The Dilemma of Defining what TOD is Today.
Being a professional procrastinator is not an easy job; it takes time to master, it makes you over-think, and on top of that, the stress of thinking makes you gain weight, as it did to me, while I was eating lots of Nutella with my daughter during my stay at home. Still, I have to blame the weight gain on something other than my lack of self-discipline.
Joking aside, I was procrastinating on the subject of this article for the last five months. ‘What is Transit-Oriented Development (TOD)?’ The topic that I should know better than the meaning of my name, Jihad, which is a nightmare to explain to non-Arabic speakers, and no, it’s not the ‘Holy War.’
Recently, I was asked to give several lectures to the student of UofC as a guest speaker on TOD. The process of preparing for those lectures helped me focus more on having a better understanding of how others understand TOD, and what are the missing components in the definition that makes the majority of us use one angle of the meaning without looking at it as a whole.
So, what is TOD, and why was it so difficult for me to consider how best to answer the question?
The answer is multilayered and as complex as the TOD today. When I first heard that people were questioning the meaning of TOD, the researcher in me paused, thought, and decide to respond in writing, since, at this time, there is an urge to bring clarity to the subject.
Let the journey begin.
The idea of building around transit stops or stations was the norm long before the term TOD became a trend, and many countries around the world don’t even use the word TOD.
TOD, as a concept and development approach, has continued evolving since its codification, which makes it tricky to define. Even though we have many definitions of TOD, and almost all of them may be correct, the issue is that the descriptions are almost always looking at it from a single dimension perspective. Hence, my first response to the question “what is TOD?” is that it’s complex. Obviously, that doesn’t cut it. As someone who studied, researched and worked on TOD for 15 years, a longer and methodological explanation of the term TOD is a necessity.
As mentioned, it’s difficult to answer the question of what TOD means today sufficiently. The answer is multilayered and as complex as TOD and its very history. It has baggage.
Since everyone likes stories, a little background is appropriate here. I started my research on TOD in 1997 when I commenced my Master’s degree at Kyushu University in Japan. At that time, my professor, Atsushi Deguchi, had just come back from the US. He was a visiting researcher at the MIT School of Architecture, where he learned about New Urbanism and Transit-Oriented Development. At that time, TOD was one of the newest schools of thought in the New Urbanism movement. TOD was Peter Colthorp’s approach to the neo-traditional neighbourhood as a solution for the sprawling culture where the answer was to localize density around transportation stops, where vehicles had traditionally taken over the spaces surrounding low-density residential development, and functionally segregated zones.
In 1998, I visited the first application of Calthorpe’s TOD in Laguna West, Sacramento, which I believe is now embraced in the general plan for Sacramento. At that time, a direct connection to Laguna West from Sacramento’s central bus station was not yet established. My trip took me almost an hour and a half, since the bus I took stopped more than 2 miles away from Laguna West, and I had to walk on roads with no sidewalks to get to the development. Visiting a development that was just delivered its first phase was exciting, fun and a privilege for a student learning about the newest idea of that time.
The development itself was brilliant, with no place for mistakes; everything related to the physical environment was manicured with well-designed narrow local roads connected to the commercial town centre and the bus stop. Wide sidewalks lined with brand new houses designed in the neo-traditional architecture style, and quite a few of those houses had their private porches overlooking the human-made lake.
I enjoyed several hours touring the development and learning first-hand how a successful TOD can be achieved through sound planning principles, specific design guidelines and public transit connections. The only shortcoming for my trip was not being able to use the bus to and out of Laguna West, which again reflects the core issue of an urban culture built around vehicles. As they say, evolution always starts with a small step.
From 1993 until today, there are twenty-seven years of research, planning, and of course, TOD projects. Some of those projects are great, and some not so much. Since then, our cities didn’t get fewer cars or fewer developments; instead, they got more and better transit systems.
As I mentioned earlier, using the word “complex” is not an answer by itself; it’s a statement. Therefore a clarification or a debate toward a term that went deep into almost every North American City’s strategic growth is necessary.
Starting to untangle the dilemma with the fact that TOD has no clear definition, I need to show the meaning of TOD through three different perspectives, academia/theory, city growth and building practice.
TOD in Academia/Theory
Transit-Oriented Development made lots of friends in academia and the research circle. Both transit agencies and environmentalist movements wanted TOD to succeed and wanted the data to show that success in both sectors. The data collected from developments promoting walkability while putting densities next to the transit nodes proved the theories that such practice is sustainable, reduce pollution, and increases revenues for transit agencies. It was a win-win-win collaboration.
TOD was the response to many planning issues of its time in the 80s and the 90s. Through a theoretical lens, TOD is a development approach to build sustainable communities in cities that have been designed to accommodate the automobile in North America post WW2.
From the first TOD development at Laguna West to the work that Calthorpe is achieving in China today, there is an enormous volume of collected data with a packed library of research, including the implications of TOD development on our cities.
