air rights from the landmarked St. Patrick's Cathedral, some six blocks away, and construct a taller, bulkier building. Preservationists have identified at least thirty-three buildings worthy of landmark protection from such redevelopment in this Midtown district, but after fierce resistance from real estate interests, only twelve have been so designated. By no logic—design, environmental, planning, zoning, landfill capacity—does demolition of 270 Park make sense, especially when at least some in the architectural community are trying to advance sustainable design…
Gratz also stresses the importance of a healthy urbanization process, something that Jacobs was careful to articulate:
Writing almost sixty years ago, Jacobs drew a distinction that warned of the difference between gradual evolution that does not disrupt a city and "cataclysmic" change that threatens a city's fabric. The alteration we witness today is cataclysmic. Hudson Yards, the new mega-development on Manhattan's far West Side, is only the most glaring example, but the supertall towers that are spreading like kudzu elsewhere are an increasingly visible disgrace. It is all a reflection of the stranglehold of big real estate interests, with their power to manipulate the zoning code beyond reason. Hudson Yards represents a kind of privately controlled gated community in the sky—definitely a cardinal sin of urbanism—but even more significant, from my perspective, is 270 Park.
Urbanism is the uneven process that creates cities, over time and organically, through a confluence of democratic, economic, and social forces. This is what Jacobs called an "urban ecology." This same process can also rebuild and strengthen even troubled cities today, if given a chance, and if big profit-driven real estate interests are not the overriding force in urban development. But authentic urbanism is a process, not a project subject to a design or plan. The result is a balanced mix of buildings and uses resulting in a built environment at human scale. That is precisely what is being lost today in New York City.
In a description that could apply to other cities (including Portland), Gratz describes a "perversion" of the public process, including the provess of establishing historic landmarks:
The redevelopment of 270 Park Avenue, which has slipped under the radar of public attention, is an alarming precursor of things to come. It is characteristic of the way the city is committing urbanism suicide, a death by a thousand smaller, self-inflicted cuts. And it reflects how real estate owns and controls a city that is supposed to run on democratic principles.
First is an underrecognized perversion of the landmarking process. Originally, landmarked buildings were awarded air rights to compensate for their owners being prevented from tearing them down and rebuilding on the same site. Those air rights, though, could be transferred to a building adjacent or opposite. Air rights from landmarks were never meant to float afar. A major consequence of the upzoning, though, is that air rights have now become transferable to increasingly distant lots…
Gratz spares no criticism of the New York development community and its "strange bedfellows" in the public sector:
There appear to be no limits to what the development community gets away with. They've taken effective control of both the City Planning Commission and the Board of Standards and Appeals (BSA). They have also succeeded in intimidating and taming the Landmarks Preservation Commission, restraining its original mission and turning its system of historic tax credits attached to landmark buildings to new commercial advantage. They are so in control, their machinations are not even hidden…
In another disquieting parallel to Portland and other cities, Gratz points out the egregious fallacy of local claims for building heights as a strategy to promote affordability:
Advocates of upzoning argue that it is needed to allow construction of taller buildings to create new affordable housing units. Real estate interests' upzoning mantra perpetuates a confusion that height creates density. This is a dangerous myth. Along with many American cities after World War II, New York experienced years of demolition and de-densification in the name of "urban renewal." This misguided movement, often acting in the name of "slum clearance," used the concept of "towers in the park" to replace old neighborhoods that had grown up organically around a density of mixed uses—residential, businesses, factories, markets. "Urban renewal" demolished existing communities, never replacing as many housing units as had previously existed.
Gratz calls for a more cautious assessment of the impacts of unchecked upzoning, and the potential for better alternative development in the many empty sites in the city. She closes by calling for a vigorous campaign to that end:
If we continue to allow the erosion of the human-scale city and long-evolved urbanism on which it depends, then I fear for the future. The first thing needed is a public exhibit of the many empty sites across the boroughs of New York, and a representation of what further, unchecked upzoning will it make possible to build in the future. But without a well-organized, well-financed campaign like the effort to save Grand Central, or a singular leader like Jane Jacobs able to take on the powers that be and a press willing to give these battles full coverage, the perilous undermining of authentic urbanism will continue.
The full article is worth a careful read, and available here.
The New Yorker article by Nikil Saval
A recent article on the work of geographer Samuel Stein argues that our housing dilemma derives from an "unholy fusion" of development and politics — "the real estate state" — which exacerbates, rather than solves, our crises of affordability, equity and sustainability.
This blog has frequently pointed out the egregious flaws in the "magical thinking" of some planners and activists — some of whom are friends of mine — who hold that adding housing supply at almost any place, of almost any kind, will somehow lower prices, promote equity, and achieve sustainable urban development. Worse, in the absence of a careful application of evidence-based tools and strategies, grounded in research evidence, we have argued that this deluded thinking will promote gentrification, degrade urban livability, and in the end, serve only the unaccountable interests of the real estate development, planning and design industry.
(Full disclosure, I am a member of this industry, but one who is, I hope, willing to entertain well-argued self-critical evidence — given the stakes when we get it wrong.)
Now, a thoughtful piece in the New Yorker dissects the flaws in this "magical thinking," and it's worth a careful read — and it offers a cautionary lesson for Portland and Oregon politicians, planners and activists. A few excerpts:
In 2018, Scott Wiener, a California state senator representing San Francisco, introduced a co-authored bill that detonated a debate over housing. The aim of Senate Bill 827 was to override local regulations on building height in order to allow denser, high-rise construction near transit hubs. At once radical and simple, its target was nothing more, and nothing less, than zoning—the most common American way to control land use. Zoning determines whether a building is commercial or residential, how big it can get, whether it's a single-family home or a high-rise tower.
[NOTE: The author fails here to make a crucial distinction between two very different kinds of zoning regulation, namely regulating use, and regulating form. The former is a culprit in any number of 20th Century fiascoes, including racially and culturally motivated exclusions. The latter is a more recent and very different kind of reform tool, much more neutral on use, by whom, when, and so on, and much more suited to produce coherent, walkable urbanism at any scale. The idea was prefigured by Jane Jacobs in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. But to continue from the New Yorker article…]
S.B. 827 elicited heated arguments, along with a few bizarre political coalitions. In supporting the bill, housing advocates found themselves allied with wealthy developers. Meanwhile, in opposing it, anti-gentrification activists found themselves allied with rich homeowners from places like Beverly Hills….despite late-breaking attempts to include anti-displacement measures, the bill failed to make it out of committee, losing 6–4. Of the votes in its favor, only two were from Democrats, Wiener and his co-author—further proof that the housing debate involves some strange bedfellows.
S.B. 827 nonetheless has spurred a more substantial conversation about zoning reform, of all things, than any urbanist could have predicted. Unfortunately, much of this conversation has taken place online, meaning that it's resembled people screaming past one another and then shrinking into two opposing crags of congealed vitriol. On one side are the YIMBYs—the acronym stands for "Yes, in my back yard"—who believe that prices are too high because of market distortions that limit the amount of housing people actually want and need. For them, the solution is to increase market-rate housing, which, over time, will result in a reduction in prices and rents. Opponents of YIMBYs—often called "NIMBYs," meaning "Not in my back yard" (as a term of opprobrium, it of course predates YIMBY)—have a variety of rejoinders to this argument, but they center on the idea that building market-rate housing will never deliver the amount of housing that people need, at prices they can afford. Furthermore, they argue that the immediate effect of introducing such housing is gentrification and displacement. It is at this point that the argument devolves into accusations that the YIMBYs are tools of rich, white real-estate developers, and that the NIMBYs are tools of rich, white homeowners, and the space in between these two positions is quickly converted into a muddy field, where no one dares show a white flag.
The particular airlessness of this debate is only partly due to its growth in the complexity-free vacuum of the Internet. The more significant constriction is that it is an argument that takes place almost entirely according to the terms of real-estate development. In a recent book, "Capital City," the geographer Samuel Stein puts this debate into context, and adds to it. He argues that our housing dilemma derives from an unholy fusion of development and politics, which he calls "the real estate state." Stein, a geographer at the City University of New York, tries to establish how industrial cities, in becoming postindustrial, opened the way for real estate to enter the breach. "Landowners have been determining the shape of cities for centuries, and the idea of housing as a commodity—even as a financial asset—is not exactly state of the art," Stein writes. "What is relatively new, however, is the outsized power of real estate interests within the capitalist state." Deriving his insights from left-wing geographers and urban historians, and also from interviews with activists in New York City, he alternates a panoptic view with one that looks more closely, from the ground up, at what reckless development does to lives and livelihoods.
But Stein's special aim is not just to show how real estate controls everything, which, if you were halfway paying attention during the financial crisis—rooted as it was in the predations of housing markets—you already know. His principal point is that the power of the real-estate state flows from the dynamic between development and the profession of city planning. Planners are usually thought of as bureaucrats, though sometimes they take on the aspect of legend: Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who tamed rebellious Paris into wide avenues that couldn't be barricaded; imperious Robert Moses, who pummelled New York with expressways. Stein's planners are at once lesser and greater than these. Though they may look like mousy cubicle denizens—determining the right sort of window treatment for a historic house, or calculating the Area Median Income for a smattering of affordable units in a luxury building—they're more influential than they appear. Planners, he writes, "are tasked with the contradictory goals of inflating real estate values while safeguarding residents' best interests." The position is an inherently uncomfortable one. But planning holds out the promise that the future is, at least in part, knowable. Explicit in Stein's narrative is the idea that a different, more democratic kind of planning might lead us to more democratic kinds of cities…
…Developers need planners, but a conflict arises when the former look to the latter for interventions in public space. "They demand that the state build the infrastructure that makes their land usable," Stein writes of developers. At the same time, they are "fiercely protective of their property rights" and suspicious of planning insofar as it threatens their control over land. Planners, in turn, are agents of the public, but they are beholden to developers, in practice. Democratic societies require at least a display of public input, but often only a display: "planners must proceed with enough openness and transparency to maintain public legitimacy, while ensuring that capital retains ultimate control over the processes' parameters." From this comes the charade of public-comment sessions, familiar to most active city dwellers, in which so-called stakeholders are invited to discuss development plans, whose basic outlines they have little chance of influencing.
Similarly, planners who want to assert broad control over the public realm are often dependent on recalcitrant businessmen, who are unlikely to give them the full measure of what they might want to achieve, since planning often involves the creation of public infrastructure that requires business to get out of the way. Much of what does get achieved requires catastrophic, violent interventions in the lives of the very people that planners are trying to help. The land for Central Park, the "green lung" of New York and one of the greatest parks in the world, was secured by expelling Manhattan's largest African-American settlement. The construction of most public housing required the resettlement of thousands of households, often those of working class African-Americans, in the destructive process known as urban renewal. (Urban renewal, James Baldwin said, in an interview, really "means Negro removal.")
…This history sets up Stein's main story, which is about the contemporary high-priced city of gentrification and displacement. Mercifully, his analysis does not mention hipsters, artisanal stationery stores, or CBD lattes. Instead, he discusses how planners have once again played a central role in scaling up gentrification "from a neighborhood phenomenon of renovation and reinvention to a larger process of displacement, demolition and development." A miasma of guilt and misunderstanding surrounds discussions of gentrification. The usual story—of upwardly mobile people moving into depressed areas and displacing existing, less well-off residents in the process—is at least partly true. But, as geographers have pointed out for some time, it also requires disinvestment: neighborhoods decline, in part, because of state neglect, and yuppies rush in where planners fear to tread. This is how the familiar story of places such as SoHo, in lower Manhattan, and Park Slope, in Brooklyn, begins. Those neighborhoods were abandoned by the government before they were occupied by new residents.
Similarly, the past three decades have been characterized by hyper-gentrification, which is a largely legislative phenomenon, the work of planners and policymakers—not simply an ineluctable market signal that is sent when someone opens a vegan doughnut shop. Stein details the number of planning-policy innovations that have made it easier for developers and large nonprofits to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes. In 1971, the establishment of New York's 421-a tax program gave developers abatements on luxury construction, for anywhere from ten to twenty-five years. (One of the great beneficiaries of 421-a, Stein notes, was Donald Trump, who built Trump Plaza, on the Upper East Side with a thirteen-million-dollar tax break.) In 2016, when the program was set to expire, 421-a cost New York $1.2 billion a year. A recent revision to the law, under Governor Andrew Cuomo, brought the cost to $2.4 billion a year. That's about six hundred million less than the M.T.A. requested from the state to fix the ailing subway system. These are the sorts of numbers that reveal how the real-estate state declares its priorities. As legislators made developers' lives easier, planners became the helpless accomplices of urban inequality.
Jane Jacobs's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," an indictment of American city planning, appeared in 1961; Robert A. Caro's "The Power Broker," an indictment of an American city planner, appeared in 1974. In the years between their publication—and partly owing to their arguments—planning lost whatever was left of its swashbuckling air, and was increasingly seen as a clumsy, illegitimate, even villainous profession, its members casually carving their utopian visions into the fabric of complex, heterogeneous cities.
When planning lost its revolutionary élan, it also lost its sense of ambition. Many mid-century planners, for all their missteps, tried to engineer a more equal city. As planning lost its power, an impressive variety of inequities crept into policymaking.
…According to ultra-YIMBY reasoning, the addition of [high-priced] apartments might not be a problem, since housing markets are, like other markets, subject to supply and demand. But, as the author Rick Jacobus recently argued in the magazine Shelterforce, the housing market is segmented, better understood "as a set of interrelated submarkets that can move somewhat independently than as a single market." For example, rent for student housing may roughly follow the laws of supply and demand, but, in general, its cost isn't eased by building a lot of housing—what matters is the supply of student housing and the demand from students. By the same token, upzoning that allows for more affordable housing to be built has effects on existing affordable housing. "When planners upzone neighborhoods to allow bigger buildings, rent-stabilized landlords will have every reason to sell their properties to speculative developers, who could then knock down the existing properties and build something bigger and more expensive," Stein writes. The long-term effect of a housing boom may be a housing bust—but, in the meantime, all sorts of pain may be inflicted on existing residents.
There are other reasons to be cautious. Historically, attempts to remedy segregation through the real-estate market have often ended up increasing it. In a groundbreaking new book, Race for Profit, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor of African-American studies at Princeton, shows how the post-urban renewal-planning regime came to rely heavily on the real-estate industry. New forms of subsidized loans were, in her phrasing, a form of "predatory inclusion," trapping black homeowners in substandard housing, while developers continued to reap dividends. Her analysis covers a specific period in time, and a particular kind of housing market, but its conclusion is general and damning: the American real-estate market was founded on racism and still depends on it. White NIBYs have kept multifamily buildings out of wealthier neighborhoods, in no small part to keep those neighborhoods racially homogeneous, and it is doubtful that real-estate developers can solve this historic inequity.
Though Stein supports efforts that would increase housing construction in wealthy areas, he is clear that these policies need to be part of a broader program. In a recent article for Jacobin, he argues that there is a general "overreliance on zoning," which is, in any case, "a tool ill-equipped to confront the private land and property markets." The solution, therefore, "is… the decommodification of land and housing." In other words, having a market for housing is itself the problem. And a return to large-scale planning is the answer.
…Decades of a housing crisis, accompanied by decades of organizing and activism, have finally led to revaluations of public housing and regional planning. A policy team led by the tenants'-rights activist Tara Raghuveer recently produced a proposal for a "Homes Guarantee"—a marquee plan that proposes the construction of twelve million new, permanently affordable homes as "social housing." Meanwhile, the law professor Mehrsa Baradaran… has called for a twenty-first-century Homestead Act, under which a public trust would be tasked with purchasing distressed or abandoned homes in historically redlined areas—a form of direct capital investment with the aim of remedying the racial wealth gap. Both are serious proposals that have the potential to shift power away from developers and toward the people historically excluded from the housing market. To be achieved, both need the backing of enormous social movements. They could also resurrect large-scale planning, conceived on a freshly democratic basis, as a profession of consequence. The planner, after decades of irrelevance, or worse, might yet be a figure of note—and perhaps, in a time of crisis, one of purpose.
Maintaining quality of life in spite of population growth
This blog has long argued that we have much to learn about livability from other cities. Indeed, that was the philosophy of blog co-founder Suzanne Lennard, who founded the International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference series with her husband Henry in 1985, and ran the conferences partly from Portland. She felt that Portland had many lessons to share with (and to learn from) other cities like Vienna. In fact, the conference series alternated between locales in the US and European cities including Vienna.
As a recent article in CityLab recounts, Vienna has taken steps to counter the myriad destructive impacts of real estate dynamics and global capital flows, which Portland has seemed so unable to comprehend, let alone counter. Indeed, a simplistic "build baby build" mentality has prevailed in Portland. Some seem to believe in the silver-bullet strategy of deregulation and upzoning, and all will be well. As we have argued, this approach does little to address the challenges, and in some case actually makes them worse. As an economic geographer from the London School of Economics put it (quoted in our last blog post):
"Upzoning is far from the progressive policy tool it has been sold to be. It mainly leads to building high-end housing in desirable locations…. Housing is an area where the law of unintended consequences is most powerful. The idea that upzoning will cause housing affordability to trickle down within our metropolis, while also setting up Los Angeles and San Francisco as the new golden land for people in less prosperous regions, is just a lot to promise—and it's based on a narrative of housing as opportunity that is deeply flawed."
Clearly Vienna has been more circumspect — with much better results to date. The city maintains a strong supply of affordable housing distributed across the metropolitan area, not jammed into tall buildings in the core. Much of it is "social housing" — housing created not as a speculative commodity but as a human right, with a variety of tools and funding mechanisms. `And all of it is created as part of the seamless creation of livable neighborhoods that are healthy for all, especially children and families.
As Maria Vassilakou, the city's former deputy mayor, put it in the CityLab article:
"A livable city is a city where people live because they want to, not because they have to… A city that is good for children is good for everybody."
The City has maintained this livability, not by stiff-arming or demonizing residents, but by engaging them in a "win-win" civic planning process. Where other cities (like Portland) have sought to marginalize existing grass-roots resident groups, Vienna has empowered them. The City has supported and even strengthened bottom-up, neighborhood-level actions to improve livability, rather than imposing simplistic solutions top-down — whether through a city planning regime, a powerful real estate development entity, or a lobbying group of self-interested professionals (the combination of which we have referred to as an unhelpful "architectural-industrial complex").
In Vienna, one way that happens is with a community grant scheme that bestows hundreds of modest €4,000 grants for small neighborhood-level public-space improvement projects. "Once one of these initiatives gets implemented, it changes the perspective of the whole neighborhood," Vassilakou said. "I think this works because this is not top-down. It's the bottom-up kind of inspiration that can change the city."
Read the full article here: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/10/most-livable-cities-vienna-social-housing-transit-mobility/600922/
New research suggests that cities, like brains, are immense networks of connective patterns built up over time. Understanding this evolving structure will help us to formulate better urban policies and practices, in Portland and elsewhere.
Few developments in the sciences have had the impact of the revolutionary discoveries in genetics, and in particular, what is called the "genome" – the totality of the complex pattern of genetic information that produces the proteins and other structures of life. By getting a clearer picture of the workings of this evolving, generative structure, we gain dramatic new insights on disease processes, on cellular mechanisms, and on the ultimate wonders of life itself. In a similar way, geneticists now speak of the "proteome" – the no less complex structure of proteins and their workings that generate tissues, organs, signaling molecules, and other element of complex living processes.
An important characteristic of both the genome and the proteome is that they work as totalities, with any one part potentially interacting with any other. In that sense, they are immense interactive networks, with the pattern of connections shaping the interactions, and in turn being shaped by them. Proteins produce other proteins; genes switch on other genes. In this way, the structure of our bodies evolves and adapts to new conditions – new infections, new stresses, new environments.
It turns out that something very similar goes on in the brain. We are born with a vastly complex pattern of connections between our neurons, and these go on to change after birth as we experience new environments and learn new skills and concepts. Once again, the totality of the pattern is what matters, and the ways that different parts of the brain get connected (or disconnected) to form new patterns, new ideas and pictures of the world.
Following the naming precedent in genetics, this structure is now being called the neural "connectome" (because it's a structure that's similar to "genome") and the race is on to map this structure and its most important features. (Much of this work is being advanced by the NIH's Human Connectome Project.)
What do these insights have to do with cities? As Steven Johnson noted in his book Emergence, there is more in common between the two structures than might appear. There is good reason to think that, as with brains, a lot of what happens in cities has more to do with the overall pattern of connections, and less to do with particular elements.
As Jane Jacobs pointed out over half a century ago, the city is a kind of "intricate ballet" of people interacting, going about their plans, and shaping the life of the city, from the smallest scales to the largest. This intricate pattern is complex, but it's far from random. As Jacobs argued, it exhibits a high degree of order — what she called "organized complexity."
And it's physical, starting at the scale of the sidewalk, and encompassing all the other movements and connections of urban activity. "Sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow," she wrote. We may also be plugged in electronically by telephone and now Internet, but (as research by Robert Putnam and others is showing) the root of the system is the physical proximity with the people we know and work with.
More than that, this pattern of connections generates remarkable efficiencies, forming a kind of "network metabolism." Jacobs has since become famous for observing highly local "knowledge spillovers," casual transfers of knowledge about a job or a new tool or idea, that help to grow new enterprises and new economic activities. Her insight, now called a "Jacobs externality" by economists in her honor, helps to explain how a city generates wealth. As we have written before, this phenomenon might well help to explain why cities are so efficient with resources per person, relative to other places.
In the same vein, the brain scientists offer some other important insights. For one thing, more important than the density per se (of neurons, or of people) are the patterns of connections. So we have to be able to ensure that many "neural pathways" can form and re-form – in the case of a person's brain, that the person is healthy and well-nourished enough to remember, and learn. In the case of cities, we have to ensure that we have well-connected, walkable cities, facilitating many cross-connections.
The brain scientists even believe now that this pattern of neural cross-connection is key to the formation of consciousness. In effect, the different parts of the brain join up into a larger system, and the result is that the system self-organizes into a state that is smarter and more aware. When a brain sleeps, this larger pattern seems to dissolve into fleeting sub-patterns – and we experience the loss of consciousness, and sometimes, dreaming.
Something similar might be going on with well-connected cities: they can self-organize to become "smarter" in their ability to generate great urban vitality with fewer resources. But this is true only if their "neurons" (the people) are able to be connected, especially physically connected, in this way.
Similarly, a city can "lose consciousness" by becoming too fragmented and too sprawling. Automobiles and other machinery can help to connect the parts of the city, but only in a very limited and encapsulated way. By contrast, a walkable public realm has vastly more capacity to form and re-form connections between people, allowing a dynamic pattern of interaction to form and sustain across the city's urban fabric.
This lesson of self-organization carries an important implication for planners and urban designers. It suggests we need to focus less on the specific elements in relation to one another – and how we might imagine they are best placed – and focus more on how we can help them to self-organize into more complex (and more efficient) patterns.
On the other hand, human brains do not start from scratch as we once thought, nor do societies – we all have patterns that we learn and apply to new situations. So too, cities have patterns that facilitate this network structure. Like a good memory or innate knowledge, the best walkable cities of history offer us many good reusable patterns to create vibrant, walkable, resource-efficient cities.
A corollary is that in our automobile-connected suburbs, it seems we have been replicating this pattern of connections – but only with heavy and unsustainable inputs of resources. Furthermore, as noted before, the structure of encapsulated cars, and existing networks of people we already know, are no match for the open-ended nature of public space networks, and their capacity to exploit "propinquity and serendipity" – the accidental connections with people we don't already know, where, as research shows, the new knowledge and innovations form. If we want more resource-efficient cities – and more creative and resilient economies – then it seems we will have to look much harder at this dynamic, and ways to exploit it to our advantage.
How can we do this, concretely? The brain scientists are working hard to map the connective patterns of particular brains, to get some idea of how the patterns tend to form characteristically within the "human connectome." For cities, it seems we might do something equally useful: map the characteristic urban patterns that have proven most conducive to this connected vitality, and that also do not interfere with – or better yet that promote – the capacity for urban self-organization.
In a sense, we already do this when we speak of design types, or planning models. But this work is usually very constrained by parochial debates within the architecture and urban design disciplines over "progressivism" versus "historicism." The result is that there has been a stagnation of real progress in this area. At worst, we have slipped into what Jacobs called a "neurosis" of "imitating empiric failure, and ignoring empiric success."
By contrast, the brain scientists point to another, less ideologically constrained path. It seems we might have much to learn from a more open, aggressive mapping and re-applying the genetic patterns of such an "urban connectome," looking at the most effective patterns from a range of cities around the world – and over centuries of evolution.
"Upzoning is far from the progressive policy tool it has been sold to be. It mainly leads to building high-end housing in desirable locations."
As this blog has long argued, the challenges of affordability, equity and sustainability are complex, and require a comprehensive approach, including economic tools, "polycentric" regional planning, and other strategic interventions. These challenges are not likely to be addressed with simplistic "silver bullets." Case in point: the idea that just building more supply (especially in the cores) will automatically result in lower prices, more opportunities for formerly excluded populations, or more sustainable urban types. (What some have called a "build baby build" approach.)
In recent research discussed on the CityLab blog, LSE economists Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Michael Storper found that "Upzoning expensive cities is no match for the deep divides within—and especially between—cities, and is wholly insufficient to remedy them."
The research by LSE is hardly the first to point out this problem with "build baby build". As the CityLab article points out, "Economist Tyler Cowen agrees that the ultimate beneficiaries from zoning and building deregulation are landlords and developers. As he puts it, "the gains from removing taxes/restrictions on building largely will be captured by landowners … More stuff will be built, urban output will expand, land still will be the scarce factor, and by the end of the process rents still will be high."And a recent study by Yonah Freemark found that upzoning in Chicago led to higher, not lower, housing prices, while having no discernible impact on local housing supply."
The author of the CityLab article, Richard Florida, expressed dismay at the barrage of derogatory criticism that he and the LSE economists received from defenders of the "build baby build" approach. "That makes little sense," said Florida. "The paper is an important cautionary tale. The authors are not saying that we should not build more housing. They are simply saying that doing so won't magically solve economic and spatial inequality, because both are deeply rooted in the very nature of the geographically clustered and concentrated knowledge economy."
But perhaps the effects of financial and other self-interests are far more seductive than the calm and reasoned approaches that are called for. Perhaps the lesson here is the one famously offered by Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Excerpts from the CityLab article are below, and the entire article can be read here.
A new paper by two leading economic geographers suggests this argument is simply too good to be true. Titled "Housing, Urban Growth and Inequalities" and forthcoming in the journal Urban Studies, it's written by Andrés Rodríguez-Pose of the London School of Economics (LSE) and Michael Storper, who divides his time among the LSE, UCLA, and Sciences Po in Paris. According to Storper and Rodríguez-Pose, the notion that an insufficient supply of housing is a main cause of urban economic problems is based on a number of faulty premises. They say the effect of supply has been blown far out of proportion.
They agree that housing is part of the problem: "Housing market failures can imperil local economic growth and generate problems such as segregation, long commute times, deteriorating quality of life, homelessness, and barriers to social mobility for certain populations," they write. But housing policy, and zoning restrictions in particular, are certainly not the be-all and end-all of urban problems. Upzoning expensive cities is no match for the deep divides within—and especially between—cities, and is wholly insufficient to remedy them.
"Housing is an area where the law of unintended consequences is most powerful," Storper recently told Planning Report. "The idea that upzoning will cause housing affordability to trickle down within our metropolis, while also setting up Los Angeles and San Francisco as the new golden land for people in less prosperous regions, is just a lot to promise—and it's based on a narrative of housing as opportunity that is deeply flawed." And as Rodríguez-Pose told me via email: "Upzoning is far from the progressive policy tool it has been sold to be. It mainly leads to building high-end housing in desirable locations."
Rodríguez-Pose and Storper question several pieces of evidence that stand at the heart of this market-urbanist view, a perspective they dub "housing as opportunity." Whereas some urban economists suggest a close relationship between housing supply and prices (with places that add supply having lower prices), Rodríguez-Pose and Storper find the relationship to be weak.
Likewise, some market urbanists point to an association between city population size and/or density and economic growth. But Rodríguez-Pose and Storper argue that this too falls away under close scrutiny—the link between city population in 2000 and subsequent economic growth from 2000 to 2016 is weak to "non-existent," on their analysis.For Storper and Rodríguez-Pose, the rising spatial inequality between cities and metro areas stems from different kinds of economies that distinguish different kinds of cities, not from differences in housing costs. Or as they put it, "the basic motors of all these features of the economy are the current geography of employment, wages and skills."
The economies and talent bases of cities have diverged over time. Expensive cities have much larger clusters of leading-edge tech and knowledge industries and of highly educated, skilled talent. It's this, rather than differences in housing prices, that is behind growing spatial inequality.
"The affordability crisis within major urban areas is real," they write, "but it is due less to over-regulation of housing markets than to the underlying wage and income inequalities, and a sharp increase in the value of central locations within metro areas, as employment and amenities concentrate in these places."
A key factor here is the growing divide between highly-paid techies and knowledge workers and much lower-paid people who work in routine service jobs. These service workers end up getting the short end of the stick, spending much more of their income on housing in expensive cities. "Under these circumstances moving to big cities provides no immediate benefits for workers without college education," Rodríguez-Pose and Storper write.
Upzoning does little to change this fundamental imbalance. Because land in superstar cities and tech hubs is so expensive to begin with, upzoning tends to create even more expensive condominium towers. "While building more affordable housing in core agglomerations would accommodate more people," the authors note, "the collapse of the urban wage premium for less-educated workers means that the extra housing would mostly attract additional skilled workers."
Solving the economic and geographic divisions of America and other advanced countries is a task that goes far beyond local housing policy.
Opportunities for improved wages in core areas have stagnated, and the "ladder has shrunk." Therefore, the decline in interregional migration can be attributed to many factors, including the new geography of skills and wages. But housing restrictions in prosperous areas wouldn't top the list. And upzoning ends up fueling, not relieving, economic and spatial inequality. As Rodríguez-Pose told me: "Income inequality is greater within our cities than across our regions. Upzoning will only exacerbate this."
"Planning deregulation and housing costs are neither going to solve the problem of areas lagging behind, nor are they likely to have an impact on the economic development of dynamic cities," Rodríguez-Pose and Storper write. Worse, they caution, "an excessive focus on these issues at the expense of serious and sustainable development strategies, can fuel economic, social and political distress and anger in declining and lagging areas that can threaten the very foundations on which economic activity, both in less developed and more prosperous areas, has been erected in recent decades."
This last point deserves special consideration. By focusing on a kind of "voodoo urbanism" approach — by concentrating too much on the urban cores, including new building there, and hoping the benefits will trickle down to everyone else — we are not only not improving the affordability and equity issues, we are actually fueling a spiraling dynamic of "left-behind places." These include the suburbs, and also, importantly, the smaller towns and rural areas where much of the so-called "populist revolt" is occurring (in both the US and other countries). Rodríguez-Pose in particular has argued for a more evenly distributed, "polycentric" approach to economic and human development, within city regions as well as national regions.
For Portland, this would suggest de-emphasizing the "build baby build" approach, and the "shove density down their throats" approach — which are both likely to fail, and to produce unhelpful political backlash — and instead, focusing on a more even-tempered and polycentric approach to development across the region — exactly as was advocated in the Metro "Centers and Corridors" report, fulfilling the Metro 2040 plan's vision of a polycentric network of walkable, compact, transit-served places across the region. It would also suggest the kind of "Goldilocks" or "QUIMBY" approach we have advocated before on this blog.
Suzanne Lennard's legacy, and the "International Making Cities Livable" conferences, will continue
Home page for the conference website to be held in Carmel, Indiana in June 2020.
Friends and colleagues of Suzanne Lennard, director of the acclaimed conference series International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) based in Portland, are celebrating her life and legacy following her death last month. (Suzanne was also co-author of this blog.)
Before she died, Suzanne made plans for the 2020 conference to be held in Carmel, Indiana. That conference will continue, and will include a celebration of her life and legacy. In fact, it will be an occasion to celebrate the new "Suzanne C. and Henry L. Lennard Institute for Livable Cities," which will continue to operate the conferences. This author (Michael Mehaffy) will serve as the new director, at Suzanne's request before her passing.
Suzanne's lifelong passion was to promote livable, equitable and sustainable cities and towns for ALL, and to share the lessons of what works and doesn't work in reaching that goal. One of the biggest obstacles is the phenomenon of sprawl — the growth of fragmented, segregated, car-dependent suburbs that work passably well for the wealthy, but much less effectively for the poor, for the elderly, for the infirm, for migrants, for caregivers and stay-at-home parents — in short, for far too many people. Thats why the theme of the 2020 conference will be "From Sprawl to Neighborhoods: Livable Cities (and Suburbs) For ALL."
As a venue for this topic, the conference will be located in the ideal town of Carmel, Indiana, which, as the conference website says, offers
…a fascinating case study of a remarkable transformation from a sprawling bedroom suburb of Indianapolis into a thriving, livable community. We'll share concrete examples of what has worked in this and other suburbs, where such a high percentage of the population now lives – either by choice, or too often because they have been unwillingly displaced from gentrifying city cores. We'll examine tools and strategies that are effective in building a new generation of walkable, equitable, livable cities – AND suburbs – for all.
This and other examples remind us that most people in the United States live in suburbs, as do increasing numbers of people in other countries. It is not enough to densify the cores of cities – which often causes profound rebound effects, as we have discussed before – but it is necessary to create many good places to live, within so-called "polycentric" regions, consisting of a range of neighborhood types and densities. (The Portland region is supposed to be planned that way as well – a point that many people seem to forget.)
As Jane Jacobs reminded us, diversity is an essential attribute of great cities — and geographic diversity must be part of the mix.
Remembering Suzanne Crowhurst Lennard
It is with great sadness that I report the passing of our dear friend and collaborator Suzanne Crowhurst Lennard, at 3:15 AM on September 17, after a relatively short illness. The cause of livable and humane cities has lost a champion — but her work and legacy will go on, including the International Making Cities Livable conference series begun by her with her late husband Henry Lennard. The next conference will be in Carmel, Indiana June 2-6, 2020. (Dr. Crowhurst Lennard was also co-editor of this blog.)
Dr. Crowhurst Lennard and her husband co-founded the International Making Cities Livable conferences in 1985. Since that time, she directed the organization of these conferences that have been acclaimed as "…the best conference on cities" (Mayor Joseph P. Riley), and "the most important continuous conference dialogue on making the world's cities and towns more livable for all of their inhabitants" (Governor Dr. Sven von Ungern-Sternberg).
Since 1985 Dr. Crowhurst Lennard was dedicated to fostering this international interdisciplinary dialogue among outstanding international practitioners, scholars and city officials on strategies and tools for increasing the livability of our cities. The IMCL Conferences have drawn architects, urban designers, planners, city officials, public health scientists, social scientists, artists, urban geographers, transportation planners and community representatives to share expertise and experience on such issues as "Reviving the Heart of the City", "Planning Healthy Communities for All", "Creating Community through Urban Design", "Reshaping Suburbia into Healthy Communities", and, for the Carmel conference next year, "From Suburb to City: A Livable City for ALL."
Much of her work focused on the design and functioning of public urban places. The purpose of this work was to understand how public places (particularly urban squares, plazas and market places) can generate social life, community and participatory self-government, and contribute to social equity and health. This work combined the study of social interaction patterns, history of the square and of democracy, building use analysis, effects of the architectural frame, influence of the surrounding built urban fabric, transportation planning, streetscape and seating design, influence of public art, and management issues such as scheduled weekly events (farmers markets), street entertainment and community festivals in the space.
Dr. Crowhurst Lennard's work concerned the social, cultural and psychological aspects of architecture, urban design and city-making, clarifying how the built environment affects social interaction, health and quality of everyday life. Her studies encompassed making cities "livable" for children, youth and the elderly; relationship between physical health, social health and the built environment; walkability, bikeability and transit; small footprint mixed use urban fabric as essential for a livable city; the mixed use square as the "heart" of the city; the DNA of the city; city identity through regional architecture; balanced transportation planning to enhance health, social life and community.
Through intensive case studies of numerous European cities that since the 1970s have been implementing innovative approaches to land use planning, transportation planning, housing, architecture, urban space design and sustainability, she identified strategies and successful solutions that contributed most to creating livable cities.
Dr. Crowhurst Lennard co-authored the following books that summarize this work: Genius of the European Square (2008); The Forgotten Child (2000); Livable Cities Observed (1994); Livable Cities, People and Places (1987); and co-edited The Wisdom of Cities (2005); and Making Cities Livable (1997). She also published numerous articles in professional journals, including Planning, Urban Land, The Mayor, Western City, Environment & Behavior and other journals for professionals and city officials.
Dr. Crowhurst Lennard received her professional degree in architecture, B.Arch.(Hons.) from Bristol University, England (1968); and an M.Arch. and Ph.D.(Arch.) in "Human Aspects of Architecture and Urban Design" from the University of California, Berkeley (1974). She later held professorships and other academic positions at the University of California, Berkeley; Oxford Brookes University; Harvard University (Summer School); and the Universities of Ulm, Germany and Venice, Italy.
Betraying our city's legacy of public involvement, and our values in grass-roots democracy
A Portland City Council meeting from September 2018.
Those of us who work professionally in public involvement (including this author) know that people can be a real pain in the rear. They can be selfish, short-sighted, unreasonable, even hostile. We can react to them in one of two ways. We can stiff-arm them, marginalize them, attack them for their behavior, and replace them with more pliant tokens of representation.
Or we can treat them as fellow citizens.
For that is what they are – citizens, with democratic rights to participate in the shaping of their public realm, their neighborhood, and their city.
We can remind them civilly too of their responsibilities, to engage pro-actively and not just reactively, to consider other points of view, and to participate in a constructive conversation and a civic process. We can also do our own level best to maintain such a process, and engage them in it. We might all then learn something from one another, and accomplish something together. That would be democracy at its best.
But democracy at its worst is still democracy – still "the worst form of government, except for all the others."
Disturbingly, some people in Portland have made it pretty clear recently that they don't have much stomach for democracy. They'd rather impose their own ideas about social justice and how to achieve it, for example. Their methods include shouting down their opponents, bullying, threatening and suing. They seem only too happy to become little dictators of their own opinions, and to hell with the rights of other citizens in this city – others who might happen to disagree with them.
Incredibly, some of these people are in government – and today they are engaged in the systematic dismantling of Portland's vaunted public involvement system, based in neighborhood-scale, grass-roots democracy.
Take Jamey Duhamel, policy director for Commissioner Chloe Eudaly. After recent citizen testimony by members of southwest neighborhood associations who were upset about the City's unilateral change of their addresses, she expressed her true attitude to public involvement in text messages obtained by The Oregonian newspaper.
It is especially notable that Eudaly is the commissioner in charge of the City's public involvement system, and her office has long denied that it is hostile to neighborhood associations. But Duhamel's emails reveal a different story.
"Why is this taking so long, ffs? Like WE GET IT ALREADY!! Who are they trying to convince?" she texted to Mustafa Washington, Mayor Ted Wheeler's operations manager.
"How you like that 'high income, high caliber' bullshit. This is why we need our neighborhood associations in their place. They get too much power and voice….they are white and 'high caliber' soooooooo … any inconvenience is a big deal to their cozy lives. HOW DARE WE STRESS THEM OUT!!!… So. Much. Privilege."
But is it privilege for citizens to complain to government about unilateral actions that affect those citizens' lives? Or is it the responsibility of government to listen to citizens, whatever their backgrounds or identities (certainly non-white but also white), and try to involve them respectfully in decision-making? The City of Portland claims that is the case – but its actions here and elsewhere betray those claims.
It is a common narrative that neighborhood association members are white, wealthy, exclusionary, even oppressors of minority voices. It is a broad brush and often flat out untrue. Worse, it is a pretense to deny an entire class of citizens their democratic rights – no less offensive than denials to other classes of citizens, in a democratic society in which all are supposed to be equal under the law. Injustice spread around is not justice.
Let's be more specific. This narrative is also too often a mere cover story, providing the convenient pretext by which to bully citizens into submission in order to get pet projects through city approvals. This is straight out of Donald Trump's playbook, formerly as a developer, and now, as president: attack, insult, divide. Launch Twitter tirades. Harass, bully, and file lawsuits.
It is not a coincidence – though it is certainly an irony – that one of Donald Trump's biggest supporters in the Northwest is allied with some of these same aggressors, these same promoters of pet projects. This Trump supporter is himself a major developer, so his own interests are obvious. The interests of other allies who act like Trump, but fly the flag of social justice in order to promote a "build, baby build' agenda, is more confused — to put it mildly. What they have in common with Trump is an apparent disdain for democracy. (Trumpism in a blue flavor, perhaps?)
What is going on? At best they are being manipulated, encouraged to be divisive, and playing into the hands of those who have the real power — those who are smiling all the way to the bank. This is certainly not promoting constructive engagement and problem-solving, which is the public sector's primary responsibility. Nor is it promoting real social justice — or real affordability, or real sustainability. It is simply allowing the city to be divided and conquered – and in some cases, doing it from City Hall.
The hostile reaction of neighborhood activists to such stiff-arming, tokenism and demonization is all too predictable. For those of us who work in public involvement, it's a familiar reaction.
But in Portland's case, we have fallen so far from what we were, and claim to be, as a healthy grass-roots democracy. The good news is that there are already signs of a new awareness — a new willingness to look hard at ourselves, to pick up the pieces of our legacy, and to revive and strengthen a moribund system. It's high time.
Oregonian: "Eudaly, staffers bungled efforts to change Portland neighborhood association rules"
Eudaly policy director Jamey Duhamiel quoted as saying "we need our neighborhood associations in their place.. any inconvenience is a big deal to their cozy lives."
Emails and texts obtained by The Oregonian newspaper show an extraordinary "bungled" attack on Portland's neighborhood associations by self-confessed anti-neighborhood activists — including some of the very officials charged with managing the City's storied neighborhood involvement system.
While Commissioner Chloe Eudaly and Civic Life bureau Director Suk Rhee deny the current code change effort has been intended as an attack on the system and is only an effort to broaden inclusion, the emails and texts tell a different story.
Portland Commissioner Chloe Eudaly has acknowledged a bureau under her control badly mishandled efforts to change the rules regarding neighborhood associations by failing to consult and involve the groups, newly released emails and text messages show.
The files reveal that the bungled undertaking led to intense pushback from neighborhood leaders and a lack of support by the City Council. That in turn has led Eudaly to delay the change and launch a damage-control campaign.
…the plan has backfired spectacularly, the emails and texts help to show. The communications were released to The Oregonian/OregonLive in response to a public records request.
…Text messages released by Eudaly's office also show [Jamey] Duhamel, the commissioner's policy director, expressing open disdain for neighborhood associations.
Duhamel sent those texts to Mustafa Washington, Mayor Ted Wheeler's operations manager, during a May 2018 City Council meeting at which many addresses in Southwest Portland were changed to new South Portland ones to make the city 911 system more effective.
Though the change was thought to be non-controversial, about a dozen people gave testimony on it at the meeting, which frustrated Duhamel.
…"Why is this taking so long, ffs? Like WE GET IT ALREADY!! Who are they trying to convince?" she said in a message to Washington, using an acronym that includes profanity.
…"How you like that 'high income, high caliber' bull—," Duhamel texted to Washington. "This is why we need our neighborhood associations in their place. They get too much power and voice."
Washington responded, "I never thought this would be this big of a deal."
Duhamel: "Well they are white and 'high caliber' soooooooo … any inconvenience is a big deal to their cozy lives. HOW DARE WE STRESS THEM OUT!!!"
Washington: "LOL, there are definitely more important issues than this."
Duhamel: "So. Much. Privilege."
In an interview, Duhamel said she regretted her words…
Read the entire article here.
West Burnside Car Sewer – Continued
When will PBOT become embarrassed enough at this national disgrace of regressive transportation to take action?
The West Burnside "car sewer," alive and well in August 2019. Note the extra width of traffic lanes and the tight clearance for pedestrians.
The situation at West Burnside continues to be a model of what NOT to do in transportation planning. In spite of progressive projects to add pedestrian improvements and bike lanes on SW/NW 18th and 19th, the main passageway of West Burnside continues to be a national embarrassment. Visitors to our urban models of Washington Park, the Japanese Garden, and NW 23rd retail district, might expect to see additional examples of innovative national leadership. Instead they are greeted with a dismal textbook example of regressive transportation policy. Perhaps they will see it as one more sad piece of evidence that Portland has lost its way.
This ugly, dangerous stretch of street has passages that do not even meet the requirements for disabled access under the Americans for Disabilities Act (ADA). Nor is traffic flow even any kind of model of "level of service" — since buses regularly impede traffic in the outer lanes, and turning cars regularly impede traffic in the inner two lanes. The street is thus a textbook case of what not to do.
We have written before about alternative approaches, including three-lane options and other solutions. In any case, action is needed, as time is passing without any movement forward.
How did West Burnside become such a dreadful negative example of multi-modal transportation?
Incredibly, the sidewalks of West Burnside were not always as narrow as they are now. They were actually narrowed by PBOT in the late 1960s and early 1970s – an era of regressive car-dominated planning. Here is an oral history by Ogden Beeman, former president of the Northwest District Association and the City Club of Portland, and a pioneer of the neighborhood association system:
Then there was the narrowing-the-sidewalks project. When they widened Burnside, they narrowed the sidewalks, and then when they put this little overpass over I-405 on Everett, they did one full sidewalk and one half sidewalk. So I went to City Council and objected to narrowing the sidewalks…
We made an impassioned plea. I think we lost five-zip in City Council. The classical thing that I always remember about that was Don Bergstrom's comments. He was City traffic engineer. I walked down to work every day since I worked downtown for the government. I walked down Everett and Burnside both. I knew those streets very, very well.
So I got up and said, "We have a great place here where people can live and walk downtown, and we can't make it more difficult."
In Portland, of course, you narrow a sidewalk and the cars come by and splash water on you. Burnside became almost impossible as a walking street, and then everybody shifted to Everett, on which they were narrowing the sidewalks.
I finished my impassioned plea, and Don Bergstrom got up and said, "Well, the Council should know that we did a study up there, and we found that the sidewalks were occupied about 12, 14 percent of the time. The street lanes were occupied about 85 percent, and therefore it makes sense to narrow one and widen the street." The sidewalks are "underutilized" by 80 percent.
Those were kind of Don Quixote days. I was a lone voice. I don't think anybody from the neighborhood, or certainly nobody in government even gave us the slightest encouragement at that time.
Have we made enough progress since those dark reactionary days? Are we slipping back into a reactionary approach to city-building, suppressing grass-roots activism — at best, losing our vision and our courage?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Ljubljana seat of UNESCO-sponsored global AI research centre
Monday, November 25 2019 | 18:43
Paris, 25 November - The first UNESCO-sponsored international centre for artificial intelligence (AI) will be seated in Slovenia's capital Ljubljana, the UNESCO conference general decided in Paris on Monday. The International Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI) is to be established early next year.
The Slovenian ministry in charge of education and science believes this puts Slovenia on the global map of the most high-profile and advanced countries AI-wise.
"The centre is a recognition to Slovenian scientists' achievements and a result of the good cooperation between the Slovenian government and UNESCO, especially in open educational resources, an area where Slovenia has gained recognition as a global leader.
"The centre will put Slovenia at the top of global technological developments," the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport said in a release.
The UNESCO conference general unanimously endorsed Slovenia's bid for the AI centre today after UNESCO's executive board endorsed it in April.
Slovenia plans to found the IRCAI at the start of 2020, when an agreement on its establishment is signed by the ministry and UNESCO.
The IRCAI will be the first UNESCO-sponsored global AI research centre, also serving as a role model for similar centres to be set up around the globe.
The ministry said a number of countries and international organisations had already expressed interest in working with the new centre.
The new facility will aim to provide an open and transparent environment for AI research and debates on AI, providing expert support to stakeholders around the globe in drafting guidelines and action plans for AI.
It will bring together various stakeholders with a variety of know-how from around the world to address global challenges, support UNESCO in carrying out its studies and take part in major international AI projects.
The centre will advise governments, organisations, legal persons and the public on systemic and strategic solutions in introducing AI in various fields.
Helping to expand AI capacities around the world, including by establishing auxiliary research centres and drafting training programmes, will also be among its tasks.
The UNESCO general conference also decided today that ethics recommendations for AI should be drafted by the next conference general, scheduled for 2021, a project in which the Ljubljana-based centre will also take part.
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Should We Really be Paying for the Royal Wedding?
1 Comment on Should We Really be Paying for the Royal Wedding?
With a crumbling NHS, a desperate housing crisis and rising numbers of homelessness, should financing the royal wedding be a top priority for our government? Many would say not.
The wedding cost a total of £32 million in total. £2 million was spent on the actual events (like the dress, venue, decoration, catering, drinks, etc.) and the remaining £30 million was spent on security. While the £2 million bill was paid by Prince Charles, the cost of security was covered by the British tax payer, a move that caused much controversy due to the ongoing social issues in Britain at the moment.
In stark contrast, in the Grenfell Tower fire disaster 72 innocent people lost their lives because their local council did not put the proper funding in place to ensure their homes were safe and habitable. Many are mortified that this country would agree to spend £30 million on security for the royals at the drop of a hat but be unwilling to ensure that people's homes were safe. To many this shows a complete lack of care for the ordinary people in this country.
Obviously, I understand that security is vital for a family that is regularly in the public eye, however couldn't we say the same about many celebrities? They pay for their own security.
Some might say that the royal family are entitled to this funding due to Prince Harry's service in the armed forces and the work the royal family do for charity. But there are hundreds of men and women who serve in the armed forces and millions who donate to charity regularly that are not rewarded in the same way.
We live in a deeply divided country. While the royals have just celebrated a taxpayer funded multi-million pound wedding, 300,000 people have no home or shelter and are sleeping on the streets and 4 million children are living in poverty. In contrast to the way the royals have been treated, those sleeping rough on the streets in and around Windsor were fined if they didn't move for the wedding like some sort of social cleansing of the streets. Quite frankly, that is disgraceful and shows an utter lack of morality and care for the vulnerable in our society.
I have wondered why there has been a sudden burst of establishment patriotism and the government's willingness to spend so much money on it. You don't have to be politically cynical to think that this event has helped to create a distraction from the tricky current issues we're facing.
Overall, I would personally prefer my money to be going towards more morally just causes such as the NHS, education, social care, housing, rather than the royal wedding. Don't get me wrong- I am extremely happy for Prince Harry and Meghan. I am happy for any loving union between two people, but we have to put things in perspective. If people do wish to put money towards the wedding then perhaps there should be a private collection, rather it being taxpayer funded. Not all of us are happy with our taxes being spent on these things.
That's £30 million that could have helped many homeless people and that could have created more hospital beds. It could have kept 72 people alive. Whatever the levels of pageantry and patriotism involved, these facts make the taxpayer funding of this wedding immoral and unsupportable.
The royal family pays more than £30 million a year to the government out of the crown estate revenue alone (which she keeps around 15%) and personal expenses are largely paid for by the privy purse generated by the duchy of Lancaster. Plus the benefit to the economy the royals bring in tourism and the boost Kate Middleton have to the UK high fashion industry in share prices the royals more than pay for themselves; the homeless's belongings were confiscated over night due to a bomb threat and were all returned the evening of the wedding.
Next Entry Should Athletes be Fined for Making Political Statements?


