The Unforseen // featured photos of suburban sprawl

IN THEATERS NOW! “The Unforseen” opened March 14, 2008 at San Francisco's Lumiere, Berkeley's Shattuck, Los Angeles's Nuart, and will open in other cities in coming months. These are three of my photos which were used in this 2007 documentary film which examines the wasting of a natural springs in Austin, Texas due to suburban development. Links to these photos…

Check out the movie website: www.theunforeseenfilm.com

The film was beautifully shot by cinematographer Lee Daniel; directed by Laura Dunn; and was co-produced by environmentalist Robert Redford as well as one of my favorite directors, Terrence Malick (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The New World).

Technorati Tags: AntelopeValley, California, development, environment, homes, LauraDunn, OilAddiction, Palmdale, PeakOil, RobertRedford, SanRamon, suburb, suburbansprawl, TerrenceMalick, TheUnforseen, urbansprawl

The many sides of the "housing crisis" — it’s later than you think in California and Texas

We bemoan the loss of pristine nature.

We cherish it, enshrine it in national parks, visit it, protect it, photograph it, promote it.

And yet will will lose more and more of it, because that is the way things go.

More and more people, with our ravenous appetites for novelty. New continents, new forests, new ports, new riches to harvest, new people to conquer.

A smaller world in 2008 than in 1492.

All the gifts of Nature, it seems, are to be brought under the whip of Mankind.

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The Unforeseen, executive produced by Terrence Malick and Robert Redford, premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Called “the best film at the festival, hands down,” the film documents the struggles between development and preservation of Austin Texas.

 

View the trailer, reviews and latest news at  http://www.theunforeseenfilm.com.

2008 Theater Showings:
March 7 - Boston - Kendall Square Cinema
March 14 - Los Angeles - NuArt
March 14 - San Francisco - Lumiere
March 14 - Berkeley, CA - Shattuck
March 28 - Austin, TX - Alamo South Lamar
April 4 - Seattle, WA - Varsity
April 11 - Denver, CO - Landmark
April 18 - Philadelphia, PA - Ritz Theater
April 18 - San Diego, CA - Ken Cinema
May 17 - Columbus, OH - Wexner Center for the Arts
more cities coming soon....

And another movie about suburban sprawl: Radiant City.

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And in today's Los Angeles Times: “A stoic little town faces tomorrow. A massive housing project may mean the end for Neenach, in the Antelope Valley.” Be sure to watch the Times's video, which is beautifully produced and photographed. They simply listen in on some of the folksy wisdom of Sigfried Carrle, a 76 year old man who moved out to this rural setting in Los Angeles County years ago.

Listen to a discussion on KCRW radio today, where they speak with New York Times business columnist Gretchen Morgenson:

The Housing Crisis Is Eating America's Economy
Home foreclosure may become an industry in itself. Today's New York Times features a California company called You Walk Away, which is looking for clients whose mortgages are now worth more than their houses, so they can't refinance to meet rising payments. For less than a thousand dollars, You Walk Away will show them how to deliver their problems back to the bank by foreclosure. Part of the problem is the idea that housing is not just a place to live, but a gold-plated investment whose value just keeps going up. What goes up must come down, leaving tens of thousands of people with increased payments on loans worth more than their houses. Are greedy banks and investors at fault? What about homebuyers themselves? And what's the impact on an economy that depends on consumer spending?

Don't tell me you didn't see this coming.

 

Technorati Tags: Austin, nature, oil, OilAddiction, overpopulation, pollution, sprawl, suburb, suburbansprawl, Texas, TheUnforseen, traffic

David Baker, architect of 888 7th, speaks on “Better Living Through Density”

From the California College of the Arts calendar:

David Baker / David Baker + Partners, Architects
Architecture Lecture Series
Monday, October 8, 2007 at 7 pm

California College of the Arts

Timken Lecture Hall
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco
Google map

Info: 415.703.9562 or architecture@cca.edu

“Better Living Through Density”

Denser neighborhoods are more active, more interesting, safer places that support local retail and services and foster community. But what makes urban housing beautiful and functional for residents and neighborhood alike? David Baker will describe—using some of his own work as examples—the components of good urban design, including active pedestrian edges, the hierarchy of open spaces, sensible parking strategies, and sustainable approaches that make higher densities better for all.