The collaborative link the TOD achieved within the academia resulted in multiple outcomes that refined the term. Here are a few examples of these refinements:
• Density, diversity and design, the main principles of TOD, are taking different meanings in academia. Research institutes are analyzing every principle in detail to reflect the complexity of both our physical environment and our lifestyle. As a result of such amazing studies, there are now tools to help evaluate our station areas to give public, developers and authorities the ability to pinpoint what’s missing in the TOD area to flourish.
• Peter Calthorpe, the father of TOD, has been promoting greener cities in the age of climate change for more than ten years. This refinement came as a result of the maturity of TOD’s fundamental ecological elements to help reduce pollution (air and noise) in new communities by promoting the use of public transit instead of private vehicles. Today, TOD is more about how to help fight climate change on the broader development level and less about not using cars.
• The most challenging outcome of TOD was gentrification. Researchers analyzed gentrifications in TOD for years, and some studies may see it as a solution, while others see it as a curse. It all depends on the location, the circumstances of the development and, above all, the affected communities. The outcome of these studies helped morph TOD into Equitable TOD (E-TOD), where equity is an essential element of the term.
These are parts of the research and data that academia produced to broaden our understanding of TOD to improve our urban environment. It also helped developers and communities identify the desired elements of TOD and to achieve them.
Moving on to my mission, I am now changing the lens to have a different dimension of TOD, this time from the city growth perspective.
The complexity of TOD comes from its nature being a development term, where development is a never-ending evolvement of building the physical world around us.
Throughout history, cities grew organically; they became the very magnets that attracted people to choose them as a home for a variety of reasons. Today, many cities and towns are trying to mimic built environments of the past to attract more residents. Some cities succeed, while others don’t. Cities are like organisms, to prosper, they have to discover the unique DNA that separates them from their neighbouring cities.
Achieving TOD is an expensive, risky and sophisticated process in any city, regardless of how we are trying to simplify it. In the bible of TOD, the Next American Metropolis, Peter Calthorpe, identifies that the purpose of TOD in cities is to establish Urban Growth boundaries within certain areas where investments in city infrastructure are located and where cities want to grow.
Therefore TOD, through this perspective, is a strategic growth opportunity that will helps cities achieve many of their planned goals, including more compact and pedestrian-oriented communities. It is also a significant opportunity to attract private investment and drive economic development where cities focus their investments and efforts in specific locations.
Research, planning and — above all — government cooperation are the keys for TODs to become more than just a development, and the way cities invest, lease or built their properties around and along transit routes and stations have a significant impact on a city’s growth.
Now we come to the third lens we look at TOD through, which is the placemaking. This lens is more about urban design and the physical environment, which is the lens most definitions are defined through.
Long ago, I learned that when I have something difficult to explain, the strategy I can use to understand it better is to know what that term is not. By knowing the ‘not’, we can focus our thinking on the actual ‘is.’
TOD is not any type of development adjacent to transit, or a blanket approach to increase density within neighbourhoods served by rapid transit. It’s not about apartment buildings replacing single-family and row housing in vibrant communities, and it’s not the architectural design of individual buildings. TOD is not a utopian vision, a streamlined process, and it should not be a vehicle for gentrification.
Through all the above answers of what TOD is not, we can narrow it down to what TOD is. TOD can be described as a multi-typology solution for a station area in a city that aims to promote movement liberty for its residents through multimodal mobility options. Further, it is an approach to create unique places characterized by mixed building forms, users, densities, uses, designs, and where equity is an outcome, not a goal.
Jason Burian, a Managing Partner at Cohn Reznick, said: “There is a fine line to be walked between new developments and building an authentic neighbourhood. No one wants to feel like they live somewhere that got invented in a boardroom.”
In conclusion, TOD through the placemaking lens is the planning, design and implementation of dense, mixed-use development centred around rapid transit stations.
As you can see, my friends, and as per my introduction, TOD is not a simple term, and I’ll argue that if TOD were simple, if it was clear and one typology, we would’ve had many examples of it in our Cities, which unfortunately we don’t. Yet, the significant fact out of all this information is that we want our cities to have successful TODs even though we don’t have one definition of the term even in 2020. Because TOD, or whatever we want to call transit-served real estate development, is the way to build our communities and neighbourhoods. It’s the right way to have an equitable, sustainable and human-oriented physical environment.
I’ll end this article by a visionary prediction of my home city, Calgary. Against many of today’s gloom and doom, ‘end of transit’ scenarios, I believe that in 2040 many Calgarians are using LRT as their primary commuting mode. They will see many completed TODs through the windows of the moving trains and busses they are on. Stations like Brentwood, Anderson, Rundle and Crossroads have completed TODs. People from across the City are drawn to these developments as destinations to visit friends, go to work or school, shop and to attend festivals and other events.
At that time, city planners, developers and citizens continue to work closely together to explore opportunities in their communities for transit-oriented development, discussing their concerns and aspirations. Through this collaborative approach, I see my city growing and having many TOD sites that are prosperous, more diverse, well designed and above all, resilient.