Ensuring software correctness and safety for communication-centric programs is important but challenging. In this paper we introduce a solution for writing communication protocols, for checking protocol conformance and for verifying implementation safety. This work draws on ideas from both multiparty session types, which provide a concise way to express communication protocols, as well as from separation-style logics for shared-memory concurrency, which provide strong safety guarantees for resource sharing. On the one hand, our proposal improves the expressiveness and precision of session types, without sacrificing their conciseness. On the other hand, it increases the applicability of software verification as well as its precision, by making it protocol aware. We also show how to perform the verification of such programs in a modular and automatic fashion.
Costea, Andreea ; Chin, Wei-ngan ; Qin, Shengchao ; Craciun, Florin. / Automated Modular Verification for Relaxed Communication Protocols. Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems. Springer Verlag, 2018. pp. 284-305 (Programming Languages and Systems).
Automated Modular Verification for Relaxed Communication Protocols. / Costea, Andreea; Chin, Wei-ngan; Qin, Shengchao; Craciun, Florin.
Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems. Springer Verlag, 2018. p. 284-305 Chapter 16 (Programming Languages and Systems; Vol. 11275).
N2 - Ensuring software correctness and safety for communication-centric programs is important but challenging. In this paper we introduce a solution for writing communication protocols, for checking protocol conformance and for verifying implementation safety. This work draws on ideas from both multiparty session types, which provide a concise way to express communication protocols, as well as from separation-style logics for shared-memory concurrency, which provide strong safety guarantees for resource sharing. On the one hand, our proposal improves the expressiveness and precision of session types, without sacrificing their conciseness. On the other hand, it increases the applicability of software verification as well as its precision, by making it protocol aware. We also show how to perform the verification of such programs in a modular and automatic fashion.
AB - Ensuring software correctness and safety for communication-centric programs is important but challenging. In this paper we introduce a solution for writing communication protocols, for checking protocol conformance and for verifying implementation safety. This work draws on ideas from both multiparty session types, which provide a concise way to express communication protocols, as well as from separation-style logics for shared-memory concurrency, which provide strong safety guarantees for resource sharing. On the one hand, our proposal improves the expressiveness and precision of session types, without sacrificing their conciseness. On the other hand, it increases the applicability of software verification as well as its precision, by making it protocol aware. We also show how to perform the verification of such programs in a modular and automatic fashion.


