A forty years of firsts with Principal Biologist Curtis Uptain and QK. Learn more about his award-winning career and contributions to biology.
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QK News! Congrats to Monique Mello and Barry Lindner, our new Visalia and Porterville Branch Managers!
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Established in 1972 in the city of Visalia, read the 50 year journey from QUAD to the QK of today.
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Learn more about QK’s planning outreach process during the pandemic.
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Information about QK and the Creek Fire Post-Fire Erosion Control Project.
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Resources and information about grant opportunities.
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QK, a California based engineering, land survey, planning and environmental firm, is pleased to announce that they have entered into an agreement to acquire Zumwalt-Hansen Associates, Inc. (ZHA). The acquisition will combine ZHA’s operations with QK’s full suite of consulting disciplines.
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Few things are unaffected by the COVID-19 pandemic. While people continue to see changes in their workplace, their schools, the way they purchase goods, and even the way they interact with others, it is clear that for Planning departments, the show must go on. But how? Planners oftentimes work collaboratively, and direct, often face-to-face communication with government officials and the public they serve is an integral part of the Planning profession. Beginning early Spring of 2020, this became a little challenging. And answering the call by the cities we serve to continue our work as closely as possible to a “business as usual” environment, while adhering to safety protocols, QK developed the capacity to assist planning departments with a program we like to call … Virtual Counter.
Virtual Counter is a program designed by QK Planners and IT professionals that uses Microsoft® Bookings and Teams technology to enable to the public to schedule appointments with Planning staff from the comfort of their homes and offices. Our Virtual Counter has access to Planning staff schedules and allows the public to choose and lock in private appointments. Appointments are blocked out in one-hour intervals and can take place via phone or video. QK has implemented a Virtual Counter for the City of Selma, California as part of our on-call Planning services and we are finding great success for both the City and its citizens.
At QK, we understand how important it is for Planning departments to continue to be accessible and available to the public. We also recognize how important it is to get creative and make sure every voice is heard and every concern addressed, while safely maintaining physical distance. Virtual Counter meets those needs, and is also beneficial for people who previously found it difficult to physically come to the Planning department for face-to-face interaction.
And we don’t think Virtual Counter stops at the end of the pandemic. We foresee the success of Virtual Counter continuing even after the pandemic is over. We believe it to be potentially invaluable for cities and counties to offer a hybrid approach to working with Planning departments where members of the community and land developers will be able to schedule in-person, video, or phone meetings that fit their needs and schedules.
Is your city interested in customizing QK’s Virtual Counter for your Planning department? Call Principal Planner Steve Brandt today at (559) 733-0440, and learn just how easy it is.
By Jessica Bispels, Associate Planner
Urban sustainability is the idea that a city can be organized and designed to reduce negative environmental and social impacts on future generations. This can include considerations for air quality, clean water, proper waste treatment, buildings that are built to last, and even social equity. Sustainable cities work hard to ensure their citizens, infrastructure, and environments have the chance to thrive for years to come.
Urban sustainability has become increasingly popular in the United States in the past couple of decades. Sustainability though, is not a new concept at all. Nineteenth century planners Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright pioneered planning sustainable cities. Then in the 20th century, innovator Aldo Leopold wrote a piece entitled The Land Ethic, in which he began to encourage citizens to think more about the impact they were placing on the environment. Bill McKibben was thinking along the same lines as Leopold when he wrote, The End of Nature, which is considered the first book to discuss global warming written in an effort to gain public understanding.
In 1992, the United Nations hosted a summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil regarding environment and development, specifically sustainable development. The summit was considered a success because through it, many world leaders adopted the ideas of change in their home countries and have since implemented sustainable development practices in their cities. The success of the summit helped to create the widespread general consensus that the importance of sustainability cannot be denied, or else the future of our planet is in danger.
Since then, planners and scholars in the United States have been working hard to define the necessary components of sustainability and figure out how exactly they must be implemented in our modern democratic system. These ideas have been criticized though, with Agenda 21 being the particular target. As stated on sustainabledevelopment.un.org, “Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment.”
Some people thought that these sustainable development practices gave the government too much power. Regardless, people like World Future Council Co-Founder Herbert Girardet, architect and urban designer/planner Peter Calthorpe, Princeton professor of climate change and systems ecology Stephen Pacala, and theoretical physicist and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering Robert Socolow have been theorizing ways to gauge how much an area like a city is harming the environment, and how to combat that through urban planning.
