“老虎项目”命运的不确定性
The Uncertain Fate of TIGER

由专筑网姬薇薇，李韧编译

这个奥巴马时代的基础设施项目鼓励了所有类型的进步项目，包括肯塔基州设计的城镇分公司，然而，这些项目现在也许会被中断。

This Obama-era infrastructure program encouraged all types of progressive projects, including the Scape-designed Town Branch Commons in Kentucky. Now it might get cut.


城镇支流项目所规划的列克星敦会议中心停车场/Town Branch Commons rendering of what is now the Lexington convention center parking lot

“小镇的支流就在我们现在的地方。”景观设计师凯特•奥尔夫（Kate Orff）告诉我，我们沿着藤街走，这是一条有三车道的快速大道，也被称为美国25号公路，它穿过肯塔基州列克星顿市的中心。我们周围都是70年代的米黄色办公大楼，这是20世纪60年代的城市更新计划的成果，这项计划试图改变该州第二大城市（人口318,449）的历史结构，但失败了。Orff和我正在追踪城镇支流的小道，这是一条被遗忘很久的小溪，它在20世纪30年代被埋在混凝土中。她认为，如果我想看，那么应该“看看下水道”。

这条小溪很快就会成为一条长达3.3英里的步行、自行车道，这里是公园和公共空间的中心，这个项目由Orff在纽约发起，这一项目将保留部分水域，小镇的支流是小溪“建立于1779年的列克星顿堤岸”，根据历史标记沿着看不见的水道而形成，标记的文字说明，商品曾流经俄亥俄河然后进入小溪，这里也是蒸汽船的所在地，直到镇里的小溪由于防洪措施而同城市里的其他水域一样被截流。由于20世纪城市规划的战略性错误，这里将成为城市复兴的一部分（米色的办公大楼，一个功能失调的会议中心，一个没有吸引力的街道景观），并把藤街走廊变成绿色通道，为走路的人、骑行的人提供绿色场所。

“Town Branch is literally underneath where we are now,” landscape architect Kate Orff tells me as we walk along Vine Street, a fast-moving three-lane thoroughfare also known as U.S. 25, that slices through downtown Lexington, Ky. All around us are beige 1970s office towers, the fruit of a 1960s urban renewal scheme that tried, but failed, to erase the historic fabric of the state’s second largest city (population 318,449). Orff and I are tracing the path of Town Branch, a long-forgotten creek that was entombed in concrete in the 1930s. If I want to see it, she suggests, I should “look in the storm sewer.”
The creek will soon become the centerpiece of a 3.3-mile-long amalgam of pedestrian and bike trails, parks, and public spaces, a project that is being spearheaded by Orff’s New York—— based firm, Scape, and that will, in places, return the waterway to the surface. Town Branch is the creek “upon whose banks Lexington was established in 1779,” according to a historical marker along the course of the invisible waterway. The text on the marker explains that merchandise once floated down the Ohio River and onto the creek, which also was home to a steamboat—until Town Branch was banished as a flood control measure, like so many other urban waterways. Now it’s having a renaissance as part of a strategy to correct Lexington’s urban planning mistakes of the 20th century (the beige office towers, a dysfunctional convention center, an unappealing streetscape) and turn the Vine Street corridor into a greenway with breathing room for pedestrians and bicyclists.


城市支流计划总体规划/Town Branch Commons site plan

作为城镇支流项目的重要资助者之一，美国运输部（U.S. Department of Transportation）去年为这个项目提供了1410万美元的巨大资助。在奥巴马政府的第一年就计划启动一项交通运输投资项目，从而实现经济复苏。这个项目促使地方官员去思考除了汽车之外更复杂的运输方式。