Life Writing is the practice of writing for oneself as a way of healing, growing, exploring and solving problems.
This course introduces participants to the practice and theory of life writing. Life writing refers to the practice of writing for oneself, not specifically with the view for publication (though this is a possibility) but as a way of healing, growing, discovering, exploring, awakening creativity and solving problems. It encompasses the keeping of journals, diaries, memoirs, biography, stories, letter writing, travel writing and fiction based on personal experience.
Research has shown that writing has a positive effect on our health and wellbeing . Increasingly writing is being used in various settings such as hospitals, cancer care centres, rehabilitation clinics and in psychotherapy practice as a therapeutic tool. While the workshop will explore the therapeutic value of writing, it will also look at other aspects of writing such as claiming one's own voice, telling one's story, discovering one's strength and joyfulness. Read Elizabeth Hickey's recent blog article here on how Life Writing can be a path to inner guidance and wisdom.
Venue: Butler House, 16 Patrick Street, Kilkenny City.
* PCI College Student & Graduate rate applies to Stuedents & Graduates of BSc Degree, Postgraduate and Supervision Courses only.
Elizabeth has over 30 years professional experience in the health care profession as nurse, social work practitioner and manager. She has worked in a wide variety of settings including community, hospital, women's refuge and prison. Elizabeth has also worked as a professional psychotherapist and supervisor.
She has been involved in academic teaching in UCD , DCU and PCI College where she taught on the Masters in Social Work, and on graduate and post graduate programmes in Counselling and Psychotherapy. Since November 1999 she has worked as an Independent Consultant providing services in the area of counselling, education, research and supervision. In recent years she has been particularly interested in the use of writing both as a therapeutic /personal tool and as a creative process. For the past five years she has provided workshops in Writing for personal development to various audiences. She is currently working on a personal memoir.
"Enjoyed meeting everybody & hearing their stories, some were very inspiring. Loved getting the chance to spend the day writing. Well worth doing - highly recommend"
"...Gosh I loved everything [about this workshop] and The teacher and group were wonderful. I would do other workshops on this topic."


