Southern Sudan plans to rebuild cities in the region in the shapes of animals and fruit, according to this BBC News report. SeattleScape blogger Mark Hinshaw sees potential there. Here’s what he has to say:

The World Institute for Anthropomorphic Town Planning announced last week that Washington State will be the recipient of six grants to counties for free-standing urban development.  Each county would be required

Courtesy of photobucket.com.

“We are excited about this prospect because we know that many legislators have been wanting get rid of the Growth Management Act,” said Keefer Bakelite, Palouse County Commissioner. “Who could possibly object to towns shaped like animals?”

Says Professor William “Willy” Grant of CWU’s urban planning school, “Few people know it, but animals make the ideal shape for communities. Civic uses fit nicely in the head, industry fits in the stomach, housing in the legs. Waste disposal systems go, um, well… near the tail.”

A number of counties are vying for the grant, having already selected the Bighorn Sheep, the Black Bear, the Salmon, and the Geoduck for their own submissions. Palin T. McHall, Executive Director  of the WIATP remarked, “Other counties will have to be extra creative as some of the best animal shapes are already taken.”  “Insects are also eligible,” he adds.

For their part, Futurewise and the Sierra Club are in a political quandary. “We hate free-standing communities. But we all love animals. It’s a true dilemma,” one close source who chose not be identified said.

Personally, I think it would be swell to have a town in look like a cicindela tranqebarica.

My bus crosses the Aurora Bridge with its wonderful public view of Mount Rainier, the city, the ship canal, the Olympics and Cascades. Since we’re destined to lose our grand aerial view from the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the pending loss of the view from the Aurora Bridge is even more aggravating.

Aurora Bridge lit up. Enhanced photo by Kenji Tachibana

So we’re spending $4.6 million, forcing residents of Fremont and Queen Anne to endure months of daytime irritation and sleepless nights while the construction crews drill and rivet and corrupt our bridge so we can possibly deter a small subset of suicide attempts.  But we’re not going to solve the problem of suicide this way and we’re not going to eliminate every hazard to our physical and mental health by such clumsy methods.  If the goal is to spend gas tax dollars to prevent loss of life, there are hundreds of unfunded highway safety projects, railroad grade separations, and drunken driving enforcement actions that would be more effective.

As reported in yesterday’s DJC, the Sheraton Hotel is finally going to improve the dreadful blank wall along the western side of 7th Avenue between Pike and Union Streets created by its first and second towers.

While I’m thrilled to hear that this long-awaited improvement scheme has not fallen through the cracks and is scheduled to start next week, it’s taking all my patience not to be cynical about this interesting state of affairs.

As I commented in an opinion piece I wrote on the subject for the DJC on 4/6/09, the big blank wall along 7th Avenue (and parts of both Pike and Union Streets as well) should not have occurred in the first place.  The City’s Downtown zoning code would otherwise require street-level uses and “transparency” (doors and windows that allow both visual and physical access to those activities) along 7th Avenue.  Somehow the Downtown Design Review Board approved a departure from those standards in exchange for wall treatment

Mirrors will be added to the blank wall of the Sheraton to make the streetscape more inviting. Image courtesy of Gustafson Guthrie Nichol.

To my mind, there is no more naturally interesting phenomenon as one walks down a city street than interacting – both visually and physically – with a variety of shops, cafés, and other establishments that organically inhabit street-level tenant spaces over the years.

I commend Gustafson Guthrie Nichol for their bold, innovative and, yes, probably very engaging “garden walk.”  In my article, I made a rather glib reference to such an applied treatment being akin to lipstick on a certain porcine animal.  And, as with any maquillage, I fear it will require an inordinate amount of maintenance and continual primping to remain the engaging and interesting street-side phenomenon that they intend.

As for the intended reflection of the Eagles Temple across 7th Avenue, this is an interesting homage to that landmark.  It reminds me of the storied reflection of Trinity Church in the adjacent Hancock Tower’s wall of glass in Boston’s Back Bay. There’s something playful and creative about this approach to a response to the

The western side of Seventh Avenue between Pike and Union streets consists of one uninterrupted, blank concrete facade. Photo by DJC staff.

Again, actual street-level tenant space, with doors and windows, could last the lifetime of the building with a changing array of establishments naturally responding to their street-level location with appropriate displays and accessibility.  Yet the placement of mirrors seems so impermanent.  Does the Sheraton Hotel management really intend to maintain and likely replace those mirrors essentially ad perpetuum?

Not to be ever the naysayer, I am anxiously awaiting the unveiling of the 7th Avenue “garden walk” next Spring as it will be a vast improvement over the existing pitiful situation.  And the Gustafson Guthrie Nichol group do marvelous work, so it will be a pleasure, yet again, to interact with their work in our cityscape.