早在2009年，奥巴马政府似乎将支持全国高速铁路系统或先进的新电网。最终，他的政府采取了一种更加循序渐进的方法来逐步完成城市的复兴。“老虎项目”鼓励其他城市像Hartford、Conn、Akron、Ohio、 Sacramento、 Calif等城市那样，恢复废弃的火车站，实施自行车共享，建设轻轨或快速公交线路，让城市变得更加人性化。前奥巴马政府官员Shelley Poticha说：“我认为‘老虎项目’非常成功。”他现在是自然资源保护委员会（Natural Resources Defense Council）的城市解决方案部的主任。“这个项目优先考虑当地社区的投资，并授予资金的使用权，并以一种整体的方式交付项目。这可能是资金直接流向城市的唯一交通项目。”

然而，在新一届政府的领导下，“老虎项目”的资金来源可能会消失。白宫今年5月公布的2018年预算中，运输部的运费被削减了约160亿美元，而在7月中旬，众议院通过了一项支出法案，该法案将取消该计划。然后，在7月下旬，参议院拨款委员会提议明年将“老虎项目”的资金投入到5.5亿美元，增加5000万美元。这个项目会继续下去吗？还是即将夭折？

One of the significant funders of Town Branch Commons, as the project is called, is the U.S. Department of Transportation, which awarded it a $14.1 million TIGER grant last year. An acronym for Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery, the TIGER program was launched during the first year of the Obama administration and has distributed $4.6 billion to “multimodal” transportation projects in cities (and some rural areas) around the country. It has been a dangling carrot that motivates local officials to think about transportation in more complex ways—in other words, not just cars.
Back in 2009, it seemed like Obama might champion a nationwide high-speed rail system or a sophisticated new power grid. Ultimately, his administration took a largely piecemeal approach to advancing a progressive urban vision. TIGER encouraged cities like Hartford, Conn.; Akron, Ohio; and Sacramento, Calif., to restore disused train stations, implement bike sharing, and build light-rail or bus rapid transit lines, transforming the country one modest project at a time. “I think the TIGER program has been very successful,” says Shelley Poticha, a former Obama administration official who is now the director of urban solutions for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It really prioritized investments in local communities and it has empowered [them] to actually use the funds and deliver the projects in a holistic way. It’s probably the only transportation program where the money goes directly to the city.”
Under the new administration, however, TIGER grants may well disappear. The 2018 budget released by the White House in May includes over $16 billion in cuts to the Department of Transportation, and in mid-July, the House passed a spending bill that would eliminate the program. Then, in late July, the Senate Appropriations Committee proposed setting TIGER'S funding at $550 million next year, an increase of $50 million. Will the program survive, or is it destined for a premature death?




今天的藤街和重新设计之后/Vine Street today and after the redesign

列克星敦市的行人

为了找到可能丢失的东西，我在6月下旬前往列克星顿，了解更多关于城镇分流的内容，这正是“老虎项目”所鼓励的前瞻性项目。在城市重建的几十年里，列克星顿小镇禁止任何一条州际公路穿过它的中心，因此这里有许多历史性的街道仍然完好无损。在市中心，一个法院正在被改造成游客中心，而前奴隶市场被重新设置为农贸市场。这座城市的餐饮和酒吧的主要客源来自于周边的两所大学，分别是肯塔基大学（University of Kentucky）和创建于1780年的特兰西瓦尼亚大学（Transylvania University），这是阿勒格尼山脉（Allegheny Mountains）以西的第一个大学。

1958年，列克星顿小镇的规划人员相当具有远见，他们在城市周围建立了一个城市的边界，所以几乎没有郊区的扩张。环绕市中心的绿树成荫的居民区很快就被马场取代。然而，值得注意的是，这种高度的自行车和步行基础设施已经成为21世纪城市的标志。另外，这条小溪曾经是列克星顿小镇赖以生存的水源。

当我发现自己站在列克星敦小镇中心后面的停车场之中,这是一个奇怪的组合建筑，玻璃柱位于前方，波纹混凝土位于后方，它具有多重功能，如旅馆、购物中心、会展中心、Rupp竞技场。停车场最终将被改造成城镇公园，这是一个占地10英亩的私人投资绿地，有草坪、表演空间，还有一个绿色丛林区域。