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Gagging Investigators And The End Of Freedom
Things Haven't Always Been This Way
Sharpton Gets Huge Payout for Criminal's Family
Bob Conover
The family of Eric Garner, who died in police custody following his arrest on charges of selling black market cigarettes on city streets, have been awarded a $5.9 million from New York City to settle the family's wrongful-death claim in the Staten Island death last July the city comptroller and a lawyer for the family said.
The agreement, reached just days before the anniversary of Mr. Garner's death, put to rest any potential legal battle that may have taken place even as a federal inquiry into the killing and several others at the state and local level remain open.
The settlement comes following a case that threatened to ignite street riots after two New York City police officers approached Mr. Garner on July 17, 2014 on a city sidewalk and accused him of selling untaxed cigarettes.
Garner, who was known to police for selling black market cigarettes and had arrested him for violating untaxed cigarette sales laws dozens of times, decided to resist arrest leading arresting officers to place him in a "chokehold" – a restraint technique prohibited under Police Department policy – to subdue him. The city medical examiner cited the chokehold as a cause of Mr. Garner's death.
Despite the finding, a Staten Island grand jury's decision not to indict the officer who used the chokehold fueled weeks of demonstrations – protests that ceased after two police officers in Brooklyn were fatally shot by a man who suggested he was avenging Garner's death.
Garner's relatives, including his widow, Esaw Garner, and his mother, Gwen Carr, filed a notice of claim against the city – a precursor step to filing a lawsuit. The notice said the family was seeking $75 million in damages which is when negotiations with city comptroller's office began.
Speaking about the settlement, City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer said:
"Mr. Garner's death is a touchstone in our city's history and in the history of the entire nation." "Financial compensation is certainly not everything, and it can't bring Mr. Garner back. But it is our way of creating balance and giving a family a certain closure."
The family had given the city a deadline of Friday, the anniversary of the death, to come to an agreement or the relatives would move forward with the lawsuit.
The agreement came after months of negotiations and is among the biggest settlements ever reached between claimants and the city. It is Mr. Stringer's practice to settle major civil rights claims even before a lawsuit is filed. His aim is to save taxpayers the expense, and families the pain, of a long legal process.
Garner's relatives were expected to discuss the settlement at the Harlem offices of the National Action Network, led by the Rev. Al Sharpton. "This is not about people getting money," Mr. Sharpton said on Monday. "This is about justice. We've got to restructure our police departments and how we deal with policing nationwide."
There was no mention of the revenge deaths of two police officers who were killed assassination style last December while sitting in a police car on an otherwise quite Brooklyn street.
Guess Who Democrats Are Pandering To… Again?
New York City and the President Arbitrarily Turn Legal Products Into Contraband
New York City Babies Can Now Be "Gender X"
DON'T LET THE MEDIA CONTROL YOU
Stay up to date with the latest political news and non-partisan opinion on issues that impact our liberty and receive the latest news and offers from our sponsors.
The Surprising Problem With Our Immigration Policy
Ilhan Omar: It's All About the Ad Hominems, Baby


