99% Invisible - 385- Shade

Episode Date: January 15, 2020

Journalist Sam Bloch used to live in Los Angeles. And while lots of people move to LA for the sun and the hot temperatures, Bloch noticed a real dark side to this idyllic weather: in many neighborhoods of the city, there's almost no shade. Shade can literally be a matter of life and death. Los Angeles, like most cities around the world, is heating up. And in dry, arid environments like LA, shade is perhaps the most important factor influencing human comfort. Without shade, the chance of mortality, illness, and heatstroke can go way up. Shade

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Last October, the mayor of LA, Eric Garcetti, gave a speech about one of the biggest issues facing his city. It's just way too hot. We know that climate change is not an abstract crisis. This is the fight of our lives. Mayor Eric Garcetti in South Los Angeles today rolling out key elements of his cool streets program. This is the first of five neighborhoods across the city where we're rolling out new features that'll help us lower our temperatures.

The city is trying lots of things to cool down temperatures, like painting sidewalks white, but the easiest way to solve this problem is shade. Just creating shade, lots of neighborhoods in LA, don't have tree coverage or high-rise buildings and because of city bylaws it's really difficult to build features like shade sales or canopies. Dirtless Sandblock has spent a lot of time looking into shade, so I sat down to talk with them about why shade is actually a matter of life or death for people living in really sunny places.

for people living in really sunny places. So you used to live in Los Angeles, and what did you notice about Los Angeles when you started walking around the city? What did I notice? I noticed that there was no one around. I noticed that the people who were around would have to position themselves in such a way to protect themselves from the sunlight.

What do you mean? I noticed people waiting for the buses behind telephone poles. I notice people waiting for the buses behind telephone poles. I notice people waiting behind the people waiting behind telephone poles because there's only that small sliver of shade that people were protected from the sunlight. Why is shade so important?

Los Angeles, like most every city in the world, is heating up. There are some scientists who I speak to who have found that in hot, dry, arid environments like Los Angeles, but also Phoenix, that shade is the most important factor when it comes to human comfort. More than air temperature, more than humidity, more than wind speed. And there's a close relationship between human thermal comfort and mortality and illness and

heat stroke. If you don't have shade, if you're not protective from the sun, you can, oh, you can become dizzy, you can become disoriented, you can become confused, a thargic, dehydrated. If you are obese or elderly or pregnant, that can tip into more dangerous things like heart attack or organ failure. And so what is the magnitude of the problem in L.A. There are a few different ways of thinking about it. We can talk about shade in terms of tree canopy, which is a very serious problem. Los Angeles has terribly unequal tree canopy.

And by tree canopy, I just mean coverage. Like say you're not our space, looking down on LA. You'll see parts of the city that are covered in green. And you'll see parts of the city that are not. They're baking an asphalt. And those two aty follow lines of wealth. It's a problem with tree canopy, it's a problem in terms of the built urban form,

Los Angeles is notoriously anti-density, Los Angeles has this image of itself as not being New York City, in fact being the anti-New York City. So sunlight and open space is a part of the culture. That's not necessarily a problem, but it becomes a problem when you can't escape it. Right. So there are no tall buildings to provide some measure of shade. I wouldn't go as far as to say there are no tall buildings. However, there are a few

tall buildings. And there's space pretty far apart. Correct. They're located in certain height districts downtown being one of them. And even some areas that city planners have designated to be taller neighborhoods, even today, they're still fought and contested by neighborhood activists. So I've seen all pictures, and I get a sense that Los Angeles used to be greener, like there was a lot of shade.

So tell me how the city was designed and how it developed into this. So time was Los Angeles was a prairie. If you look at photos of LA from 150 years ago, it's all grasslands. it developed into this. So time was Los Angeles was a prairie. If you look at photos of LA from 150 years ago, it's all grasslands. And when it was settled by the Spanish downtown, which was the original settlement, was laid out according to the law of the Indies. The city would roughly conform to a 45 degree angle, so you could have sunlight in the winter

and shade and shadow in the summer. So what, to explain the law of the Indies, what does this mean? The law of the Indies means build your cities at 45 degrees, basically. Really? Completely unlike the way we think of most American cities, which have this sort of north, south, east, west, very rich, grid.