Chris Persons, executive director of Capitol Hill Housing, has some interesting things to say about what makes communities nice, in part based on a vacation his family took touring some of Washington’s cool places. Here is what he had to say in the Capitol Hill Housing newsletter:

We are late getting out the CHH monthly newsletter because I just got back from vacation.  My family travelled for the first time to the North Cascades and Eastern Washington and we took our friend Marcia along for the adventure.  The boys thoroughly enjoyed themselves and we all soaked up plenty of sunshine.   We toured Diablo lake by boat, explored Dry Falls, dug for fossils in Republic, crossed the Columbia River on Washington’s only free ferry, ate a Billie Burger in Wilbur, drove through the Palouse and drank a responsible amount of red wine in Walla Walla.  (The boys stuck with juice.)  I didn’t think about work at all.  I did think

Walla Walla's Pioneer Park. Photo courtesy of Walla Walla Visitors Bureau.

As I have mentioned previously, the Community Development Collaborative has adopted Five Principles of Sustainable Communities:
• Equitable growth without displacement
• Affordable housing for all
• Transportation equity
• Economic opportunity and viable business districts
• Supportive and diverse environments.

A viable business district is an important element of most sustainable communities.  I tend to think of business districts in the urban village context because that is where I live and work. Columbia City and Broadway in Seattle, and Andersonville in Chicago, are all great examples of vibrant business districts.  But so is downtown Walla Walla.  There are other urban Seattle commercial districts that are not so successful.  How do these urban districts compare with Republic, Winthrop and Wilbur?  What lessons can we learn not just from thriving urban districts but from thriving (and not so thriving) rural ones?

Here are three lessons I came up with. I would be interested in hearing your ideas, too.
1) There has to be a reason for people to come.  Whether it’s Old West charm, fossils, crop circles or wine, you’ve gotta get people there.
2) There has to be a reason for the people who live there to come.   Main Street, U.S.A. attracts many tourists to Disneyland, but it doesn’t build community.  Amenities and services that support day-to-day living are important to sustainability.  If they are provided by locally-owned businesses even better.  I stood in a long line with locals and tourists at the Wilbur Billie Burger.
3) Feet-friendly streets create a comfortable scale for people.  Trees.  Wide sidewalks.  Narrow streets.  Unobstructed windows.  Benches for people to sit on.  Friendly merchants.  This works as well on South Rainier as it does in Walla Walla.

Of course a glass of Washington State merlot doesn’t hurt.  Cheers!

Downtown Seattle has its  McGuire apartments, 25-story building the owner plans to demolish because it says construction defects are too expensive to fix — a contention the contractor disagrees with.

Sarasota, Fla. has its 15-story Dolphin Tower condo complex, which engineers plan to jack up to fix severe design and construction flaws that have caused a key concrete support to fail, according to a Sarasota Herald Tribune story. Read it here.

Opponents of the deep bore tunnel are getting desperate. Now some are proposing a City referendum. Assuming your standpoint is something other than “stop the tunnel at all costs,” this is a ridiculous idea. Without getting into the minutiae, here are a few major flaws in their thinking.

1. It would cause delay, which would increase cost. To ensure top-quality, low-price proposals, WSDOT would presumably postpone the team selection, and much of the public deal finalization would be delayed as well. Even if the referendum resulted in a “go,” this would risk moving the pricing into a period of general economic recovery. As everyone in construction knows, any economic recovery will cause prices to rise substantially due to higher material costs, normalization of margins at every level, etc. The current RFP process is well timed to take advantage of low pricing that we know will last into early next year, but might not last much longer.

2. If opponents were to win, what then? Would it be a simple matter of clarifying Seattle’s exposure to overruns, or would it stop the tunnel concept entirely? Does anyone think that another option would be more popular? Based on who is supporting the referendum, it sounds like the “surface” option is their intended goal. That might play well in some neighborhoods, but it’s the worst nightmare for many of the viaduct’s

The deep bore tunnel being studied as part of the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement will carry four lanes of traffic under downtown Seattle. Much of the two-mile-long tunnel will go through glacial till, reaching a depth of 220 feet. Image courtesy of WSDOT

3. It would be a City referendum for a State project that affects the whole metro. I agree that the cost risk should be shared by the State and the City…which currently appears to be the case, barring any future contract language that specifies otherwise. Aside from the issue of Seattle’s risk, there’s the issue of who the viaduct belongs to. Referendum supporters appear to be forgetting that tunnel is a State project, and serves a region-wide traveling public. Do they really think the State will let Seattle delete a regional lifeline? If the tunnel were stopped, the result would be another highway of some kind. Probably an aerial replacement, built a couple years after the current plan during a time of much higher pricing. The no-replacement people would get to look at THAT for the next 60 years, which horrifies me as well.