David Baker FAIA has been practicing architecture for nearly 30 years, and in 1996 was selected as fellow of the American Institute of Architects. David founded San Francisco-based David Baker + Partners in 1982. With a focus on sustainable affordable housing—particularly multifamily urban infill projects—the award-winning firm has come to be known for combining social concern with a signature design character. From 1977 to 1982, David was principal of Sol-Arc, a firm dedicated to energy-efficient architecture. A progressive urban activist and bicyclist, he has also been a teacher, a union carpenter and a philosophy major, and has recently learned to knit.

Baker is responsible for the building complex nearing completion at 888 7th Street at the foot of San Francisco's Potrero Hill — site of the former Art's Trading Co.

Tejon Ranch, Ritter Ranch ~ more goodbyes to California

The last great rancho in California, Tejon Ranch, is in the process of going under the knife. Some of this landscape is now a paradise of rolling hills, native perennial bunchgrasses, streams, wildflowers, and ancient oak stands. If the Tejon Ranch Corporation has its way, it will become just another sprawling developer-driven “community” of 70,000 people living in 23,000 homes, set in the once-open California landscape 60 miles north of the last century's booming metropolis, Los Angeles  (see John Gertner's story in the Sunday March 18, 2007 New York Times, “Playing SimCity for Real”).

The giant master-planned development will encompass nearly 12,000 acres, and will, no doubt, require huge amounts of energy to build and sustain, from the energy expended to build a city from scratch so far away from the urban centers — with its roads and water and sewage and electricty and cable TV — to the energy needed by residents who, we can be sure, will be regular folks driving regular inefficient cars and cooling their oversized homes in the scorching California sun.

Below: typical suburban sprawl in California, 2006.

Below: future site of Centennial, California, seen in 2003. This area is just east of the Interstate 5 / Highway 138 interchange (Google map), a 70 minute drive north of Los Angeles.

Another massive project is underway in the nearby Anaverde Valley, where a gorgeous landscape is now being scraped over to build more thousands of homes far away from anything. Below, grading the land in November 2006, for either Ritter Ranch or Anaverde (does it really even matter?).

More about suburbs, sprawl, and all that jazz:

• Save Tejon Ranch and especially their map with photo tour
• Even the Injuns done sold out: Ritter Ranch breaks ground [Le Blog]
• Ritter Ranch in Palmdale: The Bulldozing of California Goes On [Le Blog]
• The Geography of Suburban Sprawl in Southern California’s Antelope Valley
• Suburban sprawl and other calamities ~ panoramic photos
• Antelope Valley // desert suburbs ~ photo collection

“‘We have invested all our wealth in a living arrangement with no future,’ said James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency which postulates the end of suburbia. ‘In building suburbia we embarked on the greatest misallocation of wealth in the history of the world.’”

Between these roads // the way to get there?

Interstate 280 over Mission Creek, San Francisco // Bodie (Eastern Sierra), California //  Interchange at Interstate 5 and Interstate 14, Los Angeles County

Technorati Tags: automobile, Bodie, cars, EasternSierra, freeways, highways, interstates, LosAngeles, SanFrancisco, sprawl, suburb, suburbansprawl

Radical Urban Theory at a new URL

Radical Urban Theory, the Web site I started in 1995, has a new URL:

www.RadicalUrbanTheory.com

(www.rut.com is dead; long live RadicalUrbanTheory.com)

The idea for the site grew out of some classes I was taking in U.C. Berkeley's Geography department. In the Urban Field Studies class, I met guy named Terry Wade, who I'm pretty sure suggested the name. I ran with it and got the site up a few months later. It ain't much, but it's something.

Technorati Tags: cities, RUT, RadicalUrbanTheory, urbanplanning

San Francisco scholars Gray Brechin and Richard Walker: Nov. 5, 2006

Lecture and Response: Gray Brechin and Richard Walker

The Road to Serendip: A Scholar's Discoveries in Urban Imperialism
Berkeley Art Museum theater, U.C. Berkeley (more info)

Sunday,  November 5 2006, 3:00pm

A Bancroft Fellowship in 1995 provided geographer and art historian Gray Brechin with the opportunity to wander the stacks of Berkeley's great research library, unearthing a wealth of rare period imagery that was critical to the writing of his now-classic Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (reissued by UC Press this year). In the process of his dogged browsing, Brechin assembled his provocative argument, presented in this talk, about the environmental parasitism through which those who control a few “imperial cities” dominate the planet, to our collective peril. Richard Walker, UC Berkeley professor of geography and former chair of the California Studies Association, will respond to Brechin's important thesis with reference to California's agro-industrial landscape, the environmental movement, and the civilizing influence of cities.