Urban sustainability continues to be one of the most important issues of modern planning. Planners and builders have been working to create many different kinds of standards, like Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure Envision Sustainability Professional (ENV SP) certifications, that offer certified professionals who can help people, companies, and government organizations plan and design for sustainability. Although many cities all over the United States are working toward being more sustainable, the future of comprehensive urban sustainability will require a complete ideological shift of most Americans.
By Jessica Bispels, Associate Planner
(Some of the most influential architects of the post-industrial revolution world were Frank Lloyd Write, Le Corbusier, and Ebenezer Howard. The following is an analysis of the utopian cities they designed to try and make sense of what they felt cities were doing wrong, and what they should look like in the future.)
To both Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, the industrial city was not adequate for the needs of the people. To Wright, a big city like Chicago was “a monstrous aberration built by greed, destructive both to efficient production and to human values.” After Corbusier’s move to Paris, he noticed that “the cramped and noisy business center made efficiency impossible; antiquated building codes forbade modern methods of construction; housing was inadequate for all classes….” Wright and Corbusier sought to do more than change the layout of the city; they wanted to reinvent the way in which they’re designed. Both architects wanted to ensure individualism in the average urbanite’s life, while creating a comfortable aesthetic where the built environment is integrated into the vast expanse of nature. It is in their specific methods that the differences arise. Wright’s Broadacre City places responsibility on the individual to create his or her ideal life within his or her own plot of land. Corbusier’s idea of individualism is to create a community in which the mundane tasks of survival are taken care of, and the individual is free to do as he or she pleases. Both Wright and Corbusier’s utopian cities attempt to free the individual, but their contrasting ideas of what the individual wants create differing results.
In Wright’s plan for Broadacre City, he wanted to create an alternative society. His ideal city enabled him to show the workings of government, education, religion, the economy, and the home as integral parts of the total environment. As he witnessed the stock-market crash of 1929, he strengthened his theory that the United States needed a radical physical and economic change. Wright called for a decentralization of urban areas, as he felt that the heavily concentrated city was obsolete. Broadacre City was to be comprised of decentralized units strewn across the rural countryside. He wanted a “marriage of town and country.” By taking away the walking city, Wright relied on technological advancements in transportation to make his city work.
Sketches for the Broadacre City project by Frank Lloyd Wright
Photo By: Kjell Olsen – originally posted to Flickr as Wright Sketches for Broadacre City 2, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12036508
Wright also witnessed the development of the automobile, and like so many other Americans of his time, he was fascinated by the automobile, convinced of its potential to revolutionize modern life and blind to its limitations. The assumption that every American will own or have access to a car was essential to Broadacre City. Within the city, all families would have at least one acre of land, and have an absolute right to that area. Neither shape nor scale appear recognizably urban: one ‘city’ might sprawl over 100 square miles without any recognizable center. The automobile was needed for this to be effective. As the houses, the factories, the stores, the office buildings, and the cultural centers are all in the midst of farmland, the average American needed to travel by car.
One of Wright’s ideas in his city was to shrink the economic center to the home and use the family as the basic economic unit. This was to ensure that the proletarian could “never be unemployed or a slave to anyone.” He hoped that this would strengthen the family. As a base for production, education, and culture, the family would recapture the centrality which it had surrendered to urban institutions. Broadacre city would be agrarian based, as all individuals would be part-time farmers. This placed a large importance on the individual members of Broadacre city. Wright hoped this responsibility would secure the family’s strength, while ensuring that the individuality which Wright had been preaching would have its base in the very structure of the country.
It’s important to note that the individualism of Wright’s city lies in the individual’s right to run his or her own economic center. The individual can and must do with his or her land what he or she thinks is needed. The freedom comes in the ownership of property. Wright’s concept of freedom and individuality is not interpreted in the same way by all, as is seen in Le Corbusier’s Radiant City.