In photo: Andy Peart (Sales Engineer), Brian Fox (Project Manager), Robin Sides (President), Taylor Sides (TI Division), and Maura Young (Service Department).
ICS was privileged to sponsor the 7th tee at the May CREW Charity Golf Tournament at Lomas Santa Fe Executive Golf Course in Solana Beach. While supporting women in the commercial industry, ICS is committed to building relationships among the industry. With new faces at ICS, we have been given the opportunity to revitalize our dependable reputation among fellow associates. Like good ol' Bob, ICS also believes that hard work and dedication proves to bring a hole-in-one every time! We look forward to supporting the industry's coming events.
Congratulations to Paul Aherns, Anthony Shaughnessy, David Marcial, Eric Murry, Raul Perez, Annaleis Widmar, Russ Permann, Benny Araiza, and Beau Fellows for their dedication and commitment in the accomplishment of working 40 hours a week for 40 weeks.
Please RSVP by 11/02/12 if you are able to attend - dani@1ics.net.
On October 11, 2012, DPR Construction held their Subcontractor Appreciation Open House at their offices in San Diego. ICS would like to thank DPR for hosting a wonderful evening which included great food, spirits and laughter.
As our representatives, from the left, Taylor Sides (TI Division Estimator), Mike Boehm (HVAC Estimator), Tracy Biolos (Support Manager), and Karen Case (Chief Estimator) were in attendance.
Industrial Commercial Systems, Inc. is pleased to announce the addition of our new TI Division. This division will be strictly geared toward small scale HVAC tenant improvement projects (generally in the range of 15,000 sq. ft. or less) and will provide installations in sheet metal, pipefitting, insulation, T-stat wiring and comfort balance. These services will be available for both Design/Build and plan & specifications projects. We are excited to be bringing this new division to the services ICS offers and believe it will be another step in our journey to becoming the mechanical contractor of choice for all our clients.
We will utilize our qualified ICS field technicians and a select group of vendors to create a competitive price structure. With our knowledge, experience, and creativity we will take a simplistic approach to our TI projects to ensure successful project completion and total customer satisfaction.
Taylor Sides will be the Manager for the TI Division. She will be working closely with our dedicated Field Supervisor, James Hudy and his dedicated TI field crew. Taylor will be coming around to introduce herself and talk more about our new division in the very near future. If you have any questions or needs before that time, please feel free to contact her at (760) 599-0500 x 115, or via cell at (858) 688-0269 or e-mail: taylor@1ics.net.