So you have these original settlements that are laid out in such a way as to be able to create shadow when you need it and also to bestow sunlight, also when you need it. Spanish architecture tends to have a very strong sense of natural comfort. So you'll see a lot of these kinds of missions and adobe that have these internal court yards that are shaded. You'll have covered walkways, paseos, and even today you'll see a lot of this and Spanish

revival architecture or, you know, outdoor malls that have goofy Spanish-ish names. Well, as the angelist was also in a way sort of a dusty old west town. So you think about these covered boardwalks, you think about large canvas awnings that are cooling people who are living outside and also cooling indoors, which at the time didn't have air conditioning. And another way that Los Angeles tried to stay cool was through rich, beautiful, kind of flamboyant, not just tree canopy, but a syncretic, overwhelming variety of exotic, fluorin phantom. So during this period, there was a recognition of the environment and how to be

comfortable inside of it. And when did that go wrong? Funny that you put it that way. Things started to go wrong after cheap electricity came down to Los Angeles with the completion of what's now called the Hoover Dam. So you start to see the city rebuild itself and the new development becomes like we see today. You have controlled air conditioning, you have the automobile which comes to dominate the city in the 30s and the 40s.

And with the automobile you just have a whole new way to see the city. The names of the streets are as whole words translated into magic. Fabulous stacks of freeways tremendous turnpike. The city started to think about how to market itself and how to make itself see more tracted outsideers and this is where you get palm trees. Palm trees, one essayist said, were about as useful for shade as a telephone pole. She hated them, but the city was enamored of them. And interestingly, you have different philanthropist

and celebrities starting to think about trees as being a public good, but the palm tree, in particular being one that doesn't just message L.A. as a kind of semi-tropical paradise, but also as Mary Pickford said, it's very good for window shopping from the CD or car, because the tree trunks aren't that robust. So if you're driving down some boulevard, you can see all the great stuff because the palm tree is so narrow.

So Los Angeles was also re-zoned in the 1930s to become a single family city. Los Angeles in order to sort of not pacify and not suck up, but to sort of remake itself from the image of the FHA decided that all new single family homes had to come with a front and a side yard. So you start to create a lot of space around them. Los Angeles really starts to hate the idea of density. And so when you have this type of sprawling, not very dense city, how is the shade distributed? Unevenly. Shade is distributed to people who can afford it.

If you go into these neighborhoods that were laid out to be wealthy residential enclaves, you have very wide sidewalks and the strip of grass where you can tree plant, which is called the parkway, becomes four or five, maybe even ten feet wide. And when you have these wider parkways, you have a greater space to plant a bigger, thicker, leafier tree. So, the parkway is the area between the sidewalk and the road. Correct. And there's going to be pretty wide and therefore have trees with them.

Correct. In other neighborhoods that have been redlined, that were designed as sort of worker housing that were meant to sort of jam people in together, you don't have these kinds of wide residential sidewalks instead of what you have are very narrow sidewalks because these neighborhoods are designed to facilitate automobile passage. So if you have a narrow sidewalk, you don't really have the space to plant a thick leafy tree. Furthermore, it's been incumbent upon property owners and renters to maintain this sort

of semi-public space of the parkway. You would think that in a city, whatever's on the sidewalk, whatever's outside of the property line would be managed by the city. That has not historically been the case in Los Angeles. It's been incumbent upon property owners to water, trees, to maturity, and to maintain them. If there's a tree there, it's because someone has taken it upon themselves to water it to maturity and to care for it. So each part of that process, the design of where the sidewalk is relative to the street, the fact that a person of wealth could plant and maintain a tree, all these things cause more uneven distribution of shade trees. That's right. And I would also add that in some neighborhoods, I'm thinking about a neighborhood called Hancock Park, which is a flat neighborhood, landlocked in the center

of the city. There is nothing about it that naturally lends itself over to being a lush, verdant, tree-fistuned paradise. But the neighborhood was developed as an exclusive, wealthy residential enclave. And when that happened, the power lines were underground. There is nothing in the way it is designed specifically to allow for tree growth. This is not the case in most of Los Angeles. So because of this lack of shade trees, there have been efforts to build in shade, especially around bus shelters, but it's been incredibly hard, according to your reporting. So like in your article, you talk about one bus shelter at Glaston Park. Can you tell me about that and why it was so hard to put shade there?