Le Corbusier was also a witness to the Great Depression. As the Great Depression strengthened Wright’s conviction, it changed Corbusier’s idea of administration in his utopian city. In his first city, The Contemporary City, there was no single power to regulate all the separate private corporations which accomplished the essential work of society. But Corbusier’s faith in the invisible hand of free competition was diminished after the Great Depression. He now held that organization must extend beyond the large corporations. Total administration would replace the marketplace in the Radiant City, and it would be up to experts to “match society’s needs to its productive capacities.” This differs from Wright’s belief that once the utopian city is designed, the individuals would be free to do as they please, in an organic order. Corbusier called for extensive planning and administration the entire way through, and this planned hierarchy of administration would replace the state. To Corbusier, the beauty of the organization was the product of the perfect cooperation of everyone in the hierarchy. It was the expression of human solidarity in creating a civilization in the midst of the hostile forces of nature. The natural hierarchy was one means of attaining the sublime.
Design of Brasilia – based upon the principles of The Radiant City
In contrast with Wright’s decentralized Broadacre City, the Radiant City contained centralized towers of residential space in its very core. These towers called “Unités, each contained a neighborhood with 2,700 residents. The apartments are assigned in accordance with the size of the worker’s family and their needs. The individualism of the worker can be expressed in his or her residential space. The citizen in Le Corbusier’s syndicalist society thus experiences both organization and freedom as part of his daily life. His workspace is heavily organized so that he can have freedom outside the workplace.
Corbusier places importance on the family unit as Wright does, but doesn’t give them economic responsibility. Wright hoped that the responsibility he places on the family unit would strengthen the family, but Corbusier wanted to free the family of any economic function. In the Radiant City, the family no longer has an economic function to perform. It exists as an end in itself. There is a strong distinction between work and play in The Radiant City, and the family belongs to the realm of play.
In Corbusier’s free society, men and women would work as full-time individuals. He assumed that there would be an end to the familial economic unit, and women would be free from domestic services like cooking, cleaning, and child raising. All of these tasks are provided by the society. This would therefore free the family to reassemble in the afternoon (after work and school), perhaps around the pool or at the gym, and when the family members return to their apartment they find it already cleaned, the laundry done and returned, the food ordered in the morning already and prepared for serving. This strong distinction of work and leisure is important in the Radiant City, as the individual now has the freedom to enjoy his leisure time as he pleases, instead of his work time like in Wright’s Broadacre City.
If Ebenezer Howard was able to have a conversation with Wright and Corbusier about their design, he would notice that the basic principles of his “Garden City” comply with those of the other cities. Howard’s Garden city plan was a community “in which social order and individual initiative would be properly balanced.” He also wanted to give individual liberties to the inhabitants of his city. His ideas differed from Wright and Corbusier’s, which would cause him to critique their work.
Howard would not agree with Wright’s agrarian based society. As a failed farmer himself, he thought that not even a small community could successfully manage all its farms. He thought the community should be a balance of a privately and collectively owned enterprise. Wright’s economic system is too bold for Howard, as he would argue that Wright puts too much responsibility on the people. On the other hand, Corbusier’s system doesn’t give the individual enough responsibility, relative to Howard. Because the administrators would determine even the urbanite’s living space, Howard would see this as an attack on individual liberties.
Howard wouldn’t like the layout of either Wright or Corbusier’s cities. Like Wright, Howard wanted to marry town and country, but not in the same way that Wright proposed. Wright’s Broadacre city would be too decentralized for Howard, as Howard wanted to maintain a centric city model. Howard’s marriage of urban and rural is gradual, as each outward ring is a different type of space. Wright’s complete decentralization, Howard would argue, prevents any kind of community feeling. Corbusier’s model with the skyscraper neighborhoods would be too congested for Howard. Howard’s Garden City had a gradual flow between different spaces (residential, commercial), but Corbusier’s extremely centralized residential space would be taking it too far for Howard.
Garden City Concept by Ebenezer Howard
Photo By: Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Howard’s desire to revolutionize society through a city plan was not unlike Wright and Corbusier. They all saw what the industrial age did to the city and wanted to draw away from that as much as they saw fit. The Garden City, Broadacre City, and The Radiant City were all planned because of a cultural backlash from the industrial revolution. Howard, Wright, and Corbusier saw the problems that arose in their current cities, and all attempted to solve these problems in their revolutionary utopian societies.
(Much of the analysis of these architects’ city plans and differentials can be found in Robert Fishman’s “Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier.” I read it in college and believe it to be a great analysis of 20th-century architects trying to make sense of how to plan for cities.)