Lexington’s Pedestrian Push
To discover what might be lost, I traveled to Lexington in late June to learn more about Town Branch Commons, which is exactly the kind of quirky, forward-looking project that the TIGER program encourages. During the urban renewal decades, Lexington managed to avoid having an interstate highway rammed through its center, and much of its historic Main Street remains intact. Downtown, a hulking Richardsonian courthouse is currently being remodeled into a visitors’ center (bourbon tours!) and the former slave market has been recast as the site of a weekly farmers market. The city’s dining and bar scene is enlivened by two colleges, the University of Kentucky and the tiny, oddly named Transylvania University that, founded in 1780, was the first college west of the Allegheny Mountains.
In 1958, demonstrating considerable foresight, Lexington created an urban growth boundary around the city, so there’s very little suburban sprawl. Leafy residential neighborhoods that ring the downtown quickly give way to horse farms. What’s conspicuously missing, however, is the sort of exalted bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure that has become the hallmark of the 21st-century city. Also MIA: the creek that was Lexington’s original raison d’être.
Which is how I found myself standing with Orff in the parking lot behind the 1976 Lexington Center, an oddly disjointed assemblage of glassy cylinders in front and corrugated concrete in the rear, which incorporates a hotel, shopping mall, convention center, and Rupp Arena, home to the University of Kentucky’s basketball team. The parking lot will eventually be transformed into Town Branch Park, a 10-acre privately funded green space with lawns, performance spaces, and a creek-inspired splash pad—a tantalizing destination for bikers and walkers along the new greenway.


在会议中心附近的水上公园表现图/A rendering of a waterpark near the convention center

现在，这里只不过是一层柏油路。这条小溪从柏油路下面流过。“在你看到下水道的地方。”奥夫指着一条下水道格栅说，“那便是小镇的排水沟。”在停车场的边缘，这里也是市中心的西部边缘，有一条高速公路通向一片广阔的草地，而后，这条水道又重新出现了，这是一条非常美丽的小溪。

城市分流项目正是Orff建立声誉的一种方式。作为景观的奠基人，以及哥伦比亚大学研究生城市设计项目的负责人，Orff了解其中的最新信息，在这个项目中，对自然世界的不同见解会影响到人类世界的设计策略。 Scape事务所在2013年由列克星顿市中心发展局赞助的设计比赛中赢得了这个项目，并计划于今年晚些时候开始施工。

水上城市的构想

大约20年前，当地一位名叫Van Meter Pettit, AIA的建筑师了解了城镇分流对列克星敦小镇的真正含义。当时，他的家人中碰巧有人拥有一个位于市中心的McKim, Mead & White建筑（现在是21C酒店），这座建筑的地下室需要不停地抽水，并把水引进小溪中。因为Pettit很熟悉特拉华州和位于新泽西州中部和得克萨斯州奥斯汀市的拉尼坦运河拖道，他几乎难以想象如果失去这条河流这座城市会受到多大影响。1998年，Pettit成立了一个名为Town Branch Trail的组织，目的是“将这座城市与世界闻名的乡村联系在一起，并通过小溪重塑城市景观”。

2010年，当地的承包商Jim Gray当选市长，他成立了一个工作组，负责更新和改善会议中心区域。据Lord Aeck Sargent的负责人、该项目长期参与者Stanford Harvey说，新市长“看到了各种机遇，这座城市在市中心拥有46英亩的土地，然而大部分却都是地面停车场”。

Right now, the site is nothing more than a sheet of asphalt facing the sorry underside of the center. The stream runs under the blacktop. “Where you see the drains,” Orff says pointing to a line of sewer grates, “is the Town Branch culvert.” Beyond the edge of the parking lot, which is pretty much the downtown’s western limit, and beyond a metal highway barrier that gives way to an expanse of grass, the waterway itself reappears, a perfectly pleasant little stream.
Town Branch Commons is exactly the sort of undertaking for which Orff is building a reputation. The founder of Scape, and the director of Columbia University’s graduate Urban Design Program, Orff is at the forefront of a movement in which a deep understanding of the natural world informs the design of the manmade one. Scape won the project in a 2013 design competition sponsored by Lexington’s Downtown Development Authority, and construction is scheduled to begin later this year.