It was hard because shade is a tripwire. Okay. In the instance of the Glaston Park Transit Island, you had a concern neighborhood resident, and a neighborhood activist maybe you'll call them a homeowner, who wanted to throw just a simple bus shelter over a space where she saw people naturally congregating. She ended up talking to an architect who said, let's not do a regular bus shelter, let's throw some big shade sales in here.

And when that happens, you have to start thinking about, how are we going to fix these shade sales to the ground? And when that happens, you have to start thinking about how are we going to fix these shade sales to the ground. And when that happens, you have to start thinking about what's underneath the ground. And you have water mains, you have underground utilities, in order to upgrade a sidewalk or a transit island, you then have to start honoring newer regulations like the Americans with disabilities act, so then you have to start making curb cuts to make it wheelchair accessible. So you have to take care of all these other things before you can decide to do this very lightweight, sort of low res fix.

Right. The sort of the enemies of shade are not always bad guys. In this case, ADA compliance is not a bad guy. No. Yeah, like curb cuts, not a bad guy. No. Like all these things are not bad. You know, it's not just sort of around sidewalks. Um, LA doesn't have a lot of

shaden at city parks either. So why is that? Why was this never considered valuable? It wouldn't go as so far as to say it was never considered valuable. Mm-hmm. Because I'm thinking about a park downtown called Purshing Square. That up until the 1950s was a tropical paradise. It was incredibly shady. It was meant for people to kind of hang out and shoot the breeze. And after a while, the business elite in the neighborhood decided, first of all, to install underground parking, which gets rid of the whole root system. So you can no longer plant thicker, denser tree canopy. And part of the reason why Pershing Square

was redeveloped in Shornhub its tree canopy is because Los Angeles is a city where residents are worried about crime. A city where residents are worried about homelessness. As I was working on this story, I came across multiple instances where LAPD had installed pole cameras in parks or in public housing projects. And I'd been told about something called crime prevention

through environmental design, which is this idea that we need to have increased visibility in public spaces. And you can go on Google Street View and go back five, six, seven years. And you can see over time, when a pole camera goes up, a mature street tree goes down. So there's all these selective pressures where other things are just more important. You know, like it, whether it's, I would call it somewhat the illusion of crime prevention.

Correct. No one told me that it actually prevents crime. What is detective told me was that it helps the police catch and prosecute criminals. Not that it stops them. And then this preference for this underground parking, which makes shallow ground, which, therefore, you can only have trees that have ball root systems

like palm trees. Correct. It just seems like everything is working against it, especially in this city. And so how do you think about how to balance these, you know, these different factors and their value in an urban setting? Great question.

There are a few ways to think about this. I mentioned that in Los Angeles, it's homeowners and residents who are responsible for the maintenance and cultivation of street trees. Why does it have to be that way? Why doesn't the city decide that a public urban forest? Why isn't that a value? You might also think about the question of density. I spoke to an architect, and what he told me is that maximizing floor space is the name

of the game, which means if you only have so much space to work with, which developer is going to say, let's actually carve out some of our floor space to make an arcade or a portico. That's a tough sell. So why doesn't the city properly incentivize developers to create these sort of semi-public shaded environments behind the property line that are contiguous with the sidewalk? What about just planting trees? I mean, what is LA doing about just adding to the canopy in general?