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COMMANDO JOE'S Fundamental British Values Curriculum Forest Schools Learning Adventure Trailers SPREAD THE HAPPINESS Homework
At West Horndon Primary School we are committed to promoting the fundamental British Values of:
mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs
Enable students to develop their self-knowledge, self-esteem and self-confidence
enable students to distinguish right from wrong and to respect the civil and criminal law of England
encourage students to accept responsibility for their behaviour, show initiative, and to understand how they can contribute positively to the lives of those living and working in the locality of the school and to society more widely
enable students to acquire a broad general knowledge of and respect for public institutions and services in England
further tolerance and harmony between different cultural traditions by enabling students to acquire an appreciation for and respect for their own and other cultures and encourage respect for other people
encourage respect for democracy and support for participation in the democratic processes, including respect for the basis on which the law is made and applied in England.
We embed the teaching of fundamental British Values throughout our curriculum and through special events. Examples of our provision are:
the promotion of tolerance and understanding through the International Primary Curriculum
regular assemblies developing understanding of different faiths and beliefs
developing the understanding of democracy through our class councils and Pupil Parliament
developing and understanding of democracy through holding a mock election
promoting British Values and culture through our Best of British school show
promoting our long established school values which match closely the spirit of fundamental British Values
Year Six and Pupil Parliament Visit to the House of Commons to learn about the British Democratic System
DFE Guidance
Schools should promote the fundamental British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs1. This can help schools to demonstrate how they are meeting the requirements of section 78 of the Education Act 2002, in their provision of SMSC.
Actively promoting the values means challenging opinions or behaviours in school that are contrary to fundamental British values. Attempts to promote systems that undermine fundamental British values would be completely at odds with schools' duty to provide SMSC. The Teachers' Standards expect teachers to uphold public trust in the profession and maintain high standards of ethics and behaviour, within and outside school. This includes not undermining fundamental British values.
Through their provision of SMSC, schools should:
enable students to develop their self-knowledge, self-esteem and self-confidence;
enable students to distinguish right from wrong and to respect the civil and criminal law of England;
encourage students to accept responsibility for their behaviour, show initiative, and to understand how they can contribute positively to the lives of those living and working in the locality of the school and to society more widely;
enable students to acquire a broad general knowledge of and respect for public institutions and services in England;
further tolerance and harmony between different cultural traditions by enabling students to acquire an appreciation of and respect for their own and other cultures;
encourage respect for other people; and
The list below describes the understanding and knowledge expected of pupils as a result of schools promoting fundamental British values.
an understanding of how citizens can influence decision-making through the democratic process;
an appreciation that living under the rule of law protects individual citizens and is essential for their wellbeing and safety;
an understanding that there is a separation of power between the executive and the judiciary, and that while some public bodies such as the police and the army can be held to account through Parliament, others such as the courts maintain independence;
an understanding that the freedom to choose and hold other faiths and beliefs is protected in law;
an acceptance that other people having different faiths or beliefs to oneself (or having none) should be accepted and tolerated, and should not be the cause of prejudicial or discriminatory behaviour; and
an understanding of the importance of identifying and combatting discrimination.
It is not necessary for schools or individuals to 'promote' teachings, beliefs or opinions that conflict with their own, but nor is it acceptable for schools to promote discrimination against people or groups on the basis of their belief, opinion or background.