The Idea of a City on the Water
About two decades ago, a local architect named Van Meter Pettit, AIA, figured out exactly what Town Branch meant to Lexington. His family happened to own a McKim, Mead & White building downtown (now the 21C Hotel), whose basement required nonstop pumping and that clued him in to the creek’s existence. Familiar with the Delaware and Raritan canal towpath in central New Jersey and Austin, Texas’ Town Lake trails, he could envision the lost stream’s potential. In 1998, Pettit founded an organization called Town Branch Trail, with a mission to “connect the city with its world-famous countryside and reorient the cityscape to its founding along the creek.”
In 2010, Jim Gray, a local contractor, was elected mayor, and he set up a task force to update and improve the convention center area. According to planner Stanford Harvey, a principal at Lord Aeck Sargent and a long-standing participant in the project, the new mayor “saw a waste and an opportunity, that the city owned 46 acres right in the middle of downtown that was mostly surface parking lots.”




米德兰大道的现状与方案效果图/Midland Avenue now and after the redesign

工作室聘请了来自挪威奥斯陆的建筑师加里•贝茨（Gary Bates）。“加里立即着手该项目的工作。”佩蒂特回忆道，“他把城镇分流作为他的首要项目。”

Harvey解释说：“我认为有两件事引起了共鸣。一个是关于水上城市的概念，他们认为我们将会把水引回来。”

“第二件事是，”Harvey继续说，“列克星敦小镇有众多马场，所以这条小溪穿过市中心，从某种程度上这对于农场和城市来说具有相当大的影响，这里的人们很赞同这个设计概念，特别是如果它是一条能够连接到这些农场的小路。”

“有的项目被搁置了，”Pettit说，“但是城镇分流的概念却被提升为一个独立的设计比赛。”

在接下来的工作中，大多数的公司做了明显的事，据Gena Wirth设计负责人说，他们根据小溪穿过市中心的长度，通过各个排水系统将其展示出来，尽管城市分流并没有那么重要，但仍然将它设计成为可以漫步的河堤，就像在圣安东尼奥那样。另一方面，在蓝草地区的自然景观环境中，特别是一种被称为喀斯特的多孔石灰岩对当地的经济与生态环境具有重要影响。显然，石灰岩滋养了青草，从而强化了放牧马匹的骨骼。它会导致水以不同寻常的方式运动，这影响了奥夫的设计。在她2016年出版的书《迈向都市生态》中，她写道：“地下水道穿越有渗透性的石灰岩层和表面，进入水池，最终与水池融为一体，并在最意想不到的地方戏剧性地重新浮出水面。该项目旨在通过水池、口袋、喷泉和过滤花园的场所来揭示岩溶身份，而不是通过一个线性通道。”