The city is trying to plant more trees. The city has a goal of planting 90,000 trees in the next few years. I am not sufficiently convinced that the city recognizes the infrastructural challenge to planting 90,000 trees because as we've been talking about the space in which you can plant a tree is limited. When you have things like an aeroside walk or overhead power lines or even regulations that limit or prohibit the planting of a street tree within 45 feet of a driveway, which let's be real, that's practically all of Los Angeles. That makes me think that the city is not understanding the complete wholesale reimagining of the

street that's needed in order to plant 90,000 trees. So we've talked a lot about informal urbanism in the show, and sort of interventions. People could install umbrellas and canopies without permission to fix this kind of problem just in their own neighborhood. Did you find evidence of people doing this and what is the reaction when this happens? People do it all the time. Particularly I will add in Latino neighborhoods. There's an urbanist named James Rojas who writes about Latino urbanism And he has a pretty compelling theory that Latino residents of Los Angeles know how to use the shade And he leads these wonderful walking tours where he'll point out

Shade sales that have been connected between two garages in an alleyway for kids to play in because it's more comfortable under the shade Or he'll point out these elaborate front yards where you have blue polytops just strung across a space or maybe exotic trees that are sort of overflowing into the street. Well, that sounds great to me, but I get the impression that the city doesn't always see things the same way. What I did find is that in the private realm, those things are tolerated. When they step into the public and when they step onto the sidewalk, things become more complicated. I write about a grassroots shade shelter

on Figueroa and Avenue 26 in the Cyprus Park neighborhood near the LA River. And a barber named Tony Conejo would not admit that it was he who made this really great, fantastic shade shelter made out of like an Ibeam and a great tarp and a couple bus benches, but he told me that he recognized the need for people when they're waiting for the bus just to have some protection. Tony or someone had to take down this grassroots bus shelter

because it was an obstruction in the public right of way. The city processes 16,000 obstructions in the public right of way every year. If property owners, if residents did not fear that the city would come after them threatening them with fines, perhaps we would see more grassroots urbanism. I think it's pretty surprising to think of shade as a political inequity issue. I think it surprises a lot of people. Tell me about your awakening of this and convincing people of it and just make your best case for what it is that you want people to think about when they think about shade in the city. respect for people who can't afford to duck into an air-conditioned cafe or a lift when it gets too hot.

Shade is to me an understanding that the world is changing and we want to protect citizens, the most vulnerable citizens who can't protect themselves. And it's also just nicer to be in the shade, it's cooler in the shade. I always walk on the shady side of the street, it's easier to see in the shade. You know, I spoke to a scientist who said that direct sunlight is the kind of light that you have when you perform oral surgery. That's not pleasant. No, dappled light is more like reading a book.

So I want my city to help me read a book. I don't want to perform a world surgery. Yeah, thanks for coming in. I appreciate that. Yeah, thanks for having me, Roman. Sam Bloch's article called, shade appeared in places during. Up next, as the hottest cities are beginning to recognize the importance of trees and shade, architects are drawing more and more trees.

All over their building proposals, almost a comical amount of trees, even on the building itself. Kurt and I talk about that after this. So, after I interviewed Sam Block about Shaden cities, we reached out to a bunch of landscape architects, and each of them said that the solution was pretty simple, that we need to plan more trees in cities. And one thing that you notice, if you look at architectural renderings

of proposed buildings, is that there are trees everywhere in the drawings because it looks pretty and it sells the idea of this future site being an oasis in the concrete city. And to take it a step further, more and more renderings feature big trees and shrubs actually on building themselves. Like whole vertical forests on skyscrapers.

And Kurt Kulstad was the person who made me aware of this trend and he's in the studio with me to talk about it. So when did you first notice trees just overrunning skyscrapers and renderings? I mean, it definitely wasn't the thing when I was an architecture school a decade ago. I would say it was more recent than that. During the 2010s, I started to notice

more and more of these increasingly absurd renderings, where the trees were just kind of everywhere and they were beautiful and bloom. And, you know, architects have a long tradition of kind of pushing the edges with their renderings. You'll see like a lot of really clean lines. You might not see the ugly railings on balconies, the things that are going to be there in the end, but this kind of like, we're just going to put greenery on everything and just assume that's fine and people will buy that. I mean, it just kind of got to the point of being absurd. Is it really this idea of selling an image