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ATLANTA, November 13, 2018 -- The Home Depot®, the world's largest home improvement retailer, today reported sales of $26.3 billion for the third quarter of fiscal 2018, a 5.1 percent increase from the third quarter of fiscal 2017. Comparable sales for the third quarter of fiscal 2018 were positive 4.8 percent, and comp sales in the U.S. were positive 5.4 percent.
Net earnings for the third quarter of fiscal 2018 were $2.9 billion, or $2.51 per diluted share, compared with net earnings of $2.2 billion, or $1.84 per diluted share, in the same period of fiscal 2017. For the third quarter of fiscal 2018, diluted earnings per share increased 36.4 percent from the same period in the prior year.
Diluted earnings-per-share growth of approximately 33.8 percent from fiscal 2017 to $9.75.
The Home Depot will conduct a conference call today at 9 a.m. ET to discuss information included in this news release and related matters. The conference call will be available in its entirety through a webcast and replay at http://ir.homedepot.com/events-and-presentations.
During the first quarter of fiscal 2018, the Company adopted ASU No. 2014-09, which pertains to revenue recognition. The adoption of this standard will not materially impact the Company's consolidated financial statements or related disclosures.
The Company has adopted this standard on a modified retrospective basis. In accordance therewith, financial information prior to fiscal 2018 will not be recast. The consolidated statements of earnings and balance sheet for periods and dates subsequent to fiscal 2017 reflect the effect of this accounting policy adoption.
Additional information about the impact of the adoption of ASU No. 2014-09 is available at http://ir.homedepot.com/financial-reports/quarterly-earnings/2018.
At the end of the third quarter, the Company operated a total of 2,286 retail stores in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, 10 Canadian provinces and Mexico. The Company employs more than 400,000 associates. The Home Depot's stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: HD) and is included in the Dow Jones industrial average and Standard & Poor's 500 index.
Certain statements contained herein constitute "forward-looking statements" as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements may relate to, among other things, the demand for our products and services; net sales growth; comparable sales; effects of competition; implementation of store, interconnected retail, supply chain and technology initiatives; issues related to the payment methods we accept; state of the economy; state of the residential construction, housing and home improvement markets; state of the credit markets, including mortgages, home equity loans and consumer credit; demand for credit offerings; inventory and in-stock positions; management of relationships with our suppliers and vendors; continuation of share repurchase programs; net earnings performance; earnings per share; dividend targets; capital allocation and expenditures; liquidity; return on invested capital; expense leverage; stock-based compensation expense; commodity price inflation and deflation; the ability to issue debt on terms and at rates acceptable to us; the impact and expected outcome of investigations, inquiries, claims and litigation; the effect of accounting charges; the effect of adopting certain accounting standards; the impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017; store openings and closures; guidance for fiscal 2018 and beyond; financial outlook; and the integration of acquired companies into our organization and the ability to recognize the anticipated synergies and benefits of those acquisitions. Forward-looking statements are based on currently available information and our current assumptions, expectations and projections about future events. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to future events, risks and uncertainties – many of which are beyond our control or are currently unknown to us – as well as potentially inaccurate assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations and projections. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, those described in Item 1A, "Risk Factors," and elsewhere in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for our fiscal year ended January 28, 2018 and in our subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q.