The task force hired architect Gary Bates from Oslo, Norway–based Space Group. “Gary got it immediately to an extent that kind of amazed me,” Pettit recalls. “He made Town Branch the centerpiece of his schematic plans.”
As Harvey explains it: “I think there’s two things that resonated. One is this idea of a city on the water, the idea that they thought we somehow are going to bring water back.
“And the second thing is,” Harvey continues, “Lexington is pretty much defined by the horse farms, so this idea of a green ribbon coming through downtown that is somehow about the farms and what Lexington means … people really liked that idea too. Particularly if it’s a trail that connected out to those farms as well.”
“The arena project was shelved,” says Pettit, “but the Town Branch concept was promoted as a stand-alone design competition.”
In the ensuing proposals, most of the firms did the obvious thing, according to Gena Wirth, a design principal at Scape: They daylit the length of Town Branch through downtown, liberating it from its culvert, and made it into a riverwalk, like the one in San Antonio, even though Town Branch is a far less substantial waterway. Scape, on the other hand, immersed itself in the natural environment of the bluegrass region, in particular the way a porous limestone called karst has shaped the local economy and ecology. Apparently, the limestone nourishes the grass, thereby strengthening the bones of the horses that graze on it; it also infuses the bourbon for which the state is famous. And it causes water to behave in unusual ways, which influenced Orff’s design. In her 2016 book, Toward an Urban Ecology, she wrote: “Underground waterways travel through permeable limestone layers and surface into pools, disappear into sinks, and dramatically resurface where least expected. Rather than express Town Branch as a linear channel, the project aims to reveal a karst identity through a network of water windows, pools, pockets, fountains, and filter gardens that evoke and expose the underground stream.”




街景的现状与设计剖面图/A diagram of the streetscape now and after the redesign

Scape事务所的想法很独特：城镇分流的公共空间将会是一个线性公园，通过减少主干道的车道，它被融入城市空间，并且重新规划市中心的许多地面停车场。这是一个线性的公园，然而小溪却并非如此。它与泳池、雨水净化过滤花园和其他各种水源相融合。独特的喀斯特墙体由周围乡村常见的斜角石板制成，这是该项目中经常出现的主题，主要用作长凳、屏风和铺路图案。

交通运输部在授予市镇分部的拨款时，把这个项目看作是“多式的绿色通道”，而且特别受这个想法的影响，那就是它所资助的部分将会连接到另外20英里的乡村小路。该项目的总预算仅为4000万美元，也都来自其他州的资助，加上城市和州交通和环境预算，这两个最大的公园地区由私人捐款单独支付。但据Harvey说，该项目的项目补助金让人感觉似乎这个项目已经能够顺利进行， 然而让人们大吃一惊的是，他们实际上筹集了所有的钱来做这件事。

格雷市长在70年代的一次讲话中谈到了这个会议中心，他说：“我想说的是，在今天的竞争环境中，该项目至关重要。拥有一个引人注目城市空间，这是在经济意义上保持竞争优势的重要组成部分。”

格雷的项目管理总监Jonathan Hollinger说：“我们认为这是21世纪的基础设施。我们过去50年的所作所为都是在为汽车建造基础设施。不管科技如何改变城市的未来，我可以肯定地说，我们永远都能行进。”

Scape’s idea is clever: Town Branch Commons will be a linear park squeezed into space created by narrowing the traffic lanes on Vine and repurposing some of downtown’s many surface parking lots. The park will be continuous, but the actual creek will not. Sometimes it will be evoked with pools, stormwater-cleansing filtration gardens, and a variety of other water features. The distinctive karst walls, made from diagonal slabs of stone, common in the surrounding countryside, will be a recurrent motif in the project, used as the inspiration for benches, barriers, and paving patterns.
The Department of Transportation, in awarding Town Branch Commons the grant, saw the project as a “multimodal greenway” and was especially swayed by the idea that the section it was funding would link to 20 additional miles of rural trails. The project’s overall budget, just shy of $40 million, also came from other federal sources, plus city and state transportation and environmental budgets. The two largest park areas are being paid for separately, by private donations. But it was the TIGER grant that made the project feel like a done deal, according to Harvey: “People were taken aback: They actually raised all of the money to do this. This is actually going to happen.”
Mayor Gray discusses Town Branch Commons the way his 1970s predecessor likely spoke of the convention center: “I’m saying it’s essential, essential in the competitive landscape today,” he told me. “Having a compelling, inviting, welcoming urban space through it is a big part of maintaining competitive advantage in an economic sense.”
Gray’s director of project management, Jonathan Hollinger, put it this way: “We see this as 21st-century infrastructure. What we’ve done over the last 50 years is built infrastructure for cars.” No matter how technology changes the city’s future needs, he argues, “I can say with great certainty that we’ll always be able to walk.”