4. The other concepts have MORE cost risk. In 2008 it could be argued that a tunnel had higher cost risk than an aerial option. Off the cuff, the opposite seems to be true today. The tunnel has gone through a year and a half of intense study, design, and improvement since becoming the chosen option. A replacement viaduct (or any other concept) would start over with very minimal design, very minimal knowledge of what’s under the existing viaduct, and very minimal idea of what would be needed to minimize the considerable construction inconveniences. Further, those who prefer other options typically forget to include the cost of knitting South Lake Union and Lower Queen Anne back together via a lowered Aurora, which would be a much more difficult project in their scenarios, and they leave the current tunnel severely under code. (This is all completely separate from the hidden costs of disruption (during construction and permanently) with the surface, aerial, or cut-n-cover options, which would dwarf the project cost in every instance.)

In another blog post I discussed why the idea that driving will suddenly become unpopular (an idea held by many surface option supporters) is wrong as well. I won’t get into the opponents claims about overruns on past projects, which are based on ancient history rather than the modern practices of agencies like WSDOT, Sound Transit, etc., who have done well in keeping their recent work on budget.

I suspect the referendum won’t happen because smarter heads will prevail. And if it does, it’ll probably lose, because as some old polling suggested, the public’s #1 priority is to get it done, even among many people who consider the tunnel their second or third favorite option. The tunnel is a good plan, which does an excellent job of balancing millions of viewpoints, and is ultimately the lowest-risk concept.

The Alaskan Way Viaduct and downtown Seattle. Photo courtesy of Clair Enlow.

Reading Clair Enlow’s very insightful piece in yesterday’s DJC gave me hope.  For too long all I’ve heard about is the proposed new Central Waterfront park that could some day replace the dead zone now created by the Alaskan Way Viaduct.  Don’t get me wrong; parks can be great and we do need more gathering space(s) at the City’s front door, but the thought of a single, long, linear park in that location would send shudders down my spine!

When I read that partnership committee member Mark Reddington stated exactly what I’ve thought all along, my fears started to relent, and hope entered the picture.  “This isn’t just a single space,” he said.  “It really should be a deeply integrated place.”

That’s exactly right. that does three crucial things: 1) knits back together the waterfront and the downtown neighborhoods uphill; 2) creates a new series of microneighborhoods with their own new and exciting character, and finally 3) provides a series of interesting, engaging, diverse, interconnected public spaces.

Stated succinctly, Seattle has not done a good job (yet) with downtown public open spaces. In addition, for some reason the political ethos has not yet warmed to the notion so prevalent elsewhere around the world of a genuine integration of public spaces with other public, semiprivate and private uses to achieve truly urbane spaces.  Just look at Westlake Park versus Westlake Plaza (next to the Westlake Center).  The City’s ludicrous policy of essentially disallowing any private activities (vendor carts, spill out of café tables or sales tables) onto public land leaves that park rather lackluster.  Just across the street, on private land, the smaller Westlake Plaza, complete with its coffee shop, vendor stands and exhibits is often so lively and populated it can actually become crowded. For an important civic space in a major city’s downtown that’s not a bad problem to have!

Can you imagine if that policy were allowed to prevail in the much larger central waterfront public spaces?  Just think of Pier 62/63, where not even a popcorn stand, hotdog vendor or espresso stand can be found in that vast, vacant, yet valuable space.  Yes, the view is lovely there, but imagine how much richer the experience would be if there were some minor services or amenities, together with more movable tables and chairs.

If we can truly shed this mindset and move towards an underlying principle of a genuine integration of public and private spaces, activities and uses, then we will have set the stage for a remarkable central waterfront neighborhood that could become the envy of cities across the country.

The remarks by Cary Moon, Clair Enlow and Mark Reddington are giving me hope. Let’s work with them and support this new vision for the central waterfront.

The city of Seattle has produced a flyover video that shows the Broadway alignment of the First Hill streetcar route. Click here for video.

The city and Sound Transit are moving forward with plans to build the new streetcar line linking First Hill

Visualization courtesy of city of Seattle.

The city and Sound Transit have executed an agreement that includes an expedited construction timeline. The line is anticipated to open in 2013 instead of the 2016 completion as was earlier planned.

The city will build and operate the new line, which voters approved as part of the 2008 Sound Transit 2 ballot measure.

The First Hill Streetcar will serve major Seattle work centers, including Swedish Hospital, Harborview Medical Center, Seattle University and Seattle Central Community College.

The line will link to the Link light rail system that opened this summer and the Capitol Hill light rail station when University Link opens in 2016. The city plans to begin construction in 2011.

SeattleScape blogger Irene Wall has an update on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s plans to relocate six research vessels to Newport, Ore. from Seattle next year. It is a press release from U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell on construction under way in Newport of the Marine Operations Center – Pacific pier to serve as home port for the NOAA vessels. In the release, Cantwell questions Commerce Secretary Gary Locke about the move.  Read it here. You can read Wall’s view of NOAA’s choice in the post below.