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Jimmie Johnson Kevin Harvick Ryan Newman Cole Custer Austin Dillon Matt Dibenedetto Denny Hamlin Ryan Blaney Brad Keselowski Joey Logano Christopher Bell Joe Gibbs Alex Bowman William Byron Darrell Wallace Jr. Aric Almirola Ricky Stenhouse Jr. Ryan Preece Chris Quinten Martin Truex Jr. Chris Buescher Erik Jones Kyle Busch Matt Kenseth Sports Celebrity Entertainment Arts and entertainment NASCAR Automobile racing
Hamlin holds off Keselowski for fifth Cup victory of season
Denny Hamlin celebrates after winning a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at Kansas Speedway in Kansas City, Kan., Thursday, July 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
Alex Bowman (88), William Byron (24) and Kevin Harvick (4) battle during a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at Kansas Speedway in Kansas City, Kan., Thursday, July 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
Denny Hamlin (11) battles Josh Bilicki (53) during a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at Kansas Speedway in Kansas City, Kan., Thursday, July 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
Kevin Harvick drives during a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at Kansas Speedway in Kansas City, Kan., Thursday, July 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
Denny Hamlin does a burnout after winning a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at Kansas Speedway in Kansas City, Kan., Thursday, July 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)


New vector game for Windows: Neon Invasion Earth.
Apologies for being so quiet around here - I may not post often but I do read the forum every couple of days, but I just don't have as much time anymore as I used to.
I've had an original-ish vector game sitting almost finished for many years now, but a couple of weeks ago I decided to finally finish off the last couple of missing bits and make it releasable, so here's my latest game: Neon Invasion Earth.
I hope it'll bring someone a bit of joy. I can only say that now I've finally released it has (finally) brought me some joy.
Go to my website to read more about it and download it.
...and let me know what you think of it.
Yeah, you know *I've* been awaiting this one for quite some time now!
Yeah, sorry it took as long as it did.
Things happen. I looked through a bit of the "post mortem" post and could see why, after a while, people didn't want to keep on play testing the same few levels over and over and the like.
Anyway, I got this downloaded on my laptop and will try it out on the computer later (it's the cheapest Chromebook that runs on Chrome, so no Windows programs will run off it).


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The 1921–22 Harvard Crimson men's ice hockey season was the 24th season of play for the program.

Season
Before the season, Harvard finally accepted the trend of all other college teams and agreed to play 6-on-6 hockey for the year. Additionally, Harvard accepted the new practice of playing its two defenders side by sire rather than one in front of the other. The changes did little to hamper the Crimson in their first game, however, when they returned from their Christmas break the team had to quickly prepare for Toronto. The Blues were considered by many as the top amateur team in North America and they demonstrated why when they dominated Harvard to the tune of a 6–1 victory. Harvard was able to get much more practice time before their next game and when they faced Dalhousie they appeared much more themselves.

The Crimson didn't lose another game after the Toronto debacle, though they did tie two amateur clubs in the middle of their season. After wrapping up the Triangular League championship, Harvard put together an informal group of players, composed of members of both the varsity and freshman teams, and played an exhibition match with Boston College. The cross-town rivals won the game in overtime, but Harvard was missing both its starting goaltender and team captain, so there was little doubt as to which varsity squad was the better.

Roster

Standings

Schedule and results

|-
!colspan=12 style=";" | Regular Season

References

Harvard Crimson men's ice hockey seasons
Harvard
Harvard
Harvard
Harvard
Harvard

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