or do you think it's like a little bit of this greenwashing association that it feels environmental to have trees on buildings like that? Oh yeah, I mean, that's the great thing about it, right? You can sort of sell it to environmentalists, like look how literally green our building is. And of course, you can sell it to people

because they're like, wow, I'm gonna be on the 24th floor but I'm still gonna have this kind of like lush greenery surrounding me. There's something to that too, right? I mean, like you can help bolster ecosystems, you can help filter air, you can provide some shade at least for the residents. There are arguments for putting greenery up high. Right. The problem in general is just that people don't realize how challenging it is. Right. And so what are the challenges of putting really big greenery on a building?

So the kind of number one challenge of this is just being able to support that greenery physically, right? So like, like, how's your heavy? Yeah, trees are heavy. And like, architects have to design for both active and passive loads, active loads being things like people, and passive loads being like, you know, snowfall. And basically putting like these big, heavy trees

can like double or triple the passive load requirements. So you end up having to bring in all this extra structure. And on top of that, that's not just structured to support the trees, that's also structured to support two or three feet of soil to support the tree. I mean, it just kind of stacks in their irrigation systems. There's the hoisting up of these things

in the first place. I mean, the list is locked. Right. Is it only passive? I mean, it strikes me that trees at high altitude are actually kind of active because they blow in the wind and they move. Is that something you have to account for?

I mean, I don't know if they're doing sort of lateral load calculations for that, but definitely the impact of wind on these things is a factor, right? So you get these things up high. Trees like forests for a reason, right? Like they like to be surrounded by other trees. And other trees help keep them from like blowing down.

So the high winds at higher altitudes can interrupt photosynthetic processes and just kind of cause different issues for you know that you know wasn't born and bred for that environment. And on top of that too, in a lot of these towers they show kind of equal greenery on all sides and that looks lovely. Reality works differently, like the sun rises, it sets, and so if you've got a building, for example, with a North facing facade,

you might have trees that never see any sunlight. So this kind of equal treatment on all sides makes it seem a little artificial and not very sustainable. So the greenery looks environmental, but the first problem is you have to put all these extra materials concrete and steel to make this greenery viable on top of a big building. So that's sort of one of the drawbacks of if any of this was ever a reality. I think the fundamental thing is most of the time it isn't a reality.

Right, right. A lot of these don't get built. There's sort of concept renderings that kind of get people interested in an architecture firm, you know, designed for competitions and not for being built. So do get built with sort of various degrees of success and failure. And one of the classic examples of one of these that really did get built is called the Vertical Forest and it's in Milan and it's a pair of towers. They meet a lot of the criteria we've been talking about. They essentially have kind of equal greenery on all sides. It's really lush. They made these things, right?

And they hoisted the trees up, and it doesn't look bad, and it seems to be sort of working. But, you know, they encountered a lot of issues too in construction. There were a lot of construction delays and sort of figuring out how are we going to irrigate these things and accommodate these loads. Some of those are predictable. Some of those are kind of specific to the fact that this building had to do more than a lot of buildings have to do. That same firm has since gone on to design other examples for other

cities. They all kind of look the same. They sort of look like, hey, we've got this model and we're going to kind of apply in all these different places. But one of the things that always cracks me up when I'm looking at their renderings is you'll see all these trees up on the sides of the buildings and then they'll depict the plaza surrounding it below. And they'll be like a couple of trees. And I can't help but think, you know, if you really want to go all green, the easiest way to do that would be to just add more trees on the ground. And so it makes you wonder, like, what is really the purpose? Is it aesthetic?