Gray Brechin received his Ph.D. in geography from UC Berkeley. In addition to Imperial San Francisco, he is the coauthor of Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream (with Robert Dawson). At present he is researching and writing about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal projects. Gray Brechin's official website is at www.graybrechin.net. Richard Walker has written widely on the geography of cities and industry. His most recent book is The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of California Agribusiness; his The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area is forthcoming from the University of Washington Press.

November 1, 2006 in City // San Francisco, Urbanism + suburbs | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 20, 2006

Empire: idealized suburban development ~ vs. Upland: real suburban development

From the Jones, Partners: Architecture website comes this theoretical plan for a suburban development in the “Inland Empire” counties east of Los Angeles.

EMPIRE
The structure of the typical suburban family can no longer be considered nuclear, unless by that we are implying as well its fissioning. Instead, the contemporary family is as likely to be single-parent, or no-kids, or same-sex or multi-speciated, as to be like the Cleavers of yore. Even that decreasingly typical 2-parent-2.3-kid family is more complex than the numbers alone would indicate, given the new independence of the members from each other and from the community as a whole. The single family dwelling of today must operate as much like an apartment building as a single household when all the family members are engaged in so many disparate activities at all times of the day.

In this context, to imagine the house as a machine for living is to conjure a much different image than that assumed by Le Corbusier when he first captured the imagination with that phrase. While Corbu chided the “eyes which do not see” for missing the potential referents in the planes and boats of his time, he never believed that buildings should intervene as actively in the affairs of their occupants as these examples, much less move like them. But then, the user groups of that age were themselves less mobile, and the expectations for housing were still satisfied by a traditional formula of fixed spaces. Flexibility, if addressed at all, was offered by arrangements of sliding panels or repositioning furniture.

The contemporary machine for living is more likely to understand those referents on a functional level, and have the means to emulate them on their own terms. Today flexibility can be achieved by repositioning more than just the furniture. This project, MOMORedondo, distributes the typical range of program components among three different MObile MOdular units, which are able to continuously reposition themselves over the length of the lot along a bridge crane track system. The MOMO units are able to link up to with each other to create closer adjacencies or larger interior spaces, or remain separate to give their occupants greater privacy and relief from family life. Each of the units is also able to tune its relationship to the exterior, represented on this lot by a pool, garage and work area, and front porch; by their arrangement on the site they are able to create larger outdoor spaces or eliminate them entirely, and allow light and air to any exposure of any of the units.

On the interior of each MOMO unit is a two-level rack of PRO/dek (U.S.Pat.No. 6526702) units, which house the actual equipment that gives the interior spaces their specific program identities. These are of course repositionable in the same way as the MOMO units, to produce or eliminate spaces as needed throughout the day in response to the complex dynamics of the twenty-first century family’s activity schedule.

By way of comparison, here are some photos I took in 2005 of recent suburban developments around Upland, California (in the Inland Empire):

October 20, 2006 in Architecture, California // Southern, Urbanism + suburbs | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 19, 2006

Valencia Gardens cultivated: modernism in public housing

The newly rebuilt Valencia Gardens public housing project, located at 15th and Valencia in San Francisco's Mission District, is almost done. I've written about Valencia Gardens before where I showed some photos from the Gardens' 2004 razing. Here are photos of it in March and July 2006, showing off its modern architecture bones.

Technorati Tags: architecture, HousingProjects, infillhousing, modernarchitecture, moderndesign, modernism, MissionDistrict, ValenciaGardens

October 19, 2006 in Architecture, City // San Francisco, Modernism + modernity, Urbanism + suburbs | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 21, 2006

Victorian mansion versus suburban sprawl: Fontana, California

Here's one of those things that blows my mind about Southern California (and by god I love it there): this Victorian mansion is on Sierra Avenue in Fontana, California (San Bernardino County), south of its intersection with Interstate 15 (Google satellite view and map). I don't know the story behind it but I'd love to figure this out (please contact me if you know anything about this building).

UPDATE August 2008: Read the comments on this post, where readers chime in with information about this strange home. (Thanks, everyone, for the comments!)

It was built in what was the middle of nowhere for many decades. As of late, Fontana's suburban sprawl is marching toward the property; who knows what fate awaits this incredible example of Southern California's architectural eclecticism.

Below: Seen on Live.Local.com.

Technorati Tags: Fontana, SanBernardinoCounty, SierraAvenue, Victorian

September 21, 2006 in California // Southern, Urbanism + suburbs | Permalink | Comments (12)