藤街的现状与设计效果图/Vine Street now and after the redesign

失去“老虎项目”意味着什么

在过去的十年里，美国城市的复兴，在某种程度上可以归结为联邦政府对城市中心的奖励，在城市规划中，规划者充分考虑了步行者、骑行者以及机动车的各项需求，然而这些并没有阻止特朗普政府在预算中瞄准“老虎项目”基金。从理论上讲，城镇分流项目应该吸引更多的政客，事实上，列克星敦官员支持“老虎项目”基金来源于参议员麦康奈尔（R）。当我最近跟前美国住房和城市发展部长肖恩•多诺万（Shaun Donovan）谈话的时候，他强调鼓励和资助创新是两党官员共同努力的方向：“在某些方面,政府应当支持当地社区,而不是对社区做出过多限制。”

虽然在细节上，特朗普政府对基础设施的态度似乎主要是将资金注入高速公路和机场等大型项目，然后将其私有化。在公共交通和其他低碳交通工具中似乎没有太多的兴趣。正如Poticha告诉我说：“我从特朗普政府那里得到的信息是，他们只对这些大型项目感兴趣，这样更加容易得到投资回报。”

换句话说，这并不是一种进步思想，这是奥夫的强项之一，她描述了她将当地生态融入建筑的方法，作为城市“复兴”，她将其定义为“一种具有创造性、前瞻性的行为，而不是出于对过去的怀念。”

事实上，我们21世纪的大部分基础设施都是为了修复20世纪的各项政策所造成的损失。“老虎项目”支持这些修复项目，虽然这些项目并不那么雄伟迷人，并不具有如教堂般神圣抑或如机场般雄伟的吸引力，但是，如果特朗普的“老虎项目”的预算被削减，国会预定在今年秋天通过这项计划，这不仅仅是一个项目的损失，它甚至会关联到其他的一系列类似项目。如果那样的事情真的发生，肯塔基州便失去了这条深藏于地下的小溪。

What Losing TIGER Would Mean
The revitalization of American cities that has occurred over the past decade can be attributed, in part, to the way the federal government has rewarded urban centers that took the needs of their walkers, bicyclists, and transit riders seriously. This hasn’t prevented the Trump administration from targeting TIGER grants in its budget. In theory, the Town Branch project should appeal to politicians on both sides of the aisle. In fact, Lexington officials rallied support for the TIGER grant from Sen. Mitch McConnell (R). When I recently spoke to Shaun Donovan, the former secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, he emphasized that encouraging and funding innovation at a local level should be a bipartisan effort: “In some ways, it’s very consistent with the federalist view of the Republicans that the federal government ought to be a supporter of local communities rather than dictating to local communities.”
Although light on specifics, the Trump administration’s approach to infrastructure appears mainly to be about injecting money into big-ticket projects like highways and airports by privatizing them. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of interest in mass transit and other less carbon-intensive forms of transportation. As Poticha told me: “The message I’m getting from the Trump administration is that they’re only really interested in these big projects that private equity investors can see a return of investment on.”
In other words, this is not an administration that appears intent on embracing the kind of progressive urban thinking that is one of Orff’s strong suits. She describes her approach to incorporating the local ecology into built works as a “revival,” which she defines as “a creative, forward-looking act, not driven by nostalgia for the past.”
Indeed, much of our 21st-century infrastructure has been aimed at repairing the damage done by monumental 20th-century infrastructure. TIGER supports projects that accomplish these aims in a way that isn’t always photogenic or sexy, that may not have the appeal of a cathedral-like airport terminal or a soaring bridge. If Trump’s cuts to TIGER are included in the budget that Congress is slated to pass this fall, what will be lost is a program that prioritizes the layer upon layer of interlocking systems that are frequently unglamorous and boring, and sometimes, like that lost creek in Kentucky, entirely hidden from view.


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