Is it just for the residents? I mean, if they were trying to sort of serve the public good, filter air, do all these things, they could just really pack in the greenery on the space below, and it would be potentially a really nice eminuity. Right. That's one of the interesting side effects that actually you made me aware of as well, which is like, you know, putting trees on a building is like on the vanguard of architecture, and what they abandon in this is just putting trees on the ground where everyone can use them. And what's also interesting is that it feels a little bit like architects jump the

shark at some point. We used to have this idea of green roofs are good and green roofs are good. Often they're kind of thin layers of greenery and they serve certain functions like absorbing heat and converting oxygen and they don't take nearly as much work to make or maintain just kind of this what's called extensive greenery, which is to say like sort of thin. Mouses and grasses. It's like a succulent.

You don't really have to worry about it too much. Yeah, like it more or less takes care of itself. You might need some irrigation. The weight requirements are far reduced. And so it's like they started in this good place of saying like, well, let's add these layers of greenery and it will be a real benefit to the city, to the building, and all these things.

And it's super pleasant. If you've ever been in like a fancy office building that has a green roof, it's great to have that on top there. And I've seen really nice green walls like that too, sort of just kind of thin, not over done. And then at some point, it's like the aesthetic just kind of took over and it's like, well, that's nice and all, but it doesn't really look great in my drawing of this thing that I'm using to sell to like developers and whoever else.

And then once you've got one tree, you know, you've got to put a whole forest up there, you've got to have a whole vertical forest, right? But I'm really intrigued by this side effect of like the way to make your vertical skyscraper forest stand out is to take away all the trees at the base. Oh, yeah. And that's where it would do the most good and solve this problem that Sam has pointed out, the lack of equity when it comes to shade in places. And whereas I think the simple conclusion that we come to when it comes to the issue of

shade in cities is more trees. But like most things, location, location, location. Yeah. Is really important. Yeah. And that's the thing. I would trust the intentions of these designers more if they were putting trees both on their buildings, but also all around their buildings and every

available space because those are going to be the easiest to install or plant. They're going to be the easiest to take care of. They're going to serve some public benefits potentially, or even if you're in sort of a courtyard, at least they serve the community that is being built for. And when they omit those trees on the ground and stack them all up high to make their building really stand out, it does. It feels kind of like they're leaning into this almost anti-shade stance.

We are going to reserve the shade for these rich citizens who live here. We've privatized shade. We have successfully privatized shade. And one of the things that I've dug into a little bit, and I'm not an expert on, but one of the things that I've looked at is this question of how much good do these trees do,

because it is good to add greenery to cities. Yeah, absolutely. And by some rough math, so don't hold me to it. It looks like, for example, in one of these projects, the greenery that they've encased this giant building in offsets the effective carbon footprint of heating a half dozen homes for a year. And that's good, but it doesn't, you know, if you're thinking about carbon neutrality or even having something that's carbon negative, just installing those trees and creating

all the structure for them might take up just as much carbon as they're offsetting. And so the idea that if you clad your skyscraper and trees it's going to actually make the building greener is going to be really context dependent. It might someday in some cases, but in a lot of cases it's offset by all the work you have to put into it in the first place. Totally. Architects have good intentions in general, and I think architects tend to want to solve every problem they can, including problems that aren't within their purview, essentially. I'm sure a lot of architects say to themselves, this is great. I'm putting greenery up on buildings, and I just think it would be helpful if there was some more self-examination around the question of, you know, how is this going to work as a system beyond my particular building? It's great if you're providing habitats and shade and oxygen conversion on your building,

but how is that going to interact with the city? And what is the net effect of what you're doing? Okay, well, I'm so glad that you made me aware of this and you wrote an article about this on the site a long time ago. Yeah, I've written a few and there's somewhat snarky in their headlines. I kind of have like a little axe to grind with this. Call out. Okay, that's cool.

We can check it out on the website. It's 9-9-PI-DOT-OR. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Chris Baroube and Kurt Colestead, Music by Sean Riel, Katie Mingle is the senior producer, thrust the team in senior editor Delaney Hong, Sheree Fusef, A Reach Offensive, Emmett Fitzgerald Vivian-Lay, Sophia Klatsker, Joe Rosenberg, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting.

Find them all at radiotopia.fm You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI or one Instagram and read it too. But we're throwing a lot more shade at 99PI.org. Radio Topia. From PRX. From PRX.